Bringing Elon to a Knife Fight

DOGE has made it both impossible not to talk about government reform, and impossible to talk about it. The topic is everywhere, but the subject is now entirely eclipsed on the left by the horror of who has been assigned the task and the need to decry DOGE as a bad faith effort. (...)

But we do need to talk about government reform, and while I’m sorry the conditions are quite a bit less than ideal, I think it's time we admitted they were always going to be. Democrats did not do this work. Many wonderful public servants made valiant efforts and scored some great wins, but Democratic leadership did not make it a top priority to clear out the underbrush that jams the gears of government.  (...)

I am guessing that those most worried that DOGE will succeed have never tried their hand at reforming government. It’s hard. But easier, you say, with no respect for the law, and the DOGE team will be unencumbered by such details. But that’s not true. The lawsuits will come. A lot of the government tech community is skipping the hand wringing; they've basically just grabbed a bag of popcorn and are watching in real time as Elon and Vivek learn all the things they’ve known, lived, and absolutely hated for their entire time in public service. They don’t see DOGE as their savior, but they are feeling vindicated after years of shouting into the void. I am struck by how different the tone of the DOGE conversation is between political leaders on the left and the people who’ve been fighting in the implementation trenches. One group is terrified they’ll succeed. The other is starting to ask a surprising question (or at least I am): What if even billionaires can’t disrupt the system we have built?

Take the issue of respect for the law. Put aside the headline grabbing issues for a second and live in the mundane world of implementation in government. If you’ve spent the past ten years trying to make, say, better online services for veterans, or clearer ways to understand your Medicare benefits, or even better ways to support warfighters, you’ve sat in countless -– and I mean countless — meetings where you’ve been told that something you were trying to do was illegal. Was it? Now, instead of launching your new web form or doing the user research your team needed to do, you spend weeks researching why you are now branded as dangerously lawless, only to find that either a) it was absolutely not illegal but 25 years ago someone wrote a memo that has since been interpreted as advising against this thing, b) no one had heard of the thing you were trying to do (the cloud, user research, A/B testing) and didn’t understand what you were talking about so had simply asserted it was illegal out of fear, c) there was an actual provision in law somewhere that did seem to address this and interpreting it required understanding both the actual intent of the law and the operational mechanics of the thing you were trying to do, which actually matched up pretty well or d) (and this one is uncommon) that the basic, common sense thing you were trying to do was actually illegal, which was clearly the result of a misunderstanding by policymakers or the people who draft legislation and policy on their behalf, and if they understood how their words had been operationalized, they’d be horrified. It is absolutely possible to both respect the rule of law, considering the democratic process and the peaceful transfer of power sacred, and have developed an aversion to the fetishization of law that perverts its intent. The majority of public servants I know have well earned this right.

DOGE is about to crash into this wall of weaponization of the complexities of law, policy, regulation, process, and lore in defense of the status quo and yes, the people in my community are watching. While our eyes are on potential abuses, they are also on the durability of the wall generally, and with deeply mixed emotions. It must be said: the wall is a problem. It is a problem for people who value the rule of law. It is a problem for people who care about an effective, responsive government. (...)

It's really hard to have an accurate model for why change is so hard in large bureaucratic institutions, and specifically for public sector ones, where the differences in governance really do matter. On the one hand, I do still believe that the first order problem is simply lack of attention by people with power. If politics and policy take their fair share of your oxygen, there's really just very little left for the implementation. What is available gets used on getting that particular thing done, which usually means a hack around the system instead of permanently changing it so it can be easy next time. At its worst, the hacks to get it done this time actually make it harder on an ongoing basis. (...)

Is someone against these minor and helpful changes? You could say that the vendors profit from government’s slow and poor process for hiring, but I struggle to imagine this was high on any lobbyists’ target lists. It's far more likely that there is just a perplexing combination of legitimate and imagined reasons for caution, and review by a staggering array of stakeholders. As I talked about in my book, outsiders (and certainly the right) imagine dangerously concentrated power in the executive branch, and seek to limit it. The reality is shockingly diffuse power. The bad outcomes they are fighting to prevent — burdensome, overreaching government — are the product of exactly the conditions they help create. Neither the left nor the right really has the mental models (nor, perhaps the desire) to effectively challenge the status quo of the technocracy.

You can tell a credible story about the resistance to change that doesn’t require any dirty tricks on the part of the incumbents, and I’ve often left it at that, in part because the vendors don’t come at me. I don’t threaten them. But they do go at those who do threaten them. Oracle recently admitted to some very dirty tricks in trying to keep their competitors from winning the Jedi cloud contract at the DoD. (More to say about this in a future post, perhaps. Or perhaps I’ll be too scared to attract their ire. It happens.) It’s not that they succeeded in getting the contract — they’d already lost it. They were just following their scorched earth policy of ensuring that if they couldn’t have it, no one could. And by no one, they meant their competitors, but the result is that the DoD still doesn’t have the access to the cloud that Jedi architect Chris Lynch envisioned. Our national defense is that much slower and less secure because Oracle can’t lose. These are some of the conditions under which change in government is supposed to take place.

We can wish that the government efficiency agenda were in the hands of someone else, but let’s not pretend that change was going to come from Democrats if they’d only had another term, and let’s not delude ourselves that change was ever going to happen politely, neatly, carefully. However we got here, we may now be in a Godzilla vs Kong world. Perhaps we’re about to get a natural experiment in which Elonzilla faces off with Larry ElliKong. One of the things we need to be ready to learn is that Elonzilla could lose. Or worse, since Elon and Larry are friends, the expected disruptive could get co-opted. And what would that say about the problem? Conjuring Elon is not bringing a gun to a knife fight. It was never a knife fight.

by Jennifer Pahlka, Eating Policy |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Dated (Dec. 2023) but still relevant, especially now that Elon has retreated, tail between legs, to shore up his severely damaged reputation and tanking car company (more here). But his minions and various unqualified political appointees are still in place so dysfunction will likely be the default (deep) state going forward. It's always easier to break something than repair it. See also: The Water is a Mirror (EP):]

***

"There is waste, fraud, and abuse in government, to be sure. Medicare and Medicaid fraud is real, and we should make it easier to prosecute these cases. (Elon thinks you just catch the fraudsters and lock them up — in fact, you spend years building a case and refer it to the Department of Justice, and let the wheels turn at the speed they may. There should be a middle ground.) But a lot of what people perceive as government waste is stuff like this — just unwise use of resources directed by very smart, dedicated people. Why would smart, dedicated people do this? Because in American culture, the people don’t trust their government.

My point is actually this: an enormous amount of the waste in government (and what some might call abuse) comes from people trying very hard to avoid the perception of waste and abuse. We’ve made it a first order thing. Most people who work in government (and make less money than they could) do so because it means something to them to serve the public. But serving the public turns out to involve catering to a deeply ingrained mistrust, which distorts the work, leaves soldiers thirsty, and drives further mistrust. Looking for someone to blame?

My point, dear reader, is that this starts with us."

***

[ed. And, this just in - May 27, 2025:]

Political scientist Adam Bonica noted last Friday that Trump and the administration suffered a 96% loss rate in federal courts in the month of May. Those losses were nonpartisan: 72.2% of Republican-appointed judges and 80.4% of Democratic-appointed judges ruled against the administration.

The administration sustained more losses today.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ruled that 14 states can proceed with their lawsuit against billionaire Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency.” The administration had tried to dismiss the case, but Chutkan ruled the states had adequately supported their argument that “Musk and DOGE’s conduct is ‘unauthorized by any law.’” “The Constitution does not permit the Executive to commandeer the entire appointments power by unilaterally creating a federal agency…and insulating its principal officer from the Constitution as an ‘advisor’ in name only,” she wrote.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon struck down Trump’s March 27 executive order targeting the law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, more commonly known as WilmerHale. This law firm angered Trump by employing Robert Mueller, the Republican-appointed special counsel who oversaw an investigation of the ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives.

Leon, who was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush, made his anger obvious. “[T]he First Amendment prohibits government officials from retaliating against individuals for engaging in protected speech,” Leon noted. “WilmerHale alleges that ‘[t]he Order blatantly defies this bedrock principle of constitutional law.’” Leon wrote: “I agree!” He went on to strike down the order as unconstitutional. (...)

Meanwhile, stringing things out means making time for situations to change on the ground, reducing the effect of court decisions. Brian Barrett of Wired reported today that while Musk claims to have stepped back from the Department of Government Efficiency, his lieutenants are still spread throughout the government, mining Americans’ data. Meanwhile, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought will push to make DOGE cuts to government permanent in a dramatic reworking of the nation’s social contract. “Removing DOGE at this point would be like trying to remove a drop of food coloring from a glass of water,” Barrett writes.

***

[ed. And the hits just keep coming (this time, the TACO trade): May 28, 2025:]

Judges continue to decide cases against Trump, with a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of International Trade ruling today that President Donald J. Trump’s sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs are illegal. (...)

Tariffs were in the news today in another way, too, as Wall Street analysts have begun to talk of “TACO trade,” short for “Trump always chickens out.” The phrase was coined earlier this month by Robert Armstrong of Financial Times and refers to Trump’s habit of threatening extraordinarily high tariffs and then backing down. Armstrong noted that investors have figured out that they can buy stocks cheaply immediately after Trump’s initial tariff announcement and then sell higher when stocks rebound after he changes his mind. (...)

Tonight, after news broke that the judges had ruled his tariffs illegal and after he had reacted angrily to a reporter’s question about the “TACO trade,” a weakened Trump reached out to his alt-right base as he appeared determined to demonstrate dominance. He posted a meme on his social media account showing an image of himself walking toward the viewer on what appears to be a wet, nighttime city street. Pepe the Frog, a symbol of the far right, stands in the background.

Above Trump, in all capital letters, are the words: “He’s on a mission from God.” Below his feet, also in all caps, the message continues: “& nothing can stop what is coming.” This is a phrase from the right-wing QAnon conspiracy community and refers to the idea that members of the “Deep State” and its collaborators will soon be arrested.

***

[ed. Finally, it's not just tariffs. The bumbling and backtracking re: Ukraine is the TACO trade in foreign policy:]

Trump’s mistake has been to assume that his self-proclaimed deal-making genius, supposed rapport with Putin and massive leverage over Volodymyr Zelenskyy (the US has provided Ukraine with more weaponry than the other allies combined, though less total aid when humanitarian and other support is included) would together yield a diplomatic success, perhaps one that would even land him a Nobel peace prize. (...)

Now Trump is outraged – Putin, he wrote on his social media platform, has “gone absolutely CRAZY” and is “needlessly killing a lot of people” – and, when asked whether he was thinking of tightening sanctions, replied: “Absolutely.” But this isn’t the first time Trump has warned Putin to cease targeting his missiles and drones on Ukraine (remember his “Vladimir, STOP!” post late last month?) or threatened additional sanctions. (...)

However, even if Trump moves beyond social media posts and words and actually does impose additional economic penalties on Russia this time round, the fighting won’t stop – for at least two reasons.

Liang Yan Sheng
via:

René Lalique, Winged Maiden Moonstone Enamel Brooch

via:

‘There is Just Flat Out Nobody to Work’

Trump Has No Plan For Who Will Grow US Food

Last spring, Carmelo Mendez was pruning peach trees in Colorado on a temporary visa, missing his children and wife back home, but excited about how his $17.70 hourly wage would improve their lives. This spring, he’s back in the Mexican state of Tlaxcala frantically searching Facebook for a job on one of the thousands of farms across the US that primarily employ guest workers like him.

Mendez is one of the more than 300,000 foreign agricultural workers who comes to the US every year on an H-2A visa, which allows him to temporarily work plowing fields, pruning trees and harvesting crops in states from Washington to Georgia, Florida to New York, Texas to California. But as federal immigration policies change rapidly, farmers and workers alike are uncertain about their future.

“Without [this guest worker program], I believe agriculture in the US would decline a lot because people there don’t want to do the work,” Mendez said.

As the fate of the hundreds of thousands of undocumented farm workers remains in limbo amid Donald Trump’s mass deportation threats, and the administration’s H-2A policies are undecided, the future of these guest workers remains unclear. Their numbers grow each year – and they are increasingly central to an industry historically dominated by undocumented workers. The industry isn’t creating new jobs either.

Farmers agree with farm workers like Mendez. They say they cannot attract other workers to their rural fields.

The debate over guest workers is dividing Republican support. Jonathan Berry, who was nominated to be the solicitor at the Department of Labor, wrote the labor chapter for Project 2025, the rightwing proposal to overhaul the government from the Heritage Foundation thinktank. That section advocates for replacing H-2A workers with local workers and automation. While technology could replace some specific farm tasks, many crops still depend primarily on human labor, and small farmers say they can’t afford to invest in equipment that could take more than a decade to pay off. Other co-authors of the chapter, such as economist Oren Cass, do not think the jobs should be eliminated, but that farmers should improve working conditions to attract citizens to them instead.

On the other hand, Trump’s power depends on a coalition that includes agricultural communities, who voted for him at almost 80% in 2024, according to Investigate Midwest, a journalism non-profit. Agribusiness also donated more than $24m to his re-election. Farm groups insist US citizens are unwilling to do the arduous labor and that eliminating H-2A workers could collapse the food system. They generally advocate for loosening regulations for H-2A workers, like reducing wage and housing requirements. Trump heeded their calls before. In 2019, his Department of Labor unsuccessfully proposed removing some regulations on the H-2A.

Harvest season approaching

As seasonal harvests begin, farmers nationwide are bringing over workers.

At Crist Bros Orchards in Walden, New York, H-2A workers diligently prune back apple tree branches covered with white flowers freshly burst from pink buds so that each future apple will get the same access to the sun. At the packing house, some load last season’s apples out of refrigerators on to conveyor belts while others check for irregularities before packaging.

The orchard has been in the Crist family since 1883, and Jenny Crist now runs it alongside her brother and parents. She said their first wave of workers came this past March and are preparing the orchards for harvest, when more workers come to pluck apples off the trees. By the end of the year, more than 150 H-2A workers will have passed through the compound to help produce the apples sold at supermarkets down the east coast.

“[H-2A is] providing labor that allows us to have a farm 70 miles north of New York City, and provide food in the United States, and employ people year-round,” Crist said. “Without it, we would certainly not be farming apples. My guess is that this would probably be houses.”

The H-2A visa was created by the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, a huge measure that simultaneously cracked down on employers hiring immigrants without work authorization and provided “amnesty” to close to 3 million immigrants without legal status. The law says that farmers must demonstrate an attempt to hire locally first and pay H-2A workers above the minimum wage. Unlike local workers, H-2A workers must also be provided transportation to and from their homes, housing for the season and daily transportation.

Labor leaders argue farmers prefer H-2A workers, despite their costs, because they are easily exploitable. Since the visa is connected to their employment, workers cannot find a job elsewhere, making their ability to be in the country completely dependent on an employer who can revoke it at any moment, and sometimes holds on to their passports, against DOL requirements.

This reluctance to leave an abusive worksite can be compounded by the fact that many H-2A workers arrive with debt they have accrued from paying recruiters to get here. Employers are required to pay all recruitment costs, but recruiters’ practices go largely unregulated since they operate internationally.

The DC-based Economic Policy Institute, a liberal thinktank, has said this amounts to a program that exploits and silences migrant workers, replacing year-round workers in the process. In some cases, US prosecutors have accused farmers and recruiters of using the H-2A program to engage in forced labor trafficking.

“The situation of agriculture workers in the US is really bad already, but what they’re going to do is legalize this oppression,” said Carlos Marentes, executive director of the El Paso-based Centro de Los Trabajadores Agrícolas Fronterizos. “In the H-2A program, the way they’re proposing to get rid of the regulations and any guarantees that workers get is going to look like legalized slavery. The industry understands that they need a labor force, but they [want] a labor force that is going to be afraid, that is going to be grateful because the employer is providing you a job.”

Undocumented workers left behind?

If mass deportations go forward as promised, growers and ranchers will be even more desperate for these workers. Undocumented workers compose about 40% of the agricultural workforce, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

These longtime farm workers say that the system is designed to replace them with this more vulnerable group, limiting their work opportunities and decreasing their union’s power by giving farmers an alternative labor pool.

“It’s very clear to us that the deportation of undocumented workers is to clear the field for bringing in H-2A workers instead of having these farm worker families that are part of our community now for over 20 years and providing them [legal] status to continue being productive community members,” said Rosalinda Guillen, a farm union leader in Washington state who grew up in the fields and founded Community to Community, a local non-profit. “Everybody in this country is an immigrant and has had the opportunity to build community and root themselves and all of a sudden the families that came here from Mexico don’t?”

In 2023, a bipartisan coalition in the House of Representatives introduced the Dignity Act, which aimed to address this by extending legal status to long-term farm workers while at the same time expanding the H-2A visa. The proposal eventually failed, though, after Republicans reversed course on it.

Workers still needed

In Minnesota’s Red River valley, Scott Field runs Field Brothers Farm with his brother John, growing grains, beans and sugar beets on the same land his family has worked for five generations. His local community has shrunk as younger generations moved to cities, leaving the Field brothers dependent on H-2A workers.

“There is just flat out nobody out here available to work,” Scott Field said.

With housing and transportation factored in, Field says they spend more than $30 an hour on H-2A workers. It would be easier if they could just employ them as US citizens, he said as he detailed why.

“These are people who are working, making money, spending money in our communities, and paying taxes. Talk about a revitalization of Rural America if they made it easier for them to come here and stay with their families,” Field said.

by Tareq Saghie, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images

[ed. What's surprising is that no one seemed to plan for this. Or maybe they did - the H2A exploitation issue is one that I hadn't considered but would certainly be a side benefit.]

It Might Actually Be 20 Times Easier for Quantum Computers to Break Bitcoin, Google Says

Google just dropped a new research paper, and Bitcoin maxis may want to do some quick math. The tech giant's quantum team found that breaking the RSA encryption protecting everything from your bank account to your Bitcoin wallet might need 20 times fewer quantum resources than previously estimated.

“Planning the transition to quantum-safe cryptosystems requires understanding the cost of quantum attacks on vulnerable cryptosystems,” Google Quantum Researcher Craig Gidney wrote. “In Gidney+Ekerå 2019, I co-published an estimate stating that 2048 bit RSA integers could be factored in eight hours by a quantum computer with 20 million noisy qubits. In this paper, I substantially reduce the number of qubits required.”

“I estimate that a 2048 bit RSA integer could be factored in less than a week by a quantum computer with less than a million noisy qubits,” Gidney argued.

"This is a 20-fold decrease in the number of qubits from our previous estimate," the Google researcher said in an official blog post.

But it’s not like it’s going to happen anytime soon. For context, IBM's Condor (the most powerful quantum computer to date) tops out at 1,121 qubits while Google's own Sycamore runs on 53. So your coins are still safe—for now. The trajectory is what matters, and it's pointing in a direction that should make anyone holding crypto sit up and pay attention.

The breakthrough, Google says, comes from two places: “better algorithms and smarter error correction.” On the algorithm side, researchers figured out how to make calculations for modular exponentiations—the heavy mathematical lifting in encryption—twice as fast, whereas the error correction improvements is possible because the team tripled density of the logical qubits space by adding a new layer of error correction, effectively packaging more useful quantum operations into the same physical space.

They also deployed something called "magic state cultivation"—basically a trick to make special quantum ingredients (called T states) stronger and more reliable, so quantum computers can perform complex tasks more efficiently without wasting extra resources—to reduce the workspace needed for basic quantum operations.

Bitcoin relies on elliptic curve cryptography, which works on similar mathematical principles to RSA. If quantum computers can crack RSA faster than expected, Bitcoin's security timeline just got compressed. The cryptocurrency's 256-bit encryption is stronger than the older RSA keys Google studied, but not by as much as you might hope when dealing with exponential scaling. (...)

"Bitcoin's security relies on elliptic curve cryptography. Quantum computers running Shor's algorithm will eventually break it," Project 11 wrote when announcing their challenge. "We're testing how urgent the threat is."

The security implications extend beyond crypto. RSA and similar systems underpin global secure communications, from banking to digital signatures. Google noted that adversaries could already be collecting encrypted data now to decrypt later once quantum computers become available, so they are preparing for this imminent future. (...)

The National Institute of Standards and Technology released post-quantum cryptography standards last year and recommended phasing out vulnerable systems after 2030. Google's research suggests that timeline might need acceleration. (...)

A quantum computing breakthrough could one day undermine the cryptography that secures the Bitcoin blockchain and its nearly $1.7 trillion worth of assets. Now, a BTC bounty is putting that threat to the test. On Wednesday, quantum computing research group Project 11 announced a prize of 1 BTC—currently worth nearly $85,000—for the first team to break a simplified version of Bitcoin’s elliptic curve cryptography, or ECC, using a quantum computer.

by Emerge/Decrypt |  Read more:

Image: Shutterstock/Bitcoin
[ed. Follow up to Trump's meme coin scam (below). Definitely worth checking out the whole fiasco here (with video).]

via:

The Most Corrupt Thing Any President Has Ever Done

[ed. For this guy that's really saying something, and it's hardly even a news story...]

Imagine that Joe Biden, just as he was assuming office, had started a new company with Hunter Biden and used his main social media account to recruit financial backers, then promised that the most generous among them would earn an invitation to a private dinner with him. Oh, and imagine that these investors were all kept secret from the public, so that we had no idea what kinds of possible conflicts of interest might arise.

Take a minute, close your eyes. Let yourself see Jim Jordan’s face go purple in apoplexy, hear the moral thunder spewing out of Jesse Watters’s mouth, feel the shock (which would be wholly justified) of the New York Times editorial board as it expressed disbelief that the man representing the purported values and standards of the United States of America before the world would begin to think it was remotely OK to do such a thing. The media would be able to speak of nothing else for days. Maybe weeks.

Yet this and more is what Donald Trump just did, and unless you follow the news quite closely, it’s possible you’ve not even heard about it. Or if you have, it was probably in passing, one of those second-tier, “this is kind of interesting” headlines. But it’s a lot more than that. As Democratic Senator Chris Murphy noted Wednesday: “This isn’t Trump just being Trump. The Trump coin scam is the most brazenly corrupt thing a President has ever done. Not close.”

Trump announced this week that the top 220 buyers of his $Trump (strump, as in strumpet) meme coin between now and mid-May will be invited to an exclusive dinner on May 22 (“a night to remember”) at his golf club outside Washington, D.C. The Washington Post and other outlets have reported that in the days since the announcement, “buyers have poured tens of millions of dollars” into the coin; further, that the holders of 27 crypto wallets have acquired at least 100,000 coins apiece, “stakes worth about a million dollars each.” Holders of crypto wallets are anonymous, if they want to be, so the identities of these people (or businesses or countries or sovereign wealth funds or whatever they might be) are unknown and will presumably remain so until the big dinner or, who knows, maybe for all time.

It’s also worth noting that Trump launched this meme coin just a few days before inauguration. Its value quickly shot up to around $75. It steadily declined through the first month of his presidency, and by early April, as Americans grew weary of a president who was tanking the economy, it had fallen to $7.14.

Mind you, a meme coin is a thing with no intrinsic value. It’s just some … thing that somebody decides to launch based on hype because they can get a bunch of suckers to invest in it. As Investopedia gingerly puts it: “Most meme coins are usually created without a use case other than being tradable and convertible.” It should come as no surprise that some meme coins are tied to right-wing politics. Elon Musk named his Department of Government Efficiency after his favorite meme coin, dogecoin (which, in turn, was indeed named after an actual internet meme in which doge is slang for a Shiba Inu dog).

So, to go back to my opening analogy—this isn’t even like Joe and Hunter Biden starting a company from the White House. A company is a real thing. It makes a product or provides a service. It files papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It pays taxes. It employs people. Assuming that it’s a good corporate citizen and that it exists at least in part to solve some problem or offer the public some innovation, it contributes to the general welfare.

Not so a meme coin. It’s just a hustle. It may make certain investors rich, but it does the world no good whatsoever.

So stop and think about this. First, Trump, preparing for the presidency, purportedly busy thinking about how many millions of people he’s going to deport and how he’s going to bring “Jina” to its knees and how he’s going to hand eastern Ukraine to Putin and how he’s going to cut Meals on Wheels, for Chrissakes, takes time out from all that to stop and think: Now, how can I profit from returning to the White House? So he launches, naturally, the griftiest Christmas present ever.

It starts out great. Then its value drops by 90 percent. So in April, while he’s illegally deporting legal U.S. residents to El Salvador and roiling the world’s financial markets, he stops and takes the time to think: Hey, what happened with my meme coin? I had better figure out a way to goose this grift. So he comes up with this dinner. As well as showing just how tawdry his mind is, how he just automatically and intrinsically thinks it’s his right to make a buck from the presidency, it’s unspeakably corrupt. (One small silver lining here is that after peaking Wednesday at almost $15, it’s now under $12.)

Who knows who these “investors” are? Will we ever know? Inevitably, on May 22, people will be invited to that dinner. Will we know the guest list? Will the list be sanitized? Will a few Russian oligarchs be among the top 220 but send surrogates to keep their identity hidden?

This doesn’t create the “appearance” of corruption or set up the “potential” for conflict of interest. It is corruption, and it’s a standing conflict of interest. Patently, and historically. Chris Murphy is right: This is the most corrupt thing any president has ever done, by a mile.

by Michael Tomasky, TNR | Read more:
Image: Samuel Corum/Sipa/Bloomberg/Getty Images
[ed. Grifters gotta grift, it's just like breathing. See also:Trump’s Crypto Dinner Guests Admit They’re Trying to Buy Him Off; and, Here’s What Happened at Trump’s Shady Cryptocurrency Dinner (TNR): (more here, with video!). Really awful.]

***

"The dinner was held at Trump’s private golf club in northern Virginia on Thursday evening for the top 220 holders of the president’s meme coin cryptocurrency—after an auction that brought in $147,586,796.41. Protesters lined the entrance to the building, chanting “Shame, shame, shame!” and holding up signs while attendees arrived.

The event was promoted as the “most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION in the world,” according to an email. While the top 220 buyers got into the gala, the top 25 buyers received a much more personal, “ultra-exclusive private VIP reception” and “Special VIP Tour” with Trump, allowing them unfettered access to the president. (...)"

“Donald Trump’s dinner is an orgy of corruption. That’s what this is all about,” Senator Elizabeth Warren said that evening. “Donald Trump is using the presidency of the United States to make himself richer through crypto, and he’s doing it right out there in plain sight. He is signaling to anyone who wants to ask for a special favor—and is willing to pay for it—exactly how to do that.

***

[ed. So how'd it go?]

"Crypto-investors anonymously shelled out a total $148 million to purchase access to Donald Trump, but all they got was a low-quality steak.

Guests at Trump’s supposedly “intimate” gala for the 220 top buyers of the $TRUMP memecoin gathered at the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia Thursday night, hoping for a little facetime with the president. But they were left entirely unsatisfied.

Nicholas Pinto, a 25-year-old social media influencer who spent a whopping $360,000 on the president’s memecoin, told Fortune that he was distinctly underwhelmed by the affair.

Trump, rather than cozy up to his guests, gave an address to the room that was “pretty much like bullshit,” Pinto said. Most guests struggled to get any face time with the president, according to Pinto. The event’s host Caitlin Sinclair, an anchor at OANN, said that she didn’t even get a picture with the commander-in-chief, Pinto recalled.

Christoph Heuermann, who shared a series of photographs from the event on his Instagram page, wrote that Trump gave a brief 20-minute speech “and didn’t interact with the crowd other than enjoying being celebrated.”

Only the 25 biggest investors were given access to a small VIP reception with Trump. The rest were left with only their halibut or filet mignon.

During the banquet, Pinto texted Fortune to say that the food was “trash.”

“Walmart steak, man,” he wrote." (...)

On average, each person had spent roughly $1.8 million on the president’s meme coin, in what many critics have called a blatant pay-for-access scheme.

How to Lose a Tech War

Xi couldn't be happier with student deportations

Of all the policies Trump has rolled out, the two I’m most worried will have irreversible consequences for long term national power are undermining our alliance structure and the attractiveness of the country for high end international talent.

Angela Shen (ChinaTalk’s robotics and biotech analyst) and I published a piece earlier this week in The Washington Post, arguing how America’s student visa system is critical for future science and tech success. They’ve graciously allowed us to rerun it below.

As President Donald Trump is escalating the competition with China, he risks handing it a generation-defining victory by cutting off America’s ability to recruit the best talent in the industries of the future.

In the past month, roughly 1,400 international students and scholars have had their visas revoked or exchange records terminated. Students are being forced out for infractions as minor as dismissed traffic tickets with no link to antisemitism, protesting, criminal charges or anything else labeled a safety threat by the White House. With no clear logic or public explanation behind who is detained or deported, the result is a climate of confusion and fear.

The administration is also threatening the admissions process, with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem warning she could block Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students entirely. Existing students are facing additional upheaval from the sudden freeze and elimination of research grants throughout the higher-education system. [ed. Which indeed happened this week.]

This newly chaotic environment jeopardizes a vital talent pipeline that underpins America’s technological edge — and that, if it isn’t fixed, will have deep repercussions for U.S.-China competition for decades to come.

Foreign talent is a core contributor to the scientific discovery and technological progress that have upheld American leadership over the past century. International students make up about 42 percent of STEM PhD graduates in the United States, and rather than “stealing seats,” they are subsidizing Americans’ education by paying full tuition. Their presence generates revenue that sustains academic programs, lowers the trade deficit and funds financial aid that supports increased domestic enrollment.

In recent years, about 75 percent of these students have been choosing to stay. And they have delivered when they do: One study by the National Bureau of Economic Research attributed 36 percent of American innovation (accounting for quantity, quality and value generated from patents, as well as spillover effects) in recent decades to immigrants. One-half of advanced STEM graduates working in the defense industrial base were born abroad, and 60 percent of top U.S. artificial intelligence companies were co-founded by immigrants — most of whom arrived on student visas. And far from taking jobs from Americans, immigrants with STEM education fill skill gaps in critical fields such as health care and technology and occupy complementary roles that support U.S.-born workers.

This edge in building the technology of tomorrow — AI, robotics, quantum computing, advanced batteries — is now under extreme threat from the administration’s seemingly arbitrary crackdown on students. In the face of uncertainty around visas and funding, international STEM students are increasingly reweighing their options in favor of countries outside the U.S. that are doing their best to take advantage of this unique recruiting opportunity. If visa revocations continue, the U.S. might lose some of the best and brightest minds the world has to offer — systematically undermining the future of American innovation at a time when China’s homegrown engineers are already leapfrogging American competitors in key technologies.

China knows what it’s like to have brains drained by foreign schools and employers: Among international STEM PhD graduates from U.S. institutions, those from China choose to stay about 90 percent of the time. Beijing has been trying for years to reverse that trend and is surely celebrating America’s self-sabotaging decision to help Beijing do so.

In a 2021 speech, Chinese President Xi Jinping declared that his country must win the global battle to cultivate “human capital.” China has spearheaded dozens of initiatives to recruit talent, including Chinese workers who left for schools and companies abroad. These programs offer funding, family support and resources for research, aimed at making it easy for Chinese and foreign scientists working overseas to move to China. In the U.S., a group of Republicans in Congress recently introduced a bill to close off American schools to all Chinese students, effectively doing the Chinese Communist Party’s job for it. The bill is a long shot to pass but reinforces the message that China’s best and brightest should look elsewhere.

As of now, international researchers consistently view the U.S. as the more attractive destination for world-class education and opportunities, despite a notoriously complex and sluggish immigration system. But when something as routine as a traffic violation or a trip home could derail the futures of biology and engineering graduate students, trust erodes. The effects will reverberate far beyond the individuals pushed out. Mass visa terminations for arbitrary reasons send a clear message: Even if you try to play by the rules, you won’t be safe. Families considering a U.S. education now have to weigh not just sky-high tuition but also the possibility that a student could have to leave the country before they even earn a degree. When top global talent no longer sees America as a stable, long-term bet — in light of both visa and research funding insecurity — many will vote with their feet.

by Angela Shen and Jordan Schneider, China Talk |  Read more:

Image: Leading countries of origin of top-tier AI researchers (top ~20%) working in US institutions. Source: MacroPolo

[ed. See also: Harvard foreign students face uncertainty as Trump plan to block enrolment is halted - for now (BBC).]

Booze Bans, Homework and The End of the World Clause: The NFL’s Oddest Contracts

Green Bay’s Sean Rhyan just lost out on $2m because over two missed snaps. But he is far from the only football player to deal with contract quirks

As contract clauses go, this one is pretty painful: Packers guard Sean Rhyan missed out on $2m after falling two snaps shy of picking up a bonus. The NFL has a built-in bonus pool designed to reward late draftees who see the field early in their careers. One of those performance benchmarks is a player’s volume of snaps. If they cross the 35% mark, they receive a chunky bonus. But Rhyan fell two snaps shy of that mark last season, missing the chance to see his base salary more than double.

The performance escalator is one of the quirks of the league’s Collective Bargaining Agreement. With the CBA, rookie pay scale and hard salary cap, the NFL is typically a less chaotic contractual league than others in North America. There are none of the odd riders in players’ contracts – the unlimited sushi, 30-year contracts, or Springsteen guarantees – that litter other sports. Careers are short. Leverage is fleeting. The language is standardized. However, Rhyan’s situation is far from a one-off.

The homework clause

Few positions in sports are as mentally taxing as quarterback. They have to ID and break down tricky coverages and deliver throws on target and in rhythm. It requires thousands of physical and mental reps.

Peyton Manning could squeeze in upwards of 40 hours of extra tape study a week, leading to an arms race among young quarterbacks keen to show they were keeping up with the best. When he was drafted No 1 overall by the Rams, Jared Goff was so overwhelmed by the demands of the position that he built a film-watching bunker in his home.

“I watch tape all day Monday, all day Tuesday, Wednesday we practice, Thursday we practice, Friday we practice, then I come home and watch film, then Saturday before the game, I watch film, and then Sunday morning, I watch film,” Tom Brady said in 2022. “It’s almost soothing. I can go four or five hours without getting up from the chair.”

But not everyone is so … dedicated. Or at least their team doesn’t trust that they have Brady’s inner drive. In 2022, the Cardinals signed Kyler Murray to a five-year, $230m extension, making him the second-highest-paid player in the league. As part of the contract, the Cardinals included an “independent study” clause that mandated Murray watch four hours of film a week, independent of the team. Arizona planned to include a tracker in their team-issued tablet to ensure Murray’s focus was on the game tape, rather than movies or video games. The addendum allowed the Cardinals to terminate Murray’s contract if he didn’t complete his homework.

Why would you hand $230m to a player you weren’t sure was doing the bare minimum for the position? Good question! After the news leaked, the Cardinals decided to remove the clause. But the stain still lives on; Murray continues to be hit with allegations that he isn’t as focused or engaged as the position’s elite, despite ripping off the best season of his career in 2024.

The Dez Rules

Jerry Jones operates in a league of his own. In his 36 years as the Cowboys’ owner, no one has given more leeway to rogue personalities. But no one has enforced such strict rules, either.

Some of the most intense treatment was reserved for Dez Bryant. After his 2011 arrest for assault, the Cowboys had their budding star receiver sign a “security agreement” to try to rein in his off-the-field activity. The team did not officially change Bryant’s contract, but he signed a three-year, four-page agreement with longtime Cowboys fixer David Wells. The “Dez Rules” set out a series of guidelines:

Bryant would be followed by a three-person security detail whenever he was away from the Cowboys’ training base.

• He would be driven to and from practice by Cowboys personnel.
• He would attend two mandated counselling sessions a week.
• He was banned from drinking alcohol.
• He was barred from attending strip clubs, given a midnight curfew, and only allowed to attend clubs where veteran Cowboys security staffers moonlighted as door staff.

The rules even extended to putting security cameras inside Bryant’s home, so that Wells could track who was coming and going. And Bryant had to cover the security bill himself, with the $17,000 a month cost deducted from his salary. As Bryant earned more trust, the rules were scaled back. But, as invasive as the rules were, they worked. Bryant put together the best three-year stretch of his career on the field while staying out of trouble off it.

The Bryant episode was not Jones’s first use of team-mandated security details – or the most invasive. “No, this is [not] the strictest at all,” Jones said in 2012. Adam “Pacman” Jones and Tank Johnson signed similar agreements with the team. But Pacman’s was voided after he was suspended by the league for getting into a fight with his own bodyguard.

by Oliver Connolly, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Wesley Hitt/Getty Images

jin xingye

via:

Lilian Miller, Rain Blossoms, woodblock print, 1928

via:

Tariff Uncertainty and Conflict as a Virtue

MAGA: A Guide for the Perplexed

On April 2nd, we had Liberation Day, a tariff salvo that doubled as a bid to completely reshape the global economic order. Simultaneously, Laura Loomer walked into the White House and fired competent NSC staff who served under Trump 1.0 but apparently weren’t MAGA enough for Loomer and the president. What is going on in the Trump administration, and what does it mean for America's relationship with China and its future place in the world?

To discuss, we interviewed Tanner Greer, author of the Scholar’s Stage blog, who has written a guide for the perplexed. His new report, “Obscurity by Design: Competing Priorities for America's China Policy,” is the product of dozens of interviews and hundreds of hours of studying how key Trump policy-makers think.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s start with tariffs. How did we get here, and what does this tell us about the Trump administration?

Tanner Greer: This is what I spend the first part of my report discussing — how do we model Trump’s decision-making, and why is it sometimes so difficult to predict what he’s going to do?

There are two main reasons for this. The first is that Trump wants to be unpredictable. By disposition or personality type, he enjoys being impulsive and difficult to deal with. But over the course of his life, and especially his first presidency, he came to realize that the less people know what he’s going to do, the better off he seems to do. Regardless of whether that’s better for the country as a whole, many advantages for him personally accrue from being this unpredictable force — inputs come in, and we don’t know what’s going to come out the other side.

He believes this gives him negotiating leverage. He believes that this makes his strategies more likely to succeed. There’s something self-serving about this, but he has taken this disposition and elevated it to an official philosophy.

Jordan Schneider: In an interview with the Wall Street Journal editorial board before the 2024 election, Trump said there’s no way Xi was going to invade Taiwan on his watch because “Xi knows I’m fucking crazy.”

Tanner Greer: Yes. That was his exact quote. When it comes to Chinese leaders in particular, but world leaders generally, he wants them to think he could do just about anything. A lot of his behavior can be understood as an attempt to make that belief credible. Nixon had the same idea.

This is a key part, in my view, of why Trump does what he does. He actually believes that if he nails himself down by explaining what he’s going to do or how he’s going to do it, then that will work against him and remove his negotiating leverage in the future.

He views international relations as a set of iterated negotiating patterns, as opposed to charting a big long-term strategy of trying to get from A to B accounting for lots of inputs along the way. Instead, he views things iteratively, trying for a better position over time.

Jordan Schneider: We’ve got a lot of competing impulses here. You have these visions that have populated the GOP, where big tariffs need to happen in order to raise revenue, improve negotiating positions, revitalize manufacturing, and decouple us from China. Then you have this iterative game that Trump enjoys playing.

It’s interesting to me that tariffs, which he has clearly prioritized for years, have not had an organized rollout. Even though Trump has been focused on tariffs for a very long time, the implementation appears haphazard compared to, for example, the strategy to squeeze Ivy League universities and law firms.

Tanner Greer: There are essentially two reasons for this. First, as I mentioned, Trump believes that increasing uncertainty about what he will do next is to his strategic advantage. He clearly believes this in the international sphere. (...)

There’s certainly been this idea for a long time — many people have been saying this for months and years — that we need something like reciprocal tariffs because many countries are implementing policies unequally. Additionally, there’s the argument that you need something beyond reciprocal tariffs — something truly measured — because countries will have all kinds of restrictions and their own industrial policies that don’t make the playing field equal.

That’s plausible enough. The question is, if you were given a deadline to calculate the impact of trade policies across the entire world on a bespoke basis — that’s quite hard to do. I don’t have any special insight into the process of creating these tariffs. All I can say is that I’m pretty sure the process happened that week. (...)

Jordan Schneider: Trump wants this to be an iterated game, and he wants to have a lot of fun calling folks and cutting deals left and right. But is there a point where people decide they don’t want to play anymore?

At what point, if ever, do countries just say they’re no longer interested in being on America’s team?

Tanner Greer: The question is, is that even possible? If you’re Japan, to take an example here, is it possible not to be on the American ledger, militarily or economically? I don’t know if it really is.

If you’re a country like Vietnam, geopolitically, yes, it is easier to balance away. Economically, it’s much more difficult. If Trump’s calculation is that because we have the consuming power, because our economy is so central to the world economy, many of these countries will have no option but to face the music — in the short term especially, that’s somewhat true.

The question is about alignment in the long term. This could create conditions where lots of countries on the 10-year horizon say, “Maybe we should look towards something more like autarky for ourselves, or maybe we should balance away towards some other option.” I can see that as a realistic response from some countries. But in the short term, I don’t think there’s a “We’re not going to play with the United States anymore” option. In 15-20 years, maybe. (...)

I believe the ability of American allies to accept worse conditions relative to what they’ve been given is actually pretty high. What will be much harder for them is not knowing what conditions they can accept at any point in the future.

If they’re not given some sort of enduring deal that they believe represents the new reality — where they can assess those terms and say, “Okay, this is the new deal, we can do this or we can do things the Chinese way,” and can make that decision — problems will arise.

But if the reality is that the Chinese are very stable in what they want, while the Americans are all over the place — where allies don’t know what America will say, not just administration to administration, but month-to-month, year-to-year — that’s going to be a bigger problem. This will be even more problematic than just not treating allies as treasured partners that share values and other such principles.

This sort of capriciousness or arbitrariness will cause issues in the long term. (...)

Jordan Schneider: I find it interesting how Trump, JD, and many others frame their economic and geopolitical actions as responses to a clock that’s almost run out. They argue we need to act boldly and quickly now. Otherwise, America’s fiscal health will be ruined, and America’s ability to exert influence globally will become a wasting asset that we need to use while we still have the chance. Thoughts on that, Tanner?

Tanner Greer: You can examine this at different levels of analysis. At the individual level, my report emphasizes that historically, the Trump administration has cycled through people quickly. What constitutes policy today may not be policy tomorrow as personnel changes occur.

This incentivizes individuals with a program to implement it as soon as possible and to do so in ways that make it difficult to reverse. This explains the preference for drastic actions. Consider the proposal to eliminate US aid on questionable legal grounds — the goal is to ensure that when people with different opinions arrive later, or when Congress mobilizes, the situation becomes irreversible. The tariffs approach follows a similar pattern.

Another perspective focuses on Trump personally. This is his final administration, his last opportunity. Despite speculation about a third term, his rapid pace suggests he doesn’t see it that way. He wants to make changes with visible impacts soon.

Furthermore, if you’re committed to transforming the global trade order, the global political system, or the federal government’s operational structure, many fear that proceeding slowly only provides ammunition to opponents and activates potential veto points. You need to move before that resistance mobilizes.

This probably reflects a direct lesson from the first administration, where many initiatives were frustrated — sometimes for valid reasons, often for completely irrational ones. Things were consistently delayed and obstructed, which has led Trump and his circle to conclude, “We can’t repeat the first term. We must take action immediately, regardless of staff preparation."

The priority becomes implementing significant directional changes rather than appearing methodical but never achieving results. Moving slowly creates enough opportunity for veto points, bureaucracy, and Congress to respond.

This aligns with Trump’s overall philosophy: “I operate best when people can’t predict my actions. If I act first and everyone else must react,” that’s his preferred approach. Proceeding deliberately forces you to respond to others as much as they respond to you. (...)

Jordan Schneider: Assuming he would reconsider is one of the key assumptions I’m questioning.

Tanner Greer: I’m not predicting which direction that reconsideration would take. One consistent truth about Trump in power is that he’s constantly reassessing. He doesn’t maintain loyalty to ideas or people. He adheres to certain broad principles — negative views on immigration and trade — but demonstrates remarkable flexibility in his persona, and his base allows him considerable leeway in his actions.

The expectation that his current approach will remain unchanged two years from now is almost certainly incorrect. The uncertainty for everyone else is which direction he will take, as there are many possible paths.

Jordan Schneider: I see a potential scenario where Trump becomes like King Lear at 10% approval in 2027, essentially wanting to “burn the whole world down.” We shouldn’t entirely discount this possibility.

Tanner Greer: That’s not what concerns me most. The issue with Trump at 10% approval in 2027 wouldn’t be his desire to destroy everything but rather his fear that if a Republican doesn’t win the subsequent election, he might face legal consequences. That would be his primary concern.

The difference between Hitler and Trump is that Hitler was deeply ideological. Trump himself isn’t that person. It doesn’t align with anything I understand about his character. He likely believes he’s “God’s gift to humanity” in some sense, that divine protection saved him. But I don’t think he sees himself as “the embodiment of an abstract ideology that people weren’t ready to receive yet, weren’t prepared to purify themselves for in the grand struggle.” That’s not Trump’s self-perception at all.

by Jordan Schneider and Tanner Greer, China Talk |  Read more:

Image: Reuters/Carlos Barria; via:

Republican, Democrats Unite to Do Dumb, Bad Thing

No taxes on tips

It often seems that politics exists in a perpetual stalemate, with Republicans and Democrats unable to find common ground. So, it was notable this week when both parties put aside their differences to advance a Senate bill by unanimous vote! WOW! Deadlock is NOT a foregone conclusion! The cynics are wrong — Republicans and Democrats can still come together to do big things!

If only the thing that they did hadn’t been a huge pile of elephant shit that will make America worse. Unfortunately, it was — the Senate’s “no tax on tips” bill advances a concept supported by virtually no economist in the world. The one thing that our leaders can agree on seems to be that America needs more loophole-ridden legislation that sounds like something that would win fourth prize in a “how I would make America better” grade school essay contest. The Senate bill would complicate the tax code, worsen a tipping epidemic that has already reached the level of a biblical plague, and pander to the working poor without actually helping them. The fact that the Senate joined hands to do this doesn’t warm my heart so much as make me want to move to a cabin in the woods and throw mud at anyone who tries to bother me.

Eliminating taxes on tips sounds good. Waitresses, drivers, and hairdressers work hard — hotel maids pay for humanity’s worst behavior an amount that is borderline Christ-like. We should try to find ways to make their lives better. But a key word in that sentence is “try” — we need to expend effort to find policies that work. What we should not do is pass some simplistic bullshit that falls apart if you think about it for two seconds and then buy ourselves a cake with “CHAMPION OF THE WORKING MAN” written on it.

Most working poor people make their money from wages, not tips. Only five percent of people in the bottom quarter of earners are tipped workers. Many of those people are teenagers, so not the blue collar workers that people imagine, but rather precocious twerps whose lives should be made worse as a matter of principle. There is also no logical reason why front-of-house staff in a restaurant should get a tax break but back-of-house staff should not, and we’re creating an incentive to move all work to tipped work, which is more volatile and makes it harder to win pay increases. We’re pandering to workers that we see, but there’s a much larger group of workers we don’t see — warehouse workers, janitors, and the like — who are probably thinking “fuck you”.

It’s not even clear that tipped workers will be better off. Reducing a person’s taxable income reduces the programs for which they’re eligible, most notably the Earned Income Tax Credit. It’s hard to say who will be made better and worse off by this change — that depends a lot on circumstances — but generally, workers who are middle-class-or-better will benefit most. The government will also take in less revenue, and I know we’ve all convinced ourselves that the government revenue doesn’t matter — the prevailing wisdom is that we can just rack up endless debt and then wriggle out via the “haha I died before you could collect” loophole — but there actually is a relationship between government revenue and social spending.

The strongest argument for this bill seems to be “It won’t actually do anything.” Many have noted that 37 percent of tipped workers already don’t pay income tax, many others pay very little, and a lot of tips aren’t reported anyway. The Senate has also restricted which types of jobs and which types of tips qualify. This seems to be the pattern for all populist policies, from Trump’s tariffs to Kamala’s grocery price caps: Hold a triumphant press conference, have every economist alive tell you that your plan is dumb, and then create a million exceptions and loopholes in an attempt to walk back the stupid. But the caveats create complexity and opportunities for abuse, and good policies don’t have “it doesn’t matter” as a primary selling point.

It’s also odd that we passed a policy to encourage tipped work at a moment when tipping has completely jumped the shark. It used to be that you tipped restaurant violinists for leaving you the fuck alone and prostitutes for not sprinting for the door the minute you said “Teletubbies”. Now, almost every interaction involves a tip. I’m sure that one day soon, my son will give me a hug and then present me with an iPad where the LOWEST tip option is 22 percent. Tips are out of control, the backlash has already begun, and passing a law that will make tipping an even bigger part of our lives seems like a bad move.

The tax code will also become more complex. How much of a tipped workers’ tax break will effectively be negated by the time they spend determining which tips count as “cash” tips and whether social security taxes have been properly withheld under the bill’s reporting requirements? Time is valuable, especially time that you don’t spend navigating the grotesque hall of mirrors that is our tax code. Complexity will only grow if we keep adding bespoke categories of super-special income instead of just treating it all as the same. (...)

Three quarters of Americans support no tax on tips. And at least it’s four word policy idiocy in a country that usually prefers three word policy idiocy like “drain the swamp” or “defund the police” — I guess in that context, four words is practically a white paper. But the policy won’t work. If Congress wanted to help the working poor, they could increase the standard deduction, expand the Earned Income Tax Credit, or enhance direct transfers like the Child Tax Credit; those policies reach people in all jobs and avoid the unintended consequences of no tax on tips. It really is a shame that of all the issues that could have sparked broad bipartisan agreement, this dumb bullshit is the one that did.

by Jeff Maurer, I Might Be Wrong |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

via: misplaced

[ed. Definitions matter.]

Shepard Fairey (American, 1970), Friendship and Support (Gold), 2011

via:

On Life in the Shadow of the Boomers

Ideology, which was once the road to action, has become a dead end.
—Daniel Bell (1960)

Yuval Levin’s 2017 book Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism has several interesting passages inside it, but none so interesting as Levin’s meditation on the generational frame that clouds the modern mind. Levin maintains that 21st century Americans largely understand the last decades of the 20th century, and the first decades of the 21st, through the eyes of the Boomers. Many of the associations we have with various decades (say, the fifties with innocence and social conformity, or the sixties with explosive youthful energy), says Levin, had more to do with the life-stage in which Boomer’s experienced these decades than anything objective about the decades themselves:

Because they were born into a postwar economic expansion, they have been an exceptionally middle-class generation, targeted as consumers from birth. Producers and advertisers have flattered this generation for decades in an effort to shape their tastes and win their dollars. And the boomers’ economic power has only increased with time as they have grown older and wealthier. Today, baby boomers possess about half the consumer purchasing power of the American economy, and roughly three-quarters of all personal financial assets, although they are only about one-quarter of the population. All of this has also made the baby boomers an unusually self-aware generation. Bombarded from childhood with cultural messages about the promise and potential of their own cohort, they have conceived of themselves as a coherent group to a greater degree than any generation of Americans before them.

Since the middle of the twentieth century they have not only shaped the course of American life through their preferences and choices but also defined the nation’s self-understanding. Indeed, the baby boomers now utterly dominate our understanding of America’s postwar history, and in a very peculiar way. To see how, let us consider an average baby boomer: an American born in, say, 1950, who has spent his life comfortably in the broad middle class. This person experienced the 1950s as a child, and so remembers that era, through those innocent eyes, as a simple time of stability and wholesome values in which all things seemed possible.

By the mid-1960s, he was a teenager, and he recalls that time through a lens of youthful rebellion and growing cultural awareness—a period of idealism and promise. The music was great, the future was bright, but there were also great problems to tackle in the world, and he had the confidence of a teenager that his generation could do it right. In the 1970s, as a twenty-something entering the workforce and the adult world, he found that confidence shaken. Youthful idealism gave way to some cynicism about the potential for change, recreational drugs served more for distraction than inspiration, everything was unsettled, and the future seemed ominous and ambiguous. His recollection of that decade is drenched in cold sweat.

In the 1980s, in his thirties, he was settling down. His work likely fell into a manageable groove, he was building a family, and concerns about car loans, dentist bills, and the mortgage largely replaced an ambition to transform the world. This was the time when he first began to understand his parents, and he started to value stability, low taxes, and low crime. He looks back on that era as the onset of real adulthood. By the 1990s, in his forties, he was comfortable and confident, building wealth and stability. He worried that his kids were slackers and that the culture was corrupting them, and he began to be concerned about his own health and witness as fifty approached. But on the whole, our baby boomer enjoyed his forties—it was finally his generation’s chance to be in charge, and it looked to be working out.

As the twenty-first century dawned, our boomer turned fifty. He was still at the peak of his powers (and earnings), but he gradually began to peer over the hill toward old age. He started the decade with great confidence, but found it ultimately to be filled with unexpected dangers and unfamiliar forces. The world was becoming less and less his own, and it was hard to avoid the conclusion that he might be past his prime. He turned sixty-five in the middle of this decade, and in the midst of uncertainty and instability. Health and retirement now became prime concerns for him. The culture started to seem a little bewildering, and the economy seemed awfully insecure. He was not without hope. Indeed, in some respects, his outlook on the future has been improving a little is he contemplates retirement. He doesn’t exactly admire his children (that so-called “Generation X”), but they have exceeded his expectations, and his grandchildren (the youngest Millennials and those younger still) seem genuinely promising and special. As he contemplates their future, he does worry that they will be denied the extraordinary blend of circumstances that defined the world of his youth.

The economy, politics, and the culture just don’t work the way they used to, and frankly, it is difficult for him to imagine America two or three decades from now. He rebelled against the world he knew as a young man, but now it stands revealed to him as a paradise lost. How can it be regained? This portrait of changing attitudes is, of course, stylized for effect. But it offers the broad contours of how people tend to look at their world in different stages of life, and it shows how Americans (and, crucially, not just the boomers) tend to understand each of the past seven decades of our national life. This is no coincidence. We see our recent history through the boomers’ eyes. Were the 1950s really simple and wholesome? Were the 1960s really idealistic and rebellious? Were the 1970s aimless and anxious? Did we find our footing in the 1980s? Become comfortable and confident in the 1990s? Or more fearful and disoriented over the past decade and a half? As we shall see in the coming chapters, the answer in each case is not simply yes or no. But it is hard to deny that we all frequently view the postwar era in this way—through the lens of the boomer experience.

The boomers’ self-image casts a giant shadow over our politics, and it means we are inclined to look backward to find our prime. More liberal-leaning boomers miss the idealism of the flower of their youth, while more conservative ones, as might be expected, are more inclined to miss the stability and confidence of early middle age—so the Left yearns for the 1960s and the Right for the 1980s. But both are telling the same story: a boomer’s story of the America they have known. The trouble is that it is not only the boomers themselves who think this way about America, but all of us, especially in politics. We really have almost no self-understanding of our country in the years since World War II that is not in some fundamental way a baby-boomer narrative. [1]

When I first read this passage in 2018 I experienced it as a sort of revelation that suddenly unlocked many mysteries then turning in my mind.

To start with: The 1950s did not seem like an age of innocent idyll or bland conformity to the adults who lived through it. It was a decade when intellectual life was still attempting to come to terms with the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust. Consider a few famous book titles: Orwell’s 1984 (published 1949), Hersey’s The Wall (1950), Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Chambers’ Witness (1952), Miller’s The Crucible (1953), Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (1957), and Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960) were all intensely preoccupied with the weaknesses of liberalism and the allure of totalitarian solutions. For every optimistic summons to Tomorrowland, there was a Lionel Trilling, Reinhold Niebuhr, or Richard Hofstadter ready to declare Zion forever out of reach, hamstrung by the irony and tragedy of the American condition. Nor was it the wholesome era of memory. An age we associate with childlike obedience saw its children as anything but obedient—witness the anxiety of the age in films like The Wild One (1953), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and Blackboard Jungle (1955). This age of innocence saw the inaugural issue of Playboy, the books Lolita (1955) and Peyton Pace (1956) hitting the New York Times Fiction best seller list, the Kinsey reports topping the Non-fiction best seller list, and Little Richard inaugurating rock ‘n roll with the lyrics

Good Golly Miss Molly, sure like to ball
When you’re rocking and rolling
Can’t hear your mama call.

And that is all without considering a lost war in Korea, the tension of the larger Cold War, and the tumult of the Civil Rights revolution. We may think of the 1950s as an age of conformity, purity, and stability, but those who lived through it as adults experienced it as an age of fragmentation, permissiveness, and shattered innocence.[2]

Levin explains why our perception of the era differs so much from the perceptions of the adults who lived through it. We see it as an age of innocence because we see it through the eyes of the Boomers, who experienced this age as children. But his account also helps explain something else—that odd feeling I have whenever I watch Youtube clips of a show like What’s My Line. Though products of American pop culture, those shows seem like relics from alien world, an antique past more different in manners and morals from the America of 2020 than many foreign lands today. However, this eerie feeling of an alien world does not descend upon me when I see a television show from the 1970s. The past may be a different country, the border line is not crossed until we hit 1965.

This observation is not mine alone. In his new book, The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success, Ross Douthat describes it as a more general feeling, a feeling expressed in many corners on the 30 year anniversary of the 1985 blockbuster Back to the Future. The plot of that film revolves around a contemporary teenager whisked back via time machine to the high school of his parents, 30 years earlier. When the film’s anniversary hit in 2015, many commented that the same plot could not work today. The 1980s simply seemed far too similar to the 2010s for the juxtaposition to entertain. Douthat explains why this might be so:

A small case study: in the original Back to the Future, Marty McFly invaded his father’s sleep dressed as “Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan.” The joke was that the pop culture of the 1960s and 1970s could be passed off as a genuine alien visitation because it would seem so strange to the ears of a 1950s teen. But thirty years after 1985, the year’s biggest blockbuster was a Star Wars movie about Darth Vader’s grandkid… which was directed by a filmmaker, J. J. Abrams, who was coming off rebooting Star Trek… which was part of a wider cinematic landscape dominated by “presold” comic-book properties developed when the baby boomers were young. A Martina McFly visiting the Reagan-era past from the late 2010s wouldn’t have a Vader/ Vulcan prank to play, because her pop culture and her parents’ pop culture are strikingly the same….

by Tanner Greer, The Scholar's Stage |  Read more:

Image: via

The Linda Problem

Conjunctive fallacies

A conjunction effect or Linda problem is a bias or mistake in reasoning where adding extra details (an "and" statement or logical conjunction; mathematical shorthand to a sentence makes it appear more likely. Logically, this is not possible, because adding more claims can make a true statement false, but cannot make false statements true: If A is true, then A+B might be false (if B is false). However, if A is false, then A+B will always be false, regardless of what B is. Therefore, A+B cannot be more likely than A.

Definition and basic example

The most often-cited example of this fallacy originated with Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman.

Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.

Which is more probable?

1. Linda is a bank teller.
2. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

The majority of those asked chose option 2. However, this is logically impossible: if Linda is a bank teller active in the feminist movement, then she is a bank teller. Therefore, it is impossible for 2 to be true while 1 is false, so the probabilities are at most equal. (...)

Tversky and Kahneman argue that most people get this problem wrong because they use a heuristic (an easily calculated) procedure called representativeness to make this kind of judgment: Option 2 seems more "representative" of Linda from the description of her, even though it is clearly mathematically less likely.

In other demonstrations, they argued that a specific scenario seemed more likely because of representativeness, but each added detail would actually make the scenario less and less likely. In this way it could be similar to the misleading vividness fallacy. More recently, Kahneman has argued that the conjunction fallacy is a type of extension neglect.

Joint versus separate evaluation

In some experimental demonstrations, the conjoint option is evaluated separately from its basic option. In other words, one group of participants is asked to rank-order the likelihood that Linda is a bank teller, a high school teacher, and several other options, and another group is asked to rank-order whether Linda is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement versus the same set of options (without "Linda is a bank teller" as an option). In this type of demonstration, different groups of subjects still rank-order Linda as a bank teller and active in the feminist movement more highly than Linda as a bank teller.

Separate evaluation experiments preceded the earliest joint evaluation experiments, and Kahneman and Tversky were surprised when the effect was observed even under joint evaluation.

Other examples

While the Linda problem is the best-known example, researchers have developed dozens of problems that reliably elicit the conjunction fallacy.

Tversky & Kahneman (1981)

The original report by Tversky & Kahneman (later republished as a book chapter) described four problems that elicited the conjunction fallacy, including the Linda problem. There was also a similar problem about a man named Bill (a good fit for the stereotype of an accountant — "intelligent, but unimaginative, compulsive, and generally lifeless" — but not a good fit for the stereotype of a jazz player), and two problems where participants were asked to make predictions for events that could occur in 1981.

Policy experts were asked to rate the probability that the Soviet Union would invade Poland, and the United States would break off diplomatic relations, all in the following year. They rated it on average as having a 4% probability of occurring. Another group of experts was asked to rate the probability simply that the United States would break off relations with the Soviet Union in the following year. They gave it an average probability of only 1%.

In an experiment conducted in 1980, respondents were asked the following:

Suppose Björn Borg reaches the Wimbledon finals in 1981. Please rank order the following outcomes from most to least likely. 

• Borg will win the match 
• Borg will lose the first set
• Borg will lose the first set but win the match 
• Borg will win the first set but lose the match

On average, participants rated "Borg will lose the first set but win the match" more likely than "Borg will lose the first set". However, winning the match is only one of several potential eventual outcomes after having lost the first set. The first and the second outcome are thus more likely (as they only contain one condition) than the third and fourth outcome (which depend on two conditions).

Tversky & Kahneman (1983)

Tversky and Kahneman followed up their original findings with a 1983 paper that looked at dozens of new problems, most of these with multiple variations. The following are a couple of examples.

Consider a regular six-sided die with four green faces and two red faces. The die will be rolled 20 times and the sequence of greens (G) and reds (R) will be recorded. You are asked to select one sequence, from a set of three, and you will win $25 if the sequence you choose appears on successive rolls of the die.

1. RGRRR
2. GRGRRR
3. GRRRRR

65% of participants chose the second sequence, though option 1 is contained within it and is shorter than the other options. In a version where the $25 bet was only hypothetical the results did not significantly differ. Tversky and Kahneman argued that sequence 2 appears "representative" of a chance sequence (compare to the clustering illusion).

by Wikipedia |  Read more:

[ed. Very common. Mexican immigrant/Illegal Mexican immigrant.]

Patrick Fry, Suwun

via: