but you always have to doublecheck in some fashion. its tone remains so certain as it confabulates. the risk is learning but learning things that are subtly off, leaving the self subtly off.

(i use these tools a lot now, often for programming information and examples, which has the benefit that when the machine has made up API or offered a bad example, it visibly fails. but absent that, i might be fooled.)

to a degree. but the haunted house isn’t really a novelty like the internet, but a society where politics, inherently large and inscrutable, lacks mediating institutions made of people with direct interpersonal connections. 1/

unions, local ethnic and party “machines”, fraternal organizations, churches, these are the exorcists of the house in question. 2/

only one really remains, churches, and love ‘em or hate ‘em, the intensively churched in America behave consistently rather than thermostatically. i think their trust is badly misplaced, but that is their prerogative. true powerlessness is when you’ve nothing and no one to trust. /fin

the public is not supposed to be naked, ill informed, rationally ignorant, and most of all without meaningful civil society institutions to whom to delegate their trust. 1/

we put people in a shrieky haunted house where nothing anyone says makes sense, and then condemn them when they say not that to either this shriek or that. 2/

if we want democracy to work, we’ll need foster the institutions under which a public can approximate rational constituencies. but we’ve killed those, because the “we” in this story for the most part adamantly does not want democracy to work. /fin

@kalanyr.bsky.social @archangelbeth.bsky.social @mrslibrary.bsky.social all great points! i’m not saying i’m sure that made-in-usa branding can offset extra cost. i’m just saying it might…

and regardless assuming due to loose rules of thumb that any extra primary cost differential must translate to a 4x differential in final price may be overly pessimistic.

(these costs increase linearly with the cost of the garment, though, not multiplicatively.)

(by linearly i meant 1:1 rather than by a multiple… a multiple is of course still a line!)

one strategy would be to go upscale, more services, more advertising. but you can always choose to just markup by $20 but otherwise behave exactly the same as you would with the $25 shirt from abroad. without the multiplicative markup, there’s little added security spend. 1/

conceivably the $20 markup is such a competitive disadvantage (even after the gain you get from “made in usa” branding that you *have* to go into a completely different cost and service tier to sell the shirt. 2/

but it’s also quite conceivable that made-in-usa branding well deloyed can cover the primary cost differential, and the shirts could be sold with no additional expenses required, or even fewer marketing expenses. 3/

maybe the multiplicative rule-of-thumb happens to summarize an empirical invariant, and trying to deviate from the upscale business model never works. but it’s not at all obvious that would be so, it’s a conjecture that would demand some evidence. /fin