laxam
1mo ago
To be able to deploy into government extremely-competent people whose market-clearing rate of compensation is far in excess of the pathetic sums we pay the civil service.
This is the way I have heard it described by think-tankers: Democratic shadow governments reside in universities, Republican shadow governments reside in think tanks (which are really just right-wing counter-institutions to the left-wing dominated universities in the first place).
laxam
1mo ago
Hostile government actors censoring the media is absolutely something the Founders would be intimately familiar with, on both sides of the coin...
laxam
1mo ago
Yep. In all other ways, Trump is a candidate I could hold my nose for because the alternative is worse.
But, until he concedes the 2020 election, I will never vote for him or anyone who jumps on the Stop the Steal bandwagon, period.
laxam
1mo ago
It wasn't just 'specific features of the US advertising market in the 2nd half of the 20th century', there was a period of ideological homogenization that preceded and was bound up in a discussion about professional ethics which drew on reformism and progressivism in the first half of the 20th century. There's a reason the Press' efforts to portray itself as neutral in the '2nd half of the 20th century' worked: they made a genuine effort to follow the ethical standards set up in prior generations and that convinced a lot of people to buy what they were selling.
This is important because you're not just going up against the leftovers of a series of material causes, you're dealing with an ideology that has deeper roots in people's sense of social right and wrong. It's not just that people look back fondly on the period and want it back, it's that they agree with what was (at least partially) achieved in that period and want it back.
laxam
1mo ago
It may be worthwhile to point out that the Republicans were a minority party for the whole postwar period (often about half the size of the Democratic Party) but elected only two term Presidents (depending on how you want to count Nixon) until HW while the Democrats never had a President get reflected anywhere between Truman and Clinton. Republicans were seen as something of the same, stable party for a long time, even by registered Democrats (there's a reason the Republicans got 'evil' out of the 'evil party and stupid party' dichotomy). Plenty of Democrats wanted to vote for Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan over their opponents.
laxam
1mo ago
Usually you write the ID number somewhere on the ballot, ie. Putting your driver's license number on the inside of the outer ballot.
laxam
1mo ago
Yep. The cold solace that it will be the cabinet and bureaucracy running the government so it doesn't matter if Kamala is an incompetent executive is not comforting at all after the last four years, where the cabinet and the bureaucracy were running the government and they were bad at it.
laxam
1mo ago
He's easily coherent (sometimes moreso than Kamala), he just seems to have no concept of the difference between what's in his head and what might be in other people's heads. He often talks as if everyone is just as online and embedded in the right wing echo chamber as he is, referring to people and events off hand and just kind of assuming everyone understands what he's talking about. This works fine at rallies but it really doesn't with general audiences.
laxam
1mo ago
Trump is intelligible in the sense that, if you're already familiar with the context he's speaking in, you can follow what he's trying to say. However, of you're not, you'll be lost.
His chatter about the Charlottesville fact check in the Biden debate made it exceptionally clear that he struggles to actually bring a point home and land it. If you knew already that Snopes had changed the status of the fact check then you could follow perfectly well what was going on but, if you were coming in cold, his point came off very weak and diffuse.
laxam
1mo ago
She apparently earned it in the sense that she was on the phones calling all the Party people she needed to call to prevent an open convention pretty much the moment Biden dropped out. She apparently has some kind of knack (hard to call it a 'talent') for internal party politicking that got her where she is today.
The problem there is that was also the talent Hillary Clinton had and she was much better at it.
laxam
1mo ago
Inflation doesn't erode asset prices (going into assets is actually the way you're supposed to respond to inflation), it erodes cash balances.
laxam
1mo ago
Touche. Strictly, it's meaningless to talk about a fundamentalist movement prior to the early 20th century and the Fundamentalist-Modernist battle. I apologize for carelessly using the terms synonymously.
laxam
1mo ago
invite them to live in our house designed to be a place for similar guys with similar interests to hang out
Isn't the whole point of the guy that he grew up around these kinds of white guys and he is a similar guy with similar interests?
laxam
1mo ago
I really don't have any more problem with the guy you hate than I do any of the other people described in those articles. They're not my type of people in general and I find them all equally loathesome.
But the author of the article?
I hate communists, so I hate her most of all.
It’s watching power refine and reproduce itself
Until someone does the careful, long work of going back through the life of sociology since Marx and methodically removes his influence on the field, it is irreparably tainted and anyone who is a sociologist or uses their terminology should be treated with suspicion by default.
laxam
1mo ago
On the other hand, it’s a very very useful tool to hide incompetence and grift. Everything the government doesn’t want people talking about seems to be “Russian Trolls” and it’s become a sort of go to excuse for why people are saying things the government doesn’t want to hear on social media.
I don't see any particular reason both can't be true.
laxam
1mo ago
I don't see a law saying that wages must keep pace with productivity:
Right there:
- The wage equals the value of the marginal product of labor.
In a world of high automation, one could easily argue that all workers are less productive and deserve much lower wages.
That's not the way productivity measurement works.
Automation makes individual workers more productive.
A labor productivity index can be calculated by dividing an index of output by an index of hours worked
We have observed a general trend in the last 50 years where productivity rises much faster than wages rise: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
EPI is a bullshit factory think tank funded by labor unions to produce propaganda. Their """researchers""" are paid to sit around all to figure out how to twist economic statistics to push their ideological agenda.
If we're going to go for low quality sources, here's a reddit thread on that bullshit graph:
https://old.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/6rtoh4/productivity_pay_gap_in_epi_we_trust/
The EPI graph is an embarrassment designed to draw in ignorant young people on the internet to believing something that isn't true because it's not like they can check it. Pretty much everything you've absorbed about the economy from the internet is bullshit lefty propaganda.
And I think the best chance we have of that is by not totally and unflinchingly embracing automation (even when it makes a lot of sense). We should establish a precedent where the gains of capital and automation are distributed even to wildly unsympathetic people.
And I think we should let consumer preferences drive the evolution of the economy.
laxam
1mo ago
Being a woman's movement and with a relationship to progressive politics was absolutely not mutually exclusive with being an evangelical movement, especially prior to the Civil War.
Protestantism and especially English or Scandinavian inflected Protestantism was heavily correlated with Temperance for a very long time. There's a reason many dry counties left in the South are heavily Protestant even though they're deeply conservative.
laxam
1mo ago
I have trouble considering it much of a morph, considering how much Protestant fundamentalism had to do with the Temperance movement from the beginning.
laxam
1mo ago
those who want to do it again
Fascinatingly, there is still a Prohibition Party in the United States. They've apparently run a Presidential candidate in every election since 1872.
laxam
1mo ago
There absolutely is such a law. Even in high theory, the situations where wages != Marginal labor product are situations of monopoly/monopsony, which are fought by breaking up the monopoly/monopsony. What do you think the proper word for a union with a chokehold on a service with an inelastic supply is? If you guessed monopoly, you'd be correct.
And it's funny you would bring up housing costs, which is an industry where construction productivity has been stagnant for most of a century and where severe supply restrictions are the underlying cause of price increases. This is another situation where the entrenched, rent-seeking interests need to be broken and the market allowed to function again, just like with the ports.
Breaking this union would be an unmitigated good for the country.
It has yet to happen anywhere, any time. There's always something else for people to do.
Competing states are absolutely advantaged by higher productivity but you and I aren't states or economies or large firms.
No, but we are advantaged by higher productivity, too. The 'golden age' of the post-war boom was possible because of higher than usual productivity growth from the 1920s through the 1970s.
People benefit from being wealthier. Higher productivity makes us wealthier. It's pretty straightforward.
laxam
1mo ago
It may well be that a reasonable balance for ports vs port workers involves this thug and his hangers-on being sent off to prison for economic wrecking, mass sackings and prompt automation.
Good.
But similarly reasonable balances may be imposed on unruly, arrogant tech-bros by the rest of society.
Good.
Productivity is the source of wealth. Holding productivity back in pursuit of rents is how you get extended (ie. century long) periods of economic stagnation.
What happens when we automated the dock workers, automated the factory workers, automate the retail workers... who will be left to go on strike when they automate us? And then where is our leverage to negotiate anything in the future?
What does happen when they automate all the farm work? Where will we go?
-- Farm laborer, 1860, when 70% of the population worked in agriculture.
laxam
1mo ago
Yep. It can be done, even when we were so much poorer 150 years ago. We could make something safer today, no doubt, for the vastly smaller numbers of people via our overall population and keep it affordable but we have, in addition to much greater wealth, much greater numbers of 'building codes'.
They look and sound just like you!
More options
Context Copy link