@marick i generally live in what seemed a very futuristic past.
regulation has it costs, but if you go by journalism, which disproportionately presents extreme cases, you'll overstate them. regulation has profound benefits too. that there's lots of room for improvement doesn't render the regulatory state a catastrophe. see #KevinDrum https://jabberwocking.com/yeah-america-can-still-build-stuff/
perhaps i'm mistaken, but i don't think the outpouring of support for luigi reflects affluenza or post-materialist politics.
although, yes, even people with awful health insurance do have a wide variety of sushi options these days.
this by @mattyglesias is very good. https://www.slowboring.com/p/four-years-later
Text: If I were to say, “It’s irresponsible to back Trump regardless of your views on taxes and energy because he’s an authoritarian menace,” these people would say I’m being a hysterical lib. But if I were to say, “It’s fine to vote for Trump while still strongly disagreeing with what he did around 1/6, I’d just like to hear you say that in public,” the response would be that everyone knows it’s best to avoid Trump’s bad side. If you’re not willing to voice criticism of the president, even while generally supporting him, because you’re afraid of retaliation, that seems at least a little bit like Trump is an authoritarian menace. I have concerns! And what I would love more than anything is for Trump supporters in the business world or at conservative nonprofits to set my mind at ease, not by arguing with me about whether Trump is an authoritarian menace, but by showing me that they don’t fear him and can offer pointed, vocal criticism of his conduct and strong condemnation of these potential pardons.
small frivolous expenses — i don’t wanna touch burritos let’s go back to avocado toast — don’t indicate the purchaser is either wealthy or foolish. they can be chosen because, despite their frivolity, they are immaterial relative to big sources of financial stress and deliver pleasure worth the small cost. 1/
humans don’t reveal lexical preferences for what finger-waggers deem essential first to frivolities only if income remains. this includes the preferences of the finger waggers whose excess income only lets them pretend their preferences are unhumanly hierarchical. /fin
if, during a war, you are going to decide which side is a villain by which side’s spokespeople speak tendentiously and in bad faith, you will find nearly always that all sides are the villain.
try not to slide into defending other people's caricatures of your views.
@arthegall well, at least the debate hasn’t happened yet!
@phillmv perhaps one way to persuade the mass affluent professional class on wealth taxes is to work the math that their index funds can’t grow if Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are going to enjoy the same growth on a million times more money.
how long before OnlyFans and similar are overtaken by AI fake characters run by twenty-something mostly male hustlers and we have a strange analogue of the “cultural appropriation” debate of the 2010s?
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.