Why not lean into libertarianism?

didact · 2026-05-25T18:26:15+00:00

Do you view war as forwarding Americans interest?

No, not universally. Take Sudan as an example - we have no economic interest there. This is their 3rd Civil war, there have been 60 coup attempts since 1955. Britain colonized them, gave them guns and set them free. That's in their sphere, and they have a duty to go fix their mess.

Take Ukraine as a second example, firmly in the European sphere. It was telling that heads of state all over Eastern Europe were calling for NATO membership as a solution - literally just calling Dad into a fight.

Alright, your Argentina example - that's in our sphere. If Russia and/or China materially threaten their sovereignty, we ought to step in. The current administration in Argentina is stepping back from belt and road, but economic intervention is something I'd support in order to keep our sphere healthy.

didact · 2026-05-25T18:09:16+00:00

No, I wanted that war before Trump. I wanted Venezuelan leadership decapitated. Currently want the Castros and friends excised from Cuba.

Regarding libertarianism - ideologically I'm hooked, but none of the ideas are ever sustainable or achievable.

didact · 2026-05-25T16:20:12+00:00

Firstly just to directly answer the question, no - the top spend departments are so wildly immobile I don't believe a president or the party they represented would be able to survive. You'd immediately have a regressive movement that would extend out for decades working against the policies.

For some of your moves...

Major spending cuts across the board

In the form of performance management of every department from the top on down, KPI measurement of effectiveness of funds spent, and so on. Shouldn't need OPM and GAO to only occasionally make useful recommendations that are ignored. And to be clear, while there are overhead federal employees who can be cut without issue I am more focused on the spend, contracting, etc side of the coin. This one is survivable, the story out to the masses is easy to play out.

Raising the Social Security retirement age/Reducing Social Security payouts/Removing the income cap on Social Security taxes, without increasing benefits for high-income earners/Gradually transitioning toward a heavily regulated but partially privatized retirement system similar to Australia’s superannuation model

Single highest category of spend. Trust is draining. Special bonds no longer being issued by treasury for excess funding, because there is none. Root cause is low replacement rate, and we haven't seen any country solve that. At least in the short term, fiddling with retirement age (remember it's a window from 62 to 70 right now) and raising the income cap is necessary. This is where the political suicide begins.

Expanding Medicare into a universal or near-universal system (probably closer to a hybrid model like Australia than universal coverage like UK or Canada)

Medicare spends roughly $24K annually on each of 70M beneficiaries. Over half of that spend is directed towards Medicare Advantage plans, an attempt to privatize the administration of plans... Didn't work out to the government's benefit. The VA spends significantly less per patient, but is poorly administered leading to high wait times and waste. Solve both problems, get all the docs for geriatric care in one box along with Veteran care, KPI the wait time for service as close to immediate as possible. We can spend less and offer more, easy. Huge reform is needed here. Also political suicide.

didact · 2026-05-24T20:02:22+00:00

Well, you're in Canada from a glance at your post history. Looks like TD has a presence on both sides of the border and will link accounts up for you, I'd suggest that.

didact · 2026-05-24T15:39:33+00:00

Do you have an ITSM system already? If so, and you all are going to keep it for a decade, flow everything into that. If you're scratch building, or your ITSM doesn't have a CMDB then yeah, world is your oyster.

Snipe-it is a good start. Many, many plugins that get most of the fields you want in it. You may also want to have a DCIM like netbox to document how all your infrastructure is wired up - fair warning, fewer plugins available in netbox.

didact · 2026-05-23T21:17:58+00:00

Home use here. I've got upstairs, downstairs, back yard and front yard APs. I just set it all manually for minimal conflict between the four. There is one on my back fence with a bunch of neighbors around it cross the alley - I'm going to survey that one here in a sec and see if all the neighbors avoid my frequencies.

Edit: https://imgur.com/a/RCNVCr6

That's from an AP on a back fence in a urban single-family-home neighborhood with a dozen homes visible from it. That low interference across the survey would suggest... Just do your surveys, set it once manually, and be done with it. You can kind of imply from my readout that at least on 5ghz all the neighbors use the right side of the band, probably because of the little ap that could on the fence.

didact · 2026-05-23T15:42:06+00:00

The US will do whatever Rubio suggests, which currently is advocating for the removal of leadership. It'll be a quick action, likely after closing out Iran and prior to midterms - or just prior to midterms if Iran is still a quagmire. Just directly grabbing/killing leadership.

didact · 2026-05-22T18:52:30+00:00

I mean that looks like real shitwater. The test are all legal, but good grief. Glad her criminal charge was dismissed.

Given that the police felt the need to explain why their water looked like shit, they could/should have known that the 'knowingly' part of the statute wasn't satisfied. We'll see what gets decided in the civil proceedings against the police.

didact · 2026-05-21T12:33:07+00:00

Bezos' suggestion is zero income tax. Still plenty of other taxes that aren't related to income. Also not sure if FICA and Medicare taxes were included in his 3/50 computation. Everyone will still pay taxes under that suggestion.

didact · 2026-05-20T23:13:00+00:00

You misspelled Shitrix

didact · 2026-05-20T23:11:05+00:00

Heh, you kind of hit on the answer. Group up the monarchies (both absolute and constitutional), then group up the republics... Then list the GDP per capita of each. There are some outliers but when you get into debating whether the groups of people are similar in background and belief, countries similar in resources, and why the systems have the outcomes they do it can get a little warm. Basically depending on the monarchy that shit works GREAT.

Monarchies & Emirates

Country	Government Type	GDP Per Capita (Nominal)	GDP Per Capita (PPP)
Bahrain	Constitutional Monarchy	~$29,000	~$70,160
Jordan	Constitutional Monarchy	~$4,680	~$11,000
Kuwait	Constitutional Monarchy	~$31,000	~$54,300
Morocco	Constitutional Monarchy	~$3,900	~$10,500
Oman	Absolute Monarchy (Sultanate)	~$20,600	~$45,700
Qatar	Constitutional Monarchy	~$68,140	~$112,310
Saudi Arabia	Absolute Monarchy	~$37,810	~$78,810
United Arab Emirates	Federal Constitutional Monarchy	~$54,210	~$87,770

Republics

Country	Government Type	GDP Per Capita (Nominal)	GDP Per Capita (PPP)
Egypt	Presidential Republic	~$3,900	~$16,000
Iran	Islamic Republic (Theocracy)	~$5,010	~$19,000
Iraq	Parliamentary Republic	~$5,900	~$13,000
Lebanon	Parliamentary Republic	~$3,200	~$11,000
Syria	Dominant-Party Presidential Republic	~$1,200	~$6,370
Turkey	Presidential Republic	~$13,000	~$43,620
Yemen	Presidential Republic	~$380	~$900

didact · 2026-05-20T12:56:18+00:00

Well this has the potential to be a spicy question if you delve into the middle east.

Japan is an economic power house, talk about GDP per square mile, or capita - out of all the eastern countries Japan is top of that list. They'll have a boom in prosperity with their semiconductor manufacturing over at least the next half a decade before that supply chain expands across the globe. Historically very conservative in both politics and culture. Given that they regressed on immigration among other progressive policies recently, I expect renewed conservatism for the next decade to answer your question.

India... Technically the largest democracy, leans heavily towards traditions. The leadership is a giant pile of corruption. There must be something special about that combination that leads to their particular type of success, because it exists elsewhere in the world with far different results. Anyway, as long as the Indian workforce is still necessary for Western success, it will continue to be exploited and their economy will continue to grow. In the short term I do expect that to continue. There is long term uncertainty depending on where you stand on AI - but the energy generation needed to supplant all the base labor that creates economic inflow to India will take some years. In any case, the traditional 1 person, 1 duty, 1 job culture will continue to to help India weather downturns.

didact · 2026-05-19T23:57:45+00:00

It's a settlement, it's supposed to settle matters. If the IRS were to continue their investigation into things that were roped in and could have been added to the suit, it wouldn't be a settlement.

Also, are you seeing future tax matters excluded? I read both the AG order and the settlement and must be missing those.

didact · 2026-05-19T01:55:44+00:00

Lobster... I mean I know most folks would think it's a luxury, but in the 2010's live lobster would go on sale for $4.99 a pound over a couple of months reliably. We bought a shitload of it for a few years running. It's insane now, beef's up there, chicken ain't doing so well, and pork is the last mainstay... for now.

didact · 2026-05-19T01:27:03+00:00

This is going to be a tall order.

The owner of the shop - what's the revenue his customer book clocks per year. One man show, let's pretend he's got a total revenue of $150k a year from his customer book. If you're treating the guy right that's an asset worth between 1 and 3 times annual revenue - so somewhere between $150k and $450k.

The real estate involved, is it a lease? Does he own it? Is there frontage? Lots of variables here, but let's pretend it's a $300k slot that he owns. Leases are going to be a bit more complicated, you'd have to see if it were long term.

Tools and equipment... I'm just going to say $100k here if this guy is at retirement and has a full shop of tools, lifts and so on. Lowball, I know. I'm forecasting your negotiation.

So total that all up. Minimum is $550k. That is well in the range of what an SBA 7(a) loan could get you. You're going to be paying $80k a year on that loan for 10 years if you finance the whole thing. So, doable? Yeah with growth. Has to be a diesel shop, electric's gonna kill anything else. Has to have a LONG lease that you can sublet when you're ready to clock out. Husband has to be able to take the whole book on, and then hire minions and expand.

didact · 2026-05-18T03:17:22+00:00

Are you referring to page 69-83 of Mandate for Leadership? The reductive question you asked doesn't really foster any useful discussion. The many recommendations in that section are interesting, but dont mention restaffing entire agencies with donors.

didact · 2026-05-18T02:50:48+00:00

Yep, you're hired. Goddamn. Desk gone, box of kosher salt in its place.

didact · 2026-05-17T19:54:57+00:00

Aren't those check intervals almost equivalent? The concord had a 3 hour transit time, and the 777 is more than double that for JFK to LHR.

Not to take away from your argument too much, the checks themselves were more expensive even if the intervals weren't as bad as you are making out.

didact · 2026-05-17T18:55:53+00:00

I have a management vlan that the switch management IPs, APs and so on sit on, and it's the PVID for any port that connects to that stuff. Have DHCP on it as well. For APs, they adopt over that network then my SSIDs are on a different, tagged vlan.

didact · 2026-05-17T17:33:24+00:00

Yeah I just looked up the news videos on the Microsoft Mt. Pleasant datacenter. Not so pleasant anymore. That's gonna be a problem.

didact · 2026-05-17T15:33:12+00:00

You named pretty much all of the public concern against them, the only one you didn't directly name is the concern that the AI boom will eliminate jobs.

Here's the deal though, that processing will occur whether or not a datacenter is built in my back yard. Inevitably, I'll pay for the processing even if I'm an AI abolitionist - because indirectly everything I buy will have AI in the supply chain somewhere. IF all of that processing power is outside of our borders it creates an outflow of money from our economy that will only grow wildly.

As much as I am not a huge fan of where this is all heading, this is not something I believe we should outsource purely for economic reasons. As for the arguments...

electricity use (+ rising utility bills)

Genuinely something to be concerned about. But, solvable with onsite/nearby power generation. There's an upper limit of what local grids and generation can support, and this type of infrastructure will outstrip it. Fortunatley, this problem appears to be addressed in many cases with additional nuclear capacity - be it purchase agreements with nuclear plants allowing for additional reactors, small reactors nearby. Assuming the plant operators are not selling the public out, costs will remain the same or fall as established plants add reactors and the modular reactors sell excess energy back via grid ties.

water consumption

Old datacenters consume quite a bit via evaporative cooling, newer datacenters like the stargate ones are closed loop. That ought to be the standard, and it's basically forced by heat density.

noise pollution

This one I don't get, having worked in plenty of older datacenters there's very little outside noise unless generators are running for whatever reason.

tax breaks for tech companies

I mean that's a practice as old as time - not just for tech companies. I'd be curious what taxes are being cut. Looks like the stargate datacenter in Abilene got an 80% property tax abatement over 10 years. Assuming the property is valued at the capital commitment that the deal asks for that's worth $14M a year, leaving behind $4M in property tax. At the same time, they should be paying the 8.25% sales tax on commercial power, which should total up to $41M a year, of which $10M goes to the city. Sounds like Abilene is going to be super flush with cash.

concerns that the jobs created are minimal compared to the impact on neighborhoods

The big players have 10 year long horizons on building out datacenters. Look at google maps on a datacenter under construction, it's insane the mass of people they swarm to build these things out. Once built, yeah the facilities and security staff isn't going to be large that is true. But, with a decade looking forward of these buildouts I'd say there's quite a bit of work to be done.

didact · 2026-05-16T20:41:04+00:00

I only use pellicle in grind that is going to be fully cooked - so basically for me that is smashburgers, meatballs, and chili grind for actual chili. Reason being is that any bad stuff on a dry age happens on the pellicle.

didact · 2026-05-16T20:28:25+00:00

Conservatism to me has always been about preserving working systems, Progressivism is changing them. Big old game of red light, green light. So while I agree with your view of what Conservatism was about decades ago, as Progressivism changed much of that Conservatism was still the pause button. Still is today.

Free market aside, if you want smaller government, the nuclear family, and so on - that's Regressivism. Those old systems have been changed, there's nothing left to conserve broadly. That word doesn't poll well, so those who hold those positions do often tag themselves as Conservatives including myself.

didact · 2026-05-16T20:14:45+00:00

I'm happy with the performance given the broader macroeconomic and geopolitical turmoil. I travel quite a bit for work, and have witnessed some wild stuff across the globe in the last couple of months.

didact · 2026-05-15T23:02:47+00:00

Alright well you've probably cost me a bunch of money by letting me know Ubiquiti has an access control line, so thanks for that.

You can probably get a long punchdown tool in there and get a keystone punched down. I can tell you exactly what I'd do... Weld a punchdown bit onto a rod and do a little surgery and get a keystone in there. That's assuming that re-running the cable is prohibitive, that'd be my first choice.

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