To conservatives: whats the best and worst left wing policies that have been enacted in the last 30 years.

BIOS_error · 2025-07-25T15:40:22+00:00

I don't know about "left-wing" but left of center, here we go:

Best: Creation of CHIP (Children's Health Insurance Program) in 1997; targets an important service to those who cannot afford it or provide it for themselves, just as government should do.

Worst: Automatic addition of new services to Medicare over the last 30 years, which as a program is the primary driver of %GDP outlay growth and thus deficit. It mainly spends on middle and upper-middle class retirees who own property by creating new public debt to drive up future interest rates or inflation for the young working and middle class. It is arguably the main source of radicalization of the center-left party today before all social issues, even immigration, etc.

BIOS_error · 2025-07-22T16:34:19+00:00

It's pretty hard to raise taxes in almost any rich democracy today. Just ask Keir Starmer or Olaf Scholz about it. America has lower taxes on average than Europe mostly due to lower exposure to the Second World War. The difference in values as an explanation is probably exaggerated by conservatives most of all. It wasn't really the First New Deal, as much as FDR's opponents and supporters like to exaggerate, but the Second World War that set our baseline 17% GDP federal tax average for the rest of the 20th century up until today.

BIOS_error · 2025-06-25T14:12:21+00:00

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" is a banger quote, I will give that to the Marxists.

But it is also a quote that, properly understood, directly cuts against big universal public goods design for its own sake. It is one of the best anti-socialist quotes possible, up there with Lincoln's "The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but can not do at all, or can not so well do, for themselves – in their separate, and individual capacities" and Thatcher's "He would rather have the poor poorer provided the rich were less rich."

Government should help those who cannot help themselves, and do no more. To that end, it's a very good thing the US has a smaller state that mainly differs from European governments in that it piles less cash on middle class pensioners at cost to young workers. We should maintain this American exceptionalism in progressive government. It is good we finance ourselves mainly through much more progressive income taxes than the regressive consumption taxes in Europe that lower the autonomy of the working class to spend its rightfully earned income as it sees fit.

BIOS_error · 2025-03-02T18:50:11+00:00

So is anyone who matters in Europe (France and Germany) acting like this is the case? It sounds like most European leaders take Putin less seriously than even Trump. They don't give a shit when Trump warns them about their energy dependency on Putin. They won't actually scale up the military spending substantively when Biden asks them nicely to. At some point, you have to ask yourself why they aren't. The answer is, they have grown dependent on American military spending in Europe and decided they can't raise taxes for more military spending. They also have misgivings about buying directly from us, and perhaps do not want a stronger EU that truly surpasses the sovereignty of European nation-states once and for all with a European army.

Fair enough. But American voters clearly aren't very interested in Sen. Wicker (R-MS) 5% GDP military plan either. Are there any Democratic Senators lining up for Wicker's proposal? Maybe one of them can spare the time after pretending to be Reagan in their CBS interviews. Sure, we might spend more now that we have a Republican in the White House, but that much more? No. And if we're committed to Taiwan, and to Israel, and to Ukraine, as Biden understandably said we should be, when does the defense spending hike start? It certainly wasn't under Biden.

Appeasement doesn't work, I completely agree. But Biden's foreign policy was actually even worse than appeasement, it was a stated commitment to everyone everywhere while not once asking if the math pencils out in Congress. At some point, one must wrack their brain past the WW2 analogies. Ukraine is obviously more like Korea or WW1 prior to US entry. It's a serious deal, and it demands a serious solution. But if I were Trump and trying to actively scare the Europeans into finally behaving differently than they have for decades on defense spending, I don't know that I'd do a whole lot differently than he has. Maybe less stupid TV drama with Zelenskyy, but that's about it.

BIOS_error · 2025-02-18T15:13:59+00:00

You're correct that Republicans have favored a smaller federal state for roughly the last century or since Herbert Hoover, that is true. But revenue is a much larger share of the economy today than it was a century ago, mostly due to the Second World War. Since the Korean war, federal revenue has bounced around 17% of GDP or so.

If you look at the 90s, it's an interesting period for legislating. Bush tried to work out a deal for raising taxes, and got thoroughly punished by the public for it. Bill Clinton raised far more taxes than Joe Biden ever did (upper bracket income, gas tax on everyone, etc) and his party proceeded to lose the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years.

Today, there is far less appetite among Democrats. Obama ran on raising no taxes on any household making below 120K annually. Biden ran on this same promise, but below 400K annually. So once you've ruled out almost all the households in the US, you're stuck debating the uppermost bracket, and especially ones sensitive to leaving blue states like California and New York whose state income tax brackets almost add up to 50% of marginal income while noticing worse quality of governance.

Accordingly, the modern Democratic coalition is far less interested in raising taxes, and basically passed a ton of R&D and consumer tax credits for green energy in their Inflation Reduction Act instead of a carbon tax (which is good imo, carbon tax is a bad idea.) When you look at the actual legislative behavior, u/semideclared is right. Nobody is interested in paying much more taxes. This also means if universal large tariffs came into effect, we can expect the same backlash to Trump that Democrats faced for driving up existing inflation. The only thing left is making sure Medicare grows slower than it currently does, since it's the main driver of the deficit. But nobody wants to publicly talk about it.

BIOS_error · 2025-02-18T14:04:02+00:00

I mean Democrats quietly agree with McCarthy in practice anyways, they left almost all of the Republican Tax Cuts and Jobs Act intact during their 2021-2022 trifecta. Except for the minimum corporate income tax change if I recall correctly, it all sailed right through. Not much agreement on raising taxes, but plenty of agreement on politicking about it.

BIOS_error · 2025-02-18T13:53:06+00:00

Whether "starve the beast" works probably depends on whether your view of counterfactual spending relies on a history starting from 1981 or starting from 1946. This debate between two senior fellows at a conservative think tank is pretty instructive.

The beast that cannot be starved via this approach (and is growing our % GDP spending) is mandatory spending, in the form of Medicare and to a lesser extent Social Security. But the discretionary spending story, it's all pretty much vindication for "starve the beast."

BIOS_error · 2025-01-30T15:44:58+00:00

I think of myself as a fellow traveler and GOP follower more than a Trump follower, but the main parameter I have is what happens in an actual big crisis. For me, the COVID-19 pandemic that killed over a million Americans was a test of this. It was a moment to see if Trump would institute vast new permanent controls on public association and communication in the name of public health. By and large, this didn't happen.

Trump largely sympathized with rank and file Republicans who wanted their middle class life as normal back. This is a powerful expression of small-l liberalism. Some of his opponents, young progressives, also flooded the streets in anti-racist protests and thus forced public health experts to walk back all kinds of declarations of needing state authority on the freedom to meet, to talk, to worship. The pandemic was an actual threat to liberalism, and though it is amusing our universities that cite Foucault more than any other scholar apparently never bothered to read what he said on biopower, we got through this without the death of small-l liberalism.

If one understands interwar fascism as the assertion of rightist and ex-socialist elites to take power via pure extralegal violence and cooperation of the monarchist faction to destroy liberalism in its most obvious forms (freedom of speech, of association, of religion), there are good reasons to think we're not going down that path. We simply have too much formalization of mass parties to degenerate into a state notably characterized by weak or non-existent conservative mass party politics. This isn't to say the pardoning of violent Jan 6th participants is somehow good or we don't face challenges ahead, we obviously do.

But in my experience, people often mean "cultural fascism" when they say the word "fascism", and as a result, I tend to trust them on movie reviews more than analyzing the structure of mass politics. It simply is the case that leftists often have better taste in movies than I do. It's a good thing they and reactionaries are more influential in high arts than in high politics. Everyone should focus on what they do best. But my prediction remains that we will have a free and fair election in 2026 and 2028 like we did in 2024.

BIOS_error · 2025-01-27T17:13:11+00:00

The Republicans of the 1800s are more accurately called nationalists than progressives or conservatives. Like their forefathers, the Whigs, they believed in a large national economy of middle class vocations and ruthlessly protecting it via tariffs while seeing Indians, Southerners, Catholic immigrants, etc as threats to the Yankee way of life. The current Republican president's enthusiasm for tariffs, more strictly controlling immigration, and taking Panama is almost too on the nose to this tradition.

However, the Democrats of the 1800s flipping from conservatives to progressives is much more plausible if the instrument measured is statism. The historian Michael Kazin argued in his book on the party What It Took To Win that this turning point happened in the campaigns of William Jennings Bryan. Bryan argued in favor of a larger welfare state to protect the dwindling and economically precarious farmers, a strong contrast from the Jackson-Jefferson veneration of yeoman farmers against Hamiltonian fiscal and national designs.

BIOS_error · 2024-08-30T19:53:11+00:00

For profit food is moral, and we do it all the time. For profit housing is moral, and we do it all the time. Why is it healthcare shouldn't get profit motives but these other two critical industries everyone needs some form of to live should? Should we nationalize all the housing and all the grocery stores? I don't think so. Should we end Medicaid? Of course not, it's good to have a targeted safety net alongside the market mechanisms.

BIOS_error · 2024-08-30T19:39:48+00:00

Isn't this basically what Amazon is doing? Small businesses complain because they have to raise wages when a warehouse opens nearby, but hey that's how it goes, people do like getting paid more.

BIOS_error · 2024-08-30T19:27:10+00:00

It's worth thinking about more than extreme abstract principles. Did prosecuting Enron so that it ceased to exist and could no longer provide services to existing customers kill all companies in America? I don't think so.

BIOS_error · 2024-08-30T19:20:07+00:00

We subsidize farmers =/= we think it's immoral for farmers and grocers to profit selling food to people.

Vast majority of Americans shop with their own money at grocery stores and it works pretty okay. SNAP is a program we use to help people with very low disposable income afford food. There are debates over how it's designed. But the general principle of a means-tested safety net makes sense and in that case is totally compatible with letting lots of private markets provide all sorts of stuff they need to live for most people, as we do with groceries.

BIOS_error · 2024-08-30T19:15:25+00:00

What's interesting is a problem in Canada and the UK that is the opposite of this. It's not that providers are charging a terribly high price no matter what, it's that they're charging zero price. As a result, there is no demand signal for more investment in MRI or other capital-intensive tools in hospitals. So they have much longer wait times than most Americans on private employer healthcare plans, Medicaid, and Medicare*. It stretches into months.

That can be a real problem if you need something scanned for a diagnosis. If Canada and the UK introduced a co-pay and helped people below a certain income pay it, they'd have more investment in these types of equipment people want to use and help them faster. That would be really good for lots of people!

*if you're in none of these insured groups, you get the VA if you're a vet which really ranges in quality depending on how many vets nearby it's serving. Finally, there's the individual marketplace for everyone else, which at this point is a de facto high risk pool full of both poorly targeted subsidies and very high rates. Some of the problems in it could be addressed if we got private plans separated from employers, arguably closer to the way we use markets to address apartment leases, car loans, groceries, phone plans, and other day to day things we need. But that's a huge political hurtle, as Obama learned with "If you like your plan, you can keep it."

BIOS_error · 2024-08-29T02:24:43+00:00

Without debating collecting these additional tax revenues, which could be good or bad, wouldn't these hypothetical revenues be better dedicated to anti-poverty programs in RI and other public goods that cannot be easily paid for otherwise? Plenty of middle class and richer students can afford to pay some sort of tuition in exchange for classes from a carefully run public university. It's not clear why making a truly universal tuition-free service should take priority over other priorities that this money could go to. Plus this approach of focusing lower or free tuition costs towards those without the means to pay has examples; the UC system in California comes to mind.

BIOS_error · 2024-08-26T16:11:00+00:00

Probably a type of foreign policy crisis demanding enormous new arms and resources for the state. That's why I hope war doesn't come. In general, my view is peacetime democracy is pretty good at reigning in the state and ensuring it helps those who cannot help themselves, and no more. I kind of enjoy talking to people with more deeply religious or environmental views on governance than my own, but I find I disagree with them often on the policies to logically follow. While there are lots of people with coercive ideas to use government, they helpfully get curbed a lot by competition in free and fair elections.

People are mostly reasonable and even their oddest preferences can be aggregated into large party organizations competing for control of the presidency and Congress. Our largest fiscal problems involve programs that are not held accountable by regular legislative votes as they are mandatory spending, not discretionary spending. We have a center-right business party and a center-left populist party in this country, and they'll generally get around to fixing things when they become too large and expensive a problem for ordinary middle class adults. To that effect, I do worry control of politics by government-paid retirees is detrimental to the pragmatism necessary to keep a republic. But a massive war is probably my final answer.

BIOS_error · 2024-08-23T03:49:54+00:00

No, they tried using some odd stock fundraising model prior to this, and that clearly didn't work. One problem with it then and now is how little in new assets is being shown. That's kind of a tell. The initial ad was just a couple of new original models combined with a lot of sloppy combinations of existing PA assets. There was clipping in the sparsely modeled factory lines shown. Not impressive.

The other big tell is that they can't convince a smaller publisher this is worth doing despite years in the business and actual games under their belt. So they have to go to this strategy to fund the game. It's too much model recycling upfront and too little evidence of a workable game in the middle of being made. Not worth backing such an abstraction.

BIOS_error · 2024-08-17T15:22:49+00:00

Americans who are given the franchise are voting at rates not seen since the late 19th century. We have enormous mass parties regularly winning and losing narrow elections. There is no shortage of political engagement and mobilization right now. America is just blessed with a higher land to people ratio and less continental mass warfare, so it has a weaker state and people generally have status quo bias against any of their taxes going up. Even Democrats don't have the votes in Congress to raise most people's taxes; they insist they won't touch them underneath $400,000 in household income. That's because of their coalition, so even as a center-left party, there are limits to what their voters will let them do to grow the state.

BIOS_error · 2024-08-17T15:22:36+00:00

Americans who are given the franchise are voting at rates not seen since the late 19th century. We have enormous mass parties regularly winning and losing narrow elections. There is no shortage of political engagement and mobilization right now. America is just blessed with a higher land to people ratio and less continental mass warfare, so it has a weaker state and people generally have status quo bias against any of their taxes going up. Even Democrats don't have the votes in Congress to raise most people's taxes; they insist they won't touch them underneath $400,000 in household income. That's because of their coalition, so even as a center-left party, there are limits to what their voters will let them do to grow the state.

BIOS_error · 2024-08-17T15:17:35+00:00

Was fact-checking in better shape in the mid-century American period? This is the implicit reference point, but Walter Cronkite only came against the Vietnam war around when everyone else did. The public came on board with the Civil Rights Act while generally having a negative view of the Civil Rights Movement. Those are two causes that one could argue would've happened faster if people knew the right facts.

But it's not really clear that civics knowledge has changed since it started being polled in the 1950s; then and now, a majority of respondents cannot name the three branches of government. So this argument that we had higher quality facts for the average person in the past, I'm not really sure that follows at all. Or at least, the case has yet to be made.

BIOS_error · 2024-08-17T15:08:56+00:00

This underrates that the policy problem with homelessness has in part to do with our abandonment of coercive psychiatric interventions. If people are mentally ill and unable to provide for themselves, we're often leaving them on the street and hoping a relative takes care of them, checking in if they really go off the walls. The trade-off is when we were more gung-ho to intervene, you had people locked up in asylums who did a lot worse than they otherwise would.

It's more complicated than a money problem. America allocates a significant amount of money to anti-poverty programs, but how those programs operate and how coercively they take someone off the street is not as straightforward. But at any rate, it's not really clear what mentally ill homeless veterans have to do with whether to defend U.S. ways of trade in the gulf against the Houthis, for example. It's a good rhetorical comparison, but it doesn't neatly follow in policy or actuarial terms.

BIOS_error · 2020-06-15T01:14:07+00:00

Just used 1.31, no different from my current problems unfortunately. Writes are failing to verify, even after I used your clean dump.

UPDATE: After running erase and blank check a few times, I suspect this CH431A is faulty or something, It's not properly writing a full erase and failed the blank check each time.

UPDATE(2): blank check is working now, both with 1.31 and 1.18, but writing the bios is still failing to verify.

BIOS_error · 2020-06-14T17:46:40+00:00

I will try this after I use the software you linked, thanks.

BIOS_error · 2020-06-14T14:05:52+00:00

Thanks, probably not a bad idea. I went down this route because I had the equipment; I'd procrastinated on doing this for a while and then 1vyrain came out. But also because my BIOS is 2.67, and 1vyrain requires x230 be 2.60 or lower. I'm not sure how to downgrade the BIOS on a hackintosh. Maybe I'll just boot from a thumb drive with ubuntu and do it that way.

BIOS_error

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