domain:rifters.com
Lizzardspawn
1d ago
Not a market theorist but rent seeking is extracting value and not generating. I have never seen consumers being better off when there is lack of interoperability, DRM, vertical integration, walled gardens, monopolies, oligopolies, monopsonies, drm on printer ink and other anticompetitive practices.
So it is not the best use of the capital in the society.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1d ago
I think that Mamdani's middle-class/upper-middle-class appeal may in large part be simply due to the Mr. Smith Goes To Washington idea of a honest, non-corrupt outsider against a corrupt machine creature.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
I am opposed to video games, porn, weed, fornication, rap music, and sports betting. I can’t say I have anything against DnD but I also don’t know very much about it and I’m certainly willing to be opposed to fictional entertainment in principle.
Now the difference is nobody believes that republicans will put me in charge of regulating these things.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1d ago
Yes, and they too would be alienated by the tradcon message that puts 100% of the blame for the decline in marriage on men.
"100%" is doing a lot of work there. I see a lot of "Women often suck, but you can only work on yourself, so fix that first", and it seems like it's resonating fairly well. There's a reason Peterson blew up with "Clean your room". "Get good" is a message young men are primed to be ready for.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Rubio, Abbott, and Youngkin can all foreseeably unite the three factions with the always-second-string religious right. Desantis is also a strong maybe on that front.
I don’t see Vance doing this, I don’t see Cruz, I don’t see Hawley.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1d ago
There are some talks going around how if we look at the geographical breakdown, it's a separation between transplants (Manhattan LES, Brooklyn Williamsburg, etc.) vs natives (Bronx, deep Brooklyn, deep Queens). I still want to wait for the full numbers though before more speculation.
When those transplants eventually flee the consequences of their votes, what color and letter should they be forced to wear to let everyone know that they are dangerous idiots?
I wonder if Zohran would be open to, say, a 50% wealth tax on people who leave NYC?
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Texas since ~2000 has had a de facto three party dynamic with moderates, conservatives, and democrats, and the moderates consistently the kingmakers in legislative coalitions while whichever wins the Republican primary holds unitary roles. That’s probably a better example of a stable two party system where one party always loses.
The typical case is when someone neither particularly hates or helps the poor. But the missing mood test looks at how things are framed and at superficial elements. So if he thinks the dole is good for the poor, he doesn't need to prove himself, because the belief itself already says that he "wants to help the poor". But if he thinks the dole is bad for the poor, he faces an uphill battle. The problems with this are obvious.
This also leads to moral busybodies. How exactly do you know that someone hates the poor privately? Well, if he's a friend or relative, maybe you know him. But if he's a politician or someone else you don't know personally, this is an incentive to dig up ten year old Twitter posts out of context to "prove" that he's cruel so you can dismiss his beliefs.
And then there's the situation where someone who thinks some policy harms themselves always fails the missing mood test. After all, they aren't showing concern for the other people who are helped by the things that harm themselves. (And "I think my harm is more important than someone's benefit" is selfish, so it doesn't count as showing concern even if you acknowledge that someone benefits.)
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1d ago
Bezos' Addendum to Goodhart's Law: If your anecdotal evidence flies in the face of your data, you are probably measuring the data wrong.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
This idea is not very aristocratic, it’s thoroughly rooted in middle class democracy. Even in the Middle Ages towns were governed by property holder suffrage electing officials and defended by militias of property holders. The aristocrats were for the countryside.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
The Mandate of Heaven is just important non-state people(Elon musk, Cardinal Dolan, Harold Daggett) going out of their way to praise the legitimacy of the government.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Ok, but supermarkets are not dodging rent seeking from farm suppliers- thats the wrong step in the chain. My guess is there’s a bunch of rent seeking in the processing/middleman stage too. And further I’d assume the bulk of the rent seeking in the supermarket side is mostly contractors that the supermarket cant easily replace.
One take is that Mamdani's able to massage a lot of traditionally idpol issues as anti-Trumpist or under legalisms, and thus been able to avoid explicit proposals by having the whole thrust of his lunchbucket politics also imply them.
((eg, "affordable housing" doesn't mean housing people can afford; it means a ton of Section 8.))
Another, more cynical one, is Darwin's old "it was never about being gay". Idpol doesn't care, specifically, about gay rights, or African-Americans, or Hispanics, or even about winning their votes. It cares about the cause of the day, with no more honest motivation than it being the cause of the day. And Mamdani's tongue-bathing Hamas anti-Zionism is the cause of the day among the upper-class demographics he needed to win the primary.
Edit: I was tempted to use hating the Joos above, but couldn’t find a good summary to support it. Not a problem anymore! /EDIT
There's some silver lining on that cloud, in the sense that the Idpol cause of the day can swap out on a minute's notice. But it's not gonna.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
The real question comes down to if Cuomo runs against Adams as an independent- I think Adams has a decent chance if he does not.
Do Democrats want more extreme left candidates? Are socialists ready for the big time? Was this Cuomo's unique weaknesses?
In New York City? Probably. In broader America? No.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Mark Robinson is the kind of candidate who could throw a safe election, yes.
ChickenOverlord
1d ago
Ideally the democrats can have their version of joe rogan.
I realize your whole post was sarcastic, but I'm reminded of something someone said here a week or two ago: Joe Rogan was the Democrats' Joe Rogan, they drove him and people like him away.
That said I'd love to see the dems put major support behind Hasan, the backfire would be hilarious and it would probably give Roach King Asmongold a year's worth of content from that alone.
Honestly I'm surprised the left hasn't tried to figure out Asmongold 's popularity with young men. He's a midwit at best on his good days, but his takes come across to audiences as "common sense" (regardless of if they actually are). He just has a disarming way of talking and presenting himself, and I think that's something shrieking feminist harpies are constitutionally incapable of.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1d ago
Fixing or at least freezing the decline of the economy for young men without advanced education is the “stop digging” part by at least making the economic landscape not maximally hostile to family formation.
Do the Republicans have a credible plan for that? I haven't seen one. (No, tariffs aren't going to do that)
If you’re able to get housing costs to stop rising or even fall, do the same with the asset bubble
The good news is housing costs are set to turn around for demographic reasons. The Silents and older boomers are already dying.
and put upward pressure on the lowest quintile or two of wages by creating a tight labor market
Creating a tight labor market drives up inflation and erases the gains.
TitaniumButterfly
1d ago
That doesn't follow whatsoever. It presupposes that we're always capable of evaluating deep consequences, which is plainly not the case. It also presupposes a ton of wisdom on the part of the person being persuaded.
Suppose the damage only becomes clear generations later? I'm thinking here of the sexual revolution e.g.
Inability to convince someone that an act is damaging has no bearing on whether it is.
Tiber727
1d ago
But instead, you seem to want some specific predictions of specific mechanisms that are headline-style events.
Headline-style events are probably the most effective way to shift public consensus, and were in the slavery example we keep going back to, but not a requirement. In the case of:
It just so happens to be that we don't see a world where the lack of slavery is causing all sorts of real world problems for individuals and societies.
Society doesn't seem to be paying attention to the claimed harms, and/or aren't attributing the problems in society to single parenthood. At least not to any statistically relevant degree. What would make them start now? That's why I mentioned "A point at which society realizes the status quo is unsustainable and agrees to a specific fix?"
FC's argument is actually a good example of what I was asking for, just missing which politician or group would have the interest and influence to push for something like surgeon general's warnings on porn. If Trump pushed for it he'd have a decent shot of passing legislation, but he doesn't strike me as interested in the least. And there seems to be a huge popularity gap between Trump and, well, just about anyone in the Republican Party.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
Yes - porn is a cross-cutting issue. The anti-porn faction consists of Blue sex-negative feminists and Red religious conservatives. The pro-porn faction consists of Red libertarians and Blue sex-positive feminists (and the pornographers). Both sex-negative and sex-positive feminists can get published in so-called peer-reviewed journalists, although the sex-positive feminists are currently winning the intra-left political battle.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Perceived crime rates change much faster than actual crime rates.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1d ago
Then who makes money from the food industry.
When margins are low but volume is high you can still make good money. But in a commodity market, economic forces will generally push average profit margin to $0, so it's not surprising that margins are usually low and sometimes negative.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
1d ago
Where are you getting this? I’ve seen zero conservatives squarely blaming men for not getting married.
Low employment rate by itself doesn’t actually achieve much in terms of upward economic mobility for working class young men, which I do believe has a serious effect on family formation.
For that you need to end the wage stagnation / decline as it relates to the biggest expenses for young people dating, forming relationships and attempting to start a family; housing costs.
I believe KF - Konsum filled that role in Sweden. It wasn't technically publically owned but was so intimately tied with the workers movement that it filled much of the same role that a state owned enterprise would. Nowadays noone talks about it, especially due to the commercial failure and consistently higher prices of COOP. Dissatisfaction is mostly channeled toward some kind of market interventions like anti-monopolistic actions agains the largest commercial actors and in the more radical sphere, price controls.
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