Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

kakistocracy is downstream from plutocracy because under plutocracy those who survive in positions of authority become restricted to those who’ve proven susceptible to extortion and gratuity.

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Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

if you want a fair hearing on human rights, i guess you're better off suing in El Salvador. www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/...

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Venezuela-hired lawyers file petition in El Salvador aimed at freeing Venezuelans deported by U.S.: One of the attorneys said the Venezuelans they represent are not members of the Tren de Aragua gang, had migrated from their country and “don’t have any criminal record.”

Venezuela-hired lawyers file petition in El Salvador aimed at freeing Venezuelans deported by U.S.

Link Preview: Venezuela-hired lawyers file petition in El Salvador aimed at freeing Venezuelans deported by U.S.: One of the attorneys said the Venezuelans they represent are not members of the Tren de Aragua gang, had migrated from their country and “don’t have any criminal record.”
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

The war-plans thing is bad, but I think it's far less of a scandal than lawlessly decimating USAID, CFPB, NSF/NIH, etc. It would have been a terrible tragedy if US servicemembers had been harmed due to their leaders' miserable opsec. But what those mfs have done to USAID alone will kill many more.

Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

Wow! Your paper offers a very detailed and textured discussion. A few comments: You discuss, as part of the resilience externality, that firms can be underpunished for resilience failures because, for example, they have market power so increase prices to ration the result of failure. 1/

in reply to this
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

Perhaps it goes without saying, there is nothing special about the zero point. Firms might also be outright rewarded for resilience failures, if the loss of quantity sold is more than offset by the increase in price of sale. 2/

in reply to self
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

Resilience failures, under these circumstances, can be understood as times when circumstances force what would otherwise be forbidden, restraining supply as a monopolist to benefit from high prices. 3/

in reply to self
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

You wonderfully discuss capital rationing, which is ultimately an industry-level practice. The prospect of pricing power from resilience failures becomes a case for firms to tacitly coordinate on minimizing spare capacity. 4/

in reply to self
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

That's good for the industry in ordinary times (spare capacity is a cost), and means players will enjoy windfall profits in extraordinary times, when upward demand shocks or downward shocks to some suppliers force juicy price-rationing of output. 5/

in reply to self
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

A great thing about this tactic is there's a *prima facie* actual efficiency case for it, so it's hard for antitrust regulators to condemn. You are going to insist we build inefficient overcapacity? 6/

in reply to self
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

It replaces illegal, potentially observable output restriction with deniable, stochastic capacity restriction. It looks like "lean", "just-in-time" supply chains among consolidated industries. Which, perhaps not coincidentally, is what a lot of production now looks like! 7/

in reply to self
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

In your discussion, you balance a resilience externality against a "business stealing" externality, and point out that empirically the resilience externality seems to dominate. You discuss aspects of industry and industry structure that might affect the balance. 8/

in reply to self
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

I think you are right that, observing the *status quo* world, the resilience externality dramatically dominates. But it does suggest another avenue of redress not so much discussed in the paper, regulating towards the countervailing externality. 9/

in reply to self
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

You discuss this a bit with respect to antitrust, though it is distinct from the vertical merger considerations you discuss at length. 10/

in reply to self
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

Firms in less consolidated industries may be prone to "overinvestment" due to the private, firm-specific risk of loss of share, or the private benefit of "stealing" share. 11/

in reply to self
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

In addition to regulation and business law, industrial policy encompassing both antitrust and intended to shape other characteristics that might affect the business-stealing externality could help address the resilience externality. 12/

in reply to self
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

Though as with many of the other tools you describe, getting the titration right will be far from obvious. 13/

in reply to self
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

You briefly mention finance as a central industry for which resilience is important. It seems like finance might be a particularly illuminating case study. Much financial regulation might fall under "quantity targeting" — capital and liquidity requirements, etc — in your taxonomy. 14/

in reply to self
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

The Fed broadly targets the price of finance, arguably in the name of resilience. Has the business law surrounding finance groped towards some of your ideas and suggestions as well? 15/

in reply to self
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

Finance, like the capital rationers I discussed above, is an industry where arguably resilience underinvestment is not only underpunished, but outright rewarded. 16/

in reply to self
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

Minsky's core insight was that prudent financiers are outcompeted and put out of business by more aggressive ones over the long course of the cycle, before the now infamous Minsky Moment when chickens finally come home to roost. Absent regulation, resilience investment is fatally punished. 17/

in reply to self
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

I loved the discussion of corporate governance, of shareholders' privately beneficial but often socially destructive preference for high margin over high quantity means of generating profits. 18/

in reply to self
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

Figuring out how to reshape governance incentives towards high-output, low-margin strategies strikes me as a key desideratum, undoing perhaps the elimination of what shareholders take to be managerial agency costs. 19/

in reply to self
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

You remark at a certain point that when resilience failures yield systematic crises, they should be internalized even by shareholders. I think that's overly optimistic. 20/

in reply to self
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

We ration the consequences of systematic crises by wealth (when we are made collectively poorer, what's left get price rationed). And there will always be systematic crises on the horizon. 21/

in reply to self
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

In finance I think it pretty obvious that shareholders and managers even of plainly "too-big-to-fail" banks put getting rich far before preventing even crises they might directly precipitate, absent extensive supervision and restraint. 22/

in reply to self
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

Hopefully IBGUBG ("I'll be gone, you'll be gone.") when the very profitable but resilience-impairing deals actually fail. Whether we break the world or someone else does, the important thing is we should have a whole lot of money first. 23/

in reply to self
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

So, I think that even when failures yield very systemic crises, the resilience externality remains very, very external. 24/

in reply to self
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

Anyway, a great paper! Thanks! /fin

in reply to self
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

“Unrooted party orgs cannot reach an alienated and disorganized working class. Policy entrepreneurs who have identified the failings of neoliberalism cannot reach them either. Small-minded politicos cannot build from politics to policy; pointy-headed mandarins cannot build from policy to politics.”

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Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

i love VT SEN. i say primary everyone. our system provides too little choice, too little play for the demos to express itself, when there are not contested primaries.

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Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

“Paul, Weiss’s reputation as a law firm is now kaput; it must be regarded as an adjunct of the Trump administration.”

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Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

Donald Trump has no mandate at all. The majority of people who voted in the 2024 election voted against him. He won a plurality of the popular vote. He achieved not even the barest majority, which itself would not constitute any kind of a mandate.

Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

remember when the Supreme Court said the Federal government couldn’t condition funding on medicaid expansion because that would be coercive and violate their rights? pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

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Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

what’s happening now is worse and weirder than McCarthyism. at least during the red scares, there was actually a scare. the public was persuaded there was a threat. no one is scared or threatened by people who participated in now-silenced protests on behalf of the Palestinian cause.

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Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

impeach. convict. remove. rinse. repeat.

Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

“What happened here was something far darker: the US government engaging in what amounts to human trafficking, shipping people to El Salvador as forced labor without any due process. The mask slipped entirely when El Salvador’s President tweeted ‘Oopsie… too late’”

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Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

look. i don’t know what everyone is so upset about. they used the same level of opsec as DOGE does.

Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

anti-antisemitism feels an awful lot like antisemitism. hunted.

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Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

only amongst themselves, as far as i know.

in reply to this
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

“Former diversity offices have been remained offices of ‘Belonging’ or ‘Collaboration,’ as the University of Colorado calls its former diversity program. Collaboration is all too apt a name.”

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Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

maybe for mean tweets about Teslas.

in reply to this
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

it’s got to suck for signal, i mean, states always want in to conspicuously encrypted services but boy must they be everybody’s juicy target now.

Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

have the europeans commented on whether they’re gonna pay for it?

Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com

so will they be returned so they can make their case during “individualized hearings”?

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