This is the same problem as the "AI drives the car until it can't" situation. Feel free to doze off so long as you can wake up and instantly have world class racecar "save the situation" reflexes. Hope isn't a strategy but that's what all of this feels like.
My feeling about all the corruption talk is that everyone is at different points on the "oh yeah now I see it" curve. I've noticed that I'm really annoyed at people who are just now getting it as I've been seeing it for 20+ years. Because people who are further behind didn't see it before they have no idea how bad previous corruption was and only see the new corruption as a unique evil, unmatched by anything that ever happened in a million billion years. Which then makes for very tiresome arguments about how bad it used to be back in the day. They actually argue that it used to be fine, but NOW it's bad.
Anyhow kind of a rant but it's an insight I had as to why nobody can agree on anything despite lots of folks probably being honest/good faith actors.
I think when people grow up with something it grows to become all they know, and so they assume it's normal and everything else is aberrant. So the overt corruption of now a days (or at least of yesterdays) is not even seen as corruption, because otherwise surely somebody would do or say something about. Surely.
So large 'awakenings' require localized extreme circumstances, or at least the perception of extreme circumstances. That perception keyword is what makes everything so dumb, but I won't complain. More people being 'aware' is a great thing, regardless of how we get there.
Isn't this also more unique since they're trading futures contracts vs whatever a traditional sports bet is? I thought it was kind of a clever end run around the law where taking down their gig would also mean that you have to attack commodities futures contracts as well and that the Congress would be loathe to do that lest they accidentally outlaw the stock market.
When I say "clever" I don't mean"good" I mean "crafty". You acknowledge someone has game without condoning their behavior or extolling it as virtuous.
Congress didn't eliminate the federal prohibition on sports gambling when they created the CFTC. Ergo, it is clear that Congress did not intend for sports gambling transactions to be within the jurisdiction of the CFTC.
The only clever thing they did was putting members of the Trump family on their board.
I suspected that this was the case as the president can't just invent new laws on a whim. They have a fair amount of leeway on their interpretation of laws re: directions to the administration on how/when to do things but they can't just invent a law from thin air.
Also I mean what constitutes a generator if it isn't something connected to the grid? If my car has an engine and it also has a small inverter and an AC outlet is that now a generator and subject to generator laws in addition to car laws?
They can, however, just refuse to enforce a law, or start enforcing the opposite of a law. While they may not be able to change the words on the page, the effect is identical.
The title of the article is kind of technically correct but still misleading.
It is true that The Ocean Cleanup "we're going to trawl the ocean for plastic" approach isn't working terribly well.
But they did pivot to stopping trash from washing out of rivers and into the ocean which is working. Stopping the mess from growing is also a very good thing.
This seems like some combination of the enemy of good is perfect and also sour grapes that someone else is doing the thing.
Read again? Negative is the enemy of good, and this project was a net negative.
As PR it went well, if you didn't examine it too closely. It was a misnomer from the start - it was 'harbor cleanup' or 'river cleanup' really. Where the big obvious plastic objects are. I don't believe they proposed any method for actually cleaning up the 'garbage patch' which consists of pepper-sized particles of plastic that requires a sieve to see. And which has been colonized by many marine creatures, so 'cleaning it up' would have the side effect of mass sterilization.
Issues are hard. PR is easy, especially if you hand-wave over the hard stuff.
I'm confused about the idea that the project was a net negative. Based on what? River cleanups are happening that weren't happening before. That seems relatively positive.
Is the negative that they spent too much money on the trawling that didn't work?
What iron mountain does know is which drives are owned by oss. What they don't know is which drives owned by oss have the station's data on them. Hopefully nothing is comingled and drives are dedicated to a customer. Seemingly only oss knows and they went bankrupt so who knows what shape the records are in.
It's also possible IM serves a scaleable storage system that mingles data across customers. If you S3 they don't isolate clients per physical drive, they store blocks pretty randomly across millions of drives.
Plus the case above: OSS could have had another company storing sensitive medical records, and this hands over those drives to a PBS station.
This is how I view it these days as well. I'm fine with running a deficit as long as we're solving real problems at a mix of time horizons. Using public funds to funnel more money to the ultra wealthy is the issue for me as a citizen.
> This is how I view it these days as well. I'm fine with running a deficit as long as we're solving real problems at a mix of time horizons.
There's nothing "these days" about the idea: that's how all debt should be looked at. How much in interest will it cost you, and are the benefits you get worth that cost?
Borrowing money at 2-4% to build water/sewers infrastructure so your population does not die, and thus allows for better economic growth, can pay for the borrowed money easily. Or roads, bridges, rail, schools, scientific research, etc.
If you're borrowing money because you have low revenues due to tax cuts (especially in top tax brackets), then perhaps your ROI won't be as good.
There's nothing wrong with using public funds to solve real problems, but persistent deficit spending is the wrong way to go about it!
Deficit spending causes inflation, and that type of inflation is a hidden, regressive form of taxation. It hits everybody, but the poorest suffer most when all the essentials get more expensive. The government creates new money, but really the value of that money comes out of everybody's income and bank accounts.
If additional government spending is truly necessary, it should be funded through transparent, progressive taxation, so that it only affects those who can afford to pay the tax, and so that the voting public is aware of it.
Unforunately, you're unlikely to win an election on the promise of raising taxes. The hidden tax of inflation, on the other hand, is so perfectly hidden in plain sight that most people don't notice it unless it gets out of hand.
The funny thing is that from a levelized cost of electricity stance, renewables are the cheapest, and cheaper in most cases even after storage is included. It's insane.
Eisenhower who, despite being exhausted by WWII efforts, ran for presidency because he saw that as the only way to prevent a civil war. Nowadays the American Left is Center Right, but back then the American Right was Center Left. Things change, things stay the same.
> Eisenhower who, despite being exhausted by WWII efforts, ran for presidency because he saw that as the only way to prevent a civil war.
Can you share more about this? I'm unfamiliar with a post-World War II civil war risk. Who were the conspirators? Who would be fighting whom?
> Nowadays the American Left is Center Right, but back then the American Right was Center Left. Things change, things stay the same.
I don't think this is the case. Populism has confused some folks about where things stand. There also seems to be this default assumption, kind of like the End of History, that being "left" is associated with moral goodness and so haha the American left is only just center right, ergo not quite good enough yet! I'd challenge that assumption. Frankly, the center is often the best because moving too far to one side or the other is destabilizing. Communism would be awful, as would other authoritarian ideologies like fascism.
The pendulum has been swinging pro-capital since Reagan and has not even stalled yet. This affects both parties. You will not find enlightenment by averaging "heads I win" with "tales you lose."
FDR Democrats: fixed the Great Depression by bailing out the people not the banks (construction of roads, bridges, schools, dams, airports), regulated the banks, legislated protections for unions, electrified rural America, ended elder poverty with Social Security, won WWII, won the peace after WWII. Paid for it by taxing the rich, paid down the debt by taxing pensions.
Clinton Democrats: cut the government to the bone, "DOGE but real," massive tax hike on top workers, massive tax cut on capital, kicked offshoring into gear (NAFTA was voted against by most House and Senate Democrats), teed up the China WTO admission for Bush, and handed him a massive budget surplus with a bow on top ready to be pissed away on not one but two pointless Republican forever-wars. Oh, and bonus Epstein connection.
These are not the same. FDR Democrats would see Clinton Democrats as 100% DINOs, doing everything that Republicans say they want. The DINOs can only be identified as non-Republican due to their fiscal restraint which has not been a Republican quality since Eisenhower. Obama Democrats were better, but chose to bail out the banks not the people, didn't pass single-payer healthcare, and didn't end Bush's forever wars. Biden ended Afghanistan and quietly started enforcing Trump fair trade policies. So the Democratic party has been moving left at a snail's pace after reaching a zenith of "Republicans but less shit," but they are still far, far from FDR. Who was in turn far from actual socialists or communists. Here's hoping that on this next swing of the pendulum we land on FDR again, yeah?
In any case, you cannot average your way to enlightenment. If you want that, you must learn about actual policies and actual history.
I'm a fan of FDR and think he did great things, but he also was doing so at an unprecedented time period, the aftermath of the Great Depression, itself on the heals of a catastrophic World War I, and then of course, World War II. Didn't he have 3 terms? Didn't he threaten to pack the court when he didn't get what he wanted? Didn't the United States turn a blind eye to what Japan was planning because Americans were against being involved in World War II and this was a good way to flip that? There are a lot of other things.
But I think your own argument betrays itself and proves my point.
> but they are still far, far from FDR. Who was in turn far from actual socialists or communists. Here's hoping that on this next swing of the pendulum we land on FDR again, yeah?
When you write this, you're basically arguing my very point - that the center is the best because moving too far to one side or the other is destabilizing. In your own words you've basically boxed in the Democratic Party in the center and you're just arguing FDR was in that center but further to the left. Ok? Yes I agree. If you go center right a bit, or center left a bit, what's the real difference besides the mascot?
But even from the great things that FDR did, just because they worked at one point in time doesn't mean they are forever and always the best idea going forward.
> Here's hoping that on this next swing of the pendulum we land on FDR again, yeah?
Depends on the details. If we stop MAGA, DSA, fix crime, lower taxes, lower spending, streamline the government to be more effective (this could include something like government run healthcare by consolidating agencies), or other various ideas I'm always on board with talking through the pros and cons.
As an aside I always liked Teddy Roosevelt too. Maybe my favorite president aside from the usual suspects like Washington or Lincoln.
-edit-
As another aside I don't think we have to have a pro-capital regime that's also against many of the ideas you might be in favor of. The Nordic countries for example are the most capitalistic countries on the planet according to many measurements.
As a barely related note, FDR was a staunch capitalist. He didn't do what he did because he wanted socialism, quite the contrary. He recognized that the US was right on the edge of a communist revolution, and if he didn't come in and put in concessions, capital would be over.
I genuinely believe that if FDR or an FDR-type did not exist, then communism would be the status-quo of developed nations. The US would turn communist after a bloody civil war. We would ally with the Soviets after. Together, the US, Soviets, and Europe would easily win WWII. At that point, Communism is set as the world order and would continue throughout the 20th century. Many parts of history would turn out "good" - no cold war, no Vietnam war, no Red Scare. Many other parts would turn out bad.
What FDR did was just enough to buy a few decades of peace before the capitalists ransacked the government again. By then, Communism was the ultimate enemy for obvious reasons. The propaganda was far too strong for any kind of revolution, and technology improved enough that people weren't nearly oppressed enough to care about any revolution.
Oh, and we probably would've gotten the civil rights era a couple decades earlier.
Given the history of communism and the results in every state that implemented it, I just do not agree with this assessment at all. For example, you don't need the US to be a capitalistic country for the implementation of the gulag or the Great Leap Forward. Both resulted in at a minimum tens of millions of deaths.
When you say things like "buy a few decades of peace before the capitalists ransacked the government again". What are you even talking about? I'm genuinely perplexed. Capitalism didn't, for example, cause World War I or even World War II - World War II was caused by the rise of Nazism, a nonaggression pact with Communists, and then the attack and partitioning of various countries in Europe by both the Nazis and Communists. In Asia, again, fascist powers attacked capitalist societies such as the United States. How would the US, Soviets, and Europe (who is Europe?) win World War II when from the beginning the Soviets and Nazis were aligned and jointly invaded Poland?
I would certainly grant you that, perhaps the United States would have experienced additional strife or maybe even a civil war had conditions gotten bad enough, but I can't for my life ever think that such a thing was even moderately serious. Even in countries where Communism completely took hold, capitalism found its way back because humans by intrinsic, evolutionary nature, always arrive at the same foundational conclusion which is property rights, cooperation for the greater good without coercion, and abstractions such as code or even money.
> Given the history of communism and the results in every state that implemented it
The #2 economy in the world is run by the Communist Party of China. #1, if you measure in material terms rather than financial terms.
The 1991 talking points are stale. Time passed, and the private owners of the US economy sold our industrial base to the communists in order to stuff their bank accounts. Private ownership provided the means, motive, and opportunity. I am a capitalist despite what it has done to my country, not because of it.
> The #2 economy in the world is run by the Communist Party of China. #1, if you measure in material terms rather than financial terms.
Well if you can even get accurate measurements out. Nobody really knows, for example, whether the population of China has been severely undercounted, or truly how much debt has been amassed, or what the next crises may be, similar to over-building in housing.
You also can't ignore the history of these countries in modern context. China has become more capitalist over time because communism was not working. The comment I was replying to was talking about World War II so of course pointing out the tens (hundreds?) of millions of lives lost due to communism is just participating in the discussion that was put forth here. I'd say the greatest gift China continues to give the United States is hamstringing its economy. They'd easily be #1 right now if not for the CCP.
> Time passed, and the private owners of the US economy sold our industrial base to the communists in order to stuff their bank accounts.
Not just that, but in order to get Americans the cheap baubles they so desire. But that seems less of a criticism of capitalism and more of a government failure.
Right, because Joe Sixpack got a choice between "cheap baubles" and "a job" and chose "cheap baubles"? No, this decision was made by shareholders for shareholders.
It's a government failure all right: a failure of the government to tell the shareholders to stop selling out America.
I'm not resolving policymakers of blame, but ignoring consumer behavior and cultural attitudes leads to incomplete analysis and faulty solutions. You see the same thing with respect to the environment. People still buy plastic bottled water, for example and travel all over the world on vacation while talking about how we need to reduce emissions. We can't reduce emissions without reducing or changing consumption patterns too. Corporations simply sell products that people want - it's up to us as a country to rein them in and that goes for both policy and behavior.
Sorry, I mean Peace as in "we're not beefing with the communists right now".
Part of the reason, maybe the biggest part, that communist nations struggled is because the world's largest world power, which held 50% of the global GDP post WWII, openly opposed them as much as possible. It wasn't just war, it was trading, economic attacks, propaganda. Capitalism seeped back into communist nations because they saw the US was rich, whether that was true or not, and wanted to be more like the US. This was orchestrated intentionally over decades, this was literally the US' #1 goal.
And, to be fair, the US was rich. By circumstance. Post-WWII Europe was destroyed, we held 50% of the world GDP basically by default. Then our richness eroded as communist nations developed extraordinarily quickly, and threatened the US hegemony. Then we imploded our richness from within by throwing away the concessions FDR bought. The average American got poorer and poorer, and the golden age became known as that. Nobody really noticed because technology advanced, so people were poorer, but it was hard to tell. By the 80s people knew. Then we got Reagan, and things only deteriorated further.
That's not to say that communism is good or would have been good. It would have just eliminated a lot of strife in the world and would basically align all developed nations on one singular ideology. Would that ideology then be overthrown? We don't know, but I highly doubt it. People in the US would still be living good lives, except for a very small pool of elite few who got their shit rocked. Everyone else would still enjoy the advances of technology, and they would be content. The USSR would have been much more successful with the US ideologically and economically backing them. It would also be very hard to have a war at that point: over what? All of our post-WWII wars are over communism.
I mean, think about it. The USSR was the second world power, and it was very close! Despite the largest economy and military in the world doing everything in their power to ruin them. Imagine if, instead, those two powers worked together. Imagine where the USSR would be.
Also, the USSR was more progressive than the US. I'm talking gay right, rights for minorities. We would've gotten the civil rights era decades earlier. Gay marriage way, way earlier.
Anyway, I'm not a communist, and I'm happy with how the US turned out for the most part. I just think about how different history would have been if just one president was changed. I do truly think that if FDR was never president, most if not all developed nations would be communist to this day. I think people really do not appreciate just how close the US got to being communist. It was really, really close. We were going down the exact path of every communist nation that followed. There's some sources from the early 20th century, it's interesting to read.
Jeez the horror of societies around the world wanting to be rich. Damn America for wanting to provide material wealth, medicine, and more instead of its citizens living in abject poverty!
> I mean, think about it. The USSR was the second world power, and it was very close! Despite the largest economy and military in the world doing everything in their power to ruin them. Imagine if, instead, those two powers worked together. Imagine where the USSR would be.
This is a very one-sided view. The USSR, by the way who was in league with the Nazis until Hitler betrayed them, also did everything in their power to ruin liberal democracies. Imagine, if instead, the USSR had worked along side the United States instead of opposing it!
The USSR also created things like gulags. Ever been to one? I haven't but I've heard they're not that great. Why did the USSR have to create those? Why does China even to this day have to disappear people? Fall in line with our ideology or die? Sounds a lot like Nazism to me. Meanwhile in the United States you can literally live life as a communist if you so desire. Why is one society more tolerant, wealthy, and happy and the other largely no longer exists? Because around the world people chose to not go to the gulag, to think for themselves, and to make the best use of resources available to them.
I find this USSR revisionist history to be a bit jarring. The USSR didn't even get along that well with China who was a fellow communist state. How can you argue that if everyone was communist we'd all get along when even the communist states (and those they subjected, such as in Eastern Europe) didn't get along?
Teddy Roosevelt. The man who carved the Lincolnite Progressives out of the Republican Party, taking with him the last good Republican president and the last good Republicans. He fumbled 1912, but the man in the arena said all that needs to be said about that in The Man In The Arena.
> you're just arguing FDR was in that center but further to the left
I'm arguing on your terms in the hopes that when you see the output of the "center" function change dramatically with zoom level you will trust it a little less as a source of foundational truth.
Centrism is like listening to only pop music. Many, perhaps even most good ideas can be found there, but the top slots are all bought and paid for and what do other people know anyway. Political ideas, like songs, should stand for themselves and earn their place. We should be glad that our ancestors were bold enough to occasionally push for new ideas or else they would have thrown all good ideas of history onto the refuse pile alongside the bad ones.
> I don't think we have to have a pro-capital regime that's also against many of the ideas you might be in favor of.
Of course. I'm a capitalist, in the words-mean-things sense of the term where "capitalism" means "private ownership of the means of production." Skin-in-the-game capital allocation is special and we shouldn't throw it out with the bathwater. But people who call themselves capitalists generally have politics closer to "Elon's 0.25% taxes are too much and your 25% taxes are too little" than "a laissez faire garden is a garden of weeds," which is where I stand. It's OK to believe that a softmax function is the best way to run an economy (I do!), but it's a fact that this pushes people down and one had better develop some Nobblesse Oblige to compensate or we will not see eye to eye.
People who call themselves centrists generally look for the center between recent presidents, who were all economic-right neoliberals from the perspective of policy accomplishments. Whereas I take the perspective that the neoliberal economics common to both parties is exactly what fucked up this country and needs to be undone.
> But even from the great things that FDR did, just because they worked at one point in time doesn't mean they are forever and always the best idea going forward.
Yeah. The economy has become more productive since the days of the Dust Bowl, so we should be more ambitious with our demands than FDR was.
> I'm arguing on your terms in the hopes that when you see the output of the "center" function change dramatically with zoom level you will trust it a little less as a source of foundational truth.
I'm not following. Can you expand upon this? I'm certainly not arguing that the center is the only source of good ideas - both MAGA and DSA have had great ideas, or at worst identified very real problems that weren't being addressed, but that's different from being run by, say, those organizations completely which would shift us to the far right or far left.
We can debate the zoom level but I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make. Are you saying the center isn't left enough? It's too far to the right? If you wanted to argue that FDR's policies were barely moving the needle on the left and they're still right-leaning, I say call me an ultra-conservative then because while I don't really have too much of an issue in the grand scheme of things about the New Deal policy suite (which has a mix of good and bad effects and assumptions as all policy does) to imply that such policies aren't to the left seems to me to be an arbitrary goal post move. Idk. Moving to the left or the right isn't a given, nor is it a given that such a move is good for any given society. People seem to have confused Progressivism with Progress. It's not a given, just as the End of History wasn't a given either.
> People who call themselves centrists generally look for the center between recent presidents, who were all economic-right neoliberals from the perspective of policy accomplishments. Whereas I take the perspective that the neoliberal economics common to both parties is exactly what fucked up this country and needs to be undone.
Sure, but your prescription seems to be (and correct me if I'm wrong) to throw the baby out with the bathwater - in other words destroy the institutions (either the MAGA or DSA version). Neoliberalism certainly has had a lot of issues but day-to-day life is pretty great for the vast majority of people under those regimes. Free speech, freedom of religion, free markets. Not bad at all.
> The economy has become more productive since the days of the Dust Bowl, so we should be more ambitious with our demands than FDR was.
Sure but your demands from extraction don't come from "the economy" they come from real people. That's where the rubber meets the road in a lot of these schemes and you start to lose contact with reality and what people actually want. For example, I think the economy has become more productive, my demands are the government does XYZ - maybe that doesn't align with your XYZ. Now what? You're just rehashing the current state at that point.
> Sure but your demands from extraction don't come from "the economy" they come from real people.
Elon was bitching about paying 0.25% tax on twitter the other day ($500M/yr on $200B/yr) and here I am paying well north of 25%. I could advocate multiplying his taxes by 100 and still be advocating for comparatively regressive taxation. I don't think you are honestly engaging with how fucked this has gotten.
Please stop saying things like " I don't think you are honestly engaging with how fucked this has gotten.". This is just a dumb waste of time. When someone disagrees with you, it doesn't mean they are not "honestly engaging with...", it just means they disagree with you. Whenever you or someone else writes something like that, it then means you are not honestly engaging with the person you are replying to or the topic at hand. Every accusation is a confession.
I don't disagree with raising taxes on these billionaires or whatever. If for nothing else but personal preservation and because they failed in giving back to society.
Yes it's true we shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good. But good also has to be good enough to solve the problem without creating more problems faster than it solves them.
It's fine to propose a solution but if people aren't convinced just throwing an aphorism grenade at them isn't productive.
Think about gasoline consumption in an economy. If gas is $1/gal in today's dollars you can make many trips, they're almost free. At $3/gal people do some prudent economizing. At $10/gal people stop driving and take the bus, carpool, etc.
Making the price go up 10x won't cut consumption by 90% though, maybe only 50%. Trades still need to get to the job, food still has to get delivered to stores and some people who make huge salaries will still drive to work.
During the pandemic fuel demand didn't go down by 50% and yet the price dropped dramatically. Sure office workers stayed home but that's not 80% of the jobs. Think about how much the gas price dropped vs how much traffic was still on the streets. It almost certainly wasn't a linear relationship.
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