I'm not entirely sold that he and I agree on what "like a business" means, but I do agree with heebie that it's likely to be nonsense coming from Trump and fuck that shit.
It is not a refutation of Romney or Trump. It is a response to the people for whom "Government should be run like a business" or, Christ have mercy, "he'll make good deals" is a comfortable cover story slipcasing whichever ugly, selfish impulses of the lizard brain they're tacking to the black and brown shadows in their heads.
I am convinced by Jane Jacob's book "system's of survival" that there are two different types of morality
https://www.amazon.com/Systems-Survival-Dialogue-Foundations-Commerce/dp/0679748164
from somebodies amazon comment:
"The commercial class lives by production and exchange, primarily by means of honest, binding contracts and voluntary agreements, and where initiative, inventiveness and efficiency are prized, along with industriousness, thrift and investment.
The guardian class is prevalent in governments, benevolent trusts, charity organizations, universities and schools, military and police. They shun trading and exchange, and live by taking, in the form of taxes and donations, and sometimes expropriation. They are dispensers of the good things, in the form of grants and largesse. Guardians issue commands and expect them obeyed, with courage if necessary, which they in turn are subject to themselves, for a hierarchical command structure is honored. And they use force and deception where necessary to accomplish objectives.
The greatest sin, and the cause of all corruption, according to Ms. Jacobs, is when the two systems are merged in one organization. "
Could you expand on 3? It's interesting but I'm not sure I understand it and in isolation it's not that convincing.
"Oh, you mean like a used car dealership?"
"You know, if it was a business, they could cancel Social Security and keep all the money. You mean like that?"
Run it like a failed Atlantic City casino!
On the other hand, there is an argument that natural monopolies should be run like a government.
RLaB has to have come from the '80s and the Reagan Revolution, right?
True story. My son has a stuffed tiger he calls "Mr. Business." He used to call it "Mr. F-bomb" but I forbid it.
3 seems to combine a idealist picture of what a commercial morality entails with a cynical picture of what a guardian morality entails.
3 is nuts. The guardian class is all about contracts and voluntary agreements, for one thing.
10: That tiger didn't go to business school for 2 years, paid for by his investment bank, to be called "Mr." Please address him as "Bro."
Its possible the guardian/commercial duality is a shitty model.
Agree with others in this thread. The quote in 3 sounds like it was written by a standard brand "taxation is theft!" libertarian loon. Am I missing something?
Fuck 3. From the link
That's the problem the world as a whole is facing: not scarcity, but a certain type of excess. There's too much money sloshing around without any real value to attach itself to. ...Kotsko
There are two types of left intellectuals: those who give credit and homage to Marxism, and those who steal. And maybe it is more Marxian to steal!
Sentence two has the tell word "value," and the critical rhetorical separation, perhaps only implied, between "value" and "price." Sentence two probably contains four Marxist ideas: fictitious capital, labor theory of value, overproduction crisis*, and tendency of the rate of profit to decline.
As to whether, under capitalism, a car factory is about making cars or making money is a little complicated. But the good post is about how economic entities are embedded in social relations, which can be either Marx or Polanyi, depending on your allergies. (Or racism, feminism, post-colonialism, etc)
*not necessarily too many commodities, but the inability of capitalists to realize surplus value into capital that can accumulate
Okay,as to 3, not being a fan of Jacobs, but it may be helpful to compare Pareto's two types: speculators and rentiers.
The problem is that the rentier class, aristocratic landowners for instance, as demonstrated in studies of public schools, has essentially disappeared as a class with values that can dominate in the post-modern West. We are all self-improving entrepreneurs in neoliberalism, or act like we want to be.
"Could you expand on 3? It's interesting but I'm not sure I understand it and in isolation it's not that convincing."
this has a good example:
"Once I started thinking about he world this way, I saw examples all around me. Consider this appalling story about how a private prison company lobbied for harsher immigration laws that would expand the population of prisoners and thereby improve the prison company's bottom line. Delegating a coercive government functions like operating a prison to a private company is dangerous because the prison company has divided loyalty. The people in charge of a prison ought to be completely devoted to serving the public and the rule of law. But a private company also has an obligation to generate profits for shareholders, which can lead them to cut corners in ways that damage the rights of others. In this case, the profit motive drove a prison company to lobby for laws that would swell the prison population, harming both immigrants and taxpayers."
18: And Pareto though that a society was healthy with a mix of speculators and rentiers at the top
As I said, it doesn't matter, cause the soldier/priest/mandarin class, if it even exists anymore, has become irrelevant.
It might be said that rural Trumpkins are part of that class, but they don't have the money the 18th century House of Lords did, and since y'all believe that Trump conned them, they don't have power either.
But reducing government functions to the coercive ones is basically adapting libertarianism and then trying to defend liberalism.
The argument is usually justified because the social welfare provision functions of government require funding from taxation and taxation is coercive. But that's political slight of hand. The functions of businesses that collect money require and employ the coercion of the government too. Just try not paying.
The guy who just got on the bus smells like all the marijuana.
Or just see how free exchange lasts in places where the government doesn't use coercion to defend private property.
The functions of businesses that collect money require and employ the coercion of the government too. Just try not paying.
Hear hear.
"Coercive class?" I like rentier class, old Tories, actual conservatives.
Examples from that class: Eisenhower, Carter, Bush I, and in its diseased decadent form, Bush II.
Counterexamples of old merchant/commercial/liberals:FDR, Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan?
The Clintons, Obama, Trump and all his primary opponents really don't belong to either. They are neoliberals.
y'all believe that Trump conned them
Do we believe that? I don't believe that. Sure, he's a con man on some level, but he was quite honest about being a belligerent asshole. And, ultimately, that's what a lot of people wanted to vote for.
Have a Little Second Hand Pareto ...just handy, Barrington Moore talks about the same things in different words
The "Foxes" are the elites abundantly endowed with residues of the first class (Residues of combinations) which includes the propensities in social groups to adopt flexibly to environmental or situational exigencies.
They are capable of innovation and experiment, prefer materialistic to idealistic goals, but lack fidelity to principles and use strategies that vary from emotional appeal to unadulterated fraud.
The "Lions" are conservative elites in whom the second class of residues (Persistence of aggregates) predominates. They have faith and ideology; they display group loyalty and class solidarity; they gain and retain power by the use of force.
The foxes are bold and adventurous, they do not care to be cautious and live by cunning and cleverness.
In the economic field, the foxes are the speculators; they do not dread risks for the sake of maximum profits. They indulge in promotion schemes. The lions on the other hand, are solid, conservative, tradition loving, loyal to family, church and nation.
They always prefer to rely on force rather than on cleverness. In their economic field they are rentiers. They are cautious, thrifty, content with small returns on safe investments and unwilling to gamble. The elite are composed of either of these types of individuals depending on the sort of residues that happen to prevail.
Foxes, lions; speculators/rentiers; liberals/conservatives;commercials/guardians.
A conservative feels a duty to rule without personal gain; preserving tradition and civilization. Since the justification is essentially religious, she must rely on force rather than persuasion.
There are no fucking conservatives left. Liberals won.
Or Late Capitalism won.
Compare any of the weasels on the Republican stage to Eisenhower or Bush I. Or any famous Congressassholes.
But maybe I'm wrong, and am sorely tempted to make Arno Mayer's Persistence of the Old Regime my next book instead of settler colonialism. I get distracted by the nets, dammit.
Went away, and the first paragraph of the Barrington Moore looks like this (I kinda hate academics who have the arrogance of neologisms, guardians, Catonist after Roman Cato):
1968
In sketching what finds approval under Catonist notions, it has already been necessary to mention what Catonist theories oppose. Concretely they are hostile to traders, usurers, big money, cosmopolitanism, intellectuals. In America Catonism has taken the form of resentment against the city slicker and more generally any form of reasoning that goes beyond the most primitive folk wisdom. In Japan it manifested itself as violent antiplutocratic sentiment. The city appears as a cancerous sore full of invisible conspirators out to cheat and demoralize honest peasants. There is of course a realistic basis for these sentiments in the actual day-to-day experiences of peasants and small farmers who are at a serious disadvantage' in a market economy.As far as feelings (so far as we really know them) and the causes of hatred go, there is not a great deal to choose between the radical right and the radical left in the countryside. The main distinction depends on the amount of realistic analysis of the causes of suffering and on the images of a potential future. Catonism conceals the social causes and projects an image of continued submission. The radical tradition emphasizes the causes and projects an image of eventual liberation.
I just want something new and interesting, not a rehash of ideas that go back to fucking Horace and Vergil.
The issue in 18 isn't limited to private prisons, though. Prison guard unions in public prisons have been doing much the same thing for years (lobbying for laws and policies that increase the number of people locked up in order to supply more jobs for their members). Private prisons may be more effective at regulatory capture, and have plenty of additional issues of their own, but guard unions have had plenty of political clout that they have used to block various sentencing reform initiatives.
Even better Moore:
Thus Catonism is not purely an upper-class mythology about the peasants, attributed to the peasants, but finds a response among the latter because it provides an explanation of sorts for their situation under the intrusion of the market. It is also quite clearly a body of notions that arises out of the life conditions of a landed aristocracy threatened by the same forces. If one glances at the major themes in the form of the aristocratic response that culminated in liberal democracy, one will notice that they also occur in Catonism transposed to a different key. The criticism of mass democracy, the notions of legitimate authority and the importance of custom, opposition to the power of wealth and to mere technical expertise all constitute major themes in the Catonist cacophony. Again it is in the way they are combined, and even more important the ultimate purpose, that makes all the difference. In Catonism these notions serve the ends of strengthening repressive authority. In aristocratic liberalism* they are brought together as intellectual weapons against irrational authority. Catonism, on the other hand, lacks any conception of pluralism or the desirability of checks on hierarchy and obedience.
*not an oxymoron, although an aristocracy of meritocrats is what liberalism is
I'm through, sorry, I'll walk the dogs.
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Doing some (last minute) consideration of options for charitable giving I found an option which seems promising as a way to make a donation and minimize the amount of follow-up mail/e-mail received. Givewell has a donations page where it's possible to divide the donation between their various recommended charities and also possible to chose not to share your name or e-mail with with charities themselves.
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It sounds like more trouble than mailing cash.
Okay heebie-geebie, now that Bob has been lured here you can put up the other post.
Or shipping artwork I steal from hotel lobbies.
Or shipping artwork I steal from hotel lobbies.
You and I may have different ideas about what constitutes more or less trouble.
The stuff in the room is the real trouble. Bolted down.
27- I think you have your head well up your own ass here bob. This: "A conservative feels a duty to rule without personal gain; preserving tradition and civilization. Since the justification is essentially religious, she must rely on force rather than persuasion." is horseshit right-wing propaganda.
Conservatives are always the supporters of hereditary aristocracies whether extant or nascent.
39: How kindly and respectfully you register your disagreement; your fitting right in here, roger.
Okay, look at my examples. Do you think Eisenhower or Bush I or Carter were about dynasties and accumulating vast quantities of wealth? Were they not conservatives?
Whereas with liberals, well, foundations really are the best bet for securing privilege for your descendants nowadays.
In any case, you did not do well, because ruling without personal gain (better, without accumulation and greed?) and establishing dynasties are not necessarily incompatible.
"In their economic field they are rentiers. They are cautious, thrifty, content with small returns on safe investments and unwilling to gamble."
There are Italian families still around, stable and comfortable since the Medicis in Paretos "graveyards of aristocracies". You don't manage that by taking risks and attracting attention. The ambitious are liberal, and the famous three generations from rags to rags.
Or just try to understand the Bush family. Bush II was kinda shoved into the Presidency, somewhat as a lark, but in a lot of ways is a typical aristocrat, down to the painting hobby. Where do you suppose he, and his parents have stored their money? You never hear much.
Whereas Chelsea's husband bet big on Greek default and lost, and went to jail for fraud. Liberals.
My attitude toward rich conservatives is similar to my attitude to rich liberals. Radical and committed misanthropy and alienation. But there really aren't so many around anymore.
Read a nice article today on Hermes Birkins.
You are still confusing the successful habits of old money with conservatism. The fact that the Bushes are cautious with their money doesn't make them conservatives. What makes them conservatives is that they see themselves as aristocrats and have supporters willing to indulge their pretensions.
The fact that the Clinton's son in law turned out to be a reckless gambler, doesn't prove their liberalism either. I think the Clintons would be perfectly happy to bestow a secure legacy on their daughter, and I don't think they are particularly reckless with their money, but Democrats are less likely to support the Clinton's pretensions.
not Chelsea's husband. chelsea's father in law served time for fraud. Oddly, ivanka trump's father in law also spent time in Club Fed.
43: Maybe this was one of the things they bonded over as (erstwhile?) friends.
Kind of btock, so apologies for sentimentality and possibly putting this in an inappropriate thread, but happy 2017 everyone, for whenever you reach it in your parts of the world. It's nice to be alive and nice to have this place to read and (very infrequently) post in.
Back at you Seeds. A happy 2017 to you and everyone else here!
(Not btock yet, it's only 11 AM here and I have to work tomorrow.)
Liquor rest ye merry, expats.
To the OP: no, that isn't what a hedge fund does, and before pontificating about it you should do some research.
The second-to-last sentence is a stretch, but the rest is a reasonable description of a hedge fund.
A hedge fund exists to steal money from Kevin Bacon.
A truly visionary hedge fund invests in elaborate heists.
Ergo, a hedge hog exists to steal a lot of money from Kevin Bacon.
Even though - bear with me here - being a hog, it is, itself, made of bacon.
I find that strange.
"A bustle in your hedgerow" is the traditional City terminology for when one of your portfolio of hedge funds has a good quarter.
50: it's a good description of a hedge fund from the point of view of its investors, but "it exists to turn money into more money" is also a good description of a bakery from the point of view of someone who has invested in a bakery. He's drawing a false distinction between banks and hedge funds ("shadow banks") by looking at them from different angles.
And, yes, hedge funds could exist under various different economic systems. Hasn't he heard of sovereign wealth funds?
It doesn't uniquely identify hedge funds versus other financial institutions, but I don't think that particularly hurts his point.
It doesn't even uniquely identify hedge funds versus any other sort of commercial enterprise, and that completely undermines his point.
What is the "bread" in a hedge fund?
They don't bother making bread. They just make dough.
The sanity and morals of talented people who join hedge funds to make $10M by age 25 and are ground up into evil people and profits (rich assholes, of course, being the other products besides money.)
Actually I guess that describes investment backing more than hedge funds, once the investment banks have turned kids into rich assholes the rich assholes go start hedge funds.
Wait I messed that up. The kids are the flour. Rich assholes are the bread.
58: same as a bank. Reallocation of resources into different areas of duration and risk exposure.
Except banks do that for "clients" so the earnings are taxed as income.
Because there really is no bread if you don't allow that you have a customer.
I'm not a troll, no I'm a man
And I support the analogy ban.
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I visit a whole fuckton of movie and anime review sites linked via IMDB (which started adding foreign language sites a couple years back). One in particular is in Portugese, with google translate at the top. The translation for the last year has been hilarious, but suddenly, like two weeks ago, the translation took a huge leap toward readability. Just visited a French movie site, and the translation was fine, if a little clumsy. Amazing!
Kevin Drum wrote this up December 20. It is that recent.
Google has dedicated itself to neural networks.
"The A.I. system had demonstrated overnight improvements roughly equal to the total gains the old one had accrued over its entire lifetime."
I didn't follow the Drum's link, because end of the month and NY Times, but there was too much "so much better overnight" and not enough on where it was getting the inputs. It has to have a lot of inputs, right?
In any case, I think the French site is a sign that many places will soon have the google bar at the top. And we are now all as global as we want to be, without language barriers. Check it out.
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From the Times
In London, the slide on the monitors behind him flicked to a Borges quote: "Uno no es lo que es por lo que escribe, sino por lo que ha leído."
Grinning, Pichai read aloud an awkward English version of the sentence that had been rendered by the old Translate system: "One is not what is for what he writes, but for what he has read."
To the right of that was a new A.I.-rendered version: "You are not what you write, but what you have read."
Oh. And how many people are about to become unemployed.
Oh well
Tested it on Natsume Soseki, assuming the new system is implemented
1) Vertical Japanese does not cut and paste
2) Page translation too slow to be useful. Never did get an intro page aozora done.
3) 1st section of Botchan...sucked balls.
4) But Soseki is famous for his sometimes intentionally difficult language*, like a lot of his generation. They wrote for each other. Maybe I'll try Mishima. I really want to read Shimazaki Toson, but not bad enough to spend my last years struggling
5) Back to my frequency dictionary and anki
*What I have been told, Soseki and the others used obscure kanji. Soseki did write for a mass audience sometimes, so not sure.
Google recently changed its translation model to some machine learning neural network AI shit, and the quality of translations has gone way up as a result.
73: I don't link or follow much to the Times or Wapo, because I get so sick of the "limit" screens, but if you follow the Drum link in 69, and then go to a link there the NY Times Sunday has a very long fairly technical article on the development of the Translate AI neural network software & hardware (Tensor processor chips?) that was fascinating and fun. Geniuses from Germany, Toronto, China, Vietnam, papers peer reviewed and published, history of AI, just terrific stuff and state of the art.
Fed another French site, just a couple paragraphs. They got that down.
74.last Did you try feeding it some Lacan?
Some company claims they're going to come out with a babelfish this year (my usage, not theirs, I forget what they're calling the product.) I'm skeptical.
You could probably train an algorithm to understand somebody speaking the Queens English and translate it to standard French in real time. You run into more problems when you put a Scot, and American, an Australian and a Jamaican in the room. Not to say these problems won't be overcome, but you can expect babelfish to be fairly dodgy at first.