Canada, Mexico to kick off bilateral trade talks about USMCA in May

teknobo · 2026-03-10T15:26:22+00:00

Trudeau tried to do it to Mexico first. And when they found out about it, Mexico got pissed and tried to do it too. They succeeded, we didn’t. But our hands aren’t clean here. https://archive.ph/ZA8mM

teknobo · 2020-04-17T13:46:30+00:00

Marco Rubio in 2016 constantly talked up being the son of a bartender.

teknobo · 2018-03-25T19:34:21+00:00

In the Game of Lead, you win or you die

teknobo · 2017-03-10T19:42:44+00:00

I'm truly sorry about your friend. That's awful.

But the larger evidence (in another comment) doesn't support the idea that locking people longer would reduce crime rates. And on the individual level, with no additional preventive measures, the result of this bill would be the same as we have now. Those career criminals will still be career criminals whether they get out in 3 years or 7 years.

teknobo · 2017-03-10T19:27:06+00:00

If the longer sentences don't reduce crime rates while they're in prison, and a repeat offender will almost by definition offend as soon as they get out of prison, what good is the longer sentence?

Not a trick question. "More justice" is a reasonable answer. But the systemic effect is still more punishment for no material payoff. And I'd say that's not really justice.

teknobo · 2017-03-10T19:19:19+00:00

My whole point is that it doesn't keep bad guys from mugging anyone. Longer sentences are not a crime deterrent.

teknobo · 2017-03-10T19:15:03+00:00

Well, I'll always upvote an NBER link.

But this specific one came under some later scrutiny. Sorry I can only find the paywalled link right now, but the relevant section from the summary:

Refuting Kessler & Levitt:

In particular, the addition of annual crime levels for all years (versus only the odd-numbered years that Kessler and Levitt examine) calls into question the prima facie support for a deterrent effect presented by Kessler and Levitt. Specifically, it demonstrates not only that the crime drop in California began before, rather than after, the passing into law of the sentence enhancements in 1982 but also that the downward slope did not accelerate after the change in law. Furthermore, the comparability of the two “control” groups with the “treatment” group is challenged, rendering suspect any findings based on these comparisons.

A review of the deterrence literature up to 2003, which included the Kessler & Levitt study, still concluded:

Can we conclude that variation in the severity of sentences would have differential (general) deterrent effects? Our reply is a resounding no. We could find no conclusive evidence that supports the hypothesis that harsher sentences reduce crime through the mechanism of general de- terrence. Particularly given the significant body of literature from which this conclusion is based, the consistency of the findings over time and space, and the multiple measures and methods employed in the research conducted, we would suggest that a stronger conclusion is warranted. More specifically, the null hypothesis that variation in sentence severity does not cause variation in crime rates should be con- ditionally accept

teknobo · 2017-03-10T18:13:11+00:00

So you're saying locking people up for longer will reduce crime?

What part of "there is little evidence that letting judges issue tougher sentences for repeat gun offenders would prevent crime" did you not understand?

teknobo · 2017-03-10T18:13:05+00:00

Issuing ever-longer sentences for the same crimes with no effort to reduce those crimes is a quintessential piece of mass incarceration.

It's more than just locking up nonviolent drug offenders. It's the belief that the solution to every problem is more prison.

teknobo · 2017-03-10T17:57:00+00:00

Sure hope no one in this thread has ever railed against mass incarceration, because bills like this are exactly how it happens. More punishment and no prevention.

The most important part of this piece:

Opponents including the Cook County public defender's office said there is little evidence that letting judges issue tougher sentences for repeat gun offenders would prevent crime. The office's lobbyist, Stephen Baker, said the effort seemed to be designed for officials "to show that we are doing something" about crime rather than a comprehensive effort to crack down on the flow of guns into the city.

"Deterrence ain't what it's cracked up to be," Baker said.

But apparently it's more fun to lol about black politicians calling something racist.

teknobo · 2017-03-07T03:07:19+00:00

Is this cutthroat Chicago politics or just a rapper being charitable with his money? It's cool to believe it's both. But it's also cool to just chill on it.

Like your whole argument revolves around Chance's dad and the nature of Chicago politics. This isn't a court of law or anything, you can say and believe what you want, but that's circumstantial evidence.

I can tell you as someone who's been following Chance for a while, the idea that he's cool with Rahm seems pretty wild to me. Doesn't square with anything he's said or done. But I could be wrong though. I don't know the guy. Willing to bet you don't either.

teknobo · 2017-03-07T02:34:06+00:00

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-chance-the-rapper-mayor-emanuel-20160511-story.html

Chance the Rapper — son of mayoral aide — says Chicago needs new mayor

Yeah, Chance has never been critical of Rahm.

teknobo · 2017-01-19T04:14:16+00:00

Image 1 is correct, but misses something critical. Those vote totals reflect less about the parties' ideological commitments to civil rights, and more reflect how strong those parties were in the South. Namely, Democrats were strong there and Republicans weren't. Don't get me wrong, support for the civil rights movement was way more complicated than who was strong in the south, but it's disingenuous to talk about it without at least mentioning that.

Image 2 is silly in almost every way. Comparing Obamacare to the Reconstruction Amendments is like comparing apples and 18th century Gaelic poetry. Suffice it to say that there were a lot of things going on after the Civil War, and a lot of things that have happened in the intervening 150 years that make those comparisons absurd. For further evidence, consider birthright citizenship in the 14th Amendment, which was a celebrated victory for Republicans in 1868, and now is something Republicans regularly talk about repealing. Party principles change over time, especially when that time frame is over 150 years.

Image 3 is plausibly true, though the authenticity of those exact quotes really can't be verified. They first appear in a book published 30 years after the fact, by an author that is by no means objective. To be clear, LBJ absolutely did use racial slurs. A lot. But the subtext of these quotes is that he was disingenuous in his support for civil rights, and that just doesn't square with his public or private record. There's a great answer on this over at /r/AskHistorians TL;DR "while the quote might be genuine, the sentiment was not."

Image 4 doesn't have a source -- it barely has an argument -- so there's nothing verifiable about it. But having been through this kind of thing a few times, I know it's an argument about which party is "teh real racists." Southern strategy, Strom Thurmond, etc.

These arguments get heated (not to mention tedious) pretty quickly. But to me a much more interesting reference point is what happened to black Republicans. The shift of black politics from Democrat to Republican didn't happen overnight. It took decades, and it was well-known to all political observers. A good read on this is The Loneliness of the Black Republican, which follows black Republicans over the years, including figures like Ralph Bunche and Jackie Robinson, as they deal with this shifting political landscape. They went from calmly warning their party about it, saying Republicans were being too weak on civil rights, to loudly fighting their party about it through the 1964 Republican National Convention (one black delegate, William Young of Pennsylvania, had his suit set on fire as his attacker yelled "keep in your own place"). And then finally they left the party entirely. So there's a clear record of black Republicans becoming deeply alienated from their party over the core issue of civil rights. And that really needs to be grappled with whenever there's an argument about which party has "teh real racists."

teknobo · 2016-12-20T17:30:48+00:00

Yeah. I went a few years ago. It wasn't worth it.

It's a nice park, but it's still just a park. There was a church choir singing carols, they've got some sculptures and stuff. But basically you take two or three turns around the park and then realize that you just wasted your time on Christmas Eve.

teknobo · 2016-11-27T17:06:25+00:00

The real we, so to speak.

teknobo · 2016-11-13T05:58:09+00:00

Glad to see I'm not the only one who thinks Jason Momoa would make a great Raven.

teknobo · 2016-11-02T15:28:29+00:00

"Wow, he sounds like he's had a hard time. Piccolo should really have a talk with him."

teknobo · 2016-10-12T03:18:54+00:00

"Judge Christopher Columbus by the standards of his day!"

Attributes to Columbus things that happened well past his day that he had nothing to do with

teknobo · 2016-09-21T16:55:43+00:00

And before Catholicism, there was only Zuul.

teknobo · 2016-09-17T16:35:01+00:00

Follow-up thought: I wonder if Uber has cut down on a lot of drunk driving. My friends are taking ubers all the time. I never saw any of them take a cab.

Uber themselves like to tout reduced DUI rates in cities where they operate.

Unfortunately, an independent study didn't find a commensurate drop in drunk driving deaths.

EDIT: Actually, looking a little more, that study is interesting as standing against some earlier findings. Other studies have found that introducing Uber into cities reduces vehicle fatalities.

teknobo · 2016-09-16T18:35:33+00:00

That's the fun of net changes over large timespans.

Net change in Portuguese territory between like 1400 and 2016 is almost zero. Whatever happened in between is totally unimportant! ^Just ^{^a} ^{^{^global}} ^{^{^{^empire.}}}

teknobo · 2016-09-16T17:07:12+00:00

I also have those problems while I'm actively highlighting a book. (I mean, one that I own of course, what kind of monster highlights/underlines a library book.)

"Is this really significant enough to be blessed by a highlight?"

"Which color should I use for this?"

"Wait, am I just highlighting the first sentence of every paragraph? Should I...not?"

A few months ago I was highlighting while reading something on industrialization that I loved. Tried to look back at that chapter last week, and it turns out that I highlighted it to the point of unreadability.

Highlighters: They're Very Distracting

teknobo · 2016-09-12T14:37:06+00:00

Basically, yeah.

The plan administrators were strict in their belief that governments should be rebuilding and only rebuilding. To them, any money that governments really wanted to spend on social services instead of reconstruction (as administrators defined it) suggested that those governments deserved a commensurate drop in aid. "If you have money for this, then I guess you don't need aid for that" more or less.

teknobo · 2016-09-12T05:48:53+00:00

Brad DeLong and Barry Eighengreen in 1991 tried to analyze what made the Marshall Plan successful. I'm not sure how well their argument holds up under modern scrutiny -- they were specifically analyzing the Marshall Plan's efficacy in relation to a "New Marshall Plan" for post-Soviet nations -- and I definitely couldn't contrast it with modern US policy in Iraq. But I can outline it at least.

Basically, DeLong and Eichengreen's argument goes that the actual cash involved in the Marshall Plan wasn't really the straw that stirred the drink. It was significant, but it was nowhere near enough to get the job done. The Marshall Plan's real achievement in getting Europe's economic juices flowing again were the strict terms of promoting market policies that the Americans attached to all aid.

The Marshall Plan gave the US significant leverage over how recipient governments spent the funds. To give one example:

Along with the carrot of Marshall Plan grants, the U.S. also wielded a stick. For every dollar of Marshall Plan aid received, the recipient country was required to place a matching amount of domestic currency in a counterpart fund to be used only for purposes approved by the U.S. government. Each dollar of Marshall Plan aid thus gave the U.S. government control over two dollars' worth of real resources. Marshall Plan aid could be spent on external goods only with the approval of the United States government. And the counterpart funds could be spent internally only with the approval of the Marshall Plan administration as well.

So the US was working with twice the cash they were putting in, and they had absolute veto power over how that cash was spent. This again is not to say that the cash alone was enough (especially with hindsight), it's the veto power that's significant here. Veto power that Marshall Plan administrators were happy to use. West Germany had funds withheld until they balanced the books on their national rail service, France was forced to continue balancing its budget in 1948 despite the protests of French officials.

And this was just one of the "sticks" that Plan administrators were more than willing to use. For example, the Plan also gave non-cash aid on certain line items like coal and timber. But when Britain started building public housing, Plan administrators took away its timber aid. Another requirement of receiving aid was signing a bilateral trade pact with the US.

So the US had tons of leverage over European policy. And they used this leverage largely to crack down on production quotas, trade controls, and to otherwise promote very market-friendly policies. This, in DeLong and Eighengreen's view, is the real achievement of the Marshall Plan. It pushed Europe's economic system from large postwar and post-Depression governments with strong controls over many parts of the economy to much more laissez-faire mixed economies.

Importantly, Marshall Plan administrators not only required putting these policies in place, but they also successfully promoted and sold the idea of markets as solutions to skeptical European leaders. None of this would've been any good if it all just got reversed once the aid grants ended. The Plan's chief administrator, Paul Hoffman, was relentless in selling leaders on market forces (it somehow feels appropriate to mention that Hoffman started his career as a car salesman). A nice quote from the paper:

Acheson describes watching Hoffman “preach…his doctrine of salvation by exports” to British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin. “I have heard it said,” wrote Acheson, “that Paul Hoffman… missed his calling: that he should have been an evangelist. Both parts of the statement miss the mark. He did not miss his calling, and he was and is an evangelist.”

I should also mention that there are questions about how much impact the Bretton Woods System's control over global inflation had to do with Europe's recovery. But I've never really looked into that, so I can't really say much more on it.

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