@rst @DeanBaker13 @mmasnick And there’s no substitute for anti-SLAPP protection if we want to preserve free speech. Why is it more important that a forum should be immunized from Thiel’s resentments than the person who posts to the forum, or a blogger, or a newspaper?
@rst @DeanBaker13 @mmasnick i mean no one would ever blog without Section 230 protection, right? and the financial incentives to sue some hippie running a tiny Mastodon instance are just huge. and there are no possible alternatives that might shield good faith human operators/moderators except blanket shielding of every megaplatform.
“I’m not a train expert, but my understanding is that they are typically supposed to remain on the tracks.” @ryanlcooper https://prospect.org/environment/2023-02-24-republicans-norfolk-southern-crash/
dear world,
if i am paying you money for a subscription and i can't have a proper full-content #rss feed, it really pisses me off.
that is all.
@SteveRoth (i think we were, but not coincidentally coincident with a material upswing.)
@SteveRoth All those Clinton SOTUs about a rising tide lifting all boats, and taking especial pride in black-community progress. and with some reason! here's a graph labeled (correctly enough, "White wealth surges; black wealth stagnates" but that stagnation is relative to whites. over the 1990s there's very substantial growth (later undone) https://archive.is/thnvI Here's b/w wage gaps ballooning since Y2K, esp since 2007. https://www.epi.org/blog/black-white-wage-gaps-are-worse-today-than-in-2000/
@SteveRoth And of course there's the classic piece on Black wealth destruction over the financial crisis by @ryanlcooper and #MattBruenig https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Foreclosed.pdf Bruenig also had a great piece showing that while the other races were already neoliberal, the middle-class-heavy precrisis black community had an unusually nordic wealth (i think) distribution, until the crisis destroyed the middle and neoliberalified the black wealth distribution too.
@SteveRoth @ryanlcooper (i'm looking but haven't found that one yet.)
@SteveRoth @ryanlcooper (my cheeky use of "nordic" to mean egalitarian is particularly ill-placed here, since in private wealth terms rather than income or some benefits-inclusive wealth measure, the nordics aren't particularly egalitarian.)
@markhughes @dharmik TBL could do it himself in NextStep. Yeah, the rest depended on Mosaic then Netflix then Internet Explorer, and what did they care, where was the business model in distributed creativity?
@SteveRoth Nothing has worked very well, thus far. But local confiscation riots are less plausible if the material conditions of the community nationally are improved. We had a genuine national-scale cultural improvement, from mid-1990s thru the financial crisis we were on a race-relations upswing (even while we were quietly, complacently, resegregating schools). The collapse in Black material conditions (homeowning middle class) with fin crisis basically undid the cultural progress, in my view.
@CatherineFlick @stokel i can't wait for the barage of ChatGPT reviews of itself.
@SteveRoth I think the implication with eg racism would be that remedying the material disparity might go a long way to healing the cultural problems, rather than what we've mostly tried, the other way around.
@kmontenegro i’m sure one can find or define categories that are gendered in this way, but in general victims of murder are very disproportionately male. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homicide_statistics_by_gender?wprov=sfti1
@guncelawits i think we’re eventually going to teach that all things are presumptively bullshit unless you have good reason to think that the author should care about truthfulness. the notion that one should consider an argument on its own terms, regardless of provenance, will become untenable in an age of automated abundant sophistry.
@MadMadMadMadRN and contractors cost more! and quality suffers over time from less institutional ownership and commitment.
“There’s a weird tendency in these debates to assume that ideas and cultural abstractions are what drive material conditions on the ground, rather than the far likelier and less mystical possibility that it’s the other way around.” #JeffSpross, on the debt ceiling fight, from his new substack. https://theworkbench.substack.com/p/the-debt-ceiling-here-be-stupid-dragons
[new draft post] Four quadrants of Section 230ishness https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/02/22/four-quadrants-of-section-230ishness/index.html
// i'm taking some liberties with my new first-drafts blog. this is a bit long.
@Alon @SteveRoth Steve Roth is a wealth scholar. He'll probably speak for himself, but I suspect he'd argue in favor of holistic measures of income that include all changes in wealth (so, e.g., stock price changes whether realized or not would count) as determinants of consumption behavior. These would be missed by many Gini measures. 1/
@Alon @SteveRoth A more conventional frame would be "wealth effects": people do empirically consume more as they grow richer. I don't think it's very much studied, empirically, whether there's an analogous-to-conventional-income rich-poor difference in marginal propensity to consume out of changes in wealth. 2/
@Alon @SteveRoth But the meta point is this was an extraordinary period for all the reasons we know (and are told we must gnash our teeth over, though I think the 1970s were an economic success story, at least in the US), but one reason we don't so much know that Steve points to is that it coincided with a remarkable reversal in wealth concentration. That's worth thinking about at a lot of levels. /fin
@akkartik this is great:
> Computers shouldn't be like cars, to be delegated to expert mechanics. They should be like laws, for everyone to engage in supervising. Code and laws can have subtle effects that become apparent only over months or years. So there's no way to delegate them indefinitely to others and remain certain that your interests are being protected.
evening, a bit later.
late sunset, orange only low near the horizon, eventually pitch black above. a bright artificial light hangs low over the orange horizon, above which a new moon in the blackness, above that the bright dot of venus.
@akkartik Thanks! That’s been a while. I hope among the bad takes come a few not awful spewings.