@akkartik hurrah!
evening.
pink clouds superimposed over a new moon, beneath Venus, a glowing white point.
@SteveRoth I think a lot of it was the youth politics of the time. The young were basically an interest group credibly threatening to burn it all down. They had to be bought off or crushed, and the politics of crushing middle class kids is hard (see Kent State). We’re seeing glimmers of that maybe in Gen Z labor militancy, quiet quitting, etc. The bogeyman of the Fox News /Trump / MTG demographic is used to try to keep the kids “reasonable”. Hopefully it fails.
@SteveRoth And, right? How can we do more of that? The 1970s were an economic achievement buried in smug calumny as some catastrophe that must never be repeated. Catastrophe for whom? It was, we should acknowledge, also a catastrophe for people with fixed-ish incomes and little bargaining power by which to increase them. But the miseries of that cohort are paraded like “main street” as a fig leaf for “wall street”.
[new draft post] Hello! https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/02/21/hello/index.html
@SteveRoth Ask Arthur Burns! He was pretty explicit they could have killed the inflation with sufficiently tight policy, but thought (correctly!) the social and political costs of that would be unbearably high. The policy apparatus of the 1970s was desperately afraid of young idle hands, did its best to keep them employed at wages above marginal productivity. A transfer! The low-bargaining power already-employed suffered most, but shares did badly, as did most financial assets in real terms.
@SteveRoth ...and maybe a young generation elites feared, whose high expectations while entering the labor force in extraordinary numbers the wealthy, very loudly begrudgingly, accepted sacrifices to fulfill rather than disappoint!
@SteveRoth a more egalitarian distribution is always more inflationary cet par than a top-heavy one. so, sure! but what causes the decline in top-1% wealth share (wealth velocity then rises pretty mechanically via MPC effects). why were the 1970s an unusually egalitarian decade? (of course then the media had to misery-index it, make actually a pretty good decade considering the archetype of bad.)
all this dystopian gloss on AI but think of the potential for automating guard labor.
@philshapiro how long until "Techniques for Effective Procrastination"?
“We anthropomorphize because we do not want to be alone.” @lmsacasas https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-prompt-box-is-a-minefield-ai #ViaRSS
a large language model trained only on poetry.
@failedLyndonLaRouchite my intuition is also that construction should be much more prefab, but i’ve gathered that cost-of-transport really limits this, efficient scale of prefabrication wants a scale that requires a large geography. i’d like to see this overcome. i agree that so much on-site, rather ad hoc, framing and fabrication seems less than wonderful.
@WataruTenkawa Fair enough! Generally, it’s my view that nobody knows if you’re a dog in the internet and one is always welcome not to bark. I don’t like to be associated with any particular identity or community. But there are seniors of my acquaintance who’ve not participated in social media much, who I think might benefit from relatively sane Mastodon, but kind of wouldn’t know where to start, for whom some tokens of familiarity might help.
is there any seniors-focused Mastodon community?
“building codes in the US are often prescriptive, mandating specific building systems or materials, in ways that regulations in other industries aren’t, which might make it harder to adopt improved methods compared to other sectors of the economy.” #BrianPotter https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/on-klein-on-construction #ViaRSS
it’s not a twitter bot, it’s a mechanical jerk.
“Identity Politics vs. Identity Office Politics” by @adamkotsko https://itself.blog/2023/02/16/identity-politics-vs-identity-office-politics/ #ViaRSS
“replacing a lagging stat with an inaccurate stat doesn’t help all that much and can cause more confusion than clarity.” #MattBruenig on the “total fertility rate” https://mattbruenig.com/2023/02/16/the-total-fertility-rate-is-kind-of-a-nonsense-statistic/
the use of shame as a tool for social discipline renders shamelessness particularly adaptive.
"1.00 USD = 4.1060 Romanian New Leu (RON)" ~Western Union
Official exchange rate: 4.578 RON/USD
Despicable, but you use them anyway when sending to the most marginal and vulnerable people, those with no access directly or through friends/family to a bank account.