I am so enjoying the JD Vance couch and dolphin memes, and Walz's "these guys are weird" attacks. For a long time, the tenor of Democratic and leftist politics has been outrage and indignation, which are loser stances. I would love for us to be doing the mocking.

I meant to post about the Supreme Court ruling last month, but it got away from me. But wtf is up with Newsome ordering homeless camps cleared?! Is he really just treating the entire homeless population of California like invasive kudzu that needs to be cleared when it takes root? Is this actually popular with Californians?

I do have an actual question: a few years ago, a consultant told Heebieville council that we needed to work on being Boise compliant. Martin v Boise was a rule that "homeless persons cannot be punished for sleeping outside on public property in the absence of adequate alternatives." The result was that he was telling us we needed to become Boise-compliant, ie have enough beds available for homeless people before we tackled homeless camps. (We have not followed this advice.)

Is Boise-compliance still a thing, in light of the Supreme Court ruling? Or is it dead?

Second question: how do people not realize that homeless people will still exist, if you run them off this one spot?!

Finally: apparently there are 180K homeless people in California. That's not actually that much housing. You could provide enough beds with 600 hotels. Obviously I know that sheer resources is not the actual roadblock, but it's worth pointing out that it's barely a roadblock at all.

NickS writes: After reading The Unaccountability Machine I read Recoding America by Jennifer Pahlka, and have been really impressed by it.

I'm planning on doing a post about it, but got unfortunately sidetracked by the desire to grumble about Noah Smith. The book had made me think about Noah's post arguing that liberals who are suspicious of privitizing government functions should also be suspicious of government paying non-profits to implement policies.

In sum, the years since the 1970s have been a massive experiment in whether a government, by outsourcing core functions to private actors like nonprofits and consultants, can increase the efficiency with which public funds are spent. That experiment has failed, and it needs to be reversed.

I don't agree with all of the reasons provided in the post, but I think it's a good argument and Pahlka's book offers some important lessons for thinking about the difficulties involved, and the possible benefits of re-shaping government, and the civil service, so that it's possible for the government to more successfully carry out projects.

However this also reminded me of a particularly frustrating comment by Noah in a recent podcast. I am aware that, in the past, I have tried to argue that I sometimes find value in Noah's writing and other people have made the argument that he isn't worth taking seriously. I don't want to completely concede the point so I ask (perhaps foolishly) that, in addition to dunking on Noah (and me, possibly), I'd be curious -- what would be a productive way to respond to the following. Imagine that it was said by someone who you thought was open to argument and capable of changing their mind, how would you engage?

No one's going to like the answer when I say this, but the answer is project 2025. ... The answer is to get a bunch of conservatives into the civil service. Not so that conservatives dominate the civil service, which they never will, because of education polarization. Almost everyone who wants to go into the civil service and is qualified for it is a Dem. But If you get it more nonpartisan, more politically unpolarized. Then you have a bunch of people in the civil service who are willing to say, "what we really need to do is cut down expenditures. What we really need to do is spend less and eliminate boondoggles" ... I don't like a lot of the specific ideas that [project 2025] has. But in terms of depolarizing the civil service. Education polarization has fucked our county in many ways. Unfortunately the Federalist society is the only case we've seen of depolarization within institutions. The judiciary has become a less polarized institution thanks to the Federalist society putting their thumb on the scale. Obviously they don't have the institutional power to put their thumb on the scale, but they cultivate talent ... that's what project 2025 is trying to do for the civil service and something like that is necessary in order for the country to not have a choice between nonprofit grift and everything bagel contracting requirements

Obviously Noah is shitposting (shitcasting?) there and intentionally speaking in exaggeratedly broad strokes. But I cannot believe the number of blatant inaccuracies in a short comment. First, and perhaps least importantly, the civil service is not as disproportionately Democratic as he thinks. The best numbers I can find are, "Between 1997 and 2019, Democrats made up about half of all federal bureaucrats, while Republicans wavered between a third and a quarter. (The remainder were independents.)" Second, and more importantly, WHAT THE FUCK? How can anyone point to the Federalist Society as a successful case of depolarizing an institution*. Even if, by some measure, you could convince yourself that the Federalist society had shifted the ideological balance of the legal profession in a preferred direction, how in the world would that seem like an example of improving the functionality of the profession?

So, help me out, if there was any way to reach Noah Smith with a counter-argument**, what would you say?

* I am not an expert but you might be able to make a case for the law and economics movement.

** I have no expectation of accomplishing anything. I am just using this post to vent, but I will note that a reader of unfogged does co-host a podcast with Noah, so it's not completely impossible.

Heebie's take: We're supposed to build a bridge to someone who is trying to make hay out of Project 2025 for some convoluted reason?

Discuss the Hugo Awards here, and argue with me about the quality of Project Hail Mary.

Here's a boring story: Doug suggested adding in the Hugo Awards to flesh out a Project Hail Mary thread. I knew I'd seen something recently about them, but couldn't remember where. I went to the Hugo homepage (which is itself a blog), clicked the top post, and the very first comment was a link to this post by John Scalzi, which I'd seen when Apo linked this other post on Harris and Biden. Wow, so boring! As promised.

Anyway: we listened to Project Hail Mary on the drive to Montana last week. I liked it! Doug was mixed. Spoilers under the cut and allowed in the thread.

My thoughts:
- Like I said in the other thread, it exceeded my scientific knowledge for the most part, enough for me to buy into the whole story.

- I thought the amnesia worked well as a plot device, so that he could piece together the story along with the reader. I disagree strongly with Doug that it should have been chronological, because it would have wrecked the big reveal that he didn't want to go and was actually a big coward. He thinks so highly of himself throughout the book, and we all go along with it! I love having this revealed to him alongside the reader.

- I enjoyed the ending on its own terms, but it's genius in allowing him to sidestep trying to describe what happened on earth for the past 30 years. That would have been an impossible task.

- The part I think he did the worst on was the teaching bits. That guy sounds like a terrible teacher to me!

- It's been a long time since I read The Martian, and it's further colored by having one on audiobook and one on paper, but is this essentially the same narrator voice? Does Andy Weir have one person whose brain he can convey?

Moby Hick writes: Falling Water is a nice drive from Pittsburgh, short enough for a quick visit. When you get there, you'll find there are three PokéStop and one gym. But the cellular coverage is bad with Verizon and Verizon is usually the best coverage in rural Southwestern PA. I was only able to spin two stops and I couldn't even get the gym to load. I did catch a few Pokémon, but instead of being labeled as from Falling Water or even Mill Run, they were labeled as having been captured at Ohiopyle. Which is miles away and I already have Pokémon from Ohiopyle from when I was Ohiopyle.

The sandwiches are $20, but big enough that the price is not out of line. The boxed water is $4, which is robbery. Plus, no matter how they label it, it was a carton, not a box.

The building is interesting if you are into that kind of thing. The most important thing to remember is that if you build a set of stairs from your living room into a creek, you should add a couple of extra steps so that the staircase isn't hanging a good twenty inches above the water when there's a drought.

Heebie's take: Well, that's pretty thorough!

I do love the whole mid-century serenity aesthetic. I haven't ever been, though.

In the hopes that an immediate groundswell of donations will keep the lunatics who control the Democratic Party from blowing everything up trying to set up some bizarre reality-tv search for Johnny Unbeatable to step in instead of Kamala.

I am so relieved. I have been fretting nonstop about Biden: not at all sure that he needed to step down objectively, but getting surer and surer that his campaign had become unworkable. Harris, I am entirely content with. I could quibble with her about some things, but as Democratic presidential candidates go, she's very close to the absolute best I could hope for.

https://secure.actblue.com/donate/social-bfp-july-2024-v2