@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.
remember when we had a massive crisis and responded with aggressive income supports for the working and middle class?
what if the crisis was a financial market collapse?
people who deny the sentience of LLMs come back as ChatGPT.
“McKinsey points out that roughly two-thirds of the total return for buyout deals entered in 2010 or later and exited in 2021 or before can be attributed to broader moves in market valuation multiples and leverage, rather than improved operating efficiency.” https://www.ft.com/content/b75bd032-7395-4ab1-812d-e1ed5ad58aac ht #SeanTuffy
@carolannie i think we need to bridge those moral reprehensibilities too. we’ve observed the beginnings of a “MAGA civil war”, between people who thought Trump was their champion against corporations and plutocrats, and the plutocrats who actually bought Trump. 1/
@carolannie the former group has said a lot of racist stuff, is pro deportations, etc. but if we don’t bring them into coalition against plutocracy, plutocracy will succeed. no one is banished from society or politics. they can only be banished from a side. /fin
all of my acts are official. i should have absolute immunity, citing the US Supreme Court.
@carolannie i don’t think we want to whitewash disagreements, but i think we need to agree to disagree for a while as we work to persuade people. there are so many dimensions we can disagree across with great moral fervor. if we don’t bridge those, divide and conquer will succeed.
(look at how liberal professionals are reacting to Bernie today. if the divide between Bernie-ites and liberals is rendered morally irreconcilable, the plutocrats will have nothing to fear.)
a hard thing is that, in order to overcome divide-and-conquer by plutocrats, we will have to find solidarity with groups we think are profoundly wrong on some issues, whose positions and advocacy we think are outright immoral.
what is rule of law among people for whom words have no meaning?
you-have-to-captcha-to-unsubscribe is quite the racket.