The root of Ezra’s core messaging generally cones to come from a good place. There’s something about his delivery that doesn’t seem to land right. I’ve lived in red states my whole life. While there are nuggets of truth to this, the overworn dichotomy of “Blue State Overregulation vs. Red State Deregulated Builder’s Paradise” doesn’t fit across the nation. Building codes vary by state and region based on appetite for disaster management as well. The Florida Keys’ building codes are kinda the gold standard for hurricane-proofing homes, but not all of those standards are applied even across the state. […] There is a reason Trump has chosen this path. The populist right is powered by scarcity. When there is not enough to go around, we look with suspicion on anyone who might take what we have. That suspicion is the fuel of Trump’s politics. Scarcity — or at least the perception of it — is the precondition to his success. Back to the original point… Take the above excerpts, a great through-line ahead of the final two paragraphs quoted in this initial post would be drawing a clearer line of the liberals’ “past mistakes” as inducing scarcity by lack of labor investments. Make it [1] easy for as many citizens as interested to [2] gain the tools (skills)/dignity (debt-free) to do a job, [3] guide project investments while streamlining regulations around the job requirements. How exactly the left should go about it at this moment is a bit of a tougher answer. Without flipping seats in the special elections coming up… dunno, but there a lot of ex-Federal employees with presumably a lot of institutional knowledge out of work now. An opportunity for tackling [1] and [2] may be a bit if a pipe dream at the moment, but it’s an opportunity. A lot of what’s happening is making me wonder if scarcity as the status quo is what it will take for the left to do more. I hope not. In November 2024, San Francisco’s metro area authorized the building of 292 housing structures; Austin authorized 3,059.
Neither Musk nor Trump seeks a more capable state; they seek a broken state that they can control and corrupt.
Ezra Klein is a concern troll. He has never not been. He is the Republican Lolbrooks. His message is "I'm a big booster of liberals so why do they keep doing all these liberal things." I'm sure David Brooks is a nice guy, too, and I'm equally sure his heart is in the right place. His mind, however, is very much about arranging what he sees in order to make his '60s Republican ideology work. Ezra Klein? Dude wants to go back to Clinton SO HARD and I mean, why not. Scarcity. Scarcity is why not. You're absolutely right - rebuilding a strong labor economy is absolutely the right thing to do. The Democrats have fucked up so badly that the president of the Teamsters spoke at the fuckin' RNC. Reducing inequality is another great way to reduce scarcity. Hey, how have the Democrats been doing on that See that jaggedy bit where the income share almost started to pull back? That's Black Monday. 'how bout that bit where it beelines for the sky again? (who had two thumbs and a wife on the board of Walmart?) I voted for Clinton. Twice! he was absolutely the best choice available. But he also fucking gutted the American Dream in deference to Wall Street. You wanna know when the Dems went corporate, it was under Clinton. He basically stole the Republican mojo and left them with Newt Gingrich. But it turns out that opening the world to free trade and offshoring everything so hard that even the metrics changed is bad for the proletariat! So sure. Let's build some trains. Only... the United States is unique in the world in that we have private track and public trains running on it which is the main reason amtrak has never made money. Most of the world does it the other way... except the UK, which took its rail system from pride-of-the-world to laughing-stock through the simple act of privatization. Hey, maybe some giant public works projects! Kinda like... Oh I dunno There's other ways to do it, of course. I hear Ezra Klein is big on state capitalism! Here's the thing, man. scarcity is real. You wanna see when the 'boomers got all their ideas? It's from back when Concordes made sense. It's when all the resources of the world were piped into the United States from literally everywhere else and American manufacturing was the gold standard for the world. And we could absolutely get there again. the United States has an unparalleled amount of natural resources, a highly-skilled labor force and economic protections to build a robust middle class. But all that shit was built by the government. Regulating private industry. To protect the people from its worst impulses while also providing protections to allow it to flourish. Which is why the business douches rescued Hayek and Mises from Austrian ignominy, propped up Milton Friedman and argued that corporations don't owe the public shit. Sure. Let's deregulate it all. What could go wrong? That's the wrong question, though. The right question is "what does deregulation have to do with jobs." 'cuz it's totally fucking unnecessary.
While attempting to wrap my head around why Ezra doesn’t land as well as I’d hoped, lolbrooks was exactly what came to mind… lol. A new king is crowned. Thanks for the rabbithole on income share versus union membership of top 1% (seriously). I have a reading list on the opening up of China starting with the Carter Admin and I’ll keep this graph in mind with as I start looking more seriously at the policy transitions from Carter to Reagan to Clinton (plus where NAFTA plays into it). Will be a bit to catch up, ‘cos only reading non-fiction at any given time is a bore. Shout-out to Scott Lynch for getting me through the Gilded Age reading so far. The fights in court as Zeldin’s EPA tries to wrangle back already-dispensed funds under the allegations of criminal wrongdoing on the side of the last administration (lol?) is one hell of a way to try and stop further progress by a government back initiative like CHIPS. Everyone my algos are tuned to are trying to read the tea leaves on what percentage make-up of 1890s, 1930s or 1960s our future holds, but it all looks like these labor-first policies will be on hold until who knows when (read: if a rebuke gains any traction… as tired as that sounds). Re: other ways to do it that was meant for the people whose government purpose built/funded abundance for them. As for the PWA, I love this statement from the Wiki: Specifically due to the implication of pivoting from deploying local labor for installation/long-term maintenance of fiber to launching more satellites. Why put money in pockets of people across the nation while promoting general welfare with secure underground lines when you could just launch more satellites from a concentrated supply-chain? Something something... atmospheric cooling and Kessler syndrome or whatever… The PWA spent over $7 billion on contracts with private construction firms that did the actual work. It created an infrastructure that generated national and local pride in the 1930s and is still vital nine decades later.
Post some shit dawg because I made the mistake of grinding through the Fleet of Worlds books which required me to acknowledge that there are actually like four books set on Ringworld and while I knew the second one was bad I am absolutely gobsmacked by how horrible the third and fourth one are. The thing that strikes me about every move by the Trump administration so far is they're amateurish. They presume that if they kick the table the leg will fall. There's no greater strategy than "through executive privilege we will dismantle the government for we have Supremes supporting the Unitary Executive Theory." They make a lot of headlines and they're ruining a lot of shit... but they're ruining the shit people like. A whole goddamn country gets to learn what USAID does besides providing the CIA cover. Discover that their tax dollars really do empty the outhouse at Funacres National Park. Find out how much worse Social Security workers are when there are fewer of them. It's an impressively self-determined punitive civics lesson. sigh Look. It annoys me to do this. This book pisses me off the same way my vulnerability to homeopathic remedies does. it is without rigor. Among its examples it literally goes 'oops our model misses the Civil War.' But there are aspects of sociology to it that I haven't seen anywhere else. And if nothing else, it'll show you where Steve Bannon and the rest of the accelerationists are coming from. Will be a bit to catch up, ‘cos only reading non-fiction at any given time is a bore. Shout-out to Scott Lynch for getting me through the Gilded Age reading so far.
The fights in court as Zeldin’s EPA tries to wrangle back already-dispensed funds under the allegations of criminal wrongdoing on the side of the last administration (lol?) is one hell of a way to try and stop further progress by a government back initiative like CHIPS.
Everyone my algos are tuned to are trying to read the tea leaves on what percentage make-up of 1890s, 1930s or 1960s our future holds, but it all looks like these labor-first policies will be on hold until who knows when (read: if a rebuke gains any traction… as tired as that sounds).
I do not want America to become China. But I do want it to be able to build trains. This is an awkward time to make this argument. Above reminded me of below. Which, scratches the surface of the difference between China and America’s labor + manufacturing states. Graham Allison, Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? In the time California has spent failing to complete its 500-mile high-speed rail system, China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail. China does not spend years debating with judges over whether it needs to move a storage facility. That power leads to abuse and imperiousness. It also leads to trains.
When Americans complain about how long it takes to build a building or repair a road, authorities often reply that “Rome was not built in a day.” Someone clearly forgot to tell the Chinese. By 2005, the country was building the square-foot equivalent of today’s Rome every two weeks. 29 Between 2011 and 2013, China both produced and used more cement than the US did in the entire twentieth century. 30 In 2011, a Chinese firm built a 30-story skyscraper in just 15 days. Three years later, another construction firm built a 57-story skyscraper in 19 days. 31 Indeed, China built the equivalent of Europe’s entire housing stock in just 15 years.