(we had populist revolts, from the left and the right, in 2016, which many people understood at the time in materialist terms. there were arguments about it, you might remember. i think "everyone seemed pretty optimistic" until 2021-ish is not a defensible claim.)
“just asking questions”
@jwmason.bsky.social as Green New Kalecki. (i think he’s right. @schwarz.bsky.social’s “iron law of institutions” applies to particular capitalists and the economy at large. they’d accept economic collapse and catastrophe if that’s what preserves their own capacity to control.)
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this is why the polity should organize itself through professional representatives, capable of memory and coherence, communicating actively with the represented and bound to pursue their interests. in the United States we’ve created an institutional environment in which this is impossible, however.
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somewhere there is a Cave, mysterious and magical, a Cave of Paradoxes. how, for example, can one outrage a squish? and yet. look around.
❤️
people say Trump has really coarsened our politics, but pretty much everyone who interacts with him says “pardon me”.
i sometimes run into Freedom on Mastodon, but not too recently alas. i’ve been less abroad the last decade and a half or so, but may be more abroad soon. i’m not so likely to make it to an ML thing in Spring, though i enjoyed a flurry of texts from the recent reunion. 1/
how have you been all these decades, this blink of an eye? /fin
one can talk about labor augmenting vs labor replacing change, but in practice it’s a pretty blurry distinction? if one service provider is augmented to do the work of ten, you need a lot of help on the demand side to sustain bargaining power for good jobs. is the hope is for quality-not-quantity?
it’s a small world in either case, and delightful to find you.
(btw were you the ML late night pianist circa 1996?)
if we shaped technology to generate productivity enhancements in the services sector comparable to what has happened in manufacturing, why would we think the services sector will remain where the jobs are?
a silver lining! the left and the “centrists” seem madly in agreement.
dark.
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you can’t be the prodemocracy party and then fib to prevent the public from knowing what position your members of Congress actually took in order to shield them from accountability to voters.
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has it come to this?
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who hates the democrats more, the people who vote against them or the people who vote for them?
third parties could help provide temporary logistics for survival, transportation, and refuge.
Unsurprisingly, it sounds like misuse and poor planning has been a chronic problem. But is that (a bit literally) water under the bridge at this point? If they are months or weeks from dry taps, there’ll be an acute crisis, in addition to a continuing need to remedy long term mismanagement.