sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
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User ID: 636
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
8mo ago
Whether that was smart or not, historians will debate, but we were never going to keep this going much longer, certainly not beyond 2035. Fundamentally, because the U.S. government is insolvent. It burns through $10 billion a day it doesn’t have, backed by the money printer, which funds the military, which enforces global security, which props up the dollar, which keeps the money printer running.
This makes no sense to me. Why does globalism depend on the solvency of the USG? Because the US is responsible for keeping piracy on the high seas to an absolute minimum and that's not affordable? Why can't some of that responsibility be delegated to other countries? Of course, this is missing the point entirely, because the military is only the third biggest line item on the federal budget. The US is more likely to be bankrupted by boomers retiring than mowing the lawn off the coast of Somalia.
Global trade has existed for thousands of years. Spices and silk have been imported by the west since time immemorial. We're just haggling about the level.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
8mo ago
I knew a guy in high school who was totally in the tank for SJC and he was totally pro-reading the Greeks about science, although I could never get him to explain why.
In particular, I am amazed by the inclusion of a lot of original science publications. Sure, they are interesting from a history of science point of view, but very likely they are not the easiest avenue to understand a physical concept.
It is actually even worse. Reading Euclid's Elements won't expose you to anything that's wrong but it's probably much easier to learn geometry from khan academy these days.
But when it comes to science, the Greeks were basically just completely wrong about nearly everything.
From The Generation of Animals:
Again, more males are born if copulation takes place when north than when south winds are blowing; for animals' bodies are more liquid when the wind is in the south, so that they produce more residue – and more residue is harder to concoct; hence the semen of the males is more liquid and so is the discharge of the menstrual fluids in women
Huh? He goes on like this for 120 pages. How is this worth anyone's time in Anno Domini 2025? It seems it must be an in-group signalling exercise among liberal arts respecters - poseurs aren't going to bother reading all that.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
8mo ago
The growth in real median household income is, to my understanding, driven by more women entering the full-time workforce and the growth of highly-paid white collar service work (which the median woman is more suited to and which AI has a good chance to cannibalize soon)
Maybe you could tell this story before the pandemic, but the pandemic and the aftermath have boosted male median wages too.
which doesn't benefit you one bit if you're a working class male who can't attract a white-collar partner.
It clearly benefits the median American household, so either the median American household has a white collar woman or it's not just white collar woman whose wages are going up.
Really, "prosperity" to most people means access to zero-sum things such as land in desirable areas, social status and the labor of other people. Access to those things has absolutely gone down for the median American worker in a world where wealth inequality keeps increasing and where other countries have become much wealthier relative to America, and where worst of all they keep getting blasted by social media about other people having it better than them 24/7.
This is just by definition wrong to some extent, right? To the extent that status is determined by wealth, it isn't affected by wealth inequality. Elon is wealthier/higher status than me and would be if he was worth merely a hundred million rather than a hundred billion. The top 1% are going to buy the 1% most desirable real estate and the median American by definition cannot. Etc.
What has changed here with respect to real estate is that the number of 1%ers has increased in pace with the population. There's 50% more people in the country than there were in 1980 and the California coastline hasn't grown a bit. That means that the median American is living in a less desirable, in absolute terms, than the median American in 1980.
As far as buying others' labor, consumer goods have never been cheaper. Automation has made big strides and there's still countries with much lower wages than the US. Where this has become a problem is with domestic service industries like education, medicine, the trades, etc. but this may be partially an unavoidable effect of the productivity growth that drove down prices in other sectors.
all of that is just eaten up by the hedonic treadmill and they're still miserable because they're at the bottom of the totem pole and see no way up.
The hedonic treadmill cuts both ways, the things that people think were so great about the imagined past were not considered so great by those living in the actual past. Being at the bottom of the totem pole sucks no matter what year it is.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
8mo ago
Real incomes have been down for a generation for the average American worker
They're not.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
8mo ago
his children’s formal educational opportunities.
Not even this. You might have to switch school districts because you lost your house, but universities offer scholarships. Harvard is 100% free including room and board to students from families earning under $100k (and has lesser benefits for other income bands).
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
8mo ago
New (to you) music thread?
I recently came across this choon:
It's kind of a Marty Robbins x New Order sound. Surprisingly catchy.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
8mo ago
manufacturing, which is real positive-sum activity.
Unless it's iPhones being manufactured, presumably?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
8mo ago
The bad thing about slavery isn't that they did it for free. In fact, they didn't even do it for free, they got room and board.
The bad thing about slavery was that they (or their ancestors) were forcibly abducted, transported (across state lines!), and put to work at gunpoint, with their children being born into the same situation. Illegal immigrants can leave at any moment and their kids cives Americani sunt.
It sucks that there are people born every day into poverty in third world countries. However, people who illegally (often perilously)come to this country for opportunities they don't have at home obviously will not benefit from being sent home. They know what home is like and they made the decision to come here anyway. We can talk about whether they are good for the country, but the argument that illegal immigration is bad for the illegal immigrants just doesn't hold water.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
8mo ago
We could get rid of migrant farm labor by subsidizing/tariff-exempting cheap automated farming equipment from China.
Could we? We're not reaping grain by hand these days. My understanding is that farm labor mostly goes towards harvesting fruits and vegetables and that this largely has not been automated anywhere because it's really hard. I'd be surprised if it's been economically automated in China where labor cost is much lower. I'm sure they have prototype robots, but do they have any in actual use?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
8mo ago
as territories, Australian business could just "incorporate" in Heard or McDonald, and completely bypass the tariffs levied against Australia, were this not done.
Is this actually true? It's not obvious to me that it is. Presumably American businesses are not able to incorporate in, for example, Midway Atoll or Baker Island, even though these are nominally American territories.
The alternative theory is that whoever drew up this table looked at bogus data that listed millions of dollars of machinery imported from that uninhabited icebox. That seems more likely to me.
according to export data from the World Bank, the US imported US$1.4m (A$2.23m) of products from Heard Island and McDonald Islands in 2022, nearly all of which was “machinery and electrical” imports.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
8mo ago
Aunt Stephania and Bronislaus
Kino names, gotta get back.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
8mo ago
It's pretty amazing that the solution to the harm caused by liberal immigration policy is to give even more money to liberals in the department of economic equity to distribute according to equity metrics designed by some other liberal consultant from harvard.
To my knowledge, the primary means of redistribution in the US is the EITC which does it on the basis of income. That doesn't seem very objectionable to me.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
8mo ago
the cost of groceries
Is the cost of groceries going to go up or down with tariffs on imported groceries and with reduced Mexican farm labor?
After democrats have restricted demand and subsidized supply right into the toilet, republicans seem to be interested in doubling down on restricting supply but this time without demand subsidies. Have we tried increasing supply instead?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
8mo ago
But I think you underestimate the psychological effect of holding investments yourself versus having somebody else do it for you.
401ks and (especially) IRAs are held by you, though. I can log on to vanguard and see how much money I have there along with my brokerage account. I make investment decisions for that money, etc. No bureaucracy involved.
Your argument holds perhaps for company managed funds, but it's not clear to me how many people even have those these days.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
8mo ago
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
8mo ago
Tariffs have been at least partially priced in for a while, though. And SPY has been sliding since mid February.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
8mo ago
Why can’t houses depreciate without an apocalyptic event?
A more cynical commenter than me might suggest it's because it takes an apocalyptic event for the federal government to stop propping up house prices.
As 2rafa suggested, you only eliminate the marginally best economic immigrants. If you're swiss, maybe you'll stay in Switzerland if American opportunities aren't what they used to be. If you're from Haiti, well, there's a long way to go until it's better to stay in Haiti.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
8mo ago
The (classical) Liberal World Order was premised on free trade and financial/industrial interconnections between various countries disincentivizing wars and conflicts and fostering greater cooperation. I sincerely believe that they do have this effect, but I can see and admit there are parts of this order that are causing major issues and yet are not being corrected. I'd point to mass immigration as one example, and collapsing global fertility as another.
Not only does immigration have nothing to do with free trade, but it's not even obvious how eliminating free trade reduces immigration. It's "burgers?" all over again.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
8mo ago
So howcome I have never seen a "made in USA" label
Iirc you don't live in the US, right?
Off the top of my head, I recently bought an American made water filter. Klein tools are also American made.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
8mo ago
If you acknowledge that the median American has stock market exposure, I'm not sure what there really is to argue about.
Only a minority of people are on defined benefit pension plans that are perhaps what you, as a European, envision when you think about retirement funds.
Most people are on defined contribution plans, whether that's a 401k, IRA, 403b, or some employer invested plan, are "directly" affected by the market tanking because they have no guaranteed payouts. The payouts are simply what the market provides. None of those people are gonna want to hear about how their positions taking a shit is OK because it's not "direct" exposure under some gerrymandered definition.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
8mo ago
In 2022 nearly 60% of American households had some stock market exposure, with a median of 50k and a mean of 480k invested. Tanking the S&P is well into the territory of materially hurting the median voter.
Why is a bendy banana subpar?
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