Pun Salad

From Randall Munroe's xkcd: Time Change:

Mouseover: "All discussions of daylight saving time policy are doomed by a mix of contradictory, inconsistent, and impossible preferences, which is why I think the only thing we can really hope to do is to make it worse."

It's Hayek's Road To Serfdom, I tells ya, except it's government messing with your clocks instead of messing with free markets. Demand the separation of time and state!

Also of note:

• Maybe don't sign any statement you didn't write yourself. But I'm OK with Noah Smith's cautionary approach too. He explains: Why I didn't sign the "We Must Act Now" statement (yet), And I especially like his opening quote:

  “We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.” — the Politician’s Fallacy

  The other day, a friend asked me to add my signature to a statement called “We Must Act Now: A Statement on AI’s Transformation of the Economy”. A bunch of economists, including many famous and influential ones, have been signing it. Here’s the text of the statement:

  1. AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years.

  2. This could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame. It could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards.

  3. Economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI and to build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society.

  That’s it. That’s all it is. It doesn’t say what our action ought to be, only that “we must act”. There’s no appendix, no longer manifesto attached below. It just says AI is getting good, AI could be economically important, AI could take people’s jobs and/or make us a lot richer, and that we have to do something to make sure the AI age turns out alright.

  But what is that something? What actual policies would I be recommending by signing this statement? None that I can see. It’s completely vague and unspecific.

  I recognize more than a few names on the "statement", some of them people I like, and I think there are 16 or so Nobelists (as I type). But, yes, it smells like a moral panic to me.

• Trofim Lysenko, please call your office. Jonathan Turley writes on academic illiberalism: “Frozen Out of Academic Life”: Law Professor Calls for “Repercussions” for Those Who Do Not “Recant” Views on Birthright Citizenship.

  The stifling intolerance and lack of intellectual diversity are a crushing reality in higher education today. There are few remaining conservatives or libertarians on law school faculties, which have been purged of dissenting voices through a biased hiring and promotion system. Despite years of complaints and declining public trust in higher education, faculty members continue to reinforce bias and orthodoxy in our schools. There is no better example than Fordham University School of Law professor John Pfaff, who recently called for “repercussions” for professors who do not “recant” their view that birthright citizenship is not protected by the 14th Amendment.

  Jonathan quotes Pfaff characterizing those anti-birthright citizenship scholars as "parasitic". Something that should remind you of the bad old days.

• But where does he stand on subversion to perversions? I think George F. Will doesn't go there, simply observing that The endlessly pliable JD Vance has no aversion to conversions. (WaPo gifted link)

  JD Vance has an aptitude for conversions. His have involved politics, economics, history and religion, so far. Whatever his next one is will probably not be his last.

  One propelled him from the Pentecostal Protestantism of his youth, through atheism, to Catholicism. As the U.S. government’s “most senior Catholic” (his self-description) he, in the church since 2019, warned the pope to “be careful” when speaking “on matters of theology.” Leo XIV was careless (in Vance’s view) when criticizing the Iran war.

  JD is the current best bet as the 2028 GOP presidential nominee at the Stossel/Lott Election Betting Odds site and Polymarket. Which (in turn) increases my odds of leaving that ballot line unmarked in November 2028.

• We'll just make the billionaires buy us everything! Jeff Maurer appreciates perfection: No-Tax Socialism Is So Stupid It’s Perfect.

  Last week, Bernie Sanders-backed Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed gave an answer to a question about preserving Social Security that was so remarkable that an “On this spot in 2026…” plaque might be needed to commemorate the event. Here it is:

  [Video at link, a possibly inaccurate transcript:]

  For that, I think we need to be freezing property tax for seniors. You paid off your home at some point we can't expect you to keep up with property taxes that are going up. But how do you pay for that? Well, again, you can tax billionaires for their wealth. If you were to invest in affirmative education, that will pay centrally for public schools in an equitable way. There are a lot of opportunities for us to lift the burden off of seniors who have done their job, they worked extra hard, they deserve a dignified retirement and we've gotta be thinking about how to offer them that.

  Absolutely phenomenal. That answer was the Willy Wonka seven course dinner gum of dumb political answers, in that the many flavors of stupid just keep hitting you until your sense are overwhelmed.

  The first problem is that El-Sayed answered a question about how to protect Social Security with a scheme to raise less revenue. The scheme would benefit elderly land-owners, a wealthy demographic, so a progressive making this proposal is a bit like a Klansman making a generous donation to Howard University. After proposing a tax cut on wealth, El-Sayed suggested paying for it with a wealth tax, and then capped his answer — which, I’ll remind you, was supposed to be about raising revenue and/or cutting spending — by proposing more spending on something totally unrelated. Also: Property taxes are levied at the state and local level, but El-Sayed is running for US Senate, so his whole answer is like promising to cut sales taxes in Jakarta. Just boffo stuff — if political numbskullery was art, then we just watched the Mona Lisa get painted. My only note is that El-Sayed should have found a way for his pants to fall down while accompanied by old-timey car horn going “AAAROOOOOOOOO-GAH!” — that would have elevated his response from transcendent comedy to perfect comedy.

  El-Sayed is getting a lot of grief for his pandering slopulism, and rightly so. But on the other hand: Did we really learn anything from that answer? Wasn’t that answer — in context — a dump truck full of nonsense in a campaign that is already a vast, breathtaking mountain range of nonsense? Because there is nothing remotely serious about the agenda of the Democratic Socialists of America and their fellow travelers. It’s a hodgepodge of shallow sound bites that appeal to morons, and with that being true, isn’t “I’ll raise money through a regressive tax cut that I have no power to implement” just the vocalization of currents that were already obvious?

  And yes, I snipped out that "hodgepodge of shallow sound bites that appeal to morons" quote yesterday, describing the "issues" page of one of our NH local candidates.

• And on the LFOD Watch… New Yorker writer Brady Brickner-Wood wistfully describes Graham Platner’s Very Online Undoing.

  In Maine, where I live, Platner generated swift and feverish support, the type of political enthusiasm that’s impossible to manufacture. Genuine excitement fomented among my milieu of twenty- and thirtysomethings—we finally had a guy we could throw our weight behind and organize around, someone who embodied the sort of uncompromising leftist politics that, just months before, had appeared unlikely to take hold in a state whose voters had elected Susan Collins, the Republican incumbent, to the U.S. Senate for five consecutive terms. Like much of New England, Maine has an independent-minded, anti-establishment electorate, with third-party candidates, Tea Party Republicans, and mildly progressive Democrats all achieving statewide electoral success over the past few decades. On the surface, Platner’s politics seemed like a non-starter for a Maine Senate candidate, and a prohibitive obstacle when courting the state’s rural, right-leaning voters. But his anti-establishment attitude and antagonistic relationship to power made his message resonate among unexpected populations, including the northern working-class demographics that have increasingly moved away from Democratic candidates in recent elections. Platner is fluent in the language of “freedom,” a word that goes a long way in Maine. (I grew up across the border, in New Hampshire, where the state motto, “Live Free or Die,” is a jingoistic, oft-evoked rallying cry.) The brand of freedom he presented, however, was not the libertarian ideal of uninhibited personal sovereignty but a more collective vision rooted in economic security, “the freedom to live lives with dignity and fulfillment, the freedom to not be ripped off by a for-profit health-care system, the freedom to have a roof over our heads that we own,” as he put it.

  "Jingoistic." Or worse, "libertarian". Much better to have the "freedom" to get stuff that the government will force billionaires to pay for.