This post is bonus content.

sometimes i find myself saying “thank you” to claude.ai then i wonder whether my politeness is burning down the rainforest.

unfortunately i don’t think the “industry” cares at all. that stuff is just marketing. profit is number go up.

dystopia is not salutary.

📌

yes, that’s why commodity is a better analogy. you can’t set prices or borrow in a currency that sharply spikes against goods and services. it’s a terrible unit of account.

crypto begins as, its entire architecture is shaped and constrained in order to be, a form of money or commodity independent of states. it is an experimental alternative to state coordination of finance and even contracts. now it’s surging, solely as a function of expected endorsement of the state.

i hate to link over there, but @mattbruenig.bsky.social is so good on this stuff. x.com/mattbruenig/...

in a way the essence of every right wing is "just because i would do it, and should be allowed to prosper by it, doesn't mean that you can or should."

( what a sad, tragic tale. i wonder why people, having made it to Canada, would take such lethal risks to come to the US. Canada is wealthy and extraordinarily open to immigrants. maybe it's easier to prosper without documents in the US? )

it’s harrowing, but what about it shifted your thinking?

for one thing, it tries to look through profit margins, which are historically (but past performance is no guarantee…) mean-reverting, rendering P/E overly optimistic when margins are thick.

just have a spoonful. you’ll quiet right down.

fair enough. i think it’s accurate that the piece mostly emphasizes economics education rather than acknowledging and addressing what might genuinely be unfair in immigration, even if it is in some sense economically valuable. including addressing unfairness would strengthen the piece.

bliss requires no fine distinctions.

i think that’s precisely @sjwrenlewis.bsky.social’s point: “voters don’t like foreigners” is where right-wing culture warriors want you to stop, but it’s the wrong place to stop. different forms of immigration impose different tradeoffs, and can be more or less unfair. get into the distinctions.

that depends who you are. you are presuming you are a wise technocrat, rather than a tax-avoiding plutocratic happy to become something of a warlord if state dysfunction renders that prudent.

one could. one could imagine (i’m not endorsing) guest-worker visas that waive conventional labor protections, permitting comparable exploitation with little of the loss of control associated with undocumented. i think all this is @sjwrenlewis.bsky.social’s point: it’s not the immigrants per se.