[new draft post] Wreckresentative democracy https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/12/20/wreckresentative-democracy/index.html
i wonder if Trump has so internalized the idea that money is the game of life’s ultimate scorecard that he just can’t defy Elon, a man two orders of magnitude greater than he is.
@BenRossTransit maybe. but the result we got is pretty bad. yes, the margins are tight, but ultimately we’ve ceded control to fascists for at least two years, desperately hoping they’re too inept to cement for themselves permanent control. we can have our theories about the counterfactual. but i’d go for a timely, full primary over this result in heartbeat.
it’s a bit pathetic that we watched RBG undo herself and the country because of career and ego and a misguided sense of unique capability. then we watched JRB do just the same.
now we have to live in the country their failure, our failure, bequeathed to us. it’s not clear we’ve learned anything.
the correct honorifics are God Emperor Musk and Assistant Principal Trump, right?
there ought to be something analogous to SLAPP laws for fraudulent, abusive DMCA takedown notices. https://raggedfeathers.com/@lilithsaintcrow/113682494431693388
in cars we are traffic to one another—dangerous, frustrating—when if we were on foot, we would be liveliness, buzz.
@pixelpusher220 @louis i think we'll just disagree on this. i don't think Elon Musk has a right to buy infinity attack ads against candidates he dislikes no matter how up front he is about the fact he's buying them. i agree it's not clear how we get there from here, but it's worth knowing where you want to go.
@rezendi sure. but for big firms (the ones who used to, ubiquitously, offer prompt 24/7 human telephone support), it’s unlikely offering it now would be a bigger hit on mostly dramatically expanded profitability than it was then. it would be a hit, that’s why they don’t do it! but it was a cost then too. in 1992 it was a competitive necessity, in 2024 industries have standardized around cheaper alternatives.
@pixelpusher220 @louis i don’t think money is ever speech. i think expenditure is a public, commercial act, always regulable. usual caveats apply, any regulation whose purpose is to discriminate against the expression of particular viewpoints violates the first amendment.
i don’t agree with Citizens United’s enabling of dark money shell corps, but my dispute with it is more foundational than that.
campaign finance is regulable, full stop.
@pixelpusher220 @louis they have weaponized “free speech”, in defiance of prior norms, quite a bit. most obviously citizens united.
@pixelpusher220 @louis (that’s political speech, so most protected, but of course the question at issue is what does it mean to protect political speech, let the largest wallet be loudest or shape some plausibly fair marketplace of political ideas.)
deceptive pricing as free speech: “The line of argument will be that mandating the display of all-in pricing information amounts to compelled speech by the government forced on private enterprise, violating the First Amendment.” #LukeGoldstein https://prospect.org/politics/2024-12-19-modest-ftc-junk-fee-rule-bipartisan-support/ ht @ddayen@mastodon.onlin
once we had david and goliath. now we have big pharma and little grifter.
so we’ve got to be at least like ten percent, fifteen percent, of the way through trump’s term, right? at least we’re making progress, working our way towards an end of this.
@rezendi baumol means the same customer service rep costs more in absolute terms, but still less relative to the now more productive economy. we should still be able to “afford” at least what we afforded in the past, even where low productivity and higher opportunity costs render some activities more costly.
so is this a feint, a prod that maybe gets something or another renegotiated, or are they really gonna scrooge the holidays with a shutdown?
@Canevecchio it will, but will it do us with them? won't their peace be our desert too?
@keunwoo yes, i think this is mostly it. businesses observe that the elasticity of sales to skimping on customer service is low — especially in consolidated industries, where most competitors observe this more strongly if they observe it together. they just follow a profit minimization gradient blindly towards crappy customer service. they could still "afford" the expenses they used to afford, but why pay them? 1/
@keunwoo plus, in a capital markets sense, they can't "afford" expenses their competitors don't take on. share prices, continued access to credit, etc depend upon not underperforming their peers, so even if they might have the cash wherewithal to cover the traditional expenses, once control by capital markets is taken into account, they cannot. 2/
@keunwoo and then control by capital markets now often takes the form of insuring firms are highly leveraged, so they are ruthlessly focused on generating cash flows. then if this is the case, they no longer even have the cash wherewithal to cover the traditional expense, not because they are less successful as businesses, but because creditors and shareholders are more insistent about draining them of cash. /fin
@keunwoo i don't think that's right. Baumol is a story about the relative productivity of people. the machine comes in, because one technician might be as "productive" (ignoring a difference in quality) as ten customer service agents. the technician, according to a mistaken theory of wages, is paid her productivity, so is paid much more than a traditional CSR. 1/
@keunwoo if you want to hire a traditional customer service rep—who could, after all, in oversimplified theory, be retrained as a technician—you now have to pay the old-school CSR a wage competitive with the technician she should also be. 2/
@keunwoo the role of the machine is to change the productivity, and (in mostly mistaken theory) therefore the wage associated with alternative uses of the CSR's time. the Baumol story is about the relative productivity of people though, not the productivity of people versus machines. /fin
@keunwoo so, Baumol's cost disease means in relative terms things become more expensive, as other things cheapen. but in absolute terms, they do not. in absolute terms, we used to be able to afford human customer service. you can argue cheaper substitutes now "adequately" replace it, we've been made wealthy by better alternatives, but lots of us would dispute better or even adequate.
EDIT: I think I got this backwards, see the next post.
@keunwoo (is that quite right? low-productivity-improvement things have to be paid more in absolute terms in order to compete with higher productivity alternative uses. but that cost still renders them smaller relative to the pie enlarged from elsewhere-improved productivity. so i think i got this backwards! more expensive in absolute terms, but cheaper in relative terms. still seems like it should be affordable!)