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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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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if you want a fair hearing on human rights, i guess you're better off suing in El Salvador. www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/...
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.”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.
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/
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/
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/
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/
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/
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/
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 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/
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/
You discuss this a bit with respect to antitrust, though it is distinct from the vertical merger considerations you discuss at length. 10/
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 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/
Though as with many of the other tools you describe, getting the titration right will be far from obvious. 13/
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/
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/
Finance, like the capital rationers I discussed above, is an industry where arguably resilience underinvestment is not only underpunished, but outright rewarded. 16/
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/
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/
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/
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/
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 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/
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/
So, I think that even when failures yield very systemic crises, the resilience externality remains very, very external. 24/
“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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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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“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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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.
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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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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“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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look. i don’t know what everyone is so upset about. they used the same level of opsec as DOGE does.
anti-antisemitism feels an awful lot like antisemitism. hunted.
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“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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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.
have the europeans commented on whether they’re gonna pay for it?