This is just another bad take in a country full of them. A bad take underpinned, no doubt, by the naïve faith that the USA is special and the rules of democratic decline therefore do not apply to it.
A bad take that, combined with a nation full of similarly bad takes, has the overall effect that if you are sufficiently powerful, you can do anything and get away with it. A nation full of bad takes which is now already a nation of men and not a nation of laws. A nation that acts like a cocky teenager who believes that his drinking will never lead to his driving causing any problems.
Yes, it all complicates things, no doubt about that. But the cases are not completely identical (one accused criminal’s actions appear to be mostly accidental, governed by how the accused cooperated with the authorities to the point of informing them of the unlawful behavior). The complications are not being disputed by me here. What I am taking issue with is the outright celebration of how there is now a path to holding neither Trump nor Biden accountable for something that would land J. Random Federal Employee behind bars in detention pending a criminal trial.
Both should be held accountable, and this accountability process includes taking into account one accused’s cooperation and the other accused’s lack of remorse into fact. If this ends in Biden being compelled to resign with a misdemeanor charge to his name, so be it. No special rights for the powerful.
There is only one place where a nation ruled by the principle that the powerful can do whatever the hell they want can go, and it is not a good place.
Maybe things will change, and a turn off the road to hell will be taken before the inevitable arrival at that road’s destination comes, but I’m not holding my breath.
Two countries, two coup attempts by the supporters of a recently-defeated right wing president. Both featured police officers standing idly by and even welcoming the insurrectionists. Both featured well-heeled right-wingers providing financial and logistical support.
Both countries now have people who see themselves as “patriots” shocked, shocked that in the eyes of the law they are accused criminals, and being treated accordingly.
But in only one of those two countries are top law-enforcement officials placed under arrest pending investigation of why some cops stood idly by. In only one of them are capitalists being investigated for their roles in the conspiracy.
The difference is revealing, and it is why I am not optimistic about the long-term prospects for democracy in the USA. To date, the USA’s response has been weaker than the Weimar Republic’s one to the Beer Hall Putsch. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
It is unlikely to make much of a difference. Explaining why is going to leave me feeling a lot like Captain Obvious, but ignoring what should be obvious is what got us here in the first place, so here goes.
The reason is quite simple, it fails to prioritize the number one reason why so many are homeless: because they can’t afford to pay the rent. Why can’t people afford to pay the rent? It’s obvious, isn’t it?
Price too high. It’s the reason why anything becomes unaffordable. Duh!
And why are prices too high? The same reason prices of anything get too high: because demand is outstripping supply. And why has demand outstripped supply?
To answer that one, talk to those whose job it is to increase housing supply: builders and developers. Ask them why they are not building more, when there is such a need for more. In places like Seattle and San Francisco, where the homelessness problem (and high rents) are the worst, the answer you get will always feature regulations.
It typically takes years for new housing to be approved. During these years, developers are holding a parcel of land (at a loss because they have to pay taxes on it), and paying legal experts (again, at a loss) to shepherd the permitting and approval processes through. All these are costs that must be reimbursed for a project to pan out. The easiest way to get them back is to ignore the crisis in affordable housing and build luxury units which have a higher return.
What can get approved, is often subject to extreme restrictions on how dense it can be, i.e. how many units you can create on a given parcel of land. Since urban land is expensive, the easiest way to hold down cost per unit is to minimize land per unit, i.e. build denser. Yet builders can’t do that. Yet another incentive to build only luxury housing that goes for a high price per unit.
This all makes me sound like a Libertarian Party member, blaming it all on government for getting in the way of private enterprise solving a problem. Well, in this particular case, I’ve thought a lot about it, and looked a lot into it, and it mostly is the government getting in the way of private enterprise solving a problem.
To see how much better it could be if only local governments stopped actively being part of the problem, you only have to look to Japan, where the national government has a big role in setting zoning policies, and one of its principles is to prevent local governments (who still have an important role to play there) from being able to restrict the creation of housing supply.
And, surprise surprise, not getting in the way of supply matching demand works. The world’s largest city, Tokyo, has rents comparable to Miami and way less expensive than US cities like San Francisco and New York. Also note that, within Japan, Tokyo is known for being an expensive city.
Now, the USA can’t simply import housing policy from Japan, which has a significantly different government structure. But there is still plenty of room for the Feds to do significantly more strong-arming of state and local governments: “Oh, you would like the top level of Federal aid for your highway and transit projects? Sorry, we find your housing policies too restrictive to qualify. Fix those and get back to us.”
Now, to be fair, the Biden plan does make some mention of this:
Encourage states and cities to review and update their zoning laws and policies to include more land for multiple units (like multifamily housing), offer density bonuses to developers, ease height and density restrictions, create land banks and streamline the permitting and approval process for missing-middle housing types, such as Accessory Dwelling Units.
The problem is, that is buried in the middle of a list on page 44, and the wording is weak sauce. Local governments restricting the creation of housing supply is such a huge part of the problem as to warrant its own section or at least subsection, and to use terminology stronger than encourage (strongly encourage, mandate, or even compel would be better).
And yes, there is certainly room for most of the other stuff that plan mentions. I said above that the housing crisis mostly is a result of government regulations restricting the creation of supply. Mostly is not entirely. The homeless will still need specific, targeted help.
But focusing almost exclusively on that sort of help while almost completely ignoring the primary cause is a bit like worrying a lot about the chipped paint in a room while your home’s foundation is crumbling.
The January 6th Committee report calls for Congress to bar Trump from office. Of course it does, now that Congress is going into recess before the new Congress, with a Fascist Party House majority, comes into session. This is so very much not a coincidence.
This is the same committee that deliberately scheduled “subpoenas” to come due before a holiday weekend and hopefully swept under a rug, after all. The “accountability” for that is as laughable as the same for Trump: they propose that Congress slap lawmakers gently on the wrist for it. That’s not happening, either, for the same reason as above.
It’s a show, designed for public consumption, to make it seem as if the system is interested in holding the most powerful accountable.
Congress could prove me wrong by convening a special session, but they won’t. Wait and see.
Take a look here. The very first principle listed is:
Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
By virtue of being made the first principle, a serious hint is being dropped that this principle is the most important one of all. Any lingering doubt is cleared up by the phrase “highest priority.”
This is, quite frankly, crap. It is predicated on the premise that what customers want most of all is continuous updates and change.
Continuous updates and change are one of the chief reasons why my industry’s products suck so much.
Gone are the days of physical tools like hammers, drills, saws, or even more complex ones like bicycles and motor vehicles, physical devices in a physical world whose limitations binds form to function. Instead, we have user interfaces driven more by fashion trends amongst the UI design crowd than anything else.
Learn to ride a bicycle and you have learned to ride a bicycle for life. Learn to use a mechanical typewriter and you have learned how to type for life. Learn how to use the most recent version of Microsoft Word and what you just learned will be obsolete within a few years.
Lack of stability, plus a near-absolute decoupling of form from function, are two of the very worst things about software.
And the agile manifesto actively mandates one of these two evils. As its highest priority.
It’s not all evil, of course. There is this one in there:
Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done — is essential.
Well, gold star. “A” for effort. You got one dead right.
The trouble is, this is the tenth of twelve principles. It appears way down on the list, below a first principle that is unambiguously proclaimed the highest priority.
A first principle based upon a monstrously wrong premise.
And this is the most popular software development methodology within my field today.
There’s a lot of very bad takes like this out there about the recent so-called “breakthrough” in controlled nuclear fusion.
First, I put “breakthrough” in quotes to emphasize that what’s just been achieved is a lot less impressive than what many have been led to believe by the news stories. “Milestone” would be a much better description for what has been achieved. It’s important, but far from a big breakthrough.
For openers, any claims of “net energy gain” rest on an extremely deceptive definition of what “net energy gain” is. All that has been achieved is a net gain over the output power of the lasers used to initiate the reaction. Those lasers are themselves monstrously inefficient devices; the vast majority of the energy fed into them is wasted as heat.
The upshot of this is that, overall, the fusion reactor that just achieved this supposed “breakthrough” of “net energy gain” actually consumes roughly 100 times as much energy as it produces. (And that’s without even taking all the other energy costs involved in manufacturing and operating the fusion reactor into the picture.)
Next, we come to whoppers like the following claim (source: first link in this entry): “[W]hat if we didn’t have to economize? What could humanity do for ourselves and our planet? … Bring the whole world up to a Western standard of living — and beyond — without worrying about the environmental cost?”
I mean, really now: it’s hardly as if consumption of energy at First World levels is the only unsustainable thing about modern industrial civilization. There’s all the other non-energy natural resources, many of them nonrenewable ones, that are being eaten through at an ever-increasing pace. That’s before one gets to inconvenient matters such as how shifting to fusion to power cars and trucks means shifting to electric vehicles, which are significantly more resource-intensive to manufacture than fossil-fuel powered ones (compare the resource footprint of a lithium battery bank to that of an empty steel fuel tank and it’s not exactly a pretty picture).
Suppose all goes better than planned and we get to actual net energy gain from fusion. That’s going to take a while. Then it will take a while longer for such reactors to make the journey from laboratory curiosity to a practical industrial technology. All the while that goes on, fusion will not be available as an energy source.
Mark my words, if fusion ever does become practical, it will definitely be a huge help. But that’s all it will be: a help. It won’t be a magic bullet. It won’t be a get out of jail free card from having to confront our unsustainable ways and downshift.
DeSantis loses to whatever Democrat (hopefully not Biden, but more on that later) runs against him.
Why not? Mainly age. Biden was already the oldest presidential candidate ever last time. I appreciate that he’s done better than anticipated, but he’s still not getting any younger and I think the Democrats can manage better (and probably doing a better job of inspiring voter enthusiasm) than running an octogenarian who strongly hinted when he ran last time that he would only serve one term.
Time to step aside and let a new generation serve. Someone like Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, perhaps.
Already the knives are coming out for Trump in the GOP, with no shortage of suggestions that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (more later on what his victory in the Florida gubernatorial race says)…
DeSantis ran for governor against Charlie Crist, a man who previously served as Governor of Florida… as a Republican. He ran a typical, DNC-approved, milquetoast Mr. Nice Guy campaign, trying to run to the center and make a rational appeal to the supposed policy preferences of voters. And he lost. Big.
Contrast with Pennsylvania. In the Democratic Party primary, there were two candidates. The party establishment’s favourite was Conor Lamb, who ran a standard Mr. Nice Guy campaign. There was plenty of hand-wringing amongst that establishment when John Fetterman, who ran a scrappier and more populist campaign, prevailed in the primary. Yet Fetterman won, and won despite having his clock cleaned in a debate while still in recovery from a stroke he suffered.
DeSantis’ landslide illustrates just how poorly the traditional Democratic Party campaign strategy works, and just how out of touch with political reality it is.
Really, this is so much not a surprise. This is Trump we are talking about. He’s always been a legend in his own mind. Anything bad that happens is always someone else’s fault — never his.
Of course he chose to run. This is the most predictable story since the sun rising this morning.
The dust has yet to fully settle on the midterm elections, but what we do know is that the standard shellacking of the in-party did not happen this time. Even Lindsey Graham has openly said so.
Already the knives are coming out for Trump in the GOP, with no shortage of suggestions that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (more later on what his victory in the Florida gubernatorial race says) would make a better standard-bearer for their party. (As unlikable as I find DeSantis, he’s still better than Trump.)
But here’s the thing: I have thought there would be such tipping points many times before, most recently after the failed coup attempt on January 6th. Every time, it did not happen. The GOP kissed and made up with Trump. Maybe this time is different, but I can’t get my hopes up.
Suppose for sake of argument, it actually is different this time. Then what?
First Trump is still Trump. He’s never had the emotional maturity to engage in honest self-assessment before, and there is absolutely no reason to believe that he has suddenly and for no explicable reason acquired this ability. Trump never thinks he is anything but the greatest ever. He never thinks anything is his fault.
If Trump doesn’t get the GOP presidential nomination in 2024, he will say it is because the whole process is rigged and it was unfairly stolen from him. Then he will run as an independent in all 50 states. His base of fanatical, sheep-like followers will vote for him and not the GOP.
Suppose that’s only 5 to 10 percent of the GOP. That’s still enough to doom them. DeSantis loses to whatever Democrat (hopefully not Biden, but more on that later) runs against him.
At that that point, the earliest the GOP can win back the White House is 2028. By then, Trump will either be dead or in the old folks’ home. For that matter, so will a significant chunk of his base, who leans to an older demographic. Those still alive will have the same short memory that most Americans have, and will have mostly forgotten about Trump.
As such, 2028 will be the first year the GOP can realistically hope to win back the White House. Even if they do, it will be with a more garden-variety conservative who does not pose such an existential threat to political democracy.
But, to reiterate, this only happens if the knives stay out for Trump. Also, GOP strategists have no doubt run just this scenario through their heads, and don’t much like the idea of waiting until 2028 to get the White House back. So the temptation to kiss and make up with Trump will be very real.
On the other hand, they just might go through with dumping Trump. Rage and the desire for revenge are very real things.
So yes, this might be the beginning of the end. But, to reiterate, I can’t get my hopes up.
