correlation is not causation, necessarily. but sometimes it is. but the arrow of causality may go in the direction opposite what you presume. so often what people think are means are ends, and vice versa.
@BenRossTransit @scott we’re probably not going to agree on this, because we’re likely to disagree about how much nimbys are the villain in the housing story. i do agree they often wield policy (and obviously legal) tools disingenuously. but i don’t see them as the heart of our housing incapacity story in the way i suspect you do. ( i think i’ve pointed you to this one before, but fwiw https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/06/13/yimboree/index.html )
@BenRossTransit @scott did it succeed? of course there are saboteurs who will propose bad versions of these things disingenuously. but not getting enough of the good versions is a bigger problem in practice.
@phillmv i agree, unfortunately, on the diagnosis that we are in collapse whether we prefer it or not. i’ll do everything i can to help turn into the skid, work to stabilize and remedy rather than ride the bomb Dr Strangelove style. but i don’t pretend avoiding catastrophe will be easy. neofeudalist accelerationists should be careful what they wish for. when the wheel is in spin, it rarely lands where you bet. 1/
@phillmv maybe if you confiscate the vast majority of share ownership that’s held by the top sliver, you could continue the game for small nest egg retirement savers. but that seems as difficult as any currently unthinkable reform, and if a movement developed the political power to do that, i don’t think continuing to stratify retirement security by index funds holdings would be the best choice it could make. /fin
@BenRossTransit @scott i agree these policies could in theory be designed destructively. but they are condemned indiscriminately, while actual existing policies are usually reasonably well arranged. SF’s vacancy decontrolled, new-building-exempt rent stabilization has nothing to do with SF’s inability to build. yet it is constantly condemned and blamed by a certain stripe of YIMBY.
There’s a lot of continuity between Obama’s unwillingness to go hard against banks because it would have “required a violence to the social order, a wrenching of political and economic norms” and Merrick Garland.
( see @ryanlcooper https://theweek.com/articles/950908/obama-pretender )
capitalism at its best is basically caging the devil in a boiler to drive society’s steam turbines. which can be an amazing source of energy. low carbon too!
but never forget you have to keep that motherfucker in the cage.
every day we have a 1:11, a 2:22, a 3:33, a 4:44, a 5:55. 6:66 would be the first transgression.
i’m thinking of opening up an adulting rink.
@scott it’s like the 2nd Commandment, right?
a social media site should amplify negative content during Democratic administrations but deboost it in favor of positive, beautiful, or informative content during Republican administrations.
A good post by @noahpinion on the hazards of formulaic means of describing or comparing the size and strength of economies. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/how-do-we-measure-whether-chinas
"a government that wastes least governs suboptimally… fear of waste shuts down useful experiments… if you learn from mistakes, you have to make mistakes to learn… you need…a surplus… time and resources to train, improve, and innovate." @profmusgrave https://musgrave.substack.com/p/government-needs-to-waste-more
"The thing about joining a revolution is that eventually the eddies of radicalism and reaction get mixed up. You might think that you’re leading a counter-revolution against radicalism, only to be surprised when your allies suddenly sharpen the guillotine for you." @profmusgrave https://musgrave.substack.com/p/unleashing-the-cultural-counter-revolution
"anything that isn't rigged in their favor feels like it's broken to them!" @anildash https://www.anildash.com/2025/01/04/DOGE-procurement-capture/
you know, wages are just lower in less developed countries. https://mas.to/@meganL/113773125042966193
@phillmv i agree. i basically think rents explain everything about the how things are going in the contemporary west, in the sense that that things in the contemporary west are going to pieces. the most important nut to crack but unfortunately a hard one. sits in tension with the reform-not-revolution idea, because it is very hard to reform people out of their rents.
@phillmv no offense. i view myself as a social democrat, and prefer reform to revolution as i don’t like mass death.
my views on immigration (i’m pro, but think we have to be cautious about how, framing it in terms of rights and freedoms is exciting but leads to disruption of political community and legitimate blowback) and financial mkts (can’t have a decent society without paring back the rents they distribute, which means your index fund) are the kind of things that get tetchy.
@admitsWrongIfProven just subjectively, i often feel more anxiety about posting there than here, a vague sense of dread and foreboding.
both Mastodon and BlueSky are by reputation “left” / “liberal”. maybe Mastodon is more “left” and BlueSky “liberal”?
i now mostly crosspost, and find myself more worried about blowback to my views on BlueSky than on Mastodon, which i find interesting.
there’s a strain of unreconstructed proud prosperous not-so-left liberalism much more prominent there than here.