Ads for candidates I support don’t motivate me. I resent the manipulation. I feel like they cheapen causes that matter to me, and turn them into grifts. But ads by their opponents—the shamelessness and dissembling—infuriate me. The other guy going negative is, for me, the most effective positive.
absolutely. long-term, we need ways to live more efficiently so we're not moving a ton or three every time we need to stop for milk. but while we're living this madly, we'd better EV it to mitigate the harm. i know he dislikes the activitsts, but MY's low prioritization of climate is a bit bizarre.
or we could subsidize competing flocks of new entrants, up and down the supply chain. (we need an ecosystem, inputs from lithium and rare earths to batteries and motors and airbags and doors to the vehicles themselves, not just top-level manufacturers.) 1/
China went from zero to dominance in like 5 years on EVs. they are better placed to do that, sure, because they've been subsidizing competitive capacity in general for decades, they have know-how not just at the level of a given product, but at the level of developing capabilities. 2/
still to pretend that what China did in five years is beyond our capacity ever to do (even with protective tariffs to create demand-side space) is to concede there is little point trying to compete at all. and there is no compelling reason to concede that. /fin
reducing labor supply, in a particular, benign way, is much of the point of a UBI. it’s not even a trade-off, unless you adopt the distributional point of view of capital. drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/07/22/u...
it’s weird that in development and geopolitics there’s a sense in which the opposite of West is South.
2016’s “Fight for $15” needs to be inflation adjusted to like $20. But it’s a start.
Loading quoted Bluesky post...
great new vocabulary word in this one by @rickperlstein.bsky.social. “eisegesis” — pronounced “ice-a-Jesus” and what it means is just bad hermeneutics, man. (with apologies to @poetryforsupper.bsky.social)
Loading quoted Bluesky post...
speaking personally, i think it’s perfectly acceptable to jump around and skip like a dipshit. i encourage it even. what is not acceptable is buying an election for a fascist.
Science famously progresses “one funeral at a time” (Max Planck). And so it was with moving past the NAIRU paradigm at the Fed, only a bit less morbidly. See this excellent column by @jwmason.bsky.social. jwmason.org/slackwire/do...
good that the Supreme Court has remedied that.
Tax cuts “are the political equivalent of someone chopping your house to pieces with an axe and then offering the remains back to you under a sign that says, ‘Free Firewood!’” @hamiltonnolan.bsky.social www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/why-republ...
Why Republicans Love to Offer You Tax Cuts
Link Preview: Why Republicans Love to Offer You Tax Cuts: A basic but underappreciated explanation.
give. gaffe. glove.
I think that sense has driven some of the choices. But I think it may have been, overall, um, a mistake. It’s true there would be stupid, vicious scandals over every misstep. 1/
Think AOC’s college dance, Obama’s tan suit. But the net effect of that kind of scandal is often net positive, beyond the disingenuous already-opponents who gin them up. 2/
By walking into scandals like that, tolerating them, moving forward, a person comes to seem authentic — uninhibited rather than guarded — and therefore known, trustworthy. 3/
Harris managed this beautifully with criticism of her laugh early on, turned stupid scandalmongering into an advantage, a likable quirk. /fin
i think a thing that’s really hurt Harris as a candidate is that she hasn’t made a lot of mistakes. the discipline required to avoid any hint of scandal creates a perception of inauthenticity, a sense u just don’t know the person u are asked to vote for, that they are dissembling, hiding something.
believers in Roko’s basilisk offer nuclear reactors in sacrifice to reassure themselves they will be spared.
there’s a stein’s law dynamic, but the thing about stein’s law, when it binds there are often twists and surprises in how it binds.
It would be nice if that war could truly end and North Korea could join a better world. The South has built an extraordinary country in so many respects, but the fertility trend is whack. I don't know what the counterfactual on that would be, had a unified free Korea emerged.
North Korea is not a victim of the United States. It did start the war by invading the South. But the prosecution of a justified war was rendered… problematic by the extent of destruction. Something like 20% died in three years. www.wilsoncenter.org/article/new-...
(I don't know the comparable figure for the South. Perhaps it's unfair to blame the US, if the other side was just as brutal. It was a weird war, with the South almost completely overrun—so brutalized—then the North the same, then back to close to status quo ante. Perfect for pointless destruction.)
Time is a salve, for sure. And changes of leadership can restore innocence. The US in North Korea, Cambodia? Nothing Israel has done measures down to that. It seems like ancient history, and the region broadly is a friendly trade partner. North Korea has neither forgiven nor forgotten, though.
For the past to become prologue though, it has to become the past.
Again. Maybe there's a kind of success. But there's a cost. From my vantage, Israel's behavior in the West Bank, from which 7.10 did not emit, has deeply discredited any claim that its behavior broadly has been necessary and justified. It looks to me like brutal opportunism.
Maybe these are opportunities worth taking. Obviously they are from some people's perspective. But among the costs is the regard of large groups of people who were once torn but broadly favorably disposed towards Israel. Many of us just no longer are.
Maybe AIPAC and other elite-level work can mitigate those costs can mitigate those costs, from the perspective of the people who perceive these opportunities as worth it. Maybe we are "large groups" that ultimately don't matter. Maybe not, though.
And putting aside realpolitik, surely we are not alone in perceiving the costs that we perceive. Most Israelis are not Smotrich.
