Item #1: Trump Unveils DOGE:
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 13, 2024
What better way to reduce government waste than to create a government agency tasked with that. This is like something pulled strait from Idiocracy. Also, DOGE will have to seek committee approval before it can actually cut anything. Nothing will change. Nothing of significance will be gutted. The TSA pat-downs will continue, for example. It does nothing to address state-wide regulations, which can be as bad or worse than federal ones. As we saw during Covid, state governments have considerable discretion at creating regulation.
DOGE is doomed to fail in the sense it only adds to the problem being that it’s yet another agency, does not or cannot specify anything specific to cut, much of government waste is state-level instead of federal, and passing legislation necessities bloat. Such earmarks and pork barrel spending is required to get congressmen to sign off on legislation.
Major federal programs like the DHS or FBI will never be downsized. At best, we may see a downsizing of only small or insignificant departments that play only a small or no role in people’s lives, like the Department of Education, Department of Energy, or the EPA. This means we can look forward to having to remove our belts and shoes at the airport now and for the long foreseeable future.
Item #2: The 1970s Crime Wave: Are we too complacent about current crime trends?
It’s unpopular to say, but mass incarceration works at mitigating crime. Tough recidivism laws gets criminals off the streets. It also acts as a deterrent. One can point to high relapse rates or that there is still a lot of crime, but one must consider the counterfactual and control for demographics. Controlling for demographics and culture, would there be less crime with more lenient sentencing? I think not. It’s possible that societies where leniency works are advantaged culturally or demographically in ways that the US isn’t, so it works better there. Or maybe citizens or politicians have higher tolerance for crime.
As I discuss in the post Prison spending is not too high, I posit prison spending has among the highest ROI of any government program, as criminals impart discorporate harm on society. Instead of spending $100 million on schools of dubious efficacy, $100 million on a prison or improved staffing, will have definite, tangible societal benefits.
Item #3: Who Was Bitcoin’s Satoshi? I Need to Know and So Do You
On the other hand, the Satoshi-as-a-team theory would mean that secrets are easier to keep than people think. If that’s the case, then maybe conspiracy theories are more true than most of us would care to admit.
A common argument is that conspiracy theories cannot exist because large groups of people are incapable of keeping secrets. I guess he’s never heard of intelligence agencies, sealed indictments, the FBI, or hedge funds. Large groups of people can keep secrets for a long time. Despite collectively employing thousands of people, seldom does anything leak, and when it does it’s newsworthy and outdated by then.
I have some idea who Satoshi is, but it’s not any of the usual names.
Item #4: Bitcoin surges on crypto regulatory clarity.
Legislation has always been Trump’s weak spot. True, he accomplished a lot in his first term nominally speaking, such as court appointments, Covid vaccine, and executive orders, but lasting policy change is through legislation. This does not portend well to the promised crypto regulatory reform that everyone is excited about.
Second, crypto’s shortcoming cannot just be blamed on the lack of regulatory clarity, but also that people and businesses simply don’t want to use it due to scams or the technology being cumbersome? I, at least, have observed that crypto hype has declined a lot since 2018-2021. Too many scams and broken dreams. Imagine someone invested in crypto or NFTs in 2021, lost 80+% of their money in 2022-2023, and are still down…are they going to invest again? Probably not, having been burned.
Given Trump’s bad record at legislation and garnering bipartisan support, I would put the odds at only 20% of favorable crypto legislation being enacted under Trump’s second term.
Item #5: This went viral on Twitter:
This is kinda the usual IQ bullshit.
Go to some MENSA meetings. You’ll have IQ130 brick layers and IQ150 romance novel editors.
A *tiny fraction* of high IQ people do anything interesting. IQ is one of perhaps five capabilities required to do interesting work.
Mostly bullshit. https://t.co/L7I9nNFyWG
— Vinay (@leashless) November 12, 2024
It’s funny how people who say Mensa or high IQ does not matter put so much effort into trying to to convince us it doesn’t matter. If it didn’t matter wouldn’t it be self-evident or more obvious that it doesn’t necessitate having to constantly tell everyone it does not matter? Yet we see that it just so happens that people who make more money, and have more status and success at life are also generally smarter, on average. What does it mean for someone to have ‘achieved a lot at life’? People who downplay IQ always have this vague idealization of what it means to be successful at life, yet cannot ever specify it.