> Most of us are only citizens because someone up the chain was born under this rule.
This understates the situation. All of us who are not naturalized citizens are citizens only because of the birthright clause in the Constitution. The US does not have any other way for a person born here to become a citizen.
If the birthright clause of the Constitution stops being enforced, Congress (or more likely in our current iteration, the President) will have to create a brand-new set of rules determining which of us natural-born citizens get to retain our citizenship and which do not. There is no existing law to guide them, so they can make it up out of whole cloth.
More plainly: if we choose to eliminate birthright citizenship, whoever is running the country at that time gets to determine whether you are still a citizen.
A hypothetical operational space data center will cost a multiple over a similar terrestrial facility. It would be cheaper/more efficient to offer a municipality or its citizens a fraction of that multiple to secure approvals, now that the bullying approach is running out of steam.
Instead of installing MWs of illegal gas generation and also still causing local electricity rates to spike, why not arrange to buy down the electricity of local ratepayers and also comply with existing laws & regulations?
It's worth asking why operators aren't doing that yet. I suspect it's because neither OAI nor Anthropic have an extra $50B-$100B to put out at the moment. We'll see what happens post-IPO.
> The total subsidies make up half of the market cap of their entire EV industry.
Didn't Tesla essentially stay afloat for years via government subsidies (e.g. government-mandated carbon credits)?
Didn't the US only recently end its direct subsidies for EV buyers?
Don't US taxpayers provide an enormous ongoing subsidy to ICE vehicles by underwriting the security of the oilfields in the Gulf?
Don't US taxpayers in effect subsidize US automakers by ensuring they do not have to compete in the market with the best available vehicles?
More to the point: American free-marketeerism was never about the other side, it was about the US living its own professed values at home. We didn't shackle our press in discussions about the USSR because the USSR chose to shackle its own press. Our lockout of Chinese EVs rankles in part because it's a deviation, at home, from our own professed values.
It's really not. No serious analysis reduces the complexity of markets to a single number in a single sector. In particular, it takes willful blindness to look at subsidies in the EV market and ignore other energy markets.
You're also ignoring the most important point, my last point about values. The comment is still up, feel free to re-read it.
That's the point I guess, it is not binary, but proponents of absolute free markets see it as binary when they are against regulations, and as non-binary, when it is about competition from abroad. They want to have it both ways.
Direct producer subsidies for PRC EV was <100B, less than US injected into US auto, not much more than Euro auto. The latter just poorly, i.e. pork barrel / jobs programs that does not raise baseline competitiveness.
Most of CSIS muh PRC 200b-400b includes rebates/taxes AND subsidies to upstream, i.e. battery industry which used more than cars. AKA they bundled energy sector to skew PRC numbers.
For comparable you'd have to include all historic US/EU auto subsidies, AND ASSOCIATED upstream subsidies like MOST OF fossil industry, related diesel/fuel discounts... etc etc in which case US/EU have been rebating to the tune of trillions.
Strict auto-auto sector equivalence = PRC subsidized less to commoditize their car industry in fraction of time, which is not remotely "overproduction", they still barely exports 20%... they'd have to export 50/75%+ to reach shares of EU/JP/SKR etc and even then those absurd export%s not treated as overproduction. PRC would need to be exporting ~20m more cars then they do now to even qualify.
Auto+energy sector equivalence (the 200-400b figure), PRC not even on the axis in equivalence scenario.
In any case, the point is that the US also subsidizes markets, including the auto markets. China is far from unique in this. As you say, free market capitalism isn't binary, and in this case all parties are subsidizing to some degree.
You seem to understand the meaning of "to some degree" differently than I. To me it implies that subsidies can happen at different amounts, not that they are all the same.
What is an equivalence here is, that the binary flag of "does subsidize" is true, and that equivalence holds.
IIRC more than half of cars sold in China are EV or PHEV. I am receptive to learn that there are PHEVs that are too polluting to be sold in the west, but I would love to see the data.
Euro 7 takes effect in a couple of months. For practical purposes, that means that anything on sale in Europe already has to comply; no-one’s going to launch a car on the basis that any they don’t sell by November become a waste product.
The US government basically told them they can't sell "Fable" and so they aren't. That's probably 90% of the story.
Once the government stepped in, their 5th generation was effectively killed. They either had to lock it up (Mythos), neuter it (Fable), or leave people with the perception they were overpaying for a weaker model (Opus 5).
Hopefully Anthropic has learned to anticipate this risk and has a plan for rollout of their next model that plans for capricious ad-hoc regulation.
What did they think was going to happen when they were actively doomsday fearmongering around the release of their own model? I assume somehow they thought this would lead to a moat with them being left safely inside the castle, but this response, and Reagan's 9 Words, were always infinitely more likely. It was a demonstration of a child-like level understanding of how regulatory capture works.
The PR from the US frontier labs has been poor to terrible from the beginning.
Among other things, "we have stolen the collected works of your culture, now help us grow so that you can all lose your livelihoods and become our serfs" has to be one of the absolute worst marketing approaches in history.
>They either had to lock it up (Mythos), neuter it (Fable), or leave people with the perception they were overpaying for a weaker model (Opus 5).
Option C: they could "get hacked and the models exfiltrated" plausibly. Then the horses will be out and there would be no more point for the USGov's barn door.
The government seems like it's in a rough spot. If they let Mythos out, they seem worried people could use it to mass-hack the internet. China seems to not care so much about this and they're right behind. I don't really know what the answer is.
I wonder how much of it is fears over "mass-hacking the internet", and how much of it is fears over the model discovering various NSA/CIA/etc "tailored access operations", and other deliberate side-channels / vulnerabilities / etc?
(Or perhaps vulns that NSA/etc discovered and has been keeping it private; as they're known to do).
I feel there's a lot that's unaccounted for, and the whole "AWS team reports a 'jailbreak' that is just 'review this codebase'" story doesn't add up.
I wonder if there were some parallel construction going on, and if at the same time, the NSA started losing the exploits they had because it was getting patched.
I think the latter is likely their primary concern. Certain models making hackers more effective doesn’t change that black hat hacking will still be illegal and that’s always been the prime deterrent against capable hackers.
While there is some fallout likely with much more effective hacking being easily accessible, I’m sure govt analysts (unless they were let go) have their own prediction models telling them it’s inevitable that this technology eventually makes it to everyone they don’t want having it, what with China seemingly releasing every progress they make openly. Which makes me think that they’re preparing for that inevitability by hardening the govt systems currently in place and/or by burying the secrets they want to keep hidden deeper underground.
Given the history of the US and this particular administration, I feel burying things deeper is a greater priority.
China uses the strategy of letting dangerous technologies loose which causes disruption in the short term but makes people do the right thing like secure their software. The US by comparison gives me the impression of wanting to leave the internet vulnerable by not making Mythos public so that only the US government can use Mythos to gain access to whatever system they like, which is the same thing the pegasus software does
The government isn't in a rough spot, they're just idiots. Chinese models already match Mythos in red-teaming. Anyone can use Chinese models any time they want. By holding people back from Mythos they're pushing people to Chinese models. And it worked: Chinese models now make up 70% of OpenRouter tokens (complete inversion from a year ago). Even if Chinese models weren't that great, anyone can fine-tune an open weight model specifically for red-teaming and it'll outperform any other model. So this was always going to happen.
A government staffed by logical, sane people would have figured out how not to encourage this, like mobilizing the IT and security industries to secure their products faster, while also cracking down on the "our AI is the most dangerous tool in the world" rhetoric bandied about by the frontier companies. But we don't have that, we have a government of Loony Tunes characters. When you put extremists in office you get extremist behavior.
Whether or not the government chooses to regulate the space, capricious after-the-fact regulation is the worst of all possible worlds. The ~equivalent models from OpenAI did not get the same treatment (favoritism?), and it's not clear the government has produced even rough guidelines about how to be compliant going forward.
Model prep costs far too much money to operate under this kind of regulatory regime.
They tweaked Fable to appease the USG, but it clearly refuses/downshifts more requests than e.g. Opus 5. (I have run into Fable refusals even doing really normal stuff like fixing bugs reported by static security scanners like Brakeman. Not downshifts, outright refusals.)
So the net result is they put "Fable" back on the market, but it was perceived to be a worse overall experience, at much higher cost. (Remember all this happened before most users had really even had a chance to put Fable through its paces.)
That's where we are today: Mythos is locked, Fable is neutered. They probably can't fix this until they are ready to release something that's not called Fable, or that they can say has some key architectural differences to Fable. The sword of capricious regulation is always going to be hanging over Fable.
The last high speed rail I was on was Fuxing Hao series in China, ~200mph. If we can go faster, go faster. Shanghai Maglev can do ~260mph. Japan’s Shinkansen tops out at ~199mph, a bit higher than the TGV in France (~186mph during commercial operations, but has achieved speed records as high as ~360mph).
Within the scope of land travel, it’s clear it can be built. If it isn’t built, of course, that’s a choice. But it’s a lie to say it cannot be done.
Obviously a choice, but also at 200mph it's obviously a vastly slower experience in a lot of way for many of the most-trafficked US domestic routes.
Even at 300mph, which IIRC is much faster than normal operations on existing system, transcontinental travel becomes "too slow." The opposition would be insurmountable to making it take 12+ hours to travel from NYC to LA, for example.
Effectively would split the continent in a way that it hasn't been for generations. Rountes like NYC<->Chicago would get annoyingly slower, but long routes like DC<->Seattle would become an "almost never" trip by train @ 200mph (even assuming direct, as-the-crow-flies). Practically, you're talking "east coast to Asia" durations to cross the continent. Non-starter.
Disclaimer: I love trains. I want high speed trains deployed widely in the US.
First, 300 mph (480 kmh) is not on the cards. It's feasible technically but the energy usage rises exponentially, so it's quickly less attractive. (Obviously planes are even more inefficient for exactly the same reason, but wind resistance is at least reduced at altitude.) This is why speeds tend to top out at around 300 kmh, with only a very few prestige services (in China mainly) going marginally faster.
The good news is that 300 kmh is really fast, and rail is usually much more time-efficient at the endpoints (i.e. stations are more central and there's less waiting). In China, Shanghai-Beijing (approximately LA to San Francisco) is now possible in 4h30. Given the endpoint advantage, that is more than competitive with plane travel, and much more pleasant.
As of this year, China also has a high-speed capsule sleeper that gets you from Beijing to Guangzhou (CORRECTION: 1875 km) in 12 hours at an average speed of 180 kmh. It's still night travel, not every American would be interested. But it shows what's possible.
> Beijing to Guangzhou (same as NY to LA!) in 12 hours at an average speed of 180 kmh
I don't understand. It looks like the Chinese route is ~1200 miles and the US route is about 2500 miles. At the same 180kmh, wouldn't that imply a full 24 hours on a train?
re: LA-SF, I do think HSR could make a big dent on each side of the continent. But the reality is Americans are accustomed to crossing the entire continent quickly, and HSR is not yet a substitute for that.
You're right, it's nothing like LA-NYC - corrected.
(Tangential - the source of my faulty research was Claude Haiku 4.5, which I will quote verbatim: "Two major US cities separated by approximately 2230 km are New York City, New York and Los Angeles, California." I know that figure is too low but believed it anyway. I've just asked for better figures and it's completely unable to answer accurately. Well well.)
The other figures were from memory and pretty correct.
> The opposition would be insurmountable to making it take 12+ hours to travel from NYC to LA, for example.
It already takes 6 hours to fly. Add in security, checked bags, getting to and from the airport and it's close to 10 hours. Also you waste a day or ruin a night's sleep on the redeye.
Compared to that an overnight train with a bed sounds delightful. People could do almost-day-trips, coast-to-coast, with no ill effects. Leave LA tonight, shop/sightsee/eat all day in NYC, take in a show, hop on the late train back to LA the following day. This is pretty near impossible today unless you have a private jet.
> It already takes 6 hours to fly. Add in security, checked bags, getting to and from the airport and it's close to 10 hours.
10 hours is still significantly faster than a hypothetical HSR. Remember that it would also have to stop along the way. Secon, not everyone lives/is traveling to a place that is near a hypothetical train station; you have to keep in mind that American cities tend toward sprawl. HSR leaving from e.g. downtown LA would still be less convenient for e.g. the folks who live in the Valley. It's definitely not a 10-hour excursion for many people to transit the country (source: I did this for years for work).
> Also you waste a day or ruin a night's sleep on the redeye.
Highly dependent on the individual & service class. But the point of this is you're actually physically there in less time.
> Leave LA tonight, shop/sightsee/eat all day in NYC, take in a show, hop on the late train back to LA the following day. This is pretty near impossible today unless you have a private jet.
You're going to get a lot of pushback from people who have been to weddings on the other side of the continent, since they will have done this. Most of them do not have private jets, it's just a common thing Americans do.
> Remember that it would also have to stop along the way
Why?
> Highly dependent on the individual & service class.
There are flights that offer lie-flat seats for most of the passengers on board? I have to confess I haven't ever seen any domestic flights in North America that have lie-flat seats. But maybe I'm just poor.
> But the point of this is you're actually physically there in less time.
And more tired when you get there. I'd rather sleep during my travel and enjoy the destination than waste time recovering in my hotel room. The alternative is to waste your day flying out so you don't lose sleep.
> Most of them do not have private jets, it's just a common thing Americans do.
I'm sure there are individuals who do the redeye consecutive nights. I'm pointing out that doing it instead on a train, sleeping in a bed, will leave you way more well-rested. You might fly out Friday night and return Sunday morning. But you're going to need all of Sunday to recover from those flights.
A large advantage of the train is all the places on the way. I don't actually want to get from New York to Los Angeles. However, I live in the middle of the country between the two cities and by stopping near me, I could get on that train and I could travel, probably not to either New York or LA, but to some other city also in the middle of the country.
Night trains sound like a good thing, but in reality they're not. They work well only in the cases where a city is just far enough that it's an overnight trip, but not much more. Which is to say you get on the train, you brush your teeth, you go to sleep, you wake up in the morning, and you have just enough time to get practice before you get off the train. If your train instead arrives at 4 a.m., that's way too early and so you're gonna be sleeping on the train or they're gonna have to wake you up early in the morning. The other one is particularly a great option. The other way is even worse though if you're on the train go to sleep and you get wake up in the morning and there's still several more hours to do while you're sitting on a train doing basically nothing - except thinking the whole time, you know what? I could have just flown. This would have been an hour to the airport, another hour in line, three hours of flight, and they'd be there. And then they could sleep in a hotel, the cheapest economy hotel room is still much larger than the best luxury train sleeper car.
Because (ignoring the middle of the continent for a moment) "LA" is actually a very large area where having a single stop erases many of the advantages cited for trains. LA does not really have the sort of city center of most train-centric cities, and LA has poor public transit. On the other end, "NYC" has the same property, mostly because you would want to include people from other parts of the densely-populated region around NYC and not just make everyone schlep into Manhattan.
The Shanghai<->Beijing HSR has 24 stops over 819 miles, for example. Similarly, it would only make sense for a US HSR to stop in e.g. Dallas or Chicago or other cities in between.
> I'd rather sleep during my travel and enjoy the destination than waste time recovering in my hotel room. The alternative is to waste your day flying out so you don't lose sleep.
Yeah, like I said individual preference. I don't normally want to do back-to-back redeye flights, but I have done it and am glad it was an option.
If we're talking about a replacement or alternative for flying between NY and LA, a non-stop train makes perfect sense. Planes don't stop. A high-speed train can carry more passengers than a 737.
This would make sense if the US only had two major coastal cities, but that's not the case.
From another of my comments:
A realistic HSR network in the US will also involve changing trains in the midwest because there are too many pairs of big cities involved. Miami<->SF, Atlanta<->LA, DC<->SF, Philadelphia<->Phoenix, etc.
You still need all those things for a high speed train. The only reason it’s a little less today is that almost nobody takes passenger rail.
Keep in mind these old downtown stations built in 1900 won’t be able to handle the kind of passenger counts that would “need” to be shifted from the airports, so don’t delude yourself into thinking you wouldn’t need big train stations built in the outskirts, crowded and irritating to get to, like we have with modern airports.
Your day trip thing sounds even more confusing. That itinerary that’s “near impossible” with fast flight becomes more impossible with trains that take 2-3x longer. Also, sleeper train tickets are incredibly expensive compared to coach, because of how much space they take up and the cost of upkeep for these little suites. They’re always going to be expensive, like the redeye flight on a lie-flat bed. So again, no different than what we have today, just much, much slower and less accessible to the masses.
But your high-speed train enables a lot of things that are not really feasible to do on an airplane. speed train enables a lot of things that are not really feasible to do on an airplane. You should be thinking about a train for things where I could drive my own car but it'd be a little bit annoying to spend an hour on the road.
I happened to be in Des Moines a few years ago and waiting for my airplane an announcement came on that the plane to Chicago was delayed. And I overheard someone near me say, why would you fly to Chicago? You can just drive. Realistically, if Chicago is your destination from Des Moines, depending on where you go, it is quite possible that you can drive your car and get there faster than flying. However, a high-speed train could likely get you there faster than the airplane. Chicago was of course a large city. There's a very big difference between I want to go into the loop versus my destination is an outer suburb. I would expect your high speed train makes two or even three stops in the city of Chicago plus, some stops in other cities that happen to be along the way.
Exactly all of this. HSR in the US makes a lot more sense if you look at it as a regional phenomenon. Atlanta<->Miami, DC<->NYC, NYC<->Chicago, Houston<->Dallas, Chicago<->Nashville. Those all fit the prescription of being around the same time as driving.
Miami<->Seattle is not going to fit neatly in HSR. The distance is too great. A realistic HSR network in the US will also involve changing trains in the midwest because there are too many pairs of big cities involved. Miami<->SF, Atlanta<->LA, DC<->SF, Philadelphia<->Phoenix, etc.
The other hindrance for HSR in the US is our family sizes. "It's about the same time to drive" is a solid argument for 1 traveler, it's less so for 4 travelers with 4 HSR tickets. Many people will keep driving shorter distances for this reason alone.
I have regularly taken two-day trips in the US because the cost of an airplane for 5 is much more than the cost of my car even including hotel rooms. Lately I've been taking Amtrak, which is a little bit cheaper, but it's still annoying enough that I would only do it because I hate driving.
It also helps the economics to realize that there are very few places in the US that anyone would go that not having a personal car is a reasonable thing and so you have to have the cost of a rental car to anything other than grabbing your own.
Tbh - once you somehow figure out who's going to pay for the massive amount of construction, and the land (I know the strips of farmland MIGHT be cheap but the last few dozen miles near each place everbody wants to go get very tricky) - I agree that these sub-400-mile trips are 1000x more competitive with flying, compared to the transcontinental ones. Yeah, I'd love to hop a HSR from Dallas to Houston, or Atlanta to Jacksonvile.
I just think a transcontinental HSR would not be a popular enough trip that we can responsibly include transcontinental passenger traffic in economic considerations to justify the build. In other words, if we can only afford the build in general if we can get like 60% of NY-LA, NY-SF, etc. traffic to switch to trains, then it's going to go bankrupt.
> That itinerary that’s “near impossible” with fast flight becomes more impossible with trains that take 2-3x longer.
No because you can actually sleep on the train and be well-rested. Even non sleeper seats are wider and can recline better on a train.
On planes your sleeping neighbor drools on your shoulder and your seat reclines 5 degrees if you're lucky. Sure technically you could take a redeye two nights in a row. If you don't mind being a zombie for the next 2 days.
You're comparing the most expensive train ticket, a sleeper car, with coach? That's insane. Sleeper car tickets are priced like the lie-flat plane seats. I experienced United's lie-flat premium transcontinental service almost a decade ago and it was a blissful night's sleep. Airlines have only improved the product since.
Compare a coach flight with the neighbor and the 5º reclined seat with coach train tickets with nearly the same setup. Maybe an extra inch of width.
What’s creepy is how little the people arguing for this kind of thing seem to care that the policy would be hated by a majority, and experienced as cruel oppression. They just say “this is the right thing to do.” Climate/degrowth people seem to be the most anti-democratic politically. It seems they NEED to install a monarchy to get their way, because any system of government that allows the people to have any say will never accept the massive sacrifices that they religiously believe are necessary.
Is ~400 million to ~4 billions excess deaths over the next ~50 years worth it? How many excess deaths is it worth? Everything is about trade offs. How much mortgaging of the future with are we comfortable with for today’s luxuries? Because this is a debt that will need to be paid back, potentially by someone not even yet born, through no fault of their own.
At least the future can default on sovereign debt, it cannot default on the energy and resources required to repair physical systems required for survival, that debt is the ultimate recourse debt. There is nowhere to run from it.
I hear what you're saying, but it is also true that re-splitting the population would probably be more difficult politically than e.g. switching off all the fossil fuel generation plants east of the Mississippi or gently transitioning the US fleet to all-EV. As you said, everything is tradeoffs.
Which sucks, because I really would go for a US high-speed rail network.
Yes, this is part of why it was so stupid for Sanders to not actually join and support the party. Had he done that, it's entirely possible he could have won the support of the actual voters he needed to win the presidency.
Also, it's still insane to expect Obama to police e.g. AOC's language 10 years post-Presidency. That's just an insane expectation. Reality is many voters are crazy.
He’s the elder statesmen of the party. In my mom’s part of the world he’d still be de jure in charge of the party. Then if he wasn’t replaced by another man of similar stature, control of the party might pass to Michelle (like happened at least four times in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan).
Its not like it’s totally alien in America. After Biden’s disastrous debate in 2024, Obama was the one who swooped in to lead the party through the chaos. And if Michelle ran for the nomination, she’d probably win. If she had stepped in in 2024 she would’ve won the nomination and the election.
In US politics, that mantle holds until someone else takes the nomination. That role is Biden's. It seems really odd that a former leader other than the most recent would be in charge of the party anywhere. (Remembering here that Biden is still alive and generally capable if suffering age-related decline. Also contextualizing with the fact that the sitting president is also obviously suffering age-related decline.)
> control of the party might pass to Michelle (like happened at least four times in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan).
Yeah, I can see how someone from one of those countries might project onto US politics things that are not commonly done here. Relevant here is Obama beating Hillary for the nomination in 2008.
> After Biden’s disastrous debate in 2024, Obama was the one who swooped in to lead the party through the chaos
I am a political sicko, and I do not remember this happening. Are you perhaps elevating the importance of a single speech Obama gave?
> Yeah, I can see how someone from one of those countries might project onto US politics things that are not commonly done here
Yes, that was my point. Someone asked me why my mom lumped Obama in with “radicals” and I tried to explain that she probably thinks it’s his job as the most senior man. Biden isn’t because he’s too old and sick. The patriarch is someone like Obama’s age. Gray haired but still vigorous.
> Someone asked me why my mom lumped Obama in with “radicals” and I tried to explain that she probably thinks it’s his job as the most senior man.
Another explanation is that she is misinformed and brainwashed by all the Facebook memes targeted towards boomers. It's not exactly a secret that Meta continues to push right wing propaganda in order to help elect conservative politicians.
No she watches CNN in a loop. But she left an unstable third world country and viscerally dislikes what’s going on with DSA, immigration, etc. That said she also hates Trump’s Queens immigrant affect, unpredictability, populism, etc. She loves Obama’s Anglo-Protestant affect and mannerisms but seems to dislike that he’s so tolerant of the DSA types.
You said she's also on Facebook, that's why I guessed.
> But she left an unstable third world country and viscerally dislikes what’s going on with DSA, immigration, etc.
What does she dislike about DSA, immigration, etc.? What does she think of the rhetoric coming from the Republican party that America doesn't need and want third world immigrants such as herself and her family? And that you should be rounded up, denaturalized, and deported back to Bangladesh (see Laura Loomer's recent comments).
> That said she also hates Trump’s Queens immigrant affect, unpredictability, populism, etc.
I guess it's a rite of passage for all American immigrants to hate on immigrants. "I got mine and I'm the 'correct' type of immigrant. Others are not."
> What does she dislike about DSA, immigration, etc.?
She thought the future would be Bangladeshis acting like British people instead of Bangladeshis acting like Bangladeshis in Britain.
> What does she think of the rhetoric coming from the Republican party that America doesn't need and want third world immigrants such as herself and her family?
She doesn’t want “Little Bangladesh” in Queens to be happening anymore than Trump does. One of the few things she agrees with him on. We came to a red state in 1989 and a county with a Republican congressman who ran unopposed most years, and everything was fine because we were trying very hard to absorb the local culture instead of changing it with our own. Nobody had a problem with Bangladeshi immigrants when it was just a handful of people who left their culture of origin at the door. Americans are extremely tolerant and accommodating people.
> She thought the future would be Bangladeshis acting like British people instead of Bangladeshis acting like Bangladeshis in Britain.
I don't quite get this. What acting like Bangladeshis or acting like British people mean? And what does it have to do with DSA?
> She doesn’t want “Little Bangladesh” in Queens to be happening anymore than Trump does. One of the few things she agrees with him on. We came to a red state in 1989 and a county with a Republican congressman who ran unopposed most years, and everything was fine because we were trying very hard to absorb the local culture instead of changing it with our own. Nobody had a problem with Bangladeshi immigrants when it was just a handful of people who left their culture of origin at the door. Americans are extremely tolerant and accommodating people.
So similar to Little Italy or Chinatown and other ethnic places? Why do you have to leave your culture of origin at the door? I thought one of the great things about America was that everyone can celebrate their culture. What local culture did you try to absorb if everyone left it at the door? Or are you specifically talking about white vs other ethnicities? Are you ashamed of your ethnicity and country where your parents immigrated from?
"We are the right kind of people, not the others" Internalized racism is such a weird thing to me.
> I don't quite get this. What acting like Bangladeshis or acting like British people mean? And what does it have to do with DSA?
There's a lot going in Pakistan / India / Bangladesh that's been shaped by the effect of British commerce, manipulation, and rule over a long period.
The Brits imposed a local civil service structure that itself became one of many forms of caste, classism and hierarchy, this one associated with British dress, language, and mannerisms.
You can see similar attitudes in the UK from the now old and historic first waves of post WWII immigrant uncles and aunts, overly formally British in dress and manners and looking down on their own descendants for pushing back on that and adopting other attitudes in dress and speech.
Am I missing something here? Perot was on the ballot in 1992, and he won a bunch of votes. IIRC he was the most successful independent candidate in modern times, by vote count.
Sanders ran an insurgent campaign while denigrating the party, and didn't win more votes. I seriously don't understand the argument that the person with fewer votes should win the nomination, although I am receptive to hearing a coherent articulation thereof. (Superdelegates did not enter the picture until tens of millions of votes were cast, with Sanders trailing by millions of votes.)
Perot dropped out, then reentered the race at the last minute. This cost him a lot of votes and the media framed him as unstable. He had many more votes before withdrawing.
Sanders was on track to win in 2015 but the media counted all superdelegates for Clinton throughout the campaign, costing him votes in later states where voters didn’t show up, assuming he lost. I guess this isn’t entirely the party’s fault and they did reform the system somewhat afterwards.
> This cost him a lot of votes and the media framed him as unstable
This was...an eminently reasonable response to Perot's own actions?
> Sanders was on track to win in 2015
Yes, like Clinton was "on track" to win in 2007. "On track to win" is necessarily filtered through a set of lenses that don't mean anything compared to actual votes. He didn't earn the votes, so he lost. There's nothing unfair about that.
We also can't definitively state that the reason we "went off track" and lost was the superdelegate counting. It's certainly a plausible factor, but there are so many factors that go into trying to predict how situations like this will end up playing out that I think it makes sense to start with the baseline assumption that there isn't one direct obvious cause and then try to disprove that if you suspect it's wrong.
Perot’s actions were atypical for him, and should be viewed in light of both his statements about personal threats, which he viewed as credible, AND George H. W. Bush’s deep intelligence connections (including his role as DCI and his connection to illegal and brutal Latin American operations). You also have to remember that Perot was siphoning more votes from Bush than from Clinton. Dirty tricks and general ratfuckery were extremely common in this era.
I think the sibling comment addresses Sanders very well.
Just to make sure I'm reading this correctly, are you saying that Perot thought there was a credible threat that a sitting vice president was planning to have him assassinated?
He apparently said there was a plot to release compromising (altered) photos of his daughter, just before her wedding, which is very specific. Small potatoes for Bush, who oversaw projects that created death squads.
there was a ton of ratfuckery. clinton's team got debate questions ahead of time from a friendly moderator. debbie wasserman schultz resigned as dnc chair because it was shown that the dnc tried to undermine the sanders campaign in favor of clinton. the clinton campaign was given operational and fiancial control of the dnc prior to the end of the primaries.
My recollection of the DNC linkage was that the Clinton campaign agreed to help the DNC in a set of ways (likely raising money for the DNC and helping Democratic candidates) in exchange for some affordances and Sanders refused to do likewise (which, to his credit is on brand). Is that not accurate? I admit it's been 10 years and there have been a lot of claims made as to why Sanders should have been given the nomination in spite of not winning more votes.
Brazile gives strong evidence here that the process was rigged against Sanders, inside the DNC. No, votes themselves there not altered, but when the arbiter of the process itself is not neutral, that is completely damning, and honestly, i think that behavior has just continued to this day such that we are seeing fed up Dems on the left revolting against the legacy party, causng it to look like it is about to fracture, and become the mirror image of MAGA.
> The plan would have been in effective over 18 years ago
This is such an important point. There's been ~40% of cumulative inflation over that period.
Also, anyone who was already buying insurance for years before the ACA knew the price has always gone up every year, often by double-digit percentages. Simple compounding plus the fact that insurance is always more expensive for people 18 years older are confusing a lot of people in this discussion.
You act like I’m an idiot. It was cancelled immediately when ACA was passed, and I couldn’t afford the new plans the same year.
My point about the current plans is that if you want to call them a “scam” because they are high deductible, you have to call almost all current plans scams.
This understates the situation. All of us who are not naturalized citizens are citizens only because of the birthright clause in the Constitution. The US does not have any other way for a person born here to become a citizen.
If the birthright clause of the Constitution stops being enforced, Congress (or more likely in our current iteration, the President) will have to create a brand-new set of rules determining which of us natural-born citizens get to retain our citizenship and which do not. There is no existing law to guide them, so they can make it up out of whole cloth.
More plainly: if we choose to eliminate birthright citizenship, whoever is running the country at that time gets to determine whether you are still a citizen.
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