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Per your point about radicalization happening on Twitter... one of the few/only critiques I have of your writing on substack is that your perception of different ideological groups seems to be overly-shaped by your experience on Twitter. Especially your critiques of the left seem geared towards left-twitter rather than an accurate assessment of how widespread various beliefs or ideological affiliations are actually distributed across various left factions.

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Post pandemic, left-twitter is the left.

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Didn't Left Twitter become Mastodon HOA?

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Everyone I see complaining about how bad Twitter is... is on Twitter a lot. Same criticism of the internet in general.

The vast majority of people have in fact figured this out and don’t spend a ton of time on social media because they don’t want to go crazy. Who that leaves doing most of the posting on social media is self explanatory.

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I never opened a Twitter or Facebook account (or pretty much any other social media account). The more time passes, the happier I am about that decision.

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It was easy to me to mark Twitter's decline and zombification with a shrug of indifference.

For me, Usenet newsgroups were my jam. Even though it wasn't centralized like Twitter, Usenet was deluged with AOL users (there was the slogan "you can't spell asshole without AOL") and over time spam, trolling and flame wars produced so much noise to drown out the signal that longtime users left to moderated discussion boards, formed newsletters, etc. I've lived through virtual communities being inundated and enshittified. I've seen it before. It's a survivable event.

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"enshittified"

You win neologism of the month!

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Writer Cory Doctorow either coined it or popularized it.

https://pluralistic.net/tag/enshittification/

He explains it in this post: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Doctorow: "... it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them."

"... surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit."

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You can tell Doctorow invented it because it sounds like Whedonesque baby talk.

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Something something *revealed preference* something something

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"US right wing party is now actually insane and incredibly radicalized (watch the House Speaker debacle)"

The GOP-speaker debate is just the result of a small majority and the fact that the GOP doesn't just get in line and rubber stamp whatever the establishment orders like the Democrats do. The main contention points are how federal spending is approved in Congress and the cost/benefit of funding a war we are not an official party to, both reasonable points of contention.

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Reasonable points of contention to debate on the floor and vote on in the context of bills, but absolutely not remotely reasonable points of contention for holding the basic functions of government hostage.

The first two years of the current administration were wrought with issues specifically from Democrats not just lining up to rubber stamp. Accompanying those visible acts was a fairly diverse groundswell of anonymous “yeah this other senator is also glad they’re doing it” reporting (i.e. more sources than whatever Politico throws out when they’re feeling extra saucy and gossip mag-y).

The current discipline is just kindof expected out of a minority party, stepping out of line gets you absolutely nothing when you can’t be the marginal vote needed to pass a bill.

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"Reasonable points of contention to debate on the floor and vote on in the context of bills, but absolutely not remotely reasonable points of contention for holding the basic functions of government hostage."

Recent history proves that the only way you can make significant changes to federal spending is to threaten to "shut down" the government, which is a euphemism for a portion of the federal workforce getting deferred paid vacation. Democrats do not want to cut a penny of their payouts to their loyal supporters in the bureaucracy, academia, and NGO industries, and the GOP doesn't want to raise taxes on the rich or their payouts to the only constituency that is remotely friendly to them (the Military Industrial Complex). This worked in both the Gingrich congress and the Tea Party-ish Congress, both of whom struck imperfect deals where both sides made concessions to control spending. I wish it would have been more, but such is life.

"The first two years of the current administration were wrought with issues specifically from Democrats not just lining up to rubber stamp."

Adding trillions of dollars to the deficit was the result of that rubber stamp, and all we got out of it was a boondoggle of an "infrastructure bill."

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It’s really hard to take “cutting spending” seriously as a Republican goal to begin with anyways. They don’t ever actually try and cut shit when they’re in power, it’s shutting the government down so it functions poorly when democrats are in power. They didn’t really attempt to curtail spending under Trump or Bush.

Trillions and trillions less than were it *actually* just rubber stamped, fwiw. Said infrastructure bill is already having results in new factory starts. NEPA reform and less stringent sourcing requirements would’ve made each dollar go farther, but where it is directionally correct and disperses funding over time there is still room to make those changes.

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Getting in line is party discipline. Like one of the most basic tasks of any political party in order to function.

We are living in weird times when the Democrats for the first time in like ever are exercising party discipline -- that Will Rogers quip pretty much defined the Democrats for much of their history.

Were this three decades ago, the Newt Gingrich GOP was exhibiting military-like discipline.

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"Getting in line is party discipline. Like one of the most basic tasks of any political party in order to function."

What's the point of the GOP getting in line and rubber stamping a continuing resolution that just keeps the gravy train of their enemies flowing?

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Republicans tend to represent districts that take more money than they produce in revenue. Allowing a government shutdown, even just to prove a point, has always backfired for the GOP because of the practical consequences of such an action. For instance, it does spike the unemployment rate temporarily and a second effect is that any private entity doing business with the federal government doesn't get paid.

A shutdown generally means that if Republicans want to hurt the right people, they are doing it to their own constituents.

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Let's look at the actual history. Clinton won re-election after the Gingrich shutdown, but incumbents never lose re-election when the economy is solid and Dole was one of the least inspiring candidates in presidential election history. The GOP gained 2 seats in the Senate, lost 2 in the house, while still maintaining control. The 2013 shutdown was followed by the GOP taking the Senate in 2014, and the White House in 2016. So history shows that voters haven't punished them for it. And when you're talking about red districts receiving more federal money than blue ones, that's almost entirely due to retirement benefits and military, both of which are typically unaffected by shutdowns.

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“America’s economy is undefeated”. I would be up for a blog post on whether large US budget deficits could be corrected and whether this could be done without transferring the imbalances to other sectors of the economy.

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Oct 17, 2023Liked by Noah Smith

The more prosperous we become and the more we expect to live long, healthy, affluent lives shared with our loved ones, the more anxious and defensive we become about anything that threatens us. The more you’ve got to lose, the more anxious you become about losing it.

I think this fact explains much of the existential dread and angry defensiveness of modern life.

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William. Cump Sherman's first name is William.

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Hehe whoops! That's what I get for writing really fast.

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Oct 17, 2023Liked by Noah Smith

Now that someone has corrected this, I can read the rest of the article in peace.

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I'm afraid Marc is shadowboxing the wrong opponent when asserts, first that we have control of nature, and then that some fringe wants to abandon that.

That's wrong in the first part. Not only don't we have control, we barely have understanding of our impacts No one can tell us for instance the impact of endocrine disruptors in human, let alone "wild" animal populations.

The fringe degrowthers aren't the problem. It's the hubrists who haven't really done their homework.

Probably no such thing as wild animals at this point.

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Maybe one day we’ll have a paper – akin to Noah’s fourth point – that shows how inefficiently and cruelly we treated our stock of natural resources because of our lack of any concept of a utility function for anything not human (cf. Deep Ecology).

Kuznets curve notwithstanding, what we as a species have been doing to literally every other species on Earth for centuries (millennia?) is barbarous.

You could argue this is all the more reason to support technological methods of enhancing current economic growth, without increasingly extractive natural resource costs.

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Do you honestly think there's an objective answer for a utility ratio between a human and a wild deer?

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First of all, no. You are right that utility functions are tenuous for problems of natural ecology. In fact, the utility of healthy air and water would not actually be independent for you and me, or the deer.

The bad man with an unmaintained coal ash pond affects us all. Just another example that hard-selling optimists don't seem to know about, or don't want to think about.

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"It’s precisely because innovators don’t capture most of the monetary benefits of the innovations they create that we need some other force to propel technology forward."

The tech geniuses blindness to how much of state/public does to get nascent technologies started by funding basic research, is frustrating, the DoE, DoD, etc have done so much- even privatized things like Space X wouldn't exist without tons of gov't support, Tesla would have been seriously slowed and maybe never made it without gov't subsidies of EV purchases, Pharma with all their vaccine and https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=semaglutide wonder drugs would not have had something to trial without earlier government support.

Tech inventors and entrepreneurs are awesome, private market forces to find and incentivize value delivers for consumers, and government support of new tech is great, let private tech/financing do what they're proven good at and let government do what it is good at, the combined force of both working well on a national economy is a wonder.

I would add, that clearly some people in private markets, including tech, sometimes happily take money for nothing, or worse, get profit from harming people, this will always need democratic checks to minimize these harms or mis-incentives in private markets - monopolies, cartels, fraud, non-performing markets, etc.

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Agreed to your main point, but I wouldn't oversell the idea that Andreesen underrates the value of government sponsorship of basic research. I've heard him talk about this at some length. That said, I'm not sure he mentioned it in this piece.

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Regarding the turbulence video, I believe I saw the guy who posted it say that it's not actually AI, just using sensors and real-time responses from the wind flaps to counteract the wind forces the sensors measure. This may not just be splitting hairs, either, since AI/ML is very difficult to make 100% deterministic. You really don't want your wing flap doing something unexpected in response to an unexpected input.

But overall, yes, let's get everyone on board with techno-optimism. What can the average person do to bring a future of technological progress and abundance closer to reality?

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Oct 17, 2023Liked by Noah Smith

Correct, my friends who work on control systems do not normally refer to control systems as AI.

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Oct 17, 2023Liked by Noah Smith

I was going to write my own comment saying this - its all conventional control technology, applied in some novel ways. The relevant publications are in the following link from the company's website https://turbulence-solutions.aero/technology/ - not everything new and cool is AI!

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Wow.

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Oct 18, 2023Liked by Noah Smith

Andreessen: "We believe central planning is a doom loop; markets are an upward spiral." Noah: "...this quote isn’t quite right."

There's a simple reason why the quote is more likely quite wrong. Markets, investment, trade, everything takes place in a socially maintained regulatory environment where (generally) certainty is increased and risk is reduced. That's what the state does. As you say, it may or may not be called “central planning” but it is government, law, policy, economy -- without which markets would not "spiral".

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Yep, Kamil Galeev made the fine point that folks like Musk (and Andreesen) are hothouse plants who can thrive only in a specific environment (and like most hothouse plants, do not recognize their privilege). If Musk/Andreesen had had to grow up in the libertarian paradise of Somalia, I'm going to wager they could not have created what they have.

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Musk grew up in violent apartheid South Africa and it didn’t ruin him, although he escaped at 18. Which is a worse hell hole, Somalia or North Korea? Libertarian doesn’t mean lawlessness or rule by warlords, so I wouldn’t call Somalia that, but DRK is definitely an authoritarian centrally planned government and harder to escape than Somalia or South Africa.

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You have to be blind to not recognize that libertarianism eventually devolves in to lawlessness and warlords. Libertarians like to believe in some fictitious world where power doesn't fill a vacuum so if they shrink the government down to nothing, something worse would not take it's place.

And way to set up a strawman. I hate totalitarianism as well, but that doesn't mean I think libertarianism is workable. You're essentially saying "well, if you don't like a tax rate of zero, how would you like a tax rate of 100%", which would get you laughed out of the room in any half-decent debate.

And yes, Musk escaped SA.

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Or to put it very differently to Andreessen, Akshat Rathi shows in "Climate Capitalism" that the Chinese government achieved that country's commanding technological lead over the rest of the world in EVs through supportive government policies, substantial public and private investment, and empowering entrepreneurs.

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Oct 17, 2023Liked by Noah Smith

William Tecumseh Sherman.

Also, the Southern underinvestment in manufacturing was due to the fact that the American South effectively outsourced these capabilities both to the North and to England, where the mills of Lowell and of Dickensian fiction were spinning Southern cotton with labor that was not enslaved, but was not living particularly well.

Once the South chose to secede, it knew its only way to win a long war was to bring Britain into alliance with it - thus bringing the Empire's manufacturing capability to bear against that of the Union. Such an alliance came very close to happening, but Britain chose to stay out, and the fate of the Confederacy was sealed.

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Yeah. How about those costs to mill workers in England who died young of TB because of polluted air and a poor diet? Seems like the mill owners outsourced their costs onto those guys.

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We hear the same arguments now about how regulation of pollution and safety crush entrepreneurial spirit and capitalism. In reality, the regulations reduce the social costs that are not picked up on corporate spreadsheets or employee income W-2s. Health, ecological impacts, property damage, tourism etc. suffer when those social costs are not addressed up front and prevented in the first place. In many cases, the impacts linger far longer than the production and jobs lasted.

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Oh I certainly don’t disagree. And health issues were prevalent in New England as well. It was not slavery, but it was miserable. And it - industrialization that is - was also what mattered the most in the end.

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Oct 17, 2023Liked by Noah Smith

Techno optimism, maybe if we can get past this era of people stuck to their phones and gaming I might be more of a cheerleader. Why is it with all the tech innovation the last 23 years we've become less productive? That said there are fantastic opportunities in medicine coming on board, solid state batteries, Small Nuclear Reactors, synthetic substitutes for oil products, and so on.

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Oct 17, 2023Liked by Noah Smith

Further your point about where technological progress comes from: agreed that a lot of it comes from (1) market goods and (2) government-funded research. A lot also comes from (3) public infrastructure and public health projects. Examples include interstate highways, the electric grid, chlorinated water, and Project Warp Speed.

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yep

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The recent Nobel Prize award for the mRNA research that led to the most successful Covid vaccines was a classic example. Katalin Kariko was demoted by U Penn for focusing on an area that had no commercial application but she stuck with it for decades. It was amusing to hear the pushback from many people when U Penn was trumpeting their research when people pointed out how U Penn had treated her, eventually forcing her out so that she was commuting to Germany to work at Biontech. Kudos to Rossi at Moderna and others for pushing hard for Kariko and Weissman to get the Nobel Prize, recognizing the long, lonely, poorly funded research battle they fought to get the basic building blocks in place so that the corporate world and mankind could profit from it.

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The final photo is one serious display of flooffiness.

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Thanks for using your platform to promote animal welfare.

Your argument about rabbits can also be applied to chickens.

https://www.onestepforanimals.org/about.html

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Oct 17, 2023Liked by Noah Smith

Thanks for the bunnies! (I’ll actually read later.) 😁

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Oct 18, 2023Liked by Noah Smith

China pivoting from real estate to manufacturing is another tally in the “probably yes” column regarding war over Taiwan. What’s a great way to utilize surplus manufacturing? Expendable weapons.

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“Which doesn’t mean, of course, that the modern American economy is free from the stain of slavery. It just means that that stain is probably making us poorer rather than richer. Extractive labor policies like low-paid prison labor, commonly used in the American South, under-invest in human capital and are probably thus inefficient, for many of the same reasons that Hornbeck and Logan cite.”

Yes! I think inequitable systems don’t need to be as egregious as prison labor in the South to hurt economic growth. All it takes are systems that reinforce intergenerational links between wealth, education, and health care. We’ve got that everywhere in the U.S.

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The remnants of slavery and Jim Crow are still massively impacting the US economy. The bigotry is still a fundamental reason why all of our government regulations for social safety nets, healthcare, and residential real estate are insanely complex in order to prevent the "undeserving" from getting a share. The complexity is a massive inefficiency and cost in the US economy. Just health care alone, it is probably 5% of GDP. It is a major reason why it is impossible to build affordable housing in many areas.

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