Signifyin(g)Monkey

I know this could go in a sports-related forum, but this is a pretty big deal in terms of some key political issues, including to what extent college athletics should pay its players, whether it can really continue to call itself ‘college’ athletics at all, and the general ethical quandaries of mixing big money sports with academic institutions given Americans’ perceptions about rising college costs. Plus my football team is about to become even more irrelevant and I’m already getting ready to miss ‘the good old days’. Federal judge blocks NCAA from enforcing NIL rules THEATHLETIC.COM The ruling leaves the NCAA's NIL rules in flux until the end of the lawsuit brought against the organization by Tennessee and Virginia.

This type of thing was going to happen eventually—moral panics targeting marginalized groups always have to rack up body counts before people on the fence realize just how dumb they’re being. The question is how many people will get burned at the stake before Salem —erm, I mean America—wakes the fuck up. Most important lesson in ‘chud solidarity 101’: if you say it, it’s true, as long as it supports chudworld, because what chud is actually going to take the time to figure out you’re lying—or care, for that matter?

Guilty

True story, a friend of mine on my son’s travel ball team was talking about how she wished she had more cash every month to put into her portfolio and I jokingly told her, “Just run for president. There’s so much money in it you could retire in two years.” She said she doesn’t know much about politics and couldn’t imagine writing stump speeches, and I assured her that as long as she could find a pissed off group of people to exploit, the former is definitely not a requirement and the latter can be done by ChatGPT.

Tricky Trump, Nikki Ford, more accurately As an aside thank god Trump doesn’t have even a millionth of the degree of competency and political skill Nixon did, or we’d already be living in a totalitarian MAGA dystopia.

Not really, because an AI that just recycles pre-existing data will eventually lose the capacity to adapt to new changes in its domain. (newly invented words/images/sounds/etc.) That’s not necessarily the case when it’s working with a closed system with fixed rules, like chess—but it’s certainly the case when it’s working with continuously evolving systems like human language or visual design.

The most interesting aspect of the situation to me is that there’s a paradox nested in the automation AI provides that was not present in prior technologies that caused large waves of disemployment via the automation of labor. Namely, that AIs require the labor they are built to automate. To take a simple example, an image generator AI can automate the creation of images, but it also can’t work without lots of people providing it lots of source images. An image generator, in a sense, can’t completely automate image generation without killing itself. Cars, by contrast, did not need horse-buggy drivers to work. So the dynamics of the coming labor disputes and legal battles over AI are going to be unlike anything we’ve really ever seen. We live in interesting times.

He’s gonna be fine regardless. He’ll be making money hand over fist for awhile courtesy of MAGA-world. The returns on becoming a cult leader are near infinite; it is the perfect investment, if you can shoulder the risk.

I feel like the only way to combat the effects of this special counsel report is for Biden to put his campaign into overdrive. He needs to milk every advantage of the bully pulpit like the election is next week and he’s ten points behind. People need to see him making vigorous political performances, week in and week out. And find another tack than ‘Bidenomics’, cuz it just isn’t getting any traction, even if it’s true Biden’s economic performance is superior to Trump’s. Invite Obama over and have a ‘here’s what effective campaigning actually looks like’ pow-wow. And maybe start publicly roasting Trump’s Truth Social feed, because it’s proof positive Trump is in far more severe cognitive decline than Biden. Then all you religious folk need to go to your chosen place of worship and pray like crazy that the recent uptick in consumer sentiment is the sign of a sustained trend. In the meantime, I’m going to go hide in the basement, while the possible end of formal American democracy and the beginning of an Orbanian crypto-fascist state approaches. I will emerge only to go vote, make my kids breakfast, and take my wife out for Indian food on our anniversary. Kthxbye

Javier, my bro, forget this small time crap and finish that dollarization initiative. Argentinians need to get a taste of how bad of an idea it is to bind yourself to the dollar while the rest of the continent, along with the BRICS, is dedollarizing. You were supposed to prep us for the object lesson.

Interesting factoid after a bit more googling: 'rebellion' has no specific legal definition. So it seems like if the condition is engaging in/assisting/inciting/etc. in 'insurrection OR rebellion' we're diving into the historical definition of terms, not just their narrow legal definition. It doesn't seem like too crazy of an argument that actions sufficient to find you guilty of 'seditious conspiracy' also qualify you as having engaged in 'rebellion'. (not saying it's iron-clad, either, just not as wild a stretch as the critics of Trump's disqualification are making it out to be) And, as mentioned before, there are already January 6th rioters who were convicted of seditious conspiracy. So if Trump 'assisted' or 'incited' them... Honestly, the fact that 'rebellion' doesn't have a clear-cut legal definition is kinda concerning. It seems like an open invitation to abuse the statute. If nothing else positive comes from this Colorado case, maybe we'll at least get legal precedents that will in the future prevent unscrupulous alt-right lawyers and lawmakers--or a future Orban-esque president--from stretching the law to disqualify political opponents for dumb shit like 'attending a protest that included antifa members' or 'upvoting an internet forum post that said that Republican Congressmembers should be burnt at the stake'. Emphasis on 'maybe'.

I am now legitimately interested in what the proper legal scope of the disqualification statute in the insurrection act is: Putting aside the broader political/ethical question of whether it’s a good idea to use it to kick a presidential candidate off the ballot in the first place, does this even require that someone be convicted of the specific crime of insurrection to be ineligible? It seems like it’s quite a bit broader than that. And is it talking about the narrow statutory definition of insurrection or the broader historical definition? I know some of the January 6 rioters were convicted of ‘seditious conspiracy’, which is basically the ‘manslaughter’ to insurrection’s ‘murder’. Could they still legally qualify for office if this were applied to them? Trump’s speech before the riot also does seem to come awfully close to meeting the ‘incite’ or ‘assist’ clauses. It’s not as implausible as it seems before you read the actual legal text. Even if, alas, it’s probably still a bad idea to use it to disqualify him.

SFLU has mentioned this before, but I’ve found that at the extremities of politics the most hated figure is not the opposition but those willing to compromise with the opposition. Applies to right and left. Thing is that a lot of people don’t realize Trump has pushed them into extreme territory, because many of them were normie-ish before The Orange One unchained their political Id. (Also a quality of personality cults)

Re:housing, Taking a broader macro view, I would say it’s more than just NIMBYism, it’s also the paradox of real estate. Yes, population density is part of what drives up housing prices, but perhaps the biggest driver is actually the flow of investment. The more people treat their homes as wealth vehicles, the more they invest in them rather than in other goods and services, the more it drives prices up, and the less affordable housing becomes for upcoming generations. (which coincidentally means those generations will need to borrow more to attain homeownership, which contributes to yet more appreciation) Historically, the only way to temporarily stop this cycle is through some kind of debt deflationary event. Which is why, to me, the response to the 2008 crisis is the central quandary of the millennial generation. Holding down interest rates so low for so long gave us a less brutal debt-deflation than we had in the 1930s, but it also propped up housing prices at increasingly unaffordable levels. (and gave us a bubble in corporate debt to boot) There are several reasons housing was so comparatively affordable for boomers, but one huge one is the fact that the Great Depression drove real estate prices downward for an entire generation. We didn’t let that happen this time around. I’m not sure we should have, either, since the alternative could have been worse—Great Depressions tend to produce really bad things, like great wars—but that doesn’t mean we’re not (bad pun intended) paying a price for the choice that was made. It would all be a lot easier if we as a civilization could just say “houses are for living in, and that’s all.”

What broke the American Dream for Millennials | CNN Business WWW.CNN.COM Rachael Gambino and Garrett Mazzeo planned their financial life by the book: They went to college, paid down debt, saved aggressively, got married, bought a house, started a... Things seemed so hunky dory in the 90s, though. Since then…eh…

This. More important than trying to somehow ensure no Republican ever gets elected again is ensuring that one of the two major political parties in the country—one that even when in the minority will have outsized say in shaping policy due to rampant gerrymandering and the electoral college’s rural tilt—abandons the cult of Trump. If the short-run cost is a slightly more competitive rival for Biden, it’s well worth it. Because even if (like me) you’re on the left hoping for some sort of ‘permanent political majority’, you still need some semblance of political sanity for it to accomplish anything. And the longer the Trump cult persists, the more of that we lose. But, as we’re seeing, the Republican base is pretty much still in ‘Cultural Revolution’ mode, and Trump is still very much their Mao. (One big reason why his prosecutions have mostly helped him) And like I posted not too long ago, it’s not even clear anymore that Trump consistently losing elections will break the spell, due to the zombie persistence of ‘The Big Lie’. I hope I’m wrong.

It actually conforms quite well to historical patterns of cyclical urban development and its relationship to industrial development and (in an American context) white flight. Industrialization begets urban concentration, which raises land prices. In the first phase rising land prices fund an urban middle class, then when they get too high they induce a migration of much of this middle class, as well as industrial producers, from the urban core to the periphery, funding the development of suburbs. (historically, racial tensions and income differentials usually meant the migrants were disproportionately white) This leads to all sorts of nasty socioeconomic issues in the urban core, usually disproportionately affecting (predominantly black and Hispanic) minority communities—not just due to racial income differentials but also due to racist housing policies—which along with the migration’s deconcentrating effects eventually brings land prices back down. Then as land and labor in the suburbs becomes overvalued, business and industry is enticed to return to the now-cheaper urban core, and the children or grandchildren of the original urban middle class eventually follow. This begins the cycle anew, as this new migration begins raising the price of land again. I think in Detroit’s case the cycle just took longer than in other big Rust Belt metropoles, and the effects were more pronounced, which is how it got its reputation as America’s urban horror show. In reality many other cities went through a smaller, less intense version of the same thing.

I wonder if he’s psychologically capable. Literally everything he did as governor of Florida was just prep work for a presidential run as the next Trump. Like, the actual job of governing the state was not even a priority, so much as a side-effect. Dropping out is essentially admitting it was all for nothing and his life’s work is meaningless.

Yes please

Honestly that may be what it takes to get him out of presidential politics unless the MAGA fever gripping the GOP base breaks and an anti-Trump faction of conservatives retakes the party. If he loses in 2024, he's going to run again in 2028, and every subsequent race after that in which he doesn't win but retains grassroots support. And if he wins in 2024, he'll run again in 2028 anyway on the premise that the constitution only bars him from two *consecutive* terms. And we've seen that MAGA-world will support pretty much all his political depravities, so the fact that the latter is total bullshit won't matter. I used to think that if he failed electorally enough, he'd lose the support of the base, but that was before they showed they're more than ready to ride election denialism until there are literally riots in the Capitol. Something beyond that may be required. I’m hoping that’s not the case, but am prepared for the possibility that it isn’t. For the sake of the nation, lock him up.

Isn't this a version of the West Wing story arc where Bartlett doesn't let anyone but his chief of staff know that he has MS, and then there's a national emergency and it's suddenly a huge deal? Yet another instance of something that might have qualified as a 'scandal' in the 1990s, but doesn't even register on the radar nowadays in the MAGA-verse.

Adding on to some of the points already made above by legend, you ought to consider the data for what it is at a social level--it's not really just bytes of information. It's an atomized abstraction of human labor; it represents the product of someone's efforts, however tiny and unconscious they might be. Then consider a world (not too far off now) where all economic activity is software-mediated, and production is driven primarily by the output of AIs. By demonetizing the labor that powers these AIs, you are demonetizing production more generally, and thus essentially shrinking the broader economy for everyone except the owners of the mega servers that house and route the data. Right now when that kind of thing happens we're okay with it because we've grown accustomed to the idea that we will get free services and benefits in return. But we're already approaching the limits of that model. At the end of the day, free services alone can't sustain a middle class. It ultimately needs a growing income stream of some kind to adequately feed, clothe and shelter itself.

Well yeah, that’s been pretty apparent from the beginning…but it’s, like, kinda working, which I was hoping wouldn’t be the case…

The whole ‘gee I hope this doesn’t escalate into a wider regional conflict’ idea is turning into that lump you sort of joke about because you don’t think it’s really cancer but then it doesn’t go away and gets bigger and you really start to wonder…

I found an interesting aspect of the arguments that unfolded was the way the criticisms of Dolezal echoed the arguments gender-critical feminists have leveled against the idea of accepting transgender identities—a lot of them centered around concerns about who should be able to claim the identity of a historically oppressed group. (and thus what constitutes ‘belonging’ to this group, etc.) Those parallels don’t have any bearing on the validity of the arguments, of course, (I don’t have a position on the matter; I’m still thinking through it myself) but their existence suggested, to me, that it could be a potential locus of conflict in the future, as more and more once well-defined identities become more fluid and unsettled.