The most nauseating aspect of all of this is how fucking eager they are to use military force. These disgusting losers who never spent a day in the army all now giddy to shoot up brown people in Democratic cities.
In other news, well, I did not pay attention to the news. Honestly I don’t know where the weekend went- I did go to bed last night at eight o’clock and slept for near 12 hours, so that was a large chunk of it. It was just rainy and shitty with bursts of sunlight to jack up the humidity here and there. Did get some laundry and cleaning and organizing done, but not much accomplished, I gotta admit. Oh- couple hours of Civ VII mixed in there.
Gonna head back to Andor and maybe go to bed early again- Forest Whitaker is a national treasure.
Medium Cool – Poetry That Strikes a Chord!
Doug R
I’m hoping Andor gets all the Emmys this year.
Baud
I think the most nauseating part is that we knew this is who they are last year.
Chetan Murthy
Take care of yourself, John, and tell us about how you’re doing so; hopefully some of us (me?) can emulate your self-care.
John Sterling
Laundry and cleaning are good. I consider those important adventures.
Chetan Murthy
@Baud: Thank you, yes, this. He told us who he was, and some of America believed him. And some of those Americans even voted for Harris. Sigh.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Indeed. Let the people who were urging others not to vote, protest. He told us what he was going to do. None of this was a secret. They could have voted for Harris.
SuzieC
Despite some trepidation due to my age and health, I signed up for a No Kings protest. I want 20 million people out in the streets.
Suzanne
This was a very busy weekend at my casa, and the whole upcoming week will be very busy, as well. So I haven’t paid much attention to the news, either.
I was mocked in a thread earlier in the week for saying that about half in America hates the other half, to the point of self-harm. Apparently I didn’t have data, or something. Well, I look at what’s happening in LA, and how many Americans feel their pants fit a little tighter at the prospect of shooting protestors…. and I conclude that I was probably incorrect. It’s more than half.
Marc
We’re going, too, hopefully the other 19,999,996 will show up. If I were truly serious, I’d probably take a drive down to LA, that’s where it’s likely to matter.
Chetan Murthy
Whoa. That is the most anodyne of observations at this point. I mean, what next, are we not allowed to call Uber-Under-Fuhrer Miller a Nazi? You’re obviously right. I mean, it warn’t [sic] economic anxiety that had ’em pullin’ the lever for Li’l Donnie.
Geminid
@Suzanne: I’m curious about a hospital.project in Springfield, Virginia you said you might work on. Has that work come through? I used to live near there my junior high/high school years.
lowtechcyclist
My son and three friends from his graduating class are headed to Ocean City, MD tomorrow, and staying until Sunday. It’s going to be very strange for him to be away for that long; he’s never been away from home longer than overnight before.
It’ll give us a chance to excavate his room and go through his clothes, though, which we haven’t done in two or three years (not for lack of trying), during which time he’s grown like a weed. So there’s got to be a ton of stuff in there that he’s outgrown, and we’re going to wash it all, set aside what needs to go to the local thrift store, and give him one last chance when he gets back to veto any of our choices. But he wants new clothes, and I’ll be damned if we’re buying him new until we toss some of the old.
Craig
Andor is great. I’m watching A French Village after a recommendation from someone here, and Tony Gilroy mentions basing a chunk of the Ghorman story on the series and they used some of those actors because he wanted French sounds coming from French voices for the invented language of Ghorman. Solid show about the French Resistance. I also rewatched The Battle of Algiers. Gilroy used that story as a jumping off point for S1. Forgot what a amazing film that is.
RevRick
I had a more productive day than you did @JohnCole. I began by filling in for a colleague at a local church, where I preached an updated version of my Earth Day sermon, based on texts from Genesis 1 & 2, focusing on “And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden,” and “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.” Using the image of God as the First Gardener and the charge to us to till it and keep it , as a way to preach about climate change and what we can do to address it.
Then I hustled back to my church to lead a Green Team meeting at which we planned a book study, a church-wide Zoom participation in the next UCC Earth Summit, and quarterly hands on work, beginning with a litter pickup along our street in downtown Allentown in the Fall.
Then, after lunch, I got in my 7000 steps and I just got off a Zoom meeting of the chapter leaders of our UCC Climate Hope Affiliates initiative.
RevRick
@Craig: While MrsRev goes to her bookclub tomorrow, I am going to rewatch Rogue One .
schrodingers_cat
What it is like to be a Democrat on social media.
Old Dan and Little Ann
My sister threw big party yesterday with a pig roast to celebrate a handful of big milestones. We had as many family members together and old friends all in one place for the first time in a long time. It was a beautiful thing.
frosty
@SuzieC: I will be there, I’m not sure where. I still have to make a sign. Maybe something simple: “We told you so! No Kings!”
Kelly
Around noon I had a nice swim in the river. Water temp a comfy 71f according to the USGS instruments a a couple miles upriver. We’ll be heading down for an evening swim soon. Air temp here in Oregon’s western Cascade foothills is 90f. The river is now 77f. The water temp is 7f over the previous high temp record for this date. Pleasant swimming on a hot evening but clearly our climate has changed changed.
frosty
Sad but true. Way more here in Confederate Pennsylvania.
frosty
@lowtechcyclist: Good luck with clearing out the kid’s room! No success here. He has at least 4x the amount of clothes that I have, and 3/4 of mine are obsolete since their the stuff I wore to work.
Ties? Who needs ties?
Anyway
@schrodingers_cat: why only women?
Chetan Murthy
Do you remember during Trump I, when we used to console ourselves with “but we outnumber them” ? Yeah, I’m no longer sure of that anymore, and given that the other guys want to put us in camps, it makes me feel pretty damn unsure of my place in this country.
Chetan Murthy
@Anyway: I think it’s all the same woman, no? She’s just wearing different wigs and clothes.
frosty
@schrodingers_cat: Nailed it! Yuck. Glad my only social media is B-J. And Facebook where I stay away from politics and anything my friends post is swamped by whatever they think I want to watch ….
OK, Kaley Cuoco clips from Big Bang Theory. Guilty!!!
Anyway
@Chetan Murthy: oh? I missed that …oops!
Soprano2
@schrodingers_cat: Oh yeah…
I did yard work today and finally set up my new IPad. Thanks, Patrick G.!
gene108
@Baud:
That’s a large part of their appeal.
I think there are a lot of people who want to use violence against non-white people.
Thor Heyerdahl
@schrodingers_cat: Right on the mark.
gene108
@Anyway:
The person making the video is a woman, who is playing all the parts. It’s a nicely edited one woman skit. Especially the “people” talking over each other at the end.
YY_Sima Qian
This is disgusting:
BlueGuitarist
@SuzieC:
@Marc:
@frosty:
Also going to local No Kings protest
encouraging everyone I know to go.
Protests work in many ways!
thinking of a sign seen at an April protest:
“I hate crowds, but hate fascism more”
Suzanne
@Geminid: I worked on a project in Springfield that I believe opens in 2028.
Matt McIrvin
@Marc: Gonna be protest #3 this year for me. I’m slowly developing a cardboard sign game.
JWR
@schrodingers_cat:
Damn, she’s good! And as real as it gets. TY!
Suzanne
@Chetan Murthy:
You and me both. Honestly, I didn’t feel really well and truly outnumbered until the pandemic. The utter disregard for the health and lives of others, the refusal to accept even the smallest inconvenience on behalf of one’s fellow citizens…. nothing that has happened since has brightened my outlook, either.
BlueGuitarist
@Craig:
When I seconded NotMax’s recommendation of A French Village,
I mentioned there’s an episode based on the
November 11, 1943 defiant patriotic demonstration
that inspired Churchill to escalate support for the French resistance
(and also resulted in Nazi reprisals).
an example of public protest being inspirational beyond the hopes (or even knowledge) of the participants.
June 14 should be big!
No Kings
No Kleptocracy
No Kakistocracy
Gillo Pontecorvo’s film after Battle of Algiers was Burn!
Set in a fictional Caribbean island in mid 19th century.
Marlon Brando said it was his best acting.
The other key role is played by a guy who not only hadn’t been in a movie before, had never seen one.
A brilliant, but difficult, film.
2nd half shows counterinsurgency warfare step by step.
Burn : napalm.
Leto
The Mid-Atlantic WW2 Air Show was this weekend. Spent the weekend in comfy chairs on the front porch watching a number of WW2 planes pass by. The same ones come back year after year, and I’m amazed each and every time. This is basically my official start of summer. We did have some inclement weather but overall, really good time.
sab
@John Sterling: I am glad you think so because I spent a big chunk of the afternoon vacuuming the house thoroughly. I filled a tall kitxhen trash bin half full with just cat fur and ground up dog biscuits. The dog looked so sad as she watched them disappear.
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat: That’s great!
jimmiraybob
For a smidge of perspective, America has officially, for 250 years, celebrated the colonists at Lexington and Concord for hitting the streets in defiance of lawful British authority to protest the tyranny of a king.
And, they were a lot more violent.
People get a bit prickly when their freedoms and natural rights are on the line.
CliosFanboy
@schrodingers_cat: wonderful!!!
CliosFanboy
@Suzanne: is that the one where the Mall used to be??? Gad, that’s screwed up traffic for ages already. I’m glad it will be there but I wished it’d be finished sooner.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Leto:
One of the coolest things about that is how they sound. One flies overhead and it’s entirely different than anything you’re used to hearing.
And the word of this evening is anodyne. Relates very well to the term “cognitive dissonance” in this context.
jimmiraybob
@frosty:
“I still have to make a sign. ”
Me too. I’ve decided on (at least on one side):
No peace in Gaza: Promise not kept
No peace in Ukraine: Promise not kept
No peace in America: Promise kept
YY_Sima Qian
It’s tough trying to serve as bridges these days:
Extended experience in the PRC being a detriment to obtaining security clearances is not a recent phenomenon, has been the case since at least the Obama years, if not the GWB years.
Until the late ’10s, the Harvard Kennedy School (among many others in the US, Europe, Japan & Singapore) actually had a program to train PRC government bureaucrats, & overseas experience was once seen in the PRC has a positive for technocratic positions.
Xi’s chief trade negotiator & interlocutor w/ Americans during the Trump 45 term, Liu He, had earned a Master’s Degree there. However, w/ the escalating Cold War that started in the Trump 45 term (& continued since), experience in the US especially has become a detriment. Liu He was criticized internally for the “Phase I” deal as “surrender”, even though the deal only committed the PRC to increase purchases of commodities from the US & not much more, & in any case was scuttled by the COVID-19 Pandemic disruptions. Of course, Xi’s own daughter had been educated at Harvard.
Now however, officials w/ US educational experience are scrutinized for having internalized “pro-American” views. Every other week state media publishes stories of Chinese nationals caught spying for foreign states, most of them having studied (& were recruited) overseas. State research institutes & academic institutions have been discreetly warned to keep a close eye on the activities of overseas returnees. There are Chinese companies (still a tiny minority) that overtly refuse to hire people w/ overseas education experience. Nonetheless, none of these concerns have mitigated the PRC government’s eagerness to attract overseas talent, particularly among the Chinese Diaspora, particularly in STEM fields.
I must admit the irony of seeing the Trump Administration doing everything they can to deter foreign visitors whatever the origin, while the PRC is expanding 30-day via free entry to a growing roster of countries. A further irony where Xi has openly stated a wish for 15K Americans to study in the PRC, while the Trump State Department is threatening to kick out all Chinese students from the US. The CPC regime has finally figured out that having foreigner directly experience the modern China, often in stark contrast to the impression left by media overseas, is far more effective propaganda than all of the hundred of millions of USDs in invested in external facing state media (invariably staid & cringeworthy) could ever muster.
Another Scott
@schrodingers_cat: :-)
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@schrodingers_cat:
Well, depends on the kind of “Democrat” we’re talking about since there’s plenty of the Ezra Broder Klein/MattY/Smith/Stancil/Pritchard/Atlantic/Abundance/etc types that dominate online spaces like twitter and here.
Same “Democrats” that are never wrong about anything…ever.
Sister Golden Bear
Worth noting that the protests in LA only involved about 4,000 people—which is relatively small by LA standards. Yesterday in Paramount only involved about 400 people, a number of whom weren’t even there to protest—they were driving by when ICE blocked the street for the raid, and they got fired on by ICE.
If Trump continues to escalate there’s simply not enough Feds and troops to impose martial law. The city of LA is 4 million people across 500 square miles. The LA metro region is 13 million people across more than 4,800 square miles.
The size is one reason the TV news reports are misleading, aside from “if it bleeds, it leads. ” Yes the confrontation in DTLA was not small, but it’s akin to Portland where all the action happened in a two-block area. Not that it’ll prevent Fox, etc. from claiming the entire city it is a smoldering hellscape straight out of “Escape From LA.”
Bulgakov
How do you like Civ VII? It was so glitchy when I got it (and I ordered it with the bangs & whistles) that I stopped playing it and they refunded my money. I guess they have fixed the problems?
I had units that I would send out that never “asked” for move orders after the first turn. I had to keep track of where my units were and when I last moved them. I spent less than 2 hours on it which is why I got the refund
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Sister Golden Bear:
Compared to the Rodney King riots, it’s minuscule. My wife was in LA during those, wasn’t pretty.
Hmmm, maybe we shouldn’t point that out to the Faux “News” people as it’ll give them something to run with.
Sister Golden Bear
The reality on the ground was more like this:
and a local assembly member ordering LA street dogs (bacon-wrapped hot dogs with grilled peppers and onions) from a cart near the protest.
Dr. Jakyll and Miss Deride
I hope someone comes up with a different name for the protest in my city. The Kings (NBA) are our only major league sports team. “No Kings” might sound like we’re telling them to get out of town.
YY_Sima Qian
@Dr. Jakyll and Miss Deride: “No Tyrants!”
mrmoshpotato
We knew what an orange-faced, racist, pussy-grabbing, fascistic, manbaby shitstain he was from 2015. And his first maladministration showed us what fellow trash he would surround himself with.
Disgusted that the second time is worse, but not surprised. Oh, and he’s also an adjudicated rapist this time!
But at least a bunch of stupid children didn’t have to live through 4 years of having a highly-qualified woman serving as President.
BlueGuitarist
@Sister Golden Bear:
Thank you!
rikyrah
Sleeping12 hours….I am jealous😴😴😴
schrodingers_cat
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: The Democrat I am talking about is someone like the average Balloon Juice commenter who is not a tankie nor a Joe Manchin lite. A normie Democrat who votes in every election.
IDK if Ezra, MattY even identify as Dems.
Ohio Mom
@Dr. Jakyll and Miss Deride: Maybe change it to “No King Donald” or something similar?
ETA: oh, No Tyrants is a good one!
Elizabelle
@sab: Your dog is such a sweet character. Holding her own in a house full of cats.
Elizabelle
@BlueGuitarist: I like your sign slogan. May use that in central Virginia.
And noted re Burn.
Jay
https://bsky.app/profile/pbump.com/post/3lr2yn6shgs2h
BellyCat
Same.
BellyCat
@YY_Sima Qian: U. Mich. doing this bullshit?!?!
A new low has been reached.
frosty
@Leto: I was going to go but bailed because of the weather forecast. A ME-262 (replica) jet flyby! Damn!!
BlueGuitarist
@Elizabelle:
thanks!
Re Burn: only 1 word is spoken by a woman in the film – “bread” at the start of a bread riot (a la “their ancient call for bread” in Bread & Roses) and a woman refuses to speak. There are some other difficulties and some grotesque violence.
JWR
@Jay: Oh no, not the pallets of bricks again!
Something that’s been covered extensively this evening are 5 CHP or LASD cars parked just below, but not underneath a non-fenced overpass, making them welcome targets for some of these “Anarchist’s”, or whoever’s throwing rocks and scooters over the side. My question is this: there was plenty of room to park those cruisers underneath the overpass, so why were they left out in the open? (I have my “bait” theory, with which I won’t trouble this board. ;) )
Quiltingfool
My quilt guild belongs to an area quilt network which provides various quilt programs. There is an upcoming program on using men’s ties to make a block called Dresden Plate.
I won’t be going because (1) I have no access to ties and (2) I don’t think it would look very good. No offense to men’s ties, of course.
Then again, a quilt of men’s ties might be rather appealing to men?
glc
@schrodingers_cat:
Twitter. How fitting.
Sister Golden Bear
@Sister Golden Bear:
FYI, a good visual illustration of how big LA, shown by overlaying Manhattan on the LA area.
Jay
Vid at link.
https://bsky.app/profile/lisaloe.bsky.social/post/3lqzoobjbwk2o
And the KKKops can’t even respond to a School Shooting. Too Afraid. They sit outside and wait for the killer to finish his work. But unarmed, undocumented 6 to 9 year old kids, they roll up like it’s a night raid in Falluja.
Jay
https://bsky.app/profile/notalawyer.bsky.social
Chetan Murthy
@Jay: i saw that over at atrios’s Place yesterday. Yeah, the ADL are a bunch of fascists. Like you, the thing that jumped out at me was trashing BLM.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Sister Golden Bear: Well, an essential part of New York’s character is that Manhattan is an island, after all. My gut instinct is that this is why Manhattan has so many skyscrapers: expanding urban sprawl runs into problems when you hit the water surrounding an island city, so the only available direction for expansion is upwards. New York can’t expand outwards the way Los Angeles and so many other cities can.
Chetan Murthy
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: following on from your thought, I wondered about comparing the SMSAs. The New York SMSA is about 13k sqmi. The LA/Long Beach SMSA is 34k sqmi.
ETA: Amusingly, the Houston SMSA, which always thought of as a cray-cray sprawl is, 10k sqmi.
YY_Sima Qian
@Jay:
@Chetan Murthy:
Just saw a global survey that showed overwhelming majorities in countries in most parts of the world having negative opinions of Israe. Opinions of the U.S. in Muslim majority countries, & the Global South in general, have cratered due to the U.S.’ unconditional support of Israel.
As I (& many others) have noted, Israel’s conduct in Gaza (& the WB, & Southern Lebanon, & Southwestern Syria) will cause an intense backlash. That has already happened w/ popular opinion, & elite opinions are starting to be dragged along even in the West. US actions such as sanctioning the ICC judges will ensure the U.S. catches a lot of the blowback, too. Unfortunately, Jews around the world will also get caught in the blowback, because Anti-Semites everywhere are justifying/legitimizing themselves by jumping on & usurping the Pro-Palestinian cause. That is just fine w/ Bibi & the reactionaries in Israel. Actions by the ADL & AIPAC certainly do not help!, either!
Chetan Murthy
@YY_Sima Qian: It’s not just “all around the world”. I went from pretty much solid support for Israel’s existence, to no longer supporting that. B/c Israel clearly manufactures its precarity in order to gain support for ethnic cleansing, genocide and destabilization all around it.
Gloria DryGarden
Yes. Indeed.
strange visitor (from another planet)
@Sister Golden Bear: except nyc is a lot bigger than manhattan.
Lyrebird
First off, I LOVE YOUR WORK!
Second, for whatever it’s worth, a quilt or pieced pillow sham made with men’s ties can be very appealing to some men’s kids or grandkids. Or at least my cousins said they really liked how I worked in some of our grandfather’s ties into something they would use and look at.
ETA:
@Sister Golden Bear: Thanks for posting some JOY!
trollhattan
Stuff from the Left Coast.
Ksmiami06
@Suzanne: I comfort myself with the thought that I’ll take out 8/9 of them before I go down.
Jay
Jay
Marc
@Sister Golden Bear: I find it amusing that the one burned out car in Compton that is in every news story, apparently burned because it got trapped in the intersection and the cops hit it with a gas canister. The people got out OK.
trollhattan
@Marc:
Big “Dude, I can get you a toe” vibes.
Gloria DryGarden
@Sister Golden Bear: now I want a hot dog. And to give these vendors my business
Jay
Marc
BTW, for the amusement of all 1.5 people who may care, I fell down the rabbit hole of getting various generative AI systems running on my purpose-built home servers at decent speed. After trying many inference engine options, the winner was ollama. I can run models up to 22 billion parameters on a cheap 16Gb GPU, but they have to be GGUF models quantized to between 4 and 6 bits to minimize memory and maximize performance, otherwise it’s a complete waste of time. At this point, I have fully quantized 12-14 billion parameter versions of Qwen2.5-Coder (for writing code snippets in context) and Gemma3 (for general search and text generation) that fit the GPU with room to spare (for sub-models), generate text at 35 to 50 tokens/second, and are both accurate/fast enough to be usable. There are still things that can be tuned for more speed.
NotMax
@Marc
Pro tip.
Don’t name the code Skynet.
Just sayin’.
Marc
@NotMax: Nah, man, I call one Colosuss, the other Forbin (damn, I missed my chance, that should have been Guardian) :)
NotMax
@Marc
Nicely played.
“It’s a project, not a Project.”
;)
Jay
@NotMax:
Or Hal.
strange visitor (from another planet)
m-5 multitronic system.
Don L
@Bulgakov: I was surprised Cole was playing it. Nobody is playing it. Firaxis bit the big one on this. I am playing Farming Simulator 2025, and recommend it. Very immersive.
Suzanne
@CliosFanboy: No, Theo r where the mall used to be is a different one…. But I worked on that one, as well. Sorry about the construction fuckery, not sorry about the modern healthcare you’ll get. ;)
Bulgakov
@Don L: Never heard of Farming Simulator and am looking into it. Thanks for the tip.
@Don L:
Liminal Owl
@schrodingers_cat: Perfect. Thank you.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@schrodingers_cat:
I don’t know the answer to that other than to say most in the media and a lot of online commenters identify them that way. And certainly a ton of extremist centrist Dems ID them that way and associate with them along those lines ala the lineup at last week’s Abundance Coachella shows.
Geminid
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Where is this “ton of extremist Centrist Democrats” you are talking about? I don’t see them here in Virginia. I don’t see them in our House Caucus either; just a few outliers, not a ton. I don’t see them here even though you claim this is one of the spaces they “dominate.”
What I see is a small number of self-satisfied, White male “public intellectuals” talking to each other on social media and at conferences, and some more angry White males yelling about them. I don’t see much value in either group, or much relevance either.
Matt McIrvin
@schrodingers_cat: One thing I will say for MattY: my impression is that he’s not fash-curious on immigration, which is the issue where Democrats or “progressives” are probably most likely to side with Trumpism (which is part of the reason why Trump is going so hard on it).
Matt McIrvin
(I suspect left vs. center is an inadequate model for what’s going on right now– there are all these people trying to find some part of the coalition to throw under the bus to get their pet issues across, and some of them self-identify not as centrists but as super “left”).
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Geminid:
We don’t agree on how we define and see these people, I realize that, so be it. I consider the New Democrats caucus to be part of this lump, ie., all the New Liberalism stuff they basically represent. Less Blue Doggy than the actual Blue Dogs but intellectual on their side of the spectrum. Combine the two and presto, majority of the caucus.
It’s why I say I’m the face of the party that lost and why me (and a lot of black/brown/female housing justice people nationally) push back on this constantly…and to no avail.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: I’ve seen this so-called “Abundance” movement described as Libertarian. It sounds like there are deregulatory aspects, but I wouldn’t know for sure because there’s too much real news happening to spend time studying intellectual fads.
I might pay some attention if “Abundance” ideology moves into the practical sphere; say, if next year’s Democratic primaries have some “Abundance Agenda” candidates. But I think they would likely be a front for crypto-currency interests anyway.
Geminid
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: There’s not that much practical difference between most of the New Democrat Coalition and most of the Progressive Caucus, so you in effect are at odds with 90 percent of our House members.
But even if your criticisms were limited to the New Democrats, I would still like to know how you stand for a better Democratic Party than do Sean Casten, Sharice Davids, Jason Crow and Chrissy Houlihan, four New Democrats who flipped seats in 2018;
or Janelle Bynum, George Whitesides, Laura Gillen, and Derrick Tran, four Democrats who flipped seats in 2024 and caucus with the New Democrats.
Let’s set these disparaging labels aside and get down to real cases.
Matt McIrvin
@Geminid: Ah, the ones who think the Singularity from 1990s science fiction is happening, and we just need to unleash the zillionaires to bring the nerdpocalyse (while defunding science!)
I’m getting the urge to write a book about this shit. Not sure it’s a productive urge but I could have worse urges.
schrodingers_cat
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: How would you characterize someone like me. I don’t buy the bullshit that Ezra K and MattY are peddling nor the castles that shouty Grandpa builds in the air.
I am a pragmatic D, who supported Biden when he was being stabbed in the back by the like of Ezra Klein
I follow the lead of the CBC. To me they are the moral center of the D caucus. YMMV.
Matt McIrvin
@Geminid: … here’s the thing about all this TESCREAL craziness: it was dreamed up in the 1990s or so in an environment where Moore’s Law was running rampant and making all digital electronics exponentially more powerful.
But Moore’s Law is starting to crap out. Its not quite dead yet but you can’t extrapolate like you used to. So to get miraculous new results you need exploding scale. Which you ultimately have to rent from some rent-seeking company.
And that’s what the billionaire bros are realizing. That they can own this world. They also have delusions that they can do it without workers. But that’s the fundamental realization.
Now, I’ve seen these sort of Marxist analyzes that insist that’s all there is to it, but there’s also the real technical fact that something remarkable seems to have happened with LLM systems of sufficient size that makes some of this vision possible. But it’s also true that a lot of the bullshit overselling of what it can do is fueled by this rent-seeking impulse in the twilight of Moore’s Law.
YY_Sima Qian
The idea of abundance is laudable. No one wants live in scarcity & precarity. The “Abundance Agenda” promulgated by Ezra Klein is vacuous because it fails to address the root causes of scarcity – the financialization of basic necessities (food, housing, utilities, education, health care) & the overfinancialization of the general economy (dominated by profit maximization & rent seeking); nor does it address how to vastly increase the supply of the provision of basic necessities or consumer goods. They are still trying to “nudge” the market incentives at the edges, failing to acknowledge that the US economy does not have fully free & competitive markets in many sectors, or that free market does not always achieve the best (or even good) outcomes for the political economy as a whole.
A true “Abundance Agenda” would make basic necessities readily accessible & easily affordable, at acceptable quality. Europe & most parts of the developed E. Asia do well on the provisioning of education & health care, but much less so on food, housing & utilities. Singapore does well on all of these areas.
When it comes to making consumer goods & all goods that make an economy function cheap & readily accessible, at acceptable quality, & it may rub some here the wrong way, but the only political economy carrying out an “Abundance Agenda” is the PRC. Not just through gargantuan industrial policy (although that is part of it), but also through heavy regulations, & direction interventions & indeed the fundamental design of the political economy, & nurturing cutthroat market competitive in anything that is consumer facing (hence the low profit margins & lackluster equities market valuations). Not only is the manufacture of consumer goods subsidized to achieve huge economies of scale that dramatically reduce costs (facilitated by fierce market competition), so is everything that is an input to the manufacture of consumer goods or goods that make an economy function, from raw materials to utilities to transportation to the development of human capital (here achieved by heavy regulation & domination by state monopoly/oligopolies). The one thing the CPC regime let become financialized was housing, but it saw the dangers & slammed on the brakes from 2019 – 21, accepting the large headwind on economic growth for the past 3 years.
However, I don’t think the US is ready to have that conversation, because the idea is both foreign (from a geopolitical rival, no less) & Socialist (no quotation marks here), but that is the fundamental rethink that is needed (& not just in the US). Economies have become so financialized that all of the analyses & all of the policies (& their impact) are primarily thought of in monetary terms, rather than material outcomes. (For instance, if a country whose passenger vehicle market has double the sales in nominal currency terms, but half the number of vehicles sold, is that a bigger or smaller market, in the sense that matters to the average people? Healthcare in the US is perhaps the perfect real live example.) The favored structure of the welfare state has become direct income transfers. Cash payments increases demand, but w/o concomitant increase in domestic supply, the cash infusion merely drives up inflation, or trade deficit, or both. At least cheaper imports still achieves improved material outcomes in the short term, inflation does nothing for the welfare of those being “helped”.
Right now, I don’t see anyone in the US talking about “abundance” in the true sense of the word.
Of course, there are aspects of the PRC political economy that is far from Socialist (such as limited labor rights, though better than a decade ago), & no one will confuse it for a social democracy.
Paul in KY
@schrodingers_cat: None of it was a secret.