Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
bites hard now.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
cool analogy! (TFP "measures" at least do have discernible directions of movement you can argue about and draw correlates with. i agree, very loose, often tendentious correlation hacking and causality handwaving! with vibes and cultural, it's all whatever the narrator says that it is.)
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
this feels to me like the Trump $2 bill, but for a certain kind of geek rather than for MAGA types. marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevo...
Asimov Press has a new kind of book - Marginal REVOLUTION
Link Preview: Asimov Press has a new kind of book - Marginal REVOLUTION: Today we launched our second Asimov Press book…The book’s theme is “technology,” and so we encoded a complete copy of the book into DNA, and are making those DNA copies available to consumers for the ...
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
we can't know, but we sure can't conclude that the path to some forward-looking social democracy is to impose over political anger forms of immigration that put pressure on natives' salary and employment security because maybe somehow a new new deal results.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
seems very parallel to what just happened on (i think) the other leg of your dual citizenship…
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
i think with proper industrial policy we could jumpstart a competitive North American EV industry, but i'm not sure electric personal automobiles is the smartest industry to make such a push for.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
"In defiance of the neoliberal just so story, private companies did not respond to the government’s withdrawal of support by increasing their own R&D expenditure, they responded by cutting it." @williamcb.bsky.social williamcullernebown.substack.com/p/stepping-o... ht @karengregory.bsky.social
Stepping out of Thatcher's shadow
Link Preview: Stepping out of Thatcher's shadow: After 40 years of neoliberal failure, we need more than superficial change in industrial strategy
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
“What is the point of the Liberal party?” by @phillmv@hachyderm.io okayfail.com/garden/whats... // about Canada, but with parallels to what's happened to a lot of place's "mainstream" "center-left" parties.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
🙁
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
only paranoid people believed this it was always a coincidence. mastodon.scot/@kim_harding...
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
"vibes" are even worse than "culture". things that pretend to explain but do not.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
read Bryan Caplan on how amazing UAE is for the welfare of immigrants. www.betonit.ai/p/reflection... what do you think? circumstances can be better than the circumstances people come from, but still be far from admirable. 1/
Reflections on United Arab Emirates
Link Preview: Reflections on United Arab Emirates: Or, "Look upon the world's most open borders and rejoice!"
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
if the US had evolved into a contemporary UAE, with us non-Mayflower descendants segmented into low remuneration services and construction, would that be fine? 2/
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
“the whole era was miserable” is caricature. people live, smile, suffer in every era and circumstance. but we do judge. the Gilded Age was… not good, even if it was better than how things were where our ancestors came from. 3/
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
what makes the American story we grew up with so appealing is it had a happy (we thought) ending, a middle-class society into which substantially everyone (except descendants of slaves) could assimilate and prosper. 4/
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
if we had never had that triumphalist moment, that doesn’t mean every era of America would have been the World’s Worst Hellhole. we had a lot of land and resources per capita! lots of people did well! 5/
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
but there really was a whole lot of immiseration, and absent the New Deal and GI Bill etc, a risk of pretty permanently entrenched classes. (we now face this risk again.) 6/
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
the contemporary UAE is not the worst hellhole in the world even for its guest workers. they voluntarily go. but i don’t think we’d judge a permanent UAE a success by the standards to which we hold America (unless you are my friend Bryan Caplan!) /fin
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
he lives today, a bit. gave a lot of us a smile. i’m sorry that you didn’t have his company longer.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
i’m besotted.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
OMG.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
Tesla will be the worst Chinese EV (rebranded as “American”), but the only one we’ll be allowed to buy (thanks to targeted tariff waivers).
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Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
📌
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
Thanks!
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
perhaps not *entirely*, but close! upscale passengers could skip Ellis Island. big commercial passage was through NY/Ellis Island (i guess SF/Angel Island on the Pacific side), but if you arranged passage to elsewhere, or walked across the Southern or Northern border, here you were, you were in.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
Good point! Just the first — beyond specific anti-Chinese animus — that was sufficiently powerful to provoke a serious expansion of the role of the Federal government. (Or, perhaps more precisely, the first when the Federal government had advanced to where it could develop that capacity.)