Favorites: Polling, Parliament, and Preassembled Projects
JD Vance at a loss for words, parliamentary systems lock out extremists, and elevator costs soar
Just a wild amount of whiplash on tariffs. Jens Nordvig quipped that we have tariffs on everything except everything. A simple overview of the last month or so from Tsachy Mishal (cached) is "there are no tariffs but the S&P 500 is 7% lower and the world hates us"
While we're not seeing as much popular uprising against Trump, it's sort of wild to also see this stat at the same time. The headline of the article he links is actually pessimistic about this, arguing that a new crop of candidates for office will mostly just displace incumbent Democrats. We’ll see
The overall cost of construction isn't any lower, but it happens off-site in a factory, pretty cool to see it go up so fast.
This comic was published in 2021! One of the programs they're ending is malaria bed nets, here's a thread (cached). It's literally the most cost effective ways (cached) to save lives in the modern world that we know of .
Article I Section 9: Powers Denied Congress - Clause 5: Exports “No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.” His staff clarified that he just meant import tariffs. But just… completely insane to go announcing random stuff like this.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– An article covering where the public stands on a bunch of policy and social issues, with a focus on trying to chart a path towards popularity for Democratic policies. If you want to win elections right now, you should know that the public heavily favors deporting illegal immigrants accused of violent crimes. (Seems bad for due process). But what's the public's opinion about non-violent criminals? You shouldn’t just do whatever is popular, but you need to know which of your positions is unpopular. (src)
– M Nolan Gray argues that some city planning departments hold positions with as little scientific support as vaccine denial. (src)(cached)
– A short thread about how much nicer cities would be if we allowed single stair buildings. But most importantly, a brand new study from Pew showing that single stair buildings are at least as safe as dual-staircase buildings. (src)(cached)
– Can humans actually think? Surprisingly limited evidence! (src)(cached)
– Trump admin is truly arguing that Canadian timber imports represent a national security threat to the US. It's just total nonsense (cached) (src)(cached)
– While Parliamentary systems are probably more durable than US-style Madisonian institutions, a real strange feature is that as an extremist party emerges but lacks a majority, the other parties will work together to lock them out of power. By doing this, they ensure that thermostatic opinion never swings against the extremists, keeping their numbers from crashing to zero. (src)(cached)
– JD Vance argued with Yglesias on Twitter. Yglesias had pointed out that given the US' large capacity to manufacture arms, and our goal of increasing capacity in the near to medium term, shipping arms to Ukraine is something we can do indefinitely. JD Vance disagreed, but despite a prestigious degree, and experience publishing arguments about policy details at length, Vance's responses amounted to "nuh-uhhh!" (src)(cached)
– Ramez Naam argues that if nations see the U.S. fail to defend Ukraine, that incentivises them to develop their own nuclear weapons, and worse, it incentivises all countries whose security was previously guaranteed by the US to do the same. Seems like Trump's policies are the ones pushing the world towards WWIII. Paul Graham argues that (cached) Trump's desire to help Putin is so intense that it makes it really hard not to get into conspiratorial thinking. (src)(cached)
– Part of why elevators are ridiculously expensive in the US is that the elevator union blocks preassembly of elevators in factories. (src)(cached)
– Suddenly we’re going to need to use GDP estimation systems for totalitarian countries for the US instead. (src)(cached)
– Oh look, an old post by David Sacks explaining why the government shouldn't invest in cryptocurrencies. Weird that he's in favor of it now. (src)(cached)