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Cake day: November 19th, 2023

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  • The 13th ended slavery. You’re probably thinking of the 12th which says that no person constitutionally ineligible to “be” president can be elected as vice president. Importantly, the 22nd only places limits on being “elected” as president, so it’s not (necessarily) creating a constitutional requirement to “be” president by some other means.

    Like I said, it could be an interesting legal fight if it even came up.


  • You can only be elected as president twice. You can probably hack the system by getting multiple other presidents to select you as vice president, then resign. If you serve more than 2 years of the term they were elected to, that reduces the number of times you can be elected as president to one.

    The 22nd amendment doesn’t say that someone that serves 3.99 years of another president’s term multiple times can’t still be elected, and it doesn’t say that someone not qualified to be elected as president can’t be elected as vice president, but the 12th amendment might. Either of those could be an interesting legal fight.



  • Trump was pretty ineffective in his first term, largely because he did a terrible job of supporting people who really agreed with his agenda, and an even worse job of removing people from influential positions who didn’t.

    He said during his campaign that he knew much better who to trust, but now he’s got Elon Musk and RFK Jr. prominently featured. I don’t think he has learned anything, and I think he will be just as ineffective this time.

    It’s possible that some of the Republicans in Congress will support more of his agenda, but even there if they have to overcome the filibuster, I don’t think mass deportation, a federal abortion ban, or most of the rest of the potential worst of it is in the cards.






  • It could be a case where 1 7-Eleven car crash per day is the median, but not the majority, with 0 and 2 or more combined being more than 50%, so they mean (but communicate poorly) that most days have 1 or more cars crash into 1 or more 7-Elevens, but they couldn’t say that most days have 1 car crash into a 7-Eleven. The only additional information that that would give above simply reporting the 1.14 average is that it’s not highly concentrated on a few days, like if 300 of the annual car crashes into 7-Elevens all happened on 7/11 when people jostle over free slurpees.

    In short, “average” has too many meanings for its average use.



  • There are details missing in this question that matter tremendously. Squirrels are faster and more agile than us. If they are well coordinated, and behave optimally to win (without concern to their individual survival, only the group’s success), I think it would take only a small number of squirrels to brutally murder most people, something like 5. I think their best strategy would be to go for the eyes first, then inflict bleeding injuries and escape again before the person can react. Without tools, and without backup, this approach wouldn’t take long to wear down most people.

    If the squirrels don’t care about their own survival, but make straightforward attacks, I’d think closer to 10-20. The person’s injuries will still compound quickly, but once thet have a grip of a squirrel, it wouldn’t be especially hard to lethally injure.

    If the squirrels still behave like squirrels, and are instead attacking because (for example), they are starving, then the number probably doesn’t matter much, as they’re more likely to go after each other, and the person would have the opportunity to plan and ambush small groups at a time.






  • “Bigger” is easy, because there are obvious ways to measure the size of a government, like the revenue the government gets, the amount of government spending, the number of people working directly for the government, the number of people currently imprisoned, or who have been imprisoned at some time in their life. There’s also slightly more abstract things like the amount of time people spending doing paperwork for the purposes of the government, and the total volume (pages might be a reasonable measure) of government laws, and regulations.

    As for controlling more of our lives, I think it’s significant that many of the most influential regulations are local. Cities design with building codes with the idea of servicing car traffic, emergency vehicles, and parking needs. This prioritizes cars over other forms of transit by government mandate, and puts a pretty steep upper limit on how walking friendly (or bicycle, or mass transit) city areas are allowed to be. In most places, you need exceptions to the rules to have areas without roads running everywhere.

    A similar thing happens in food regulations. Many places around the world have small food vendors that sell a single (or a few) food items from a stall on the street side. The US has strict food regulations that require sinks, refrigeration, and other items that don’t fit in that kind of environment. Most US cities also control the number of street side vendors that are allowed to exist. If you watch “street food” videos, that doesn’t exist in the US because of our regulations.

    Regulations add to the cost and complexity of housing. My great grandfather built a house. I read the requirements to do that now, and gave up. There are hundreds of pages of regulations and requirements, inspection schedules, and licensing requirements that must be followed. Some of those regulations aren’t even free to access.

    On the other hand, these requirements placed uniformly on many industries have some benefits. When you buy a house, you can expect it to be suitable in a huge number of circumstances. Self built, self designed houses sometimes have major design flaws, and sometimes collapse or burn down or flood for surprising reasons that could have been foreseen by experts.

    It’s very likely that more things we do are regulated, and those regulated activities are more tightly controlled than they were in the past. A part of that is that politicians are systemically more willing to make additional regulations than they are to remove existing regulations, even if some of those regulations are known not to work.