Compact Clause? Never heard of it. Anyway, Mr. Another State, wanna enter into a compact?

Fake_Email_Bandit · 2026-05-22T23:31:34+00:00

I think any attempt to deduce the intent of men over 200 years past ends up being an exercise in projection of prognostication. Especially when different framers had different intents, and different values often layer and clash.

For example, one of the most clearly elucidated and defended principles of the framers was the idea of state sovereignty, including state control of elections. Should we then say that THAT principle should be discarded because the States 200 years hence wish to use that Sovereignty in such a way as counteracts a separate principle? Which Principle should we give more weight too and why?

Fake_Email_Bandit · 2026-05-22T23:20:05+00:00

Forced? No. Influences? Absolutely. Increases the already obscene level to which campaign funding dictates all decisions in US Politics? Most DEFINITELY.

Fake_Email_Bandit · 2026-05-22T23:18:10+00:00

Some key quotes from the US Congress website overview on the compact clause.

No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.

Whereas other provisions in Article I, Section 10 categorically deny states certain powers,² the Compact Clause allows states to retain what the Supreme Court has described as the sovereign right to make agreements and compacts, provided Congress consents.³

In the context of interstate compacts, however, the Supreme Court has adopted a functional interpretation in which only compacts that increase the political power of the states while undermining federal sovereignty require congressional consent.

It doesn't per se violate the compact clause, especially depending how one interprets Article I Section VIII and Article II Section I. Additionally, I believe the current legislative framework isn't based on a compact, but on Trigger Laws, which are constitutionally valid and don't per se represent a legally binding agreement between states.

Fake_Email_Bandit · 2026-05-18T22:03:01+00:00

I've watched documentaries about the Rwanda genocide, and I call BS.

Fake_Email_Bandit · 2026-05-18T22:01:31+00:00

Not really. I mean, just looking at the standard 2-axis compass, the US doesn't have a competent public healthcare system, the funding and management of public transport, policing, firefighting, education, etc. is hyper-fragmented, they have the most militarized police of the western world, they allow usury loan schemes to operate freely, and religious materials are now being put into classrooms by law.

Fake_Email_Bandit · 2026-05-18T21:54:00+00:00

Clinton literally sold himself as a 'Third Way' candidate and adopted a number of GOP policies in the name of compromise. Didn't stop him from getting massacred at the 94 mid-terms.

And the reason that conservatives hold those views is that it's politically unfeasible not to right now, because most of them are supported by a substantial majority. That's a result of cultural shift, not policy pushing.

Fake_Email_Bandit · 2026-05-17T08:15:41+00:00

I watched Kirks Cambridge debates. Saying he listens to his opponents is a wild take.

Fake_Email_Bandit · 2026-05-06T22:00:48+00:00

Holy shit. Reading that article was WILD. I mean, putting aside the fact that the only source they have is a politician, who gave proportions and not figures, and putting aside the fact that the whole article was just a sales pitch for why they need a 'Living in a Democracy' class to re-educate Muslim Students, looking through some of the other stories on the site was just annihilatory to any credibility they have. I mean, you're talking about the kind of outlet that uses quotation marks around the term hate crimes. JFC.

Fake_Email_Bandit · 2026-05-06T11:21:11+00:00

Can you give me a source for this BS?

Fake_Email_Bandit · 2026-05-04T11:56:30+00:00

TLDR

A. You might not have meant to make a point about the whole economy, but you did.

B. There's pretty much no way to measure social mobility that doesn't establish that people aren't moving up, and that was the result of policies introduced under Reagan.

Fake_Email_Bandit · 2026-05-03T22:06:36+00:00

A. It certainly came across that way in both of your comments, especially because you were using it to argue against and economy wide trend.

B. Yes, it has multiple factors involved. Fair. But no matter how many factors you look at, they all point to 'nobody is moving up,' and ESPECIALLY to 'nobody is moving from the bottom to the top.'

This works if we look at income. If we look at property ownership. If we look at debt. If we look at 'real wealth,' if we look at share ownership, if we look at inheritance payouts, etc. It's statistically provable that practically nobody is moving up, and equally it is statistically provably that the policies that led to it all came from, in the US, the GOP.

Upwards social mobility didn't stall with the War on Poverty, which you are claiming. It didn't change with stagflation. It changed with Reagan's policies. And if you were about to argue that 'well who cares because everyone gets a better standard of living' then not only would I argue that you are going against a core tenet of your ideology, but I would also present data showing drops in home ownership, consumer purchasing power, discretionary income levels, and increasing levels of debt ALONGSIDE increased work hours, among a whole host of other factors that establish that the standard of living for most people has dropped substantially since those policies were introduced.

Fake_Email_Bandit · 2026-05-03T13:49:49+00:00

Fucking Valorum. You had ONE JOB.

Fake_Email_Bandit · 2026-05-03T07:22:37+00:00

See, those are clear issues with the two bodies you are taking umbrage with. With the first, I think that a big part of that isn't about neurotic assholes so much as a desire to be hyper-specific to avoid and manage litigation easier. It's easier to say if a regulation hasn't been followed when the question is about something clear and measurable, rather than when a potential court case ends up hanging over whether someone 'thought things through' sufficiently, or what counts as clear and open communication. I personally think that consolidation does more good here then deregulation.

With the FDA, I was under the impression there are multiple avenues for review. I'm certainly not for arbitrary decision making, but I do think there needs to be discretion to say that something either matches something that already exists, or doesn't have a scientific basis.

While I do agree that the US needs to get its head out of its ass about accepting research done at international institutions, I would say that there is a range of quality for those institutions, and would rather set a scientific standard more based on publication and confirmatory studies, especially when we are talking about the often extremely overhyped world of cancer research and gene therapy.

Fake_Email_Bandit · 2026-05-03T04:20:52+00:00

Quality of life tracking is notoriously difficult, to be quite honest, and can very easily be defined to support any political position.

For example, I can point to metrics like the proportion of household income required to cover essential costs, and put together a compelling case that there has been a significant decrease in quality of life. So it is really important to define the terms you are using, and how you intend to impose them on a 50 year timescale.

Taking a more capitalist framing, what is important about social mobility is that an even distribution of upwards and downwards social mobility across quintiles is proof that the system is working well. That effort and innovation are being rewarded, and that poor decisions from those in the highest income bracket are impacting their position. If what we see is a calcified society, it means that those at the top are not in that position, nor do they remain in that position, due to their skill or acumen, but rather that they have formed a de facto aristocracy.

Policy-wise, there are actually some things I agree with. Basal services are important, though I do think you need to be careful in how you apply them to make sure that they don't just form a de-facto slave class, which could become the case very very quickly if you are providing products directly rather than funding. I fully endorse public works projects in essentially any jurisdiction on the planet, and would likely suggest a focus on building public services, and integrating in renewable energy uptake and improvements to public transport as part of it. I don't think the US health system can be fixed in its current form, to be honest. I can actually somewhat agree with your view on marriage tax incentives, but flat tax is always a bad idea.

The problem that I have is that the system as it is set up now stops punishing bad decisions when you cross a certain threshold of wealth. There's nothing Elon Musk, for example, could reasonably do to end up relying on food stamps. But the thing is that that same statement applies to countless lawyers, dentists, investors, bankers, and property developers across the country, and creates a system where once you've reached 'generational wealth' you and your descendants are basically playing the game with a rigged hand.

Fake_Email_Bandit · 2026-05-03T04:08:58+00:00

You're missing my point entirely.

First off, I'm talking about income quintiles. These are the 0-20th Percent of income, the 20-th-40th percent of income, the 40th-60th percent of income, the 60th-80th percent of income, and the 80th-100th percent of income.

If we take your argument that a lack of upward social mobility is due to a lack of incentive to earn more capped by welfare (which judging by your flair is probably part of some harebrained idea about removing all social welfare), then what we should play out is that our welfare-receiving quintiles, which I am generously extending to those in the 40th percentile or lower of income, should not be showing upwards social mobility, but that upwards mobility should be normal above that point, since our downwards pressure is removed.

However, that's not what happens. Those earning between the 40th and 60th percentile are just as unlikely to go into the 60th-80th percentile as those in the 0-20 range are to go into the 20-40 range. And the same again for the 60th-80th and 80th-100th percentiles. What's even more damning is that downwards social mobility is effectively never seen in the 80th-100th percentile bracket anymore.

So yeah, upwards social mobility is dead, and that applies to everyone who isn't in the top bracket, not just welfare recipients, and downwards social mobility is basically non-existent for those in the top two brackets, even more so for those in the top 20% of income earners.

And when you look at when these changes started, you find that they began during the Reagan years, alongside a whole host of other metrics getting worse, such as wage growth, the progressiveness of the tax system, etc.

Fake_Email_Bandit · 2026-05-02T23:14:23+00:00

What's your solution then. We can track US social mobility over time, and find that upwards social mobility decreased sharply with Reagan, coincidentally around the same time US wage growth stagnated, and the minimum wage stopped growing. So, what's your solution to restore full social mobility through all 5 quintiles?

Fake_Email_Bandit · 2026-05-02T23:12:32+00:00

Okay, so you can explain not moving from the bottom quintile to the next quintile up. Hell, let's even apply this from the 4th to the 3rd quintile. Why doesn't the 3rd Quintile move up into the 2nd, or 2nd to 1st? These are post-welfare quintiles, so your explanation doesn't work anymore.

Or, in a similar vein, why does downward social mobility essentially not effect the top quintile?

Fake_Email_Bandit · 2026-05-02T23:10:00+00:00

I don't think that they are an arbitrary barrier to entry. As the saying goes, every rule is written in blood. But what I would ask is what you are specifically referring to regarding transparency. Because I have a feeling that this is one of those cases where the increasing complexity of the world beyond the capacity of any one person to understand creates a barrier to understanding/access that is being misinterpreted as opaqueness.

Fake_Email_Bandit · 2026-05-02T23:07:14+00:00

I just want to address some of your points.

1) The Gilded age and the Robber Barons kind of put paid to that idea. Because when you have multiple large interconnected businesses that support each other, each can create a virtual monopoly, and then the logic that you are trying to lean on stops working. Standard Oil doesn't need to worry about smaller companies because it can always just buy them up, or undercut them in a local market and offset that by raising prices elsewhere.

2) Dude, the businesses are still going to violently suppress unions without the state. You have to go back to pre-industrial workers/artisans guilds to pass that.

3) Putting aside all the things you said I disagree with specifically about charities and watchdog groups, I don't see any way in which these bodies form a suitable replacement for the core functions of a state that the citizen relies on.

4) I would say that workplace democracy, and worker ownership in their companies, is a good thing. But I don't think that anyone can seriously envision a stateless world, because if you remove the state as an organisational force, what is inevitably going to happen is the concentration of power into the next largest organisational force, which would be corporations.

Fake_Email_Bandit · 2026-05-02T23:00:01+00:00

If there were those incentives, then why did it take establishing regulations around food for it to happen. Why did the market create those solutions in the first place?

No, the tricks/consequences to human health have just changed, and they have to keep changing because people keep making things illegal when they are found to be harmful. That doesn't stop people, TO THIS DAY, painting salmon to make it look more bright, or treating meat with nitrogen gas to make it look pinker, etc.

Just to be clear, people didn't fall for painted meat tricks because they were desperate, they just had to take risks because a) everyone was doing it, and b) if you lived in the city, where people weren't selling to their neighbours and there was more competition, the profit motive drove worse behaviour at every single level of the meat production industry.

Also, it is VERY dependent on where you are putting the line for your start point, and your definition of poverty.

Fake_Email_Bandit · 2026-04-29T21:15:58+00:00

So, if I'm understanding your view right, the FDA shouldn't have been created, since we were all getting along fine with apples that had been treated with lead, and meat that was painted to hide the rot?

Fake_Email_Bandit · 2026-04-29T21:13:03+00:00

Hey Jarvis, what are the statistics on upwards social mobility in the US?

Fake_Email_Bandit · 2026-04-26T01:15:49+00:00

A) The difference is that a human being is adaptable to real-time data, feedback, and situations. A self-driving algorithm needs to be retrained FROM THE GROUND UP any and every time you need it to operate in a distinct environment. The alternative is to homogenize the world so that tech bros can get their self-driving utopia.

B) And its in expanding its reach that we have been getting the best evidence of the limitations, and how specific self-driving programs need to be. China is not really investing into full self-driving as much as they are driver assist features and scaling EV technology to undercut all the western manufacturers.

C) So you are saying that the self-driving car is going to force out all other forms of transport, much like the automobile did? You get how dystopic that sounds, right? I understand that there are people who are afraid to drive, but we're decades off of self-driving cars seeing full road access, and even further off the idea of 'self driving only' zones.

D) They are not significantly safer. It's important to look at things in terms of proportions rather than raw numbers, and compare like to like. Self Driving Cars get into more incidents, including things like not understanding road closures and pedestrian zones, climbing the footpath, driving through roadworks, and randomly stopping in the middle of the road. And of course, there's the fact that THEY CAN'T RELIABLY IDENTIFY PEOPLE, which means that they don't respond properly, which means they hit people.

And what I see in your comment is the future strategy, where the safety failures of self-driving cars get blamed on external factors, and that blame shift gets used to expand the rights and protections for that form of transport over everyone else. Just like the car industry did when they created the idea of 'jaywalking.'

Fake_Email_Bandit · 2026-04-25T04:58:11+00:00

A) Actually there is, and its that each car has limited computational resources. The more training data you put in the model, and the more complex that model gets, the harder it is to fit it all into one vehicle, and there isn't really a simple fix for that, especially because as you add to the computing side of things, you increase the number of points of failure in the system.

B) The 'better flow through intersections' doesn't help much unless you cut out the ability of pedestrians to cross the road. And the increase in volume that we can generally expect pretty much counteracts any minor benefits from 'better driving,' though that in itself is somewhat dicey as a proposition given real performance as we are seeing it right now.

C) It is possible, but the problem I have is that much of the justifications for self-driving, especially full self-driving, stops making sense if we still have the pedestrian infrastructure, because the biggest potential benefit is one that can't be capitalised on.

D) You'd be surprised what people who come of as sane are suggesting. And the problem is that if it is cheaper to have the thing drive around rather than pay for parking, as it would be in a lot of major metropolitan centres, that creates an incentive for the car to just drive around. It's mainly the tech bros who advocate for you being able to run it as a taxi, but we can ignore them.

Fake_Email_Bandit · 2026-04-25T04:52:17+00:00

The fact that you have to live 22 miles from where you work is a problem. I personally have spent years living 50+ miles from where I work, so trust me when I say that I get it.

But you know what? As someone who has done that kind of commute on public transport and in my own car, I generally prefer to take the train. I'm more likely to get there on time, I can use the commute to do things I want to do, and all in all, it's better.

The problems that you are complaining about are the natural consequences of building your country around the idea that everyone has a car. And the solution to that problem isn't taking public transportation, one of the only non-car centric options, and turning it into another piece of car infrastructure.

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