netstack
Texas is freedom land
No bio...
User ID: 647
A couple in the Depression. More if you count local politicians, conventions, etc.
Not so much during COVID, perhaps because, you know, it wasn’t that bad?
This asshole tried to kill a judge in 2020, but it was some sort of unhinged #MeToo grift instead of a COVID thing. And then there was this random act of schizophrenia in 2023.
But really, violence is rare.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
21hr ago
N=1, but this is actually the first time I’ve seen “futures” mentioned in conjunction with tariffs. My parents, coworkers, etc. just talk about the collective “market” crashing.
I learned about them from a Terry Pratchett joke. Something about a pork futures warehouse.
Anyway, google trends doesn’t tell you anything useful. Interest in tariffs has spiked. So have terms like deficit and onshoring. Are these psyops, too?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
Hence the famously efficient Soviet model?
Coercion smooths out the economic signals that tell you how valuable your industry really is. It’s possible to get a good deal, but you will lose out to competitors who aren’t trying to command their economy.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
I’m literally watching the goalposts move in real time. It’s infuriating.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
That’s absurd. Believing in something really hard doesn’t make it true, nor does it make it good. You’re opening the door to a lot more than the classic deontologies. New Age woo, personality cults, ultranationalism—they’re a lot harder to discount once you throw out rationality.
I think it’s also ridiculous to accuse the Buddhists of being “less developed” than, presumably, Christians. Doubly so if you’re considering the initial Protestants, the Second Great Awakening sects, any of the charismatic branches. Criticizing the parent church for being too materialist was like half their reason for splitting.
Oh, and of course you trot out the old punching bag. I don’t exactly disagree that “wokeism” is missing key traits of a religion, so I have to ask: do you think it would work any better as a movement if it abandoned all pretense of materialism? Would the practitioners be happier, would they resolve their internal contradictions?
Because it sounds like a lot of double standards. They should stop overthinking, but also be logically consistent. Oh, and they can’t underthink, either, or they’ll undermine their prosocial activities. Those get measured in material terms, so that subjective serenity must be worthless. Also, material terms don’t matter, and the real failing is allowing a “crisis of meaning.” Everyone should develop their own faith, except where it contradicts with your values, in which case they can get bent.
I don’t think your position is consistent.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
How is that possible?
Googling it only gives me people arguing over CICO.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
Afraid I don’t have one. Honestly, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a policy evaluated by normal economics. I’m willing to believe it happens, but it sure doesn’t make it to the public eye.
YouTube has started recommending me “tariff equation” apologetics, but I’m not desperate enough to sift through them for quality.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
To the user who reported this comment with:
can we not have wumaos invade this forum?
lol. Dase has been productively commenting since before you knew this forum existed.
That said, I’m going to remind him not to put words in other peoples’ mouths. Especially not with this level of sarcasm.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
Is no one going to mention the elephant in the room? He takes it seriously enough to write 72 chapters of compare and contrast with an Old Testament cosmology.
Colors of Her Coat was beautiful. In better times, it would stand with some of Scott’s most recommendable work.
I’ve been trying for some time to put into words my model of postmodernism, and Colors hits one of the key points. The very process of refining an art form pushes it into familiarity. Familiarity breeds contempt. Contempt insists that there’s no difference between good things and bad things, you fool, you absolute moron. That’s how we get solid-blue paintings and noise music and nihilistic, deconstructive fiction.
Maybe the public hates modern architecture. To a critic, though? The kind of person who is paid to think about buildings day in and day out? Novelty is essential. It’s new training data. His job is not to tell us about good buildings, but to participate in a conversation, no matter how Advanced it gets. Who cares if it alienates the proles? They’ll catch up eventually, right?
This is what’s missing when reactionaries criticize progressive media. Most of the time, they aren’t actually trying to erase your aesthetics. It’s more that your preferences are old news.
It did, probably.
Color TV cost like $650 in 1980. Ten years later you could get a Japanese one for…$400. They even ditched the wood paneling. Today a similarly-sized Chinese flatscreen is, like, $150.
I’d grabbed a bunch of links from the FRED, Minneapolis Fed, and BLS to show this for other goods, but lost my draft. So feel free to compare numbers. All else equal, more competition means lower prices.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
That’s fascinating, but I wish it had data points from the mid/late 20th century. If the curve flattens out by the 70s, with ubiquitous refrigeration and antibiotics and other technologies, it wouldn’t actually contradict the OP.
(I suspect the curve does not, in fact, flatten at that point.)
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
Remember that moron who kept posting not-quite-bait and then deleting his posts?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
It's so your competitors can't catch a free ride on your product's reputation. E.g. copying your label and slapping it on a can of lighter fluid. Makes you look bad.
This was probably more important pre-Internet and pre-international-shipping.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
Countries like Germany faced the same global pressures
Is this true? Germany spent most of that blue-collar period partitioned, demilitarized, and stripped of human capital. It’s probably the worst comparison in Western Europe.
and came out intact.
Is this true? I definitely recall some of our European users expressing their disgust with the absolute state of German politics. And industry. And entertainment, etc. etc… If you want to make the case, you should probably bring some receipts. My guess would be that Germany imported all the soundbites and “learn 2 code” dismissals of the American consensus when it imported all our fintech and communications advances.
Instead, they built protected, respected, cottage industries and stable vocational tracks with early sorting
Here’s the part with legs. I want to see more about the proposed alternative, because that’s where a lot of critiques of neoliberalism stumble. How does it get around the supply/demand curves? How well can it generalize to larger players in the market?
I have a lot more to say about this, which is a good sign for a top level.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5d ago
"Intestate" meaning "without testament"? Learned a new word today.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
6d ago
Are you serious?
I think this is the first time I've seem someone suggest that Democrats don't hate Trump enough.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
6d ago
I could imagine a feedback loop where anything that boosts wages boosts housing prices, as sellers and landlords try to capture that value. So a labor shortage, a minimum wage hike, that kind of thing. Then the labor shortage ends and wages slow down, but housing stays expensive.
What I don’t get is what actually triggers an asset price correction. How does the market stay, apparently, uncorrected, and why does it stop? Why can’t houses depreciate without an apocalyptic event?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
7d ago
I was going to make this a top-level, but since it’s apparently topical…I was digging through my post history for something and ran into this based on a different @2rafa comment.
Enlisting is an employer of last resort. There were a lot more people at their last resorts in 2008-2012, a lot of people who really needed a competitive paycheck and a comprehensive insurance policy. In 2024, that’s not necessarily the case. We’re coming off a couple years of COVID distortions and zero-interest-rate phenomena. That has a way of making boot camp less appealing.
So, Conspiracy Theory of the Week: Trump is intentionally trying to trigger a recession to bolster U.S. military recruitment.
If the economy crashes, more young American men will choose the military. If it crashes faster than the housing market, even more so. And if it crashes in the midst of a publicized house-cleaning session, well, the new recruits are more likely to endorse the Trump party line.
HHS has already lost more employees than the DoD despite the latter being 10x larger. (Numbers could be off; it’s hard to find coverage that isn’t hysterical about the whole process.) Meanwhile, USMEPCOM is one of the few exemptions to the DoD hiring freeze. Can’t recruit new troops if there’s no one running the stations!
There’s the whole bit where he’s slashing the VA, but this doesn’t actually disprove anything. After all, who hates the VA more than veterans?
This is stupid and I don’t actually believe it. There’s no advantage over simpler theories which don’t assume a 5D mastermind.
To wit, Trump policy is governed almost exclusively by his aesthetic sensibilities, and he’s mashing whichever buttons look like they might steer us in that direction. Military reform is somewhere in the pile. High enough to give the DoD a better deal than DEd or HHS; not nearly enough to intentionally tank the stock market.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
7d ago
I’d warn you for being antagonistic, but I looked back at the last time I did so. I’m pretty sure it was for responding to the same (ban-evading) guy.
So I guess I’ll just remind everyone not to feed the trolls.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
7d ago
I don’t have a specific recommendation, but you could consider gun range bags? The ones designed for multiple pistols. They’re vaguely cubic (if you can remove the dividers) and tend to have more padding.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
7d ago
Baby, bathwater.
Almost none of our legal system relies on that sort of chicanery. Rewarding any administration for doing more of it is a terrible idea.
Are we looking at the same graphs? Cause the spike in "tariffs" looks more extreme than any of the ones you showed.
Also, if you extend this one back to the beginning of 2020, rather than April 2020, there's a giant spike in both "futures" terms.
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