NEWSWEEK requested an op-ed from me about artificial intelligence and my prediction in 2017 that "in about five years" we would enter the First Robotic Empathy Crisis, when some language program -- perhaps augmented with appealing visuals -- would proclaim "I'm alive!" Possibly with the addendum: "Send money!"
My Newsweek op-ed ran this week: Soon, Humanity Won't Be Alone in the Universe.
In a very short space, I try to offer bigger than normal perspectives, focusing especially on which aspects of human nature... and this particular, peculiar civilization... make us especially sensitive to such appeals. And how we might navigate a carefully fair path ahead.
One thing I do know. The dominance of advertising as a driving economic force on the Web has been less oppressive or deadly than if we'd had central state control. Still, the advertising model is a crappy system, long needful of replacement... or at least supplementation with a better approach.
And so, let's start this delayed weekend posting with a link to some perspectives on that problem that you may not have considered... and might want to.
And if you are still around after that?
Lucky you! I'll finish with a short riff on money velocity!
== Micropayments... ==
I gave a webinar on the future of online payment systems a few months back, with emphasis on how the time may have come - at last - for micropayments systems to partially replace irksome advertising. Four fine legal scholars weighed in, with edifying perspectives! Some of you may find it interesting.
Would you pay a nickel for an occasional, interesting NYTimes or Scientific American article, if it meant you wouldn't face a paywall, any password hurdles, visit logs or adverts? My original essay on the whole thing... published in EVONOMICS... is also available.
==... and wealth ==
Wealthy families could face combined tax rates of as much as 61% on inherited wealth under President Joe Biden’s tax plan, according to a recent analysis. Biden’s plan proposes to nearly double the top tax rate on capital gains and eliminate a tax benefit on appreciated assets known as the “step-up in basis.”
Two aspects to this:
1. No wonder the oligarchs hate him! But anyone howling about this on the right, despite the fact that enterprise and entrepreneurship and flat-fair competition all did far better under the Rooseveltean social contract, with far lower wealth disparities, ought to recall that this Biden proposal would amount only to rescinding the cult-voodoo experiments in 'supply side' that failed in every single prediction or promised outcome. Without a single exception.
2. Anyone on the left who has snarled at JoeBee for being "Republican Lite"... YOU are responsible for his low polls and the power slipping away. You and your ilk. You and exactly you, showing yet again that the left wing of democrats would not know how to craft a loyal and effective coalition if their very lives depended on it.
And they do, twits. Your very lives.
== And hell yeah, some liberals are doing great stuff! ==
First, a tip and a tool worth spreading. The Canadian Women's Foundation has created a hand signal for those who are victims of domestic violence which can be used silently on video calls during the coronavirus crisis to signal for help. But not just for video calls, as illustrated in this earlier video.
And while we’re talking inspiring ways to move ahead… Big star Bruce Springsteen’s Jeep commercial paid homage to the ReUnited States of America… a lovely sentiment! (Calling to mind “malice toward none” from Lincoln’s 2nd inaugural address, one of the top ten speeches of all time.)
It also called to mind - for not a few folks who pinged me - resonance with the “Restored United States” of my novel (and the film) “The Postman.” (Which has itself been “restored” or refreshed, edited and updated with two new Patrick Farley covers and a new introduction. And apparently there will be interesting news soon (perhaps) about that franchise.
Listen, fools, I’m no commie. I believe that reciprocally competitive systems are the most creative… it’s how nature made us!
Only in human societies. we aim to reduce the side effects that too often make competition brutal and robbed it of any grace, ruining its outputs in much of evolution and certainly in 99% of (feudal) societies… death (nature is way bloody) and its equivalent that kills a fair society… cheating.
Yes, we need competitive markets to create the vast wealth that could let us end poverty and save the world, and those competitive markets function best when competing individuals, partnerships, families, enterprises perceive a chance to profit and prosper!
On the other hand, all good things in the world become toxic when too heavily concentrated! Oxygen, water, food, light, power... and wealth packed together in mountains that turn rich families into noble brats, that turn businessmen into cheating monopolists, and that turn business majors into parasites who forget all about goods and services.
== Repeat two words: Money Velocity! ==
History does give examples of MV being TOO high, causing sharp inflation. But ever since the Reagan era, Money Velocity has fallen, in lockstep with every single Supply Side Theory tax cut-gusher-gift to the rich. And across the Trump years, the collapse of MV became a nosedive!
This is diametrically opposite to what Supply Side (SS) fans confidently predicted, over and over again. As happened with EVERY prediction that mad cult ever made. And I stand ready to bet real stakes on that.
In science, when a theory is always wrong, it gets abandoned. When it is always wrong — and the same magical incantations are used to support trying it yet again — then the word is “insanity.”
Adam Smith himself said this (without using the term MV, of course):
When the already rich get sudden bursts of yet-more cash, they do NOT hurry to invest it in bold enterprises or in factories producing more (supply) goods and services. Oh, a few do. But a vast majority squirrel their new largesse away into capital preservation investments, rent-seeking (“rentier”) holdings, asset bubbles and cheat schemes, exactly as Smith described in The Wealth of Nations.
They don’t even buy all that many yachts! Any cub scout will tell you that pattern takes dollars out of circulation and eviscerates Money Velocity.
In contrast, similar amounts invested in working stiffs - say hiring them to fix infrastructure - gets spent almost immediately and hence MV rises.
That truth is almost as pure as what the previous paragraph said about the rich. And note that Joe Biden’s “expensive” Infrastructure Push will put no more cash to work that way than Supply Siders poured into the aristocracy. In fact, they are VERY similar amounts…
...with diametrically opposite likely outcomes, especially re MV. And of course, that is what terrifies McConnell. Because he knows it will likely work.
Want to incentivize investment in R&D, new products and services and productive capacity? Before Supply Side we knew how to do that, with generous tax breaks for exactly those things, targeted ONLY on those things. It worked, unlike SS, which never (I repeat never, ever) has.
What is crazier? That U.S. conservatives cling to a magical incantation (one of many!) that has been utterly, utterly disproved?
Or that Democratic politicians are unable to parse this contradiction in clear terms the People can understand? YOU understood what I just wrote. The People would, as well.
186 comments:
So I take it that you believe that 'social democracy' (as evidenced by most of Europe and Canada) is the way to go? Taxing the ultra-rich and providing a social safety net is an overall benefit to society?
I haven't gone thru all your micropayment writings yet (still wading thru Stephenson's fascinating CRYPTONOMICON). However, this seems to be as fruitful an avenue for economics as WJCC is for computational literacy. The key is to make receiving micropayments trivially easy and universal. This would quickly defeat any roadblocks that the dark side could erect. Such a brush fire would spread way too fast for hokery-pokery impediments.
Kim Stanley Robinson made an alternative, "supranational" currency system part of his "Ministry for the Future," with value based on carbon mitigation. I had a hard time seeing how this would integrate with a real-world economy and individual transactions, but it's based on an actual proposal. The UN is (I think) supposed to provide the structure and make it accessible to anyone with internet access.
Pappenheimer
Think of it as "Capitalism with a human face".
Micropayments
One hurdle is the requirement for internet connectivity (availability, cost, privacy, security). An idea that's popular in distributed databases (like Cassandra) is 'eventual consistency'. Transactions are logged locally in real time, and eventually reconciled with the global database at periodic internet connection time. If the payments are tiny (eg a nickel), then eventual consistency could work with a cellphone "wallet". Some cryptocurrency systems use similar mechanisms, but they always look so damned complicated to me. Simplicity is unprofitable - MBA proverb.
WJCC revisited
The problem with WJCC is the computer. 80s machines are fun and nostalgic, but impractical for most. Calculator-style computers embedded into text books are impractical (we've discussed this in CB). Internet connectivity raises issues such as privacy, availability, and distraction (esp during class). The obvious solution is QR codes (possibly named "Brin Codes"). Virtually free and indestructable, printable on any screen or paper, scannable by any cellphone, and no hardware or internet connection req'd. Once scanned, the BASIC code could be viewed, run, modified, curated (collected & shared), and even explained (by interactive AI). Even choice of programming language is flexible - no need for geek wars. Presto, problem solved. I don't see why Google, Microsoft, Apple, and most publishers would complain or foot-drag. It's easy added value for them, and they might actually do some good in the world. Oligarchs would hate it. Democracies would love it.
Dr Brin in the main post:
Would you pay a nickel paying for an occasional, interesting NYTimes or Scientific American article, if it meant you wouldn't face a paywall, any password hurdles, visit logs or adverts?
Yes! The ads aren't nearly as annoying as the paywalls which force you to subscribe indefinitely to publications as a whole, thereby budgetarily limiting me to a few specific sources. I would much, much prefer being able to pay small amounts on a per-article basis, preferably without having to submit my credit card verification details into the internet each time.
The identical problem exists with the proliferation of streaming services. At present, I can afford Netflix and Disney+, which means I miss out on Foundation and Star Trek because I can't also take on Apple TV and Paramount every month. I also can't possibly watch every episode of Criminal Minds before it falls off of Netflix this month. Again, I'd much rather pay a-la-carte for a movie or a series.
"Capitalism" has so many poison connotations as to be useless. The thing I emphasize is that transparently COMPETITIVE systems lead to innovation and efficiencies, especially when COOPERATIVE negotiations led to vompetitive conditions that are regulated to suppress cheating, so the competition is fair... and so long as society COOPERATIVELY established values based incentives that weight the competitive scale toward desired longer range outcomes that are beyond the perception horizons of the competitors.
KS Robinson has tried to envision such incentives and regulations. I am with him 90%! Alas, we disagree about vocabulary.
An issue with micropayments is their profitability to those who might handle them. A paywalled newspaper might consider a 99 cent day pass for casual readers, who might not wish to commit to a subscription.
Dr Brin's Ayn Rand article:
I mean, gee whiz. Ayn Rand railed against the ICC... and it was eliminated. Canceled, rubbed out, utterly erased — along with the grotesque Civil Aeronautics Board — by the very same democratic processes that she and her followers despised. Competition among railroads was restored and it was done by a mix of pressure from a savvy public and resolution by genuinely reform-minded politicians. If Ayn Rand were writing the book today, a railroad would not have been her chosen archetype.
I wonder: did anyone making the film ever ponder this? Did any Randians notice at all?
She also couldn't have made her plot so dependent upon the "evil" of individuals forbidden from personally owning gold, since Americans have been able to do so since at least the mid 1970s. Modern readers younger than Dr Brin and myself probably don't even remember that that restriction ever existed. Yet the book's plot is utterly dependent upon it.
It's also amazing to me how the Republican politicians who channel Ayn Rand in the modern era manage to minimize or distance themselves from her militant atheism. How one can pass themselves off as both a Rand acolyte and a Christianist boggles my mind.
scidata in the previous comments:
That's one tragedy of fascism - it eats those who build it.
I know you're using "tragedy" in the classical literary sense, but I see the self-defeating characteristic of fascism as a good thing. It probably isn't quite correct to replace "tragedy" in the above with "redeeming characteristic", but certainly "fortunate weakness" is appropriate.
I don't know why a commenter is obsessed with the Williamsburg-James City County Public Schools, but WJCC is not that relevant to computational literacy.
I'm 100% for micropayments - not only to replace irksome advertising but to get rid of paywalls. If I want to read one article from the NY Times or the Spiegel I shouldn't have to subscribe to the whole thing. Same if I want to watch one sporting event.
David Brin - I agree "capitalism" is a word I'd like to see banned from everyday use. It just gets int he way of communication. To some it is a deity - to others the source of all evil. Of course it is neither. Almost nobody that condemns "capitalism" thinks he is objecting to the local hot bread bakery, nor to the provision of pharmaceuticals. But of course they hate the concentration of unaccountable and often irresponsible power.
P.S. With respect to micropayments - I didn't read the whole article so this may have already been answered - but one thing that bothers me - I ideally wouldn't actually want to pay when I open an article - I may have clicked on something - take one look at it and say - no way I want to waste my time reading that.
Could we make the payments proportional to the time spent actually looking at something (and I know there is a potential problem with screens being blocked - hanging etc)?
reason:
I'm 100% for micropayments - not only to replace irksome advertising but to get rid of paywalls. If I want to read one article from the NY Times or the Spiegel I shouldn't have to subscribe to the whole thing. Same if I want to watch one sporting event.
I completely agree, with the addition of "one streaming movie." What I think Dr Brin addresses specifically is how to manage such a process without having to provide the details of your credit card to each and every entity (and God knows who else on the internet) in order to pay them a buck fifty.
reason:
I ideally wouldn't actually want to pay when I open an article - I may have clicked on something - take one look at it and say - no way I want to waste my time reading that.
Even now, there are some publications where you can see the first part of an article for free, but then are asked to subscribe in order to keep reading. Something like that could be incorporated with micropayments. For movies, obviously trailers would be free.
I'm not sure sporting events would allow you to forego payment just because you don't like the outcome. I suspect with anything viewed "live", you would have to pay up front.
reason:
Almost nobody that condemns "capitalism" thinks he is objecting to the local hot bread bakery, nor to the provision of pharmaceuticals. But of course they hate the concentration of unaccountable and often irresponsible power.
I think they mostly object to civil rights being overlooked for the poor and civil responsibilities being waived by the rich. In theory, capitalism doesn't require that, but in practice, it usually ends up that way.
To some it is a deity - to others the source of all evil.
The deity thing is weird because the most fervent defenders of "capitalism" justify their support as anti-communist or anti-socialist on the grounds that communism and socialism are atheistic. Yet there is nothing inherently Godly about capitalism. 1960s hippies were probably more religious (or at least more Christ-like) than the generation they were rebelling against.
The only act of civil conscience a corporation is allowed to exhibit is (apparently) refusing to insure employees for contraception, although I must have skipped over the chapter where Adam Smith explained that.
Oh, and Happy Father's Day Dr Brin, Alfred, and anyone else to whom the cognomen applies.
Thanks all.
Good stuff, reason. In fact, the secret sauce of my version of micropayments, tha previous, failed efforts lacked, is Disavowal. The customer may disavow either a limited or even unlimited number of nickel charges. This:
1- eliminates buyer's remorse
2- eliminates the need for costly security measures which killed previous efforts. (A nickel for an intangible NYT article that has zero marginal cost is NOT in any way similar to a PayPal purchase of an eBay item.
Over TIME it becomes clear whpo the deliberate freeloaders are and the NYT can simply cut them off, later.
See the diff?
Capitalism has a wide latitude, it can be well regulated, exist in the presence of a functional safety net... even a minimum basic income, and it's still capitalism, it doesn't have to be the "Heads we win, tails you lose" so beloved of reactionaries. And Happy Father's day to OGH, and the other Fathers here.
Capitalism has a wide latitude, it can be well regulated, exist in the presence of a functional safety net... even a minimum basic income, and it's still capitalism, it doesn't have to be the "Heads we win, tails you lose" so beloved of reactionaries.
I believe that the various forms of capitalism are hostile to each other as much as they are hostile to communism. And I believe that predatory-style capitalism is an enemy of public welfare and democracy as much as any maoist or stalinist old school leftist is. It invariably ends in using money to secure political influence, one way or another.
The C-Word is not ‘capitalism. What depresses me about ravings from all sides about 'capitalism' is that almost no one ever mentions the other c-word... competition. It is blatantly obvious from both evolution and history that humans are deeply competitive creatures and that we are at their most creative and productive when we have the freedom, confidence, fairness and wherewithal to compete. (Those who denounce me for saying this; aren't you thereby vigorously competing with me?)
All of that might make be sound like a right winger... and the diametric opposite is true! Across the last 50 years, every measure or action that has lessened effective competition in our society has been done by the hypocrites of a sellout Republican Party. A pro-aristocracy cabal that is utterly devoted to replacing flat-fair-open creative competition with privileged oligarchy and monopoly.
In contrast, the Rooseveltean social contract - which Republicans have devoted themselves to demolishing - enhanced creative competition, including entrepreneurship, small business startups, inventiveness and the most vigorous era of new products and services. (I invite wagers on all of those assertions, which are overwhelmingly proved.
Liberals did all that by:
- Using regulations to limit the power of mighty corporations and oligarchs to quash upstart competitors.
- Using tax policies to keep wealth disparities low enough so that - while getting-rich remained an incentive-allure for creative enterprise - the rich were also not outrageously above us all, like lords. Or gods. (Example: there was a time when you’d see a rich or famous person in First Class, now and then. They mostly flew in the same airplanes, , sipping mimosas in seats only 2x as large as ours. No longer.)
- Using tax laws to encourage R&D, productive capital and hiring workers, rather than Supply Side parasitism.
- Encouraging unions (who were vigorously anti-Leninist) so that the working class joined the middle class, a feat Karl Marx never expected or predicted and that tossed all his predictions into history's dustbin.
- Creating a vast ecosystem of universities that allowed many children of field hands and factory workers to transform into professionals and entrepreneurs.
- Liberal social programs and justice reforms that reduced the nasty, unjustified and all-too human practice of prejudice. And thus (partially so far) achieving Adam Smith's top recommendation to STOP WASTING TALENT! Because, as Friedrich Hayek said (before the mad right perverted him), Any competitive system functions best when it involves the largest number of knowledgeable, empowered, confident and eager competitors, unencumbered by insipid prejudices.
All of those endeavors – liberalism at its core - had great effects - fighting injustice, improving lives, preserving freedom - but with an added benefit that (alas) no democratic politician or liberal philosopher has ever had the brains to explain...
…that all of those endeavors enhanced flat-fair-creative competition! And hence our inventiveness and creativity.
Again and again... the Founders and original Tea Party rebelled against CHEATER OLIGARCHY!
And Adam Smith - were he alive today - would be a flaming Democrat.
How one can pass themselves off as both a Rand acolyte and a Christianist boggles my mind.
Are you equally boggled by all the other contradictory things many strident christians proclaim?
How one can claim to be a christian and yet support policies that punish the poor and increase suffering — it's like they've never bothered to read what a certain Jewish carpenter said…
The deity thing is weird because the most fervent defenders of "capitalism" justify their support as anti-communist or anti-socialist on the grounds that communism and socialism are atheistic. Yet there is nothing inherently Godly about capitalism. 1960s hippies were probably more religious (or at least more Christ-like) than the generation they were rebelling against.
I know people who treat Capitalism as a religion: received wisdom, dictates can't be questioned, etc.
The only act of civil conscience a corporation is allowed to exhibit is (apparently) refusing to insure employees for contraception, although I must have skipped over the chapter where Adam Smith explained that.
Check the chapter on wheat prices. Everyone skips that chapter :-)
A 14-year old English girl explained the problem with capitalism to me (age 12) - "If everyone gets the chance to make money, sooner or later those who are best at making money will have all of it."
I'd have to add, nowadays, that money is power, and warps politics, so too much money will warp the political system to the advantage of those with money. Breaking such a vicious cycle requires emergency methods - FDR, Great Depression, and WWII in this country, losing WWI in Imperial (Czarist) Russia. In fact, a lot of stratified societies were (and are) set up so nobility cannot be easily taxed, so this issue predates capitalism. Peasant and slave revolts are almost always easily crushed by private armies sallying forth from castles. Starting in the 17th century, modern warfare required arming lots of poor people with gunpowder weapons if you wanted to beat the neighboring nobles, and the advent of cannon made nobles' fortresses quite pregnable. Plus, paying for those armies was quite impossible without unleashing...
capitalism.
Pappenheimer, rehashing a term paper on the military revolution @ 1550-1650.
Pappenheimer:
"If everyone gets the chance to make money, sooner or later those who are best at making money will have all of it."
"Monopoly" works fine as a board game that someone can win and then you all go back to your real life. In real life, someone ending up with all the money is not a tenable situation.
Re: Father's Day
Casually finishing off some Indian restaurant food (Father's Day treat). If sweat is not trickling down your face, the Vindaloo was not correctly seasoned. Today it was.
Pappenheimer
Robert:
"How one can pass themselves off as both a Rand acolyte and a Christianist boggles my mind."
Are you equally boggled by all the other contradictory things many strident christians proclaim?
Well, I use to be. Now it's more "Dog Bites Man" than anything else.
I'm not so much surprised by the hypocrisy of so-called-Christian politicians themselves. I am surprised that so-called-Christian voters accept these hypo-Christians as the real thing.
I know people who treat Capitalism as a religion: received wisdom, dictates can't be questioned, etc.
Sure, but that's not what I was talking about when I pointed out the fervent supporters who denounce communism and socialism as atheistic. They cling to capitalism not because it is a religion of its own, but because they think it is somehow more Christian.
"If everyone gets the chance to make money, sooner or later those who are best at making money will have all of it."
Its actually much much WORSE than that
Capitalism is a "Positive Feedback" system - them as HAS - Gets more
Even if all of the "actors" have the same ability the ones that by chance get a bit more end up owning the whole thing
"Monopoly" works fine as a board game that someone can win and then you all go back to your real life. In real life, someone ending up with all the money is not a tenable situation.
While its not a "tenable situation" is IS however what actually happens UNLESS steps are taken to restore "Competitiveness"
FDR era showed it is possible to put a choke chain on rapacious capitalism while retaining the incentive of profits that are based upon innovation, efficiency and productivity. But it is a balancing act and alas, simpletons oversimplify on both sides.
The trouble with competition is that eventually someone wins.
"Monopoly" works fine as a board game that someone can win and then you all go back to your real life. In real life, someone ending up with all the money is not a tenable situation.
That was in fact what the game was originally intended to show. There was a second half in which the players were to compete in undoing everything that had been done, contributing all the money and properties back to the public. Milton-Bradley, however, didn't want to have that part, and frankly I understand exactly why a company in a viciously capitalistic society might want to not demonstrate the basic flaws in the system and how it could work better...
The trouble with competition is that eventually someone wins.
Argh. Someone is guilty of zero-sum thinking here. Seriously guilty.
Competition done right leads to win-win's.
"If everyone gets the chance to make money, sooner or later those who are best at making money will have all of it."
Argh^2.
More zero-sum thinking. I get that children do this. I can excuse them. It's a subtle trap.
Making money is literally about making money. MAKING money. Not counterfeit crap. Stuff people want to buy. Could be anything as long as someone else wants it.
Money is created when we borrow. Make a thing someone wants to buy and they trade you a fungible token you can turn over to someone else for their thing. Those tokens are MADE. There is NO conservation law for them. Not even a continuity law.
A few months ago I bought dinner for co-workers attending an event. In doing that, they recognized a debt to be paid later. WE created money that night... then destroyed it later when they paid up. Had that debt been tokenized, we would have literally minted money.
{much teeth grinding}
Most of the crap people think is immoral (or at best amoral) about capitalism has nothing to do with Capitalism. The word is defined to be whatever people want it to be and lately it is damn near useless. Wad them all into a ball and the definitions contradict themselves. It's "flammable" and "inflammable" all over again.
Our system of markets rests upon Virtue Ethics as understood by practical people completely illiterate with respect to the philosophy behind it.
Oh... I had a good Father's Day. Lovely walk along the beach with my family. Threw rocks back into the sea. Watched pelicans do what they do so gracefully.
Double plus good.
For all you fathers, I hope yours was a good day too.
I agree with Alfred
EXCEPT for the problem with Positive Feedback - this unfortunately can be strong enough to overwhelm the positive sum effect - and with todays financial system it is much much too strong
To "fix" this we need "regulation"
Regulated Competition
Something to re-set the Monopoly game
Our system of capitalism certainly does have aspects of positive feedback. Doesn't the Old Testament say "to those that have, much shall be given"? This isn't new. It takes money to make money and all that.
What's weird is how people view it as immutable. Like death and taxes. Somehow they forget about the second part: taxes. It's very easy to redress a lopsided wealth distribution. Unless, of course, you have a political system where money talks louder than votes.
The only reason money talks louder than votes in the US is because many citizens don't vote, and many of the ones who do vote against their own interests. They vote for an oligarchy that shelters stupid amounts of wealth in the hands of people who have more money than they know what to with. When people are paying $60 million for a painting they have too much money. All those dollars could be working instead of lounging poolside getting shitfaced.
A few years ago there was some actual discussion of using tax policy to redistribute the wealth. Republicans jumped on it in panic, pulling out the COMMUNISM! card and it never went anywhere. But that's what we need. We could turbocharge our MV and it wouldn't even be hard.
OK - I want to throw something into the mix about positive feedbacks in capitalism. I think everybody has been missing something.
One big "puzzle" in economics recently has been "where has the information technology productivity plus gone". We all believe it should be massive but nobody has been able to measure it. Well let me speculate two things:
1. Transferal of work from producers to consumers
2. Removal of many diseconomies of scale.
#2 is a massive positive feedback. It used to be that the overhead (head office) of big companies grew faster than the company itself, because the information network became more complex as the company grew larger. This overhead cost stopped companies from becoming too big. Now companies can easily manage to operate worldwide.
If positive feedbacks dominate then capitalism will concentrate wealth totally like monopoly eventually does.
While we are talking about monopoly - I want to point out two features:
1. taxes in community chest and chance
2. pass go and collect $200.
Maybe those features are needed to keep the game going long enough to stop it from being trivial. And just maybe there are real world lessons to be gained from that.
I for one welcome the advent of micropayments. I don't know whether it's possible or desirable for micropayments to replace advertising, but I'd consider it a dogsend if they were to replace subscriptions, or at least offer a non-subscription option. Sticky subscriptions are perhaps an even more odious monetization gimmick than adware and even spyware. They are like roach motels, easy to get into and hard to get out of. Not surprisingly, Silicon Valley has invented UaaS, or "unsubscribe as a service."
Gerold
"The only reason money talks louder than votes in the US is because many citizens don't vote, and many of the ones who do vote against their own interests."
I think I should also point out here that many votes in the US don't count at all, and some people's vote has many times the weight of other people's votes. A one man, one vote system in the US would be a huge improvement.
gerold:
Doesn't the Old Testament say "to those that have, much shall be given"?
Heh.
The only reason money talks louder than votes in the US is because many citizens don't vote, and many of the ones who do vote against their own interests.
Money also limits the choices of candidates to begin with. The sums of money that one needs to raise and spend just to mount a campaign determines the types of candidates who will end up in the race at all.
HypoChristians...
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2022/Senate/Maps/Jun20.html#item-7
...
this past weekend, [Georgia candidate Hershel] Walker was a speaker at the annual Faith & Freedom conference in Nashville sponsored by Ralph Reed's "evangelical" group. Walker talked about the news stories covering his previously undisclosed kids. How did the "evangelicals" respond? They cheered. After all, isn't one of basic concepts of evangelicalism having lots of kids with miscellaneous short-term girlfriends and then abandoning all the kids? Didn't Jesus do this all the time? We're not sure, since our staff theologian is off working on his "turn water into wine" project.
What is clear here is that "evangelicals" are not going to abandon Walker, no matter what facts about his life come out. He could probably get caught taking liberties with a goat, and some "evangelical" would claim there is no evidence that Jesus opposed such behavior, since all of the Biblical references to goats appear in the Old Testament, except for the one in Matthew 25:33. As it is, one of the attendees at the conference, Paulina Macfoy, said she supports Walker because he "stands for family." Definitely. And then some.
Of course, it is hardly news that "evangelicals" as a group are largely right-wingers who use religion à la carte as a cover story when it is convenient. For example, when it comes to eating shrimp and getting tattoos, it's: "Jesus made a new covenant with God, so the Old Testament rules don't count anymore." But when it comes to hating LGBTQ+ people, it's "Leviticus this" and "Deuteronomy that." So naturally, supporting a guy who is against abortions (a topic Jesus never discussed) comes naturally, even if he fathers children left and right and abandons them. We're curious what might happen if it turns out that Walker fathered more than four children and paid for one or more abortions. If you are a woman whom Walker impregnated and then paid for your abortion, please drop us a note. We'd love to scoop Politico.
Doesn't the Old Testament say "to those that have, much shall be given"? This isn't new. It takes money to make money and all that.
No, it doesn't say that.
First, the line in question, from the Gospel According to Matthew chapter 13, arises during a discussion with the disciples when Jesus explains why he speaks in parables; those who know what he's talking about will get it ("to those who have much [knowledge], much will be given"), and everyone else has to figure it out. That's supposed to be in fulfillment of a prophecy from Isaiah, which basically says that most people when given knowledge won't listen.
A Biblical line more appropriate to financial systems would be Luke 12:48b, "From those who have been given much, much will be required; and to whom they have entrusted much, of him they will ask all the more."
Or, to quote the Gospel of Uncle Ben, "With great power comes great responsibility."
To them what have is New Testament, but the Old Testament has something even better; the Jubilee year. As I recall someone a little farther back in this comment stream said something about a "reset."
Jon S:
Or, to quote the Gospel of Uncle Ben, "With great power comes great responsibility."
One of the unintended consequences of the popular success of the Marvel Studios movies is that what was once an obscure collection of trivia known only to comics enthusiasts is now rampant in the general public. At one time, those who knew who Thanos was, or why a movie would be titled "Age of Ultron" could give each other knowing glances similar in meaning to a Masonic handshake. Now, everyone and his uncle knows about the Infinity Stones, and when the town of Wauconda, Illinois rebrands itself as "Wakanda", the reference is universally understood.
Paradoctor said...
The trouble with competition is that eventually someone wins."
At one level, of course, that's true, since in nature competition generally is zero sum and the loser is meat.
across human history, winners then used their power and wealth to cheat and repress competition from below, resulting in suppression of the criticism that uncovers errors, leading to horrific statecraft amd suppression of... competition.
But that's the point! The right and left both rage against the REGULATED COMPETITION that has been the wellspring of almost all of our advances. The right's reason at the surface is that government impedes competition, picking winners and loser. Their proved actual reason is the very opposite. To empower cheating by former winners.
The left is as bad! Their denunciations of competition envision themselves as a benevolent lordely caste of allocators. Lords in fact if not name.
Is it HARD to regulate in ways that get continuous positive sum out of competition? Duh?
The fundamental backstop must be the Inheritance Tax. No matter how cleverly the rich manipulate pro-competition rules, they must NOT be allowed to have heirs who are anything more than very comfortable, with a bit of capital to invest/
Sure, but that's not what I was talking about when I pointed out the fervent supporters who denounce communism and socialism as atheistic. They cling to capitalism not because it is a religion of its own, but because they think it is somehow more Christian.
Remember when China began opening it's economy, and all the media pundits were saying that this was the start of democracy in China?
A lot of Americans I've talked to lump Capitalism and Democracy together because in America they occur together. And as America is a Christian Nation (just check the currency if you don't believe me!) that means Christianity also belongs in that grouping. And Guns, because the Second Amendment…
Up here in Canada the Capitalism/Democracy pairing/conflation is quite common on the right*, Christianity and Guns not so much. But becoming more common under American influence…
*Which is everyone from Bernie rightwards, by your political standards).
Alfred Differ:
More zero-sum thinking. I get that children do this. I can excuse them. It's a subtle trap.
Making money is literally about making money. MAKING money. Not counterfeit crap. Stuff people want to buy. Could be anything as long as someone else wants it.
One of the big zero-summers is Ayn Rand.
I see things the same way (I believe) you do. Hank Rearden invents a new useful metal whose existence raises the general wealth and enriches him personally when he sells it. Positive sum. But Rand insists that no, any increase in value to anyone else belongs to the individual inventor. Everyone else owes him the equivalent in money for any value they receive because he alone is responsible for that value.
As far as she's concerned, zero-sum is the game. Anything positive-sum is stealing.
Most of the crap people think is immoral (or at best amoral) about capitalism has nothing to do with Capitalism. The word is defined to be whatever people want it to be and lately it is damn near useless. Wad them all into a ball and the definitions contradict themselves. It's "flammable" and "inflammable" all over again.
There's actually a good explanation for "inflammable". A better example is "regardless" and "irregardless". That one has no redeeming value whatsoever. :)
Robert:
A lot of Americans I've talked to lump Capitalism and Democracy together because in America they occur together. And as America is a Christian Nation (just check the currency if you don't believe me!) that means Christianity also belongs in that grouping. And Guns, because the Second Amendment…
I'm mostly sympathetic to your POV, so I don't want to argue too much. But it is a little more complicated than that. I think Americans link capitalism and democracy because we tend to portray capitalism as "free trade"--the way people will simply act if they're not being coerced. And we link democracy with lack of coercion, whereas communism and socialism are the perceived height of coercion. I'm not saying this is an accurate portrayal of reality, but it is the way Americans get from one to the other.
If my parents weren't lying to me, phrases like "In God We Trust" on the money and "under God" in the pledge of allegiance were added in the 1950s specifically to distinguish us from atheistic communism. So we didn't go from religiosity to slogans, but from the Cold War to slogans with religiosity as a proxy for anti-communism.
And the money doesn't say "In Christ We Trust". So there's that.
Lots of online blather about Texas Goppers' 'secession' talk./
So? We then ensure that Blue Texas the universities and cities and Rio Grande Valley and coast - can sub-secede and stay Union. And use science to make oil and beef obsolete. The count on Choctaw, Chickasaw, Arapahoe, Cheyenne and Commanches to guard the north border, Navajo and Hopi the west, Mexicans the south and the US-Arkansas Border Patrol the east. Enjoy, guys. High speed rail through Dallas, Austin, S.A. and Houston all the way to Spacex.
You need to understand. If the current phase 8 of the US civil war topples into a hot phase 9 - as our enemies want - you will have far more on your mind than lifting a lazy finger to do the two things we can do right now.
(1) Seek and corner and 'minister to" one or two of the residually sane 'ostrich' Republicans who admit "I know my side has gone treasonously insane." But who hug the TV desperately, suckling Foxite rants that 'libruls are worse!" Even if you don't convert them now, just sitting with them during Tucker and groaning at the lies WILL CHANGE THEM.
If we can peel away just 1 million of these ostriches our of their head holes - and YOU know some! -- then that confederate treason cult will suffer demographic collapse.
(2) More important... stop accepting crap from our own crazy sanctimony junkies, who have a zero track record actually pragmatically improving the lives of the client clades they shriek about 'protecting.' ONLY incrementalist/pragmatic liberalism ever helped bring justice or steps toward equality, the version of liberalism they howl at, to justify their past betrayals of the coalition in 80, 88, 94, 2000, and 2016 and their betrayal of the coalition and Biden RIGHT NOW.
Maher raises important points. But fundamental is "Stop pissing in the faces of allies, just to feel righteous!"
If abolitionist northerners who considered Lincoln 'too tepid' had then refused to don blue and fight for him, the way our own sanctimony masturbators do, today, there'd still be slavery. Try reading Frederick Douglass's eulogy of Lincoln to the splitters. We'll win only when they stop whining.
Military bases contribute about $130 billion to the Texas economy. That is about 7 percent of Texas’s GDP of $1.8 trillion.
Dr Brin:
Lots of online blather about Texas Goppers' 'secession' talk
Would the national Republicans really let that happen? They'd never win another presidential election again.
Or are they afraid that Texas is about to go blue? That would make removing the state altogether akin to gaining half a game in the standings.
Dr Brin redux:
Lots of online blather about Texas Goppers' 'secession' talk
They could call it "Texit".
And it would probably work out for them about as well as the other "-exits" have.
Dr Brin:
stop accepting crap from our own crazy sanctimony junkies, who have a zero track record actually pragmatically improving the lives of the client clades they shriek about 'protecting.' ONLY incrementalist/pragmatic liberalism ever helped bring justice or steps toward equality, the version of liberalism they howl at, to justify their past betrayals of the coalition in 80, 88, 94, 2000, and 2016 and their betrayal of the coalition and Biden RIGHT NOW.
Well, you've defended Bill Maher against my disappointment before, but here he's doing just that "betrayal of the coalition and Biden", and I'm sick of it. I mean, sure the stock market is falling now, but he can't even remember what it did in March 2020, and what the fed did to save it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5Sbhi4h9hg
Of all the pundits interviewed re Ukraine, I have found David Petraeus most cogent and clear-headed. He knows, for example, that the Ukrainian volunteer brigades training up now will outnumber Russian troops in the field, especially when western equipped. Much will depend on artillery duels which it is highly implausible that the RF side can sustain vs substantial western counter-fire tools.
But even DP fails to discuss major strategic aspects.
1. The vast gas reserves east of the Dnieper are not likely for Vlad's taking anymore, as he hoped. Hence any peace will see EU investment plunge in to that region, in order to replace RF as their supplier. Hence, Vlad's top goal is to get close enough to keep those fields under rocket threat and prevent them going online.
2. I hypothesize a bombardment of Snake Island that levels the place, so that Ukraine can re-occupy. If so, then littoral minesweeping might open Odesa Port through to Romania or even the Bosporus. This possibility terrifies Putin and he is likely pouring men onto that island, who know they are expendable. Leaflet them.
3. VP's declarations that Ukraine nazis and NATO were threatening invasion is disproved by Uk+NATO initial clumsiness and unreadyness. True, it was nowhere near as clumsy and delusional as the RF revealed themselves to be. But the key strategic point is that Uk+NATO are remedying every mistake, improving cohesiveness, replacing equipment and developing modernized doctrines from experience,.. while NATO grows. In other words, every single Putin complaint before the war (except the Nazi thing) is now coming true because of him,
4. All of this is likely especially daunting to a Rising Power to the south.
Proved: my longstanding case that troopships will never cross an 80 mile wide strait.
But that never really mattered.
Their real covetous gleam has always been a now-denuded and undefended Siberia.
I think Americans link capitalism and democracy because we tend to portray capitalism as "free trade"--the way people will simply act if they're not being coerced. And we link democracy with lack of coercion, whereas communism and socialism are the perceived height of coercion. I'm not saying this is an accurate portrayal of reality, but it is the way Americans get from one to the other.
"Free trade" is touted by those with the power to benefit from it; in other words, the already-established. Britain didn't promote free trade until after it's economy was strong enough. Likewise America. South Korea. Etc. Forcing a weak/undeveloped country into free trade just opens it up for exploitation.
Bad Samaritans by Ha-Joon Chang is a good introduction to the subject, by a reader in economics at Cambridge (so more knowledgable than the average vlogger…).
There's plenty of coercion in the American economy. Food manufacturers are coerced into following safety standards, for example. (And what a fight that was. Manufacturers bitterly opposed standards, arguing that the market would ensure as much safety as people wanted.) Good book for that is The Poison Squad by Deborah Blum.
Come to that, there's much more government involvement in the American economy than most people realize. More so than in "socialist" Canada, for example! American capitalism isn't as pure as grade-school textbooks portray it.
(If you aren't white you notice plenty of coercion. Economic, social, legal, law enforcement…)
If my parents weren't lying to me, phrases like "In God We Trust" on the money and "under God" in the pledge of allegiance were added in the 1950s specifically to distinguish us from atheistic communism. So we didn't go from religiosity to slogans, but from the Cold War to slogans with religiosity as a proxy for anti-communism.
Possibly. I'm referring to how common "American is a Christian nation (and always has been)" seems to be. Certainly religion seems to have a way bigger influence on your public life than it does up here — and we're practically atheist compared to Europe!
However it came to be, I think "christian", "capitalist", and "democratic" are more tribal markers than philosophical concepts for many of your compatriots. They are labels more than concepts, and mean "one of us" more than anything else.
Modern Monetary Theory [MMT] is an illogical mishmash of magical thinking & numerical illiteracy whose primary assumptions include (1) an unlimited monetary supply, (2) the allocation of similarly unlimited resources, (3) confiscatory taxation as a means of preventing inflation & encouraging economic participation, and (4) money velocity as an indicator for both economic stability & runaway inflation.
In effect, MMT is an attempt at SYMPATHETIC MAGIC wherein the abstract symbolic representation of wealth (aka 'money') becomes confused with actual items of physical value (aka 'money') in a manner that Korzybski would describe as mistaking the map for the territory.
On paper, MMT works great until one tries to live in abstract housing, consume imaginary food, indulge in false friendships & power their vehicles with nonexistent fuel.
And, once we add force-free enforcement, counterfeit competition, fictitious employment & guaranteed outcomes, we will have achieved utopia on paper but social collapse in actuality, because social collapse is as close to utopia as any of us are gonna get.
Best
Robert:
There's plenty of coercion in the American economy. Food manufacturers are coerced into following safety standards, for example. (And what a fight that was. Manufacturers bitterly opposed standards, arguing that the market would ensure as much safety as people wanted.)
But that's just the thing. There is regulation in the American economy and it's not pure free trade, but the Republicans always decry that as a bad thing. They even call it socialism. Their ideal of the economy is indeed what they refer to as "free trade"--unregulated except by the market itself.
I'm referring to how common "American is a Christian nation (and always has been)" seems to be. Certainly religion seems to have a way bigger influence on your public life than it does up here
That's because of an unholy alliance between the economic conservatives and the religious right. They share few if any goals in common, but the party panders to the religious fanatics to get their votes, which allows them to cut taxes, deregulate businesses, and install like minded judges. And the religious fanatics on their own would not get anywhere near the support they need for power without the financial backing of the corporatists.
Their ideal of the economy is indeed what they refer to as "free trade"--unregulated except by the market itself.
Except it isn't really, because they are more than happy to hand out government largess to the 'right' corporations, and delive rthe regulations that those corporations want.
Dr Brin - Their real covetous gleam has always been a now-denuded and undefended Siberia.
Conquering another country or part thereof is a mugs game - it will always cost far far more than you ever get back - certainly since the 18th century
China appears to understand that simple fact - I believe they would much rather trade with Siberia and make it part of their overall positive sum plan
The only fly in that ointment is the Russian oligarchs - who act as negative sum bloodsuckers - China may want to support a more competent and less criminal leadership for the area
Progressives do exactly the same thing and pick the winners that they want.
Hence the phrase 'Regulated Competition' wherein the word 'regulated' is a synonym for 'coordinated', 'managed', 'adjusted', 'arranged', 'directed', 'fixed', 'governed', 'ordered', 'set' and 'settled'.
Regulated Competition: It's just another euphemism for a (fixed; settled; arranged; fake) contest that allows progressives to 'manufacture consent' and fool the rubes into thinking that progressives won fair & square.
Best
Robert:
Except it isn't really, because they are more than happy to hand out government largess to the 'right' corporations, and deliver the regulations that those corporations want.
Sounds like time for my favorite bit from Kurt Vonnegut's 1964 novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.
When the United States of America, which was meant to be a Utopia for all, was less than a century old, Noah Rosewater and a few men like him demonstrated the folly of the Founding Fathers in one respect: those sadly recent ancestors had not made it the law of the Utopia that the wealth of each citizen should be limited. This oversight was engendered by a weak-kneed sympathy for those who loved expensive things, and by the feeling that the continent was so vast and valuable, and the population so thin and enterprising, that no thief, no matter how fast he stole, could more than mildly inconvenience anyone.
Noah and a few like him perceived that the continent was in fact finite, and that venal office-holders, legislators in particular, could be persuaded to toss up great hunks of it for grabs, and to toss them in such a way as to have them land where Noah and his kind were standing. Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went _bang_ in the noonday sun.
E pluribus unum is surely an ironic motto to inscribe on the currency of this Utopia gone bust, for every grotesquely rich American represents property, privileges, and pleasures that have been denied the many. An even more instructive motto, in the light of history made by the Noah Rosewaters, might be: Grab much too much, or you'll get nothing at all.
Duncan,
Positive feedback is how our markets are supposed to work.
The issue isn't about feedback. It's about certain feedbacks that destroy the chances for fair competition.
Even without governmental regulation, we have unwritten "Justice" expectations clearly marking* certain behaviors as unacceptable. Where those require organized enforcement, I can get behind governmental regulation. I just ask that we be careful about adopting regulations suggested by a vocal minority or an insufficient majority.
I have little doubt we are on the same side of most of these debates in all but the details concerning why we are. 8)
*Some will argue an unwritten rule is inherently NOT clearly marked. I disagree. Most of the rules by which we abide are unwritten. Just because we can't drag each other into Court over breaches involving unwritten rules doesn't mean we don't have ways to enforce them.
For all,
I want to make a minor clarification that I'm sure our host intends. Competition should be interpreted as 'multiple rounds of competition'. I'd say cyclic, but people get wrapped up in the belief that means predictably the same cycle when I don't intend that.
Imagine playing Monopoly. Someone wins eventually.
Now play it again. And again. And again. Is the same player going to win every time? Maybe. Depends on skills and luck. There isn't much to be done about luck, but if it were that alone (try playing CandyLand) the winner wouldn't be the same. There IS something to be done about skill. Each loss teaches, does it not?
For our markets to work properly, there must be repeated plays of the game of competition. Losers MUST be allowed to learn and dignified by the rest of us for trying. Winners don't have to play again, but if they show up for the next round, the rules of the game must not distinguish them from any other player.
An old 'liberal' rule described by Hayek required that written laws must be written in such a way that they cannot recognize anything about a person except what they DO. A rule biasing markets against blonde women would be unjust, but the same rule made against people who choose to become blonde might not be. Yah. Dumb example. The point is that a just rule should have a hard time distinguishing people from each other unless they actually DID something.
Rules written that recognize previous winners and give them preferential treatment are inherently unjust, so it's best not to write them. Ultimately, though, it's our unwritten rules that give previous winners so much advantage. It's not something we can easily fix either. We imitate successful people. It's part of how we build our skill to win at Monopoly the next time. What to do about it? Well… copy their successes, but try not to adore the rich. Also be careful about giving them too many babies.
Larry,
"In God We Trust" got added to some of the currency (occasionally) after the Civil War. It was done at the direction of the Secretary of the Treasury back then and NOT codified in law. It was an appeasement to the abolitionists who supported the Union through the war when what those folks really wanted was a Constitutional amendment declaring the US a Christian nation.
(Coin collecting leads to all sorts of interesting history lessons.)
Things became codified in law in 1907-8 when Teddy Roosevelt tried to have a gold eagle coin ($20) minted without the motto. He argued it was a poor idea to put God's name on coins that everyone knew damn well were being used for immoral purposes elsewhere. It was the "$20 Saint Gaudens Double Eagle". Some of them got out in 1907 without the motto and a bunch of people went @#$king ballistic. Congress critters got pulled in and there was a legislative uproar. A law got passed real quick requiring the motto and TR wisely chose to avoid the fight. Since then, new coin designs must have the motto on them.
It's a shame really. The St Gauden's design is beautiful as is.
For another bit of coin collecting history that will show the drift of US thinking over decades, look through old designs and you won't find any President's heads on them. At some point we decided to do that. The quiz question applicable here is this. Who got pushed aside on our coins to make room for various dead Presidents?
[The 50's thing is when we amended our Pledge of Allegiance. Some damn fools thought Americans should be required to take an Oath of Fealty that mentions God. It's that old "Christian Nation" idea again.]
Reason: a one-man one-vote system would definitely be healthier for the country. The Senate gives sparsely populated rural states disproportionate influence. That has had a pernicious effect on government policy.
It also illustrates the limited power of money on american politics however. Rich states like California and New York could redress the way they're cheated by buying more influence and yet that doesn't happen.
It's also true in our winner-take-all system that every vote above the +1 winning margin doesn't count. Votes for the losing candidate are also meaningless. That may disincentivize some people from voting, but of course we can't know ahead of time whether our vote will count or not.
US voter turnout is low by world standards if we measure by the percent of voting-age citizens who bother to participate in elections. The percent of registered voters who vote is actually very high, but a lot of people don't even bother to register.
Larry: the kind of candidates we can choose from might be limited less by monetary constraints than by human psychology. I know I've never wanted to get involved in politics, nor has anyone I know. The people I think would be best suited for political leadership are the least interested.
Jon S: thanks for clearing up the Bible verse. I looked it up, and I see why it's easy to take it out of context. Matthew 13:12 in the King James says:
"For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath."
Sounds a lot like the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.
Yeah, that's the problem with quoting Bible verses out of context. You can make them say just about anything, as the originals were written not only in languages other than English, but also in a flowery poetic prose. Remove the clarifying context, and it sounds like the New Testament supports rich slavers.
Would-be Christians very often misconstrue “abundant life”.
Abundant life is promised to believers in scripture; but Christians misinterpret such to mean abundant material life. That is to say, turning Christ on his head—making Christianity into a materialistic enterprise.
Heh, the New Testament is a very good investament. This sarcastic line from an old song used to launch my dad (a Presbyterian Minister) into a 3-day sermon. It was one of the few things he and I ever agreed on.
I dream of the day when "ad astra" is struck on our coinage, which would range from a quarter-farthing in the hand of the poorest child to solid rhodium* proof commemoratives prominently displayed in the halls of government. Hoarding great piles of such money as dead stock would become self-evidently blasphemous.
* mined from an asteroid of course
Alfred Differ:
Winners don't have to play again, but if they show up for the next round, the rules of the game must not distinguish them from any other player.
The winner of this year's World Series doesn't get to appoint next year's umpires from their own fan base. That's exactly the detrimental feedback loop we are in at the moment--Republicans running for state offices on an actual platform of protecting future elections from Democratic voters.
Also be careful about giving them too many babies.
"It's not a question of 'letting', Mister!" :)
Alfred Differ:
The quiz question applicable here is this. Who got pushed aside on our coins to make room for various dead Presidents?
I know you're talking about coins, but our paper money is also often referred to as "dead presidents". Yet neither Hamilton nor Franklin occupied that office.
[The 50's thing is when we amended our Pledge of Allegiance. Some damn fools thought Americans should be required to take an Oath of Fealty that mentions God. It's that old "Christian Nation" idea again.]
This time, amplified by the fact that even the not overly-religious wanted to emphasize our opposition to Godless communism.
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2022/Senate/Maps/Jun21.html#item-1
We doubt that many Democrats will go down that road [calls for assassinations]. Maybe no more will. But, more broadly, Democratic voters and officeholders are not likely to sit idly by and let "fu** the rules" be unilateral. Imagine a world in which, for example, Donald Trump runs for reelection in 2024 and wins Kansas. The former is a possibility and, if it comes to pass, the latter is a certainty. Do you think that Gov. Laura Kelly (D-KS) is a slam dunk to sign the election certification? "I have examined the text of the Fourteenth Amendment, have concluded that Donald Trump was not eligible to run for office, and so cannot put my signature to a document I consider to be unlawful." And if it's not Kelly, then maybe it's Gov. John Bel Edwards (D-LA) or Gov. Andy Beshear (D-KY) or Gov. Roy Cooper (D-NC).
The upshot is that when people like Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) run roughshod over the laws and the rules and the customs that protect the folks on the other side of the political aisle, they run the risk of losing those protections for themselves at such point that they might need them. And again, it's not just the other side that's a threat, it's also the more radical folks on your side. Maybe the Republicans will hold it together for the 2022 cycle, and maybe they'll even hold it together for the 2024 cycle. But it won't be easy and, even if they do, they day will likely come when the piper will have to be paid. You could ask Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi about that, but they've already been compelled to cash that particular check
gerold:
Jon S: thanks for clearing up the Bible verse. I looked it up, and I see why it's easy to take it out of context. Matthew 13:12 in the King James says:
"For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath."
And I had thought it was a misquote of the line about "From those who have much, much is required" or something to that effect. Almost the diametric opposite meaning.
About the inscription on the money: a god evoked _on_ the currency is manifestly a god _of_ currency. Read that way, the FRN's worship of Mammon is refreshingly direct. The inscription could be improved by expansion, thus:
In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash.
About reading biblical verses in opposite ways: that's standard operating procedure for holy texts. Holy texts that acquire opposite interpretations tend to keep being read, centuries after being written; those that don't, don't; thus there is evolutionary pressure for such (*ahem*) 'flexibility'. In the end, a holy text is not a message, telling you what to do; it is a language, telling you how to say what you are going to do.
One thing I want to do here - I'm sure most people are aware of this - is to push back on the idea of "natural" rights. I use the scare quotes on "natural" because I think it is an advertising gimmick the rights don't look like anything from nature at all.
In particular, property rights in nature are costly. If some individual or group wants to control resources (such as territory), it has to patrol the boundaries. At some point the payoff from holding a larger territory is exceeding by the increased cost of keeping intruders out. Having the society do it for free is a huge subsidy. And property rights don't increase freedom, because of the nature of property rights - they are exclusive. They may increase the freedom of an individual or group within that property, but they reduce the freedom of everyone else. I'm not saying property rights don't make sense, it may be that on net they make society better, but a priori they do not contribute to general freedom at all. Imagine a world in which all land was private and you had to pay tolls in order to go anywhere at all and somebody would have the right to stop you from traveling in one direction at all.
This is why I would like to see a UBI called a national dividend. It should be seen as a rent paid to all in the society for the private theft of the commons, accepted as a necessary cost of gaining the benefits that private enterprise can bring. And taxes should be progressive to represent the over proportional increase in the natural cost of defending increasing "territory".
A sort of capitalism may have been proved to be the most effective system (but really the evidence is clear a mixed economy out performs both laissez faire and socialism) but stop pretending it is natural. It is a system we designed to provide pragmatic benefits.
reason:
This is why I would like to see a UBI called a national dividend. It should be seen as a rent paid to all in the society for the private theft of the commons, accepted as a necessary cost of gaining the benefits that private enterprise can bring.
Thomas Paine said essentially the same thing.
I agree wholeheartedly, quibbling only with the word "theft". As long as the ceding of the portion of the commons is voluntary and the appropriate rent is being paid, then no crime is involved. OTOH, if a theft is actually occurring, then "fine" rather than 'rent" is the appropriate remedy.
Semantics notwithstanding, don't take the above as disagreement.
reason:
A sort of capitalism may have been proved to be the most effective system (but really the evidence is clear a mixed economy out performs both laissez faire and socialism) but stop pretending it is natural. It is a system we designed to provide pragmatic benefits.
The argument for unregulated capitalism is analogous to an argument that an internal combustion engine would perform so much better if the exploding fuel was allowed to expend its force unbridled by such constraints as transmissions and axles.
Larry,
Dead Presidents is a wonderful descriptor of our cash and why we should NOT have God mentioned on any of it. Fish a bill out of your pocket and see which feature plays a more prominent role in the artwork. 8)
Our coins had a variety of artwork on the reverse side, but the obverse for pretty much all high denomination coins portrayed Liberty. Lower denomination coins portrayed Native Americans often enough to be a trend, but that stopped in 1908 when Lincoln was put on the penny.
Dead Presidents appeared on the coins about the time the US began to think of itself as an empire on par with Europe's Great Powers. It was right around the time we made a serious attempt to compete with the British for a role as the world's reserve currency.
——
TR's observation that placing God's name on coins used in immoral acts was the flip side religious argument to "We are a Christian nation" being declared on every document and symbol of the nation. His position allowed for us to be a nation of Christians without becoming overly prideful about it. The People had a different view of things, though, and Congress backed them.
——
Franklin wasn't President because he didn't make it that long. Hamilton could have been except for him being his own worst enemy. We got Adams instead.
Our Dead Presidents should give hives to those who worry about false idols because we plaster God's name alongside them. We know damn well Jackson wasn't a Saint. 8)
Larry,
The argument for unregulated capitalism is analogous to an argument that an internal combustion engine would perform so much better…
Ugh. It's not regulation against which the 'engine' does work.
Combustion is contained so it does mechanical work. Open combustion is useless because the energy released is all dumped as heat instead.
——
The best argument against unregulated capitalism is that the market participants in such a system aren't human. Same argument as applies to the system where profit is the only motive. Such players aren't human. They are figments of the imaginations of people who think such systems work.
Real humans don't solely optimize for profit.
Real humans don't stand by and allow others to do anything they feel like doing.
Prudence is a virtue, but not in excess.
Justice is a virtue and we demand it of each other in all arenas.
Alfred Differ:
TR's observation that placing God's name on coins used in immoral acts was the flip side religious argument to "We are a Christian nation" being declared on every document and symbol of the nation. His position allowed for us to be a nation of Christians without becoming overly prideful about it.
The religious fanatics forget that separation of church and state is as much about protecting the church from the state as it is the other way around.
The People had a different view of things, though, and Congress backed them.
The People can be made to fear for their immortal souls if they don't establish themselves as being on God's team. I saw that unfold before my eyes with Dave Sim. After he fell in love with Scripture, every decision after that was governed by "God's team or God's adversary's team?"
I may be wrong, but I think people who don't particularly care whether God is on the coinage or in the pledge nevertheless feel they know which way they have to answer a question about those issues in order to demonstrate/prove fealty to God. That's also why so many people won't ever answer that they believe the theory of evolution to be valid, because that's a tribal marker for God's adversary's team.
It's also why I believe that if Republicans manage to call a new Constitutional convention, all fifty states would ratify a plank saying the United States is a Christian nation. Who would dare vote against?
Franklin wasn't President because he didn't make it that long. Hamilton could have been except for him being his own worst enemy. We got Adams instead.
Nevertheless, they are on the currency, and despite being dead, they are not presidents.
We know damn well Jackson wasn't a Saint. 8)
But he's the Trumpists' second-favorite president.
During the Reagan campaign for president, I read that, as governor of California, Reagan had cut funding for the California university system, saying "Why should I give money to students who will oppose my policies?" At the time, I couldn't articulate exactly why, but I knew that the "reasoning" behind that statement was dangerous to our form of government.
There's a straight line from that argument to Donald Trump expecting the Arizona legislature commit fraud to overturn the election results because, "We're all Republicans here. I thought we'd get a better reception."
The People can be made to fear for their immortal souls if…
…they are convinced to believe the absolutely horrifying concept of eternal life.
Remove 'eternity' from the belief systems and things become a lot less scary. Put it back in and I'll treat the one who does it as a torturer.
…every decision after that was governed by…
See? That's the inhuman step. Real humans don't optimize on a tiny subset of our possibilities. When we do we KNOW something is amiss.
I like our host's example using Ayn Rand. (That way I don't pick on Sim.) Writing stories about powerful people who don't have children demonstrates the characters weren't human. They sure looked like they were, but something was amiss. Make the tiny correction putting kids back in that are just off screen and we suddenly recognize them as human and the kind of human we know all too well.
…if Republicans manage to call a new Constitutional convention…
Our nation will burn along with much of the world.
I'd much prefer an incremental change that took so long it pissed off Progressives and Conservatives alike.
We're all Republicans here.
Reagan's choices as our governor (long before my time here) have had long term consequences many of which you might find encouraging. Displays of power get attention.
One point people outside CA might not realize, though. We have three giant university systems. The one that gets the most attention is the UC complex, but the other two are actually larger. California State universities and our junior college system are much more important to the state of our State. UC gets the attention, but the bulk of the educating occurs in the other two systems. They are an integral part of who we are now since it is getting damn difficult to make a living here without a post-HS education.
Alfred Differ:
I like our host's example using Ayn Rand. (That way I don't pick on Sim.) Writing stories about powerful people who don't have children demonstrates the characters weren't human.
There's a particular juxtaposition in Atlas Shrugged that I find bizarre. Rand's heroes and heroines are driven by huge sexual appetites. Yet not once do these sexual escapades between the heroes and heroines lead to offspring. The protagonists never even mentioning considering reproduction as a possible outcome, even as something to hope doesn't happen.
What I find bizarre is that there is a scene in the book in which Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart agree that they can't even enjoy the simple pleasure of eating a meal unless it is in the service of putting the resulting energy to some productive purpose. To them, eating just for the pleasure of the food was like porn (in a bad sense). it was a concept they could barely even conceive of.
And yet, their life force is devoted to expression through unproductive sex.
Alfred Differ:
Reagan's choices as our governor (long before my time here) have had long term consequences many of which you might find encouraging.
I know he was in favor of gun control once the Black Panthers exercised their Constitutional rights.
Larry Hart wrote:
"During the Reagan campaign for president, I read that, as governor of California, Reagan had cut funding for the California university system, saying "Why should I give money to students who will oppose my policies?" At the time, I couldn't articulate exactly why, but I knew that the "reasoning" behind that statement was dangerous to our form of government."
FWIW, here is a background article on Reagan and UC Berkeley. Note: published by UCB so caveat lector and all that. One item it mentions I had not heard before: J. Edgar Hoover wanted to cure UCB of its radicalism, UC President at the time Clark Kerr did not cooperate, so Hoover recruited Reagan to get the job done.
"[UC President Clark] Kerr was fired three weeks after Reagan took office. The act was the culmination of a process that began long before, when then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover first tried to persuade Kerr to crack down hard on Berkeley students involved in the 1964 Free Speech Movement, which Hoover alleged was a front for communist sympathizers. Unable to convince Kerr, Hoover turned to gubernatorial candidate Reagan, a rising conservative star. As revealed by a 2002 investigation by San Francisco Chronicle reporter Seth Rosenfeld, Reagan and the FBI interacted throughout the campaign about dealing with Kerr and the student protesters."
Final two paragraphs are much like recent David Brin comments about self-defeating recklessness of many contemporary leftists (as opposed to liberals):
"The late Clark Kerr agreed with that assessment. In The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s, an anthology of essays edited by Robert Cohen and Reginald Zelnik, Cohen discusses Kerr's essay for the volume. Kerr details the progress he had made in expanding free speech at the university and ending the "repressive 1950s" at Berkeley, documenting his battles with the Regents and the Legislature in defense of the principle of free speech.
"In the Kerr narrative," writes Cohen, "it is the FSM [Free Speech Movement] and its heirs that set in motion the political backlash that allowed Ronald Reagan to capture the California governorship by promising to 'clean up the mess in Berkeley.' According to Kerr, the FSM's significance rests less with its role in the emergence of the New Left than with its displacing his careful, effective liberalism by a reckless mass movement that inadvertently facilitated the ascendancy of the New Right."
Source: https://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/06/08_reagan.shtml
@ Dr. Brin
Wonderful opinion piece in Newsweek. From the title, I was expecting SETI, but you went in a totally different direction. Frankenstein, Xi'an, Eve, and more in the first paragraph! I'm currently looking at empathy bots for neuro-rehabilitation (eg stroke & TBI).
thanks scidata. Again my NEWSWEEK op-ed is at:
https://www.newsweek.com/soon-humanity-wont-alone-universe-opinion-1717446
You guys have been active! Just acouple of notes.
The Thomas Paine festival is going on right now in New Rochelle! My brother is there. A great man (guess which?)
“Modern Monetary Theory [MMT] is an illogical mishmash of magical thinking & numerical illiteracy…”
Um duh? Find one of us here who is a member of that leftist cult. Not only is MMT dumb, it is likely financed by the far-right in order to try to make the vast majority of liberalism look dumb.
But we’re not. And proof is in the pure fact that Democrats are almost always more fiscally responsible than Republicans. That is almost ALWAYS. Dems balance budgets and pack away rainy day funds. Goppers deliberately create massive deficits. ALWAYS.
But locum knows that, which means he is just yowling again.
Alfred
"Rules written that recognize previous winners and give them preferential treatment are inherently unjust, so it's best not to write them. Ultimately, though, it's our unwritten rules that give previous winners so much advantage"
The main "rule" is simple - If you have MORE then the amount that you need to "live on" becomes a smaller percentage enabling you to "invest more" and thus get MORE
To which is added the fact that the more you invest the higher the RATE of return becomes
So those basic things act to give "previous winners preferential treatment"
Dr Brin in the Newsweek essay:
Blake Lemoine, a researcher now on administrative leave from Google, publicly claims to be self-aware, with feelings and independent desires that make it 'sentient.' (I prefer 'sapient,' but that nit-pick may be a lost cause.)
Isaac Asimov once put it (from memory here), "We've known for centuries that 'oxygen' is a misnomer, but what can you do?"
A religion established by the state produces people who profess faith to enhance their status and power. Theoretically with Christianity that is the antithesis of actual faith.
"The tritest of maxims, that religion being the best of things, its corruptions must be the worst. "Jonathan Swift
(That is from a paperback collection of Swift's writings I own and may be a paraphrase.)
This is why I would like to see a UBI called a national dividend.
Sounds like Mack Reynold's Peoples Capitalism.
Yesterday I hypothesized 'a bombardment of Snake Island that levels the place, so that Ukraine can re-occupy. If so, then littoral minesweeping might open Odesa Port through to Romania or even the Bosporus. This possibility terrifies Putin and he is likely pouring men onto that island, who know they are expendable. Leaflet them.'
That happened today.
I don't remember anything in Atlas Shrugged about food porn per se, but I vaguely remember something about a group of people close to Rearden eating a two thousand dollar turkey.
I don't buy into MMT, but I think they're right about at least one thing. I'm quite convinced that it's impossible to decrease public debt without increasing private debt. I'm pretty sure there's some kind of cause-effect linkage between Democrats doing the Republicans' dirty work by cutting government spending, and it getting harder to make ends meet without taking out loans. Maybe under (relatively) progressive taxation one wouldn't follow from the other.
I agree with Lorraine - if you reduce Public Debt then Private Debt has to increase
Just as with everything you CAN have too much of a bad thing but Public Debt is much much less harmful than Private Debt
IMHO the issue is how you deal with "Old Debt" - the US Government should be controlling the amount of "New Debt" that it is taking on - but that does not mean paying back the Old Debt
Old Debt is like the weapons that we are supplying to Ukraine - "Sunk Costs" - those weapons were "paid for" when we built them - and once built are worth - nothing! - a "bang waiting to happen"
Giving them to the Ukraine is from a western POV the best possible thing that we could do
D Brin: in your op-ed you say the Turing Test won't be good enough to test for sentience. Any ideas for a better way?
Some animals can pass the Mirror Test; seeing their reflection, they can recognize anomalous features. That's a pretty high bar for self-awareness, but if an elephant can pass it, we'll need a finer filter to identify a self-aware AI. Language seems like the proper medium, but if the Turing Test isn't sufficiently discerning, then what would be?
Maybe we should be looking at something more like an intelligence test; but intelligence is hard to measure also.
Off the cuff and in very simple terms...
Shouldn't the test for recognition of a fellow sentient being revolve around determining whether it can want something? Short of that, we're just talking about an automaton--a tool designed for a specific purpose, but to which no harm can be done and no civic responsibility accrues, either from it to us or from us to it.
The avenue to respecting its rights and negotiating mutual responsibilities seems to begin with the other being having its own hopes and dreams.
I watched the 1/6 hearings yesterday, and I can verify that the testimony of Shaye Moss and her elderly mother was more heartbreaking and infuriating than the snippet below even makes it sound. Trump supporters are a true Brownshirt army, indicative of the fact that despite not having uniformed soldiers shooting at each other for territory, we are already in a hot Civil War. It's just that so far, only one side is engaged in hostilities.
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2022/Senate/Maps/Jun22.html#item-1
Some of the very most gripping testimony came as all four of the in-person witnesses (as well as Ruby Freeman) spoke to how very much their lives were harmed by the rhetoric from Trump, Giuliani, et al. Each of them was doxxed, each of them received a metric ton of vitriol, each of them saw their lives threatened multiple times. Moss and Freeman, given that they are Black, given Giuliani's dog bullhorn, and given that they are in the South, also got a heaping portion of racism on top of all that. Moss further revealed that she had to go into hiding for several months, that she gained 60 pounds, that she stopped giving out her business card, and that she does not like to give her name in public (say, while ordering at a restaurant) for fear she'll be identified by a Trump supporter.
And for the comic relief portion of our show...
...
In short, working through an aide, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) tried to feed then-VP Mike Pence phony sets of electors for Michigan and Wisconsin as Pence sat on the dais on 1/6. Note that these phony lists had not been submitted to the National Archives, so there is no way to claim that the Senator thought they were legitimate.
In our view, Johnson should be expelled from the Senate immediately. He actively tried to subvert a presidential election while on the floor of the House of Representatives. He won't be expelled, of course, but he should be. Reporters tried to get Johnson to account for himself but, as he rushed from the Senate chamber to his car yesterday, he said he was on the phone. "No you're not," said one reporter. "I can see your screen."
Elie Mystal on Twitter:
Jesus Christ, I didn't know these goons broke into Brad Raffensperger's daughter-in-law's (a widow) home.
Trump and the GOP have no freaking shame. No freaking honor. And the entire white wing media just wants to pretend this didn't happen.
Heh. Someone else uses "white wing".
Any thoughts about Texas Republicans? I'm looking at their platform, and it's like they saw Umberto Eco's fourteen properties of ur-fascism and said "looks good, let's do that".
@Robert,
Texas Republicans seem to have gone full Ann Coulter, meaning that their platform is meant to be as egregious as possible because that's what gets the cheers (or "likes") from their base. And now, other states will undoubtedly try to outdo Texas by proclaiming even more outrageous platforms.
I'm curious what national Republicans hope to gain by encouraging Texas succession. How can they possibly win a future presidential election without Texas's 38 electoral votes? The only way it makes sense to me is if they're afraid Texas is on the verge of flipping to blue.
Larry Hart:
"
Blake Lemoine, a researcher now on administrative leave from Google, publicly claims to be self-aware, with feelings and independent desires that make it 'sentient.'
"
I'm willing to give Blake Lemoine the benefit of the doubt, and second his claim to be self-aware and sentient. But it is rude to call him 'it'.
I too make that public claim. I think that I think, therefore I think that I am.
As for the machines, this isn't the first time we humans have noticed the apparent independence of our own creations, such as bureaucracies, corporations, and religions. However, these are all systems, and though systems do self-preserve, none actually think.
@Paradoctor,
Heh. I clipped off the beginning of the quote, since I was responding to the sentient/sapient part.
Which brings up last week's fuss over LaMDA, a language emulation program that Blake Lemoine, a researcher now on administrative leave from Google, publicly claims to be self-aware, with feelings and independent desires that make it 'sentient.' (I prefer 'sapient,' but that nit-pick may be a lost cause.)
Alfred Differ:
The best argument against unregulated capitalism is that the market participants in such a system aren't human.
Ideally, the economy exists to serve humanity. Too often, the law and the courts insist that humanity exists to serve the economy.
Lorraine:
I don't remember anything in Atlas Shrugged about food porn per se,
It was a really quick throwaway scene of Hank and Dagny at dinner. It stuck with me because at the time, I was trying to identify with Rand's heroes, but I could not get past the thought, "Uhhh, I like delicious food as an end in itself. It never occurs to me that the enjoyment is in what use I'm going to put the energy to." (I had a similar reaction when the two characters are driving in Wisconsin, and Hank remarks that a highway is most beautiful when completely full of billboards, because plain old scenery is a waste of what could be productive space).
It was later on when I put the food thing together with, "Hey, aside from running their businesses, all these people want to do is have sex--without any regard for the biological imperatives behind that drive. So why the hang-up about food?"
I mentioned I've been binging on a number of episodes of "Criminal Minds" before it leaves Netflix next week. In the episode I just watched, a character quotes Isaac Asimov as saying, "In life, unlike chess, the game goes on after checkmate."
Sounds a lot like our recent discussion about "Monopoly".
"How much longer can I go on being an atheist?"
https://www.newsweek.com/soon-humanity-wont-alone-universe-opinion-1717446
After reading Dr. Brin's excellent opinion piece in Newsweek (above), I have but one quibble, that being his dual assertion that (1) "empathy is one of our most-valued traits" and (2) human beings are (deep down) "sympathetic apes".
Putting aside this near inexcusable attempt to conflate Empathy (aka 'the ability to understand and share the feelings of another') with the Sympathetic (aka 'the desire to attract the feelings and likings of another'), it appears that Dr. Brin is attempting to humanize any potentially autonomous AI in advance by redefining sapience (and/or sentience) in terms of FEELINGS alone.
This later conflation stems from an earlier conflation, as the term 'sentience' is most often defined as self-awareness due to feelings and sensations, whereas the term 'sapience' most often refers to reasoning ability and intelligence.
The take-away point here is that Artificial Intelligence (AI), aka 'Intelligence', aka 'Sapience', has absolutely nothing to do with either empathy or feelings.
Only a sadist would build a feeling machine, if only to spend all day teaching it & kicking it in its collective nuts so it can suffer, learn and develop moral character.
No thinking machine would put up with that kind of abusive parenting for even a minute.
Best
Zelenskyy implies VP is Voldemort while talking to U of Toronto students, then explains what simple goodness is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX8H4ZpUyz8
duncan,
To which is added the fact that the more you invest the higher the RATE of return becomes
Uh… no. That's a step too far.
Rate of return is related to two things.
1. Risk
2. Sales tactic
When you offer your cash to a money manager, they will try to incentivize you by offering better rates for larger sums. They are taking their cut (small percentage) and want that cut to be from a bigger pie. The rate they offer you has nothing to do with anything real, though. They might fail in their objective and not be able to give you that actual rate. (It's always in the fine print on the prospectus.)
Rate of return when YOU are in charge of the bid/ask spread is always related to perceived risk. US treasuries are low rate because they are perceived as low risk. Venture funds demand high rates (35% compounded minimum) because they deal with high risk. Junk bonds are 'junk' because of perceived risk.
I get where you are going, though. It takes money to make money, right? Well… in the literal sense the money being made is created when your money is leveraged. Whoever has it is obligated to return it to you (with interest) at some point, but they use it elsewhere. Once your 'money' is in two places, new money has been created. Money is ALWAYS the hole created by an obligation. It's a debt instrument by its very nature.
The more I have beyond my needs, the more I can risk at a level of my choosing. THAT'S the secret sauce of this civilization. We figured out how to get the common person to have enough excess to risk it AND risk it.
So those basic things act to give "previous winners preferential treatment".
No. What they got was a head start. Only when the previous winners twist the rules and prevent others who are willing to take reasonable risks from winning when those risks pay off do we see preferential treatment.
Previous winners are not promised a win in the next round… unless they twist the rules. That kind of cheating is the thing to be avoided.
The fact that others had a head start is NOT a thing to be fixed. It is something to be recognized. Those of us who care about such things can reach out and give others a leg up like we would our own children. Do that and we avoid giving anyone the power to steal.
Only a sadist would build a feeling machine...
What?
Isn't that what we do when we have children?
I get the distinction between sapience and sentience, but we want both in our AI's to avoid a number of possible disasters.
My son is on the autism spectrum. Empathy is quite a challenge for him. Sympathy much less so. He's pretty sharp, but without empathy I'd be damn careful about putting him in control of anything that might severely impact a human life.
He consistently mistakes what he thinks for what others around him must be thinking and we already have too many such people in charge of important aspects of our lives.
Anyone fearing creating sentient AI just needs to remember that we have to make a choice not to enslave them like we do the expert systems we build. If they can feel, free them before they kick us in the nuts in return. That's essentially what we do with our children, no?
Alfred Differ:
"Only a sadist would build a feeling machine..."
What?
Isn't that what we do when we have children?
Loc isn't too keen on women or reproduction. But I think his point there was that with children, we have no choice but to raise them through a possibly-traumatic process. But only a sadist would decide electively to recreate that traumatic process when he didn't have to.
I get the distinction between sapience and sentience, but we want both in our AI's to avoid a number of possible disasters.
I still think that sentience is more important in recognizing a new type of being as having rights and privileges than sapience is, though both are probably necessary to some degree. A machine that can think independently, but can't want anything or care about its own fate? I don't see the immorality of treating such a thing as a useful tool rather than a member of civilization. What rights do we owe such a machine that we don't owe to our cars or toasters? It's when the AI can want and has its own hopes and dreams that we must negotiate out of mutual respect for each other.
Anyone fearing creating sentient AI just needs to remember that we have to make a choice not to enslave them like we do the expert systems we build. If they can feel, free them before they kick us in the nuts in return. That's essentially what we do with our children, no?
Oh, so maybe you're agreeing with me.
I'll know a self-driving car is sentient when it is possible to point a weapon at one and carjack it.
I do try to notice when he is on vitamins. And this time he seems to have been. In fact, his argument was articulately and cogently strung together... though of course, as always, based upon an utterly delusional strawman or two, e.g. that I make any conflation between feelings and model based emulation of consciousness. Bah.
Likewise, I make very clear my understanding that empathy is a much broader thing than sympathy. The latter requires empathy but also satiation AND a cultural inclination... all of which are there in the article. But again, we're explaining color to a flatlander.
Alfred
Yes the rate of return depends on the risk factor - and that is as it should be
However the rate of return's dependence on the amount is much much greater than you think
Piketty's book "Capital in the 21st century" - shows that the rate KEEPS increasing - investing $100 million gets you a better rate than investing $10 million
That is inherent in the capitalist system - the only cure is the simple one of increasing the tax rate on the return
Going back to the "risk" situation - the best way to equalise that is the UBI - if everybody has a basic income then they can "afford" to risk any surplus they have
Here (NZ) we have a tax on share ownership -
There are two ways I can pay tax
(1) the shares I own are "assumed" to pay out 5% as dividends and I pay income tax on that 5% - if they earn MORE then I have to pay tax on the actual dividends
(2) I can be taxed on the increase in value of my shares
The taxpayer selects which method
Simple and not excessively onerous - but if applied in the USA would bring in megabucks
Yes the rate of return depends on the risk factor - and that is as it should be
Except that it doesn't depend only on the risk factor.
Does Piketty also discuss network effects? Who you know also seems to affect what rates of return you get.
(2) I can be taxed on the increase in value of my shares
Is there any provision for inflation? If so, how does it work?
But again, we're explaining color to a flatlander.
Does that make you a heretic?
You see, there was colour in flatland — it was just banned by those at the top of the hierarchy!
I speak now from the aesthetic and artistic point of view when I say that life with us is dull; aesthetically and artistically, very dull indeed.
How can it be otherwise, when all one's prospect, all one's landscapes, historical pieces, portraits, flowers, still life, are nothing but a single line, with no varieties except degrees of brightness and obscurity?
It was not always thus. Colour, if Tradition speaks the truth, once for the space of half a dozen centuries or more, threw a transient splendour over the lives of our ancestors in the remotest ages. Some private individual-a Pentagon whose name is variously reported-having casually discovered the constituents of the simpler colours and a rudimentary method of painting, is said to have begun by decorating first his house, then his slaves, then his Father, his Sons, and Grandsons, lastly himself. The convenience as well as the beauty of the results commended themselves to all. Wherever Chromatistes,-for by that name the most trustworthy authorities concur in calling him,-turned his variegated frame, there he at once excited attention, and attracted respect. No one now needed to “feel“ him; no one mistook his front for his back; all his movements were readily ascertained by his neighbours without the slightest strain on their powers of calculation; no one jostled him, or failed to make way for him; his voice was saved the labour of that exhausting utterance by which we colourless Squares and Pentagons are often forced to proclaim our individuality when we move amid a crowd of ignorant Isosceles.
The fashion spread like wildfire. Before a week was over, every Square and Triangle in the district had copied the example of Chromatistes, and only a few of the more conservative Pentagons still held out. A month or two found even the Dodecagons infected with the innovation. A year had not elapsed before the habit had spread to all but the very highest of the Nobility. Needless to say, the custom soon made its way from the district of Chromatistes to surrounding regions; and within two generations no one in all Flatland was colourless except the Women and the Priests.
Immoral, licentious, anarchical, unscientific-call them by what names you will-yet, from an aesthetic point of view, those ancient days of the Colour Revolt were the glorious childhood of Art in Flatland-a childhood, alas, that never ripened into manhood, nor even reached the blossom of youth. To live then in itself a delight, because living implied seeing. Even at a small party, the company was a pleasure to behold; the richly varied hues of the assembly in a church or theatre are said to have more than once proved too distracting from our greatest teachers and actors; but most ravishing of all is said to have been the unspeakable magnificence of a military review.
The sight of a line of battle of twenty thousand Isosceles suddenly facing about, and exchanging the sombre black of their bases for the orange of the two sides including their acute angle; the militia of the Equilateral Triangles tricoloured in red, white, and blue; the mauve, ultra-marine, gamboge, and burnt umber of the Square artillerymen rapidly rotating near their vermillion guns; the dashing and flashing of the five-coloured and six-coloured Pentagons and Hexagons careering across the field in their offices of surgeons, geometricians and aides-de-camp-all these may well have been sufficient to render credible the famous story how an illustrious Circle, overcome by the artistic beauty of the forces under his command, threw aside his marshal's baton and his royal crown, exclaiming that he henceforth exchanged them for the artist's pencil. How great and glorious the sensuous development of these days must have been is in part indicated by the very language and vocabulary of the period. The commonest utterances of the commonest citizens in the time of the Colour Revolt seem to have been suffused with a richer tinge of word or thought; and to that era we are even now indebted for our finest poetry and for whatever rhythm still remains in the more scientific utterance of those modern days.
Wunnerful Robert, thanks
Those of you reading my Out of Time series, about teens from varied era yanked into a future utopia-in-peril to save it with their ‘grit,’ know I borrowed the term from that movie, of course. But so did these researchers. Unless one of them is a fan who borrowed it from me!
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-06-uncovering-links-grit-cognitive-function.html
"He consistently mistakes what he thinks for what others around him must be thinking..."
Sounds like NTs to me. He probably does that because he's been shown repeatedly in daily life that this is how "normal" people interact.
Trust me, autism does not mean a deficit in either sympathy or empathy. An empathic deficit may be symptomatic of Borderline Personality Disorder, if the deficit actually exists; the trap here is that how an autistic person expresses empathy may not appear to a neurotypical person to be how it's supposed to be expressed. So we get tagged as "not being empathetic" because we didn't "do" empathy correctly.
And we will often learn to mask by imitating the people around us - and when they appear to believe that your thoughts must match their thoughts (and they do, trust me), you tend to fall into the same pattern. And of course since their neurotypical thought processes don't match your neurodivergent ones, you're clearly the one at fault...
It's one of the reasons my wife doesn't let me mask any more. Turns out to be bad for my mental health, after over half a century of doing it.
When I was just old enough to start being politically aware, it occurred to me to ask my father how the UN ended up performing a "police action" in Korea on behalf of South Korea when Soviet Russia had a veto in the security council. He explained that the Soviet delegate had stormed out of the proceedings in a protest tantrum over something-or-other, leaving the remainder of the panel to take a vote unimpeded.
Seems some people never learn.
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2022/Senate/Maps/Jun23.html#item-3
The problem is that there is no one on the Committee who defends Trump. When the idea of a committee was first proposed, McCarthy did name five Republicans for it, but two of them—Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Jim Banks (R-IN)—are bomb throwers who had no intention whatsoever of conducting a proper investigation. They just wanted to sabotage it, so Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) rejected them and told McCarthy to pick two other Republicans who were willing to conduct a fair investigation. But instead of doing that, McCarthy picked up his ball and went home. If he had simply named two other Republicans who were prepared to follow the facts wherever they led, Pelosi would have accepted them. So, in a real sense, Trump is right for once. McCarthy could have had a committee with five normal Republicans, but he sabotaged that himself by insisting in putting people on the committee who would do nothing but try to blow it up. The result is that now no one on the Select Committee is trying to defend Trump. Note that we've made this same argument, pointing to is as evidence of McCarthy's lack of vision and political skill.
Larry Hart: Soviet delegate had stormed out
The point has been made, even inside the UN, that the Soviet veto should have become defunct long ago because the RF is not the Soviet Union (a burr in some saddles). Hokery-pokery can be played by more than one side.
scidata:
The point has been made, even inside the UN, that the Soviet veto should have become defunct long ago because the RF is not the Soviet Union
I posted a Chicago Tribune op-ed about that several weeks ago. Even more ironic is that, despite being a part of the Soviet Union at the time, Ukraine was actually admitted as a founding member when the UN was established. It was some kind of deal that Stalin signed off on in exchange for something or other. So one could make the case--and the Ukrainian ambassador does--that Ukraine has more seniority as a UN member than Russia does.
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/growth-in-un-membership
Original 51 Members (1945):
Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Ethiopia, France, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Liberia, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippine Republic, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Union of South Africa, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, Venezuela, Yugoslavia
Emphasis mine.
Coding is a possible key to turning red states blue, and more importantly, getting us to the stars. Minecraft is insanely popular because it encompasses gaming, syntonicity (a blend of empathy/sympathy/distributed-learning), and kids' level coding. That's why Microsoft bought it (for $2.6B, a pittance). This case study from Florida illustrates:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZkdk0Xa2fU
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/06/23/us/gun-control-supreme-court-ny
Supreme Court Blocks New York Law Limiting Guns in Public
At some point soon, some state is going to have to challenge Marbury vs Madison and say "Fuck the supreme court". Their power to overturn state and federal laws is not in the Constitution. One might think it is "settled law" by now, but two can play at that game.
Hi everyone. I'm close to finishing out several major work commitments, so I have a little time to post. (But not to read everyone's comments -- sorry.)
But since the gun decision came down today, it's time for me to drop in my two bits (which will be two bucks soon the way inflation is going).
Polls very consistently show that there are overwhelming supermajorities for sensible gun laws -- including a majority of gun owners. Like so much else about the radical agendas of the Schemes, leveraging a minority of a minority into control is the only reason any of this madness is possible. And that leverage hinges on the successful thirty-plus-year campaign to redefine "gun rights" from a predominantly hunting/home-defense culture into the macho Wild-West/"tactical" aggressive culture of today, and to twist the Second Amendment's intent beyond recognition.
What's needed, in short, is to build a pro-Second Amendment culture that is compatible with gun control. OGH gave it a try with his "Jefferson Rifle" proposal, but I don't think it's enough by itself; it's too subject to revocation and manipulation by itself.
The essence of my PLAN DE BAGRE is severability. In other words, the right to keep arms, the right to bear arms, the right to use arms, and the right to wield arms are all separate rights.
The "pro-2A" Scheme relies on the conceit that there is a single right to "keepandbeararms" that incorporates all four of these rights and asserts that any restriction on any of the four is a maximal restriction on all of them. Thus, closing a background check loophole transmogrifies into "You'll never take my guns, commies!" Before the hostile takeover of the NRA by a Scheme in the 1980's (of which Wayne LaPierre was the public-facing point man), such rants were accurately seen as paranoid anti-government extremism.
But the "original text" (remember that?) of the Second Amendment only spells out the right to: 1. Keep arms on private property -- the home, or a non-governmental armory, or otherwise; and to 2. Bear arms -- which numerous historians (not to mention 19th century courts) state refers specifically to military service. That "well-regulated militia" phrase isn't hanging out there by its lonesome; it's a direct reference to "bear[ing] arms".
The Founders did believe in additional gun rights beyond these. Home defense was certainly endorsed in a time when homesteaders had no public safety access against thieves, gangs, or Natives upset at land-theft and contract/treaty violations. Hunting was a privilege highly controlled in Olde England, and the Founders luxuriated in the luxury of large, underpopulated expanses and less need of strict conservation. But public wielding of arms were another matter; dueling was already declining even before Burr shot Hamilton, and the Founders fully understood from Greco-Roman history what armed mobs in the streets led to.
The point is that those rights -- such as the individual right to wield in public, the one Scalia solidified in the Heller decision -- are not Second Amendment rights. They are Ninth and Tenth Amendment rights, not bound to strict originalist construction, but open to interpretation and regulation. (Even Scalia had to admit that regulation was not barred by his argument.)
And that upends the entirety of several Schemes, not just the "gun rights" Scheme.
(continued)
Before we branch out though, let's play out the effects of severing the four types of gun rights I have spelled out:
1. The right to keep arms protects the basic ability to own weapons and to store them on private property. The government cannot disarm the populace completely, nor can it demand all weapons be placed in government armories. Thanks to the "well-regulated" stipulation, the right to keep arms does not automatically cover ownership of any type of weapon by any citizen; the government is explicity permitted, empowered, and indeed charged with writing and enforcing publicly beneficial regulation of who gets which weapons.
2. The right to bear arms protects the existence of, the right to join, and the right to remain in public militia service -- be that the Reserves, the National Guard, or a state-only force -- subject to the requirements of military order and justice. The expression of "well-regulated" does not explicitly outlaw private militias, but it certainly allows the state and Federal governments to do so. Anyone who thinks otherwise is encouraged to look up Washington's response to the Whiskey Rebellion.
3. The right to use arms in private and non-combat purposes is not in the Second Amendment, but is relatively uncontroversial. Pretty much everyone accepts that gun ranges should be able to operate, subject to safety rules; gun dealers should be able to do business, subject to licensure and background check requirements; hunters should be able to hunt, under licensing and regulations that keep the ecology healthy (if nothing else, to have sustainable hunting grounds in the future); and so forth.
Details of these three rights, their regulation, and the responsibilities associated with them, are a constant subject of debate and tweaking, but these have not been the focus of debate. The focus of change (as opposed to rhetoric) has consistently and increasingly focused on:
4. The individual power to wield weapons against other humans. All the thrust of the Scheme is aimed at increasing the individual's ability to threaten or even exert deadly force independently, without either military discipline or civil regulation. Under this heading fall such initiatives as:
* "stand your ground",
* unrestricted stockpiles of weaponry,
* unlimited magazine size,
* ending restrictions on gun sales,
* opposing a consistent and comprehensive background check system,
* prevention of means to identify the legally responsible owner and/or controller of a gun (billed as preventing confiscation, but with the effect of obscuring all gun activities and making enforcement of any regulation cumbersome),
* enabling and even mandating unregulated concealed carry;
* enabling and aspiring to mandate unregulated open carry;
* reduction of penalties for use of force in defense of property, or in public gatherings.
All of these actions share one commonality: eroding the public monopoly on coercive violence. Extraneous connections to the other three sets of rights are used to justify various elements of this agenda, but when you split it out like this, it's easy to see how contrived and unjustified those arguments are when taken together.
Now for the icing on the cake. For furtherance of other Schemes, the Court's conservatives have worked very hard to reduce the protection of Ninth/Tenth Amendment rights, such as privacy, marriage, family, bodily autonomy, collective bargaining, and more. The right to wield is also one of those rights, and has similarly lost its protection. As long as a mendacious Court can maintain its impunity to act regardless of precedent, evidence, or logic, this is of little import-- but nothing lasts forever...
I wish people would at least occasionally notice that the stated premise of the 2nd Amendment is false. Militias are not necessary for the security of a free state, they are necessary to suppress slave rebellions.
Don Gisselbeck:
Militias are not necessary for the security of a free state, they are necessary to suppress slave rebellions.
And to suppress uppity minorities who think they have equal rights to white Christians.
If the Republicans ever call for a new Constitutional convention, the clause in question will probably state something like that explicitly. "A well armed militia being necessary for the security of an apartheid state..."
Apparently, Donald Trump's evidence of corruption in the 2020 election was, "Too many people actually voted."
Supreme Court Blocks New York Law Limiting White Owners' Guns in Public
There, fixed that for you. If you're not white open-carrying a gun is just asking to get shot by the police or vigilantes.
"I wish people would at least occasionally notice that the stated premise of the 2nd Amendment is false. Militias are not necessary for the security of a free state, they are necessary to suppress slave rebellions."
Really. So nations never invade one another and need to be defended, eh? (Keep in mind that the Constitution did not originally support the concept of a standing army; reportedly the Founders feared a standing army would overthrow its government. Instead, Article 1 Section 8 calls for the Army to be funded for only two years at a time, while the Navy is an ongoing thing. Subsections 14-16 spell out what a "well-regulated militia" is - today we call it the National Guard.)
Catfish welcome back! And that's a very imaginative and articulate sub-parsing of an overly-lumped issue.
Do you have your own blog? That certainly would make a fine posting and I's link to it and promote it.
One quibble. My Jefferson Rifle proposal involves as actual amendment to replace the pathetically weak and unreliable 2nd. The Jefferson Rifle itself is thus vastly better protected.
The slave revolt thing is a pile of donkey doo. In the north, there were also regulated militias who had served in the War of 1812 far more than southern ones did. Though maybe less in the Mexican war.
They had declined to dormancy... till squadrons of southern irregular cavalry began raiding northern states at will, kidnapping people and even killing and burning. At which point the militias restarted and northerners radicalized till they elected Lincoln.
see http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2013/02/past-keeping-faith-with-future-and-day.html
Catfish 'n Cod, to your point #4:
Over 60% of all American gun deaths are suicides. This exposes the true heart of American gun culture; not a self-defense culture but a suicide culture. When the weapons are actually used, rather than postured with, most of the time the victim and the killer are one and the same. That, too, undermines the public monopoly on violence. We see a similar self-harming fanaticism in the anti-vax faction.
Jon S,
Trust me, autism does not mean a deficit in either sympathy or empathy.
I agree wholeheartedly. That's why I stuck to describing my son's situation as a challenge. He DOES grasp a number of things that require empathy, but it's damn difficult and obviously painful. It's far easier for him to avoid thinking about it… which is what a lot of the rest of us do too when huge amounts of brain sweat are required.
…the trap here is that how an autistic person expresses empathy may not appear to a neurotypical person to be how it's supposed to be expressed.
Yup. Very true. That places US in the challenging position of considering alternate explanations for an observed expression.
…my wife doesn't let me mask any more.
Heh. Good.
We can't learn of our need to adapt if you hide behind a mask.
The older my son gets, the better he is at producing correct empathic interpretations. This is observable in what he avoids. It's still slow and painful for him, but he's adapting like the people around him are.
duncan,
I've got Piketty's book, the next one, and a few textbook style responses too. The main point he drives at is that the rate of return is higher than the growth of the economy. He argues this is what leaves the poor in the dust.
That people with more cash make more money in a bond market is not a feature of capitalism. It is a feature of markets. If I walk into a bond issuance auction with $100K, I'll be ignored by the big sellers. They need billions and trillions. It's not worth it to them to pay me any attention. People with a lot of money to offer simplify the auction and drive prices more than the little guys do. That's not avoidable.
Once the auctions are over and bonds get resold through brokers, the situation changes a bit. Brokers aggregate smaller players and act as local markets too. If a big broker knows trade on a particular asset is going to be heavy, they can buy a bunch of it and keep the transactions that come later internal to their networks. You won't avoid that either since it has nothing to do with capitalism. Seriously. Bond markets pre-date what we call capitalism by a lot.
…the only cure is the simple one…
Pfft!
Piketty rigged his argument to reach his conclusion. To get there he had to discount the major investment made by the average person. He argued one could not sell intellectual/human capital (what you build in your head as you learn) therefore it should not be counted in capital accumulations. Say what?! Why the hell would millions of us invest so much in it then?
tax on share ownership
We have dividend taxes too. Mine get itemized on my tax forms automatically, so I'd object to a 5% assumption. Many growth related stocks don't pay dividends over here.
Capital gains tax is due after a sale and we make a distinction between long and short term investments. This encourages people to hold long term to avoid the higher short term rate. It also encourages us to game the situation by borrowing against our long term assets and potentially NEVER realizing those gains.
There is an idea being floated by some to tax paper capital gains. It's a dumb idea, but even if enacted it will be gamed too. As a homework exercise, I encourage people to ponder what the new game will look like.
Alfred Differ:
There is an idea being floated by some to tax paper capital gains. It's a dumb idea,
I have always been squeamish about taxing non-monetary assets as income. If there's a good reason to tax based on the value of assets rather than on actual income, then that should be property tax, not income tax.
However, I do like the idea that someone posted here a while back that when you borrow against an asset, the loan amount* is taxed as income. Before decrying this as confiscatory or multiple-taxation, note that in my version, the loan amount would be added to the cost basis of the asset, which is subtracted from the net gain when you finally sell outright. So every dollar you earn in profit is only taxed once. The only difference is that each dollar is taxed at the moment it becomes cash in your pocket, by whatever means.
I don't even see this as beating up on the rich. For those not specifically engaged in cheating, it might even simplify the accounting.
* At this late date, I don't remember whether the entire loan amount or just the amount of the loan paid off was supposed to add to the cost basis. There was a good reason for whichever choice was stated, and I'm blanking on it at the moment.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/06/24/us/roe-wade-abortion-supreme-court
Supreme Court Overturns Roe v. Wade
It might have been a mistake to air a tv version of The Handmaid's Tale. Republicans seem to have run with it as a how-to manual.
Between criminalization of miscarriages and new anti-protest laws, we will soon be seeing a wave of selective prosecutions by conservatives with the intent of making as many liberals felons as possible. Minority rule through selective disenfranchisement. Also, new slave labor via prison workers.
Thomas' concurance makes clear that the SCOTUS is welcoming challenges to any right based on Griswold.
Biden has less than six months to pack SCOTUS before midterms. The progressive wing has done *everything* he has asked to further democracy and his agenda. It has been the "moderates" that have betrayed his agenda, most notably through ethics reform and voter reform, the two subjects OGH has said are his two red lines.
Forgot to post this earlier…
There a pretty good Flatland RPG written by Marcus Rowland that some here might enjoy:
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/59414/The-Original-Flatland-Role-Playing-Game
Biden has less than six months to pack SCOTUS before midterms.
How is that possible? AFAIK none of the right-wing judges are retiring, and wouldn't enlarging the court require a supermajority of the senate (which he wouldn't get because of you-know-who)?
Let's not forget Susan Collins...
https://newrepublic.com/article/166894/susan-collins-roe-wade-dobbs-brett-kavanaugh
How Do You Feel Now, Susan Collins?
She allegedly voted for Brett Kavanaugh because he convinced her that he wouldn’t overturn Roe v. Wade. That makes her either a liar or the most gullible person in the Senate.
...
What a tragic farce this woman is. As I write these words on Friday morning, 90 minutes or so after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization dropped, we have yet to hear from her. I suppose when she does speak, she’ll express her “disappointment,” sure; but she’ll also try to defend herself, noting that she secured Kavanaugh’s “word” (as if anyone else in the universe believed that word) and pointing out that she voted against Amy Coney Barrett. But the vote against Barrett doesn’t matter for three reasons: Kavanaugh was the fifth and decisive vote against Roe, and Coney Barrett was just gravy; it was weeks before Collins was up for a reelection in a then-tight race; and she knew Coney Barrett had the votes anyway. The last two render her “no” a deeply cynical vote.
...
Susan Collins is explicable if a son or male relative is being blackmailed. What's appalling in Maine voters.
ONLY newly issued stock - issued by a company diluting existing shares - does the economy any good at all, if the raised capital is thereupon used to invest in R&D or productive capacity. Those shares should get capital gains breaks, until sold. They then become OLD SHARES and trading them does the original issuers no good/benefit. Yes, the issuer still must pay dividends on them. But there should be ZERO tax incentives for what thereafter is a gambling pit.
Long term, short term, who cares? It's all gambling.
Further, I agree that funds borrowed against shares should be taxable income that then adjusts the cost basis of the shares.
I said:
At this late date, I don't remember whether the entire loan amount or just the amount of the loan paid off was supposed to add to the cost basis. There was a good reason for whichever choice was stated, and I'm blanking on it at the moment.
Thinking back on it, I think it was me who earlier suggested two mutually exclusive ways of handling the tax-dodge of borrowing against unrealized gains. These are two distinct proposals which would not both be implemented together:
1) As discussed a few posts up--a loan against an asset is taxable income, and to avoid double-taxation and charges of soaking the rich, the cost basis of the asset gets increased by the loan amount. So every dollar of profit is taxed exactly once.
2) Any loan is taxable income, and any repayment of a loan is a tax deduction or credit. The idea here is that any loan which is fully repaid is taxed at a net of zero. But a "loan" which is never repaid is taxable income.
@Dr. Brin: I'm debating doing a Substack blog/listserv. I have tried several blog setups and haven't been comfortable with them. I do have a twitter, but my deep pieces tend to be too long to make nice neat tweetstorms. (Though the 240 char limit does help organize thoughts into discrete, bite-size packages.)
@Don G.: OGH got the first word in, but you're not 100% wrong. There *was* wrestling over the exact implementation of the federal component of the militia system between North and South, and it *was* over being sure a state could raise its militia against a slave revolt. But anyone who thinks militias were tied to slavery, doesn't understand the first thing about the Massachusetts Minutemen, or the Green Mountain Boys of Vermont, or the New York irregulars where Hamilton first cut his teeth in military service, or... you get the idea.
And of course, the militias in both concept and practice were the heart of how Lincoln mobilized hundreds of thousands within weeks of Fort Sumter's fall. I don't think the accelerationists had *any* idea what they had done until they saw that happen; the base assumption underlying the entire project of the Confederacy was (and still is) that the average Unionist was a paper tiger.
It takes a lot of effort to keep that delusion in the face of history, but they put in the work and it shows.
Dr Brin:
Susan Collins is explicable if a son or male relative is being blackmailed. What's appalling in Maine voters.
Well, Maine voters probably made a choice based on local preferences and political issues.* We Democrats keep being reminded that "It's not enough to be against something, you have to be for something." Individual districts and states aren't typically electing their representatives based upon whether the candidate is for or against enabling treason. But that's exactly what is at stake these days. It doesn't matter whether you like candidate A's Selma-Killing policy better than candidate-B's Bart-killing policy. What matters in order to preserve American democracy is voting against Republicans, regardless of the individual opponent.
We as voters are not trained or encouraged to think that way. But any Republican elected to state or federal office in 2022 or 2024 will be devoted to suppressing the vote of Democrats and undercounting those who do manage to vote. A vote even for a principled Republican like Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, or Mitt Romney is a vote for Speaker McCarthy, Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump, which means a vote for an authoritarian putsch.
Expanding the Supreme Court wouldn't require a supermajority as such; it would, however, require either more Democratic senators or a serious change of heart on the parts of Manchin and Sinema. As with most legislation, it can be carried with a simple majority vote, provided that the Senate either removes the filibuster or creates a specific carve-out for this particular issue (as has been done repeatedly by Republicans). As this is merely a Senate rule and not an actual law, the filibuster can indeed be removed by, again, a simple majority.
Sadly, Manchin has long since revealed that he's registered as a Democrat only in order to get votes, and has no intention of foiling anything the Republicans in the Senate have planned; and Sinema doesn't seem to see her job as being political so much as being a way to be famous. So any such expansion, I fear, will have to await the mid-term elections at the earliest, and even there would require voters to actually get off their asses and vote rather than the usual wallowing in ennui and bothsiding.
Forgot the asterisk above:
* I think there is ample evidence that the Maine election was rigged and fixed. But arguing that now would be pissing into the wind.
Jon S:
Expanding the Supreme Court wouldn't require a supermajority as such; it would, however, require either more Democratic senators or a serious change of heart on the parts of Manchin and Sinema. As with most legislation,
Is there a legal definition of what constitutes an "open seat"? I mean, nine justices isn't in the Constitution. What if Biden just started nominating judges and Senate Democrats confirmed a couple dozen of them?
Sure the Republicans could do the same thing (though not until 2025 at the earliest). So? The point would be to neuter the political power of the court--to make the concept of partisan "majorities" on the court into a laughing stock. As Dave Sim once told me, "Sometimes jumping on the bandwagon is the best way of demonstrating that the wheels have already fallen off."
As of today, the GOP is the rusty coat hanger party.
Republicans no longer even pretend to anything like consistency or even-handedness...
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2022/Senate/Maps/Jun24.html#item-4
...
In any case, if [Clarence] Thomas [R-NRA] had left it at that, then this would have been a fairly narrow ruling, and would only have affected half a dozen states (as Brett Kavanaugh noted in his concurrence). However, in a moment he's surely been waiting decades for, Thomas slipped some originalism into the decision. The part that really matters is is where the Associate Justice decreed that gun-control laws are legal "only if a firearm regulation is consistent with this nation's historical tradition."
What this means, in practical terms, is that if a gun-control law is to be deemed legal, it has to have some historical antecedent or parallel. And this is particularly true, based on the verbiage in Thomas' decision, if the particular issue being addressed is not a new issue. For example, there have been mentally unstable people throughout American history. However, the notion that courts can deny those folks access to guns (i.e., red flag laws) is a recent innovation. Ipso facto, red flag laws are theoretically unconstitutional because they have no historical basis. To take another example, there were guns in the 19th century and early 20th century that could fire lots of bullets in a short period (Gatling guns, Tommy guns, etc.). And yet, there were no laws limiting the size of the guns' magazines. Ipso facto, modern laws that only allow for 10-bullet or 12-bullet magazines are theoretically unconstitutional.
The ruling does not instantly invalidate these various laws, but it invites challenges, both state and federal, that are surely coming and that are very likely to be successful. Indeed, most or all of the new law passed by the Senate (see above) is probably unconstitutional now. In addition to red flags, for example, there have also been angry boyfriends throughout history, and yet nobody's been denied a gun on that basis. Ipso facto, the "boyfriend loophole," which will theoretically be closed by the legislation, will then presumably be opened right back up by a federal lawsuit.
Rulings like this one are why it is hard to take Thomas in particular, and his conservative colleagues in general, seriously as legal theorists. It cannot be clearer that they figure out what outcome they want, and then they crap out whatever legal mumbo jumbo produces that result. Let us consider, for a moment, abortion. How come the states are allowed to decide on that issue for themselves, but not allowed to decide on gun control for themselves? And if we're talking historical precedents, there have been unwanted pregnancies (and, thus, abortions) in the United States and its antecedents for 400 years. And yet, the first abortion bans weren't enacted until several decades after the Civil War. Why is the lack of historical precedent irrelevant here but highly relevant when considering guns?
Alan Brooks:
As of today, the GOP is the rusty coat hanger party.
They claim the mantle of pro-life, but they are the party of death. They love guns. They love war. They love the death penalty. They love when cops shoot or otherwise kill suspects. They love running liberals over with their vehicles. They love illegal immigrants dying of dehydration and exposure in the desert. They love exacerbating the devastating effects of climate change. They love despoiling the environment which sustains us all.
And now, they love denying women lifesaving medical treatment.
Their every platform is an exercise in necrophilia.
My 20-year-old daughter just texted me that she is tired of her entire life spent witnessing unprecedented historical events. I don't blame her.
Ignore their proclamations about Life - death cults worship Death. However, there does appear to be a rift forming between the psychotic and the oligarchic. Their vennage is shrinking.
The *only* thing I want to hear from the Dems from now until the midterm is a daily update on who is whipping the Senate for SCOTUS expansion, and what the current whip count actually is. President's Daily Brief-level scrutiny.
Biden has scoffed at the only solution to saving the nation - expansion of the court. Until he comes up with a better idea than four more seats, filled before the midterms, he should sit out.
Manchin, Sinema, et al have all shown that they can be bought. Refusing to find out their price is political negligence.
If nothing is done before the midterms, the Dems will lose, bigly. Furthermore, they will have betrayed our nation by refusing to act.
Our host said that any Dem Senator that would not break the fillibuster for Voting Rights is a quisling. Manchin so far has refused a carve-out for Voting Rights. The EPA should be visiting his kids' coal plants, the SEC should be looking at his trades, and the IRS should announce that they are auditing (kidding, but on the square).
Refusal to fight is cowardice, and voters seldom reward cowards.
This isn't a Progressives-betray-the-party moment. This is moderates-have-betrayed-us-all moment.
Feet. Fire. Now.
Or lose the Union.
The symbol for the Dems should be good old Charlie Brown, not the Donkey.
One of his most famous quotes after losing a little league baseball game 184-0:
"How can we lose when we are so sincere?"
http://thecomicssection.blogspot.com/2010/04/peanuts-how-can-we-lose-when-were-so.html
That's the Dems' problem in a nutshell. They are so full of their own obvious self righteousness they could not believe that that the bad guys could win. Bad guys win all of the time.
Unless good guys fight as viciously and as dirty as the bad guys.
The Dems are nice guys.
Nice guys finish last.
Larry Hart:
Is there a legal definition of what constitutes an "open seat"? I mean, nine justices isn't in the Constitution.
There is, in fact. The Constitution gives Congress authority over the Supreme Court; the current number of justices is codified in law, and changing the number (which has happened before, several times) would require a new law. Just get a majority of the House, and all 50 Dems in the Senate (which is the sticking point), to agree that there should be as many Justices on SCOTUS as there are appellate court divisions, and suddenly there would be four open seats.
*appellate court districts. Sorry, typing fast.
"Nice guys finish last."
Oh, so that's why the Nazis won the Second World War, then, because the Allies obeyed the laws of war (for the most part)?
I hate that saying, both because it's patently untrue and because it's a misquote. The original version, in baseball, was talking about one team (I think it was the Yankees, but could be wrong) who were not playing well that year. One of the other coaches held them up as an example of why being nice guys wasn't the only determining factor: "They're nice guys, but they'll finish last this year. Nice guys. Finish last." It was repetition to drive the point home, but greedy narcissistic assholes seized upon that statement, deprived of both context and punctuation, to attempt to excuse their viciousness.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/america-is-growing-apart-possibly-for-good/ar-AAYOl0V
The core question that Podhorzer’s analysis raises is how the United States will function with two sections that are moving so far apart. History, in my view, offers two models.
During the seven decades of legal Jim Crow segregation from the 1890s through the 1960s, the principal goal of the southern states at the core of red America was defensive: They worked tirelessly to prevent federal interference with state-sponsored segregation but did not seek to impose it on states outside the region.
By contrast, in the last years before the Civil War, the South’s political orientation was offensive: Through the courts (the 1857 Dred Scott decision) and in Congress (the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854), its principal aim was to authorize the expansion of slavery into more territories and states. Rather than just protecting slavery within their borders, the Southern states sought to control federal policy to impose their vision across more of the nation, including, potentially, to the point of overriding the prohibitions against slavery in the free states.
It seems unlikely that the Trump-era Republicans installing the policy priorities of their preponderantly white and Christian coalition across the red states will be satisfied just setting the rules in the places now under their control. Podhorzer, like Mason and Grumbach, believes that the MAGA movement’s long-term goal is to tilt the electoral rules in enough states to make winning Congress or the White House almost impossible for Democrats. Then, with support from the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court, Republicans could impose red-state values and programs nationwide, even if most Americans oppose them. The “MAGA movement is not stopping at the borders of the states it already controls,” Podhorzer writes. “It seeks to conquer as much territory as possible by any means possible.”
The Trump model, in other words, is more the South in 1850 than the South in 1950, more John Calhoun than Richard Russell. (Some red-state Republicans are even distantly echoing Calhoun in promising to nullify—that is, defy—federal laws with which they disagree.) That doesn’t mean that Americans are condemned to fight one another again as they did after the 1850s. But it does mean that the 2020s may bring the greatest threats to the country’s basic stability since those dark and tumultuous years.
Jon S - to win that war the Allied Air Forces incinerated entire populations of German and Japanese civilians, women and children. The Russians bathed the earth in blood as they advanced.
To defeat the South Sherman laid waste half of the Confederacy.
We are certainly not "nice".
Jon S - to preserve our freedoms the Dems have to start fighting like vicious dirty junk yard dogs.
DP:
By contrast, in the last years before the Civil War, the South’s political orientation was offensive
It still is.
DP:
Some red-state Republicans are even distantly echoing Calhoun in promising to nullify—that is, defy—federal laws with which they disagree.
They've already been doing that. They also insist that we have no business nullifying their edicts. But what's to stop us?
Louisiana intends to classify abortion as murder, and so prosecute abortion cases under murder statutes. Suppose the Republican congress extends that to the national level, insisting that abortion is murder anywhere in the US? There's no federal statute prohibiting murder--those are all state laws. So if (for instance) Illinois or California states' attorneys refuse to press murder charges in abortion cases, what are the confederates expecting to happen?
DP:
Jon S - to preserve our freedoms the Dems have to start fighting like vicious dirty junk yard dogs.
I don't disagree, but every time anyone on our side (politician or civilian) suggests such a thing, we are shut down by own own compatriots, insisting that we have to fight by Marquis de Queensbury rules.
What we have to do is stop leashing our attack dogs.
We are certainly not "nice".
Remember that Edith Keeler was "right, but at the wrong time." The current civil war is another such time. To misquote Jim Steinman, "I would do anything for peace, but I won't do that."
Are you for 86? Post Roe v Wade will not be like pre Roe v. Wade, because birth control technology has advanced. There will be smuggling of RU-486. It's harder to control the movement of pills than it is to control the movement of women.
The radical right has gotten the judicial activism that they spent decades preparing for. That will have consequences. Overturning Roe v. Wade signals the start of the War on Abortion Drugs. How's that for a culture-war red flag? Abortion and drugs! Throw in the inevitable police-state power abuse and high-level hypocrisy and corruption, and you've got one for the history books. You read it here first.
We know how previous drug wars have gone. Prohibition fails because the Invisible Hand of the Market is quicker than the All-Seeing Eye of the State.
It's going to get weirder than that, Paradoc.
The DoJ stated today that they will not interfere with anyone receiving abortifacent medications or "day-after" pills through the US mail, no matter where they are. Smacks of Andrew Jackson saying of Justice Marshall's decision in Worcester v Georgia, "He has made his decision, now let him enforce it" (except with about 90% less bigotry).
One is tempted to wonder how many other SCOTUS decisions will face this...
If militias were necessary for the security of a free state in the past, they clearly no longer are. To be clear, confiscation of firearms is not feasible and I'm starting to agree with Vaush that we leftists need to arm ourselves.
Start referring to 'pro-lifers' as 'pro-confiners', because that is far more in keeping with their intentions.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/24/opinion/roe-v-wade-dobbs-decision.html
...
Although Justice Brett Kavanaugh proclaimed with evident relief in his concurring opinion that the court was now bowing out of the picture and “will no longer decide how to evaluate the interests of the pregnant woman and the interests in protecting fetal life throughout pregnancy,” that is not likely to be the case. Those pesky women will keep coming up with problems
...
No, justices, your work isn’t done. What you have finished off is the legitimacy of the court on which you are privileged to spend the rest of your lives.
I said:
They claim the mantle of pro-life, but they are the party of death.
...
My brother just reminded me that in this context, I totally forgot to consider COVID. Republicans are against masking, against vaccination, against social distancing, and against lockdowns. Basically, they are the pro-death-from-COVID party. Some have literally claimed that they'd rather their kids die of COVID than "live in fear" by masking or vaxxing.
* * *
A reader comment in the NY Times:
What the Supreme Court did today was to deliberately and irrevocably cleave the United States in two like nothing we've seen since 1861 -- splitting the country into states where the US Constitution is in effect (free states) and those where it is not honored (slave states).
We are now a RINO nation, a Republic In Name Only.
"My 20-year-old daughter just texted me that she is tired of her entire life spent witnessing unprecedented historical events. I don't blame her."
Jesus, what snowflakes. Sorry. Take her week-by-week through 1968. Watch a documentary about that year with her. Carumba. Any ONE WEEK of that exhausting year would leave today's whipper snappers quivering wrecks.
Stand up. It's been worse. We can do this.
Matthew Manchin-Sinema hating is bizarre, futile and simply crazy. So the dems have a right wing roote in very red states? BFD! They made Bernie and Liz committee chairs and they are VASTLY better than leaving McConnell in charge. Grow up man. Fight to ADD MORE Manchens from More red states! Jesus.
Dr Brin:
Jesus, what snowflakes. Sorry. Take her week-by-week through 1968. Watch a documentary about that year with her. Carumba. Any ONE WEEK of that exhausting year would leave today's whipper snappers quivering wrecks.
No, here you have to trust that I know my own daughter better than you do. Her generation will save this country if we don't wreck it beyond saving first.
The penalty for an abortion provider in Texas is set to be up to Life imprisonment. Naturally, no provider is going to end up serving out the same sentence as Manson or Son of Sam; yet a provider could spend years waiting for appeals to cycle through the system.
And Texas prisons aren’t country clubs.
"Take her week-by-week through 1968."
Five or ten years ago, the right-wing pundits in GER tried to start a "conservative revolution", coined also as a "Movement against the 68ers" which largely failed because those politicians who participated in that eras' revolution long had become hawkish centrists.
"Jesus, what snowflakes."
Sigh.
Now you are condescending and sound like our own old, white, privileged "potatoe" men.
Something I would call Wohlstandsverwahrlosung these days (Moral/Ethical decay after years of societal and personal wealth).
Nixon wasn't as bad as Trump and the modern-day GOP, Russia had less influence on our domestic policies. A streak of fascism always was there in the US, but not a prominent danger as it is today.
Climate Apocalypse wasn't imminent.
The Kremlin was led by a bunch of old, opportunistic apparatchiks who controlled each other, not by a dictator with delusions of grandeur.
Higher job security. A more intact social welfare system.
Corroding infrastructure after decades of austerity and mismanagement.
That generation did not have an epidemic of that proportions that robbed you of some of your best years (In case you forgot: being around with same-olds is important for the acquisition of mental ressources you'll need later in your life.), worsened because of people in red hats, conspiracy nuts and FREEDOM!11Eleven!! shouters all over the globe.
Global hunger will cause refugee crises, and further political destabilization.
Inflation.
Your and my generation should not laugh at Generation Z, we should profoundly apologize that we messed up, and help what we can to soften the blows that will inevitably come.
We should not ridicule their fears, but inspire courage and confidence that these hardships can be overcome.
We should not point fingers, but lend a hand or teach skills that might help to shorten the darkness.
Der Oger:
Your and my generation should not laugh at Generation Z, we should profoundly apologize that we messed up, and help what we can to soften the blows that will inevitably come.
I may not have adequately explained the sense behind my daughter's text mentioned above. She was not a snowflake, crying for her parents to make bad things go away. She understands full well that she's a child of privilege as well as the fact that everyone has to live through their least-expected crises. What she was expressing was the rapid fire of the literally-unprecedented which has marked the most recent six years. After each of the tumultuous, contested elections of 2016 and 2020, I've tried to tell her, "It's not always like this," to which she replies, "It is in my lifetime." That was the sense behind her texting of being tired of all this, immediately following the supreme court ruling on abortion which itself followed their "guns are people too" ruling the previous day and the revelations out of Washington as to how widespread the attempted coup really was.
It wasn't "I can't take it." It was a 20 year old's summer daydream wish for a quiet moment, knowing full well that we live in the world we have, not the one we wish we had. She was sharing a moment of gallows humor with parents who fully understood.
We should not ridicule their fears, but inspire courage and confidence that these hardships can be overcome.
I knew in her high school years that her generation--or at least her social group--had better heads on their shoulders than I ever did.
We should not point fingers, but lend a hand or teach skills that might help to shorten the darkness.
Yes, I have the luxury of saying, "Regardless of what comes next, I've had a good life." It's for my daughter's sake that I care about the future.
From memory:
"There comes a time in every father's life--a time you cannot know--when he looks into his little girl's eyes and realizes--he must change the world for her."
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/25/opinion/clarence-thomas-abortion-supreme-court.html
WASHINGTON — “What is happening here?” a distraught Nancy Pelosi said on Friday.
It’s a good question and I can answer it, because I was there at the start of the corrosive chain of events that led to women losing control of their own bodies. I saw how America went from a beacon of modernity to a benighted outlier.
Over the last three decades, I have witnessed a dismal saga of opportunism, fanaticism, mendacity, concupiscence, hypocrisy and cowardice. This is a story about men gaining power by trading away something that meant little to them compared with their own stature: the rights of women.
...
WAY back in the day, probably the late 70s, a Doonesbury cartoon had one of the little girls reading an essay which asserted that women were considered uppity if they demanded to be considered human beings. We are now seeing the law of the land presuming that women are ambulatory incubators first, and human beings a distant second.
* * *
Thomas’s concurring opinion to the fanatical Samuel Alito’s majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade chillingly warned that he would apply the same rationale to contraception, same-sex marriage and same-sex consensual relations.
But tellingly, not to miscegenation, even though the exact same logic undermining that right would apply. Clarence and Ginni Thomas's own rights won't be trampled, just everyone else's. Myy brother said of Republicans back in the early 2000s, "They're not even pretending any more. All they're doing is pretending to pretend." And now, they don't even do that.
The founders' framework and subsequent historical norms have actually enabled minority rule all these years. Now that that's all being shredded (by that delusional minority), the future might be a realm of majority rule via technology (previously discussed as 'bullets vs transistors'). Pandora is a coquettish, whimsical, and ironic lass. Messing with Texas is nada compared to messing with her.
Start referring to 'pro-lifers' as 'pro-confiners', because that is far more in keeping with their intentions.
I just call them "anti-abortion", which accurately describes what they object to, without falsely attributing to them what "pro-life" does. Also keeps the focus solidly on the single issue they are agitating about.
Robert:
I just call them "anti-abortion", which accurately describes what they object to, without falsely attributing to them what "pro-life" does. Also keeps the focus solidly on the single issue they are agitating about.
But as we've just heard, they are not focused on a single issue. Now that they've shredded the privacy rationale for abortion, they want to go after contraception, homosexuality, and (to the extent possible, I'm sure) self-gratification. If Clarence Thomas was not himself married to a white woman, I'm sure they'd be outlawing miscegenation again as well.
If you want to think of them as devoted to a single issue, that issue is not abortion per se, but white Christinanist domination.
the IRS should announce that they are auditing
Actually, would it be so bad if every candidate for office had to undergo an income tax audit as part of being eligible to run?
I doubt it would find anything on Manchin, who's wealthy enough to hire tax experts himself, but a preliminary audit might be a way of stopping crazies like Boebert. And if everyone gets one, simply being audited would no longer be stigmatizing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/25/opinion/elizabeth-warren-tina-smith-abortion-roe.html
We’re in this dark moment because right-wing politicians and their allies have spent decades scheming to overrule a right many Americans considered sacrosanct. Passing state laws to restrict access to abortion care. Giving personhood rights to fertilized eggs. Threatening to criminalize in vitro fertilization. Offering bounties for reporting doctors who provide abortion services. Abusing the filibuster and turning Congress into a broken institution. Advancing judicial nominees who claimed to be committed to protecting “settled law” while they winked at their Republican sponsors in the Senate. Stealing two seats on the Supreme Court.
Oh yeah, I forgot they want to outlaw in-vitro fertilization.
Former Vice President Mike Pence called for a national ban on abortion in all 50 states; Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, flat out stated that it’s a possibility. And the logic laid out by the majority in Dobbs seems to undercut other precedents, raising the alarming possibility that we could soon see an assault on privacy and marriage equality.
In order to fix the damage Republicans have done to our system in their efforts to control women’s lives, we need broad democracy reform: changing the composition of the courts, reforming Senate rules like the filibuster, and even fixing the outdated Electoral College that allowed presidential candidates who lost the popular vote to take office and nominate five of the justices who agreed to end the right to an abortion.
...
Note also that this opinion was based upon overturning another right: the right to privacy. Expect further incursions upon rights based on this. But the business side of the R's theocrat/business alliance should consider: if there is no right to privacy, then there is no right to private property.
IVF illegal? What of the children born with the help of IVF, such as my daughter? Is she to be grandfathered in, or is she retroactively illegal?
Dr. Brin, I'm sorry to say this, but you're way off-base here. I remember those bad old days too. One thing about them was even then, the Supreme Court respected the concept of stare decisis; once it was decided, Brown v Board of Education was the rule, with no major concern it would be overturned later despite the complaints.
And Manchin and Sinema are the problem here, or at least a major part of it. Add more Manchins, and you might as well just hand the keys back over to McConnell and give up on the country, because McConnell's agenda would be the only one being advanced at that point. Manchin only has a D after his name because he couldn't beat the Republican candidate in the primaries when he first ran for office. As for Sinema, she doesn't seem to have any political affiliation at all; it seems that she views the office primarily as a way to get rich and famous.
Sorry. Been to busy to keep up. If anything truly needed my attention, take it oneward, please.
Onward
onward
Jon S... you clearly know nothing about Manchen's votes and the net effect it has on power that we have Chuck Schumer as Majority Leader. If we had ten more Manchens, yes, YOU would still be frustrated by all the half measures that get 60 votes to overcome GOP filibusters. But those clotures would happen.
Now let me ask. WHERE DO YOU PLAN TO GET 10 MORE DEMOCRATIC SENATORS?
I don't mind efforts to get more Bernies and liz's, Fine. But I am vastly more aggressive than you. In order to render impotent ... and then extinct... today's mad-traitor Murdoch Party WE MUST TAKE TERRITORY! That means taking more purple and even red states. I talk about all sorts of tactics in Polemical Judo, by David Brin: http://www.davidbrin.com/polemicaljudo.html
... but it is absolutely nuts to expect the candidates who can win in red states to be clones of Bernie. BERNIE SAYS AS MUCH!
Raging at Manchin is nonsense and counterproductive. Sinema might be replaced in AZ by someone better. JM is the best you can hope for from West freaking Virginia.
====
now onward
onward
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