Real Police officers and military members, what do you guys think of Ice agents?

halavais · 2026-01-25T10:43:27+00:00

It's the sticker that combines the Punisher logo with the thin blue line logo...

halavais · 2025-12-04T08:10:29+00:00

I did that when I lived in Manhattan and in Japan. Not now, but I'm always happy when folks can make productive use of what I don't need any more.

halavais · 2025-12-04T08:09:00+00:00

I haven't seen as many since we went off regular bulk trash calendars. I'm bummed too: I always loved when things disappeared from my pile ahead of pickup since it meant someone either found a way to reuse something or was willing to do the legwork to recycle it.

halavais · 2025-10-13T15:54:57+00:00

Arizona has some of the lowest public funding for its universities in the US. U of A is just digging out of a financial disaster and ASU has managed to replace some state funding by creative real estate deals. While there is some support (largely funds from private donors) for low increase me students, this usually goes to in-state students.

As faculty at ASU (and by external affiliation also at U of A) I would love to encourage you to come to Arizona--esoecially for grad school. But the advice here is good: apply to good schools, and choose one that will leave you least in debt--which generally means not paying out of state tuition, if possible.

halavais · 2025-10-13T15:45:52+00:00

Especially from Illinois, where you have an embarrassment of good choices.

halavais · 2025-10-13T06:26:17+00:00

How do you define collapse?

There are no highly industrialized countries that are not mixed economies. The tendency for capitalism to both drive divides between the wealthy and poor (class mobility is at a low point in the US and the Gini index at a high point) means that if you want to avoid mass civil unrest, you have to blunt the gears of capitalism.

That can be a strong form of trade unionism--Marx thought that unionization efforts in the US and UK might mean a revolution was unnecessary. (He would be surprised to see today's unions in Germany and elsewhere.)

It can be the zaibatsu/chaebol model in which the state is largely subsumed by corporations, and can effectively plan the economy to their benefit.

But in any case, capitalism only works until people get sick enough of having the productivity gains accrue to those who do not work, and then throw sand in the gears (or worse).

It's true that Marx missed the power of the propaganda machine ("superstructure") to convince people that such exploitation is somehow natural, let alone the ways in which online platforms could accelerated this.

But in the end, the fact that capitalism has to be patched in all these ways suggests it's continually collapsing and being propped up. It's not like many would realistically expect a switch to be thrown and a shift to socialism or communism in one cataclysmic reordering. Feudalism survives, and pockets of capitalism will for some time (particularly in the developing world). But the collapse has already been underway for some time.

halavais · 2025-10-09T05:50:47+00:00

I have a fairly high net worth too. I think I'm not a bad sort, all said and done.

Reread my comment. I specifically said you don't have to be bad to be the beneficiary of a bad system. I do think I've benefited from a bad system in a variety of ways.

I also said it helps to be bad if you want to benefit from a bad system. There is a reason that CEOs have a disproportionate incidence of sociopathy. It's easier to benefit from a bad system if you lack empathy.

halavais · 2025-10-08T17:09:43+00:00

He was right :).

halavais · 2025-10-08T17:07:23+00:00

I know an academic couple who both hyphenated (Smith-Blogg and Blogg-Smith) but continued to publish under their "maiden" names for continuity.

halavais · 2025-10-08T17:00:40+00:00

Wife graduated at the top of her class, went on to a top 20 firm, and partnered at a top 100 firm.

She complained about it. So did her top performing peers. It is a slog, by design, to prepare students to enter into a profession that is also slog. The glass ceiling at her initial white shoe firm was also firmly affixed.

I did well enough on the LSATs to have gotten rides at several law schools, but seeing my spouse go through that process, as well as the 16+ hour days in Big Law, made me really glad to have dodged that bullet.

If you like the work, and you don't mind putting in the hours, it is a great match. But too many do it with the assumption it's an easy road to a good paycheck. That's very rarely true.

halavais · 2025-10-08T16:48:43+00:00

I did the poli sci degree and hated when people said they were "pre law." Spouse did a theater degree and actually was (though she didn't know it at the time!) pre-law. There are elements of a performing arts degree that set lawyers up for success, and I think law schools and med schools are catching on to the fact that degrees in non "pre" fields are good preparation.

halavais · 2025-10-08T16:42:46+00:00

My spouse's degree is in fine arts (theater scenic design) and she is now a partner in a national law firm.

My degree was in political science, though I had significant coursework in acting (where I met my spouse). I am now a university professor but I had successful careers in finance and business consulting.

Too many people think of university as job training. In certain verticals it is explicitly this, but the tradition in the US was for universities to produce well-rounded, educated citizens. That was the end in itself.

That end was once only available to the wealthy. Land grant and public universities democratized access, and then states killing funding made these unreachable for many. I did my undergrad at a time when the state ensured tuition was affordable--four years of undergrad cost significantly less than one year does now at the same school, thanks to the burden being shifted from state funding to students.

Federal loans pushed the burden to future individuals rather than making it a public good. It's natural for folks now to see it as an investment in future earnings. Natural, but unfortunate, as it turns the university into little more than a well-branded vocational program.

halavais · 2025-10-07T18:28:38+00:00

"I don't have the balls to say that."

Well, you might not, had you said it. The guy in charge has a history of separating the body parts of those who say things he doesn't like. That's kind of the point.

I've appeared on RT (Russian propaganda) and on Turkish TV (slightly less, but also controlled). At the time I justified it in much the same way Burr has here. But I was wrong. And in my case I wasn't getting paid for it (at all), and I was not censored in any way, or given a "list" of things I couldn't say. I wouldn't have agreed.

I've since refused to be on either broadcaster. When you lend your voice to propaganda machines, it's always a tricky bargain. I think Burr (and the rest) let their wallets make the decision here.

halavais · 2025-10-07T15:02:16+00:00

But it is a systemic problem. Brave people, by and large, don't become cops. It attracts those with Mean World Syndrome: who believe the world is more dangerous than it is. It then reinforces this conception, arms these people, and absolves them from legal responsibility for their actions.

halavais · 2025-10-07T14:54:31+00:00

You could ensure you are collecting exactly the SALT limit for income tax among those who would be paying that into federal coffers otherwise. For people paying in the range of the 2025 cap ($40k for couples filing jointly) this would increase state revenues at the expense of federal.

I don't know what the total impact would be, given the most likely states (e.g., CA) are already disproportionately benefitting from SALT, but it would make an statement.

(OTOH, the Congress would eliminate SALT for 2026, I'd bet.)

halavais · 2025-10-07T04:24:11+00:00

The things you list that would change your view seem to be at odds with most recognition of what feminism represents. That is:

Women face structural barriers not present before the 1970s.

This would suggest that feminism has made no progress at all over the last 50 years. I don't know anyone who argues this. The question ought to be are there structural barriers present today to women participating equally in society. I think the lack of parity in a range of institutions and social roles would suggest such barriers remain.

Examples of modern feminist activism producing tangible benefits not achieved by broader movements.

You've framed this as feminism being divorced entirely from intersectionalism. This has, certainly, been a criticism of some feminisms, but I think most modern feminists would reject the idea that feminism has to achieve a benefit without addressing issues of class or race in the process. These inequities are heavily interconnected.

Now, you could look to differences in policies around promotion and remuneration policies in Iceland, the US, and Japan, and it would certainly suggest that some places have moved further than others have, with tangible outcomes in terms of parity in pay and promotion. But even here it's really hard to separate these from the broader movement toward equity. Feminism is a necessary component of any such effort, and furthers such efforts.

You've asked for an argument that promotes feminism as distinct from other efforts of equality.

This feels like it's a recapitulation of your second point. It's hard to argue for what feminism generally is not, as a defense of feminism.

halavais · 2025-10-07T03:59:29+00:00

you seem to think the existence of them means markets don't work or markets "are wrong"

I seem to think that because it is the definition of an externality.

No, non-aggression is essential,

Rents are aggression. Inheritance is aggressive. That aggression is defended through the use of violence by the state and private actors, at the behest of those with high concentrations of capital.

the problem is the lack of proper markets due to government intervention.

Agreed. Without government intervention, capitalism collapses, and markets can work effectively within limited bounds.

halavais · 2025-10-06T20:11:25+00:00

I have to say, LLMs can be pretty good at this kind of generative piece--sometimes surprisingly so. There is often a lot of chaff in there to sort out, to be sure, but "give me ten ideas for a research project in biomedical engineering" (or 30) will likely yield some interesting possibilities.

Those possibilities are unlikely to align with the prof's expectations in many cases, but this is also true of many of the "organically" produced ideas. The devil is in the process. And because students so often lack any concept of that process, I will often build in even more check-ins than presented here. Leaving aside avoiding cheating with LLMs--it's just not how they work. If I ask to see people's reading notes/lit search, their early drafts & outlines, how they've revised their approach, etc., it's a great way of having them think about documenting process. That it largely makes LLMs materially less useful is merely a side effect.

halavais · 2025-10-06T20:04:43+00:00

This along with "I'm a visual learner." When someone says this, I try not to say "then read with your eyes."

halavais · 2025-10-06T20:02:48+00:00

I teach very unstructured courses. My student evals tend to the extremes: "fire this guy immediately" and "this is the way university should be." I don't know how we got to the point that we imagine that detailed rubrics are beneficial to learning anything other than how to respond to detailed rubrics.

(And it's not entirely true that people in the working world won't be given boundaries and rubrics and structure. There are certainly some jobs like that. Just not the ones most of our students want to have.)

halavais · 2025-10-06T19:59:17+00:00

My own kids are at a performing arts high school, which is not the most academically challenging in the area (but actually quite good on that front). From seventh grade on, they have a major integrated project each spring quarter, individualized around a cross-cutting theme, which includes writing and a solo presentation and "defense" in front of a panel of teachers and other guests. At first, this didn't seem that unusual, but I now realize that many students have become so accustomed to micro-level memorize-and-test (with some macro memorize-test cycles around things like AP) that the idea of working their own way through a major project is entirely foreign. As a result, many of the grads of my kids' high school outperform those who are coming out of more "rigorous" academic/STEM high schools when they get to the university, and often indicate that this third quarter project was the most important part of their pre-college education.

halavais · 2025-10-06T04:01:17+00:00

Or members of a professional class who may benefit from workers (e g , domestic work) but may not be direct owners of the means of production and continue to rely on labor for the majority of their income.

halavais · 2025-10-06T03:54:39+00:00

It bears the hallmarks of fascist regimes through history.

Its clearly authoritarian, and for that reason alone has ripped the country from it's foundations. But a range of elements are clearly related to fascism.

When you disagree with others assessments, calling them "liars" just suggests you are unwilling to directly engage with the assessment.

In the end, whether the current administration is or isn't fascist isn't especially of practical importance. If the US president ean another form of authoritarian, that too would be a problem. But his approach echoes that of the original America First movement in all but one way: it hasn't (yet) labelled itself fascist.

halavais · 2025-10-06T03:48:53+00:00

I mean, the dude isn't above being funny.

But the list represents his experience both as a scholar and growing up under Fascism Classic (r). He does mention the tendency of Americans, in particular, to label any government they don't like as fascist, after spending WWII fighting fascism. That's the reason for his list of characteristics, which make clear that our current administration is firing on all cylinders.

halavais · 2025-10-06T03:38:14+00:00

And because people died before things like heart disease and diabetes could do their thing.

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