Funny how I doubt that Mitt Romney would have done this despite being on the board of Bain Capital.
I've worked at companies after a leveraged buyout and it is the corporate equivalent of the third world. I hope the oligarchs enjoy their spoils while the money their printed on still has value.
Entrepreneurs forget that they worked this hard because it was their company. Most companies act like their employees should work this hard because of their culture. They forget that we wouldn't be there if they didn't pay us.
This article misses a crucial point. We've been training the ability to discern quality (taste) out of the population for the past 50+ years. We do this by reducing funding for Arts education, shifting STEM courses away from empirical, experimental scientific approaches and mathematical logic to rote memorization and lessons focused on creationism.
This gradual shift has allowed us to accept the disposable nature of the goods we consume today. It's all bad machine drip coffee that needs creamer for $5.
Watch an action TV show shot in the 70s that features car chases and you will see cars from the 1940s and 50s on the road. Sure, you see cars from the 90s on the road today but very few of them are American. When was the last time you saw a Saturn or a Pontiac? Those companies have only been gone 15 years.
To return to the coffee analogy, why is Starbucks so popular? Their beans are stale and over roasted and their drinks are bitter and often scalded to the point that vanilla, caramel and pumpkin lattes are more popular than regular ones. It could be argued that it's because of non-coffee offerings (pink drink, etc.) but I would argue that it's because of a lack of taste and an inability to think for ourselves -- to trust our own taste over the need to fit in to trends (be seen with a green straw or a blue text message bubble).
Isn't this why the author used ChatGPT in their example? Brand recognition. And true to form the results are terrible. AI is a product that would have been laughed out of the marketplace by a more discerning public. Sure when it's on it's amazing, but when it's off, it's terrible and nearly 100% of the time it's in-between and close-enough will get sold. This is where the author's argument says people will still buy from a barista, but if most people buy at Starbucks the barista's coffee shop goes out of business and the consumer loses the choice.
So many things are coming together in a perfect storm for profit that it is inevitable that AI will be widely adopted, jobs will be lost, products will get worse, the gap between have and have-not will increase at an accelerated rate and worst of all, no one will notice.
Someone has forgotten that many of the 9/11 terrorists came into the US from Canada. Pretty sure not having the Canadians helping to watch for more will be a good deterrent. Glad we've opted to not put qualified people in our government, who knows what someone with actual intelligence experience would have done?
Is that a criticism of Canadian border security, the rcmp, US border security, the fbi, …? Countries protect their own borders vs entry and their internal security. Who let them take flying lessons?
This has me thinking of graduating from an Art Masters program at the start of the Bush administration to find only 300 professorships available to some 30k applicants. I am a software developer now paying for my Arts education still, 23 years later.
It's funny how the politicians say they're going to create jobs but usually due to their policies, jobs evaporate. When will we call bullshit on these claims? FDR understood that the only way for a government to create jobs was to hire people. Neo-liberal conservatives love magic thinking like creating jobs through giving money to the rich when just hiring poor people with that money is more efficient (and obvious).
The neo-libs were wrong, but the neocons aren't doing this. This new breed of grifters only pay lip service to the neocon agenda. This time, it's about controlling from the top and cutting the tree of Liberty.
Because while capitalism and "free markets" are excellent for solving some problems such as dynamic resource allocation, they are not only terrible at solving other problems, they actively make them worse.
Start with any issue related to a commons — a "free market" will ALWAYS turn it into a Tragedy Of The Commons, literally destroying the thing that was most valued.
Plus, the entire concept of a "Free Market" is nonsense. No markets are ever completely free — there are ALWAYS regulations, whether codified or informal, enforced by official agents or vigilantes, and penalties for violating those regulations. The arguments are only about what are the regulations (and really, who the regulations are designed to benefit).
Capitalism & "Free Markets" are also extremely bad at providing for all members of society when they encounter accident, hardship, illness, or infirmity.
Ultimately, overly free markets result in extremely unequal and unproductive societies, where a few people hoard approximately all the wealth and the rest of the population is barely functional.
Fundamentally, all these types of theories are wrong because they assume a baseline of the benefits of a well-regulated society, with a social safety net. They assume their "free market interventions" will result in only improvements, when the actual result will be a highly stratified, mostly poor, and dysfunctional society. The remarkable thing about history is not only that we had great minds like Newton and Einstein, but how many similar-caliber minds lived their lives in subsistence mode — those "neo-xyz theories" ultimately ensure that 99.9% of all Newtons and Einsteins will never have a chance to achieve anything.
A bit of a quibble, since you seem to be equating Capitalism with "free markets" (but you put free markets in quotes, so perhaps you're intending sarcasm). In any case, for others reading:
A "market" is any place people come to exchange goods and services, and seems to be a sociological Truth. They appear in nearly every society, going back thousands of years, even before written history.
A "free market" is an academic ideal, where every actor in the market is perfectly rational, has complete information, and is not under any sort of coercion. This is, of course, impossible to achieve in practice, similar to solving a high school physics problem and ignoring friction.
Capitalism, then, is a tool for exploiting those imperfections for your own gain. Using your wealth or power to coerce others, acting on hidden information, preying on peoples' insecurities through advertising, and so on. Capitalism is explicitly opposed to a free market, and continuously tries to undermine it, for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful.
The role of democratically-elected governments should be to represent the peoples' interests in the market, in opposition to the elites. Like you said, through regulations to protect the commons, prevent monopolies and other exploitation, and so on.
The dilemma is that a weak government allows corporations and the wealthy to do whatever they want, and is powerless to stop it. A strong government can stop or slow their influence temporarily, but is also a jucier target for corruption.
I don't know how we get to that, though. We've now had two generations awash in propaganda, that the free market is good and capitalism is synonymous with the free market, and that any problems you're facing aren't the fault of the wealthy and powerful, but are because of the minorities that can't defend themselves.
The theory expresses by an slim state that does only a few things, but does not interfere with businesses. "Trickle-down" is one "theory" of theirs: if you give money to the rich, directly or reducing taxes, the money lands in the end at the poor, but this "theory" has been disproven so often that you can't call it a theory anymore.
"Neoliberalism" is Reaganomics, a series of beliefs about the world:
* The government is generally the problem [with our economy], not the solution to our [economic] problems.
* Low taxes, low regulation, and low barriers to trade favor positive-sum economic development.
* The market will perform most regulatory tasks for us out of enlightened self interest.
* Ricardian specialization in international trade is to the benefit of all.
* Money made by the wealthy will trickle down to everyone else's quality of life.
* The Laffer Curve is self evident and we are self-evidently always on the right side of it; Cutting taxes will increase receipts.
Conservatism is highly compatible with this worldview, but it was embraced by liberals as well after the country re-elected Reagan in a landslide. Clinton's "Third Way" portrayed itself as an alternative to traditional Republican and Democratic concerns that was socially progressive but promoted a slightly softened version of this economic theory.
Some version of or equivalent to the Third Way has basically been in control of the Democratic party ever since due to its superior ability to fundraise for campaigns, due to the slow death of the labor movement, and due to the death of the dream of international communism among fringe intellectuals.
In an attempt to differentiate itself, conservatives tilted hard, hard right on social politics (if not always policy), and brought the economic policies to an extreme that would have been nonsensical a generation earlier.
Most people who didn't spend the last two or three decades living off of returns on their investments, have been frustrated with the failed promises of neoliberalism, and it is losing traction with liberals; Or rather, [neo]liberals are losing traction with the electorate.
I don't think the claim that there is atleast one highest total tax collected point in between 0 and 100% tax is that wild? It aint that much more to it? (I agree with the rest of the point about missusing it)
You could argue that the model is too simple ofcourse. Or that 100% tax on certain things don't give 0 revenue and that 100% tax is not the roof. E.g. some people are paying to work at farms.
The response of tax revenue to tax rate changes might be discontinuous and highly dependent on the current tax rate and other temporal factors. Like, the optimal strategy for the next 5 years might be to increase tax for one year and then decrease it, whilst the optimal strategy for 10 years time is to do nothing at all. Imo this renders the idea of the Laffer curve to be pretty useless.
Thanks for this. The mention of compatibility between conservatism and neoliberalism is interesting. The UK Conservative party historically aligned with a more "mercantilist" economics. This sometimes stood in opposition to free market ideology; for example the Corn Laws divided the party, and there was strong support for tarrifs well into the 1900s. But Thatcher instituted a shift very similar to Reagan's, and by the 1990s everyone was a neoliberal.
Neoliberalism is an economic theory embraced by both parties (and globally really), and have been since the oil crisis during Carter. It can be confused with liberalism the political theory, but it's different. Each US political party has a slightly different flavor, but economically it's the same. It's good from a macroeconomic perspective and a strategic perspective, but eliminating trade barriers allows US companies to outsource labor to poorer countries at the expense of US workers for lower prices (in a nutshell). Think Apple in China, Tata, US manufacturing in Mexico, etc.
I assume neoliberal conservatives are the conservatives who embrace neoliberalism, but both parties have embraced it for generations. We seem to be rolling it back somewhat since the main strategic benefit (containing the Soviet Union) is no longer as relevant (until recently I suppose).
Even when Carter is identified during the correct time frame, it's always best to remember that the oil crisis and runway inflation that followed were the complete doing of Nixon and OPEC beforehand.
Actually in current hindsight it could most realistically be said, pointing to the most prominent national leadership involved, that such distorted economic policy arose "during" Al Saudi.
Is starting it without consent the same thing? When they realized I was doing it they were not happy but I kept it secret for about half the dev time.
In the end what triggered management was the word "refactor". Management has issues with anything that is associated with mistakes, so our Jira doesn't have "bug" tickets and teams that rollback releases have harder times scheduling subsequent releases and additional red tape to navigate.
I understand there will be teams that are just punching the clock who don't care about or learn from mistakes, but this doesn't feel like the norm in this industry to me. I suspect that the replaceable cog mentality of management brings some generalization about labor as being all highschool burger flippers regardless of the industry or product.
Regardless, knowing what spin will trigger management and avoiding it is better than doing it on the DL IMO. If management is aware but unclear on what the details are they will at least allocate time to your effort.
I've worked at companies after a leveraged buyout and it is the corporate equivalent of the third world. I hope the oligarchs enjoy their spoils while the money their printed on still has value.
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