Barry Zuckerkorn

It’s a bill to create technical standards by which anyone can mark their digital files with a rough analogue of a robots.txt that says “don’t train on this file,” and a requirement for AI training to obey that standard. It’s for everyone, because copyright is for everyone who creates pretty much anything.

Plus the net worths of Trump’s cabinet is basically the highest in history:

• Betsy Devos (Education): $2 billion
• Wilbur Ross (Commerce): $600 million
• Steve Mnuchin (Treasury): $400 million

Linda McMahon is worth $3 billion but was “only” SBA administrator, not a cabinet secretary.

Jared Kushner is from a family whose net worth is in the billions between all of them, and he got his dad a pardon.

Let’s not forget major donors like the Adelsons, the Kochs, and everyone else.

Yes, Democrats have some billionaires on their side, but the balance isn’t even close.

In my opinion, it’s quite similar to Brexit: maybe you can get a majority coalition to disapprove of the status quo, but good luck getting them to actually propose a more popular alternative. Much less proposing an actual procedure for getting that alternative onto ballots.

Structurally and functionally, our political systems are not set up to run anyone other than the person who won the primary. Changing a presumptive nominee this late in the cycle is fraught with potential complications, but can be done if there’s sufficient support for a specific alternative candidate. Realistically, it’s Biden or it’s Harris. There’s no feasible way to get someone else at the top of the ticket.

Why they went into this election season without even attempting to run anybody aside from Biden I’ll never know.

When has either party ever run a credible candidate against their own incumbent?

It’s not just about pledged delegates

The leadership of the DNC, DCCC, DSCC, etc., are chosen by election, by members of each committee. State parties send their delegates to participate in these things.

despite not being an incumbent

Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. These are processes that longtime party members participate in, and run on, about the structural rules and procedures to follow, and they’re open to everyone. Elections often pit “establishment”/“insider” candidates against “insurgent”/“outsider” candidates, and there are examples of each kind (or hybrid candidates) winning the nomination in the modern primary system.

It’s more of a spurious correlation: incumbency doesn’t buy the advantage in the nomination race, but reflects that a candidate has the network and resources to have the popular support of their own party. That’s why incumbents always win the nomination, and tend to win reelection in the general.

Tell me, during an incumbent primary, who controls the DNC?

Same as during a non-incumbent primary. The person who won the most recent nomination tends to have an outsized voice in the selection of party officials (because it’s their pledged delegates who vote on all the other stuff). Yes, that means Biden-affiliated insiders had an inside track in 2020, but that’s also true of Clinton allies in 2016, Obama allies in 2012, Obama allies in 2008, and Kerry allies in 2004.

More than a year ago, the DNC adopted new rules—including a primary calendar that ignored state law in Iowa and New Hampshire and eliminated any primary debates—designed to ensure that Biden’s coronation would proceed untroubled by opposition from any credible Democrat.

Which of those changes in the rules do you think were designed to benefit Biden specifically? De-emphasizing the role of Iowa and New Hampshire? There’s been people clamoring for that for decades, within the party.

There’s basically no set of rules that will ever create a credible challenge to an incumbent who wants to run for reelection. It’s a popularity problem, not a structural problem.

No one deserves to be a president any more than anyone else, and treating an incumbent as though they do, without having to go through an open, democratic primary process, is to treat them as more deserving of future authority than other citizens.

There was a primary, and Biden got the most votes/delegates under the rules. Nobody is saying that incumbents should automatically get renomination. Or even that the incumbent should get some sort of rules advantage (like say, the way the defending world champ in chess gets an auto-bid to defend his title against a challenger who has to win a tournament to get there).

The rules are already set up to where any challenger has an equal structural change of winning the primary. They just won’t have the actual popular support. You know, the core principles of democratic elections.

This shifts balance from unelected officials who can be fired by the president (administrative officials) towards unelected officials who can’t be (judges). It doesn’t actually reduce regulatory power, just puts that regulatory power under the supervision and review of even less accountable officials.

Rage isn’t sustainable. Enthusiasm is down across the board, and the question will be whether enthusiasm among left-leaning voters has wanted waned to the same degree as among Trump’s base.

Your description of a drink that takes the world by storm, increasing in market share but dropping in quality may be roughly accurate analogy for a lot of consumer goods, but even in this telling the market is improving if that drink is displacing even lower-quality competition.

In terms of non-alcoholic drinks sold in coolers in convenience stores and grocery stores, we’ve seen the steady march of improving products as an average across the shelves, even if the same product name might be getting worse. In the 80’s, the dominant market share for orange juice in grocery stores was frozen cans to be mixed with water at home. But Tropicana and Florida Natural and a few other brands made a splash with not-from-concentrate orange juice. Old brands like Minute Maid got in on the action, and new brands like Simply rose up, too.

Now, it might be that these brands have gotten cheap with stuff since dominating market share. But if you look at who they took that market share from, it’s unquestionably a lower quality product they’ve displaced.

Across the beverage industry as a whole, you’ve got a whole bunch of newer higher priced drinks, where the unfathomably expensive for 2000 Red Bull is basically the middle of the pack for energy drinks, and where there are so many beverages that cost several times as much as Coca Cola.

So that’s a story of a forward march in higher prices for qualitatively preferred items, over that amount of time. This story I do think applies to processed food and drink, as well as electronics, prepared food, home furnishings, and cars. We expect a lot higher quality every year, as the things get more expensive, and we feel annoyed that any particular brand or model seems to be slipping in quality while we as a consumer market tend to move up the chain.

We’re angry that streaming seems to be slipping back to cable-like quality, when streaming as of 2024 is still a much better value proposition than cable in 2014. The displacement is happening in two directions, for a net benefit to the consumer in a way that doesn’t feel like a benefit. Same with music, video games, etc.

The real story is that housing, education, healthcare, and dependent care (both childcare and elder care) have gone up so much faster than inflation that these things are finally squeezing normal people out of their comfort zones right when the other stuff stopped dropping in price as much as before.

No, the Florida law prohibits voting by felons convicted in other states, when that other state prohibits voting. So Florida would follow New York’s lead. And the New York law prohibits felons from voting only until they’ve served their full prison sentence.

So if Trump doesn’t get sentenced to any prison time, then he’ll be eligible to vote in New York (and therefore Florida).

Great article. It’s long, though, so to summarize the main points for those of us who don’t have a ton of time:

• State constitutions protect individual rights, just as the federal constitution does. Many of these rights are the same rights listed in the federal constitution, but state supreme courts can interpret them in a manner that is more strongly protective of those individual rights. (They can’t meaningfully interpret their state constitutions as less protective than the federal constitution, though, because if something is protected by the federal constitution, a state constitution can’t un-protect that.)
• And State constititons can protect rights that have no federal analogue, while also being relatively easy to amend. Once abortion rights got de-constitutionalized at the federal level, a lot of states have gone on to explicitly protect a right to abortion in their own state constitutions.
• This is a critical time for this strategy, as we now have a US Supreme Court that is interested in dialing back individual rights protected by the constitution. So state courts need to step up, using this “judicial federalism” idea that traces back to when the 1970’s Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Burger, started its conservative turn against the 1960’s Supreme Court decisions under Chief Justice Warren.
• Of course, this history of the movement attracts criticism that it is inherently a progressive/liberal doctrine, which has some kernels of truth, but many conservative legal scholars believe it to be important, too.
• Specific examples of legal issues that can be constitutionalized at the state level have been LGBT rights, election/voting rights, conditions of incarceration, and a rising movement to use state constitutions to mandate policies fighting climate change.
• But there are challenges to litigating these issues in states rather than the federal level. One issue, obviously, is that the impact is limited to a single state at a time. Other issues include the difficulty of funding that kind of litigation, as the federal rules for civil rights litigation actually can get the cases funded by the losers (which also makes it easier for nonprofits and donors to put up the up-front cost of litigation), which is an arrangement that basically doesn’t exist in state courts. Plus, state courts are much more clearly partisan and political than the federal courts (often with judges elected to fixed terms in partisan elections), staffed up with judges with life tenure appointed by past administrations, so there have been several examples of state supreme courts reversing themselves just a few years after an earlier decision.
• Still, it’s better than nothing, and successes at the state level can build momentum for national movements.

I also speak post college level English. And I can recognize dumb ideas written in English. Mises was a hack.

I’m too old for school shooter drills, but I’m like basically the perfect age for being terrified of velociraptors after watching Jurassic Park in theaters. Not only do I know how to barricade a door, but I also know how to use mirrors to visually trick people into seeing hallways that aren’t there!

If you think that society was friendlier to trans people in 1999 compared to 2024, you are mistaken.

The consumer confidence index has been on a down ward trend over all since an initial jump with vaccine rollouts.

Yes, and partisan affiliation is a big chunk of that shift during late 2020 and early 2021. Republicans went from generally positive to strongly negative when Biden was elected, while Democrats didn’t flip as strongly from strongly negative to still pretty negative. You can tie it to vaccines, but, uh, I’m gonna go ahead and point out a more significant shift that happened at the same time.

I don’t think the lived economic experiences of Republicans and Democrats of the same income levels are all that different, but the cross tabs in these surveys show very different perceptions.

So I stand by my general view that a lot of the mismatch stems from people’s feelings being poorly correlated with even their own experience.

Telling people they should be happier because unemployment is low is an awful political strategy.

I’m not trying to formulate any kind of political strategy. I’m just observing people and trying to explain what I see with a predictive/explanatory model, not formulating some kind of message. And my model is simple: Republicans will never be happy about the economy under a Democratic president, and most of the rest of the sentiment is just driven by gasoline prices, and to a lesser extent, food prices.

nation wide polls and indicators suggest that people are generally unhappy with the economy

The Michigan Consumer Sentiment Survey that is basically the standard on this sentiment analysis seems to be heavily correlated with gasoline prices, far more than gasoline prices actually affect the economy.

And consumer sentiment about the economy has been moving upward over the past few months, while gasoline prices have been low. Did anything change between November and now, to bring it to the highest level of the last 3 years? I’d argue the only real change we’ve seen in the economy over the past few months is low gasoline prices. All the other long term structural things are still present.

The article tries to cite specific metrics to counter the headline metrics, but I’m not sure they paint a picture supporting the author’s points.

Those days are long gone. Today’s typical American working household has several earners, sometimes in multiple jobs.

Following the first link shows an article that paints a picture of life being better for dual earner households:

This shift towards a dual-earner model presents challenges like fewer hours for home production, but also benefits like improved work-life balance satisfaction for husbands doing more housework. Personal savings rates have fallen from 15% to 5%, yet 71% of dual-earner families contributed to 401(k) accounts in 2015.

Following the second link shows that multiple jobholders as a percent of the economy has been trending downward for decades, hitting a record low during the height of the pandemic, and climbing back up to around the average for the previous decade.

The article continues:

If one earner loses a job while the others keep theirs, she may leave the workforce for a time; there is the option of making do with less, and for some there is early retirement. She will not, in that case, count as unemployed—however difficult her life. A low jobless rate can mask a great deal of stress in such households.

This is strange, because the hypothetical person in this category would be counted in metrics like U-6, which has also been at near record lows since the pandemic recovery.

The employment-to-population ratio is still a bit below where it was in 2020, and far below where it was in 2000

Well, the percentage of the population over 65 is much, much higher than it was in 2000. If you look at prime age labor force participation, the number is higher than it has been the previous 2 decades before that.

The author should’ve focused on other metrics (housing prices, food prices) rather than choosing metrics that don’t actually support his hypothesis, or metrics that are themselves presented in this context. To that point, he could’ve expanded on how it is that individuals experienced what he describes as “sawtooth” economic fortunes, rather than just the brief mention he gives them: pandemic era relief actually went to real people, especially households with children.

I mean, I actually like the author. He’s shaped a lot of ideas that formed my own political identity and view towards economic issues over the past 25 years. I just think this particular article is a miss.

So narratives are crafted that are divorced from reality the public is experiencing

This is true, but it’s true for many, many more places than just politics, or even messaging about politics coming from politicians. And it swings in both directions.

Social media (including the Activity Pub driven fediverse) takes off with some narratives that are just wildly inconsistent with each other and inconsistent with how a substantial number of people feel. But the nature of how we experience the world now is that our feelings are driven increasingly by little threads of online interaction that may or may not actually resemble the world we are experiencing offline.

Is Taylor Swift a good musician? Is the best cell phone an iPhone? Am I considered strong if I can bench press 220 lbs/100 kg? Do electric cars help the environment? Is it a red flag that my date refused to tip more than 20%?Your answer to these questions depend heavily on who you talk to, and the discussion around these topics can get pretty heated, even when they’re ultimately low stakes issues.

The Internet has a way of catastrophizing little things, ignoring big things, and mixing it all together that it’s almost inevitable that how we feel becomes disconnected with actual metrics, even the metrics within our own life. Negative feelings like anger, fear, resentment, and hopelessness can fester even with people who are thriving.

In other words, while I agree that the correlation between economic metrics and personal feelings has loosened a lot, I’m not entirely convinced that the feelings are correct while the metrics are wrong.

Open and auditable source code is a laudable goal, and one I generally endorse.

But the more important issue is an open audit trail.

The implementations I’ve seen that make the most sense are electronic machines that validate and mark ballots that are both human readable and machine readable. The input validation can prevent overvotes (accidentally voting for more than one candidate) and add a verification step for undervotes (choosing to leave a particular choice blank), while the voter gets a verifiable visual feedback that their ballot has been properly created. Then they drop it in the box.

At the end of the night, the paper ballots are fed into tallying/counting systems, which should entirely distinct from the input validation systems. That way they get a machine count that night, but still have an auditable paper trail.

Given the choice between a direct voting machine that’s open source, or a closed source machine that creates the paper trail in that way, I’d choose the auditable process.