I'd like to point out that the South was only a fan of States Rights exactly insofar as they let them do slavery. The millisecond it came to forcing Northern states to return escaped slaves, they suddenly weren't the same principled supporters of devolving and federating power. Funny how that works.
And just in case it wasn't clear enough already: one of the first acts of the Confederacy was to draft a provisional constitution which explicitly authorized slavery, and which prohibited either Congress or any state from passing laws to the contrary.
Also, there is a massive conflict of interest associated with trusting the opinions of companies actively engaged in labor and environmental arbitrage. Opinions of politicians and think-tanks downstream of them in terms of funding, too. Even if those opinions are legitimately more educated and better reasoned, they are on the opposite side of the bargaining table from most people and paying attention to them alone is "who needs defense attorneys when we have prosecutors" level of madness.
If anyone is looking for an expert opinion that breaks with the "free trade is good for everyone all of the time lah dee dah" consensus, Trade Wars are Class Wars by Klein & Pettis is a good read.
It is the CPU-Intensive Workload Results; which compares Python versions and notes "Python 3.11 consistently outperformed newer versions across all memory configurations. It was 9-15% faster than Python 3.12, 3.13, and 3.14. This surprised me"
The most obvious conclusion is the benchmark is simply flawed in some way; if this result is real, then it says something about how AWS compiled OpenSSL it says absolutely nothing about the speed of Python versions.
1000%. The good solution is Georgism (perhaps with rolling leases, which are hard to manipulate, rather than LVT, which is easy to manipulate) but obviously everyone who bought into the ponzi will fight you tooth and nail so probably the best we can hope for is to slap the Nth bandaid on the problem with some NIMBY busting.
I don't know the history. That would be the source of my discontent. Every time things like this come up, the hyperfocus on Western experience erases whatever insight could have been gained by looking at the topic in its totality. My guess is that whatever dynamic the history of the printing press in the East might have lent to this conversation wasn't even considered until I brought it up. That was my contribution.
You should look in a mirror (and proofread). Everything you're accusing me of applies to you. It's an overwrought reaction which indicates that I hit a nerve. You'd better soothe that ego bruise with a bit of curiosity, than with the tantrum you've been throwing.
You've got it flipped. He was working from a false premise; his conclusions were a net negative to the conversation. I brought it back to zero by pointing out the flaw. And now you want to paint me as the bad guy, probably because I dashed the egotism at the core of his mistake, which you drew some amount of esteem from. The same deal as the people who persecuted Galileo for upending the geocentric model of the universe. Just because he couldn't extrapolate all of the ramifications of a heliocentric model doesn't mean he "wasn't contributing" by pointing out its significance.
But I suppose this analogy reveals that your tack is fundamentally European. So, at least you're consistent. What would be better is if you'd have some humility. Say it with me now: "We forgot to consider prior art because it originated from a part of the world that we tend to fail to acknowledge. This failure adulterated our analysis with an inferior premise. Thank you for pointing this out. We will now make a more appropriate analysis using research on the subject that was previously in our blindspot."
> that's a very strong statement that requires some refinement
Yes, but much of that refinement would be the gritty details of pushing back on awful self-serving definitions that were carefully crafted to mislead. Flouting them altogether is a strong opener.
Contrast to the boring analytical speech: "The notion of value espoused by neoliberal economics is wealth-weighted while the colloquial definition of the word does not have a wealth-weight attached, sometimes even the opposite (see: feeding orphans). This loophole is large enough to march 1000 elephants through and wage a class war. "Value Creation" is not about doing what people want, it's about doing what wealth-weighted people want, and as inequality grows that increasingly means doing what rich people want, which is primarily to pump assets so that they can get paid for being rich. This twist of terminology is how you can brainwash someone into thinking that enshittification, in all its forms, is somehow for the greater good, when it's actually just for the good of rich people who want to get paid for being rich."
The boring analytical speech is theoretically the stronger argument, but if theoretically stronger arguments won elections we wouldn't be here. So the best move is just to reverse-uno the "government bad, drown it in a bathtub, private sector good" propaganda.
But even the analytical speech is too strong: humanity has been down that road and it is fraught with other problems. Government isn't necessarily better either and like everything it must be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Enshittification is inevitable, but would be easily undone if the anti-trust laws were properly enforced. It's a beautiful balancing act, and we can't get there by black-and-white "government bad/good, private bad/good". At least, that's what I think.
It seems that people will only willingly act in the common good for small communities; at the level of government, you either enforce the common good, or you take advantage of greed and try to loosely direct it into the interests of the common good. Right now there is an argument to be made that we are not successfully achieving the latter strategy as "Value Creation" is now a bastardization of its original intent. But the former option is too diabolical to consider.
When you drive to work, you yearn for a negotiation with the local road monopoly?
On cold nights, you dream of a glorious future where an unregulated energy utility could try to trick you into surge pricing?
When you wrote your post, you did so with teeth clenched in disgust at having to use a government invention?
When you take the trash out, you wish it were a bit more exciting, that you had to dodge gunfire from skirmishing warlords?
And so on, and so on, but the point is that a statement you probably intended as a slight hyperbole actually required a staggering amount of "out of sight, out of mind."
What a bizarre argument. Where is the implication even coming from that gets you to the idea they can't think government services can be better for the people than private products unless you "agree with the US's current budget". Why would the current us budget, good or bad, efficiently spent or not, deeply corrupt or perfectly honest, be the only criteria for having an opinion on shared services versus private market?
Are you trying to say that you think the current US budget is bad and therefore all government spending for all time is inherently bad and worse than every other option? If so that's a really weak take.
It depends. The military is not particularly efficient, but it's not clear whether that is desirable. The tax system is not efficient, but that is by design of the industry. Many other organizations are surprisingly efficient actually, hence why some of DOGE's scalpel treatment was so harmful.
The government is an enormous ship and you want enough checks and balances to ensure it cannot suddenly turn on a dime without a huge emergency.
As for the debt, that mostly comes down to:
1) Military spending to enforce US domination across the globe.
2) Social security for the Boomers (many countries are being hit by this).
3) Unsustainably low tax rates given the requirements of government. In particular, the presence of numerous tax loopholes for the ultra-wealthy.
4) The insanity of the healthcare industry in the US.
The meaning of the word "efficiency" is highly contextual.
Operation Warp Speed rapidly developed and distributed a totally novel COVID vaccine to billions of people in just two years, but was extremely costly. Was that efficient?
The number of federal employees per American citizen has been shrinking for 80 years. Is that efficient, if it also leads to long waits for government visits?
The United States has not fought a peer state in war for decades - largely because billions of dollars are spent to build bombs that will spend their entire lives in a warehouse. Is that efficient?
Large organizations tend to operate the same way regardless of their ideology. The only real difference between government and private orgs is that one of them will fail faster under stress - and much like efficiency, whether that's good or bad depends on context.
You're really missing the point. The college administrators who make those decisions are well paid but generally not wealthy or true members of the upper class.
Right, and it's worse when you remember that the people who voted for this knew exactly what they were doing because it's how they made their money in the real estate market: obtain property rights over inelastic supply, pump cheap debt into the counterparties, price spiral, laugh all the way to the bank.
I'd like to point out that the South was only a fan of States Rights exactly insofar as they let them do slavery. The millisecond it came to forcing Northern states to return escaped slaves, they suddenly weren't the same principled supporters of devolving and federating power. Funny how that works.