DFHippie

I was sued. I was 19 years old working as a painter for a dishonest contractor that paid crap wages. I nosed out of a parking lot after work one day to see around a line of cars turning in and a big sedan ploughed into my little econobox. Several years later, as the statute of limitations was about to run out, the driver of the sedan sued me. My insurance companies first move, before doing any discovery, was to offer her $50k. She said no, so discovery began. It turned out she'd been mis-prescribed an anti-psychotic to create the symptoms she was suing me for having caused. The case was thrown out. The insurance company's legal bills ended up being much less than $50k, but the way it worked was they took a guess at the break even point, offered a bit less than that, and made an offer.

That's not to say this is how it works when Meta is on trial. I just thought it was useful perspective on the nature of settlements.

Do you think gutting the IRS is going to improve that ratio?

Not all public sector jobs are the same. Working for a defense contractor is not the same as working for the IRS. Defense gets money dumped on it year after year. The IRS gets starved year after year.

They didn't. Not until Trump started tariffing them. (I don't have time to find references, but Paul Krugman has you covered for data and analysis.)

All Trump's policies assume he's playing a single-move game where his is the only move. It turns out it's an infinite game and the other side actually has free will and competent decision makers. He can't just wish people into the cornfield as he promised.

> the civil service has a lot of leverage because most of them cannot easily be fired

Unless, as Doge showed us, you ignore the law, fire them anyway, and the SCOTUS says, "Yeah, whatever."

That, plus massive influence campaigns from Russia, China, and US oligarchs like Musk and Thiel, are how we came to be living through the current general disaster.

This is what you were told the Democrats ran on, not what they ran on. You got all your information from partisans who lied about the other party.

The weird thing about Adams was that he believed Trump was Dogbert, not the pointy-haired boss.

If he'd stayed apolitical people would have kept clipping his strips and putting them up on cubical walls. Dogbert was not an appealing character. His sharper edge kept the sharp edges of Dilbert and the other engineers more out of one's attention. Then Adams revealed that he believed Dogbert was the one to emulate and tried to prove his theories (and he said black people were scary -- there was that) and he polarized himself. Much of his audience recoiled. He gained new, more ICE-esque followers, and then still more of his audience recoiled.

To his credit he pioneered the PR death spiral later made famous by Kanye and Rowlings. This was not the career capper he was looking for.

Jeff is actively abetting this.

I assume "planting" is a typo'ed "palantir", in which case I agree completely. And it's true inside the US as much as outside.

He will die pretty soon. He's just the first stage of the rocket. He thinks he's a pharaoh letting a thousand pyramids bloom, but he's expendable. He'll be gone. People will chisel his name off the monuments he's vandalized. But the people who granted him power like what he's doing. He's somebody's monkey. The hollowing out of the US and the world order that produced western prosperity and security will continue. The people who call the tune to which he dances will call tunes for the next monkey.

That's always the question with this unitary executive business. They believe this is the government defined by the Constitution, regardless of precedent. Do they believe it is a good system of government? Do they believe this is the government intended or rather the government allowed by legal loophole, vagueness, or contradiction? Because it seems like they think the president should rule like a monarch because they happen to control the presidency at the current moment, not because it is a wise and effective system of government.

X controls Musk, not the other way around. Foreign influence campaigns control X. Thus governments buy the services of a rich patsy to control/destroy their opponents.

And the unchecked corporate/oligarchic power is often just government power funneled through disposable, if rich, patsies.

A lot of things will be harder for the US to do if everyone in the world hates us. Letting people come here and see that most Americans aren't monsters pays dividends beyond the dollars they spend.

The Trump Administrations actions read like a checklist of things you'd do if you wanted to destroy the US's power to protect itself and its allies and promote the well-being of its people.

I think it's pretty obviously me pontificating from personal observations. Did you see the "hakuna matata"? We're allowed to do that here.

And yes, sure, it's more complicated than that. It's always more complicated. It's unlikely the final word on any topic will fit in an HN comment.

To elaborate a bit: your parenting is much more likely to affect how your kids parent their kids. And, for better or for worse, mostly what they'll be doing is avoiding the mistakes you made. Your mom was distant and judgmental? You'll be super attentive and supportive, assuming your kids need what you wanted. And quite likely you'll overshoot the mark and set up a pitfall your kids will avoid when it's their turn. And they will then overshoot the mark. The cycle of parenting. Hakuna Matata.

In general your kids' friends are much more important to them in the long run than you are. You are always there, but their friends represent the society they will be sinking or swimming in. They turn away from you and your tastes and opinions for a reason: their survival depends on understanding the tastes and opinions of their peers. You will stick with them (usually). Their peers are free to abandon them. Peer relationships are fragile but important. Parent-child relationships, however important, are much more durable, so they require less attention from the child.

So there are basalt boats floating on the not so salty Baltic.

Note, the article doesn't say that she threw molotov cocktails. She was put into induced comas, tied to a bed, kept in social isolation, etc. because she didn't want to live under her parents' control.

This. Two speakers of the same language only have approximately the same understanding of the meanings of the words they both use. Communication succeeds because we are constantly seeking and correcting misunderstandings that arise due to no two people speaking exactly the same language.

The same process that allows two speakers of the same language to communicate adequately allows one to translate from one language to another. If it were truly impossible to translate from one language to another, we would be unable to perceive this and argue about it. The recognition and correction of errors is part of the process of translation just as it is part of the process of communication in a single language.

Any problem with externalized costs or benefits is a collective action problem. You get a benefit everyone pays for or you incur a cost which everyone pays. The individual incentive is to freeload on the resources of others. It is functionally theft.

Regulation and other government actions can solve these problems by internalizing these costs/benefits. Any solution to these problems involves collective control of individual actions, which is to say, government at some scale.

There is some irony in the people who say "taxation is theft" ignoring the theft of the commons counteracted by taxation and the government services it supports.

> The incredible successes of Trumps second term so far will encourage and empower populists everywhere.

Successes? He's succeeded at consolidating power because his own party and his partisans on the Supreme Court allow it. Also, destroying stuff is easy. What are these successes of which you speak?

> Or maybe lately, Larry Ellison's take over of Paramount/CBS (but it feels more like he is buying a toy for his son).

If it were just a toy for his son these things wouldn't have happened - Stephen Colbert canned - Bari Weiss hired to head the news division - $32 million settlement for an easily winnable lawsuit

I've probably missed some. Ellison is a huge Trump supporter and is clearly reshaping CBS to at least go easy on Trump, if not to make it yet another right wing propaganda outlet.

That's discussion of the same event but not the same article/post.

> Trump claims to want to bring back manufacturing.

Trump claims a lot of stuff. It's all gaslighting*.

* Speaking of things Trump would claim to be for. Electric lighting is effete foolishness that makes your testicles shrivel!

Journalists are always acting as though only liberals have agency. "If we just talk about things differently, everything will be great." But if someone is hitting you over the head, not every element of the relationship is in your control.

From its first day of operation there have been people wanting to tear NPR down precisely because they do not control its content. The choice they have offered is "be controlled by us or we will destroy you." These aren't listeners saying this, but people who do control other media the listeners listen to. People who control ever more media with each passing year, in fact. At this rate, they control more every week.

The people seeking to control NPR don't want to argue about particular articles. They want to argue about NPR itself, and no newsroom wants themselves to be the story. It's a hard beat to cover. No matter how hard you strive to be honest, thorough, disinterested, and engaging, you are in fact one of the parties, so anything you say is suspect and easily characterized as biased.

Both-sides'ing stuff is a way to resist control, but there has been a backlash against that, because it is a compromise with the truth. It's lying by implication while not lying by outright assertion. It's lying in the interest of the people shaking you down.

Too many never decided to start using their minds. They won't notice the transition.

> There seems to be something in us humans that yearns for more than just calories.

And we have no evidence that we are different in this from Neanderthals (arguably also humans). There is evidence of cultural variation among chimps, so there must also be cultural change. Do they yearn for things more than calories? Well, they play. They are curious.

I am extremely skeptical of claims that humans are special. We are strongly motivated to find this to be true. On the one hand, it flatters us. On the other hand, it justifies believing we are ethically distinct. This same way of thinking has been applied to other humans with results we now deplore.

Are we special, the chosen creatures? Maybe. We sure want to believe we are. It's fun and useful to be special! But maybe we should be cautious leaping to that conclusion. I think Jane Goodall was of this mind as well.

Sure, but this is true of neanderthals as well. So we can't say we are especially creative or dynamic in our culture. We can say that our material culture, that small fragment of it that was preserved, was static.