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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • It is weird that your comment was removed.

    it’s a fine balance between putting a 20% tariff on literally every import (i believe trump wanted to do this) and putting a 100% tariff on chinese EVs to give the american auto market a leg to stand on.

    Right this is the contradiction I was poking fun at.

    Personally, I prefer the carrot to the stick approach. I think we should do more stuff like the chips act and less stuff like tariffs. This is especially true in the context of technology that aids in the transition to an economy that uses less fossil fuels. The ~$10,000 Chinese EVs would be a pretty massive tool in that arsenal. (Though not as good of a tool as they are in China because of China’s genuinely impressive rail system.) If you want more American made EVs —cool so do I— but we will get there faster with the right industrial policy. The tariffs do little to make that happen.







  • If wielding power in our “democracy” is so complicated that we must exclude non-experts isn’t that an indictment of our democracy? What is it about the legislative and executive process that people are ignorant of?

    While I am skeptical of the celebrity as politician trend which has been prominent over the last few decades; especially on the right. I don’t think lack of experience is the problem with the trend.

    Put aside what you think about Trump’s political project for a moment. He was effective at giving conservatives what they wanted. Tax cuts and Supreme Court seats. Despite having zero legislative and executive experience. You could say the same thing about Reagan and perhaps Schwarzenegger.

    I agree, expecting a strongman to come in and save us from all our political issues is problematic. We shouldn’t recreate feudalism. We need to learn to organize ourselves into a base of democratic power that we can wield towards our broad economic interests.

    But at the same time our media apparatus runs on spectacle, it takes someone with the charisma of John Stewart to be taken seriously by mainstream power brokers. Perhaps he could breakthrough the spectacle and kickstart a new progressive era that could enable those democratic ends.

    Because the alternative to charisma for gaining political legitimacy is going through the political system. And the longer you’re in that system the more time that system has to influence you towards ends that want to stop progress. Just look at Jamal Bowman and John Fetterman.



  • They could potentially release source only with no art assets. Then you wouldn’t be able to compile the game without either owning the game or pirating the assets elsewhere. But it would allow community members to update the game when it breaks or to add new features. Similar to the Mario 64 decompile.

    While all this would be great for consumers it would probably take legislation to get publishers on board with something like this. Publishers have a financial incentive to let the games languish then force you to pay to get a “remastered” version.


  • Yeah, I’m not sure I agree that YouTube wants their platform to shrink. Even if you don’t watch ads you are still giving them your data which they can monetize.

    Personally I would be willing to pay for YouTube premium but not under the current terms. 1. If I’m paying for the service they should no longer collect and sell my data. 2. Allow me to have a YouTube-only account not connected to other Google services and 3. The current pricing is a bit high.

    They can offer these terms or I’ll continue to use them logged out with Adblock. Or they can continue to enshitify and eventually their platform will start to shrink which will make the data they sell to advertisers less valuable.


  • I own a 1080ti and there was recently a massive update to Allan Wake 2 that made it more playable on pascal GPUs. Digital foundry did a video on it: http://youtu.be/t-3PkRbeO8A

    I don’t know of any current game that can’t run at least 1080p30fps on 1080ti. But of course my knowledge is not exhaustive.

    I wouldn’t expect every “next-gen” game to get the same treatment as Alan Wake 2 going forward. But we’re 4 years into the generation and there has probably be less than 10 games that were built to take full advantage of modern console hardware. My 1080ti got a few more good years in it.



  • I don’t remember them saying that specifically. But we did spend a lot of time on supply and demand curves which heavily implies that.

    To be fair to my econ101 class for a moment when I took that class it was during the Obama years and that was a bit before progressivism made the come back it has now. A lot of people were still Fukuyamaists.

    I think economics is a pretty complicated subject that is deeply intersecting with ideology. It maybe impossible fully to disentangle how the economy works with how it should work. To expect kids just out of high school to critically examine all the nuances of a field beyond the assumptions they grew up with, while simultaneously learning the basics of that field is a pretty tall order. And if the experts at the time are moving away from that way of thinking anyway, why bother?

    Of course in retrospect they probably should have bothered. But that’s just how the flow of history has to work I guess.

    Edit: There’s some nuance and detail I could probably add to that conclusion. But I’m running out of steam for tonight.





  • But it doesn’t matter because the lesson to take away is that in any system the people with power will modify it to what we have now

    Was the system that the peasantry lived under in the commons the same as what we have now?

    All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

    Ok?

    The quote you just gave is from famous socialist George Orwell from his book Animal Fram. Which is critical of the structures the Soviet Union created.

    But your comment is actually in direct contradiction to Orwell’s actual more nuanced point. His point was not that every system devolves into capitalism… he was himself a socialist who fought along side communists in the Spanish civil war after all. His point is that we need to think critically about the structures we’re creating to ensure they’re serving egalitarian ends. Something I agree with Orwell on.

    The original reason why I commented was because it didn’t seem you were engaging in the same project of critically examining economic structures in the way Orwell was and the way Smith was. Though I would love to be proven wrong.

    I think you should think more critically about what people tell you about Adam Smith and George Orwell.


  • Adam Smith did not ‘invent’ capitalism. No single person can invent an economic system. He made some early observations and normative assertions about a set of economic relations that were forming independent of him.

    So the economic system we had prior to capitalism was feudalism. The common lands that I mentioned were apart of the feudal system. The system of landlords and rent-seeking were and are apart of capitalism. You can just look around… we still have these things. You do understand that right? Unless you’re saying our current system isn’t capitalist.


  • Yes Capitalism is supposed to be pro-worker/anti-rich

    Supposed by whom? The rent-seeking behavior that Smith criticized was largely brought about by enclosure; the process of enclosure was foundational to capitalism.

    Hence my comment about people still paying to live before adoption of capitalism

    This is ahistorical, before enclosure the peasantry had substantial rights to live freely on the common land.

    I suppose it does depend on what is meant by ‘pay to live on this earth’. If you just mean that people have to work to take care of themselves then, sure. But that’s not really what this meme is referring to. If it was then the orangutan would be ‘paying to live on this earth’ as well.