@paninid indeed. it's remarkable how openly tendentious so many have become.
i really hope that we all retain the capacity luxuriate in our absurd domestic squabbles over the coming days and weeks.
On the one hand, ethnic cleansing is a terrible practice.
On the other, rarely has a leader made so plain (whether sincerely or as excuse) that another polity's civilians must suffer and die for a cause the foreign leader supports, whatever the views and preferences of the people doomed to suffer.
Which is also disagreeable. I don't know which is worse.
cf https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/rafah-border-gaza-egypt-israel-1.6994234
Text: Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi called for access through Rafah in a speech on Thursday. He also pushed back against letting in large numbers of Palestinians. "The threat there is significant because it means the liquidation of this [Palestinian] cause," el- Sisi said. "It's important for its people to stay steadfast and exist on its land."
@SteveRoth thanks! a simple answer to a simple question!
@SteveRoth i guess not! that's probably the explanation. in my simple model of the solar system everything is coplanar, but i guess the moon's orbit cuts through the plane defined by the earth's, so an eclipse requires a coincidence.
what i've never really understood is why there isn't an eclipse once a month.
@SteveRoth there never is that conversation, or there does not need to be. people have gotten good at the tacit in coordination. the blackrockians can just talk amongst themselves and realize they are nervous about this stuff. a few of them can "philanthropically" fund some research, then contact some muckraking journalists who benefit from access, and it's done. soon there's a netflix about how the pharmaco suppressed it. all the work, conversations, were in the name of public health.
@SteveRoth right. aggregate demand is a curve on some hypothetical graph where the generic good has a quantity on the x-axis and a price on the y. suppliers "as an externality" have some control over the shape of this curve. surely they don't want the curve to collapse, downward and leftward. they are levered to nominal revenue. how would they prefer the curve to evolve? they could exert pressure to shift it right, or they should exert pressure to shift it up. 1/
@SteveRoth i say—you do too, from your own experience, nothing sweeter than just raising prices—they do their best to shift it up. rather than expand quantity, create conditions under which higher prices will be paid. /fin
@SteveRoth aggregate demand can be decomposed into P and Q. i think the aggregate strategy of our corporate sector has been to increase the P:Q ratio (you can't measure that straightforwardly though, P of what, Q of what?), generating overall aggregate demand growth that flows to profits and is consistent with (and real-economy patterns of production dependent upon) a skewed income distribution.
@SteveRoth not true. everyone involved in running blackrock is levered to high prices of incumbent assets. huge negative externality.
how do they do anything about the pharma company? whether via the pharma company or via someone else, they probably get some research published that suggests dangerous side effects, sadly but soberly encourage legislators and regulators to turn these drugs into the next fen-phen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenfluramine/phentermine
elect the speaker by approval vote on a secret ballot, and the winner would be whomever the less parochial of either party would be willing to live with despite not being their first choice, some ways towards an approximation of nonpartisan.
cf #JamesSurowiecki https://x.com/JamesSurowiecki/status/1713305713144164715
// god i spent too much time lurking over there today and i have a pit in my stomach and a hole in my heart.
@SteveRoth i dunno. i think Blackrock's principals also own a lot of shares in nicely cartelized industries, and their incentive to (however tacitly) collude to preserve those rents (already capitalized into valuations) would easily outweigh their incentive to beat the few relevant competitors they might collaborate with. you are presuming a kind of resilience of competitive incentives over other interests that i think experience mostly contradicts.
@SteveRoth (didn't we read something together recently that pointed out price wars are supposed to be the fount of capitalist discipline, but in actual practice price wars are quite rare because principals understand seeking an advantaged position in a negative sum game is in general likely to be a rough strategy?)
there's a bomb in the building, and it would take a skilled bomb squad to cut each of the colored wires in just the right order to prevent an explosion. but the cops' priority is to catch the bad guys, even if that means letting the building blow up, so they're maybe not taking that time or care with the wires.
we are all in the building.
even lurking over at x/twitter feels like opening a seal of the apocalypse. i hope things aren’t as bad as doomscrolling over there has made me feel. https://x.com/rainmaker1973/status/1713161968364785759
it is distressing how several prominent voices, mostly voices who style themselves as "liberal", are using foreign radicalism and the often very polarized takes that emerge among spectators (them and their domestic adversaries both) to encourage further radicalization and polarization of domestic coalitional fault lines.
yes i am subtweeting (not subtooting), no i won't name names. but it is to the discredit of people whom i sometimes credit.
🎵 i'm being followed by a moon shadow, moonshadow moonshadow. 🎵 https://m.ai6yr.org/@WXFanatic/111234843861356805 ht @sqncs