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Democratic socialists largely want a saner version of a market economy, where power resides with labor and government aggressively combats capital's worst tendencies, but they aren't calling for old-style command economies like the USSR, Communist China, or Castro's Cuba.

AOC is a fantastically talented politician with a lot of good ideas, but I think she needs to replace the word socialism with something that has less baggage.

This is the general disadvantage socialism has relative to capitalism in terms of appealing to others. Socialism and communism have more than a hundred years of history, including a lot of mistakes we've had to learn from. Capitalism has no memory and therefore on its own terms has no history.

We need to get better at getting our actual message out there. The recent victory is a start, but if it were down to ideas rather than personality politics (and, you know, other stuff the other side uses) we'd be up by 20 points in every state.

Legal fees are a rounding error to these companies. It's all about the "power move". They don't want to work with people who'll stand up for themselves over "a measly" $50K.

Comparing yourself against others is a loser's game. If the person is better, you lose. If the person comes out worse, you're taking a dip by comparing yourself at all to that person, so you still lose.

If "blue state" workers think their red-state brethren are incorrigible racist assholes, and "red state" working people think the blue states are full of virtue-signaling effete hypocrites... then capital wins because, even though 75% of the American public likes socialist economic ideas (when stated plainly and without a "socialist" label) they are all fighting each other over unrelated stuff, like whether J.K. Rowling's latest misinformed comment means we should stop reading her.

Then there are the ones who spend years studying rhetoric and linguistics, have worlds and characters they've been building for years, and want to write "Big" novels that often hit 200,000 words or more and can't really be compressed. They're as hard working as the prolific crowd, but from the outside it looks like they're dilly-dallying. When they finally publish, they're putting forward the best 200K words out of 2M... which makes a distinction that a few people care about although, to be honest, most readers don't. It's not an economical way to write. You do it because you're chasing some kind of deified Relevance that you'll never fully know if you've achieved because the real test is whether you're remembered 100 years after you die.

I'm immensely curious to see if He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named gets his book out, just to watch the YCs squirm. Rumor through mutual acquaintances is late 2021, but having never met this person, what do I know.

A profit is gain realized by buying things, recombining them using innovation, and selling at a favorable price. A true profit is something you make, again and again, and with diminishing returns because prices move and the gap closes, as with arbitrages. Rents, which are more reliable, are payments you collect because you own things. (You may use those things, or you may, using the more common sense of the word, rent those things out.)

Most "profits" are actually just rents. Rents extracted because the company owns real estate, rents extracted because of brand presence, interest (which is a rent on money) through financing programs, rents extracted because workers' need for daily survival has them systematically underpricing their labor, and rents on political capital (favorable regulatory environment).

Getting paid because you have a great idea is intermittent, and usually requires taking on a lot of risk, and risk is something established companies hate. Getting paid because you own something is easy-as-shit and forever reliable. Where does the car industry make the bulk of its gains? Not on selling the cars, but in financing. It's an evergreen business, so long as there is capitalism-- there will always be people who need money they don't have, and it will always be an easy business to collect the vig.

Regular businesses eventually stop innovating-- they have plenty of smart people, but the bosses don't want to take risks because they're busy collecting personal rents by holding management positions, and obviously don't want to lose that-- and their "profits" converge to the rent roll on the resources they own. That's just how it works. Average equals mediocre, the latter used non-pejoratively.

That said, it's not sexy to imagine that one is investing into companies that have become mere utilities, that will continue to collect rents on the resources they own (of which a person can buy a tiny fractional share of the ownership) but not really do anything interesting.

These ultra-capitalist non-profits (non-profits-for-now) create the illusion that they're something different... that they're "rocket ship" companies run by people with supernatural talent and "vision", that they aren't rent-seekers using capital's native advantage over labor for reliable but unpulchritudinous gains... which is what all large companies are... but, instead, a kind of "new company" that is going to innovate moonshots and synergize us up a new century of prosperity, freedom, and magical puppies that never poop. Smart investors recognize that all of that is bullshit, and that these tech unicorns are just as exploitative as traditional companies (and, in fact, probably more so) but they also realize that dumber investors get the warm fuzzies and that there is therefore a premium.

The problem with communism is that it has too much history. It has a record, some of which is ugly, some of which is littered by some really awful people who claimed (and claim) to be "communists".

The problem with capitalism is that it has no history, no memory. It doesn't get better, and it doesn't learn. It's the same shit today that it was in the time of the Pinkertons. Government did get better at regulating it, but in the past 40 years it has gotten worse at doing so.

Plenty of charismatic people are socially inept, charmless, and unpleasant in close interpersonal relationships, but this doesn't make them any less charismatic on a stage. They often have no genuine friends, but tens or hundreds or thousands of people who will put aside their own concerns to do things for the charismatic individual.

Charisma is a pattern by which other people, for reasons that are hard to parse, and through mechanisms that are invisible, do things for the charismatic person. A charismatic person is threatening because others will kill for him, and he's a desirable benefactor because others will commit resources to his causes, but it seems to be a self-perpetuating phenomenon that snowballs and can carry on for most of a lifetime. It does seem to collapse in old age. This is why charismatic but hideous people like Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump, and Bill Cosby meet such ignominious ends. They're invincible, until they're not.

There are skills that enhance a person's charisma. You can learn rhetoric, public speaking, and the norms of social interaction. But that's all they are: skills. Nothing can guarantee charisma. Nothing can guarantee that you'll get that core set of people to follow you that will produce a snowball effect. On that, it seems to be pretty random who wins and who doesn't.

Charisma exists because people want to be the charismatic person. They want to be someone who can wave a hand and bring ruin to their enemies. What they don't realize is that by following the charismatic, they're defeating their own purpose. It is not traits of the charismatic that generate this feedback loop. It is mostly just luck. That said, the way to improve one's odds to find people who are looking for a charismatic to follow, which means finding new territory, rather than hanging around an existing charismatic in a space where such people are already spoken-for.

Corporate capitalism is theft, but that doesn't mean all socialists are good or that no socialists are thieves.

COVID-19 proved corporate capitalism invalid. I would have rather seen socialism succeed than capitalism fail and certain I wish we hadn't had to see over a million people die because of our economic system, but nevertheless, this is an opportunity for the left. Universal basic income is now a mainstream position. Trump, who would have probably be winning if COVID-19 hadn't happened, is now the underdog.

I feel a lot of sympathy for people who are, for the first time in their life, experiencing mental distress, serious ill-health, and disability. I don't mean to understate that. I'm not happy that COVID-19 happened, and I don't think anyone is. For me, though, the uncertainty has kept me going. There's a lot to be afraid of, but there's also cause for hope. It is now not merely a growing sentiment but common knowledge that our economic elite must be overthrown, no matter the cost.

I buy it, but that sucks. I know my view is idiosyncratic, but I view making money like a biological process. Most things have to do it if they want to survive, but it doesn't deserve to be the thing that matters. The Silicon Valley focus on explosive growth, as opposed to healthy and reasonable long-term growth, is bad for the world.

I wonder if they are adequately assessing the risk of this decision model. People get deeply emotionally attached to media, and it's a strong negative when a series you love is cancelled, so this could negatively affect their brand over time. And that's not something which is so easy to design KPI's around as new subscriber numbers.

Right. This is especially true of series with defined story arcs. A sitcom can be ended at any time, but if Breaking Bad had ended at Season 4, it would have pissed off everyone.

It started with the chain bookstores. Used to be, getting in was the hard part, but once a writer got published, he stayed published. His editor would keep supporting his books until he broke out. Chain bookstores wrecked this. They'd pull an author's numbers, see that the first book was a flop, and pass on the second. They also introduced the 8-week rotation, which meant that reader word of mouth (a slower process) got disenfranchised, forcing publishers to pick winners (lead titles) and losers before the books were even launched.

This changed the incentive structure. Instead of having to get one person, who knew literature, to believe in his work, an author has to convince a whole committee of people. If the editor can't sell the book to the money people, it gets no marketing or publicity and it dies.

Then there are the literary agents, who don't even read 99 percent of the work sent to them. That's done by unpaid college-age interns. So, instead of writing a book readers will love, your focus becomes writing a book that people will think their bosses like. It's a totally different game.

I'm not surprised this is happening to Netflix. We tend to have a pro-data bias in technology. We don't realize that when the money people get their hands on data, that unless we are extremely editorial in the context in which they interpret and use that data, it's going to be a disaster. They don't have altruistic motives and they don't work nearly as hard as we do to understand complexity-- it's best to think of them as a different species.

They get more tolerable over time. Remember that actual health problems almost always develop over time. Even COVID takes days to kill you. At 40, you have a low likelihood of sudden cardiac death. It can happen, of course, but as long as you work out and eat well, you're doing what you can. So, if you feel like hell for 5 minutes, with distinct waves, it's probably a panic attack.

The tingling symptoms you get are probably the result of hyperventilating. Slowing down your breathing can help. To an extent, though, these things just have to be ridden out.

Cold water helps a lot. Go to the sink and splash water on your face. Optimal temperature seems to be 20 C (68 F). That'll help lower your heart rate. Slow your breathing to match.

Also, as someone with panic attacks, I know that during the first ones, I feared the shame and embarrassment that would accrue to sudden collapse at a young age (I was 24). Thing is, no one's going to think it's your fault. If you have a random-ass heart attack at 24 (or 40), it's not something you did and you shouldn't feel bad about yourself. You can still die-- life is inherently risky-- but no one's going to think bad of you for being unlucky, and you shouldn't think bad of yourself (in that extremely low-probability counterfactual) either.

Death: either there's an afterlife or there isn't. If there is one, it'll be interesting to see what's on the other side of this whole thing. If there's no afterlife, you won't exist to be disappointed. Either way, not worth dread. People die, but no one is dead. If those who have left us still exist, they probably see themselves as more alive than they were when down here; and if they don't exist, then it is not accurate to say they are dead so much as they just aren't.

Plenty of Buddhists meditate on their own death. It helps to process the inevitable; to dedicate 10 or 20 minutes once in a while to the acknowledgement of mortality. Don't do this during a panic attack because you can't really "meditate" while in one.

Music often helps. Smells can help, as long as you don't develop that meta-level anxiety.

There's also no shame in seeking therapy and medication. You said 20 attacks since April-- that's about 1 per week. If that's all you have, taking a benzo, typically at a low starting dose, as-needed, isn't going to make you an addict. You don't want to be taking those things every day though.

Finally, panic attacks do end. They are the ultimate troll, and they can throw all sorts of weird-ass symptoms (including phantom smells) but they don't last forever. Each wave, in my experience, is about 90 seconds (90 horrible seconds). Awareness, crescendo, semi-relief, return to merely moderate anxiety. The interval of vulnerability (in which these waves are prominent in my mind) is 15–60 minutes, 90 minutes on the outside.

As I get older, the attacks themselves get a lot milder. That said, the physical recovery is more of an issue. Even a mild attack leaves me feeling like I overdid it at the gym. But I'll take that over the all-out psychic horror I experienced in many of my first ~50 panic attacks.

Good luck! I'm sorry to hear that you're going through this.

Sweden is a bit of an outlier. They're a socialist country (by 2020 standards) that screwed up for non-economic reasons. They just got it wrong.

What most people who are middle-class or higher don't understand is hustle. People fetishize that word in Silicon Valley, but hustle is the principle of needing money to live and doing whatever it takes to get it. It isn't pretty, but it's how the other half lives. These people don't have savings because their wages are too low, so when they have an unexpected expense, it fucks them up. Hustle is: Pawning possessions. Odd jobs. Short cons. Gig labor. Petty crime. Panhandling. Whatever it takes, in truth. These people aren't morally worse than us middle-class salarymen and -women. They just have shittier options.

Hustle is a force that governments can't really control (unless they go hard core, like China) because these people are usually quite good at evading authorities. Hustle keeps afloat the people the system has failed. It keeps them from dying. It also, in a pandemic, spreads disease. It's why compliance has been so atrocious in the US and UK and Peru.

Do you need to "lock down" sufficient to get R below 1? Unless you want a humanitarian catastrophe, the answer is yes. Unfortunately, if your economic system runs on the "don't work, don't eat" model, you are going to see so much hustle (noncompliance, to use a more distant bourgeois word) that even your most ardent efforts are likely to have only moderate results. That doesn't mean they aren't working, and it doesn't mean you don't need them. It's still better to have R at 1.1 than at 2.5. But the fact is that an economic system like US-style extreme capitalism isn't built to handle anything out-of-context like a pandemic.

There is no "talent shortage". There are a lot of whiny, cheapskate employers trying to scam the government, or to convince programmers that they have it "so good right now" so they aren't able to see the exploitative nature of capitalism.

Programmer salaries were amazing in the 1980s and '90s, if you were any good. The numbers were the same as now, but adjusted for inflation, $300-500k (in today's dollars) wasn't unusual... not for middle management or PM bullshitters but actual, honest-to-God, knew-what-they-were-doing programmers. You could actually get rich by working. Today, your only shot at reaching that comp level is playing politics and climbing a management ladder, or a "technical ladder" that is calibrated to be approximately 50 times as hard as the management one to create the impression that all these MBA-toting Directors and VPs are actually good at something.

Also, recruiters have existed forever and most of them are optimizing for churn, but if you think that you can hire "an agent" as a programmer and not be laughed out of the interview... sorry. They'll say "It was great to meet you" and then hire an "unagented" H1-B.

I have a lot of authors in my social circle. It's true. I don't think they're usually as destructive as Steinbeck was to his family, but it's a rough road. They experience everything at high intensity-- you have to, to be able to write compelling fiction. Getting the accolades and money is about your only shot at making that hypersensitive existence "worth it", so to speak.

Negative reviews hit these people harder than you'd expect, it's true. If the reviewer's right, then there's cause for regret. If the reviewer's wrong, it means he didn't see the work as worth taking seriously. If you're not sure, then you start to question whether you know anything about your own writing. You can end up giving far too much rent-free mental real estate to someone who got bored on page 27 and wrote a shitty DNF review. And you can't respond, either; authors who respond to reviews (positive or negative) in the public end up regretting it. There's just no good that comes out of it.

Most of the authors I know end up envying the more visual artists, who can display their talents more easily. A painting is either ugly or beautiful and it's visible within a few seconds, even though it may take longer to pick up the subtleties. With a novel, you have to convince people to put hours of time into reading something they might end up hating. In traditional publishing, even getting read by someone of any importance at all takes monumental effort (that has very little to do with actual writing).

If I were to live in 1970, either in the US or the USSR, I would have picked the US, no contest. Back then, capitalism actually worked. If you wanted a job, you looked a CEO up in the phone book, called him, and got one. You'd literally get every promotion if you worked two honest hours per day. It ain't like that anymore.

In 2020, capitalism sucks. There are basically no opportunities unless you inherit the connections. (I anticipate downvotes from 20-year-olds who've just read Ayn Rand and think her writing reflects how the world really works.) Would communism have degraded just as fast? It's hard to say. I doubt it, but we'll never know, since we destroyed it.

Don't get me wrong. There was a lot wrong with the USSR, especially under Stalin. And since they didn't have a tradition of democracy and free speech in Russia, it wasn't a good place for dissidents. For most people, though, they did a much better job of lining people up with positions and careers suiting their wants and talents than our "work for rich people or you starve" system does.

Capitalism is a system that runs on human misery, led by a class of people who are completely unaccountable to anyone but themselves, who therefore have no incentive to make things decent for the workers.

Five is still ridiculous, though. There's so much waste in the system these days; the world would run fine on a three-day week.

It's time for working people to get fighting again.

The BP logo is a green-yellow sun; it's happy, because it's capitalism-- shiny and happy on the surface, and please don't read the fine print-- whereas most nuclear projects require government involvement, and government doesn't invest money into advertising or branding, preferring quiet competence (when you hear a lot about your government, that's usually because someone screwed up). So, people have a relative over-focus on the problems with nuclear power (which are serious, and need to be addressed) compared to other sources of energy.