site banner
PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   33108 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

7
Bottom New Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Jeanne Kuang for CalMatters, "Abundance meets resistance: Are Democrats finally ready to go all in on building housing?". (Part of an ongoing series on housing, mostly in California. Now also at TheSchism.)

Those of you who have followed this series may remember the sad history of attempting to upzone around transit in California. It's a straightforward idea: transit infrastructure is expensive to build, more people will ride it if more people live near the stations, and it's a bad idea for cities to enforce apartment bans in those areas. California has made two major attempts in the last decade to fix this, and is embarking on a third.

First, 2018's SB 827, which didn't even make it out of committee. Then, 2019's SB 50, which was delayed until 2020 and then failed to pass the Senate. Since then, there have been some significant reforms; see 2021, 2022, and 2023. But the YIMBYs haven't taken another big swing since 2020, and they're doing that and more this year.

  • SB 79 (CA YIMBY): allow increased height and density limits within a quarter to a half mile of transit stations in three tiers depending on the frequency of service.
  • AB 609 (CA YIMBY): actually exempt infill housing from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).
  • SB 607 (Press release): greatly reduces the ability to use CEQA to indefinitely delay projects.

The latter two bills have been absorbed into the budget process, which is the Governor's way of pushing them forward. The former has not.

The politics are interesting. The SB 79 Housing committee hearing is worth watching; the chair, Aisha Wahab, was opposed to the bill, but it passed by a single vote. (This is called "rolling the chair", and it's a big lift.) And then it happened again, in the Local Government committee, the chair, Maria Elena Durazo, opposed the bill, and it again passed by a single vote; it's headed to the Senate floor for a likely vote in early June.

The stunning thing here is that, despite the years that have passed since 2018, the discourse among the bill's opponents hasn't changed. Because this is California, and most of them are Democrats, they oppose it from the left, and seemingly sincerely; Wahab talks about how "affordable" (i.e., subsidized) housing would be preferable, but there's no mention of how to pay for that, so in practice, the alternative is what we've been doing for the last couple decades, i.e., nothing. The Building Trades representative talks about any bill which doesn't mandate union labor as being tantamount to murder because the working conditions and the produced buildings will be unsafe. And there's generally an idea that market rate housing is bad, but affordable housing is good, and somehow if we outlaw the former, the latter will prosper. This has clearly not happened.

This rhymes with the current Abundance discourse, which has been extensive. (I can't do it full justice, but the basic idea is that we've regulated the government into an inability to accomplish anything, and we should stop doing that. It's most dire in housing, but the same idea applies elsewhere.) Reactions on a national scale oddly mirror the left-NIMBY discourse in California, ranging from Zephyr Teachout describing zoning reform as "relatively small-bore" to Robert Jensen suggesting that maybe poverty and death would be better for the environment instead. (As a treat, enjoy Sam Seder beclowning himself in front of Ezra Klein.)

My theory of this, developed over a series of infuriatingly circular conversations, is that there's a faction which is very attached to the idea that every problem is caused by a failure to write big enough checks or a failure to sufficiently tax (or if you're edgy, guillotine) the wealthy. So, if housing is unaffordable, it must be because we haven't sufficiently subsidized below-market-rate housing, or down payment assistance, or because rich people are hoarding homes and leaving them empty, and if you think otherwise, you must be simping for billionaires. This view is incompatible with understanding the details; for example, in that Sam Seder interview, Seder would talk about the corrupting power of money, Klein would talk about cartels of homeowners, Seder would say that that's just more corrupting power of money, but Seder's approach is very specifically to target oligarchs and corporations, not homeowners.

And this is the kind of equivocation I see in the best-regarded left critique of Abundance I could find, from Sandeep Vaheesan at The Boston Review. He gets the details wrong--he points to the government's support of nuclear power via liability limitation and ignores ALARA; he claims that upzoning doesn't actually produce more housing (so why do the NIMBYs fight so hard?); he defends the exorbitant rents in San Francisco by saying that it's a "superstar" city unlike Houston (is San Jose?)--but at its core, he wishes the book had clear villains like Thomas Piketty's "clear portrait of patrimonial capitalists and lavishly compensated executives thriving at the expense of everyone else". His proposed solutions are, naturally, to break up large corporations and to write bigger checks to bureaucrats so they can do more paperwork.

At each point, Vaheesan equivocates: about "deregulation" (if you want to end apartment bans, you must want poor people to live on Superfund sites!), about "democracy" (if you don't want to hand out veto points like candy, you must love oligarchs), and about the efficacy of reforms (upzoning and streamlining are simultaneously ineffective and giveaways to the wealthy).

"The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed." This sounds like a promise, but in California's case, it's a warning. The problems, contradictions, and failures of blue governance are at their sharpest here, and if there's a way forward, it'll be here as well.

My rather unpopular opinion is that if housing wasn’t an investment most of these problems would solve themselves.

Nobody really wants more housing supply because it means that the one asset most middle class people can aspire to have — a house — at best stagnates in value and at worst declines in value. No politician want to be the person who made housing values fall. They’d have a hard time getting elected dog catcher if they approve enough new development to lower the cost of housing. Heck, people might not be happy if their house doesn’t increase in value. As such you have a problem that pits the owners of homes against the renters who want to own homes. You have to pick one.

The other issue with everyone trying to buy single family houses is that it’s acre for acre about the worst possible way to build housing. Condos are probably better for housing a lot of families in less space, apartments are cheaper but probably better suited for single people. If you want housing, it’s probably better to build for density and put more people in less acreage.

The other issue with everyone trying to buy single family houses is that it’s acre for acre about the worst possible way to build housing.

For ants and sardines. For people, they're great, despite taking up more acreage per unit.

I understand that you have a visceral distaste for living in a city, and would rather have a lawn and a driveway and plenty of air between your walls and your neighbors'. These are all nice things! But people also seem to dislike having to drive to get anywhere, to enjoy the economic benefits of agglomeration, and the various other benefits of living in cities.

Ideally, people who like cities can live in cities, and people who like cars and driveways can live in suburbs. But nearly every place in the country is designed for cars and driveways. Maybe a little of the residential land could be set aside for city living? (Because right now, in cities, almost none of it is.)

And we can all agree not to dehumanize the people who want to live differently?

I mean people in other countries live in pretty dense urban environments without too much trouble.

Yes, and their lifestyles are inferior to mine. Yet another indication of their enormous poverty relative to a professional American.

Apartments are literally built different in America compared to Europe.

All the urban issues most cities have come down to onerous requirements. You want European urban centers? Then start using European regulations.

Which is the city with high density, high per capita GDP, and high TFR?

Honestly most people don't give a darn. They just want a place to live without yearly rent increases and an annoying landlord. Sure, SF boomers are gonna get a huge payout when they retire to move to a cheaper area, but for people moving for work or personal reasons, most of them are actually moving from low COL to high COL, and most of them also don't have a huge equity in their houses either. Of course being underwater sucks as af, but very few people in a trendy neighborhood that is getting upzoned actually believe that upzoning will nuke their property values, and if they do believe it then they're just retarded.

Speaking as a nimby myself, I don't want (American) transit because it's a huge drain on taxes due to graft and incompetence, and it also brings in undesirables. I also don't want density because brings traffic, makes people talk about transit, and brings in the libs too.

The ideal situation would be for time to forget my neighborhood for a decade so property taxes go down, then maybe for property values to spike through the roof the month before I sell. But time forgetting my neighborhood is about the best I can ask for. So anyways, fuck off, we're full.

it also brings in undesirables

This is a weird one that, while I'm generally YIMBY, I can see that if houses in my neighborhood were $20, the calibre of my neighbors (who are generally great folks) would drop precipitously. Price discrimination is in practice keeping the meth addicts living under bridges downtown out of my neighborhood.

It's the one part of the circle that "abundance" doesn't square for me. But marginal supply seems generally good and reduces prices in a mostly-stable fashion.

Housing needs to be expensive to be useful though, because there's no other way to keep out the undesirables.

there's no other way to keep out the undesirables

Oh there are a bunch of other ways, actually. They're just all impolitic in the West is all.

Housing is a natural investment vehicle for two reasons:

  1. It's an asset that is likely to hold its value over a long time, and
  2. As an investment asset, it provides you housing for "free".

In other words, while property is not a completely safe investment, it's a relatively safe one (if you're smart about it), and unlike other relatively safe investments like index funds and treasury bonds, you can live in it. Notably, it doesn't need to greatly increase in value for this dynamic to be controlling. That's just a quirk of certain spots becoming much more highly desirable.

Condos are probably better for housing a lot of families in less space, apartments are cheaper but probably better suited for single people.

Condo + strata fees = single family home mortgage payment, so they're not actually cheaper.

The reason detached single-family units are important is because they deliver the ability to personally develop. With a condo you're not actually doing anything; you're not doing maintenance on your mechanical devices (unless you're fortunate enough to have a garage or driveway, of course), you're not really able to store anything, you can't do anything loud (no instruments, etc.), it's more difficult to entertain people, etc. The same thing applies to townhouses to a lesser degree.

You don't get Apple Computer (to name a particularly famous example) without a garage to work in, and condos don't usually have those.

No politician want to be the person who made housing values fall.

Sure, but (and as "bullets instead of dollars" downthread mentions) that's also balanced against solutions that might be less than democratic (if the dominant voting bloc is smart enough to understand the issue they can avoid that, but they seldom are). Gerontocracies tend to be relatively bad at defending themselves simply because the average 70 year old tends to be an inferior soldier no matter how high up they believe their elbows might go.

The reason detached single-family units are important is because they deliver the ability to personally develop. With a condo you're not actually doing anything; you're not doing maintenance on your mechanical devices (unless you're fortunate enough to have a garage or driveway, of course), you're not really able to store anything, you can't do anything loud (no instruments, etc.), it's more difficult to entertain people, etc. The same thing applies to townhouses to a lesser degree.

This led me down an interesting rabbit hole - I am aware of the importance of the myth of the garage startup in Silicon Valley, but also that the main lines of mentor-mentee and exited founder-investor-founder genealogy run back to Fairchild Semiconductor via companies that were not founded in garages or, mostly, by garage tinkerers. A quick fact-check finds Wozniak denying that Apple was actually founded in the garage (the tinkering that led to the Apple I happened inside the house - it sounds like the garage was just used to store inventory), that pictures of Jeff Bezos founding Amazon in his garage show a room that had not been used to store motor vehicles for a very long time, and that the Google garage was commercially rented space which happened to be a converted garage. It looks like the last significant tech company founded in a space which was primarily designed to store motor vehicles was HP in 1939. Nvidia is often referred to as founded in a garage, but it was actually founded in a spare room in Curtis Priem's townhouse.

In other words, the point of the Silicon Valley garage isn't the idea of the garage as marginal space - it is that it was normal for middle-class Americans to have more square footage than they actually needed, giving space to work in. A spare room, something it is perfectly possible to have in a townhouse, or even in a condo if you live like middle-class Continental Europeans or super-rich New Yorkers do, works better as a home office/workshop than an unconverted garage. And the surplus of square footage is something that you don't get by insisting on sprawl zoning in a place as rich as Silicon Valley - nobody thinks that the next generation of Silicon Valley founders can afford SFHs with garages in the Valley, and it is notable that the only reason that the Apple founders had access to the garage in the first place was because Job's parents had bought the house it was attached to before Silicon Valley became Silicon Valley.

The even more important point is absence (or, in the case of California, lax enforcement) of laws against running businesses out of private homes. The canonical place to found a 21st century startup is a Stanford dorm room. Under UK charity law, that is illegal in a Cambridge College room.

I’m not suggesting doing away with SF housing entirely, but I think it’s important to increase urban density if you want to solve the housing crisis. It’s not meant to be for everyone, but to provide enough housing stock that it’s reasonably affordable to live in the city within a reasonable commute of your job. For most people, that’s fine.

Land is perhaps the ur-investment, the one thing guaranteed that God (and perhaps the Dutch) aren't making more of. Even in societies where the government owns all the land, like in China, and merely hands out leases you have crazy real estate bubbles.

There is fundamentally no way to uncouple housing from investment because houses are expensive and take a lot of time and effort to build. There will always be fewer houses then there are people willing to buy them.

Austin, Texas empirically shows that it is possible for rent prices to go down as long as you build enough housing. Whether people are still treating land as an investment or not is academic at that point. The important thing is to lower the value of houses.

Whether it is an investment is beyond our ability to change. Whether it's promoted and protected as an investment is more malleable.

As an example, Canada's new housing minister said that prices don't need to come down. He is promoting housing as an investment instead of as shelter, and it doesn't need to be that way. He could've just as easily said "Prices need to come down because houses are for living in. To those who had planned on downsizing and using the extra money for retirement other purposes, it sucks to be you, but too bad. we'll help you make a different plan. To the foreign investors who bought properties here, I'd like to say lol, thanks for the cash, suckers that this will help us ensure sustainable growth that we can all benefit from."

I live in Canada.

There's no amount of propaganda that can make land or housing an unattractive investment. If people want to live somewhere badly enough, it increases the subjective value. It is fundamentally a doomed proposition unless you adapt a communist system where the government decides where and how you live. Land is such a powerful store of wealth that the primary goal of wars - not just in human societies, but in apes, and all sorts of creatures who fight over territory - is its acquisition.

Even if you say: 'all land is no longer an speculative investment vehicle' - it will not change the essence of the fact that people will start exchanging property rights with bullets instead of dollars. Because that was the status quo, before the market.

There's no amount of propaganda that can make land or housing an unattractive investment.

Okay. But it's clearly impossible for housing to be a good investment in real terms and for it to be affordable at the same time. So the options that I can see are:

  1. Gerontocracy. Buy now or be priced out forever. Housing to the moon. If you're too young or poor to get on the property ladder now, too bad - hopefully you're the eldest/an only child and your parents will leave you the house when they kick the bucket, unless the bills they rack up at the end of their lives consume the equity of course. And if you aren't too poor yet, don't worry: you will be.

  2. Housing supply is allowed to increase and the price is allowed to decrease.

  3. The Japanese method. Housing demand is forced to decrease so that the price decreases. Either cramming more people per household (intergenerational housing?) or expelling people from the country/area. I hear Canada has a lot of unpopular Indians, but note that this still involves prices going down and therefore housing being a bad investment.

Curious if I'm missing a fourth option here.

Economic growth faster than housing price growth

Any operational definition of "economic growth" in this context that results in it not getting harder to buy housing over time means that housing is not a good investment.

It means it isn’t a relatively good investment. The goal is to make housing affordable without decreasing eh value of housing. If wages grew 5% pa, housing prices grew 3% pa, and inflation 2% pa, then housing would become relatively cheaper without eliminating the equity in homes.

More comments

bullets instead of dollars

I always liked the pithy Spanish "plata o plomo". Finally an equivalent English bon mot.

See this is a problem with markets. Markets just aim for profits, that's what they're for and all they do. If you want anything more than profits (increasingly often highly short-termist profits), you need a non-market solution. We want deep, long-term investment and expansion of housing stock. That's good for the economy in the longterm, enables population growth, mobility, agglomeration effects. But you can't get there by just naively relying on markets to do their thing, that's how you get rentierism and ridiculously high property prices.

Naive state interventions aren't great either, regulation is much of the problem. Imagine a big state-owned corporation with the economies of scale and long-term planning to build housing en masse, build whole new cities. No stakeholder engagement, no endless procedural crap, no quotas for pregnant women or criminals, no building substandard housing and then shutting down the company when the cracks show to rinse and repeat later. No expensive consultants who charge by the hour running rings around bureaucrats who have no idea what they're doing, do everything in-house.

State-owned corporations are unfairly maligned by mainstream economics, they do plenty of excellent work. Nobody in the private sector, nobody on the planet can challenge China State Shipbuilding Corporation. Housing is simple, easy to build just like commercial shipping. Build in a factory, assemble on site. It's a perfect sector for a huge state-backed capital investment. Plus government has natural abilities regarding land, it's a match made in heaven. All that's needed is rigour and discipline.

See this is a problem with markets. Markets just aim for profits, that's what they're for and all they do. If you want anything more than profits (increasingly often highly short-termist profits), you need a non-market solution. We want deep, long-term investment and expansion of housing stock. That's good for the economy in the longterm, enables population growth, mobility, agglomeration effects. But you can't get there by just naively relying on markets to do their thing, that's how you get rentierism and ridiculously high property prices.

...no, you literally just have to remove the zoning restrictions on building housing and the market will trip over itself to build more housing until the price of rent collapses. Then you simply remove prohibitions on racial discrimination so that people don't have to use unaffordability as a way to keep out the underclass.

This whole mess is caused by the government refusing to let markets solve the problem.

There aren't significant problems with race in Australia such that urban centres are very unsafe. But property here is even more expensive than in much of America, compared to income.

Productivity in the construction industry has been falling in Australia. It's been falling in America too. Regulations are partly to blame but the whole thing needs a reboot. There's an entire genre on tiktok showcasing the poor quality of new-build American houses, all this wonky or leaky, shoddy construction work. There are problems with price, quality and quantity.

Housing is the sort of industry where it makes sense for big companies to do it, not tiny little shrimps. Learning-by-doing is clearly needed and not happening. There has to be close coordination with government anyway to build out the infrastructure needed, dams, water, power... It should be managed by the state but in a capable, effective fashion. I realise that last sentence sounds retardedly naive but it is possible in principle.

When in doubt, copy Singapore. It's run with heavy state involvement there, 80% of the housing stock is public housing, they have construction productivity that actually goes up and housing is actually affordable. Per Claude:

Singapore HDB flats rated as most affordable housing in major Asian cities, better than Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing

Singapore's affordability ratio is 4.5-4.7 for public housing vs 13.7 for private property

Key Success Factors

Government Control: Single agency (HDB) controls entire process from land acquisition to completion

Standardization: Standardized methods and designs enable prefabrication and economies of scale

Technology Investment: Continuous R&D and early adoption of automation/robotics

Integrated Approach: Total approach covering planning, design, land assembly, and construction as seamless whole

Economies of Scale: Mass production approach with consistent demand

Singapore also has ethnic quotas in their public housing. https://www.hdb.gov.sg/cs/infoweb/residential/buying-a-flat/buying-procedure-for-resale-flats/plan-source-and-contract/planning-considerations/eip-spr-quota

When in doubt, copy Singapore

They are 100% urban and 76% ethnic Chinese.

69% of Americans choose to live in suburbs. Ultra-urban state planning (even if competent!) won't work on us. It isn't relevant to our wants and inclinations.

This is like people who say America should be more like Japan because of their great health outcomes. On one hand, yes. On the other hand, we just aren't Japanese and a bunch of fat white people severely underperform them on health outcomes. There's no path from us to them.

If Western, white countries are unable to replicate the successes of Asian countries then we may as well give up on politics and civilization generally.

The Chinese didn't go 'oh well they're white and we're yellow, we'd better just accept inferiority, mediocrity and humiliation - we'll just be coolies working for pennies'. They copied what they liked about our civilization and discarded what they didn't want. Lee Quan Yew did exactly that, he went to London and America and brought back good ideas to try.

Low-crime isn't impossible because we're not Asian. Clean public transport isn't impossible because we're not Asian. Crime used to be low. Public transport used to be clean. It still is in many places. If the demographics are bad, adjust tactics to keep them in line or change the demographics. Send criminals to prison or blow their heads off - capital punishment has a long history in the West. You can just do things.

Americans should definitely stop eating chemical slop and eat more Japanese food - rice and fish. It tastes good and is good. Or they could eat excellent European cuisine. Nothing about being white condemns a country to substandard outcomes.

They are 100% urban and 76% ethnic Chinese.

Europeans (the supermajority population in most American suburbs) have lived in dense urban towns and cities for thousands of years too.

The American preference for suburbs also is less organic than many conservatives online suggest. Zoning laws effectively prevent mid-density inner suburbs of the European or even traditional American kind.

Not dense like modern Asian cities, or even modern European ones. I'm right now in a "city" in Europe that's less dense than the suburb (of NYC) I live in at home. For being a city it's surprisingly civilized; just not having so many damned people is a major advantage.

mid-density inner suburbs

Yes, pre-car America had dense walkable 'streetcar suburbs'. Not a modern lower density SFH car-based suburb, but a proper extension of the city. Some small houses mixed in with big apartment buildings. Just hop on the trolley to go to work.

Anyone with financial means fled them like they were radioactive as soon as it was feasible to do so. They transformed into crime-ridden slums with horrible public schools. Exactly the sorts of places I pay to not live in. We were in the New Urbanist Garden of Eden and voluntarily left with great haste.

Google tells me Europe was 5-10% urban circa 1700. And that's really straining the definition of 'urban' to include towns of a few thousand people. I don't think that special Chinese-only DNA makes Singapore function. But they have a certain set of social norms and types of people we don't much have in the US. Their ways aren't and won't be ours. Given the wildly different situations (ethnically Chinese ruled modern city-state vs much more pluralistic continent-spanning world power), I'd even say shouldn't.

Exactly the sorts of places I pay to not live in. We were in the New Urbanist Garden of Eden and voluntarily left with great haste.

Not exactly voluntarily; there was some ethnic cleansing.

More comments

Anyone with financial means fled them like they were radioactive as soon as it was feasible to do so. They transformed into crime-ridden slums with horrible public schools.

That didn’t happen because of the invention of the suburbs. Dense inner suburbs in New York City like Brooklyn Heights have some of America’s most desirable and expensive real estate even though their residents could easily afford huge McMansions further out into the (20th century) suburbs. In Paris and London they likewise remain extremely expensive and desirable real estate even though - again - their residents could easily move out to the modern suburbs and live in much larger houses with big gardens etc.

The factors that turned the inner suburbs of Baltimore and Philadelphia into shitholes have nothing to do with some inherent issues with that urban housing layout. There were indeed intractable problems with dense urban and particularly tenement housing until the mid-19th century but modern sewage, plumbing, hygiene and other innovations mean they were no longer relevant a century ago, let alone today.

No expensive consultants who charge by the hour running rings around bureaucrats who have no idea what they're doing

If California made such a state-owned housing corporation, this is just what would happen. They'd make housing as quickly and as cheaply as they are making that bullet train. Endless quantities of taxpayer money would be set aflame in the furnace of consultant payments.

They'd in-house the cost disease.

The sad thing is that there is a way around this, you can actually build things if you have political will and funding. All you need to do is have the politicians eliminate all the regulation that stands in the way of the thing you want built, and have the actual building be done by the private sector, ideally with private funding.

A good contemporary example of this is the renovation of Notre Dame after the fire: the French parliament passed a law exempting the project from all legal compliance, one experienced and trustworthy man was given full power to do the thing and he hired specialist contractors with money obtained from private donations. And lo an behold, a construction project delivered itself in time for once.

People will perhaps rightfully say you can't do that for every project, but if you're not willing to do so for something, do you really want that thing?

That's farcical. If California made a state-owned housing corporation, they would build zero houses. The state is precisely the obstacle to house building. The reason we don't have houses is because if you try to build a house, they'll put you in jail.

What's farcical? You guys are agreeing:

They'd make housing as quickly and as cheaply as they are making that bullet train.

Oops! I managed to miss the irony

I think that there are two distinct groups which value high house prices.

One group are investors. At the end of the day, they profit from the fact that land is in limited supply, and people have been moving towards cities for centuries, thus steadily increasing demand. The proper way to fix this is a Georgian land value tax. If any value you gain from owning land is 100% taxed in perpetuity, then the intrinsic value of the land for its owner becomes zero. (Realistically, one would impose taxes which would increase towards 100% over a few decades, so present-day investors might still reap 20 years worth of rent or so. This is certainly more than the kind of people who invest in goods with perfect supply inelasticity deserve.)

The other group are home owners who would prefer to stay apart from less wealthy people for good or bad reasons, the (home-) NIMBYs. While I am not very sympathetic to the NIMBYs, I can sort-of see their point. If you bought a house situated a quarter of an hour drive from the city half a lifetime ago, you have every reason not to be happy if the urban sprawl swallows your neighborhood and your suburban home gets surrounded by high-rises. Still, as Jesus said, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."

I think that the dynamic between these two groups is not always the same. To complicate things further, landowners generally also own the buildings on their lots, and depending on the type of building their rent could increase or decrease with further urbanization. If you own a hotel building, you will likely be more enthusiastic about urban development than if you own single-family homes you rent to wealthy people.

Still, as Jesus said, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."

That's Spock. And Star Trek 3 and 4 completely (and explicitly) undermine that idea

That was the joke, surely?

I don't think the writers intended Spock to be the sole voice of wisdom in the series. If anything, he's used to show that pure rationality, while probably at least functional, isn't the best most human way to make decisions.

The discussion surrounding this is a never ending source of amusement. Ezra says "please just let the government build shit and stop getting in the way", and then leftists say "what do you mean? I'm not getting in the way? but also, did you stop to consider... [words words words]" It's beyond parody. I'm impressed they don't ever see the irony.

If there's one thing the leftists get right, it's that this is a political nonstarter. The whole reason they're in this mess in the first place is that populists are fundamentally opposed to progress. Populists want handouts and they want their enemies destroyed. Higher principles are of no particular interest. And the Dem coalition is only getting more and more populist in the wake of Biden's presidency, despite its legislative successes, failing to build anything or deliver real results for the poor and stupid and over-socialized -- a case that Ezra made quite well in his book. Leftists look at Trump and don't think there's anything particularly wrong with having a retarded president (and why would they? they tried non-retards and got no handouts and no enemies destroyed), they just wish it was their retard.

Can we really blame the average left-leaning voter for feeling this way? It wasn't given a name until recently, but this whole "housing theory of everything" idea has been floating around in wonky circles for at least 15 years now and totally ignored by Dem lawmakers. People have been griping about the cost of housing since the Occupy protests. Obama could have, in the popular imagination, been the president who builds instead of the president who bailed out wall street, if he were so inclined and better advised, but it wasn't on his radar in the slightest. In what sense do Dems deserve the mantle of technocrats when they're so behind the game? Being right in this case doesn't really matter when the median voter can barely read.

The thing about housing is that, except for the interests of existing homeowners (about the only thing that gets negative publicity), nearly everything blocking it is supported more by the Democrats or has been for most of its existence. Zoning and building codes, unions and labor laws, urban growth boundaries, environmental considerations, affordable housing mandates, etc. This makes it very hard for Democrats to build housing because the only problem they can see is "existing homeowners".

Yep, Abundance holds up a mirror to Democrats and many don't like what they see. A lot of their assumptions about governance and economics has be thrown out to accept its thesis. That's why there's so much nitpicking about political strategy and messaging efficacy and never any criticism of its actual prescriptions. Moreover, the existing homeowners (the much maligned NIMBY liberal) are usually moderate Democrats, so they make a good villain for leftists to blame. Meanwhile, The Groups are mostly leftist sinecures and axe grinders, making a good villain for technocrats to blame. Cue internecine conflict.

I think if COVID lockdowns had not tanked the credibility of technocrats everywhere, there would be enough trust that this agenda could get motion. Unfortunately, that's not the world we live in. It's almost absurd we live in this reality where we have such boundless wealth and nothing but frivolities to spend it on, where "We need more houses? OK, let's build more houses" and "We need more energy? OK, let's build more solar/wind farms" faces such extreme and multi-pronged resistance, but so it is. Put another trillion into NVIDIA. Perhaps God can save us from ourselves.

The reason is that it's not actually wealth, it's all debt. It's all people running away from debasement and trying to get decent interest to avoid value being destroyed.

So collapsing the ridiculous real estate prices by making them real is out of the question. And everyone, including the government, is locked in the line-go-up suicide pact because if you stop, you get a singularity where anything might happen. So we just manage decline and plug the holes with anything that is at hand.

God's coming alright, but he tends to take his sweet time, and you're not going to like the hangover when he does. Nobody will.

You're being too charitable; consider Sam Seder, who isn't that far to the left, being constitutionally incapable of blaming anything other than corporations and billionaires for high housing costs. This is how you get left-NIMBYs tying themselves into weird knots, like blaming Blackrock (which owns something like 0.1% of single-family homes) or asserting that we don't need more supply, because there are fewer homeless people than vacancies, or because all of those houses are secretly being kept empty by "speculators".

Vaheesan:

Diminishing public power over land use decisions means greater private control, which in turn means more deference to the whims of the market and more discretion for corporate executives and financiers—in short, more oligarchy.

This is the kind of equivocation I was talking about. ("Public power" in this case doesn't mean elected officials doing things, but rather the power of individuals to block the entire process.) When the only tools you have are taxing the rich and breaking up big companies, every problem looks like oligarchs and monopolies.

The Discourse around Abundance has truly been something to behold. It's hard not to nutpick about this stuff. On the plus side, some politicians really are taking it seriously, not by saying "Abundance!" really loudly, but by trying to refocus on outcomes over process; see Buffy Wicks' permitting reform report; among other things, it's behind some of the CEQA streamlining that's been taken up by the governor.

I agree that running on permitting reform and streamlining and bottlenecks isn't a political winner; voters aren't nerds, if anything, they're the opposite. But voters notice when nothing works, when CAHSR doesn't ever happen, when housing just gets more expensive, when medical costs keep rising, when college is stupidly expensive and even if you don't want to go now everyone's whining that they want you to pay back their loans.

So, the left is very happy to point out that populist red meat sells better than wonkish problem-fixing. But as that essay I linked at the bottom of the original post says, "Criticism is all well and good, but at some point you have to build something." My theory of the 2024 election is (a) everyone hated high prices and blamed the incumbent parties for them, and (b) the Democrats tried to tack to the center, but the disengaged voters who decided the election didn't believe them. Demonstratively yelling about taxing the rich and guillotining the oligarchs isn't going to fix that.

If I may indulge, I note that a "suggested article" linked to from the above is "A Different 'Abundance Agenda': Avoiding Delusions and Diversions", from Robert Jensen, previously famous for other far-left things.

If there is to be a decent human future—perhaps if there is to be any human future—it will be fewer people consuming less energy and creating less stuff.

The text of the article is detailed about "less", but is coyly silent about "fewer". Like many critics, he seems not to have read the book beyond the title, but he does propose an alternative.

Instead of the promise of endless material abundance, which has never been consistent with a truly sustainable future, let’s invest in what we know produces human flourishing—collective activity in community based on shared needs and reduced wants. For me, living in rural New Mexico, that means being one of the older folks who are helping younger folks get a small-scale farm off the ground. It means being an active participant in our local acequia irrigation system. It means staying home instead of vacationing. It means being satisfied with the abundant pleasures of this place and these people without buying much beyond essentials.

A cheap shot suggests itself. ("You know, somebody said, ‘Oh, the shelves are going to be open.’ Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. So maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally.") Horseshoe Theory is real.

But on a serious note, when I see this kind of thing, I hear my ancestors screaming from beneath pails of water and bales of hay and endless subsistence-farming toil, and I wonder to what degree the women of the Hill Country, pre-electrification, would agree with Jensen.

Sometimes these women told me something that was so sad I never forgot it. I heard it many times, but I’ll never forget the first woman who said it to me. She was a very old woman who lived on a very remote and isolated ranch—I had to drive hours just to get out there—up in the Hill Country near Burnet. She said, “Do you see how round-shouldered I am?” Well, indeed, I had noticed, without really seeing the significance, that many of these women, who were in their sixties or seventies, were much more stooped and bent than women, even elderly women, in New York. And she said: “I’m round-shouldered from hauling the water. I was round-shouldered like this well before my time, when I was still a young woman. My back got bent from hauling the water, and it got bent while I was still young.” Another woman said to me, “You know, I swore I would never be bent like my mother, and then I got married, and the first time I had to do the wash I knew I was going to look exactly like her by the time I was middle-aged.”

right wing housing theorem of theory sounds a bit like high housing prices suppress TFR and this leads to an increase in immigration in order to maintain high housing prices. not sure if the data is consistent with that. i guess left wing housing theory of everything wouldn't include immigration but include inequality and some other left wing focused issues.

Honestly, it’s a species of hyper normalization. We know they can’t fix it, they know that we know they can’t fix it, but what’s the alternative? Vodka I suppose. And it does go beyond housing. It’s education— billions spent, and English majors struggling to read book. It’s health— where obesity is normal, and any hospital stay requires a GoFundMe.

Solutions are out there. One I think might make a difference is to forbid corporations from buying houses, and limit how many houses an individual can own. This would at least prevent Blackrock from buying up SFHs the minute they go on the market to turn into a rental property.

At each point, Vaheesan equivocates: about "deregulation" (if you want to end apartment bans, you must want poor people to live on Superfund sites!), about "democracy" (if you don't want to hand out veto points like candy, you must love oligarchs), and about the efficacy of reforms (upzoning and streamlining are simultaneously ineffective and giveaways to the wealthy).

If you look at the general progressive mindset as religious, this behavior starts to make a lot more sense. Government bureaucrats are a protected priestly class, similar to but lower status than academics.

Therefore all blame must be shifted away from them, towards the hated enemy: billionaires, conservatives, or whoever the outgroup happens to be at the moment. I don't say this as a sneer at progressives, conservatives do the exact same thing as well.

But as @coffee_enjoyer and others here have pointed out, there's no getting away from religion. Using the religious worldview to model politics has opened my eyes and explained quite a lot of this seemingly incomprehensible behavior.

It's not religion, it's politics.

Bureaucrats are friends of the left and enemies of the right. Which at once decides their loyalties and who wants to lower or increase their numbers and power. There's little else to it.

Religion is probably inescapable too, but what you're looking at here is merely the friend enemy distinction.

If you want to get political ends, such as actually building enough dwellings to lower the price thereof, you need to get enough people who actually hold the levers of that stuff on one coalition against the remainder. This is how anything is decided in human society.

Now lefties are not going to get any of that stuff done because there is a rift in their coalition on this issue, where some people want cheap housing and others want things that make this impossible (and they have more power). So the only way for the coalition to remain and people to save face is for everyone to pretend this is the work of some real or imagined enemy and look to something else they agree on. Therefore, it's all because of wreckers.

Right wingers do this too of course, much easier to pretend the dissolution of morals isn't aided and abetted by capital or that that the army isn't weak because of procurement being rife with embezzlement if we can all agree that it's the fault of degenerates and perverts.

The real dark truth here is admitting that this mechanism is necessary, because without this nonsense you can't actually maintain a coalition to do anything, let alone what has to be done.

This seems like just partisan politics, nothing religious about it.

Their team bad.

Our team good.

There is an issue? Obviously their team did something bad and we need more funding for our team.

A joy to see another grendel-khan California housing update. As an excuse to reply, I present another Noah Smith blog anti-anti-Abundance post. Located via Hanania dunk. At the end, Smith presents some polling results:

But a recent poll suggests that although there’s lots of interest in the abundance idea, the message is still less appealing than populist red meat. Although you might think a poll by some pressure group calling itself “Demand Progress” might be biased toward populist causes, I found the wording in the questions the wording in the questions to be reasonably fair

If we take Demand Progress at face value (probably shouldn't), then the results suggest the largest plurality of Dems make the policy as presented a net negative for electoral reasons. I don't think this justifies Hanania dunk farming but the second result via Smith's blog might. If lefty progressives can successfully frame a false dichotomy that presents Dems a choice between Abundance and the moral clarity of anti-corporate sentiment, then the winner should be clear. There's a whole lot of equity in anti-greed memes even among moderate Dems.

The worse stuff gets the less sensitive people are going to be to this kind of framing. Which already seems to be the growing reality. However, Republican coding the policies is not an empty threat to the movement. I'm not sure what it's like in the local politics, but* does seem that's why so much of the discourse online remains focused on meta questions about the discourse. Popularity and electoral risk will determine how diluted the agenda gets before making it into policy and how much of the dysfunctional machine can be protected. An unthinkable, unlikely, but most entertaining outcome of this conflict would be Abundance Dems giving up on the party. Instead, we'll get the more likely, boring outcome of progressive pouting.

The Building Trades representative talks about any bill which doesn't mandate union labor as being tantamount to murder because the working conditions and the produced buildings will be unsafe.

Building trades unions are basically guilds; just giving them what they want might raise costs a bit, but it won’t stop anything from happening- they do actually do their jobs at high quality standards(and, admittedly, equivalent prices).

Union leadership also limits membership to secure jobs for their members.

If the local union has 500 members and each can do 0.2 houses per year (e.g. a crew of 10 can do two houses per year), then I guess your city is building a max of 100 houses. What if you want more than 100 houses built? Too bad, union labor is mandated, and they're not interested in de-monopilizing the sector.

Those 500 workers will sure be happy that they're in so much demand. The union did its job.

Take for example the IUEC. From WP:

The IUEC forbids modular construction of elevators, preventing the kind of preassembly and prefabrication that have become standard in elevators in the rest of the world, leading to higher elevator costs in the United States. The union limits entry of new workers into the field, and has constrained the ability of firms to use new technology to streamline elevator production in the United States.

Data indicates that elevator-related work is the highest paid trade in the United States, with a median wage $47.60 per hour in 2021.

See also this article (found with google, I can not vouch for the source):

Smith estimates that a new six-stop elevator that costs $170,000 to install in North America would run $60,000 or less across the Atlantic. Operating cost differences are even steeper. New York City guidelines advise affordable housing developers to budget $7,500 for annual elevator maintenance, with private housing operators in New York and Washington quoting similar numbers. This is several times European costs: one German firm, for instance, offers midrise maintenance contracts for about $450 per year.

I will grant you that building costs are not the biggest impediment to building, they come after high land costs and NIMBY, but they are very much part of the problem.

To be clear, unions are not saints. But also labor costs are just generally high in America, it's unfair to give unions 100% of the blame.

In many cases it raises costs significantly, not because the individual tradesmen are paid that much more (they are, but that's not the problem), it's that they have union-mandated staffing levels. If bargaining were truly Coasian (hah!) then you could easily make a deal to increase salaries even further in exchange for bringing staffing to international standard.

This killed a plan by Steph Curry to open a HQ in the dogpatch.

If bargaining were truly Coasian (hah!) then you could easily make a deal to increase salaries even further in exchange for bringing staffing to international standard.

Not that this is politically feasible in the least, but to keep labor costs down, we could (like Singapore) bring in guest workers from places like Bangladesh to do construction work on the cheap—co-Asian bargaining, if you will

We already do that; around half of California's construction workers are foreign-born, and of those, about half are undocumented. But the cost of living here is so high that you still have to pay a lot for workers, even if they're under-the-table.

Ah, illegal immigration.

Ideally, it would work like that. And with the Carpenters' union, it has; back in 2023, they broke off from the Building Trades and cut a deal where they'd settle for "prevailing wage" (pay union rates, whether you hire union workers or not) rather than "skilled and trained" (hire only union workers). It raises costs significantly, but it doesn't essentially make the bill a dead letter, which is what the Trades consistently push for.

The Reincarnation of Julius Caesar or: Why So Many People Give Trump a Pass for Corruption

This is partly in response to the post by TheAntipopulist below, but at the same time I'm about to go off on a tangent about Julius Caesar so I thought I'd make this top level.

Donald Trump is, undeniably, the most openly corrupt President in modern US history. What I mean is, no other President has been so corrupt and yet done so little to hide it. He isn't even pretending not to be crooked.

So why do so many people not seem to care?

Let's go back in time 2,000 years and talk about the assassination of Julius Caesar.

To set the stage: Caesar was a charismatic politician in ancient Rome who rose to be the leader of the Populaire faction. As a Populaire he favored redistribution from the rich to the poor, especially in the form of land reform. He also practiced what he preached, giving lavishly to the people of Rome. Notably, he left a huge amount of money to the people in his will, a cash sum to every citizen that was large enough to make a difference in the lives of the poor. And this clause in his will was a secret - people only found out about it after he was assassinated! That means it wasn't just performative or ambitious, he really meant it.

He was also one of the most shameless criminals in Roman history.

As his opponents never ceased to point out, Caesar's conquest of Gaul was built on a series of wars that he illegally started without consulting the Senate. He bragged about how he could get away with anything by bribing judges and politicians. When two of his opponents won both of the two Consular seats (essentially co-Presidents), Caesar bought one of them off with a king-sized bribe and used him to block the other's legislative agenda with his veto power.

I want you to imagine the scope of this with an analogy: A younger Donald Trump gets himself elected to Congress and marches an army into Mexico on a flimsy pretext (invasion of illegal immigrants!). He starts a blatantly illegal war using a combination of US troops and local Mexican auxiliaries, and becomes a trillionaire by enslaving millions of Mexicans and plundering their treasure. Then an unfriendly Democratic government under Bill Clinton tries to attack him by passing a bill condemning his actions. In response, Trump pays President Clinton off with a bribe of 100 billion dollars and Clinton uses his veto to block the bill that he himself just proposed, and, in fact, campaigned on.

That is how corrupt Julius Caesar was.

The thing is, everyone else was also corrupt. Corruption was a load-bearing element of Roman politics. In order to win office, a politician needed to pay out bribes, throw games, build temples, and so on. This usually involved borrowing money or owing favors. It was inevitable that when that politician came to power and those debts came due he would need to leverage his office to repay what he owed. In other words, everyone was corrupt. Literally everyone.

Enter the Optimates, Rome's other major political faction.

The Optimates were against corruption in theory, but in practice they were also all corrupt. What they really wanted was quieter, less disruptive corruption. To keep it at a manageable level. To them, the way Caesar went around flaunting his crimes was the real problem. It was one thing to pay off a few Senators, but buying a Consul was going too far.

The thing is, the Optimates also reflexively opposed all attempts at actual reform. Caesar was the one who passed sweeping anti-corruption legislation that put limits on how much politicians could squeeze out of their offices, and even his opponents couldn't deny that these reforms were necessary.

It was not really a dispute about whether corruption was acceptable or unacceptable. I would argue that the Optimates' desire to sweep it all under the rug was actually a step in the wrong direction. Caesar talked about corruption openly, and having a problem out in the open is the first step to solving it.

Later on, Caesar was serving as proconsular governor of three provinces. This office made him immune from criminal prosecution, so even when his opponents were able to take power he was safe. But the Optimates knew that Caesar would run for Consul again as soon as the mandatory ten-year gap between Consulships expired. They wanted to stop him from passing more reforms or wealth redistribution schemes, and they knew that there was no possible chance that Caesar wouldn't win his election in a landslide, so they decided to find a way to get rid of him.

They found a dubious legal ambiguity that they argued would allow them to take away Caesar's immunity and bring him back to Rome to face trial. After a lengthy debate, the pro-Optimate Senate suspended the law and the Constitution and declared their version of martial law (the Senatus Consultum Ultimum) to force Caesar to step down. Caesar surprised them by marching on Rome with his army, and the rest is history. After a civil war, which Caesar won, and an election, which he also won, his enemies stabbed him to death on the floor of the Senate house.

But when they paraded through the streets declaring that a tyrant had been killed and Rome was free, they were not greeted by the cheers they were expecting. Wasn't Caesar ambitious? Wasn't he corrupt? Wasn't he plotting to make himself a king? Why didn't the people of Rome hate him like the Optimates did? Why weren't they happy the tyrant was dead?

Because the people of Rome were not happy with the status quo. They didn't care about the Republic, because that was just a system for deciding which wealthy aristocrats would get to oppress them. They didn't care about the law, because that was just a system for deciding how the wealthy aristocrats would get to oppress them. They only cared that Caesar had given them games, feasts, and victory over the Gauls, and now he was dead.

Even the Optimates didn't try to deny that Caesar's reforms were necessary. They damned his memory but did not repeal his anti-corruption legislation.

Caesar's assassins did not get to enjoy their victory for long. When Caesar's will was read in public and the people of Rome found out that every adult male citizen had been left a part of Caesar's vast fortune, it started a riot. Caesar's assassins, who had attended the funeral in a show of peace and unity, had to flee the city in fear for their lives.

In the end, the people of Rome would riot to demand that Caesar's adopted son, Caesar Augustus, be installed as king. That's how little they cared about the Republic.

Augustus himself put the rebellion down. He didn't want or need to be king. He had already rigged the vestigial Republic so that he could rule in everything but name. The Roman Empire would go on pretending it was still a Republic for several centuries.

What to take from this? I don't think you can just measure two sides against each other and say, "This side is more shameless and blatant in their corruption, so they should be criticized more harshly." On one hand you could say that defying anti-corruption norms will erode them and make our society more corrupt. But on the other hand, bringing it out into the open might be necessary to kill it.

Now that Donald Trump is openly messing with US tax policy for personal gain with his combination of tariffs and insider trading, maybe that will be the catalyst to finally pass laws against using secret government intelligence to make money trading stocks. Maybe if it stayed at the level of Nancy Pelosi doing it under the table it would have gone on forever, but now that it's so blatant and so offensive it can be eliminated in one chaotic decade.

My intuition is that public crimes are actually less bad than secret ones. I would rather have it all out in the open.

It was not really a dispute about whether corruption was acceptable or unacceptable. I would argue that the Optimates' desire to sweep it all under the rug was actually a step in the wrong direction. Caesar talked about corruption openly, and having a problem out in the open is the first step to solving it.

Because it wasn't about corruption as such. They just didn't want Caesar (or, early on in his career, his allies Pompey and Crassus) to win

You can't really map it unto America by making it all about corruption in the shady business deal sense. You can't really explain anyone's behavior here (though arguably some Optimates seem crazy or reckless either way) without the civil war that preceded Caesar and what it did to the Roman psyche.

America isn't really there.

Now that Donald Trump is openly messing with US tax policy for personal gain with his combination of tariffs and insider trading, maybe that will be the catalyst to finally pass laws against using secret government intelligence to make money trading stocks.

I mean, if we're going to compare to the Roman Republic, it should be noted that many attempts were made to pass laws to fix the problems caused by corrupt people. Including, sometimes, by those very people!

It didn't work, and the after-effects of their corruption and norm-breaking outweighed their good intentions.

The Republic, once it became so "corrupt" that it lost the ability to promise its citizens safety in the pursuit of politics, could no more legislate that back into existence than it could control the weather or enforce a positive economic sentiment.

You can't always get it back. You can't always write something that outweighs your lack of virtue. Sometimes you just break things.

Because it wasn't about corruption as such. They just didn't want Caesar (or, early on in his career, his allies Pompey and Crassus) to win

You'll forgive me if I find this to be more of a similarity between Caesar and the optimates/Trump and the establishment than a difference.

The other side remembered the proscriptions and chaos caused by people pushing their reforms and will too far. People lost friends and colleagues and people like Pompey and Crassus were prime beneficiaries.

They weren't scared of just losing a political battle. They were scared of getting liquidated this time around if they let anyone claim enough political clout by getting certain wins.

Very different from the initial backlash to Trump. The moment of realization that history hadn't ended and there wasn't going to be a coronation by the emerging democratic majority may have felt existential but hard to argue it's the same.

Maybe if it stayed at the level of Nancy Pelosi doing it under the table it would have gone on forever

According to this site, trade like Nancy, make 715% returns over ten years!

Very interesting post. I'm not entirely convinced, but let me turn it practical: where was the safest place to live when Rome turned from a Republic into an Empire, and where is the best place to live now? I've been worried that the Pax Americana is coming to an end, our Republic's core can no longer maintain its security, and that the international shipping lanes are seeing a lot more instability than before. But if Trump is to be our Caesar, then we will lose our Republic well before the point when our Pax Americana breaks down.

My focus right now is in settling and raising a large family, so where to settle in Roman times? I think "in Rome" proper is out: the city saw numerous riots and insurrections during the political chaos at the end of the Republic, and one does not want one's family caught in the chaos. However, the benefits of being a citizen of Rome were vast, with increased legal rights, commercial rights, and freedom of movement, so one probably wanted to raise one's children within the Empire (Saint Paul as a citizen of Rome was able to walk all around Modern Turkey unaccosted.) One also wants the benefits of industrial civilization (toilets!), so life outside the Empire is also not recommended.

What about the provinces? It depends a lot on the province. Some of them were subject to regular warfare and raids. The marker of these was that they were highly militarized and the risk of invasion was known. The provinces in the "middle ring" of the Empire were probably the safest place to be.

The other major dangers of industrial civilization are subfertility and industrial contaminants. The cities of Rome had poorer sanitation (more plague), high poverty, and greater rates of lead poisioning. Fertility among the elites was also much reduced in Rome due to later age at marriage and smaller family size. The provincial fertility rates were so much higher that the elite became more provincial toward the time of the Late Empire.

So, what would this mean in the modern day? Avoid the core cities due to low safety and low fertility: New York, London, DC, SF. Avoid the threatened periphery due to risk of invasion: Taiwain, Poland, Korea, and states with lots of military infrastructure like Nevada and the Great Plains states (Map of Nulear complexes 1 Maps of silos and predicted fallout patterns). It looks like the winning strategy is to settle the prosperous provinces: the eastern Midwest, Southern canada, Southern France, or Scandinavia.

I will live in Montana. And I will marry a round American woman and raise rabbits, and she will cook them for me...

Very interesting post. I'm not entirely convinced, but let me turn it practical: where was the safest place to live when Rome turned from a Republic into an Empire, and where is the best place to live now?

A backwater seaside province. Northern California/Southern Oregon or Maine. Ma-aybe Florida Panhandle/Mobile/Biloxi.

I think you’re right about Pax Americana having ended. For most people it ended decades ago. It’s just now reaching the professional classes. But if you drive through the rural parts of the South, it’s already happened, probably 2 generations ago, and these places look like the ruins of a civilization rather than a thriving one. Rusty, dirty, shabby, abandoned buildings everywhere. The people themselves live in poverty for the most part. Urban cores have been war zones for decades and everybody knows it.

I see Trump as a manifestation of the problems of American Empire, rather than the cause. We are not the same steady, stalwart and practical people who built Pax Americana, we don’t have the ability or the willpower to keep it. All that’s left is to tear it up and hopefully squeeze out the few good years we have left.

But if you drive through the rural parts of the South, it’s already happened, probably 2 generations ago, and these places look like the ruins of a civilization rather than a thriving one. Rusty, dirty, shabby, abandoned buildings everywhere. The people themselves live in poverty for the most part.

The rural South has always looked like that. The economic and social structure of the South has not historically been conducive to prosperity. Arguably, many parts of the South are doing better than ever, thanks to weak labor laws, cheap labor, and permissive planning/environmental laws making it an appealing place to build factories (and houses).

The (rural) South has, if anything, done better than most of the rest of the country over the last few decades. The entire Sunbelt has no shortage of brand new construction suburbs and schools and infrastructure (even some factories!) while the Rust Belt, when I've visited, has, at best, maintained the infrastructure from most of a century ago. Pick a suburb in Ohio and compare it to one in Florida or Texas.

Air conditioning has really changed things.

Pick a suburb in Ohio and compare it to one in Florida or Texas.

What if you compare it to one in say Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi or New Mexico?

Granted, I don't live on that side of the Atlantic Ocean but Florida and Texas have never seemed to me to be modal examples of "the South".

Virtues are dead so there is no point in up holding them. In Rome during Caesar's time the system was broken and people knew it. The same is true in modern day America.

When the system is broken and dysfunctional you need someone who doesn't care about the rules but instead can fix things. Trump and Caesar are both less focused on formalities and more focused and doing. The current system consists of people like the people in Versailles who were more concerned with trivialities at dinner parties than the national budget.

Trump's biggest issue is that he is far older than Caesar was when Caesar was in power and the US has far more institutional inertia than Rome had. Trump can't get nearly as much done even if he blatantly disregards the rules.

Virtue is predictability. Those with honor can be trusted to at least follow the terms of a deal and not try to screw you at the last minute. A man who promises wine at one drachma per amphora but who will fill it with cholera water is less worthy a partner than a man who sells at five drachmas per amphora but who fills it honestly.

That is the big problem with corruption: it is an open ended incentive to race to the bottom, and it ruins any faith that any activity with a time lag will be honored. Did the property owners intimidated by Crassus have any faith that Crassus would not come back later and spike up the rates? The main advantage is that Crassus would have stopped other arsonists from burning down their property if only to reserve that right for himself, which from our modern lenses is insane.

What we see in modern USA is a different form of corruption: the corruption of credit. The wheel of loans and equity and finance have made money in hand disconnected from money that is spent, and so it is those who game the system that benefit. Republican corruption may involve private benefit, but Democrat corruption involves robbing the public purse to pay off their friends and pets. I again point to the homeless advocacy industrial complex that exists only to drain coffer for the privilege of inconveniencing everyone including the homeless even further. Its not like the grifter even profits that much; Dominique Davis of Community Passageways per propublika bilked 10m from 'community contribution' which are largely state funds put into 'dollar matched' foundations and the wages only hoovered up 50% of the funds, with the remaining 50% just disappearing.

For all the crimes of Caeser and Crassus and Trump and the republicans, I can at least squint and see they did SOMETHING with their corruption and their grift. For the corruption which includes democrat and socialist and every possible shithole tinpot dictator you'd be lucky to even see the mansions that are built off stolen lucre. Spending money to waste money even more quickly seems to be the order of the day for others, and if you're a US citizen asking what the hell the democrat states do with their current tax bases should make promises of taxing the rich being the panacea suspect.

Virtues are dead so there is no point in up holding them.

I disagree with this. It's good to be personally virtuous.

If (for the sake of argument) "the system" truly is broken and it needs someone who can operate outside of the rules, bending or breaking them at times, even getting his hands dirty, then the necessity of that is worth considering. But the aspiration behind that should be returning to an era where virtue is rewarded, not creating an extraordinary state where the system being broken is acceptable.

I would argue that basis of the political system of Rome, the patron-client relationship, was already as corrupt as any mafia by our understanding. Basically, if a rich patron family sponsored a political campaign for the scion of a client family, the expectation certainly was that the scion would use his office to further the interests of his patron. Perhaps not always in the most blatant way possible, but a magistrate who one day decided to make decisions on their merits for the Roman people only would certainly be seen as a disgrace to his family.

This was forever the issue with land reforms: whoever gave land to the masses would by Roman convention become their patron, and thus gain enormous political power.

Now, there is obviously a difference between having a long-standing client family and just buying a consul with cash, but it is a difference in degree, not in kind. A platform to stomp out corruption (as we understand it) in Rome would go as well as a platform to abolish the navy in the British Empire.

American politics are generally much less corrupt than Roman ones were. Sure, companies will sponsor campaigns, but any voter who cares can find out what the sponsors of a politician are. My gut feeling is that 87% of the political decisions (weighted by impact) are made on either ideology or merit, perhaps 10% of the decisions are made to please campaign donors and perhaps 3% of the decisions are made to personally enrich the decision maker.

Trump II is different from this. Sure, all the anti-immigration stuff is purely ideological, and if you count the personal ego of Trump as part of the ideology, a lot more of his squabbles are also non-corrupt. But all this tariff back-and-forth seems like it was mostly for the purpose of ripping of the stock market, and the airliner thing was on a "we do not even bother to pretend otherwise any more" level.

American politics are generally much less corrupt than Roman ones were. Sure, companies will sponsor campaigns, but any voter who cares can find out what the sponsors of a politician are. My gut feeling is that 87% of the political decisions (weighted by impact) are made on either ideology or merit, perhaps 10% of the decisions are made to please campaign donors and perhaps 3% of the decisions are made to personally enrich the decision maker.

You could say the same about crucial issues in Rome at that time such as let's say land reform or distribution of wealth from kingdom of Pontus. On surface level it was a discussion of ideological conflict between optimates and populares, but in the end the conflict was about which faction will distribute wealth and maintain power.

For instance during latest elections 92% of votes of people in DC landed in favor of Democrats - these are all people staffing all the most powerful federal institutions. You can go one-by-one with other institutions depending on public money be it public schools, academia etc. It is by now basically captured by one of the parties. You may downplay it such as merit or ideology, but the fact is that people governed by bureoucracy have different views from those who rule them. This also means that members of one political party extract resources from general population and distribute them toward their own client network of sympathizers.

In a sense the system is already corrupted. When they saw Caesar giving them personal promise of benefits they saw it as more tangible and in a sense even less corrupt compared to some vague promise of of reward by the republic controlled by people they viewed as actually corrupt.

For instance during latest elections 92% of votes of people in DC landed in favor of Democrats - these are all people staffing all the most powerful federal institutions.

The gentrified bits of DC where the young childless feds live is about 70% Dem. The reason DC is 92% Dem is not the feds (most of whom commute in from the suburbs), it is the black vote turned out by the Marion Barry political machine.

Sure, companies will sponsor campaigns, but any voter who cares can find out what the sponsors of a politician are.

Where patronage relationships not known in Rome? At least you could attack your opponents on it.

My gut feeling is that 87% of the political decisions (weighted by impact) are made on either ideology or merit, perhaps 10% of the decisions are made to please campaign donors and perhaps 3% of the decisions are made to personally enrich the decision maker.

How would Rome compare? You dont conquer the mediterranean without making some good decisions.

I think this is cope. You want to draw a line from Caesar to Trump, but the comparison doesn't make any sense (for a lot of reasons, not just the corruption angle). Leave aside the question of whether or not Caesar was good in the long run. Caesar, in your telling, leveraged his position to try and enact reforms. By your own comparison (and also reality) Trump is not doing that. Trump is not a guy playing the game better than anyone else while pushing for reform. He's pushing for more power and getting rid of guardrails holding him back from more corruption. Instead, the argument is, essentially, that Trump being overtly terrible is a good thing because it will inspire others to enact reforms so it can't happen again.

The problem is that Trump commands the unfaltering loyalty of a base of supporters who are, to be charitable, absolutely clueless. They categorically reject any suggestion that he's corrupt. None of this "at least he's public about." No, Trump is the most honest and upright politician we've ever had. After all, he's a billionaire already. This base in turn demands public devotion to Trump to be part of the team, and if you're not an idiot that means Olympic-level mental gymnastics to rationalize the extraordinary corruption of the Trump administration.

My intuition is that public crimes are actually less bad than secret ones. I would rather have it all out in the open.

My intuition is that corruption is always an iceberg. For every act of shameless public corruption there are a dozen hidden ones. Worse, because Trump is so blatantly, shamelessly corrupt and uncritical devotion to Trump is the bare minimum to be a Republican, you end up with a situation where one of the parties is essentially pro-corruption and actively resists attempts to fix the systems that allow Trump's abuses. If there was broad consensus that we needed to fix things in the future, the argument might make sense, but there's not and can't be because serious criticism of Trump is inadmissible in conservative politics right now. Thus we get this borderline parody of Murc's Law where Democrats are somehow at fault for Republican corruption.

Cope ... about what? As I understand it, if this is cope then I must be coping with something, such as a tragedy or the receipt of bad news. Have I received any bad news lately that I would need to cope about? I don't think I have.

This is just a theory of public attitudes about corruption in politics. I'm not saying that corruption is definitely going to be fixed for all time as a result of Trump's actions. I'm just trying to explain why so many people care so little about Trump's corruption allegations, for the benefit of the many people who seem to have trouble wrapping their heads around it.

My intuition is that corruption is always an iceberg. For every act of shameless public corruption there are a dozen hidden ones.

What if this isn't true? What if there are icebergs of corruption floating invisibly beneath the surface, and political loyalty has driven people to ignore the sinking ships and pretend that nothing is wrong? In that case, the addition of a few acts of corruption above the surface (which by your own analogy is dwarfed the vast bulk of hidden corruption beneath the water) is really not that big a deal.

I think it's fair to say that if your intuition isn't true then America's government has a serious problem. Sure it would be nice if an absence of corruption out in the open meant an absence of corruption in secret, but that is a heck of an assumption isn't it? What if you're wrong?

I think your position requires you to argue that corruption in the US government wasn't widespread or problematic until Trump got involved. Which certainly is ... something that someone could say, if they felt so inclined. I find it difficult to believe.

Your categories are incorrect. The people you claim to be "conservatives" really aren't any more- there are elements of that in their policies since they're pushing in a pro-classical-liberal direction (which is itself a conservative idea just due to age), but the factions have realigned. Traditional conservatism, as you know it, is dead.

Right now, the Conservatives are in fact the Democrat-aligned faction [education-managerial complex, bureaucrats and white-collar workers, welfare state/make-work beneficiaries], and the Reformers are the Republican coalition [military-industrial complex, kulaks and blue-collar workers, welfare state/make-work maleficiaries].

They categorically reject any suggestion that he's corrupt.

There are suggestions that he's corrupt from Conservatives. Of course, because Conservatives are extremely butthurt because the Reformers got elected, they claim corruption at every turn and expect me to believe it because of some misplaced sense of social propriety (which is just a defense mechanism, and an especially womanly one, that Conservatives expect to work- but that only works on social credit, and their social credit card's been declined after they put their response to the uncommon cold on it).

serious criticism of Trump is inadmissible in conservative politics right now

Reformers have trouble criticizing Reformers. Conservatives have trouble criticizing Conservatives. That much is known. Reformers tend to form cults of personality a lot easier than Conservatives do; that's also because Conservatives are the faction with no ideas.

And I'd be perfectly happy to accept a Conservative claim that Reform is corrupt, if it had factual backing. But I'm still not seeing it; what I'm seeing is stuff like "the law's finally getting applied fairly for once" (laws that Conservatives fought long and hard for), "institutional human trafficking efforts by Conservatives are being addressed" (remember, it's "illegal immigration" when Conservatives approve of it and "human trafficking" when they don't), and "economic progress isn't getting unfairly impeded by regulators".

I've said this with regards to "the left are all pedophiles, look at all the groomer literature" before, so I'll say it again: if the strongest evidence opponents can muster is not actually what the word means, and they are incapable of coming up with a way to describe what's actually wrong beyond hand-waving and arguments from aesthetics, then their claims should be ignored by default.

So yeah, I have a hard time criticizing Reformers for ignoring "Trump is all corrupt, look at all the [aesthetically-repellent to Conservatives] things". Criticize his erratic governance, and the smarter ones will be happy to listen to you (because that is a factually-correct claim, and one that hurts his own faction), but that's also the best they can do because, again, the Conservatives are simply in the wrong here.

The people you claim to be "conservatives" really aren't any more... if the strongest evidence opponents can muster is not actually what the word means

You are the one consistently advancing an idiosyncratic definition of conservatism. If you want to play word games, I can't stop you, but let's not pretend it represents typical use. Republicans call themselves conservatives. They are proudly defending traditional gender roles, social hierarchies, economic arrangements, etc... Now, there is a term for a radical-yet-reactionary populist movement, but it's not 'reformer'.

More importantly, word games don't actually fix the problem. Relabeling Trump's political affiliation does not change anything he does.

Of course, because Conservatives are extremely butthurt because the Reformers got elected, they claim corruption at every turn and expect me to believe it because of some misplaced sense of social propriety

This seems like a spectacular failure to grasp the substance of Trump critiques.

(I don't know that anyone expects you to believe anything, since you're Canadian and thus not terribly relevant to American domestic politics)

Reformers have trouble criticizing Reformers. Conservatives have trouble criticizing Conservatives

No. There is a very distinctive cult of personality around Donald Trump that does not apply to any other politicians, Republican or Democrat. Biden caught enormous amounts of flak from both the center and left wings of his party, and the Democrats more broadly are notorious for squabbling. Republicans are a little less prone to infighting, but it is very normal to see intraparty criticism there as well (especially if you can frame it as the target not being conservative enough). Donald Trump is uniquely protected by the unwavering loyalty and epistemological deficiencies of his core supporters.

I've all of the sudden seen AI blackpilling break out into the normie space around me. Not so much about FOOM, and paperclipping, or terminator scenarios, but around the sudden disruptive nature, and especially around economic upheaval. Not exactly sure why. Veo3 has been part of it.

For example, coworkers suddenly aware that AI is going to completely disrupt the job market and economy, and very soon. People are organically discovering the @2rafa wonderment at how precariously and even past-due a great deal of industry and surrounding B2B services industries stand to be domino'd over. If my observation generalizes, that middle class normies are waking up a doompill on AI economic disruption, what is going to happen?

Let's consider it from 2 points of view. 1 They're right. and 2. They're wrong. 1. is pretty predictable fodder here - massive, gamechanging social and economic disruption, with difficult to predict state on the other side.

But is 2 that much less worrisome? Even if everyone is 'wrong', and AI is somehow not going to take away 'careers', people in mass worrrying that it's so will still manifest serious disruption. People are already starting to hold thier breath. Stopping hiring, stopping spending, running hail mary's, checking out.

Somehow, it's only senior management who doesn't realize the impact. (They keep framing 'If we can cut costs, we'll come out on top, instead of following the logical conclusion, if everyone stops spending the B2B economy collapses.) - I have a nontechnical coworker, who has recently recreated some complex business intelligence tool we purchased not long ago using readily available AI and a little bit of coaching. He had an oh shit moment, when he realized how cannibalized the software industry is about to get. The film industry seems about to completely topple, not because Veo3 will replace it immediately, but because, who's going to make a giant investment in that space right now?

I suspect the macro economic shock is going to hit faster than most are expecting, and faster than actual GDP gains will be made, but maybe I'm just an idiot.

The major theme of Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, outside of his obvious love and nostalgia for the mighty river of his boyhood, is the unending march of progress. He speaks of the raft-men (who he also immortalized in Huck Finn), who would lazily guide rafts loaded with upstream cargo down to the Gulf and spend their free time preaching their strength and tussling with one another with an Appalachian verve that reminds me of nothing more than WWE fights. They were beaten out by the steamboats. He talks of his experience as a pilot of one of these steamboats, a highly lucrative profession due to its technical complexity and fine art, carefully dodging the sandbars and "reefs" (usually - sunken trees) and adverse currents and following side-channels to cut out major parts of the voyage, not only at day but even at night, through nothing more than one's memory, with the constant risk of the bomb of a boiler sitting below-decks and threatening to detonate and kill most of those aboard, as happened in fact to Twain's brother - liveliness, risk, and the gaudy beauty of those old, painted boats, which Twain recalls pulling into his hometown's dock as a child, with the tempting offer of a life on the river and wealth beyond his imagination. The trains came down the river postbellum, and the passengers and freight moved over, for the most part, and little tugboats in the hire of the newly muscular federal government came along to pull all the stumps and dredge all the sandbars and haul long trains of barges for far cheaper than the steamboats ever could, leaving the pilot's job simpler and his steamboat derelict and unwanted.

Twain, of course, was a fervent Progressive - of the movement of the time, which meant recognition of what was changing, and what was changing so much for the better. And indeed, he describes these incredible shifts in the world of his time. The mosquito-ridden bogs of New Orleans were drained by a modern system of sewage and water control that left nowhere for them to breed. The agonizing, slow stage-coach journey he took out West was replaced by a train that made the trip in a fraction of the time and in total luxury. All of these things were changing over the 19th century. I remember feeling almost dizzied when reading Twain's Innocents Abroad, when he stops in his pleasure-trip in France in 1868 - the last time I had read about France, it was 1815 and Napoleon's troops were marching north for their doomed encounter with Blucher and Wellington, and their movement was compassed by Napoleon's compass, firmly set to the number of miles a pack-laden man could march in a day. But now the country was covered by a beautiful and perfect train network - why march to the Netherlands when you could go by train? Incredible, incredible. Or I remember how Chekhov (yes, that one), who was a doctor as well as a playwright, had expressed shock at some of the war-deaths in War and Peace, as he himself was (now, later), perfectly capable of curing the gangrene that was irreversibly fatal in 1812. (But I can't find that quote again at present, so treat the source as apocryphal - but not the medical fact.) The end of the 19th century was a different world from the start, completely and totally.

Hopefully you've enjoyed at least some of this meandering, but let me make my point clear. What gave the Progressive movement of the 19th century such muscle was the obvious, incontrovertible, and massive improvements to life of applying its methods generally. Everyone became richer, healthier, and in better control of their environment - especially in America, where the fruits of the movement rapidly percolated down to the common man. There were disruptions, and pretty major ones too. The steamboat industry was one of those sacrifices. But the great wealth of the time defanged the worst of the Luddism that could have arisen in response. Luddism is always on the back foot compared to the powerful evolutionary quality of progress, but it can make some temporary gains if there's enough general sympathy - and there just wasn't, and the reason why there wasn't is clear.

We've recently been sold a story that computing is the next Industrial Revolution. Certainly computing is now everywhere, absolutely everywhere. What was once an analog control mechanism became a custom-programmed digital interface; the custom-programmed digital interfaces have become small installations of Linux. Everything is "smart," which (to be honest) often doesn't live up to its own name, but the processing power is there. The ubiquitous internet has changed how we interact with just about any question of fact and knowledge. AI is, in a sense, just a continuation of that, another horizon of computing. Where before we would have people sitting and doing manual entry, now we have a prompt sent to an LLM to produce similar output. Everything that required a little human fuzziness and finesse to corral uncertain inputs into uncertain outputs now falls under the domain of the digital. So now we don't have to bother getting our fuzzy mindsets to cleanly interface with discrete digital systems, but instead can interface with those fuzzy AIs and get what we want without worrying about the specifics. That, I think, is what's roughly on the table here. Obviously jobs are at risk, just like the old manual computers were replaced by calculators, and how the required number of secretaries went down as computing technology went up, and how email replaces the need for a great many form-shufflers, but there are meaningful changes in how people can interface with the world - as a simple example, no more balancing a checkbook, just log onto your online banking portal and you can see exactly how money entered and exited your account (and a short hop to your credit card's website will give you the rest of the breakdown).

But people are, this time, generally unhappy in a way that goes beyond the disruptions of the past. The main division I've noticed in optimism here - beyond the AI fanatics, who I think are an unrepresentative subset of hobbyists invested in the technology for reasons other than pure practicality - is between ownership and everyone else. There was a post on here some few weeks back, where a small businessman was using AI and was pretty happy with what it was giving him. That's the small end of AI. On the large end, CEOs in big businesses are creaming their pants about AI to the shareholders under the impression that shareholders are very interested in AI, and less cynically, they might even believe that AI is an important improvement to their business model. (I have connections in the industry on both sides of the buying-AI and selling-AI divide, and at the moment neither one has a good idea of what LLMs will be useful for but definitely don't want to be left out - my paraphrase, but not my words on that one. So I'm a little more dubious than the CEOs are, here.) So if you stand to control the use and output of AI, you're all in favor. If not, then you're a lot more skeptical of whether it will benefit society. That's it. There are other questions about efficacy, which we don't need to get into, but assuming it will do something, the answer of whether or not it is good depends on whether you will get control over it.

And this is not a new question for computing. I'm sure the median reader here is aware of the "right to repair" movement arguing that non-licensed mechanics should be able to repair proprietary hardware, like cars and farm equipment. But the reason this movement had to start, the shift from the old mechanic status quo, was the introduction of computing to vehicles. EULA terms for the software on these vehicles, most famously from John Deere, would invalidate the license if anyone other than the manufacturer was involved in the repair. Computing, because of the tight copyright and licensing scheme for the distribution and reuse of software, has become a powerful tool for ownership in America and abroad. If you get a purely mechanical tool, it is possible - maybe not easy, but possible - to modify it to meet your needs, and certainly legal. With software, this is often illegal. Old software, because its source code is both under copyright and not published, disappears into the ether instead of being used as a meaningful basis for new software - the public domain of software is only those things which people have, for their own reasons, decided to publish generally. And more recently, in the age of cloud computing and the internet, the tools we use most commonly aren't under our own ownership and on our own servers, but on some large company's server - a company who can make unilateral decisions about our software, nominally responsive to the market but certainly not responsive to you. (I'm still personally salty over a Firefox UI change from fifteen-odd years ago.)

This is why the response to AI is so muted among your coworkers, in my opinion. It's obvious to the little guy that you don't control what's happening with software. The ownership is simply removed from you. There's no real alternative than to get what's coming to you. If someone retrains an LLM and makes it worse for you, then you'll just have to suck it up, won't you? If they replace your job, you're not getting any of the profits, are you? It's just more leverage for power and less for everyone else. And I don't think this is going to change, not as long as we regulate software under our current rules, with copyright and the EULA. Those rules are not a necessity of the technology, but they sure do create "natural" monopolies, as much as if we'd let Carnegie copyright molten steel and hold onto that copyright for 90 years. Until this changes, there is never going to be good news out of computing, because the only news will be that the bastards who rule your life get to twist your nuts a little tighter. AI is no exception.

Install Linux, btw.

Great post.

I've recently learned about Solow's Paradox, the idea that productivity growth in developed countries doesn't appear to be reflecting the impact of computers / the internet / the smartphones despite their obvious incredible impacts on society and it's been pretty fascinating to think about.

Consensus seems to be split between productivity statistics overestimating inflation and underestimating real growth and theories that computing really just hasn't significantly moved productivity for various reasons [personally I think this would explain a lot....]

Solow's Paradox

Parkinson answered this one in 1955. Work expands to fill available time. If you come up with a way to do useful tasks in less time, the tasks will be made harder or more BS tasks will be added.

This didn't happen during industrialisation and electrification though. Yes, to some extent the nature of work expanded and changed, but productivity grew very obviously and rapidly in those eras in a way that we don't seem to be seeing with computerisation.

I think it did happen during industrialisation for white collar work, though. Previously, you had a clerk writing documents all day. Maybe he could do ten letters a day (figure pulled out of the air, not backed up by data). The Victorian postal system was incredible; in London you would have multiple daily deliveries of post (so it was possible to write a letter in the morning, post it, and have a reply by the evening).

This wasn't happening in a vacuum, things like the expansion of the railways meant faster travel and now it was possible to send and receive goods over longer distances.

Then the typewriter gets invented. Now your productivity in the office has skyrocketed (relatively). Now you can do ten letters in the morning! Naturally, no employer is going to pay workers to sit around for the rest of the day, or go home after half a day's work. Now that your output is more than ten letters per day, your employer wants you to do twenty letters per day, because now the business can grow to support that.

And typewriters were the thing that made startups (to use a comparison) possible. Now women could work. Now you could buy your own typewriter and set up as a secretarial service for small local businesses that maybe didn't or couldn't afford to employ a clerk, but did need documents written (or typed) up. The new job of "typist" was created:

The typewriter appeared in the latter half of the 19th century, a period of massive industrial and societal change. The Industrial Revolution had paved the way for the increasing dominance of big business, bringing fundamental changes to ways of working. As bureaucracy increased, so did the requirement for documentation and processing. With the emergence of the typewriter and the need to create documents quickly, a new role developed: that of the typist.

...One woman who took advantage of the opportunities offered by typewriters was Ethelinda Hadwen. Born in Lancashire in 1863, she was the daughter of a cotton mill owner, studying in Paris during her teens. After returning to the UK in 1886, she opened a typewriting office in Edinburgh with her business partner Elizabeth Fleming. The office provided typing services to local firms and was the first of its kind in Scotland. The average typewriter office employed four or five people, usually women, and offered typing and translating for businesses, banks, lawyers, authors, architects, and professors. These were businesses where women weren't only workers, but unusually for the time, also employers.

Now costs came down and productivity soared. And gradually the role of "secretary" no longer meant "a job for a man, possibly a university graduate, who will deal with more than just correspondence" and became "a job for a woman who can type and take dictation but is a vocational training job".

By 1891, the time of publication of this Sherlock Holmes story, typewriters as the new office tech were commonplace enough that they could be used in crime:

“It is a curious thing,” remarked Holmes, “that a typewriter has really quite as much individuality as a man’s handwriting. Unless they are quite new, no two of them write exactly alike. Some letters get more worn than others, and some wear only on one side. Now, you remark in this note of yours, Mr. Windibank, that in every case there is some little slurring over of the ‘e,’ and a slight defect in the tail of the ‘r.’ There are fourteen other characteristics, but those are the more obvious.”

“We do all our correspondence with this machine at the office, and no doubt it is a little worn,” our visitor answered, glancing keenly at Holmes with his bright little eyes.

“And now I will show you what is really a very interesting study, Mr. Windibank,” Holmes continued. “I think of writing another little monograph some of these days on the typewriter and its relation to crime. It is a subject to which I have devoted some little attention. I have here four letters which purport to come from the missing man. They are all typewritten. In each case, not only are the ‘e’s’ slurred and the ‘r’s’ tailless, but you will observe, if you care to use my magnifying lens, that the fourteen other characteristics to which I have alluded are there as well.”

Until typewriters, and secretaries, and typing pools, became the new normal and that reached the saturation point of "we are at thirty letters a day" which became the new standard of productivity. And then came word processors, and... rinse and repeat.

Probably an issue of diminishing returns. At some point between 1900 and 1955, the amount of useful work available fell below productivity * the amount of time available to do useful work. So instead of doing more useful work, we started refining the work we were doing. More safety procedures, more record-keeping, more documenting, more reports on all of the above -- all of that can be increased without bounds.

But that requires a set value for “useful work.” Previous societies found more useful work to do as more time became available. Time freed from labor on farms became time spent in factories, for instance. So your model demands an explanation of why useful work has suddenly plateaued, as a function of useful work, not of bureaucracy.

More safety procedures

Although we are well past the point of diminishing returns (except, possibly, on the roads), this was the opposite of bullshit during the time period you mention. Workplace deaths dropped by an order of magnitude between 1900 and 1970 and another order of magnitude between 1970 and the present.

Getting as much work done in the same number of hours, but with fewer dead workers, is a real improvement.

Yeah. My eternally optimistic boomer dad likes to tell me that many of the problems I'm complaining about today are just the pendulum swinging a bit too hard in the other direction due to the real problems of the surprisingly close past (parental abandonment > helicopter parenting, deaths and accidents are common > oppressive safetyist protocols, racism > wokism, etc.) and that, having experienced both, he takes modernity over the past any day, and that we will move past this, too. I guess I agree with everything except that the last part needs its champions to happen, and nobody seems to really want to volunteer.

Is he a fan of Hegel, by any chance?

More comments

My gut feeling is that this AI wave will be a short panic and then basically blow over. To predict massive job loss you have to assume that jobs are already distributed rationally, and that companies are good at adapting to and using new technology efficiently. Neither of these are even remotely true!

If you've ever seen how the sausage gets made at a major company, jobs are very much withheld and created on more of an internal, political basis than any actual needs the companies have. On top of that, most major organizations are still barely adapted to using spreadsheets and the most simple algorithmic techniques that were created decades ago. Literally just using excel to automate tasks could save these companies tens of millions of dollars a year. And yet... they don't?

So the idea that just because there's a new technology coming out that can do a bunch of fancy new stuff, does not convince me that we'll have massive job loss at all. What will likely happen, and what has already been happening for a while, is that the people in white collar roles who can use these tools will just shift off more and more work to them privately, and pretend they are still just as busy. The roles might get a tad more competitive.

But we're not going to be in a doomsday scenario where everyone loses jobs, even IF AGI comes out tomorrow.

In the last couple of year you can see in the gaming industry that small teams deliver great games and rake massive profit s - not that it hadn't happen before, but they are encroaching on AAA territory. If you can deliver the same as a massive bloated company at fraction of the costs - eventually someone will displace it.

On the other hand there are other parts of the gaming industry where the big breakthrough came from taking something relatively niche and low-budget and dumping huge amounts of money into it. To name two examples, Monster Hunter was fairly sizable as a franchise but was ticking over on PS2-era budgets by developing primarily for handhelds, then decided to go AAA for World and massively succeeded. Genshin Impact arrived in what was previously a low-budget Gacha gaming landscape and singlehandedly reshaped it, with a pricetag of $100m upfront and estimated $200m more a year since.

Returnal did pretty well by dumping a AAA budget into the roguelike genre.

Yeah Clair Obscur is amazing. I also do see this but that being said, most market share is still with massive games. There is more room for indie but these behemoth business aren't going to go under overnight.

Didn't Clair Obscur receive funding from multiple sources? Allegedly the list of backers included Microsoft, a French government program, etc. Not exactly "indie".

It's not unusual for foreign games to be funded by that government (one example that comes to mind is The Long Dark).

Also, the team was like 40 people + contractors. Thats AA on the smaller side, not indie.

Ok fair! I don't know the formal definitions of indie. They're small though for sure.

On top of that, most major organizations are still barely adapted to using spreadsheets and the most simple algorithmic techniques that were created decades ago. Literally just using excel to automate tasks could save these companies tens of millions of dollars a year. And yet... they don't?

You say this is because of political/irrational reasons but I think it's because the human capital available to them is too stupid to use a spreadsheet to (e.g.) predict when they need to restock the warehouse. Something intelligent agents should be very useful at!

Currently, you can either have Pete walk the warehouse every week and plan a re-order list based on his vibes, or you can buy an expensive business intelligence package, which is risky because it requires you to switch a ton of your existing workflow over. The smart simple solution a college grad in hard sciences with a spreadsheet can come up with is not available to most businesses because that grad doesn't want to work in an import-distribution business.

I've worked with this type of business before, and I think you've diagnosed the problem correctly. I don't see them being able to get AI to automate any of these steps though for the same reasons that they couldn't get spreadsheets to help them.

With current AI, sure, but we might not be too far away from AI bridging that gap from the other side.

Let me join the chorus of voices enthusiastically agreeing with you about how jobs are already bullshit. I've never been quite sure whether this maximally cynical view is true, but it sure feels true. One white-collar worker has 10x more power to, well, do stuff than 100 years ago, but somehow we keep finding things for them to do. And so Elon can fire 80% of Twitter staff, and "somehow" Twitter continues to function normally.

With that said, I worry that this is a metastable state. Witness how thoroughly the zeitgeist of work changed after COVID - all of a sudden, in my (bullshit white-collar) industry, it's just the norm to WFH and maybe grudgingly come in to the office for a few hours 3 days a week. Prior to 2020, it was very hard to get a company to agree to let you WFH even one day a week, because they knew you'd probably spend the time much less productively. Again, "somehow" the real work that was out there still seems to get done.

If AI makes it more and more obvious that office work is now mostly just adult daycare, that lowers the transition energy even more. And we might just be waiting for another sudden societal shock to get us over that hump, and transition to a world where 95% of people are unemployed and this is considered normal. We're heading into uncharted waters.

I haven't worked at very many firms but it has not been my experience that any of the office jobs in my department are perfunctory. Around 200 of us move billions of dollars in investments, originating and underwriting new construction investments, managing those investments over their lifecycle, inspecting them and eventually exiting them. As one of the tech guys that builds and maintains the tools used by the teams doing these various tasks I have a decent idea of what each group does and I just don't really think it's the case that any of the job categories are bullshit. How big each group is does have some politics to it, maybe originations could be run leaner and our tech team could run at either a lower headcount and need to focus on keeping things working or a higher headcount and build more tools in our backlog but ultimately that isn't arbitrary and the marginal employee will add more value even if it's not clear if the marginal value exceeds the marginal cost.

Some of our employees are very much doing email jobs, they interface with outside syndicators who hunt for deals for us to evaluate and then enter the deal information into our system. We even build tooling and imports to make this process smoother but someone actually does need to be the person to ask the syndicators what's going on when things aren't perfectly normal and build up the case for or against an individual investment.

I'm not sure what exactly people are imagining when they think about bullshit jobs, it's always some vagueness or pointing out that a lot of time is spent waiting around rather than hammering nails for the whole shift or whatever. But it actually is genuinely important that when the email comes in you have someone to evaluate what it's saying and pull the right levers in response. The act of coordinating these people is also itself a pretty complicated job and I can attest that automating these tasks is tricky and full of difficult process questions.

If you find your work meaningful and seeing that it is not bullshit, well good for you. I've also been mostly lucky in that aspect that I've done very little bullshit through the years. But I've ended up recently in "Bullshit Jobs" territory by doing stuff is that essentially specializing to tech that is designed for scaling to millions of concurrent users and applying it for B2B that is going to see tops of a couple of thousands users if they capture the majority of the market. There is very little wrong with the tech in itself, and it is useful... but the thing that I'm using it for is not benefiting the business, improving the world or making me happy because it is being misapplied. I quit my last job for the very reason, thought I was out of it and all of a sudden I got transferred back to doing the same thing at the new place.

There are bullshit jobs, but only in fat companies.

E.g. I know of a bank that has a whole dozen person 'enterprise architecture ' department that's supposed to manage their IT architecture.

They manage, instead, an erroneous, mostly fictional model of the actual IT architecture.

"Bullshit jobs" strikes me as a massive motte and bailey.

There definitely are bullshit jobs. But a very common case of a "bullshit" job is one where the employee does work that's actually essential to a company or to societyy, but doesn't directly produce tangible things, so it feels like his job is useless.

"To a company" does a lot of legwork here. Jobs that are essential to companies but only for the companies to compete for the market and squeeze each other out, with nearly zero sum for society, are the classic example of a bullshit job.

Sounds like you're just talking about rivalrous or zero sum work, which certainly exists but I don't think is usually what people mean when they invoke bullshit jobs. Usually people are trying to bring to mind people digging holes and filling them back in again, not competition.

Doesn't squeezing each other out mean that they are becoming leaner and more efficient so giving the same products/services at lower cost to society? Can you give me some examples of the sort of jobs you are talking about? I am not sure I understand.

I specified advertizing because advertizing is explicitly not about leaning down the production to make the products cheaper, but rather at capturing more buyers. For a buyer, it does not matter whether they buy product A or product B if the products are identical but one captures 90% of attentionspace. For companies, it means an order of magnitude in revenue.

More comments

I once worked for a massive multinational company where I interacted relatively frequently with the enterprise architects. They were getting shit for their models being inaccurate, which they were, but this wasn't because they were creating erronous models but because the it architecture changed by the time they managed finish a model. When you have thousands of people constantly updating something, and not documenting what they're doing, it's hard to create an accurate up to date model.

You can of course create a high level model but that isn't very useful. What they realised had to be done was automating at least part of the model generation but since that couldn't get any budget for that (in part because they were behind on model creation!) they were stuck with manually updating their models and people not using their work.

Were their jobs bullshit? They were needed at the company but they things were structured in a way where they were unable to produce much value.

This isn't a truly massive company, it's a national one with maybe <50 in-house developers. There's a 35 year old system that's barely documented because management is, as always clueless and doesn't care about pushing it or even allocating workforce for it.

Short of cheap competent AGI agents, with the workforce is retiring, the entire company is inevitably headed to a systemic crash which will create a gigantic PR problem because it's the sort of business that needs to be reliably up at all times and has ~100,000s of customers. So far they haven't really had one longer than a few hours.

Hmmm these are reasonable points. But as someone else pointed out, part of the fact that we're in this state is that the government has strong incentives to keep the unemployment rate down.

Then again government dysfunction is increasing too!

Prior to 2020, it was very hard to get a company to agree to let you WFH even one day a week, because they knew you'd probably spend the time much less productively. Again, "somehow" the real work that was out there still seems to get done.

When working from home, I find I'm more productive because I know I can block out my time the way I like, so there's no panic rush to try and get it all done in hour A to hour B. If I'm not busy (because there are times when there just isn't that much 'real' work to be done), I can go off and do housework or do personal things online, then the next batch of real work comes in via email or whatever and I work on that. There isn't the rush over "I have to get this done by X o'clock, because I have to be out of here by clocking off time, because I have to be home on time to make sure I don't miss the delivery" or whatever, so I can be more thorough.

In the office, if the 'real work' isn't enough to fill up the day, then I do waste time online or pretending to be busy or procrastinating so putting off work because I want to fill up those empty hours. The difference is that at home, I'll go and put on a load of laundry. At work, I'll have some tabs open and a spreadsheet and pretend to be 'working'.

If you've ever seen how the sausage gets made at a major company, jobs are very much withheld and created on more of an internal, political basis than any actual needs the companies have. On top of that, most major organizations are still barely adapted to using spreadsheets and the most simple algorithmic techniques that were created decades ago. Literally just using excel to automate tasks could save these companies tens of millions of dollars a year. And yet... they don't?

Ah. You've met both my employer and the department that employs them at the State level, I see.

And yet... they don't?

schizopost: Maintaining a high female employment rate in white collar labor is the end all be all of western governments, sufficiently big corporations are being blackmailed into not automating these tasks to prop it up. The SEC, IRS, and EEOC exist to make sure the government always has a hammer to drop.

/schizopost

It’s probably just economic inefficiency.

Maintaining a high female employment rate in white collar labor is the end all be all of western governments

Why?

If your reply is "because WIMMEN RULE THE WORLD and they force the government to go along and prop them up with bullshit jobs to be 'equal' to men" then I say you are mistaken.

It's economics. In order to grow the economy, business and government wanted a larger pool of workers. Here are all these stay-at-home women, get them into the workforce (and if that has the happy side-effect of depressing wages and reducing our labour costs well that's nice too). Social expectations shifted, helped along by feminism, that women who didn't go out to work were "wasting" their education and were somehow being parasitic on society. Economic expectations around two-income families meant that things like mortgages were calculated on the basis "both of you are earning, right?" Tax revenue is also based on "everyone who can work is working" and that includes working-age women. A lot of service industry jobs (and I'm including things like nursing and teaching here) are now female-dominated.

Economic necessity also means that women need jobs (no more staying at home being supported by parents if single).

Youi can try having "the man is the breadwinner, the women is the homemaker and child raiser" system back, but unless the guy is making very good money, it won't be economically feasible, and for low-income households, given government supports, the woman is probably better off being unmarried and raising the kid, with a live-in boyfriend or a boyfriend who lives elsewhere and just visits. Is that ideal? No. Is that what we've got now? Yes. Okay, take all the women out of the workforce, raise men's wages accordingly. And every cost-cutting management rule goes "so now we need cheap immigrant labour or automation instead".

I agree with this -

If you've ever seen how the sausage gets made at a major company, jobs are very much withheld and created on more of an internal, political basis than any actual needs the companies have.

...but this would suggest to me that the disruption will come from new entrants (startups and scaleups) who can effectively leverage AI tools to transform workflows. If Status Quo Inc don't incorporate AI effectively and sell their services for $1000/hour, but Insurgent Inc are able to sell materially equivalent goods for $100/hour, then clients and customers will eventually switch suppliers. Obviously this won't apply as strongly in industries with very strong incumbent advantages, but even here I would expect some disruption - see e.g., Palantir making inroads in military procurement.

I do think that disruption is happening, but again it's much more difficult than it seems. Startups typically take a few years just to get off the ground with a viable product, and then it takes like a decade for them to eat a whole industry.

And often before they eat the whole industry, they end up getting acquired by big Corpo and their value gets absorbed and spread out to all the people not doing a super efficient job lol.

Everything that requires extensive capital investments and permitting will be very slow to change, as will the government, and areas where there are natural monopolies.

Disruption isn't really possible for the majority of the economy.

For sure there are sectors less prone to disruption, but I don't know about the majority of the economy. Finance alone is 20% of the US economy and there's huge potential for disruption there. Professional scientific and technical services are another 10%, and many of those (e.g., management consultancy) are also vulnerable to AI transformation. Healthcare (20%) obviously has massive legal barriers in place but AI will increasingly nibble around the edges (e.g. in healthcare administration, AI therapy).

The financial sector is both highly regulated and employs a disproportionately small number of people compared to it's share of GDP. While it accounts for 20% of GDP it only employs some 4% of the workforce, which is about half of manufacturing (which is supposedly dead in America) or less than a third of healthcare.

Even if the finance industry would be disrupted it would affect relatively few people, despite it's large share of GDP and would therefore not lead to wider scale panic. At best/worst we're looking at a mild upward pressure on unemployment.

If you've ever seen how the sausage gets made at a major company, jobs are very much withheld and created on more of an internal, political basis than any actual needs the companies have.

Well said.

I’m inclined to take the indictment of economic inefficiency even further, and point out that jobs at major companies are also created on an EXTERNAL political basis. As @hydroacetylene says, the government has a variety of incentives (which may or may not include his schizo one) to keep the (formal) employment rate high. While I am skeptical that LLM-based AI will ever get good (or at least reliable) enough to make mass unemployment a realistic possibility, even if we grant the hypothetical that it actually will, I fully expect the government to disrupt the disruption by just writing some legislation which obliges corps to employ human rubber-stampers (“supervisory oversight”) on AI processes, thereby neatly regenerating all the white-collar jobs which have been automated. Legal compliance hits startups just as much as it hits status quo inc.

The year is 2050. Humans have long since ceased to do productive work. Amazon and Walmart are giant government contractors competing to provide unemployed people with ‘basic’- a groceries, clothes, household goods, etc ration. The two mega corps keep lobbying for basic to increase; their primary bargaining tool is offering to hire more ‘process supervisors’ and ‘account managers’ to sit in rubber rooms.

The year is 2050. Mass unemployment has been forestalled by government revenue per employee maximums. Practically speaking, this means the vast majority of jobs are sinecures, but the social prestige of being sinecured to a particular firm or brand has skyrocketed in value, and likewise the PR cost of sinecured associates can potentially be Bud-Light-level apocalyptic. As a result, sinecures at highly-desirable firms often take on substantial relations efforts on behalf of the firm for free, both to maintain their sinecure, acquire additional sinecures, and potentially rake in social media influencer consulting fees), but also to increase the social prestige of the firm overall, and by proxy, themselves. Having multiple sinecures is possible for people who are motivated to do things that increase brand value or mindshare, and people with exceptional social desirability may acquire many more. Income supplementation via gig work will still be possible for things that can't be done as well by computers and robots or require the human touch, though naturally the returns will be low since the supply is huge. Of course, anyone with valuable sinecures must be on good behavior in public, for bringing disrepute or negative reaction to the firm will mean instant termination, and potential blackballing.

Those who have been blackballed or otherwise unable to merit a sinecure on the basis of their social worthiness must provide by going and doing actual labor, probably many hours of grinding gig work, or finding a valuable contracting niche. Most actual work below executive level done at the firms is performed by independent contractors, who supplement their sinecures (if they have one) with hourly contracting fees. And of course, there's always welfare, but which only provides at sustenance levels.

If this is a portent of our future, score another point for "Japan is living in the future".

Absolutely. Agreed on all points here. Even if we do get mass automation, social pressure won't allow for mass unemployment.

What if we get decent UBI though? Or enough promises of a socialist utopia where no one has to work the masses buy into.

On top of that, most major organizations are still barely adapted to using spreadsheets and the most simple algorithmic techniques that were created decades ago. Literally just using excel to automate tasks could save these companies tens of millions of dollars a year. And yet... they don't?

Citation needed.

I think that "tens of millions of dollars" is not a good measure for potential savings. A more appropriate way to look at savings would be to consider the fraction of the total costs of the company.

Software consultants and vendors of enterprise resource planning software have been plaguing advising all kinds of businesses since the early 90s. I find it very unlikely that there is any sector which could save ten percents of its costs by just using Excel. Stuff like electronic inventory management or customer relations databases are standard for pretty much any business larger than a lemonade stand.

The lowest-hanging fruits left are probably more on the order of 1% of the total costs, and I think that it is reasonable for companies to be wary there. Consultants have been known in the past to overpromise and underdeliver, and that shiny ERP solution which is supposed to take care of all of your software needs might end up being a software hellscape which requires an expensive specialist to run and only does half of what you want it to do.

I will grant you that in large organisations, departments often become fiefdoms whose bosses employ a lot of people simply to show how important their department is, not because they are needed. But for most organizations, these oversized departments came to be long after the invention of spreadsheet software, and at the core they are indicative of a political, not a technological problem.

I'm personally of the opinion that normie dooming about AI and the job market is just a way to express the growing malaise that's enveloping the west and has little to do with actual macroeconomic effects.

Yes, if we do manage to create truly transformative AI that obviates labour everything is on the table - I'm not too interested in litigating AGI timelines but if that does happen it's not just going to be a weak white collar labour market, we're walking out the other end gods or 6 feet under.

On the other hand, if we top out somewhere around "useful tools" level as we are now it's not clear to me that anything is likely to change macro-economically. There's been no meaningful changes to any macroeconomic statistics attributable to LLM's as of yet [unless you count the wild valuations of AI companies].

In my domain, software, there's quite bitter culture wars about how useful LLM's are on a micro level [personally I find them very useful but certainly not a replacement for anyone yet] but there really haven't been noticeable improvements in software productivity on a macro level. All the commercial software I use day-to-day is still varying degrees of shit and there's been no noticeable change in velocity in open-source [the use of Copilot in the .net repo is quite amusing, https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115762].

Even the internet, clearly the most transformative and life-altering invention of the last half-century has had questionable impacts on GDP and productivity growth.

It's true that individual tasks may become obsoleted like copy-writing and perhaps translation [although every translator friend of mine seems to be drowning in work right now] but jobs have always been augmented by technology to replace tasks and that's nothing new. The vast majority of white collar work is in my opinion either transformative-AI-complete or there because we want a human [for liability/regulation/comfort] even if a machine could already do it. If we reach the point where AI is not outcompeted by AI-human centaurs in doing meaningful white collar work then we should be much more concerned about not being paperclipped than whether Becky can still get a job in HR or marketing.

To return to the original point, my opinion is that AI kvetching is largely driven by people wanting a safe way to express the sentiment that life in the West is just generally going downhill. I was struck by a quote I heard from a friend the other day, that "nobody dreams of the 22nd century" like men in the 20th century used to dream of what the 21st might look like.

A blue triber might tell you it's because the billionaires are taking all the money and that climate change will end the world, a red triber might say it's because mass immigration and the death of Christian values is ending western society, and a grey triber might say it doesn't matter because AI will save/fix/kill us all. Nobody can agree on the causes, but pretty much nobody in the first world thinks life will look better in a century without some sort of eschatological transformation.

Anecdotally my extended family in the old country seem to be much more optimistic about the future and everyone seems pretty optimistic about AI despite being mostly pretty poor by first world standards. Each generation saw pretty drastic jumps in quality of life and things are looking upwards for the next generation too. You can see here that it's almost all poorer countries on an upwards trajectory excited for AI and richer countries going downhill that don't like it which is interesting to consider.

https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report/public-opinion

Something is just off in the first world, and COVID and AI accelerated it. I don’t know what exactly died. But the US, in particular, seems to be dealing with the kind of crisis Western Europe did in the previous century, a loss of faith in all institutions and the massacre of all meta-narratives. Neither my progressive or even conservative friends care much about the Constitution or the framers or the civic religion any more. I don’t know anyone who’s optimistic about the future. I certainly know some people who have optimism about their own future, or who are making the best of their lives as they exist, but about the social fabric people feel… trapped, like we’re already six feet under and there’s no escaping it.

People want to put this at the feet of wokeness, or Trump, or communism, or atheism, but I don’t know what it is. Even those narratives seem snuffed out.

I once heard someone call it “Late Soviet America” and that’s really what it feels like.

Amusingly, the Soviet gerontocracy everyone made fun of? Yeah every single one of them was younger than Trump, Biden, Mconnel, Pelosi, etc.

Better healthcare and less degenerate lifestyles.

In lieu of term limits, elected officials should be required to drink a full liter of vodka over the course of the work day, and another one before bed.

"less degenerate lifestyles"?

I'm supposed to call alcoholism good ?

Something is just off in the first world

It happened very fast too. There have always been minorities who are loudly disgruntled with good reasons (particularly older people in declining regions), but in the noughties and even the early teens the dominant outlook was Thatcher/Blair/Reagan/Clinton style optimism. By 2019 (even pre-pandemic) if you weren't some kind of doomer you stuck out like a sore thumb as either an out-of-touch establishment tool or a Silicon Valley investor talking their book.

In the UK, you can date the change to somewhere between the 2012 Olympics and the 2016 Brexit referendum. The US isn't very different.

Given the timing and speed of the shift, I am inclined to blame algorithmically-curated social media.

The media started pushing it in the early oughts, though. Star Trek had a drastic tone shift from optimistic to dark and serious- and this is probably what killed the franchise, that’s not really what Star Trek is all about- just for one example.

Also Battlestar Galactica. I think a number of events in the 00s combined to make it clear that we hadn't got answers to all of our problems - the 2008 financial crisis, 9/11 and the inability to turn a theocratic Islamic state into a liberal Western one. Environmentalism. These problems were huge but obviously totally unsolvable by ordinary people.

Also, people were bored. Nobody wanted to hear that we had solved everything and we just had to a) wait for laissez faire economic growth to solve all our problems and b) accept that anything which wasn't solving itself just had to be that way. They/we wanted change and adventure. I always think that was a big part of the response to Covid - people were longing for a Big Problem in which we could all Do Our Part.

I see it as the final death of the naive optimism that was abroad in the 1989s and 1990s. That was unsustainable becait frankly wasn’t true and couldn’t ever possibly be true. We were kind of faking it by kicking various cans down the road repeatedly. Once we ran out of road, pretending that we were simply going to win Civilization VI style was completely implausible, but this is what people literally believed. We ran out of road because is Islamic theocracy, because we developed a serious addiction to buying now and paying later, and various forms of laziness and gluttony and so on. That was sustainable for two reasons: we were the default currency and the world’s largest market, and we had hands down the best military that could not be seriously challenged. Those conditions could not last because those conditions never do. No nation or empire will ever stay on top forever. But we’d so structured our economy, or lifestyle, our government spending as if we were going to be The Rome that Never Falls.

Once 9/11 happened we slowly came to realize just how much we had let slip away. Arabs with box cutters could strike at will, and not only could we not stop them, we couldn’t even find those responsible. We can’t remain at the top of education when China and India were eating our lunch in STEM. Why buy from Americans when China can make it better and cheaper.

There was indeed naive optimism throughout the non-Soviet member states of the collapsing Eastern bloc as well in 1989-91. What devisively killed it (besides economic collapse) was the Gulf War and the bungled Soviet intervention against separatists in the Baltics.

Yes, but it was also quite the psychological and even philosophical blow. Before 2001, we just sort of assumed that the world order was USA and Western Europe on top, everyone wanting to be us. We basically ended up not only resting on our laurels, but often tearing up the things that lead to our success.

Culturally, we tore up quite a lot of the social technologies that made success possible. We decided on some level that self-control, decency in a very broad sense, family and the centrality of protecting children from physical and emotional and psychological trauma, excellence as a virtue. Those things became sort of passé. Only old people and boring people still thought that one man, one woman for life with the woman as primary caregivers, or worried about too much sex, drugs, and violence in movies. Who cares, we are the top civilization heading for victory, and everyone wants to be like us.

Educational standards did not keep up, and in fact they are pretty low by this point. We decided that having an educated population was less important than the uncomfortable need to make kids learn things. But again, we were dominant, and believed we would always be dominant.

So what happens when we were rudely awakened by 19 guys with box cutters taking down major landmarks in America. And Americans had no idea how or why it happened or what we should start doing to fix it. We thought we permanently were going to be the utopian future. What now.

My contention is that our stories, especially popular stories are how people deal with the stories. Battlestar Galactics was an attempt to deal with 9/11. We thought everything was fine. Then the Cylons blew up the colonies. You never knew who was or wasn’t a cylon which is kinda like the jihadists who might or might not have been integrated into American society. The story explored all kinds of the different facets of the situation.

I think our current mania for medieval fantasy and romantasy is a longing for things that exist in those archetypes — strong, wise leadership, nobility, tradition, and heroism. And so how would a knight deal with some of the problems we face right now? Or a wise King?

Yeah, the revived battle star was a big deal for portraying suicide bombers in a sympathetic light on big-budget prime time TV. I picked Star Trek as an example because its whole brand is cheery, optimistic future where we can all settle our differences.

I’ll also point to the Catholic Church sex abuse crisis, hurricane katrina, Russo-Georgian war, and no child left behind just blatantly and obviously failing.

Also, people were bored. Nobody wanted to hear that we had solved everything and we just had to a) wait for laissez faire economic growth to solve all our problems and b) accept that anything which wasn't solving itself just had to be that way. They/we wanted change and adventure. I always think that was a big part of the response to Covid - people were longing for a Big Problem in which we could all Do Our Part.

Yeah, I think this is a big part of the Fourth Turning stuff.

Your system was the same dysfunctional managerial as today, except it was not under strain and the race communists have yet not obtained enough power.

All the shit you're dealing with now was in the same rusty pipeline, coming.

I think normies used to believe in 3 myths that all crumbled since 2008:

  • there'll be no more inflation
  • credit will remain cheap
  • international trade will always remain free

All of these provided an illusion of everlasting modest welfare.

As a startup founder LLMs are enormously useful but not primarily for coding.

LLMs are great for issues such as: "which AWS service to use", how to make pitch deck, which type of adds should I buy, how do I configure a firewall for my server, how to find a good accountant, how to file taxes, gitlab or github and so on.

I don't have a large team of experts, I don't have a lot of time and I have a multitude of different roles. I am CFO, CTO, CEO, dev ops engineer, lawyer, and HR. AI allows me to be somewhat competent at all these tasks and allows me to solve them quickly. The new paid version of ChatGPT is great at quickly producing mock ups and even suggestions for features and user stories.

LLMs are going to allow far more people to start a company and to be able to launch things. Need a NDA and LLMs will make a professional looking PDFs in a minute or two.

This is a form of Gell-Mann amnesia effect. When there's instant feedback and excellent legibility of when answers are correct vs incorrect, like programming, we instantly see the flaws. But on softer squishier questions, you accept the answers. But it's all similarly bad AI slop.

I mean if you take tasks off the lap of your workers you don’t need so many of them. If you can take half of my job away, you can just give me double the workload of tasks that only a human can do and therefore you need half the staff. And while you didn’t get rid of everyone, you’re saving a lot of money, while also putting significant downward pressure on the wages of those who remain.

Do the above over most of the kinds of jobs normies have, and it is an apocalyptic loss of jobs. If 70% of normie jobs reduce headcount by 50%, that’s a lot of people. And since nobody needs to hire them, they’re either trying to retrain for new jobs or they’re simply dropping out of the labor market.

I cannot speak for others but at my own software company it would be a mistake to assume all the work we currently get done is all the work there is to do. We have a long and constantly growing backlog of things we would like to do to improve our product but must constantly prioritize due to much less capacity. If all our productivity doubled with AI the result would likely not be "the same work done with fewer people" but "much more work done with the same people."

The C++ and Javascript creators foresaw that this day would come and made sure you can never get rid of technical debt.

I keep hearing stories of COBOL programmers getting paid insane amounts of money...

If you can take half of my job away, you can just give me double the workload of tasks that only a human can do and therefore you need half the staff.

But now you have half the staff, and your competitors have half the staff, so presumably the market price of the stuff you are selling will face downwards pressure. It could be that your existing clients will want to buy more your stuff as its now cheaper and you get now clients who previously were not able to afford your product, perhaps you find out you need to hire more people...? But if half the workforce got fired at step 0, that is much less people able to buy any products despite their cheaper price...?

It will be nightmarishly complicated to adapt to when its happening, let alone predict.

People make comparisons to horses and combustion engine. True, many horses got "unemployed", yet traffic increased a lot. There are probably more people involved in logistics and industries enabled by it than ever were in "horse service industry". And horses were never the presence on the demand side of the equation, they never bought anything.

It also reduced the need for horses, who have been reduced mostly to glorified pets.

I think there’s a lot of pretty catastrophic scenarios even with modest AI advancement. They don’t tend to get a lot of examination because most people tend to be focused on the really extreme best and worst case scenarios.

What kind of catastrophic scenarios are you thinking about?

I can see a lot of ways in which current/modest AI advancements are going to make the world worse (damage to the education system, the end of audiovisual content as reliable evidence, propaganda/astroturfing/surveillance) but really these are all just extensions of existing slow decline, not catastrophic scenarios per se.

What kind of catastrophic scenarios are you thinking about?

There is only one cohort of white collar worker that knows what is to be obsolete overnight in the world today - the Eastern Bloc boomers and oldest genx-ers. The ones that were in their 30-s and older when the berlin wall fell.

And they didn't took it easy. So I expect if we shed white collar jobs fast the shock to be painful. And few of the white collars today have the rural connections to be able to move into trades or something similar.

To return to the original point, my opinion is that AI kvetching is largely driven by people wanting a safe way to express the sentiment that life in the West is just generally going downhill. … Anecdotally my extended family in the old country seem to be much more optimistic about the future and everyone seems pretty optimistic about AI despite being mostly pretty poor by first world standards. Each generation saw pretty drastic jumps in quality of life and things are looking upwards for the next generation too.

This is insightful and food for thoughts! The explanation makes sense, but even better that this trend is showing up in the data of a study.

pretty much nobody in the first world thinks life will look better in a century without some sort of eschatological transformation.

I wonder why that is. Capitalism/Market economy of ideas converged on doomerism as being more attention hogging? Or some underlying malaise which lead to insecurity?

Yes, if we do manage to create truly transformative AI that obviates labour everything is on the table - I'm not too interested in litigating AGI timelines but if that does happen it's not just going to be a weak white collar labour market, we're walking out the other end gods or 6 feet under.

6 feet under what? Very amusing to imagine a superintelligence apathetic enough to exterminate humanity but sentimental enough to bury us afterwards.

Paperclips, naturally.

6 feet under what?

Other corpses and/or rubble, presumably.

Somehow, it's only senior management who doesn't realize the impact.

Most of the pessimism I've seen has been quite different than this.

Rather than fear that the AI will work, the fear seems to be that management will buy into the hype and fire everyone, regardless of whether it works or not.

If it does work, you're out of a job because the whole industry has been displaced. If it doesn't work, you're out of a job because management was greedy and they all follow each other like lemmings, so it's going to be a nightmare to find a new job at a company that isn't infected with the same mindset.

The big fear I personally have is that management buys into the promises of consultants and vendors who claim that AI will be their solution and advise cost cutting before benefits materialize, or worse when the low hanging fruit is all that is plucked.

If you want a preview of this nonsense, just attend literally any conference now. Every single vendor is now forced to add 'AI' into their suite of offerings, but more concerningly they are saying that they will deliver AI capabilities to clients who hire these guys. The incentive structure for companies is to have an internal manager assigned to spearhead this endeavor, and that persons incentive in turn is to outsource all responsibility possible to the vendor. A vendor that is thus inclined to lie because they have little to lose is the most likely outcome, and I've seen it happen so many times. Builder.ai is the clearest high profile example of late, but I've seen this happen like a dozen fucking times already.

No I think I was unclear, yes this is in line with what I'm seeing. When I said sr. mgmt doesn't realize the impact, I mean the follow through logic of the macro effects of every other company also freezing spending and hiring.

Rather than fear that the AI will work, the fear seems to be that management will buy into the hype and fire everyone, regardless of whether it works or not.

I think that this is justified. There is a reason why tropes such as the Pointy-Haired Boss from Dilbert or the Boss from BOFH exist. In a lot of non-tech companies, non-technical people are in charge of IT management. Often, this attracts a certain sort of people. "We are using tech from a decade ago and it is working okay for our needs" is no way to bedazzle the board or future directors. While IT might be best seen as some more complex version of plumbing which should be mostly unnoticed by the users when it works well, your average head of IT has delusions of grandeur which go well beyond that of the head of facility management.

For example, anyone who understands the basics of the blockchain will immediately notice that it does not offer anything interesting to 99% of non-scammy enterprises. Luckily, your IT manager can count on the probability of a board member understanding what the blockchain is to be very small, so they can sell a fairy tale of the block chain being the future of IT, point out how people got rich from bitcoin, and how there is money on the street just waiting to be picked up, and it with their plan United Dairy Producers Inc will get a slice of the cake. And they can also depend on consultants popping up who will happily sell them some repackaged open source blockchain software.

While blockchain might serve as a baseline for "empty hype", AI certainly has a non-zero potential for most corporations. But unlike the blockchain, there is no decisive first-mover advantage for adopting AI tech for non-tech companies, if your archenemy Dairy and Cheese United adopts some tech a year ahead of you, it seems unlikely that they will bankrupt you in that time because they just reduced their accounting costs to zero.

I’m continuing to make the confident prediction that AI, no matter how smart, will be given to insanity, personality disorders, just plain stubbornness, etc, and that GPP from the serious cybernetics corporation will be like mules or llamas in past days; it has its uses, but for applications requiring sanity, common sense, and on-taskness over brainpower, you still need a person. This is will make the white collar job market worse, especially at entry level, and probably some parts of the blue collar job market. It won’t end the concept of employment. There will probably, at the end of the day, just be more NEETs and lower pay for college degrees in nothing in particular.

This is a little wild of a prediction given that it already seems to be proven wrong.

Current gen AIs already seem poised to be pretty disruptive.

I think the main reason they are not as disruptive is because they aren't done cooking. Why try and squeeze out work from an AI right now when the AI will be better and cheaper in 6 months?

I think the main reason they are not as disruptive is because they aren't done cooking.

This is my take. Its still a nascent technology.

For some reason this popped into my head. and I compared it to this or even this.

I don't think AI is going to be a VR style hype train to nowhere.

It will always be better and cheaper in sixth months.

Meanwhile I've already used it to do things for my startup that I can't even imagine how I'd have paid for otherwise.

Meanwhile I've already used it to do things for my startup that I can't even imagine how I'd have paid for otherwise.

Would you mind sharing any examples? I've failed to engage with AI in any meaningful way, not for ideological/luddite reasons, but the simple inertia of doing things the way I've always done them. I'd love to try something new, and don't know where to begin.

Me too, I haven't really played around with AI for some weird anxiety about not being able to apply it effectively. I'm kind of sticking my head in the sand on AI to avoid thinking about my FOMO.

You can literally just start by asking it how to apply it effectively.

I'll give it a go, thankyou.

Think of it this way: you've missed out on a bit, sure, but AI progressing so fast right now, that the value you left on the table so far is really insignificant compared to what you can get at any point you decide to jump in.

Don't really have time to get into it atm but I didn't want to leave you hanging. Just play with it. Try to get it to do stuff. You'll be amazed.

I've also had better luck using AI as a disposable coder I can rush to test and let it run into walls rather than hoping my dev team would be able to figure things out organically. The tension of streamlining vs overloading a dev team is always an issue, and I've certainly found human intervention necessary for a great many edge cases that will show up.

Certainly the administrative loads and documentation tracking for what projects are extant and what is viable is helped. In the weirdest sense AI is useful as a stupid conversation partner to sanity check, and it doesn't mind being bullied or rejecting effusive praise.

These are mere engineering issues.

If you were a zoomer you'd have already solved a problem related to your chatbot getting insane and you'd know it's not a hard constraint.

Somehow, it's only senior management who doesn't realize the impact.

If 1/3 of your coworkers are worried, you'll notice.

If 1/3 of senior management is worried, that's not a majority, and management won't say anything.

I have a nontechnical coworker, who has recently recreated some complex business intelligence tool we purchased not long ago using readily available AI and a little bit of coaching. He had an oh shit moment, when he realized how cannibalized the software industry is about to get.

So many contract renewal conversations with SaaS providers lately are like "they want how much per year for this service? that's three months salary for a typical engineer and our engineers say one of us can build this in-house in 6 weeks with LLM tools"

People are saying a lot of things and doing little. I've heard similar claims, but haven't seen any meaningful increase in SWE productivity and I've talked with friends and managers at other companies and they say largely the same thing.

The one thing I've seen is a slight cut back in use of consultants, particularly third world ones, but that might as well be a result of cutbacks due to economic uncertainty.

I've heard similar claims, but haven't seen any meaningful increase in SWE productivity and I've talked with friends and managers at other companies and they say largely the same thing.

There definitely is some increase, but not at the right level yet. You can't yet fire all your junior devs and let the LLM close JIRA tickets on its own. What you can do is retrain your senior devs much faster. An LLM is the best form of introductory documentation right now. The bottom falls out when you start asking it hardcore questions, but this can be solved by more extensive (and expensive) training.

And the neat thing is, by the time those senior devs age out of the harness and you'd struggle with replacing them because junior devs have gone the way of the dodo and there's too few younger, experienced devs, AI agents will be good enough.

In my experience the questions do not really need to be that hardcore, but perhaps we have different definitions of what hardcore is.

I do agree about LLMs being a very good way to get introductory information. How valuable this is for the median developer I don't know. A lot of people seem to be working with the same languages and APIs for a long time.

but that might as well be a result of cutbacks due to economic uncertainty.

But this uncertainty is what I’m interested in. How much is effect but how much could snowball into cause? Buyers get skidding, forecasts go down, and so forth. I’m not saying it’s the leading cause of uncertainty to anywhere near it. But I am noticing it becoming a contributing factor

Not uncertainty due to AI, uncertainty due to tariffs.

No I know. Of course that’s the biggest part of it. My overall point is I’m seeing uncertainty expressed in AI uncertainty, whether that’s just a rebundling of tariff etc uncertainty or not, my fear is that it is contributing to increased general uncertainty, which will be additive economic results trending from that uncertainty

Presumably, if one wanted to, one could just firewall the main API servers. The big players are well known and with the possible exception of full-size DeepSeek, local models are not powerful enough to be very useful.

I’m not in favour of it, but I don’t think there’s anything stopping a majority voting for this. The only reason AI hasn’t been stomped on is the arms race and the fact that overwhelmed first world countries like the UK see it as the key to getting back in the black. Neither of this are immutable facts of the universe.

AI is the boot, it's going to be doing all the stomping. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter are some of the most powerful companies in the world, they have a gravity well that pulls everyone else behind them. Shut down AI, what does that do to your stock portfolio? Your pension? What does that do for your reelection campaign, is the other guy going to get the algorithm on his side, millions in his warchest? How do you coordinate against AI when all major internet forums are looking to AI as a revenue source?

Or the 20 million people spending hours a day on character.ai, they're not going to let their wAIfus and husbandos go without a fight.

Not to mention that everyone else in business has some kind of interest in AI. The manufacturers want to automate their factories and improve their logistics, services companies want to boost productivity.

And the arms race, as you mention, DARPA, the Pentagon and leading lights in the Chinese Communist Party. That alone is an insoluble problem for decels, what do you say to the paranoia of American strategists? Without a technological advantage, the US doesn't stand a chance against China. They're certainly not going to let China get ahead. And China is not going to stop, it's clearly identified as a key technology to advance in. The public in China love AI, they're very optimistic about it.

Governments couldn't care less about implementing unpopular policies, mass migration for one. Or ending the death penalty. Or invading foreign countries for dubious reasons. If they see it as a core priority, they'll make it happen regardless of what people think. AI is almost certainly far more seductive than any of these things, with far stronger institutions backing it. I'm very bearish on decels having any success whatsoever. Remember PauseAI? Basically nothing happened. It was a squib, hundreds of billions in capital was redeployed to rapidly advance AI in 2023, the exact opposite of what they wanted.

I'm thinking of the

massive, gamechanging social and economic disruption

case, where say 70% of people become unemployed or suffer a sharp reduction in status. I don't like mass migration either, or the repeal of the death penalty, but the opposition to those is ~50% of the population max and most of those are pretty wishy washy about it. Governments hate disruption more than anyone, if too much happens too fast I can entirely see the government just bringing the hammer down, like China did with Ma. There's nothing technologically inevitable about cloud-based AI remaining available. And once it looks like one side of the China/America divide might start dialling this stuff down, I can well imagine their opposite number gratefully following suit.

In short, government with unanimous popular backing is still the biggest beast out there. IF it comes to the kind of unemployment figures above, I think AI companies will bend the knee or be broken. Obviously, if things remain as they are, the future is much more murky.

70% sure, maybe. But what happens if it's 'just' 2008 levels of sudden disruption? And then a small stagnant window before another dive. I am more worried about falling into a series of local minima, where the immediate 'solutions' get us into a worse scenario.

In some respects 70%+ emplyment disruption, or a skynet scenario could be better, in creating a clear, wide consensus on the problem and necessary reaction. I am more worried about a series of wiley cyote getting over a cliff before he realizes it, falling, then repeating as he tried to get ahead of the next immediate shift.

If unemployment rises to 70%, then AI can also be used for combat power and war economy work.

Imagine a swarm of AI-equipped drones, faster and more coordinated than anything in Ukraine today. Imagine the ground-based robots they're trying out but with a machinegun on top: https://x.com/XHNews/status/1921201829066797357

Automated trucks for logistics, all coming from automated factories. That's all eminently possible with 70% unemployment, plus more exotic stuff like satellite swarms spying on everybody in real time, decapitation strikes with novel nerve agents we can't even detect.

How is a human military going to fight that, especially when AI is going to be deeply embedded in their communications? Perhaps a government or sections from a government will merge with a leading AI company or nationalize them earlier in the game but I can't see how they'd successfully shut them down without rendering themselves globally irrelevant. If they wait until 70% of people are unemployed, they might just get crushed.

What do you do if 70% of people are made obsolete? Shut down AI and send them to do useless work? Put tariffs on AI-made products overseas? Seems like delaying the inevitable.

Neither superpower wants to slow down, Trump's America explicitly wants to win the AI race with Stargate while China has allocated considerable effort to developing AI. It's bipartisan in America, Biden was also keen to restrict GPUs leaving the US. I don't think there's any anti-AI faction in China at all, I'm not aware of a single evil AI in the entire Chinese cultural corpus. We haven't even stopped the 'randomly develop gain of function megadeath viruses for no good reason' arms race after a megadeath virus leaked, so what are the chances of stopping the 'immense power and wealth' race after it gives out immense power and wealth?

There's AI and there's AI. People detection is a simple matter which you can do on-chip. Anything like

Automated trucks for logistics, all coming from automated factories. That's all eminently possible with 70% unemployment, plus more exotic stuff like satellite swarms spying on everybody in real time, decapitation strikes with novel nerve agents we can't even detect.

in the next 5-10 years, like automated coding or automated logistics, is going to be heavily relying on a handful of APIs (approx 4 now) provided by a handful of companies. China could shut down LLMs in China tomorrow if it wanted to - firewall OAI and Anthropic, close down Deepseek. Boom, done. America would have a slightly harder time but it's basically straightforward.

Neither wants to, yet. But if the societal disruption starts to become uncomfortable, they can and they may well. I'm not talking about evil AI, I'm talking about obvious and destabilising social disruption. More than immense wealth and power, governments like stability. China and America are quite capable of running private military AI research on things like YOLO whilst mutually deciding that giving public/corporate society access to AGI is too disruptive to tolerate.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats