Domestic consequences of the 2024 US presidential election: the quickening

[Dmytry]

Also, to put that in reverse perspective, Trump ran such a shambolic, embarrassing campaign, he might as well have been on the trail for Harris, and that still didn't drop his numbers. He almost could not have done worse if he tried, but that turnout still happened.

I think this is wishful thinking. I think all of that "embarrassing" stuff energized his base, and a lot of it was carefully calculated (e.g. "they are eating the cats" thing) with an eye to whether there's enough Haitians with citizenship anywhere to swing a state.

The one consolation I have is in a very real way, Democrats left it all out there for this election. I can't think of anyone that was holding back. Hell, in Georgia, Harris 60,000 got more votes than Biden in 2020. The problem is Trump managed to add another 200k. We had a historical turnout that beat 2020 by over 250k votes. Even with our population increase, that's a better turnout than before. I think that means Georgia has had its best turnout ever, now.

His huge success is that he found ways to tap into parts of his new base who would normally not vote.

That incel basement dweller over there? He went to vote, because of the whole abortion thing. That guy with a swastika tattoo? He loved the "eating the cats" thing, mass deportations and all that, he's actually hoping Trump is Hitler. And say what we want about republicans of the years past, the guy with a swastika tattoo never before had any hope that a major candidate is Hitler.

edit: then the guy working at a restaurant getting paid in tips and being apolitical, heard about no tax on tips, maybe. It's not all racism and sexism, either.

 

[Dmytry]

It is probably too early to be able to know any of this with certainty. We would need more retrospective polling to know for sure.

Most people don't have swastika tattoos.

But it isn't about most people. It's about having a few people who hadn't voted before voting for you, more of them than vote for Harris.

On the other hand, the sum total of most people's critical reasoning ability is probably "Inflation went up and X was in charge when it happened." I have spoken to people with university degrees who believe that inflation went up because the government raised interest rates. This is a first and difficult obstacle for an incumbent when the economy is shaky, or even when it is just perceived to be shaky.

Because of that lack of critical reasoning ability, when even Trump's own former officials warn them that Trump is dangerously fascist in outlook, they're apt to shrug and ask, "Okay, but what does that have to do with gas prices?"

Definitely, however, there is a particular demographic, of X size, which they succeeded in motivating with that rhetoric too.

The great shortcoming of liberals and I include myself in this, is that we tend to think that morality, the law, and the common good will matter. For most of our fellow citizens they do not.

That one's kind of just the usual stupidity, I think. He's been going on about rising prices, and promising huge new tariffs. That this kind of thing succeeds is normal.

 

[Dmytry]

Sort-of? I don't think any of that was calculated. Trump is simply too far gone to be that strategic.

The cats thing was Vance's, to start with. The thielboy with all the analytics a thielboy can get.

Yes, it was explicitly the Trump campaign's plan to get out male voters that don't normally vote. That's not a surprise. What I am surprised about is they actually turned out. I thought he had hit his occasional voter ceiling in 2020, and aiming at a group that arguably needed the most handholding to get out seemed to me an unlikely bet.

Ultimately there's a certain meanness in American politics.

If you promise great harm to some subset of people which doesn't include a voter, plus an economic policy affecting everyone, that voter will by default think that the policy would benefit them, because there's an enormous narrative bias in everything to present it as tradeoffs.

This does not mean this particular voter will necessarily vote for you, they might think that it is amoral to trade one for the other, but they will nevertheless take the economic promise as more credible.

It all works in synergy. Promises of mass deportations, anti abortion, etc. that makes Trump's economic policy more credible to all not affected by the first part, due to this bias.

edit: even democrats opposed to Trump are biased to see their choice as some sort of noble sacrifice of a personal benefit for the good of the disadvantaged.

 

[Dmytry]

Deportation of immigrants is a non-starter and republicans know it.

Running Trump for President is a non-starter.

Running an openly racist and misogynist campaign is a non-starter.

Overturning Roe is a non-starter.

First impeachment? He's done!

Second impeachment? He's done!

A coup attempt on live television? He's done!

If the "muslim ban" is any indication, I think what they're gonna do is go after legal immigrants by doing some shit like withdrawing work authorization on a Monday morning.

Costs nothing and makes good on the promise to do some shit that harms someone else.

As far as illegal immigrants go, you got to catch them first. They have a truly inalienable natural right that you can't do shit to them without catching them first. Non permanent residents with valid paperwork have the least rights.

 

[Dmytry]

In my opinion, as just some asshole on the internet who hates politics and politicians and all of this: For a while, the democratic party needs to basically just be the republican party, but with abortion and weed. Then they can start to slowly, cautiously, get a bit more progressive on other stuff. It's a horrifying thought but we have a horrifying populace, apparently.

But that is what Democrat party pretty much is these days, except for occasional not-an-old-white-male attempt of unclear impact (it could be that Democrats would actually done worse with an old white male, could be that they would have done better, we don't know).

And what the Republican party has done in response? Republicans talk about dogs and cats being eaten, Venezuelan gangs taking over, and promise mass deportations.

Politicians don't want concessions, they want to win the election.

Republican politicians absolutely will not allow Democrat politicians to simply free ride on Republican media's alternate reality. Any serious attempt to do so would force Republicans do something even more outrageous.

 

[Dmytry]

Meanwhile when Trump was asked for a plan to lower grocery prices, he started ranting about immigration and promising deportations of the people harvesting and preparing and packaging those groceries. Between that and tariffs, I fully expect grocery prices to steadily rise during the new administration.

Yeah, this.

I think he won largely on 1: desire for disruption of the status quo by people who don't realize it can always get much worse, and 2: the "human sacrifices" fallacy whereby people expect that because immigrants will suffer, they will benefit. People expect to be paid for amorality.

Ultimately the ideological commitment is just not there. Trump rants about immigration because he thinks voters love it. Voters don't think much about actions and consequences but instead just want someone else sacrificed to make their own condition better.

It is evil and a lot of harm will happen out of it, but the voters will not get what they wanted.

 

[Dmytry]

Of course not. Because suffering and/or sacrifice is not a zero-sum game. There is no limit to the number of people who can suffer without doing a single good thing.

The idea that exiling (functionally) random people will make things better is tantamount to saying that, "9/11 was a good thing, actually."

Yeah.

I was thinking about it some more, and I think this is where Trumpism falls way short of fascism.

A non imitation fascist would have a plan for replacing immigrant labor with forced labor, for invasion of Mexico to replace agricultural imports with looting, and so on and so forth. So that when they get in power and do all their nasty shit, the grocery prices actually fall in relation to wages. Even if it is unsustainable and temporary.

Here all we have is appeal for the folks who are willing to try human sacrifice to see if it works by magical means.

 

[Dmytry]

He has a plan for the economy: take credit for all of the growth, improvement in inflation, etc. that he's just spent the past year denying exists.

That would require him not to rock the boat too much - not do huge tariffs, definitely not interfere with low paid immigrant labor, etc.

Yeah, if he suddenly turned into an average Republican politician there's a pretty decent chance of Vance getting elected fair-and-square in 2028 . That would be just politics as usual. The concern with Trump is that he'll do completely dumb shit, get unpopular, and then he and Vance will dismantle democracy for Republicans to win anyway.

If he actually manages to maintain popularity by not rocking the boat, well, Americans aren't perfect and they often elect imperfect leaders, whatever.

 

[Dmytry]

Fascism doesn’t have to be executed well for it to still be fascism.

It kind of has to be good enough, though.

Americans have fairly distorted understanding of dictatorships and their emergence. The dictator has to maintain their popularity, even when there's no elections at all. Early on this absolutely does require things getting better (even if that is mere recovery from the civil war in which the current dictator was a mid rank commander).

That said... the mass deportations can't happen with anything resembling the current law enforcement capabilities, coupled with the obvious fact that even if you arrested 11 million people, other countries wouldn't take them (hence the camps). I think the difficulty and cost of pulling this off is so obvious that, whatever Trump may have meant over the course of this year, he will ultimately decide on just a more aggressive version of existing policy. More deportations, but not 11 million.

My speculation, as I said earlier, is that like with the Muslim ban he will do lazy stroke of a pen things against immigrants who presently have perfectly valid paperwork and are present here legally.

This completely leapfrogs the huge difficulty of deporting actual illegal immigrants, while simultaneously being a tougher stance on immigration (in voter eyes) than even the impossible perfect deportation of literally every illegal immigrant would be.

Other thing is executive order reinterpreting the 14th amendment, that is also piss easy and it goes through courts, which is even better than any instant success (because the base is energized watching if their favorite candidate will win this one).

The one reassuring thing here is that Trump sincerely doesn't give a shit, and he's completely fine with doing stuff that gets rejected in courts because he can then go on about how corrupt the courts are (and still win when it gets to SC).

 

[Dmytry]

Do they really?

One who Trump admires—Putin—may not be wildly popular, but has been able to hold onto power, even with a general societal decline and a costly war going on. The keys to success may be instilling a sense of complacency/fatalism in a large part of the population, and not exposing the core support demographic to too much privation. As long as the leadership can maintain minimum acceptable standards with their base—and keep them distracted, how much does popularity matter? After all, the cited issue with voters in this round was the economy—as long as they can buy their basics and have a sense of regularity, there's a lot that people will suffer through.

This is after 22 years on the throne, and with the general tendency to support the leader during a war. The whole "our country, right or wrong!" thing applies everywhere, the war pretty much puts the whole "declining conditions" off, regardless of whether it is right or wrong.

If you look at his early rule, living conditions kept improving for quite a while. Not to mention the whole blowing up apartment buildings thing.

Basically if I look at Russia, which got no history of democracy and had essentially unchecked presidential power demonstrated most clearly in 1993, it still took a lot more favorable conditions and less stupidity, to install a proper blatant dictator.

 

[Dmytry]

The average farm worker in Mexico earns $17k a year. We have a free trade agreement with Mexico. Do you think that undocumented farmworkers in California or Georgia or Arizona make less than $17k a year? No.. they make double that (about $17 an hour in the US). Is there a vegetable that you can't grow in Mexico that you can grow in California? No.. it's the same climate...

Put it together. The US is not Europe. The high cost of groceries in the US has nothing to do with our uncompetitiveness on the global stage. Low skill wages are not the cause.

Low skill labor availability is certainly gonna be the cause if we remove said labor and the produce rots in the fields.

The unemployment is pretty low, so good luck getting replacement workers to quit their existing jobs and move out into the boonies. To do back breaking work that most are not even fit enough for.

Then, with less food production, someone will have to go without or it will have to be imported.

Going without can be done in several ways, each next one scarier than the last.

Prices could rise, so people go without because they cant afford it. Also makes people unable to afford other stuff, with a potential for a cascading effect. A lot of the price rise initially just lines someone’s pockets, since theres huge inertia with regards to restoring production.

You could keep prices the same but have empty shelves and bread lines like its USSR that is about to fall apart.

On the positive the money remain unspent and could be spent on something else, on the downside this is how regimes fall, even regimes which are completely undemocratic.

The only administrative thing that sort of helps a little is rationing and only to the extent that it reduces food waste by those who would otherwise be able to afford food waste. Those in charge of rationing have to know what they are doing or they will increase food waste instead.

I can tell you something is wrong. Uk grocery prices are half that of the US and the UK pays more in energy costs than anywhere in the world and has comparable PPI wages to the US (including health care). How can that be?

Are UK prices really half? I looked up a few common basic items - eggs, rice, oranges because you were talking about those… prices seem comparable.

I did not use those price comparison websites because theres an entire cottage industry of creating bullshit SEOd sites, and it would be a lot of work to legitimately research prices.

 

[Dmytry]

.

tesco search for eggs, rice, and oranges.

15 count bulk eggs 1.99, oranges 0.30 each, 1kg bag of rice 1.85 (price is in sterling)

safeway masmati rice about 4$, eggs were about 6-7 for same number last time I was there, oranges are a bit more than 50 cents apiece... Mind you I'm in CA but sounds right.

1 pound sterling is about 1.28 US dollars.

Eggs got thrown off kilter by bird flu here, still, Walmart now has them at $3 for 12 (online price) which would be about 3 pounds for 15 (conveniently 15/12 is 1.25) . So that'd be 1.5x

Rice is $3.34 for 5 pounds, : https://www.walmart.com/search?q=rice which is $1.47 per kg.

I'm thinking you might be comparing cheapest to premium. Also for per item stuff like eggs and fruit you really ought to go by weight, even relatively small % increases in size correspond to large weight differences (since weight is ~ size cubed).

And with regards to wages proportion of the price, this is where American magical thinking hits.

It doesn't matter what proportion of price is wages, because if you remove low wage laborers, produce fucking rots in the fucking fields, there is a shortage, there's increased prices, there's people having less disposable income (because more of their income goes to food), decreased spending on other things.. a few years down the line a bunch of people happily working elsewhere right now lose their jobs and move out in the country to pick fruit.

There's a specific mechanism by which capitalism reallocates labor, and it is slow, and when unemployment is already low it is unpleasant for everyone involved.

On top of it, unskilled labor isn't all fungible. When N people lose their job, only M<N are actually physically fit to work in the fields. So there's even more unpleasantness where many of those who lost their jobs can't go work the fields, and it takes even longer for some other people to leave their jobs for picking fruit in the fields etc etc. All of it happens at an absolutely glacial pace, each next thing waiting for the last.

The magical thinking is where "produce rots in the field and there's an import tariff" is answered with anything whatsoever about decreased taxes or interest rates or other measures that operate entirely on paper, not on fruits and vegetables.

 

[Dmytry]

I'm comparing it with the cheaper version because I was comparing it to the cheaper versions at tesco.

edit: might also depend on the supermarket chain, that's why I went with Walmart.

I don't think anyone has any magical thinking beyond some outliers, most people understand who is picking the produce from the fields and the problems with getting them there... they just don't care because it's not those people stealing jobs/stealing things its "the others" never mind they can't point to them.

Maybe not if someone starts with the mechanistic thinking (produce rots in the fields -> ) and keeps on going, but even then most people go something like "produce rots in the fields & tariffs are applied to imports -> prices rise -> but with lower taxes people have money and can afford increased prices."

There's a mental habit to convert everything into $ impact, and lose track of the physical item.

 

[Dmytry]

ETA: There is open talk of revoking the legal status (given to them under the first Trump administration) of the "cat/dog/goose-eating" Haitian immigrants in Springfield and sending them to (get this) Venezuela.

Yeah when I heard that one I was like "I understood that reference" (see Madagaskarplan), although I'm still not 100% certain if it was originally intended to be a reference.

 

[Dmytry]

Also re legal immigrants, Trump promised to get rid of birthright citizenship by EO on day one:

https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda...ldren-of-illegals-and-outlawing-birth-tourism
Now the particularly interesting thing about it is that it is obviously blatantly unconstitutional, so it would end up in front of the supreme court, which can then re-interpret the 14th amendment with some sort of "illegal immigrants are not subject to the jurisdiction thereof" nonsense.

And at that point, unlike a new constitutional amendment, it would logically be retroactive - to start with, it has to be retroactive to affect what ever case it was about.

This is not to say that children of illegal immigrants would lose citizenship, no. Nobody would lose citizenship. They would not have ever had it in the first place.

While he did talk about this during his presidency and didn't do it, I have no reason to doubt that if he's promising to do that EO on the first day, he will do that EO on the first day (or at the latest, sometime within the first week)

 

[Dmytry]

SCOTUS can't be too careless with reinterpreting birthright citizenship lest they render Trump ineligible to hold office. More likely, they would perhaps ascertain a generational or year-based cutoff.

How do they do that though? Either the conventional interpretation is the correct one, or Trump's.

If it is Trump's, then it has always been correct. Court rulings, generally, apply retroactively (how else a court decision in 2028 can possibly affect a child born in 2025?).

I guess they could say some stuff along the lines of how due to widespread reliance on the incorrect interpretation, ... but that's even more inconsistent.

Anyhow, we'll see.

edit: re jurisdiction, this particular SC can simply claim that they aren't subject to the jurisdiction thereof in one sense of the word, and are subject to the jurisdiction thereof in another. Some sort of illegal combatant - like BS.

 

[Dmytry]

I've been literally physically sick to my stomach for a week now. I am the "right color". I am from the "right kind of country". Nothing I hear from the incoming administration tells me that will matter a good goddamn. And with plenty of online evidence that I am not a fan of Trump, I am "vermin" and "the enemy within", AND easily deportable. I don't sleep well at night. I am old enough to have heard ALL the stories from grandparents on both sides about how everyone around them INSISTED that the Nazis would not come after the GOOD people, the WHITE people, the WORKING people, the LEGAL people, until they did. They were all part of the resistance, and I don't know if I'll have the balls they had. I hope I do.

I seriously doubt it would affect either of us. We're the right color, yeah we've been talking shit but so what, that's too wide a net. If we actually got into politics however as politicians... yeah.

Think of Hitler. He did throw all of the German National Jews into the camps. Socialists who were in politics too. He didn't throw just everyone who voted against him, however, that's too ridiculous. And he had a lot of nazis night-of-long-knives'd.

I think most of consequences for us will be the regular economics shit same as everyone else, like e.g. a huge market crash.

 

[Dmytry]

RFK is a nut, but there’s a lot going wrong in public health. We have seen Alzheimers treatments approved even though they have shown no clinical benefits and experts advised against approval.

Just wanted to address this... what exactly do you think Vivek (the other head of the "department of government efficiency") was trying to do with his startup Axovant Sciences, using a drug he bought on the cheap from GSK after it failed 4 clinical trials?

Worsening this particular wrong is very much on the agenda of the current administration. Plus with RFK jr. they can ban competing products that are actually effective.

edit:
One thing I've been wondering a lot about lately, the dependence of everything on the rule of law and how much we take it for granted.

Let's say a VC firm A invest in a startup B . An individual C in charge of other people's money (pension fund manager, a high up in large corporation with dilute ownership, you name it) buys shares of B from A using other people's money. Eventually C is fired, and he starts a startup D into which the VC firm A invests (thus completing a kickback).

If people get too comfortable with doing this, everything will go to shit.

People like to throw the word "kleptocracy" around, meaning "overly rich people are in charge". It isn't that. A kleptocracy is where thiefs are in charge. If the US is to descend into a kleptocracy, capitalism as you know it will cease to work.

 

[Dmytry]

You put the beginning at the end. Near as I can tell you're the only other person I've seen online who realizes that people need to act. No one in the current administration seems to realize it. Most people online are in outright denial and/or are busying themselves with the usual Democratic circular firing squad. It's not hard to see the coming Constitutional crises. What happens if Biden grows a spine and refuses to leave the White House? What happens when Trump invokes the Insurrection Act and sends troops to round up Newsom? What happens when Musk declares NOAA dissolved and boards up the offices? What happens when the blanket tariffs go into effect and food imports abruptly stop along with all the agricultural workers being herded into concentration camps?

I'm reminded of the plot of Demolition Man where the citizens of the future utopian state are so soft that they have no idea what to do when a real bad guy shows up. Where are the demonstrations? The sit-ins? The boycotts? The strikes? Crickets. I guess America's just gonna stand there and watch democracy bleed out.

At minimum people need to get themselves ready. They need to arrange communications with their families, such as with Signal. They need to know where their identity documents are. (Now would be a great time to renew your passport.) They need to collect all their insurance, financial, and property information. They need to have a plan to get to a blue state if not to a sane country. I don't see anyone doing any of this. I don't see anyone even talking about it.

66 days.

Thing is, so far Trump hasn't deviated significantly from what he promised to do when campaigning.

He was promising to fuck shit up and people voted for it and he's announcing he will fuck shit up as promised.

So far there isn't anything that America did not democratically sign up for. The time to protest was when he was promising this shit. And there will be time to protest when he implements his shit and the consequences are not what he claimed they would be.

But inbetween these times, he pretty much gets to do what ever he promised to do that Americans signed off on.

 

[Dmytry]

Well, the political infighting has begun.

Insiders are starting to say that Musk is acting like co-president.

What all left leaning journalists (or just not Musk leaning) need to do is start asking Trump what Musk thinks of something, whenever Trump says anything. And crediting the election to Musk.

 

[Dmytry]

Or ask both Musk and Trump for their position on something and then publish both, with headlines like "Is Musk undermining Trump? DOGE advisor backs different policies behind President's back."

Crediting the election to Musk ought to do it all by itself. As well as suggesting that Trump owes to Musk.

Trump legitimately worked very hard as a performer, especially considering his age.

 

[Dmytry]

Another benefit of those chosen for cabinet level - no way to invoke the 25th due to stroke or malfeasance, ect, I doubt the majority will be there.
I'm convinced that this was one of the primary considerations while vetting these folks.

The basic idea is to set it up so that all of these guys positions are dependent on Trump. Stalin had a similar set up, to ensure that the politburo were quaking in their boots fearing what would become of them when Stalin dies.

The next step will be to offer these people opportunity to commit what ever crimes, more the merrier. Stock manipulation and trading, for example. See Musk and F35 above, he's stupid enough to do that stuff and trade on it if it moves the stock price. For the most important position he's picking people who are, let's put it this way, naturally inclined to go full Lavrentiy Beria.

 

[Dmytry]

Things may be definitely changing—and for the worse—but it may not be so dire as under Stalin. Trump—as recounted by Michael Cohen and others—has a more sedate MO. It generally involves giving people in the organization some type of benefit—but accepting it ensnares the recipient in corruption. That way, when someone is no longer of use to Trump, they are forced out, and tainted, giving them little recourse to fight it. Look at the many who have worked for Trump, whether in a political or business capacity. They leave damaged, often facing legal quagmires, while Trump moves on with few repercussions. Besides Cohen, look how well it's gone for Giuliani, Powell, Barr, Pence and many others. It's sort of a reverse Midas—those whom he touches are often damaged, not enriched.

Yeah he certainly isn't gonna be able to go full Stalin particularly considering his age.

I'm just pointing out similarity of the set up, as far as making sure that everything depends on Trump. Also, Stalin did literally kill a lot of his own appointees; Trump is just firing them and casting them out, but the principle is fundamentally similar (and frankly they are just as thoroughly removed from consideration as if they were dead. Politically, Pence matters even less alive than he would had the mob strung him up).

 

[Dmytry]

Of course I'm defeatist. We watched our president just fucking fellate Russian hegemony. We're a fucking puppet state of Russia now. Our Federal government is being hollowed out and replaced with Yes-Men. Our Cyber Security is ignoring our biggest cyber rival. Our IC chief is a goddamned Russian asset. It's only a matter of time before every fed gets fired for no fucking reason. We're headed straight into a Great Depression. Any resistance is going to be mopped up by our police state. Half our fucking country is perfectly happy with all of that. The public has no power to change anything.

We're fucked. We're cooked. My only hope is our fucking up won't drag the rest of the world with it.

I'm convinced that they're building a dictatorship equivalent of Titan, the carbon-fiber hulled submersible, except they're heading straight down without even having let the epoxy cure.

Half of the country is perfectly happy with the idea of going down to the Great Again. They can almost shoulder the high egg prices for a bit. They aren't ready for getting fired from their jobs, losing their houses, etc. And the country is run by billionaires (and their yes men) who are completely out of touch with basic issues like "unable to pay mortgage = lose your house".

 

[Dmytry]

Keeping in mind there's a not insignificant portion of the US (and an overall overrepresentation in Congress) who are welcoming the apocalypse cause it means Jesus is coming again and they get to spend eternity in Heaven while all those fucking heathens and sinners burn in the Lake of Fire.

I dunno. I've been thoroughly unimpressed with the sincerity (or lack thereof) of American Christians, to be honest. Once they can't pay their mortgage they're hurting the same as any atheist.

 

[Dmytry]

Resisting will have to wait until these guys make the recession great again.

Trump did win the election, because most voters didn't think their material condition will significantly worsen. None of what he has done so far would convince them otherwise, it has to actually happen (and it seems to be well on the way, laying off a very large number of employees is alone really risky for the economy that is as services-heavy as the US - people who don't have enough money don't go out to eat etc etc).

edit: if you tell them that laying off the federal workers will crash the economy, they suspect that you are just being altruistic towards government workers, same as for the identical argument regarding undocumented workers. That suspicion can only be dispelled if they suffer direct consequences. Such as e.g. when a Trump-supporting federal worker gets laid off, they are not so happy with Trump any more. Same presumably extends to non government workers but it takes a while for the federal layoffs to impact everyone else's jobs.

 

[Dmytry]

Are all human that self-centered or this is more a USA problem? I honestly feel sick to my stomach that people are ok someone else is suffering.

Well, the morally worst 50% of people are pretty damn bad anywhere, I think.

edit: It's probably even worse because most of these people aren't even actual life long psychopaths, they just think its very cool to be one. Hence the tendency of rejecting outright any selfish argument that could possibly be mistaken for altruism in disguise. Such as e.g. "the produce will rot in the fields if you deport all undocumented laborers" or "economy will crash if you lay off all federal employees".

It's exactly the same whether it is an undocumented laborer or extremely documented NNSA worker. The important thing is that Joe Random Guy knows he's neither. That's what nobody but a fraction of the "extreme left" ever understood. Even "far left" here doesn't understand that, e.g. Bernie Sanders for all his good qualities still subscribes to this whole worker-vs-worker thing when it comes to foreign workers, he doesn't get it that if you allow a wedge between undocumented workers and documented workers you also allow a wedge between regular workers and e.g. workers that passed extensive background checks, or between any other kind of workers that the billionaire class needs to turn against one another.

 

[Dmytry]

I am pretty selfish myself, but the level of selfishness displayed in USA are closer to comic/manga level. I wonder how much it is the "individualism" culture. I think USA has the strongest individualism culture on earth?

It's about 50% of the people and for most it is a fucking cosplay, like people showing up in cowboy boots at the rodeo.

The phonies are if anything the worst, because they are easily talked into selfless harmful actions like not wearing a mask during a pandemic to prove just how selfish they are. If their social instincts were properly absent, the noble psychopath that thinks for themselves that they want to emulate, they'd just wear a mask to protect themselves, and not give a fuck if it makes them look unselfish.

 

[Dmytry]

It's like COVID when the cases were few, doubling every 3 days, and Cuomo was telling people that its a good time to go out to a restaurant.

There wasn't gonna be any resistance to what Cuomo was saying, until a week and a half later.

The impact is still all projected and nobody's gonna protest over a projected impact.

 

[Dmytry]

This statement right here needs to be the opening thesis statement for at least five or six threads now. People are largely acting like things are normal because they still are normal for most people. The population experiencing not normal is still small but growing.

Then also if you are in a certain carbon fiber hulled submersible being lowered into the water, it's not the time to protest that they forgot to put on the endcap.

You want it to flood as soon as it gets into the water, to maximize chances at survival. You most decidedly do not want the end caps to be screwed on.

 

[Dmytry]

Also since places like walmart live off of cheap foreign goods it's going to be very funny to see the fallout (not that i'm opposed to walmart going belly up but a lot of people take big box stores and their cheap goods for granted).

Could see it happening but i think balkanization is more likely in the long term rather than trump turning the entire US into a fully authoritarian state. "resist the militias" also get fit and find like minded people. Finally stop using smartphones and social media. get comfortable with utilities like tor as well if online surveillance crackdowns do happen, would highly recommend to start scrubbing social media profiles.

I think it's a cargo-cult attempt at a dictatorship.

They look at something like Russia where Putin simply started a huge war that completely fucked their economy, and he's fine. They also look at propaganda against every-unfriendly-dictator-who-got-sanctioned-by-the-US-ever. The latter's economy is doing terrible, of course.

But it is a consequence, or at most, a correlation. It is not the cause of a dictatorship, except at times indirectly (e.g. when CIA or KGB turn a banana republic into a dictatorship when their favorite leader fucks up the economy and faces a loss in the elections).

Fucking up the economy is not good for the dictatorship project. Even a well established dictatorship can collapse when fucking around like this.

edit: ultimately i sort of feel that the election hinges not on election rigging and economy, but on whether they overestimate how much they can get away with, or not.

After his 2016 win, Trump said that if the US didn't have electoral college, then he would have campaigned differently and he would have won anyway.

And I think there is a lot of truth to this, not in the part that he would have won anyway but in the sense that, yes, the way they act depends on how well democracy works. If they think they can rig the elections more, then they make use of that to institute policies that turn more voters against them.

The outcome of the election thus hinges not on how much they rig the elections or how much they turn their voters against them, but on how well they estimate everything - if they overestimate they will lose, if they don't overestimate they win.

If they think they can disenfranchise ten million voters, that means they will institute policies that lose them ten million voters, comparing to the situation where they don't think they can disenfranchise anyone.

 

[Dmytry]

Something came up in an Observatory thread (UserJoe posted a link). There's an executive order specifically targeting nuclear regulation.

Apparently there's some bullshit silicon valley think-tank called "the breakthrough institute" which got in on the DOGE action, and presented the following "whitepaper".

I hadn't extensively checked the references to see if they used AI to make things up, but a few choice quotes:

The preponderance of scientific evidence indicates that an annual dose
limit of 50 mSv (5 rem) or less does not result in detectable increases in adverse health outcomes
across diverse human populations and exposure scenarios. Furthermore, substantial evidence
supports the conclusion that even 100 mSv (10 rem)/year would maintain a reasonable safety
margin based on available epidemiological and radiobiological data

Which is absolute utter horseshit, especially the last part. (edit: you can also read the transcript from NRC discussion where numerous qualified people explain why it is horseshit).

Interestingly it doesn't seem to be any actual reactor operators asking for that. Even Three Mile Island incident exposed people to only 1 millirem, or 1/100 of a mSv. Public exposure during normal operation simply is not an issue for any reactors.

Even RBMK, with its notorious difficulty of meeting the "don't explode" safety standard, only exposes general public to single digit microSieverts (other than when it explodes). I used to live in Lithuania which used to be powered primarily by a pair of RBMKs.

Think of it as having a standard of not shitting more than 1 gram of shit on the floor in your kitchen (for Americans, a teaspoon). If you don't shit on the floor in the kitchen, you stay below that limit by many orders of magnitude. If you have a big dog (RBMK), the dog might take a giant shit, but otherwise, the dog also wouldn't have much trouble staying below 1 gram limit. If someone's arguing the limit could be safely raised to 50 or even 100 grams, that is quite seriously weird, regardless of the relative safety risk.

edit: to balance it out, it doesn't seem that NRC was actually ordered to do anything differently (or not yet), just to consider alternatives to LNT.

 

[Dmytry]

If you can raise the dose limit of what constitutes exposure, you can then raise the limit on what constitutes "radioactive waste". There's a lot of low level waste generated by operating a nuclear plant of any description (but especially doing anything with radioactive substances that isn't a reactor, like medical or processing radioactive materials in any way). Mostly this is stuff like potentially lightly contaminated gloves, gowns, containers, etc. Right now all this stuff has to be disposed off in a safe, controlled manner with a lot of paperwork and safe-guards in place. Likely this change is driven by someone who has to deal with large-ish quantities of low level radioactive waste (my guess would be medical) and wants to be able to just chuck it in the domestic trash.

That's a very good point. Although a lot of medical isotopes are pretty short lived so some of the waste can simply be kept until non radioactive.

Wouldn't be too surprised if these thinktankers just use nuclear energy as a misdirection / to legitimize their position, because of course the nuclear medicine etc are doing completely fine with regulations as they are, with little to complain about beyond some variety of "we could have saved $1 for each $10000 treatment". Apparently in the US you can just go home with radioiodine treatment in your thyroid (someone brings that up in the meeting).

I guess in theory an alternative solution to ALARA could be found along the lines of paying to offset public risks via free cancer treatments. But that would cost money, and I have a strong suspicion that it would cost more money than dealing with the waste the way we deal with the waste now.

There are certain advantages in not trying to split the hair at the low end of the waste range; its not like low activity waste isn't simply put into plastic barrels and transported in normal, non lead lined trucks.

 

[Dmytry]

I'm of 2 minds. Largely the evidence basis for the validity of the LNT model is... questionable. There's enough data to show there's likely some lower level of background radiation where there IS a threshold. But where exactly that is? We can't say.

By the way, keep in mind that the average natural background radiation in the US is twice what you (going by your username) have in the Netherlands, and combined with the average medical exposure here, it is approximately 4x your natural background. And the study population size (required for given p-value) increases inversely proportionally to effect squared.

The population sample sizes required for establishing LNT's correctness for additional doses (over natural+medical) in the US, are thus about 16x smaller than what is required for establishing LNT for doses over natural background alone in the Netherlands.

edit: then also of course it's not equal across the US either; having LNT in Denver (due to high background) but hormesis in Houston, but oh wait maybe no hormesis in Houston either because suppose we find that sunburns add to the "total" over which the dose response acts, that would be a regulatory nightmare.

And the only way to find out is a lengthy and ethically questionable process. The aftermath of Fukushima might be the most well documented incident we'll be able to use for research into low level exposure, but even there sorting primary from secondary effects and cause from correlation will be extremely difficult. Thus we should probably keep to using the LNT model. Even if we know it isn't perfect for very low dosage.

There was an accident in Taiwan that provided very good data for low level exposure.

A short backstory. A large Co-60 source was scrapped and ended up contaminating a huge quantity of rebar. That rebar was used to build homes, schools, etc in Taipei.

A number of people, many of them young adults and children, were chronically exposed to varying doses of gamma radiation. The government tried everything (except protecting the people). They tried not telling anyone. The first time radiation was detected, they tried blaming a dentist.

Finally, they did a study that found 97% lower cancer rates in the exposed population, comparing to the general population's average. A true cure for cancer - instead of putting Co-60 into radiotherapy machines, you need to simply mix it into rebar. Worthy of Nobel prize if true.

This is the kind of shit that we'll have in the US if MAGA goes nuclear.

Every self-respecting hormesis pseudoscientist (e.g. this MAGA-aligned Breakthrough Institute's whitepaper) will mention Taiwanese rebar to support their point, but will never mention a follow up study, conducted decades later, found increased cancer rates in the exposed population, relatively to age matched controls.

Honestly, "hormesis" is better understood in the historical context, alongside e.g. telling radium dial painters to lick their brushes and telling them that it is healthy and good for them. Discussions of alternatives to LNT always neglect the social and historical context - sexism, worker rights, businesses killing their employees, etc etc. Focusing on physics or biology of it misses the actual cause of hormesis, which is social rather than biological.

edit: also, without historical perspective, it is hard to comprehend the actual proposition made by these breakthrough people.

It is not that there exists some threshold of exposure, and for people living below that threshold, small additional exposure is harmless. That proposition wouldn't be of much use for regulation, until you establish what is the threshold, which combination of pollutants it should apply to, what fraction of the population lives how far below threshold, how the threshold varies between individuals, etc. Do children have a threshold? Do embryos? Do germline cells?

It is simply a modern version of what management told the radium dial painters. It is simply that a "small" additional dose is harmless or maybe even good for you. It doesn't matter what the existing dose is, you can always use more. No matter how many times you licked the radium brush, one more lick is harmless. You'll never prove that one lick of a radium brush is harmful. It may be good for you, some studies show. So just lick it one more time. This is the Hormesis Hypothesis. Any attempt to discuss the science of dose response sane-washes the absolute fucking load of motivated horseshit that it is.

There's some overlap with a traditionally Observatory-rather-than-soapbox topic, but I consider this to be a largely Soapbox matter, since this all originates from a purely political move (Trump's executive order).

 

[Dmytry]

in case anyone in reading in the UK who, at first sight, had an aneurysm.

I think the reason its easy to interpret it as "three separate shots" is that Trump had an all caps truth social post about it.

There are still people in the government who try their best to deflect the damage by trying to stay as close as possible to the de-facto status quo. Instead of splitting MMR in three they split MMRV in two which is how it usually is. But they are being fired.

This also goes for my nuclear concerns above.

Sure, right now there is no indication that NRC will actually relax their dose limits, let alone adopt a public dose limit that (over a few years) exceeds Soviet "you did enough for the motherland and you get to go home, son" limits for the guys who shoveled fuel back into the hole where the reactor used to be.

But we are one small step away from either one of the dishonest fucks who wrote this whitepaper, ending up in charge of NRC (Why do I call them dishonest fucks? A good example of utter lack of honesty is how they bring up the Taiwanese rebar accident while neglecting to mention later studies). The only thing securing us from this outcome is relative obscurity of the topic. And perhaps lack of political connectedness of these particular thinktankers.

There's probably at least 3 years left of this shit. I very much hope that in practice much of the shit they are trying to do will be deflected into making much noise about small changes, but I'm becoming increasingly worried that it won't.

 

[Dmytry]

Honestly, I despise RFK Jr. much more than Trump.

A stuck clock (like naturalistic fallacy) would be sometimes right - it would be wrong about vaccines, but it would be right about climate change and pollution. In a naturalistic fallacy government, I would not have to worry about climate change or NRC raising dose limits 50x or defunding of EPA.

A general pro-business stuck clock, too, wouldn't necessarily seek to undermine vaccine makers (even though the net pressure of money is against an ounce of prevention and in favor of a pound of cure, and eventually with enough healthcare consolidation we could expect pro business to turn anti-vaxx). Nor would a general pro-business stuck clock do as much damage via ICE, or tariffs, or undermine renewables being already built, or the like.

We are not dealing with a stuck clock. I am increasingly convinced we are dealing with a concerted effort to harm the United States by various means. (Not that the US hadn't done the same, but I have kids and I have little interest in being on the receiving end of some cosmic justice).

 

[Dmytry]

More on the radioactive MAGA (from the observatory thread):

https://inl.gov/content/uploads/202...f-Radiation-Protection-Standards-R0-Final.pdf

The paper is at least partially written using Claude.

The public limit is less unreasonable (5 mSv / year), albeit unjustifiable. The same tiny villages are presented in the same misleading way:

Studies from areas with high natural background radiation (including regions in Kerala, India, and
Ramsar, Iran) have not shown conclusive evidence of increased cancer rates or other adverse health
outcomes, even with background radiation levels significantly exceeding regulatory limits.

Cited small village studies have effects of 0.19 (95% CI: −1.87, 3.04) and −0.13 Gy−1 (95% CI: −0.58, 0.46) . Error bars are too wide to conclude anything. Because too few people live in those villages.

But the authors use weaselwording to imply that this is in contradiction with LNT.

Taiwanese rebar is curiously absent (now that there is a study which actually shows increased cancer rates).

50 mSv / year for workers without ALARA is actually quite horrible, and they suggest raising it further to 100 mSv / year.

Other thing that is truly upsetting is that its not like they got some alternative nonlinear biological model that fits the data and where the cumulative effects decrease to zero subject to some conditions, which some scenarios may meet (literally a steady uniform dose over a year) and some may not meet (all in one day, or to a portion of the body, or hot particles causing tiny radiation burns in the lungs, etc). Instead everything is to be combined linearly and then a non linear function is to be applied.

It is quite obvious that this isn't a technical disagreement about existence of a biological threshold, but a disagreement about fundamental ethics - whether existence of some under-powered small-village studies can entitle employers to causing predictable harm to workers by exposing workers to hazards demonstrated by larger studies, even though small-village studies do not contradict the model derived from large studies, but are merely inconclusive.

 

[Dmytry]

Plus they can just send Putin state secrets via Signal if they want to.

Speaking of Putin, I am kind of wondering if this radioactive MAGA bullshit about ditching ALARA + raising occupational limits to 100 mSv / year, doubles as a low grade radiation poisoning attack against folks who maintain the strategic deterrent.

I never wondered that about hormesis / anti linear no threshold folks before, because they kept a mask of respectable disagreement and were usually very vague about what they consider to be "low doses" of radiation.

Now the masks are off, and they are demanding what amounts to a very very large career limit, and lying about the state of evidence, in outright denial of numerous recent high quality studies.

In two and a half years under the proposed limits, the worker would receive a dose equivalent to the limit for shoveling spent fuel off Chernobyl roof. Most recent empirical data from a large study of nuclear workers suggests that the cancer-causing effect of that dose received chronically is likely quite a bit worse than past estimates based on the atomic bombings data:


That can be very easily explained with the same "DNA repair" and other arguments that hormesis / threshold proponents always allude to - if some normally inactive DNA repair (or anything else they allude to) activates in response to significant doses (received quickly) and partially offsets the increased cancer risks, then current estimates of effects of radiation exposure would be appropriate for Chernobyl roof cleanup but underestimate the impact on someone who receives that dose over 30 months.

For what its worth I personally believe the orthodoxy: ionizing radiation is (normally) only a minor contributor to much greater overall genotoxic stress, which implies that population effects of small doses are linear: (f(x+d)-f(x)) ~ d for small d. (And of course DNA repair results in DNA that contains mutations)