it’s weird how you can watch dead people performing live.
“within every lean, hungry, tech start-up founder, a bloated monopolist was struggling to get out.” @henryfarrell https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/08/no-exit-opportunities-business-models-and-political-thought-in-silicon-valley/
// from what is actually a thoughtful and sympathetic meditation on reconciling Silicon Valley ideals with complicated human reality, not a mere polemic against tech founders and VCs.
love the humans, each and every.
Great pushback to the egregious Obama apoligism and Biden accomplishment minimization by a certain cadre of self-proclaimed “centrists”. (They are the center of nothing, may they forever rule their domain.)
By @ryanlcooper https://prospect.org/economy/2024-08-19-in-defense-of-bidenomics/
from @csissoko https://syntheticassets.wordpress.com/2018/09/16/why-claims-that-the-2008-bailout-was-a-success-should-make-you-angry/ ht @ryanlcooper
Text: Forcing lenders to come to the table on the basis of economic reality is something that every collateralized borrower can do - except for the little guy whose only collateralized loan is on his/her primary residence. Fixing the cramdown inequity was one of President Obama's promises before he was elected. But lo and behold Treasury staffers in his administration "stressed the effects of cramdown on the nation's biggest banks, which were still fragile. The banks' books could take a beating if too many consumers [were] lured into bankruptcy by cramdown " (Kiel & Pierce 2011). Treasury's position on this should be read: we need to bail out the banks, so we can't allow the economic reality of the situation to affect the cut that the banks get.
“Oh great. It's no longer possible to download the Barnes & Noble Nook app, which means there's no way to install it on my new tablet. This in turn means that the ~100 books I have on Nook are now gone. Pffft. I will never be able to read them again.
Three cheers for the intersection of modern technology and crappy corporations.” #KevinDrum https://jabberwocking.com/no-more-nook/
“Generally speaking, firms with more market power can price gouge, so [price gouging] laws are sometimes known as ‘antitrust as last resort.’” @matthewstoller https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-price-gouging-vs
[new draft post] Murdering Hayek https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/08/18/murdering-hayek/index.html
“If you’re not not paying for the product, you’re the product, and if you are paying for the product, you’re still the product.” @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess
“the soft bigotry of low expectations”
Screenshot of tweet from @XLProfessor: The bias in the press is the bias of massively lower expectations for Republicans, who aren't expected to tell the truth, make sense, have policy based on reality or pretends to help people, or even not be criminal authoritarians But purposeful bias would be easier to counter.
from “Why Inequality Matters”, #BrankoMilanovic https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/inequalities/2024/08/14/why-inequality-matters/
Text: High inequality has also political effects. The rich have more political power and they use that political power to promote their own interests and to entrench their relative position in society. This means that all the negative effects due to exclusion and lack of equality of opportunity are reinforced and made permanent (at least, until a big social earthquake destroys them). In order to fight off the advent of such an earthquake, the rich must make themselves safe and unassailable from "conquest". • This leads to adversarial politics and destroys social cohesion. Ironically, the social instability which then results discourages investments of the rich, that is it undermines the very action that was at the beginning adduced as the key reason why high wealth and inequality may be socially desirable.
“Look, I’m a prosecutor, and I’m going to prosecute the people who are ripping you off,” is not so bad a pitch!
The crypto industry opposes the creation of a central bank digital currency for the same reason Intuit dislikes free tax-prep software from the IRS.
A bad economist is one that presumes supply is price elastic, when in fact the price elasticity of goods and services varies tremendously over time, across different goods, across different regulatory regimes. Supply is expected to be less inelastic when industries are consolidated and firms have market power.
A lot of bad economists are wagging their fingers today.
Core to the art of economic policy is to engender price-elastic supply. It’s a difficult, remarkable achievement.
I think Kamala is going for Obama -> Trump voters who felt betrayed by Obama’s economic “centrism”.
There are technocratic questions to answer surrounding some of the ideas she is mooting. But those technocratic questions can be answered. There are in fact ways of discouraging sharp price increases without imposing ceilings that drive goods to shortage, for example.
All of that is tomorrow’s work. Today she is saying whose side she’s on. I think it could deliver a landslide. I’m delighted.
i really like my fediverse community. i really miss a lot of people, and miss out on discussions i’d like to be part of, that have migrated to BlueSky.
i’d love it if there were some good way to bridge between here and there. i have no idea how tall on order that would be.
“In 2005, when D.R. Horton sold a record number of homes, it made $1.47 billion. In 2023, when it built roughly half as many, its profit was a little over three times as high, or $4.7 billion. And this dynamic isn’t because it focused on the high end, its overall market share was twice as high in 2023!” @matthewstoller https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-the-land-stupid-how-the-homebuilder
“The [crypto] industry mobilized this year, forming a network of independent expenditures under the umbrella of Fairshake to weaponize a broken campaign finance system to their advantage. Fairshake has become the single largest outside spender in this year’s elections thus far, with $120 million in cash on hand, even greater than the notoriously well-armed American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).” #LukeGoldstein @ddayen https://prospect.org/power/2024-08-15-democrats-complete-big-crypto-reset/
“so many children dream of moving to Hollywood, becoming an executive, and destroying all copies of a movie they didn’t work on. truth be told, I remember sitting on the floor of my living room, watching the Oscars, imagining deleting the nominees for the tax breaks.” https://www.thewrap.com/coyote-vs-acme-warner-bros-discovery-filmmakers-respond/