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Feb 27, 2021
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If both Trump and liberals seem unappealing you should look into Marxism.

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I find this so interesting. What is it about Marxism that you find appealing?

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Marxism gives an analysis of class that is rooted in economics and history rather than the kind of fashions and furnishings that often trip up others. I mean, Marxists talk about the structure of work and how it fits into the world economic system. That's something that I do 8 hours a day; work. Compare to the cultural fretting from liberals and conservatives about what kind of coffee you drink or if you watch NASCAR or polo or whatever. I give that stuff about 2 minutes thought per week; is that really relevant? It all seems so surface-level and tawdry compared to Marxist analyses.

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It sounds like you're saying that you find Marxism interesting as a philosophy, not necessarily that you think his philosophy is superior and should be enacted. If that is right, that makes sense. Or am I reading you wrong?

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It's both interesting as a philosophy and it should be enacted. "Should be" is understating the case really, it is being enacted continuously.

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It sounds like you're referring to Marx's position that history will naturally progress to a point of global capitalism wherein all identity markers other than class will fade away, leaving just the proletariat on the one hand, and the capitalists on the other, and that at that point the revolution will occur and the dictatorship of the proletariat be established. Am I reading you right? If so, I think we're at my point of confusion, namely, how do you account for the fact that instead of the above occurring, the USSR and China had national largely non-industrial worker based communist revolutions that led to great famine and great oppression? I really can't wrap my head around a promotion of communism that doesn't account for what seem to be massive failures on its part. If your answer was, oh, China and the USSR didn't practice true Marxism I'd accept that as an answer but elsewhere you seem to indicate to me that you approved of Maoist tactics so am I right in assuming you do think China and the USSR are good models of communism?

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It's rooted in economic ideas that were obsolete long before Marx, such as labor theory of value. Many new concepts such as marginal utility theory, economic calculation problem and comparative advantage principle are needed to understand modern economy and value of highly compensated middlemen.

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I have. Their history of murdering and impoverishing their own citizens is a turn off for me.

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Why should anyone look at centuries old philosophies that proved disastrous every time they were attempted? Marx was a reactionary who long for more pastoral times before industrial revolution without having personally experienced the hardship of pre-industrial living. He would have made great friends with the Unibomber. Now this post gives us new ideas to think about and try with possibly good results.

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"Marx was a reactionary who long for more pastoral times before industrial revolution"

There are lots of bad takes on Marx, but this is easily the most hilarious.

Go read the Manifesto. It's brimming with paeans to early capitalism, touting its superiority to feudalism and praising it for abolishing "the idiocy of rural life" etc.

Later on, Marx did become concerned with the effects of capitalism on the natural environment, calling attention to what he termed the "metabolic rift". But he was faaaaaar from a luddite or a reactionary, and his theory of Communist revolution requires capitalist development, "without which want is merely made general".

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Feb 26, 2021
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I think he writes his own material.

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Feb 26, 2021
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test reply

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Feb 26, 2021
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Furthermore, it's hard to say how much "voting a bit more for Trump in 2020 vs 2016" is any indication of appeal in 2020 rather than an indication of *lack* of the *extreme* anti-appeal he had to these people in 2016, or the special appeal Obama had in 2012 and 2008.

There might be a few places where Trump did as well among minorities as Bush did in 2004 (I'm thinking mainly in the Rio Grande Valley and Miami), but those are rare.

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Feb 26, 2021
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That's the thing, right? What is the difference between a futures market and a sufficiently deep casino book that somehow manages to capture somewhat abstract predictions? It feels to me like the more it becomes unique, the shallower and less predictive it gets. There are plenty of real instruments that capture questions like "what will the inflation rate in the US be in 10 years" and "the electric car is the future of transportation" that seem way more robust than something that is just something like the Simon/Ehrlich bet writ large.

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I think the ability to trade your bets before them being realized is a big part of it?

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I mean, the GameStonks thing shows that a few billionaires like Elon Musk are able to manipulate markets *even more* than the hedge funds, by making people do it for the lulz.

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Feb 26, 2021
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Out of how much was spent overall?

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Feb 26, 2021
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So why doesn't Wal-Mart cater people who drop big money on single purchases?

If the actual numbers don't matter, why did you say $2.3 billion from 25 people? If the actual numbers don't matter why do you not want to say the full amount?

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Feb 26, 2021
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Then why did you say something to begin with?

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Feb 26, 2021
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Nice

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There's been research on this. The causality goes from politicians supporting certain policies to donations going to them. When politicians decide not to run for any more terms, they don't become less accomodating to the donor class. Garett Jones has been pointing out that they actually veer against populism when not "in cycle".

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Feb 26, 2021
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"So why doesn't Wal-Mart cater people who drop big money on single purchases?" What a totally insane non-sequitur.

Staying on topic, if your argument is that America isn't an oligarchy you're just very misinformed (or intentionally lying).

This article is a good starting point if you're trying to come to grips with the fact that America is not a democracy, if by 'democracy' you mean that policy is set based on the wishes of voters: https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf

The most relevant excerpt: "When the preferences of economic elites and

the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for,

the preferences of the average American appear to have

only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant

impact upon public policy."

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That's a very interesting paper! Thanks for sharing.

Although the paper does define economic elite as in the 90th percentile, so were talking about households that make $160,000+/year which is a bit different than billionaires controlling things. I'm also surprised they looked at income instead of wealth when defining their elite. Even more strange they define the average citizen's preferences as being the 50th percentile. So instead of looking at the aggregate preferences of everyone outside the elite class or everyone altogether, they are just looking at a specific middle band.

Additionally organized interest groups were split into two categories: business interest groups and mass public interest groups. I would think mass public interest groups would be a close representation of the mass public feelings, but I suppose a lot of people don't get involved in mass public interest groups. (Which fits in with what the Vox article says below.)

To showcase both sides, here's a rebuttal on Vox: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-study

It looks like the first accusation is basically of p-hacking. Something we sadly see regularly today, especially in social sciences. Of the 1,779 bills in the dataset, the economic elite and the average American agreed on 1,594, leaving only 185 bills to examine the difference between them. There's some more crunch in the article itself and a rebuttle from the authors of the original paper.

By the way, I never said I thought democracy was that policy is set based on the wishes of the voters, and either you made a mistake by claiming that or are being deceptive here.

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> Who cares?

Boy you sure gave up quick.

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> Who cares? When you're getting 2.3 billion dollars from 25 people, you do whatever the fuck they want.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in-almonds/

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Feb 26, 2021
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Why don't politicians charge a whole hell of a lot more?

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There are plenty of people willing to do it. All you have to do is lie incessantly to your constituents, say in Congress for a couple decades, and you'll have amassed a decent amount of wealth. If you aren't willing to do it, the elites can just find somebody else.

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I’m not understanding what your point is. Is this oredicated on the premise that Democrats are better for the working class? Or are you arguing against the system in general. How is the article anti-white, please.

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*predicated. Substack really needs an edit function.

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Feb 25, 2021
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"Ban Mckinsey" sounds more on point.

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Feb 25, 2021
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I'm guessing Jack isn't against the idea of strategy consultants (abstractly construed) so much as McKinsey in particular. I'm reminded of this essay, written by an anonymous insider: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/02/mckinsey-company-capitals-willing-executioners

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Feb 25, 2021
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Of course it strawmans the other side. It's a description of a form of demagoguery that Scott is arguing would be more effective than the current form. He may also believe that it is more nearly correct, but we can't expect a political party to limit itself to fair arguments for its position.

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Feb 26, 2021
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Ideally you strawman people you are sure won't vote for you — ones who the people who might vote for you don't like.

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It's their side that talks most openly about liquidating kulaks, though.

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Feb 25, 2021
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Feb 26, 2021
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>Republican party

>anti-white

lmao

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Yes.

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Which part of his proposal is "anti-white"?

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Feb 25, 2021
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The transition wasn't completely binary but looking at presidential elections after 1960 and before 1990 purely based on which states the Democrat won:

Democrats did relatively worse in the South in 64, 68, 72 (only won one state and it wasn't in the South), 84 (same), and 88.

In 1980 it was about the same in the South as in other regions (although the West was especially Republican).

The only year the Democrat did significantly better in the South than in the country as a whole was 1976, when the candidate (Carter) was a southerner.

So overall I think it's safe to say that while the Democrats were still competitive in the South after the 60s, they definitely weren't "the party of the South" anymore.

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Thinking further you could definitely argue that the transition took a lot longer in congressional and state elections. But even then I think the 60s is a good estimate for when Democrats stopped being "the party of the South" even if they kept a strong presence there.

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OT: I wish people couldn't delete their own comments.

You get people writing high-effort and thoughtful responses that suddenly make no sense because the words they're responding to don't exist.

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Adding an edit function would be helpful. It also might make the problem worse. Perhaps an edit function that allows people to click through to see the edits?

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Partly for this reason, I often quote the part of the parent comment that I'm commenting on.

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On the other hand, it demonstrates that some people have some residual sense of shame and reconsider intemperate things they have said on the Internets. I tend to think twice before I hit "post", but that's just me.

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Seconded. The Wayback Machine often lets you do an endrun around this, which seems like a good solution, but it doesn't work here.

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(A) Ignoring non-presidential elections is silly.

(B) Republican presidents did well in the south because they did well everywhere from 68 to 92, winning an average of more than 40 states per election. But if you look at the vote totals, they did worse in the south until the mid to late 80s, and the south didn't vote solidly for a republican until Bush in 2000.

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Yes Republican dominance in the South didn't set in until the 90s. But I don't think you can really say the Democrats were "the party of the South" during a period where their presidential candidates were more likely to win non-Southern states than Southern ones.

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but they weren't. in 68, demo/dixiecrats combined win the south. 76, democrats win the south. In 1980 and 88, republicans win almost everywhere, but all the most republican states are western. in 88 there are one or two republican states that are highly republican, and then the real shift happens over the next decade. the only exception is 1972.

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In 64, practically the only states the Democrats lost were in the South. In 68, saying "the Democrats won the South if you combine them with the separate party that actually won the South" isn't actually a compelling case. It's true that the landslides in 72, 80, and 84 make it harder to draw conclusions but at the least those don't show a clear Democratic overperformance in the South.

And again the key thing here is that "Democrats were the party of the South" is a much stronger statement than "Democrats were competitive in the South." And that stronger statement doesn't really seem to hold up after the early 60s.

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> the Democrats won the South if you combine them with the separate party that actually won the South" isn't actually a compelling case.

Yes it is when you're claiming republicans won the south. 30% dixiecrat, 30% democrat and 40% republican is NOT republican dominance.

> And again the key thing here is that "Democrats were the party of the South" is a much stronger statement than "Democrats were competitive in the South."

the statement is republicans didn't dominate the south until the 90s. dixiecrats were democrats, not republicans. They didn't call themselves the dixiecans, after all.

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Feb 25, 2021
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Feb 26, 2021
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🙄

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Feb 25, 2021
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Feb 25, 2021
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The phrase "3D jobs" is fascinating!

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Feb 25, 2021
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I had to clean up Uncle Norman's apartment after he dropped dead at the age of 90. He had been incontinent for a while. I hired professionals. 2 bedroom apt, say 1,000 sq. ft. $10/sq.ft. I am not complaining. It was a debt of honor, a family thing.

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Knausgaard's first book in his famous series revolves around this task that he and his brother have to manage

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Fucking dog had fucking papers...

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That's quite surprising to me. In the US at least there is still a large "degree premium" which is used to explain why so many people are going to college. Is that not the case in Ireland? If so do you still only have a small minority of 18 year olds going the college route or have you also seen the same level of explosion in demand for higher education?

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Feb 26, 2021
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I'm always a bit leery when people point to random well-made items from their grandparents time that still work trying to argue that things used to be better made.

it's survivorship bias on steroids. in 100 years time some kid will be showing off their grandfathers blender from 2020 and people will make wow noises about craftsmanship... while completely ignoring the million crappier blenders sold the same year that simply didn't survive till 2120.

You can buy some really nice fancy toasters even now that will probably last extremely well but most people don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on a toaster.

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Hey Internaut. What do you think is the supply demand situation for blue collar jobs in Ireland? How can we improve the prestige? What about the quality? How big of a mistake was removing the trade track from education?

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Feb 28, 2021
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Really appreciate the time and effort you put into this. It's great to get your insight, and disappointing that I can't find that insight anywhere else.

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Feb 25, 2021
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I keep hearing the degree premium is as strong as ever here in the US... but that's because wages for people without degrees keep going down rather than going up for people with a Bachelor's.

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A bunch of my friends work in cleaning in ireland and it's normally not the most lucrative job unless you own your own company and have some good connections.

The degree premium is going to be confounded all to hell, especially in ireland.

Since college admission works directly off exam points it tends towards ruthlessly and brutally fair and since most of the cost of tertiary education is covered by the state with extra grants for low income students ireland is unusually good at taking bright kids from poor backgrounds and tossing them into university which means that college gets even more strongly correlated with base IQ than in the states.

So when someone with a college degree makes more money it's hard to say if it's simply that bright people are both more likely to score well on exams and do well in the workforce because that confounds it all to hell.

throw in irelands strong tradition of exporting it's young people whenever there's an economic downturn where people with good credentials have an easier time getting jobs in the UK, America, Australia... etc

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Please excuse my ignorance, but what are 3D Jobs? All I'm getting from Google are results about 3D graphics and the like, and since that has no obvious connection to window washing, I'm assuming it's a case of can't find the esoteric due to similarly named mainstream.

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Feb 25, 2021
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What are "WCR" and "CCU", and "this one job"?

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I totally get this. Last year we bought and renovated a home in an area where we have few contacts. After a series of disappointments getting estimates from the guys on the first page of search results, we started soliciting contractors by word of mouth. Most of the guys we went with barely have a webpage, and none of them came up in Google searches. They don’t *need* it; referrals give them as much business as they can handle.

Not only were they not plugged in online, they barely use available payment tools. Some didn’t even take credit cards. But they were licensed and insured and totally professional in their work.

The contractors on the first page of results all seemed to be following some sort of SEO playbook and might even have been using the same suite of materials and tools, marketed to guys who want to up their game. They made extensive use of glossy pamphlets and scheduling tools that seemed designed to calm my assumed fears as a suburban housewife that the guy ringing my doorbell at 10am would indeed be Frank from Electro Inc. They also charged up the wazoo compared to the guys sticking to phone calls and paper checks. We simply couldn’t afford most of the guys using the Advanced Professionalism Web Optimization Package. I assume those fancy 21st century business tools consume a lot of overhead.

It occurred to me that the economy is like an iceberg; a vast amount of important stuff is underwater and we probably have no idea how much based on the parts we can see analyzing web data. Now when I hear theories about how close we are to automating everything, I wonder if the people theorizing have ever had to find someone to rewire their house.

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>Most of the guys we went with barely have a webpage, and none of them came up in Google searches. They don’t *need* it;

This isn't just a working-class phenomenon. My mother made wedding cakes for decades. Most of the sugarcraft guild have no websites of their own, they don't need them because they're craftspeople who don't lack for work.

Going round wedding faires with my SO apparently I'm not allowed look at the cakes any more because I couldn't keep the expressions off my face. Almost everything I've ever seen at a wedding faire nobody in my mothers circles would have ever allowed leave their workshop. Most of it would have scored badly in the childrens sections of sugarcraft competitions.

The people who constantly have to plug for business at faires are the people who are so poor at their job that they can't get anyone to recommend them to friends and so end up short of work.

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I keep hearing upper-middle class people with houses saying "are there ANY plumbers who are sane, can arrive at the agreed hour, and clean up after? willing to pay for it."

So I imagine that the ones who DO meet the requirements are in high demand and earn WAY more than a librarian or teacher.

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Feb 28, 2021
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Surprisingly, it's the same in science and engineering.

The internet will tell you a lot, but the important parts are either hidden in experts' heads or siloed in corporate R&D. There is even some in physical books that nobody bothered to OCR. Once you go past undergrad level the availability of information drops off a cliff.

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Are there any online sources you do recommend for getting exposure to a variety of interesting blue-collar information? I can follow a bunch of academics on Twitter and have a reliable source of neat studies, or read the blogs of programming nerds and learn about useful computer things, but I don't know of a good way to regularly encounter a breadth of content for real-life skillsets and jobs (or trust myself to evaluate which such things are genuinely good).

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This. The practical knowledge that sustains modern life is rapidly disappearing. Fucking water and heat are going to become some sort of sci-fi cult mystery.

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I took.it to mean jobs in which you have to use your hands, like plumbing, unlike ones that only require you to read.

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"Dirty, Demeaning, or Dangerous" jobs

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I took it to mean jobs involving the third dimension (height). But maybe it means 'outside' jobs as distinct from paper-pushing on a desk (or pixel-pushing on a screen as it might be now).

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I took it to mean jobs involving the third dimension (height). But maybe it means 'outside' jobs as distinct from paper-pushing on a desk (or pixel-pushing on a screen as it might be now).

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So where do the boat paraders, brand new $70k truck ralliers, and Trump supporters who flew to the Capitol riot, staying in fancy hotels - fit in with this white working class? Maybe these "petty exurban bourgeoise" are a small sliver of Trump's base. But they're certainly the most visible and vocal.

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See the previous post about the difference between economic class and social class.

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The core assumption of this piece, that social class can beat out economic class as a principle for organizing political coalitions neglects the role of near zero real interest rates in easing tensions within coalitions. Republicans don't have to face trade-offs between low taxes, high military spending, and social security benefits for their massive elderly base. Dems don't have to face a trade-off between high taxes on their upper middle-class base and expansive welfare for poor minorities. The coalition between all the rungs of a social class ladder is possible in a zero-interest rate vetocracy where tradeoffs are nil, and the state can't do anything ambitions for the bottom rung, but I don't see it enduring if those conditions change.

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Why can't the state do anything ambitions for the bottom rung? UBI, say?

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Well, the party that wants to right now is geographically disadvantaged, and you need to control a trifecta in order to do anything. Dems can only do whatever their 3-4 most conservative members will sign off on jamming through in reconciliation.

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The trade offs are all still there though. Deficit spending on cheap credit gives you more money to allocate but it doesn't determine who gets it. We could raise taxes and have even more military spending or higher social security payments than we do now. We could cut those things and have even lower taxes than we do now.

And everything all kind of balances anyway. Sure, if you have low interest rates you can spend on credit, but then asset prices inflate. Housing costs more. The cost of living increases relative to wages.

The way out of high interest rates is to print the debt. That causes nominal prices and wages to increase (inflation), but the consequent higher interest rates cause asset prices, i.e. housing prices, to decline relative to wages. So now the working man pays more in taxes to fund social security without deficit spending, but spends less on rent. Cancels out. The retiree's social security check comes and they spend more on food and transportation but less on rent. Cancels out again.

The inflation also makes the coalition easier to hold, because nothing looks like a cut. You get a constructive spending reduction by just not increasing spending as fast as inflation. You get a constructive increase in revenues at the same tax rate because nominal wages increase relative to nominal assets and income/sales taxes are a percentage of wages/dividends and capital gains taxes are a percentage of the *nominal* asset price increase, so that inflation and high interest rates increases real government revenues without a nominal rate increase.

It's not obvious that this actually makes a coalition politically more difficult than low interest rates.

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Orwell made poignant observation of this in Wigan Pier, the upper class guy going broke trying to keep up appearances, versus the well-off laborer

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At that point, I feel like you've basically reduced class structure to Red Tribe and Blue Tribe and just renamed them in a way that's more palatable to Red Tribe.

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Thats what it kind of always was, didn't you know?

The US doesn't only think of "Class" in terms of money. Some *behaviors* are trash, while others are better.

Have you ever seen "Ghetto" Black women wrestling in the street or sidewalk, over some guy or something? How really are they at all distinct from the lardassed White trash women going at each other in the dirt of some trailer park?

If you blessed them with millions of dollars, they wouldn't be percieved differently.

Look at Trumps diet, or television habits. Until the democrats got the cue to stop mocking him for it, they did so constantly. Their mockery was aimed at unmistakable symbols of class, or a lack thereof.

McDonalds burgers, fries, and frappes? Those are what I eat, and they're awesome!

"~800-588-2300/ em-pire!" I used to hear that every morning on TV before going to school, or before my mom went to work. In my free time, I watch hours of TV. Why do these people think these mundane and okay things are so, so wrong?

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> Have you ever seen "Ghetto" Black women wrestling in the street or sidewalk, over some guy or something? How really are they at all distinct from the lardassed White trash women going at each other in the dirt of some trailer park?

For the purposes of this discussion? One group is overwhelmingly likely to vote for Democrats, the other for Republicans. Either you think one group isn't voting their interests, or there's some fundamental difference in terms of their interests that isn't reflected by this analysis of class.

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Or maybe the ability of Democrats to successfully culturally signal "anti racism" despite doing absolutely nothing to lift black people out of their socioeconomic position is the Right-wing version of "What the fuck is wrong with Kansas?".

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From the perspective of the Right, perhaps. Are you sure you understand the perspective and incentives of a hypothetical Black voter?

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It's really not that implausible that people vote against their individual interests. Jason Brennan's libertarian Against Democracy makes this point better than I do, but basically, think of it in terms of *individual incentives*. For each voter, their incentive to vote in their own interests is actually very low, since their chance of effecting the outcome is minimal. Almost certainly they could find something else to do with the half an hour it takes to vote that would have higher expected value. So it's not a priori implausible that people simply ignore their own interests in voting, since the consequences are very small. At this point, you might say 'well, why the hell do people bother voting at all then', but the answer is that people like the sense that they are performing their civic duty, that they are taking part in a big important community activity and expressing their moral identity, and voting is a very low-cost, highly visible way of doing all those things. But if that's why your voting, you'll get weird cognitive dissonance if you then try and pick the candidate who is best for you, rather than best for the nation/your community. The latter, I suppose, might lead to groups voting in the interest of the groups, even though the members aren't trying to vote in their individual interests. But Brennan provides a fair amount of empirical evidence that people tend to try and vote in the national interest specifically (though I have forgotten exactly what, and no doubt, like all social scientific evidence it could be challenged).

The idea that people vote against their own interests gets a bad rep, because it's associated with people patronizing their enemies, especially their lower class enemies, but that's a separate matter from whether it's true.

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Thank you, that's an interesting perspective. I'll look into that book.

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Only a Libertarian could oppose Democracy on the basis that people aren't self interested enough - usually the complaint is the other way around!

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This post is an odd combination of class condescension and attacks on the Dems for class condescension.

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That does seem to be the fundamental paradox of the modern Republican party. I don't think they can realistically shed the class condescension, though.

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> Why do these people think these mundane and okay things are so, so wrong?

They don't. It's a strawman. I'm from Tampa, I eat barbecue and fast food, and I love the Olive Garden. I can hear the tune of the ad you're referring to, and I've watched hundreds of hours of TV in recent months.

I am also a highly paid professional deep within the most ultraliberal bubble in the country. Never once, not on *any* occasion, has anyone I've met attacked me even implicitly for these traits.

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Here's some similar testimony:

' In the book, Vance describes his life at Yale as bewildering, since he was among the small number of students from poor backgrounds and constantly felt like he was playing catch-up, learning that Cracker Barrel is not actually fine dining and figuring out which fork to use. But he has mostly kind things to say about his fellow students and faculty:

Yale made me feel, for the first time in my life, that others viewed my life with intrigue. Professors and classmates seemed genuinely interested in what seemed to me a superficially boring story: I went to a mediocre public high school, my parents didn’t go to college, and I grew up in Ohio.

In the movie, though, Vance’s story plays out quite differently. After the emergency call to his girlfriend, J.D. sits at the dinner table with fellow students and attorneys from high-powered law firms. He is nervous. While making conversation, he says that he is from Ohio and that his grandfather moved there from Kentucky’s hill country to work in a steel mill.

A quiet falls over the table. Everyone glances at each other knowingly. Nobody says anything. They change the subject, while J.D. sits crestfallen and mortified.

I yelled at the screen when I saw that. (Yelling happened multiple times throughout the movie.) Reading Hillbilly Elegy, I feel some kinship with Vance. My people are not from Appalachia, but they’re working-class Northerners, by way of immigrants, potato farmers in Maine, and shoot-your-dinner-from-the-porch North Carolina rednecks. I too am the first in my nuclear family to go to college (on a massive scholarship), and to earn two master’s degrees I’ll be paying for until I retire. Growing up, Cracker Barrel was my favorite special-occasion restaurant.

But my alma mater is an elite institution. Most of my friends were well-off, though a lot of them didn’t realize that the things they took for granted — parents who could send money to them, cable TV, Pop-Tarts for breakfast — were far beyond my imagining. Like J.D., I often felt out of place.

And yet that’s exactly why this scene rang so false. It seems impossible that everyone at that table would take J.D.’s biographical note as embarrassing; instead, as Vance himself points out in his book, his background makes him intriguing, someone different from the usual bunch. '

https://www.vox.com/culture/21547861/hillbilly-elegy-review-netflix

Of course, a Vox writer is hardly an unbiased source on something like this, but Vance himself is a conservative.

The truth is that people work on two tracks with this kind of thing. When, for political reasons, they want to be mean about [outgroup] they will mock them for [outgroup] cultural norms. But when they actually meet someone from [outgroup] as an individual, they will generally refrain from hostility and try to be nice, and tolerant of difference, especially if politics doesn't come up.

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But also, American liberals are actually well aware that classism is a thing and is bad: it's a central part of their mythology (I don't mean that term pejoratively) that Republicans are bad because they think the poor should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and don't understand that their lives are hard.

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You're insisting on applying a singular definition of class based on aesthetics. I don't think it's as versatile as you suggest. Look around this thread for how easily your definition gets coerced as 'the upper class is [the Cultural Other I Most Distrust]. I know They hate me, therefore I must hate Them'. Helpful.

At any rate, this view is already a clear central beat of Trumpism, which claims that our aesthetics and way of life is being destroyed from the top down by a nefarious, morally vacuous and conveniently abstract elite who hate god and love nothing more than a good abortion (the fact you make no effort to integrate either of these founding dogmas when discussing New Republican Aesthetics is a dead giveaway of your SF elitism, for lack of a better term)

So, I don't see anything new here, politically. Except the prediction market stuff, which I find marvelously ironic in a post mostly about class. Do you not perceive how the SF-based futurist technobabble crowd constitutes a very coherent class, much more convincingly than the formless latte-sipping blob you seek to conjure? Is it lost on you how classist you sound, in this regard, with claims like "$TECHNOLOGICAL_SOLUTION will solve our problems and anyone who disagrees is stuck in the past (trust me I understand this better than you, guess you need to be engineer-adjacent to get it)"?

Finally, I think this interacts with your earlier piece on "gay rights are civil rites" in interesting ways, and I hope you explore that intersection in the future.

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But the futurist technobabble crowd isn't a prominent political class. They exist, but they aren't an organised bloc in the same way that poor evangelical whites without college degrees and rich coastal whites with college degrees are organised blocs that vote together and each hate the other.

"$TECHNOLOGICAL_SOLUTION will solve our problems" is only a class signal in a much more European, capital-versus-labour conception of classes than Scott is gesturing towards. If you wanted an American upper-class signal about technology, you'd go for something about algorithmic bias or the impossibility of solving complex social problems with technology.

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I find the idea that the only help possible for the poor is UBI or welfare more than a bit paternalistic and condescending. And quite likely untrue. Trump's answer for that was protectionism, aka make work available. And he got a lot more voters for this than Democrats get for UBI - especially among this very demographic.

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"A majority of the people arrested for Capitol riot had a history of financial trouble" https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/02/10/capitol-insurrectionists-jenna-ryan-financial-problems/

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Hard to separate psychologically connected issues from a simple tendency to make bad decisions.

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Hard to find literally anyone who hasn't had significant financial problems. That is quite literally the only growth sector of our economy; financial engineering to ruin lives for profit.

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I remember the statistic was comparing to the national average, so it does mean something.

On the other hand, there are probably simpler explanations: people that are doing well just aren't as likely to be in the street, no matter the side.

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yeah, and with our 40 year span of 'nobody but the top does well' economics we should have lots of violence to look forward to.

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