jeroboam
1mo ago
One of the reasons I tend conservative is the different views towards exit rights.
For most conservatives, the reaction to liberals who want to go start a communist paradise elsewhere is "Good. Go do it!". This is a sincere wish. The presence of communism elsewhere is the surest bulwark against it happening here. The idea of communism so alluring that we need constant reminders about its failures, which are guaranteed.
But liberals have more of a "yous can't leave" attitude. The grand experiment can only work if everyone is forced to join. If the ants go somewhere else, the grasshoppers won't have any food to eat. Thus, states like California are considering exit taxes to trap the high-performing people in the state. And obviously the Soviets had to keep people inside with barbed wire and guns.
jeroboam
5mo ago
It's worth pointing out that these Presidents are at the long end of a fashion arms race that leads to absurd opinions. Expressing normie opinions is not the way to climb to the top of the heap in academia.
Thus we lead to a situation where slight deviations from recent progressive norms are deemed "hate speech" while calls for literal genocide are not.
It's similar to the men of the Middle Ages who wore pointier and pointier shoes.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/medieval-europeans-pointy-shoes
It's not like these men independently arrived at the idea that these shoes were somehow better. And, if they wore the same shoes 200 years earlier or later they'd look ridiculous. But if you asked them to explain why they wore the shoes, they'd probably be able to mutter some sort of answer other than the true one: "everyone else is doing it".
Are you shocked when politicians don't express sincere beliefs on the campaign trail? What if they only campaigned to a tiny sliver of the far left? Imagine the lunatic ideas they'd have to express to get noticed. Yes increasingly, that's what it takes to advance in academia.
These Presidents aren't stupid. Instead they are the result of a long and thoroughly rotten distillation process that rewards a very specific set of extreme beliefs. Signalling is a hell of a drug.
jeroboam
1yr ago
Yes, we did try "tough on crime" and it worked. The U.S. murder rate fell by large amounts and reached a minimum in the 2010s a few years after the peak in the prison population. The fall in murder rates was perhaps most visible in New York where it fell from about a peak of 30.7 in 1990 to just 3.4 in 2018.
Unfortunately, we've done a complete 180 and now are extremely permissive. In today's news in my hometown of Seattle, a person was arrested after committing a violent assault against a tourist while spewing racial slurs. (The story was mysteriously short on other details). The particular offender had been arrested 47 previous times.
https://old.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/11tqdik/man_arrested_for_committing_racial_hate_crime/
The "War on Drugs" was also largely successful. Drug overdoses per capita during the 1980s were less than 1/10th current rates. Yes, that's correct. Drug overdose rates have increased by more than 1000% since the 1980s.
As is typical, in an effort to reign in rare abuses, we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater and now tolerate exceptional rates of drug use and violent crime.
Okay, I'll go.
The big news this weekend was that Trump had a rally and said that, should he not be elected, the U.S. auto industry would be overrun with cheap Chinese imports. He used the word "bloodbath".
The mainstream media, which we're assured rarely tells outright lies, decided to find the exact dividing line between an outright lie and "still technically the truth". You can be the judge of whether they succeeded. For just one of many examples, Joe Scarborough ran a segment where the words "Trump warns of a bloodbath for America if he loses" were emblazoned on the bottom of the screen.
Of course, if any of this surprises you in the slightest, you haven't been paying attention. It's slightly boring at this point and would be funny except so many boomers still watch that dross.
What I want to focus on is the actual substance of Trump's claim. I think that, this time, Trump is on to something. The Detroit auto industry is about to have a head-on collision with China and get absolutely wrecked.
Already, Detroit is not in good shape. The Big 3's share of U.S. auto sales has fallen from 90% in 1965 to just 44% by 2018. (I'm sure it's much lower now). It gets worse. The only reason that Detroit has done this well is a 25% tariff on foreign light trucks that was passed by LBJ in retaliation for European tariffs against U.S. chicken.
In terms of small cars, Japanese automakers have been beating Detroit for decades. For luxury vehicles, Germany has worldwide dominance. That leaves only light trucks and SUV's, where Detroit still performs well only due to tarriffs. We've sort of forgotten about Detroit since 2008. The perception is that things were bad for awhile, but then the automakers got bailed out and they're okay now, especially #girlboss CEO Mary Barra.
This isn't true. The stock prices of the Big 3 have limped along. GM, once the 2nd most valuable U.S. company, now has a market cap only 2% the size of NVIDIA. And, if the Big 3 haven't gone bankrupt again, it's only by jettisoning high-paid union labor. Michigan, once a well-off state, now ranks 39 out of 50 in household income, falling well behind former hick states like Texas and North Carolina.
Enter China.
China is already, by far, the world's largest producer of automobiles, producing about 3x as many as the U.S. Also, China can sell an EV for $10,000. While I'm sure there would need to be changes for the U.S. market, it would not be too expensive at scale. Get ready for hordes of these "shitty but good enough" cars to enter the market.
"No one will ever buy a Chinese car" you laugh, nearly dropping your monocle into your glass of cognac. I don't think this opinion can withstand serious scrutiny. Japanese cars once had a similar reputation. Nowadays, choosing to buy an American car over a Japanese one is seen as either extremely patriotic or moronic. Even if quality never improves, people still buy plenty of Kias and Hyundais. How many more would they buy if the price was reduced by 30-50%?
So let's say all of this is true. A wave of Chinese imports are coming which will cripple the U.S. auto industry. How will voting for Trump help? My gut feeling is that Trump can't save Detroit but that, unlike Biden, he'll at least try.
For most of the period of the 1980s-present, the world has been a huge beneficiary of free trade. The rich in the U.S. have grown much richer, obscenely so. But the biggest gains have been won by the working class in developing nations, especially China. Despite all that there have been losers. The biggest losers are the working class in rich nations, especially in areas that compete with China.
The traditional government solution to manufacturing being outsourced has been to offer job retraining and lots of government benefits to the affected class. But this just doesn't work. The places that have been affected by blue collar job loss are now hollowed-out shells of their former selves.
Trump will probably at least try to ban or tax Chinese cars. Is this the right thing to do? Maybe, maybe not. It will cost American consumers a lot of money, and it will depress wages in China. In aggregate, the tariffs will probably make the world a worse place. But they will help the group that has lost so much and which has been ignored and scorned for decades. The group Biden pretends to care about but which Trump actually does.
Edit: Just saw this retweeted by Crémieux:
America's most affluent metro areas in 1949: https://twitter.com/DKThomp/status/1769891112095740274/photo/1
You'll never guess who's #1.
jeroboam
1yr ago
Yeah. For some reason, people seem to hold the axiom that corporations "maximize shareholder returns". There is not much evidence to believe this is actually the case.
Once you drop that axiom, things make a lot more sense.
Here's a better axiom:
"Companies are run primarily for the benefit of people who run companies."
Our treasured colleague Kulak is at it again with another post on his Substack.
I know that a slow-moving budget crisis is not the spiciest meatball, but the fiscal situation in the United States is looking bad. Debt to GDP is now above the previous high set at the peak of WWII. But whereas the post-wars years saw demographic and technological tailwinds, the current epoch is characterized by low fertility and productivity growth.
It gets worse:
The real crisis is the Unfunded liabilities, all the promises the US has made to Boomers (who dominate the vote) and others about money they’re GOING to spend.
As of now total Unfunded liabilities stand at 213 trillion dollars, $633,000 per US Citizen (Man woman, and newborn babe)… These are all dollars the US has promised to pay to someone somewhere at some point: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Federal pensions, VA Benefits, etc. And cannot in any politically feasible way restructure or get out of.
While it might be possible to split a shrinking pie and remain friends, it is definitely IMPOSSIBLE to split a pie when more than 100% of the pie has already been promised to one person or another. Give a person a dollar, they are mildly happy. Take a dollar away and they are FURIOUS.
At this point, I'd encourage you to find a nearby senior citizen. Please explain to them that they don't deserve their social security check. You see, the money that was supposedly SAVED was in fact already SPENT. Far from saving money, their generation actually left a sizeable DEBT to future generations. So not only would seniors have to give up their government checks, they would have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional taxes just to get to even.
I'll wait.
Just how irrational are the expectations of our Boomer rulers? Slobodan Milošević understood.
Milosevich promised, and other politicians promised, their followers the old communists pensions would be honored and paid… And even at the height of the wars they won every election because of that base of aging pensioners…
The last politician to even contemplate reforming Social Security was George W. Bush, who claimed to have earned "political capital" shortly after his re-election in 2004. By March of 2006, his approval rating had fallen from the high 50s to just 31. Nowadays, politicians in either party don't even mention Social Security except to praise it effusively and promise to defend it at all costs.
We are well and truly fucked. The Federal government will be forced to default or inflate away its debts within the next 10-20 years. And this is BEFORE the numerous suggestions to somehow EXPAND the welfare state, whether they be student loan forgiveness, payments to favored racial groups, or universal basic income. After all, ours is a great laboratory of democracy. So while the Federal government enters a slow fiscal doom loop, some states like Illinois, California, and New York seem to be attempting a speed run.
How do we get out of this? Kulak has a few ideas, but I'm a little less dramatic.
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AI. Maybe we will somehow thread the needle between doom and nothingburger. 🤷
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Immigration. The U.S. could escape this problem by cherry picking the best citizens from other countries and telling everyone else to GTFO. We are still, after all, the best country (>10 million population subdivision). This would work, but it would never happen and it's probably a bad thing for the world at large.
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Inflation. Many liabilities are indexed to inflation such as Social Security and Medicare. But we could inflate away all the existing debt. Debt to GDP actually decreased in 2022 because of 9% inflation. That level of inflation for a decade or two could make the problem less bad. It would also be helpful if the official inflation numbers were even more fake.
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Things are just shittier in the future. Brazil is still a country. This is your future.
Imagine requiring multiple courses on Muslim theology, all taught by fundamentalist imams, and with most of the students devout Muslims, but then assuring the students that "it's okay to disagree".
I honestly don't see any difference except that, as you point out, Wokism is more popular than Islam among our current elites.
This was wonderfully written. This is what people must feel like when they meet Bill Clinton and feel "heard". I live in Seattle. You saw exactly what I see, and feel exactly the same way about it. Our city sucks in a lot of very real ways.
That said, you did manage to hit up all the notoriously bad places such as 3rd and Pine and the downtown Target. Most of the city is nowhere near as shitty. You also got pretty unlucky. I've never had anyone try to grab me, and I've yet to see any fully naked junkies.
And, yeah, Portland is worse: https://old.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/1auwcev/i_visited_seattle_last_night_from_portland_wow/
jeroboam
6mo ago
A few years ago I looked at the budget, and Wikipedia was spending more on travel and conferences than they were on servers.
The costs have ballooned enormously since.
The money is quite simply being wasted. Wikipedia worked perfectly well (better even!) ten years ago when the budget was a small fraction of its current bloated state.
While I agree with your analysis, I'm having trouble picturing a race-flipped version of this story where the woman isn't portrayed as a modern-day Rosa Parks and the boys aren't charged with a crime.
Wow, those avatars are ugly.
Have you tried bird watching? It's like Pokemon Go in real life. It's a great excuse to go for walks and explore new areas. Want to scratch that collector itch? Everytime you see a new bird, add it to your life list. See how many you can collect. Also, birds are just amazing and beautiful unlike those fucking avatars.
If you want there's a free app called Merlin that will help identify birds and keep track of your list. It's totally free with no ads. I'd also recommend a pair of binoculars.
jeroboam
3mo ago
I think too many people in power have learned from MMT how money, banking, and government finance actually works, so it would probably take a few generations for people to forget those again for debt-hysteria to strongly return
This seems like a fringe opinion. Countries that have "figured out how money works" and lean into debt-financed government spending tend to end up like Argentina or Turkey.
We've just experienced an episode of high inflation due to government stimulus. If anything, we've learned just how dangerous MMT can be.
Why would returning to historical levels of deficit/GDP be considered hysteria?
jeroboam
8mo ago
People on this forum have written about the difference between homeless and homeless.
Bullying is similar.
If by "bullying", you mean the rough and tumble nature of normal male play, then I suppose there is a point.
If by "bullying" you mean the scenario where one child is relentlessly picked on by nearly all the other children, then no, we don't need that. That would be like saying we need more kids molested so that they understand that rape is bad. Children's lives and subjective experiences have value. To subject a child to intense bullying is one of the worst things that can happen to them. Any theoretical gain in empathy as a result would pale in comparison to the immense harm.
jeroboam
19d ago
It's All Astroturf
I came across this post today comparing two Reddit threads on LateStageCapitalism, posted 10 months apart, with essentially the exact same content, including top level comments and replies but with different user names.
Discussion on HackerNews.
The posters on HackerNews, ever blinkered, theorize that this is some sort of effort to farm karma in order to promote products. That theory is almost certainly not true. There is minimal commercial value to Reddit accounts.
The alternate explanation seems obvious. Hacktivists are manipulating Reddit to promote far-left ideas, creating fake accounts to post and vote. This does not take much imagination. In fact, Trump supporters were doing the very same thing in 2016 prior to being stomped by the site admins.
You'd have to be pretty simple to think that most of the political stuff you read on Reddit or Hacker News isn't deeply manipulated. It doesn't take many votes to sway things in one direction or another. All it takes is a few downvotes to keep dissenting voices from even appearing in front of real users. On the other hand, with a few upvotes, your own content will be featured front and center. It's comically easy to achieve.
It's been said that most of what you read on line is written by crazy people. I think it's worse. I think it's written by people who are trying to manipulate you.
jeroboam
3mo ago
I'll reply to what I think is your central claim which is that "my private sex dungeon isn't off limits to cops so why should my hard drive be off limits".
The difference is scale.
For example, my house is not very secure. I lock my doors, but anyone with a crowbar could pretty easily break in and steal my stuff when I'm gone. I live in Seattle, so there's also zero chance they would caught or go to jail. Why am I okay with this state of affairs? Why haven't I put iron bars on all the windows? The answer: there simply aren't enough people willing to commit a home invasion to worry about it.
On the other hand, let's say I had cryptocurrency on my computer. (I don't, by the way). I would take extreme measures to keep this secure because everyone in the whole world could potentially steal my coins.
The number of people that local cops can harass is limited by the resources of the local police department. Salaries aren't cheap.
The number of people that government spy agencies can harass is much more scalable. The Canadian truckers had their bank accounts frozen less than 2 years ago! We need digital privacy so that a government bureaucrat can't change a 1 to a 0 and lock a million dissidents from their bank accounts.
Scale matters.
jeroboam
8mo ago
It's a political cudgel to wield against your enemies.
Politician A: Let's ban holocaust denial
Politician B: Let's not restrict free speech
Policitan A: Politician B is a Nazi
Its inconceivable that Holocaust denial would be a a top priority in 2023 unless there were political points to be scored. Any time spent discussing this nonsense could conceivably be spent on real problems.
jeroboam
6mo ago
Agree with everything you said, but Jews are allowed to organize for their own benefit and defense whereas non-Jewish whites are generally not. It's a hate crime to paint a swastika on a synagogue, but calls to kill whitey are generally met with shrugs.
To make another point...
Once we take away Jews, what percentage of college Presidents are white? What percentage of gentile whites are being admitted to Harvard? The dominance of Jews in the elite space is sucking up much of the quota reserved for whites.
And, for the record, I have no problem with the success of Jews. My friend group is dominated by Jewish people, and I think their success is mostly due to superiority of intellect. (Let's say 80% intellect, 20% clannishness). But if we are going to start leveling in a sort of Harrison Bergoron way, I don't think it's fair that Jews get a hugely disproportionate amount of the white quota. And, yes, it's a quota.
The best world is a race-blind world. But once we start noticing, then I don't want to be in the one group that it's allowed to discriminate against when there is a much more successful group right next door.
jeroboam
6mo ago
The Israel/Hamas conflict is really interesting because it is tearing the progressive coalition apart.
In every other major news event recently (BLM riots / Covid lockdowns / Ukraine war) there has been an unambiguous correct orthodoxy that is strictly enforced on all members of the coalition. Even slightly wavering from the party line is sufficient for cancellation.
Early on in the war, it seemed like we almost go to a similar point. There were strong efforts to make support for Israel the official party line. A few people even got canceled for expressing support for Palestine. But the inconvenient truth is that a majority of the progressive rank and file supports Palestine over Israel.
It will be interesting to see where this goes. Neither party feels like a natural home for Jewish people right now. Will Jewish people start to lean towards the Republicans? Will the Democrats abandon their progressive wing? I guess we'll see. The conflict has been a real mask-off moment for who the real anti-Semites are in America.
How many other question have solutions to them that aren’t analyzed because the researcher starts with the wrong frame.
Pretty much the entirety of sociology is based on the faulty blank-slate premise.
For example, we see that boys participate in sports at a higher rate than girls. And so we say "how can we increase girls in sports". But that's the wrong framework. In fact, girls sports participation is far too high. Girls and women don't spontaneously play sports. Seriously, have you EVER seen a group of women playing pickup basketball or soccer in the park? I never have. Literally never. (Although sometimes one or two bold women will join the guys).
While girls enjoy being part of a team, they would have a lot more fun participating in something besides sports.
jeroboam
26d ago
There is something hellishly dystopian about fleeing to another country, possibly even across the ocean, and your country of birth is still trying to pull you back. Particularly because women are given a free pass. It's natural to feel like there should be some cost associated with the privilege of not having to be forcibly conscripted to fight against an invading army.
Very strange how blank-slatist ideas just sort of vanish when any sacrifice from women is involved.
For the record, I am not a blank-slatist, think women should not serve in combat, and think they would make terrible soldiers for the most part. But if we are going to live by the rules of the blank slatist, those rules should at least be applied fairly.
jeroboam
2mo ago
And what about when the worm turns, and the next moral panic and/or government comes around? Will they persecute Trudeau in the courts for perpetuating hate through his use of blackface?
This line of reasoning never works. The whole reason that this legislation is on offer is because progressives have achieved total cultural victory in Canada.
If Trudeau thought this would ever be used against him, then it would never have been proposed.
Instead, they believe it will be a useful tool to further stifle dissent. They don't believe the worm will ever turn. Maybe they're right.
jeroboam
7mo ago
All in all, I view social security as unfixable. Giving a large percentage of people a check every month turns those people into single-issue voters whenever their check is threatened.
The original sin of Social Security was treating it as something you earned, and not as welfare for old people. People paid in. Now they want their money back, $30 trillion debt be damned. This line of reasoning isn't entirely bullshit. After all, people who paid in more do get more later which is why this "tax" is regressive. It's not really supposed to be a tax. It's supposed to be insurance.
To me, the biggest takeaway is that Universal Basic Income is a bad idea and should be avoided at all costs. Once it starts, it would be impossible to kill even if it fails at all its goals. And of course it will never be enough. The check-getting group will always vote to get larger checks and the expense of everything else.
jeroboam
10mo ago
HBD arguments are persuasive to the people who can be reached. Eventually it will undermine the narrative.
By the 1980s, Marxism-Leninism was a spent force. Even though apparatchiks emptily repeated the slogans at party conferences, few true believers remained. How many KGB agents didn't secretly wish they had been born in the West?
Likewise, the empty platitudes of wokism will become more hollow. To me, and to anyone who is paying attention, HBD is true and obvious. The believers in blank-slatism will start to look more and more deranged, much like a Soviet functionary who actually believed in Marxism in 1980 (so cringe). Sure, one still can't say the true thing out loud. But passionately supporting the dogma will start to look pretty silly as well. The eye rolls will increase.
The intellectual arguments come first. Everything else follows.
jeroboam
11mo ago
I don't know what's actually happening, but reasoning about motivations, I'd expect the opposite.
Most people at Google are "woke" but they aren't true believers. In a Muslim society, they'd be religious. In WWII Germany, they'd be Nazis. They just go with the flow and want to advance their own career.
Meanwhile, the 5% (or whatever) of woke true believers make everyone's life miserable. Also, being a litigious bunch, they are hard to fire. Layoffs provide the perfect time to rid oneself of these troublemakers.
On the other hand, there are basically zero outspoken conservative activists at Google. That behavior was already a fireable offense. Any wrongthinkers are either keeping their head down, already gone, or more likely never hired in the first place.
The California model.
I just got back from a brief trip to California that didn't include the parts where the violent drug zombies live. It was a lovely vacation. California is absolutely beautiful.
Let me introduce the secrets to California's success.
Be blessed with the most amazing geography and weather anywhere in the U.S. and maybe the world
Be the center of the world tech and entertainment industries
Make a deal that baby boomers get to live out their natural lives in splendor and grace while a complete population replacement happens beneath them
As a wealthy tourist, it was all very nice. Whereas the coast of Florida is loaded with aggressive traffic and people, the coast of California is dotted with pleasant beach communities. All the houses cost like $3 million dollars so no one can afford to live there. Despite the best weather and scenery on the planet, the population is going DOWN. People are friendly and nice. The restaurants are full of white retirees, still paying $1000 in annual property tax on their $4 million house they bought for $200,000 in 1981. 95% of the workers are Hispanic. I have no idea where they actually live. But the quality of service was very high and prices were reasonable (at least compared to Seattle).
A quick 5 minute drive from Santa Cruz and you're in a beautiful redwood forest. No houses or people here. Just a beautiful state park with miles of trails. I saw a school group with an earnest white teacher explaining tree rings to a group of about 20 young students. 100% of the students were Hispanic.
People are actually leaving this state, the state that has everything, that was dealt a hand of aces. Productive citizens are taxed at eye-popping rates to prop up the seniors and the underclass. It works for now. It seems kind of similar to what's happening in Europe and where the rest of the U.S. is headed as well.
In any case, I had a wonderful time. I highly recommend California as a tourist destination.
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