Okay, I've devoted my last few blogs to wonderful science news... and ongoing not-so-wonderful arguments over how to get max benefits and minimize the harms from 'generative artificial intelligence,' as the mélange of chatGPT/Bard/LLM-golems are now being called.
(Alas, and I say this with love: any emerging super AI would look at the insipid level of discussion going on right now and conclude there's little sapience to emulate, here on Planet Earth!)
Anyway, for my own health and yours, let's turn to a less-infuriating topic. Time for a political posting! Let's start with the so-called "election steal"...
== Thieves think everyone else does it, too ==
Latest word is that half of the saps who signed on to be on Trump's slates of shill 'alternate electors' are now turning state witness for immunity. Fine. Anything to push this along.
Trumpian claims of a 2020 election ‘steal’ are so weird! Most of the places where it supposedly happened were in Red States where Republicans controlled the offices with real power over elections – governor, Secretary of State and Attorney General. So what's the rationale, again?
The scenario is that somehow Democrat Mayors of those states’ large cities concocted a cabal that cheated on a massive scale, fooling all the State-controlled employees and veteran senior citizen volunteer poll workers. Moreover they did so perfectly! In a coordinated putsch that left zero real evidence. (Again, those red attorney generals would have pounced, if there were any. Any at all.)
Okay so, we're to believe a whole passel of pathetic mayors did this - far better than any operation by any spy agency in human history - without a single participant being motivated by patriotism – or huge whistleblower rewards offered by Fox etc. -- to denounce with evidence and collect those big prizes? Wow, that's some scenario!
Throw in vote-flipping voting machines. Dig it, that indeed used to happen... in red states that used notorious machines without paper ballots or receipts that might allow a hand audit. That travesty quietly ended during the Obama Administration and today almost all places in the U.S. use paper that's then read by the voting machine. This, in turn, allows post-election hand audits of suspicious (or random) precincts. You might recall when Arizona Republicans tried to do just that, with the "cyber ninjas" in Maricopa County. Much to their embarrassment when Biden's net total went UP by a very small amount?
Which is weirder? That this illogic keeps recurring? Or that democrat politicians are too polemically dim to make the point as clearly as I just did?
== Weirder ==
What’s the weirdest aspect? That millions of flat-out imbeciles across our highly educated country clutch these KariLake / MikeLindell yammers desperately, like religious catechisms, without ever, ever, ever having the maturity to get fed up with promises of evidence “next week.” See “Kari Lake carries election denier banner across Iowa amid divided GOP.”
No surprise to those of us who spent 2+ years demanding to see the 'proof' Lindell and others raved that they had and would release 'next week.' Like Trump's "great US health care plan to replace Obamacare!!!" that he literally said "you'll see next week!" scores of times.
Or "You'll do your taxes on a card!"
Or "I'll show you all the financials!"
Or "Putin is smart, so very smart!"
Oh and here's a slam dunk I have never seen applied to this mess. Where are those 'love letters" Trump exchanged with Kim Jong Un?
They are property of the U.S. archives and the people of the US. It is the most explicit case of a state document - openly touted BY Trump - that was never handed over. Stolen, in fact. Have any of you even heard a peep about that?
Probably some advisers took one look at the letters and cried 'burn them!'
Um, okay. Here's another 'why does no dem say it?' Why, after putting us through years of "Obamacare is terrible!" do we hear nothing about it or even the O-word, from McCarthy & McConnell and them all? Could it be because Obamacare works and is now hugely popular? Or because folks might ask: "Where is that Trump-care plan we were promised 'next week'?"
Heck after 3 years, will you go ahead and indict Hunter Biden already? You have 60% of state attorneys general and had J Durham, Trump/Barr's Special Prosecutor.
Maybe Hunter WILL get indicted for something. Fine. Meanwhile, though, grand Juries across America have indicted almost a hundred times as many GOP factotums as Democrats. Demand your uncle BET $$$ on that. He will flee.
Heckfire, let's compare - transparently - HB's entire life to any randomly chosen month of Donald Trump Junior. Seriously, let’s start a bi-partisan campaign to get BOTH Trump and Biden to order utter transparency from their sons. And while we’re at it, let’s compare war hero and great guy Beau Biden to Eric?
“By his fruits you shall know him.”
Oh, one lie that’s circulating: … that disgraced former counter-intelligence FBI lead in New York had been opposed to Donald Trump. In fact McGonigal’s paymaster in Moscow was the same one who recruited as Russian agents Michael Flynn and Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort and Rudy Giuliani and a dozen others.
Only in a twist, it appears that the New York Times may have been complicit… along with Putin pal Jill Stein… in helping Trump achieve his surprise ‘victory’ in 2016. See the Washington Post on: Why Biden's document case is different than Trump's.
Enough ranting from Brin for now. Hang on just a bit.
== Random musings ==
Apparently whole networks of Russian spies are being unravelled by western intelligence agencies, validating my longstanding suspicion that those agencies have long been quietly far more competent than they let on. Alas, what has not cracked yet are two far more important vipers' nests: the world of secret wealth hoards and the kompromat files used to blackmail (likely) hundred in western capitals, especially Washington DC.
== And... Jimmy... ==
Okay, some of you are old enough to recall when presidents both earned and deserved some degree of respectful deference, even from the opposition. Nixon wrecked that, as did Vietnam and hell year 1968.
Still, there was a flicker the first year of Jimmy Carter's term, when a little affectionate humor flowed... attempting to recapture some of the fun of Vaughn Meador's JFK - ribbing First Family records. I just played a little of this one. And here are some sample tracks.
Of course we know the US right was desperate for revenge for Watergate, and conspired with the Ayatollahs to extend the hostage crisis to reward Reagan for favors to come. And since then US politics were never the same, especially after Dennis 'friend to boys" Hastert's 'rule' ended all negotiation in the greatest deliberative body on Earth.
Still, with all the world suddenly rediscovering Carter - at minimum as a profoundly good human being - this little affectionate roast merits remembering.
225 comments:
1 – 200 of 225 Newer› Newest»Seen at Charles Stross's (@cstross@wandering.shop)mastodon page:
"Fun fact: since 2019, there have been more Conservative MPs convicted of sex offenses than there have been people convicted of voter fraud". Would not be surprised if an analogous statistic was true here.
Darn. I just missed the cutoff I had a reply for Larry Hart from the last one:
Thanks Larry. Indeed…Though I’m not an AI specialist or a pre-cog like OGH, I would guess that *script-wise: it might be possible today, and if not: within a couple of years or so. Image-wise: maybe 5-7 years? I can imagine that it would be possible in a few years after that for a group of fans to do something like you suggested for a modest amount of money.
For your consideration:
In a world where money rules and IP laws aren’t worth the digital paper they’re written on: a group of die-hard fans of the classic shows of Paul William Henning use the funds raised through a small Kick Starter campaign (supplemented with money from neighborhood bakes sales) to “commission” from the “creative agents” of a “Rising Asian Power” additional full seasons of 22 episodes each of their beloved Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, and Green Acres. (Be afraid. Be VERY afraid!)
Re: film (and TV) anachronisms: Yep. The most glaring recent example I can recall is where in 1920s(?) England of Downton Abbey, the Earl of Grantham uses the term “parallel universe”!
*This goes into what has been termed the “Nora Ephron Problem” (or something similar) by the WGA: they’re worried about a producer telling a n intern to upload all of Nora Ephron’s scripts and ask for a script about X in her style.
==========================================================================================
More Trump fun:
At least 8 fake electors have been granted immunity in the Georgia Trump investigation (https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/05/politics/georgia-trump-fake-electors-immunity/index.html)
Carol Martin corroborates E Jean Carroll’s account of aftermath of alleged rape
(https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/04/trump-civil-rape-trial-last-witness)
A bit older, but another interesting dispatch from Bizarro World:
Most Republicans would vote for Trump even if he's convicted of a crime, poll finds
(https://www.npr.org/2023/04/25/1171660997/poll-republicans-trump-president-convicted-crime)
============================================================================================
Finally, I consider this quite strange:
US arrests two for running secret Chinese ‘police station’ in NYC
The FBI has arrested two US citizens on charges of running a Chinese ‘secret police station’ in New York. (https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/world/us-arrests-two-for-running-secret-chinese-police-station-in-nyc/vi-AA19Zpo3?ocid=Peregrine)
Was this a Chinese "secret police station" or a Chinese secret "police station"?
Remember/have you heard of Barney Miller- the '70s sitcom about a NYC police station?
How about a reboot? This would be a similar NYC-based police sitcom, except it would be the folks at this Chinese secret police station...
In the previous, Larry Hart said...
On the more general topic of modern historical illiteracy, I will point out that however Hollywoodized old period pieces used to be, many such movies used to strive to at least get the feel of a historical time and place correct. When watching the old black and white Cyrano, for example, I can distinguish the French and Spanish soldiers by their uniforms. Much at The Ten Commandments messes with the biblical story, watching it feels like you're in ancient Egypt, or in the neighboring desert. For all their faults, westerns feel like you're out in the old American west.
Is this "feel" something other than language? I find, to the contrary, that many more recent film (and television) presentations are arguably more accurate in representing the reality of the past, compared to the generally quite "sanitized" (in a number of different ways) versions of, say, the 1930s to 1950s.
Some time around the 1980s, movies stopped feeling authentic in that same way. Characters in seventeenth century France or the colonial era throw out anachronisms like, "Yeah, right" and such, almost as if to purposely break the fourth wall. Either the writers don't know enough to create verisimilitude, or they purposely avoid doing so.
I wonder how much of this - at least for those of us who are older - represents not a change in film but a change in ourselves. None of us has any memory of language as used in the "old west", let alone "seventeenth century France or the colonial era", and very few have any even secondhand knowledge of that language, which means that we have no real understanding of what would be anachronistic for the period. But we have experienced the changes in language over our own lifetime, and recognize those changes (such as "Yeah, right") as something different than what we can remember. Thus, such usages "feel" anachronistic to us in a historical setting, in a way that something that was contemporary in 1940 - but anachronistic for 1840 or 1740 - does not.
Gregory Byshenk - I'm a bit surprised by your comment. There are books written by people who were there at the time.
Dr Brin in the main post:
Okay so, we're to believe a whole passel of pathetic mayors did this - far better than any operation by any spy agency in human history - without a single participant being motivated by patriotism – or huge whistleblower rewards offered by Fox etc. -- to denounce with evidence and collect those big prizes?
It seems to me that the "rationale" is even simpler than that. They know in their bones that Trump won. They don't (personally) know anyone who would vote for Biden. Trump is the most popular president in history. So therefore, the very fact that Biden scores a win in a jurisdiction is itself prima facie proof of cheating.
The fact that the wins occurred in red states is more, not less, proof in their minds. Sure, Biden could have legitimately won in lefty hell-holes like California or New York. But Arizona? Georgia? Virginia? Biden could only have won those by cheating.
(I'm not advocating--just explaining)
The immediate goal may have been to persuade Trump's Supreme Court to ignore a stolen election, but in the longer term it's all about controlling elections by excluding non-Republican voters.
Any Republican with half a brain realizes they can never win a fair election. The purpose of the election ‘steal’ campaign is to justify 'tightening' up the election rules to prevent anyone who isn't a card-carrying Republican from voting.
gregory byshenk:
None of us has any memory of language as used in the "old west", let alone "seventeenth century France or the colonial era", and very few have any even secondhand knowledge of that language, which means that we have no real understanding of what would be anachronistic for the period.
I do get your point, and there might be some of that going on. But I think what I noticed changing somewhere around the 80s isn't just that. I'll cite an example, contrasting Charlton Heston's role as Cardinal Richelieu in the 1970s Three Musketeers movie with Tim Curry's in the 1990s. Now, you are correct that I have no primary knowledge of language and customs of the real France in the early 1600s. But I do have a sense of how powerful men of the era interact and intrigue. And the moviemakers of my younger days (and before) seemed to go to some trouble to make their settings plausible to the audience--to make them feel transported into the time and place of the story*. True, this involves a willing participation by the audience, but I was certainly a willing participant, and perceived that the moviemakers were working with me in that endeavor, not that they were pissing on me and telling me it's raining (like casting Adam Sandler in a remake of The Longest Yard.)
So back to Cardinal Richelieu. Never mind how silly (and yes, anachronistic) parts of the plot were, Heston's 1970s portrayal itself was masterful. I could totally believe this was a guy who knew how to manipulate kings to consolidate power behind the scenes. I contrast that with Tim Curry playing the same part in essentially the same story in the 1990s. He played it as a comedic supervillain, speaking in mike-drops and gratuitously fondling ladies' breasts. I suppose some like that sort of comedy--even I can appreciate it in its place--but it was not a convincing portrayal of Cardinal Richelieu.
* Incidentally, that was the real magic of Star Wars back in 1977. For the first time, you could watch a Flash Gordon-type space opera and feel as if the ships and weapons and worlds were really right there in front of you. This isn't about "realism" in the sense of knowing what a space battle or a Death Star is really like. The movie created its own imagery of what those things should be like. But it felt right.
Larry,
The initial commentary on Star Wars agreed with you - it looked like a used universe. Dinged-up landspeeders and star freighters with electronic glitches that required percussive maintenance - not something that the Federation would have put up with in its Fleet.
There is plenty of evidence of how people talked in the 17th - 19th centuries, from Grimmelhausen to Swift to Twain, but Gregory is right - none of us have first hand knowledge, except for some (scratchy) recordings very late. But our imagining will be off - Twain commented on how Elizabeth I's court was far more...earthy...than Victoria's.
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2023/05/i-had-sincere-but-odd-question-so-i.html
Interesting. It might not have original insights, but it seems to be pretty good at identifying and organizing the insights that humans have had over the years.
reason said..."Gregory Byshenk - I'm a bit surprised by your comment. There are books written by people who were there at the time."
Yes, but who reads?
---
The Heston 3Musks was definitive and terrific. The later two were abominations.
My colleague Ted CHiang is getting a lot of play. He is very smart and offers good insights... and his obsession with 'capitalism' while ignoring how many other forms of male-dominance oppressions there have been across 6000 years, prevents him from even seeing the real problem. Alas.
https://news.google.com/articles/CBMiY2h0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lm5ld3lvcmtlci5jb20vc2NpZW5jZS9hbm5hbHMtb2YtYXJ0aWZpY2lhbC1pbnRlbGxpZ2VuY2Uvd2lsbC1haS1iZWNvbWUtdGhlLW5ldy1tY2tpbnNledIBAA?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen
Dr Brin:
The Heston 3Musks was definitive and terrific. The later two were abominations.
The first one came out when I was 12 or 13, and I enjoyed them purely as adventure flicks. Later on, I got how much comedic farce was included, especially to accommodate the clumsiness of the real-life actress, Raquel Welch. Still I've enjoyed re-watching them for what they are. Much later in life, I realized that they had much in common with the campiness of the Adam West Batman, which is to me as Seldon is to scidata.
Regardless of anything else, I was and am in awe of Charlton Heston's portrayal of Richelieu. I still swoon over "By my hand, and for the good of the state, the bearer has done what has been done."
* * *
Pappenheimer:
none of us have first hand knowledge, except for some (scratchy) recordings very late. But our imagining will be off
Yes, I acknowledge that. The "realism" of period pieces sometimes relies on the filmmaker's imagining of what the time and place was like moreso than what they really were. Star Wars makes that abundantly clear, as there is no such thing as "what the time and place are really like," but it has that same feel that the filmmakers got it right.
The gist of what I was talking about is the difference between the filmmaker honestly trying to portray an unfamiliar setting such that the audience can believe it is really there vs the filmmaker not even pretending to verisimilitude, but preferring fourth-wall-breaking self-awareness instead. The latter seems (to me) to have overtaken the former beginning some time in the 1980s.
Just because it's true doesn't mean there is an electoral advantage in saying it.
I mean, you might as well ask why don't atheists (or hell even democrats) run for office by making really strong arguments why believing that Jesus rose from the dead or Mohammed flew up to heaven is incorrect?
Sometimes making true arguments doesn't help because they aren't likely to convince almost anyone and pushing them causes some people to see you as hostile to people like them or that they care about.
It's the same way that there are people who might not really believe in their Christian faith anymore but because they still have many friends/family who do and still see it as part of their identity will process someone who keeps talking about how it's not true as threatening to people like them. Same thing with belief in the big lie. And even atheists may think: yah they are right but I don't want someone who is always talking about this divisive issue.
Harping on it isn't likely to persuade anyone at this point so it's not clear it's good politics to keep raising it.
Dr Brin's "althouse" link above:
I went on to chat with ChatGPT about the value of 5-point arguments and to compliment it on its own (seeming!) humility (
All in all, that seems like a more productive way to interact with a youthful AI than the more common tropes of trying to trick and humiliate it.
For all their faults, westerns feel like you're out in the old American west.
I'm gonna disagree with that. Most westerns did a horrible job of depicting what the west was like. Towns had gun control, most "shootouts" were ambushes not quick-draw duels, etc.
Likewise for your other examples. They create a fine 'feel' for an imaginary place if you have no knowledge of the real one, but to someone who actually knows a bit about the period they are riddled with anachronisms. The costumes in the Ten Commandments, for example, obviously use modern materials (and the female makeup is oddly 1950ish).
I saw the Three Musketeers (with Heston, Welch, and Caine), and enjoyed it, while noting the comic goofiness (gooniness? Spike Milligan was in the cast as well)
Then I got around to reading the Dumas original, and discovered the comic goofiness was there from the start!
The vast majority of American Westerns were about propagating a myth that many viewers wanted to believe... and paid to do it.
Manly men... being manly men.
Pfft! Not even close to reality. Had they tried the movie ratings/censors would have been all over them.
... and then along came Clint, who I suspect is still Unforgiven by some.
Robert:
They create a fine 'feel' for an imaginary place if you have no knowledge of the real one, but to someone who actually knows a bit about the period they are riddled with anachronisms.
Alfred Differ:
The vast majority of American Westerns were about propagating a myth that many viewers wanted to believe... and paid to do it.
...
Pfft! Not even close to reality.
I do understand that. I still maintain there is a difference between allowing your audience to feel immersed in a time/place different from their own (however fictional or mythological that time/place may be) vs. winking at your audience that while the screenplay tells you the story takes place in 1613 France, we all know we're in 1990s Burbank, so why pretend otherwise?
A NY Times columnist agrees with Dr Brin...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/05/opinion/private-jet-travel-environment.html
...
Chuck Collins, one of the authors of the I.P.S.-Patriotic Millionaires report, pointed out one final problem with private jets: They allow the wealthiest individuals to ignore the problems the rest of us have to endure.
“When the ultra wealthy get to opt out of a system, they have much less of a stake in improving it,” Collins said. He pointed to the debacle at Southwest Airlines over the holidays. “If over 100 billionaires couldn’t get home to their families because the air traffic system was having a meltdown, maybe we’d have a better system.”
I still maintain there is a difference between allowing your audience to feel immersed in a time/place different from their own (however fictional or mythological that time/place may be) vs. winking at your audience that while the screenplay tells you the story takes place in 1613 France, we all know we're in 1990s Burbank, so why pretend otherwise?
Yes, but that's not what you were saying when you wrote "Much at The Ten Commandments messes with the biblical story, watching it feels like you're in ancient Egypt, or in the neighboring desert. For all their faults, westerns feel like you're out in the old American west."
I've watched The Ten Commandments, and it didn't feel like ancient Egypt. Wrong cosmetics, wrong clothing, too clean… Ditto old westerns. They are immersive, but mythological rather than historical. If you watch an old western and think "now I know what it was like to be in the Old West", you are almost certainly wrong, because the west that they portray never existed.
Hmm... a West with gun control in towns, treacherous but pragmatic ambushes instead of nobly cinematic quick-draw standoffs, poor hygiene, poor dentistry... I'd watch that movie. Once.
By the way... how will future hack-writers misremember us?
Alfred,
Regarding your past rocketry antics: I would have waited until I knew my team had the expertise and enough money to pay for burning down the desert or blowing people up. But then, you're T-type, I'm not.
Think about this in evolutionary terms. A concept that bounces off conservatives minds is the fact the diversity is strength. While the T-types are out getting blown up, and the survivors coming back with useful information, others are making sure that the whole species doesn't go extinct, inventing things like parachutes and the like. But today the stakes are very different than they were 50 kilo years ago. Back then, if somebody dared you to yank the mammoth's tail, chances are, you would be the only one trampled. Today if some egomaniac decides to flex his financial muscles, he dumps toxic waste and mutagens into the water table and destroys the lives of the gods know how many people. And since the egomaniac has money, his lobbyists can ensure that the problem never, ever gets fixed (or at least, not on his dime). About 50 kya, the robustness of human skeletons took a dive, a clear indicator that reckless T-types had become maladaptive to a large degree, and that trend does not seem to have changed. Right now we're around 18%, but as the world gets more crowded and more factional, and the technology and its waste products become more deadly, it may be that we will need a much smaller proportion to stave off extinction.
The thing about using evolutionary arguments, though, is that evolution drives pretty much everything to extinction. Evolution is not about justice, freedom, love, compassion or any of that. Evolution is about pure survival. However, evolution has managed to sculpt species that care about things like freedom, justice, love and compassion. These are also survival strategies, but biology has neglected this side of the equation for ages until recently (in spite of old Charley-D's examples), and the vast majority of the people are decades, if not centuries, behind the science. These kind of discussions really need to go mainstream.
PSB
As a D-type, you would think I would be all over the adventure ...
Paradoctor,
Since future hack-writers are unlikely to be actual humans, they will have access to vast amounts of data but zero comprehension of meaning. I doubt we could predict any details, but we can bet that it will be much worse than, "Motel of the Mysteries."
PSB
Robert:
Yes, but that's not what you were saying when you wrote "Much at The Ten Commandments messes with the biblical story, watching it feels like you're in ancient Egypt, or in the neighboring desert. For all their faults, westerns feel like you're out in the old American west."
Ok, you are correct that I segued from "Modern movies foster historical illiteracy" to "Modern movies insult my intelligence with historical illiteracy."
I would say that the overlap between the two is the sense that modern entertainment has given up on the audience caring about historical illiteracy. Maybe because the modern audience really doesn't care.
Maybe I was just young and naive, but I was captivated and immersed in history by "The Time Tunnel". Even James Cameron didn't put me on the deck of the Titanic like that show did, and he even had a Canadian sensibility.
Thomas Carlyle said, "What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us." However, I think it really depends on what we read (or watch) much earlier in life. Pre-skepticism perhaps.
I would say that the overlap between the two is the sense that modern entertainment has given up on the audience caring about historical illiteracy. Maybe because the modern audience really doesn't care.
I would argue that audiences have rarely (if ever) cared about historical literacy. Rather, they cared about mythological literacy (in the sense that they wanted movies that maintained particular myths). Are modern movies insulting their audience's intelligence by acknowledging that they are movies written for a modern audience any more than earlier movies were by pretending to be historically accurate?
Robert:
Are modern movies insulting their audience's intelligence by acknowledging that they are movies written for a modern audience any more than earlier movies were by pretending to be historically accurate?
Their audience isn't monolithic. They cater or try to cater to their perceived target audience. I am no longer a part of that. I don't fault them for that, but do notice it.
Curmudgeonly, I feel as if the audience would care if that aspect of the entertainment were fed rather than starved. But that might be naivete on my part.
One of the best westerns was dumped-on. HIGH NOON does NOT portray a town of cowards. Time and again the citizens who HAVE backed him up in the past - most of them civil war veterans - say "we don't want our town to be a stage for a personal grudge match between egotists."
Dr Brin:
One of the best westerns was dumped-on. HIGH NOON does NOT portray a town of cowards.
If he had just kept going out of town at the beginning, the movie could have been five minutes long with no one killed. :)
In fairness, the Gary Cooper is afrsid they'll just follow him wherever he goes. Solution is to bushwhack if they follow. But yeah, not a great movie plot.
Alfred,
Just back from Bloomsday. Next up is rehydration and a hot bathtub with epsom salts...
Pappenheimer
P.S. re: Westerns - having ridden (badly) in my youth, I used to look at the Main Streets of Dead Ent Gulch or whatever and think, "who cleaned up the horse poop?"
Pappenheimer:
the Main Streets of Dead Ent Gulch or whatever
I don't know how old I was when I realized that "Tombstone" was not a made up name, but it was way older than I should have been.
Who cleaned up the horse poop? In the rain?
Check out 'The Worst Jobs in History'.
They did feature folk who strewed straw out for people to cross in safety.
PSB,
I would have waited until…
Heh. Yah. Many did, but we worked out the numbers and figured we would have to be financed to the tune of a few million dollars just for the risks. To be innovative would have required another couple million. None of that was EVER going to happen. We knew that.
We got better on the safety front by repeated testing* at the cost of about $15K and some angry neighbors. From there we figured out how to finance the operation through sponsorships (like NASCAR teams do), but the yearly budget was never more than about $20K with much of that coming out of our own pockets.
We did get some DoD money a couple of times. They were pretty upset at the end when all we managed to prove was that our idea needed about $1M in ground infrastructure that they never intended to finance.
Some of that team is still at it, but I gave up after almost 10 years. I formed my own team with a different approach that had more potential for venture capital. I was wrong, though. VC's come in at a later stage than I understood, so that second team folded after spending about $12K.
———
I get there are risks with the T-Types, but when some of them pull it off the rewards are absolutely gigantic. If not for little teams like mine, a few guys with a bit more money to spend would not have stepped in. If not for them, the richer guys wouldn't have stepped in. Without them, there would be no Tesla Roadster in orbit around the sun out past Mars working through its fourth orbit.
Without those T-Types, we go extinct here on Earth like every other primate in a relatively short time compared to some other species. We could check out with them too. So… yes. Diversity is absolutely required. There are all sorts of paths that lead to almost immediate extinction. LOTS of them.
———
As for whether my first team behaved ethically, some said No. Some said Yes. Some just didn't want to say. I have mixed feelings about some of what we did, but I'm convinced that you all would be stuck on this dirtball without me and my friends. I can sleep at night because I know risk takers who are trying to prevent extinction.
* Every decent engineer will tell you that real data informs good design better than anything. Problem is… these tests are actual events in the real world. To the engineering team, they look like tests. To everyone else, they look like the real thing. Fly the rocket and see if it digs a giant hole under the launch pad. That's a test, right? Mix in the food additive and try it on a few people. That's a test too.
In the end, the question is whether or not you want to be one of the test subjects because there are engineers all around you trying to do things.
Paradoctor,
I'd watch that movie. Once.
Exactly.
They tell stories. We pay for the opportunity to watch.
Fail to satisfy us and we won't pay again. (Supposedly.)
———
Larry,
winking at your audience
The very same screenplay can be shot several different ways. Swap out a director schooled in the old way for someone trying something weird (happened a lot in the 70's) and you get a VERY different story told on film.
I've had a bit of fun these last couple years learning how to write screenplays. Along the way I learned that they are really just bait. If they tempt the interest of producers, they get purchased and turned into whatever they damn well fell like producing. Star Trek TOS scripts were episodic westerns dressed in 23rd century mini-skirts. Spec scripts are really auditions where your role is (likely) complete after the sale, but you are usually shown the door.
SOA changed everything in the 70's. Your campy Batman was out. Movies that taught you to mistrust even the people making them were in. The change wasn't accidental… or unintended… or undesired. They purposely chose to stop serving your preferred stories… because 1968 had consequences. So did Watergate. And then… etc.
Alfred,
"In the end, the question is whether or not you want to be one of the test subjects because there are engineers all around you trying to do things."
- Here's another question: How do you stop über-rich, utterly callous corporatists from using basically everyone as test subjects, taking zero responsibility for it, never being held accountable for their crimes, and being treated like great heroes just because they have money?
Okay, that's a few questions.
Diversity is strength, but there may be some variants the human species is better off without. In most cases, though, these are memetic variants rather than genetic variants. Some reasonable percentage of T-types is good, but no percentage of T-types who act like the Sacklers, Donald The Grope, or a majority of Congress and the Executive Cast are good for the species. You want to make omelets? Who has to be the eggs?
PSB
Alfred Differ:
SOA changed everything in the 70's. Your campy Batman was out. Movies that taught you to mistrust even the people making them were in.
This isn't a disagreement, but your wording reminded me of an article I read in one of those magazines for schoolkids back when The Sting was current, which would have been around 1973. From memory, but pretty close to a direct quote, "Movies about a man and a woman falling in love are out. Movies about men working together to accomplish a goal are in."
Alfred Differ:
Your campy Batman...
Just so it's clear, while I don't apologize for my Batman fandom, that's not the only kind of entertainment I like or appreciate. Casablanca, The Godfather, and the aforementioned The Sting are among my favorites.
PSB:
You want to make omelets? Who has to be the eggs?
"You can't make an omelet without mingling the white part of the egg with the colored part, and then bringing in all sorts of diverse ingredients."
"who cleaned up the horse poop?"
I assumed it all got trampled into general background dust.
PSB,
Okay, that's a few questions.
Heh. Most of them are the same question if you squint at them a bit.
"How do you stop bad people doing bad things?"
As a regular here, you should know the answer. Transparency.
———
Being caught in an act obviously won't suffice. Even if a large number of people think the act is bad, a sufficiently large number might disagree and protect the one who did it. If that protection happens, you are going to have to deal with it at the next level by judging the protectors as having done a bad thing too.
It all comes down to how hard you are willing to fight and for how long. There is no magic in transparency. We have to be willing to act against those we decide have done enough harm to justify it.
———
…but no percentage of T-types who act like…
I'm going to mildly disagree with you here and point out the biological analogy I think applies. "The Grope" is exercising our social immune system. If you don't do that periodically, people forget what Liberty means. Go long enough without a valid parasite and your immune system just might pick a target anyway. it might pick something you need to keep.
While I would rather have not suffered The Grope as President… it happened… and now a whole lot of things are revealed. We have justifiable targets for our immune responses. The danger now is we respond TOO wildly. Think about our biology again. That happens within us too.
In the end, I think of The Grope and others like him as worm parasites. Damn difficult to kill without killing the host, but they can be managed if you can see them. Hence Transparency.
Please define "T-type" and "D-type".
Larry,
I loved the Sting. I enjoyed it as a kid for a different reason and saw it through different eyes (especially the relationships) after I grew up a bit more.
———
One of the things you would NOT have seen in that news magazine for school kids is how our ethic was adapting to the new sense of mistrust we discovered in our institutions. The strong, silent male was on the way out. Rick Blaine spoke on camera, but no one doubted he was a tough guy. No gushy lines.
Compare Redford in The Sting and All The President's Men. Look at Hoffman in that later movie. Talk, talk, talk, talk! Are they tough guys? Not by the standard promulgated in Westerns. Yap, yap, yap!
———
But you were focused on historical verisimilitude. I think you'll find that as the US got wealthier (on average) the number of produced films grew. VERY rough average, but it makes sense since larger possible revenues could be chased with more production. Were they all high quality projects done by the classic studios. Nope. That all changed about the time you complain about that loss.
I think we see the same thing going on today with the collapse of newsprint publishers. It got cheaper to produce digital content AND anyone can do it… if you don't mind the piss poor quality. Look at the US film industry and I'm pretty sure there was more of the same going on back then. The cream was still produced, but not the same way and not sold to people who wanted what they used to want.
Paradoctor
T-type = Testosterone-dominant temperament. D-type = Dopamine-dominant temperament. S-type = Serotonin-dominant temperament. O-type = Oxytocin (and/or Estrogen)-dominant temperament.
á la The Fisher Temperament Inventory
NB: temperament refers to the genetic elements of personality, though genetic does not mean wholly unalterable. I use the T-type terminology, though Fisher created a set of names she thought would be more descriptive for popular consumption, but even she doesn't really like them. Alfy and I have been talking about this stuff for a long time.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4522611/
https://www.psychmechanics.com/fisher-temperament-inventory/
https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/FTI/
This last one is the online test you can try for yourself. Bon AppetÃte!
PSB
Alfred,
If being caught in the act isn't necessarily going to bring about a useful result (presumably meaning a deterrent) then even the most radical transparency won't be a panacea - necessary but insufficient. Culture matters. When you have huge numbers of people who feel strongly disaffected by mainstream society, they are likely to excuse bad behavior they perceive as sticking it to whoever they have chosen to blame for their problems (and that may or may not actually be who is causing their problems, i.e. Trump supporters).
As to the idea of exercising the immune system, the point is well taken. No paradise is sustainable for that very reason, and the steady-state doesn't really happen in social organizations at any scale. Which is worse, the disease or the autoimmune disorder caused by an overactive immune response? Could be either, could be six of one, half a dozen of the other. These risks have to be constantly, and intelligently, balanced. There's no one formula that will work at all times in all societies under all circumstances. On top of that, no two people will have exactly the same idea about how to strike a balance. That's what dialogue is for, but even that gets complicated when everyone comes to the forum with their own set of knowledge and assumptions. We'll be busy forever, unless something very sci-fi happens.
PSB
We have indeed.
For the record, I score almost equally for T and D. One point higher on D.
My low score is S. Much lower.
PSB,
I was almost killed by my own immune system in 2013. It was a close thing. I spent a year on a chemo-drug because I just happened to have a disorder that they could do anything about. My youngest sister was diagnosed with one around 2006 and just died from it last year. So… I freely admit to a special kind of terror when it comes to organisms destroying their own otherwise healthy tissues.
In a very direct way, these experiences shape a LOT of how I respond to Progressives nowadays. I tend to agree with them on a broad ethical front and then disagree on how to go about dealing with a social 'disorder.' Without taking the side of bad people, I can often see why we might be better off putting up with them than trying too hard to rout them.
My opinions regarding Conservatives weren't as affected. I'm not respectful of traditions except as a possible source of trial-and-error knowledge. They can take their demands for conformity and stuff them where the sun doesn't shine. I know enough biology (and economics for that matter) to understand the role diversity plays in evolving ecosystems.
———
Transparency still matters, though. There are some who will not be deterred by being caught, but some will. True sociopaths don't run every company. I know that from experience. They don't even run most companies, but let's suppose the percentage was high. I'd still say transparency is the solution because many of the people who WORK for sociopaths won't like being caught at doing bad things. If you can trim the army of people who serve sociopaths, you are doing a good thing even if it feels like it is not enough.
And yes. Culture matters. Consider those people who feel strongly disaffected. Ponder why they are willing to stick it to you and your friends. There are quite a few of them, but their ability to act in a coordinated fashion depends on them sticking together. If you can get inside a few of their heads, you are in a position to disrupt their coordination by depriving them of reasons to stick it to you.
It's not as hard as some say, but there is no possible way to disrupt them if we are lazy. Yes. They are disaffected. So… wrap their into your culture. Find a way to make friends with some of them. There is no lazy way to do it, but when we get off our butts we CAN do it.
———
We'll be busy forever
Good thing we are a speaking species. 8)
Alfred Differ:
I loved the Sting. I enjoyed it as a kid for a different reason and saw it through different eyes (especially the relationships) after I grew up a bit more.
Back before home video, I rarely had a chance to see movies more than once unless they were already relegated to the late night shows on tv. That changed when I went to college and they showed campus movies every weekend. The Sting was one that got played a lot, and one thing I noticed was that even after three or four viewings, I was still finding surprises that I hadn't noticed previously.
Look at the US film industry and I'm pretty sure there was more of the same going on back then. The cream was still produced, but not the same way and not sold to people who wanted what they used to want.
I will grant that movies in the 80s produced some golden comedy. Fourth-wall breaking and anachronism is much more tolerable in that milieu. In fact, often it is the entire point.
They believe Democrats are corrupt, because they believe everybody's corrupt.
"who cleaned up the horse poop?"
In major cities they could not keep ahead of the horse manure accumulation. It was produced faster than sanitation departments could clean it up.
Whenever you see a movie or TV show set in a 19th century city the one thing missing would be massive piles of horse poop everywhere.
In 1894 the London Times predicted that “In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.”
Fortunately our cities were saved by one of the greatest advances in human health and environmental protection.
The automobile.
"who cleaned up the horse poop?"
I assumed it all got trampled into general background dust.
Dust and mud. There's a reason Saturday was washday — it meant your skirt was clean for church on Sunday. Also why boots were much more common than shoes among all but the very wealthy: easier to clean a boot than an (expensive) stocking.
Also why lockjaw was so common. You were basically living in an aerosol of horseshit.
But yeah, all the westerns I've seen haven't had nearly enough piles of horseshit. Or enough flies. (When I was in Mongolia the flies were everywhere, well-fed by all the animal droppings from the herds.)
We need to take the threat of a second Trump admin seriously. Not just because of the recent shock poll but because even the staunchest Democrat looks at Biden and goes, "Meh".
But I have a solution.
ChatGPT 2024!
Provided of course that ChatGPT was "born" in the USA and a court rules that it is sentient (or at least as intelligent as the average politician - a very low bar).
Age might be an issue since it will only be 2 years old come the next election, not the required 35 year. But since a computer "thinks" so much faster than we do, those two years make it thousands of years old by its own time scale.
Speaking of AI, if I could go back a bit to earlier concerns about the dangers of AI, I'd like to take a moment and voice a contrarian opinion.
We are also looking at a demographic collapse. Birthrates are below replacement rates in nearly every nation outside of sub-Saharan Africa, some birth rates have completely collapsed (South Korea, Japan, Italy, Eastern Europe, etc.).
In the meantime, populations are ageing and will start shrinking. Available workers will make up a smaller and smaller percentage of the population while retirees make up a larger and larger percentage. More and more benefits for the elderly will have to be paid for by fewer and fewer workers. Financially that is not sustainable.
AI saves us from a financial collapse by requiring fewer workers to do the same amount of work.
We should not be banning AI.
We should be taxing it.
More contrarianism:
AI makes space colonization possible by minimizing the requirement for the most expensive component of any space program - the need for humans in space.
Working with an AI network, only a few hundred humans would be required to actually work in space to fully develop the asteroid belt. All prospecting, mining, manufacturing, ship building, rotating habitat construction, and material transport would be mostly performed by robots controlled by AI and managed by humans.
And then comes terraforming and colonizing the solar system. Mining out Mercury to build an energy generating Dyson swarm orbiting the Sun, terraforming Venus by mining its CO2 atmosphere for for carbon fiber to build ships and habitats, terraforming and greening Luna, terraforming Mars, mining Ceres for water, building thousands of Bishops Rings (with a living space equivalent to the area of India) and 10s of thousands of other rotating habitats, expanding out to the Jovian moons and beyond to the Kuiper Belt ... all become economically feasible if you minimize the cost of humans in space.
Without AI we won't be expanding into space because canned monkeys are too expensive.
Even more contrarianism for those worried about a super AI enslaving or exterminating mankind. Technology has a habit of diffusing a spread. There won't be one AI (like "Colossus, the Forbin Project - a highly underrated movie BTW), there will be billions of AIs.
The first automobiles were "rich man's toys" that only the very wealthy could afford. Then along came Henry Ford and the Model T, a car for the masses.
The first computers were massive and expensive, only used by large corporations, NASA, DOD and major universities. Then along came the cell phone and the internet and everyone on the planet, no matter how poor, has access to a treasure trove of knowledge and information.
The first AIs will obviously be used oppressive governments and by greedy corporations to wipe out labor costs and maximize profit. But before you know it, everyone on the planet will have a sophisticated AI in their back pocket, with the same empowering and transformative effects (both good and bad) created by the automobile and the cell phone.
DP:
Age might be an issue since it will only be 2 years old come the next election, not the required 35 year.
If you closely read the constitution, the problem for ChatGPT (as it is with my cat) isn't age, but personhood. The eligibility requirements for the office are in expressed entirely in the negative--who can't be president. To whit:
No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.
As long as ChatGPT is not a person, it does not fail the above test. Neither does my cat, for that matter.
The problem comes into play on January 6. From the Twelfth Amendment (emphasis mine) :
The electors shall meet in their respective states and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, ...; they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President, and they shall make distinct lists of all persons voted for as President, and of all persons voted for as Vice-President, and of the number of votes for each, which lists they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States,
So ChatGPT, like my cat, can be president, but it can't get there by the electoral vote process.
If ChatGPT (or my cat) were to be made Speaker of the House, it could conceivably become president by the line of succession. No electoral votes are involved in that scenario.
DP:
even the staunchest Democrat looks at Biden and goes, "Meh".
In the 80s, it was cynically said of Jesse Jackson that were he to walk on water, the headline would be "Jesse Can't Swim". I realize that Republicans oppose Biden for the reasons they'd oppose any Democrat--abortion, social spending, "wokeness", etc. But for those Democrats who are so uninspired by Biden as to let authoritarian fascism replace him:
What the fuck has this guy not accomplished that makes you so down on him? I guess "There's no pleasing some people."
DP: there will be billions of AIs
There are already over 2 billion PCs, and dozens of billions of embedded (and networked) devices. The biggest supercomputers could be configured quite easily to run billions of concurrent instances of GPT.
On Democratic dissatisfaction with President Biden...
...apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
LH, Biden was hardly my first choice, but no way was I going to vote for "Drumph!". Biden's likely as close to what we need as the "Chosen of Mammon" will allow.
Tim H:
Biden was hardly my first choice, but no way was I going to vote for "Drumph!".
That was my position in 2020 as well. I liked Biden as a candidate because, unlike the other Democratic contenders (too black, too gay, too female), he was non-threatening enough to white men that he could actually win a national election. And the main goal was to oust Trump.
I wasn't particularly excited by Biden, but I didn't have to be.
That was then. Now that Biden has a record to run on, I can't imagine what these disaffected Democrats would need him to have accomplished in order to enthusiastically vote for more of the same. That he is less popular now than he was as an untested quantity boggles my mind. It tells me that the white wing propaganda machine is well oiled.
Yes, Biden/Pelosi try hard to make clear what they accomplished... SCADS! Yet the left will ignore all of that in desperate need of sanctimony shrugs.
I don't care if joBee goes (a little) senile in office, so long as his personality remains grandfatherly steady and reliant on the 5000 top quality folks he appointed atop a quarter million dedicated civil servants. That community of honest, skilled adults is incomprehensible to the tyranny-minded and those who need to worship a Big Man.
---
Alred is one of the only TRUE libertarians I know. Sharing progressive goals overall and admitting that a different clde - moderate liberals - have a vastly better track record at outcomes and generally protecting freedom... he nevertheless says "Go for progress in the ways that are least meddling and controlling on individuals. And stop trying to police what and how I speak."
---
Who is this "Al" you guys are going on about? I know a coupl of Alberts. I had an Uncle Al when I was a kid. Voted for Al Gore...
PSB:
This last one is the online test you can try for yourself. Bon AppetÃte!
Well, I'm apparently an O-Type, which is about as surprising as the news that water is wet.
Still there are some questions on that test that I honestly don't know how to correctly answer. Things like "It is important to follow rules." Should I agree with that because I believe there are norms of behavior necessary to a civilized society, or does agreement imply that I believe in policing rigid gender roles and racial hierarchy?
Back on the old "Cerebus" list, someone would often post links to similar tests about whether you are conservative or liberal, or authoritarian vs libertine--that sort of thing. And there were always questions I had to wrestle with "Do I claim the literally correct answer, or the one I know this question is a proxy for?" One example went something like, "According to supply-side theory, tax breaks result in overall increased government revenue?" If I agree with that, am I agreeing that the theory really works, or am I just agreeing that that's what the theory says?
Dr Brin:
Who is this "Al" you guys are going on about? I know a coupl of Alberts...
Maybe a good name for an AI would be Algernon.
Larry Hart:
Neither ChatGPT nor your cat (or mine) are legally persons; but corporations are persons, because the Law is an ass. So if a corporation were headed by an AI, then it could be President of the United States.
Let us not forget Mark Twain's suggestion that cats be kings.
Higglety-piggelty
Charlie my kitty-cat
What doe you think of
King Charles, his Grace?
I've duties like purring
and eating and sleeping;
My schedule is full,
Let him rule in my place!
Paradoctor:
but corporations are persons, because the Law is an ass.
If you read your Dickens carefully, the line is "the law is a ass." No "an". I know it sounds stupid, but there it is.
So if a corporation were headed by an AI, then it could be President of the United States.
If it's a person, it has to be at least 35 years old and a natural-born citizen of the United States. Corporations may simulate personhood in many ways, but "natural-born" is not one of them, and citizenship itself is dubious.
Alfred Differ:
I loved the Sting. I enjoyed it as a kid for a different reason and saw it through different eyes (especially the relationships) after I grew up a bit more.
When MAD Magazine spoofed the movie, even they missed a crucial point. They did a scene where Redford's character is informed that the waitress was "sent to entice you with her charm and good looks." Apparently meaning that that girl wasn't all that attractive, MAD followed up with this exchange:
"Who did that?"
"The Polish Mafia."
(This was back when you could tell Polish jokes in polite company).
But in the real movie, the waitress was not sent to entice Redford--only to observe his movements before finding a good time to kill him. The fact that he hit on her was a surprise to her and threatened to upset her plan.
Rick Blaine spoke on camera, but no one doubted he was a tough guy. No gushy lines.
Didn't he have a few with Ilse when outside the Blue Parrot when he was trying to convince her to leave Lazlo and take up with him above the saloon. For just a bit there, he was acting out:
Kinda scrawny, and pale,
Picking at my food,
And love-sick like any other guy.
I'd throw away my sweater, and dress up like a dude
In a dicky and a collar and a tie.
If I loved you.
Just a bit, though. :)
You can probably imagine the reaction of a 1980s campus audience to Ilse's "I can't think any more. You'll have to do the thinking for both of us." Too bad. Even then, I knew greatness when I was seeing it.
What really impresses me about Casablanca was that if the drunken line "It's December 1941 in Casablanca. What time is it in New York?" is to be believed, the screenplay was written before America was even in the war. They certainly didn't have the benefit of hindsight we do now to know that it all works out and the good guys win in the end. It must be hard to be optimistic in that situation, and yet they could pull off "There are parts of New York, Major, I wouldn't advise you to try to invade," and "Welcome back to the fight. This time I know our side will win."
Compare Redford in The Sting and All The President's Men. Look at Hoffman in that later movie. Talk, talk, talk, talk!
A co-worker of mine in 1991 had that very problem with the two-part ST:TNG episode with Spock on Romulus. It's maybe my favorite episode of the entire series, and he just found it disappointing. "Too much talking." It reminds me of a silly joke about a couple who is late to a baseball game, presumably the wife's fault. Upon arrival in the sixth inning, she asks what the score is, and is told zero to zero, to which she replies, "So we didn't miss anything!"
DP
The Demographic problem is a storm in a teacup
YES there will be more pensioners per "worker"
But that will be more than balanced by the lower number of "Kids"
So financially its a wash
But its actually better than that - most pensioners do NOT just sit on the couch - most are busy doing things - child minding, helping people - building things - doing research
Mostly things that don't register on the "GDP" but all things that contribute to the whole society
There is ONE issue - which in almost completely American - the American "Healthcare Business" does try and extract everything they can from the last few months
While most of the world allows people to die in peace the USA tries to give them a couple of extra weeks in pain (and empty their pockets)
Reading this:
"No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States."
It occurs to me that only the bold bits are still relevant.
I thought the guy who cleaned up after the horses was that little fellow at the end of the parade in the old cartoons portraying Mr Peabody and Sherman. Lots of guys like that? With their little push brooms.
Larry,
The finish date for the screenplay for Casablanca was June 1, 1942. That's the Warner version, though. It's an adaptation from a stage play written in 1940. That earlier version was definitely an anti-nazi piece, but the Warner version was written after Pearl Harbor qualifying it as propaganda. Good propaganda mind you. 8)
This link has the Warner version.
https://mckeestory.com/wp-content/uploads/Digital-CASABLANCA.pdf
This one refers to the earlier stage play.
https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/casablanca-script-screenplay-pdf-download/
DP,
It's not space colonization without people in space.
I'm not knocking the role AI's will have out there. You are right about the costs we suffer supporting biological humans in terribly hostile environments. However, there will be a role for us* and we will go in the least costly way possible when we bring our biome with us.
It's not colonization without us, though, unless we make the AI's as emulations of humans. These are better described as EM's than AI's.
* Some have a hard time believing this, but it's the same basic idea as why there was a role for humans outside Africa where our species was spawned. It's not that we had a 'role'. It's that we made one. Like everything else we do, we make our purpose.
Larry,
I said to myself years ago that if Larry took the FTI he would be O-type, hands down. Yes, water is wet, and you can tell by the things water says and/or writes.
The issues you bring up about answering these types of instruments have been around forever. Everyone who makes these things knows that they are imperfect measuring tools, based on averages, and highly susceptible to ambiguity. Ideally what we need is a way to measure the base levels of these molecules in the brain directly, but the technology isn't there, yet. The next best thing is blood-serum. That would get pretty expensive, though, to do on large, presumably representative population samples. The other problem is that blood-serum levels approximate CSF levels, but not perfectly, and there is a time lapse between events that change levels in the brain and a resulting change in the blood. On a positive note, I met up with an oxytocin researcher (Dr. Paul Zak), and he told me that there is a new kind of sensor that clips to the ear and can measure OT in the blood by way of a light pulse. That was maybe 2018 or so. Perhaps by now that technology has been refined for other neurohormones by now.
As far as similar tests circulating around the Net, most of them are just bunk. I'm not too concerned about which Disney Princess I resemble most, anyway, but even the ones that claim to be serious are often based on very dubious science, if any science at all. Political ones are rarely anything but stereotypes.
PSB
Howard,
"They believe Democrats are corrupt, because they believe everybody's corrupt."
- That's because they are corrupt, but to maintain their delusion of moral superiority they have to claim that anything they are guilty of must be true for everybody - just about the oldest cop-out in the book.
PSB
Alfred,
I like your attitude generally, but given your neurochemical makeup, and what you have been saying about letting engineers experiment recklessly with other people's lives, your comment about not trying too hard to route them seems strange. And of course, if you don't try too hard, problems tend to fester, and people who have radical "solutions" (like The Final Solution) start getting more attention. If we don't squash the fascists, there's a very good chance that they win.
I wasn't arguing against transparency. Like I said, it's necessary but insufficient. If huge numbers of people think that "Grab 'em by the pussy" is a signal of great manly virtue, transparency backfires. Transparency is only good if the people who are witnessing it have actual morals with which to be outraged.
"Ponder why they are willing to stick it to you and your friends." You're assuming I have friends? On top of that, since I'm not actually a Democrat, they aren't really targeting me. If allowed to talk about numerous subjects, I piss off people on both sides. If I keep my mouth (or keyboard) shut, they'll never know.
As to trying to get into their heads, it's easy to just dismiss them as a bunch of Nazis, mostly because they are, but they're too dumb to realize it. I got into a spat with one of these on FacePalm a couple weeks ago, but decided to take a different tack. I checked his profile and saw that he was a former Marine, so I told him about my military father, about the skin condition that disqualified me from service, and my experience growing up in a city full of military bases. Then I pointed out that the military doesn't teach enlisted to think, they teach them to obey the chain of command without question. That's necessary in combat, but going to the voting booth is not the same thing as going into battle. On the positive side, he stopped hurling insults at me. However, he stopped saying anything at all to me, so I have no way of knowing if I got through his thick skull, or if he just gave up.
PSB
DOTS sounds like Meyer-Briggs for genes.
These personality profiling tests are all the rage with management, mainly because everyone else is doing them.
The thing to remember is that, at best, they indicate a behavioral preference rather than something that's immutable to your being.
The fellow running a consulting course I was on went through the explanations for each measure, and how to use them to assess the people we were consulting with.
He also gave some amusing counterexamples based on personal experience.
PSB,
your comment about not trying too hard to route them seems strange
It's not that I don't want to punish them all. I do. The problem is that the level of 'social inflammation' necessary to bring that about may very well kill the patient.
Look at this biologically. The worms that like to use us as hosts evolve pretty fast relative to us. Many of them can hold off our immune systems long enough to reproduce. Some are so good at it they can take up residence. Without modern medicine, we can't beat them except by avoiding them.
I point out the worms because our own immune systems still tend to recognize them as invaders. It's just that we don't ramp up our inflammation levels high enough to beat them. Doing so kills us too often making the trait maladaptive. ONLY modern medicine has shown a way to beat them without killing us.
How does that apply? Think of our sociopaths as worms and I think you'll see it. Memetic worms. What modern medicine can we apply to beat them? I'm quite certain progressive preaching doesn't work. We've been at that for ages. The worms are still rich and a whole lot of people want to be like them.
———
If a huge number of people believe "grab 'em by the pussy" is a new virtue, your POV is in deep trouble. The worms will have won and they'll feast on your carcass.
Transparency HAS to be combined with action or it is a hollow illusion. I already see a lot of people who want action, though, so I'm cautiously optimistic. What they need right now is transparency.
(I say cautiously optimistic because I think too many progressives rely on delegating the ugly social tasks related to punishment to their elected officials. They ought to know better since they DO occasionally lose elections. Never delegate social judgements to be dished out. Only criminal judgements.)
———
The US Marines actually does prefer the enlisted to think. Some of the best jokes I've heard describing the idiocy of institutions come from the personal experiences of marines. The unthinking jarhead is a stereotype that doesn't apply all that well.
No matter, though, because your story is a decent example of what I have in mind. Your spat was in the open, right? You might not have gotten through to the guy, but it's there for others to see. Disrupting his incantation breaks a piece of the communication web between him and others who might have piled on. No doubt they'll go elsewhere, but you can't fix the entire internet. What you CAN do is disrupt your opponent when they come in contact with you.
If you take a bit of time and brush up on their jokes, you'll probably be ready for the next one. 8)
Plus, worms do occasionally turn.
Alfred
Sure we'll need people but only a cost saving minimum.
Once we have the orders of magnitude increase in energy from even a small Dyson swarm, and Venus, Luna, and Mars are terraformed, and thousands of Bishop rings and other rotating habitats constructed, along with Ceres, the moons of the Jovian worlds and the dwarf planets of the Kuiper Belt being para-terraformed we'll have room for 100s of billions of humans.
It just doesn't make economic sense to use them for work in space itself.
They're too expensive.
PSB:
Political ones [online surveys] are rarely anything but stereotypes.
They seem to try to gauge which of many separate stereotypes one fits into. Racist? Fiscally sound? Jingoist? Just because you fit one right-wing stereotype doesn't mean you fit the others, so they try to obliquely determine which ones you do (and do not) fit, and how strongly.
That's what I mean about the ambiguity. If they put an agree/disagree question out there with the statement, "It's ok to be white", what does my response tell about me. If I respond literally (of course it's ok to be white like me), does that indicate that I'm tolerant of all races including my own, or does it peg me as a white nationalist who uses that slogan to own the libs? Scott Adams failed that test.
That's exactly why I cringed during the 2016 Democratic primary debates when the moderator asked Hillary and Bernie "Is it 'Black Lives Matter', or 'All Lives Matter'?" He was giving them a false choice between acknowledging systemic racism (appearing to support Black Supremacy) or advocating equality (but implying that black lives don't matter after all). My answer would have been "Black lives matter because all lives matter." But if that was a question on a test, my answer would not be an option.
Larry - You can probably imagine the reaction of a 1980s campus audience to Ilse's "I can't think any more. You'll have to do the thinking for both of us."
Not to mention them reacting to Ilse line, "Who is that boy at the piano?".
Yeah that is offensive by today's standards.
Not to mention Capt. Renault's sexual exploitation of female refugees being played for laughs ("I will be here tomorrow night with a stunning blonde, and I will be very happy if she loses").
That is really uncomfortable to watch in the age of MeToo.
And yet Casablanca remains one the best movies ever written with every brilliant line of dialogue being quotable.
Similarly, "Gone with the Wind" is wrong on so many levels. From happy black slaves to Rhett carrying a fiercely resisting Scarlet up the staircase to force himself on her - and then showing her the next morning happy, sighing and loving every minute of it.
And GWtW is still probably the greatest movie ever made.
So should we should judge art by the standards of today or just accept great films for their technical brilliance, overlooking the now uncomfortable parts?
DP:
Not to mention them reacting to Ilse line, "Who is that boy at the piano?".
Yeah that is offensive by today's standards.
That's just an accurate portrayal of how people talked in 1941.
Not to mention Capt. Renault's sexual exploitation of female refugees being played for laughs ("I will be here tomorrow night with a stunning blonde, and I will be very happy if she loses").
I'm going out on a limb here, but I can be ok with that. First of all, Renault was not presented as being the good guy in those scenes. And yes, he sexually exploited young women, but at least he was honest and provided his promised services in return. Had he not been corrupt in that way, his official duty was to enforce the law set down by the collaborationist government. So those women and their families were only helped to escape because he was a sleaze.
So should we should judge art by the standards of today or just accept great films for their technical brilliance, overlooking the now uncomfortable parts?
My own answer to that should be clear. Casablanca is my all-time favorite movie, and I just recently commended Netflix for allowing me to see Animal House again in all its uncut, original glory.
One thing to keep in mind is the makeup of the audience. I watched Animal House alone in my own house. I'm not sure how comfortable I would have felt with my 21-year-old college student daughter present, or even worse--in the company of a group of her friends.
My college dorm once showed a screening of Birth of a Nation, which I saw alongside my brother and his best friend, who is black. None of us were in sympathy with the POV of the film, but while I could watch it to admire the technical craft (impressive by 1915 standards) and to laugh uncomfortably ("Can you beLIEVE this crap?") at the overt racism, I was keenly aware that our black friend could not just compartmentalize so easily. If I had it to do all over again, I'm not saying I wouldn't have watched that film, but I would not have done as part of that particular audience.
The problem I see with the lefty, too-woke, cancel culturists is that they deem a thing to be unsuitable for any audience because it is unsuitable for a particular audience.
Larry, given that BoaN inspire the Klan and presented justifications for lynching maybe we should be careful about what audience is watching it.
You want cinematic genius? Try Leni Riefenstahl. A brilliant film director and literally the only female director on the planet in the 1930s, she pioneer film techniques still used today.
She was technically a truly great propogandist. You know that Olympic torch run from Greece thing? Didn't exist in ancient Greece or in previous Olympics. That was her idea and it forms the opening montage of her film Olympiad, a documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Then she did another film called "Triumph of the Will".
Oh, did I mention that she was a dedicated Nazi and loved her some Hitler?
So what do we do with the art produced by racists like DW Griffith, or Nazis like Leni Riefenstahl?
Or pro Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein - whose masterpiece "Battleship Potemkin" glorifying the Leninist regime - just watch the scene with the baby carriage rolling down the Odessa steps as the Czar's soldiers shoot the working class - was in theaters when the Holodomor (the Soviet man-made famine) was killing 10s of millions in Ukraine?
Or the Ring music of virulent anti-Semite Richard Wagner?
How do we separate good art from a bad person?
Animal House, revenge of the Nerds, and pretty much every frat boy comedy from the 80s are just too difficult to watch.
Racist? Fiscally sound? Jingoist? Just because you fit one right-wing stereotype doesn't mean you fit the others,
How is "fiscally sound" a right-wing stereotype?
All the evidence in my lifetime (and I'm retired) shows that right-wing parties run up the deficit while in power, while left-wing parties lower it. At least in Canada and America — not certain about other countries.
The problem I see with the lefty, too-woke, cancel culturists is that they deem a thing to be unsuitable for any audience because it is unsuitable for a particular audience.
As opposed to the righty cancel culturists who deem a thing to be unsuitable for any audience because it is uncomfortable for them.
Robert:
How is "fiscally sound" a right-wing stereotype?
Ok, "conservative stereotype". In the context of a survey asking questions to determine where you fall on the political axes. A question about balancing the budget (for example) would probably be used to indicate fiscal conservatism, even though--as you say--liberals tend to actually be the more fiscally sound party.
The Chicago Tribune this morning had an editorial--not an op-ed--whose headline was something like, "We're at the fiscal cliff again. Time to revisit a balanced budget amendment" That's clueless.
As opposed to the righty cancel culturists who deem a thing to be unsuitable for any audience because it is uncomfortable for them.
Not "as opposed to". "For the same reason as..." I'm obviously on the liberal side, but I was pointing out a way that liberals sometimes go too far and create enemies rather than friends. There's no disagreement here that the right does that regularly.
Again, always leave a little bit of wiggle room just in case the worm decides to turn.
--------------
When chatGPT can write gems like CASABLANCA, then we're talkin' turkey. Right now it's just parasitic mimicry. Vultures, vultures everywhere.
Not "as opposed to". "For the same reason as..." I'm obviously on the liberal side, but I was pointing out a way that liberals sometimes go too far and create enemies rather than friends. There's no disagreement here that the right does that regularly.
The difference is that the left tends to get offended on behalf of other people, while the right gets offended on behalf of themselves. That's the opposing factor i was referring to.
Robert,
the left tends to get offended on behalf of other people
I don't see it that way. They are imagining themselves in the shoes of those other people... and they aren't very good at it. Offense declared afterward is at least partially related to a need for a sanctimony high.
I'm not complaining, though. If they didn't make at least some effort to imagine being someone else, we'd all be screwed. It's just that I don't think the follow up is necessary. I don't think it works as well as they imagine it does.
------
scidata,
Worms do indeed turn. I've seen it happen.
Robert:
The difference is that the left tends to get offended on behalf of other people, while the right gets offended on behalf of themselves. That's the opposing factor i was referring to.
Oh, I see I misinterpreted your comment. I thought you were chiding me for complaining about the mote in the left's eye while not noticing the beam in the right's eye.
DP:
<<
How do we separate good art from a bad person?
>>
By stealing it, of course. Study the techniques and tropes, improve on them, then shamelessly exploit them to opposite effect.
DP:
How do we separate good art from a bad person?
For me, it often comes down to "I know it when I see it." Like, I can't logically explain why I can still enjoy early Woody Allen movies, but won't listen to old Ted Nugent songs.
To some extent, it has to do with when I was first exposed to the artist, especially before knowing the bad stuff about them. It also has something to do with the difference between an artist with characteristics that offend me vs one who has essentially declared himself to be at war with me (or with groups I am included in, or those I personally care about).
A 1970s comic set in WWII had Marvel's Invaders required to save the life of Josef Stalin from a Nazi assassin. At the time I read that story, I could root for Stalin against the Nazis because I didn't know all that much about Stalin. Now, it's more difficult to know who to root for.
I don't see it that way. They are imagining themselves in the shoes of those other people... and they aren't very good at it. Offense declared afterward is at least partially related to a need for a sanctimony high.
Not arguing against sanctimony highs as a motivating factor, or that their imagination is good — but attempting to put themselves in someone else's shoes puts them ahead of those who've decided that their own shoes are the only ones anyone should wear (and get their own sanctimony highs beating on anyone who disagrees with them).
DP:
Animal House, revenge of the Nerds, and pretty much every frat boy comedy from the 80s are just too difficult to watch.
Part of that--for Revenge of the Nerds especially--is that nerds are cool and powerful today in a way that is very different from the scene in 1984. So their antics at the expense of the sorority girls and to some extent even against the jocks feels more like punching down than it would have back then.
Animal House, I don't even try to impose a modern sensibility on it. I remember what it was like watching it in 1978 as a college freshman--the exact right age for it. For a guy, anyway.
Remember, St Ronnie was probably one bad helicopter engine away from being a very minor footnote to history.
I've stayed in the res that inspired Animal House. Not with students there (it was during intersession).
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-animalhouse-idUSN1960484520071219
DP:
You want cinematic genius? Try Leni Riefenstahl. A brilliant film director and literally the only female director on the planet in the 1930s.
For years--decades maybe--I thought that must be a man's name that just sounds like a woman's, because I could not wrap my head around a woman as such a prominent influencer in Hitler's Germany.
You want cinematic genius? Try Leni Riefenstahl. A brilliant film director and literally the only female director on the planet in the 1930s.
Well, except for Dorothy Arzner and Lois Weber, among others.
There were a lot more in the 1920s and earlier, who have been quietly written out of history.
Robert
Just to add another country to your list of - Non fiscally conservative right wing parties
http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2016/03/13/the-conservatives-have-been-the-biggest-borrowers-over-the-last-70-years/
It's not that hard to imagine why conservatives raise the debt. Piketty got that part exactly right. Bond holders tend to be very rich people who aren't excited about taking big risks with their money. The more a nation borrows, the more it borrows from them.
Conservatives are supplying their clade with relatively low risk ways to make money on their money.
If you don't like rentiers, you honestly should consider NOT borrowing from them. You don't have a lot of options for preventing that when your clade is out of power, but you DO have some when it comes to communicating why you believe what you believe to your elected representatives.
Larry,
re: rooting for Stalin...
It's still permissible to root for Stalin to Not Lose. That's essentially what Churchill did.
"If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference of the Devil in the House of Commons.""
Pappenheimer
Alfred Differ:
Bond holders tend to be very rich people who aren't excited about taking big risks with their money. The more a nation borrows, the more it borrows from them.
Conservatives are supplying their clade with relatively low risk ways to make money on their money.
And yet, the myth persists that Republicans are fiscally responsible and Democrats are addicted to spending. Again, this very morning, my Chicago Tribune had an editorial titled:
"Again, US teeters at the fiscal cliff. Time to revive talk of a balanced budget amendment."
Lest there be any doubt of the nature of the content:
...
The nation has endured 10 standoffs over the debt ceiling in the last 13 years. For the most part, the same pattern persisted — Republicans pushed for spending cuts that would shave down the national debt, while Democrats bitterly fought to defend their addiction to gluttonous, inflation-friendly spending.
...
I think I'm the only one who remembers the fact that under Clinton, the deficit became a surplus, and there appeared to be a real possibility that the national debt would be entirely paid off. Alan Greenspan was in a total panic over that possibility and made sure that Bush's tax cuts assured there would continue to be a lucrative national debt for creditors. I know you (Alfred) said pretty much the same thing. I'm only pointing out that not only are the Democrats more fiscally responsible--more likely to cover their spending with taxes rather than borrowing--but it is a complete lie that Republicans are interested in controlling the debt, let alone a balanced budget. When they had the chance to make that a reality, they freaked!
Republican talk of fiscal responsibility is just their way of forcing Democrats to spend less on our goal in order to preserve funds for their spending when they're in power. Somehow, the debt ceiling and the debt itself are never issues when a Republican is president. Once (1995) may be happenstance, and twice (2013) coincidence, but by now I know enemy action when I see it.
The article itself is paywalled, but for completeness' sake:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/editorials/ct-editorial-debt-ceiling-crisis-biden-mccarthy-20230509-77nhmnomtjagxjvyvhctpuffaa-story.html
Larry, the Chicago Tribune editorial is easy to understand.
They are lying.
Conservative and centrist media lie about the debt and spending for the same reason.
They are a wholly-owned subsidiary of the oligarchy.
Their paychecks and power depend on them being liars.
Republican talk of fiscal responsibility is just their way of forcing Democrats to spend less on our goal in order to preserve funds for their spending when they're in power.
I'll note that Harper (Conservative PM) cut the GST by 2% explicitly not to stimulate the economy (it didn't) but to limit the ability of future governments to fund programs. There was no pretence it was about economics, just flat-out admitted that it was a maneuver to tie the hands of future federal governments.
Stop calling them "conservative". They do not conserve: not life, nor liberty, nor property, nor rule of law, nor honor. Their very name for themselves is a Big Lie.
To a lesser extent, "liberals" also delude themselves, for they are not very good at liberating.
Paradoctor,
When it comes to liberating, I'd rather be liberated by FDR liberals than Bush conservatives. Compare the outcomes of post-war Iraq to post-war Japan (though to some extent this is oranges and apples, it's obvious who is operating primarily from greed and ideology, and who was willing to listen to the experts)
Pappenheimer
I'm with Matthew on ownership of the conservative media, but not sure about the centrists.
In all seriousness, I only read editorials to decide whether I want any of my money in the hands of the owner. I'll cross the Chicago Tribune off my list of possible purchases, but it's been ages since I considered buying any paper not out of NY or LA.
Compare the outcomes of post-war Iraq to post-war Japan
That's also at least partly because (like with Germany) there was a perceived need to rebuild the defeated country as a bulwark against the USSR.
Stop calling them "conservative". They do not conserve: not life, nor liberty, nor property, nor rule of law, nor honor. Their very name for themselves is a Big Lie.
To a lesser extent, "liberals" also delude themselves, for they are not very good at liberating.
Just a note that up here "Conservative" and "Liberal" are political parties (indeed, the two largest ones). That's why our media is careful with whether the words are capitalized (political party) or not.
And small-c conservatives do conserve: the rule of rich white men. Although UK conservatives seem more about the rule of rich and not so hung up on whiteness and maleness.
Paradoctor:
Stop calling them "conservative". They do not conserve
Quoting Asimov (from memory): "We've known for centuries that 'oxygen' is a misnomer too, but what can you do?"
* * *
Alfred Differ:
I'll cross the Chicago Tribune off my list of possible purchases
The Tribune is still a very good source of hard news in a time when much of that is going the way of the dodo. The reason I reacted so forcefully to the editorial posted above is because it seemed to cross a line I haven't seen the paper cross in a while. I was surprised (in a bad way) to see that that wasn't an op-ed by one of their conservative pundits or a guest essay from the Heritage Foundation, but an actual unsigned editorial.
The quality of the opinion section has indeed suffered since the paper was bought by a hedge fund and most of their regular staff columnists were let go.
Still, they are nowhere near as bad as they were in 1936 when they openly campaigned against FDR's re-election. Legend has it that their phone operators were instructed to answer incoming calls with the greeting, "Chicago Tribune. ### days left to save the republic."
Robert:
And small-c conservatives do conserve: the rule of rich white men.
Conservatives to strive to conserve "the right not to have things change." A good argument could be made either way as to whether pushing things backwards a few decades or centuries constitutes "change" or "conservation on steroids."
Remember that anti-Soviet sentiments were being condemned as "counterrevolutionary" 70 years after the revolution happened.
Alfred Differ:
Conservatives are supplying their clade with relatively low risk ways to make money on their money.
Then you'd think they'd exert their influence over Republicans to prevent a catastrophic default. That this doesn't seem to be (openly) occurring, I'm led to believe one of two possibilities, one good and one bad.
The good one is that the real movers and shakers know that the debt ceiling wrangling is all bluster and that nothing bad will actually happen.
The bad one is that we've reached "Do you still think you can control them?" time.
Larry Hart,
you forgot to mention that the easiest way to balance the budget is not by cutting spending, but by raising taxes. And one of the primary reasons that Republicans blow out the budget is that they cut taxes. In fact I would be happy if there was a debt limit law that said if the debt limit is exceeded then taxes have to be raised.
LH:
“Oxygen” is a misnomer in Latin, readable by scholars. I doubt that it causes any lab accidents. “Conservative” is a misnomer in English, readable by the masses. I am fairly sure that it has caused many to vote against their own interests. I attribute the first misnomer to cultural inertia. I attribute the second misnomer to political corruption. Fortunately we have alternatives: “authoritarian” and “reactionary”.
Paradoctor:
Fortunately we have alternatives: “authoritarian” and “reactionary”.
"Fascist". Don't forget my favorite.
Plus: “most dangerous fool”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/09/opinion/putin-ukraine-war.html
Larry Hart said...
"Alfred Differ:
Conservatives are supplying their clade with relatively low risk ways to make money on their money.
Then you'd think they'd exert their influence over Republicans to prevent a catastrophic default. That this doesn't seem to be (openly) occurring, I'm led to believe one of two possibilities, one good and one bad.
The good one is that the real movers and shakers know that the debt ceiling wrangling is all bluster and that nothing bad will actually happen.
The bad one is that we've reached "Do you still think you can control them?" time.
Another bad possibility, the real movers shakers want an economic crash so they can make a lot of money off of it. After all they've made lots of money off of crashes in the past by several methods including exotic financial instruments that only they can play with that are basically bets that certain debts will default, by taking government aid money and using it to do stock buy-backs instead of using it how they promised in order to get the aid and simply by planning and being prepared to take advantage of crashed values to buy them low and suck money out when the rise again, just to name a few. You now, socialize losses and privatize profits. Times of rapid change are times of opportunity, particularly for blood sucking leeches.
Hey Dr. Brin,
I downloaded an album yesterday, and in one of the songs they singer stops, the music stops, and then they suddenly play a couple bars from Ammonia Avenue. As a long-time Alan Parsons fan, I thought you might appreciate the homage. Its good to know that we aren't the only ones who remember Uncle Alan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzH6toY_EPw
PSB
LH 5:22:
“Turning back the clock” is generally an attempt to impose, by force, a fantasy of a past that never actually happened; so it really is a most destructive radicalism. Besides, turning back time is as physically impossible as levitation by bootstrap-tugging. I resent such pseudo-advice. May those who advocate physical impossibilities show us how by doing something physically impossible!
Excuse me, that should have been “anatomically” impossible.
Larry,
to prevent a catastrophic default
I'm not sure everyone believes that who needs to believe it. If I have money out of the market, I should be able to re-enter later when prices are crushed, right?
A default will cause the bond markets to seize. That doesn't happen very often, but the people who predict it correctly stand to make a lot of money on the way down (shorting options) and on the way up again (buying calls).
There HAS been a recent jump in the purchase of credit default swaps lately. Basically insurance. Remember those?
------
Anyone planning to make money when we default is underestimating the damage that will be done I think. Bond markets don't bounce back quickly like stock markets do. If they seize, we literally don't know the price of the assets. No one knows because they don't trade.
Remember that scene in Idiocracy when the Brawndo computer laid off everyone? It's not just that prices change. We will be at risk of losing business continuity at many places.
I don't think they get that... or think they can survive it without all the rest of us showing up with pitchforks and torches.
Another bad possibility, the real movers shakers want an economic crash so they can make a lot of money off of it.
Disaster capitalism. Why change what's been a winning strategy?
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/27/disaster-capitalism-antony-loewenstein-review
The ironic thing is that in actual disasters most people pull together; it's the forces of 'law and order' that usually cause the most casualties.
http://www.rebeccasolnit.net/book/a-paradise-built-in-hell/
Alfred Differ:
Anyone planning to make money when we default is underestimating the damage that will be done I think.
...
I don't think they get that...
Heaven help us if the powers that be think that the effect of a US default is just a drop in asset prices. Much of the world economy is based upon the assumption that an investment in US debt is safe. Once that's gone, we're not getting it back.
Alfred,
So far as I can tell from the WSJ and such, there's a built-in assumption that Democrats will have to cave, since they are the responsible party who aren't willing to blow up the world economy.
We democrats are also the irresponsible party who won't cut domestic spending to the bone to accommodate the Trump tax cuts on rich people and corporations, because hyperinflation a la Weimar Germany is a looming threat and will destroy the world economy if spending (except military spending, which should be boosted) isn't slashed.
I listen to my Fox-addicted dad and skim the Jeremiads he sends me, so I know that both statements are true.
Note - my dad isn't stupid and was a major financial officer of a large US corporation. That's what is so scary about the present debt ceiling standoff. I don't think it's for show any more. Apparently the only way to safeguard my inheritance is to vote Fascist*. The weird thing is that the old Fascists made sure to support and coddle the burghers and farmers who voted for them...the current Republican budget would be a middle-class setback. I guess that's OK as long as it's a lower-class disaster. (Sparrows, curtains rods, overpasses.)
I still think there's a good chance that the big money will lean hard on these bozos, but I don't know if the bozos are taking orders any more. Darrell's question from Cabaret above, "do you still think you can control them?", is scarily apropos. I suspect a lot of capital is flowing to Zurich.
*It really ticks me off to use that word, because calling most Republicans Fascists used to be hyperbole. Now, you are who you vote for.
Pappenheimer
LH:
Qui bono? Well... does Putin have anything on the GOP?
Or is this instead mass elite stupidity?
N.B. - letting tax cuts expire is the same as raising taxes. The Trump Billionaire Bonanza expires in 2025.
Pappenheimer
It's time once again to quote Frank Wihoit:
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect".
Pappenheimer, ask your Dad which party is ALWAYS more fiscally responsible re debt and deficits.
So Do Outcomes Matter More than Rhetoric? - CONTRARY BRIN - http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2014/06/so-do-outcomes-matter-more-than-rhetoric.html
Pappenheimer,
I'm kinda hoping the Democrats don't cave and then Biden issues and executive order to continue business as usual. They ARE co-equal branches of government where the one that will be most upset at him is currently divided.
But this all does remind me of union/management fights. Both sides want the laborers to be working, so the only real question is how it is going to happen.
Larry,
Once that's gone, we're not getting it back.
I'm not so sure about that, but I'd rather not test it.
Remember... this hasn't been tested. We are making doom and gloom predictions. We don't have a crystal ball. We just have a strong desire not to see that future.
Also ask yourself... where else are those bond investors going to put there money? Seriously. What options do they have? The bond market is absolutely HUGE. Where are they going to put all that money?
Stop calling them "conservative". They do not conserve
I have suggested using 'selfservative' instead: a more honest description that might make some wonder if that really is their tribe.
Paradoctor:
Well... does Putin have anything on the GOP?
Stop calling them the GOP.
There is no longer anything Grand about them, nor Old in the sense of stately, established, traditional.
GQP is acceptable. :)
As to your question, that should be obvious to even the most obtuse by now.
They appear to be indulging in a fantasy and are disinterested in how they look from the outside. Our role may be limited to picking up the pieces.
LH, "Formerly GOP" requires less explanation.
Paradoctor - does Putin have anything on the GOP?
No, they just share the same world view.
https://www.google.com/search?q=why+do+republicans+love+putin&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS720US720&oq=why+do+republicans+love+putin&aqs=chrome..69i57.7801j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#ip=1
Putin has created a racist, oligarchic, authoritarian regime unafraid to slaughter large numbers of non-white people in Chechnya and Syria, stomped on the free press, persecutes gays, and has made the Orthodox church a branch of government.
For evangelical MAGA folks, Putin's Russia is paradise.
Alfred Differ:
The bond market is absolutely HUGE. Where are they going to put all that money?
Crypto?
Putin and Xi probably expect that capital fleeing the US will flow their way. I doubt it really will, but they may be operating on that assumption.
Even if they keep investing in US bonds, it will be considered a riskier investment than before, discouraging some investment and requiring higher rates on the rest. You'll never get to see negative interest rates again.
Since you already know that money can be crated out of vacuum and return to nothingness, my biggest concern is that a lot of money doesn't survive the new paradigm.
DP:
For evangelical MAGA folks, Putin's Russia is paradise.
Then they should do what they used to tell dirty hippies to do in the 60s and go there.
Alfred Differ:
But this all does remind me of union/management fights. Both sides want the laborers to be working, so the only real question is how it is going to happen.
It's more like Homer Simpson calling around to rally support for Ned Flanders's Stupid Left-Handed Store. "Remember when I paid back that loan? Well now I need you to do a favor for me."
What Biden (and sane liberals) is demanding is that we cover the expenses we (including Trump) already ran up and then separately negotiate and compromise on future spending. What Republicans insist on is negotiating and compromising over what we're willing to give up in return for letting essential governance happen in the first place. Paying our (already-incurred) bills is no longer an apolitical function of government--it's something Republicans demand something in return.
It reminds me of locum's old rhetorical question about negotiating with Hitler, implying that we are the intransigent ones if we refuse to compromise over an acceptable number of Jews to kill. Three million perhaps, or two million.
Then they should do what they used to tell dirty hippies to do in the 60s and go there.
That is as likely to happen as a libertarian moving to a place free from the restrictions of government.
They would be required to serve, they only wish to rule.
Larry,
We need to meet up for omelettes some time. I like your style. I'm not sure if my go-to omelette house back in Colorado still exists, though, and I don't even remember the name, so I can't look it up. Any good omelettes in Chicago? I've yet to find one out here.
Don't forget to mention that The Grope raised the National Debt by 40%. Repugnant Ones really hate it when you point out their hypocrisy, though these days they just deny everything and make up more "alternative facts."
PSB
While we're talking about unions, I had an encounter that might give people some talking points should you ever find yourself trapped in the presence of rabid, raving, fascist Republicans bitching about how "communist" unions are. There are some people who think you're a hero if you teach, and then there are those who think you're in league with Lucifer. One who was saying that the unions are destroying the country and especially hated the "woke" (which is to say, not Republican Correct) teachers' unions couldn't say what unions do except demand money. I told the dumb bitch that I used to work in a school district that had a toothless union - we weren't allowed to strike during working hours, only picket after school. Still, picketed we did when the superintendent decided that he had a better idea than to use the budget to get new textbooks after 10 years. He decide that the gym in the middle school needed to be replaced, and that little construction project blew the entire budget for two years. It turned out that the superintendent's son had just finished up an architecture degree, and was working for the company that somehow, mysteriously, won the contract to build that gym. Sure, they gym was old, but so was every building in the district. The local news, of course, stressed that the teachers were striking for better pay, but never mentioned the textbook issue, the corrupt contracting, or the fact that this particular district had the second highest paid superintendent in the Greater Los Angeles Area, but the lowest-paid faculty and staff. The old bag insisted that teachers are nothing but greedy bastards who don't care one bit about the students, and only want to "indoctrinate" then.
Feel free to pass that one around, and if you have any good union stories, share them. It's us against the Republican Correct Nazis, and the pattern is happening all over the world.
PSB
"It reminds me of locum's old rhetorical question about negotiating with Hitler, implying that we are the intransigent ones if we refuse to compromise over an acceptable number of Jews to kill. Three million perhaps, or two million."
- Where is Fecal Ranch, anyway? My hope is that he finally grew up and is afraid to show his ugly attitude here anymore, but that's probably too much to hope for...
PSB
PSB:
Any good omelettes in Chicago? I've yet to find one out here.
I used to like Old Country Buffet (breakfast on weekends), but they all seemed to have closed, at least around these parts. Some expensive hotels have good breakfast buffets with omlette bars, but they're...well, expensive.
Repugnant Ones really hate it when you point out their hypocrisy, though these days they just deny everything and make up more "alternative facts."
They don't even do that any more. They just own the deplorability. My brother said this way back in the Bush/Cheney days, "They don't even pretend any more--they just pretend to pretend." And now, I think they've stopped even doing that.
My hope is that he finally grew up and is afraid to show his ugly attitude here anymore,
Well, now you've probably gone and done it.
Larry,
Crypto? Ha, ha!
Um. No.
There ARE very rich people putting money into crypto, but some of them have little choice in how they try to hide money from their local tyrant. Crypto's volatility is huge! Those folks can lose half their money when they do it. They know that going in, but it's better than losing it all to the local tyrant.
Musk is a risk taker, so don't treat him as an exemplar of rich people trying to make money on their money. He's taking much larger gambles than crypto buyers. Most of the richest won't do that. They want relatively safe places to put their money so it earns money.
A bond buyers mindset is VERY conservative. They want the principle they invest to be preserved (primary goal) and to earn a moderate interest (secondary goal) that reflects the risk they take of failing at the first goal. They stand to make very little money on the upside and risk losing everything on the downside. That reward profile attracts ONLY the most pessimistic, paranoid investors… of which there are a lot. Mostly it draws the very rich… or other small nations who need to put their foreign currency reserves somewhere.
There is a class of bonds where you'll find risk takers. The common name for them is junk bonds. They are issued by borrowers who people believe might default… or just vanish like a burp in the wind. My sub-prime lending employer from years ago lent money to risky customers and then packaged the revenue streams as various grades of bonds. Some of them were pretty risky so a high interest rate was demanded by the buyers. We charged high interest rates on the loans accordingly. Junk bonds are a small sliver of the market, though. Most of them are corporate bonds, but occasionally you'll find US States falling into that territory when they blow up their budgets. Confederate war bonds definitely qualified.
Equity buyers (stocks mostly) are more willing to take risks, but they cover quite a range. Value investors are also interested in principle preservation, but expect dividend payments instead of interest. If you look at the rates, some dividends are actually lower than the safest bonds. The attractive part of these is they provide a monthly income where bonds don't unless you own very large numbers of them spread across different maturity dates.
Everything else you imagine as a possible investment is riskier with crypto way, way, way out there.
———
You'll never get to see negative interest rates again.
Don't bet on that. Principle preservation is the primary objective. They can afford small losses over the short haul. They hate it, but it's far better than "actually" risky investments. The value of a treasury bond depends a great deal on politics… which money can influence.
This points out the real risk they faced in the late-90's as our public debt began to fall. If that trend had continued, they would have had no choice but to move money into equity markets… and the US equity supply simply isn't big enough. Stocks already inflate year over year because many of us push a steady supply of cash into retirement funds (401K's, IRA's, etc), but having former bond buyers spill into the equity markets would cause far more demand than could be met. Even today and with global markets, the volume of money in bonds is gigantic. VAST! If it moves elsewhere, it will create excess demand and prices will explode. [I wouldn't mind that, but that's because I have money in the US stock market.]
Larry and PSB: if you are talking about actually in the city, Ann Sather (three locations on the North Side) used to do very good omelettes. But it has been over 20 years, so things may have changed. (I know that a few other places I would recommend from that long ago no longer exist.)
Alfred Differ:
Crypto? Ha, ha!
I was being sarcastic, although somewhat kidding on the square. If any true movers and shakers are betting enough on tanking asset prices that they would purposely cause
A bond buyers mindset is VERY conservative. They want the principle they invest to be preserved (primary goal) and to earn a moderate interest (secondary goal) that reflects the risk they take of failing at the first goal. They stand to make very little money on the upside and risk losing everything on the downside. That reward profile attracts ONLY the most pessimistic, paranoid investors…
I was gonna say that sounds like me, except for the "risk losing everything," which seems to me to be the opposite of a preference for principal protection.
Value investors are also interested in principle preservation, but expect dividend payments instead of interest. If you look at the rates, some dividends are actually lower than the safest bonds. The attractive part of these is they provide a monthly income where bonds don't ...
Glad I read ahead before responding, because this does sound like me. If there is a risk of losing much or all of the principal, I would want cash coming in to offset that risk, not just a balance sheet that shows my holding is worth more--until it isn't.
This points out the real risk they faced in the late-90's as our public debt began to fall. If that trend had continued, they would have had no choice but to move money into equity markets… and the US equity supply simply isn't big enough.
And this is why not only will Republicans never pay down the debt, but it doesn't seem like a good idea to expect that. I remember when it seemed like it might happen, and while that sounds good to the low-information voter, the real powers that be were freaking out, and laid down the law to then-President W to prevent it.
* * *
"Principal", not "principle" (although I prefer to preserve both if I can help it).
Hate to sound schoolmarmish, but it was a no-excuse spelling word (which could cost you a letter grade on a paper) in my high school.
Andrew Marvell would have had to take a B on his famous poem for "Thorough the iron gates of life".
I messed up the first response:
I was being sarcastic, although somewhat kidding on the square. If any true movers and shakers are betting enough on tanking asset prices that they would purposely cause a default, I could totally see them waiting it out in Crypto.
Reading "Chicago" and "omelette" sparked a new omelette recipe idea. An omelette stuffed and or covered with the tomato sauce, sweet Italian sausage and cheese from Pizzeria Uno's Chicago Classic pizza. I'd eat that.
Probably have to roll me out in a wheelchair afterwards.
Truth.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/07/opinion/tucker-carlson-christian-right.html
The more the Christian right latches on to cruel men, the more difficult it becomes to argue that the cruelty is a bug, not a feature.
Why has so little new housing been built lately in the US? Many factors are discussed. Almost never what I deem the real culprit. Under Trump wealth disparities skyrocketed. Inheritance brats need places to stash extra lucre. Never into productive enterprises (as Supply Side falsely predicted they would).
Rather, as Adam Smith described, into 'rent-seeking' properties. Cash purchases of real estate put vast portions of US housing stock out of reach of new buyers. Those rentier lords don't want new housing to deflate their holdings.
PSB,
I don't think characterizing unions as communists is fair, but there are counter-stories to your anecdote that suggests they aren't fundamentally different from the management they face off against in negotiations.
Part of why I don't teach at the college level is my piss poor views of the union which I see as occasionally acting like a protection racket. You HAVE to join or they are against you being employed at all.
My sour experience dates to the 90's when I was beginning to transition from grad school. I patched together a living teaching part-time at schools that had slightly more demand than supply for lecturers. I wasn't allowed to teach more than a certain amount in any one district without coming under their union contract and I understood that. They also couldn't make early promises regarding classes to teach. It had to look like emergency spending or other contract rules applied. They'd call a few days before a semester started. I understood that too and coped with no complaints.
Problem was, when I finally graduated I should have kept my mouth shut about having the PhD. When a local JC heard of it, they had to pay me more because of their contract. They couldn't afford to pay me more, so I was out. There was no option for me to continue the relationship we had before I graduated.
I get why that union negotiated for clauses involving pay like that. I really do. It's a system for defining what someone's contribution is worth that leaves no wiggle room for abuse by management when they don't like someone. Unfortunately, that system completely ignores the liberty of the person offering to labor for a wage. It dictates the price instead of tolerating what the market might demonstrate what the price should be. Systems like this actually CREATE shortages when prices are set too high much like rent control does. The second-to-last last JC where I taught could NOT tap the actual labor pool in their area because they couldn't have a say in a voluntary wage negotiation.
———
My wife is currently in a teacher's union. She deals with elementary school kids in the special needs classes. I've seen a few things that have softened my sourness regarding your unions. Some administrators are simply dicks, but I'm not convinced yet that her union can or should do anything about them. The real underlying problem is how pensions are trapped to regions which discourages teachers from picking up stakes and working for different administrators.
Why you all put up with that is beyond me. Seriously. It's as if you all want to be indentured servants.
Larry,
Most investors are low risk takers. We hear a lot about the others, but they are the froth and spray on a windy sea. Unfortunately for the low risk takers, when supply and demand are mostly in equilibrium, the froth and spray drive prices. Every transaction sets a new price, so buy-and-hold folks only get to have a say once.
[Yah. I messed up with principle vs principal. I don't use the later form much as I'm not a value investor most of the time. I'm definitely a T-type in the equity and options markets, but not at the extremes. 8) ]
Every investor risks losing everything they put in. Some risk losing more. They don't like to think of it that way, but that is the reality. The only question is the size of the risk at various levels of loss.
———
The classical retreat for bond holders is gold and silver. You might catch late night ads on TV making pitches to buy or sell the stuff. As a rule, bet against what the ads are saying if you are going to play in that market at all.
I don't think gold and silver can function the way it used to in the pre-20th century era. The markets got way too big. World GDP is about to crack $100 trillion. That's a PER YEAR number, so try to imagine the value of all the property underlying our markets and you'll see why the gold bugs are crazy. There is no place to put all this wealth that isn't already being tapped. At best we move it around and there aren't enough precious metals on Earth to soak up the supply in the bond markets.
———
And this is why not only will Republicans never pay down the debt, but it doesn't seem like a good idea to expect that.
I don't think they ever will for the same reason old Tories would never have paid off British debts. Too many aristocrats had investments in those debts and expected to roll them over form year to year. This is VERY well described by Piketty in that big book of his. Even if I disagree with Piketty on his other conclusions, he nailed the Rentier description perfectly.
Oh... I should be fair and point out other place where Piketty nailed it. When you actually look at historical wealth reserves, you find the richest used land. As wealth grew, though, they ran into a limit. Bonds provide the only market big enough nowadays.
Now contemplate what debt repayment looks like in that historical sense. It would be like someone ELSE paying to own all the land... taking it out of the market. They might as well destroy it if YOU are accustomed to using land to store wealth.
Feel free to pass that one around, and if you have any good union stories, share them. It's us against the Republican Correct Nazis, and the pattern is happening all over the world.
Last time I was on strike (retired teacher here) we weren't striking for money for us, but for money to be spent on students. Didn't stop the right-leaning press from claiming that we were all greedy bastards out for higher wages. (There was a law limiting wage increases to less than the rate of inflation, that we were challenging in the courts, but we were striking over more resources for students.)
That law was later ruled unconstitutional, but the damage was done — we still lost wage increases for four years. The police still got their increases on schedule — their contracts were settled before the bill was passed.
For reference, I'm Canadian, so our right-wing is equivalent to your Democrats, with your "socialist" Senator Bernie being a only a bit right-of-centre.
Alfred Differ:
There is no place to put all this wealth that isn't already being tapped. At best we move it around and there aren't enough precious metals on Earth to soak up the supply in the bond markets.
That's essentially the theme of Kurt Vonnegut's Jailbird, which he wrote as an attempt at a science fiction novel about economics.
"And this is why not only will Republicans never pay down the debt, but it doesn't seem like a good idea to expect that."
I don't think they ever will for the same reason old Tories would never have paid off British debts. Too many aristocrats had investments in those debts and expected to roll them over form year to year.
I'm not disparaging them for continuing to not balance the budget. I'm saying it's long past time we get past the notion that keeping to a balanced budget and eliminating the national debt is an unqualified good. It seems to me that no one who actually knows stuff agrees with that canard, but they get votes from people who don't know any better by pretending to agree with it. That theory needs to have its head severed and buried along with its body at separate crossroads.
Now contemplate what debt repayment looks like in that historical sense. It would be like someone ELSE paying to own all the land... taking it out of the market. They might as well destroy it if YOU are accustomed to using land to store wealth.
As The Joker put it in my favorite Batman episode:
"If you make a thing unusable, it's just as good as stealing it."
Rather, as Adam Smith described, into 'rent-seeking' properties. Cash purchases of real estate put vast portions of US housing stock out of reach of new buyers. Those rentier lords don't want new housing to deflate their holdings.
There is a significant correlation between the share REITs have in a housing market and the unaffordability of that market.
The real underlying problem is how pensions are trapped to regions which discourages teachers from picking up stakes and working for different administrators.
That is just wild. Up here pensions are fully transferrable by law, and have been since the last century. I had some barriers when I looked at moving from Ontario to Alberta, but transferring my pension wasn't one of them.
For reference, the barriers were mostly the hiring practices of Alberta school boards — specifically expecting candidates to be available for interviews on a couple of hours notice, back in the days when cell phones were bricks and even pagers were rare. In hindsight I'm glad I never moved.
Larry,
"Well, now you've probably gone and done it."
- I sure hope not! Apologies all around if it comes back...
PSB
Darrell,
Add some peppers and onions and I'm in line behind you.
PSB
Alfred,
"Why you all put up with that is beyond me. Seriously. It's as if you all want to be indentured servants."
- Like we have any choices? Especially after spending all those years in college, up to our necks in debt, erroneously believing that we were going to make a difference. By the time you realize what a scam it is, no one will hire you for anything other than teaching, and the private schools pay so little you can forget having a family, a retirement, or any future free from serfdom. That describes much of America's economies these days.
Unions are like any other organization - they are not impervious to corruption, so they have to be watched, but without them there is little or no power that can fend of the atrocities of the executive caste.
PSB
Unions are like any other organization - they are not impervious to corruption, so they have to be watched, but without them there is little or no power that can fend of the atrocities of the executive caste.
i have worked both private and public, union and non-union.
I want a union. Even if not perfect, they're closer to being on my side than management is.
Thing is, like democracy, unions require getting involved to work properly. Taking the time to go to meetings, learn enough about issues to have an informed option, etc.
I will skip the politics this week. I don't have time to read it all. Any thoughts about the Microsoft - Helion Energy deal?
https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/10/23717332/microsoft-nuclear-fusion-power-plant-helion-purchase-agreement
Helion has contracted with Microsoft to provide an powerplant to supply 50 MW of power via aneutronic fusion. By 2028. Their approach would produce less than 5% of the energy in the form of fast neutrons. Their approach would also skip the steam cycle and convert fusion power directly into electricity.
I am just a tax lawyer, not a physicist. But I would love for this to really work. Just this morning I was watching excerpts from the HBO series CHERNOBYL and I was wondering if there were any possible ways to convert nuclear power directly into electricity. Strange how my mind works.
Larry,
…eliminating the national debt is an unqualified good.
I'm going to be more than a little graphic here, but don't take it personal.
I do so to point out how misguided I think some are on this topic.
I think it WOULD be a good idea to eliminate the debt. That's a huge step in stoping your abuser from raping you year after year. Have no doubt in your mind… that is how I see Rentiers when they make their political puppets dance. They have strings on the elected officials, something else up your you know where, and the puppets and rape victims blame each other.
When you support your government borrowing large sums of money, you support your rapist's lifestyle.
———
I'm not against borrowing in general. I am against borrowing with no plan to do anything other than kiss the ass of your abuser. The ACTUAL people who abuse you.
The reason the public debt needs to be cut isn't because that's an unqualified good.
It's because you are being abused and think you are getting something good out of it.
Make them put their money elsewhere. Stop the cycle of abuse.
(And please don't tell me you think it would be better to steal their money and hand it to their puppets.)
Alfred Differ:
I'm not against borrowing in general. I am against borrowing with no plan to do anything other than kiss the ass of your abuser. The ACTUAL people who abuse you.
No doubt, there is waste, fraud, and abuse in the budget. However, to take one example, we spent beyond our immediate means to fight WWII. We spent beyond our immediate means to save the economy during the pre-vaccine COVID period. And to a lesser degree, we spend beyond our immediate means to stimulate ourselves out of recessions.
There are fiscally sound reasons for borrowing--infrastructure which later increases revenue and saving ourselves from a physical enemy among them. I'm glad we're not constrained by a balanced-budget amendment from doing so.
And please don't tell me you think it would be better to steal their money and hand it to their puppets.
I assume you refer to taxation. I don't want taxes used to enrich the politicians themselves. I want them used for good governance and public service. I've yet to hear how a government--any government--can function without revenue and where that revenue would come from without taxation.
I think it WOULD be a good idea to eliminate the debt.
You should have voted for Gore then. In Florida. It ain't happening in our lifetime, and I'm just tired of the Democrats taking the blame for that fact.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/07/opinion/tucker-carlson-christian-right.html
I’ll end with a point of agreement with Wallnau. I do agree that [Tucker] Carlson was more powerful in Christian politics than “a lot of preachers.” I’ll go even further. He was more powerful in Christian politics than virtually any preacher alive.
I'll go even further. He was more powerful in Christian politics than Christ.
PSB,
Like we have any choices?
Yes, but it is painful. I know because the gamble I took to go to grad school and get my degree actually failed. I was trained for academia. That's where I wanted to go. I bought into the fraud and re-sold it to those around me. Didn't work, though. Much like small private colleges offering to train adults in new careers, there is a difference between the sales pitch and market realities. It didn't help that I left grad school right into the teeth of a recession, but the underlying reality is they train many, many more of us than can possibly be hired into existing academia.
My academic training was ill-suited for the job market I finally entered in late '93, so I set it aside and learned new skills. The only reason I got away with that is I didn't have any student loans*. Well… no long terms loans. I had taken short-terms ones in the early 80's to deal with cash flow issues, but that's it. They were gone by '93 except for one credit card which I was carrying over month to month. That sucked, but not like what the rest of you faced with student loans.
You are wrong about only being hire-able for teaching, though. I thought that was the case with me too until that last JC cut ties with me. I DID look around, but I also rolled over and started doing temp work for peanuts. You can bet I didn't mention my education much. When it came up I brushed it aside and said I just needed a bit of work while I worked on interviews. Or I needed to pay a credit card. Part-time teaching didn't pay much, so I pitched to them that I needed to put on a smile and fill the gap. AFTER they got to know me I changed my tune and asked them to consider long-term temp positions… which they did because I was revenue to them.
———
There IS an ongoing scam and I think y'all should be mad as hell. I was, but I got over it when I realized my employment option limits were actually self-imposed.
t's a weird thing to realize that we self-limit and I've never been able to communicate just how liberating it was when I finally understood that. When I did, I quit blaming that union, or the universities, or pretty much anyone else. My life got a lot happier when I realized it was mine to decide where I took it.
———
* My wife took on student loans to complete her teaching credential for mod-to-severe autism kids in the schools. We actually work out the numbers. She considered a cheaper path, but I didn't like the school where she would have gone. Too much risk of it being one of those places that don't give a damn whether you find work after they've got to you sign onto all that debt. I pushed for a more expensive option and pointed out how we'd clear her debt without relying on HER income.
I know most teacher-wanna-bee's can't plan it that way, but taking on debt without a serious plan is a poor way to invest in yourself. It can easily become indentured servitude. As I was saying to Larry, it becomes part of the cycle of abuse.
Alfred Differ: You can bet I didn't mention my education much
You might be surprised at how common this is. I've known a few inverse 'fake it till you make it' types myself. Brilliant autodidacts too, hiding in troglodyte hierarchies, fearing getting 'outed'. A lot of them are SF fans.
The economy and balancing the budget
All of that becomes easier when you understand that
"The Economy" sees money multiplied by the speed of transactions
"The Budget" simply sees money
So its possible to "balance the budget" while at the same time "boosting the economy"
Speed of Money is the important part
(and tax cuts are the slowest money)
@Alfred Differ,
I have to admit, I'm unclear on some of your...principles...concerning borrowing and lending. Is it your view that the government should do without money? Assuming no, where should its money come from? Since taxation is theft, aren't we required to pay interest or dividends in order to induce those looking to put their money to work to let us use it? If taxation is theft and bonds are submission to rape, I'm confused what the alternative is.
To me, the difference between democratic government and tyranny is not that the bad government collects taxes and the good one doesn't. The bad one uses its powers to exploit its subjects for private gain, whereas the good one uses its powers for "the lives of my crew".
GMT,
I'm not a physicist either. I did a quick GooGoo search, and came up with conflicting tales. My best guess based on what I read is that there is a hypothesis out there, but it hasn't been adequately tested, so making that kind of commitment sounds a bit dodgy. Hopefully someone with more experience in that realm will clue us in.
PSB
Alfred,
It's very self-affirming and mentally heathy to pretend that you are in control of your life. It must feel good, and it seems that you have been fortunate enough, as well as hard-working and tolerant of hardship enough, to maintain that comforting illusion. People don't even control their own minds, much less trillions upon gazillions of utterly random things they know little or nothing about. If you have been fortunate, that's great, but don't presume that anybody can do it. The factors that fight us are legion, and the claim that it is all up to the individual is how you get victim-blaming, one of the self-servatives' ugliest agendas.
When I went looking for jobs, I was asked by everybody, why aren't you looking for a teaching job? The answer is that one of my doctors told me that continuing to teach would likely cause a relapse, which could easily kill me. So I don't teach anymore, but no one wants to hire me for anything else. Not personal perception, actual words from actual interviewers, HR personnel, and I forget who else.
PSB
Duncan,
Dr. Brin has discussed the velocity of money problem before, if my admittedly poor memory serves (my hippocampus looks like Swiss Cheese, and I mean Alpine Lace, not the more usual Emmenthaler). I've rammed the idea down the throats of right-wing Nazis before. It doesn't convince them, but once in a while someone else thanks me for the information. Communication is good.
PSB
I'll go even further. He was more powerful in Christian politics than Christ.
What's surprising about that? Most people involved in Christian politics are more powerful than Christ.
Robert,
Agreed on the value of unions. As a former teacher, though, I can promise you that not much of anyone has time to get involved. The demands of the job are way beyond human capacities - what happens when teaching standards are made by committees. Unions probably work better where the people they represent aren't so massively over-worked, don't take their work home every night and on the weekends, are told what to do by admin who never tell you how they want you to do it, then give you poor performance ratings base don your inability to read their minds, etc.
PSB
I support unions but... I've been a member of 3 unions. The only one that did a decent job was the Teamsters...and that seems to have been because they approached the employees and made a campaign to show the benefits of joining.
The other 2 unions I paid money to were arranged by an agreement between politicians and union leaders. In both cases, my pay was kept lower than necessary by the union and benefits were worse.
I've represented employees in non-union shops and I've seen how employers abuse them. Unions that get too big stop looking out for their members and start looking after the interests of the leadership. It's a damned difficult problem. If the union is too small, the employers can push it around. If the union becomes too big, there is a risk it will stop looking after the members.
Have you ever worked in a riding stable? I have. I was lucky. We only had to clean up after 120 horses. I was one of the Super Duper Poop Scoopers.
Horse manure eventually dries out but it is messy and smelly for a few days. In the late 19th century, horse manure was a major problem. A horse will produce 15 to 35 lbs of poop and 2 pints of urine per day. New York City 100,000 horses producing 2.5 million pounds of manure per day. This came to be known as the Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894. The Times in London predicted that in 50 years, every street would be buried in 9 feet of manure.
Rebels without a cause.
PSB, your job description for teachers is *exactly* why they need a union.
@GMT re: direct nuclear to electricity.
You could take a beta (ie electron) emitter and place it in a hollow conducting sphere.
Charge build up can be drawn off as current.
Should work in theory (anyone try?) although I doubt it would produce a huge amount of power.
As a former teacher, though, I can promise you that not much of anyone has time to get involved [in unions].
As someone who recently retired from three decades in the classroom, I disagree. I know what it's like to work 60-80 hour weeks. Not being involved in the union is like not taking the time to stay fit; it's short-term thinking that results in even worse consequences down the line.
I've met colleagues from private schools, and with one or two exception they earn less and work longer hours than I did, with no job security because they are on yearly (or shorter) contracts. Some private school teachers are unionized, and are much better off than their non-unionized colleagues.
Nobody has the time for everything they want to do, but as any parent knows you need to make the time for important things. And being involved in your union, like being involved in at least your local politics, is one of those things. Unions are essentially democratic, and democracies only work for the people when the people themselves make the effort to be involved.
I didn't watch Trump's Hitler-rally on CNN, but I can't help hearing about it on progressive talk radio (which does exist).
From what I've heard discussed, Trump laughed off the idea that the debt ceiling was increased without controversy many time on his watch. When asked about his comment as president that the debt ceiling should always be handled cleanly, he smirked, "I'm not president any more."
If he really said that, or anything like that, he openly admitted two quiet parts out loud. First of all, the Republican Party isn't even pretending any more that they view the national debt as a problem of its own. It's only an excuse to hammer Democrats when they are in power. This has been obvious to liberals forever, but it's finally sinking into the general consciousness. Even those voters who like the tactics the Republicans use at least understand the trick now, and so do those on the opposite side.
Maybe more importantly: Is that the first time Trump admitted that he is not the current president?
He almost rivaled Satan in his power!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L07fMoafVh4
He says he could end the war in 24 hrs. Is that an admission he doesn’t think he’ll be elected potus next year, thus he has nothing to lose by making such a promise?
Alan Brooks:
He [Trump] says he could end the war in 24 hrs.
I'm pretty sure he means he would withdraw support for Ukraine and let Putin roll into Kyiv.
Tony,
Not a physicist, but have a retired uncle who was...he gave me some old books. I even read some of them.
D-T fusion reactions create alpha particles and neutrons.
I know of no way to convert either of those directly into electrons. According to wiki, an alpha particle is a stripped helium atom, so by definition has no electrons...and you don't want to go messing about with neutrons. So, unless I'm missing something, we're still using heat to do work and make electrons dance the old fashioned way - steam is the simplest converter. But maybe piezoelectricity?
Pappenheimer
PSB,
It's not so much 'control' as it is 'direct'. Even then the million little random things have a lot more say in what happens than many of us care to admit. What I figured out was that they were the ONLY things directing me if I didn't contribute. When I did, I discovered that I had some say in the matter.
Yes. I know not everyone can do it. I strongly suspect, though, that many give up before they've actually found they have a limit. I'm not going to point a finger of blame at them when they do, but I'm also disinclined to be emotionally supportive of their surrender until I'm certain. I think I do them harm otherwise.
———
I was thinking that you were retired, but it sounds like I jumped to a conclusion. If you've been knocked out of your profession for medical reasons, let me restart by saying "That sucks!" and follow through with "How can I help you do what you want to try to do? If anything."
You don't have to talk about it here. You don't have to talk about it at all. But… if you want a stubborn guy on your side, I'm inclined to help people I like. I might be TOO stubborn to take, though. Your call. 8) [I'm at first initial last name at gmail.]
None of the current fusion zealots ever talks about extrating and converting the energy. An extraordinarily huge problem. I've seen one proposal. Shunt the fused--hot plasma into the interior of a mountain that is pre-laced with cooling pipes that carry away heat to convert while the center of the mountain contains everything from the reactor.
Larry,
First up, I'm of the opinion that our governments spend far more than necessary on things we could be doing for ourselves through organizations that don't have taxing authority. Money would still get spent doing a lot, but the coercive portion could be reduced. If those other organizations raise money through bonds, it becomes a different thing because they won't have coercive powers. You'd be able to turn around and smack them if they did something you didn't like.
The rape aspect of federal bonds comes from how we roll them over year after year. There is no plan for paying them off. Look at your own credit cards and check to see if you do that yourself. (I don't need to know.) If you do, you are treated much the same way by the entity holding your account. They are happy to take your money as long as you keep paying. THEY don't see it as rape, of course. They see it as you renting their money and if you want to keep on doing it, why should they stop you?
The real lunacy of having no plan to pay off public debt, though, comes from the fact that the people who create it ALSO have coercive power over you and your finances. The rich folks lending money know this and can put their money to use keeping the game going.
———
My libertarian friends (I don't have many anymore) think they can fix this with a wave of a hand. Stop spending. I disagree. That trauma would be worse than defaulting on the debt. We'd be doing Russia and China a huge favor.
What I think we have to do is stand up and turn around so we are at least facing the wrong way to be raped again. From that position, we ponder which bits of spending we REALLY need and ask if there are ways to shift it to entities with no coercive powers. Face the abuser… then try to do something productive about it.
———
The bad one uses its powers to exploit its subjects for private gain…
Every lender has that power over you if you have no plan to pay of the debt and can't afford a default.
You are being exploited now by a system you probably think serves your immediate interests. That's what makes this so difficult to explain. The system supports your abuser's rentier lifestyle.
Alfred Differ:
There is no plan for paying them off. Look at your own credit cards and check to see if you do that yourself. (I don't need to know.) If you do, you are treated much the same way by the entity holding your account. They are happy to take your money as long as you keep paying.
I'm just the opposite. With the exception of a few mistakes or lost bills, I have paid off every credit card every month for my entire adult life. From what I understand, the credit card companies hate me for that.
But if I were treating credit the way you describe, it would be more like consensual sex than rape. Because I would do it with a clear idea of what I can afford and what consequences I am willing to bear. I wouldn't rely on credit to buy things I can't afford--just things that I can't afford right now but are necessary investments in order to make money later. Like an interview suit and a car before my first job.
THEY don't see it as rape, of course. They see it as you renting their money and if you want to keep on doing it, why should they stop you?
As I see it, this is only a problem when the consequences are not understood. Metaphorically, when you don't know that consensual sex might produce a baby or disease. More to the point, when the borrower gets in too deep and can't support both the debt and essentials like food and shelter. That's a risk for the borrower, but it doesn't do the lender much good either if he has to write off the bad debt, which was part of the whole sub-prime loan fiasco in 2008. There's part of the "Why should they stop you?"
You are being exploited now by a system you probably think serves your immediate interests. That's what makes this so difficult to explain.
I think it was C.S. Lewis who said that the message of salvation in Christ was likewise difficult to explain in the mid-20th. To him, the issue was that back in the day, everybody believed and knew that they were sinners damned to Hell, and so the message that divine forgiveness was available was received as good news. But in the modern world, the messengers bringing the news of salvation have to first (his words) "preach the diagnosis." Before they can tell you about salvation through Christ, they first have to convince the listener that he needs it--that his soul is otherwise imperiled. This, of course, is bad news, not good news, and is much harder to get the listener to take seriously.
I see you in much the same position relative to economics.
The system supports your abuser's rentier lifestyle.
You likely hear this as learned helplessness, but I don't see any practical point in a solution which requires going to war with those guys. Remember how well (not) the Clintons did with their 1990s health care proposals by openly warring with the insurance companies? Obama did better (though far from perfect) by bringing the insurance companies on board, at least to the extent of (Gene Hackman in The Poseidon Adventure) not working against us.
The way I see it, any economic plan that requires a drastic forced reduction in the lifestyle of the rich and famous would face an insurmountable obstacle. For that reason, I'm willing to a certain extent to leave them alone if they'll leave us alone. The rich and powerful are not all sociopaths, and some of them can be brought on board with minimizing the misery they create for others. But not if those others are seen coming for them with pitchforks or guillotines. Those are weapons of last resort, to be used by those whose prospects are so hopeless that they're willing to lose it all as long as they take the bastards with them. I could see getting there, but I'm not there yet. (Trump supporters think they are there, but they have no idea what they'd be losing by burning the system down).
Larry,
I'm glad to hear you practice safe borrowing. Very glad. 8)
So few do and they get trapped with everything from student loans to credit card balances they barely maintain.
So for you, your credit relationships are consensual. The card companies probably don't hate you, though, as long as you keep coming back. That's fine too because you can stop. The relationship of both voluntary and euvoluntary.
———
I see you in much the same position relative to economics.
Ha! You might be right. I'll have to give that some thought.
I'm not alone, though. Piketty made some of the same argument.
———
I don't want to go to war with the rich lenders. It's not because they'd fight back, though. I want them in the riskier parts of the markets where they don't really qualify as rentiers anymore. I want them playing a different game than the one called "Buy a government".
Alfred, the national debt is one thing if it rises more slowly than GDP and national wealth, which is almost always true under dems. The effects of Rooseveltean investments in infrastructure, from schools to dams etc, were pragmatic to a degree that defies any theoretical objections. ABove all, if the uplift of poor kids adds to the pool of eagerly creative competitors ... and if that is accompanied by the memes I discuss in VIVID TOMORROWS: Science Fiction and Hollywood - http://www.davidbrin.com/vividtomorrows.html...
... then the net result will be a lot MORE LIBERTARIANS. Standing atop the imperfect near-paradise the Roosevelteans built for them.
By coincidence I responded thus within the last hour to an invitation to speak at Freedom Fest:
---
--->I am on record - in works like The Transparent Society - being huge on individualism and the positive sum outcomes of reciprocal competition. It's my main theme in commentaries on AI, lately. Hence, I am libertarian in that sense. Alas, I also believe the movement has lost any sense of history, e.g. who the main oppressors of freedom and competition were, across 4000 years.
I used to show up at FF about every 3 years or so. I stopped being invited after giving a talk showing that dems, while irritating and bureaucratic and preachy, nevertheless are better in every conceivable way for either bedroom or market freedom or fiscal prudence, than a party that's now utterly suborned by the inheritance brats whom Adam Smith denounced, the oligarchs who were the main enemies of competition and liberty for 4000 years.
I pointed out that Smith and Hayek would approve of helping poor kids get the health and education and level playing field they need in order to COMPETE... a word that the AEI/Heritage/Cato/Forbes/Koch 'libertarians' never use, any more. The word that should be central to L'ism.
I was never invited back.
Sure, I'd love a chance to debate Forbes onstage. Not sure anything short of that would seem anything but futile.
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2023/Items/May12-7.html
Slaton spent so much time in his own mind, it would seem he forgot to, you know, look in the mirror. A married man and a father, and someone who described himself as a "bold and brave Christian-Conservative," he was also in the habit of pursuing sexual relationships with his underlings.
I would have replaced the bolded (emphasis mine) word "also" above with the word "therefore".
@Pappenheimer alpha particles carry charges, too ;-)
So the setup I describe should still work.
(Thinking about it more, escaping alpha and beta particles result in a buildup of opposite charge on the radiation source, so it would ultimately act as the circuit sink/source, and you'd get a hole current doubling your output.)
Of course, the bulk of energy from a fusion reaction presents as gamma rays.
How to convert that directly into electricity rather than heat?
There aren't many (ie any) photovoltaic cells with an energy gap measured in MeV, although you could perhaps harvest a little bit that way. Hmmm...
David,
I usually won't argue against the value of any particular spending choice… except for truly dumb ones. Most everything else has a kind of logic to it where it makes some sense. Even aircraft carriers make sense, though I happen to think we have enough of those at the moment.
What gets my attention in the broad sense we've been tossing around here on this thread is how some get very upset at certain billionaires who happen to be openly annoying and then fail to see how much more subtle behaviors are doing far more harm. Funding the rentier lifestyle is arming one's opponent who normall stage just far enough off stage to avoid the pitchforks and torches.
———
When the debt grows slower than the GDP we are paying it down with future dollars. Our GDP growth rate isn't very high, though, so it doesn't take much to blow past it undoing the good done in previous years.
The ONLY time we've actually zeroed the debt was under Jackson… and I don't want to be associated with that guy or his method. However, I do think it is time for progressives to admit they don't win every election suggesting it would behoove them to do a bit more good while they can. In terms of the public debt, that means recognizing HOW they finance the lifestyle of their adversaries and then considering reductions or shifts to force our richest to take more risks.
The debt should be paid off as best we can… and then we should try to shift some of what is typically government funded elsewhere to the entity funding it doesn't have coercive authority. Let the rentiers make more of their income from those other places where no one has political authority over our lives.
———
My local (county level) libertarian party goes through serious changes when we swap out management. The broader party is composed of factions generally named after an exemplar. At various times we've had the Mises Caucus folks running things, but it really boils down to what the next slate of directors believes to be true of the world. We aren't a big group, so radical changes DO happen when we swap in new people.
I'm not sure which faction dominates FF right now, but I'm fairly sure it will change and then change again over the years. With you preaching results, though, it might be a while before the wheel spins round to a faction not already deaf to your message.
Tony,
If you run estimates on the current generated by moving alpha particles… it's not much. It's SO not worth it
With PV's we are very fortunate that the sun emits most of its radiation in a band that will move outer electrons in a number of crystals. Longer wavelength radiation will move outer electrons in metals, but there isn't much energy flux to be found compared to what our star is dumping on us every day.
The ONLY sensible way to get gamma rays moving electrons 'directly' is to do it the way our star does. Process those gamma rays through a huge amount of plasma causing them to be re-radiated (eventually) in a part of the spectrum that moves OUTER electrons in crystals. You don't want to be anywhere near gamma rays. You don't want to be anywhere near large atoms with displaced INNER electrons.
———
There is nothing organized about the energy output from a fusion reaction, so think of it all has 'heat' right from the start. The whole point of a steam engine is to capture heat to create a heat gradient. It is the gradient that does work like pushing a piston or spinning a turbine. It is the gradient that provides enough order to do work at all.
If you want power from a disorganized source of energy, you HAVE to create a gradient first. That's why the steam engine was one of the most important inventions in all of human history. It demonstrates the basic idea AND shows how one works. We've replicated the idea millions of times over and changed to other fluids and environments, but the core abstraction is the same in all of them. Organize the heat a bit… then do work.
The people who invented thermodynamics put it to use in ways that utterly changed humanity… and we aren't done with those changes yet.
@alfred. Oh, you're quite right. But the question was asked, and I had an envelope handy, so...
Heh. Sometimes I wish platforms like this one had a simple chalkboard accessory for quick sketches and BOTE calculations. I get why they don't, but my-oh-my would they be useful. 8)
Alfred Differ said...
First up, I'm of the opinion that our governments spend far more than necessary on things we could be doing for ourselves through organizations that don't have taxing authority. Money would still get spent doing a lot, but the coercive portion could be reduced. If those other organizations raise money through bonds, it becomes a different thing because they won't have coercive powers. You'd be able to turn around and smack them if they did something you didn't like.
I see that you said "I usually won't argue against the value of any particular spending choice…", but that makes your first sentence above a more or less empty one. After all, everyone - and that includes avowed socialists and communists- believes that we should only spend government money on the appropriate things. The question comes down to what one considers the appropriate things.
I would also suggest that the last sentence of the quoted paragraph is something out of fantasy. I am pretty sure that I - and indeed every person reading this - would not "be able to turn around and smack" non-state borrowers regardless of what I - or we - thought about their actions. I certainly am not in a position to withhold multimillion dollar loans from private entities. Indeed, it is only collectively - via the state or some state-like entity - that normal individuals (outside the top five percent of wealth-holders) can hope to exercise any such control.
In fact, I submit that your proposal in practice would give ever more control to those controlling the greatest amount of wealth. Rather than planning and funding things collectively, we would end up with "organizations that don't have taxing authority" going hat in hand to Blackrock or other non-state entitites controlling vast wealth - and such entities are geared toward serving their own interest rather than that of the public, often wishing to have some control over the things in which they invest.
Alfred Differ:
I do think it is time for progressives to admit they don't win every election suggesting it would behoove them to do a bit more good while they can. In terms of the public debt,
I think the Bush tax cuts taught Democrats the opposite lesson--that there's no point being fiscally responsible if that just gives the opposition more money to spend on their priorities rather than yours. In layman's terms, why bother saving if your spouse is going to blow it all on beer? Republicans have (at least since the 80s if not before) been successful with running up the debt so that they could complain about spending when Democrats were in power. What's happened more recently is that Democrats and some voters have finally caught onto the trick.
During the Obama years, I used to use the snarky phrase, "It's not about whether government is big or small. It's about whether government is tall, venti, or grande." The debt, like the tide, will apparently rise to its natural limit. The only question is what the money is used for. You and I probably agree that it would be nice if the world wasn't that way, but experience says that it is.
I said:
In layman's terms, why bother saving if your spouse is going to blow it all on beer?
Maybe it's time to forego the illusion of a joint checking account. Have a Democratic Treasury and a Republican Treasury, both authorized to do whatever it is that the current Treasury Department can do. The current government has taxing authority, and chooses which party Treasury to deposit the revenue with. They're allowed to borrow from each other, but lending is authorized by the respective parties, and concessions can be lawfully attached to such loans.
Better or worse than what we have now?
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