281–290 of 347 posts
Surprised this didn't get any comments. It's a good reason to leave (or not move to) the US, or increasingly, the UK.
Once you leave (and give up citizenship) you loose a lot of options to influence it. And you leave behind those who are either too naive, too poor, too sick, or otherwise unable to follow; together with the elements who made you leave, and who now have free access to a completely empty stage..
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> If someone were to write and (crucially) popularize a version that reads the way people explain Foucault, things would be different. Foucault was French. French (and Europeans that are non British in general) do not write theory and history the way anglosaxons do. At least most of them doesn't. If you want to learn from them, you have to study their idioms. You cannot just point at it and say it's unquotable or ali…
Disclaimer: I'm Anglo Saxon, and I'm also a butcher in your terms despite spending reasonable amount of time and effort working to understand this stuff. I think the key difference here is that code actually has to compile, so no matter how clever your lispy magic gets it's still grounded by that reality. Foucault (and Barthes, Saussure et al) are unencumbered by the constraint of their prose actually having to be pa…
Nail on head. The relationship between the words of the above and reality is similar to the relationship between a painting of a landscape and the real landscape. It's not that the painting is not valuable in itself, but it would be a mistake to think that it says anything about how the landscape actually works
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Yes, I get the gist of it. I am not convinced it is plausible.
I agree, but not for the reason you gave in your comment. The police wouldn't know they're going along with a despot. They would don riot gear, block streets, and set up checkpoints in the name of safety from terrorists and looters.
What happens next?
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So when in 1960s students revolted against the War in Vietnam, an average American knew all those things? I don't think so. I'd rather draw parallel to Ancient Rome and its citizens. As long as there were "Games" in town and bread for free nobody cared. Once the Rome was on fire they woke up. For some time. The situation is hopeless. The only solution is when US runs out of money. Goes bankrupt. Which is quite possib…
> I'd rather draw parallel to Ancient Rome and its citizens. As long as there were "Games" in town and bread for free nobody cared. Once the Rome was on fire they woke up. For some time. This is not why the Roman empire collapsed. In fact the term "collapse" itself implies some weird sudden event, rather then a gradual evolution over the course of hundreds of years into the various entities which became the forerunne…
Like UK -- it has declined from an Empire Status, but did not collapse. I agree - the same with Roman Empire.
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And it is possible to see "why" all these things have been happening once you understand that the country has been getting poorer and poorer for some time and more and more in debt. In other words, the USA in an Empire in decline. Each and every aspect of life in the US is a little bit worse every year. This has been a process since I believe 1973 when US went out of the gold standard. Rich nations, creditor nations,…
> The solution is bankruptcy, to be able to start over from scratch. I believe it has more to do with the unfettered rise of the military-industrial complex (including banking/finance), which has siezed near complete control of our political machinery. We have become a corporate state, wherein politicians are fully purchasable and policy is made for a narrow set of interests vs. for the people. If this is not changed…
USSR bankruptcy caused plenty of revolutions in the whole region.
People are calm and don't care - exactly like the article implies - till there are three missing meals. Hungry stomach makes them go to the streets and revolt. Not another news about the Government going crazy.
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So when in 1960s students revolted against the War in Vietnam, an average American knew all those things? I don't think so. I'd rather draw parallel to Ancient Rome and its citizens. As long as there were "Games" in town and bread for free nobody cared. Once the Rome was on fire they woke up. For some time. The situation is hopeless. The only solution is when US runs out of money. Goes bankrupt. Which is quite possib…
> The situation is hopeless. The only solution is when US runs out of money. Goes bankrupt. Which is quite possible. Once USD isn't the world currency, the country defaults. Why would it? The US dollar not being the world currency wouldn't drop the value of US industrial output , but it would (presuming that it dropped the value of the dollar due to reduced global demand for US dollars) reduce the value of US debt. W…
90% of all USD in circulation isn't even in the US borders. Isn't used for the needs of the US industry/economy. Thanks to this the FED can print, print, print into the oblivion, getting back just 10% of inflation it created, while the world gets the 90%. Ever heard the famous: “The dollar is our currency, but your problem” by John Connally, President Nixon’s Treasury Secretary, to a delegation of Europeans worried about exchange rate fluctuations?
Now the ponzie scheme grew (as they always have to) so it is not only Europeans, but also Arabs and Asians, but the days of the USD debt ponzie scheme are counted. There are just these many losers on the planet to buy into it.
Now, just imagine these additional USD coming from all over the world to the US. Hyperinflation?
And just a single simple event could cause that: Chinese tying their Yuan to gold. Who on Earth will want your t-bill backed by the most indebted government on the planet, when they can get it backed by gold and the biggest creditor government in the world?
>Which would be bad for entities with incomes or assets denominated in US dollars, but good for entities with debts denominated in US dollars, and neutral for entities whose income was dependent, say, on US output.
Right. Your debt would vanish. I think that's the only good thing from the hyper inflationary perspective. The debt is USD denominated, so yes, it makes sense. Again, from China perspective, a little price to pay to have world reserve currency instead of the US having it.
>This is neither true nor meaningful; as long as the debt can be serviced, it doesn't actually need to be repaid (and could, in fact, grow in absolute terms over time without limit without harm so long as output was growing apace.)
If we use the official government formula of calculating inflation from Ronald Reagan years we are at 10% today. We've been for at least 3 years now. And what is the return on the t-bill? Again, it might be true, that at least you know you'll be repaid even if it means you'll loose. But t-bills are in fact in a bubble territory now. What will you do when interest rates rise? If interest rates are at 7% we're talking about more than 50% of tax revenue going just to service the debt. Just to pay the premium. Over 50% of the tax revenue! And what if we have to have it at the levels from the beginning of 1980s? At 18% ? We won't even be able to service it. And in 1980s most of the debt was hold by the Americans. So the money was going back to the US economy. Currently most of the debt is held by foreigners. Can you imagine the impossibility of a political situation were over 50% of the tax revenue goes to foreigners in the middle of a financial crisis? And it is just at 7% interest rates. The FED effectively can't rise the rates. There is no way they can do it. You think this is acceptable like forever for t-bills holders?
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What's wrong with Ayn Rand?
Generally, people don't like her for lacking 'heart'. However, most people don't actually understand her message, nor do they appreciate her definition of selfishness. It's very unfortunate because her writings were on the spot on about human behavior.
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There are many things in this world/levels of perspective that benefit from a non-mathematically rigorous analysis- up to and including the question "what is the benefit of rigorous mathematical analysis". That doesn't mean they don't have their own kind of rigor or that you should be able to understand them right away without any background knowledge. The attitude you have is shared by folks in the humanities who th…
So here's the operative difference: I can explain to a non-technical person what the Y-combinator gets you in terms of results. I could make a physicist or mathematician or mechanical engineer or even an analytic philosopher understand the significance, and then it's just a matter of notation. And I really wish postmodernists would stop hiding behind the banner of "the humanities". Analytic philosophy, history, class…
As for the humanities thing, yes, I agree. Just as physicists can make many clear statements that resonate with people who don't even know math, there are many aspects of the humanities that are accessible and clear to people who have never studied theory. Your disdain for higher level theory would also make it difficult for you to enjoy certain texts by people like Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, none of whom are "postmodernists".