Author Archives: theusernamewhichismine

Amazon will not be part of the “Resistance”

I wanted to write this half a year ago, but with Trump’s tariffs back in the news, I figured I’d give it another go.

When Trump first enacted his so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs, many experts (mostly partisan experts though) predicted the apocalypse. It was bad enough that many news sources started educated their readers on the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, which anyone who watched Ferris Bueler’s Day Off will know were the tariffs enacted during the Great Depression. These tariffs have been blamed for contributing to the depth and intensity of the Great Depression, and naturally partisans wanted voters to make that connection to Trump’s Tariffs.

I myself also started watching out. I live in a major city with a major train hub, and as I commute past it I like to look out and check how many boxcars are being loaded and unloaded by trains. Earlier this year it seemed the tariffs might have actually been apocalyptic, the train yard was empty on some days. But despite partisans stoking fears of COVID-level shortages, tariffs have seemed to have a marginal effect on the US economy. Growth has remained strong in 2025, with the US well ahead of pretty much every advanced economy on earth in terms of growth rate. The EU may be a massive free trade area, and the USA may have become an increasingly protectionist autarky throughout the Trump-Biden years, but that hasn’t been enough to make the EU more competitive or the US less.

It’s likely because the tariffs are indeed marginal. Tariffs are a tax on imports, but like any other tax they can be avoided and mitigated by changing behaviors. Companies have shifted to sourcing their products from areas with lower tariffs, changing their production line to build more things in America, or in some cases are simply accepting lower profits and not passing the cost of the tariffs onto consumers because they need to maintain market share. In other cases the tariffs *are* leading to a rise in prices, but consumers still have the chance to substitute tariffed goods for other goods or just stop buying alltogether.

The tariffs have likely contributed to inflation remaining well-above target, and have likely made certain consumers much poorer without realizing it (as they purchase tariffed products and can’t find substitutes), but the tariffs have not had nearly the destructive effects that I and many others believed they would.

But the biggest problem for Trump’s detractors is highlighting the adverse effects of Trump’s tariffs. Remember that the American people seem to broadly like tariffs: Biden expanded Trump’s tariffs, Bernie surged in the Democratic Party by denouncing Clinton’s pro-corporate policies (which were usually also pro-trade policies) and Trump has completely remade the GOP into a protectionist party. America’s two parties are dominated by protectionists, and many free-trade Democrats have been furious that 2028 hopefuls have mostly denounced Trump’s tariffs as being “too high, too broad,” rather than hitting out that “tariffs are just plain bad and shouldn’t be used.”

It seems that Americans really do like tariffs, so trying to attack Trump for his tariff policy doesn’t hit as well as it “should.” This is a big problem for free-trade Democrats because to them it’s patently obvious that Trump’s tariffs have led to higher inflation and lower growth, but Americans aren’t necessarily buying it.

Enter Amazon. As the foremost distributor of direct-to-consumer goods, Amazon is acutely sensitive to trade policy. Any raise in tariffs will cause a raise in prices for imported goods, causing consumers to purchase less and that hurts Amazon’s bottom line. Amazon has every reason to lobby as strongly as possible *against* tariffs, and as a consumer-facing company that everyone knows, free-trade Democrats thought they’d found their edge.

The idea went like this: what if Amazon *shows consumers* how much higher their prices are because of tariffs? What if every time a consumer buys a 100$ imported product, Amazon shows its base cost but then hits them with a “+15$ because of tariffs” fee at the checkout? Consumers would be furious at these hidden costs, but their fury would be directed at Trump and his tariffs. The tariffs would become unpopular, Trump would become unpopular, the free-trade Democrats and Amazon would be the big winners in 2026 and 2028 when (hopefully) less protectionist Democrats would be swept into power on a wave of consumer backlash.

It all seemed so perfect, leaked reports even claimed that Amazon was openly considering this idea.

But then Amazon made an official statement that they would not under any condition display tariff prices. Their statement said that while such a move was considered, it was never approved, which isn’t unusual as companies are constantly considering many thousands of moves that are never approved. Furthermore Amazon spokesmen pointed out that the company had never shown consumers the cost of tariffs during the Biden administration, even though Biden had hiked tariffs to their highest point since Jimmy Carter.

Amazon felt the move would damage its own brand, worsen its political position, and bring basically no benefit. If Amazon was an arm of the Democratic party, then maybe it would make sense. But as a profit-maximizing entity, pissing off your customers with hidden fees *and* wading into the political arena with a nakedly partisan endorsement of the opposition (by blaming the current administration for high prices) just doesn’t make sense.

So Amazon will *not* be part of the Anti-Trump Resistance. As Michael Jordan once said, Republicans buy sneakers too, and most profit-maximizing companies find it best to *not* piss off half the country by taking overtly partisan stances. They may try to take political stances, but they will always present themselves as non-partisan to consumers, because they don’t want to lose business from angry voters. And directly blaming Trump’s Tariffs for high Amazon prices, after 4 years of never doing such for Biden’s Tariffs would indeed be an overtly partisan act, because it’s an attempt to blame Republicans for high prices and push consumers towards supporting the Democrats.

This then made Amazon a target of April’s 2-minute-hate in the eyes of free-trade democrats. These Democrats don’t see “showing the cost of tariffs” as partisan at all (because people always believe their own beliefs are just “the obvious truth,” and not a partisan stance). Rather, when Amazon *refused* to show the cost of tariffs, it was blamed for kowtowing to a “fascist” government, comparisons to 1930s German companies were ever-present, and Bezos himself was derided as a coward and a collaborator, rather than the profit-maximizing businessman that he is.

The simple fact is that obviously no multinational company is going to want to lose half its customers, so no multinational company is going to make their storefront an advertisement for the Democrats and against the Republicans. I’m sure Amazon is lobbying the administration on reducing tariffs, it was widely reported that tech giants did this exact same lobbying last time Trump was in power. But just because Amazon doesn’t like tariffs doesn’t mean they want to torch their credibility with Republican consumers. Because Republican consumers might angrily ask why Amazon is sourcing products from overseas (and showing people a tariff) rather than sourcing *American* products like Trump (and Joe Biden, and Bernie Sanders) would prefer they be doing.

Anyway I’ve found a dozen ways to restate this one point: Amazon is not going to become part of the Resistance, it will not show consumers what the price of Trump’s tariffs are in part because that would be a partisan move that would invite blowback and boycotts from Republicans: “why isn’t Amazon buying American instead, and why didn’t Amazon do this stunt during the Biden administration?”

But I wanted to note one additional reason Amazon won’t be showing consumers the price of tariffs, and it’s isn’t because of what Amazon wants, it’s because of what their suppliers want.

The relationship between Amazon and its legion of medium-sized suppliers is a tricky one. On the one hand some random clothing store like Shoes&Shirts LLC (fake name) probably likes that Amazon gives them a massive amount of customers to sell to. Amazon’s global consumer base makes it easier to scale up by just having a single contract with Amazon, rather than having to negotiate multiple deals with brick-and-mortar stores in every single country.

On the other hand, Amazon’s dominance of the market gives them a lot of power over their suppliers, they can negotiate a large cut of the proceeds, demand suppliers abide by Amazons rules and regulations, and overall an agreement with Amazon can be like a pair of golden handcuffs. If you’ve seen how indie developers complain about Steam, you’ll understand how small and medium suppliers complain about Amazon.

The situation can be even worse, since Amazon competes directly with its own suppliers. Say Shirts&Shoes LLC has a new style of Comfy Sweater that is flying off the digital shelves. Amazon can see this, and see that another company makes a nearly identical sweater for a fraction of the cost. Amazon can then source their own Comfy Sweater from this other company and try to undercut Shirts&Shoes LLC on price, fulfilling the orders themselves and taking Shirts&Shoes’s business out from under them.

Amazon suppliers are therefore very very cautious with what information they give to Amazon. They do *not* want to tell Amazon the price it costs them to make something, they only want to reveal the price they’re selling it for. Giving away the price to make something makes it even easier for Amazon to undercut them.

If Shirts&Shoes’s sweater is selling for 100$, and you can source it for 60$, you still don’t know for sure if you can undercut them. Maybe Amazon lists their own sweater for 75$, but Shirts&Shoes responds by cutting the price down to 50$ because they can actually make it for even less than that. Amazon would be putting a lot of money into a failed attempt at capturing new market share, Shirts&Shoes would be furious at the attempted betrayal, AND both would now be making less money because the shirt is selling for less so both sides get less of a cut. The only winners would be the consumers.

So Amazon’s suppliers DO NOT want to give Amazon any information more than they need to. And that by the way includes the price of tariffs.

When Shirts&Shoes brings a shirt into America, customs charges them a tariff based on the declared value of the shirt. Shirts&Shoes then has to set the sale price at a level high enough to cover not only the cost of the shirt, but also the cost of the tariff. If the value of the shirt is 20$ and there’s a 100% tariff, then they can’t sell the shirt for less than 40$ without taking a lose.

But they may be selling the shirt for 100$ anyway and taking 60$ of profit. Now, the shirt’s price may have gone up because there used to be no tariff and now there’s a 100% tariff. So the free-trade Democrats would love if the shirt was listed on Amazon for a price of 80$, but had an extra 20$ “tariff tax” at the checkout that would be directly blamed on Donald Trump.

But Shirts&Shoes doesn’t want to reveal that the base cost of their shirt is 20$ with a 20$ tariff on top. Because at that point if Amazon can source the same shirt for 35$, then they can undercut Shirts&Shoes and steal their business, and both sides know it. Instead, Shirts&Shoes would like the costs going into the shirt to be as obfuscated as possible.

They’d probably like their customers to think that it costs them 90$ to make a shirt and they’re selling it for 100$, because that way they don’t seem to be making “too” much profit. If customers knew Shirts&Shoes had such a high mark-up, customers might think they were getting ripped off, and would make nasty posts on the internet to complain about Shirts&Shoes’s prices. This could harm Shirts&Shoes’s brand.

And they’d probably like Amazon to think that it costs them 5$ to make a shirt and they’re selling it for 100$. Because they don’t want Amazon to attempt to undercut them and either steal their business or initiate a price war which harms their profit margins.

So ambiguity is entirely in Shirts&Shoes’s interests, and so they don’t want to reveal any tariff information to Amazon. That in turn means that even if Amazon wanted to, it wouldn’t be able to reveal tariff information on any third party products, only on products it sources itself. That could backfire if Amazon even decided to reveal tariff prices, as *only Amazon’s own goods would show the tariff as a hidden cost*. Buy a good sourced by Shirts&Shoes? What You See Is What You Get. Buy a good sourced by Amazon? You have no idea WHAT the real price will be.

To summarize, Amazon (and other profit-seeking companies) will NOT be part of the resistance, as they do not want to damage their brand in the eyes of partisans. Likewise, it’s not even a simple thing for Amazon to JOIN the resistance and reveal to customers the true price of tariffs. They’d be pissing off their own customers by making customers feel like the price is a bait-and-switch, they’d be demanding information from their suppliers that the suppliers don’t want to reveal, and if the suppliers DON’T reveal that information, then only Amazon-sourced products would show a tariff anyway, meaning Amazon gets all of the blowback for “high prices” while their suppliers can claim “Same Low Prices As Ever,” even if prices everywhere are actually rising.

Partisans think everyone should join their fight, and that the only reason not to is base cowardice. They’re usually wrong.

Civilization VI and the No City Challenge

Let me tell you a hilarious story, then later get technical about why it happens.  

The Civilization series of games gives you control of a civilization and asks you to “win” history.  You can win by conquering the world, or by having your civilization elected supreme leader, or my researching enough technology to escape the cradle of earth and go out to colonize the galaxy.

But fundamentally civilization is about cities.  Cities are where everything happens, you build your military in cities, you get money from cities, you get research from them, your civilization is nothing without its cities, and when your last city is lost, you are defeated.  

It makes sense then that you want to always have *more* cities so you can have *more* stuff.  Two cities give you twice as much of everything as just one, a third city upgrades you 50% from two and so forth.  The Civ games have tried to put limits on “infinite city spam,” but generally *more* cities is always better than *less*.

That’s why the One City Challenge is such a challenge.  The One City Challenge is a longstanding challenge for Civilization veterans, demanding you win the game using *only one city*.  This means staying unconquered long enough to either diplomacy yourself into the World King, or research your way into galactic colonization.  

But the One City Challenge is nearly impossible when you’re up against AIs building as many cities as they can.  I’ve never beaten the One City Challenge, and most who do beat it do so on the lowest difficulties.  Beating the One City Challenge on Deity (the hardest difficulty in the game) is only for Civ Masters with a *lot* of luck on their side.

But Civ VI introduced something new, wonderful, and stupid.  Civ VI introduced the No City Challenge, and it’s doable on Deity.

See in Civ VI, the Maori civilization starts with the ability to sail the oceans, and their starting settler and warrior both begin in the ocean.  It’s easy enough to send the settler and warrior way down to the artic ice caps and hide in the ocean forever, never meeting or even interacting with any other Civs (because who would explore the desolate ice caps in this game?).  Now you’re playing the “No City Challenge,” an attempt to win the game while hiding in the ice caps and never even settling a city.

But how on earth would you *win* this challenge?  No city means no research, no money, no production.  You could never settle the galaxy OR be elected world leader this way, could you?

Well galaxy no, world leader yes, because Civ VI also has a hilariously broken victory condition.  

In previous Civilization games, Diplomatic Victory required a majority of the world’s population to vote for you as leader.  This meant you needed to make very good friends with a good number of the other Civs, becoming allies and trade partners, and being such good friends with them that they’d be willing to elect you leader, even though it meant giving up their sovereignty to you.

Civ VI doesn’t do this though, instead Diplomatic Victory means collecting “diplomatic points” until you have 20 of them, and 20 points means you win.

But how do you get diplomatic points?  Some ways still rely on production and money, for example you can help out after natural disasters and build wonders of the world to gain diplomatic points.  

Clearly those ways are unavailable if we’re hiding out in the ice caps, so the No City Challenge instead relies on the World Congress, which is hilariously broken in its own right.

The Civ VI World Congress starts up once enough time has passed for the game to reach the medieval era.  At that point, every Civ will gain the opportunity to vote for random “world congress resolutions.”  These resolutions are chosen at random, you have no control over them.  And they’re binding on you, even if you’ve never met half (or all!) of the other nations in the World Congress.

And these resolutions make no sense when you think about that.  For example, our real world has done a lot of work banning Ivory hunting, even though Ivory was considered a luxury centuries ago.  The Civ VI world congress can also ban Ivory, but it does so even if the people voting on the resolution have never met each other.  So you can have a situation where people you’ve never met, on the other side of the world, are now enforcing an ivory ban on you even though your own ruthless Civ sees nothing wrong with Ivory hunting.

Anyway, any time you vote for the winning “side” of a resolution, you earn a diplomatic point.  Even if the vote wasn’t close, *even if you only casted a single vote*.  If the world votes to ban Ivory and you also voted Yes, you get a diplomatic point.  

You get votes according to how many cities you have *but you also always get 1 vote no matter what*, and here’s where we come back to the No City Challenge.  Our Maori Civ hiding in the arctic still gets to vote in the World Congress, even though they don’t have any cities.  It’s also *very* easy to predict how the AIs will vote, and very easy to know which World Congress resolutions will pass or not.  So if our Maori Civ can just cast their 1 vote for the winning resolution each time, they can rack up Diplomatic Points until they have 20 and they win.

Think about this, a Civ sitting in the arctic, never founding even a *single* city, has “won” because they voted for the winners in every election of the World Congress.  The other Civs of the world have determined that the Maori (who they never knew existed until now, wait how did their votes even get cast?), the Maori who have zero cities mind, are truly the skilled diplomats the world needs to lead it to peace and prosperity.  And these Civs (who again, *have never met the Maori*) will give up their spaceships and their weapons of war to let these Diplomats rule the world.  

And this isn’t even a theoretical victory condition, it’s actually happened.  Several times.

This insane “victory condition” comes about because the AIs in Civ VI are very bad at *winning* even if they’re pretty good at *not losing*.  See, the World Congress is Weird and Broken, but even then, previous Civ games would never have seen this type of victory because an AI would have won some other victory before then.  Previous AIs were pretty good about conquering each other, culturally dominating each other, or reaching Alpha Centauri alone, especially if the player wasn’t there to stop the strongest Civ from running away with the game.  And that’s what the rest of this post is about, Civ VI AIs can’t easily *lose*, but they can never *win*

I recently got the Civ VI bug again and wanted to write about it.  I made some posts long ago discussing how Civ VI is the only Civ game I’ve ever beaten on Deity (the hardest difficulty level).  This isn’t really because I’m good at the game, it’s because the AI is bad at it. 

See, there are really two sides to “winning” a game.  One side has to lose, the other side has to win.  This seems obvious, but let me be clear: the AI in Civ VI is *really really bad at winning*, so much so that if the player can even become *moderately good at not losing* then they are guaranteed to win eventually, even if they themselves are bad at winning.  

Let me compare Civ VI to its predecessor, Civ V.  I once played a very high-level game of Civ V with Polynesia.  I settled islands, I built my navy, and since this was an “archipelago” map where there was lots of water everywhere, this made me undefeatable in war.  

See Civ V made it so that land units traverse the water by just walking into it and conjuring up a boat for themselves (maybe they built their boat on the land).  But these land units are completely powerless in water, they are instantly destroyed by any true naval unit.  A roman trireme can attack a division of marines, and as long as the marines are on the water the trireme will win and take zero damage.

So in this Polynesia game, my main war strategy was to bait enemy land units into the water and slaughter them with my ancient, obsolete ships.  I would repeatedly send triremes against marines and modern armies, and win with no casualties because the AI never build naval units to defend their sea-borne land units.  

It was impossible for me to lose.  But I was never going to win.

See although I had an impregnable military, my economy was in dire shape.  High level AIs get obscene bonuses to production, research, and the economy.  My enemies were in the Industrial Age while I languished in the Renaissance, and even if this didn’t matter militarily it would soon matter technologically.  

Civ has always provided a number of ways to win, both through war *and* peace.  You could conquer all your enemies, or you could build a spaceship to Alpha Centauri and say neener-neener as you colonize the galaxy, that also counts as winning.  Well my enemies were clearly going to get to Alpha Centauri while I was still figuring out coal and oil.  They were going to *win* even if it it didn’t feel like I would *lose*.  

Militarily, I was unstoppable.  Culturally, I was fine.  Economically, I punched above my weight.  But in the end, my enemies could always win through Technology, and win they did.

This story is meandering, but it proves an important point: winning isn’t just about *not losing*, it isn’t just about staying in the game and staying active.  There are victory conditions that the AI can still meet, and they can use those to win even if they don’t knock you out of the game, even if it feels like you never “lose.”

Civ VI though, Civ VI AI’s don’t have this.  Civ VI AIs are like me in that Polynesia game, they’re good at *not losing*, they’re terrible at *winning*.  And in fact they’re so bad, that they are almost incapable of winning at all.  

The Civ VI AIs are terrible at building a spaceship to go to Alpha Centauri.  They are incapable of achieving cultural or religious domination.   They will never conquer most of their neighbors.  And with those being the main ways you can win, a player playing competently will *eventually* luck into one of those.  So long as a player just *doesn’t lose* they can slowly crawl their way into *winning*, even though the AIs are strong enough that they *should have won long ago*.

What does it mean to think? 

It may surprise you to know, but I was once a philosopher.  To be more accurate, I was once a clueless college student who thought “philosophy” would be a good major.  I eventually switched to a science major, but not before I took more philosophy classes than most folks ever intend to. 

A concept that was boring back then, but relavent now, is that of the “Chinese Room.”  John Searle devised this thought experiment to prove that machines cannot actually think, even if they pass Turing Tests.  The idea goes something like this: 

Say we produce a computer program which takes in Chinese Language inputs and returns Chinese Language outputs, outputs which any speaker of Chinese can read and understand.  These outputs would be logical responses to whatever inputs are given, such that the answers would pass a Turing Test if given in Chinese.  Through these inputs and outputs, this computer can hold a conversation entirely in Chinese, and we might describe it as being “fluent” in Chinese, or even say it can “think” in Chinese. 

But a computer program is fundamentally a series of mathematical operations, “ones and zeros” as we say.  The Chinese characters which are taken in will be converted to binary numbers, and mathamatical operations will be performed on those numbers to create an output in binary numbers, which more operations will then turn from binary numbers back into Chinese characters.   

The math and conversions done by the computer must be finite in scope, because no program can be infinite.  So in theory all that math and conversions can themselves be written down as rules and functions in several (very long) books, such that any person can follow along and perform the operations themselves.  So a person could use the rules and function in these books to: 1.) take in a series of Chinese characters, 2.) convert the Chinese to binary, 3.) perform mathamatical operations to create a binary output, and 4.) convert that binary output back into Chinese. 

Now comes the “Chinese Room” experiment.  Take John Searle and place him in a room with all these books described above. John sits in this room and recieves prompts in Chinese.  He follows the rules of the books and produces an output in Chinese.  John doesn’t know Chinese himself, but he fools any speaker/reader into believing he does.  The question is: is this truly a demenstration of “intelligence” in Chinese?  John says no. 

It should be restated  that the original computer program could pass a Turing Test in Chinese, so it stands to reason that John can also pass such a test using the Chinese Room.  But John himself doesn’t know Chinese, so it’s ridiculous to say (says John) that passing this Turing Test demonstrates “intelligence.”   

One natural response is to say that “the room as a whole” knows Chinese, but John pushed back against this.  The Chinese Room only has instructions in it, it cannot take action on its own, therefore it cannot be said to “know” anything.  John doesn’t know Chinese, and only follows written instructions, the room doesn’t know Chinese, in fact it doesn’t “know” anything.  Two things which don’t know Chinese cannot add up to one thing that does, right? 

But here is where John and I differ, because while I’m certainly not the first one to argue so, I would say that the real answer to the Chinese Room problem is either that “yes, the room does know Chinese” or “it is impossible to define what “knowing” even is.” 

Let’s take John out of his Chinese Room and put him into a brain.  Let’s shrink him down to the size of a neuron, and place him in a new room hooked up to many other neurons.  John now receives chemical signals delivered from the neurons behind him.  His new room has a new set of books which tell him what mathematical operations to perform based on those signals.  And he uses that math to create new signals which he sends on to the neurons in front of him.  In this way he can act like a neuron in the dense neural network that is the brain. 

Now let’s say that our shrunken down John-neuron is actually in my brain, and he’s replaced one of my neurons.  I actually do speak Chinese.  And if John can process chemical signals as fast as a neuron can, I would be able to speak Chinese just as well as I can.  Certainly we’d still say that John doesn’t speak Chinese, and it’s hard to argue that the room as a whole speaks Chinese (it’s just  replacing a neuron after all).  But I definitely speak Chinese, and I like to think I’m intelligent.  So where then, does this intelligence come from? 

In fact every single neuron in my brain could be replaced with a John-neuron, each one of which is now a room full of mathematical rules and functions, each one of which takes in a signal, does math, and gives an input to the neurons further down the line.  And if al these John-neurons can act as fast as my neurons, they could all do the job of my brain, which contains all of my knowledge and intelligence, even though John himself (and his many rooms) know nothing about me.   

Or instead each one of my neurons could be examined in detail and turned into a mathematical operation.  “If you recieve these specific impulses, give this output.”  A neuron can only take finitely many actions, and all the actions of a neuron can be defined purely mathematically (if we believe in realism).   

Thus every single neuron of my brain could be represented mathematically, their actions forming a complete mathematical function, and yet again all these mathematical operations and functions could be written down on books to be placed in a room for John to sit in.  Sitting in that room, John would be able to take in any input and respond to it just as I would, and that includes taking in Chinese inputs and responding in Chinese.  

You may notice that I’m not really disproving John’s original premise of the Chinese Room, instead I’m just trying to point out an absurdity of it.  It is difficult to even say where knowledge begins in the first place.   

John asserts that the Chinese room is just books with instructions, it cannot be said to “know” anything.  And so if John doesn’t know Chinese, and the Room doesn’t know Chinese, then you cannot say that John-plus-the-Room knows Chinese either, where does this knowledge come from? 

But in the same sense none of my neurons “knows” anything, they are simply chemical instructions that respond to chemical inputs and create chemical outputs.  Yet surely I can be said to “know” something?  At the very least (as Decarte once said) can’t I Know that I Am? 

And replacing any neuron with a little machine doing a neuron’s job doesn’t change anything, the neural net of my brain still works so long as the neuron (from the outside) is fundementally indistinguishable from a “real” neuron, just as John’s Chinese Room (from the outside) is fundementally indistinguishable from a “real” knower of Chinese. 

So how do many things that don’t know anything sum up to something that does?  John’s Chinese Room  is really just asking this very question.  John doesn’t have an answer to this question, and neither do I.  But because John can’t answer the question, he decides that the answer is “it doesn’t,” and I don’t agree with that.   

When I first heard about the Chinese room my answer was that “obviously John *can’t* fool people into thinking he knows Chinese, if he has to do all that math and calculations to produce an output, then any speaker will realize that he isn’t answering fast enough to actually be fluent.”  My teacher responded that we should assume John can do the math and stuff arbitrarily fast.  But that answer really just brings me back to my little idea about neurons from above, if John can do stuff arbitrarily fast, then he could also take on the job of any neuron using a set of rules just as he could take on the job of a Chinese-knower. 

And so really the question just comes back to “where does knowledge begin.”  It’s an interesting question to raise, but raising the question doesn’t provide an answer.  John tries at a proof-by-contradiction by saying that the Room and John don’t know Chinese individually, so you cannot say that together they know Chinese.  I respond by saying that none of my individual neurons know Chinese, yet taken together they (meaning “I”) do indeed know Chinese.  I don’t agree that he’s created an actual contradiction here, so I don’t agree with his conclusion. 

I don’t know where knowledge comes from, but I disagree with John that his Chinese Room thought experiment disproves the idea that “knowledge” underlies the Turing Test. Maybe John is right and the Turing Test isn’t useful, but he needs more than the Chinese Room to prove that.

Ultimately this post has been a huge waste of time, like any good philosophy.  But I think wasting time is sometimes important and I hope you’d had as much fun reading this as I had writing it.  Until next time. 

Ten Episodes in China’s Diplomacy: the uncanny resemblance between communist countries and monarchies

I’m reading Ten Episodes in China’s Diplomacy, a written account by former Chinese Diplomat Qian Qichen of ten episodes when China made a name for itself on the world stage. What strikes me though is how much of communist diplomacy in the 1980s revolved around funerals.

I don’t know how true this is, but I was told that funerals were important parts of diplomacy for European monarchs and states. The funeral of a sovereign is a time when even old enemies can be temporarily reconciled in a shared expression of mourning. The Christian funeral service allows the separate nations to find familiarity in their shared religious observances, and the priest may even give a sermon reminding us that every death is a new beginning: a time to bury the hatchet and forge bonds anew.

The event of a ruler dying in office, and of their neighbors coming together under the banner of their shared religion, gives a chance for old enemies to make amends. If the sovereign themselves had enemies, those enemies might take the opportunity to make nice with the sovereign’s successor. Or if his neighbors were enemies with each other but friends with him, they can at least exchange pleasantries at the Christian funeral and perhaps promise to meet again and bury the hatchet.

All this to say: this kind of funeral diplomacy was a key part of Chinese diplomacy in the 1980s. China was severely isolated in the 1980s, they had almost no relations with Russia, they had fought a war with Vietnam, their main ally was the economic basket case North Korea, and the West hated them only marginally less than their fellow communists.

But under Deng Xiaoping, China wanted to reset its foreign relations and normalize its borders in both the North and the South. But while Deng was ready, his fellow communists were non-committal. In fact Qian Qichen’s book makes clear how little China spoke to the other communist countries, and how little those countries listened to China.

But several moments came together to allow China to approach its neighbors in a more friendly manner. Several leaders of both the USSR and Vietnam died in rapid succession, and each funeral was a chance for the communist world to come together to mourn the leaders’ passing and forge new ties of friendship. China rapidly sent an emissary to Leonid Brezhnev’s funeral to make clear that they wanted to reset Sino-Soviet relations. And the death of Le Duan in Vietnam allowed the Chinese and Soviet ambassadors a chance to speak privately, even if they avoided each other in public.

The parallels between this communist “funeral diplomacy” and the Christian “funeral diplomacy” I outlined above are quite striking. And it does put into perspective how many communist countries acted like monarchies. Unlike in a Democracy, monarchies assume the ruler will reign until death, and reign undisputed. There are very few opportunities in a monarchy for policy change because the guy in charge probably believes the same things he believed 20 years ago. So the death of a monarch is a rare opportunity to bring about a policy change.

And like in the old Christian tradition, these communist monarchs could come together under a shared banner of mourning. They may denounce each other in public, but once a communist leader dies his fellow communists can usually agree that at least he was a Marxist instead of a capitalist. That alone creates a shared ideology which can underpin the “let’s bury the hatchet” feeling during the funerary events. Just as a priest may remind the attendants of their shared Christianity, so too may a communist orator remind the attendants of their shared communism.

Qian Qichen naturally asserts that it was China’s skillful policy and diplomacy that brought about the positive resolution to these 10 events, but many of the early events were mostly matters of circumstance. Leonid Brezhnev was a hardliner, so of course he wouldn’t accept resolving the Sino-Soviet border dispute in China’s favor, nor would he or Le Duan accept resolving Cambodia in China’s favor. But Gorbachev was a reformer (or a lightweight if you believe his critics) who was happy to make deals in China’s favor in order to reduce the political and military pressure on the Soviet Union while he tried to reform it economically.

In the end it’s likely all of these events would have been resolved one way or another as China industrialized and became a real player on the world’s stage. But communist funeral diplomacy allowed Deng Xiaoping to resolve most of these disputes in the 80s when China was still a mostly agricultural nation that still had to import food to survive.

It’s something to think about.

I got a cat

I haven’t posted much, but the most important update I can add over the past two weeks is this: I got a cat. A long-haired black kitty who is very shy but likes to sit on my lap in a dark room while I scroll on my phone or read books under a night light.

Who knows what goes on in the minds of cats, but I hope this kitty overcomes her shyness and starts exploring my house more. She mostly sits under the bed which is a bit dirty and although I brought her little cushions and toys to play with she mostly hides under their unless I’m sitting in the bed myself. Then she sometimes comes up to sit in my lap, nudge my hands, and look up worriedly at any sound coming from the rest of the house.

Still it’s only been a few days, and she lived for over a year in a cat adoption center with many other cats. The house is new to her, and by her hisses at the adoption center she didn’t get along with every other cat there. She probably is worried about scary predators that might be lurking outside of the one room she hides in. She also doesn’t like the other members of my family yet, but I hope that will change. So far she only hides, she hasn’t bitten or scratched. But I got this kitty so everyone could enjoy her presence not just me, and I hope she learns to love the folks I love.

I don’t know exactly what toys a kitty likes because many cats seem to enjoy different ones. Laser pointers seem universal, but some kitties haven’t cared about ribbon toys or squeeky mice or all the other things we’ve bought to entertain them. She seems to enjoy pets though and sitting in a lap, and I have plenty of that to spare.

When I go away to work I worry that she’s scared at home, but she’ll have to get used to that as I’m not one of the lucky few who works from home or can stay home all the time because I want to. I hope she takes the opportunity when I’m away to explore more of the house and maybe even find other places to sit, I’d love to pet her on the couch or at a computer instead of just in the bed.

Where is college affordable?

I was talking to a friend recently about a conversation I overheard from two co-workers. One of them had attended Georgia Tech University (in Georgia, natch), the other had attended CalTech (although they were from NYC). The Georgia Tech student said “even though I’m from California, Georgia Tech was the more affordable option, so I went there.”


It’s an amazing statement, because many people who’ve gone to college would assume the opposite. Most states make a distinction between “in-state” students and “out-of-state,” with out-of-state students paying a premium on tuition. Many states also have special scholarships and funds only available for their in-state students.

You’d therefore think that a California student would find CalTech the more affordable option, since they’re both top-ranked schools and California should be providing in-state benefits that Georgia Tech doesn’t. But it wasn’t so for this student.


I told this to a California-based friend of mine who replied “I’m surprised they thought California schooling was more expensive, California community college is free.”


But I think there’s a disconnect between students and those outside the University system as to what constitutes “affordability,” and community college is one part of this disconnect. I won’t bury the lede too much: students don’t want community college because it doesn’t offer them what a proper college does. Making community college affordable doesn’t make college itself affordable.


There are a lot of reasons to go to college:
Gain skills
Gain experience
Build networks
Signal value
None of these are well-served by community college.


Gaining skills is the place where a community college should have the greatest value: a calculus class there should teach you the same things as a calculus class at MIT. Math is math, right? But the specific in-class material is only one part of the skill-building that students seek.


The “quality” colleges that students want to attend will be staffed by eminent professors who are on the cutting edge of research in their field. And yes, there is “research” in mathematics. Students don’t just want to learn the facts that were written down decades ago, they want exposure to the unexplored parts of their discipline so they can learn how to contribute themselves. So for any STEM student, just taking community college courses doesn’t really give you much “skill” in your field, because while you may have the book-learning, you don’t have any exposure or experience working on the cutting edge.


At a research university students can work in labs, attend conferences, hear seminars by famous professors, all things you can’t do at a community college. So really a community college cannot give you the skills that a “real” university can, it can only give you the knowledge base that you can then use later to build those skills.


Gaining experience is sort of different from skills. In both STEM and humanities, students will want some experience in their discipline of choice, both so they can make sure they actually like it and so they can better get a job right after graduation. Community colleges are usually overlooked by companies canvasing for interns, and for good reason since many of the students at a community college already have jobs. Likewise a community college will have a lot less clubs or professional guilds through which a student can find new opportunities for leadership or work.


So everything from internships, to student leadership positions, to funded fellowships is a lot harder to find at a community college vs a university. And for those reasons students who want experience will shy away from community colleges even if they are free.


Networks are again hard to build at community colleges. Harvard isn’t Harvard just because the students are smart, it has an enormous pull factor in part from the children of the rich and famous who attend there. At a tier-1 university you can rub shoulders with future CEOs and politicians. Even at a tier-2 or -3 university you can find future managers and leaders. Community colleges are largely attended by people who already have a job and are trying to upskill into a better one, and therefore don’t have the time or effort to network.


Community colleges also are largely attended by students who couldn’t get accepted anywhere else. And it’s sad but true, that most students who didn’t have the grades to go to a university likely don’t have the wherewithal to be future movers and shakers. So your networking opportunities are not great at a community college. Students who want to network will avoid them.


Finally, signaling value. It has become cliche to say that college doesn’t teach you anything and the only reason to attend is as a signal. I disagree with this, but it is true that college does act like a signal to future employers. By attending a “good” university, you show that you are skilled and capable, at the very least you were skilled enough to get in and graduate, so you can probably be trusted with an entry-level position.


Yet again this is something that community college just doesn’t provide. Community college is not a strong signal for employers, it is required to take everyone and employers are wary about the actual quality of the graduating students. Fairly or not, community college is not a strong signal, and so students who believe in the signaling theory will not want to attend.


I think everything I’ve written here is mostly a “duh,” but it still needs to be said. Because when the debate about the cost of university turns to “free community college,” we need to recognize that “there is a price cheaper than free.” Just because something is free doesn’t mean it’s the best option or truly the cheapest option. What you save in tuition, you lose in opportunities to network, to gain skills, to gain experience, and to signal your value.


Now you can still do all these things outside of a community college. You can network outside of college while taking free classes, find internships, become a local leader, etc etc. But all those things require a lot of time, effort, and frankly even money (travel for networking isn’t cheap). A university provides them along with your tuition. So this is what I mean about “a price cheaper than free,” community college classes may be “free,” but they don’t provide you with any of the benefits that people actually want from a university. And trying to match a university’s benefits alongside the free classes from a community college will usually end up costing more time and money than just attending the university instead.
Free community college was pushed as a solution for the college affordability crisis, but it really isn’t one at all.

Community college has a place, but it doesn’t provide what university students want at all. And that’s part of why California schools remain unaffordable, even for California natives, because the state is subsidizing what students don’t want while allowing costs to grow out of control on what students actually need. If California at least built a hell of a lot more housing, then cost of living would go down and the universities would become cheaper to attend by default. But I suspect more and more that the “quality” California universities will become a playground for the rich or connected, with much of the middle class going out-of-state instead.

How much of Canadian-bound immigrants wish to eventually immigrate to America?

This will be a post long on musing and short on evidence. But I have two anecdotes about Canadians, or at least Canadian-bound immigrants.

In grad school I met a Chinese woman who moved to Canada for her undergrad, but her express purpose was to eventually find her way into an American graduate school (which she did). She knew that not only would a Canadian undergraduate degree look good to an American Grad school, but she also knew that she could get her American visa while living as a student in Canada, and that it would be easier to do that than to get a visa while living in China. Most people don’t realize, but even if you’re accepted to a University, you aren’t guaranteed a student visa. The American state department can reject your visa if they think you’ll overstay, and the staff are very strict when issuing visas in China and India, but much more lax when issuing visas in Canada.

Now why didn’t she do her undergraduate degree in America? I don’t know, I never asked. Maybe it was too expensive, maybe she couldn’t get in. But she was open an honest that she though an American degree was better than a Canadian one, and much better than a Chinese one, and so getting an American degree was crucial for her career.

And a researcher I know at my current job has Canadian citizenship, but he and his family immigrated there with the intention of eventually reaching America. I don’t know how, but he said it’s a lot easier to get permanent residency and citizenship in Canada as opposed to America, and it’s a lot quicker. And once you’re a Canadian citizen, you have a much higher chance of getting a visa into America compared to an Indian citizen.

Like in China, the state department considers Indian citizens to be at a very high risk of overstaying their visas, and so are reluctant to give visas to them. But Canadian citizens are low risk. If you eventually want to move to America for work, moving to Canada and becoming a Canadian citizen can be a long-term strategy.

So how common is this overall? I have absolutely no idea, but I’d like to know. I know that recently both Canada and America had very high spikes of immigration. Canada under Trudeau defended its immigration policy on economic grounds as bringing in more workers to grow the economy, America under Biden instead used humanitarian grounds, as America being a beacon for the tired, poor, and huddled masses. But during this spike, there were still stories of people coming to Canada and then trying to use that to move to America.

So how true is this, and what are the implications? A troubling implication would be if Canada was seen as a “secondary” destination for many migrants, who would only go there if they thought or knew they wouldn’t be able to go to America. That would mean the international opinion of Canada’s economy is rather low, and also that it probably wasn’t receiving the best and brightest compared to America (because the best and brightest are more likely to be accepted into America).

This could also have ramifications to how Canada is affected by American policy. America is endorsing a highly restrictive immigration policy. Will this cause more immigrants to seek Canada, as they cannot reach America? Or will it cause *less* immigrants to seek Canada, as many of them *only went to Canada in order to reach America, which they now cannot do*?

Canada is also changing its policy at the same time, so teasing apart a single cause is difficult, maybe impossible. But it does make me think.

I was once talking to an econ guy at a conference, and he said that if every country on earth adopted open borders, most countries would see their immigration plummet as almost all immigrants they would have received would instead go to the United States. I don’t know if this is true, and he was an American of a certain political persuasion, so he may have had emotional reasons to believe this is true. But if anyone else out there has evidence of this, I’d love to see it.

Klein 4: What Ezra Klein’s abundance agenda doesn’t contend with

The answer is trade-offs, Ezra Klein doesn’t contend with trade-offs. But I also wrote the title of this post to reference an old song I heard by a group called “The Klein Four,” check it out, it’s a good song if you like jokes about math and love.

I’ve discussed a lot about Ezra Klein’s abundance agenda before. To remind us, Ezra Klein says the reasons for America’s economic malaise is that we have made it impossible to build the houses, jobs, and infrastructure that we need to bring down costs and bring up wages. Housing costs will go down if we build more houses, so the government should write laws to ensure we can build more houses.

This agenda can seem very “ivory tower,” but has come into sharp focus with the creation of the bipartisan Abundance Caucus, as well as the likely next mayor of New York City coming out in support of the abundance agenda.

But the question that I want to raise is: what political group will be thrown under the bus in pursuit of abundance?

I mean this question honestly. This is not a gotcha, this is not an attack. This is my assertion that abundance *will* require trade-offs, and certain political groups *will oppose* those trade-offs no matter what. In order to enact Abundance then, you will have to choose your trade-offs, and therefore choose who goes under the bus.

Klein is not a politician, and he and his co-author have tried to assert that there really aren’t any trade-offs with abundance. We can keep *all the good things* that he and his co-partisans support without any negative side affects. And likewise the new laws we write to ensure that housing, factories, and infrastructure get built faster and more efficiently will not harm his co-partisan’s priorities whatsoever.

But I think Klein does this because he makes the classic mistake of thinking everyone has the same priorities as he does, they just don’t have the knowledge he does to realize he’s right.

So to start: will Abundance throw unions under the bus, or will it continue to allow them to have veto power over housing projects they don’t like? Josh Barro wrote about this extensively. He points out that unions in blue cities have consistently held up building projects in order to increase their own power. Unions make demands that increase the cost and time-line of a project, and if they don’t get it they use every possible veto point (such as the need to get community approval or the need to do environmental review) to prevent a project from happening.

This creates a trade-off, unions vs abundance. Klein side-steps this and tries to claim that no, there really isn’t a trade-off, and he actually wants to make it radically easier to form a union. But that isn’t important. It’s quite easy to form a union in America, it’s very difficult to exercise union power. Unions are exercising what little power they have when they hold up projects, and they do so in order to ensure the project enriches their members and not non-unionized laborers. Established unions don’t care about forming unions, they’re already established. They care about enriching their members.

So there *is* a trade-off between unions and abundance. Klein tries to handwave that somehow we remove the union veto and give them some other power and that they would accept this as a fair trade. But they simple would not. So if you remove the unions’ ability to veto infrastructure projects, then you throw the unions under the bus. If you don’t remove their veto, you walk back the abundance agenda, because you are failing to make it easier to build housing, infrastructure and jobs.

Or what about environmentalism? Energy is expensive, and it’s a huge barrier to economic growth and the abundance agenda. Right now America pays a lot less for energy than much of Europe because we allow our oil companies to frack oil out of the rocks to release it. But this is an environmental double-whammy, all that fracking harms the environment and burning all that oil accelerates global warming.

Klein’s environmental co-partisans will want to ban fracking and restrict oil, while abundance for consumers may require continued fracking so Americans can use their cars and so America’s economy can continue to use that energy. Germany and the EU have shrinking or stagnating economies in part because the price of energy there is so high.

Again Klein handwaves this by saying that we can make solar panels and solar power so cheap that energy will be cheaper that way. But this ignores present reality. Texas currently is the American leader in energy abundance, with an incredibly permissive permitting regime. It indeed leads America in the installation of solar panels. It also leads America in the fracking of oil.

If solar power were such a sure bet, then Texas energy barons would stop investing in oil and move all their money into solar panels. No company would ever willingly leave money on the table like that. But solar power *is not* a sure bet, and it still has massive difficulties that make oil viable. Battery technology is not sufficient to make solar+batteries cheaper than oil or gas for night-time power. And electric cars still aren’t cheap enough to make American switch over their ICE cars.

You can’t just “abundance” your way into ignoring economics, if you make it easy to permit *any* energy, then you will permit a lot of fossil fuel-based energy solution and piss off environmentalists. If you restrict fossil fuels, you undermine abundance by raising America’s energy prices and making it harder for Americans to drive and making it harder for American companies to operate.

I wanted to write more but I’m a bit tired and this post is very late, it should have been finished two weeks ago. But let me finish with this, every single group that supports abundance has their own group policy that they see as sacrosanct. They will support the removal of *other groups’ policies* but not their own. Abundance will therefore require finding which group is weakest, and removing their policies, or finding some compromise that pleases no one but at least gets things done.

The unions will happily undermine environmentalism and local democracy, but will never support a reduction in union power. Environmentalists will not allow environmental laws to be degraded, but may allow for a reduction in union power and local democracy. And you know what local groups think.

So when you want to build new housing or a new train line through a city, each group will block it until you make the expensive concessions necessary for their support. Abundance is all about removing those expensive concessions so it’s cheaper and easier for America to build. So the question is then clear: which group will be thrown under the bus. Until the Abundance Agenda has an answer, it will largely remain a performative slogan more than a real ideology.

What exactly *isn’t* Ezra Klein’s “Abundance Agenda?”

Answer: It isn’t neoliberalism.

Unfortunately, Klein killed my joke. Because between my last post and this one, he made his own post in the New York Times where he clarified that “Abundance” is *not* about neoliberalism. Be warned, I’m writing at night again so this post will be more streamsofconsciousness-y than the last.

First, an intro paragraph: Ezra Klein says the problem with America (and especially Blue States) is that they are Unable To Build. They can’t build rail, or houses, or energy infrastructure. And while nowhere in America can build these well, Blue States are doing *especially badly*. This inability to build means our transport is expensive, our houses are expensive, our energy bills are expensive, and we need to embrace Abundance (aka “build more stuff”) in order to fix our economy. Abundance means building lots of stuff to bring down prices and make everyone happier.

I’ve been amused to see “Abundance” described as some form of rebranded “neoliberalism.” Neoliberalism is a slippery term, but the shackling of the state was a thoroughly neoliberal project.

The above is a quote from Klein, but here he himself falls into the trap of “neoliberalism is whatever I don’t like.” No wonder neoliberalism been described as an “ideological trashbin,” neoliberalism is the political equivalent of a wastebasket taxon.

He describes this “shackling of the state” as the reason we Can’t Have Nice Things in this country, or rather it’s the reason all of our government building projects are way over-time and way over-budget. He does think that some deregulation should be done to allow the free market to build things (like houses), but he is still a partisan Democrat and believes that the government should always take the first step in transportation and energy. Secretly I also think he wants to flex his left-of-center bonafides so he can quell accusations that he’s a secret Reganite, but regardless, he says we cannot have Abundance simply by deregulating, we also have to “unshackle the state.” But what does it mean to “unshackle the state?”

See, the “shackling of the state” as he calls it was really a reaction to the post-World War 2 economic consensus. It was common consensus after World War 2 the State should be allowed to buy up land and invest in infrastructure whenever it wanted, which is exactly what Klein says they should do now, and exactly what Biden said he would do from 2020 to 2024. But the authority of the state is unchecked, it has a “monopoly on the use of force” as they say in poli-sci. So eminent domain aka *forcing people to sell their land* was the common way for the state to build infrastructure, since forced sales (rather than negotiations) are always the best way to make a project happen on-time and under-budget.

We can debate whether or not eminent domain was a bad thing, but in my experience it’s basic Democratic Party orthodoxy that it was *really really bad*. You may recall former Secretary of Transport Pete Buttigieg talking about how the highways were racist by design. This quote was wildly taken out of context, but what he meant was that the government eminent domain’d poor neighborhoods in order to build our highways. Now, in American, eminent domain still requires you to pay a “fair value” to the people whose house or land you buy up. So when using eminent domain, the government buys poor neighborhoods instead of rich ones because poor ones are cheaper to buy, this is obvious. But since minorities are more likely to be poor, this means the poor neighborhoods that were bought up and paved over to build highways were more likely to be minority ones. Hence eminent domain = bad.

In reaction to eminent domain, America “shackled the state.” The power to use eminent domain was massively curtailed, and demands were placed on the state and elected leaders to find other ways to complete infrastructure without this kind of forced-sale.

But unshackling the state is exactly what Klein wants to do to enact the “Abundance Agenda,” and that would mean allowing minority neighborhoods to be bought up and their residents displaced so the government can build infrastructure. It would also mean the government can do other things it did under the pre-shackled consensus, like flooding native tribal land to build the Hoover Dam, floodiung rural Tennessee to build the Tennessee Valley Authority dams, and in many many cases of displacing people who would rather have stayed where they were.

This unshackled state was seen as an injustice by the socially-minded on the left, and so they pushed for strong laws that would prevent the government OR ANYONE ELSE from being able to do this again. The so-called “shackling of the state” was done in the name of Social Justice, not neoliberalism.

And here is a point I would like to make: Klein routinely fails to grapple with the trade-offs that his “Abundance Agenda” would create. He says that we need to “unshackle the state” in order to build lots of good things and bring about Abundance. He says that we *used* to be a country that could do this, and points to the New Deal and the Eisenhower Interstate System as proof of this, and as a model Democrats (and America) should follow. But he doesn’t realize or fails to mention that this unshackling would cause all the problems that are still complained about to this day, bulldozed neighborhoods and displaced people.

Ezra Klein wants to build railroads in the way Eisenhower built interstates, but that’s going to mean blasting through poor neighborhoods in order to get a rail line into the city, just as Eisenhower did. That’s going to mean building across Native land because that’s the shortest way to build a line between many of our Western cities. And since minorities in America are still more likely to be poor, that means the neighborhoods you’ll be blasting through will be minority ones, and you’ll be fought every step of the way by the groups who worked to “shackled the state” in the first place.

Klein is very clearly interested in social justice, but he paints a picture in which the shackling of the state was just caused by misguided leftists and hairbrained libertarians, not his social justice co-partisans. He refuses to grapple with the question of “is it just to bulldoze a poor, black neighborhood to build infrastructure that will be used by millions?” Unless he has an answer for that, then he doesn’t actually have an answer for how to “unshackle” the state.

This refusal to grapple with trade-offs runs rampant through Klein’s Abundance Agenda. He frequently makes the claim that we just need to cut red tape and *get building* and that this will allow us to achieve our every dream. But what exactly is stopping us from building, and who demanded that red tape in the first place?

The sources of Red Tape can be discussed, but I want to keep in mind a few things:

  • Every source of Red Tape *agrees that we need to cut Red Tape*
  • Every source of Red Tape thinks that *their objectives are the most important*
  • Every source of Red Tape just thinks *someone else’s objectives are the ones that should be cut* in order to cut the Red Tape and achieve Abundance
  • Klein falls into the trap of imagining a sort of Red Tape “Legion of Doom” who just stop government projects because they’re evil and don’t like government. But in fact Red Tape is always put there at the behest of some interest group that is trying to protect its members wherever possible

The sources of red tape I’d like to discuss are, in order:

  • Local democracy
  • Environmentalism
  • Taxpayers
  • Unions

Local Democracy is the one that Klein and the Abundance folks feel the strongest in attacking. Everyone hates NIMBYs, but local democracy is more than just them. As I said in the previous post, there are usually listening sessions for any new building project to get neighbor buy-in. These sessions are a great way for NIMBYs to stop projects by demanding so many listening sessions that the project becomes too expensive to be profitable, but any other interest group can also use the demand for listening sessions in order to hamstring an unwanted project.

When framed as “NIMBYs vs infrastructure,” I’m sure it’s easy to get online consensus that local democracy should be crushed beneath the Federal boot. But your political opponents will always try to frame the argument in their way, and supporters of local democracy will frame it in terms of democracy (duh) but also minority rights (why should their minority neighborhoods and native land be forced to bear the burden of all this construction?), social justice (why are these things always built in poor neighborhoods?) and local knowledge (the DC bureaucrats need to listen to the locals because they don’t understand the needs of this area).

If you don’t have a response for these framings, then you won’t be able to bulldoze the NIMBYs and build your railroads. The problem for Klein is that this is a trade-off, are we willing to sacrifice social justice and build our railroads through a poor minority neighborhood, just like we built our highways? It’s easy to attack NIMBYs in the abstract, much harder when we have actual history telling us what happens when we *do* let the Federal Boot stamp on local democracy. And while the Interstate System is widely loved, it has seen a lot of pushback by Ezra’s ideological allies, and Ezra himself is pretending that their concerns over local democracy won’t affect his Abundance Agenda.

Next let’s discuss environmentalism, which is another soft target for the Abundance folks. Abundance folks like Klein laments that “surely we shouldn’t have years of environmental review slowing down our *wind farms*. Surely we shouldn’t allow people to block solar panels in *the dessert*”. But reframed in terms of unknown environmental risks and biodiversity and it gets a lot thornier.

The Abundance Agenda seems to argue we should be fine with building a new railroad/wind farm/solar farm without the years of environmental review demanded by environmentalists. Environmentalists will hit back that we don’t know 100% what chemicals might seep into the water lines, or how many species will go extinct due to habitat destruction, or how much deforestation and de-greening the new construction will cause. I trust the engineers to do their due diligence, and I trust the EPA to monitor situations as they come up. But can Ezra really sell that to America and the environmental movement at large?

The whole point of environmental review is preventing those kinds of “chemicals in the water/mass deforestation” catastrophes, even if the review takes years or decades (in the case of California High Speed Rail). It only takes one research paper to assert that a new train *may* lead to elevated Lithium levels in the rivers of southern California, and then you’ve lost public buy-in for the project at large. And of course if the railroad *does* lead to Lithium in the water, what then? It’s easy for Klein to talk about “cutting environmental review” but he never grapples with how to respond to the claims *within his own coalition* that doing so will make America more sick.

Abundance is an ideology that to some extent wants to be bipartisan. Klein uses Red States as his model to harangue Blue states, and congress recently created a bipartisan Abundance Caucus to champion Klein’s ideas. Although this bipartisan group still voted overwelmingly for the exact kind of anti-abundance legislation that Klein laments, so whatever. But still, I’ve used this post to discuss the conflicts between the Abundance agenda and some parts of Klein’s otherwise partisan orthodoxy, I’d like to use the next post to discuss some of its conflicts with other orthodoxies.

I’d meant these to all be one post, but couldn’t get my thoughts out in time. See you again soon.

Declaring victory on my Twitter prediction, conceding defeat on self-driving cars

I’ve made a few predictions over the years here, and I want to talk about two of them.

I’m declaring victory in saying that 2022 was *not* the Year Twitter Died. It was an extremely broad opinion in the left-of-center spaces that Musk was a terrible CEO, that firing so much Twitter staff would destroy the company, that it would be dead and overtaken very soon. I can concede the first one, the second two are clearly false.

The evidence from history has shown that firing most of Twitter’s staff has *not* led to mass outages, mass hacks, or the death of twitter’s infrastructure. It may seem like I’m debating a strawman, but it’s difficult to really convey the ridiculous hysteria I saw, with some claiming that Twitter would soon be dead and abandoned as newer versions of most popular browsers wouldn’t be able to access it. Likewise it was claimed that the servers would be insecure and claimed by botnets, and would thus get blocked by any sane browser protection. None of that has happened, Twitter runs just as it did in 2021. It is no less secure and it not blocked by most browsers.

Nor has the mass exodus of users really occurred. Some people think it has because they live in a bubble, but Mastodon was never going to replace Twitter and Bluesky is losing users. And regardless of your opinions on that, the numbers don’t lie.

I’ve said before that I used to be part of a community that routinely though Musk’s sky was falling. Every Tesla delay would be the moment that *finally* killed the company, every year would be when NASA *finally* kicked SpaceX to the curb, every failed Musk promise would *finally* make people stop listening to him. You’ve heard of fandoms, I was in a hatedom.

But I learned that all of that was motivated reasoning. EVs aren’t actually super easy, and that’s the reason Ford and GM utterly failed to build any. It’s not that Musk was lucky and would soon be steamrolled by the Big Boys, Musk was smart (and lucky) and the Big Boys wet their Big Boy pants and have stilled utterly failed in the EV market despite billions of dollars in free government money.

Did Musk receive free government money? Not targeted money no, any car company on earth could have benefited from the USA/California EV tax credits, it’s just that the Detroit automakers didn’t make EVs. Then they got handed targeted free money, and they still failed to make EVs.

NASA (and the ESA, and JAXA, and CNSA) haven’t managed to replicate SpaceX’s success in low-cost re-usable rockets sending thousands of satellites into orbit. So now *another* Musk property, Starlink, is the primary way that rural folk can get broadband, because Biden’s billions utterly failed to build any rural broadband.

And of course while Musk has turned most of the left against him, he has turned much of the right for him, which is generally what happens when you switch parties. And now that he’s left Trump, some of the left want to coax him back. Clearly people still listen to him even if you and I do not.

So I was very wrong 10 years ago about Elon Musk being the anti-Midas, but I learned my lesson and started stepping out of my bubble. I was right 3 years ago when I said Twitter isn’t dying, and everything I said still rings true. Big companies still use Twitter because it’s their best way to mass-blast their message to everyone in an age when TV is dying and more people block ads with their browser. The same reason people prefer Bluesky (curate your feed, never see what you don’t want to see) is the same reason Wendy’s, Barstool Sports, and Kendrick Lamar prefer Twitter. They want their message, their brand, to show up in your feed even if you don’t want to see it. It’s advertising that isn’t labeled as an ad.

So that’s what I was right about, now I’m going to write a lot *less* about what I was wrong about, because I hate being wrong.

I was wrong about how difficult it would be to get self-driving cars on all roads. In 2022 I clowned on a 2015 prediction that said self-driving cars would be on every road by 2020. Well it’s 2025, and I’ll be honest 5 years late isn’t that terrible.

At the time I thought that there was a *political-legal* barrier that would need to be overcome: how do you handle insurance of a self-driving car? No system is perfect and if there’s a defect in the LIDAR detector or just a bug in the system, a car *can* cause damage. And if it does, does Google pay the victim, or the passenger, or what? Insurance is a messy, expensive system, split into 50 different systems here in America, and I thought without some new insurance legislation (such as unifying the insurance systems or just creating more clarity regarding self-driving cars), that the companies would realize they couldn’t roll these out without massive risk and headaches.

I was wrong, I’ve now seen waymos in every city I’ve been to.

So it seems the insurance problems weren’t insurmountable, and the problem was less hard then I thought. You can read my thoughts about how hard I *thought* those problems were, but to be honest I was wrong.