anon_
2d ago
I'm not talking about the mythical never-Trump Republicans, but suburban moderates, swing voters, and independents. I've pointed this out before, but Mt. Lebanon, a wealthy Pittsburgh suburb, used to be reliably Republican area and, while it had been shifting leftward for several years prior, the emergence of Trump turned it into the kind of place with rainbow flags and "In this house we believe" signs.
I guess we'll see if this translates to any real power dynamic within the Demcoratic apparatus, or whether they will triple down on hard wokism.
Republicans had a massive chance when the US decided it was fed up with that shit, I guess we'll see how much of it they squandered.
anon_
2d ago
And this is where we get to see how much the edgy millennials get to determine conservative discourse in opposition to the kind of old school Christian types
anon_
2d ago
You should probably look at this guy’s entire life.
Whatever Bohacek is, “progressive” ain’t it. You’ve lost the plot.
anon_
4d ago
Maybe. But this was a man whose vote was apparently needed. So retarded or not, his view on it matters.
It really would be nice if our leaders could decide not to shoot themselves in the foot. Just once.
anon_
4d ago
I understand how the euphemism treadmill works.
Using terms that are considered slurs today, regardless of whether it's a slur in decades since or hence, is a flex by the edgy -- an attempt t demonstrate that they don't recognize that social norm and can't be made to.
anon_
4d ago
It took me a while to realize this was anti-abortion advocacy.
I'm not really sure it is. Or at least I think the pro-choice advocacy position here is that they too wish they could push a button to make them all better. I think you part ways only on what to do when we cannot do so -- when the kid is not going to be all better no matter our best efforts.
anon_
4d ago
at the expense of another human's entire existence.
I'm reasonably sure (at least as far as these things go) that one of our close friends didn't have a planned 3rd and 4th kid after the 2nd was profoundly disabled.
Anecdote isn't data of course.
anon_
4d ago
I'm quite sure Trump refers to things as stupid and idiotic on a weekly basis.
Some parts of the iconoclastic euphemism-treadmill-go-brrrr contingent wants to recast the word 'retarded' as a synonym for 'very stupid'. That doesn't make it so.
anon_
4d ago
The real meta-meta joke is that she talks to children the way she would condescend to adults, instead of regarding them as unformed people that will one day bear profound moral and social responsibility.
anon_
4d ago
Well, at the risk of being the bearer of unwelcome news, I don't think the stout Indiana conservative-conservatives and the edgy alt-right conservatives are gonna ever seen eye to eye. Bohacek can no more respond with ironic detachment than Trump can issue an apology -- it's not in either man's nature. And that's the intra-right generational fissure, which now that the right is ascendant, is arriving exactly on cue.
Of course you're absolutely right that it's an unforced error to do something that exposes that rift in his own coalition.
Ultimately, retarded children give people the ick, including leftists and Democrats.
True, but I think it cuts the other way when the GOP wants to elevate to prominence people that wouldn't terminate over it. Recall the old "what's the different between Sarah Palin's mouth and her vagina" joke.
anon_
4d ago
It’s both very small and very large at the same time. Are talking about the man’s daughter.
anon_
4d ago
Whenever I go to a restaurant where (rich, high earning, often at least moderately intelligent) clientele are dressed like disgusting slobs, which is almost all of them, the reason for their slovenliness is because of a decline in standards.
That may have been true a quarter or half century ago. Today, it's more of a counter-signaling thing. It's the exact same mechanism -- dressing like crap while sitting courtside is an impossible-to-forge signal of status.
OTOH, I do strongly agree we can go back in on broken windows for antisocial offenses. But hassling people for wearing sweats isn't coming back.
anon_
4d ago
If everyone has the time and money to visit some beautiful beach on a tropical island paradise, how pleasant will that beach end up being? If everyone can afford a Bugati Veron, what will the rich do to show off?
Those are different examples! The experience of a beautiful beach with lots of colorful fish isn't a status good. It's a good-in-itself-good.
And maybe if you love racing your supercar, it could likewise be. But if you're showing it off for clout, it's now a different class of good.
anon_
4d ago
If you thought US politics could not get more (figuratively) retarded ... you'd be wrong.
Apparently Trump called Tim Walz (among other things) a (figurative) retard. Walz is pretty dumb but is not (medically) a retard. But Michael Bohacek has a daughter with Down's and apparently he's it went over poorly enough to derail the GOP redistricting effort.
[ An interesting parochial aside here is that decades of abortion politics has made Down's a bit of a CW item. And Indiana was among the first to react to Dobbs writing a ban that not only doesn't except Down's (only lethal anomalies count) but in a (laudable) fashion, it specifically un-excepts it. ]
My (subjective) take is that Bohacek's stand seems noble in a wildly-out-of-time kind of way. Like we're back in the 80s/90s and mainstream conservatism was still broadly anti-transgressive while the left was about iconoclasm. But I suppose also that 'family over politics' is not a value that either party is willing to endorse -- certainly not the scolding types gloating about talking down to their transphobic uncle at thanksgiving.
anon_
4d ago
Another slight problem is the status differential. A hundred K back in 1959 puts you in a different social status for the day than that amount would today.
No doubt on the relative status, but that's kind of the question -- how much would you really sacrifice for relative status.
Most Americans could retire abroad for a song. They don't, because relative status isn't all they care about.
anon_
5d ago
What does your favorite macroeconomic model say would happen if you raised everyone's wage 25% across the board? It can't be good for prices, either directly or via inflation.
this boon being given [...] leading to more profit for them [...] we cut down the hours worked for ordinary people so the benefits of the productivity increase goes to them
There is a secret third option, which is that profit and wages both remain fixed, and the cost of the good/service provided goes down. This helps ordinary people* as they pay less for what they buy.
Indeed, in a competitive market, productivity gains spread through industries, and the same pressure pushes profit back down.
anon_
6d ago
Hold up -- I thought we're paying people proportionally -- folks at 4 days would be paid 80% of the current salary.
Otherwise what you're talking about is just an across-the-board 25% pay raise for everyone. And that, in turn, just further shifts things from labor to capital, which is (IIUC) the opposite of what you want.
anon_
6d ago
First, I claimed O(logN) as an absolute lower bound, which I think suffices for the purposes of this discussion to disprove the claim that IB could just hire more people.
Second, I think in the absolute (totally imaginary, of course) best case, each instruction would come from the top and be distributed to O(1) people on each level of the hierarchy: CEO tells the VP, VP tells the director, ... and the results are reviewed back on the way up, thus traverse 2*M levels where M is the depth of the hierarchy which is logN. No actual firm runs like this, but it's a lazy way to derive a lower bound / impossibility result.
anon_
6d ago
Busywork is exactly the friction/overhead that comes from having to synchronize information, decisions and tasks across different human minds!
Think about any dumb meeting -- if the entire process could be done by a single mind, that's all overhead. You'd never need any reporting either.
Someone else said it better: white collar work is exactly where the mythical man month rule applies. A team with 4/5ths as many people working full time will be more product than one working 4/5 days a week.
The Supreme Court wasn't very receptive to Trump's argument that he can apply vast tariffs based on a thin (but extant, I suppose) Congressional mandate.
Indeed, it's probably worthy of a larger post, but I think the Court could really lean into the Major Questions Doctrine as an important way of correcting the vast indifference of Congress to actually governing.
So I don't know what happens to all those trade deals, to be honest.
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