ctlby

6 ms·

1.
by ctlby 7y ago
Prosperity is causally prior to taxation, not the other way around. To quote the great Bryan Caplan, "It takes a colossal host to sustain colossal parasitism."
2.
by ctlby 7y ago
Your argument against minority rule is to invoke... the courts? "Majority rule is great. Except when it does stuff I don't like, in which case I'll lean on minority rule by an infinitesimal number of unaccountable dudes in
3.
by ctlby 7y ago
You seem to be positing a world where “bad” decisions are somehow kept off the ballot, leaving only a menu of “good” options for the wise majority to enact. Well, that’s not our world. When a CA gay marriage ban comes up for vote, it’s imp
4.
by ctlby 7y ago
No, not literally a smoking hole (though I believe arson was a problem for a time?) But as close to one as you’re going to get in the USA. I can’t disagree more with your majoritarian arguments. You (and I) would probably object when, e.g.
5.
by ctlby 7y ago
> doesn’t suggest any useful policy All good points. Some blue cities do very well and some do very poorly. I have to conclude that the problems are mostly exogenous to policy. > being “blue” leads to failure To be clear, I was never
6.
by ctlby 7y ago
It's easy to change my mind on this: just provide me a decision rule that'll put rural decay data points on the "failure" side of the classification boundary while leaving urban decay on the other.
7.
by ctlby 7y ago
I earlier acknowledged the difficulty of coming up with a reasonable definition of "failed." I will say that I don't think it's enough to be simply below-average in literacy or above-average in crime or whatever; you rea
8.
by ctlby 7y ago
I'm not inclined to think that slow demographic decline constitutes failure. Even if you disagree with that, my preferred definition has the additional "law and order" requirement, and I've never seen a rural example of
9.
by ctlby 7y ago
Not sure why you were downvoted. This is the best answer I've ever received to my question.
10.
by ctlby 7y ago
I put the word in quotes to indicate the tendentiousness of any potential definition. I personally don't think of any part of America as having "failed," but if you force me to pick, I'd choose any area that suffered fro
11.
by ctlby 7y ago
These have been the rules for nearly 250 years. Why are you only up in arms about it now?
12.
by ctlby 7y ago
Curiously enough, the only parts of the country that have ever approached anything resembling "failure" are (heavily progressive) urban areas like NYC and Detroit.
13.
by ctlby 7y ago
Can you point to the law McConnell violated in doing this? And if not, in what sense is the current court illegitimate? Finally, how does this in any way address my question about the president "seizing" power?
14.
by ctlby 7y ago
Can you explain how the current president "seized" power? Was there some extra-legal mechanism at work that I'm not aware of?
15.
by ctlby 7y ago
Can you explain in what way this is a "Jim Crow era practice?"
16.
by ctlby 7y ago
Capitalism only "kills" people in a counterfactual sense. For example, you might posit that, had society gone out of its way to provide medical care to a sick individual, that person still would be alive. But that counterfactual i
17.
by ctlby 7y ago
If we take climate change activists at their word, the answer is a resounding YES. There is a full-blown crisis brewing, one that can only be resolved with massive social changes ("if everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little
18.
by ctlby 7y ago
Your linked paper does not discuss natural disasters at all. How is this an answer to the parent comment’s concerns?
19.
by ctlby 7y ago
You're confusing concepts. Regression to the mean doesn't depend on any IID assumption. Conditional expectations are right in the definition! In the bivariate normal case (height, intelligence, etc), it's a necessary conseque
20.
by ctlby 7y ago
> It's rational for the company to try to pull them Aren't there issues with follow-on offerings? By taking the entire IPO pot for itself, the company will probably struggle to find investors if/when it needs to come back
21.
by ctlby 7y ago
The only real practitioner in this thread has one of the only downvoted comments. Incredible.
22.
by ctlby 8y ago
I’m not mad at anyone, you simply haven’t explained anything. You just keep repeating the standard litany of Republican sins. I never disputed Republicans’ attempt to give themselves an electoral advantage. I just disagree that this is cons
23.
by ctlby 8y ago
Suppose they had in fact won the largest House majority in history. What exactly would it change? How would NN be faring right now? Moral grandstanding aside, I don't see the relevance of any of this.
24.
by ctlby 8y ago
You're unnecessarily fixated on the 1% threshold I set out earlier. While nothing you said has changed my mind (my estimate is still <1%), I'm not really interested in the exact number. My point is that your concerns are qualit
25.
by ctlby 8y ago
Dude, you're just hand-waving at this point. Add up all the gerrymandering you want. Maybe it gets you to 2%. Maybe 5%. Heck, let's say it accounts for 100% of Republican House members! Wave your wand and make it disappear. The Ho
26.
by ctlby 8y ago
I cannot overstate my doubts enough. Can you point me to evidence (aside from Stacey Abrams' sour grapes) that this swung an election?
27.
by ctlby 8y ago
I'm really not trying to move the goalposts. It just seems weird to use the House to argue about the incredible effectiveness of the Republican's underhanded tactics--when they don't even control the one body where those tact
28.
by ctlby 8y ago
Your article explains the House of Representatives makeup in what the NYT concedes is the single most gerrymandered state in the country. Should we really be generalizing from that? Regardless. The biggest obstacle to NN is currently the Se
29.
by ctlby 8y ago
The House of Representatives is currently in Democratic hands, so the system there would appear to be working as intended. Meanwhile, the Senate and the Presidency are controlled by Republicans, and gerrymandering is utterly irrelevant to
30.
by ctlby 8y ago
Do you genuinely believe these things explain >1% of Republican electoral success? If so, can you explain your thinking?

More ›