@buermann @franktaber@mas.to @DetroitDan i think he makes his living mostly from antitrust oriented thinktanking which (like subscription letters) is an inherently corrupting line of business, but often the best people can do. https://www.economicliberties.us/matt-stoller/

@franktaber@mas.to @DetroitDan he does, to his credit, puncture and reality-check some of Andreeson and Horowitz self-flattering claims. he does not, so much, of Vance, which I agree is disappointing. for example https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2024/07/vance-cool-on-credit-card-bill-lobbyists-say-00169011 although maybe that was too close to breaking news to be included.

@franktaber@mas.to @DetroitDan I agree with you!

But I still think it’s a good piece precisely because it grants Vance and his dance partners the benefit of the doubt and explores the plain contradictions in their coalition in the most sympathetic plausible terms. Even if you take these people more seriously (and more morally) than they deserve to be taken, where do you end up? Not in a very persuasive spot, I think, but Stoller does give fair consideration.

in their early years, they asked us all to trust them, they were the good guys — “don’t be evil” was their mission! — they only make money when the web grows richer and deeper, they said.

trust us, they said, but they soon proved there is no trust they won’t violate if the P&L doesn’t pencil, even at the most trivial scales, or if some strategic brainstorm has them prefering we gravitate towards a next big thing. cf @danilo https://hachyderm.io/@danilo/112809807306890936

@buermann @franktaber@mas.to @DetroitDan Yes. Stoller, to his credit, delves into that. I think the place he arrives is ultimately too credulous, grants all of Vance and Andreeson and Horowitz too much benefit of the doubt. But the piece is the opposite of simply pretending the, um, tension doesn’t exist. It’s an attempt to make sense of exactly that.

@franktaber@mas.to @DetroitDan Stoller’s beat is antitrust first, economic populism more broadly second. I don’t think he’s interested, for example, in distinguishing between a kind of herrenvolk populism and the universalistic kind you and I might support. Which is a way of saying—perhaps unflatteringly—I think broader questions of fascism are just outside of his focus. He’s trying to figure out whether Vance’s purported economics can be taken seriously, despite his (ugly) affiliations.

@franktaber@mas.to @DetroitDan whether well or poorly (i'm sure Stoller gives Vance more benefit of the doubt than you think he deserves), that is the contradiction Stoller is trying to explore.

"campaigns are not where realignments happen, they are only where promises are made." #MatthewStoller writes on JD Vance https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/can-jd-vances-populist-crusade-succeed ht @DetroitDan

"For of all the reasons Donald Trump chose J.D. Vance to be his running mate, the one that stands out the clearest is this: Vance came complete with the biggest dowry in human history." #HaroldMeyerson https://prospect.org/politics/2024-07-18-would-jd-vance-join-uaw-picket-line-tesla/

one way to understand this moment is that the golden age of television — with its antiheroes and garish plot twists — has finally caught up with US electoral campaigns, replacing past decades’ formulaic procedurals.

unfortunately, at least so far, the better the television, the worse the consequences of the politics.

I think this article is unpersuasive, because it worries about what intelligence agencies will do with commercially available data and asks we restrain them, without discussing what private actors might do with the same data, and how we restrain them.

I certainly want the US intelligence community to be able to do anything Elon Musk is able to do. I distrust both, but I distrust Musk and his fellow plutocrats more. ht @Geoffberner https://newsie.social/@freedomofpress/112808439487349216

@isomorphismes yes. it’s a small world after all, when a giant like the United States bestrides it.

@GCarty80 @scott (i think both have been eras of perceived scarcity and decline, rather than abundance and growth. i think the pace of relative drift of the monetary unit is less important than that.)

only god knows what these fuckers are going to do next.

"Against choosing your political allegiances based on who is 'pro-crypto'" @vbuterin https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/07/17/procrypto.html

"Wisdom and intelligence have shockingly little to do with one another. Sometimes, I think they might be inversely correlated." #quoderat http://www.technologyasnature.com/core-issue/

@farah i sometimes regret i lack the technical skill to bury my head in the sand.

from #PaulStarr https://prospect.org/justice/2024-07-17-supreme-courts-license-presidential-vengeance/

This Supreme Court is undermining the administrative state so that labor conditions everywhere can be like those in Oklahoma marijuana farms.

from #SebastianRotella @kirstenberg https://www.propublica.org/article/marijuana-oklahoma-china-immigration-safety-workers ht @ZhiZhu