bleepblorp

The other way of looking at things is that, prior to neoliberalism, one full-time middle class income could pay for a house and support a family of four.

After neoliberalism, getting a house and two kids takes two working adults, and often jobs that involve much more than 40 hours a week. The situation for millennials and younger is even worse, as most of them have been frozen out of the housing market in regions where there are good jobs.

We all have cell phones now, but are we really better off if we (collectively) have so little time outside of work that we (collectively) don't get to see our kids grow up anymore, or if we can't afford houses anymore?

The other, other, thing to look at is that household wages have stagnated since the 1980s in comparison to GDP (see eg: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=bOfK) while unavoidable costs (e.g. housing, education, healthcare, communications) have exploded. There are lots more fancy toys available now than in the 1980s, but the median person has a smaller percentage of discretionary income to spend on them. I'm not convinced that taking away choice is a net positive.

2020 is far, far worse than 1992 was.

1992 didn't have former White House officials calling for current officials to be beheaded for disloyalty.

Unlike the ACA under Obama, the Republican response to Clinton's dead-on-arrival healthcare plan didn't involve establishment GOP figures calling for 'a second amendment solution.'

The current wave of senior GOP figures disputing the legitimacy of the election -- to the point of looking for ways for pro-Biden states with Republican state governments to dismiss the results and send pro-Trump electors to the electoral college -- is also unprecedented in modern history.

America is in dangerous territory and it is much worse than it was in the 1990s.

Direct link for the curious: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/can-his...

I don't agree with Turchin's thesis that the US is in trouble because it's producing too many elites who don't have places in upper society. If anything, America's elite problem is under-competition rather than over-competition.

American elites don't compete with each other in any meaningful way; they conspire with each other to exploit the public. Notice that nominally opposing businesses both funded California prop 22 to entrench the right of these elites to under-pay their workers. This kind of elite collusion is endemic across American society.

The reason American society is in danger is that decades of elite collusion, combined with the intentional use of cultural wedge issues as electoral levers, have left many Americans economically vulnerable and has misdirected their anger at minorities rather than at the people who have picked their pockets clean.

Vulnerable and angry people are prime targets for demagogues, and that's how the US wound up with Trump.

The evolution of American social divides into issues of morality (see eg: https://imgur.com/a2dTuWZ , or https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/reaching-out-to-trump-voters-... ) in recent years has likely damaged American society irrecoverably. People who have diametrically opposed moral worldviews can't work together.

I think of what happened to much of the anglosphere (including the US) after 1970s as a reversion to the historical mean.

The economic and social investment that went into the WWII war-effort and the postwar period created a bubble of prosperity that produced real improvements for pretty much everyone from 1945 to the 1970s. Unfortunately, this level of investment has not been sustained. Now the investment bubble is over, we're reverting to the kind of nasty, brutish, and uncertain life that has been the normal state of affairs for much of history.

The rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s (under Reagan in the US; Thatcher in the UK; Mulroney in Canada; etc) and the disinvestment that followed made the stagnation in living standards--and increasing socioeconomic insecurity--for the median person inevitable.

I don't see a way to turn things around, as the social disinvestment of the 1980s has eroded social ties to the point that no one is willing to pay for the kind of collective projects (infrastructure, education, a public commons) that would improve conditions for the median person. Far too many people find it comforting to blame the other for a declining society rather than understand that societal-level problems require societal-level solutions.

I've noticed that contemporary tech people (or at least the richer ones) have a cultural tick that leads them to deny or minimize the importance of real problems that don't involve shiny new technology. By way of examples:

Microsoft destroying YouTube-DL: Problem.

Amazon exploiting its non-tech workforce: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Bitcoin's energy use: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Macs not running third party code: Problem.

Nuclear war: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Global climate change: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Future risk of AI paperclip maximizers: Problem.

Current danger of businesses operating as human-powered paperclip mazimixers: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Etc.

Frankly, I think open source needs to embrace the idea of 'no commercial use' as a viable license choice.

I'm not keen on the idea of a million/billion/billion+ dollar company taking code I've written for my own enjoyment and using it to disproportionately enrich the company's shareholders or abuse its customers by denying them control over their devices.

Code that can be used in closed devices shouldn't be available for the manufacturers of closed devices to use.

> Though long-term I think this is a bit silly in the first place considering approximately everyone is walking around with computers in their pockets that would be perfectly capable of letting you confirm transaction amounts on a display you trust.

This is how China's new-generation payment systems work.

I realize this will sound snarky and/or overly aggressive. However, I'm being entirely serious and can't quickly come up with a better way to phrase this:

How do people with functioning moral compasses come together with the kind of people who see pictures of children in cages and say "America, fuck yeah?"

How do people who want some form of democratic government come together with the kind of people who think it's entirely right and proper for a president to do his best to prevent his political opponents from voting -- by disrupting the postal service, by soliciting the help of multiple hostile foreign governments to smear his opponent, calling for his opponents to be imprisoned without charge, and by attempting to halt vote counting in the courts?

How do people with any kind of respect for the value of human life watch video of the George Floyd killing and come together with the kind of people who watch the video and argue that the police did nothing wrong?

I don't think these divides can be healed. These issues are not matters, like arguments over the size of government, where compromise is both possible and mutually beneficial. Instead, they are moral red lines about which compromise is neither possible or desirable. What the 70-odd million who voted from Trump want out of their country isn't compatible with the basic moral outlook of the 75-odd million people who voted against him.

To take an extreme example, if a bunch of Nazis want to kill 10 million people, 'compromising' by agreeing to let them kill only 5 million people isn't acceptable -- and yet, this is exactly the kind of moral compromise (truly in the other sense of the word) that would be involved in bringing together Trumpist and anti-Trumpist factions.

In addition to the moral divide, there is a reality/gullibility divide between the Trumpist and anti-Trumpist factions. Trumpists believe an awful lot of stuff that is factually untrue. They reject global warming and dismiss the scientific evidence as the product of a Chinese hoax to destroy America. 56% of Republicans now believe in Qanon (an ideological conspiracy theory born out of the argument that Democrats eat babies) to some extent[0]. The overwhelming majority of Trumpists get their news from Fox, a media outlet which spreads more misleading information than accurate information.[1] How does anyone with a commitment to respecting consensus reality reach people who have chosen to live in comforting fantasyland rather than cope with the world as it is?

I don't see any way for the US to get out of this mess without breaking up into multiple countries.

And, to the usual 'downvote to -1' crowd: what part of this analysis is wrong?

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-electio...

[1] https://www.politicususa.com/2015/02/06/fact-checker-finds-6...

> Could this be a situation where politicians have faulty data and use that to guide how they act?

I'm not aware of any data on this specifically with regard to drug control policy, but there is research from 2013 which reveals that American politicians vastly overestimate how conservative American voters are on multiple key issues.

See e.g.:

Primary source: https://www.vanderbilt.edu/csdi/miller-stokes/08_MillerStoke...

Popular media reporting: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/11/study-congress-overe...

Further analysis: https://theprogressivecynic.com/2014/05/02/is-the-usa-center...

It's amazing how many people came out to dispute this point -- often in the most 'I am very smrt' way possible.

Ammonia concentrated for use as fuel (or other industrial processes) is not the same thing as window cleaner, just as hydrogen peroxide concentrated for use as rocket fuel is far, far more dangerous than the hydrogen peroxide diluted for use in first aid kits.

Do you have any substantive criticisms of my premise that the US is beset by irreconcilable differences of in moral worldviews?

Further, not that I watch CNN, but why should anyone who chooses to consume cable news choose not to get their news from the network with the highest rating for factual accuracy[0]?

[0] https://www.politifact.com/article/2015/jan/29/punditfact-ch...

I've seen conflicting reports about this but I'm not going to argue the point. I can certainly see why 20ft would be a problem.

It seems to me the counting authority should have set up some 4K CCTV gear, and/or 4K webcams on an internal network, for the duration. The pandemic gave them ample warning that physical distancing measures would be required.

The earlier post's premise--as pushed by Trump over Twitter--that Republican poll watchers were specifically targeted for exclusion, however, is factually wrong.

> Russian election interference was investigated by Trump's own Justice Department. They didn't find any.

The DoJ very much found signs of Russian election interference. They just couldn't prove that the Trump campaign actively conspired with Russia.

The Republican party was under a consent decree to prohibit it from attempting to prevent minorities from voting, but once enough Republican justices were installed on the supreme court the consent decree was terminated. The court also voided the most effective parts of the voting rights act, which further allowed the GOP to suppress voter turnout among demographics likely to vote Democratic.

The preponderance of partisan, Republican, judges on the supreme court is very much part of the problem.

At least read the Wikpiedia summary of the Mueller Report[0] if you don't have the time to read the whole document.

The 'Russia hoax' produced multiple criminal charges, both of Russians for interfering in the 2016 election, and of several Americans for obstructing the DoJ's attempts to investigate the possibility of people in the Trump orbit conspiring with the Russian government.

It has been factually established that Russia interfered with the 2016 election. The only question -- which cannot be answered because people in the Trump orbit lied to investigators and concealed evidence -- is whether the Trump campaign actively conspired with Russian entities beyond Trump openly asking for their help to access H. Clinton's 'emails.'

Take a step back, take a deep breath, and remember that some issues are a lot clearer than intentionally obfuscatory Republican narratives make them out to be.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_report

> Philadelphia successfully removed GOP observers from the tabulations rooms

Don't repeat disinformation. This never happened.

Poll watchers were required to stand 10 feet away to protect workers from COVID-19. The court ruling required that they be allowed to stand 6 feet away.

Faith is eroding in the American electoral process because the Republican party has been working very hard both to undermine the process and to spread propaganda to the effect that the process is untrustworthy.

People could have more faith in the process without more legal cases like Florida 2000 (which kept Gore out of the White House despite him winning the vote in Florida), the Brooks Brothers Riot[0] and its 2020 replicas, the 2019 Georgia governors race (where the Republican candidate was also the secretary of state responsible for counting the votes; needless to say, there were 'irregularities.'), pervasive efforts to prevent demographics that historically do not vote Republican from voting[1], manipulation of the postal service to disenfranchise likely Biden voters[2], the continuing myth of 'voter fraud' that the GOP spreads[3] to justify disenfranchisement, and the constant drumbeat of 'it's rigged if I don't win' emerging from Trump's Twitter account and replicated by Facebook and other right-wing media outlets.

There's no clear way to restore faith in the electoral process without removing disdain for democracy from the Republican Party's DNA.

[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/what-is-the-brooks-b...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/11/05/usps-late...

[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/24/fbi-has-not-seen-evidence-of...

Quoting Martin Gurri as quoted in the parent post, NOT the words of wahern in parent post itself:

> Today the big issue is… what? Wearing MAGA hats? Racism certainly isn’t a divisive issue. Everybody’s against it.

In light of the past months of Black Lives Matter protests, counter-protests by white supremacists (who often enjoyed the support of law enforcement), and overt race baiting by Trump and his surrogates, claiming that racism isn't a divisive issue in American society is tone deaf at best.

The overwhelming majority of Americans who experience medical bankruptcy have health insurance.

The issue US left-leaning people have with voter ID laws is threefold: there's no documented problem with voter fraud that needs to be fixed through ID requirements, two, ID requirements are often imposed with the explicit intention of reducing voter turnout among the poor, and three, that there is allegedly a large swath of Americans who don't have valid identification and can't get it easily.

Realize that in some states, the offices which produce identity documents for people who don't drive might only be open twelve days a year and are located in areas that are not accessible by public transit. For people at the bottom of the American income inequality pyramid, getting documentation might be something they can't afford, in terms of the time off work, taxi fares, and the costs of possible legal assistance.

Seems to me the good faith solution is just to make sure everyone can get identification easily. However, the foundational issue is that voter ID requirements, combined with hard-to-get documentation, is a bad faith policy intended to keep poorer people from voting. Fix the 'bad faith' problem and everything else is trivial to put into place.

This would never work in America because Republican supporters would do their absolute best to disrupt the count by intimidating poll workers. It happened in 2000[0] and it's happening again now[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot

[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/what-is-the-brooks-b...

Much of American physical and civic infrastructure is like that of a 3rd world country.

Most of the cases of extremely disrupted voting (such as 12 hour lines, mysteriously 'broken' voting machines in urban areas, or the 300,000 mail-in ballots that the postal system refused to deliver) are, however, intentional policies intended to reduce the turnout of Democratic voters. The US has a very long history of making it as hard as possible for non-conservatives to vote[0]; these irregularities are just the modern descendants of poll taxes and the Jim Crow laws.

Politically, the US has much more in common with Central/South America, and contemporary Poland under Law and Justice, than it does with places like Spain or Germany.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...

Extensive ID requirements and indelible dyes are measures to minimize voter fraud, such as voting by ineligible persons or eligible persons voting more than once. Voter fraud is nearly non-existent in the United States.[0]

The overwhelming problem with American elections is electoral fraud, a term which encompasses such things as preventing eligible voters from voting, not counting legitimate ballots, voter intimidation, and jerrymandering. These problems cannot be fixed through measures intended to minimize voter fraud as they are the result of the state, and/or parties, abusing the democratic process rather than the citizen abusing it.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/24/fbi-has-not-seen-evidence-of...

The importance of representative sampling is taught in undergraduate statistics courses.

Do you have any reason to believe that pollsters and other statisticians are so ignorant of their own field not to understand this?

Yes, most other democratic countries do.

American-style slow results have more in common with the kinds of places that need time to "massage" the results than with the electoral processes in most democracies.

There are two possible explanations for why US polling stopped tracking US election results in 2004 and now underestimates conservative vote margins.

Either conservatives have started lying to pollsters about their voting intentions or conservative officials started manipulating the vote totals in their favor.

Take your pick as to which possible explanation is most palatable and/or most probable.

What happens if the SIM is damaged, lost, or stolen?

People who live outside of a system but are heavily exposed to it can often develop insights that those who are immersed will overlook.

Case in point: see this video of foreign journalists expressing their views of American culture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcTXPT5LrL8

I've been using paid Zoho mail for about eight months and have very few complaints.

I haven't had any problems with outbound deliverability. However, their inbound post-delivery spam controls are overzealous and categorize almost all mail from new correspondents as spam.

The only major problem with Zoho is that they host mail inside US jurisdiction so it's vulnerable to NSA abuses.

Mailbox.org (based in Germany) is a possible alternative for people who want/need to keep their data further away from American commercial espionage operations.

Good grief.

Parts of Eastern Europe have had an industrial base since the 1800s. Indeed, the Czechs have been making cars since 1905. Of course Eastern Europe trains qualified construction workers.