Several years ago, the first time I said that I expected a peaceful partition of the US, the idea was ridiculed and people piled on.
Things are pretty different from what they were even just a few years ago.
The US doesn't really have a single, common, consensus culture or history. New Englanders are not the same as folks in the Pacific Northwest, or the Southwest, or the Southeast, or the Plains. And none of those folks are the same as each other.
And that's just the regional aspect.
Different cultures, different history. Different values.
Folks in New England have more in common with folks in maritime Canada than they do with folks in Texas, for example. Or Alabama, or Florida, or Kansas, or Minnesota, or Kentucky. And so on.
Trump is shredding Constitutional small-r republican governance, which is really the main thing we have in common. So I'm not sure what's left. And I have no idea how that gets resolved.
To be perfectly honest, I'd be fine with New England separating from the US in its current incarnation. Whether just becoming a country of its own, or becoming a Canadian province. I just have no idea how we would get from here to there without people being harmed, so I'm not really an advocate of that.
Perhaps a stronger model of federalism? Which would also take a lot of work, and I don't see that we're in a place where that could be discussed in a reasonable way - a way that could lead to an actionable plan.
My expectation is that we're just going to stumble forward into a heavily conflicted mediocre future.
By many measures, compared to other OECD countries we're already mediocre. We have a lot of money and a lot of guns. That seems to be what we value, and what we're good at.
Which I find kind of disappointing.
the lack of visual art and, with a very notable exception, the apparent lack of sites for religious rituals.
I'm not sure this is so. My understanding is that cave art attributable to Neandethals have been found in the Loire and in Spain. The attribution is based on dating the paint used, which apparently (or allegedly) pre-dates homo sapiens' arrival in Europe.
The famous individual buried in Shanidar cave surrounded by pollen is often cited as an example of Neanderthal intentional burial practices, indicating symbolic thought and ritualistic behaviors.
I was just teaching my son who just discovered music about playing on top of the beat vs. behind, etc.
The force is strong with this one!!! An advanced topic for a youngster - does your son play an instrument, or is he just listening? Not a complaint, but in reality this just isn't possible.
You could be right.
:(
Russell is a lot like Hilzoy
Yikes! Are you sure you have the right (R)russell?
You are very kind, bc. I appreciate this, although I doubt I live up to it. If this is a suggestion that we should have political shibboleths for commentators, I'm against it.
Pretty much my feeling also. And I think the suggestion of "just don't engage" is also fine. I know there are certain topics that I'm just not interested in discussing.
The folks that we exclude from here tend to be folks (on either - or any - side of the fence) who are rude or offensive, in whatever way. And we generally give folks ample warning before they get bumped - most of the folks that have been banned have shown that they simply refuse to stop doing whatever it is we've asked them (usually repeatedly) to stop doing.
I'm not sure anyone has been banned simply for their opinion, per se.
Conservative lurkers, c'mon in! Just don't be jerks. We'll try not to be, too.
The other player that comes to mind for me right away with this trait is John Paul Jones.
Jones was the glue in Zep. And a brilliant player, definitely the undersung member in that band. Check it, the bass in this is just a perfect counterpoint to everything else that is going on. Funky, solid, he ties the different sections of the tune together and keeps in moving forward.
And if it's a Zep tune and it isn't a guitar or drums or voice, it's JPJ playing it.
Re: Ringo, you can always tell a young green drummer who doesn't understand how making music with other people works yet, because they don't like Ringo.
Hey, open thread!!
Ringo Starr, aka Sir Richard Starkey, turns 85 today. The most musical drummer on the planet, his drum fills are melodies. The chillest Great Big Pop Star on the planet, too.
A personal hero, on a few levels.
Peace & love, as the man says. May it be so.
Nothing in a context suggesting alien space bats.
Time to adjust my meds. :)
Before I began commenting here, I hung out at RedState for a while. Earlier today it occurred to me that maybe alien space bat was over there. Which kind of tracks, maybe.
So I went to RedState to see if they have a search feature. I didn't see one, and I didn't really want to spend any more time there.
So I guess alien space bat guy will remain a mystery. And I promise not to bring it up again, GFTNC.
russell, please stop taunting me with the alien space bats guy.
I've tried searching the blog many times for all possible variations of "alien space bat". No joy.
If anyone has better Typepad-fu than I do (which is probably everyone) and wants to give it try, I will appreciate it. I think it was quite a while ago, but I'm not sure of a particular time period.
It's also possible that I hallucinated the whole thing.
I'll also note that a random walk through the archives will show that we've had more than a few... interesting characters here over the years.
Anyone besides me remember Brick Over Bill and his recipes for rice and beans? :)
Maybe I'm living in some kind of fantasy ObWi populated by the bizarre flotsam and jetsam of my imagination....
Also, wj - I'm fine with people who refer to their faith-based beliefs as part of why they think what they do - I've done that myself here on a few occasions. But folks coming from that perspective have to respect that many or most folks here may not find that persuasive.
More seriously: How much diversity are you, personally, willing to tolerate?
tl;dr - anybody sensible, for any reasonable definition of "sensible", is probably OK with me.
I'm OK with people who voted for Trump, per se. Not sure about full on MAGA cultist, they yell a lot and don't seem to understand the concept of argument from fact. But, I'd be willing to give it a try.
Also re: MAGAs, I personally would draw a bright line around gender- or race- or ethnic-based theories of human value and superiority, they just trigger my inner impulse to invite them to f*** right off. It's a personal failing, I know - judge not, keep an open mind, right? - but one I am willing to own. We all have our limits.
I'm probably more comfortable with religious fundamentalists than most folks here due to personal history, but conversations with them tend to devolve into unanswerable arguments from authority. I.e., if "the Bible says" is not part of your epistemology, there isn't really a basis for conversation. It can be kind of a dead end.
All the other flavors of conservative you name here are pretty much fine with me. I just ask that people keep it out of ad hominem territory, probably in both directions.
Also, it's a fraught time, it's easy for things to go sideways. If there actually are conservatives of any of the varieties you name interested in joining the party, we might need to update / reinstate posting rules, just to make sure everybody stays in bounds.
I'm a 13-year-old shiba inu raised by a murder of crows...
LOL
I'm a 68 year old American geezer raised on duck and cover, Kennedy assassinations, Vietnam, Nixon and CREEP, J Edgar, MLK Jr and his assassination, race riots and cities on fire.
Early adulthood was Reagan and AIDs. We gave up on duck and cover somewhere in there and were basically just crossing our fingers.
Middle age was W Bush, 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq, Abu Ghraib, and waterboarding for fun and profit.
And, here we are now.
What a long strange trip it's been.
Supposedly seeing things on TV helped turn people against Vietnam.
True this. But, it was a different time.
There were three national broadcast TV networks, many if not most people got there news from those or newspapers. Or both. So there was a common set of news sources for most of the country, and those sources generally provided the same basic set of information, although with a somewhat different slant.
The cliche is that everybody trusted Walter Cronkite (CBS, through 1981) and Chet Huntley and David Brinkley (NBC, through 1970). They didn't necessarily agree with everything they said, but they were seen as basically truthful, reliable voices.
And, the cliche continues, when Cronkite in particular began questioning the war, that was the tipping point.
Vietnam was also (I think) the first war where there was a lot of video coverage, and it was timely, i.e., you would see things fairly soon after they happened. The photomagazines like Like also provided a lot of coverage.
Net/net, most people got their news from the same places, and those places were trusted, and they were all fairly consistent in the information they presented.
I don't think any of that is true now.
Re: Gaza in particular - I read a couple of foreign news sources - the Guardian, the BBC, Reuters, El Pais, Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera has a *lot* of coverage of Gaza, but I don't think very many people read it. It's based in Qatar, no small number of USians would probably not read it for that reason alone.
On the US side, I read the AP, which has a fairly "just the facts" stance (I think?), but they don't have the same level of coverage of Gaza as others do.
And I think everybody has basically forgotten about the Ukraine at this point.
I read Krugman on substack, but that's about it. I signed up for a bluesky account but basically never read it.
Don't do TikTok or similar.
News and information is a remarkably fragmented and siloed universe these days.
I wish there still was something with the ubiquity and trust level of the old 6 o'clock news guys, I think it would help make some of horror shows going on now more widely visible.
But they're more or less gone.
This has me reminscing, mostly fondly, about Brick Oven Bill and the alien space bats guy. I don't think either of them were banned, I think they both just moved on to greener pastures...
Anyway, if there are any conservative lurkers out there who are pondering participating but are afraid it's just too lefty in here for them, please consider this your invitation to jump in. We will do our best not to jump all over you! At least not right away... :)
F*** it, I'll just write it again. It'll likely be less ramble-y.
It's true, we used to have a wider variety of voices. Over time, we've kind of sorted ourselves into a liberal-to-left boomer-and-genx niche.
It's actually really hard to be a contrarian voice on a blog (or anywhere). People yell at you a lot, it takes time and work to build credibility. So I understand why conservatives would shy away.
In McK's case, specifically, he had good things to say, but seemed unable to resist the urge to scold us all for being a bunch of lefty goupthink hypocrites. Which was rude and unwelcome and tiresome. So he got bounced. Came back as BigBadBird, same thing, so he got bounced again.
I'd be happy to see more conservative voices here, but things have become so polarized that I'm not sure it'll happen. Real harm has been, and is being, done, and people's feelings run high. It's a different time.
Regarding the 4th, just not feeling it this year. To be honest, I'm feeling like I'm kind of done with the USA. Not that I'm going anywhere, I've just lost faith that we will ever get past the same tired old bullshit that we began with.
The stupid, sadistic cruelty of what's going on now is just a bridge too far. It's pointless, it's cruelty for it's own sake. If that's not evil, I don't know what is, and I cannot align myself with it, at all, ever.
We're gonna pay for this, and I don't look forward to it.
So that's my 4th of July.
Thought I posted a comment, don't know if it's lost in the intertoobz or if I just did Preview and forgot to hit Post before I refreshed the page.
Stupid computers! :)
Anyway, if it's floating around out there and somebody can find it and repost it, great. Otherwise I'll try again later.
ETA: 12:20 comment released from confinement. -Ed.
It's true, there used to be a much greater variety of points of view here back in the day. Von, slarti, bc (who still pops up now and then). Lots of others, some quite good.
Now we're mostly liberal-to-left, mostly (I think) boomer and genx.
It's actually really hard to participate someplace where you are the contrarian voice. It's a lot of work, and is not always particularly rewarding. People yell at you a lot, it takes time and patience to build some credibility. So I can understand why conservatives might not want to hang here.
That said, I'd welcome more conservative voices here. I'd just ask that they not just show up to trumpet their point of view and yell at people. Actual conversation would be good.
I appreciated McK's presence here, but a lot of the time he seemed to just be here to scold us all for being such hypocrites. It was rude and tiresome, which is why he was banned the first time around. And it's why he was banned the second time, having popped up as BigBadBird.
I'm sorry to say but I'm not sure it's possible to have the kind of mixture of voices that were once available. Not because anyone has any intention of excluding anybody for their point of view, but because things have become so polarized. Real harm has been, and is being, done, and people's feelings run high.
But I personally would be willing to give it a shot.
Regarding the 4th of July, suffice it to say that I was just not feeling it this year. Went to my niece's for her daughter's 16th birthday, ate a hot dog and some birthday cake, hung with family, came home, read a bit, went to sleep. That was my exciting 4th.
In many ways, I feel like I'm about done with this country. Not that I plan to go anywhere else, I just am losing my belief that we are ever gonna get past the same toxic bullshit we started out with. It just never seems to end.
The cruelty - pointless, sadistic, nihilistic cruelty - we are capable of is freaking crushing me.
I don't know if any other place is better, I just know what we are right now, and what we have been, and it breaks my freaking heart.
So that's my 4th of July story.
Grok's summary is not particularly helpful
I know that this is just further proof that I'm an old man yelling at cloud, but I am learning to hate AI.
It's like mansplaining as a platform. Plus, an electricity hog.
Doesn't anybody read a book anymore?
I will now go yell at random kids to stay off my lawn.
This was a really interesting read, lj. Thank you for sharing it.
I haven't read Abundance so to some degree I felt like I lacked some context in following all what was being said - like I was hearing the response to a somewhat large statement, without having heard the original statement. So maybe I should read Abundance?
But even given that, it was a thoughtful and thought-provoking read. I've subscribed to the substack at the free level.
One thing in particular I was struck by came from the comparison of US vs. Chinese "manufacturing culture", for lack of a better term. A number of points are made in the discussion, but the thing that struck me most was more or less summarized in this para:
America definitely has advantages in excavating "innovation points" that have clear commercial value and market acceptance, but when it comes to those "1.1 improvements"—the continuous polishing and optimization—the gap compared to China is obvious. This actually reflects deep institutional design differences between the two countries: America's system encourages high-risk, high-reward winner-takes-all, while China's structure tends more toward stable returns and inclusive distribution. These institutional and cultural differences in risk appetite ultimately show up in the industrial realities and innovation models we see today.
If I were to try to boil this down and restate it in my own words, I'd say:
China is patient, the US is not
In other words, in the US we seem to always be chasing the next "unicorn" - the next disruptive thing that is going to give finance capital that magical 100 for 1 ROI. And we want to see that ROI in a relatively short window of time - 5 or 7 years? Whereas in China, they have the patience to build systems that improve over time through constant iterations to offer more modest, but stable returns, over longer time spans - 10, 20, 30 years.
And the patient, incremental approach is more effective in building out a robust manufacturing sector. Because, as others in the conversation note, while manufacturing processes are reproducible to a great degree (and therefore capable of scaling and moving from place to place), they often require what the contributor Afra calls "tacit knowledge" - information embedded in human minds about how to do things.
Which takes time to build and pass along, and is less amenable to scaling and relocation.
A really interesting - and relevant - read, thank you again for sharing.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “An open thread on July 4th”
Several years ago, the first time I said that I expected a peaceful partition of the US, the idea was ridiculed and people piled on.
Things are pretty different from what they were even just a few years ago.
The US doesn't really have a single, common, consensus culture or history. New Englanders are not the same as folks in the Pacific Northwest, or the Southwest, or the Southeast, or the Plains. And none of those folks are the same as each other.
And that's just the regional aspect.
Different cultures, different history. Different values.
Folks in New England have more in common with folks in maritime Canada than they do with folks in Texas, for example. Or Alabama, or Florida, or Kansas, or Minnesota, or Kentucky. And so on.
Trump is shredding Constitutional small-r republican governance, which is really the main thing we have in common. So I'm not sure what's left. And I have no idea how that gets resolved.
To be perfectly honest, I'd be fine with New England separating from the US in its current incarnation. Whether just becoming a country of its own, or becoming a Canadian province. I just have no idea how we would get from here to there without people being harmed, so I'm not really an advocate of that.
Perhaps a stronger model of federalism? Which would also take a lot of work, and I don't see that we're in a place where that could be discussed in a reasonable way - a way that could lead to an actionable plan.
My expectation is that we're just going to stumble forward into a heavily conflicted mediocre future.
By many measures, compared to other OECD countries we're already mediocre. We have a lot of money and a lot of guns. That seems to be what we value, and what we're good at.
Which I find kind of disappointing.
On “Plus ça change…”
the lack of visual art and, with a very notable exception, the apparent lack of sites for religious rituals.
I'm not sure this is so. My understanding is that cave art attributable to Neandethals have been found in the Loire and in Spain. The attribution is based on dating the paint used, which apparently (or allegedly) pre-dates homo sapiens' arrival in Europe.
The famous individual buried in Shanidar cave surrounded by pollen is often cited as an example of Neanderthal intentional burial practices, indicating symbolic thought and ritualistic behaviors.
On “An open thread on July 4th”
I was just teaching my son who just discovered music about playing on top of the beat vs. behind, etc.
The force is strong with this one!!! An advanced topic for a youngster - does your son play an instrument, or is he just listening?
Not a complaint, but in reality this just isn't possible.
You could be right.
:(
"
Russell is a lot like Hilzoy
Yikes! Are you sure you have the right (R)russell?
You are very kind, bc. I appreciate this, although I doubt I live up to it.
If this is a suggestion that we should have political shibboleths for commentators, I'm against it.
Pretty much my feeling also. And I think the suggestion of "just don't engage" is also fine. I know there are certain topics that I'm just not interested in discussing.
The folks that we exclude from here tend to be folks (on either - or any - side of the fence) who are rude or offensive, in whatever way. And we generally give folks ample warning before they get bumped - most of the folks that have been banned have shown that they simply refuse to stop doing whatever it is we've asked them (usually repeatedly) to stop doing.
I'm not sure anyone has been banned simply for their opinion, per se.
Conservative lurkers, c'mon in! Just don't be jerks. We'll try not to be, too.
"
The other player that comes to mind for me right away with this trait is John Paul Jones.
Jones was the glue in Zep. And a brilliant player, definitely the undersung member in that band.
Check it, the bass in this is just a perfect counterpoint to everything else that is going on. Funky, solid, he ties the different sections of the tune together and keeps in moving forward.
And if it's a Zep tune and it isn't a guitar or drums or voice, it's JPJ playing it.
Re: Ringo, you can always tell a young green drummer who doesn't understand how making music with other people works yet, because they don't like Ringo.
"
Hey, open thread!!
Ringo Starr, aka Sir Richard Starkey, turns 85 today. The most musical drummer on the planet, his drum fills are melodies. The chillest Great Big Pop Star on the planet, too.
A personal hero, on a few levels.
Peace & love, as the man says. May it be so.
"
Nothing in a context suggesting alien space bats.
Time to adjust my meds. :)
Before I began commenting here, I hung out at RedState for a while. Earlier today it occurred to me that maybe alien space bat was over there. Which kind of tracks, maybe.
So I went to RedState to see if they have a search feature. I didn't see one, and I didn't really want to spend any more time there.
So I guess alien space bat guy will remain a mystery. And I promise not to bring it up again, GFTNC.
"
russell, please stop taunting me with the alien space bats guy.
I've tried searching the blog many times for all possible variations of "alien space bat". No joy.
If anyone has better Typepad-fu than I do (which is probably everyone) and wants to give it try, I will appreciate it. I think it was quite a while ago, but I'm not sure of a particular time period.
It's also possible that I hallucinated the whole thing.
I'll also note that a random walk through the archives will show that we've had more than a few... interesting characters here over the years.
Anyone besides me remember Brick Over Bill and his recipes for rice and beans? :)
Maybe I'm living in some kind of fantasy ObWi populated by the bizarre flotsam and jetsam of my imagination....
Also, wj - I'm fine with people who refer to their faith-based beliefs as part of why they think what they do - I've done that myself here on a few occasions. But folks coming from that perspective have to respect that many or most folks here may not find that persuasive.
"
More seriously:
How much diversity are you, personally, willing to tolerate?
tl;dr - anybody sensible, for any reasonable definition of "sensible", is probably OK with me.
I'm OK with people who voted for Trump, per se. Not sure about full on MAGA cultist, they yell a lot and don't seem to understand the concept of argument from fact. But, I'd be willing to give it a try.
Also re: MAGAs, I personally would draw a bright line around gender- or race- or ethnic-based theories of human value and superiority, they just trigger my inner impulse to invite them to f*** right off. It's a personal failing, I know - judge not, keep an open mind, right? - but one I am willing to own. We all have our limits.
I'm probably more comfortable with religious fundamentalists than most folks here due to personal history, but conversations with them tend to devolve into unanswerable arguments from authority. I.e., if "the Bible says" is not part of your epistemology, there isn't really a basis for conversation. It can be kind of a dead end.
All the other flavors of conservative you name here are pretty much fine with me. I just ask that people keep it out of ad hominem territory, probably in both directions.
Also, it's a fraught time, it's easy for things to go sideways. If there actually are conservatives of any of the varieties you name interested in joining the party, we might need to update / reinstate posting rules, just to make sure everybody stays in bounds.
"
Yes, I realize that I'm assuming a general preference for reality. Challenge that if you wish.
bring back alien space bats guy! :)
"
I'm a 13-year-old shiba inu raised by a murder of crows...
LOL
I'm a 68 year old American geezer raised on duck and cover, Kennedy assassinations, Vietnam, Nixon and CREEP, J Edgar, MLK Jr and his assassination, race riots and cities on fire.
Early adulthood was Reagan and AIDs. We gave up on duck and cover somewhere in there and were basically just crossing our fingers.
Middle age was W Bush, 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq, Abu Ghraib, and waterboarding for fun and profit.
And, here we are now.
What a long strange trip it's been.
"
Supposedly seeing things on TV helped turn people against Vietnam.
True this. But, it was a different time.
There were three national broadcast TV networks, many if not most people got there news from those or newspapers. Or both. So there was a common set of news sources for most of the country, and those sources generally provided the same basic set of information, although with a somewhat different slant.
The cliche is that everybody trusted Walter Cronkite (CBS, through 1981) and Chet Huntley and David Brinkley (NBC, through 1970). They didn't necessarily agree with everything they said, but they were seen as basically truthful, reliable voices.
And, the cliche continues, when Cronkite in particular began questioning the war, that was the tipping point.
Vietnam was also (I think) the first war where there was a lot of video coverage, and it was timely, i.e., you would see things fairly soon after they happened. The photomagazines like Like also provided a lot of coverage.
Net/net, most people got their news from the same places, and those places were trusted, and they were all fairly consistent in the information they presented.
I don't think any of that is true now.
Re: Gaza in particular - I read a couple of foreign news sources - the Guardian, the BBC, Reuters, El Pais, Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera has a *lot* of coverage of Gaza, but I don't think very many people read it. It's based in Qatar, no small number of USians would probably not read it for that reason alone.
On the US side, I read the AP, which has a fairly "just the facts" stance (I think?), but they don't have the same level of coverage of Gaza as others do.
And I think everybody has basically forgotten about the Ukraine at this point.
I read Krugman on substack, but that's about it. I signed up for a bluesky account but basically never read it.
Don't do TikTok or similar.
News and information is a remarkably fragmented and siloed universe these days.
I wish there still was something with the ubiquity and trust level of the old 6 o'clock news guys, I think it would help make some of horror shows going on now more widely visible.
But they're more or less gone.
"
This has me reminscing, mostly fondly, about Brick Oven Bill and the alien space bats guy. I don't think either of them were banned, I think they both just moved on to greener pastures...
Anyway, if there are any conservative lurkers out there who are pondering participating but are afraid it's just too lefty in here for them, please consider this your invitation to jump in. We will do our best not to jump all over you! At least not right away... :)
"
F*** it, I'll just write it again. It'll likely be less ramble-y.
It's true, we used to have a wider variety of voices. Over time, we've kind of sorted ourselves into a liberal-to-left boomer-and-genx niche.
It's actually really hard to be a contrarian voice on a blog (or anywhere). People yell at you a lot, it takes time and work to build credibility. So I understand why conservatives would shy away.
In McK's case, specifically, he had good things to say, but seemed unable to resist the urge to scold us all for being a bunch of lefty goupthink hypocrites. Which was rude and unwelcome and tiresome. So he got bounced. Came back as BigBadBird, same thing, so he got bounced again.
I'd be happy to see more conservative voices here, but things have become so polarized that I'm not sure it'll happen. Real harm has been, and is being, done, and people's feelings run high. It's a different time.
Regarding the 4th, just not feeling it this year. To be honest, I'm feeling like I'm kind of done with the USA. Not that I'm going anywhere, I've just lost faith that we will ever get past the same tired old bullshit that we began with.
The stupid, sadistic cruelty of what's going on now is just a bridge too far. It's pointless, it's cruelty for it's own sake. If that's not evil, I don't know what is, and I cannot align myself with it, at all, ever.
We're gonna pay for this, and I don't look forward to it.
So that's my 4th of July.
"
Thought I posted a comment, don't know if it's lost in the intertoobz or if I just did Preview and forgot to hit Post before I refreshed the page.
Stupid computers! :)
Anyway, if it's floating around out there and somebody can find it and repost it, great. Otherwise I'll try again later.
ETA: 12:20 comment released from confinement. -Ed.
"
It's true, there used to be a much greater variety of points of view here back in the day. Von, slarti, bc (who still pops up now and then). Lots of others, some quite good.
Now we're mostly liberal-to-left, mostly (I think) boomer and genx.
It's actually really hard to participate someplace where you are the contrarian voice. It's a lot of work, and is not always particularly rewarding. People yell at you a lot, it takes time and patience to build some credibility. So I can understand why conservatives might not want to hang here.
That said, I'd welcome more conservative voices here. I'd just ask that they not just show up to trumpet their point of view and yell at people. Actual conversation would be good.
I appreciated McK's presence here, but a lot of the time he seemed to just be here to scold us all for being such hypocrites. It was rude and tiresome, which is why he was banned the first time around. And it's why he was banned the second time, having popped up as BigBadBird.
I'm sorry to say but I'm not sure it's possible to have the kind of mixture of voices that were once available. Not because anyone has any intention of excluding anybody for their point of view, but because things have become so polarized. Real harm has been, and is being, done, and people's feelings run high.
But I personally would be willing to give it a shot.
Regarding the 4th of July, suffice it to say that I was just not feeling it this year. Went to my niece's for her daughter's 16th birthday, ate a hot dog and some birthday cake, hung with family, came home, read a bit, went to sleep. That was my exciting 4th.
In many ways, I feel like I'm about done with this country. Not that I plan to go anywhere else, I just am losing my belief that we are ever gonna get past the same toxic bullshit we started out with. It just never seems to end.
The cruelty - pointless, sadistic, nihilistic cruelty - we are capable of is freaking crushing me.
I don't know if any other place is better, I just know what we are right now, and what we have been, and it breaks my freaking heart.
So that's my 4th of July story.
On “From the Chinatalk substack”
Grok's summary is not particularly helpful
I know that this is just further proof that I'm an old man yelling at cloud, but I am learning to hate AI.
It's like mansplaining as a platform. Plus, an electricity hog.
Doesn't anybody read a book anymore?
I will now go yell at random kids to stay off my lawn.
"
This was a really interesting read, lj. Thank you for sharing it.
I haven't read Abundance so to some degree I felt like I lacked some context in following all what was being said - like I was hearing the response to a somewhat large statement, without having heard the original statement. So maybe I should read Abundance?
But even given that, it was a thoughtful and thought-provoking read. I've subscribed to the substack at the free level.
One thing in particular I was struck by came from the comparison of US vs. Chinese "manufacturing culture", for lack of a better term. A number of points are made in the discussion, but the thing that struck me most was more or less summarized in this para:
If I were to try to boil this down and restate it in my own words, I'd say:
In other words, in the US we seem to always be chasing the next "unicorn" - the next disruptive thing that is going to give finance capital that magical 100 for 1 ROI. And we want to see that ROI in a relatively short window of time - 5 or 7 years? Whereas in China, they have the patience to build systems that improve over time through constant iterations to offer more modest, but stable returns, over longer time spans - 10, 20, 30 years.
And the patient, incremental approach is more effective in building out a robust manufacturing sector. Because, as others in the conversation note, while manufacturing processes are reproducible to a great degree (and therefore capable of scaling and moving from place to place), they often require what the contributor Afra calls "tacit knowledge" - information embedded in human minds about how to do things.
Which takes time to build and pass along, and is less amenable to scaling and relocation.
A really interesting - and relevant - read, thank you again for sharing.
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