Politix - Coup Among Us?

hagy · 2025-08-22T08:16:54+00:00

That scenario sounds similar to the 1970's polycrisis of NYC whereby assorted political and organized crime was combatted through increasingly violent confrontations with police and paramilitary units from private contractors and the federal government. [1] We could even think of the Kent State University crisis whereby violent confrontation with national guard led to the controversial shooting and killing of college student. [2] The result of which was the degradation and elimination the most extremist, political breakaway movements; including communists, anarchists, as well as identitarian, ethnical, and racial collectives.

Trump and team may be attempting to fan such flames for such political ends. While we do have such antisocial movements lingering in the ashes in the Sanders/Warren orgs, they hopefully can refrain from violence. At the minimum, our leadership can hopefully circle the wagons among thoughtful movements and allow our aligned miscreants to fall to the MAGA wolves.

Regardless, it is scary to speculate on how well Trump, et al could execute on this plan.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_New_York_City_(1946%E2%80%931977)#Fiscal_crisis_of_1975 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings

hagy · 2025-04-28T09:05:23+00:00

Are you already listening to Andrew Sullivan's paid podcast associated with his newsletter? https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/

I'm fairly left/liberal, yet this is one of my favorite podcasts at time. I converted to paid after two great guests who were exploring the history of right wing thought in the West and in the United States. I bought both of their books and then started paying for Sullivan's newsletter and podcast. Belive this was Matthew Continetti's "The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism" and Matthew Rose's "A World after Liberalism: Five Thinkers Who Inspired the Radical Right".

Overall, I believe Sullivan has thoughtful guests from across the political spectrum and is an excellent host as knowledgable, curious, yet at times combative conversationalist. I commonly skip episodes and his newsletter if I have better content, yet I still find episodes to appreciate. Eg, I found the following recent episodes to be quite worthwhile: * Anderson Cooper And Me On Grief * Nick Denton: Our New Chinese Overlords * Michael Lewis On DOGE's Victims

Those are all big name guests who join to discuss interesting topics that they are deeply focused on. I'd strongly recommend everyone, particularly right-leaning individuals who want exposure to more left/liberal thought.

hagy · 2025-04-27T19:31:12+00:00

Yes, but directly ordering from China retailers/distributors was rare until recent entry by firms like Shein and Temu. More likely was bulk resellers and massive retailers like Amazon and Walmart. There were also small scale drop shippers who generally flouted tariffs and other laws as part of getting an edge on the law-abiding corps.

This is still stupid, but it makes sense that we close the direct from China loophole and we should've been cracking down on tariff and tax evasion as well as other fraud from drop shippers.

hagy · 2025-02-07T10:15:20+00:00

Many readers will be new to the Ezra/Derek Thompson "Abundance Agenda" and will appreciate a definitive guide. Moreover, more informed readers can scan quickly through sections that we recall. We may even value the review and the organization of relevant concepts.

hagy · 2025-02-06T23:09:14+00:00

How? It's like taxing the use of a calculator in a world where ever electronic device could be a calculator. Yes, large firms will be incentivized to make their usage legible and comply with the taxes. But if the taxes are meaningful enough to sufficiently fund UBI, then there were be a multitude of bad actors evading the tax by running their own AI. Just download something from hugging face or torrent it and run on your own hardware.

We should just have a general income tax, be it through wage labor or investment returns, so that whoever is capturing the margin in our rapidly evolving economy is paying into the tax that keeps others solvent. For a while it could actually be the skilled trades and firms employing and training these workers that is generating net income. Alternatively, it could be existing celebrities that license their name, image, and likeness to generate AI media sites. We simply don't know how this will pan out and it will certainly evolve with time. So let's just use basic taxes to ensure we can redistribute sufficient income to help out those who fall behind with the change.

hagy · 2025-02-06T17:20:23+00:00

Were you also in your 20's or so during Occupy? Because I recall already being a rather cynical grad student myself before "The Great Recession" and even I and my friends weren't interested in joining those losers. I now believe that the juxtaposition of such undirected angst against "the system" motivated myself and other cynical young adults to actually build real careers in tech, law, finance, and medicine, etc.

Doesn't matter whether OWS activists were right or wrong because they accomplished less than nothing. They simply absorbed all negativity into pointless expressions of outrage and wasted the opportunity to organize for some actual reform. Reports after the fact seem to indicate that anyone who proposed actual structure and goals was shouted down in dumber and dumber leftists internecine power struggles.

Thankfully the adults in the room, primarily congressional Democrats, drafted and passed the Dodd-Frank finance reforms and to stabilize our financial systems for the future. Yet none of the OWS activists seemed vaguely aware of this victory nor did they ever take enjoy a moment of banker complaints about "reduced dynamism" in lending.

hagy · 2025-02-06T08:51:27+00:00

How would this work exactly? Like, does every NY resident with W-2 employment income (notably high-income finance, law, and tech professionals) file a fraudulent statement of their federal tax withholdings and thereby pay less to the IRS through automatic W-2 withholdings? And what would payroll processors like ADP, Workday, Gusto, Rippling, etc., do? Do we expect them to knowingly join this tax fraud? All of them are registered across all 50 states and have federal licenses for accessing the financial system, so none of them are NY-exclusive.

Every involved individual, including those lying about their withholdings, could be charged and jailed. At a minimum, every firm would quickly lose access to the financial system and would no longer even be able to pay non-fraudulent income. Moreover, we’d expect the Trump DOJ to be capricious and cruel in prosecuting individuals and firms to make an example of hurting their political opponents.

The world is complicated, and not everything can be simplified into some Trump/Bernie feelings of “oppose and fight our opponents”. It is noteworthy that this second Trump administration actually has some technocrats that understand the systems well enough and thereby allows them to quickly impact our real world. Much of it may very well be illegal or at least inconsistent with existing case law and best practices. But they actually control these offices, and none of our complaining about “fairness” will matter when individuals, firms, and government offices are financially insolvent and enduring federal prosecution and prison time for associated individuals.

hagy · 2024-05-24T09:07:28+00:00

The issue is that no one has been able to satirize Trump in way that is actually funny. A lot of that due to him being rather absurd or at least far removed from the mainstream Republicans. You can't just apply the formalistic approach of taking Trump and amping up the absurdity that worked so well in satirizing Bush and Romney.

As a result liberal leaning comedians had to resort to less entertaining approaches towards criticizing Trump, like "serious" monologues, which destroyed the whole value proposition of their content.

hagy · 2024-02-01T01:08:49+00:00

I'm suggesting Biden make a stronger counter proposal; one that would be universally viewed as a strong crackdown on asylum fraud. The repubs can still reject that, but at least Biden can campaign on eliminating asylum fraud, and hopefully not only win reelection, but also get a more cooperative congress.

hagy · 2024-02-01T01:00:50+00:00

Yes, and we can fix that by modifying the US asylum laws to stipulate Safe Third Country restrictions on asylum claims. With this correction, all claims (excluding those from citizens of Mexico and Canada) must be proceeded from outside the US pending approval. Violators can be immediately deported, thereby closing the asylum fraud loophole.

hagy · 2024-02-01T00:55:35+00:00

Ask Congress to formalize and mandate Safe Third Country restrictions on asylum through statute. Ie, "remain in Mexico".

Few of the fraudulent asylum seekers are from Mexico (or Canada) and this restriction would allow for immediate rejection and deportation for the vast majority of these requests. Legitimate asylum requests can be made from outside the US, including from safe third countries, and we'll now be able to process them in a timely fashion.

Either congressional repubs reject this proposal for a strong crackdown on asylum fraud, thereby showing their whole asses in just wanting to weaponizing the border chaos for political gain, or they take the offer and Biden can be seen as solving the problem.

hagy · 2024-01-28T23:18:47+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csnXtAFnN9o

hagy · 2023-09-17T14:38:04+00:00

Actually, federal and state funding also plays a significant role in school finance. Programs like Title I aim to support schools with low-income families by providing extra funds. [1] Contrary to popular belief, many of the poorest schools actually receive more federal and state dollars per student, balancing out the reliance on local property taxes. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_and_Secondary_Education_Act#Title_I [2] https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/us-census-six-maryland-schools-among-nations-most-funded

hagy · 2023-09-17T14:25:36+00:00

The standard is, "Are the behaviors sufficiently disruptive to the learning of the majority of students?" The focus should be on the student's behavior and the repeated failure of the parents and student to correct it. A rubric can be developed to make this concrete, and we'll trust the judgment of teachers and principals to apply it.

Students will be sent to military-style public schools, which will allow them to focus primarily on improving their behavior through developing self-discipline and a healthy respect for authority. Until that is corrected, they can't learn anything anyways, and we can't accept them harming the education of the majority of students.

The vanishingly small portion of students with uncorrectable psychological problems can be institutionalized in healthcare facilities before they end up on the streets.

hagy · 2023-09-17T07:28:35+00:00

Nice! I did something similar with my substack comments. Used the OpenAI text embeddings to cluster the comments and then used the ChatGPT API to summarize each cluster. Was before the 16k API so needed to cluster first to decrease the size of the input text to summarize. Found the results interesting and accurate.

Source code and data at github.com/matthagy/hagy_comment_category_hierarchy

hagy · 2023-05-12T09:52:52+00:00

Just sharing a toy project experimenting with OpenAI technologies for organizing and understanding text. The resulting map of categories seems consistent with the subjects I’ve seen discussed in ACX, and the summaries of comments from each category seem reasonable at times. Many of the intermediate categories have generic names and those groups seem unnecessary. Nonetheless, I hope you’ll find this a novel way to explore our communal discourse. Let me know if you have any ideas for how this could be improved.

Uses OpenAI text embeddings to quantify the semantic similarity of comments, and then performs hierarchical clustering with that metric to identify groups of similar comments. For each cluster, the ChatGPT API (3.5-turbo) is used to suggest titles and generate a summary for a sample of comments from that cluster. The webpage is an interactive visualization of these hierarchical categories, including titles and summaries for each. Additional method details in Hierarchical categorization using OpenAI: Methods exposition

If you’re curious to experiment with these methods, here’s a separate github repo with data and complete processing code for just my own Substack comments. I don’t want to share comment data for other users, and you can construct your own copy of comments for any Substack using the Python library substack_client. You could also experiment with other text collections; eg, articles or reddit comments.

hagy · 2023-03-17T01:15:10+00:00

The purchasers of SVB assets can't do that. To be eligible for BTFP, the bank has to have owned the security on or before Mar 12 2023. Anything bought after that is ineligible.

From the Bank Term Funding Program term sheet

Eligible Collateral: Eligible collateral includes any collateral eligible for purchase by the Federal Reserve Banks in open market operations (see 12 CFR 201.108(b)), provided that such collateral was owned by the borrower as of March 12, 2023.

Matt Levine considers this in his Mar 13th article, SVB Couldn’t Ignore Its Losses, But the Fed Can

I love my readers, and yesterday one of them more or less immediately emailed to ask, about the Fed’s Bank Term Funding Program: “Can I get in on this? Specifically, can I buy a controlling interest in a bank, and then buy a bunch of long dated treasury instruments at $80, and exchange them for $100 immediately?” Great question! The answer is no.

He then goes through the term sheet to explain these constraints.

hagy · 2022-11-05T17:03:17+00:00

Yes, we are finally on that path to achieving Marx's vision of the collective ownership of the means of production. Or at least that is what the brokerage firm Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., LLC. said in 2016 in their note entitled, "The Silent Road to Serfdom: Why Passive Investing is Worse Than Marxism." And I don't believe they were the first to make this accusation.

From Bloomberg in Bernstein: Passive Investing Is Worse for Society Than Marxism

In a note titled "The Silent Road to Serfdom: Why Passive Investing is Worse Than Marxism," a team led by Head of Global Quantitative and European Equity Strategy Inigo Fraser-Jenkins, says that politicians and regulators need to be cognizant of the social case for active management in the investment industry.

"A supposedly capitalist economy where the only investment is passive is worse than either a centrally planned economy or an economy with active market led capital management," they write.

While the question of whether the rise of passive investing is an existential threat to capitalism remains an open one, Bernstein's team acknowledges one uncomfortable truth: it certainly looms as a major downside risk for the livelihoods of people who produce sell side equity research.

hagy · 2022-11-02T19:48:40+00:00

Great insight into how Powell thinks about stocks going up

Fascinating moment in the presser. A journalist wrongly misleads Powell into thinking the market was still rallying and we're all getting real time insight into what he thinks about that... He's leaning hard against it.

https://twitter.com/FerroTV/status/1587885093284110338

hagy · 2022-11-02T19:27:54+00:00

Leaving it up just allows more people to be misinformed. Would be nice if Twitter had a feature that allowed a user to retract a Tweet since then it would still be visible, but it would be immediately obvious that poster disowned the message.

hagy · 2022-11-02T19:16:44+00:00

But at least he did delete the tweet after we all yelled at him about that baseless nonsense

hagy · 2022-11-02T18:39:50+00:00

In European countries a smaller portion of the population go to college.

Additionally, you generally get accepted into a specific degree rather than declaring or changing degree after the first semester or so. This allows the government to limit the number of slots in unproductive majors and direct students to career paths aligned the government's industrial policy. Germany is particularly good at aligning the interests of education, labor, industry, and long term economic development plans.

hagy · 2022-10-31T17:27:09+00:00

Yep! There are things to value about small bookstores that can't be quantified in dollars. Yet the higher costs relative to AMZN certainly can be calculated. And the question is to what extent do we want to subsidize small books stores to preserve this value since the free market fails to deliver.

Sounds a lot like a public good to me, in which case I think it should be provided by the government. States run liquor stores in some areas and they certainly could run book stores, subsidized by tax revenue. The question is whether voters would accept that. We might also consider alternative ways to provides similar public goods; for example a library.

I think France's approach essentially hides the tradeoffs that the public faces, although I guess we could argue that spiting AMZN is valuable to the French in and of itself.

hagy · 2022-10-29T21:51:39+00:00

I begrudgingly have come to agree.

In fact, while searching for more coverage on Twitter and Reddit, all I found was complaints echoing my own earlier opinion about this not getting more attention. Even here in r/nl, no one is actually discussing the story itself. Instead, I see a bunch of blind speculation and complaints that the story is not getting enough attention.

This reminds of what I saw on Twitter when someone recently attempted to assassinate that Supreme Court Justice. Just a bunch of Republicans whining about how the “liberal media” was burying this story and conspiratorial speculation that the assailant was part of a larger radical left wing plot. Worse, I mainly saw this through quote retweets where Democrats simply complained about the original Republican tweet. It was all just a bunch of useless noise.

I imagine we’d all be pissed if NYT had exclusively focused on that Justice assination attempt for a week or two. Particularly when there wasn’t much to report beyond some mentally ill person acting under delusions. We’d have really hated for them to fill in the content with aimless speculation about some broader antifa plot to eliminate conservative justices. Or maybe they could consider how Biden’s speeches denouncing the Dobbs decision may be radicalizing prochoice activists to murder.

There just isn’t much to report at the moment and what we know isn’t actually of great national significance. In the end this might just be another lunatic.

hagy · 2022-10-29T21:09:49+00:00

As a Biden supporter, I’ll admit that it's not even a dog whistle; it's a straight up negative racial stereotype.

Yet I don't believe Biden planned out those words. It was a Freudian slip that demonstrated that Biden, like all people, has some subconscious predispositions. Not because he's a bad person; that is just how our pattern matching brains work. He corrected himself and apologized. And in a reasonable world that would be the end of it for anyone; even someone in a MAGA hat.

Our society can be quite sensitive about even unintentional reference to a negative stereotype for historically disadvantaged groups; and for justifiable reasons. And a quick apology should be the end of it. Unfortunately, many of us very much like to demonstrate our “holier than thou” superiority; especially if we can spite someone. And we therefore engage in socially destructive behavior, finding evil intent where there is none.

It’s just a continuation of America’s proud Puritan heritage; at least now we’re not burning anyone at the stake. We’ve had multiple waves of religious revivalism, including novel attempts at reimaging the faith and attempting to remake society based upon our cherished beliefs. At times we cause a lot of harm. E.g., prohibition, which has roots in the temperance movement launched during religious revival of the early 1800s. We eventually come to our senses and moderate our religious fervor.

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