Re: Guest Post - Long Weekend Longwatch

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Just now getting back to the world of the internet.

Warning - it sucks.


Posted by: Robert Halford | Link to this comment | 01-15-18 11:44 AM
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Also, I just procrastiwatched this video and it is actually great. Great. To toss Snyder some money I also just bought this book which I've been meaning to red for a while.


Posted by: Robert Halford | Link to this comment | 01-15-18 12:02 PM
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I should say I watched part of it. The whole thing is like over an hour.


Posted by: RH | Link to this comment | 01-15-18 12:05 PM
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That's a disturbing lack of commitment to procrastination, RH.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 01-15-18 12:20 PM
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He'll get to the rest later.


Posted by: Eggplant | Link to this comment | 01-15-18 12:32 PM
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Well played.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 01-15-18 12:53 PM
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I felt sorry for him when Letterman fired him, but I never watched the show.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 01-15-18 1:32 PM
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Also, I just procrastiwatched this video and it is actually great. Great.

It sounds good. I probably won't listen to it today, but will try to do so in the next day or so.


Posted by: NickS | Link to this comment | 01-15-18 2:09 PM
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When I knew Tim Snyder, he was a lumpen kid in the back row of my English class who talked exclusively about petty crime and professional sports. Glad to see he's come a long way since then.


Posted by: Natilo Paennim | Link to this comment | 01-15-18 2:15 PM
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I listened to the whole thing! Interesting! Thanks, Mossy!


Posted by: peep | Link to this comment | 01-15-18 5:20 PM
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||

I am the dumbest dummy who cannot figure out how to do this google art face match thing on my phone. To the point where I am suspecting that somehow my phone is not giving me the same options on my version of the Arts & Culture app that everyone else seems to have been doing all weekend. On topic because I'm just now getting back to the internet.

|>


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 01-15-18 7:41 PM
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I've been told the app is not available everywhere (I haven no idea why) from twitter.


Posted by: Asteele | Link to this comment | 01-15-18 8:11 PM
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You're welcome, peep!


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 4:48 AM
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"[America] has only been a democracy in the sense that we understand it for about as long as I've been alive."

Correlation is causation.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 6:03 AM
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I'll be damned I'll watch a whole video before I figure out how Snyder is misusing the word neoliberal. I will just denounce him, content-free. You're wrong, Snyder!


Posted by: Walt Someguy | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 6:39 AM
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I should read some of his books. I like history, but I like the kind that is a specific story about an event or series of events instead of "this is what it all means" histories.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 6:48 AM
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I used to like the "what it all means" books, but having now lived through some actual history and having become expert on some actual topics, I feel like they're mostly bullshit. For example, the dominant fact of the last 150 years has been economic growth, and I know that the best summary of the economic literature on the question of causes of economic growth is "dunno".


Posted by: Walt Someguy | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 7:01 AM
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Yes, they're for young people.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 7:06 AM
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....and I know that the best summary of the economic literature on the question of causes of economic growth is "dunno".

I thought the answer was "Neoliberalism".


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 7:21 AM
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The other dominant fact of the last 150 years has been natural resource extraction, that may have something to do with it.


Posted by: Cryptic ned | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 7:22 AM
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18 Like eating Tide pods.


Posted by: Barry Freed | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 7:56 AM
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I think that's covered by "neoliberalism". It means everything and nothing.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 7:56 AM
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22 to 21.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 7:57 AM
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20: Economists have heard of this, and yet have surprisingly not converged on it as an explanation. I mean, the reductio (if all of the natural resources never existed there wouldn't have been much economic growth) is true, but it doesn't explain much of the variation. Japan has fuck all natural resources. China had just as much coal in 1960 as it does now, while GDP contracted like 10% in 1960, and averages 6% growth now. The US has pissed away resources on economically inefficient suburbs because resources aren't currently an important constraint on US growth.


Posted by: Walt Someguy | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 8:15 AM
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China had just as much coal in 1960 as it does now

Unless they're replacing the stuff they burn, I suspect it had more coal in 1960 than now.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 8:18 AM
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15 - he's on team it's become a meaningless signifier that expresses nothing other than a vague gesture and shuts down conversation by being nonspecific. He's one of the good guys on this topic.


Posted by: Robert Halford | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 8:18 AM
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God, that's even worse.


Posted by: Walt Someguy | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 8:20 AM
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International banking and joint stock companies, according to Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle." (Everything I know I learned from SF writers.)


Posted by: DaveLMA | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 8:33 AM
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OT: To those in Washington, happy "Temperance and Good Citizenship Day".


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 8:39 AM
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Washington State, obviously.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 8:41 AM
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"Japan has fuck all natural resources"

Really? I thought it at least had a fair amount of coal.


Posted by: ajay | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 8:51 AM
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Yes. And copper, and silver, that I know of.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 8:55 AM
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I'm just under 20 minutes in and it's excellent. The point about Britain and France never having been nation-states is really good.


Posted by: Barry Freed | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 8:55 AM
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Before googling, I think Japan started with a decent amount of coal, but it dwindled enough to be uneconomic to mine by maybe the 60's.


Posted by: Minivet | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 8:55 AM
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They googled away their coal?


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 9:01 AM
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Japanese Wikipedia: in 2002 there was only one coal mine in operation in Japan, but energy prices since then have led to a few more reopening. 2015 production 1.2m metric tons.


Posted by: Minivet | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 9:01 AM
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best summary of the economic literature on the question of causes of economic growth is "dunno".

At the risk of insulting some of our commentariat, I confess to being fond of the description of the field of economics as "astrology for bros".


Posted by: AcademicLurker | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 9:10 AM
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37: Economics is a bit more serious than that. The real astrology for men is analyzing stock charts.


Posted by: Cryptic ned | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 9:19 AM
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There's a rather sweet Japanese film, Hula Girls, about a defunct mining town attempting to transform itself into a Hawaiian-themed spa resort. It's very like British comedies with similar social settings - think Brass or The Full Monty.


Posted by: Ume | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 9:39 AM
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37: It really isn't, though. Maybe Econ 101 is? The field has a definite right-wing bias, but is tightly intertwined with the empirical evidence. You are better off reading a right-wing empirical economics paper (with some critical distance) on any economics subject than you are reading 99% of non-economist sources. Very few astrology horoscopes can be summarized as "dunno".

Economics is completely fucked up, and it would be great if there were an influx of critics to keep it honest. Sadly, though, the existing critics are largely super-lazy, and work backwards from whatever their desired answer is -- usually CAPITALISM SUCKS LOL, but sometimes GOVERNMENT SUCKS LOL. (Though part of the reason that economics has fewer right-wing critics is that the right has literally no idea what actual economists think.) The spirit to understand how capitalism works, and not just why it sucks in every way, is lacking.


Posted by: Walt Someguy | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 9:58 AM
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Coal is what counts. And iron ore i suppose. Once you have that you can build an industrial civilisation and a fleet and go and grab whatever else you need.


Posted by: ajay | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 10:07 AM
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Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided...but by iron and blood!


Posted by: Opinionated Otto von Bismarck | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 10:14 AM
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42: Watching Fall of Eagles?


Posted by: Minivet | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 10:24 AM
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41: To the extent that isn't a joke: TTBOMVLK Japan industrialized by borrowing foreign money to pay for foreign imports it needed to make stuff, until it had enough of its own stuff to manufacture more exports than it imported (which only happened in IIRC the later 1960s). In this story having coal only mattered to the extent it reduced the amount of stuff that had to be imported (which maybe wasn't trivial).


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 10:44 AM
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TTBOMVLK

New mouseover.


Posted by: Sir Kraab | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 10:47 AM
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Anyhow everyone should watch this video. In part it can be read as a call for exactly the kinds of people Walt is talking about in 40.2, though honestly most economists these days are empirical enough to be part of the solution, not the problem.


Posted by: Robert Halford | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 11:29 AM
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Anyhow everyone should watch this video.

I've started listening to it in the background and it is very interesting. I expect that I'll want to (background) listen to it a second time because I feel like I'm missing things and it's good enough to be worth getting the details.


Posted by: NickS | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 11:59 AM
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Neoliberalism is the post-1980 glorification of markets and skepticism about the efficacy of government intervention in domestic affairs. People seem to be thrown by the fact that mainstream democrats and republicans both support it but it is an actual thing that has a historical beginning and will have a historical end.

Things that are not neoliberalism: socialism, social democrats, FDR and LBJ style liberal interventionists (and on the bad side -neo reactionaries, fascists, white nationalists)


Posted by: lemmy caution | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 12:00 PM
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The spirit to understand how capitalism works, and not just why it sucks in every way, is lacking.

Marx must be rolling in his grave.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 12:42 PM
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Hegel was buried standing on his head.


Posted by: fake accent | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 2:53 PM
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Marx's head?


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 3:53 PM
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I almost pedantically explained fa's joke. God, please take me home before I hurt too many others.


Posted by: Walt Someguy | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 4:01 PM
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I don't see the problem.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 4:21 PM
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OT: Two-hour delay tomorrow. Hooray.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 4:21 PM
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53: Marx said that he was turning Hegel on his head.


Posted by: Walt Someguy | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 4:24 PM
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If he's buried standing on Marx's head, then somebody must have flipped him back.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 4:27 PM
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11: You're not the dumbest dummy. It turns out Texans are blocked! from the google arts face-matchy thing! Also Illonoins.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 8:18 PM
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For obvious reasons.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 8:20 PM
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I suppose that having people upload their faces to an app owned by the Borg, for purposes of having AI match it against a database, is not entirely unproblematic.


Posted by: Spike | Link to this comment | 01-16-18 8:31 PM
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Since I'm apparently defending economists today, I just found an example of how far the reputation of the Freakonomics guy has fallen. This is an actual quote from an actual econ journal: "In fact,Levitt's work demonstrates that it is no longer even necessary to do the regressions correctly in order to achieve fame and superstar status in the dumb and dumber regime we're in. Two of Levitt's most famous papers are false..."


Posted by: Walt Someguy | Link to this comment | 01-17-18 2:17 AM
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