ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
20hr ago
Newsom has consistently underperformed a generic Democrat in California. Not nearly as bad as Kamala, but still trailing other Democrats.
The issue is that (recent) California politics rewards different traits than more partisan-competitive states. It is incredibly cutthroat and involves genuine skill, but it is much more cloak and dagger and focused on managing the groups and building alliances with other politicians. These have some carryover to national elections, but it would be much smarter for Democrats to select someone whose skill set involves winning competitive elections.
Then again, he's tall and has a good head of hair, and that may well be enough if the economy or the war go south.
ThenElection
2d ago
In the event of a hot war with China, no commercial shipping will be going through any region of the ocean close to China. This is extremely painful to China, but it's also very painful to all of the US and its allies--you can expect an immediate double digit percentage drop in GDP of Japan, South Korea, and the Phillipines (and Australia, likely to be more significant than SK and the Phillipines), and Taiwan is worse off than even China in that scenario. US and the rest of the world also will feel significant pain.
ThenElection
2d ago
I wonder if the Venezuela operation has expanded Chinese leadership's scope of imagination. Before people mused about the possibility of China doing something similar, but it seemed almost absurd fantasy. But the US has shown that it's possible, and an existence proof of an operation like that succeeding has a powerful draw to it. And, if they can pull it off, it solves a lot of problems with a protracted war against US forces.
ThenElection
2d ago
That's mapping modern distinctions to times where they didn't apply (or were at least much more fluid). Subjects weren't as rigidly bound to a prince (or a lineage) as citizens are to the modern nation state. A prince might be the ruler of Florence one year, and the ruler of Urbano the next, then the ruler of neither, then the ruler of Urbano again, each transition driven by an ever shifting array of forces. And, once subjugated, a previous enemy prince becomes a subject.
What is weird is that we are in an era of spectacular profits: the rate has risen significantly, not fallen, due to the Schumpeterian heroism of the tech industry. Okishio has won over Marx.
There's also a kind of schizoid relationship people have with the rate of profit. When people object to capitalism, their anger is usually at excess profits, not companies ruthlessly competing away each other's margins; whatever grumbles about airline leg room there are, it's not what's driving any political anti-capitalism. But if we take Marx seriously, exploding profits is, if not outright impossible, then at least a sign of capitalism's strength, with its end state moving proportionately further into the future.
It's difficult to get any of the leading foundation models to write a comment full of racial slurs. DeepSeek also refuses. (Grok is currently broken for me.)
Maybe that could be the future proof-of-humanity? Obviously it's nothing inherent in the architecture and there are workarounds, but I don't see those safeguards being removed anytime soon.
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