I'm reading Caro's  Path to Power now, and he says seniority system was well established in the house by Johnson's arrival in the depression.

I greatly appreciate the context you provided in the linked comment, and in general the attempt to explain why an underrepresented side views their choices as reasonable or necessary. I want to do what I can to support you continuing to bring up counterpoints and things people are missing. 

This particular post reads to me as president-neutral, in that you could post it on a conservative-leaning forum under a democratic president and it would look equally in tune with local culture. Maybe I'm wrong about that, it's easy to read things that match one's own worldview as neutral, in which case I'm asking for specifics on what makes this not neutral. 

One guess, based on your other comment, is that Habryka takes the legitimacy of the court for granted, in which case I'd like to dig into more detail on that. 

(relevant thread from a lawyer early last year on the powers and tools that courts have to force a president or other federal officials to follow their court orders, such as freezing assets).

"Force" seems strong compared to what the thread says. He starts with "no chance of the White House successfully refusing to comply" but for every mechanism except freezing assets, he caveats with "this might work"

refinement: people have always moved, but they used to reorient towards a local social circle. Now they can stay in contact with their old friends forever but they're never going to discuss local politics with them, only national. 

why did local news ever work?

A lot of recent political changes are blamed on the loss of local news (motivating example), which is in turn blamed on the internet undercutting ad revenue (especially classifieds revenue). But if people never cared about local news enough to ~pay for it, why did papers ever offer it? Why not just sell the classifieds and the national news people were willing to pay for, and save the expense of the local stuff no one wanted? 

Some ideas:

1. Newspapers and tv channels were confused and didn't realize they could get away without producing local news. 
   1. This seems unlikely to me, because if all they cared about was national news why subscribe to the local newspaper at all? People who only wanted national news would subscribe to a national paper. 
2. some sort of preference cascade, such that the price people were willing to pay for local news dropped as others' willingness dropped. 
3. People lost interest in local news for non-preference-cascade reasons
   1. Mobility meant people felt less invested in their local area
      1. I think the trend at the time was for fewer interstate moves.
   2. More competition for people's time. In the 90s there were four channels and at 6 and 11 they were all showing local news. What were you gonna do, not watch TV? 
   3. People don't seek out local TV news but can be hooked via ads during prime time programming ("the hot new trend ruining the lives of students at your kids' high school, specifically"). As people stopped watching prime time tv with ads, channels lost the opportunity to hook people for their local coverage. 
4. Local but not national news was replaced by something else, like Facebook, Citizen, or Nextdoor.
   1. I don't think the timing or distribution work out for this. 

Bold of you to assume that 7 will be enough to finish the story.

Prestige/reputation is supposed to work like the pagerank algorithm: every person has a little bit of prestige to distribute, it flows to a few major sinks, and those sinks can themselves distribute it to the people they respect.

Real prestige isn’t like this, of course. You can improve people’s perception of your prestige, and thus your actual prestige, with the right clothes or website design. But you can also hack the pagerank algorithm. For example,  let’s say we have 3 low status entities: a website, a blogger, and a small meeting of subject matter experts.  We can improve their status by calling them an online magazine, a science writer, and a colloquium, but that’s not yet prestige hacking. The real magic comes when the colloquium introduces the writer and the magazine as if they are important, because then their presence makes the colloquium more impressive. Then the magazine can write up the colloquium as if it was important, because that makes their exclusive access more impressive.  Via tricks like this, one can manufacture pagerank weight out of thin air.

The ethics of this are complicated. I will say as a practical matter that failures of prestige hacking are punished harshly and if you are learning about the concept just now you should assume you are bad at it. The goal of this post is teaching self-defense through recognition. 

Credit allocation: I learned the term from people at Leverage, but when I asked around I found the idea originated elsewhere and no one was sure who deserved credit for the name. 

would a co-writer help?

You're only counting the core series, right? I'm into the books as a substrate for watching conspiracy videos on youtube, in which case the procrastination projects are as valuable as the core books. 

@Eric Raymond has a tweet in which he lays out a taxonomy of treaty enforcement. His three options are:

1. The US bombs non-compliant countries
   1. Eric doesn’t mention economic punishments but I put them in the same category as bombs
2. The situation is an iterated prisoners’ dilemma where sides prefer cooperate-cooperate to defect-defect. The benefits of cheating are less than the cost of moving to the worse equilibrium
3. Wordcel bullshit (worthless)

The thing is, neither 1 nor 2 require a joint agreement between countries. You, a powerful country, could always just declare that you will bomb any country that creates nukes or sneezes wrong, and let them make their choices. And if it’s an iterated prisoners’ dilemma (or stag hunt) you don’t even need to be more powerful, just have a sufficient gap between C-C and D-D. So to the extent treaties do meaningful work, it has to live in the wordcel bullshit. 

Here are some guesses as to what that wordcel bullshit/verbal magic could be:

• Treaties give all parties a chance to define cooperation and defection, so they don’t accidentally defect.
• Having defined cooperation and defection, countries have a harder time claiming a defection was a misunderstanding.
• Make a change in policy explicit. Canada pulled out of the Kyoto protocol (despite wet-noodle level enforcement), and that closes the debate as to whether they failed to meet their quota by accident despite enormous effort, or are choosing not to try. 
• These definitions would be important enough if you were negotiating between two people, but countries contain multitudes. Cease fires aren’t just an agreement between countries A and B, they’re an agreement between all the hawks and doves within A, that x will be considered defection and x’ will not. This makes countries more predictable to each other.
• Treaties help yesterday’s hawks share a definition with tomorrow’s hawks, again improving predictability. 
• If you unilaterally impose terms on one country, other countries will get nervous about what terms you will unilaterally impose on them. If the country has given you permission to impose those terms, perhaps for some immediate reward like food aid, other countries can reassure themselves they would simply not agree to freeze their nuclear program in exchange for food.
• Like failing to return a book at an upscale library or defaulting on a lazy creditor, sometimes the only consequence to breaking an agreement is people knowing you did so. Breaking even a toothless, obviously aspirational agreement too blatantly might ding your international credit rating in ways that hurt your ability to get the agreements you do want, like lower tariffs.
  • This assumes that people-who-matter can’t cleanly distinguish between for-real treaties and for-show.
  • My hometown library sent me to collections at age 8. 
• Working out definitions that might be used in future treaties/threats, while everyone is feeling chill. 

You can sum most of this up as “legibility”, which makes sense, since it’s a key comparative advantage language has over bombs.