This backs up my idea that people basically go through life trying their hardest to get straight the last confused thing they learned about a topic (and why people remember their failures to learn "hard" subjects like math in school), and ultimately memorize a Not Even Wrong idea better because it lacked the internal logic that would have simplified it to the point of being trivial and intuitive.

I saw a guy on Reddit who claimed to be a very specific personality type, announced his IQ to be tested at 147, and then proceeded to make a huge number of alarming spelling errors.

But... is it capitalism? This is what I was getting at at the beginning of this line of questioning. Is capitalism comprehensive of certain actions that the government takes when the government intervenes in the economy on behalf of capitalists, or does capitalism end where the public sector begins? When lobbyists working on the oil industry lobbyists convince a president to open up a national park for drilling, and other examples, is that capitalism at its fullest, most true expression, or is that some weird, bastardized variety of it, where, as you say, capitalism actually becomes its opposite?

wait til you see these widgets tho

That's the question I asked you. As an example, you offered the private sector lobbying government for socialized education. Is that capitalism, or is it socialism?

Well, what do you think? I've already thought up a bunch of possible interpretations, and have even given some reasons under what circumstances one is preferable to another: if we're using capitalism in a stricter sense, according to the "formal" definition I described earlier, then, it probably isn't. If capitalism is just whatever the economic ruling class does in the pursuit of increasing its wealth (specifically, what it does to engineer the economic system), then it probably is.

Clearly capitalism isn't just "whatever", because capitalism is distinct from manorialism and mercantilism, and those systems were also for the benefit of the wealthy (although limited by the knowledge and capabilities of the wealthy of the time).

I think I've gotten confused. What's your point, again?

So, John McCain has brain cancer.

I wonder if the disease had a role in his rambling remarks in Comey's testimony. :saddowns:

Yeah, I thought immediately of that speech. The whole situation really sucks.nobody deserves cancer :\

That's not a useless point. It was sloppy to say "whatever the ruling class does". It's too inclusive a definition. So let me refine it: capitalism is what the capitalist class does in the pursuit of wealth, by creating circumstances that make it possible to receive a higher return on the investment of capital.



In one sense, I don't have a point, in the sense that there's no specific argument I'm defending. But there's a point to my questioning, in the sense that I have a goal. You said this before:



At the very least, when we criticize capitalism, we aren't only talking about an idea ("capitalism is a system where those with capital seek to increase their wealth through the exchange of capital for productive labor"). We're talking about a system that has been created and is maintained by a certain class of people. Capitalism is an idea, but it is also and an historical reality. The harmful consequences of that the capitalist system, as it has developed and changed over time, are not limited to the narrow domain of economics. It also has harmful political and social effects. My goal is to ask questions to get you take a stance on where capitalism exceeds the economic, and where, so far it is an object of critique, it also becomes political and social, so that we can better appreciate what social and political problems can be attributed to capitalism, and which one's can't.

https://twitter.com/DavidKlion/status/887831017721143296

It's disappointing how many voices on the left see Republican politicians suffering from health issues as "only fair" and "good". The argument is that Republican policy is cruel, and Republican politicians suffering will obstruct the implementation of their policy. Also, since Republicans are cruel and their policies would literally result in death, they deserve whatever bad things might befall them. Pretty nasty stuff.

Decorum matters.

man does politics seem to make Twitter warriors feel tough sitting there in the comfort of their own homes

Give me a break. You're just twisting what I said into some incredibly generic plug of socialism.

https://nytimes.com/2017/07/20/health/john-mccain-brain-cancer.html

Shame on them! Shame!

This is even sloppier. The wealthy (which is the term I prefer here, because defining capitalism as the actions of capitalists is circular) were just as interested in achieving higher returns as rent under manorialism, or wealth extracted under mercantilism. Your definition covers all rich people doing anything to get richer, since the dawn of time.

You cannot separate capitalism from wage labor, operation of capital for the profit of its owners, or securitization and commodification of capital. And believe me, it is well worth criticizing on its own merits, not just as a thing rich people do.

That's... not a good definition, either.

I don't need you to help me take a stance. I've already said this at least once in this thread, and a few places elsewhere:

Capitalism permits an acute and rapid concentration of wealth in a way that few other systems do, and it marries the individual survival of the people to the wellbeing of a few capitalists. That means it is very easy for the rich to get their own way within a capitalist democracy, whether by bribe, or coercion, or simply because the capitalists have undue influence over the voting public as their employer or potential employer (of course, the original intention for the United States was that only capitalists would be able to vote at all, but that's a separate discussion).

I basically think capitalism and democracy are incompatible. The capitalists will always seek to subvert democracy in order to extract rents, and the citizens will eventually be forced to subvert capitalism for their own survival.

Now, discussing specific capitalists behaving badly makes me super turgid, but the reason I'm not preoccupied with redressing those actions specifically is because I'm a lot more interested in (and concerned by) how easy capitalism makes it. Rich people are *******s who do ****ty things to get richer, that's nothing new, and honestly it's nothing you can ever change. All you can do is minimize the damage they can do. The problem with capitalism is that it maximizes the potential damage. On purpose. You can't cure greed, but boy oh boy can you cripple capitalism.

Does that answer your question or goal or whatever?

Huh. It's really hard for you not to be a jerk, isn't it?


It's ok, you don't need to answer that question.

Uh... okay? Calm down.

So about those real estate developments...



https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-20/mueller-is-said-to-expand-probe-to-trump-business-transactions

.

It's probably the wrong choice but I'm straight avoiding Trump news articles until they announce his impeachment. Way too much information to keep track of.

Well he's done so many wrong things so that's certainly likely to be true assuming Mueller does his job (which it looks like he will).

At any rate, the news generally provides no educational benefit that can't be consumed in book from years later (other than entertainment).

Good riddance to Trump then. And yeah, I assume that any impeachment will be followed by 50 articles and books detailing why he was impeached, and even morr if he is convicted so I can get caught up.

Yeah.

White house looking pretty shaky these days. Press secretary resigns (and is replaced by someone who was one a vicious critic of Trump), Trump's personal lawyer quits, and Mueller may look into Trump's tax returns against Trump's wishes. Go big or go home to find the smoking gun, perhaps.



http://thehill.com/homenews/news/343069-trumps-personal-lawyer-resigns-from-top-post-amid-legal-team-shakeup#

This is like the part in rocky horror where Frank is doing his floor show and things are reaching the peak of their ridiculousness. Any second now trump will be killed and most of his cabinet will return to Transylvania.

sadly trump pales in comparison to the effective tyrant that was Dr. Furter

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yZlRqk5_6U

NSFW I guess if you're into that stuff

oh i guess spoilers too?

Things have gotten bizarre enough / hard to follow that if he were "killed and his cabinet returned to Transylvania", the ongoing situation would become more comprehensible rather than less. Which is pretty weird.

Which to me is a pretty sure primary symptom of collapse, and the fact that people are still going about their business as usual in the face of it (excepting cringey social media posts about how we need to unite/recycle/love etc.) is suuuuuper embarrassing.

I had a sort of random thought today about this: I realized that spectator sports will remain more important to the common folk than anything else, including regime change, societal collapse, etc.. Bread and circuses....

To be honest since the collapse is inevitably we should provide more bread, but intravenously. To keep people satiated.

I don't think we're going to make it:

https://newrepublic.com/article/143984/were-brink-authoritarian-crisis

What would be tragicomical is if the wealthy began to worry that economic collapse could mean deflating their power and influence, and they tried to move to Canada, China, the Netherlands or something, but then got robbed by the government in some kind of retaliatory IRS counter-attack.

"some kind". It's pretty well defined already!

The US considers its citizens liable to tax in the United States even if they are not considered tax residents. That means US citizens must pay income and capital gains taxes, and prepare and file tax returns, and make estimated tax payments, as long as they remain citizens. When they get tired of doing that and renounce their citizenship, the US charges them an expatriation tax on unrealized capital gains (equal to the amount of capital gains taxes the citizen would pay had they immediately sold off all of their property at current market prices, and then bought it back again). You need a shocking amount of liquidity in order to renounce your US citizenship, equivalent to selling a house or a business you founded overseas.

Departure taxes aren't unusual in the tax world, although most other countries charge at the time you lose your tax residency (i.e. when you have significant liquidity from the sale of a house, a relocation package, etc.) rather than at the time you lose your citizenship. I don't know of any other countries that charge their citizens income taxes or require tax returns while they are living overseas, or when they are considered tax residents of a foreign country under a treaty. It's onerous, to say the least.

Oh, another strange thing the US does is the FBAR. US citizens are required to report their foreign financial accounts to the Treasury Department. That's only your part; US FinCEN then demands a report on your financial activities from the foreign bank. As bad as the FBAR is for you, it's worse for the bank. Some banks have been turning away US citizens because it costs them more money to deal with the US government than they make from the US citizen, leaving them stranded in a foreign country without a bank account.

The US government already does everything possible to **** up expats.

Oh, and congress has already tried a few times to get expats inadmissible in (i.e. banished from) the United States if they renounced their citizenship under suspected tax avoidance. There is currently a law on the books for it, although it's not presently enforceable.

The only way the US government could make things worse for US citizens living overseas is if they instituted actual capital controls, but then US corporations wouldn't be able to pay foreign suppliers, either. So it's about as bad as it can ever get right now.

Well then as individuals, I guess they'd be screwed if things really went south. There'd still be plenty of opportunity for capital to move overseas, though, maybe? In the sense that if the most talented workers began emmigrating (perhaps for non-financial reasons), maybe the business ecosystem would follow along? And some other city other than San Francisco etc. became the hot place for VC's to dump money into.

Maybe. I don't know. There's something to be said for sticking around and cleaning up after yourself. As someone overseas from them, I really don't want the rich American rats fleeing the ship they've sunk*.

The only US competitive advantage in R&D is embarrassingly high professional salaries. In terms of national strategy it's super effective, but it's irrational from the perspective of businesspeople and investors, and sooner or later they're going to realize that. I'm not sure if wealthy people are willing to be so stupid with their money that they end up re-bootstrapping Silicon Valley or Wall Street in another country.

(* For example: Peter Thiel should be sentenced to summary disembowelment if he ever boards a flight to New Zealand.)

Peter Thiel should be sentenced to summary disembowelment regardless.

If Trump pardons himself I will personally take a train to DC and start protesting.

Depends what you mean by collapse. Is America quickly and irreparably losing world dominance? Sure, but give us years of competent leadership (though we're nigh into fantasy land supposing this) and we can stabilize and be just a major world player. But I don't think the world economy is in any major crisis right now.

It felt that way in 2006 too.

But some of the traditional indicators of an oncoming recession suggest we may be headed for a recession sometime in the next year or two. Plus, we're due for one.

The Democrats probably need a recession to beat the Republicans during the midterm and to beat Trump in 2020 given how oblivious they appear to be.