- Also, there is a massive conflict of interest associated with trusting the opinions of companies actively engaged in labor and environmental arbitrage. Opinions of politicians and think-tanks downstream of them in terms of funding, too. Even if those opinions are legitimately more educated and better reasoned, they are on the opposite side of the bargaining table from most people and paying attention to them alone is "who needs defense attorneys when we have prosecutors" level of madness.
If anyone is looking for an expert opinion that breaks with the "free trade is good for everyone all of the time lah dee dah" consensus, Trade Wars are Class Wars by Klein & Pettis is a good read.
- I think that's the CPU benchmark rather than the python benchmark -- and comparing CPU ARM64 vs x86_64 seems worthwhile.
- If a Bond villain bought all of the oil in the Middle East, would it affect prices in the US? (Yes, of course it would.)
- You tackled a contributing member of our community into the mud. I tackled you into the mud. We are not the same.
- 1000%. The good solution is Georgism (perhaps with rolling leases, which are hard to manipulate, rather than LVT, which is easy to manipulate) but obviously everyone who bought into the ponzi will fight you tooth and nail so probably the best we can hope for is to slap the Nth bandaid on the problem with some NIMBY busting.
- History of non-european printing press development: cool!
Summary of above: cool and useful!
Example based on the above: cool and insightful!
Slamming someone for using a european example because that's what they know: not cool, not insightful, not useful.
- > that's a very strong statement that requires some refinement
Yes, but much of that refinement would be the gritty details of pushing back on awful self-serving definitions that were carefully crafted to mislead. Flouting them altogether is a strong opener.
Contrast to the boring analytical speech: "The notion of value espoused by neoliberal economics is wealth-weighted while the colloquial definition of the word does not have a wealth-weight attached, sometimes even the opposite (see: feeding orphans). This loophole is large enough to march 1000 elephants through and wage a class war. "Value Creation" is not about doing what people want, it's about doing what wealth-weighted people want, and as inequality grows that increasingly means doing what rich people want, which is primarily to pump assets so that they can get paid for being rich. This twist of terminology is how you can brainwash someone into thinking that enshittification, in all its forms, is somehow for the greater good, when it's actually just for the good of rich people who want to get paid for being rich."
The boring analytical speech is theoretically the stronger argument, but if theoretically stronger arguments won elections we wouldn't be here. So the best move is just to reverse-uno the "government bad, drown it in a bathtub, private sector good" propaganda.
- When you drive to work, you yearn for a negotiation with the local road monopoly?
On cold nights, you dream of a glorious future where an unregulated energy utility could try to trick you into surge pricing?
When you wrote your post, you did so with teeth clenched in disgust at having to use a government invention?
When you take the trash out, you wish it were a bit more exciting, that you had to dodge gunfire from skirmishing warlords?
And so on, and so on, but the point is that a statement you probably intended as a slight hyperbole actually required a staggering amount of "out of sight, out of mind."
- "It's not a war because side X won" is truly one of the arguments of all time.
- Right, and it's worse when you remember that the people who voted for this knew exactly what they were doing because it's how they made their money in the real estate market: obtain property rights over inelastic supply, pump cheap debt into the counterparties, price spiral, laugh all the way to the bank.
We really are a society of ponzi schemes.
- > at least I don't suffer from TDS
Trump earns the ire of his political opposition. Framing that ire as delusional is itself delusional.
- He threw a double Sieg Heil at a US inauguration. That's not a rock you're under, it's a boulder.
- Like I said, some combination of doctors and legislators. If doctors lobbied the laws (or budgetary line items) onto the books and they are still in effect, they still have culpability.
Blaming congress too is fine, but let's be clear: someone has to fight to increase every budget and the AMA didn't just know this when they were structuring their proposal, didn't just count on it not happening, they considered this an implementation detail subordinate to the openly admitted primary objective of propping up physician wages as the Greatest Generation passed. That was always the goal, they were extremely open about it, and about 15 years ago I was attending a talk on demographics in medicine with a primarily physician audience, one of them asked what the plans were to change this to staff up for the Boomer wave (the bump was on the slide, begging the question) and the presenter waved his hand and said maybe they could do something... or not, and then he laughed, and the rest of the room laughed with him.
I'm glad that the AMA has changed their stated position now that it's too late to change course (for the Boomers anyway) and their squeeze is bearing fruit for them and suffering for their patients, but I'll always remember that room full of doctors and doctors-to-be laughing about the prospect of intentionally understaffing for profit. I have it filed in my memory right next to the phone call of Enron traders giggling as they ordered power plants offline to scare up prices, except it's about a million times worse.
- Triage, whether by overworked nurses or by auction or by private death panel or by public death panel, is not necessarily a problem created by administrators. It can be created by having too few surgeons, in which case whatever caused that (in a time of peace, no less) is at fault. Last I heard it was the doctor's guild lobbying for a severe crimp on their training pipeline, in which case blame flows back to some combination of doctors and legislators.
- > voluntary business transactions
The evil parts are hid in property rights which are not voluntary.
> made to never grow too big, in order to avoid impacting very many people
Consolidated property rights have more power against their counterparties, that's why businesses love merging so much.
Look at your tax return. Do you make more money from what you do or what you own? If you make money from what you do, you're a counterparty and you should probably want to tap the brakes on the party.
- That's an insightful point! Making insightful points like that one is taxing on the brain, you should consider an electolyte drink like Brawndo™ (it's got what plants crave) to keep yourself sharp!
Ugh I hate it so much, but you're right, it's coming.
I'd like to point out that the South was only a fan of States Rights exactly insofar as they let them do slavery. The millisecond it came to forcing Northern states to return escaped slaves, they suddenly weren't the same principled supporters of devolving and federating power. Funny how that works.