I'll regret asking this - but what do they propose replacing capitalism with? Are we back to the Hallmark Movie town economy of vegan restaurants and feminist bookstores that somehow keeps everyone in upper middle class modern comfort?
I told you. We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week. But all the decisions OF that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting--by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs,--but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more--
Most people are confused by capitalism, which is why I like the term free markets better. Capitalism or free markets at it's heart is people being free to buy and sell with whom they want and keep the fruits of their labor.
Moreover, capitalism and free markets ARE compatible with regulations to keep abuses of the system in check such as monopolies or worker protections as basically every developed country has already proven.
But alternatives to capitalism haven't faired so well in the wild. They don't scale well for the simple reason that people won't work hard if they can't keep the fruits of their labor.
I certainly know I wouldn't. If I can't get ahead why bother. Like we told the kids the other day, life's a competition. If you can't win, then you won't play
I mean, capitalism is fundamentally about someone *else* (viz., the shareholders) keeping the fruits of your labor…equity is essentially a claim on proceeds.
It's literally the opposite. Under capitalism you negotiate with someone else what your labor is worth and get paid a market compensation for it. The fruits of your labor are worth what you're selling your labor for.
Under communism you get told what to work on by someone else and your compensation has no relationship to the value it provides. If it's more valuable than you're being paid someone else is literally keeping it.
Firstly, I was not contrasting this communism, but rather the state of nature prior to the existence of joint-stock companies. The essence of capitalism isn't "not communism" it's "the separation of ownership from control and the sale of equity to fund enterprises in the form of a claim of on enterprise profits and/or proceeds of enterprise sale."
Secondly
>>If it's more valuable than you're being paid someone else is literally keeping it.>>
This is also how it works under capitalism. You're not employed unless your employer generates an economic surplus from your employment, which doesn't happen unless the value created exceeds your wage. If you work in the oil patch and the price of oil goes up, that doesn't mean your wage does.
>>your compensation has no relationship to the value it provides>>
Sort-of true under capitalism depending on definitions used except that as the value provided is a ceiling on compensation and anything below that is a potential bargaining range. You're competing with other labor suppliers to provide the highest value to the employer at the lowest marginal price, which doesn't have any necessary relationship (other than the aforementioned wage ceiling) to the level of surplus provided. Farm laborers literally provide the food that keeps people from starving--basically the highest subjective surplus around after oxygen--and they're paid peanuts, because they compete with numerous others independent of the surplus they create.
Pre-capitalism wasn’t everyone running a small business; it was mostly people working for feudal lords who were both the owners and controllers of capital. People enjoyed even less of the fruits of their labor under the pre-capitalist system, and even Marx considered capitalism an improvement over previous feudalism. Modern businesses that don’t separate owners from controllers from large law firms to family-owned restaurants tend to be significantly worse places for non-owner employees to work than comparable publicly traded corporations where the managers are not the owners but also are accountable to shareholders.
Yes, quite right although one need not even go to feudal lorders, if one was in crafts one was generally subject to being under a Master craftsman and nothing in the historical record suggests that was a wonderfully free and enabling experiene, quite the contarary, I think grindingly exploitive would be the phrase.
Of course even in free-peasantry lands, most farmers labored for other larger farmres or did quasi-feudal other labor (as returns on small farms are shit, and
The early colonial mass exodus (mass relative to being able to afford to get a spot on a ship, even allowing for becoming a quasi-serf to pay that off) to get land in the Americas from W. European countries without fuedal lands says much.
The price of oil can also go down and the company makes a loss. Does that mean that the service that the laborer provides is negative?
In a free market the economic surplus from labor should be theoretically low. If there's a large difference you could go to a different employer or start your own business and get around that. I recognize that it's more complex in the real world, but it is more fair than alternative systems.
The only objective way to assess value is on economic terms. We can argue more about subjective measures. But a society that, say, paid teachers more than succesful entrepreneurs would end up with both poor teachers and poor entrepreneurs.
"The essence of capitalism isn't 'not communism' it's 'the separation of ownership from control and the sale of equity to fund enterprises in the form of a claim of on enterprise profits and/or proceeds of enterprise sale.'"
No. The essence of capitalism is property rights. If you make a thing, you own it. If you own a thing, you may do with it what you wish.
I would accuse you of being simple, given your apparent mistaking of me for a Marxist and your conflation of whether capping upside returns for lower downside risks is likely be positive-sum for whether it’s consisent with “keeping the fruits of your labor.” You are mistaking a descriptive claim with a normative one.
The fact that labor creates a surplus in excess of its wage is just a precondition of employment: worker that produces $14 of value per hour at a wage of $20 per hour does not remain employed ( nor in the general case can they and the enterprise remain solvent).
And the fact that the value created has no necessary connection (other than as a ceiling) to wages is just an effect of competition and marginal effects: food has high subjective utility but low price due to high competition and low input costs, production of food has low input costs in part because farm labor has very low pay, in turn because there are lots of bidders to sell their labor (who implicitly don’t have higher-return markets in which to sell, or else Baumol effects or market exit would elevate wages) — conditions that are all independent of the surplus value created by labor whether conceived of as subjective use-value or as exchange-value (the gap between which comprises the sale bargaining range). It’s just more interesting for goods with high subjective use-value becuase the intrinsic demand is self-evident so it’s clearer that the effects on price are dominated by competitive equilibria rather than by total surplus value created. It’s no particular surprise that a peddler selling knickknacks on the side of the road makes a poor wage, because there’s limited demand for the product. If you want to use a market with a high prices and revenues but a low prevailing wage there’s always acting, finished textiles or handbags or other LVMH-type products, electronics assembly, or adjunct-taught academia.
Pop quiz time! Without looking it up, guess who said the following:
"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."
Which, of course, it has. Capital accounts for about 20-25% of GDP. The rest is labor, which keeps a much larger share of the total. Without capital, labor would produce much less per unit of effort. You can tell by looking at how our ancestors lived, back when they had to make literally everything within a small band of people on unimproved land. In modern terms, the raw productivity of labor without capital is maybe just around $1,000/yr. Some capital is human capital, which the laborer owns. The rest is physical capital, or more abstract forms of property, which they generally don't.
And the real return on capital, as Piketty showed us, has averaged 4-5%/yr since antiquity. If returns rise (either because capital is scarce, or because someone opened up a new way to make more productive capital) then investment/savings rise and bring it back down. If it falls, people don't bother saving as much and it rises.
(I don't remember if this part was in Piketty, but it seemed natural to me to assume that this rate was a stable attractor state because it meant an owner could enjoy the full value of their savings and then pass it on undiminished to their children ~14-20 years later, or about one biological generation for most of history)
As Nikuruga points out indirectly, you confuse "shareholder corporations" with "capitalism"- a frequent innumeracy. As a general matter the vast majority of businesses in any given economy, including US, are not shareholder corporations, but varying things like Partnerships, Mom&Pops sole proprietorships (often not even organised as a company), etc.
Mistaking a sub-set of companies that employ ~a third of employees for Capitalism is a error from the get go.
The fact the equity owner has brought tools and money - capital to work with makes in a modern economy the labor possible and more valuable. It is literally why we are all vastly richer, even in the poorest countries, than we as a species were in the 18th or 19th centuries, despite now having a populatoin of 8odd billion versus under 1
In theory, yes, but in practice publicly traded corporations typically award employees with equity more so and can feel less hierarchical than a lot of manager-owned firms like law firms.
Agreed, I don’t know why defenders of capitalism would use that term. The term by its own name suggests you’re shilling for capital! “Free markets” sounds much better. And there are situations with things like monopolies or protectionism or various forms of regulatory capture where the interests of “capital” do not align with “free markets”.
It’s also confusing when discussing with people on the left because many people on the left include things like colonialism within capitalism because a lot of the colonial empires were internally capitalist (leading to a discussion on a thread on this blog a few days ago!) even though most people don’t consider colonialism to be part of capitalism. It’s just a confusing term and “free markets” is less confusing if what you mean is just you want less government regulation.
I think they propose an economy of tradwife influencers making some side money selling the goods they make on their farm, but making their real money running seminars on how to become a tradwife influencer making some side money selling the goods you make on your farm, while making your real money running seminars on...
We will all live on a collective farm. I shall write poetry, and you shall weave tapestries. No one will ever have to grow food, unless they want to do gardening as a hobby.
"Are we back to the Hallmark Movie town economy of vegan restaurants and feminist bookstores that someone keeps everyone in upper middle class modern comfort?"
You forgot architecture studios and handcrafted carpentry workshops, but yes.
That's almost exactly what I've said about the frequency with which (virtually always male) architects turn up in (almost always) romantic/romantic comedy movies -- it's an "artistic" profession, but "manly" because it allows the character to usually have a scene where he's wearing a hardhat and work clothes when visiting a job site, and it popularly codes as an upper middle class profession.
What do they propose replacing it with? Generally, they don't. This isn't a positive ideology of economics and governance. It's about tearing bad things down, not building good ones up, while denying the bad things have associated good things that will also get torn down.
*Any* real system would most likely fail to be acceptable, and would need to be taken down in turn, until and unless all humans become angels and no longer need systems. Or they pretend to make a proposal with too few details but which would very obviously fall apart in ten minutes in the hands of actual humans.
The libertarian catch phrase for this idea is "utopia is not an option." Basically, you have to compare your proposed system or policy to stuff that exists in the real world, not to the ideal world you can conjure up in your head.
How about a society where we work fewer hours, waste fewer resources on empty consumerism, and have more time for the really good things in life: love, nature, curiosity, family, friendship, adventure, creativity, rest, and reflection?
Make the reduction of the working week an actual policy priority, try different things, see what works. The 40 hour work week is not an essential pillar of civilization.
No, it isn't an essential pillar of anything. In many contexts it is outdated or actively counterproductive. And I agree that's a great idea for a *goal* or *aspiration* that a policy or plan or society could have.
But, it is not a plan, or a policy, or a structure within which people can try plans and policies. In order to get to that goal, there needs to be an actual system that results in real humans doing the actual things that need to happen to produce and sustain that society, and prevents them from doing the things that would destroy it.
Separating employment from health insurance would have a ton of benefits in terms of stuff like added mobility.
I had a coworker for many years whose family owned a small business. She worked for us as a secretary because she had a diabetic child and couldn't afford health insurance on her own. This was a great deal for us (she was very smart and capable), but it surely didn't make any sense in the grand scheme of things for her to do office work for us instead of her family business just so her kid could get medical care without bankrupting her family.
I think most people don't realize how much health insurance as a part of employment chains people to their current jobs and prevents entrepreneurship. It's a kind of invisible tax on people with families leaving large businesses/government agencies to start their own businesses, retire early, etc.
I don't think anyone suggested it was an impossible ideal. These are all straightforwardly good or at least arguably good policy recommendations whether they lead towards the end goal under discussion or not.
However, if we want to make it to a point where everyone enjoys (the useful aspects of) upper middle class living standards (what @BronxZooCobra mentioned) with time to focus on love, nature, curiosity, family, friendship, adventure, creativity, rest, and reflection (your stated objective) this won't get us there, or anywhere close. That will take much, much deeper changes that will be very controversial, especially in terms of when and how they get implemented, because along the way they will empower and disempower various groups heavily invested in the status quo, including often to their own long-term detriment.
What I would add to what Matt says here is that something that the obsession against concentrated corporate power misses is that small businesses can "concentrate" themselves to unite in actions that are counter to what they want as well. For example, the National Federation Of Independent Business was the lead plaintiff against the ACA!
"I find this constant effort to recruit small business owners — the single most right-wing demographic — as anchor points of progressive economic policy to be fairly bizarre.
At the end of the day, the upshot of the entire freakout about institutional investors in rental housing is just to protect small-scale landlords from competition.
But this is what we're repeatedly seeing from the TAP/Warren universe, an effort to move away from the idea of promoting competition toward the idea of protecting small business owners *from* competition. https://www.slowboring.com/p/an-abundance-agenda-for-antitrust
It's a big thing historically as well, for example the "country store" was an instrumental part of the Jim Crow system in broad swaths of the south and the white power elite that dominated the "store system" hated the Sears Catalog, which their crazy ideas like "We don't care about the color of your skin, we just want to sell you stuff" https://www.npr.org/2018/10/16/657923126/how-the-sears-catalog-was-revolutionary-in-the-jim-crow-era dangerous talk that must be suppressed of course.
Huh! Learn something new every day. Of course, this only makes me like Jordan more, and even as a role model too. Navigating post-celebrity career public life amicably is just incredibly hard to do in these, our polarized times, but I'll be damned if he doesn't keep largely pulling it off. Really makes one appreciate Tom Lehrer's life advice, that if one has trouble communicating effectively, then the very least one can do is to shut up. Great wisdom to be found in silence...and those who think it's violence, well, they were never going to be more than fair-weather friends anyway.
Shame about the latter years brand floundering though. I can certainly respect trying out new things rather than simply hitting the infinite money button of the OG 1-13ish designs, although of course they do that plenty too. But not having ~a single one of the newer models after that range ever catch on bigly tells you a lot. So much riding on the legend of His Airness, even for fans like me who've never actually willingly watched basketball. (But was subjected to dozens and dozens of rewatches of Space Jam in the 90s. No idea why the daycare centre seemed to own just that one VHS.)
I came very close to mentioning Heart of Atlanta Motel, but decided to keep my comment brief to highlight Matt's more. Big business would have dealt a serious blow against Jim Crow with or without the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Not sure this is accurate. Absent the universal standard that the law made possible it would have been necessary to fight Jim Crow on a town by town institution by institution basis. Not saying this wasn’t necessary anyway but it have been a lot harder without the law.
This is correct in nearly a definitional matter given the finality of law. Only question is just how long it would have taken without law, which will be unanswerable but would have trended that way. Similar to the finality of slavery via the 13th Amendment.
Slight disagree, given the ability to discriminate fees (small d discriminate) a Marriott website that can tell me if pets are allowed could also tell me whether "those people" are allowed.
That's because the Left believes that small business owners are only people who sell food and crafts on Main Street, instead of the niche manufacturer or construction business in a non-descript industrial park. The shop owner on Main Street is righteous. The industrial park doesn't exist.
It's not for nothing that once the land has been developed into an industrial park, then abandoned and viewed as tainted, they call it BROWNfield land!!!!!!!1eleventy
I know I'm beating a broken record here, but Elizabeth Warren is easily one of the most disappointing politicians of her generation, defining that as what she is divided by what she should have been able to become.
I see your point, but there’s a meaningful difference between “standard pre-2016 conservative politician, who may have bad policy ideas but at least has some integrity” and “spineless lackey who bends over and kisses the Orange King’s ass.”
Meh. Read any of Tom Frank's skewerings of that bunch-- "The Wrecking Crew" is probably the most famous-- and you'll find that the brazen combination of total corruption and ideological fascism has existed in the Republican Party since the Nixon era.
Having personally experienced the transition from being employed by a "family" business (mandatory overtime, two half-days a month, holidays paid but rarely observed, occasional seven day work weeks) to a megacorp (four day work weeks, optional overtime, holidays paid and observed, higher wages) this resonates hard.
"How do you feel about, I guess let's call it, deferred compensation?"
I feel foolish for asking this in a comment, but how do you make italics happen on Substack? Are other flourishes like bold, strikethrough, underline also available?
Ah, and here I thought someone had built a better mousetrap, by which I mean Substack comment UI. Not that I dislike plaintext, but one must keep up with the rhetorical innovation of the Joneses. Gotta save on <̵s̵>̵s̵t̵r̵i̵k̵e̵t̵h̵r̵o̵u̵g̵h̵<̵/̵s̵>̵ tokens in this attention command economy.
Yeah, I think of family farms in particular as combining startup-level life/work balance and riskiness with a big capital investment and middle-manager level income. It's easy to see why most people don't stay on the family farm!
But if they've made the transition to operating with lots of people who aren't members of the family and are, for all intents and purposes, strangers who just somehow got hired, then they've got to be treating the people in ways that scale.
Yeah, but they’re required to do things like benefits like regular old megacorps. Shoot, I think that here even the minimum wage is delimited by company size
Even despite all the protectionism and cultural prestige laundering, the fact remains that I simply don't patronize (non-restaurant, non-"creative") small businesses very often versus BigCos. It's not due to being a cutthroat penny-pincher either. What I care about is Quality(tm), no matter who's selling the goods and/or services. One-woman artisan shop making clothing by hand, the old-fashioned way?* I'm happy to fork over a large premium, because the goods are just very nice versus fast fashion, and almost no one has similarly attractive designs. The added halo of "supporting a small business"...just doesn't really factor into it? So it doesn't speak to me when pundits and politicians pound the table about the plight of Main Street. As long as there's *some* successful tax-paying business there, rather than vacancies and blight, it's all good. And so many of these idealized cutesy little bookstore coffeeshops and whimsical tchotchke vendors, I'm like...I don't buy those things anyways, so what do I care? No one's forcing anyone to shop at Barnstormer and Noble, Staryucks, or East Elm.
I guess I always thought of the idea of the Democratic Party supporting smaller businesses as coalition building but in spite of their relatively right-leaning tendencies. Ultimately why would it matter if the Dems want to be seen as the Big Tent party? The rose colored glasses I sometimes wear was also hopeful the party could marry smart immigration policy with helping small businesses get up and running. And now that many of these small businesses got screwed over tariffs, figure timing wise this could work out politically.
This feels uncomfortably close to "XYZ demographic will surely fall in line behind our set of priorities if only we massage the messaging in just the right way".
Tbh I don’t think there are enough “business owners” to really be an important voting constituency and they aren’t a monolith. Like most of them are Republicans but I have a friend with a small custom manufacturing business who was bankrupted by tariffs and now works in retail; I don’t think he will be supporting Trump. We should support pro-competitive policies on the merits and be against rent-seeking by both small and big business.
There is quite a lot of fantasy amongst certain proggy D where the small operator (as like the Small Farmer versus Corporate Farmer) is imagined as a hippy dippy granola bio-vegan-organic, which in aggregate is wrong.
Of course anti-growthism generally as well a sort of reflexive ideological view of the market (and mistaken belief that large Corps own and employ more than they actually do, as well as collapsing all the market down to large C-Corp entities [or even C-Corps generally])
Now as to the Small biz owner and winning over, as I am literally that demographic, but of course rabidly anti-Trump and in RenEnergy... so the danger of anectdote:
I would suggest utility in Small Biz owner demographic after tariffs and inflation on the Abundance side (not the restrictions side) as
(1): growth agenda for "Regulatory Simplification" (not "dereg" but streamlining, scraping off the cruft, rationalisation - mostly focused on the energy area, grid, but probably potential for wins outside (I think of Steven Koltai's substack on the USAID in Feb 25 and his observations of Barnacles Growing on Barnacles, i.e. accumulated rules on rules paralysing effective Gov action: https://stevenkoltai.substack.com/p/usaid-and-government-inefficiency : sort of subject area a reformist D that is not of the Warrenite mode could do well on )
-- for energy but also for unlocking improved "blue governance" - modernising approaches.
-- can be a winner to peel off a % of votes sans per se losing others (in geographies where they can't be lost, rather than running up super-majorities amongst the urbane urbanites)
(2) opposition mitigation (intentity mitigation) notably in geographies where Ds once were fine in my own lifetime and now are endangered species. (peeling off percentages of which notably in geoegraphies where D have lost territory as
Pro-Growthism of streamlining and making more effective could be a useful pitch plus have pocketbook payoffs.
*: that is, former Republican, although of the old NE variety, small(er) business owner, entrepreneur-founder...
I think they would view these considerations as grubby politics and irrelevant. From their point of view, small businessmen may statistically be racist and right-wing, but the essence of what they do (i.e. capitalism on a limited human scale) is good. Building a large inhuman corporation and becoming fabulously wealthy, in contrast, is, at its essence and in principle, bad. Their starting point is that they want their ideology to be focused on economics, and they want it to be left of Marx but right of Clinton/Obama, and then the rest follows. Whether or not it works as a political coalition doesn't really matter. Most people vote on their deeply held convictions, not on their narrow material interests, so even the small business owners themselves don't support the project, the American people as a whole will (or so they think). Especially if more and more Americans own or work for small businesses as a result of their policies.
I’ve been struggling with a knee injury for almost three months, brought on by trying to get back into running after giving birth to Little Velociraptor, and I just learned that I’ll need to have surgery to repair a torn meniscus. Thankfully they were able to fit me in quickly. I’m having the surgery on Monday.
The recovery sucks, because I can’t put any weight on my right leg for four weeks after the operation, and walking around on crutches is slow and awkward as hell. Also, for the first week I won’t be able to drive, because I need my right foot to press the pedals.
This sucks extra hard while trying to look after an infant (can’t carry her and use crutches at the same time). My mom offered to stay with me for a few weeks to help me. She’s awesome.
It will feel great once I’ve recovered and can build up my strength again!
Anyway, either I’ll fall off the surface of Substack next week or I’ll post more than usual to distract myself from pain post-surgery, we’ll see!
Ugh, sucks to hear. At least they are able to repair the meniscus. In some cases the damage is so great that the meniscus has to instead be trimmed. The short term recovery is shorter, but there is a long term increased risk of arthritis.
The only reason I know this is because a torn meniscus is a common injury in football. In the past, most players chose a trim to get back on the field sooner. But that has started to shift to repair as they think of their long term health.
I pooched my own meniscus a few months back, and the doc was refreshingly honest after looking at the MRI--basically that soft joint tissue is black magic, the span of injuries to the structure is not well characterized, and all else being equal if things seem to be getting generally better and not worse, let's not touch it and see how it progresses.
Ah, you're a runner, great. You used to run five miles a day. If that hurts, stop that and try four. If that's still causing trouble, let's check back in.
I snorted when I read this "I believed that capitalism was the source of all greed, inequality, and destruction in the world,”
This is bad. It's bad that people are getting this exactly backwards. HUMANS are the source of greed and inequality, and capitalism* is a useful system for channeling that into something productive.
I also sincerely think all these Millennials and Gen Zers need to learn more about communism in the 20th century and how that turned out.
*capitalism with government regulation for things like labor and environmental standards....
Eh... humans are not so special. I think even naked mole rats and other similarly freaky mammals can be greedy and inequitable! To say nothing of the gluttonous and controlling (literal) queen bee of the hive, that BITCH.
I think this was one of the more useful takeaways from The Selfish Gene. When you reframe everything not around societies or families or even individuals but the minuscule unit of the gene locked in competition against other genes....everything else is just epicycles upon epicycles built around that.
No one believes anything if they don't live it themselves. We can't even get left people to stop voting third party despite regaling them about the story of Al Gore and Iraq.
Artemis II splashdown is nominally scheduled for 7:07pm Central Time (aka Best Time), so realistically I'd want to tune in for entry interface no later than maybe 6:40.
The Gamebred Bareknuckle MMA main card begins at 8pm eastern, so there's enough time to watch both! I'm sure all true SB heads are familiar with Anthony Smith vs. Chase Sherman in the main event, also Thiago Santos is fighting, Alex Nicholson, etc. etc.
If you don't know what bareknuckle MMA looks like- type 'King of the Streets' into the Youtube search bar while you wait. You can thank me later. (Don't do it on a work computer tho)
Is there an official drinking game or bingo card for how many inappropriate digressions Trump makes while giving his official statement honoring their return?
I wish the commentariat engaged a bit more with the girlboss vs feminist distinction Halina laid out, because it was new to me and not "woke" or "cringe" but straightforwardly well put!
Also, I didn't read this as Halina being anticapitalist but just articulating Amoruso's philosophy. I disagree with the anticapitalist bit just like the rest of you, no point relitigating it
Thoughts on the breaking-news sexual impropriety allegations against Swalwell? It's not good, obviously, but big-picture anything that helps consolidate the D field is probably preferable...even given Trump's probable own-goal with endorsement.
(I'll still vote whoever the D ends up being, but...please, please don't make me vote Porter. Fine with appointing Rs to smaller local offices, don't trust them at the gubernatorial level. Not under this POTUS who keeps throwing federalism under the trolley.)
Receipts seem to be in order and the Dems REALLY needed to trim the field before the primary. Would not be surprised if this was an open secret since the timing was a bit too perfect for multiple reasons. Especially after Trump did the own goal of endorsing.
I'm not sure any of the low-polling candidates can resuscitate their campaigns (which would just create the same crowding problem). Most likely, it's going to be Steyer and Porter heading forward. And, I guess, I'd choose Steyer in the primary. Was probably going to choose Swalwell before this.
I was definitely on Team Warren and Porter a few years ago, but can't say I like how that movement evolved. But I'm for whatever keeps a Republican out. We have enough moderate Democrats in California that I don't care if the state Republican Party just turns out the lights and shuts down.
Feel ya there. I voted Bernie in 16 and 20, and...well...look at me now, on the centre-right (or far-right by CA standards). Don't love everything the CA Dems do, sometimes even the moderate bulwark lets stupid shit happen; the fact that this retarded wealth tax, with signatures aggressively recruited by pay-to-play masked buskiers, has real legs at all is a serious failing. And of course we still piss away tons of the world's 3rd largest economy's GDP on progressive windmill tilting to featherbed the NGO-industrial complex while the provision of basic government services limps along.
There's a lot of ruin in a state, to be clear, I just wish we could be extremely rich *and* a shining model of successful blue governance instead of extremely rich *and* the butt of decades of jokes about leftist mismanagement. That's where a not-insane not-totally-packed-in CA GOP would nominally come in. Alas. Don't think the timing lines up to call the flaccidity of the Republican Party out west a bellwether for the national party also not being able to raise real politicians, but it's not unrelated either. It's hard to imagine another Reagan happening. (Not in the sense of condoning The Gipper's politics, but that when we send our best to Washington, their jibs are always gonna be cut one way now.)
I'm still quite liberal (really wish I could still identify as a progressive). As for the GOP in California, they only exist to raise cash for the national operation due to the state's population and relative wealth. They have no intention to become relevant here.
"This Swalwell situation was … shall we say widely rumored and it’s interesting that the gossip doesn’t seem to have made its way to all the big shots out west."
I'm not a professional at hot takes, but I think that Trump endorsing Hilton over Bianco is actually a pretty smart move.
Bianco is the more bombastic and naturally recognizable MAGA, make-libs-cry, character and I feel like sans-endorsement from Trump he would consolidate the CA GOP around him. But endorsing the milder Hilton keeps him in the race and raises the possibility that we end up with Hilton + Bianco top two which would be an incredible outcome for the GOP as opposed to the default of Bianco taking 30%, Porter 15%, and Hilton 14%. If not for how bad Trump is, I would actually wish for the dumb top-two system (with no write-in option!) to take an all-time bite out of the Dems behind.
Yeah...with a different monarch at the top of the ticket, I'd maybe even consider throwing a vote to Hilton (anyone related to Paris can't be that bad!), just because it seems incredibly hard to steer the CA Dem ship rightwards unless it crashes outright into a GOP iceberg. Happy that there's some possibility of reforming the much-abused ballot initiative process, and SF in particular might consolidate more power into the Mayor instead of the Board being the viziers behind the throne. But some levers can only be effectively pulled from the state-level Mansion, unfortunately.
In direct years? No, I suppose The Governator was not so long ago, and I did not hate everything he did back then + since then. But then we had another rerun of Governor Moonbeam, and then Newsome survived a recall against a hilariously crowded field, and...bunch of other stuff happened. Life comes at you fast now more than ever.
I hate to be that guy, but is this really the standard we're adhering to, going forward? Swalwell denies any wrongdoing. Is he lying? I don't know. If I had to guess, I'd say yes. But the evidence against him is either hearsay or circumstantial, and I'm not comfortable with the idea that accusations like this should immediately end a politician's career.
We have two accusations of sexting from adult women who, by their own admission, freely participated in it. Is that sexual misconduct?
We have one accusation where the woman was so inebriated she doesn't seem to remember what did or did not happen; the only clear allegation she's making is that he touched her leg and kissed her without her permission. Is this sexual misconduct? Should it end a politician's career?
The one accusation of rape comes from a woman who again was so intoxicated she doesn't remember how she got to his hotel room. It's totally possible that Swalwell took advantage of the situation and raped a drunk woman. It's also possible that she's misremembering what happened, or has a score to settle, or some of both. The fact she told friends and family at the time doesn't prove anything.
Is "believe women" really the standard we're adhering to, going forward? And do you not see that shit like this is exactly why so many people don't trust Democrats in power?
Seeing as how the current trajectory of Swalwell's career is "making it much more likely that the next governor of California is a Republican," I am pretty comfortable with ending it by any means necessary. With extreme prejudice.
The receipts are pretty solid here with lots of screenshots. Seems likely that this was a bit of an open secret so the "case" was probably built up beforehand. It might be a coordinated hit job, but it has the virtue of being true.
I don't think anyone's called on him to resign from the House, just to stop taking up space in the governor's race. This is definitely not the Al Franken era anymore.
We just need to make sure our promising presidential prospects have a clearly defined sexual orientation. The gay men get all-female staffers; the straight men get all-male staffers, etc. Presto, no inappropriate workplace affairs....
Trump's efforts to literally purchase the Hungarian election continue apace, but something that I fundamentally do not understand is why Hungary is still sitting around blocking the EU from doing things in the first place. They're obviously in violation of dozens of treaties about democracy and human rights; why have they not been expelled years ago?
One of the things that makes me doom over the long-term viability of liberal institutions is that they are so incapable of dealing with cuckoos in the nest. This is related, I think, to the fact that Democratic Party honchos keep telling us to support and fund candidates who then turn around and betray us afterward (there are far more party switches from Dem to Rep than vice versa).
It's the same problem with everything else in the EU. When you require unanimity nothing will ever get done, especially as they keep expanding member states.
The simple answer is 'there is no mechanism in EU law for expelling a country'. There *is* a mechanism for suspending a country's voting rights, but it requires unanimity among the other members and either Poland or Slovakia or both have always made clear they would not support its deployment. So instead the EU has withheld billions of euros of funding from Hungary instead.
A: What Honchos are "telling you" anything? What fictional universe is "PartyHonchos"(who the fuck are they) Small Donors? You people show no sign of actually following anything but Vibes. big Donors... same. email blastings and online campaigns for funding show no particularl signs of following any orders (from what apparatus with what actual powers?_
B: if more party switches are to R versus D I would suggest (as a non-D and never have been one) that one needs to look at D Own culture for explanation.
As an observer who has never been party-political - the Demorats purity pony habits and quasi Torquemada attitudes towards the unclean heathen converts from another group - versus the Rs who generally give few fucks at all and quite more broadly cheer even opportunistic conversions - is not in any way promoting
Frankly I think a signficant portion of Revolutionarianism is simply secularised and displaced religiousity and many such people were they displaced back 2-3 centuries would have been fevered religious reformists seeking to purify and improve (doctrice/practice X). Probably some deep bio-root to this that gets channeled and expressed in culturally mediated ways...
I don't understand why people are Marxists, but I also don't understand why most Marxists think they should be part of the revolutionary vanguard party rather than being one of the supportive workers.
The crackup between Trump and the right-wing podcasters is interesting because it illustrates the internal tension within conservatism over which is the bigger priority: opposing those who are most culturally alien, or opposing liberalism (democracy, political liberty, women's rights, religious pluralism, etc). Trump straddles that line but falls more in the former camp, while the podcasters are more in the latter camp. Vance is also more in the latter camp, which makes me wonder if he's capable of achieving a rapprochement with the Iranians where they prioritize their shared hatred of the libs over their differences. Ideologically they have some things in common! But that might well put him into conflict with Trump. On one hand, Trump was able to take a similar approach with North Korea, but Muslims are more of a cultural bogeyman than old-school Communists are these days.
People also probably forget that NK is nominally communist. Brutal dictatorship, sure, but it's really too weird with all the family's divine mythology.
"The Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI was an activist group in the United States during the early 1970s. Their only known action was breaking into the field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) located in Media, Pennsylvania and stealing over 1,000 classified documents. Disclosure of the files led to public scrutiny of surreptitious FBI activities and several reforms."
The WaPo reporter who covered it at the time later wrote a book about it, and this documentary is based on her book. Since the statute of limitations had passed by 2014, most of the activists spoke on camera.
At first all the newspapers refused to publish the documents. "Gracious, these were obtained illegally! Also we're terrified of J. Edgar Hoover." Thank God for Kay Graham.
I get that they did a good thing at the time. But five decades of this culture of suspicion against the government has robbed us of a LOT of public goods.
Being suspicious of J. Edgar Hoover was the right thing to do. COINTELPRO was bad! The FBI wrote an anonymous letter telling MLK to kill himself. Ah, if only they'd had Twitter.
Meh. I’d rather be able to afford a house and not be inundated with NIMBYs who think every damned data center approval involves bribing the zoning board and gOeS RiGhT uP tO tHe ToP!!11
Well, I might quibble because you know internet, on "directly" but yeah, most definately opened those doors, and perversely knocked down the institutional barriers out of superficial fetishisation of 'democracy=more-voting' (1970s primaries 'reforms')
I know you Gen Zers don't think that much of our Millennial music but I swear we have some good Colorado tracks if you dig deep: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joJlY9AYf2I
Flying to NYC to stay with my wife for the week! Not looking forward to the 5am flight tomorrow but at least I'll get in in time for us to have a nice dinner together and the Oakland airport's not bad.
Probably my last flight on Southwest for a long time, though, the customer service has absolutely gone downhill. They used to be an airline where I could expect someone to try and work with me when I called their help line and instead they just robotically read the policies and go "I'm sorry, I can't help you" to basic questions now.
Sad that Southwest continues it's devolution into Another Generic Airline as was sadly expected. And I am so pissed at the gaslighting they have been doing with ads to try to convince people that the differences that earned them devoted customers were "Bad, Actually" (heavy scare quotes there).
I have yet to fly since the disgraceful change, I'm guessing I'm going to just be churning aggregators like Google Flights to find what's best for me now.
Yeah, we used to go to Southwest if the fare and flight was reasonable, and otherwise do the aggregator sites, since we knew we'd get a predictable fare and experience with Southwest. Now that Southwest has gotten rid of all that, well, aggregator site it is.
Preparing for my first trip to Dublin. Would love any ideas of stuff to do. My wife has been a couple of times and I know she is going to hunt the knitting scene, which apparently is quite strong there.
The Guinness Storehouse is a great tour, obviously the beer itself is great, but the view from the top where they serve it is probably one of the best in the city.
The best place for a craft cocktail is a place called The Blind Pig, best place to sample Irish whisky is a place called The Whiskey Reserve. Walking around that part of town, by Temple Pub, is pretty nice albeit very touristy. George's Street Arcade is a cute area, The Long Hall nearby is a good pub, although honestly all the best pubs were in Cork or Galaway. I spent very little time in Dublin compared to other cities, but that's what I've got.
Reminds me of a commercial from my misbegotten youth that went something like “Dublin Berkeley Cupertino, San Jose.” I can’t remember what they were selling, but I wonder if the company is
I was super social last weekend--charity auction on Friday, Boise's first ever home pro soccer match on Saturday, family Easter on Sunday--so this might be a weekend to take it easy for me. We've got the Masters week going on, and as of now Rory is clearly on a mission to defend his green jacket.
I'm clearly not from or in California, but I've never been bullish on Swalwell. Honestly, at this point, I'm "Anyone But Katie Porter." I do like the one guy, the mayor from San Jose(?) who demonstrates sanity.
Matt Mahan! I've told all my friends and family to vote for him. I have even made the case to some GOP family members that a vote for Mahan is an effective vote against Porter as opposed to an emotional vote for one of the two (probably) dead-in-the-general Republicans. It's logical, but I don't know if they're going to be able to leave the marshmallow on the table.
I want to vote for him! But if the two Republicans are still both polling near the top even after Trump broke the symmetry between them, then I'll have to vote for whichever Democrat is polling highest at the end (which unfortunately doesn't look like Mahan just yet).
Mahan will be the candidate! (I feel the same and my vote will probably go to pretty much any top polling Dem who isn't Porter and even then maybe her; of course, I only admit this pseudo-anonymously, the only way we get Mahan is by supreme confidence)
Lagerville beer festival in (slightly rainy!?) Buellton California. Going with a large group of friends. No IPAs allowed, excellent; looking forward to seeing some of the breweries who traveled from out of state, Mexico, Japan, and Chile!
This comment has me itching to walk a few blocks to the neighborhood brewery on a very pleasant afternoon. I disapprove of both hardcore pro-IPAers and hardcore anti-IPAers--just drink what you like and let others do the same.
Neighborhood craft breweries can be among the best third-places, you should go!
I admit I'm a beer snob and so I find the IPA proliferation to be excessive; I think that the IPA abundance is a product of how quick/easy the production time is compared to very slow/challenging lagers production, rather than a real consumer preference. The Germans and Czechs have been drinking beer for a hundred generations and they prefer low ABV refreshing beers rather than hop bombs. We are a young country, a young people, we will find our way.
(I'm not even a true lager zealot among my friends, the truth is places which make good lagers make good ales, places that make bad ales usually don't make lagers or make bad ones)
Update: I am now at the brewery, and I just explained to a young couple why cities in the West were beset by uncontrolled vagrancy due to the bad Martin v. Boise precedent that Grants Pass v. Johnson overruled.
And this is a dog friendly brewery, and we also talked about Dog Discourse. Good times.
I've always been more of a dark beer fan myself, but IPA's have grown on me in the past 8ish years. I actually think the higher ABV is a major part of the IPA's success; it's much classier to drink a New Belgium tallboy than a Steel Reserve.
Sunday is a big day for me - early morning work meeting (yep you heard that right) and then a friend coming into DC so we can see the Belair Lip Bombs which I am VERY excited about.
They’ve stripped out most of the dumbest NFL rules and they experiment a lot with newer ones. The best thing is the Super Challenge — contra the lies and ignorant bleating of most NFL fans, the Super Challenge absolutely DOES work and we don’t get challenges every play because duh you only get one per game.
Football is just a cursed sport with officiating, where multiple variables have to be verified at the same time that makes it difficult to conclude calls. Not nearly as discrete as fair/foul calls in baseball or in/out calls in tennis where there's a literal bright line to help out.
Once you see the parallels between the one, the only, the legendary Dr. Eric Fingl-Dingl reporting on next week's civilization-ending covid VaRiAnT, it's hard to unsee.
Even if you're subject-matter qualified and well-meaning, as a human, it is hard to taste the sweet nectar of clicks and not realize (consciously or unconsciously) which side of your bread is buttered. No outright mistruths, but motivated reasoning and selective emphasis. Especially if your training is narrowly technical rather than practiced and habituated in this-but-maybe-that communication. Many such cases.
“Which is that this is another step towards superintelligence, clear additional evidence for skeptics that yes such an entity would be able to pwn and accomplish whatever it wanted, and a giant set of warning signs that we are not on track to handle this.“
When you DEFINE quote-unquote "superintelligence" as being something that is able to utterly wreck us when it wants to, then yes, such a thing would be able to wreck us if it wanted to.
Does such a thing exist yet? lolno. Could it? Who knows!
Most humans already live in situations where they are easily pwned by more powerful humans, e.g. look at the people being forcibly displaced by more powerful countries in various places right now. So the real question is not whether superintelligence could pwn us so much as whether or not superintelligence would use its pwning power more malevolently than powerful humans already use their pwning power today. Given that Anthropic (despite my criticisms of their hostility to open-source) seems to clearly be the less malevolent party in its disputes with Trump, I lean towards no.
I'm a big Anthropic fan, but I have wondered a little bit whether all this talk about what Mythos can do is hyping things up a bit much. But then I see that Google and Microsoft are collaborating with them on Project Glasswing, and aren't denying anything they're saying, and it seems big and scary and awe-inspiring.
I mean, either these zero-day exploits I'm hearing about are real or they're fake. Seems very unlikely they're fake.
In which case, this doesn't seem like hype. It seems genuinely scary and it seems like AI researchers at Anthropic are genuinely afraid of their own creation.
Here’s the thing about Simon Willison. He’s a smart guy, but he’s never worked at a modern enterprise software company. So to him “there’s an unpatched vulnerability in openBSD that can crash it!” sounds scary*, but no actual company in 2026 is running an openBSD server that’s just like, connected to the internet. The ability to exploit this vulnerability relies on a set of assumptions that just isn’t true anymore. You can’t directly communicate with the OS over the internet and everyone at Anthropic should know that so it’s very very silly for them to act otherwise.
This will be a useful tool! It’s not apocalyptic. Security professionals are fully aware that these zero days exist and they don’t know about them. They design their defense accordingly.
There’s a really really good reason most “hacks” are due to social engineering anymore. If the report was “we found a flaw in AWS API gateway that lets un-authed traffic through”, then I’d worry.
*and to be fair, it's a bad bug, but there's a reason it's existed for 27 years with no one noticing it: the attack requires you to send a very specifically malformed packet directly to the L7 server layer, but in reality you cannot do this unless you have direct access to the socket. In a real system, the gateway would have to let this through and it would *not*, because it's malformed. And if this was actually possible in the wild, the solution is just....don't let malformed packets through the gateway, which you shouldn't be doing anyway.
I'm kind of wondering if this will end up being like the hullaballoo around the Erdos problems that were solved. In almost all cases, the problems and solution were real but either the problem was boring and tedious so no one had bothered, or the solution actually existed in the literature but was so obscure no one realized it.
Yeah, the only bit that I have any real questions about is whether the early-training versions of it really did keep breaking out of their sandbox system.
Conversely, the reference to eating a sandwich strongly inclined me to call BS on that alleged incident. It was just far too cute a detail to include -- why does the specific nature of the employee's lunch matter?
Yeah, my general inclination is to trust Anthropic on all this. But I also know that I'm a bit too much of a fanboy, so I try to actively maintain some skepticism of them (as I clearly should have for OpenAI 5 or 6 years ago).
- mythos found real vulnerabilities in lots of software
- these vulnerabilities are not worth a *human's* time to fix because they are not exploitable in actual production systems
- it's worth having a bot fix them because why not
as a corollary to the second point, this is true for fields outside of software as well. there's probably an uncountably large number of typos on wikipedia, but it wouldn't be worth paying anyone to fix them because they don't actually matter. Having a bot fix them would be fine though.
I don’t know anything about cybersecurity but when I use AI for things that I do know about it feels like it is getting better rapidly but still not really capable of doing a lot of things that a trained human could, prone to mistakes, and not really “magical” in any way, so I’m a bit skeptical of this. It’s mostly a hobby tool rather than a professional tool for me because I’m not going to hire humans to help do my hobbies anyway; professionally it is only a starting point and not really capable of producing reliable finished product outside the most routine use cases. Some day it probably could achieve this at its current rate of improvement! But today does not feel like that day.
I am more worried about Anthropic trying to keep capabilities so restricted. The most realistic AI dystopia is something like the movie Elysium where a small elite controls all the AI and disempowers everyone else because they no longer need everyone else’s labor since AI can do everything better. Anthropic keeping the best models controlled in the name of “safety” makes this future more likely. We should be open-sourcing stuff and ensuring everyone has access.
It's been a real pill moment for me (can't remember what the current colour classification is) to learn how many people mismanage credit cards and other types of Revolving Door Project credit. Even with my bosses, who earn significantly more...if I mention I never keep any card balances, they're baffled, like this is a new concept and/or who can afford that in this economy? Also would I like to hear how their latest sojourn to Cache Creek Casino and Resort went? And it's just depressing. Credit score? I hardly knew her. Yeah, at a certain point, one can play the fully-capitalized game and make more on investment income than the cost of borrowing that leverage...but that's a lot closer to fuck-you money than a retail frontliner's finances, with much more favourable loan terms. Whoever taught me the mores of financial responsibility (surely wasn't my parents!), I owe them a big debt of gratitude. So easy to get trapped in bad money habits for life, where the only way out looks like hustling harder and harder for more benjamins.
We need to get much more DGAF about that stuff, as we used to. Our pronunciation of Deutschland, for example, is so weird it sounds like a whole different word!
more mind blowing perhaps to realise plattsdeutsch (low[lands] German and nederlands (lowlands) deutsch were more or less same thing but for Martin Luther triggering German standardisation centered around his highlands (hoch deutsch) dialect. So Dutch and Deutsch (platts both)
I'll regret asking this - but what do they propose replacing capitalism with? Are we back to the Hallmark Movie town economy of vegan restaurants and feminist bookstores that somehow keeps everyone in upper middle class modern comfort?
I told you. We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week. But all the decisions OF that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting--by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs,--but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more--
Be QUIET! I ORDER you to be QUIET!
Most people are confused by capitalism, which is why I like the term free markets better. Capitalism or free markets at it's heart is people being free to buy and sell with whom they want and keep the fruits of their labor.
Moreover, capitalism and free markets ARE compatible with regulations to keep abuses of the system in check such as monopolies or worker protections as basically every developed country has already proven.
But alternatives to capitalism haven't faired so well in the wild. They don't scale well for the simple reason that people won't work hard if they can't keep the fruits of their labor.
I certainly know I wouldn't. If I can't get ahead why bother. Like we told the kids the other day, life's a competition. If you can't win, then you won't play
I mean, capitalism is fundamentally about someone *else* (viz., the shareholders) keeping the fruits of your labor…equity is essentially a claim on proceeds.
It's literally the opposite. Under capitalism you negotiate with someone else what your labor is worth and get paid a market compensation for it. The fruits of your labor are worth what you're selling your labor for.
Under communism you get told what to work on by someone else and your compensation has no relationship to the value it provides. If it's more valuable than you're being paid someone else is literally keeping it.
Firstly, I was not contrasting this communism, but rather the state of nature prior to the existence of joint-stock companies. The essence of capitalism isn't "not communism" it's "the separation of ownership from control and the sale of equity to fund enterprises in the form of a claim of on enterprise profits and/or proceeds of enterprise sale."
Secondly
>>If it's more valuable than you're being paid someone else is literally keeping it.>>
This is also how it works under capitalism. You're not employed unless your employer generates an economic surplus from your employment, which doesn't happen unless the value created exceeds your wage. If you work in the oil patch and the price of oil goes up, that doesn't mean your wage does.
>>your compensation has no relationship to the value it provides>>
Sort-of true under capitalism depending on definitions used except that as the value provided is a ceiling on compensation and anything below that is a potential bargaining range. You're competing with other labor suppliers to provide the highest value to the employer at the lowest marginal price, which doesn't have any necessary relationship (other than the aforementioned wage ceiling) to the level of surplus provided. Farm laborers literally provide the food that keeps people from starving--basically the highest subjective surplus around after oxygen--and they're paid peanuts, because they compete with numerous others independent of the surplus they create.
Pre-capitalism wasn’t everyone running a small business; it was mostly people working for feudal lords who were both the owners and controllers of capital. People enjoyed even less of the fruits of their labor under the pre-capitalist system, and even Marx considered capitalism an improvement over previous feudalism. Modern businesses that don’t separate owners from controllers from large law firms to family-owned restaurants tend to be significantly worse places for non-owner employees to work than comparable publicly traded corporations where the managers are not the owners but also are accountable to shareholders.
Yes, quite right although one need not even go to feudal lorders, if one was in crafts one was generally subject to being under a Master craftsman and nothing in the historical record suggests that was a wonderfully free and enabling experiene, quite the contarary, I think grindingly exploitive would be the phrase.
Of course even in free-peasantry lands, most farmers labored for other larger farmres or did quasi-feudal other labor (as returns on small farms are shit, and
The early colonial mass exodus (mass relative to being able to afford to get a spot on a ship, even allowing for becoming a quasi-serf to pay that off) to get land in the Americas from W. European countries without fuedal lands says much.
The price of oil can also go down and the company makes a loss. Does that mean that the service that the laborer provides is negative?
In a free market the economic surplus from labor should be theoretically low. If there's a large difference you could go to a different employer or start your own business and get around that. I recognize that it's more complex in the real world, but it is more fair than alternative systems.
The only objective way to assess value is on economic terms. We can argue more about subjective measures. But a society that, say, paid teachers more than succesful entrepreneurs would end up with both poor teachers and poor entrepreneurs.
"The essence of capitalism isn't 'not communism' it's 'the separation of ownership from control and the sale of equity to fund enterprises in the form of a claim of on enterprise profits and/or proceeds of enterprise sale.'"
No. The essence of capitalism is property rights. If you make a thing, you own it. If you own a thing, you may do with it what you wish.
Under this definition homo habilis making stone handaxes were capitalists.
Your analysis is shot through with errors, of which the idea that labor surplus, a typical marxian simplicity.
Of course one could work in pure Partnerships form where one takes on 100% of the equity risk of laboring - no profit, no money.
that most people don't opt for such - because outside of abstraction by Marxian innumeracy, it is sucky high risk - is a general indicator
I would accuse you of being simple, given your apparent mistaking of me for a Marxist and your conflation of whether capping upside returns for lower downside risks is likely be positive-sum for whether it’s consisent with “keeping the fruits of your labor.” You are mistaking a descriptive claim with a normative one.
The fact that labor creates a surplus in excess of its wage is just a precondition of employment: worker that produces $14 of value per hour at a wage of $20 per hour does not remain employed ( nor in the general case can they and the enterprise remain solvent).
And the fact that the value created has no necessary connection (other than as a ceiling) to wages is just an effect of competition and marginal effects: food has high subjective utility but low price due to high competition and low input costs, production of food has low input costs in part because farm labor has very low pay, in turn because there are lots of bidders to sell their labor (who implicitly don’t have higher-return markets in which to sell, or else Baumol effects or market exit would elevate wages) — conditions that are all independent of the surplus value created by labor whether conceived of as subjective use-value or as exchange-value (the gap between which comprises the sale bargaining range). It’s just more interesting for goods with high subjective use-value becuase the intrinsic demand is self-evident so it’s clearer that the effects on price are dominated by competitive equilibria rather than by total surplus value created. It’s no particular surprise that a peddler selling knickknacks on the side of the road makes a poor wage, because there’s limited demand for the product. If you want to use a market with a high prices and revenues but a low prevailing wage there’s always acting, finished textiles or handbags or other LVMH-type products, electronics assembly, or adjunct-taught academia.
Pop quiz time! Without looking it up, guess who said the following:
"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."
Abraham Lincoln.
"A disloyal portion of the American people have, during the whole year, been engaged in an attempt to divide and destroy the Union."
Keynes?
Friedrich Hayek.
Adam Smith
No, I think the prose is too modern for that, but you're sort of on the right track.
Which, of course, it has. Capital accounts for about 20-25% of GDP. The rest is labor, which keeps a much larger share of the total. Without capital, labor would produce much less per unit of effort. You can tell by looking at how our ancestors lived, back when they had to make literally everything within a small band of people on unimproved land. In modern terms, the raw productivity of labor without capital is maybe just around $1,000/yr. Some capital is human capital, which the laborer owns. The rest is physical capital, or more abstract forms of property, which they generally don't.
And the real return on capital, as Piketty showed us, has averaged 4-5%/yr since antiquity. If returns rise (either because capital is scarce, or because someone opened up a new way to make more productive capital) then investment/savings rise and bring it back down. If it falls, people don't bother saving as much and it rises.
(I don't remember if this part was in Piketty, but it seemed natural to me to assume that this rate was a stable attractor state because it meant an owner could enjoy the full value of their savings and then pass it on undiminished to their children ~14-20 years later, or about one biological generation for most of history)
As Nikuruga points out indirectly, you confuse "shareholder corporations" with "capitalism"- a frequent innumeracy. As a general matter the vast majority of businesses in any given economy, including US, are not shareholder corporations, but varying things like Partnerships, Mom&Pops sole proprietorships (often not even organised as a company), etc.
Mistaking a sub-set of companies that employ ~a third of employees for Capitalism is a error from the get go.
The fact the equity owner has brought tools and money - capital to work with makes in a modern economy the labor possible and more valuable. It is literally why we are all vastly richer, even in the poorest countries, than we as a species were in the 18th or 19th centuries, despite now having a populatoin of 8odd billion versus under 1
In theory, yes, but in practice publicly traded corporations typically award employees with equity more so and can feel less hierarchical than a lot of manager-owned firms like law firms.
Agreed, I don’t know why defenders of capitalism would use that term. The term by its own name suggests you’re shilling for capital! “Free markets” sounds much better. And there are situations with things like monopolies or protectionism or various forms of regulatory capture where the interests of “capital” do not align with “free markets”.
It’s also confusing when discussing with people on the left because many people on the left include things like colonialism within capitalism because a lot of the colonial empires were internally capitalist (leading to a discussion on a thread on this blog a few days ago!) even though most people don’t consider colonialism to be part of capitalism. It’s just a confusing term and “free markets” is less confusing if what you mean is just you want less government regulation.
I think they propose an economy of tradwife influencers making some side money selling the goods they make on their farm, but making their real money running seminars on how to become a tradwife influencer making some side money selling the goods you make on your farm, while making your real money running seminars on...
"Under capitalism, man exploits man, but under socialism, it's just the opposite."
We will all live on a collective farm. I shall write poetry, and you shall weave tapestries. No one will ever have to grow food, unless they want to do gardening as a hobby.
"Are we back to the Hallmark Movie town economy of vegan restaurants and feminist bookstores that someone keeps everyone in upper middle class modern comfort?"
You forgot architecture studios and handcrafted carpentry workshops, but yes.
My wife had the discussion about the architects in movie's the other day. It straddles the line between manly construction, but creative artist.
That's almost exactly what I've said about the frequency with which (virtually always male) architects turn up in (almost always) romantic/romantic comedy movies -- it's an "artistic" profession, but "manly" because it allows the character to usually have a scene where he's wearing a hardhat and work clothes when visiting a job site, and it popularly codes as an upper middle class profession.
those non-existent fairy tale towns are such an uplifting fantasy though don't burst my bubble!
If they just let us have cats at big businesses we wouldn’t need to shop at independent bookstores
"what do they propose replacing capitalism with?"
Kickboxing.
What do they propose replacing it with? Generally, they don't. This isn't a positive ideology of economics and governance. It's about tearing bad things down, not building good ones up, while denying the bad things have associated good things that will also get torn down.
*Any* real system would most likely fail to be acceptable, and would need to be taken down in turn, until and unless all humans become angels and no longer need systems. Or they pretend to make a proposal with too few details but which would very obviously fall apart in ten minutes in the hands of actual humans.
The libertarian catch phrase for this idea is "utopia is not an option." Basically, you have to compare your proposed system or policy to stuff that exists in the real world, not to the ideal world you can conjure up in your head.
How about a society where we work fewer hours, waste fewer resources on empty consumerism, and have more time for the really good things in life: love, nature, curiosity, family, friendship, adventure, creativity, rest, and reflection?
That sounds great as an outcome. How do you structure society to achieve that in a way that doesn't immediately fall apart?
Make the reduction of the working week an actual policy priority, try different things, see what works. The 40 hour work week is not an essential pillar of civilization.
No, it isn't an essential pillar of anything. In many contexts it is outdated or actively counterproductive. And I agree that's a great idea for a *goal* or *aspiration* that a policy or plan or society could have.
But, it is not a plan, or a policy, or a structure within which people can try plans and policies. In order to get to that goal, there needs to be an actual system that results in real humans doing the actual things that need to happen to produce and sustain that society, and prevents them from doing the things that would destroy it.
Here are some ideas that might help:
1. Decoupling healthcare provision from employment
2. Strengthening unions
3. Tax incentives to encourage part-time and remote work
4. Labor protection laws for employees who want to reduce their hours
5. Basic Income
6. Treating “leisure growth” as a measure of economic success that competes with GDP
7. Relatedly, accepting slower growth or even economic contraction as desirable if it leads to more leisure
8. An educational system that emphasizes curiosity, learning, and personal growth over preparation for employment
This is not an impossible ideal I’m suggesting. Many European countries already have shorter workweeks. We can look to them as policy models.
Separating employment from health insurance would have a ton of benefits in terms of stuff like added mobility.
I had a coworker for many years whose family owned a small business. She worked for us as a secretary because she had a diabetic child and couldn't afford health insurance on her own. This was a great deal for us (she was very smart and capable), but it surely didn't make any sense in the grand scheme of things for her to do office work for us instead of her family business just so her kid could get medical care without bankrupting her family.
I think most people don't realize how much health insurance as a part of employment chains people to their current jobs and prevents entrepreneurship. It's a kind of invisible tax on people with families leaving large businesses/government agencies to start their own businesses, retire early, etc.
I don't think anyone suggested it was an impossible ideal. These are all straightforwardly good or at least arguably good policy recommendations whether they lead towards the end goal under discussion or not.
However, if we want to make it to a point where everyone enjoys (the useful aspects of) upper middle class living standards (what @BronxZooCobra mentioned) with time to focus on love, nature, curiosity, family, friendship, adventure, creativity, rest, and reflection (your stated objective) this won't get us there, or anywhere close. That will take much, much deeper changes that will be very controversial, especially in terms of when and how they get implemented, because along the way they will empower and disempower various groups heavily invested in the status quo, including often to their own long-term detriment.
What I would add to what Matt says here is that something that the obsession against concentrated corporate power misses is that small businesses can "concentrate" themselves to unite in actions that are counter to what they want as well. For example, the National Federation Of Independent Business was the lead plaintiff against the ACA!
https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/2042634139854066166
"I find this constant effort to recruit small business owners — the single most right-wing demographic — as anchor points of progressive economic policy to be fairly bizarre.
At the end of the day, the upshot of the entire freakout about institutional investors in rental housing is just to protect small-scale landlords from competition.
Why are we so invested in this? https://www.slowboring.com/p/protectionism-for-small-landlords
But this is what we're repeatedly seeing from the TAP/Warren universe, an effort to move away from the idea of promoting competition toward the idea of protecting small business owners *from* competition. https://www.slowboring.com/p/an-abundance-agenda-for-antitrust
You can't even win small business owners over with this stuff, because their interests are profoundly aligned with the GOP tax and anti-labor agenda. https://www.slowboring.com/p/small-business-is-not-the-answer"
It's a big thing historically as well, for example the "country store" was an instrumental part of the Jim Crow system in broad swaths of the south and the white power elite that dominated the "store system" hated the Sears Catalog, which their crazy ideas like "We don't care about the color of your skin, we just want to sell you stuff" https://www.npr.org/2018/10/16/657923126/how-the-sears-catalog-was-revolutionary-in-the-jim-crow-era dangerous talk that must be suppressed of course.
Progressive Hero Michael Jordan knew that Republicans buy shoes, too.
My enduringly favourite apocrypha. If he didn't say it, someone else would have (been rumoured to).
Oh he said it, but he was playing cards and maybe half-joking.
https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/29130478/michael-jordan-stands-firm-republicans-buy-sneakers-too-quote-says-was-made-jest
Huh! Learn something new every day. Of course, this only makes me like Jordan more, and even as a role model too. Navigating post-celebrity career public life amicably is just incredibly hard to do in these, our polarized times, but I'll be damned if he doesn't keep largely pulling it off. Really makes one appreciate Tom Lehrer's life advice, that if one has trouble communicating effectively, then the very least one can do is to shut up. Great wisdom to be found in silence...and those who think it's violence, well, they were never going to be more than fair-weather friends anyway.
Shame about the latter years brand floundering though. I can certainly respect trying out new things rather than simply hitting the infinite money button of the OG 1-13ish designs, although of course they do that plenty too. But not having ~a single one of the newer models after that range ever catch on bigly tells you a lot. So much riding on the legend of His Airness, even for fans like me who've never actually willingly watched basketball. (But was subjected to dozens and dozens of rewatches of Space Jam in the 90s. No idea why the daycare centre seemed to own just that one VHS.)
Wise words...
I came very close to mentioning Heart of Atlanta Motel, but decided to keep my comment brief to highlight Matt's more. Big business would have dealt a serious blow against Jim Crow with or without the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Not sure this is accurate. Absent the universal standard that the law made possible it would have been necessary to fight Jim Crow on a town by town institution by institution basis. Not saying this wasn’t necessary anyway but it have been a lot harder without the law.
I agree but the end would have been the same. The reason the law passed is because the broader culture had already started changing.
Excellent point. Sort of like the way the marriage equality decision by the Supreme Court ratified a change that already had taken place.
Exactly, SCOTUS never would have made that rule in 1970 or even 1990
This is correct in nearly a definitional matter given the finality of law. Only question is just how long it would have taken without law, which will be unanswerable but would have trended that way. Similar to the finality of slavery via the 13th Amendment.
Slight disagree, given the ability to discriminate fees (small d discriminate) a Marriott website that can tell me if pets are allowed could also tell me whether "those people" are allowed.
That's because the Left believes that small business owners are only people who sell food and crafts on Main Street, instead of the niche manufacturer or construction business in a non-descript industrial park. The shop owner on Main Street is righteous. The industrial park doesn't exist.
The shop owner on Main Street is also a Republican.
There was a local hippie-themed coffee shop and it caused a minor local uproar when it was revealed that the owner was an avid Trumpist, lol.
In Europe, this is the main demographic that has turned against the EU.
No, no -- the industrial park exists, but it's environmental racism.
It's not for nothing that once the land has been developed into an industrial park, then abandoned and viewed as tainted, they call it BROWNfield land!!!!!!!1eleventy
ZOMG! TruthNuke!!!
How can Birthing Person Nature be racist...?
I know I'm beating a broken record here, but Elizabeth Warren is easily one of the most disappointing politicians of her generation, defining that as what she is divided by what she should have been able to become.
I guess my expectations of her were never high.
This.
Most disappointing *Democratic* politician, surely?
My expectations of what Republican politicians can ever hope to be, before they cease to be Republicans, are pretty low.
I see your point, but there’s a meaningful difference between “standard pre-2016 conservative politician, who may have bad policy ideas but at least has some integrity” and “spineless lackey who bends over and kisses the Orange King’s ass.”
Meh. Read any of Tom Frank's skewerings of that bunch-- "The Wrecking Crew" is probably the most famous-- and you'll find that the brazen combination of total corruption and ideological fascism has existed in the Republican Party since the Nixon era.
If there’s one word that comes to mind when I think of Dubya it’s integrity.
Seconded.
Having personally experienced the transition from being employed by a "family" business (mandatory overtime, two half-days a month, holidays paid but rarely observed, occasional seven day work weeks) to a megacorp (four day work weeks, optional overtime, holidays paid and observed, higher wages) this resonates hard.
As family business owner Bob Belcher put it so eloquently, "𝘈𝘭𝘭 𝘳𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵, 𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘯. 𝘠𝘰𝘶'𝘳𝘦 𝘮𝘺 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥𝘳𝘦𝘯, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘐 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶. 𝘉𝘶𝘵 𝘺𝘰𝘶'𝘳𝘦 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘢𝘵 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘥𝘰 𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘐 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘭 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘐 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘭 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘐'𝘥 𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘦 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘰𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘪𝘧 𝘐 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥."
"How do you feel about, I guess let's call it, deferred compensation?"
I feel foolish for asking this in a comment, but how do you make italics happen on Substack? Are other flourishes like bold, strikethrough, underline also available?
Sharty just learned all that yesterday! https://yaytext.com/
I believe I actually introduced this technique to the Slow Boring commentariat some months ago.
I slouch corrected!
There are a dozen interchangeable websites that will change plaintext ASCII into equivalent unicode in italics, bold, etc. etc. etc.
This happens to be my first search result, but they all do the same thing: https://yaytext.com/bold-italic/
Ah, and here I thought someone had built a better mousetrap, by which I mean Substack comment UI. Not that I dislike plaintext, but one must keep up with the rhetorical innovation of the Joneses. Gotta save on <̵s̵>̵s̵t̵r̵i̵k̵e̵t̵h̵r̵o̵u̵g̵h̵<̵/̵s̵>̵ tokens in this attention command economy.
A family business is only a better place to work if you’re in the family.
And not even then a lot of the time!
The "family " left and started their own competing business. Their toxic culture went with them. Not that my current workplace is amazing...
Yeah, I think of family farms in particular as combining startup-level life/work balance and riskiness with a big capital investment and middle-manager level income. It's easy to see why most people don't stay on the family farm!
It should also be noted that many large businesses are also still family owned.
But if they've made the transition to operating with lots of people who aren't members of the family and are, for all intents and purposes, strangers who just somehow got hired, then they've got to be treating the people in ways that scale.
Yeah, but they’re required to do things like benefits like regular old megacorps. Shoot, I think that here even the minimum wage is delimited by company size
Yes these are family owned by still businesses with hundreds (or thousands) of employees.
Even despite all the protectionism and cultural prestige laundering, the fact remains that I simply don't patronize (non-restaurant, non-"creative") small businesses very often versus BigCos. It's not due to being a cutthroat penny-pincher either. What I care about is Quality(tm), no matter who's selling the goods and/or services. One-woman artisan shop making clothing by hand, the old-fashioned way?* I'm happy to fork over a large premium, because the goods are just very nice versus fast fashion, and almost no one has similarly attractive designs. The added halo of "supporting a small business"...just doesn't really factor into it? So it doesn't speak to me when pundits and politicians pound the table about the plight of Main Street. As long as there's *some* successful tax-paying business there, rather than vacancies and blight, it's all good. And so many of these idealized cutesy little bookstore coffeeshops and whimsical tchotchke vendors, I'm like...I don't buy those things anyways, so what do I care? No one's forcing anyone to shop at Barnstormer and Noble, Staryucks, or East Elm.
*shameless plug for Jemma Clare Swartek
I guess I always thought of the idea of the Democratic Party supporting smaller businesses as coalition building but in spite of their relatively right-leaning tendencies. Ultimately why would it matter if the Dems want to be seen as the Big Tent party? The rose colored glasses I sometimes wear was also hopeful the party could marry smart immigration policy with helping small businesses get up and running. And now that many of these small businesses got screwed over tariffs, figure timing wise this could work out politically.
This feels uncomfortably close to "XYZ demographic will surely fall in line behind our set of priorities if only we massage the messaging in just the right way".
Tbh I don’t think there are enough “business owners” to really be an important voting constituency and they aren’t a monolith. Like most of them are Republicans but I have a friend with a small custom manufacturing business who was bankrupted by tariffs and now works in retail; I don’t think he will be supporting Trump. We should support pro-competitive policies on the merits and be against rent-seeking by both small and big business.
There is quite a lot of fantasy amongst certain proggy D where the small operator (as like the Small Farmer versus Corporate Farmer) is imagined as a hippy dippy granola bio-vegan-organic, which in aggregate is wrong.
Of course anti-growthism generally as well a sort of reflexive ideological view of the market (and mistaken belief that large Corps own and employ more than they actually do, as well as collapsing all the market down to large C-Corp entities [or even C-Corps generally])
Now as to the Small biz owner and winning over, as I am literally that demographic, but of course rabidly anti-Trump and in RenEnergy... so the danger of anectdote:
I would suggest utility in Small Biz owner demographic after tariffs and inflation on the Abundance side (not the restrictions side) as
(1): growth agenda for "Regulatory Simplification" (not "dereg" but streamlining, scraping off the cruft, rationalisation - mostly focused on the energy area, grid, but probably potential for wins outside (I think of Steven Koltai's substack on the USAID in Feb 25 and his observations of Barnacles Growing on Barnacles, i.e. accumulated rules on rules paralysing effective Gov action: https://stevenkoltai.substack.com/p/usaid-and-government-inefficiency : sort of subject area a reformist D that is not of the Warrenite mode could do well on )
-- for energy but also for unlocking improved "blue governance" - modernising approaches.
-- can be a winner to peel off a % of votes sans per se losing others (in geographies where they can't be lost, rather than running up super-majorities amongst the urbane urbanites)
(2) opposition mitigation (intentity mitigation) notably in geographies where Ds once were fine in my own lifetime and now are endangered species. (peeling off percentages of which notably in geoegraphies where D have lost territory as
Pro-Growthism of streamlining and making more effective could be a useful pitch plus have pocketbook payoffs.
*: that is, former Republican, although of the old NE variety, small(er) business owner, entrepreneur-founder...
I think they would view these considerations as grubby politics and irrelevant. From their point of view, small businessmen may statistically be racist and right-wing, but the essence of what they do (i.e. capitalism on a limited human scale) is good. Building a large inhuman corporation and becoming fabulously wealthy, in contrast, is, at its essence and in principle, bad. Their starting point is that they want their ideology to be focused on economics, and they want it to be left of Marx but right of Clinton/Obama, and then the rest follows. Whether or not it works as a political coalition doesn't really matter. Most people vote on their deeply held convictions, not on their narrow material interests, so even the small business owners themselves don't support the project, the American people as a whole will (or so they think). Especially if more and more Americans own or work for small businesses as a result of their policies.
One last piece on this thread. It’s from Brad Delong‘s Substack I hope I have copied properly.
https://braddelong.substack.com/p/reading-us-grant-personal-memoirs?r=cnjpf&utm_medium=ios
I’ve been struggling with a knee injury for almost three months, brought on by trying to get back into running after giving birth to Little Velociraptor, and I just learned that I’ll need to have surgery to repair a torn meniscus. Thankfully they were able to fit me in quickly. I’m having the surgery on Monday.
The recovery sucks, because I can’t put any weight on my right leg for four weeks after the operation, and walking around on crutches is slow and awkward as hell. Also, for the first week I won’t be able to drive, because I need my right foot to press the pedals.
This sucks extra hard while trying to look after an infant (can’t carry her and use crutches at the same time). My mom offered to stay with me for a few weeks to help me. She’s awesome.
It will feel great once I’ve recovered and can build up my strength again!
Anyway, either I’ll fall off the surface of Substack next week or I’ll post more than usual to distract myself from pain post-surgery, we’ll see!
That sucks. Here's to a speedy recovery and a rapid return to your *real* family here at SB.
(Fact check: not your real family but we'll still miss you)
Ditto that
Wishing you a speedy recovery!
Ugh, sucks to hear. At least they are able to repair the meniscus. In some cases the damage is so great that the meniscus has to instead be trimmed. The short term recovery is shorter, but there is a long term increased risk of arthritis.
The only reason I know this is because a torn meniscus is a common injury in football. In the past, most players chose a trim to get back on the field sooner. But that has started to shift to repair as they think of their long term health.
I pooched my own meniscus a few months back, and the doc was refreshingly honest after looking at the MRI--basically that soft joint tissue is black magic, the span of injuries to the structure is not well characterized, and all else being equal if things seem to be getting generally better and not worse, let's not touch it and see how it progresses.
Ah, you're a runner, great. You used to run five miles a day. If that hurts, stop that and try four. If that's still causing trouble, let's check back in.
To be twenty again.
Sorry to hear that! I hope your recover is quick and easy.
Your running days might be behind you.
I snorted when I read this "I believed that capitalism was the source of all greed, inequality, and destruction in the world,”
This is bad. It's bad that people are getting this exactly backwards. HUMANS are the source of greed and inequality, and capitalism* is a useful system for channeling that into something productive.
I also sincerely think all these Millennials and Gen Zers need to learn more about communism in the 20th century and how that turned out.
*capitalism with government regulation for things like labor and environmental standards....
Heh. A friend with a 16-year-old daughter told me that her daughter said, "But *real* communism has never been tried!"
Ah, to be a teenager again.
Aw man. I feel there should be a quote for this, something about not remembering the past....
Eh... humans are not so special. I think even naked mole rats and other similarly freaky mammals can be greedy and inequitable! To say nothing of the gluttonous and controlling (literal) queen bee of the hive, that BITCH.
I think this was one of the more useful takeaways from The Selfish Gene. When you reframe everything not around societies or families or even individuals but the minuscule unit of the gene locked in competition against other genes....everything else is just epicycles upon epicycles built around that.
Yeah the basic animal need to survive and reproduce....
But the queen bee does sound like a jerk.
post 1970s starry eyed idealisation - our chimp cousins are right nasty bastards.
Yes, a time machine back to Sov to get a taste.
As a GenX who had the odd opp to do student exchange to E. Germany before the wall fell...
Or if one can still read, reading the literature like Milovan Djilas New Class to see the same patterns emerging in the Sov new classes.
No one believes anything if they don't live it themselves. We can't even get left people to stop voting third party despite regaling them about the story of Al Gore and Iraq.
True, true. We are but chimps in the end with delusions of philiosphising grandeur papering over our little chimpy band brains.
The Chernobyl miniseries was pretty good
Yes, actualy was, I should rewatch.
Artemis II splashdown is nominally scheduled for 7:07pm Central Time (aka Best Time), so realistically I'd want to tune in for entry interface no later than maybe 6:40.
Space, bitches! The United States of Space. https://youtu.be/9DLuALBnolM?t=365
My partner and I are considering heading down to the coast to see if we can see a bright flash for a moment at 5:07 pm behind Catalina island!
Space szn
The Gamebred Bareknuckle MMA main card begins at 8pm eastern, so there's enough time to watch both! I'm sure all true SB heads are familiar with Anthony Smith vs. Chase Sherman in the main event, also Thiago Santos is fighting, Alex Nicholson, etc. etc.
If you don't know what bareknuckle MMA looks like- type 'King of the Streets' into the Youtube search bar while you wait. You can thank me later. (Don't do it on a work computer tho)
I'd never heard of this at all until approximately 1/3 of every radio commercial break was blasting this into my ear.
Something something diminishing returns.
Is there an official drinking game or bingo card for how many inappropriate digressions Trump makes while giving his official statement honoring their return?
I hope not unless y'all have a new liver on call for me.
Thanks for the reminder, watching now
Really enjoyed this, Halina! Also, I believe it’s “Bette Davis”, not Betty. Edit: I am wrong.
That's what I thought too! The description didn't seem wrong about Bette Davis.
Relieved to hear I wasn’t the only one confused about that. I also thought it didn’t sound implausible for Bette.
I had to confirm myself.
I wish the commentariat engaged a bit more with the girlboss vs feminist distinction Halina laid out, because it was new to me and not "woke" or "cringe" but straightforwardly well put!
Also, I didn't read this as Halina being anticapitalist but just articulating Amoruso's philosophy. I disagree with the anticapitalist bit just like the rest of you, no point relitigating it
I think this is the Betty Davis in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Davis
I stand corrected!
Thoughts on the breaking-news sexual impropriety allegations against Swalwell? It's not good, obviously, but big-picture anything that helps consolidate the D field is probably preferable...even given Trump's probable own-goal with endorsement.
(I'll still vote whoever the D ends up being, but...please, please don't make me vote Porter. Fine with appointing Rs to smaller local offices, don't trust them at the gubernatorial level. Not under this POTUS who keeps throwing federalism under the trolley.)
You're telling me that the guy who got honeypotted is a sex pest? Can't be.
Porter + wealth tax just became more probable.
When I went to the brewery, I saw one accusation, and now it's ballooned into four. The odds of invoking of the Bill Cosby Rule increase....
Agreed that hopefully it spurs a crackup that breaks the gubernatorial race impasse and gets others to drop out once a clear leader emerges.
Receipts seem to be in order and the Dems REALLY needed to trim the field before the primary. Would not be surprised if this was an open secret since the timing was a bit too perfect for multiple reasons. Especially after Trump did the own goal of endorsing.
I'm not sure any of the low-polling candidates can resuscitate their campaigns (which would just create the same crowding problem). Most likely, it's going to be Steyer and Porter heading forward. And, I guess, I'd choose Steyer in the primary. Was probably going to choose Swalwell before this.
I was definitely on Team Warren and Porter a few years ago, but can't say I like how that movement evolved. But I'm for whatever keeps a Republican out. We have enough moderate Democrats in California that I don't care if the state Republican Party just turns out the lights and shuts down.
Feel ya there. I voted Bernie in 16 and 20, and...well...look at me now, on the centre-right (or far-right by CA standards). Don't love everything the CA Dems do, sometimes even the moderate bulwark lets stupid shit happen; the fact that this retarded wealth tax, with signatures aggressively recruited by pay-to-play masked buskiers, has real legs at all is a serious failing. And of course we still piss away tons of the world's 3rd largest economy's GDP on progressive windmill tilting to featherbed the NGO-industrial complex while the provision of basic government services limps along.
There's a lot of ruin in a state, to be clear, I just wish we could be extremely rich *and* a shining model of successful blue governance instead of extremely rich *and* the butt of decades of jokes about leftist mismanagement. That's where a not-insane not-totally-packed-in CA GOP would nominally come in. Alas. Don't think the timing lines up to call the flaccidity of the Republican Party out west a bellwether for the national party also not being able to raise real politicians, but it's not unrelated either. It's hard to imagine another Reagan happening. (Not in the sense of condoning The Gipper's politics, but that when we send our best to Washington, their jibs are always gonna be cut one way now.)
I'm still quite liberal (really wish I could still identify as a progressive). As for the GOP in California, they only exist to raise cash for the national operation due to the state's population and relative wealth. They have no intention to become relevant here.
Matt's take: https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/2042950405257138206
"This Swalwell situation was … shall we say widely rumored and it’s interesting that the gossip doesn’t seem to have made its way to all the big shots out west."
I'm not a professional at hot takes, but I think that Trump endorsing Hilton over Bianco is actually a pretty smart move.
Bianco is the more bombastic and naturally recognizable MAGA, make-libs-cry, character and I feel like sans-endorsement from Trump he would consolidate the CA GOP around him. But endorsing the milder Hilton keeps him in the race and raises the possibility that we end up with Hilton + Bianco top two which would be an incredible outcome for the GOP as opposed to the default of Bianco taking 30%, Porter 15%, and Hilton 14%. If not for how bad Trump is, I would actually wish for the dumb top-two system (with no write-in option!) to take an all-time bite out of the Dems behind.
Yeah...with a different monarch at the top of the ticket, I'd maybe even consider throwing a vote to Hilton (anyone related to Paris can't be that bad!), just because it seems incredibly hard to steer the CA Dem ship rightwards unless it crashes outright into a GOP iceberg. Happy that there's some possibility of reforming the much-abused ballot initiative process, and SF in particular might consolidate more power into the Mayor instead of the Board being the viziers behind the throne. But some levers can only be effectively pulled from the state-level Mansion, unfortunately.
Was it that long ago that Arnie was gov?
In direct years? No, I suppose The Governator was not so long ago, and I did not hate everything he did back then + since then. But then we had another rerun of Governor Moonbeam, and then Newsome survived a recall against a hilariously crowded field, and...bunch of other stuff happened. Life comes at you fast now more than ever.
I hate to be that guy, but is this really the standard we're adhering to, going forward? Swalwell denies any wrongdoing. Is he lying? I don't know. If I had to guess, I'd say yes. But the evidence against him is either hearsay or circumstantial, and I'm not comfortable with the idea that accusations like this should immediately end a politician's career.
Normally I would agree, but the CNN reporting is very thorough and pretty damning. They covered their bases on this one.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/10/us/eric-swalwell-sexual-misconduct-allegations-invs
We have two accusations of sexting from adult women who, by their own admission, freely participated in it. Is that sexual misconduct?
We have one accusation where the woman was so inebriated she doesn't seem to remember what did or did not happen; the only clear allegation she's making is that he touched her leg and kissed her without her permission. Is this sexual misconduct? Should it end a politician's career?
The one accusation of rape comes from a woman who again was so intoxicated she doesn't remember how she got to his hotel room. It's totally possible that Swalwell took advantage of the situation and raped a drunk woman. It's also possible that she's misremembering what happened, or has a score to settle, or some of both. The fact she told friends and family at the time doesn't prove anything.
Is "believe women" really the standard we're adhering to, going forward? And do you not see that shit like this is exactly why so many people don't trust Democrats in power?
Seeing as how the current trajectory of Swalwell's career is "making it much more likely that the next governor of California is a Republican," I am pretty comfortable with ending it by any means necessary. With extreme prejudice.
The receipts are pretty solid here with lots of screenshots. Seems likely that this was a bit of an open secret so the "case" was probably built up beforehand. It might be a coordinated hit job, but it has the virtue of being true.
I don't think anyone's called on him to resign from the House, just to stop taking up space in the governor's race. This is definitely not the Al Franken era anymore.
Maybe Pete has an advantage here as a candidate. (He just needs to stay away from any really young staffers, which is what got our gay mayor.)
We just need to make sure our promising presidential prospects have a clearly defined sexual orientation. The gay men get all-female staffers; the straight men get all-male staffers, etc. Presto, no inappropriate workplace affairs....
Trump's efforts to literally purchase the Hungarian election continue apace, but something that I fundamentally do not understand is why Hungary is still sitting around blocking the EU from doing things in the first place. They're obviously in violation of dozens of treaties about democracy and human rights; why have they not been expelled years ago?
One of the things that makes me doom over the long-term viability of liberal institutions is that they are so incapable of dealing with cuckoos in the nest. This is related, I think, to the fact that Democratic Party honchos keep telling us to support and fund candidates who then turn around and betray us afterward (there are far more party switches from Dem to Rep than vice versa).
It's the same problem with everything else in the EU. When you require unanimity nothing will ever get done, especially as they keep expanding member states.
A better question: why hasn't some enterprising European spook poisoned Orban with polonium or novochok(sp)?
Google Translate tells me that Hungarian for "Nine Familial Exterminations" is "Kilenc Családi Kiirtás."
The simple answer is 'there is no mechanism in EU law for expelling a country'. There *is* a mechanism for suspending a country's voting rights, but it requires unanimity among the other members and either Poland or Slovakia or both have always made clear they would not support its deployment. So instead the EU has withheld billions of euros of funding from Hungary instead.
A: What Honchos are "telling you" anything? What fictional universe is "PartyHonchos"(who the fuck are they) Small Donors? You people show no sign of actually following anything but Vibes. big Donors... same. email blastings and online campaigns for funding show no particularl signs of following any orders (from what apparatus with what actual powers?_
B: if more party switches are to R versus D I would suggest (as a non-D and never have been one) that one needs to look at D Own culture for explanation.
As an observer who has never been party-political - the Demorats purity pony habits and quasi Torquemada attitudes towards the unclean heathen converts from another group - versus the Rs who generally give few fucks at all and quite more broadly cheer even opportunistic conversions - is not in any way promoting
Why do so many people feel they have some kind of duty to be a revolutionary?
Death to the Revolution!! G-d Save The Man™!!
Frankly I think a signficant portion of Revolutionarianism is simply secularised and displaced religiousity and many such people were they displaced back 2-3 centuries would have been fevered religious reformists seeking to purify and improve (doctrice/practice X). Probably some deep bio-root to this that gets channeled and expressed in culturally mediated ways...
Hormones without another focus.
I don't understand why people are Marxists, but I also don't understand why most Marxists think they should be part of the revolutionary vanguard party rather than being one of the supportive workers.
The crackup between Trump and the right-wing podcasters is interesting because it illustrates the internal tension within conservatism over which is the bigger priority: opposing those who are most culturally alien, or opposing liberalism (democracy, political liberty, women's rights, religious pluralism, etc). Trump straddles that line but falls more in the former camp, while the podcasters are more in the latter camp. Vance is also more in the latter camp, which makes me wonder if he's capable of achieving a rapprochement with the Iranians where they prioritize their shared hatred of the libs over their differences. Ideologically they have some things in common! But that might well put him into conflict with Trump. On one hand, Trump was able to take a similar approach with North Korea, but Muslims are more of a cultural bogeyman than old-school Communists are these days.
People also probably forget that NK is nominally communist. Brutal dictatorship, sure, but it's really too weird with all the family's divine mythology.
The Divine Right of Kims
Watching the documentary "1971" on Tubi.
"The Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI was an activist group in the United States during the early 1970s. Their only known action was breaking into the field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) located in Media, Pennsylvania and stealing over 1,000 classified documents. Disclosure of the files led to public scrutiny of surreptitious FBI activities and several reforms."
The WaPo reporter who covered it at the time later wrote a book about it, and this documentary is based on her book. Since the statute of limitations had passed by 2014, most of the activists spoke on camera.
At first all the newspapers refused to publish the documents. "Gracious, these were obtained illegally! Also we're terrified of J. Edgar Hoover." Thank God for Kay Graham.
Yeesh.
I get that they did a good thing at the time. But five decades of this culture of suspicion against the government has robbed us of a LOT of public goods.
Being suspicious of J. Edgar Hoover was the right thing to do. COINTELPRO was bad! The FBI wrote an anonymous letter telling MLK to kill himself. Ah, if only they'd had Twitter.
Meh. I’d rather be able to afford a house and not be inundated with NIMBYs who think every damned data center approval involves bribing the zoning board and gOeS RiGhT uP tO tHe ToP!!11
Indeed. Carrying on the same approach and habit permanently has been very damaging and hasn't really made the difference they sought. Not really.
In many ways it’s led directly to Trump
Well, I might quibble because you know internet, on "directly" but yeah, most definately opened those doors, and perversely knocked down the institutional barriers out of superficial fetishisation of 'democracy=more-voting' (1970s primaries 'reforms')
Big weekend plans for anyone?
I’m picking up arepas right now for TV night with Boo. Football is on Sunday. Might do ribs with friends at some point. Not much else tho!
Headed home to Colorado. Arepas sound nice too.
I know you Gen Zers don't think that much of our Millennial music but I swear we have some good Colorado tracks if you dig deep: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joJlY9AYf2I
Flying to NYC to stay with my wife for the week! Not looking forward to the 5am flight tomorrow but at least I'll get in in time for us to have a nice dinner together and the Oakland airport's not bad.
Probably my last flight on Southwest for a long time, though, the customer service has absolutely gone downhill. They used to be an airline where I could expect someone to try and work with me when I called their help line and instead they just robotically read the policies and go "I'm sorry, I can't help you" to basic questions now.
Happy that you'll be with your wife.
Sad that Southwest continues it's devolution into Another Generic Airline as was sadly expected. And I am so pissed at the gaslighting they have been doing with ads to try to convince people that the differences that earned them devoted customers were "Bad, Actually" (heavy scare quotes there).
The activist investors who forced this are fucking morons. They should be tried for this crime.
Oh yeah it’s infuriating! I used to be such a loyalist.
I have yet to fly since the disgraceful change, I'm guessing I'm going to just be churning aggregators like Google Flights to find what's best for me now.
Yeah, we used to go to Southwest if the fare and flight was reasonable, and otherwise do the aggregator sites, since we knew we'd get a predictable fare and experience with Southwest. Now that Southwest has gotten rid of all that, well, aggregator site it is.
I have lost so much of my loyalty to Southwest that I am flying into O'Hare rather then Midway on my next scheduled trip to Chicago
Preparing for my first trip to Dublin. Would love any ideas of stuff to do. My wife has been a couple of times and I know she is going to hunt the knitting scene, which apparently is quite strong there.
The Guinness Storehouse is a great tour, obviously the beer itself is great, but the view from the top where they serve it is probably one of the best in the city.
The best place for a craft cocktail is a place called The Blind Pig, best place to sample Irish whisky is a place called The Whiskey Reserve. Walking around that part of town, by Temple Pub, is pretty nice albeit very touristy. George's Street Arcade is a cute area, The Long Hall nearby is a good pub, although honestly all the best pubs were in Cork or Galaway. I spent very little time in Dublin compared to other cities, but that's what I've got.
Which Dublin? Ireland, or California? I grew up near the latter, and ... there's nothing.
Safeway headquarters? Also apparently one of the fastest growing cities in the area (in California?). Also lots of green hills.
Reminds me of a commercial from my misbegotten youth that went something like “Dublin Berkeley Cupertino, San Jose.” I can’t remember what they were selling, but I wonder if the company is
still around.
I was super social last weekend--charity auction on Friday, Boise's first ever home pro soccer match on Saturday, family Easter on Sunday--so this might be a weekend to take it easy for me. We've got the Masters week going on, and as of now Rory is clearly on a mission to defend his green jacket.
I shall monitor POLITICS and post about the same here at Slow Boring. 🤭
I look forward to your Cali takes (google it)
I'm clearly not from or in California, but I've never been bullish on Swalwell. Honestly, at this point, I'm "Anyone But Katie Porter." I do like the one guy, the mayor from San Jose(?) who demonstrates sanity.
Matt Mahan! I've told all my friends and family to vote for him. I have even made the case to some GOP family members that a vote for Mahan is an effective vote against Porter as opposed to an emotional vote for one of the two (probably) dead-in-the-general Republicans. It's logical, but I don't know if they're going to be able to leave the marshmallow on the table.
I want to vote for him! But if the two Republicans are still both polling near the top even after Trump broke the symmetry between them, then I'll have to vote for whichever Democrat is polling highest at the end (which unfortunately doesn't look like Mahan just yet).
Mahan will be the candidate! (I feel the same and my vote will probably go to pretty much any top polling Dem who isn't Porter and even then maybe her; of course, I only admit this pseudo-anonymously, the only way we get Mahan is by supreme confidence)
Matt has also endorsed Mahan. https://www.slowboring.com/p/100-years-of-increasing-leisure
Meeting a friend at a charity Warhammer 40K tournament, then dinner with coworkers after their soccer match.
Lagerville beer festival in (slightly rainy!?) Buellton California. Going with a large group of friends. No IPAs allowed, excellent; looking forward to seeing some of the breweries who traveled from out of state, Mexico, Japan, and Chile!
This comment has me itching to walk a few blocks to the neighborhood brewery on a very pleasant afternoon. I disapprove of both hardcore pro-IPAers and hardcore anti-IPAers--just drink what you like and let others do the same.
Neighborhood craft breweries can be among the best third-places, you should go!
I admit I'm a beer snob and so I find the IPA proliferation to be excessive; I think that the IPA abundance is a product of how quick/easy the production time is compared to very slow/challenging lagers production, rather than a real consumer preference. The Germans and Czechs have been drinking beer for a hundred generations and they prefer low ABV refreshing beers rather than hop bombs. We are a young country, a young people, we will find our way.
(I'm not even a true lager zealot among my friends, the truth is places which make good lagers make good ales, places that make bad ales usually don't make lagers or make bad ones)
Update: I am now at the brewery, and I just explained to a young couple why cities in the West were beset by uncontrolled vagrancy due to the bad Martin v. Boise precedent that Grants Pass v. Johnson overruled.
And this is a dog friendly brewery, and we also talked about Dog Discourse. Good times.
I was accosted by YET ANOTHER dog today while running in the park. I can’t stand these irresponsible morons.
My only IPA complaint is trying to find a variety pack that isn't only varieties of IPAs. I like them fine, but I don't *only* want them.
After a trip to the Pilsner Urquell brewery I’ve become a staunch advocate for that variety
I've always been more of a dark beer fan myself, but IPA's have grown on me in the past 8ish years. I actually think the higher ABV is a major part of the IPA's success; it's much classier to drink a New Belgium tallboy than a Steel Reserve.
Session mead is the way.
Sometimes diversity and inclusion is a win-win for everyone involved
Oooo lagers are my favorite.
Gonna spend several hours at the bar, binge watch Jury Duty Season 2 probably, then maybe play Wrath of the Righteous the rest of the time.
Football on Sunday?? In April?
Sunday is a big day for me - early morning work meeting (yep you heard that right) and then a friend coming into DC so we can see the Belair Lip Bombs which I am VERY excited about.
My fantasy team name is “Real Football Starts In March” lol
It’s the UFL. Since the Rams left STL, the biggest football team in the minor leagues by a country mile has been my STL Battlehawks.
Ah ha! Yesterday a colleague said she was going to see the Defenders, and I nodded like I knew what she was talking about. Now I know. TY.
She said it’s football like it used to be. Is it??
Well, DC are indeed our rival!
They’ve stripped out most of the dumbest NFL rules and they experiment a lot with newer ones. The best thing is the Super Challenge — contra the lies and ignorant bleating of most NFL fans, the Super Challenge absolutely DOES work and we don’t get challenges every play because duh you only get one per game.
Ok Super Challenge sounds funny. Also NFL fans can hardly complain about excessive adjudicating.
Football is just a cursed sport with officiating, where multiple variables have to be verified at the same time that makes it difficult to conclude calls. Not nearly as discrete as fair/foul calls in baseball or in/out calls in tennis where there's a literal bright line to help out.
Started to read about the Mythos model from Anthropic and it is genuinely scary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tjw9K9mQp4I
*Casts Sharty from my graveyard for 3 Black Mana* /s
Once you see the parallels between the one, the only, the legendary Dr. Eric Fingl-Dingl reporting on next week's civilization-ending covid VaRiAnT, it's hard to unsee.
Even if you're subject-matter qualified and well-meaning, as a human, it is hard to taste the sweet nectar of clicks and not realize (consciously or unconsciously) which side of your bread is buttered. No outright mistruths, but motivated reasoning and selective emphasis. Especially if your training is narrowly technical rather than practiced and habituated in this-but-maybe-that communication. Many such cases.
From today’s Zvi post:
“Which is that this is another step towards superintelligence, clear additional evidence for skeptics that yes such an entity would be able to pwn and accomplish whatever it wanted, and a giant set of warning signs that we are not on track to handle this.“
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/claude-mythos-2-cybersecurity-and?open=false#%C2%A7oh-also-if-anyone-builds-it-everyone-dies
I guess at this point I can't really see an argument for superintelligence *not* being able to just pwn us if it wanted to. Its way over-determined.
When you DEFINE quote-unquote "superintelligence" as being something that is able to utterly wreck us when it wants to, then yes, such a thing would be able to wreck us if it wanted to.
Does such a thing exist yet? lolno. Could it? Who knows!
It seems like Claude Mythos, if weaponized, would dramatically increase cyber-warfare capabilities of malign actors.
And Anthropic can't guarantee Mythos is aligned.
Most humans already live in situations where they are easily pwned by more powerful humans, e.g. look at the people being forcibly displaced by more powerful countries in various places right now. So the real question is not whether superintelligence could pwn us so much as whether or not superintelligence would use its pwning power more malevolently than powerful humans already use their pwning power today. Given that Anthropic (despite my criticisms of their hostility to open-source) seems to clearly be the less malevolent party in its disputes with Trump, I lean towards no.
I'm a big Anthropic fan, but I have wondered a little bit whether all this talk about what Mythos can do is hyping things up a bit much. But then I see that Google and Microsoft are collaborating with them on Project Glasswing, and aren't denying anything they're saying, and it seems big and scary and awe-inspiring.
I mean, either these zero-day exploits I'm hearing about are real or they're fake. Seems very unlikely they're fake.
In which case, this doesn't seem like hype. It seems genuinely scary and it seems like AI researchers at Anthropic are genuinely afraid of their own creation.
Like, this doesn't seem like hype
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/7/project-glasswing/
Here’s the thing about Simon Willison. He’s a smart guy, but he’s never worked at a modern enterprise software company. So to him “there’s an unpatched vulnerability in openBSD that can crash it!” sounds scary*, but no actual company in 2026 is running an openBSD server that’s just like, connected to the internet. The ability to exploit this vulnerability relies on a set of assumptions that just isn’t true anymore. You can’t directly communicate with the OS over the internet and everyone at Anthropic should know that so it’s very very silly for them to act otherwise.
This will be a useful tool! It’s not apocalyptic. Security professionals are fully aware that these zero days exist and they don’t know about them. They design their defense accordingly.
There’s a really really good reason most “hacks” are due to social engineering anymore. If the report was “we found a flaw in AWS API gateway that lets un-authed traffic through”, then I’d worry.
*and to be fair, it's a bad bug, but there's a reason it's existed for 27 years with no one noticing it: the attack requires you to send a very specifically malformed packet directly to the L7 server layer, but in reality you cannot do this unless you have direct access to the socket. In a real system, the gateway would have to let this through and it would *not*, because it's malformed. And if this was actually possible in the wild, the solution is just....don't let malformed packets through the gateway, which you shouldn't be doing anyway.
I'm kind of wondering if this will end up being like the hullaballoo around the Erdos problems that were solved. In almost all cases, the problems and solution were real but either the problem was boring and tedious so no one had bothered, or the solution actually existed in the literature but was so obscure no one realized it.
Yeah, the only bit that I have any real questions about is whether the early-training versions of it really did keep breaking out of their sandbox system.
Are you referring to the anecdote about the Anthropic researcher who was emailed by Mythos while eating a sandwich?
I mean I can't independently verify that if that's what you're talking about but I tend to believe Anthropic on this stuff.
Conversely, the reference to eating a sandwich strongly inclined me to call BS on that alleged incident. It was just far too cute a detail to include -- why does the specific nature of the employee's lunch matter?
Well I would focus on stuff like this then:
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/7/project-glasswing/
Yeah, my general inclination is to trust Anthropic on all this. But I also know that I'm a bit too much of a fanboy, so I try to actively maintain some skepticism of them (as I clearly should have for OpenAI 5 or 6 years ago).
The following things can be simultaneously true:
- mythos found real vulnerabilities in lots of software
- these vulnerabilities are not worth a *human's* time to fix because they are not exploitable in actual production systems
- it's worth having a bot fix them because why not
as a corollary to the second point, this is true for fields outside of software as well. there's probably an uncountably large number of typos on wikipedia, but it wouldn't be worth paying anyone to fix them because they don't actually matter. Having a bot fix them would be fine though.
I don’t know anything about cybersecurity but when I use AI for things that I do know about it feels like it is getting better rapidly but still not really capable of doing a lot of things that a trained human could, prone to mistakes, and not really “magical” in any way, so I’m a bit skeptical of this. It’s mostly a hobby tool rather than a professional tool for me because I’m not going to hire humans to help do my hobbies anyway; professionally it is only a starting point and not really capable of producing reliable finished product outside the most routine use cases. Some day it probably could achieve this at its current rate of improvement! But today does not feel like that day.
I am more worried about Anthropic trying to keep capabilities so restricted. The most realistic AI dystopia is something like the movie Elysium where a small elite controls all the AI and disempowers everyone else because they no longer need everyone else’s labor since AI can do everything better. Anthropic keeping the best models controlled in the name of “safety” makes this future more likely. We should be open-sourcing stuff and ensuring everyone has access.
Everyone except the Chinese, and how do you do that? Frankly I think only the US military should have access to AI
>"chapters on everything from credit cards and the dangers of debt."
Dave Ramsey sends his regards.
It's been a real pill moment for me (can't remember what the current colour classification is) to learn how many people mismanage credit cards and other types of Revolving Door Project credit. Even with my bosses, who earn significantly more...if I mention I never keep any card balances, they're baffled, like this is a new concept and/or who can afford that in this economy? Also would I like to hear how their latest sojourn to Cache Creek Casino and Resort went? And it's just depressing. Credit score? I hardly knew her. Yeah, at a certain point, one can play the fully-capitalized game and make more on investment income than the cost of borrowing that leverage...but that's a lot closer to fuck-you money than a retail frontliner's finances, with much more favourable loan terms. Whoever taught me the mores of financial responsibility (surely wasn't my parents!), I owe them a big debt of gratitude. So easy to get trapped in bad money habits for life, where the only way out looks like hustling harder and harder for more benjamins.
Great job reporting, clarifying, and going back to the original sources on this Halina!
Non sequitur: the real pronunciation of Qatar is garbage; something more akin to kuh-tarr is just way more metal.
They should just own the letter Q as branding. Like on Qatar Airlines the food is labeled “Quisine”
And the only thing they serve is Quizno’s. I’m game, so long as they bring back the weird commercials with the rat things
I don't understand why those people don't just speak English, including in spelling their country.
They can speak whatever language they like, provided it's sufficiently metal.
Qätär.
We need to get much more DGAF about that stuff, as we used to. Our pronunciation of Deutschland, for example, is so weird it sounds like a whole different word!
It blew my mind when I first learned that the Pennsylvania “Dutch” are actually “Deutsch”!
more mind blowing perhaps to realise plattsdeutsch (low[lands] German and nederlands (lowlands) deutsch were more or less same thing but for Martin Luther triggering German standardisation centered around his highlands (hoch deutsch) dialect. So Dutch and Deutsch (platts both)
The real pronunciation is uncomfortably close to the handle of a scatalogic MAGA Twitter account...