“I don’t want Democrats to be more enthusiastic about bombing in Iran” is almost a perfect summary of my frustration with Fetterman. I truly feel Manchin took too much shit for his stance but I feel like his brand of moderation was almost picture perfect considering the consituency of West Virginia but when it comes to Fetterman, his brand of moderation feels very misguided.
Like him being very enthusiastic about bombing Iran feels like an unwise moderation that bleeds support from base for almost nothing in exchange…
Why does no one think Fetterman's stroke affected him greatly? He seems like a different person now than he did pre-stroke. He really shouldn't be a senator.
I don't know, I feel like I see people talking about the stroke all the time.
It's true that strokes can cause personality change. The thing about Fetterman was that he had very shallow and superficial philosophical commitments pre-stroke. He had been "in politics" for a while, but as the mayor of a very small municipality. There's no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the trash, and he got famous mainly for being an oddity (bald, 300 pounds) and a media star (went on Anthony Bourdain show) but his political views were pretty scattershot and random. Then he became lieutenant governor, which is a position where you famously don't have to do very much. That kind of blank, uncharacterizable profile appeals to Americans on many parts of the political spectrum, but especially the left, who interpreted a lot of thin, piecemeal evidence as proof that he was a socialist and "anti-establishment," almost like he was their noble savage. In fact, even pre-stroke, nobody really knew for sure where he'd land on a lot of issues once he was pressure-tested.
This is the kind of thing that for me gives Graham Platner the exact same vibes that Fetterman gave off four years ago. You could tell me virtually any story about what kinds of views Senator Platner will be espousing in 2030 and I'd believe it. He could be a communist, he could be an antivaxxer, he could go full white nationalist, he could try to mandate oysters in school lunches - nothing would surprise me.
Fetterman isn’t moderating. He is poking his finger in the eye of Progs after Omnicausers repeatedly harassed him at his home (while giving Republicans a complete pass.)
Like Manchin, with all his flaws, he was a partisan Dem who break with party for mostly unpopular stuffs at his home while Fetterman and Sinema, their passion project feels very misaligned
A big mistake is the belief that a 60 vote Democratic Senate has a bunch of additional north east/west coast style progressives. The reality is it has 8 or 10 Manchins who win in their state for parochial reasons, code conservative on a number of social issues, but will vote for Democratic judicial nominees and to expand/clean up holes in Medicaid.
I think many partisans hold an expectation is even more crazy than east coast or west coast progressive. At least the ones online… but I suspect this is an evaporative effect of people getting tired of outrage politics and opting out.
It’s a normal reaction to double down and get defensive. The level of delusional outrage over… thumbsing down Bernie’s $15 minimum wage rider that couldn’t be included in the budget reconciliation, just shows how far Prog extortion politics went. So excessive.
When my son hits his little sister for taking his Pokemon cards, that's a normal reaction but also I am clear that it's not acceptable. When a grown adult and US senator adopts that approach it's worse.
Yeah, it gets unjustifiable when it aggravates people like me, who don't like Progs or Omnicausers and had nothing to do with them. If you're going to be spiteful, you've got to at least keep your spite narrowly tailored. Instead, the common and natural reaction for lots of relatively moderate Democrats is going to be to poke *their* fingers in *his* eye.
Yea like I def agree it is a normal reaction and I think it def was counterproductive for progressive to act that way but him doubling down and becoming defensive like making things worse imo
Like you don’t have to match the energy (and I’m not saying just caving to prog’s demand either btw - I think it is much smarter to pick fights. And this applies to both sides in this case
Lots of people are not super smart or healthy about these things. One aspect of the “Great Awokening” is how many normal people got pushed into crazy rabbit holes and contrarian opinions.
And now knowing a guy at phd who basically polarized against most obnoxious type of campus left and end up becoming basically “most off-putting campus activist with libertarian ideology”, this feels very relevant (I feel like, while I feel very bad for him to have such an experience, him becoming also obnoxious is not helping…)
I can’t relate to how people who became a Senator—surely one of the 1000 most powerful people on the entire planet—still feel aggrieved. I really started having a low opinion of Fetterman after reading this interview with him: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/26/magazine/john-fetterman-interview.html
Fetterman: “I’ve been disappointed on the reality of that part of it. And it’s just also astonishing. I can’t understand why there’s people that are willing to spend tens of millions of their own money to try to hold that office. ’Cause then you can get there and be like, Hmm, look at the glamour: I’m sitting in a 500-square-feet apartment, and I’m on Grubhub and watching bad TV on Netflix or whatever. I like to ask all of my colleagues, Hey, is there some kind of secret society or like a social life or something glamorous? Even [Mitt] Romney, I mean, he’s incredibly wealthy, and he has a nice house, but I read that he sits on his nice chair and watches Netflix and eats salmon from his friend, and actually puts ketchup on it. So I haven’t met that one person that’s having that quintessential glamorous life. It’s been elusive for me, but it’s not one that would even appeal to me.”
Despite his last sentence you can just feel the disappointment. Seems like despite his image he was chasing glamor. And how are you so greedy that you are disappointed from being one of the most powerful people on the planet just because you still watch Netflix and eat salmon and ketchup??
It seems like he suffers from severe depression. That kind of focus on the negative and fatalistic thinking is a classic symptom. I know he’s had to seek inpatient treatment for it in the recent past.
Of course, maybe you shouldn’t be a US Senator if you have major mental health issues.
Progressives used to love Fetterman though. He was the progressive candidate when he ran. You can’t blame his changing on progressives when he was the one who changed first.
Progs love the stabbed in the back narrative. They did the same crap with Sinema. They pulled the same stuff on Fetterman. Turing friends into enemies.
“ if you met a childless person who earned a high wage but only worked 20 hours a week because he didn’t value money very much and just wanted to focus on Call of Duty”
I feel seen.
“ There is simply no major mass-transit system in the world that works on the basis of free buses.”
I meant 100,000 visitors on a given day. Last year Luxembourg had over 3 million overnight visitors. All of whom presumably used its mass transit (even the airport train is free.)
so the debate trick would have been to ask you for a list of cities that just qualify as "major" and then find the one that has lower daily ridership than Luxembourg.
I’d seriously consider taking a job that paid me half as much as I make now but only required 20 hours a week to work, if it could offer the same level of benefits. I’d have to move to a less nice apartment but the lifestyle benefits seem nice. The issue is few such jobs exist, and even when they do they rarely offer health insurance or PTO.
what happens when you work for yourself is that (depending on the field and market etc.) you can vary greatly on how busy you are...with 100 hour work weeks and 10 hour work weeks.
That’s the dream. It seems like it takes a lot of hustle in the early years to get a business off the ground the though, before you can take advantage of that flexibility.
My assumption is the particular 20 hours per week I work would still be pretty fixed and not flexible, so it would be something five 4 hour days a week. So if I got sick, I would need to take time off. Since I’d be making less money, taking unpaid time off for sickness would be even less tolerable.
Also, I’d like to still be able to take real vacations occasionally where I get to disconnect from work completely. Even if I was working three 6.5 hour days per week and had four-day weekends, that’s not enough time to travel to Europe, for example.
Ah I was thinking more along the lines of needing to bill 20 hours a week and there be flexibility around those hours. Or, take a week off and work 40 hours the following week.
The key to doing this, and it can be done, is to have it seemly for the client. You make it work and if that means you have to get up early at the hotel in Paris and work 4 hours, you do it.
That would depend on one being able to shift one's hours around. Also, it doesn't solve the sick leave issue, since one can get sick at unpredictable times.
Remember that at least one of the reasons for paid sick leave is to discourage people from working while they have a disease that can infect other workers or customers.
Oh I certainly wouldn't try to conclude that free buses are a good idea anywhere else.
Now in terms of defining "major", Luxembourg's daily ridership (about 350,000 a day) is equivalent to Seattle and and more than say Denver or Portland.
Luxembourg does not have free buses and paid-for non-buses, which is the proposed model for NYC. It has free everything.
Alon Levy's point (which Matt linked) that the important thing is for buses and subways to be the same fare so you don't get people switching between the two for financial reasons is a very strong one. If there's a bunch of money to spend on lowering fares in NYC, the best thing that the MTA could do with that money would be to lower MetroNorth and LIRR fares to be the same as subway/bus fares within the Five Boroughs.
Proposing free subways in NYC is so obviously unaffordable that no-one dares mention it and it will clearly never happen; there are a handful who think free buses will be a first step to free subways, and a bigger group who claim to believe that, but they mostly know it won't happen and some rather like the idea of segregating the scary poors on the buses so the subways (which they use) can be kept for people like them.
Countries not understanding their near neighbours is a common problem. Britain similarly spends lots of its elites' time and energy on the Middle East, as well as following US politics and topics of global concern (eg climate change, development aid etc). But European affairs is so poorly regarded we essentially Brexited by accident, and then spent years in torturous negotiations with the EU because we don't understand how the EU functions or what parts of the relationship are valuable.
Similarly my understanding is that post-Soviet states were a low status desk for Russian diplomatic and intelligence officials prior to 2022, and this low investment contributed to poor quality information feeding up into the top of decision-making over the past decade or so.
My theory is that there's a combination of elites believing they understand nearby countries inherently without having to do much work or invest much in it, and them learning the language of their near neighbours doesn't provide the same payoffs as learning/speaking English or something more exotic. A world where more top British politicians spoke French and German, more top US politicians spoke Spanish, and more top Russian officials spoke Ukrainian and Kazakh is probably a better one.
Конечно. But they are speaking it less and have been for some time. If you only engage in these countries as a monoglot Russian speaker, there's a whole bunch of pro Western and nationalist things that you cannot engage with or understand. It's similar to how there's only so much monoglot English speakers can understand even pro-Western countries like Mexico or Japan.
Part of it is post-imperialist. Russian elites think Central Asia is their playground and birthright. Similarly for Britain and Ireland. Somewhat similarly for the US and Mexico.
Maybe part of this is that nearby nations are just boring. For example, Kipling wrote tons of poems about European stuff and no one reads them. His poems about the colonies are much more exciting.
I don't have any numbers here but my casual experience is that a fair chunk of English in general can speak French or German so I'd expect this would apply to their top politicians.
We're of course worse for not speaking Spanish although that is changing.
Nick Clegg speaks French, Spanish and Dutch, to pick one example that I know.
A lot of the British upper class speak good French (partly because of the schools they go to, partly because they tend to ski in France or French-speaking Switzerland), so when the Tories are in power, the language skills tend to be better than when Labour are. German is probably number two, but a chunk less common. And there are quite a few who think they speak Greek but don't (they learned Ancient Greek and they've forgotten a lot more than they think they have).
The UK Foreign Office is dominated by foreign-service types and doesn't have a lots of monoglot desk-bound analysts the way the US State Department does, so language skills there are usually very good: the big problem is that while the Embassies in Europe are very high-prestige, the desks in King Charles Street are not (the Middle East and Asia desks are much bigger deals). Part of this is just that Paris Embassy is much easier to contact than the Baghdad Embassy, so UK-based decision makers tend to just call Paris rather than the France desk in KCS, while they'd talk to the Iraq desk in KCS in preference to calling Baghdad.
The UK foreign policy establishment outside the FO is a different story; there's the Europe lobby (Best for Britain, European Movement, etc) which is entirely separate from the FP establishment (Chatham House, etc).
The best next change for American healthcare policy would be to get rid of employer-sponsored health insurance and make the entire country one giant insurance market, but no one is touching that with an 11-foot pole.
Yes, this is actually the best argument against the UK NHS. The subsidised-and-regulated mandatory insurance model (where, in many cases, the insurers are not allowed to be for-profit) that is common on the European continent is far more stable in the face of political risk.
Yes, the government is getting increasingly annoyed that stopping trans people from getting hormones through the NHS doesn’t actually stop them getting hormones.
And they can’t ban the hormones themselves, because they’re used by lots of cis people (e.g. oestrogen is in the contraceptive pill).
“Instead, each Canton has their own insurance offerings from various national insurance companies. What those plans have to cover is mandated by law. Insurance companies cannot deny any patients from buying these plans. The price of those plans has to fall in a very narrow band that the cantonal government sets every year based on that company's previous year performance and the larger cantonal insurance market.”
Sounds nice, but you still have to contain costs or this will just lead to a run up in premiums or companies leaving the market like California and Florida have for homeowners.
Switzerland's insurance is split by the Canton. (So strike one on the countrywide marketplace for insurance idea)
Every resident of Switzerland is legally obligated to carry insurance. (Wait, this is not part of the nationalize insurance to solve everything plan?)
The cost of this insurance varies by the Canton of residence. So high cost Cantons like Zurich, Geneva, Basel, have monthly premiums that run around 500 CHF (643 USD) per month. + Or - 100 per month based on the deductible. Even the lower cost Cantons still run at 350 CHF. Cantons are tiny. Zurich is the biggest by population and it has only 700,000 people.
Now where is that premium cost coming from? The magic of the market in the capitalist banker's paradise of Switzerland?
No. They didn't get their money by being the kind of idiots who believe in a free market for health insurance.
Instead, each Canton has their own insurance offerings from various national insurance companies. What those plans have to cover is mandated by law. Insurance companies cannot deny any patients from buying these plans. The price of those plans has to fall in a very narrow band that the cantonal government sets every year based on that company's previous year performance and the larger cantonal insurance market.
Companies can offer supplemental insurance that covers beyond the basic insurance. Policy holders have to ask for this and pay extra for it. Companies can decide whether or not to cover a patient with supplemental insurance.
That is how the Swiss insurance system works and it has little relationship to a market based system beyond there being private companies who provide the coverage.
Employer-provided insurance is market-based insurance.
Competition between insurance providers for the business of employers, or between employers over the generosity of employer self-insured plans, is the main market signal we have for what share of their income Americans want to spend on healthcare.
But it's a very imperfect, weak signal, because the actual consumers of healthcare only have indirect feedback, such as by complaining to their employer about the quality or cost of the insurance the employer has chosen to offer.
Unfortunately employer group plans where all the buying decisions are made by employers are the only real way in our current system that individuals can participate in buying groups that pool their bargaining power against insurance providers.
But we could create other types of patients buying groups, so that people could join an insurance buying group unrelated to their job, instead of negotiating on their own as an end individual with the insurance company.
I'm with MY on [not] bombing Iran, and maybe it is generational. Over the last 8 or 10 years I've come to realize how much my alignment with the Democrats is really born of things that were happening during the Bush 2 administration. The party and broader left was a much more hospitable place in those days for socially libertarian dudes who also thought American society could be improved with a more coherent, social democracy-lite version of the federal government. I still think it's the correct way to do things on the merits but the older I get the more homeless it feels.
I think any younger people who are expecting something better to come out of the Iran situation probably would be well served to read up on experience with Iraq in the 90s. We had regular air strikes and missile attacks for years and it never achieved anything. A lot of the rationale for the eventual invasion was that the kind of war we are currently seeing against Iran is unlikely to succeed (going in on the ground is of course even worse).
It's always worth remembering that the most successful 20th century military actions by the US met the following requirements: (i) authorized by Congress, (ii) public support by the American people, and (iii) strong international backing. All 3 isn't a guarantee of success either but it has never worked without all of them in place.
I wonder how much of this is just social media making “normie” views more accessible. Like when the Internet first came out, civil libertarians were the first adopters and it seemed like EFF-type views were widely held, but I’m not sure that ever actually impacted Democratic politics. Maybe those views never had any real influence and it’s just more obvious now that everyone is online.
Yes, but this time the Israelis are involved, so they likely know something. They seem much better at planning Middle East escapades than the US at this point. I doubt even the MAGAs are dumb enough to trip into some sort of Iraq quagmire.
Israel is good at quick short term tactical successes, in part due to its military prowess but in part due to its willingness to take a 'let God sort em out' approach to these fights, then leave all of the long term messes and fallout to other people (mostly America). Their involvement makes this worse, not better.
I agree that the chances of a quagmire remain low largely because there was 0 attempt to make the case for this to the American public and there is no popular support for a real invasion. But we should not be blind to the way one escalation and counter escalation tends to justify the next. Once shots are being fired it is always easier to justify doubling down than pulling back.
I think Slow Boring precisely shows that jobs are less lumpy. I subscribe to a bunch of newsletters, if they are all half price and half as often I think that would be straightforwardly better for me. And also "writer who produces a couple columns a week in conjunction with several others" is the most successful model in journalism -- that's the NYT op ed page, for example.
Most jobs do not have to be lumpy though—people could work European hours and vacation norms and things would still run. Most people would be a lot happier working less and retiring later over our current system where you burn yourself out while working dreaming of retiring early (sometimes extremely early like the FIRE folks) then are retired with nothing to do.
I need to be working at least as hard as my peers or I risk losing this job. If that happened I would lose my healthcare and potentially have my resume scarred in a way that moves me down the ladder. That would be bad, so I work hard to avoid it. Most people do - and thus none of us get to work less.
Unfortunately the prisoner’s dilemma extends across countries too. For a while, it was the US defecting at Europe’s expense. Now China’s defecting even harder at the US’s (and Europe’s) expense.
We still live in a world where employees working harder is a competitive advantage.
Yes, this is where some policy intervention comes in to nudge things in the direction of allowing for leisure. Lower hour work week before overtime kicks in, revisit rules on exempt/non-exempt status.
Something like a sabbatical fund if one has worked 56 of the last 60 quarters for time off/retraining. (Spitballing)
I think Matt's cultural frame is important as well, like parental leave is now seen as much more valid than it used be.
I understand the sentiment, but when the motive is competition with your peers, I have doubts about how effective interventions can be.
Like literally this weekend, no one is FORCING me to work but I probably will. Same for my wife. That's just how better paying white-collar jobs are these days. There's no overtime or anything, just cultural expectations and not wanting to fall behind my peers.
I feel this. My company has 'unlimited' PTO and the result is that I am never off even when I am off. Though I also don't really get too mad about it as long as I'm treated like an adult/trusted to get my stuff done without micromanagement. There's a point where it comes with the territory.
I hear people say things like this a lot, but it’s not inevitable. Most of my friends are upper middle class white collar workers, and I can only think of two who are routinely working more than 40-45 hours per week. You do probably have to accept being more like 80th percentile in income rather than 95th, but it’s accessible if you prioritize it.
When I owned that restaurant fire protection business the entire business was built off # of inspections performed per day per technician. It was ~ all variable but our techs mostly worked 40 hour weeks. Some wanted weekend overtime work. They could have worked fewer hours and earned less but they didn’t. My sense is most people wouldn’t actually be a lot happier working less **and** earning less. Which is the tradeoff vs. Europe.
I suspect it would be hard on small business. Just going off of where I grew up, there are lots of 2-4 person businesses where it’s a hardship when someone takes vacation. 4 weeks or so would make it even tougher.
Not a reason not to do it, but we should understand where blowback might come from.
I actually think there's a certain groundedness to be gained from doing at least some household work. To be sure, I'm not about to throw away my washing machine, but I also think doing the dishes and cleaning up clutter around the house does give me some kind of buy in to the communal space of the home, facilitating co- ownership of the space. I think having robots do all that work actually could take something away that helps keeps us human.
It's interesting to contrast MattY's view here toward the benefits of "increasing leisure" through the efficiency of robot tech and Halina's recent piece on how Zoomers are dropping alcohol for chemicals that can increase work efficiency. I suspect the people who will have the robots to do their housework will (because of costs) also be the ones who will use that time not for leisure but to do more work.
Rich people have always had household employees that did all the work. I am acquainted with a woman who has a full-time housekeeper six days a week, and then a different Monday housekeeper because God forbid one single day should pass without a full-time housekeeper.
There's another aspect to the idea of the 15 hour work week which kind of ties into this: Keynes, Fuller, et al didn't take into consideration that technology is constantly evolving. We could have less work if we were happy with 1930s technology washing machines but if you want the 'next best thing' people have to be employed to invent, upgrade, and build new production lines. So you could have your 15 hour work week but you wouldn't have your house cleaning bots and you'd be Squeegeeing your wet laundry, lol. It would be like the Amish---arbritarily setting a certain level of technology and no further.
Soon AI could do the inventing for us. We'll be able to just float in a bag and exist in a virtual world while giant robot spiders care for our physical bodies.
Almost half the mailbag devoted to just one question is kind of impressive. I wish I could get a question like that in! Wrt the actual answer, I think one doesn't have to go full Graeber to recognize that a great deal of time-on-the-clock is not really "job", it's work to enable the Real Work(tm) to get done. Meetings and paperwork (sadly still in abundance working grocery, it's farcical), filing interdepartmental memos up and down the chains of command, servicing customers. Not that that latter's not a real function of the job, to be sure, but there's a very real sense in which having a friendly meandering conversation with the kindly grandmother at checkout funges against filling empty shelves. You can intentionally overstaff to provide such slack...but then we're moving away from the 15 hour week by encouraging more "consumption".
There are also hard physical limits to ekeing out efficiencies when demand is inconsistent. Like, yeah, as a popular grocery store we know which days we'll probably need to schedule more staff. (I don't understand why everyone and their mother shops on Sundays?) But to actually get that down to an hour-by-hour estimate...I mean it's doable in theory, but no one wants to work "weird" hours like 7 to 2, or show up just to bag for a couple hours due to surge demand, or whatever. And if you're wrong, then you end up with a few unfortunate souls on the sales floor dealing with constant customer queries, lines stretching into the aisles, and the truck driver's tapping his watch thinking to himself, ugh, I gotta drive back to Central Warehousing and these jabronis are making me wait cause there's no one qualified to use the forklift. Not great, Bob!
Finding meaning outside of work is a whole other thing though. People tend to just handwave it away as "leisure", and of course I'd love to have more time on the margin to kick back and listen to Boris albums on repeat or whatever. Only so much ass-sitting before restlessness kicks in though. There is so much work to get done in the world, whether we officially call it "work" or not, and sooner or later I feel called back to the fight. None of us are free from toil until everyone is free from toil.
I think a big question to ask about the work hours per week question is how many hours kids need to be in school. I've always got the feeling that the standard Slow Boring take is that they aren't in school *enough*. If so, then in a Keynesian utopia, that limits some of the leisure opportunities that active parents can do relative to the childless, and I'd curious what effects would come from that.
How much of school being too short is parental self interest though? I want school to go to 5:30 because I work until 5 so need my kids to be doing something in the afternoon. But if I also got off work at 2 I could spend the afternoon with my kids and it would be fine?
Parental self interest will always be the trump card in the end. What I'm curious is what is thought to be the minimum number of hours kids typically need to be in school in order to sufficiently learn what they need to learn.
I actually think Matt Mahan should try to soften his image a bit and should try being nice like Daniel Lurie, who is also a moderate reformer. Mahan has all the right views but he often projects a prickly, combative persona: sharp public callouts, an aggressive social media posture, and visible alliances with tech figures who trade in snark.
His posture makes him seem obsessed with a narrow corner of Silicon Valley instead of someone who wants to be a leader for the whole state.
Daniel Lurie’s approach of portraying himself as a humble problem solver on Main Street is a better electoral choice for a moderate reformer imo
It's simultaneously an important-stakes race, and also one where I once again feel befuddled by the dizzying array of contenders. A soft SB endorsement isn't nothing, so I guess Mahan's a useful Schelling point for now...but the perennial ineptitude of the CA GOP to send Worthy Opponents also means I don't care overly much which D makes it in, as long as they're not so far left that they support the <s>SEIU cash grab</s> Definitely One Time We Promise Billionare Tax.
I don't think things have changed that much since the Victorian era, the gentry were still expected to be clerics, scholars, responsible and involved landlords, politicians etc even when they made all their money from rents.
"I don’t actually want Democrats to be more enthusiastic about bombing Iran." I was surprised to see so many hawkish comments from this board this past week. Although the disagreements are what makes this forum fun and engaging!
As someone who’s not a strict non-interventionist, I was particularly surprised that so many people were in favor of an operation that has no justification given and no objective or endpoint. Was all that left as an exercise for the reader? “Figure out why this is good and what winning looks like?”
The most common attitude I've heard is that Iran's government sucks and no one has sympathy for their leadership dying, but also that's true of a lot of places so what are we doing this for?
The tone of Fable of the Bees is fine, but it is wrong in that it is basically vulgar Keynesianism, all that is needed is demand to call forth the production. It overlooks the incentives for investment in hive building, the technology of honey storage, knowlege work of flower selection, etc. :)
I haven’t read it, but reading the Wikipedia summary it seems that we are ruled by people who took its insights too literally, and also a populace that is less and less concerned with doing right versus getting theirs (even on the level of listening to loud music and running red lights). What we want is “hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.”
The "free bus" discussion left out a few practical points: equiping a fleet of buses with the tech needed to integrate with metro/subway, phone payments, etc is VERY expensive in captial terms - only to find that the majority of the riders qualify for free/subsidised fares anyway. Free buses are also faster on routes, easier to transfer to/from, and not having to figure out fares will attract a small number of in frequent riders. ( this would not apply to NY City but would apply to suburban systems).
It's so much easier to board. You don't have to fumble with your wallet or bring up the app on your phone. I'm not a hardcore "free bus" person but you have to acknowledge that it's easier for the passengers.
PVTA (western Mass) has free busses and it seems to work well. The thing I notice is that it speeds up boarding - busses run a bit more reliably to time with free fares. (Fare was $3.50 a day for unlimited rides before, so it's not mostly the money.)
"(Fare was $3.50 a day for unlimited rides before, so it's not mostly the money.)"
Google says that PVTA has 7.8 million riders a year. At $3.5 a pop, that's $27 million. Its total operating revenue is $63 million. So it gave up almost half its operating revenue in fares. In theory, if it had kept the fares, it could increase its activities by 25-40%. That money is instead now covered with federal(16%) & state/local (73%) grants. If there is a budget crunch and funding is cut in either places, services will be far more impacted.
Transit nerds are like "you already charged me through my tax bill, why are you double charging me at the fare box?" And normies are like "you already charged me at the fare box, why are you double charging me on my tax bill?"
I think the transit nerd fantasy is that if we make it free, regular voters will start thinking of it as a critical government service like schools and roads, and they'll then be willing to pay more taxes to support it.
Having a father who worked in public transit agencies for over 30 years, I don't think people who could be characterized as "transit nerds" are in favor of free buses on any large scale (as compared to very specific applications like the Mall Shuttle in Denver).
It’s like free roads and free parking. If your parking meter charges 10 cents an hour, then all it does is annoy people and cause complexities to operate. But on top of that, with buses, everyone who’s already on the bus has to wait while people boarding are fumbling for change. There are a lot of costs to charging *any* amount, and if the revenue collected isn’t that much, then the cost/benefit ratio can point to free.
At least in my experience, part time work while caring for a child or something similar is still considered lower status than full time work. And part of that is that most part-time jobs are low status.
I think it would be good policy to change labor regulations to allow for more flexible work opportunities in high status jobs. It would also allow for job sharing as well - something I’ve seen in the civil service, where two people share a full time job.
IOW, as long as labor regulations and rules make “full time” employment the standard, not much is going to change.
“I don’t want Democrats to be more enthusiastic about bombing in Iran” is almost a perfect summary of my frustration with Fetterman. I truly feel Manchin took too much shit for his stance but I feel like his brand of moderation was almost picture perfect considering the consituency of West Virginia but when it comes to Fetterman, his brand of moderation feels very misguided.
Like him being very enthusiastic about bombing Iran feels like an unwise moderation that bleeds support from base for almost nothing in exchange…
Why does no one think Fetterman's stroke affected him greatly? He seems like a different person now than he did pre-stroke. He really shouldn't be a senator.
I don't know, I feel like I see people talking about the stroke all the time.
It's true that strokes can cause personality change. The thing about Fetterman was that he had very shallow and superficial philosophical commitments pre-stroke. He had been "in politics" for a while, but as the mayor of a very small municipality. There's no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the trash, and he got famous mainly for being an oddity (bald, 300 pounds) and a media star (went on Anthony Bourdain show) but his political views were pretty scattershot and random. Then he became lieutenant governor, which is a position where you famously don't have to do very much. That kind of blank, uncharacterizable profile appeals to Americans on many parts of the political spectrum, but especially the left, who interpreted a lot of thin, piecemeal evidence as proof that he was a socialist and "anti-establishment," almost like he was their noble savage. In fact, even pre-stroke, nobody really knew for sure where he'd land on a lot of issues once he was pressure-tested.
This is the kind of thing that for me gives Graham Platner the exact same vibes that Fetterman gave off four years ago. You could tell me virtually any story about what kinds of views Senator Platner will be espousing in 2030 and I'd believe it. He could be a communist, he could be an antivaxxer, he could go full white nationalist, he could try to mandate oysters in school lunches - nothing would surprise me.
Absolutely agreed
Like I really feel bad for him but in retrospect I feel like it really was a big mistake not picking Conor Lamb…
Fetterman isn’t moderating. He is poking his finger in the eye of Progs after Omnicausers repeatedly harassed him at his home (while giving Republicans a complete pass.)
Yeah, he's much closer to Sinema in primarily being motivated by personal grievances.
Yeah I almost wrote about Sinema too lmao
Like Manchin, with all his flaws, he was a partisan Dem who break with party for mostly unpopular stuffs at his home while Fetterman and Sinema, their passion project feels very misaligned
A big mistake is the belief that a 60 vote Democratic Senate has a bunch of additional north east/west coast style progressives. The reality is it has 8 or 10 Manchins who win in their state for parochial reasons, code conservative on a number of social issues, but will vote for Democratic judicial nominees and to expand/clean up holes in Medicaid.
I think many partisans hold an expectation is even more crazy than east coast or west coast progressive. At least the ones online… but I suspect this is an evaporative effect of people getting tired of outrage politics and opting out.
It’s a normal reaction to double down and get defensive. The level of delusional outrage over… thumbsing down Bernie’s $15 minimum wage rider that couldn’t be included in the budget reconciliation, just shows how far Prog extortion politics went. So excessive.
When my son hits his little sister for taking his Pokemon cards, that's a normal reaction but also I am clear that it's not acceptable. When a grown adult and US senator adopts that approach it's worse.
I am not saying it’s reasonable, just a common reaction. Fetterman’s conduct isn’t moderation. It’s spite.
Yeah, it gets unjustifiable when it aggravates people like me, who don't like Progs or Omnicausers and had nothing to do with them. If you're going to be spiteful, you've got to at least keep your spite narrowly tailored. Instead, the common and natural reaction for lots of relatively moderate Democrats is going to be to poke *their* fingers in *his* eye.
Yea like I def agree it is a normal reaction and I think it def was counterproductive for progressive to act that way but him doubling down and becoming defensive like making things worse imo
Like you don’t have to match the energy (and I’m not saying just caving to prog’s demand either btw - I think it is much smarter to pick fights. And this applies to both sides in this case
Lots of people are not super smart or healthy about these things. One aspect of the “Great Awokening” is how many normal people got pushed into crazy rabbit holes and contrarian opinions.
Lots of people aren’t senators!
Yeah I absolutely agree.
And now knowing a guy at phd who basically polarized against most obnoxious type of campus left and end up becoming basically “most off-putting campus activist with libertarian ideology”, this feels very relevant (I feel like, while I feel very bad for him to have such an experience, him becoming also obnoxious is not helping…)
I can’t relate to how people who became a Senator—surely one of the 1000 most powerful people on the entire planet—still feel aggrieved. I really started having a low opinion of Fetterman after reading this interview with him: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/26/magazine/john-fetterman-interview.html
Fetterman: “I’ve been disappointed on the reality of that part of it. And it’s just also astonishing. I can’t understand why there’s people that are willing to spend tens of millions of their own money to try to hold that office. ’Cause then you can get there and be like, Hmm, look at the glamour: I’m sitting in a 500-square-feet apartment, and I’m on Grubhub and watching bad TV on Netflix or whatever. I like to ask all of my colleagues, Hey, is there some kind of secret society or like a social life or something glamorous? Even [Mitt] Romney, I mean, he’s incredibly wealthy, and he has a nice house, but I read that he sits on his nice chair and watches Netflix and eats salmon from his friend, and actually puts ketchup on it. So I haven’t met that one person that’s having that quintessential glamorous life. It’s been elusive for me, but it’s not one that would even appeal to me.”
Despite his last sentence you can just feel the disappointment. Seems like despite his image he was chasing glamor. And how are you so greedy that you are disappointed from being one of the most powerful people on the planet just because you still watch Netflix and eat salmon and ketchup??
It seems like he suffers from severe depression. That kind of focus on the negative and fatalistic thinking is a classic symptom. I know he’s had to seek inpatient treatment for it in the recent past.
Of course, maybe you shouldn’t be a US Senator if you have major mental health issues.
Fetterman has largely been a disappointment. I would kind of be surprised if he ran for re-election in 2028 but I think he's a one and done.
Progressives used to love Fetterman though. He was the progressive candidate when he ran. You can’t blame his changing on progressives when he was the one who changed first.
It was the shorts. They were deceptive.
Progs love the stabbed in the back narrative. They did the same crap with Sinema. They pulled the same stuff on Fetterman. Turing friends into enemies.
I dunno, he seems just very supportive of Israel to me. That used to be pretty common for Democrats.
It’s not just that. Look how he’s voted on domestic legislation.
That was back when the big issue was the Arab states ganging up on Israel, and long before settlements and Israel’s MAGA turn.
I don't know why bombing Iran would be considered moderation at all - whether it's wise or unwise is a different matter.
“ if you met a childless person who earned a high wage but only worked 20 hours a week because he didn’t value money very much and just wanted to focus on Call of Duty”
I feel seen.
“ There is simply no major mass-transit system in the world that works on the basis of free buses.”
Luxembourg actually. I’m here right now.
Luxembourgish transit is not major in any sense.
Luxembourgeoise was right there...
Services 700,000 residents plus another 100,000 business travelers and tourists.
I meant 100,000 visitors on a given day. Last year Luxembourg had over 3 million overnight visitors. All of whom presumably used its mass transit (even the airport train is free.)
so the debate trick would have been to ask you for a list of cities that just qualify as "major" and then find the one that has lower daily ridership than Luxembourg.
I’d seriously consider taking a job that paid me half as much as I make now but only required 20 hours a week to work, if it could offer the same level of benefits. I’d have to move to a less nice apartment but the lifestyle benefits seem nice. The issue is few such jobs exist, and even when they do they rarely offer health insurance or PTO.
what happens when you work for yourself is that (depending on the field and market etc.) you can vary greatly on how busy you are...with 100 hour work weeks and 10 hour work weeks.
That’s the dream. It seems like it takes a lot of hustle in the early years to get a business off the ground the though, before you can take advantage of that flexibility.
Why would you need PTO with a 20hr a week job?
My assumption is the particular 20 hours per week I work would still be pretty fixed and not flexible, so it would be something five 4 hour days a week. So if I got sick, I would need to take time off. Since I’d be making less money, taking unpaid time off for sickness would be even less tolerable.
Also, I’d like to still be able to take real vacations occasionally where I get to disconnect from work completely. Even if I was working three 6.5 hour days per week and had four-day weekends, that’s not enough time to travel to Europe, for example.
Ah I was thinking more along the lines of needing to bill 20 hours a week and there be flexibility around those hours. Or, take a week off and work 40 hours the following week.
The key to doing this, and it can be done, is to have it seemly for the client. You make it work and if that means you have to get up early at the hotel in Paris and work 4 hours, you do it.
Sick leave and vacation are both reasons to want PTO.
Work 10 hours Monday and Tuesday and then take a week off and then work Thursday and Friday of the following week.
That would depend on one being able to shift one's hours around. Also, it doesn't solve the sick leave issue, since one can get sick at unpredictable times.
Remember that at least one of the reasons for paid sick leave is to discourage people from working while they have a disease that can infect other workers or customers.
To go on vacations
So it can work in a city state with the highest GDP per capita in the world.
Oh I certainly wouldn't try to conclude that free buses are a good idea anywhere else.
Now in terms of defining "major", Luxembourg's daily ridership (about 350,000 a day) is equivalent to Seattle and and more than say Denver or Portland.
> I feel seen
I support you, man. Live the dream!
I read this and assumed Matt doesn’t spend much time in San Diego
Luxembourg does not have free buses and paid-for non-buses, which is the proposed model for NYC. It has free everything.
Alon Levy's point (which Matt linked) that the important thing is for buses and subways to be the same fare so you don't get people switching between the two for financial reasons is a very strong one. If there's a bunch of money to spend on lowering fares in NYC, the best thing that the MTA could do with that money would be to lower MetroNorth and LIRR fares to be the same as subway/bus fares within the Five Boroughs.
Proposing free subways in NYC is so obviously unaffordable that no-one dares mention it and it will clearly never happen; there are a handful who think free buses will be a first step to free subways, and a bigger group who claim to believe that, but they mostly know it won't happen and some rather like the idea of segregating the scary poors on the buses so the subways (which they use) can be kept for people like them.
Countries not understanding their near neighbours is a common problem. Britain similarly spends lots of its elites' time and energy on the Middle East, as well as following US politics and topics of global concern (eg climate change, development aid etc). But European affairs is so poorly regarded we essentially Brexited by accident, and then spent years in torturous negotiations with the EU because we don't understand how the EU functions or what parts of the relationship are valuable.
Similarly my understanding is that post-Soviet states were a low status desk for Russian diplomatic and intelligence officials prior to 2022, and this low investment contributed to poor quality information feeding up into the top of decision-making over the past decade or so.
My theory is that there's a combination of elites believing they understand nearby countries inherently without having to do much work or invest much in it, and them learning the language of their near neighbours doesn't provide the same payoffs as learning/speaking English or something more exotic. A world where more top British politicians spoke French and German, more top US politicians spoke Spanish, and more top Russian officials spoke Ukrainian and Kazakh is probably a better one.
Counterpoint, the Brits realize their true enemies are the the French.
That's always been the case.
I think foreign policy elites are just really bad at their jobs.
Almost all post Soviet central Asians speak Russian along with their local language.
Конечно. But they are speaking it less and have been for some time. If you only engage in these countries as a monoglot Russian speaker, there's a whole bunch of pro Western and nationalist things that you cannot engage with or understand. It's similar to how there's only so much monoglot English speakers can understand even pro-Western countries like Mexico or Japan.
Part of it is post-imperialist. Russian elites think Central Asia is their playground and birthright. Similarly for Britain and Ireland. Somewhat similarly for the US and Mexico.
Except the US has a lot of almost native Spanish speakers to draw from if needed.
Only one of them is wrong :P
Maybe part of this is that nearby nations are just boring. For example, Kipling wrote tons of poems about European stuff and no one reads them. His poems about the colonies are much more exciting.
Well, Danegeld is still read, but that’s about the time back when Denmark was exciting.
There’s a much more specific case for the British. Ireland is right there and Britain occupies a quarter of the island.
I don't have any numbers here but my casual experience is that a fair chunk of English in general can speak French or German so I'd expect this would apply to their top politicians.
We're of course worse for not speaking Spanish although that is changing.
“is that a fair chunk of English in general can speak French or German”
Maybe on a DC Comics alternate Earth. Their language ability is nowhere near continental abilities.
Nick Clegg speaks French, Spanish and Dutch, to pick one example that I know.
A lot of the British upper class speak good French (partly because of the schools they go to, partly because they tend to ski in France or French-speaking Switzerland), so when the Tories are in power, the language skills tend to be better than when Labour are. German is probably number two, but a chunk less common. And there are quite a few who think they speak Greek but don't (they learned Ancient Greek and they've forgotten a lot more than they think they have).
The UK Foreign Office is dominated by foreign-service types and doesn't have a lots of monoglot desk-bound analysts the way the US State Department does, so language skills there are usually very good: the big problem is that while the Embassies in Europe are very high-prestige, the desks in King Charles Street are not (the Middle East and Asia desks are much bigger deals). Part of this is just that Paris Embassy is much easier to contact than the Baghdad Embassy, so UK-based decision makers tend to just call Paris rather than the France desk in KCS, while they'd talk to the Iraq desk in KCS in preference to calling Baghdad.
The UK foreign policy establishment outside the FO is a different story; there's the Europe lobby (Best for Britain, European Movement, etc) which is entirely separate from the FP establishment (Chatham House, etc).
The best next change for American healthcare policy would be to get rid of employer-sponsored health insurance and make the entire country one giant insurance market, but no one is touching that with an 11-foot pole.
https://x.com/DolphinMossad/status/2029325120595001433
"I for one do *not* think things would be better if there were only one insurance company and RFK Jr was the CEO."
Yes, this is actually the best argument against the UK NHS. The subsidised-and-regulated mandatory insurance model (where, in many cases, the insurers are not allowed to be for-profit) that is common on the European continent is far more stable in the face of political risk.
At least in the UK there are non-NHS clinics.
Yes, the government is getting increasingly annoyed that stopping trans people from getting hormones through the NHS doesn’t actually stop them getting hormones.
And they can’t ban the hormones themselves, because they’re used by lots of cis people (e.g. oestrogen is in the contraceptive pill).
Market based insurance doesn't work. No other country does it.
Pick a system from of about 35 other rich countries and copy it.
I thought Switzerland did this?
They do, more or less. Of course it's heavily heavily regulated.
“Instead, each Canton has their own insurance offerings from various national insurance companies. What those plans have to cover is mandated by law. Insurance companies cannot deny any patients from buying these plans. The price of those plans has to fall in a very narrow band that the cantonal government sets every year based on that company's previous year performance and the larger cantonal insurance market.”
Sounds nice, but you still have to contain costs or this will just lead to a run up in premiums or companies leaving the market like California and Florida have for homeowners.
They do not.
Switzerland's insurance is split by the Canton. (So strike one on the countrywide marketplace for insurance idea)
Every resident of Switzerland is legally obligated to carry insurance. (Wait, this is not part of the nationalize insurance to solve everything plan?)
The cost of this insurance varies by the Canton of residence. So high cost Cantons like Zurich, Geneva, Basel, have monthly premiums that run around 500 CHF (643 USD) per month. + Or - 100 per month based on the deductible. Even the lower cost Cantons still run at 350 CHF. Cantons are tiny. Zurich is the biggest by population and it has only 700,000 people.
Now where is that premium cost coming from? The magic of the market in the capitalist banker's paradise of Switzerland?
No. They didn't get their money by being the kind of idiots who believe in a free market for health insurance.
Instead, each Canton has their own insurance offerings from various national insurance companies. What those plans have to cover is mandated by law. Insurance companies cannot deny any patients from buying these plans. The price of those plans has to fall in a very narrow band that the cantonal government sets every year based on that company's previous year performance and the larger cantonal insurance market.
Companies can offer supplemental insurance that covers beyond the basic insurance. Policy holders have to ask for this and pay extra for it. Companies can decide whether or not to cover a patient with supplemental insurance.
That is how the Swiss insurance system works and it has little relationship to a market based system beyond there being private companies who provide the coverage.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Employer-provided insurance is market-based insurance.
Competition between insurance providers for the business of employers, or between employers over the generosity of employer self-insured plans, is the main market signal we have for what share of their income Americans want to spend on healthcare.
But it's a very imperfect, weak signal, because the actual consumers of healthcare only have indirect feedback, such as by complaining to their employer about the quality or cost of the insurance the employer has chosen to offer.
Unfortunately employer group plans where all the buying decisions are made by employers are the only real way in our current system that individuals can participate in buying groups that pool their bargaining power against insurance providers.
But we could create other types of patients buying groups, so that people could join an insurance buying group unrelated to their job, instead of negotiating on their own as an end individual with the insurance company.
I'm with MY on [not] bombing Iran, and maybe it is generational. Over the last 8 or 10 years I've come to realize how much my alignment with the Democrats is really born of things that were happening during the Bush 2 administration. The party and broader left was a much more hospitable place in those days for socially libertarian dudes who also thought American society could be improved with a more coherent, social democracy-lite version of the federal government. I still think it's the correct way to do things on the merits but the older I get the more homeless it feels.
I think any younger people who are expecting something better to come out of the Iran situation probably would be well served to read up on experience with Iraq in the 90s. We had regular air strikes and missile attacks for years and it never achieved anything. A lot of the rationale for the eventual invasion was that the kind of war we are currently seeing against Iran is unlikely to succeed (going in on the ground is of course even worse).
It's always worth remembering that the most successful 20th century military actions by the US met the following requirements: (i) authorized by Congress, (ii) public support by the American people, and (iii) strong international backing. All 3 isn't a guarantee of success either but it has never worked without all of them in place.
I wonder how much of this is just social media making “normie” views more accessible. Like when the Internet first came out, civil libertarians were the first adopters and it seemed like EFF-type views were widely held, but I’m not sure that ever actually impacted Democratic politics. Maybe those views never had any real influence and it’s just more obvious now that everyone is online.
I think it's mainly just that people aren't very principled.
Yes, but this time the Israelis are involved, so they likely know something. They seem much better at planning Middle East escapades than the US at this point. I doubt even the MAGAs are dumb enough to trip into some sort of Iraq quagmire.
Israel is good at quick short term tactical successes, in part due to its military prowess but in part due to its willingness to take a 'let God sort em out' approach to these fights, then leave all of the long term messes and fallout to other people (mostly America). Their involvement makes this worse, not better.
I agree that the chances of a quagmire remain low largely because there was 0 attempt to make the case for this to the American public and there is no popular support for a real invasion. But we should not be blind to the way one escalation and counter escalation tends to justify the next. Once shots are being fired it is always easier to justify doubling down than pulling back.
I think Slow Boring precisely shows that jobs are less lumpy. I subscribe to a bunch of newsletters, if they are all half price and half as often I think that would be straightforwardly better for me. And also "writer who produces a couple columns a week in conjunction with several others" is the most successful model in journalism -- that's the NYT op ed page, for example.
Most jobs do not have to be lumpy though—people could work European hours and vacation norms and things would still run. Most people would be a lot happier working less and retiring later over our current system where you burn yourself out while working dreaming of retiring early (sometimes extremely early like the FIRE folks) then are retired with nothing to do.
It's a prisoner's dilemma microeconomics problem.
I need to be working at least as hard as my peers or I risk losing this job. If that happened I would lose my healthcare and potentially have my resume scarred in a way that moves me down the ladder. That would be bad, so I work hard to avoid it. Most people do - and thus none of us get to work less.
Unfortunately the prisoner’s dilemma extends across countries too. For a while, it was the US defecting at Europe’s expense. Now China’s defecting even harder at the US’s (and Europe’s) expense.
We still live in a world where employees working harder is a competitive advantage.
I am at a global company and whenever I think about placing a role in the EU, their labor laws nudge me to place it in India or the US instead...
You also have to, most regrettably, also have to compete for scarce essentials like housing in the NIMBY era.
Yes, this is where some policy intervention comes in to nudge things in the direction of allowing for leisure. Lower hour work week before overtime kicks in, revisit rules on exempt/non-exempt status.
Something like a sabbatical fund if one has worked 56 of the last 60 quarters for time off/retraining. (Spitballing)
I think Matt's cultural frame is important as well, like parental leave is now seen as much more valid than it used be.
I understand the sentiment, but when the motive is competition with your peers, I have doubts about how effective interventions can be.
Like literally this weekend, no one is FORCING me to work but I probably will. Same for my wife. That's just how better paying white-collar jobs are these days. There's no overtime or anything, just cultural expectations and not wanting to fall behind my peers.
I feel this. My company has 'unlimited' PTO and the result is that I am never off even when I am off. Though I also don't really get too mad about it as long as I'm treated like an adult/trusted to get my stuff done without micromanagement. There's a point where it comes with the territory.
I hear people say things like this a lot, but it’s not inevitable. Most of my friends are upper middle class white collar workers, and I can only think of two who are routinely working more than 40-45 hours per week. You do probably have to accept being more like 80th percentile in income rather than 95th, but it’s accessible if you prioritize it.
When I owned that restaurant fire protection business the entire business was built off # of inspections performed per day per technician. It was ~ all variable but our techs mostly worked 40 hour weeks. Some wanted weekend overtime work. They could have worked fewer hours and earned less but they didn’t. My sense is most people wouldn’t actually be a lot happier working less **and** earning less. Which is the tradeoff vs. Europe.
I suspect it would be hard on small business. Just going off of where I grew up, there are lots of 2-4 person businesses where it’s a hardship when someone takes vacation. 4 weeks or so would make it even tougher.
Not a reason not to do it, but we should understand where blowback might come from.
I actually think there's a certain groundedness to be gained from doing at least some household work. To be sure, I'm not about to throw away my washing machine, but I also think doing the dishes and cleaning up clutter around the house does give me some kind of buy in to the communal space of the home, facilitating co- ownership of the space. I think having robots do all that work actually could take something away that helps keeps us human.
It's interesting to contrast MattY's view here toward the benefits of "increasing leisure" through the efficiency of robot tech and Halina's recent piece on how Zoomers are dropping alcohol for chemicals that can increase work efficiency. I suspect the people who will have the robots to do their housework will (because of costs) also be the ones who will use that time not for leisure but to do more work.
Rich people have always had household employees that did all the work. I am acquainted with a woman who has a full-time housekeeper six days a week, and then a different Monday housekeeper because God forbid one single day should pass without a full-time housekeeper.
I don't think it makes her less human.
There's another aspect to the idea of the 15 hour work week which kind of ties into this: Keynes, Fuller, et al didn't take into consideration that technology is constantly evolving. We could have less work if we were happy with 1930s technology washing machines but if you want the 'next best thing' people have to be employed to invent, upgrade, and build new production lines. So you could have your 15 hour work week but you wouldn't have your house cleaning bots and you'd be Squeegeeing your wet laundry, lol. It would be like the Amish---arbritarily setting a certain level of technology and no further.
Soon AI could do the inventing for us. We'll be able to just float in a bag and exist in a virtual world while giant robot spiders care for our physical bodies.
Almost half the mailbag devoted to just one question is kind of impressive. I wish I could get a question like that in! Wrt the actual answer, I think one doesn't have to go full Graeber to recognize that a great deal of time-on-the-clock is not really "job", it's work to enable the Real Work(tm) to get done. Meetings and paperwork (sadly still in abundance working grocery, it's farcical), filing interdepartmental memos up and down the chains of command, servicing customers. Not that that latter's not a real function of the job, to be sure, but there's a very real sense in which having a friendly meandering conversation with the kindly grandmother at checkout funges against filling empty shelves. You can intentionally overstaff to provide such slack...but then we're moving away from the 15 hour week by encouraging more "consumption".
There are also hard physical limits to ekeing out efficiencies when demand is inconsistent. Like, yeah, as a popular grocery store we know which days we'll probably need to schedule more staff. (I don't understand why everyone and their mother shops on Sundays?) But to actually get that down to an hour-by-hour estimate...I mean it's doable in theory, but no one wants to work "weird" hours like 7 to 2, or show up just to bag for a couple hours due to surge demand, or whatever. And if you're wrong, then you end up with a few unfortunate souls on the sales floor dealing with constant customer queries, lines stretching into the aisles, and the truck driver's tapping his watch thinking to himself, ugh, I gotta drive back to Central Warehousing and these jabronis are making me wait cause there's no one qualified to use the forklift. Not great, Bob!
Finding meaning outside of work is a whole other thing though. People tend to just handwave it away as "leisure", and of course I'd love to have more time on the margin to kick back and listen to Boris albums on repeat or whatever. Only so much ass-sitting before restlessness kicks in though. There is so much work to get done in the world, whether we officially call it "work" or not, and sooner or later I feel called back to the fight. None of us are free from toil until everyone is free from toil.
In Switzerland and Germany, supermarkets are closed on Sundays.
Never thought I'd see a Boris shout out on SB! Awesome band, incredible live show.
I think a big question to ask about the work hours per week question is how many hours kids need to be in school. I've always got the feeling that the standard Slow Boring take is that they aren't in school *enough*. If so, then in a Keynesian utopia, that limits some of the leisure opportunities that active parents can do relative to the childless, and I'd curious what effects would come from that.
How much of school being too short is parental self interest though? I want school to go to 5:30 because I work until 5 so need my kids to be doing something in the afternoon. But if I also got off work at 2 I could spend the afternoon with my kids and it would be fine?
Parental self interest will always be the trump card in the end. What I'm curious is what is thought to be the minimum number of hours kids typically need to be in school in order to sufficiently learn what they need to learn.
Also how you count unpaid work matters a lot.
The paid work hours of an average UMC household have roughly doubled since Keynes time.
I actually think Matt Mahan should try to soften his image a bit and should try being nice like Daniel Lurie, who is also a moderate reformer. Mahan has all the right views but he often projects a prickly, combative persona: sharp public callouts, an aggressive social media posture, and visible alliances with tech figures who trade in snark.
His posture makes him seem obsessed with a narrow corner of Silicon Valley instead of someone who wants to be a leader for the whole state.
Daniel Lurie’s approach of portraying himself as a humble problem solver on Main Street is a better electoral choice for a moderate reformer imo
It's simultaneously an important-stakes race, and also one where I once again feel befuddled by the dizzying array of contenders. A soft SB endorsement isn't nothing, so I guess Mahan's a useful Schelling point for now...but the perennial ineptitude of the CA GOP to send Worthy Opponents also means I don't care overly much which D makes it in, as long as they're not so far left that they support the <s>SEIU cash grab</s> Definitely One Time We Promise Billionare Tax.
I don't think things have changed that much since the Victorian era, the gentry were still expected to be clerics, scholars, responsible and involved landlords, politicians etc even when they made all their money from rents.
P.G. Wodehouse would like a word.
Arguably the Victorian era changed social expectations in this respect.
"I don’t actually want Democrats to be more enthusiastic about bombing Iran." I was surprised to see so many hawkish comments from this board this past week. Although the disagreements are what makes this forum fun and engaging!
As someone who’s not a strict non-interventionist, I was particularly surprised that so many people were in favor of an operation that has no justification given and no objective or endpoint. Was all that left as an exercise for the reader? “Figure out why this is good and what winning looks like?”
Was listening to some veteran and he was listing all the Americans Iran had a hand in killing...In Iraq. And Lebanon. None in the US.
Jumped out he didn't seem to consider "have fewer servicemembers in warzones" as an option.
The most common attitude I've heard is that Iran's government sucks and no one has sympathy for their leadership dying, but also that's true of a lot of places so what are we doing this for?
The tone of Fable of the Bees is fine, but it is wrong in that it is basically vulgar Keynesianism, all that is needed is demand to call forth the production. It overlooks the incentives for investment in hive building, the technology of honey storage, knowlege work of flower selection, etc. :)
I haven’t read it, but reading the Wikipedia summary it seems that we are ruled by people who took its insights too literally, and also a populace that is less and less concerned with doing right versus getting theirs (even on the level of listening to loud music and running red lights). What we want is “hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.”
The "free bus" discussion left out a few practical points: equiping a fleet of buses with the tech needed to integrate with metro/subway, phone payments, etc is VERY expensive in captial terms - only to find that the majority of the riders qualify for free/subsidised fares anyway. Free buses are also faster on routes, easier to transfer to/from, and not having to figure out fares will attract a small number of in frequent riders. ( this would not apply to NY City but would apply to suburban systems).
I genuinely don't get the "free bus" obsession. It feels like more of a factional signifies than a solution to anything.
It's so much easier to board. You don't have to fumble with your wallet or bring up the app on your phone. I'm not a hardcore "free bus" person but you have to acknowledge that it's easier for the passengers.
Would be easier if flying was free, grocery shopping was free, etc. I'm not sure what distinguishes bus riding...
PVTA (western Mass) has free busses and it seems to work well. The thing I notice is that it speeds up boarding - busses run a bit more reliably to time with free fares. (Fare was $3.50 a day for unlimited rides before, so it's not mostly the money.)
"(Fare was $3.50 a day for unlimited rides before, so it's not mostly the money.)"
Google says that PVTA has 7.8 million riders a year. At $3.5 a pop, that's $27 million. Its total operating revenue is $63 million. So it gave up almost half its operating revenue in fares. In theory, if it had kept the fares, it could increase its activities by 25-40%. That money is instead now covered with federal(16%) & state/local (73%) grants. If there is a budget crunch and funding is cut in either places, services will be far more impacted.
Transit nerds are like "you already charged me through my tax bill, why are you double charging me at the fare box?" And normies are like "you already charged me at the fare box, why are you double charging me on my tax bill?"
I think the transit nerd fantasy is that if we make it free, regular voters will start thinking of it as a critical government service like schools and roads, and they'll then be willing to pay more taxes to support it.
Having a father who worked in public transit agencies for over 30 years, I don't think people who could be characterized as "transit nerds" are in favor of free buses on any large scale (as compared to very specific applications like the Mall Shuttle in Denver).
It’s like free roads and free parking. If your parking meter charges 10 cents an hour, then all it does is annoy people and cause complexities to operate. But on top of that, with buses, everyone who’s already on the bus has to wait while people boarding are fumbling for change. There are a lot of costs to charging *any* amount, and if the revenue collected isn’t that much, then the cost/benefit ratio can point to free.
At least in my experience, part time work while caring for a child or something similar is still considered lower status than full time work. And part of that is that most part-time jobs are low status.
I think it would be good policy to change labor regulations to allow for more flexible work opportunities in high status jobs. It would also allow for job sharing as well - something I’ve seen in the civil service, where two people share a full time job.
IOW, as long as labor regulations and rules make “full time” employment the standard, not much is going to change.