" One of the core libertarian principals is Don't hurt people"
Not violently hurt them, no. But you can underprice your product to ruin all your competitors and then jack up prices once they are all bankrupt. That's fine. You can get together with fellow employers to drive down wages artificially. That's fine.
Your "traditional" libertarian defines "don't hurt people [or] steal their stuff" *very* narrowly. You originally used "and" there, and that strikes me as apropos of libertarians: they conflate theft and harm, and even theft they define very narrowly. Under libertarianism, anything you can get someone else to agree to give up in exchange for what you offer them it totally fine, no matter how exploitative or uneven the transaction may be, nor how lopsided the arrangement of power and leverage is, excepting violent threats (which is what the government exists to protect against: violent theft).
As I wrote elsewhere above, I think Freddie was specifically referring to the kind of technocrat, silicon valley libertarians who work very aggressively to disrupt traditional industries in the name of creating something more efficient and valuable to consumers, with the trade-off being that usually the consumer gets mined for data and hooked on something striving to become a monopoly.
Beyond specific critiques of that form of libertarianism, you have to remember that Freddie is a communist. He has deep philosophical objections to solutions being sold as commodities (in your example, imagine being charged a subscription service to use the stick). The specifics of that outlook are beyond any particular post (except for occasionally when he really dives down into what his deepest anti-capitalist principles are) but they are always going to inform his whole outlook, which is what he was acknowledging here.
Ironically many of those writers you mentioned probably call themselves Marxists, i.e. disciples of a stats-nerd obsessed with technology, who made fun of alot of people (I like to call the "The Capital" the "Great Roasting of obscure authors only rembered through this" privately) but none more than naive socialists who wanted to return to "Nature" (including his own brother-in-law).
Ardently agree with the guy elsewhere in this thread who pointed out that Marx was the original "Left-YIMBY" or "Left-techno-solutionist". If Marx were with us today, he'd be adamantly reminding us that his change-agent was the urban industrial proletariat, not damned peasants and suburbanites.
Sure, and Marx would probably kinda hate that. He would probably point out all the ways in which capitalist society reengineered itself over the 20th century to euthanize the proletariat as a class-for-itself proper, and then berate the hell out of all of us Leftists or "Marxists" for having *gone along with that* and just invented new revolutionary subjects out of our asses instead of fighting to preserve the conditions that enable progressive class struggle.
I wasn't disagreeing with anything you said. I just see a lot of left-wing discussion around the "factory worker" and it strikes me as coming from people who've read the proverbial "theory" (probably Wikipedia) but have no idea what's going on in the 21st century economy.
I'm not disagreeing with you either. But I am disagreeing with the people who keep trying to replace the proverbial "factory worker" in the Marxist schema with literally anything else that's easier for them to get a hold of: postcolonial anthropology grad-students, Starbucks baristas, Indian peasant farmers, Iraqi insurgents, Chinese capitalists, Californian computer programmers. I've heard all of these feted and praised as the revolutionary subject of "today", for some value of "today" I actually lived through in the last 20 years.
I agree with all of this so much. To the point where it almost feels like I've spent weeks writing thousands of words to express this in a more poorly written, less well thought out way. Didn't anticipate drinking at 8 AM today but, here we are.
I will note that although I also share the feeling about this being a space inhabited by tech bros who believe in the most childish form of libertarianism, this has always been, in my view, the inherently Marxist position. And although I have (perhaps wrongly?) abandoned my youthful faith in revolution I've never abandoned my youthful faith in our ability to engineer a better world. This was also the mainline American view until about the 1970s when we our thought leaders became infected by European post-war pessimism. If this space feels flooded by Silicon Valley Ayn Rand reading hucksters, it's just because everyone else abandoned it for no good reason.
I will endlessly stand up for a bunch of nerds and workers earnestly trying to solve real problems, against the people trying to stop them because they have an interest in continued Problematization.
Haha, I saw that, thank you. I didn't want to selfpromote but wow the timing on this one. I'm choosing to flatter myself and just say Freddie and I think alike.
This engineer agrees completely - you can’t engineer your way out of everything, but technological problems can be fixed by technological solutions. Energy is something we produce with technology; housing is something we build. Why not engineered solutions to these problems?
All of New York would collapse in 24 hours w/o the work of engineers. So would Houston. Sanitation engineering has saved more lives than any other man-made solutions to anything. Dostoyevsky was an engineer before he started writing literature. Listen to the engineers.
For a serious comment, yeah, I find the left-leaning climate moralism bizarre. I thought the goal was to reduce carbon emissions. But, for some, it seems to be about creating a more "natural" world or something, and reducing carbon emissions are just an excuse to do so.
weeellll ... kinda so what though? In environmental terms, the core question is "is this environment currently being fucked up with inept management?" If the answer is "yes", then the bad management may destroy it anyway, and destroying something painstakingly created and maintained over thousands of years by humans is not actually any better than destroying something that sprung up by itself
The 'created Amazon' has been known for a while now, hasn't it? It made it into Chrales Mann's '1491', and that book is 15 years old by now
That's a good way of putting it. I imagine there's some large overlap between these people and the ones who think white people should feel guilty for being white.
If these people just found a good liberal church it would absorb their need for guilt.
I'm not kidding. It's a pressing human need for most people, and if they don't fulfill it with an hour on the weekend, it just expresses itself in other ways.
*EDIT* Sports teams, too, absorb the need for stupid tribalism. If I hate the Steelers, that's one human need taken care of, and I don't need to hate Republicans/Democrats/THE JEWS/homosexuals/rednecks.
I've never once come across any of these books or lesson plans that encourage white people to feel guilty for existing or being white. I'm sure such things exist in the fringes of racial resistance academia, but come on. Where are you getting this from? It's the "guilt" part that I just don't see.
And where is a situation that books and lesson plans aren't 'open' to parents? Do you mean that parents should be involved from the very first step of researching, developing and finalizing all curricula? That wouldn't be realistic, so what ends up happening is ignorant parents at least around here - they tried to get "New Boy" or whatever it's called banned and every argument offered during an interview I heard on the radio was completely wrong including major details about what these mothers *thought* was in the book (but wasn't). This was just on my local NPR/college radio station last night.
One of the things one woman said was that, in this semi-autobiographical novel - white people were being made to feel guilty for being white because one of the white characters' mom who happened to be well off practices yoga all day. The horror! Could you imagine what might happen when an impressionable young white kid reads this?!
Regardless, clearly all learning materials and course structure info is already available to parents or they wouldn't have been able to raise such a ruckus about this book (that eventually wasn't banned - at least here).
Yes, which is why I become instantly suspicious when people demonize them in favor of Sprawl-Land suburbia, which is just going to be colonized and sucked dry by Wal-Mart anyway.
Wal-Mart in Athens Georgia was the place people came from all over the state to see the National Football Championship trophy (big parking lots). WM has done this for other sports event winners in other states.
Also, the bus stop outside my Walmart is always teeming with people. If you want to talk about acccess for poorer folks, the more services Walmart provides, the better.
Our Walmart has food, clothes, a pharmacy, a bank, and an optometrist in it.
But yeah, the nearest Wal Mart to us has a UPS store, a hair salon, a place where you can pay your municipal bills, and several other things I don't recall the exact nature of along the inside front of the store. Same thing with Kroger, though.
Ok, but I was going by my experience, back in the day oh so long ago, of living in a smaller town, and watching Wal-Mart kill off all our more independent and more specialized retail outlets. You're never gonna convince me that letting them suck up the consumption spending of whole communities with a total monopoly is a good idea.
The rank and file climatistas don't know enough to understand how much money lies in being carbon good. Money they'll never get. The switch from ICEs to EVs will result in the largest amount of consumer spending in history over the next 20 years. It won't be remotely carbon neutral or better, but it sure will be nice for a lot of bottom lines.
Jan 17, 2022·edited Jan 17, 2022Liked by Freddie deBoer
In the fusion debate I get the sense that some people really don’t want it to work. Why? Because if it works people will be happily driving their electric Tahoes to their 5,000 sq/ft McMansions an that’s just wrong.
Why is it wrong? Because of climate change. But there would be no climate impact. Well…I find that lifestyle ascetically revolting. Is the closest to an actual reason I can think of.
Meanwhile, I'm waiting for Commonwealth Fusion Systems to do an IPO so I can get rich off a fusion company so good at basic, non-scammy engineering that
1) In 2020 they published specs for their machines in the Journal of Plasma Physics with full peer-review and transparency,
2) In 2021 they built the superconducting magnet whose specs they'd published in 2020.
Like holy shit, you guys can publish the theory one year and build the theorized part the next? TAKE MY MONEY, HOW DO I GET ON THIS TRAIN?
Believe me, they will gladly take your money. Fusion is not going to be the way out. The fuel cycle is wrong and we will not likely have any tech that can control the reaction and net any energy. We can make D-T cycle go boom. But good luck controlling it to get usable net energy. Do not for a minute believe this "power of the Sun" nonsense. The Sun runs on hydrogen to helium conversion that produce protons. This occurs at temperatures and pressures that are not achievable on earth. Our D-T process produces highly destructive neutrons, which are much more difficult to deal with and are destructive of earthly materials of the type we use to make reactors.
I think a lot of people with strong feelings about climate are understandably exhausted that others don't want to entertain lifestyle changes. But then I think there's a bit of critique drift and their ingrained attitude about sacrifice and thrift ends up taking over, but because they originally started thinking about it in terms of science, they think they're still thinking scientifically. That's my psychological read on the situation... I think I've gotten through to one or two libs by pointing that out to them. Some libs are hysterics but others are just trying to overcome cognitive dissonance and if you can help them deal with the cognitive dissonance, sometimes they listen.
I'm just going through put it bluntly. Many on the left thought Climate Change would finally be their big win politically and they care almost as much about this as they do about climate change itself. I've lost count of how many times I've heard some kind of quasi vulgar materialist argument that "climate change will make things so bad people will have to turn on capitalism" or something similar. It's hopelessly naive to expect to profit politically off such a crisis. The left sure as hell doesn't seem to have benefitted much from COVID and that made a lot of people's lives worse too. The retort is often "well, COVID just didn't make people miserable enough. It'll have to get even worse to really change things." So we're firmly in "the worse, the better" territory.
It varies pretty bigly, actually. Plenty of inventory in the exurbs and farther flung suburbs. Also lots of inventory in the 'luxury' RE market that none (or almost none) of us could afford. Also varies by location of course. Just in Texas, Houston, for example - somewhat high inventory. Austin - very low.
Who calculates this "freedom index" and what factors into it? I've seen it mentioned a couple of times in the past few days, so I'm guessing some outlet like Reason must've recently published something about it?
Oh, for sure the right does it too. Everyone tends to fantasize about that moment when everyone else will have to admit they were wrong and you'll finally get your way. I just wish people were more cognizant of it during a crisis like this.
Our FL beach condo's value nearly doubled in past 2 years. I've been on that stretch of beach for 40 years.
I'm STLL happy to turn US Navy into Global Nuclear Energy Dept and use it to rule over 100 shit hole countries, instead of bombing them to death if need be...
Which solves global warming, but only for my reason - US imperialism
Any solution will only make Dems way of life weaker. Less status for bureaucrats. More for entrepreneur god kings. Those are the only options on the table. Still worried about climate change?
One of Frazier's great insights in "the Golden Bough" was that it was easier for people to change their religious beliefs than to change their religious rituals.
As so many of our beliefs, in politics, climate, etc., have become religious in fervor and faith, while at the same time we've lost trust in institutions that could instituter change, we're in a situation where it has become increasingly harder to change BOTH belief AND practice.
There is a lot in this essay. No, No Sneering at you. It's important.
I will make 2 points.
1) Big engineering projects are everything-- Maybe people wouldn't get together or sacrifice for something grand, but they do every day pay taxes for the infrastructures that make their lives possible...and the engineering behind these is spectacular. After Hurricane Sandy --Resiliency Measures Already Incorporated Into Ongoing Upgrades at Manhattan and Gowanus Pump Stations https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/press_releases/13-107pr.shtml#.YeV9nf7MIrA
Of course do people even know about how the Boring company is changing Las Vegas right now?
2) People can come together in big numbers. I was in Athens, Georgia on January 15 for the celebration of the National Football Championship. Over 100K people all liking each other regardless of politics. Stetson Bennett at Raising Cane. You'd feel better about humanity after a day like that. Road to Glory. https://georgiadogs.com/sports/football
(knew I'd find a way to get the Georgia link to you all).
"Of course do people even know about how the Boring company is changing Las Vegas right now?"
It isn't. It's used at the convention center and barely works. We have the worst public transit in the known universe and and adding a one lane highway isn't going to help.
I want us to bring back the Manhattan project and Appollo mission mindset. Take dozens of our brightest minds, put them in a room, give them all the resources they want. Imagine if we did this at the beginning of Covid.
When's the last time a major institution did something remarkable and inspiring? There's a massive distrust of ambition in America right now. We have no grand narratives, or even shared plans for a better future. Is this what people mean by cultural postmodernism?
I'm generally a defender of ideological postmodernism (at least to some extent); I think that a recognition that grand narratives are never truly representative of the world is a good thing. However, grand narratives are really *useful* and to the extent that postmodernism has made them untenable, it's a serious problem.
Look no further than my town, Evanston Illinois, to see that it's easier for the local university to fill in the lake than it is to deal with the NIMBYism and CAVES (citizens against virtually everything)
And especially around here (and probably places like the Bay Area too) - the CAVES, the NIMBYs, and the militant-equity (everything is gentrification) types have formed an alliance to block pretty much anything.
I know this was not the focus of the article, but you once again mentioned that you believed “vaccines, boosters, and masking are essential precautions in a pandemic.” 100% with you on vaccines (and boosters). But I have yet to hear a compelling argument for continuing to wear a mask. To protect myself? Couldn’t care less if I get COVID (again). I’ve taken the basic precautions necessary to minimize my risk of severe illness (i.e. I’ve been vaccinated and boosted). Protect the unvaccinated? Sorry, but a some point it’s incumbent upon others to protect themselves. Health insurers should have stopped covering the cost of COVID care for them long ago (but that’s a separate issue). Protect those too young to be vaccinated? If you’ve been paying attention, you know perfectly well that young children (including unvaccinated young children) are at extremely low risk of severe illness from COVID. Protect the old and/or the vulnerable? In many parts of the country, I think there’s some merit to that point. In New York City, I call bullshit. Why, 2 years into a pandemic, would you choose to still live in the most densely populated city in the country? If you know you’re at high risk of severe illness, and knowingly choose to stay, that’s your prerogative. But don’t lecture me about my responsibility to keep you safe. And if you’re still living in NYC despite being very worried about COVID, why are you still living here? It’s not for the cheap rents, and it’s not for that Big City lifestyle. Finally, should I still wear a mask to reduce the spread of disease, thereby reducing the risk that our health systems are overwhelmed? Now I admit, that’s actually a compelling argument...EXCEPT that we just had by far our biggest wave yet, and ICU beds in New York are still not full (the NY Times has a tracker you can check). And in the event that staff shortages have posed threats to operating at full capacity, we’ve been able to fall back on the National Guard and the Army. So...I’m still waiting for a compelling argument. Bring it on.
They are? I mean, I guess some of them are, but the people I've seen be skeptical of this proposal are the same ones that have been banging the drum for years against high construction costs in the United States.
I mean in the broad sense. If we're not going to give outside the box ideas a hearing at all and just assume we have to win the sisyphean debate with NIMBYs, I think it makes the whole thing harder. We should be looking at creative ideas in parallel with trying to make the usual channels work. I don't know, maybe it's just this specific idea that pushes people's buttons and otherwise they're open to unusual solutions, in which case I retract my point.
" One of the core libertarian principals is Don't hurt people"
Not violently hurt them, no. But you can underprice your product to ruin all your competitors and then jack up prices once they are all bankrupt. That's fine. You can get together with fellow employers to drive down wages artificially. That's fine.
I was describing common corporate policy before turn of the last century anti-trust statues. Standard Oil, American Tabaco, US Steel, etc.
Your "traditional" libertarian defines "don't hurt people [or] steal their stuff" *very* narrowly. You originally used "and" there, and that strikes me as apropos of libertarians: they conflate theft and harm, and even theft they define very narrowly. Under libertarianism, anything you can get someone else to agree to give up in exchange for what you offer them it totally fine, no matter how exploitative or uneven the transaction may be, nor how lopsided the arrangement of power and leverage is, excepting violent threats (which is what the government exists to protect against: violent theft).
How is the libertarian position different from what I've defined above?
As I wrote elsewhere above, I think Freddie was specifically referring to the kind of technocrat, silicon valley libertarians who work very aggressively to disrupt traditional industries in the name of creating something more efficient and valuable to consumers, with the trade-off being that usually the consumer gets mined for data and hooked on something striving to become a monopoly.
Beyond specific critiques of that form of libertarianism, you have to remember that Freddie is a communist. He has deep philosophical objections to solutions being sold as commodities (in your example, imagine being charged a subscription service to use the stick). The specifics of that outlook are beyond any particular post (except for occasionally when he really dives down into what his deepest anti-capitalist principles are) but they are always going to inform his whole outlook, which is what he was acknowledging here.
Ironically many of those writers you mentioned probably call themselves Marxists, i.e. disciples of a stats-nerd obsessed with technology, who made fun of alot of people (I like to call the "The Capital" the "Great Roasting of obscure authors only rembered through this" privately) but none more than naive socialists who wanted to return to "Nature" (including his own brother-in-law).
Ardently agree with the guy elsewhere in this thread who pointed out that Marx was the original "Left-YIMBY" or "Left-techno-solutionist". If Marx were with us today, he'd be adamantly reminding us that his change-agent was the urban industrial proletariat, not damned peasants and suburbanites.
Thing is, the urban industrial proletariat are Starbucks Baristas. We don't live in factory-worker times.
Sure, and Marx would probably kinda hate that. He would probably point out all the ways in which capitalist society reengineered itself over the 20th century to euthanize the proletariat as a class-for-itself proper, and then berate the hell out of all of us Leftists or "Marxists" for having *gone along with that* and just invented new revolutionary subjects out of our asses instead of fighting to preserve the conditions that enable progressive class struggle.
I wasn't disagreeing with anything you said. I just see a lot of left-wing discussion around the "factory worker" and it strikes me as coming from people who've read the proverbial "theory" (probably Wikipedia) but have no idea what's going on in the 21st century economy.
I'm not disagreeing with you either. But I am disagreeing with the people who keep trying to replace the proverbial "factory worker" in the Marxist schema with literally anything else that's easier for them to get a hold of: postcolonial anthropology grad-students, Starbucks baristas, Indian peasant farmers, Iraqi insurgents, Chinese capitalists, Californian computer programmers. I've heard all of these feted and praised as the revolutionary subject of "today", for some value of "today" I actually lived through in the last 20 years.
Who do you think is the revolutionary subject of today? I'm not a Marxist, and I don't think any revolution is coming in my lifetime.
A lot of librarians have unionized --Carnegie Librarians with Steelworkers, Baltimore Librarians with Machinists, Detroit Librarians with Autoworkers, Northwestern University Librarians (in Evanston() with SEIU. See Union Library Workers: http://unionlibraryworkers.blogspot.com/2022/01/national-center-for-study-of-collective.html
I grew up in an area where there were 3 shifts at factories. And there were bars and businesses that accommodated them. This was the Hawthorne Works.
It closed in 1986....I don't think big urban areas have this kind or employment now.
https://chicagology.com/skyscrapers/skyscrapers116/
Marx had servants. That always causes me to wonder if he had to make his own food and wash his own clothes...
I agree with all of this so much. To the point where it almost feels like I've spent weeks writing thousands of words to express this in a more poorly written, less well thought out way. Didn't anticipate drinking at 8 AM today but, here we are.
I will note that although I also share the feeling about this being a space inhabited by tech bros who believe in the most childish form of libertarianism, this has always been, in my view, the inherently Marxist position. And although I have (perhaps wrongly?) abandoned my youthful faith in revolution I've never abandoned my youthful faith in our ability to engineer a better world. This was also the mainline American view until about the 1970s when we our thought leaders became infected by European post-war pessimism. If this space feels flooded by Silicon Valley Ayn Rand reading hucksters, it's just because everyone else abandoned it for no good reason.
The nerds and engineers are too socially unaware of the groups that want the problems to continue that they earnestly try to solve the problem.
Often they don't know WTF they're doing, but honestly trying to help is infinitely better than just pouring sand into the machine and laughing.
I will endlessly stand up for a bunch of nerds and workers earnestly trying to solve real problems, against the people trying to stop them because they have an interest in continued Problematization.
I shouted you out in another comment! Don’t drink too much.
Haha, I saw that, thank you. I didn't want to selfpromote but wow the timing on this one. I'm choosing to flatter myself and just say Freddie and I think alike.
This engineer agrees completely - you can’t engineer your way out of everything, but technological problems can be fixed by technological solutions. Energy is something we produce with technology; housing is something we build. Why not engineered solutions to these problems?
All of New York would collapse in 24 hours w/o the work of engineers. So would Houston. Sanitation engineering has saved more lives than any other man-made solutions to anything. Dostoyevsky was an engineer before he started writing literature. Listen to the engineers.
Well, listen to them sometimes
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Engineers_and_woo
This was fantastic.
I wrote this idea in the comment section for the COVID article. I expect royalties
For a serious comment, yeah, I find the left-leaning climate moralism bizarre. I thought the goal was to reduce carbon emissions. But, for some, it seems to be about creating a more "natural" world or something, and reducing carbon emissions are just an excuse to do so.
WE MOST ATONE FOR OUR SINS
Fordlandia http://www.failuremag.com/article/fordlandia
It is such an interesting book. Once it was all about the rubber.
weeellll ... kinda so what though? In environmental terms, the core question is "is this environment currently being fucked up with inept management?" If the answer is "yes", then the bad management may destroy it anyway, and destroying something painstakingly created and maintained over thousands of years by humans is not actually any better than destroying something that sprung up by itself
The 'created Amazon' has been known for a while now, hasn't it? It made it into Chrales Mann's '1491', and that book is 15 years old by now
That's a good way of putting it. I imagine there's some large overlap between these people and the ones who think white people should feel guilty for being white.
If these people just found a good liberal church it would absorb their need for guilt.
I'm not kidding. It's a pressing human need for most people, and if they don't fulfill it with an hour on the weekend, it just expresses itself in other ways.
*EDIT* Sports teams, too, absorb the need for stupid tribalism. If I hate the Steelers, that's one human need taken care of, and I don't need to hate Republicans/Democrats/THE JEWS/homosexuals/rednecks.
Georgia - Alabama seems to do it here.
I've never once come across any of these books or lesson plans that encourage white people to feel guilty for existing or being white. I'm sure such things exist in the fringes of racial resistance academia, but come on. Where are you getting this from? It's the "guilt" part that I just don't see.
And where is a situation that books and lesson plans aren't 'open' to parents? Do you mean that parents should be involved from the very first step of researching, developing and finalizing all curricula? That wouldn't be realistic, so what ends up happening is ignorant parents at least around here - they tried to get "New Boy" or whatever it's called banned and every argument offered during an interview I heard on the radio was completely wrong including major details about what these mothers *thought* was in the book (but wasn't). This was just on my local NPR/college radio station last night.
One of the things one woman said was that, in this semi-autobiographical novel - white people were being made to feel guilty for being white because one of the white characters' mom who happened to be well off practices yoga all day. The horror! Could you imagine what might happen when an impressionable young white kid reads this?!
Regardless, clearly all learning materials and course structure info is already available to parents or they wouldn't have been able to raise such a ruckus about this book (that eventually wasn't banned - at least here).
AND BY SINS WE MEAN ALLOWING PEOPLE TO LIVE IN DENSE URBAN CORES RATHER THAN BUCOLIC SUBURBS RUN BY JOEL KOTKIN
Well, dense urban cores would have a lot less pollution than sprawlland
Yes, which is why I become instantly suspicious when people demonize them in favor of Sprawl-Land suburbia, which is just going to be colonized and sucked dry by Wal-Mart anyway.
Some of my ancestors lived in Russia once. Once bitten, twice shy.
I put "gentrification" alongside "cultural appropriation" as one of the dumber ideas I've heard.
The first time I heard the term "gentrification", it was from the mouth of the matron of a family that had been displaced by gentrification.
Wal-Mart in Athens Georgia was the place people came from all over the state to see the National Football Championship trophy (big parking lots). WM has done this for other sports event winners in other states.
Wal-Mart allows RV campers overnight. https://www.allstays.com/c/wal-mart-locations.htm
I'm not defending WM, just pointing out that it is more of a public square than people in cities might know.
Also, the bus stop outside my Walmart is always teeming with people. If you want to talk about acccess for poorer folks, the more services Walmart provides, the better.
Our Walmart has food, clothes, a pharmacy, a bank, and an optometrist in it.
Kinda like the grown-ups' Sonic then?
But yeah, the nearest Wal Mart to us has a UPS store, a hair salon, a place where you can pay your municipal bills, and several other things I don't recall the exact nature of along the inside front of the store. Same thing with Kroger, though.
Ok, but I was going by my experience, back in the day oh so long ago, of living in a smaller town, and watching Wal-Mart kill off all our more independent and more specialized retail outlets. You're never gonna convince me that letting them suck up the consumption spending of whole communities with a total monopoly is a good idea.
NO NEED TO SHOUT! Thank you.
No, we MOSTLY do not. But many think we MUST atone, soon, because The End is Near.
The rank and file climatistas don't know enough to understand how much money lies in being carbon good. Money they'll never get. The switch from ICEs to EVs will result in the largest amount of consumer spending in history over the next 20 years. It won't be remotely carbon neutral or better, but it sure will be nice for a lot of bottom lines.
In the fusion debate I get the sense that some people really don’t want it to work. Why? Because if it works people will be happily driving their electric Tahoes to their 5,000 sq/ft McMansions an that’s just wrong.
Why is it wrong? Because of climate change. But there would be no climate impact. Well…I find that lifestyle ascetically revolting. Is the closest to an actual reason I can think of.
Which of course makes no sense. You can still ride your bike, and live in a tiny home on a subsistence farm if you want to be pure.
But you won’t have the satisfaction of being right.
Meanwhile, I'm waiting for Commonwealth Fusion Systems to do an IPO so I can get rich off a fusion company so good at basic, non-scammy engineering that
1) In 2020 they published specs for their machines in the Journal of Plasma Physics with full peer-review and transparency,
2) In 2021 they built the superconducting magnet whose specs they'd published in 2020.
Like holy shit, you guys can publish the theory one year and build the theorized part the next? TAKE MY MONEY, HOW DO I GET ON THIS TRAIN?
Well, they've got quite a ways to go yet: https://news.mit.edu/2021/MIT-CFS-major-advance-toward-fusion-energy-0908
Believe me, they will gladly take your money. Fusion is not going to be the way out. The fuel cycle is wrong and we will not likely have any tech that can control the reaction and net any energy. We can make D-T cycle go boom. But good luck controlling it to get usable net energy. Do not for a minute believe this "power of the Sun" nonsense. The Sun runs on hydrogen to helium conversion that produce protons. This occurs at temperatures and pressures that are not achievable on earth. Our D-T process produces highly destructive neutrons, which are much more difficult to deal with and are destructive of earthly materials of the type we use to make reactors.
I think a lot of people with strong feelings about climate are understandably exhausted that others don't want to entertain lifestyle changes. But then I think there's a bit of critique drift and their ingrained attitude about sacrifice and thrift ends up taking over, but because they originally started thinking about it in terms of science, they think they're still thinking scientifically. That's my psychological read on the situation... I think I've gotten through to one or two libs by pointing that out to them. Some libs are hysterics but others are just trying to overcome cognitive dissonance and if you can help them deal with the cognitive dissonance, sometimes they listen.
I'm just going through put it bluntly. Many on the left thought Climate Change would finally be their big win politically and they care almost as much about this as they do about climate change itself. I've lost count of how many times I've heard some kind of quasi vulgar materialist argument that "climate change will make things so bad people will have to turn on capitalism" or something similar. It's hopelessly naive to expect to profit politically off such a crisis. The left sure as hell doesn't seem to have benefitted much from COVID and that made a lot of people's lives worse too. The retort is often "well, COVID just didn't make people miserable enough. It'll have to get even worse to really change things." So we're firmly in "the worse, the better" territory.
It’s much bigger than politics - they want others to see the error of their ways.
And you see just as many on the right saying COVID is the final overreach that will show everyone that they are right.
The real estate market in NJ is en fuego as well. That kind of undermines your point.
It varies pretty bigly, actually. Plenty of inventory in the exurbs and farther flung suburbs. Also lots of inventory in the 'luxury' RE market that none (or almost none) of us could afford. Also varies by location of course. Just in Texas, Houston, for example - somewhat high inventory. Austin - very low.
Refugees from NY.
Why in your estimation are wages so low in FL?
Who calculates this "freedom index" and what factors into it? I've seen it mentioned a couple of times in the past few days, so I'm guessing some outlet like Reason must've recently published something about it?
OK, I knew it had to be one of the "libertarian" zines or think tanks.
These are the questions we must answer before addressing climate change.
Oh, for sure the right does it too. Everyone tends to fantasize about that moment when everyone else will have to admit they were wrong and you'll finally get your way. I just wish people were more cognizant of it during a crisis like this.
Yes, that moment when public libraries get all the money!
"Many on the left thought".
Dude, climate change is terrifying. You don't have to come up with cynical theories about the left and big wins.
Climate change is a joke.
Our FL beach condo's value nearly doubled in past 2 years. I've been on that stretch of beach for 40 years.
I'm STLL happy to turn US Navy into Global Nuclear Energy Dept and use it to rule over 100 shit hole countries, instead of bombing them to death if need be...
Which solves global warming, but only for my reason - US imperialism
Any solution will only make Dems way of life weaker. Less status for bureaucrats. More for entrepreneur god kings. Those are the only options on the table. Still worried about climate change?
Love this. Freddie for President!
One of Frazier's great insights in "the Golden Bough" was that it was easier for people to change their religious beliefs than to change their religious rituals.
As so many of our beliefs, in politics, climate, etc., have become religious in fervor and faith, while at the same time we've lost trust in institutions that could instituter change, we're in a situation where it has become increasingly harder to change BOTH belief AND practice.
Your essay does a great jon of pointing this out.
There is a lot in this essay. No, No Sneering at you. It's important.
I will make 2 points.
1) Big engineering projects are everything-- Maybe people wouldn't get together or sacrifice for something grand, but they do every day pay taxes for the infrastructures that make their lives possible...and the engineering behind these is spectacular. After Hurricane Sandy --Resiliency Measures Already Incorporated Into Ongoing Upgrades at Manhattan and Gowanus Pump Stations https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/press_releases/13-107pr.shtml#.YeV9nf7MIrA
Of course do people even know about how the Boring company is changing Las Vegas right now?
2) People can come together in big numbers. I was in Athens, Georgia on January 15 for the celebration of the National Football Championship. Over 100K people all liking each other regardless of politics. Stetson Bennett at Raising Cane. You'd feel better about humanity after a day like that. Road to Glory. https://georgiadogs.com/sports/football
(knew I'd find a way to get the Georgia link to you all).
"Of course do people even know about how the Boring company is changing Las Vegas right now?"
It isn't. It's used at the convention center and barely works. We have the worst public transit in the known universe and and adding a one lane highway isn't going to help.
Thanks, someone told me it worked well and I read about it but maybe too optimistic. I'll think of a different example.
One of the advantages of the Boring tunnel is that it can actually be built, in a time when few other things can.
Well, I'll give you that.
you mean this? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hi9YzPDBZS8
well, this isn't often. but yes, ha ha.
I want us to bring back the Manhattan project and Appollo mission mindset. Take dozens of our brightest minds, put them in a room, give them all the resources they want. Imagine if we did this at the beginning of Covid.
When's the last time a major institution did something remarkable and inspiring? There's a massive distrust of ambition in America right now. We have no grand narratives, or even shared plans for a better future. Is this what people mean by cultural postmodernism?
“ Imagine if we did this at the beginning of Covid.”
We did - we had the vaccine coded in less than 72 hours.
Sure, but I think we forgot to invite a few people
I think the idea that the vaccine was "the solution" suggests that we didn't actually get a set of the brightest minds of our time in a room.
I'm generally a defender of ideological postmodernism (at least to some extent); I think that a recognition that grand narratives are never truly representative of the world is a good thing. However, grand narratives are really *useful* and to the extent that postmodernism has made them untenable, it's a serious problem.
Look no further than my town, Evanston Illinois, to see that it's easier for the local university to fill in the lake than it is to deal with the NIMBYism and CAVES (citizens against virtually everything)
I’m trying to remember if it was an FdB post or a book that taught me the term BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything)
And especially around here (and probably places like the Bay Area too) - the CAVES, the NIMBYs, and the militant-equity (everything is gentrification) types have formed an alliance to block pretty much anything.
I know this was not the focus of the article, but you once again mentioned that you believed “vaccines, boosters, and masking are essential precautions in a pandemic.” 100% with you on vaccines (and boosters). But I have yet to hear a compelling argument for continuing to wear a mask. To protect myself? Couldn’t care less if I get COVID (again). I’ve taken the basic precautions necessary to minimize my risk of severe illness (i.e. I’ve been vaccinated and boosted). Protect the unvaccinated? Sorry, but a some point it’s incumbent upon others to protect themselves. Health insurers should have stopped covering the cost of COVID care for them long ago (but that’s a separate issue). Protect those too young to be vaccinated? If you’ve been paying attention, you know perfectly well that young children (including unvaccinated young children) are at extremely low risk of severe illness from COVID. Protect the old and/or the vulnerable? In many parts of the country, I think there’s some merit to that point. In New York City, I call bullshit. Why, 2 years into a pandemic, would you choose to still live in the most densely populated city in the country? If you know you’re at high risk of severe illness, and knowingly choose to stay, that’s your prerogative. But don’t lecture me about my responsibility to keep you safe. And if you’re still living in NYC despite being very worried about COVID, why are you still living here? It’s not for the cheap rents, and it’s not for that Big City lifestyle. Finally, should I still wear a mask to reduce the spread of disease, thereby reducing the risk that our health systems are overwhelmed? Now I admit, that’s actually a compelling argument...EXCEPT that we just had by far our biggest wave yet, and ICU beds in New York are still not full (the NY Times has a tracker you can check). And in the event that staff shortages have posed threats to operating at full capacity, we’ve been able to fall back on the National Guard and the Army. So...I’m still waiting for a compelling argument. Bring it on.
It's very generous of you to offer your neighbors an ICU bed.
Insightful comment. Thank you for your input
I think people are skeptical of this proposal not on the merits but because they see a city where it took 15 years to build 1.5 miles of new subway.
Sure, but I don't think they realize they're part of the problem.
They are? I mean, I guess some of them are, but the people I've seen be skeptical of this proposal are the same ones that have been banging the drum for years against high construction costs in the United States.
I mean in the broad sense. If we're not going to give outside the box ideas a hearing at all and just assume we have to win the sisyphean debate with NIMBYs, I think it makes the whole thing harder. We should be looking at creative ideas in parallel with trying to make the usual channels work. I don't know, maybe it's just this specific idea that pushes people's buttons and otherwise they're open to unusual solutions, in which case I retract my point.
I hear what you’re saying and I agree with you, but NIMBYism isn’t the sole reason Americans are really bad at building things.