Political Economy

Understim

Chill Clowns, Political Economy, Politics

And this is why I thought then and continue to think that Matt Yglesias is a fucking idiot.

Obama made the choice that millions of Americans would lose their homes. And yes, that was a choice — it all could’ve been prevented. That was done to save the banks and specifically the banksters who wrote all that fraudulent paper. This decision ruined many Americans economically for the rest of their lives as well as making the Great Recession worse and last much longer than it otherwise would have.

Obama also oversaw the largest loss of black wealth in history. He was and is just an evil, venal person.

As president, he had one of the greatest opportunities for real reform since the 1930s. And instead he forked over the country and its wealth the rich all so he could be a billionaire later himself. No Obama, no Trump it’s also important to remember.

Tiny Baby

Chill Political Economy, Politics

Remember how so many clowns came out of the woodwork (or the clown car) to insist that Obama had no power, that he was just a little tiny helpless baby, that there was nothing at all he could do — even with both houses of Congress and a favorably-inclined Supreme Court?

Well I fucking remember even if you do not.

Now compare and contrast with all that Trump has done. Even if you omit the items that are plainly illegal, a president can do a whole hell of a lot. Whether this surfeit of power vested in one individual should be the case is not what I am debating. And I’m not even debating if Obama was a giant useless coward or not.

All I am stating is what the evidence 100% confirms: Obama could have done a lot more and chose not to, no matter what his idiot supporters claim.

Prone

Chill Political Economy, Prediction

I am going insane. This company will lose $10bn this year! Generative AI has peaked! There isn’t a sustainable business model, and the products are mediocre and error prone and don’t even do anything cool despite costing billions and accelerating climate change and stealing everybody’s artwork!

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— Ed Zitron (@edzitron.com) January 22, 2025 at 6:03 PM

I like Ed, but this is a clueless take. He’s not thinking predatorily enough, like an MBA would. The point of GenAI is to eventually replace workers, not to be these little toys we have now. The MBAs simply DO NOT CARE if AI does not do work that is as of the quality that a human can do. If a GenAI costs 1/20 the price and does work that’s only 1/4 as good — that is still a net win. In MBA thinking, anyway.

Ed is wrong, wrong, wrong. “Mediocre and error prone” at a low price is just fine in capitalism. Preferred, even, if it never talks back, never demands higher wages and has no actual human needs.

Understand this or you understand nothing.

Home Slice

Chill Political Economy

In broad outline, I agree. Without that home-building gap Trump would’ve never had a chance. Building enough housing still would not have solved that many good jobs were shipped to Mexico and China and never replaced — but an adequate home supply would’ve made us far less likely to go off the rails as a country.

It wasn’t just the effects of 2008 that caused this gap. Around then, NIMBYs really ramped up their bullshit. In a very real sense NIMBYs might ultimately cause the destruction of the United States more than any other single factor.

Unins

Chill Political Economy

Is the World Becoming Uninsurable?

As tail risks increase greatly, insurance costs should rise very non-linearly because how actuarial risk calcs work. Basically, to simplify the work of actuaries greatly, a 10x or greater increase in tail risk1 means that most areas are no longer insurable.

We’ve reached that now with recent disasters in the North Carolina and with the LA fires.

Soon, I’d expect many places to have no insurance available at any price. And yes, that has everything to do with climate change.

  1. Rather, the unpredictability of likely tail risk costs.

Homer

Chill Clowns, Political Economy

This is bullshit, because the actual truth is that the people who can’t work from home effectively are the very same people who didn’t do any work in the office. Invariably, they are the ones who spent hours wandering around the building, chitchatting, gladhanding, disturbing everyone else and pretending they were busy while doing absolutely nothing.

All the MBA types who hate WFH secretly know that is true, but don’t care — because they want work to be both a social club and a panopticon where they can keep an eye on their slaves. And a lot of them are just morons who think that butts in seats == productivity. Certainly cannot discount that many of them are just really, really dumb.

If your people are not productive working from home, you have a management problem. It’s not a WFH problem.

On average, I produce about 2-3x as much working from home as I do in an office — both because I work longer hours and I can do my actual work.

I will never work an office job again. Not for any money.

Eff Ic

Chill Clowns, Political Economy

This comment is exactly right.

I am old enough to remember when companies had large training departments, there was an actual training period, and most departments were adequately staffed. That started disappearing (along with pensions) during the 2001 recession and then all of that was completely eliminated in the name of “efficiency” during and after the Great Recession. People younger than 42 or so cannot remember how it used to be. But it was better.

Now, 10-20 job roles are collapsed into one or eliminated altogether. For instance, Microsoft doesn’t even have QA anymore. And it shows. The developers and to a larger extent the users are expected to handle this.

This same process happened across industries as MBAs took over, corporations concentrated on stock buybacks and enriching execs and shareholders short-term rather than any longer term sustainability. And we see how that played out.

The Problem Is Not Cost

Chill Political Economy, Prediction

Yup. And it’d only cost around $100 billion to fill the desert1 with enough solar panels and batteries to power the entire United States year-round forever.

The problem is not cost. Nor even what is possible. The problem is will. We could do so much more than we have done. And we should. The future does not belong to faint-hearted, anemic degrowthers cowering before the god of lost causes and reveling in their prostrate servility. The degrowthers claim that tech will not allow us to survive what is coming. But that is completely wrong. In fact, it is the only thing that will.

We undertake insanely ambitious projects or we die. It’s as simple as that.

As I’ve said before, we must become the gods that we pretend to be.

  1. Or somewhere, if the desert is gone.

Ridge-id

Chill Annoying, Clowns, Political Economy

NIMBYs have made all of us significantly poorer compared to what could have been. One economist estimated that GDP would be 30% higher without NIMBY evil. I think that is probably correct, though I suspect the real number could be as much as 50% larger if we’d crushed NIMBYs when we should have (during the 1970s). Preventing people from living where productive work and economic prosperity is located has all sorts of follow-on effects that are difficult to account for.

Areas with year-round good weather like San Diego and its immediate surroundings should probably have a population of 20+ million.