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.
maybe Day 3 of 2025 will be better.
“In a time of acute loneliness, the proliferation of AI-generated content seems not unlike an act of pollution, compromising the integrity of the social ecosystem.” @lmsacasas https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-cat-in-the-tree-why-ai-content
On the collapse of US NIIP. So much for “dark matter”. Yet more testament to the profound but often overlooked importance of pure revaluation in aggregate accounts. https://www.rabobank.com/knowledge/d011326758-the-us-international-investment-position-and-the-international-role-of-the-dollar
cc @SteveRoth
Finish reading this post for free.
@migurski does it foreground the subjectivity of the vibes perceiver, or the community to which the vibes are attributed?
this feels to me like the Trump $2 bill, but for a certain kind of geek rather than for MAGA types. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/01/asimov-press-has-a-new-kind-of-book.html
@inertiate building a new industrial policy is the only thing that can save America from a long, Argentina-style decline I think. goes beyond shipbuilding, but includes it. and doing industrial policy well is always hard, the odds are always against. it's a lot of what i write about lately. https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/09/04/income-driven-repayment-of-fixed-capital/index.html
@kescher are vibes downstream from culture, or is culture downstream from vibes?
only paranoid people believed this it was always a coincidence. https://mastodon.scot/@kim_harding/113760494456661041
"vibes" are even worse than "culture".
things that pretend to explain but do not.
“What is the point of the Liberal party?” @phillmv http://okayfail.com/garden/whats-the-point-of-the-liberal-party.html
// about Canada, but also about just about everywhere in the developed world where a “mainstream” “center left” perhaps formerly social-democratic party is struggling electorally because it has sacrificed all other values to “the center must hold”.