Can anyone copy paste the actual article here? It’s behind a paywall. I generally like Jacobin so I’d withhold judgement until actually reading the article.

Although I’d disagree on “Bidenism” as a term simply because Biden has not had nearly enough impact or influence to merit that word existing.

Let’s say you want to find what will be an “old person’s name” in 2060. What you do is subtract 60 from 2060 => 2000. Then go to google and type in “most popular baby names year 2000”

pick the first 10 or so and those will be “old person’s name”

it’s a curiosity thing. i think there’s a value to seeing it, although not regularly seeing it.

humans are capable of some horrifying brutality. we live in nice little perfect bubbles and we don’t even realize it.

for example, it’s very easy to catch yourself cheering for war in the name of idealism. but see a couple dozen war videos and you realize what it really means. i think your statement honestly holds true for any type of morbid type of content. for example Crime and Punishment- dissecting the psychology of a double homicide. you could say “why would you read 500 pages of dense literature about someone murdering two innocent people?”

it’s because that’s part of the human experience, for better or worse.

similar to interrogation videos on YouTube. Even poetry like Suicide in the Trenches

I knew a simple soldier boy

Who grinned at life in empty joy,

Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,

And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,

With crumps and lice and lack of rum,

He put a bullet through his brain.

No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye

Who cheer when soldier lads march by,

Sneak home and pray you’ll never know

The hell where youth and laughter go.

Trump’s base is more nuanced, I think. If he starts the rhetoric bashing “big pharma” and “corrupt CEOs” then I think his base will fall in line.

That’s the thing with Trump. His policies don’t actually need to be logically coherent with traditional GOP values.

For example, GOP has historically championed low regulation, low taxes, and free market capitalism. This has been hammered home until it’s become almost an autonomic verbal tic or religious phrase (“inshallah” “god bless our troops”)

But then he comes and he loudly and repeatedly pushes for tariffs - instating large and broad taxes that restrict free market capitalism. And what happens? His base cheers him on for it.

Or for example GOP has historically been supportive of illegal immigrants. Look at Ronald Reagan, another quasi-religious symbol of the GOP. He gave amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants. Legalized them and supported immigration. Why? Because it’s good for free market capitalism.

What about Trump? He goes the other way. Wants to restrict the import of labor as much as possible, hurting free market capitalism.

See what I mean? It doesn’t actually matter what his real policies are. That’s what I find fascinating about him. I think he has the power to take universal healthcare and actually implement it in this country if he wanted to. And that it would cement his legacy permanently.

Which to me, is something a megalomaniac would want

I think the smart move, from Trump, would be to announce he supports public healthcare. That the American people have spoken and bla bla bla, he’s the voice of the people. He would immediately jump 15 points in popularity.

of course a lot of people would lose money and there’s an ingrained power structure that will fight that tooth and nail. but Trump has dismantled and taken over powerful existing power structures before (ie the GOP).

this would help him if he really does want to radically change the country into a psuedo-fascist oligarchy thing which seems to be Musk’s and Thiel’s goal

are you saying that those construction projects won’t get done

No, but it would both

a) slow down significantly

b) costs would rise significantly

The issue is it’s hard to find laborers. Americans simply don’t work as hard as immigrants. I’ve been doing this for about a decade now and that’s one thing I’ve learned. You don’t hire Americans to dig holes. They will work half as hard, complain 5 times as much, and leave as soon as they find something better.

But Pablo and Juan will work with a smile on their face, don’t care about being nomads working from state to state without complaints, and they’ll work Saturdays and even Sundays if you let them. You gotta basically force them to take days off.

Low-skill Americans prefer easy jobs like working at a cashier where they can stand around all day. That’s what they’re good for. Skilled Americans do office jobs, management, supervision, etc.

So let’s say we get rid of all illegals. During a time where we already have a labor shortage, we would eliminate 10~15 million people from the economy that basically fuel key parts of our economy.

What would happen? An exacerbation of the labor shortage and inflation. Large construction companies would see their costs jump up. Productivity would lower. Which would mean less demand for construction materials. Which would lead to price instability - aka more inflation. Small businesses would be most effected.

That’s just construction. We would see effects in many industries such as landscaping or agriculture as well.

I mean, this is they way the left makes it sound… as if, we DON’T support illegal immigration, our country is doomed… and it’s ridiculous.

First, I want you to remember being pro-illegal immigration is a right-wing capitalist policy. Ronald Reagan gave amnesty to all illegals. His economic advisor, Milton Friedman, advocated for open borders.

The reason being because immigration is essentially an extension of economic policy. The labor market is a market like any other. The more regulations you put, the worse it gets for business. Regulations include, for example, restricting the importing of labor or artificially removing labor from the population (aka mass deportations)

Second, I would like to remind you that Obama deported more people than Trump did.

This entire conversation has nothing to do with left versus right. Both parties are more or less in agreement on the general trends. There has been no significant immigration reform for decades, even though there have been multiple instances of GOP majorities and DNC majorities. Why?

Because of the reasons I outlined above. It’s actually really beneficial to the economy for us to have an underclass of cheap labor that has less rights than everyone else. It’s essentially a mini and voluntary slavery. Sort of like how Dubai imports Indians. Lots of pros, very little cons.

Thirdly and lastly, it’s only been since 2016 or so that we have seen the anti-illegal and anti-immigrant rhetoric in general start increasing. You want to know why?

Because our society has been taken over by populists. Our country is in its death throes and vultures are already picking at the corpse.

This once free market economy that produced the strongest country in the world is being destroyed bit by bit. They want to restrict the market as much as possible. First, you put in tariffs restricting the free flow of goods. Then you artificially freeze the labor market.

The end goal? An economy designed for only the largest corporations who are allied with those in power. That is what we are becoming and they are accomplishing that by pulling the wool over your eyes.

There’s also obviously plenty of, for lack of a better word, entrepreneurs

Yeah, it’s interesting.

Over the course of the last two decades or so, the government has slowly been enforcing the I9 verification process. Where employers have to get some information from you when they hire you. Social security number, driver’s license, etc. This makes it so illegals shouldn’t be able to work most jobs.

Of course, there are ways around it. I’ve worked for smaller sized publicly traded companies that simply look the other way. I knew a middle manager who was illegal and the company knew about it- but didn’t really care. So they just cooked the books, so to speak, so the employee could continue working. I remember when he got deported. His wife wanted her niece from their home country to come visit and stay with them for a couple weeks. Girl was 16. Customs officer thought it was suspicious, started asking girl some questions. Officer did not like the responses.

So they waited at the airport with the girl until employee went to go pick up his wife’s niece. Officer then questions employee, he doesn’t have appropriate documents. 8 months later, after the standard deportation procedures (which involves going in front of an immigration judge, etc), he was deported.

Moral of the story? If you have to pick up someone from the airport and you’re illegal… find a friend with documents and send them instead. Safer

One way to get around as an illegal that seems to be very popular is just to start a company and work as a 1099 subcontractor.

So for example, you don’t need documents to start a business. You start a business, apply for an EIN number with the IRS under that business. Then when you go work for some construction company, you don’t work as an employee. You sign up as a 1099 contractor.

That way the company hiring you is not legally liable for anything - they are simply hiring a company to provide a service. They aren’t hiring illegals to do work- whoever the contractor chooses to hire or not is not a concern of the host company. Uncle Sam gets his taxes and everybody is happy.

Vast swathes of the construction industry work using that system. I don’t want to name names, but some very big-name companies would suffer quite a bit should we actually deport even a small % of illegals.

My main point is that the system is designed to keep undocumented immigrants in the “informal economy” by paying under the table

I understand the point you’re making and I agree with you. It’s designed to keep them in the shadows. Although keep in mind, it’s not always under the table. Like I outlined above, a lot of it ends up being taxed and documented properly. I know illegals that get paid $2000 weekly salary, have a work truck assigned to them, and have their rent paid for. They do their yearly taxes and Uncle Sam doesn’t care because he’s making his cut.

There’s a high demand for people that speak both English and Spanish and have both a) technical skills (aka can work spreadsheets, emails) and b) have construction experience. It’s really hard to find these people and many of them tend to be illegals.

You want to really hurt illegals? Get rid of the ability to do what I just outlined. But then Uncle Sam would lose $$$. So that’s what I’m curious what Trump is actually gonna do.

There absolutely are illegals being put in similar situations as Dubai does with the Indians. For example, the Chinese love doing this. They’ll start a Chinese restaurant and then import Chinese to live and work there for pennies on the dollar. Other examples are Mexicans working in agricultural in the SW of the country.

But that certainly isn’t the only way and in my experience isn’t that common.

I’ve worked all over the rust belt / bible belt in a little over a dozen states doing large construction projects. At least for my industry, the vast majority of the laborers are illegals. They don’t disappear after getting paid. I’ve worked with some regularly for over 5 years.

From what I’ve heard from people in California, your experience is not typical

Undocumented immigrants don’t “do the work legal citizens aren’t willing to do” or “work harder than legal citizens”. Those are both racist liberal talking points

majority of my life was spent as an illegal immigrant. i’ve been embedded in illegal immigrant communities my whole life. i’ve worked with many and have known many more

it’s my experience that both of those statements are true.

a) they do work citizens aren’t willing to do and b) they work harder

i can elaborate on why I believe those things are true, but absolutely if I’m looking for a laborer for specific types of work… I will always avoid the native-born citizen.

whole ecosystem of fear is designed to keep immigrants working jobs below minimum wage and/or in appalling working conditions

believe it or not there are many illegals that make wages higher than what most americans make.

there’s many types of illegal immigrants. there’s not one size fits all to make generalizations. but the majority of them are similar to oil drill workers.

a working class male goes far away to a labor-intensive job that nobody wants to do. they do this because they can make a relatively large salary and then use that money to do something back at home.

so for example Mexicans will come and work in construction. They can make upwards of $300+ a day of work with experience. this is many times more than what they could reasonably expect in Mexico. but not only that, they’re making more than many native born American citizens.

it’s just lower skilled Americans tend to flock to low salary and low effort jobs like retail or food service.

I wonder if he’s gonna actually do it. An actual real concentrated effort to remove illegals would cause serious problems.

Inflation would spike, lots of industries would slow to a crawl, certain commercial areas would be essentially destroyed.

For example, in many different fields of construction the majority of the hard labor comes from illegals. Big companies hire contractors who then hire contractors who use illegals because they are much more productive than Americans and you can pay them less.

If we get rid of them, they would have to both dramatically increase their labor cost and the projects would slow down.

That would raise the price of doing business which is inevitably always passed down to the consumer. Then you have certain areas with ethnic markets and ethnic restaurants and such. Many of those would lose half or more of their business overnight.

This would be so disruptive it’s hard to understate. And I know Trump knows this.

That’s my burning curiousity right now. Is this whole thing similar to the Wall™ ? A symbol that isn’t meant to accomplish anything meaningful beyond giving the droolers something to point to? Or is he serious?

If he’s serious, we’re about to begin a radical shift. He would not be doing this if he wasn’t ready to radically change things.

mostly egalitarian troupe hominids

“mostly” is pulling a lot of weight in that statement, eh?

sure, we took care of the elderly and others in the tribe. packs of wild dogs and monkeys have been seen to do that as well. share food, etc. but if our early tribes are anything like what we see in primates, and it almost certainly was, the distribution of power was not equal.

there are monkeys with differing levels. baboons have a much stricter hierarchy than bonobos, but the structure is still there

The Haudenosaunee / Iroquois Confederacy is a good example of how to approach such a problem

I do not claim it is impossible, although I also do not believe that the exceptions disprove the rule. My favorite example personally is the brief anarchist experiment during the Spanish Civil War. The anarchists managed to at least for a short period of time replicate what I believe would be the ideal society.

the issue is that this type of society simply loses to other more authoritarian ones in a sort of Darwinist playing field. the vanguard party commies beat the anarchists and then the nationalists beat the communists. bye bye egalitarian power structure

Calling the skill and ambition distribution a pyramid is really an artifact of history, not biology

let’s say i am a foot taller than you and weigh 100 pounds more. we have just finished a hunt and we are distributing the spoils. let’s say I take double your portion. you speak up “hey I deserve an equal amount” and then I simply look at you and say “no”

what are you gonna do? my genetic makeup (along with external factors of course, like my mother’s nutrition while i was in the womb) caused me to have more physical power than you. you have no choice but to bow your head and take what you get.

that doesn’t mean it’s impossible, for example, to create alliances with others in the tribe and end up with a “social victory” and we actually see these types of behaviors in chimps. but I think that in itself is just another form of power. social intelligence, political and diplomatic maneuvering is a function of intelligence which like physical strength is a makeup genetic (as well as external, like before)

so you may be physically weaker, but mentally stronger. but in the end, power is power.

the older I get, the more I realize how deeply ingrained this structure is in our societies. I wish it weren’t, but it really is. the only way around it, I think, would require a radical restructuring of our society and would necessarily have to be just as dystopian as the opposite extreme

because of a few things

a) when you start a game of monopoly, everybody is equal. by the end of the game, wealth (think of wealth as an analog to power) snowballs and only one or two people will have all the resources.

when you start a communist government, it’s not a fresh game of monopoly. it’s a continuation of the previous game. and the vast majority of people are joining in after the wealth has been accumulated. therefore, power remains in the hand of the powerful

b) there is a large variance in human capabilities. to be frank, the vast majority of people are sheep. their world view is narrow and motivation stunted. they don’t really care very much about things outside of their life and they don’t want to learn, grow, etc. there isn’t anything wrong with that, and there’s sort of a whole religion based on this

but some people are very talented, ambitious, and greedy. these people will end up at higher positions, no matter your form of government. humans tend to naturally distribute ourselves in hierarchies. aka pyramids

this goes all the way back to our primate roots. look at chimps where the male leader of the pack has dibs on which female monkey he wants to mate with. the weaker monkeys have to bow their head and take what they can get.

tldr: hierarchy and pyramids are in the very fabric of human existence. doesn’t matter what form of government or economic system you pick. pyramid will develop somehow, someway

i’ve used it fairly consistently for the last year or so. i didn’t actually start using it until chatgpt 4 and when openai offered the $20 membership

i think AI is a tool. like any other tool, your results vary depending on how you use it

i think it’s really useful for specific intents

example, as a fancy search engine. yesterday I was watching Annie from 1999 with my girlfriend and I was curious about the capitalist character. i asked chatgpt the following question

in the 1999 hit movie annie, who was the billionaire mr warbucks supposed to represent? were there actually any billionaires in the time period? it’s based around the early 1930s

it gave me context. it showed examples of the types of capitalist the character was based on. and it informed me that the first billionaire was in 1916.

very useful for this type of inquiry.

other things i like using it for are to help coding. but there’s a huge caveat here. some thing it’s very helpful for… and some things it’s abysmal for.

for example i can’t ask it “can you help me write a nice animation for a react native component used reanimated”

because the response will be awful and won’t work. and you could go back and forth with it forever and it won’t make a difference. the reason is it’s trained on a lot of stuff that’s outdated so it’ll keep giving you code that maybe would have worked 4 years ago. and even then, it can’t hold too much context so complex applications just won’t work

BUT certain things it’s really good. for example I need to write a script for work. i use fish shell but sometimes i don’t know the proper syntax or everything fish is capable of

so I ask

how to test, using fish, if an “images.zip” file exists in $target_dir

it’ll pump out

if test -f "$target_dir/images.zip"
    echo "File exists."
else
    echo "File does not exist."
end

which gives me what i needed in order to place it into the script i was writing.

or for example if you want to convert a bash script to a fish script (or vice versa), it’ll do a great job

so tldr:

it’s a tool. it’s how you use it. i’ve used it a lot. i find great value in it. but you must be realistic about its limitations. it’s not as great as people say- it’s a fancy search engine. it’s also not as bad as people say.

as for whether it’s good or bad for society, i think good. or at least will be good eventually. was the search engine a bad thing for society? i think being able to look up stuff whenever you want is a good thing. of course you could make the argument kids don’t go to libraries anymore… and maybe that’s sorta bad. but i think the trade-off is definitely worth it

if we’re talking about consecutive time spent, ie one single uninterrupted block of time, then I’d say about 7~8 hours.

one time my ex-girlfriend’s cat managed to get way. we think it was one of the roommates opened the door to the back and wasn’t paying much attention. the cat was sneaky, he would try to dart out all the time

i spent the entire day, basically, walking around the fairly large apartment complex yelling out his name and shaking a bag of treats

a few hours in, my ex had a mental breakdown and gave up thinking any continued searching was hopeless. she really liked the cat and wasn’t taking it well

but i just kept at it. towards the end of the day, around dusk when it was starting to get dark, i heard an exasperated meow behind me and the cat came up running to me. it looked very scared and confused.

we had just moved from one place to another a few hours away. so it was used to be an outside cat but it didn’t know the area whatsoever.

anyhow it actually stopped trying to run out of the house after that, so that was nice

i went through a breakup a few years back and spent like 2 years just alone at my house. didn’t interact with any friends, didn’t seek out any romantic interests. nothing, just coding video games and work basically.

after a while, i started getting interested in social contact again. so i started going to kava bars. every night after work i’d go hang out a couple of hours at a kava bar. started meeting people, having a social life. i got on tinder, met some girls. started dating one of them

moral of the story?

sometimes in life you have phases. it’s OK to be alone for a while. but when you feel like you don’t want to be alone anymore, go out to a place where there are people. i don’t know how the kava scene is in new zealand… i’d imagine you get pretty good stuff because you’re smack dab in the middle of the pacific island region.

but to me kava bars are great because a) i don’t like alcohol or people who are drunk and b) you get an interesting scene of “alternative” people who don’t necessarily mash with the standard mainstream ideals of what youre “supposed to be” or “supposed to do”

so that worked for me but may not work for you. maybe you like chess. maybe you like card games. maybe you like drinking beer and playing pool. or bonsai.

whatever the hell you like, there’s something out there so just go to social events regularly and the rest will solve itself

you’re gonna tell me that a $5,000 bottle of wine is 200x better than a $25 bottle of wine? They’ve done many random taste tests and even the wine experts can’t always tell the difference.

the difference is the luxury. the garcon coming out and telling you about some fancy wine grown with special grapes in france. he pours it for you and your date. etc

illusion of comfort. the illusion is what is important.

sometimes there are differences. for example when you pay for an expensive supercar, it’s going to drive incredibly well. the money goes somewhere. but i think a large chunk is what i said, an illusion

something that is objectively unnecessary but gives comfort or at least the illusion of comfort

i think of it like the laws of diminishing returns

think of a shitbox $3,000 used car. assuming the engine is more or less running, you get like 80% of the benefits of a car

it gets you from point A -> B - the primary purpose of a car

then you spend another $10,000 for a $13,000 5~6 year old Toyota or something. now you have A/C, that gives you an extra few % benefits. You get a carplay so you have a nice little screen for a GPS, another few %. you get a key that unlocks your car, etc.

so you went from 80% to lets say 90%. but that base 80%, getting you from point A -> B hasn’t changed.

that extra $10,000 bought you 10% extra

then let’s say you spend another $100,000 for a $113,000 car

you get all the benefits of the previous cars, but you maybe can speed up a little faster. you have heated seats. you have a sport mode or something.

that extra $100,000 bought you another like 7% so now you’re at 97%

Luxury is that last 20%. The closer you wanna get to 100%, the more expensive each % costs. This is a status symbol