According to the state table, the average household income for the bottom quintile of household incomes in Louisiana is $13,319 and the average value of Medicaid to said quintile is $20,053, so this will effectively remove 16.1% of their household income. That’s behind only New Mexico.

And the House Speaker, the guy leading the group that proposal just came from, is from Louisiania.

That seems pretty impactful. I mean, those guys are going to be able to buy rather fewer eggs than they had been able to buy.

The poor got a custom performance of great political theater and a small measure of protection against the dreaded femboy scourge. Don’t tell me that that’s not worth more than the money!

President Trump endorsed the House plan earlier this morning, despite vowing yesterday to not cut Medicaid.

Shocking. President Trump had been such a paragon of truthfulness and integrity of character, a man of total consistency in his statements, right up until this point.

I’d like to see an economist explain the rationale behind the first-sale doctrine applying to IP on physical media but not if it’s not tied to physical media in the US (note that the EU currently does approximate applying it to non-physical media). I have a really hard time seeing a reason for that.

I can believe that the doctrine of first sale shouldn’t be a thing. And I can believe that it should be a thing, and should apply to all forms of media. But applying to one but not the other seems like a pretty hard sell to me.

Physical copies degrade over time, whereas digital information may not. Works in digital format can be reproduced without any flaws and can be disseminated worldwide without much difficulty. Thus, applying the first sale doctrine to digital copies affects the market for the original to a greater degree than transfers of physical copies.

Okay. But…so what? Why do we care whether the market for the original is affected? If that were a factor, wouldn’t we object to the legality of making backups? Wouldn’t we treat more-durable forms of media differently than less-durable forms of media, or take into account the decay in value of the IP itself that lives on the media?

Like, I could understand maybe an argument that permitting a vendor to restrict physical media transfers of IP is economically desirable but simply isn’t enforceable, ergo we’re better off without a lot of halfway attempts to restrain it. But I’ve never seen it explained with that as a rationale.

In most cases, I’d guess that factories don’t need cameras or AI image analysis to track output, because workers aren’t simply putting their output into a single pool with the output of other workers. The factory already has an easy way to know how much output the worker is producing, and, no doubt, has a record of that.

There might be fields of work where that’s not the case, where it’s hard to know what any one worker is actually producing. But I’m dubious that it’s gonna be people doing assembly work in a factory.

There might be more-valuable uses to record and analyze workers in a factory. I remember that in Cheaper by the Dozen, the father works as a motion efficiency consultant — was in the heyday of US doing assembly-line factory work, and he’d go in with a video camera, record workers working, and then break down how workers were working and see if there were different motions that workers could be trained to use to increase output.

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

A time and motion study (or time–motion study) is a business efficiency technique combining the time study work of Frederick Winslow Taylor with the motion study work of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth (the same couple as is best known through the biographical 1950 film and book Cheaper by the Dozen). It is a major part of scientific management (Taylorism). After its first introduction, time study developed in the direction of establishing standard times, while motion study evolved into a technique for improving work methods. The two techniques became integrated and refined into a widely accepted method applicable to the improvement and upgrading of work systems. This integrated approach to work system improvement is known as methods engineering[1] and it is applied today to industrial as well as service organizations, including banks, schools and hospitals.[2]

But I’m skeptical that trying to find workers who aren’t producing output in a factory using AI vision stuff is going to be all that useful.

If those start backing up, I would guess that Congress is going to get grouchy. I wonder who actually passed that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Information_Act_(United_States)

Looks like the House was unanimous. Wikipedia doesn’t have the Senate, but it’d be very surprising if they differed much.

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

This amendment was unanimous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Drug_Abuse_Act_of_1986

This amendment was 95%-ish in favor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_Act_of_1974

This amendment doesn’t show the House vote, but the Senate was ~90% in favor.

[EDIT: This last one actually restricted disclosure of some personal information of citizens without their written authorization, so it’s a minor move in the other direction]

So I’m pretty sure that both parties want FOIA.

If you remember, Trump was making an enormous deal out of the fact that he was going to “release JFK files” during this campaign. In general, I think that a lot of supporters are suspicious that the government is Up To Something and want to watch it.

Also, the Heritage Foundation was behind Project 2025. Their website describes the Freedom of Information Act in pretty positive terms.

I don’t think that FOIA is likely going to be at much risk. From what I’ve read, I think that in general, a lot of people supporting Trump are suspicious that the progressive bureaucrats are going to go get up to no good progressive things in shadowy confines unless the sensible conservative public keeps an eye on them.

It sounds like they haven’t gotten access in this case. I’m actually kind of curious as to the impact where DOGE has gotten access to material. Like, it may constrain federal agencies, but does it have any impact on DOGE once it has that information? Like, what happens if a DOGE employee walks off with a bunch of information?

There are a couple issues at stake here, I think.

• First, classified information. My impression from past reading that there are supposed to be two DOGE people who are authorized to work on classified information.

• Second, what vetting has occurred in general.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Government_Efficiency#Known_DOGE_employees

  Edward Coristine, the 19-year-old son of the owner of snack company LesserEvil,[139] (LesserEvil has distanced themselves from Edward Coristine)[140] had been previously fired from an internship at Arizona-based data-security company Path Network in 2022 for “leaking internal information” to competing businesses. He boasted on Discord, weeks after being fired, about having retained access to the servers.[110][141][142] In 2021, Coristine launched Tesla.Sexy LLC, a business that manages web domains for image hosting services, some of them registered in Russia.[142][143] Some of the web domains managed by Coristine include children-sex.party, child-porn.store, kkk-is-cool.club, nigga.rentals, nigga-sex.download, owns-a-slave.shop, raping-women.club, ketamine-rape.date, rape.business, and rapes-wo.men, promoting the sale of child sexual abuse material, racial slurs, rape, and the Ku Klux Klan.[142][144] Coristine claims to protect the privacy of his users, stating, “All your images are encrypted. We do not log IP addresses, device agents or anything else.”[142] He also collaborated with ‘The Com’, a social network of hackers associated with cybercriminal activity.[145] According to experts, Coristine’s past activities raise security clearance issues.[146]

  It might be perfectly-acceptable to hire Coristine for many positions in the government. But I do not think that it is a good idea to choose him for the DOGE position, given a recent history of leaking data and retaining access to IT systems. It’s not just Coristine in particular, but the question of what vetting DOGE has actually done. If Coristine made it through DOGE’s vetting, presumably someone else could as well. And those people are touching a lot of data.

• Third, what information security procedures are happening with extracted data? I’m sure that various departments have their own information security procedures. Whether they are themselves sufficient is an fair question, but this is pulling data from a lot into one place.

• Fourth, what review is happening before publicly-releasing data? It sounds like some material is being publicly-published without conferring with the people who are normally responsible for its security. Sometimes, it’s not immediately obvious what impact a release of information might have. For an infamous example, Trump’s tweeting of a reconaissance satellite image during his first term, which exposed the resolution that US satellite reconaissance systems are capable of. Trump’s response was that he had the authority to release it, which is probably true. But I strongly suspect that he did not understand the information security implications of doing so, and I doubt that he checked before releasing that information. I would guess that Trump simply thought that there was nothing secret in the area being imaged, so no problem, and didn’t think about the implications of exposing imaging properties. Information security is hard, and even people who specialize in it get things wrong. DOGE is not specialized in the data of the agencies that it’s looking into; its people probably aren’t in a good position to make calls as to the impact of public release of data.

Macron’s strategy was to spend as much time as possible with Trump, hoping to use their relationship to advocate for Ukraine and Europe.

So, I’m not French or European, so this is an outsider’s standpoint.

But I’ve read past material in the French media claiming that Macron has historically strongly favored personal discussions between himself and foreign leaders, having processes that cut out the French foreign office and relied upon his personal interactions. I believe the phrase they used was “hyperpersonalized” diplomacy.

kagis

The article I was thinking of was much longer and focused specifically on France, but here’s another talking about it and using the same “hyperpersonalized” term, so I don’t think that it’s just that author:

https://www.politico.eu/article/emmanuel-macron-ukraine-war-vladimir-putin-russia-diplomacy-france-documentary/

The film confirms what Elysée hacks have known for a long time — that Macron runs France’s foreign policy single-handedly with a small team of advisers. During the 115 minutes of the documentary, France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian makes an appearance just once and is never filmed speaking. It’s Macron’s diplomatic advisor Bonne who discusses with Macron the French president’s phone calls with Putin, who listens in on the calls and discusses the Elysée’s official statements on the subject. Macron’s advisers aren’t seen challenging the president in any meaningful way.

“[The film shows] a diplomacy that is operated by a handful of people, as if they were running a start-up, as if everything could be resolved with the mobile numbers of ‘Olaf’, ‘Volodymyr’ and ‘Vladimir’, (without neglecting the importance of direct contacts of course),” Le Monde’s Washington correspondent Piotr Smolar wrote on Twitter.

French presidents traditionally have more control over their country’s foreign policy than other western leaders who have to wrestle with strong parliaments or foreign affairs ministries. But for Duclos, the documentary exposes the weaknesses of a hyper-centralized diplomatic machine.

This is talking about a French documentary, which might have driven the article that I read as well.

I don’t know whether that’s a fair, objective assessment. I don’t have the familiarity with French political currents to make that call. But it at least sounds plausible to me.

The problem is that Macron’s time leading France has seen several major foreign policy fiascos for France, and a number of them center around what looks to me like Macron getting an incorrect assessment via that personal interaction route.

• Macron personally interacted with Australian leadership surrounding the submarine deal, and was confident that French defense contractors had it in the bag. Then, AUKUS went through, and Macron in particular was blindsided.

• Macron aimed at personal phone calls with Putin in the runup to the invasion of Ukraine, and was convinced that Russia would not involve Ukraine and that he could personally influence Putin.

I think that there was one other big issue, something where he was negotiating with another EU member, but I can’t recall what it was now.

There have also been a few articles that have made it to the English-language press on smaller issues that have made me a little suspicious that Macron hasn’t, perhaps, been as effective as someone in the diplomatic corps might have been.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/20/europe/macron-cyclone-mayotte-french-swear/index.html

Macron tells cyclone-hit Mayotte islanders to be grateful they are French after facing jeers

French President Emmanuel Macron has faced jeers from locals on the cyclone-battered French overseas territory of Mayotte, telling them they should be “happy to be in France, because if it wasn’t France you’d be 10,000 times even more in the s***.”

Like, Macron might be perfectly right on the financial side, but I am deeply suspicious that that was not the best statement to make, regardless.

Then I remember some point where he was calling Italy a “rogue member of the EU” or similar. At this point, there was Article 7 activity against both Poland and Hungary, and the UK was in the Brexit process. I remember commenting something like “whatever the merit or lack thereof of attacking Italy, you need to end some of the conflicts in the EU. With this, you have one of the six largest members leaving the EU, you’re trying to strip voting rights from another, and you’re calling another a ‘rogue member’. You cannot have this many fights at once. You will paralyze the EU.”

https://www.politico.eu/article/emmanuel-macrons-italian-snubs/

Now, okay. I have Trump running my country, and I think that Trump is considerably more objectionable than Macron as a diplomat. But I am hesitant to say that Macron doing one-on-ones or personally-driving diplomacy with foreign leaders has been all that great for France.

Why the fuck is no one just cutting eggs out of their diet?

All you have to do is stop buying them and demand will dry up and prices will come back down

You’re not wrong, but on the other hand, plain eggs are goddamn delicious. Not like there’s some kind of soy-based equivalent experience.

And I’m sure that people will cut them out of their diet – the price will keep going up until the amount of demand at that price matches the number of eggs available. And there is some price where any given person will do that.

Hasn’t hit that point for me yet, though. I love my eggs.

I was reading that a major constraint on chicken farmers in the US is that they have to rebuild their stock after huge losses in chickens, and you cannot just instantly magic up an infinite supply of new chickens – takes a while to scale that up. It sounded like the companies that raise chickens are not the same as the ones that produce eggs – like, if you’re an egg-producing-farm, you’re competing on the open market with individuals to buy chickens. So it’s gonna drive up the price for random individual who just wants a chicken and buys from the same chicken-raisers.

All that being said, if a chicken is going for $6, I cannot imagine that the price of a chicken is a huge part of the price of eggs. Like, feed, a hutch, care, heating, maintenance of the infrastructure…that’s gotta outweigh the price of the chicken substantially.

If you ever want to spend more on eggs and poultry products, getting chickens is a great option. It isn’t cheaper by a long shot when you factor in your time and proper care.

If you want cheap eggs, be friends with someone who has chickens.

Note that the same approach also works well with boats and IMHO, albeit to a lesser degree, pets.

On a related note, I wonder whether it’s actually mandatory to have that portrait of the current President hung on the wall you see in a lot of federal agencies. A lot of them do, but I don’t know whether that’s actually a requirement.

kagis

Looks like it isn’t, that it’s just a convention.

https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/verify/verify-are-government-agencies-required-to-display-portraits-of-current-presidents/285-572232006

VERIFY: Are government agencies required to display portraits of current presidents?

We turned to the U.S. General Services Administration, the GSA, to verify our viewer’s question. The simple answer is no, according to the Office of Strategic Communication for GSA, which is an independent agency of the U.S. government that helps manage federal agencies.

It’s response: “There is no regulation that specifies that federal agencies must display portraits of the sitting President and Vice President in the space they occupy. However, GSA displays portraits of the President and Vice President in the public areas of the buildings that GSA owns and operates, including locations leased by GSA, where the building is fully occupied by the federal government.”

I don’t know if you’re likely to see Trump-kissing-Musk’s-feet video displays showing up en masse, but I could certainly imagine agencies removing the portrait of Trump, if there’s no requirement to display it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBH9TmeJN_M

We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically-affected. We want — when they wake up in the morning, we want them not to want not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.

— Russ Vought, current head of OPM (the federal government’s “HR office”), in a 2023 talk

I’d say that he’s probably successfully managed to get the “harming morale” part down, at any rate.

It would expose librarians to a class one misdemeanor charge. That’s punishable by up to a year in jail and a $2,000 fine.

Representative Will Mortenson, R-Fort Pierre, said that’s wrong.

“We got to do better than this, folks,” Mortenson said. “There’s work that we can do in this policy area, but heading right to sending the librarians to jail is not cutting the mustard.”

Yeah, I don’t think that this is reasonable.

If you want to filter Internet content on library computers – which I assume is the issue here, not kids checking out Fanny Hill – then just say “libraries in South Dakota need to run filtering software package X”. It won’t be perfect, but then, hey, neither will librarians, and dumping the risks of that imperfection on them serves no purpose.

https://youtu.be/Jxb-Szj8jVU?t=1449

you can’t follow people

He said “Lemmy” but probably meant “Threadiverse”, and mbin does support both the Twitter-style following user model and the Reddit-style forum model.

To use fedia.io as an example:

https://fedia.io/people

I dunno about piefed, haven’t used it.

Not a very large userbase.

Misleading speech is one thing, but Trump is pretty far outside the normal.

Donald Trump

swaying to the Village People’s anthem YMCA.

Wait…what now? I don’t listen to them and am pretty out-of-touch with music/fan-identity stuff, but aren’t the Village People a gay-themed thing?

kagis

Huh. Apparently so. Not just me who is puzzled.

https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/01/20/village-people-gay-trump/

Just what, exactly, is going on with Village People? And why are they performing at Trump events?

The decision to perform at Trump’s inauguration incurred the wrath of fans, especially as “Y.M.C.A” and other songs by the band have been embraced as queer anthems.

One angry fan wrote on X: “What a f**king, ungrateful, pathetic sellout! If it wasn’t for the LGBTQ community, the Village People wouldn’t have gained such popularity and “YMCA” wouldn’t have become such a mega hit.”

“No surprise that this guy happens to be the ONLY original group member who WASN’T gay,” they continued, referring to Willis.

Another said: “You would think that as a band founded and focused around queer culture, you’d have a little more respect for queer people. Not to mention a backbone, for yourself.”

To understand what’s currently going on with Village People, and how they ended up performing for a President-elect famous for his “grim” anti-LGBTQ+ views, it’s helpful to look at where they came from.

https://www.out.com/gay-music/village-people-trump-inauguration-explained

Jim Newman, a former member of the band for eight years, put out a video on Threads expressing his disappointment at the current version of the Village People.

“The Village People that were around for about 40 years had a strong, loyal gay following,” he said. “There was a lawsuit about four years ago, they took away the name Village People from our band, the band that had been around forever, a lot of originals still in the band, and they gave it to an ex-member who was fired a couple years in. And he started a new group, and that is the Village People that performs. Or Village People would never ever perform at a Trump rally, we would never give him the right to use those songs, and we would never slap the face of the strong, especially gay audience that made us who we are today.”

I think that part of the reason that Trump’s met with success is that he’s adapted to a social media environment.

Like, historically, messages went out through media. So you had someone who was at least reasonably educated and probably at least somewhat-informed (like, you’d have a reporter that specialized in politics or whatever) as an intermediary. So you see the material with analysis.

When you have maybe five news channels on the television and maybe a couple local newspapers as your prime source of news, the press is really important.

But that’s not the environment we live in any more. Most people aren’t subscribing to paid news media, and Google and some others have absorbed a fair bit of advertisement money, so ad-supported news media is harder than before.

During Trump’s first term, he focused on directly communicating via social media.

He also set up his own social media network; that’ll even-more isolate some consumers.

So in a lot of case, Joe Blow is placed in a position where:

• He may not be in a great position to be able to evaluate the truth of a statement. If he’s not seeing or doesn’t trust conflicting media, it’s possible to push outright lies. Trump has said a lot of things that aren’t even internally-consistent with his own statements.

• Especially for people who have particular issues that upset them, it’s possible to push messages that are more-targeted than in the past. Like, let’s say you care about, oh, immigration. If you read MigrantNewsVlog or something, you can only be seeing material about your pet issue. As long as you agree with Trump on that, at least in sentiment, you might be okay with it.

• He has to identify the actual important information. Currently, a lot of social media optimizes for what gets engagement. Things that make people angry get engagement. So if someone keeps putting out material that produces outrage, anger, and fear, it generates engagement:

  https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/16/media/steve-bannon-reliable-sources/index.html

  “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told Lewis. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

I mean, he did this through his first term. It was not politically-fatal to him to say very controversial things.

Also, specifically on Ukraine, most Americans just don’t care that much or know that much about foreign policy. It’s not just Ukraine, but in general. Foreign policy rarely plays a huge role in domestic politics. If there’s something that’s gonna really make the public upset, it’s most-likely not going to be foreign policy, but domestic policy.

Also, I’d point out that these political communication issues that are broader issues than just Trump. Like, there’s nothing about this that’s something that only Trump can do. There’s nothing about this that only politicians can do. And there’s nothing about this that only Americans can do. This is something that other places will also run into.

My guess is that there will be a bit of an arms race as communications strategies evolve to deal with our new technological environment. Some of it will be what kind of information people put out. Some of it will be tweaking the recommendations algorithm on social media that does recommendations, I think – I don’t actually think that optimizing for outrage is optimal, because if being on social media is just an unmitigated flood of unpleasant, sensationalist ragebait, users start tuning out. In the short term, it might make people use a social network more, but I suspect that it’s not a good idea in the long term. I don’t think that clickbait titles are the long-run optimal strategy – like, sure, in the short term, a clickbait title will win A/B testing. But in the long run, the publication putting out the material loses credibility – one starts to say “oh, yeah, it’s those guys” when seeing an URL. Maybe something like Bluesky’s approach – which I understand uses distributed curation lists – will become the dominant paradigm on the social, and may be more-resilient to clickbait.

But I don’t think that what we see in 2025 is going to simply be “the future”, because there will be continued adaptation on all sides: by people generating news, people writing material, social media networks, and consumers. When radio was new in America, FDR took advantage of it with the Fireside Chats.

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

The fireside chats were a series of evening radio addresses given by Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 32nd President of the United States, between 1933 and 1944. Roosevelt spoke with familiarity to millions of Americans about recovery from the Great Depression, the promulgation of the Emergency Banking Act in response to the banking crisis, the 1936 recession, New Deal initiatives, and the course of World War II. On radio, he quelled rumors, countered conservative-dominated newspapers, and explained his policies directly to the American people. His tone and demeanor communicated self-assurance during times of despair and uncertainty. Roosevelt was regarded as an effective communicator on radio, and the fireside chats kept him in high public regard throughout his presidency. Their introduction was later described as a “revolutionary experiment with a nascent media platform.”[1]

Roosevelt believed that his administration’s success depended upon a favorable dialogue with the electorate, possible only through methods of mass communication, and that it would allow him to take the initiative. The use of radio for direct appeals was perhaps the most important of Roosevelt’s innovations in political communication.[2]: 153  Roosevelt’s opponents had control of most newspapers in the 1930s and press reports were under their control and involved their editorial commentary. Historian Betty Houchin Winfield says, “He and his advisers worried that newspapers’ biases would affect the news columns and rightly so.”[3] Historian Douglas B. Craig says that Roosevelt “offered voters a chance to receive information unadulterated by newspaper proprietors’ bias” through the new medium of radio.[4]

So we’ve had politicians move to direct communication before, and then back-and-forth adaptation in response. I expect that we will this time as well.