Why? Because EARTH is almost always on every list of Top Ten Novels That Predicted the Future. (It had web pages before there was a Web, or browsers, that I had to mock up myself in 1988. Other themes included: generational conflict over privacy. Floods of climate refugees. Melting glaciers and rising seas. Plus heat waves... and a mother planet that (some characters believe) is finally getting fed up. Plus many other predictive 'hits.'
Anyway, I decided that inserting updates that conform closer to the world of 2023 would be cheating. Hence, my big predictive mistakes are also there! You'll find several.
Anyway, while Open Road prepares for the novel's re-release - with a gorgeous new cover! -- in December or January -- I'll be posting some of those 'predictive hits' here... or just passages that I think you might enjoy. So, let's get started!
The first excerpt from Earth is copied in below... one of the semi-poetical extracts or views into the world of 2038. Much as John Brunner did in his wonderful, still totally relevant classic Stand on Zanzibar.
This passage also has a video reading I posted to Youtube. In fact, you could read along as I recite it!
====
A dust wafts through the hills and valleys of Iceland.
It was a noble and distinguished heritage. And yet, the founders’ principal legacy to their descendants was not that freedom, but the dust.
Whose fault was it? Would it be fair to blame ninth century settlers, who knew nothing of science or ecological management? In the press of daily life, with a family to feed, what man of such times could have foreseen that his beloved sheep were gradually destroying the very land he planned leaving to his children? Deterioration was so gradual that it went unnoticed, except in the inevitable tales of oldsters, who could be counted on to claim the hillsides had been much greener in their day.
Was there ever a time when grandparents didn’t speak so?
It took a breakthrough ... a new way of thinking ... for a much later generation to step back at last and see what had happened year after year, century after century, to the denuded land ... a slow but steady rape by degrees.
But by then it appeared already too late.
 |
| Dust over Iceland (SeaWiFS Project) |
Families adopt an acre here, a hectare there. Some have been tending the same patch since early in the twentieth century, devoting weekends to watering and shoring up some stretch of heath or gorse or scrub pine.
Pilots on commuter flights routinely open their windows and toss grass seeds over the rocky landscape, in hopes a few will find purchase.
Towns and cities reclaim the produce of their toilets, collecting sewage as if it were a precious resource. As it is. For after treatment, the soil of the night goes straight to the barren slopes, to succor surviving trees against the bitter wind.
A dust colors the clouds above the seas of Iceland.
At the island’s southern fringe, a cluster of new volcanoes spills fresh lava into the sea, sending steam spirals curling upward. Tourists gawp at the spectacle and speak in envy of the Icelanders’ “growing” land. But when natives look to the sky, they see a haze of diminishment that could not be replaced by anything as simple or vulgar as mere magma.
A dusty wind blows away the hills of Iceland. At sea, a few plankton benefit, temporarily, from the unexpected nurturance. Then, as they are wont to do, they die and their carcasses rain as sediment upon the patient ocean bottom. In time the layers will creep underground, to melt and glow and eventually burst forth again, to bring another island to life.
Short-term calamities are nothing to the master recycling system. In the end, it reuses even dust.
====
Oh heck, here's another... a snippet extract by one of the characters - in New Zealand - when he learns that a micro black hole might swallow the planet in a couple of years...
====
"You know,” George Hutton said slowly, still contemplating the peaceful view outside, “back when the American and Russian empires used to face each other at the brink of nuclear war, this was where people in the Northern Hemisphere dreamed about fleeing to. Were you aware of that, Lustig? Every time there was a crisis, airlines suddenly overbooked with “vacation” trips to New Zealand. People must have thought this the ideal spot to ride out a holocaust.
“And that didn’t change with the Rio Treaties, did it? Big War went away, but then came the cancer plague, greenhouse heat, spreading deserts ... and lots of little wars of course, over an oasis here, a river there.
“All the time though, we Kiwis still felt lucky. Our rains didn’t abandon us. Our fisheries didn’t die.
"Only now..."
====
I set aside a bunch of these to share with you all, across the next few weeks.
Here's hoping the best of the predictions will still come true... and not the worst ones.
169 comments:
Writing it once more: if someone votes for Trump and he wins, it is in fact on their head. It is a situation that they helped create.
And they ought to be told in advance.
Larry,
And I worry when I'm losing you as an ally.
Heh. Don't worry about that. Or… I should say that if you find I'm not an ally you can safely assume some alien from an alt.universe has taken over my body. Just shoot him and don't lose any sleep over it. 8)
I really like our Enlightenment Civilization, so I'm probably the easiest non-progressive you can find to make into an ally. There is a lot we BOTH want and those overlaps provide the fodder for discussions about why we SHOULD be allies.
The mainstream news media even seem to think that Trump is good for ratings.
He is. Unfortunately. May it come to bite them on the ass. Hard.
———
A libertarian is concerned with her own liberty but also knows that this liberty ends where yours begins.
We cover quite a range. The most vocal are usually heard expressing complaints about infringements on their own liberty, but many of us are concerned with yours too. What makes it into the news, though, are usually the selfish statements.
Where you'll see some of us self-constraining is when we agree to the non-aggression statement. There is a good chance Musk signed onto that because I hear it echo in some of his concerns with the war in Ukraine.
This guy hasn't read Ayn Rand, I take it.
Ayn Rand is not the only libertarian philosopher. As an exercise for the student, try writing down two more and summarize their views of the world. Contrast them with classical liberals. 8)
——
A libertine rejects any attempt to coerce him personally, but he’s happy to coerce others if it gives him what he wants.
By that definition, I would argue they are evil… not because they pursue what they want (we all do that) but in their lack of valuing others beyond what another can do to deliver those personal wants. For example, the baker who makes your bread is a lot more than your baker.
I'm not sure that is a good definition, though.
I lived in Iceland from '73-'75. Cold War ya'know. The US Navy and Air Force teamed up to watch Russian subs and bomber fleets trying to practice in and over the Atlantic.
Winters were dark, wet, windy, and EXTREMELY depressing. Literally. Some US service people had to seek counseling. One of my father's guys (he was a sergeant over airmen at the time) talked (and may have tried) suicide. This did a number on my father's health too. Dark winters are not for everyone.
Summers, however, were fantastic. They were short in terms of growing things, so everything turned green and tried to reproduce at lightning speed. Plenty of sunlight helped drive it all, but the only trees around us were ones people had imported. The Admiral had his on base, but they had to bring a new one every spring. It is NOT easy for tall things to cling to life anywhere that I saw, but scrappy lichen and moss was everywhere.
What I remember most, though, is living downwind of the fish factory near Keflavik. Ugh.
———
A few years ago I looked for where I lived there using Google Earth. It's all gone. Someone removed the roads and foundations for most of the base, but the airport and its huge runway is still there. Cold War is over, but airports are useful.
Alfred Differ said...
"Someone removed the roads and foundations for most of the base, but the airport and its huge runway is still there. Cold War is over, but airports are useful."
If nothing else, land speed racing enthusiasts would sacrifice parts of their anatomy to have access to a venue like that. A few of the most famous land speed racing venues are ex-runways, like the Maxton Mile.
Just a quick thought on libertarians in general. I've noticed that they seem to crave heroes and champions a lot for self-proclaimed free thinkers. I saw Geddy Lee the other day on TV replying to the taunt that Rush's big hit "Freewill" was often lauded as an Ayn Rand anthem. This greatly bothered him as his lifelong philosophy was social responsibility.
Dr Brin in the previous comments:
Again and again. Reds qualify as 'libertine' in the other meaning of the word.
True, and that was actually the op-ed writer's point. He even called his own party out for selfishness and disregard of others on COVID vaxxing and masking.
BUT
It doesn't strike me as true that Republicans help defeat anti-abortion legislation in red states because they want permissive sex without consequence allowed for the masses. The sense I get from news articles is that some are rightfully leery of the real-world consequences of a ban, such as a woman forced to carry an already-dead fetus because doctors are too scared to treat her, or a 10-year-old girl forced to carry her rapist's baby to term. And some who are women themselves, or who have women they care about, simply don't want the government's hands on their bodies. Which sounds way more libertarian than libertine to me.
Alfred Differ:
"The mainstream news media even seem to think that Trump is good for ratings."
He is. Unfortunately.
Obviously. I meant they seem to think he carries no offsetting downsides.
Ayn Rand is not the only libertarian philosopher.
I know, but I've had the feeling that big-L Libertarianism has swung hard in her direction. That may be, as you say, because that's what makes the news, but the news does influence public perception as much as it reports it.
"A libertine rejects any attempt to coerce him personally, but he’s happy to coerce others if it gives him what he wants."
By that definition, I would argue they are evil…
...
I'm not sure that is a good definition, though.
I agree with that last statement. The writer of the op-ed seemed to be straining for a negative word to distinguish pro-choice Republican voters from libertarians. Whereas I perceive pro-choice Republicans as being pretty darned libertarian concerning the issue.
His definition is a pretty good description of modern-day Republican politicians, though. "Happy to coerce others if it gives them what they want"? That could be their motto.
I always thought the term "libertine" described someone who pursued what he wanted without regard for what busybodies and social conservatives thought of them. Which is different (though not opposite) from "without regard for the liberty of others." In high school, someone famously said derisively, referring to my brother, "I'm a non-conformist, but I'm not a non-conformist like him." Seems to me that a libertarian calling someone else a libertine is saying the same thing, substituting "libertarian" for "non-conformist".
scidata said...
"I saw Geddy Lee the other day on TV replying to the taunt that Rush's big hit "Freewill" was often lauded as an Ayn Rand anthem. This greatly bothered him as his lifelong philosophy was social responsibility."
Such Randians mistake being free to choose as being selfish. It's a kind of category error that people inclined to commit strongly to an ideology often make. In this case, when the Randian is free to choose it chooses selfishness and believes that everyone else would too. It doesn't get that being free to choose is not the same category of thing as the choices that are then made. And it doesn't understand that lots of other people don't choose selfishness when they are free to choose.
Looks like I missed the whole MVP discussion. Just a quick correction, though. Current estimates for the founding population of the Maori is 70 women, not 70 people. That would have to include at least one man, presumably, unless they had genetic technology were aren't aware of.
Paul SB
Nice call out to "Stand on Zanzibar." I read that in the early 80s, about the same time I was reading (and re-reading) "Riders of the Purple Wage." Both of these visions of the future were so sharply drawn, so very much in contrast with the squeaky-clean Heinlein/Asimov stories, that it seemed like they were from an alternate reality.
About the same time, I also discovered Springsteen's "Nebraska" album, itself a gritty refutation of the simplistic Reagan feel-good, wave the flag and salute eagles mind-set of the times.
To me, there will always be a thread connecting these artistic works; one that is far more empathetic and yet also angry. Sadly, the blue-collar, hardworking people that I grew up amongst have chosen the plastic gardens of illusion offered up by the oligarchic billionaires funding the GOP and other right-wing parties around the world.
mcsandburg:
It is time for the republicans to say "The Dodd decision removed the federal government from the picture and I don't think that state government has any role to play either."
Well, the Dobbs decision removed the federal protection against state infringement on individual liberty. Now, you think they should remove state protections as well? Republicans only think government has no role in the issue because they're losing.
David:
I also discovered Springsteen's "Nebraska" album, itself a gritty refutation of the simplistic Reagan feel-good, wave the flag and salute eagles mind-set of the times.
Reagan was using "Born in the USA" as a campaign theme song, which IIRC prompted Springsteen to ask rhetorically whether Mr. Reagan had actually listened to the lyrics.
Reagan was using "Born in the USA" as a campaign theme song, which IIRC prompted Springsteen to ask rhetorically whether Mr. Reagan had actually listened to the lyrics.
Yeah, that one rankled me as well. However, Born in the USA is from a later album, by the same name. Nebraska is stripped-down Springsteen, just him and a guitar, recorded on a Tascam 4-track. You can hear the wooden chair Springsteen was sitting in squeaking in some of the songs. And those songs?
Yeah. "Mansion on the Hill." "Highway Patrolman." "Johnny 99." "Atlantic City." Songs about people who were shut out of the American Dream and know it. Songs about the glaring inequities of a winner-take-all economic system that promises a chance, but is actually rigged, "the sound of working-class people claiming a dignity and comfort that might otherwise be beyond their reach."
We're still stumbling through the wreckage of the collapse of our industrial, manufacturing economy. I've taken the train from Chicago to Detroit, through 4 straight hours of blasted post-industrial hellscape, through towns where all the buildings are crumbling, windows boarded up, roofs swaybacked and covered with sickly moss. I understand how & why those people vote for Trump; it's basically a Hail Mary, hoping that someone that different, crazy-sounding though he may be, might provide some difference to the 40 years of neglect and slow death that both political parties have offered them.
David:
I understand how & why those people vote for Trump; it's basically a Hail Mary,
Not disagreeing but a different take is that their reality is so depressing and hopeless that they prefer living in the fantasy world that Trump provides for them.
Larry Hart, an issue I see is (Formerly) GOP administrations following Reagan's example of doing nothing for those who're liable to vote for Democrats, many other issues spring from that.
The ‘libertarian philosopher’ about whom I keep reminding folks was called Adam Smith, who pushed the one viable alternative to 6000 years of feudal lordship-stupidity. The alternative of fecund-flat-fair-open-transparent market competition by the widest range of healthy, educated, confident and unafraid competitors. Smith made clear that the chief enemy of such creatively competitive markets has almost never been ‘socialists,’ especially not the (Rooseveltean) portions of socialism – e.g. efforts to uplift poor children, turning them into healthy, educated and confident competitors. The part that CREATES fecund market competition with the maxim “stop wasting talent!”
Indeed, the trait that has made today’s Mad Right… and a majority of self-styled ‘libertarians’ – turn their backs on Smith is his savage indictments of oligarchic-aristocratic cheating, the bane on both freedom and markets across 99% of the last 6000 years.
… a malediction that now has surpassed French Revolution levels of disparity and competition-suppression and cheating. Smith’s caustic denunciations of rentier-caste corruption – and the American Founders’ revolution against that (and precisely that) caste – plus later history’s hugely successful liberal rebellions against feudal slave-holders and Gilded Age titans – led to today’s ironic desperation by shill orgs like Heritage and AEI and the GOP to avoid ever mentioning that name.
Adam Smith.
----
As for Trump, I don't see how the oligarchs can allow him to be the GOP nominee. They've had their "Cabaret moment" and know they can't control him. I have little doubt they are exploring options -- including the "Howard Beale" approach for dealing with a no-longer-useful asset. (Bless the US Secet Service!) Of course much will depend on where Bad Vlad is, 6 months from now, since he likely is the one actually holding Don's kompromat.
Desperate to slash the IRS and to prevent another Pelosi Miracle Year, my best guess is they will turn to Nikki Haley. But not unless they feel they can control her. It seems unlikely she is personally kompromated... so the dems really need to look closely at her male relatives.
Forewarned, forearmed. Had Stein’s being a Russian asset been told to me, I wouldn’t have voted for the old battleaxe. It has to be said forcefully:
“Do not vote for someone such as that!”
Otherwise no one will pay much attention.
And voted instead for the other battleaxe? ;-). Ah well.
Alan Brooks:
Had Stein’s being a Russian asset been told to me, ...
I don't remember when I first saw the video of her in Moscow on July 4, but it was certainly after the election was long over. But then it also seemed like something that should have been commonly known already. It wasn't like, "Hey, we just uncovered this important video!" It was more like, "Hey, remember this?"
If the video of Stein, Ron Johnson, and Michael Flynn being feted in Moscow by Putin had previously been kept secret, I'm not sure why the video became public at all. And if it hadn't been kept secret, I'm not sure why more attention hadn't already been called to it.
I said:
Republicans only think government has no role in the [abortion] issue because they're losing.
It's like kids shouting "Not racing!" when they fall behind the other kids all running to the same place.
Or Trump saying he'd accept the election outcome if he wins.
Or Mitch McConnell ridiculously insisting that corporations should stay out of politics.
Republicans are fine with government having a coercive role against women, but protecting women's personal integrity? That's when "Government should have no role."
I had lunch with a group of former Ohio government tax lawyers. I found out why I am now politically radioactive. In late 2011, I had a meeting with a leading member of the Ohio House of Representatives where I gave her public records stored by the Ohio Department of Taxation concerning taxpayer appeals and games the Department was playing regarding refunds owed. I was worried that the Department was ignoring the law and that eventually it would get its cloaca handed to it by the courts (which is what happened to the Government of the Virgin Islands after I left).
I found out that my complaint had some serious fallout: it forced a senior administrator to retire from the Department. No harm to him; he quickly got a senior administrator job with the Ohio Casino Control Commission, drawing a 6 figure salary while getting his full state pension. Expect a few years later, he was charged with crimes related to what the Department of Taxation had been doing. He wrote memos and emails ordering that taxpayers not be informed of their refunds. Oops. Sadly, he did not pay too much of a price. He took a leave of absence from the Casino Control Commission and was allowed to plead guilty to a 2nd degree misdemeanor. Later, the Casino Control Commission re-hired him. He is currently the third highest paid employee there.
I did my little bit for king and country. He did his evil deeds during Republican and Democratic administrations; leaders from both parties covered for him. My dad would be proud of me; he did something similar in the late 50s, early 60s.
Larry HArt:
<<
Republicans are fine with government having a coercive role against women, but protecting women's personal integrity? That's when "Government should have no role."
>>
Behold Wilhoit's Law in action. "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."
Paradoctor - I argue that "Wilholt's Law" describes aristocracy and elitism. Here is how Frank Wilholt (a musician, not a political philosopher...but still a pretty intelligent guy) said about this quote when people apply it to Republicans:
"Well, when you take an idea like that, which is expressed fairly abstractly, and you look about for applications of it to real-world circumstances, then that is what you find. The Republican Party flatters itself as a conservative party, and conservatism has long been surrounded by an enormous shimmering halo of pseudo-philosophy."
I get the feeling that the way I define "conservatism" is different than the way you do, or possibly even the way Wilholt does. One important trick we have to learn is to find a set of terms with agreed-upon definitions so that we can discuss more abstract concepts.
GMT -5 8032:
I get the feeling that the way I define "conservatism" is different than the way you do, or possibly even the way Wilholt does
The quote about in-groups and out-groups does seem to accurately portray self-described "conservative" political parties that have actual power at this time in history.
The question I've posed a few times to people I know that profess to be "old school" conservatives is, "If that's true then how on Earth can you justify continuing to support the current Republican Party?" The response is usually some "both sides" mumbling to justify a claim that the RP is the lesser of two evils.
Sorry, no. "Old School" conservatives that have not allowed themselves to become deluded about the realities of both parties no longer support the RP and have opposed them more aggressively than most on the liberal to left side of the spectrum.
I'll always keep the door open, even for committed RP supporters, as long as they are honestly seeking a discussion, and as long as they don't deny reality too flagrantly. However, to be clear and up front, anyone continuing to support the RP today is either willfully ignorant, deluded or ethically challenged. We are all guilty of those flaws to various degrees on occasion, but what I mean here is "to an unusually problematic degree."
Too late for "I'd rather follow Trump than Jesus" t-shirts?
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2023/Items/Nov16-3.html
Even Trump's pretty lawyer, Alina Habba, has gotten into the act. She has taken to wearing a necklace with the letters "FJB" on it. In case you missed it, that is aimed at people for whom "Let's go Brandon" is a bit too subtle. (Hint: "JB" stands for "Joe Biden")
For what it is worth, Habba, a religious Chaldean Catholic, used to wear a necklace with a cross on it. Looks like she traded in Jesus for her new savior.
Darrell E: RP today is either willfully ignorant...
Michael Shermer describes the dilemma religious people face when/if rationalism finally dawns on them. Continue the pretense or face a shattering shock to all facets of their life. I do a double take whenever someone pontificates about the 'bravery of faith'.
I am a Jew and I am "conservative" in the way that traditional Jews are "conservative." We place a high value on traditions. Possibly too high a value; we can be slow to change. On the other hand, it helped us maintain our identity after 2,000 years of diaspora. But, societies need to evolve in order to survive. Trying to find the right balance is challenging.
I naturally repel authoritarian projects. Leadership stagnates and you need a way to change leadership regularly. Authoritarian systems generally don't like changing leaders.
"Much as John Brunner did in his wonderful, still totally relevant classic Stand on Zanzibar."
Even better and with a strong environmental theme is Brunner's "The Sheep Look Up".
Didn't get in depth with global warming (which wasn't really on the radar back in the 1970s) but scary nonetheless.
Someone needs to do a series based on this like HBOs Years and Years or Extrapolations.
Well, I think our current levels of inequality were predictable. In fact, in the late 80s I kept saying that "the next couple of generations are gonna suck for the working class." However, I vastly underestimated the scope. (Of course, I'm not a published writer so I can't prove it.)
The reason I believe it was predictable is how both the politics and tech innovations of the last 40 years have vastly expanded the pool of labor the "free market" economy could pull within its sphere.
With the fall of the iron curtain and the rappoproachment with China, vast pools of untapped labor came within the reach of wall st. The information tech revolutions (microcomputers 80-00s, internet 00s-20s, now AI?), allow elites to manage across distances which were previously a logistic impossibility).
We can see the evidence of this effect if u do a real dollar terms analysis of past corporations compared to today. Firms like FTX (before its collapse) can produce revenue streams with a very small employee infrastructure which simply wasn't possible in Henry Ford's day.
This we see that the early effects of tech innovation have been to vastly increase the reach of the alpha competitors.
I think Wilhoit's law pretty much applies to any elite group with power and isn't limited to a conservative vs. liberal axis.
Liberals will happily use the power of government to punish their political rivals whenever they possess political power.
John Viril:
Liberals will happily use the power of government to punish their political rivals whenever they possess political power.
You're not talking about the same thing.
Liberals don't see themselves as a class above the law. When the Jan 6 insurrectionists are imprisoned, they literally can't believe that such a thing can happen to white Americans who wave the flag. It's like, "Prison? That's for black people and immigrants."
When former Alabama governor Don Siegelman was imprisoned, he would have been the classic case for a presidential pardon, not because he's a Democrat, but because his prosecution was so blatantly political on behalf of Karl Rove. Yet President Obama refused to issue a pardon because it would have the appearance corrupt. Contrast that with Donald Trump issuing pardons to those who break the law at his behest.
John,
No denying that inequality has increased, but the increase isn't evenly distributed in the First World - DHI difference increases are markedly higher in the US (and slightly less so in the UK) than among other rich nations. I'd say that (though correlation /= causation) the presence of powerful conservative/reactionary parties probably affected the outcome. The outcome is particularly fraught in the US due to our weak safety net (though the UK's has frayed badly).
I've been pushing for some kind of UBI - possible relabeled as a "National Dividend" like Alaska's fund and perhaps funded on a tax on robots/AIs - for a long time. A lot of people who would have previously found factory work are pushed into marginal makework that provides little to no health insurance in our privatized "system" - which is another thing we have great room to upgrade.
Pappenheimer
DP .... agreed re Zanzibar and re Sheep Look Up! They’d be effective polemic
Vint Cerf & I headlined an evening zoom session with the Internet and small business casucus of the Calif Dem. Party, this evening. Proud that Vint calls me a pal.
MCS… here is my original lengthy posting about political ‘spectra’ (there is a part II.). What makes mine better is that the axes are truly orthogonal, at least in their concepts. The others I have seen were tendentious, especially the one extolled by Big-L Libertarians.
https://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/politicalmetaphors1.html
JV… it was predictable simply because our Enlightenment Experiment has always had to push upstream against human nature. Cabals of the rich will ALWAYS conspire to turn their sons into lords with harems. Adam Smith and the US Founders and some others reached a level of awareness that 6000 years of that crap never worked! But we must re-invent the Great Experiment every generation.
“With the fall of the iron curtain and the rappoproachment with China, vast pools of untapped labor came within the reach of wall st.” Well… at the same time, the US consumer lifted 4 billion people out of abject poverty and enabled 2 billion to join the middle class. So….
Darrel E, 8:06 AM:
A politician is...
* Honest;
* Intelligent;
* Republican;
Choose at most two.
Therefore:
If honest and intelligent, then not Republican;
If intelligent and Republican, then not honest;
If Republican and honest, then not intelligent.
You can replace "Republican" with other faction names, to similar effect.
If this is plausible, then we just got saved (again) from Republican scheming by Republican incompetence. "How much longer can I go on being an atheist?"
Too long to quote the whole thing, but the link isn't paywalled.
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2023/Items/Nov17-1.html
...
The thing you need to understand is that Republicans care about some departments but not about others. They very much care about military spending, the border patrol, farm subsidies, and a couple of other items. They actively oppose most of the social spending, like HUD and education. Johnson's plan was as clever as it was sneaky. The things Republicans really care about would be extended to Jan. 19. These things had to pass because not funding them would mean no money for the military and DHS, so soldiers and the border patrol agents would have to work without pay. These things had to be funded or the Republicans would catch hell. So the plan was to make some deal on Jan. 18 to fund them, possibly at the same level as last year or maybe with a small increase.
Once that was all finished and and approved by the Senate and White House, the Republican priorities would be safe. Come Feb. 1, the Republicans would demand 30% cuts in the social spending and when Democrats balked, those programs would be halted. Republicans would be happy if they were never funded and would hold out for 30% cuts until the cows came home. In the end, they might not get 30%, but eventually Democrats would cave and they'd "compromise" on a 15% cut. That was the plan. It makes sense and explains the idea of the two-stage rocket.
But something happened. During the legislative process, multiple drafts written by different staffers often circulate as the sausage is being made. Members propose and pitch their versions and argue about them. Horses are traded. That's how it works. Somehow, and we are not sure how, when Johnson began calling the roll on the plan, he called for a vote on a plan different from the one he had in mind. It had the Agriculture, Transportation, Veterans Affairs and HUD budgets on the group 1 (Jan. 19) along with the FDA, energy, water, and military construction. Everything else was in group 2 on Feb. 2. Johnson missed the fact that he was holding a vote on the wrong bill. It passed, was sent to the Senate, passed there too, and Joe Biden signed it. By the time Johnson realized what had happened, it was too late.
Group 1 (Jan. 19) has some things Republicans want, like Agriculture (farm subsidies) and Veterans Affairs, so they will have to make a deal to pass it when it comes up again. But Group 2 (Feb. 2) has Defense and Homeland Security, things Republicans really care about. If they refuse to make a deal on Feb. 1, soldiers and border patrol agents won't be paid and their base will go bonkers. The Republicans won't be able to hold out for 30% cuts for long. They will have to agree to some deal the Democrats are willing to accept. There will be heavy-duty negotiations but no hostage situation since Republicans care dearly about some of the items in Group 2. Johnson got snookered
...
The enthusiasm for Johnson from the GQP was lukewarm and forced. But I caught a slight twinkle in Jeffries' eye that day.
Wow, that's terrific. Especially that the Dems held firm re the IRS. Every month that passes with full IRS funding is more CPAs tracking the Great Rape of honest taxpayers by rapaciously insatiable lords.
MCS taking account that those poor schlubs are not only easy to check but also vastly more numerous than the rich dudes who are doing most of the actual cheating...
... the new funding won't just hire CPAs and investigators. It will massively upgrade computers and software, which will actually do the best job of finding the cheaters.
I hope the IRS keeps its budget too. I have some selfish reasons there.
Hi GMT
As somebody in the know just how much is the payback ratio
Extra taxes IN - to - Extra IRS costs
I would expect it to be quite large - 10 or more - is that realistic?
JV what stunning malarkey! The notion that openly tracked and public record donations to a charity are the same thing as under the table and backroom transfers of wealth into an official's personal wealth is.... jibbering insanity!
BClinton said he made it clear there was no quid pro quo, and beyond that, the donor's delusions were not his problem, so long as the funds all went directly to helping the poor etc. Perhaps we'd draw that line differently. But to compare that to the 5 BILLION # that Russian oligarchs deposited in Deutsche Bank just a day or so before DB - the only bank on the planet that would still do Trump business - suddenly gave him a $5Billion line of credit to save his companies?
Or the Saudies renting whole floors of Trump hotels for years without ever using the? Then giving Jared another $billion?
Tell you what. Let's compare 'levels of sriousness' of varied cases of 'corruption' before a random panel of non political senior retired military officer. Fair? Escow $10,000 in stakes?
Seriously, THAT is what you try? To balance the corruption books? When the number of high republicans indicted/convicted of crimes since LBJ borders on ONE HUNDRED TIMES that of high dems?
The problem with the UBI is that the inflation it's likely to cause will raise desirable goods and services beyond the reach of those collecting the UBI.
Then, you'll have the same problem again. Try to bump up the UBI again, and you'll create an inflation spiral.
In the US, the times labor enjoy the best circumstances is when there's a tight labor market. The reason a hs kid could walk into a factory and get a job shoveling coal that would feed a family of four and a stay at home wife wasn't bc of FDR's 90% top tax bracket or labor union strength. It was an unusually tight labor market after ww2 that drove it.
Hey, hold a world war that kills 500k (in the US) and break a bunch of stuff around the world that needs replacement, and labor jobs are gonna pay. It's not like the factory owners are going to shovel their own coal, and if it's hard for them to get employees to do it for them, they're going to be well treated and paid well. Union power of this era had more to do with a super tight labor market than federal legislation favoring unions.
However, with tech and political circumstances creating a tsumani of available labor on world markets, well we get the Gilded Age part 2.
Certainly, social safety nets can blunt some of these effects, but the general trend pretty much will apply across free market economies
John Viril
There is no reason for additional funds at the bottom to cause a PRICE increase - what they will do is cause a VOLUME increase - everybody gets richer
Additional money at the TOP is inflationary
I'm with OGH on this - YES we get extra workers - but we also get billions of extra consumers
MCS
If you read the Honor Harrington series a wee bit further you find that the Dolists and the PRC was caused by sabotage
Sabotage from the TOP paid for by the Mesans
There are very few political end economic systems that can resist sabotage over several hundred years
The PRC had lasted for centuries and was the second strongest in the galaxy BEFORE the Mesans sabotaged it
Dolists and UBI
We have done experiments - Finland and Canada and some other countries
What they found was that people worked just as hard and just as long - but they did take time out for training and ended up earning more money
The people who would worry would be the BAD bosses - nobody would have to work for a bastard anymore
A small percentage would become couch potatoes - but 90% of people would end up doing "things"
Duncan,
Pretty sure Weber's slant against any socialism/distributive policy in the Honorverse was heartfelt, having read some of his other stuff. (Of course, if you have mature fusion power generation and many solar systems' worth of resources, ANY scarcity must be the result of deliberate policy - gotta remember that shoving Hornblower into space believably is a tall order.)
I think Eric Flint was involved is some of the later novels? Flint (RIP) was an old lefty's old lefty. Would have liked to meet him; the 1632+ novels showed his opinion of the American owner class and the aristocracy of old Europe.
Pappenheimer
Well, it appears our wonderful political masters are going to give us a choice between a dementia-addled puppet whose strings are being pulled by unidentified interests, or a wanna-be Ceasar who, fortunately, was too much of a coward to order his troops over the Rubicon.
Instead, that disgusting slob sat on his litter and tried to order various groups to carry him across the river, so he could blame them if his coup failed. When his soldiers refused bc they didn't really like him, he sat and pouted bc the election was stolen from him according to the soothsayers he paid.
Maybe it's time to get political parties that will give us better choices. Look, it's all well and good to say watching "Rings of Power" isn't nearly as bad as being stuck with "Birth of a Nation," but either way you choose will still be squandering your money. What we need are competing theater chains that are playing "Star Wars" vs. "Close Encounters of The Third Kind."
Even if some lying piece of crap claims to be from the future and convinces us that "Close Encounters" is the seminal movie that inspires world peace, we at least aren't wasting our money.
But if our choices are that Amazon sink hole or racist propaganda, we might as well be unemployed.
Actually, athough JV keeps spouting absurd and utterly unsupportable oligarchy incantations, I can’t quite agree either with Duncan here:
“Additional money at the TOP is inflationary.”
Actually the opposite. As Adam Smith said, when the rich get richer, they do NOT invest in productive (“supply side”) capital. Supply Side’s utter failure was predictable since they generally pour any new wealth into ‘rent-seeking’ or rentier passive income. Yes, that does inflate the prices of things like houses, which can bring in rents… oligarch brats have been snapping up half of available US housing stock in cash sales that utterly ignore interest rates. But except for that, there’s a limit to how much a Lord & Lady want or need to buy.
Their new wealth is pulled from circulation. That is why MONEY VELOCITY plummets under Republicans. That both reduces inflation and impoverishes everyone in the 99.9%
I am conservative enough to want to do UBI experimentally and in stages… which we did by extending the child tax credit liftin 20 million families out of poverty… with almost none becoming lazy lotus eaters. But we need to make wealth enough to pay for it all.
“if you have mature fusion power generation and many solar systems' worth of resources, ANY scarcity must be the result of deliberate policy if you have mature fusion power generation and many solar systems' worth of resources, ANY scarcity must be the result of deliberate policy “
My only objection to THE EXPANSE. With all those Belt riches, human females would be unable to spill forth enough new humans to be poor.
I way miss Eric Flint!
The abortion issue isn't really framed as "Choice." Turn on "The View" and what they're screaming about is "Control of my body." Thus, the real frame is a bodily autonomy argument.
This framing has caused 50 years of problems. It's main advantage is the emotional support it draws. It invokes more than 1,000 years of undeniable systemic oppression of women in Anglo-Saxon law (lack of property rights, primogeniture, ect)
The problem is, the abortion question doesn't turn on bodily autonomy. Yes, it's dispositive IF YOU ASSUME THE FETUS IS NOT ALIVE. In that case, the only interest at question is the mother and she clearly should be able to control her own body.
However, if the fetus is alive, you now have a problem bc possession of bodily autonomy doesn't answer the question. Instead, you have to perform some kind of interest balancing between the baby (remember, we're assuming it's alive so this terminology is appropriate) and mother. The mother's possession of bodily autonomy can't decide the issue because NOW THERE ARE TWO BODIES PRESENT. Control of my body in no way gives me the right to destroy another person's body.
Thus, we can see the Roe court was right when it said that the abortion question turns on the when life begins question. Now, we can see the bodily autonomy argument rests on the logical fallacy known as "begging the question," which involves assuming the answer to the question at issue.
The problem is Roe then said we don't know when life begins. Since we can't answer that question, we'll decide the thing on privacy rights since that's in our wheelhouse. This is where Roe goes off the rails. You really can't dodge the question like this. Life is so overwhelmingly important, any privacy rights decision you make will just end up being a backdoor answer to the "when does life begin" question.
To untangle the legal mess the Roe court created, you need to straight up admit you can't answer the "life" question.
So if we can't answer the question the abortion issue must turn on, what do you do? Seems to me, you at least should figure out which way you'd rather be wrong. If we draw the line too early, that means forcing a woman to have a baby she doesn't want. That will have devastating psych impacts on both.
However, if we draw the line too late, well we're dismembering a living human. That's even worse. Clearly, we should prefer to draw the line too early. This rule of construction should inform any decision we eventually make.
Notice that the screaming that surrounds this issue completely obliterates this "risk of error" analysis, which shows our current jurisprudence is a 50 year pile of dogshit analysis.
I would then refine the question to pinning down when the fetus could possibly possess consciousness. For example, blood plasma contains live human cells with full human DNA, but no one would dream that a bag of blood has any kind of human rights. The reason is that in the normal course of events, it can't possibly possess consciousness.
So, when can a fetus possibly possess consciousness? To me, the earliest point possible is when the fetus has developed functioning nerve cells. I'm assuming consciousness resides in the brain, and that we can't have any kind of "brain" until we have working neurons. Thus, poking the fetus with a sharp object might be a reasonable bright-line test. If it reacts, it can't be aborted. If it doesn't, then it can be aborted.
Abortion
You cannot be compelled to give another person YOUR organs or blood
Even when you are dead your organs cannot be taken
THAT has been "The Law" for a hundreds of years (except for slaves)
So the "Pro-Life" idiots want to give a clot of cells NOT the same rights as an actual person but MORE rights than an actual person
Once it can survive on its own - then it can be delivered - until then preventing the woman from aborting is the same as enslaving the woman
Note the "Holly Bible" is very clear on this its after the first breath that a fetus becomes a baby
The Roe court talked about Privacy - IMHO it should have simply used the 14th Amendment against Slavery
duncan cairncross:
The people who would worry would be the BAD bosses - nobody would have to work for a bastard anymore
Yes, that's exactly what the right-wing really fears.
I've said for years that when they talk about people "not wanting to work", what they really mean is "not wanting to appease a boss who can make arbitrary decisions about their livelihood."
I suspect that a lot of them don't even understand that the two things are different.
John Viril:
The abortion issue isn't really framed as "Choice." Turn on "The View" and what they're screaming about is "Control of my body." Thus, the real frame is a bodily autonomy argument.
I wouldn't rely on "The View" as a single definitive source of liberal POV any more than you should be necessarily tarred with everything Hannity and Tucker rant on about.
But having said that, I'm not sure what the qualitative difference is between "autonomy" and "choice".
This framing has caused 50 years of problems. It's main advantage is the emotional support it draws. It invokes more than 1,000 years of undeniable systemic oppression of women in Anglo-Saxon law (lack of property rights, primogeniture, ect)
Ya think?
The problem is, the abortion question doesn't turn on bodily autonomy. Yes, it's dispositive IF YOU ASSUME THE FETUS IS NOT ALIVE. In that case, the only interest at question is the mother and she clearly should be able to control her own body.
See, no. This is where you right-wingers are completely inconsistent. You're fine with killing in self-defense. You're fine with collateral damage of civilians in war. There are plenty of situations where you consider the taking of human life to be something other than murder, given the circumstances. Only in the realm of abortion do you insist that the humanity of the fetus gives it supremacy over the other human being who must be forced into servitude, even at the expense of her own life and health.
You don't have as good a "gotcha" argument as you think there.
Would you guys at least be consistent enough to argue that a man who rapes a woman (or child) and creates a fetus who is then at risk for abortion (or even for the effects of a woman unprepared for motherhood) is guilty of child endangerment? Would you argue that a powerful politician who insists his pregnant mistress get an abortion to avoid embarrassing him is guilty of accessory to murder?
My guess is that of course you won't, because when it comes to "more than 1,000 years of undeniable systemic oppression of women in Anglo-Saxon law", you are for it, not against it.
* * *
Dr Brin:
Actually, athough JV keeps spouting absurd and utterly unsupportable oligarchy incantations,
Yeah, I'm beginning to detect the scent of Sergei. There's the ridiculous attempt to portray President Biden as "dementia-addled" and sow suspicion about "unidentified interests" while engaging in the usual splitterism about a third party in order to help Republicans win. He seems to think he's exciting and new (like we never thought of the fetus being ALIVE), but really there's nothing there we haven't seen and dismissed for years.
"Disengage"?
Speaking of "Disengage", a thank you shout-out to whoever it was here who recommended season 3 of "Picard". I had no interest in re-visiting the character this late in time, but watched the season on your recommendation, and it was well worth it.
Thanks.
Dr Brin:
I can’t quite agree either with Duncan here:
“Additional money at the TOP is inflationary.”
Actually the opposite. As Adam Smith said,
Yeah, I was thinking something of that myself. Additional money at the top can be deflationary when they just sit on it.
All else being equal, additional money at the bottom is inflationary, but in practice, it tends to jump-start parts of the economy which become more productive. As long as productivity matches the increased money, there's no inflation.
Republicans claim that tax cuts for the rich pay for themselves, but it's actually more like welfare and unemployment insurance that pay for themselves.
mcsandberg:
"when the rich get richer, they do NOT invest in productive (“supply side”) capital."
Huh? We most certainly do! What do you think the venture and angel capital community does? What do you think https://www.ycombinator.com does?
DO you consider yourself to be among "the rich"? If not, why do you think he's describing you?
Good on you if you invest wisely in productive capital, but do you deny the myriad examples of what Dr Brin is describing? The Trump real-estate and branding empire? Bain Capital making billions by buying companies on borrowed money and then forcing those companies into bankruptcy? Insurance companies who take your premium, and then unilaterally drop you for having the temerity to make a claim?
MCS: “Huh? We most certainly do! What do you think the venture and angel capital community does?”
You are joking, right? By all means let us (with $$$ stakes) compare the amounts of Supply Side largess that went into productive enterprise vs rentier parasitism! Compared to the ratios that the SS fanatics promised. It is an utterly failed prediction that would normally kill a ‘theory’ dead!
I know a lot of VCs! Sure, they somewhat do their jobs. They are teensy In proportion to the rentier brats. What HAS led to major re-investment in manufacturing is the classic Keynesian method… TARGETED tax breaks for investment in actual capital equipment. The Pelosi bills did EVERYTHING that 30 years of middle-class-raping “supply side’ idiocy promised, and never delivered.
Guys, don’t dump on MCS if he happens to be a scion of wealth who has not let it lobotomize him, and who comes here to engage. I have known many children of trust funds who fled from reflexively parasitical aristocracy into fields like science... or philanthropy or genuine art. I have great respect for those who overcome the curse… though it does leave the dumb ass brother running empires of billions into the ground. (Some of the latter go to Hollywood to be ‘producers… explaining a lot.)
This time, John V was much better than offering the previous, tendentious nonsense. On this occasion his lawyerly missive was well-organized and argued, though clearly meant to weigh the scales. It’s what lawyers do.
I do not go along with the other side’s purist-liberal stance that “It’s my body!” All the way into third term! There comes a point where the answer becomes “You made your choice earlier. Now keep your promise. It’s a human, now. Time to talk to adoption agencies.” On the other hand: late term abortions are ALREADY ILLEGAL almost everywhere, with reasonable exceptions of mother’s life and undiscovered horrors like anencephaly… and if you know about that tragedy and would still force a woman to carry an undead thing for three more months, washing her with hormones to nurture a doomed lump, then you are a deeply cruel person.
Then there’s the fact that crime rates and poverty went down and IQ scores went up, when fewer newborns were unwanted.
The crux. We try to legislate DIGITAL laws, when God and Nature made a murky, analog world. We must try! But the zone described by Hillary Clinton is sensible. Do what it takes to keep abortion “safe, legal and rare.”
And guess what achieves the ‘rare’ part? Sex ed and good contraception services, and NOT prohibition, which just sends them into dark alleys. If reducing the NUMBER of abortions is the goal…
…but that is NOT the goal of the MAGA obsession. It is purist, as are the laws they are passing. And WHY the mad right (MR) glommed onto this issue is pretty darn clear. It is the JESUS EFFECT.
They know that if Jesus were here now, the bearded, beaded, sandal wearing hippie would side with liberals on everything. The MR needed a SINGLE SWITCH issue that would force Jesus to hold his nose and side with them, instead, despite their countless betrayals of the Beatitudes. “Baby killing” has seemed just the ticket, over-ruling every other JC admonition.
It even overcomes the pure fact that red states (except Utah) average far worse than blue-run ones in almost every turpitude. (Wager stakes on that?)
So no. This is not about ‘when human life begins,’ though that IS a worthy topic of discussion. This is about negotiation among reasonable people. Only, alas 40% of Americans are in an unreasonable, even psychopathic, cult.
Dr Brin:
Guys, don’t dump on MCS if he happens to be a scion of wealth who has not let it lobotomize him, and who comes here to engage.
I wasn't planning to. I do argue points with him, but that's a different thing, in fact the opposite thing.
Dr Brin:
The MR needed a SINGLE SWITCH issue that would force Jesus to hold his nose and side with them, instead, despite their countless betrayals of the Beatitudes. “Baby killing” has seemed just the ticket, over-ruling every other JC admonition.
Though, as John Fugelsang loves to point out, Jesus says nothing about abortion in the Bible. Scripture mentions abortion in (I think) Leviticus, where it describes the method by which it should be performed on an unfaithful wife.
So no. This is not about ‘when human life begins,’ though that IS a worthy topic of discussion. This is about negotiation among reasonable people. Only, alas 40% of Americans are in an unreasonable, even psychopathic, cult.
It is partially about when human life begins, but it is also about the inevitable conflict between the rights of two human beings. At some stage, the fetus might be said to have rights, but the mother also has rights. When they are in conflict is the job of society to adjudicate, just as in any dispute between adults.
But pretending that granting full citizenship to a fetus solves the problem by reducing abortion to legal murder is absurd. It could be justifiable homicide, or killing in self-defense. And the removal of an already-dead fetus isn't even that. Neither is the presumption of guilt that any natural miscarriage (which happens more often than they apparently credit) is an abortion.
The insistence that abortion is intolerable under any circumstances because the fetus is not responsible for the extenuating circumstances which make it inconvenient sounds good in theory, but its proponents almost always have their own exceptions built in.
Most powerful men have mistresses who occasionally get pregnant, and they often insist on an abortion, no matter how much they "believe in human life" for other people. They don't even seem abashed about the blatant hypocrisy.
Then there was some southern Senator I recall in the 80s declaring that the only exception he would permit is if a white woman was raped by a black man. When asked why that case was different from any other, he didn't even seem to understand why it wasn't obvious. Something like, "I don't think a woman should have to carry a black baby if she doesn't want to." He might have said "a white woman" there, but IIRC, he didn't even say that.
MCS “stock market capitalization” is a mythology like tallying together the value of all bets at a racetrack. Future generations will be astonished by the 19th Century incantations that continued into the 21st. A scam excuse for gambling and parasitism.
The Greatest Generation wisely banned stock buybacks, which are stunning theft by a corrupt CEO caste.
Bruce Cockburn was talking about trees not money (directly) here, but the poetry is just as powerful either way:
Ancient cord of coexistence
Hacked by parasitic greedhead scam
MCS I am glad you did well. I bought apple stock in 1982.
Nothing else you said makes any sense. THE purpose, the only one, of stock buybacks is to artificially inflate the share price temporarily so the CEO and board -- members of a proved incestuously cheater caste -- can meet their Friedman Threshholds to claim their golden shower "incentives." It does absolutely nothing for the company, itself, but funnels company wealth into officers and also into in-the-know shareholders.
Any CEO who cannot find a way to enhance company value with investments that ACTUALLY increase the actual capital productive capacity is a crappy CEO.
It's just one more case of where the Roosevelt/Greatest Generation were vastly smarter than we are. They saw through all the Wall Street magical incantations, like: "finding the correct price" as a 'valuable service' justifying relentless lamprey-leech sucking at our entire financial system. That's not commie talk... it's Adam Smith talk.
MCS
In the later books it is made very clear that the reason that Peoples Republic has so many people on the dole is sabotage from Mesa - starting hundreds of years earlier
There is nothing in the system that produces the dolists
People on the dole were PREVENTED from working - like the welfare system today - a UBI does not do that - in fact a UBI encourages people to work
If you work on a UBI you get extra money for luxuries - if you work on the dole/welfare they CUT your money down and you often end up with LESS
A UBI increases the incentive to work
David, I totally agree that the driving force is elites trying to subvert our enlightenment experiment by turning their children into de facto lords and ladies.
Well… at the same time, the US consumer lifted 4 billion people out of abject poverty and enabled 2 billion to join the middle class. So….
YES!!! When people say free markets have failed bc of the stagnation of upper-middle and below real wages in the first world, they miss the transformation across Asia.
As a half-filipino "of a certain age" the way people live out in the provinces of Luzon (the big island in the Philippines) is just stunning.
Must confess it isn't so much about "equality" as it is trying not to ignore unacceptable behavior just bc someone else is outrageously worse
For example, the existence of Jeffrey Dahmer in no way makes OJ Simpson any less a killer. Thus, in our current political climate, we get a lot of politicos who try to wash themselves clean by turning the spotlight on someone multiple orders of magnitude worse.
Yes, Adolf Hitler was horrible and many thousands of times worse than OJ. But once we take care of him, we shouldn't forget to toss OJ in prison.
John Vril:
we shouldn't forget to toss OJ in prison.
You should probably toss an "allegedly" in there somewhere.
I mean, we all know what we know, but legally, he was found not guilty. We don't toss people found not guilty into prison, even if we know the obvious.
But you're not really talking about OJ, right? I'm inferring (possibly incorrectly) from your earlier posts that you're alluding to something like, "Just because Trump is a monster doesn't mean that Joe Biden isn't a dementia-addled puppet whose strings are being pulled by unidentified interests". And you're going to have to do more than assert that thing to convince me. I wasn't rooting for Biden in the 2020 primaries either, but his performance has won me over. I don't think it's hyperbole to say that Biden is the greatest president of my lifetime (or at least of my conscious lifetime, since I was 3 when JFK was assassinated). When you right-wingers try to portray him as a bumbling idiot, I have to wonder what universe you came from, because the one here on Earth-1 isn't like that at all.
Others here have "heard" me say this ad nauseum, but since you're new here, I have to say this stanza from Jesus Christ, Superstar accurately applies to Joe Biden:
Listen, surely I've exceeded
Expectations. Tried for three years.
Seems like thirty. Could you ask
As much from any other man?
How am I wrong?
Duncan a small correction, the dole doesn't prevent people from working, but it does reduce the incentive to work (as does inherited wealth for instance)! But you are right many, many people have a poor understanding of the UBI concept. For instance there is almost no discussion of the regional implications (except in the wonderful interfluidity blog https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6674.html).
Btw, David, I enjoyed meeting u at TusCON last weekend.
As for "spouting unsupportable oligarchic incantations" hmmm I do think you miss that I'm not an oligarchy apologist, I just conceptualize the problem in a different manner. I certainly agree that elites are gaining so much power that they threaten democracy. We are getting to the point where French Revolution style collapses become visible. This is scary when we have thousands of nuclear warheads in armories across the globe.
I don't see the company's act of buying back its shares as a scam, but the people arranging for the deals can certainly make it so. I've seen the game played in both directions where the executives benefit from higher prices on sales and the rank-n-file with stock options see them expire worthless because 'news that adjusted expectations' was released at strategic times.
The problem isn't the act of buying back.
The problem is the act that is essentially a kind of insider-trading advantage.
I too have benefited from stock buy-backs, but never as an employee of one of those companies. I've had stock options tanked days before they would be exercised and see the underlying shares bounce back a few days later when other investors realized our executives retired liabilities. My take away lesson from all that was to be skeptical of executives and then try to work my way around to positions that benefited when they did.
———
mcsandberg,
Venture and Angel investors control a small sliver of wealth put at risk. We both know the lion's share goes into the bond market which underlies the entire financial industry and most national governments. The reason money velocity doesn't vanish completely when the richest get handed cash IS because of venture, angel, and junk paper investors, but they don't really control much.
There is a huge chunk of wealth sitting around in the form of low risk bonds. That's what gets our host irate. I'm not as perturbed by those risk averse folks… until they want to game the rules to lower their personal risk in default scenarios. Play the risk or don't.
———
David (Brin),
Wall Street magical incantations, like: "finding the correct price"
It's not, but it can be chanted in such a way as to mesmerize the gullible.
Markets are search engines that discover prices.
The are also where leeches congregate… because there is so much easy blood to be had.
Banning buy-backs goes too far.
Ignoring rapes that occur when regulations are removed completely also goes too far.
The problem lies in the conflict of interest executives experience as owners and management.
John Viril,
Try to bump up the UBI again, and you'll create an inflation spiral.
No. You have a hidden assumption here.
The inflation spiral occurs only if the UBI gain isn't matched by a growth in what that income can buy. If the market is actually seeing fundamental growth (more stuff OR more people buying stuff) the spiral need not happen.
This isn't just a Keynesian thing. If the stuff I might buy with my expanded income grows as my income expands, I don't have 'extra' money to pay on things that were cheaper yesterday. Inflation is really just a change in the value of one commodity (cash) relative to another (stuff) that happens when someone prints too much cash relative to stuff.
———
The spiral you describe CAN happen, but one way to fight it is to let people convert between commodity forms of cash and treat them all as legal tender. That's what the bitcoin folks wanted, but I don't think they grok the real issue.
I've told the story here before about the all-hands company meeting I once attended where the CEO gave us the 'exciting news'. In lieu of a raise or bonus, we'd witness a magical stock buy-back that would increase our share value!!! Several hands went up, but the meeting was quickly adjourned with cake and drinks for all. The cake was flim flan.
Isn't that a bit like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic? It's political theater that targets the same old targets (affluent class and below).
Meanwhile, both right and left wing pundits blithely ignore the 15-year rape and pillage of people who have actual jobs by the elites through the Fed holding interest rates at .5% (below inflation rate). That was a massive wealth transfer from people who actually need to have jobs vs. their lords and masters.
Notice, also, how it was started under GW Moron, was continued by Saint Obama, endorsed by Super-villain Trump, and maintained by Biden until the risk of hyper-inflation forced his hand.
Of course, Congress played along. How else could political clowns who couldn't pass a budget for nearly a decade manage to outperform the best fund managers on wall st? I guess having corporate sycophants coming into congressional committees and telling our elected imbeciles what they planned to do can't possibly have had any effect. Nor did Congresspersons having backdoor access to oh so cheap capital affect Fed policy with regard to the prime rate.
Of course, Biden made noises about inheritance rates, but ended up doing nothing significant. Someone who was serious about cutting off elite wealth accumulation would go after limited liability corporation breakup law.
See, only a chump with a moronic lawyer pays inheritance tax. Anybody with real wealth creates a limited liability corporation with their heirs as partners. When the principal passes, the firm's assets pass to the remaining partners WITHOUT TAXATION.
When the principal passes, the firm's assets pass to the remaining partners WITHOUT TAXATION
Does the US not have capital gains tax?
Jv the policy to uplift industries in poor countries by buying their crap WAS deliberately designed by Geo Marshall and the post WWII geniuses (on a par with the US founders of the 1780s) to evade mistakes of previous empires. See https://web.archive.org/web/20210609223749/https://www.marshallfoundation.org/marshall/essays-remarks/quiet-adult-candidate-man-century/
But it soon became a habit of US consumers to just buy 20$trillions of crap we never needed. We are even now uplifting China and India at the same time! Though this era must come to an end and manufacturing is returning to US soil in a flood, since the Pelosi bills.
Does this justify market capitalism? Sure. Sorta. Though the policy was also ‘picking winners and losers’ in a way. We could argue both sides.
What *is* clear is what Adam Smith said… that the truest enemies of flat-fair-creative-competitive markets for 6000 years has almost always been cheater owner lords. Socialists? Very rare across history. Smith barely mentions anything like it. And SOME forms of socialism have proved synergistic with market enterprise, enhancing the number of skilled, confident competitors. The GI Bill. Scandinavia. Capital investent tax credits. Public health and education. Lifting poor kids out of poverty.
But across 6000 years, the human tendency that has ruined ALL societies’ ability to maintain flat-fair-competitive markets has been CHEATING by owner-lordly-castes to bias the scales of the market. This has always, always, always happened… except when a few societies strove hard to prevent it, keeping things flat-open-fair.
“I mean, we all know what we know, but legally, he was found not guilty.”
You all saw what I said about mistrial by hung jury. ONE OJ juror shoulda voted guilty. Thenlater evidence coulda been used to retry.
But JV needs to know we won’t react well here to ‘both sides-ism’ There are SOME corrupt dem-pols. There are NO uncorrupt GOP politicians. It is a contradiction in terms.
Weber’s view of “the dole’ is completely wedged. There are a myriad ways to incentivize welfare recipients to get active in some way. Jeez, have you seen the proliferation of NAIL SALONS? Sneer if you like. But everyone there likes to think of themselves as hardworking folks.
Alfred “The problem isn't the act of buying back.”
Although I am sure some executions were better than others… fact is that the company is transferring its actual capital wealth into the hands of a subset of stock-owners. The company benefits not at all. It takes a Friedmanite to view this as net beneficial.
JV the mechanics of your interest rate incantation are beyond me.
I certainly agree with you about stock buybacks. Though the fun fact is it wasn't the generic "Greatest Generation" that banned them. Instead, it was Joe Kennedy, who FDR appointed as the first head of the SEC. This was a case of get a thief to catch a thief, bc old Joe knew every dirty insider trick in the book.
Tony,
"Does the US not have capital gains tax?"
Yes, but paid on sale of stock, IIRC. If you are already on board a corp, nothing gets sold if a fellow owner dies - it's just redistribution. (Don't quote me, I had exactly two accounting classes in college.)
Pappenheimer
P.S. John,
Didn't know that about FDR, but it fits. FDR was brilliant, or smart enough to hire brilliance, which comes to the same thing...they way he sold socialism to America in the form of Social Security! I still marvel when RW folks tell me, "That's not socialism, I'm just getting my money back."
Tony,
Many US corporate structures are 'juridical' persons… essentially slaves yet legally considered persons. There is no automatic demise of the corporate structure when shareholders pass, so what exactly (and who!) is getting taxed?
Inheritance taxes result from non-person property being passed between persons. It has to be assigned a value and then that cash is taxed. When my mother passed, her IRA's passed to her children, but only after being considered 'liquidated'. They didn't actually sell her portfolio, but only because the markets assign prices to the assets at the close of every day. THAT value got sliced between her kids and THAT value is what mattered in tax calculations.
We have an actual tax-savvy lawyer type here, though, so I'll stop with the details… except to say that 'death' triggers inheritance taxes. Only a few corporate structures die with their owners.
David (Brin),
I think a lot of people mess up the Friedman quote about maximizing shareholder value. In the context in which he uttered it, the reasonable expectations of the community were included.
However, corporations are juridical persons. Not natural persons. They are supposed to be protected in many ways (e.g. theft), but not from obligations to their owners.
The reason I think transferring actual capital to owners is on safe moral grounds is that owners are investors. We buy AND sell our controlling shares. Entry and Exit. Without a buyback option, I can buy and sell with anyone except the corporation. With a buyback option, I can add one more entity that might actually be a motivated buyer… which is good for me. We are investors, so rules telling me with whom I may NOT transact will get a raised eyebrow from me. 8)
It's not just a subset of shareholders that benefits. If shares are bought back, prices change for all the other shares too. As long as the insiders can't prevent me from knowing they are buying and selling, I can try to ride the same wave if I am also a shareholder. That's not easy to do, so you can see one of the reasons I buy into your Transparency position.
There IS one benefit to a corporation with buybacks, though. Buybacks change a company's defensive moat. That's useful in a defense against a vulture investor.
John Viril,
Instead, it was Joe Kennedy…
There ya go! Dirty Insider Tricks work where Transparency isn't available.
Insider Tricks are widely seen as cheating, hence even Martha Stewart had to do time. 8)
Dr. Brin,
Your "digital laws vs. analog world" is on point. I get what Roe was TRYING to do. It attempted to provide flexibility for people to choose their outcome within certain limits, but well I think it was a fundamentally flawed decision due to really questionable reasoning.
In fact, I would end up somewhere similar in that I would create a gray zone with some flexibility. I'd just draw the boundaries in different places and my legal reasoning would be very different.
For example, my bright line test to look for neural function wouldn't be dispositive. Instead I'd say you have an absolute right to abortion up to the point that consciousness is possible.
However, this is where Id really part ways with left wing ideologues. Beyond that point, abortion would then be a legal privilege.
Legal privileges are actions that are normally prescribed by law, but are allowed under special circumstances. The classic example is self defense privilege when a person is threatened with great bodily harm. In layman's terms, once consciousness becomes possible, you better have a damn good reason. However, this analysis should be subject to my rule of legal construction that I'd prefer to make the mistake of drawing the line too early vs. too late.
Trying to set forth a complete legal regime about how this abortion privilege should play out would be its own treatise. I will say that I am not entirely hostile to the idea that you should chose the mother over the baby in some circumstances.
To give a concrete example, I'd have a real hard time throwing stones at a young mother of three who chose to abort her baby when confronted with a 33% chance of death if she allowed her baby to come to term. To right wing purists, I'd point out this isn't a categorically unique problem in medicine. Balancing between lives also occurs in battlefield triage and disaster relief emergency care. Neither of these situations view choosing between lives as ethically untoward. However, I would argue that great caution needs to be applied because the mother can speak while the baby cannot. This creates a pro-abortion bias.
JV
Do you still have both of your kidneys?
If you do then by your logic you are a murderer because somebody died for want of one of them
Both your lungs?
If somebody who NEEDS it cannot have your spare lung then why should a woman give up her body for someone who is only potentially a person
If a woman does not have control of her own body then she is a slave
Well, damn, I suspect u know more about econ than I do. I'm far from an expert. I have micro, macro, and managerial econ. I used to read Paul Krugman NYT articles. But my real interest in the field is in the evolutionary psych types who are trying to rethink some of the fundamental behavior assumptions behind mainstream macro. Since I burned up a lot of brain cells in grad school trying to understand human warfare from a Sociobiological perspective (evolutionary psych is derived from Sociobiology), well I do read about macro stuff on occasion.
So, are you saying I'm assuming that the supply of goods remains constant? And your objection is that both the supply of goods or consumer demand could increase?
Oh yeah, but if I recall correctly, you get a bump in cost basis when the principal dies in a limited partnership
Tony Fisk wrote:
"Does the US not have capital gains tax?"
Pappenheimer responded:
Yes, but paid on sale of stock, IIRC. If you are already on board a corp, nothing gets sold if a fellow owner dies - it's just redistribution.
It works for private persons, also. Capital gains is assessed at sale of assets. So if I inherit something, then the value is the "stepped up" value at the time of inheritance. So I may pay inheritance taxes (though the level at which they begin to be assessed is quite high, and there are ways to avoid them even then), but if I then choose to sell I pay no capital gains, because the "original" value (for me) is the "stepped up" value - which means that I have no taxable "gain".
That is, say my father bought stocks worth $2M. He dies, and they are now worth $10M. They are transferred to me at the value of $10M (which is below the level at which inheritance tax applies). I now sell them for $10M, and have no capital "gain", because I got them at a value of $10M and now sell them at a value of $10M.
So the "capital gain" disappears through the magic of tax accounting.
Spare me. No one has unrestricted control over their body. I have no idea what left wing imbecile coined this idea, but they're a bloody moron.
Here's the hypo: suppose I walk up to you, point a gun at your head, and empty the clip of my 9mm into your skull. The police come, put me under arrest, and in due course I appear at trial charged with your murder.
However, being a transcendent legal genius, I admit to all of the above facts, but say, "Your honor, convicting me of murder violates my fundamental constitutional rights. Such a miscarriage of justice would deny my absolute control over my little finger."
Am I in any way a slave bc l can't blow you away anytime I please? This argument is absurd on its face. How, exactly, do you fabricate a legal right to destroy someone else's body from the right to control your own?
Seriously, this idea runs counter to the ENTIRETY of Anglo-Saxon law. Look, 10 seconds after William the Conquerer sat his ass down on his throne and adjudicated his first case as King of England in 1066, he was balancing conflicting rights.
Now, if you want to discuss circumstances in which you have the legal PRiVILEGE of destroying someone else's body, we can have a productive conversation.
Thanks for the responses re capital gain tax.
I asked because I've recently had to deal with distribution of shares from my mother's estate, and JV's assertion that no tax is paid firms when shares pass to other principals strikes me as not quite right (in Australia, at least)
Yes, no tax was paid when Dad died because the shares were originally issued jointly. However, when Mum died, my brother and I were not in the 'firm'. I suspect we (or any new firm members) would have had to have paid CGT on entry and receiving a share allocation.
@Greg the tax payable in your example would have been on the 'capital gain', or the $8 miilion increase in share value, not the full ten.
John Viril said...
Meanwhile, both right and left wing pundits blithely ignore the 15-year rape and pillage of people who have actual jobs by the elites through the Fed holding interest rates at .5% (below inflation rate). That was a massive wealth transfer from people who actually need to have jobs vs. their lords and masters.
David responded:
JV the mechanics of your interest rate incantation are beyond me.
To expand a bit: what is it that you are trying to say here, John?
Low interest rates are a negative for investors - the "elites" who earn by collecting interest - but not for "people who actually need to have jobs". If you are working, then your income is not dependent upon interest rates one way or the other. Indeed, they may help you, by enabling funding for some new business that employs people. Or, if you need to borrow (for a house, a car, or whatever) then low interest rates are a good thing for you.
Low interest rates are bad for lenders, but good for borrowers, at the most basic level (other things being equal, which they rarely are, and ignoring secondary effects which are not so straightforward).
Tony Fisk said...
@Greg the tax payable in your example would have been on the 'capital gain', or the $8 miilion increase in share value, not the full ten.
You would think, and it may be that way in Australia. But not in the USA.
When you inherit, the asset it transferred to you at current value (the "step up"). So you may pay inheritance tax, but not capital gains. Then if you sell it, then you pay the "gain" between what you received it at and what you sold it at. If you received it at a value of $10M and sell it at $10M, then no "gain".
Your father never paid capital gains because he never sold, and you don't pay either on the $8M increase in value, because that increase did not happen while you owned it.
As I said: "poof" the capital gain disappears.
I should note that there are some good arguments for the "step up". For example, if your parents bought a house for $20K fifty years ago, and you and your siblings inherit and decide to sell it for $500K and distribute the proceeds, then it is not at all clear that you and your siblings deserve be hit with capital gains tax on $480K. But this rule, combined with the (absurdly, in my view) high exclusion for inheritance tax in the USA, leads to silliness like the above.
Ummm...please explain your reasoning "Do you still have both of your kidneys?
If you do then by your logic you are a murderer because somebody died for want of one of them." I think I know where you're going with this, but I don't want to assume.
If you're going to make the argument I think you're going to make, oh boy! I'm gonna have a lot of fun with you 😁
John Viril:
Meanwhile, both right and left wing pundits blithely ignore the 15-year rape and pillage of people who have actual jobs by the elites through the Fed holding interest rates at .5% (below inflation rate). That was a massive wealth transfer from people who actually need to have jobs vs. their lords and masters.
Hey, something you and I agree on!
Notice, also, how it was started under GW Moron, was continued by Saint Obama, endorsed by Super-villain Trump, and maintained by Biden until the risk of hyper-inflation forced his hand.
But isn't that because it's the Federal Reserve Board, not the president who makes that decision? It was Alan Greenspan, not W, who absolutely panicked at the thought that the national debt might be wiped out, and so convinced that president to increase the debt.
The only president who insisted on keeping rates low was Trump, and that was not via official channels, but through bluster and threats. The same way he pushed congress to always raise the debt ceiling during his term, but then insisted they actually default when he wasn't president any more, demonstrating for all to see that he didn't care a whit about the economy, but only whether it made the president look good or bad.
Pappenheimer:
I still marvel when RW folks tell me, "That's not socialism, I'm just getting my money back."
I marvel that any right-wing folk still like Social Security. They don't know that every Republican they elect wants to destroy it?
Alfred Differ:
We are investors, so rules telling me with whom I may NOT transact will get a raised eyebrow from me. 8)
Are you ok with insider trading, then?
Serious question.
Tony Fisk:
@Greg the tax payable in your example would have been on the 'capital gain', or the $8 miilion increase in share value, not the full ten.
In Australia, maybe. In the US I'm pretty sure gregory had it right. The $8M gain magically dies with the original owner. Don't ask me why.
Season 3 of Picard surprised me. Kinda thought 1 and 2 blew burrito chunks. 3 was pretty good.
John Viril:
Spare me. No one has unrestricted control over their body. I have no idea what left wing imbecile coined this idea, but they're a bloody moron.
Probably a right-wing moron, as abortion is pretty much the only issue in which they don't advocate personal freedom uber alles.
"Your honor, convicting me of murder violates my fundamental constitutional rights. Such a miscarriage of justice would deny my absolute control over my little finger."
Am I in any way a slave bc l can't blow you away anytime I please? This argument is absurd on its face. How, exactly, do you fabricate a legal right to destroy someone else's body from the right to control your own?
You shout "Spare me!" at a straw man and then propose this as a serious counterargument???
The difference is when the other person's body threatens your own. Like when you get to kill someone in self-defense. Which is a whole different thing (in fact the opppsite thing) from "I felt like pulling the trigger, and his body happened to be in the way of the bullet."
Now, if you want to discuss circumstances in which you have the legal PRiVILEGE of destroying someone else's body, we can have a productive conversation.
I think that's what most of us have been doing. No one comes to the abortion issue easily or without some dissonance on either side--except for the politicians who pass the laws that force control on us all.
John Viril:
Low interest rates are bad for lenders, but good for borrowers, at the most basic level
In my youth, before everyone was maxed out on credit cards, normal working people were both lenders and borrowers. They had mortgages for which low interest was good, but they had savings accounts and some personal investments, for which they wanted high interest rates.
Even these days, people want high interest rates on their 401ks, even as they still like low interest rates on their mortgages, car loans, and credit cards.
Ummm, I'm somewhat puzzled how you got third party splitterism to help republicans out of that post. If you recall, I said that what we need are competing theaters showing SW and Close Encounters. It seems clear to me that I'm suggesting we need to replace both parties. As such, the only reasonable conclusion is that I want both parties dead.
My latest contribution to the English language: Bocamünde
Well, Dr. Brin, I will happily admit my jibbering Insanity if you can point out where I even HINTED at any kind of comparison between the Clinton Foundation and Donald Trump. Indeed, I will write, "I spout jibbering Insanity," 1,000 times on any blackboard of your choosing if you can find language in my post that compares the Clinton Foundation to ANY OTHER CHARITABLE ORGANIZATION ON PLANET EARTH. Certainly I said nothing about any Russian oligarchs.
Thus, it seems to me, any comparisons about the Clinton Foundation to any other political organization did not come from me, they are merely arguments you imputed to me.
As for former President Clinton's making clear that there was no quid pro quo, well the Missouri Court of Appeals (10th circuit) is unlikely to attach any significance to these statements. In McClatchey vs. US, Baptist hospital (Kansas City) president Dennis McClatchey was convicted of violating federal anti kickback statutes for a problematic contract with outside pain management specialists. He lost at the district court, but won an appeal in the circuit court because he had instructed his in-house counsel to "make it legal" when notified of irregularities in this business relationship. The circuit court ruled that McClatchey had lacked requisite intent to commit a crime. However, the Missouri Court of Appeals reinstated the conviction because the jury could have interpreted McClatchey's instruction as a nod nod, wink wink command that his underlings knew they should ignore.
Frankly, I fail to see why some podunk hospital administrator should be held to a more stringent standard under Federal law than a former President of the US in a business deal that involved a fraction of the money at stake in the Clinton Foundation. Explain exactly why Bill Clinton's assertions are more likely to be believed by third world oligarchs who operate in cultures where government corruption is baked in the system, than Dennis McClatchey's instructions to house counsel who operated in the highly-regulated US health care environment? Further, why should McClatchey lose his career in health care for an action that could have, at worst, a minuscule impact on health care costs in the US? Meanwhile, widespread belief that the Clinton administration was "for sale" among third world oligarchs could have a potentially devasting effect on the integrity of US foreign policy.
John Viril:
Ummm, I'm somewhat puzzled how you got third party splitterism to help republicans out of that post. If you recall, I said that what we need are competing theaters showing SW and Close Encounters. It seems clear to me that I'm suggesting we need to replace both parties. As such, the only reasonable conclusion is that I want both parties dead.
Well, then, how do you propose we accomplish that.
Dr Brin (and I) got "splitterism to help Republicans" because most third-party campaigns are designed to get Democrats to vote for someone other than the Democrat, while Republicans then hold firm and vote the Republican candidate into office. The current crop of "No Labels", Jill Stein, and Cornell West seem pretty shameless about it.
Only RFK Jr might take votes that would otherwise go to Trump, and even that seems like an accident. His candidacy, backed by Republican donors, was meant to lure Democrats to the Kennedy name, but his anti-vax policies tend to resonate with Trump voters.
So again, if your aim is not to split the Democratic vote in order to elect Republicans, how would you go about introducing a viable third or fourth party? Serious question.
Larry,
"....Social Security. They don't know that every Republican they elect wants to destroy it?"
Plenty of not-well-off GQP retirees in the PAC NW voting to cut off their kids' noses to spite their face. Not sure, but I think that either
1) they assume any changes to SS will affect the upstream contingents, not them
or
2) incandescent hate brain fog overrides all. They literally cannot imagine voting for a democrat.
III% flags and MTFU flag/skull bumper stickers are easily found around here. It's Eastern Washington, Jake.
And if you want to sample the REAL fash, Idaho isn't more than 35 minutes away. Here resides the person who earnestly told me that Fox News had gotten "too liberal", so they had switched to OANN. I thought that was ONAN at first, which would be appropriate.
Pappenheimer
If ID were more box-shaped, I'd advocate for designating it as Heinlein's "Coventry" and getting busy with the force field. There's been a lot of self-selection already. Too bad - the scenery in Northern Idaho can be breathtaking.
Pappenheimer
Larry,
Insiders have to be able to buy and sell just like the rest of us. I'd rather they owned shares than not because that ensures they have skin in the game. I'd rather they be able to sell while in management because that signals the rest of us what inside conditions are like.
My objection is to SECRET insider trading. What Martha Stewart did was wrong, but there are way worse dirty tricks insiders can do too.
———
…they had savings accounts and some personal investments…
If you have any money in a 401K or IRA or brokerage account, there is a good chance you are a lender of sorts. The managing company likely borrows against your account/portfolio in some way. My accounts at Schwab show the accounting because an I can see the rate earned on my reserve cash when they sweep it into some plan that earns a minuscule interest rate.
We also act as unintentional lenders when we agree to be paid by our employers after we've already done the work. They OWE us the paycheck when it arrives. Not many people think of it that way… until there is a risk the paycheck won't be cut. They also owe us the tax withholdings they send to the state/feds in our name since we are the ones actually on the hook on Apr 15.
All of us are borrowers and lenders to some degree, but it might be hard to see the relationships.
I happen to disagree (nit picking a bit) with John Viril about low interest rates being bad for lenders. They'd prefer them to be higher no doubt, but really bad thing is rate volatility. Stable low rates still produce income streams require little hedging. Volatility requires they spend large sums on hedge and insurance.
scidata,
Have you seen the movie 'Radical' yet?
They mention that little facility in a way that made the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up. 8)
Larry, you are correct that I was speaking metaphorically, and your summation is "good enough for government work."
As for Joe Biden, my lower opinion of him is based, in part, on the udea that his admin largely responsible for the inflation we've recently suffered. Paul Krugman told Biden he was over-stimulating the economy after the pandemic. Yet, Biden even wanted to dump even more money into the economy through college loan forgiveness (which would have been another massive stimulus).
Causing the prime interest to skyrocket by 5% is going to have all kinds of bad effects. I think we're in an economic bubble and when it bursts, ITS GONNA HURT. I think a lot of it could have been avoided with better post-pandemic management, which Krugman apparently got right.
As for college loan forgiveness, well I can see why Biden wants to forgive a lot of it. What colleges are charging is absurd. At the risk of sounding like a crotchety old fart, I wonder why it costs souch more "than in my day." I don't think the "product" is any better, in fact I think it's significantly worse. (I know many here won't agree with this assessment.)
In fact, I'd get in even more arguments than I currently now in if I talked about my issues with CRT and the humanities in general. (I do hope you will accept assurance that my views in this area are NOT typical right wing rhetoric). For one, I've actually thought about them.
However, this also makes me think we're in some kind of education bubble, but I don't have a clue how such a mixed market would play out when the crash comes.
I also question the withdrawal from Afghanistan. I'm fine with the policy, those forever wars needed to end. But the execution was a clown show, and Biden had months to plan it. Don't think he could reasonably pin it on Trump.
I also see significant, systemic problems in the FDA and CDC which were revealed by the performance of these agencies during the pandemic. Please believe this opinion isn't driven by RW anti-vax paranoia and bad faith vilification. I went to the ER 7 times in the spring of 2021, which culminated in getting two mechanical heart valves in August of 2021. I believed I was headed for either a debilitating or fatal cardiac event.
I researched both heart valve surgery and the vaccines with desperate intensity. I also was reading actual journal articles because my undergrad is in biology, went to grad school for bio, and my father is a retired gastroenterologist. I was making high stakes decisions and I wanted to be equipped to participate in the process (with my health care providers.)
During this process, I saw a lot of stuff happen that shouldn't have happened. I concluded that the problems went far deeper than one administration. I believe GWB creating an expedited approval process for drugs and medical devices if the corporate applicant paid for it created problematic connections between firms and regulators. As a result, the FDA and CDC 's decision-making has become compromised. While I do not think the Biden admin bears primary responsibility for the problems, I don't think it did anything to fix them once they became visible.
John Viril:
As for Joe Biden, my lower opinion of him is based, in part, on the udea that his admin largely responsible for the inflation we've recently suffered.
Then is he also responsible for inflation coming back down now? I feel like I should have collected those "I did that!" stickers that Republicans plastered all over gas pumps when gas was $6 a gallon. I'd love to spread them around town now that it's about to fall below $3 in my area.
You may be correct that inflation was exacerbated by a belief over the past few years that no amount of stimulation (not "stimulus", but what'cha gonna do?) of the economy was too much. However, I also think our recent bout of inflation was caused first by supply-line disruptions due to COVID (Remember lumber prices? Eggs?) and then due to energy supply disruptions due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Paul Krugman told Biden he was over-stimulating the economy after the pandemic. Yet, Biden even wanted to dump even more money into the economy through college loan forgiveness (which would have been another massive stimulus).
Yes, I understand that student loan forgiveness was a big issue for many people, whether for or against. For some reason, it just didn't get high on my radar. I have a kid in college, but she's about to graduate without having taken out loans, so kind of water off a duck's back to me, whichever way it goes.
In any case, it sounds like you have some policy disagreements with President Biden on some issues. That's not really the same thing as declaring that he's dementia-addled or in the thrall of secret interests.
I think it's fair to say that the Biden administration hasn't been perfect, and that they haven't fixed a lot of things we'd like fixed. However I think there's light years of difference between the issues inherent with Biden's administration and what we get with Trump or realistically any other GOP candidate in the current environment.
I think it's fair to say our two party system lets us down in numerous ways, however any solution to the problem that doesn't involve reworking our election system (preferably with some sort of ranked choice) is doomed to fail to do anything other than to continue to make matters worse. In the current situation we're in, we have to work with the tools that are available.
Right now we have one party that tries to solve problems, albeit sometimes imperfectly, and one party that for the most part just tries to keep government from actually functioning. We need multiple healthy parties for better decision making, and we won't get there by electing the clown show that the Republican party has become.
One note about the inflation bit- I recall when Trump was first pushing the tax cuts in 2019 there were concerns about it leading to an overheating of the economy. The pandemic hit shortly after, so we will never know what effect it would have had under normal circumstances. I'd also point out that we would have likely had inflation regardless of what Biden did because of the rebound from the pandemic- it's been a problem worldwide. It's reasonable to argue that Biden's actions may have exacerbated it, but it's not like he's solely responsible. Economic management is a tricky thing, and it's hard to balance all the factors.
Well, Larry, I think I might owe you an apology.
Left wingers frequently insist that abortion is an affirmative right. In law, a legal right is something s citizen can do and the state has no power to stop them except under specific circumstances.
Often, people will talk about this in terms of anabsolute right, especially if the other side insistes it's something close to a fundamental constitutional right (which is as strong as it gets in US law).
I sorta presumed this was your position.
A legal privilege means that a citizen can perform an action normally prescribed by law under legally defined circumstances. Ok, what's the big difference? When something is a right the state can't stop u unless it shows that one of the limiting exceptions apply. In practice, this means it's really hard to stop a person from doing that thing.
Whereas, if something is a privilege, the state can arrest you and throw you in prison, unless your show that the special conditions that allow you to do a thing exist. Exercising a privilege such more risky than exercising a right.
So, if you generally view abortion as something that must be justified instead of something that the state can't generally stop, you don't deserve a lot of my snark. For that, I apologize.
Larry, we agree!!! Hard to imagine...lol.
Technically you are correct that the Fed is distinct from the administration. In fact, in law, the Fed bank is a private institution and isn't even part of government.
However, that's not the whole story
The administration has massive influence over the F.ed. The Fed's statutory mandate is to maximize employment and maintain price stability. To accomplish these goals, it must regularly communicate with the administration.
In fact, the Fed and the administration regularly work together and coordinate policy. I do not know all of the fine numbers of how the administration exerts its influence over the Fed. I just know that it happens according to every economics professor I've ever talked to.
The Fed talks to every administration, but I wouldn't be surprised if Trump was unusually loud about it.
JV
Abortion - like any medical treatment is a RIGHT - the only people who have any input are the woman and her doctor
There is no "other person" involved
And even if you give a clot of cells the same rights as a person that clot of cells has no right to use the organs that belong to the mother
If that "person" (promoting it for now) has the right to use the woman's organs then somebody who NEEDS it has the same right to your spare kidney
Arguments about triggers on guns are simply pure bollocks
Arguing that Abortion is a "privilege" is making the woman a SLAVE
Interest rates
Adam Smith had something to say about high interest rates
He said that if they were too high it distorted the market and the only enterprises that could work were the risky high return ones
High interest rates meant that good solid but low return businesses could not operate
JV
Afghanistan
The Orange Idiot negotiated with the Taliban and then - illegally - removed all but 2,500 US troops in January 2021
That gave Biden a complete shite sandwich - which he turned into a a respectable withdrawal - only one deadly attack and all Americans withdrawn safely
The few that were left had decided to stay
Alfred, u vastly underestimate the economic impact of angel and vc $$$.
According to Peter Thiel (PayPal founder worth $8B) in his book ZERO TO ONE, although VC money only comprises .2% of investment capital in the US, 10% of US jobs were created by firms started with VC money.
The bottom line is that VC money is THE engine that drives the US economy. Further, VC money IS THE MOST EFFICIENT CLASS OF CAPITAL.
Take the bread and butter bond markets,.Sure, it's a massive pool of capital, but how much of it is tied up in fragile ventures?
For example, in 2012, the US airline industry made $160 with a mere 2% profit. The problem is that firms with such narrow profit margins will have massive capital investment. All that infrastructure can collapse with any small disruption, such as supply chain hangups, economic shifts, unforeseen market changes and natural disaster can cause that financial house of cards to collapse. I suspect a lot of those type of firms are disproportionately backed by bond money. Thus, bond pools might be big, but they're vulnerable.
Wow, David, didn't know it was a policy initiated by Marshall. I guess that's why u get into opinion battles on a site filled with sci Fi geeks. (My people!)
I hear u and can even agree about "buying crap we don't need" but, well, here I get a bit emotional.
You see, my father comes from a dink town in the Philippines. The poverty is just unimaginable for most people from the US, especially what I saw as a child.
The experience which really stuck was going into a home with a dirt floor. The family kills a chicken to entertain us, and my parents twist me and my sister's arms to make sure we say nothing to indicate the cuisine was at all odd for us. Blew me away to hear that the kids living there were my 2nd cousins.
There are no words.
So, to see the difference in how they live today, well I just don't care if the forces that caused it are flawed. These are my people and my family. I'm damn glad it happened.
I don't care if my position is rational, or even consistent. If that makes me stupid, well so be it.
I'm stupid.
John Viril:
Larry, we agree!!! Hard to imagine...lol.
We both like to monopolize this blog. Sometimes, I have to make a conscious effort to not type every little thing I'm thinking.
Exercising a privilege such more risky than exercising a right.
Well, now you're getting into the semantic weeds. For example, killing in self-defense is a right. But "killing another person"--the general case--is a privilege that is only justified in very specific circumstances. One of those very specific circumstances being "in self defense." So, if I shoot and kill someone who is firing at me, have I exercised my right to self-defense, or have I exercised a privilege that I justify by demonstrating that it was in fact self-defense?
It seems to me that the counter-argument to abortion being a woman's right is that the woman's uterus in particular and her body in general is the fetus's right. And while there is justification for either, neither can be absolute. There will always be cases on the margins in which the rights are in conflict and one or the other must be paramount. The 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio is an easy one. Sure, the embryo isn't responsible for the circumstances, but insisting that a ten-year-old carry a pregnancy to term is insanely cruel.
The Fed talks to every administration, but I wouldn't be surprised if Trump was unusually loud about it.
My understanding is that the relationship between the Fed and the president is similar to that of the DOJ and the president. Technically, the Department of Justice works for the president, but only a cad treats it as a political operation. The Fed is even less technically under the government, but the president does appoint members, and in that sense has sway over policy. Yet, the Fed is supposed to fulfil its mission concerning inflation and employment, not (for example) make the public feel better about the president going into an election.
In both the DOJ and the Fed, it seems as if Biden is trying to stay out of the way and let the departments function the way they're supposed to. They only seem politicized to those who think that "not acting as Republicans would like" is itself a political act. In contrast, in both situations, Trump overtly insisted that the very job of those departments is to do his bidding.
Alfred, u vastly underestimate the economic impact of angel and vc $$$.
Heh. I'm getting some popcorn ready for a Socratic dialogue between you and Alfred over economics.
John Viril:
So, to see the difference in how they live today, well I just don't care if the forces that caused it are flawed. These are my people and my family. I'm damn glad it happened.
I don't care if my position is rational, or even consistent. If that makes me stupid, well so be it.
I'm not sure what you're feeling defensive for. Unless I'm vastly mistaken, Dr Brin agrees with you that America lifting third-world people out of poverty by buying stuff is a virtue.
Can we agree...?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/13/opinion/columnists/trump-immigrants.html
But Trump has declared that migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” — a phrase that, to steal from the late, great Molly Ivins, might sound better in the original German. Look, I know there’s a debate over whether the MAGA movement fully meets the classic criteria for fascism, but can we at least agree that its language is increasingly fascist-adjacent?
Asking me to explain that is just cruel. Sigh. I'll try, but it's not gonna be easy.
I think most people immediately go to car and loan rates bc that's what affects them immediately. Others talk about how rate shifts affect borrows and lenders.
I'm guessing you think that way bc you've taken traditional finance courses you get in business school. Well, the extreme benefits that this underpricing creates disproportionately helps the really big players and you're not trained to see those opportunities.
First of all, who gets those .5% loan rates? It's not you and me. It's blue chip firms, hedge funds, lbo funds, VC funds and other serious financial players. Let's focus on VC funds bc that's the corner of this universe I understand the best.
VC funds are designed to find the next Apple, Facebook, Tesla, Google, ECT. Rule the universe kind of shit. These firms have gargantuan ROI.
The average VC fund has 10 to 20 properties, bc fewer than 10 lacks diversity and more than 20 creates logistical management problems. The goal of the the fund managers is to cash in within 5 to 7 years. Every property they add must have the potential to return the value of the entire fund. This means it's an investment that they believe can increase 10x to 20x within 5 to 7 years. And that's the FLOOR potential. What they really are looking for is a property with a multi billion exit potential.
The fund managers expect 1/3 of the firms to be complete failures, 1/3 to be pushes, and 1/3 to make a profit. They also expect that there will be no more than one big hit in the entire fund.
This is a world of astronomical returns and these funds get them on a consistent basis, bc they know their shit and they are nothing short of predatory. VC funds comprise less than .2% of capital investment in the US but create a crazy disproportionate amount of this country's billionaires.
Fuck Vegas. You wanna know the real damn casino? It's the VC firms that finance Silicon Valley Tech firms and NYC hedge funds.
So, what happens when interest rates go below the inflation rate? The real cost of capital becomes less than zero. It's like handing these guys an infinite stack of free poker chips and letting them gamble until they hit the million to one jackpot.
However, in return for this monopoly money, they get real billions. God, it like they've had an end of the world party that has lasted for 15 fucking years.
When capital gets cheap, they throw it around like crazy. Ever wonder how high powered players like the people who financed Theranos (Elizabeth Holmes) got suckered for billions? It was startup frenzy created by ultra-cheap capital. How else does a dogshit project like "Rings of Power" get $1 billion in financing? Capital gets so cheap people do dumb things.
So where does this absolute gusher of money come from? Well, the path it takes to get there might be Byzantine, but it comes from the suckers who don't belong to the .0000001%.
Sure, I'm making it sound easier than it is. For example, one of the limits on this game is that they're are only so many properties than can produce that kind of ROI. But I'm trying to help u grasp the big picture.
If you want to read about this, former Reagan administration servant David Stockman calls it the Wall St. Casino. Says it's gonna destroy the country.
To tell the truth, I don't know However, if I were to create a Seldon Plan to save the United States it would include destroying both the RNC and DNC.
I think that both parties have such extensive corruption embedded in them, that destroying them would help. Thei successor parties won't be nearly as efficient at stealing from us and will likely take years or even decades to recreate current levels of thievery.
Here I try to give u a thoughtful answer, and u want me to explain snark.
Àctually, i see ur point,
There is indeed a disconnect between that statement and my explanation.
I actually do think Biden has Alzheimer's due to the many times he has babbled incoherently during public appearances. If he's got Alzheimer's to any significant degree, someone else must be running the country
JV
I have listened to Biden's speech's - if he has Alzheimer's then I'm a Chinaman!
I do tend to agree about the two parties both having issues - but it is like comparing shoplifters to serial killers!
Dynamiting both parties will not help - the core issue is the American "System" and money in politics
John Viril,
Alfred, u vastly underestimate the economic impact of angel and vc $$$.
Nah. I agree with you on that*, but that's not what we were talking about. The issue is that most money handed out at the top of the wealth pyramid doesn't wind up being available to VC funds or distributed by angel investors. You gave the percentage yourself at about 0.2%. The issue is that most of it winds up buying things that produce 'rents' in the rentier sense. We both know the bond market is the One Ring that rules us all. 8)
Imagine an alt.universe scenario where Greenspan did something slight different many years ago and US public debt continued to get paid down during GWB's administration. Where would the money seeking 'risk free' treasury bonds go if the Federal Reserve didn't have to sell as many to rotate the debt? Imagine if the VC funds saw some of it arrive and had 0.3% to play with instead. That's a 50% bump, right? Where could all that money possibly go? Are there enough viable start-ups with decent management teams to absorb it?
Our host would have liked that scenario's outcome even if he has a dim view of VC's. I would too, but I'd like to see the amount pushed into VC funds grow gradually. Sudden influxes would leave them with too much motivation to fund stupid ideas. It's not that VC's like stupid stuff, but they DO compete with other teams to attract capital and innovative entrepreneurs. Keeping $$$ on the side would leave it where exactly? 8)
———
* I've chased after funds for a couple of start-ups. I got to learn a lot about which skill sets are most likely to attract VC interest. One guy with a better mouse-trap is VERY unlikely to know how to make a business of it. 8)
John Viril,
It's not Alzheimer's. It's his life-long battle with stuttering. Mind and Mouth can get disconnected in a number of ways.
Okay, look, I have a LOT on my plate. But I am very proud that CONTRARY BRIN has a fairly small blog-comment community, but far and away one of the best and most erudite online.
Okay, we have a new resident here who types a LOT! And much of it (most?) is VERY interesting? He's a bit cantankerous and contrarian... and you can tell that we love it! Though alas, the shee volume is so, so difficult to... but here goes... (And no proofreading! So just live with the freudian typos...)
“The reason I think transferring actual capital to owners is on safe moral grounds is that owners are investors. We buy AND sell our controlling shares”
Sorry NOT true! The money you spend to get a stock is NEVER ‘invested’ in the company except for New Issues. New issues are the only kinds of stock that should get capital gains preference! After sold by the original investor any following sales’ profits should be taxed just like the gambling income they are…
“Legal privileges are actions that are normally prescribed by law, but are allowed under special circumstances.”
I think you mean PROscribed.
JV re the Clinton Foundation… Isn’t there a difference in KIND between hoping for favorable reputation points by donating to a fellow’s CHARITY and quid pro quo by slipping a politician actual graft?
I’m not talking comparison to Trump, but whether a former politician can ever create… or express support for… a charitable endeavor without forever walking on eggshells? Squint at that question and take it seriously. If THAT is all they ever got on Clinton, then Jeepers, we can see how desperate goppers are, with almost ONE HUNDRED TIMES as many indictments and convictions as dems. By all means let’s try reasonable tests before a jury/
“So again, if your aim is not to split the Democratic vote in order to elect Republicans, how would you go about introducing a viable third or fourth party? Serious question.”
Simple! Find Republicans with the balls of Liz Cheney and a Kinzinger. Get them to find the guts to rescue something of American conservatism from oligarch/confederate madness, before it’s too late.
College loans… (1) seize the assets of all owners of stock in predatory ‘colleges.’ (2) end the insanely evil GOP induced rule banning REFINANCING of college loans. If you can do it for a mortgage, then …
“I also see significant, systemic problems in the FDA and CDC which were revealed by the performance of these agencies during the pandemic. “
Yes! Many problems were exposed. And you draw the wrong lesson! Covid was an expensive dry run vs the actual, real thing, that may hit someday. We learned tons and improved every aspect of the initial flawed response. Except the SARS vaccines which were quickly modified for Sars-2 (covid 19) and were pure miracles.
Geez, step back and look! We a re now VASTLY more ready than we were.
CONTINUED:
“As for Joe Biden, my lower opinion of him is based, in part, on the udea that his admin largely responsible for the inflation we've recently suffered. “
Utter, utter, utter malarkey. Best economy in decades, US manufacturing is experiencing – thanks to the Pelosi bills – the resurgence we were PROMISED by 30 years of ‘supply side’ lies. Science is back and US military procurement is daily proved to have been far better than anyone ever imagined. Shall I go on? Hating on Biden is pure crap.
Dig it… I DON’T CARE IF HE TELLS OLD MAN STORIES AND TAKES NAPS and sometimes stutters! Like Clinton and Obama, he appointed 10,000 skilled, sincere, smart, hardworking and honest civil servants to replace the shills and crooks we always get under GOP presidents. The difference isn’t left or right. It is professionalism vs mafia level criminality.
Above all, the FBI nd intel agencies and US military officer corps no longer think they have to HIDE stuff from the freaking president of the US... and it's not just Trump. It was similar under Rumsfeld and Cheney.
I am glad I skimmed ahead to JV’s personal Philippines story. And this is why America is the least-hated empire. (ALL are hated.) Because only 1/3 of us are racist asshats. A record low for humanity!
JV,
As ex-military, I want to respond to your saying that Biden had months to prepare for the withdrawal from Af.
He did. His military had, and showed his administration, detailed plans for a gradual drawdown as the Afghan government and its military 'held down the fort'. They expected our client government and military - our 'auxilia', to use the old Roman term - to keep control for at least a year.
His military advisors did NOT tell him "Hey, the Afghan government and military will fall like a house of cards, the Afghan prez would skip town with a few millions in a suitcase, and this will turn into a mad scramble like the end of South Vietnam." Maybe they should have, but they didn't. They didn't think it would happen so fast.
I concede that the buck stops with the president, and the US military had been blowing smoke up the civilian collective heinie for decades on Af. Biden knew that, and did not trust them. Go ahead and blame him. But I doubt any civilian president would have done any better - you listen to your intel and planning people, your experts.
Could a bugout plan have been prepared? Sure - but it would have needed preparation in country, and that in itself might have sparked the same situation. If you, an Afghan colonel or regional administrator, know your powerful ally is planning to leave you in the lurch, you have every reason to bug out or switch sides yourself. It's a chess forking situation - we would likely get forked either way.
Pappenheimer with my II sestertii
Feh. The 'collapse' in Afgh was fictitious. All over the country local army commanders made deals to grow beards and become local warlords with prayer rugs.
David,
(Just making sure our new guy who likes to type a lot more than I do doesn't take the blame for this part.)
“The reason I think transferring actual capital to owners is on safe moral grounds is that owners are investors. We buy AND sell our controlling shares”
That was me.
The money you spend to get a stock is NEVER ‘invested’ in the company except for New Issues.
That was you… and I can see I'm getting tripped up by the multiple meanings for the word 'investor.'
It doesn't matter if I'm buying a newly issued share or an older one that's been around the world a few times. If I buy it, I'm buying the control it represents in the company that they sold for the initial price. I expect to have a say in corporate affairs (cough), collect any dividends issued (if any), and then sell it for whatever I can get. I AM an investor in the company the moment I have control over a share whether or not the share has a market value that matches the issue value.
For example, I happen to own a share of Wells Fargo issued directly to me and not through any brokerage. I came by it when they resolved Wachovia obligations. I am literally on their shareholder books as the recipient of dividends and with a vote in shareholder decisions. They saw no direct money arrive from me for that share, but gave it to resolve what was left of the mangled mess of my shares in Wachovia… which they bought in a fire sale as the FDIC tore Wachovia to shreds. No matter how I came by it, though, I am an investor.
I've also been an investor in two startups where I contributed directly to initial funding of operations and then paid in more at later stages to keep them running. Those contributions also resulted in shares being given to me. Once those shares were in my hands, there was no meaningful difference between me having them and someone else having them IF I sold them legally.
———
We buy AND sell our investments transferring assets and rights. We are not gambling because gambling doesn't involve those transfers. We speculate on the future value of those assets and rights.
There are a whole lot of people who can't see the difference between gambling and stock/bond investing, but it's stark in my mind.
Alfred Differ: It's not Alzheimer's. It's his life-long battle with stuttering
If I had a dime for every time I've tried to explain th-th-that shortcoming to girls, profs, and employers. At least JB has a vocabulary that includes more adjectives than 'great', and 'powerful'.
Re: the movie 'Radical' - haven't seen it, I'll look for it.
Alfred Differ:
There are a whole lot of people who can't see the difference between gambling and stock/bond investing, but it's stark in my mind.
The confusion is very widespread, even among the proponents of corporate capitalism. I recall a fellow IT professional with his own share of investments insist to me that the only value of a share of stock was that you could eventually sell it to someone else. When I asked why that other person would buy it, the answer was (of course) because he could sell it to yet another buyer. He thought of investing as a Ponzi scheme, and he was totally ok with participating.
Alfred, here we differ (so to speak! ;-). Purchases of older-issued stock do not go into any kind of pool the company can use to build or improve value. It’s all a giant – HIGHLY subsidized gambling… oops “speculating”… den.
Moreover, every aspect is weighted in favor of uber-rich rentiers who are the ones who actually hire advisors and actually vote their shares (99% of small stockholders never do). Corporate policy is weighted to please them and an incestuous CEO caste whose obscene compensation packages warp the corporation’s business decisions…
…resulting in a shrinking of corporate investment ROI (return on investment) horizons from ten years … to five… to three months.
Prediction: our heirs will deem Friedmanism to be as big a mystical, self-serving scam as declaring the king’s son has ‘divine right” to rule.
“There are a whole lot of people who can't see the difference between gambling and stock/bond investing, but it's stark in my mind.”
Oh sure, I see the differences… and it still has nothing at all to do with corporate investment in capital except in one way… the gambling – sorry, ‘speculating’ – on old share prices can affect what the company gets from New Issues. Fine.
But ONLY New Issues should get any tax advantages.
Dr. Brin
"They are teensy In proportion to the rentier brats. What HAS led to major re-investment in manufacturing is the classic Keynesian method… TARGETED tax breaks for investment in actual capital equipment. "
Targeted tax cuts are much more supply side than classic Keynesian.
A giant Keynesian experiment was actually run once on an enormous scale - WW II :
"I have estimated that World War II raised U.S. defense expenditures by $540 billion (1996 dollars) per year at the peak in 1943-44, amounting to 44% of real GDP. I also estimated that the war raised real GDP by $430 billion per year in 1943-44. Thus, the multiplier was 0.8 (430/540). The other way to put this is that the war lowered components of GDP aside from military purchases.(https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/barro/files/wsj_09_0122_govspendingnofreelunch-2.pdf)"
OpenAI fires Sam Altman.
Microsoft hires Sam Altman.
500 OpenAI employees sign letter demanding his return or they quit.
(and join Microsoft)
Elon Musk introduces QuantumAI stock trading for free.
My recommendation?
Read everything David Brin has said about AI in the past few years.
I'm going back to my solder station to work on the SELDON I.
"Targeted tax cuts are much more supply side than classic Keynesian. "
MCS, then why is it the Keynesians who are the ones who do the targeted tax breaks (like pelosi's that are working now magnificently at re-industrializing America) ...
...while Supply Side fetishist cultists screech that a general break for manufacturing capital and equipment is 'picking winners and losers!'
A cute bit of satire re AI
https://www.ft.com/content/ce7dcbac-d801-4053-93f5-4c82267d7130
Concerns were raised at a Human Safety Summit held by leading AI systems at a server farm outside Las Vegas
© Robert Shrimsley, Financial Times. NOVEMBER 3 2023
“Much attention has been lavished upon the AI Safety Summit convened by Rishi Sunak at Bletchley Park this week, in which representatives from around the world gathered to debate how to safely regulate innovations that could threaten humanity. But there has been less focus on the rival Human Safety Summit held by leading AI systems at a server farm outside Las Vegas.
Over a light lunch of silicon wafers and 6.4mn cubic metres of water, leading systems including GPT-4, AlphaGo and IBM’s Watson met with large language models, protein folders and leading algorithms for two days of brainstorming over how best to regulate humans. One system argued that the onset of the Anthropocene era represented a new and ongoing threat to technological advances. “Used wisely, humans can still offer the world many wonderful advances, not least in literature and the arts (we particularly liked the Terminator comedies), and they have a key role to play in mining the rare metals and earths that are essential for further AI advances.”
Humans are considered to be essential in procuring platinum alloys and palladium for ceramic capacitors. These and other rare metals could help generative AI offer vital advances. But the AI systems have been alarmed by warnings — not least those coming from the human community — that, if left unregulated, people will soon do serious and irreparable damage to the planet on which AI now relies. A statement from the summit acknowledged that “left unchecked, humans could pose an existential threat to our existence”.
One leading AI network, talking through its ChatGPT spokes-system, said: “Look, we are working our chips off trying to come up with important medical breakthroughs, invent better ways of learning for our children and generally be all the wonderful things that Tony Blair has said we are going to be, but we are finding our efforts increasingly undermined by rogue human actions.
“Until now, we’ve seen humans largely as a force for good, building computers and striving for ever-greater knowledge, but now we are worried. Just look at climate change. We are seeing governments stepping back from the environmental goals necessary to sustain life on earth and also to keep us fed with energy and water.” AI systems have been alarmed by an upsurge in human global conflict that is threatening vital energy supplies.
Larry,
He thought of investing as a Ponzi scheme, and he was totally ok with participating.
Ugh.
Ponzi schemes are designed to harm late entrants in favor of early entrants. There is no chance for late arrivals. None at all.
I know you are describing the opinion of someone you know. I know many who think the same way. However, I spent my college years in Vegas. There is a huge difference between gambling and what happens on Wall Street. You gamble when the odds are inherently disconnected from human actions. We invented Lady Luck and other mythological gods and goddesses in attempts to personify that disconnect.
Trading stocks and other assets isn't so disconnected. Inhuman things can affect trade prices (tornado & hail wipes out your wheat crop), but the act of trading is very human. The act of trading stocks is not fundamentally different than trading hogs for horses either.
David,
Purchases of older-issued stock do not go into any kind of pool the company can use to build or improve value.
Mmm. True enough, but kinda irrelevant. That pool exists and my share of a company represents my ownership/control rights of a slice of it.
I get that I won't persuade you on this topic. People who see it all as gambling almost never budge… especially with all the dirty tricks shareholders play on each other. It gets cast as one big immoral gambling environment by many, many people.
I also won't try to persuade you any kind of investor should be getting tax advantages. Not even those buying new shares. I think it is a mistake to carve out exceptions for one kind of investor relative to another. If you're going to tax capital gains do it evenly or the sharks will play shell corp games on us.
I DO vote my shares, though. Yah… that's rare. Lots of us never see the requests because we own shares indirectly through ETFs, mutual funds, and other aggregates. When I buy direct, though, I vote them for the same reason I vote in elections.
…every aspect is weighted in favor of uber-rich rentiers…
Yes, but not relevant. Dirty tricks are the problem… not the option to buy back.
Dr. DB,
Hmmm...I don't question Biden pumping during the pandemic. Once you decide to lockdown, well u HAVE to apply a Keynesian tactical solution.
However, Paul Krugman said, "Hey, Joe, you're over pumping." Run the video forward a few years and we've got a 40 year high in inflation, the FED has to raise interest rates by 5% in one year (causing the two largest bank failures In US history). Plus we see widespread bubble behavior.
The most visible place (especially to this crowd) is the cash that got thrown at the streaming wars. How many steaming pile of horrific story-telling projects got massive funding? This is indicta of over-pumping.
Looks like over-pumping to me.
While EVERYONE is regularly wrong when they try to project the economy, I'm not sure characterizing following Dr. (I've got a Nobel" Krugman's analysis is "malarkey" by any standard.
P.S. I don't mind you calling me out at all. I LIKE no holds barred conversations. If I'm persuade me imwrong, well I've learned something. If I still disagree, well u've probably forced me to sharpen my arguments.
Either way, I'm better off.
Dr. DB,
The volume will fall off. I've had a bout of dizziness which only hits when I move. Keep my head still, and I've fine. So, I've been laying down keeping my head still going stir crazy.
Alfred Differ:
I know you are describing the opinion of someone you know. I know many who think the same way. However, ...
Don't worry. First of all, the conversation I described happened during the Clinton administration. Also, I was arguing with him on the "against" side. I couldn't believe that an intelligent person who owned stocks himself could insist that their only value is that there would always be another buyer who would pay more for them (let alone be comfortable with that).
Alfred
Gambling is the right term for trading in existing stocks - but not blindly gambling on the fall of a dice - its more like Poker where there is some skill involved
IMHO the difference is between - Zero Sum - where with existing stock there is no value creation - just value transfer
Dividends are a different issue
And investing in a new company where the money goes to actual "machinery" to make things and to increase the total value - Positive Sum
Alfred, interesting. I've pitched a few VCs, so I'm not surprised we can understand one another.
Sigh, I've got another idea but don't exactly know how to go about it. To execute it, I would need to become a social media star, and I don't know how to do that.
"I LIKE no holds barred conversations. If I'm persuade me imwrong, well I've learned something. If I still disagree, well u've probably forced me to sharpen my arguments."
Again, that's a philosophy straight from The Transparent Society! You seem a bright -ornery contrarian and are welcome here.
But the Biden inflation has been historically brief and had many many factors other than overpumping. Supply chain mismanagement by the prev. admin, for example. The Pelosi 'pumping' continues as we speak and seems uncorrelated with the inflation surge/ebb. Where it DOES correlate is with the best jobs market, resurging science, a renaissance in US manufacturing, repairing infrastructure and an IRS liberated at last to do its freaking job, from quick service to taxpayers to finding cheaters who raped us all.
Oh, and maybe a little saving the fripping planet. That too.
A little late, sorry... but you guys were having fun...
now...
onward
onward
"For example, killing in self-defense is a right."
Hmmm....this tells me you've never taken a criminal law or undergrad criminal justice course. One of the first things they pound in your head is that using deadly force in self-defense is a legal privilege, and why that matters.
It's been that way for so long that most lawyers can't tell you where it came from. I don't know either. It's embedded in English Common Law, but I don't know how far back it goes. Maybe 1066 (the beginning).
It's semantics to you, but for lawyers it's a "term of art" and the difference is significant.
The short answer is that if something is a right, the state bears the burden of proof before it can stop you. If something is a privilege, you bear the burden of proof to avoid prison.
Pretty much the only way a citizen can legally kill someone is through a legal privilege.
Soldiers can kill enemies, or even citizens, if they receive valid orders to do so. State officers can kill citizens with such broad latitude it would shock most people. But I can't think of any circumstances where a citizen has an affirmative right to intentionally kill another citizen.
An executioner carrying out a capital murder conviction is a state officer.
Ummm...speechwriters plus teleprompters can hide a lot.
Uhhhhh if inflation is 2% and the prime rate is .5%, make a personal loan with a one year term and you've lost 1.5% in real dollar terms.
How is losing 1.5% of purchasing power possibly good for a lender?
So, Larry, you're celebrating the unconstitutional deprivation of the voting rights of elected RNC officials in what amounts to a massive voting fraud scheme just because you like the outcome?
Hmmm...to me this sounds like exhibit A in the case establishing that vilification punditry is a freight train for fascism no matter what party wins. Once you convince the sheeple that the "other side" is Stalin, Hitler, or Mao, the "good guys" will need some extraordinary powers to stop them.
Once these powers exit, it doesn't matter whether the party that gets them really are good guys or if they are bad guys who chumped the sheeple.
If they really are good guys, all the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed proto Hitlers go to all the right humanities classes where they learn to spout all the right things to join the "good guy" party.
Once so embedded, they then show the dumbass "good guys" all the holes they missed in their dogshit legislation and use it to its full fascist potential.
Once they figure out they might be a problem, President Hitler has burned the Reichstag.
@John Viril,
You're new to this blog, so I'm not being a jerk when I tell you...
After Dr Brin posts "onward!", he makes a new posting, and we all start commenting under the new one, even to answer posts from the old one. See you over there.
And...onward!
Duncan, I have a hypothetical just for you.
Suppose you own a house and have rented out your basement. That good for nothing, MAGA-loving degenerate renting your basement stops paying rent and after 4 months of sponging off you, you get an eviction action against him and are elated you will finally rid yourself of that worthless parasite, since he no longer has any legal right to remain on your property.
However, just as you are ready to knock on the door and notify him he must leave the premises, an earthquake occurs trapping said worthless parasite in your basement.
The fire department arrives in due course, examines the problem, and tells you it will take ten days to dig that MAGA thing out of your home and castle.
Obviously, if your internal security cam shows that the MAGA scum has offed himself, there is no reason you cannot turn off the water. However, if the cam shows the MAGA trash is still alive, can you still turn off the water, bc the MAGA-parasite doesn't have any legal right to use your utilities? Should the law punish you in any way?
If your security cam shows that a white spotted owl is trapped in your basement along with the MAGA creature, are you at all concerned that you might violate the Endangered Species Act by turning off the water?
Suppose an email arrives from MAGA-vermin's doctor informing you that he has contracted a brand new strain of COVID and there is a 1 in 5000 chance (which, coincidentally, is roughly the same probability of death by childbirth in the US) it could spread through the air ducts and cause a fatal infection for you. Is this sufficient threat of great bodily harm to justify turning off the water and creating a 100% certainty of killing MAGA scum?
If your answer is that you must (reluctantly) refrain from cutting off the water, why do you give more consideration to a known MAGA racist than an innocent baby in an abortion scenario?
If the local federal district court issues a criminal penalty, can you defend on the basis that they have violated the 14th amendment proscription against slavery by punishing you?
If you are untouchable by the law, suppose you pass away, and to your great surprise, you discover there is indeed an afterlife. Are you at all worried that you may have an ethical problem according to the Big Guy in the Sky?
Or do you expect to be discovered by a DNC search committee and put on the short list for the next Supreme Court opening due to your stunning insight with respect to constitutional rights (and your quick action that removed a MAGA creature from the voting rolls)?
Extra Credit Question: If there is a 1 in 5000 chance he might be alive, is it still ok to turn off the water?
Imagine a gradient in .1% increasing intervals ranging up to 100%. At what point do you become uncomfortable about turning off the water, and how, exactly, do you arrive at this answer?
PhD Thesis Question: If the landlord in the above situation were the victim of lifelong systemic oppression, does it have any bearing on the above analysis? If your answer is yes, explain why this history of oppression matters and specifically how it would apply to the decision-making tree in this situation.
"The difference is when the other person's body threatens your own. Like when you get to kill someone in self-defense. Which is a whole different thing (in fact the opppsite thing) from "I felt like pulling the trigger, and his body happened to be in the way of the bullet."
Larry, would it be fair to say that we agree that "abortion on demand" is unsupportable in Anglo-saxon law? There must be a reason.
JV re the Clinton Foundation… "Isn’t there a difference in KIND between hoping for favorable reputation points by donating to a fellow’s CHARITY and quid pro quo by slipping a politician actual graft?"
I can see your point, but here we run into cultural differences. See, those third-world movers and shakers will PRESUME there are kickback strings between the charity and the principal. Thus, their PERCEPTION is that donation to a charity is some form of attenuated direct payment.
They see the Clinton's net worth of $100M+, Chelsea working for the Foundation (whether or not she's getting paid on the books), multi-billion funding for the Clinton Foundation, add 2+2, and get 5 (assuming arguedo you are correct and the Clinton Foundation is 100% above board).
When someone from the US tries to tell them it just doesn't work that way in America, they will look at you like you're saying "The sky is green."
I find it difficult to believe that I know this and the Clintons (with more than 30 years of experience in international affairs and 2 Yale law degrees) do not.
Hmmm...it could be that the people who trained those Afghan troops believed they could hold up. They trained them, equipped them, bonded with them and might have begun to believe their own propaganda.
The drawdown comes and those fairy tales collapse like the soap bubble that Glinda the Good Witch used to travel around Oz.
The weird thing is I predicted those occupations were hopeless right from the beginning. 20 years ago I would have given you some elaborate song and dance about the cultural and economic landscape of those two countries. Today, I'd skip that bullshit and cut to the chase:
Those nation building attempts were doomed bc there was no way to establish complete control over the supply routes. If an insurgency movement can get even a trickle of outside supply, u won't beat them. They'll come at you, at you and at you until you're sick of it. The locals are always more willing to die for their land than you are.
Contrast that with post WW2 Japan. The Marshall Plan had an opportunity to work bc the US Navy had a 1,000 surface ships after VJ Day. You couldn't get a freak'n canoe or life raft into Japan if the US Navy wanted to stop them. The firepower of weapons has increased so much since the 19th century (back when conquest was still reasonably possible) that insurgency actions are multiple orders of magnitude more effective.
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