CapitalistImperialistPig

Our world is infested by parasites; what keeps them down is partly Democracy and blah; partly that anywhere that becomes too uncompetitive gets out-competed. That's not a careful analysis, but what I mean is that we accept a balance as we must: as long as society functions, and produces enough wealth for all or most, we tolerate some parasites. And at least at the moment it is working: the share captured by the unproductive isn't too high...........William Connolley Libertarians generally, and rich people especially, are preoccupied by slackers - those they perceive to not be pulling their weight.  Of course we don't all quite agree on who those "parasites" are.  There are some obvious suspects - the young, the aged and infirm.  Then, of course, are the unemployed.  People like that creep Mitt Romney think they are anybody who doesn't pay income taxes, even if the other taxes they pay amount to a higher tax rate than paid by Romney and his rich fans. Most ...

BBC Culture asked writers around the globe to pick stories that have endured across generations and continents – and changed society.  They asked 108 critics to pick their top five, and came up with a top ten and top 100 list - which ought to suggest that there was substantial diversity in the critics opinions.  The changed society component of this game means that literary merit is not the sole criterion, and indeed that is evident.  Of the top five, I had only read numbers four and five: 1. The Odyssey (Homer, 8th Century BC) 2. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852) 3. Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818) 4. Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell, 1949) 5. Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe, 1958) Of these, I think only number one and perhaps number four count as among the greatest works of literature, but the influence on history of Stowe's book was immense. Six through ten are all truly great though: 6. One Thousand and One Nights (various authors, 8th-18...

Human evolution took an unusual turn a couple of million years ago.  Some species started growing giant brains, and some of the brainiacs eventually displaced all the other human species, including other brainiacs like the Neandertals.  This path was not taken by any other ape or really, by any other animal.  Why so?  It's clear today that that brain growth facilitated a whole lot of other human progress, like speech, manufacture of complex tools, and cooperation in large groups, but evolution is always about the past, not the future, so why did the brain growth mainly come first?  Or perhaps we should ask why it stopped just as those things were reaching a critical mass? The disadvantage of a big brain is that it has a high metabolic cost.  It's the intellectual equivalent of having a car with a big V-8 (or V-10 or V-12) engine.  Powerful but expensive to operate.  And that's not even counting the cost of having young who might decide to become...

I've mentioned before that I really liked the initial book of the series by Cixin Liu ( The Three Body Problem ), but now that I have read The Dark Forest and Death's End I should mention that I don't like them as much.  A good feature of the first book was the author's portrayal of the Chinese Great Cultural Revolution and its aftermath.  I find his future societies less compelling. This, I suppose, is a personal problem, but I also disliked the relentlessly pessimistic tone of the latter two books, and started to find his conceptions of future technology and science more irritating than entertaining. The author narrows his focus in the latter books and concentrates mostly just on one character.

I have probably written a lot on my beefs with libertarianism, but I find I keep coming back to this theme.  So here goes one more time.  Let me count the ways. 1) It's a mask for untrammeled corporate power.  Under the guidance of the Kochs and their ilk, American libertarianism has been used to protect the depredations and outright criminality of corporate theft, murder, and environmental destruction.  See, e.g.,  Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right   2) Similarly, it justifies the political power of corporations and vast personal fortunes, creating a ruling political aristocracy that controls the legislature and the courts.  See as above. 3) It protects one kind of collective power, that of corporations and money, while attacking any collective action of workers and others who lack great financial resources - for example, labor unions. 4) It is deeply dishonest in the way it pretends to cel...

If poor people knew how rich the rich were, they would be rioting in the streets.......... Chris Rock A new article in The Atlantic , which apparently borrows heavily from a new book  by Richard V. Reeves, claims that the real problem is not the rich, but the upper middle class, defined as the 9.9%, meaning those members of the top ten per cent in wealth who are not members of the top 0.1%.  It argues somewhat persuasively that the tax code, zoning laws, labor and licensing laws, elite university admissions policies and much else have been rigged to specifically benefit those persons at the cost of everybody else.  Matthew Stewart, the author of the Atlantic piece, argues that the 9.9% constitute a new American aristocracy. In recent decades, economic inequality has exploded in the US, and economic mobility (the movement of persons from one economic level to another) has sharply declined.  Who is to blame?  The new aristocrats says Mr. Stewart. This kind o...

The attempt to construct the truly automatic automobile goes on.  We now know how the self-driving car in Arizona happened to kill the pedestrian attempting to cross the road - it knew that emergency braking was needed but its programmers had decided that such a maneuver was so important that it should be reserved for the human driver, who wasn't paying attention.  Such problems will be solved eventually, some of them, quite unfortunately, through trial and catastrophic error. Meanwhile, back in 2018, a few automatic car features, like adaptive cruise control, have crept into the mainstream and work reasonably well, if the driver remembers when they are on and when not.  Another one, automatic lane keeping, seems to really suck. I have one of these vehicles, and have test driven a number of different brands, and, so far as I can tell, none of them work very well.  That opinion seems to be widely shared.  Among other problems, they seem to fail utterly at kee...