Perceval

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Chap. XI, Part III, "Rent of Land: Conclusion"

Subtitle: "but the interest of those who live by profit has not the same connexion with the general interest of society"

> "His employers constitute the third order, that of those who live by profit. it is the stock that is employed for the sake of profit, which puts into motion the greater part of the useful labor of every society. The plans and projects of the employers of stock regulate and direct all the most important operations of labor, and profit is the end proposed by all those plans and projects. But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity, and fall with the declension, of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich, and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin...

> Their superiority over the country gentleman is, not so much in their knowledge of the public interest, as in their having a better knowledge of their own interest than he has of his. It is by this superior knowledge of their own interest that they have frequently imposed upon his generosity, and persuaded him to give up both his own interest and that of the public, from a very simple but honest conviction, that their interest, and not his, was the interest of the public. The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always in the interest of the dealers...

> "The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order or men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."

Before BLM, OWS was hamstrung by the introduction of the Progressive Stack, ensuring that they could not effectively organize or even remain coherent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_stack

Interesting that you begin your comment with Piketty and end with housing value. A Brookings study on Piketty's work indicates that most of the re-concentration of wealth that Piketty finds is actually driven by increases in housing prices: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/deciphering-the-fall-and-.... By contrast, non-housing capital income is on a secular decline since WWII.

I had a similar experience. My initial stipend in grad school was $13,500/yr. My first job after defending was a VAP position for $55,000, also in my early 30s. After a year of that, I jumped to an FFRDC for twice as much.

Rats and cockroaches also co-evolved with humans. Is that a partnership that evokes similar sentimental feelings for you?

Is it clear that they do have more problems? The U.S. Government blew up a majority of its initial rockets. U.S. private sector companies almost always have a failed first launch. SpaceX's Falcon 1 failed in 3 of its first 5 launches. Japan having a failed first flight is 100% what one would expect—it would be exceptional had it not failed.

You can't really test a rocket until you fly it. You can ground test subsystems and components all you want, but that's not a system-level test of a rocket. The only true system-level test of a rocket is to fly it. When you deal with volatile hypergolic substances subjected to extreme conditions all flowing through a complex system-of-systems that have never been through integrated testing together, you are going to have some spectacular failures. Doesn't matter how much money you have or how clever your engineers are or what a quality organization you've implemented.

Nothing out there from foreign competitors compares to the F-35. And keep in mind that the F-35 isn't nearly as good as the F-22, B-2, or B-21. You'll have to keep your eyes out for the forthcoming 6th Gen fighter (literally, because you really won't see that one on radar).

I once worked at the Pentagon, and my co-workers noted that I wasn't really a Pentagon employee until I could string together a sequence of no less than five acronyms back-to-back in a sentence and still have it make sense. My five were "JS J5 GCP VEO IPR."

It true that Astra took 7 tries to get to orbit, but they did so in record time from founding to achieving orbit.

* Astra - 5 years

* SpaceX - 7 years

* Firefly - 8 years

* RocketLab - 12 years

* Virgin Orbit - 13 years

ABL, Relativity, Blue Origin, Stoke - never made it to orbit

Compare the cost of SLS ($4.1 billion) and Vulcan ($100-200 million) to an Astra rocket ($4 million). If you spend 100-1000x more money, is it impressive to have better performance than a $4 million rocket?

The existing providers were NASA and United Launch Alliance, the latter of which is a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed. They merged their space launch businesses in 2006, because neither could individually sustain their launch services given 1) the expense of their systems, and 2) the low number of launches in the late-90s/early-00s. They were the sole provider to the USG from 2006-2015, only because SpaceX won its lawsuit against the Department of the Air Force in 2015, which had been blocking SpaceX from competing for DOD/NRO launches.

A good starting point would be Hans Morgenthau's Politics Among Nations. He was a German Jewish emigre to the United States, and it was with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation that his book was used to create International Relations departments within universities across the United States in the immediate post-WWII period. Prior to Morgenthau and the Rockefellers, international relations was not its own discipline distinct from history, philosophy, law, jurism, etc. Morgenthau's book was the standard textbook for international relations for several decades, and in it he tries to outline European realpolitik for his liberal American audience. His is still probably the most literate, sophisticated, and nuanced international relations introduction.

On the topic of a systemic drive to increase ones power at the expense of others, leading to escalatory and conflictual international dynamics, your go-to book is John Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. He is also in the realist school of thought like Morgenthau, although you'll find that his style of writing is much punchier and pugilistic than Morgenthau's.

On the attempt to build systemically de-escalatory effects at the international level, I would pick up a copy of G John Ikenberry's After Victory. He describes how victorious countries following major wars would create a new set of rules for the international system, and how at least some of those post-war regimes attempted to reduce the returns to power in order to increase the stability of the system and reduce perceptions of threat and insecurity by weaker states. Note that he worked in the State Department during Bush Sr administration and has that direct experience of attempting to ensure order and stability following the end of the Cold War.

If you want to read case studies in escalation toward a war that no single actor actually wanted, I recommend Stephen Van Evera's Causes of War with a focus on his study of WWI. It goes well paired with Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August.

There was a lot of pro-Ron Paul content on reddit early on. Then there was a large and very active Donald Trump subreddit that reddit outright banned.

I think one of the key reasons subreddits lean left is the very active use of banning. Despite having a doctorate in political science, I was banned from /r/scotus because at least one mod didn't like my politics. During one discussion in /r/AskSocialScience, I had my flair stripped from me by the mods because they didn't like my answers, even though I was the only person in the conversation citing sources.

I moderate a large subreddit myself (300k+ subs) and I am well aware of how important the banhammer is to keep discussions civil, trolls out, and brigading held at bay. But for most subreddits that even remotely touch politics, bans really only seem to skew one way, ensuring that non-liberal viewpoints are scarce at best.

Can't wait for the next version of Clippy that polices whatever you're writing to make sure you capitalize 'Black' but not 'white,' and use only non-gendered xe/xir pronouns, and have footnotes/endnotes that cite an equal number of female-authored and male-authored papers.

The "Great Awokening" began circa 2012:

* https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/americas-wh...

* https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2304/2304.01596.pdf

* https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18259865/great-awokening-white...

* https://unherd.com/newsroom/where-did-the-great-awokening-co...

Locate and arrest individuals who have broken the laws that ICE is charged with enforcing?

Apple doesn't need to buy a weather app on the iPhone (when it offers its own pre-installed weather app anyway) in order to get your location. Apple can get your location directly from the iPhone itself.

There are huge lobbies supporting seasonal and temporary worker visas.

For one area you mention – farming – there is a specific H-2A seasonal worker visa, and industrial agriculture is a huge lobby.

Hotels, resorts, and other venues use the H-2B non-agricultural temporary worker visas. For example, Trump's properties (in)famously use them to staff up during busy seasons. These companies are also substantial lobbies in favor of guest worker visas.

But these are all temporary work visas, not visas allowing for permanent work and residence in the United States. So they would not cover permanent economic migrants who end up in the restaurant sector or in janitorial work.

Reminds me a bit of Heinlein's Time Enough for Love

Maybe it was drawing from the couple thousand North African troops that fought for the Wehrmacht: https://allthatsinteresting.com/free-arabian-legion

AI stands for Artificial Ideology

The media have done a number of stories, analyses, and editorials noting that white nationalist/white supremacy groups appear to be more diverse than one would otherwise expect:

* https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/why-...

* https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/minorities-...

* https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/6/2/why-white-suprem...

* https://www.voanews.com/a/why-some-nonwhite-americans-espous...

* https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/05/08/texas-sho...

* https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-08-20/recall-c...

Are these "big strategic changes" or are they changes that have been obviously needed for a while and made quickly in order to stop the bleeding?

Notepad/TextEdit are my go-to HTML/CSS/Javascript/PHP editors.

When I got more serious at one point in my life I used BBEdit.

I found Firefox's development tools very useful as well.

> Beware Marxist terms, but then he kinda coined the "capitalism" term too!

The term "capitalism" (kapitalismus) does not appear even once in the entire corpus of Marx's writings.

'Kapitalismus' first appeared as a term arrayed against socialism in Werner Sombart's 1902 book Der moderne Kapitalismus. It was only after this book that the term capitalism was incorporated bit-by-bit into Marxist theorizing.

'Capitalism' didn't appear in political science dictionaries/glossaries until after World War I, and didn't appear in the Encyclopedia Britannica until 1926.

Global sperm counts are also dropping, so eventually the physical ability to reproduce might be affected: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/human-sperm-counts...

The Early Medieval period, the immediate post-collapse centuries, are also referred to as the Dark Ages, distinct from the High Medieval Period and Renaissance Period.

He traveled to a foreign country and joined a militia to put his life on the line fighting fascism. Does that demonstrate more or less skin in the game against fascism than Stalinism?

Another recent review: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/01/15/the-rebels-cli...

This is precisely the category error the author is making: because the Middle Ages were an era of epic poetry, therefore all the descendant institutions from the Middle Ages belong to the methods/standards of epic poetry. It's nonsense on stilts.

Forcing Pindar's odes, Homer's epics, Njal's Saga, Dede Korkut, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Arthurian legends to follow the rules of the scientific method, and citation, and falsifiability, and judging them as stylistically and culturally deficient because they didn't sufficiently cite their influences would be bonkers. They would be ruined as pieces of art.

The reverse—allowing an R1 university to produce scientific knowledge using the rules of High Middle Ages poetry—is similarly ludicrous and ruinous.