dctoedt

In the quest for political power, you can't spend what you don't have — and that could well be the foremost benefit of near-confiscatory taxation of the ultra-rich, much as we did in the 1950s and early 1960s. Perhaps then the drive for status might take forms other than the urge to pile up more and more wealth as a sign of one's superiority.

In school long ago, I learned to do multiplication and division using logarithm tables, and to compute square- and cube roots using pencil and paper. Haven't done any of those things since then.

> How many groups assimilated into WASP austerity or self-deprecation?

1. Austerity and self-deprecation are hardly unique to "WASP culture" (quote unquote). I imagine you know South Asians, Blacks, Hispanics, East Asians, etc., who engage in those practices to a greater or lesser extent.

2. Among those who do practice austerity and self-deprecation, the extent and degree of the practice can vary with time and circumstances.

3. There's a deeper problem: When it comes to understanding why we human animals behave the way we do, we're much like the alchemists of old. In astronmomical terms, behavioral scientists are still working to get to the equivalent of Ptolemy. They've got a ways to go to reach the level even of Copernicus or Kepler, let alone Hubble and LeMaître.

Historically, assimilation into American culture tends to happen over two to three generations.

• One pair of my grandparents were immigrants. Grandpa built a business but to the end of his life his English was tough to understand. Grandma hardly spoke English at all. They lived in a neighborhood surrounded by other immigrants from their home country.

• Their kids — my mom and her siblings — grew up speaking English at school and with each other (apart from when they switched to cut us kids out of the conversation) but not with their parents.

• Their many grandkids — my generation — grew up speaking only English. AFAIK, only one of us knows any of our grandparents' language at all (she took it in school IIRC).

• I also speak neither German nor Irish Gaelic, the languages of my immigrant ancestors on my dad's side of the family. And for practical purposes my own kids speak only English. (My grandkids aren't yet old enough to talk.)

I've repeatedly seen the same phenomenon here in Texas. Example: I have nephews whose great-grandparents on the other side of the family were Mexican immigrants. My nephews speak zero Spanish (AFAIK) and are as American as anyone.

I've read that this is a widespread phenomenon among immigrants from every country.

So: Patience — assimilation into American culture will happen.

> you're [sic] criticism overlooks the most important part.

I wasn't trying to present a balanced assessment of Anglo culture, which has clearly been a world leader in many, many respects. I was reacting to your seeming insistence — which appears to be getting more pronounced — that immigrants should embrace Anglo culture as superior to their own.

There are good- and bad elements in every culture. Cafeteria-style cultural mixing is how progress happens (modulo intellectual-property law).

> That American system is the bequest of America's British and Dutch founders: Anglo law, social and political norms, and civic culture, and Anglo/Dutch views towards markets and commerce. ... It's about correctly understanding the source of our own prosperity.

Now you're overvalorizing what you refer to as Anglo social and political norms. Those norms weren't a monolith — neither were they an unalloyed good.

The Anglos in question famously included enslavers of kidnapped Africans, mainly but not exclusively in the American South. Our whole constitutional system was bastardized to keep those worthies on-side for ratification.

To be sure, the spectrum of Anglo norms included abolition, mainly in the North. But in the South, those norms also included secession and civil war to preserve enslavement as an economic and social system.

IIRC, the enslaver class were largely of English stock — although many white southerners were of Protestant Scots-Irish descent (e.g., John C. Calhoun), and some of Welsh (e.g., Jefferson Davis).

Now let's talk about immigrants' cultural contributions: The residents of some regions of Germany were no slouches commercially. In the U.S., they and Irish Catholics were largely anti-slavery. German immigrants especially were pro-Union; that led to violence against them during the Civil War by Confederates. [0]

(I don't know enough about Dutch contributions to say anything useful about them.)

Bottom line: Let's not fetishize the Anglo-Dutch origins of the American system. The finest crop seeds will be useless without decent soil, water, and light. Seeds don't provide those things. And as summarized above, in our case the seed was far from uniformly good.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nueces_massacre

I think you're underselling the value in that time and place of the "just plain folks" who immigrated here — such as your family and, in earlier generations, mine.

My immigrant ancestors were farmers, ordinary workers, and small-business people. Not one of them had much education. But in the main they had reasonable shares of motivation, family orientation, and work ethic. They had the gumption to leave their various countries and come here where opportunities were greater — just as you said was the case for "desis like [you]."

My people filled a need when they came to the U.S. at various times in the 19th and 20th centuries. I imagine your people did the same. Sure, in purely-economic terms they didn't make the near-term contributions that their descendants have. But life isn't a snapshot, it's a movie.

> we also are "choosing" to let people starve, die of cancer, etc.

It's debatable whether taking half of billionaires' wealth would materially advance the efforts in those areas.

What seems far less debatable is the political consequences of the accummulation of so much wealth — coupled with essentially zero legal restrictions on the use of that wealth in the quest for (governmental) power.

> It's amazing for people who couldn't build anything before, but now can.

(Raises hand.) I'm doing things with my online law-school course materials, in just a few minutes using Claude, that I never even considered doing before because I didn't want to take the time to improve my rudimentary JavaScript- and CSS skills. Instead of just a fairly-simple, single-page HTML document, Claude is helping me turn the materials into something genuinely useful for both my students and practitioners.

> something like "you know, I really don't think this is my thing."

Phrases I've heard:

- This isn't my favorite

- Um, not really my cup of tea

> the county (of which there are 254 in Texas)

Fun fact: Texas's counties range in population from ~5.1 million (Harris — Houston) to less than 500 (Loving, King, Kenedy [sic])

Not to be conspiratorial, but about an hour ago I saw this in The Economist: "Russia’s grey-zone attacks on Europe are growing more brazen"

[QUOTE:]

Russia has been staging covert operations and deniable provocations against European countries for many years. Since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022 they have increased. These have included incursions by reconnaissance drones, hacking, arson, parcel bombs targeting cargo flights and plots to kill executives of leading European arms firms. In recent months the pace of such shadowy attacks appears to have risen again. The Russian operations have three main goals, according to analysts and security officials: trying to coerce European countries into halting their support for Ukraine; raising the costs of providing that support; and attempting to make NATO look powerless.

[/QUOTE]

And of course there've been "suspicious" cable cuts in the Baltic Sea and other European waters ....

https://www.economist.com/europe/2026/09/21/russias-grey-zon...

> I would LOVE to own a laundromat.

My (late) kid brother did that for a number of years. Big time sink and PITA.

> And then nobody will vote for them ever again, and it'll be a utopia after the rebuild. Playing the long game.

(Sarcasm noted.) There was a bitter joke about Islamist takeovers by elections after the Arab Spring: "One man [literally], one vote, one time."

> Cleaning the bathroom, on the other hand, would leave my mind largely free to think whatever I feel like.

I haven't calculated a cube root by hand since, what, sixth grade? (It's been so long I don't remember.) I'd hate to spend the mental cycles having to do that kind of task.

No, I didn't know that. Just did so — thanks for the tip.

[delayed]

Comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49411243 by @dabedee is dead from downvoting but shouldn't be.

"Verbing": For some reason, to me the use of "impact" as a verb has always been fingernails on a chalkboard. But it's hard to see the distinction between that and using "access" as a verb (as in the linked C & H strip), which seems unremarkable.

> "And if you really care about your health you should do them every 3 months to catch problems early!"

When I moved to Houston just after law school, I found a doctor and made an appointment to get a routine physical exam; I hadn't had one since getting out of the Navy three years earlier.

Doctor: So what brings you here?

Me: A triennial physical exam.

Doctor (incredulously): You get a physical exam three times a year?

Me: No ....

FTA: "By doing so, Trump is making good on a promise he made almost 10 years ago to go back to the steam system after hearing a sailor praise it while visiting a ship during his first term."

FTA: "By doing so, Trump is making good on a promise he made almost 10 years ago to go back to the steam system after hearing a sailor praise it while visiting a ship during his first term.

"But since Trump said in an interview with Time in 2017 that he told the Navy to go back to “goddamn steam,” top Navy and industry leaders have resisted the move because of the enormous expense to tear out such a complex system that was integral to the design of the Ford class."

> Having done both [software and law],lots of lawyers are also nerds who just like to tinker with the law and words

Having also done both: In legal drafting work, there's less systematic pre-release testing before the equivalent of a "program" is loosed upon the world. There's not much in the way of counterparts to software unit testing and regression testing, in part because legal-drafting clients can be vociferous in demanding that their lawyers keep costs down.

Lawyers who like to tinker with words include contract drafters and litigation counsel, plus lobbyists trying to influence draft legislation and regulations. Such tinkering can fuck things up more often and at greater scale — e.g., by inflicting compulsory burdens and costs on others — than can most programmers.

I'm not-infrequently dismayed by the quality of the contracts I review for clients because of the "tinkering with words" by the lawyers on the other side of the deal. Back when I did IP litigation, I was sometimes likewise dismayed by the bullshit arguments that some lawyers felt free to make in their court papers because what the hell, the worst that can happen is almost never more than the judge just saying "no." And as mostly a law professor these days, I review court opinions all the time and am regularly amazed how judges (and their law clerks, such as Rayiner used to be) can be so patient in responding to such arguments.

> The complete transformation and legitimization of betting culture in the United States has been surreal to watch.

Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress implicitly predicted this (albeit for Luna, which was obviously modeled on the U.S.).

(Heinlein was right about so many things ....)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress

FTA: "AI may be lowering the cost of operating outside a traditional firm by allowing one worker to perform tasks that once required a team, support staff, or firm-based infrastructure."

And from a WaPo summary: "Contrary to the future envisioned by doomers, AI will drive more independence in the labor market by reducing the costs to owning your own business." https://wapo.st/3ToNK0o (gift link)