It’s easy to explain once you realize the real ideology of these people is money. Even if they have other internal beliefs they’ll get buried under the desire to make more money.
Money is just a metric. I'd say their real ideology is power. It's the classic authoritarian delusion that has fueled every "web 2.0" startup, now writ large - it's okay if we centralize power, because we will only ever use the power for good. Of course this completely ignores how power agglomerates in the real world, especially in the presence of the strong Moloch attractor accelerator that is state-orchestrated capitalism (why it's tempting to focus critiques on money).
And ironically (or not), this overarching dynamic is exactly the core lesson of the One Ring! It's like their main takeaway from the books was "having that ring would be awesome!!1!".
Maybe the facile fascination with Tolkien comes from having read them too early in life, before they were able to understand adult concepts like burden ? If you think of Frodo as merely having to do some chore that The Adults are making him do, then at least he gets to play with some pretty awesome toys and see some pretty cool stuff. And this would seem to be the level of moral development underpinning the contemporary neofascist movement (or "autocratic authoritarian", for those who are triggered by the F-word).
But Karp, Steinberger told me, needed “to find a reason beyond just opportunism and necessity” to embrace Trumpism. His reasoning, however, is so incoherent it seems pretextual.
Toward the end of the book, Steinberger quotes Karp lambasting the left for failing to adequately address antisemitism, chaos at the border and the threat of Iran. “I’m sick and tired of left-wing people fostering right-wing populist movements because they won’t be adults about these issues,” said Karp. That is perfectly cogent as a centrist critique of progressives. As a justification for aligning with a right-wing populist movement, it’s bizarre.
"Woke" was originally about waking up to the fact that America was built on systemic racism (which is absolutely the case), but was then artfully redefined by the Right as "shrill liberal nonsense" that is designed to be completely vague and amorphous so that it satisfies the desire for "librul tears" and cannot be defended because there's no specific points to defend.
So by stating they are "anti-woke" they just mean "New! Improved! 100% Librul Tears!". It's intellectually fraudulent and just spiteful.
Might be a hint that a lot of tech/SV signalling was just "woke capitalism" the whole time, and they dropped the pretense the moment it became politically advantageous.
Tech was never woke. It's a boys club and on the "good" side was geeky nerds who just cared about hacking and the "bad" side about financial velociraptors hunting money. Nothing woke about that.
First taxing carbon with a blockade, now taxing animal meat with screwworm. I wonder what bad thing he'll accidentally destroy next, maybe the military industrial complex?
Great points. Military industrial complex, he's shown how the US military doctrine we're extremely heavily invested in doesn't work too well in this new world of cheap drones, so maybe. Maybe Raytheon et al will lose their expensive military contracts and we'll build out much cheaper weapons. Maybe the guy is actually just brilliant at making unpalatable things happen.
Well most of the increase in prices goes into petroleum companies' profits (at least the ones that can export). So it's technically not lost and will be invested somehow.
Like a Carbon tax, the money doesn't disappear. But to whom it gets distributed, that's another story...
I think it should be pointed out that we have the police we have because enough of the population is ok with it -- because they operate with the assumption that the cops exist to harass "others" but not themselves.
If the entire citizenry said "no more!" to this nonsense we could have better policing all around.
Good will and trust can ultimately have monetary value, and having a funnel based on open source is a viable play if it leads to a service that is sticky.
Starting up a coal-fired power station depends heavily on the plant's current temperature, taking anywhere from 2 to 48 hours to reach full operational capacity. Because of massive metal boilers and turbines, the heating process must be slow to prevent severe thermal fatigue and equipment damage. [1, 2]
The startup time is broken down by the plant's previous state:
• Hot Start (less than 8 hours offline): 2 to 4 hours. The boiler and equipment are still warm, allowing for a relatively quick resumption of steam production.
• Warm Start (8 to 120 hours offline): 4 to 8 hours.
• Cold Start (More than 120 hours offline): 12 to 48 hours. The plant must be heated from room temperature, which involves initially burning expensive natural gas or diesel just to safely warm the furnace and metal pipes before coal can be introduced. [1, 3, 5]
To explore how these heavy thermal operations impact the broader electricity supply, you can review the U.S. Energy Information Administration's grid reliability data or dive deeper into the technical challenges via the Environmental Protection Agency's Coal Startup Report. [6]
If you are interested in the broader power market, let me know:
With coal, we should use what we have when needed, but absolutely should not invest a penny more in its development.
Instead, that money should go into geothermal which can provide clean baseload power and provide a path for the oil industry to pivot their work to. Everybody wins, except for the coal mine owners and their workers.
The workers should be trained to likewise pivot to geothermal and other renewables. The mine owners can get fucked.
Pointing out legitimate failure of an administration is not partisan -- denying or deflecting that criticism is partisan. The current regime has slashed so many programs based on the flimsiest reasoning (including "my predecessor supported this so therefore I hate it").
I'm more than happy to acknowledge any failures by Dem leadership because I'm not a party member and even if I were I would not let that blind me to the reality of that failure.
An interesting aspect of speaking with republican family members is that they assume democrats are monolithic and will revert to that assumption once enough time has passed. Like, unable to process being told that nobody in the room watches CNN or likes the Clintons.
I think conservative's brains are wired differently, and there's studies that back that up. They tend to lack empathy, which implies they can't walk in other people's shoes so therefor their assumptions about others are based upon how they themselves think.
I don't write that to demean them, I'd like it if it wasn't so -- this comment is in no way intended to be deragotory.
That said, I think this substantiates the notion that with conservatives "every accusation is a confession", because they can only see the world through their eyes they assume everybody else thinks like them.
reply