Our forefathers, the Boomers, competed for social status the old fashioned way — bigger houses, fancier cars, trendier job titles, younger / hotter / tighter trophy wives, that kind of thing. When Gen X entered the workforce, we couldn’t compete with that, and not (just) because of Boomer narcissism; there were just too few of us. So we invented the “lifestyle striver” method of social competition. We made fun of the corporate ladder-climbers (anyone else remember “die yuppie scum” from the late 80s?) and embraced “authentic” experience.
That’s why everything was suddenly so Xxxtreeeeem!!! in the early 90s through the Naughts. We can’t afford to fly to Gstaad for a ski weekend, but we can buy a snowboard. Dad might be on Wife 3.0 at that point, and she’s younger than us, but our girlfriends — marriage is for squares — are so much more environmentally friendly. We can’t compete with their high-end clothes, so we’ll push for “business casual” in the office, homeless-casual in our personal lives (everyone can afford thrift store flannel). And so on.
The Millennials and Gen Z, lacking the wherewithal to do even that (what with the six figure college debt and all), invented the “persona striver” as their means of intra-group social competition. For the low low price of a smartphone and a data plan, you too can pretend to be The Most Interesting Persyn in the World online. I’m told there are entire subcultures online, “cottagecore” and the like, revolving around aping the style and mannerisms of prior eras. “Anonymous” seems to think that these kids are actually, physically doing this stuff — that the “cottagecore” lesbians really are moving into little houses on the prairie to bake bread by hand — but it’s obvious that’s not necessary, as this is an entirely online thing and Photoshop exists.
Either way, it’s sufficient for our purposes to note that the cost of entry keeps dropping, while the “totalization” (for lack of a better word) of the lifestyle keeps growing. An old-fashioned, conspicuous-consumption style striver was free to be an individual. Yeah, sure, they were all “yuppies”, but there were Protestant yuppies and Catholic yuppies (and atheist yuppies and everything in between). There were Liberal yuppies and Conservative yuppies (and Libertarian yuppies and everything in between). You might find the same few standard books on all their shelves — management meatball crap; the novels of Danielle Steele and Sydney Sheldon — the same way you’d find the same basic kinds of clothes in their closets, but there was still a lot of individual variety within those broad constraints. You could predict a few broad, superficial things about a yuppie from his business card, but there were no safe bets on anything else.
The lifestyle and persona strivers, on the other hand, are much more narrow. While the yuppie might go to Molokai this summer on vacation, next summer to Italy, because why not?, the lifestyle striver was pretty much trapped in his niche — it’s trail hiking or bust. And the persona striver can’t afford to go anywhere, so xzhey have to make up elaborate justifications for it (“by staying home and baking these muffins from an original 18th century recipe, I’m being completely carbon neutral”). It’s no accident, in the Marxist sense, that marathons and Crossfit and all that shit really took off after the turn of the century, as well as the whole “animal rescue” deal — it’s both a lifestyle and a persona, and it costs next to nothing, and you can, indeed must, do it all day every day.
Severian, “Striving for Revolution”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-11.
January 8, 2025
January 6, 2025
QotD: The right to bear arms
And that is where ethics and psychology bring us back to the bearing of arms. For causality runs both ways here; the dignity of a free man is what makes one ethically competent to bear arms, and the act of bearing arms promotes (by teaching its hard and subtle lessons) the inner qualities that compose the dignity of a free man.
It is not always so, of course. There is a 3% or so of psychotics, drug addicts, and criminal deviants who are incapable of the dignity of free men. Arms in the hands of such as these do not promote virtue, but are merely instruments of tragedy and destruction. But so, too, are cars. And kitchen knives. And bricks. The ethically incompetent readily (and effectively) find other means to destroy and terrorize when denied arms. And when civilian arms are banned, they more readily find helpless victims.
But for the other 97%, the bearing of arms functions not merely as an assertion of power but as a fierce and redemptive discipline. When sudden death hangs inches from your right hand, you become much more careful, more mindful, and much more peaceful in your heart — because you know that if you are thoughtless or sloppy in your actions or succumb to bad temper, people will die.
Too many of us have come to believe ourselves incapable of this discipline. We fall prey to the sick belief that we are all psychopaths or incompetents under the skin. We have been taught to imagine ourselves armed only as villains, doomed to succumb to our own worst nature and kill a loved one in a moment of carelessness or rage. Or to end our days holed up in a mall listening to police bullhorns as some SWAT sniper draws a bead …
But it’s not so. To believe this is to ignore the actual statistics and generative patterns of weapons crimes. “Virtually never”, writes criminologist Don B. Kates, “are murderers the ordinary, law-abiding people against whom gun bans are aimed. Almost without exception, murderers are extreme aberrants with lifelong histories of crime, substance abuse, psychopathology, mental retardation and/or irrational violence against those around them, as well as other hazardous behavior, e.g., automobile and gun accidents.”
To believe one is incompetent to bear arms is, therefore, to live in corroding and almost always needless fear of the self — in fact, to affirm oneself a moral coward. A state further from “the dignity of a free man” would be rather hard to imagine. It is as a way of exorcising this demon, of reclaiming for ourselves the dignity and courage and ethical self-confidence of free (wo)men that the bearing of personal arms, is, ultimately, most important.
This is the final ethical lesson of bearing arms: that right choices are possible, and the ordinary judgement of ordinary (wo)men is sufficient to make them.
We can, truly, embrace our power and our responsibility to make life-or-death decisions, rather than fearing both. We can accept our ultimate responsibility for our own actions. We can know (not just intellectually, but in the sinew of experience) that we are fit to choose.
Eric S. Raymond, “Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun”.
January 4, 2025
More on the “Boomers and Year Zero” thing
I sent the link I posted yesterday to Severian and asked for his reaction, saying that “Eric is three years older than me, so I’m on a cultural time-delay both for that and for not being American, but I still felt he was much more right than wrong here”. Sev’s thoughts as posted at FQ in the weekly mailbag post:
The upshot is that it isn’t the Boomers’ fault — they got tricked into it by Marxists, for whatever value of “it” is foremost in your mind, every time you’re tempted to say “OK, Boomer.”
I largely agree, with the caveat that “tricked” is a bit strong. There were conscious, indeed State-directed, attempts at outright cultural subversion — Raymond cites Yuri Bezmenov, and we’re all familiar with that. But there’s a limit to how much damage that kind of thing can do. What mostly happened, I think, circles back to that “excess calories” bit, above. That’s overly reductive — it’s a springboard for discussion, not a categorical statement — but the fact is, you need a certain baseline of physical security before Chesterton’s Fence becomes a thing. Or, as Confucius (or whoever) said, “The man with an empty belly has one problem, but the man with a full belly has a thousand”.
By 1960, at least in AINO, you had a critical mass of people who had never gone to bed hungry. Ever. And so it never crossed their minds that “going to bed hungry” is a thing people have to worry about. That had profound effects, that we’re still working through. It was never the case, ever, in the entire history of mankind, that the average person didn’t have to put some thought into where his next meal was coming from.
The entire human organism — physically, mentally, culturally — is oriented around the problem of caloric supply. Again, I acknowledge that’s overly reductive, but roll with me here: Our biochemistry has been profoundly fucked up by high fructose corn syrup, for the simple reason that a teaspoon of that shit has more, and more highly bioavailable, energy than an entire feast for our Paleolithic ancestors. At the risk of looking like a fool for using an engineering, especially an automotive, metaphor with this crowd, it’s like trying to run rocket fuel through a Model T.
You cannot blame the Boomers for fumbling a situation that has never before been seen, in the history of mankind.
And it’s even hard to blame them for not getting it, even now. One’s mental habits ossify, like one’s tastes, sometime in one’s twenties. It is very, very hard to break the conditioning of a lifetime, and it gets exponentially harder the older you get. I myself thought Ace of Normies was just crazy edgy — how can that maniac say these things?!? — when I first started reading him …
… back around 2004. That’s because I was in my 30s, which means my worldview was stuck a decade earlier. Even now, all my go-to cultural touchpoints are in the 1990s — Alanis, obviously, but pretty much all of them; the 21st century might as well not exist for me, culturally, if you go just by what I’ve written here. Which means that my own worldview tends to be kinda Boomerish, thanks to that weird telescoping effect TV had on the culture. The Boomers grew up watching TV, and then they made TV, such that you can ask anyone who was there — your typical college campus in 1994 was all but indistinguishable from a “liberal” campus in 1968 (your typical college campus in 1968 would’ve had sex-segregated dorms, a whole bunch of “married student housing”, and so on).
I got over it, obviously — and just as obviously tend to go a little overboard with my getting over it — but it takes tremendous effort. As I like to say, the Red Pill is really a suppository, usually administered by jackhammer. To expect a Donald Trump (born 1946), to say nothing of a million lesser lights, to fundamentally grok that it’s not 1968 anymore, is asking an awful lot. It is what it is.
Winning WW2’s Most Important Battle – Battle of the Atlantic
Historigraph
Published 15 Aug 2024The Second World War featured many important land battles on a colossal scale. They involved hundreds of thousands of participants, ranged across hundreds of miles and inflicted the most terrible destruction. But none of them were as long-running, as vast or as crucial to allied victory as that fought at sea in the Atlantic, where for four years Allied navies and civilian sailors fought a life or death struggle against Germany’s U-boats. This is the story of how it was fought, and how it was won.
00:00 – WW2’s most important battle
00:45 – The U-boat menace in the early years
08:53 – The massacre off the eastern seaboard
13:12 – American ship printer go brrrrrrrrr
19:31 – The Allies gain the upper hand
21:49 – Black May: the convoy battles of 1943
24:41 – The most important victory of WW2
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January 3, 2025
The Boomers and “reset to Year Zero”
On Twit-, er, I mean “X”, ESR responds to a post from Devon Eriksen decrying the Baby Boomers for effectively destroying the culture of the postwar “American Dream”:
… I’m a late Boomer, born in ’57. I can dimly remember the day JFK was shot. I watched the moon landing. My teens and early twenties coincided with the 1970s. I was there for it all.
And even then, even in the 1970s, feeling a sense of subtle disintegration all around me, I already dimly grasped that we weren’t just falling. We were being pushed.
But I was very young then; I wouldn’t come to fully understand why, and by whom, for almost another 30 years
We Boomers didn’t burn down our heritage in a fit of thoughtless hedonism. I mean, we did some thoughtless hedonism, yeah, but that’s not where the real damage came from.
If you want to know where the damage came from, look up Yuri Bezmenov. Listen to him explain “demoralization” and the long game of Soviet culture-jamming against the West in general and the U.S. in particular.
Reset to year zero was a Marxist idea. It was part of a suite of memetic weapons, infectious propaganda bombs deployed against the social and cultural cohesion of the “main enemy”.
Often, they were successful in damaging us by leveraging not our vices but our virtues. Valorizing tolerance and liberality until they became helplessness in the face of more and more extreme forms of deviance was one of their attacks.
We didn’t fall on our own. We were pushed. The Boomer fault wasn’t that we were hedonists or nihilists, it’s that we didn’t have sufficient cultural immune defenses against what was being done to us.
Why that is exactly is a long sad story that I’m still not sure I completely understand. But I can hit some highlights.
One is that religion failed us. This is nobody’s fault and I don’t think it could have gone differently; it’s a failure that had been on the cards ever since the mechanistic worldview reached effective completion by Darwin. One of the things the Marxists did was work to accelerate the inevitable decay of religious authority.
Secular conservatives failed us, too. They had one job — just one job — which was to explain why all those Chesterton’s fences shouldn’t be torn down. They utterly flubbed that on all three levels of awareness, analysis, and persuasion. That could have gone differently.
It didn’t help that after the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954 conservatives developed a severe case of cowardice about calling out Communist subversion.
That may have been their single greatest dereliction of duty. The result was that over the next 50 years Communist institutional capture of academia and other institutions went almost unopposed. Which is why today we struggle with “woke”.
Most of us Boomers weren’t wreckers, even by accident. Most of us were duped. It’s easy to say in hindsight we should have done better, but the enemy was very clever and determined.
Try not to judge us too harshly, kids. It’s nice to think that a later generation might have done better, but … I haven’t seen it happen yet.
January 2, 2025
DOGE has a lot of low-hanging fruit to pick
Patrick Carroll selects some of the least-defendable ways the US government has been spending taxpayer money from Senator Rand Paul’s 2024 Festivus Report, including pickleball courts, $10B in unused office space, DEI initiatives for birdwatchers, crop fertilizer in foreign countries, and literal circus performances:
Rand Paul by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
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Why does such government waste persist year after year? A significant part of the explanation traces back to the concept of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. Essentially, the beneficiaries tend to be a small, concentrated group, so they lobby hard for these outlays because they stand to gain a lot from them. Taxpayers, on the other hand, tend to be dispersed and only minimally affected by any single expense, so it’s not usually worth it for them to lobby against the spending, or even learn about it in the first place.
Economist Gordon Tullock famously illustrated this concept with his fictional Tullock Economic Development Plan. The plan “involves placing a dollar of additional tax on each income tax form in the United States and paying the resulting funds to Tullock, whose economy would develop rapidly”.
Think about the incentive Tullock would have to advocate for this plan, compared to the incentive that an ordinary taxpayer would have to look into it and voice their objections. With campaign contributions and votes to be gained from the special interest beneficiaries, is it any wonder politicians often go for these kinds of wealth transfers?
The ubiquity and stubborn persistence — year after year — of all this waste, combined with the economic theory that explains why it happens, suggests that there is a fundamental problem with the process of government as we know it. This is not, as many are itching to believe, a “Democrat” problem or a “Republican” problem. The degree of government waste changes very little with changing administrations. No, this is a problem with the government as such.
To solve this problem, we need to ask not just who should run the government, but what the government should be allowed to spend money on in the first place, given what we know about its entirely predictable and repeatedly demonstrated propensity for waste and dysfunction.
Milei has already started that conversation in Argentina. Let’s hope that with the new Trump administration and DOGE, that’s a conversation we can have here as well.
QotD: Sincerity
This is what the French call le horse pucky. If we may be so bold as to speak of “the human spirit” — which is pretty heavy for a column starting with a professional wrestler — the 90s killed it stone cold dead. The human spirit can flourish in the most awful situations, but one indispensable requirement is: Sincerity. You just can’t be snarky about the “Ode to Joy” or ironic about the Sistine Chapel. If you do, then there really is no difference between Beethoven and MC Funetik Spelyn, nothing to choose between Michelangelo and a dog turd on the sidewalk — someone placed them there intentionally, which is the only distinguishing characteristic of “art” possible in a world overrun by Postmodernists and Deconstructionists.
Severian, “Why the 90s Was the Worst Decade Ever”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-04.
January 1, 2025
The Korean War 028 – Happy Nuke Year! – December 31, 1950
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 31 Dec 2024Matt Ridgway arrives in Korea to find his Eighth Army broken and dysfunctional from top to bottom. He has a mere few days to rectify these issues and get them combat-ready before the Communist Chinese forces approach once more. But the stakes are high; UN forces commander Douglas MacArthur continues to pressure Washington to expand the war, through either conventional or atomic means. As 1950 expires, the doomsday clock is ticking.
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Mark Steyn – “This is not a healthy development in world affairs”
Mark comments on the ongoing political punch-up over the US government’s H1B visa program for foreign workers:
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as the figureheads of D.O.G.E.
As you’ll have noticed, the world’s most uniquely unique peaceful transition of power turned suddenly violent over Christmas with various of America’s super-brainy Indians beating up on each other: Nikki Haley, the Boeing board’s token Sikh, lit up Hindu monotheist Vivek Ramaswamy’s tweet like Air Canada overhead baggage in objection to Vivek’s remarks on US “mediocrity”. The offending Ramaswamy tweet was in response to MAGA objections to Trump’s appointment of Madras techie and open-borders fanatic Sriram Krishnan as his AI advisor. This was a very 2025 brouhaha: while you knuckle-draggers down in flyover country were arguing about sub-minimum-wage Hispanics turning down the sheets at Motel Six, the Hindu billionaires have been busy taking over the country.
Is everyone in this all-American punch-up an Indian? Well, no, eventually a South African weighed in. The Boers don’t like the Hindus, do they? I think I got that from Gandhi. Ah, but in this case Elon agrees with Sriram and Vivek.
A couple of very general observations:
1) The MAGA base intuits that H1B visas are a racket. Why wouldn’t they be? Everything else the federal government touches is — from presidential pardons to West Point to Jan 6 justice. America is the third largest nation on earth — a third-of-a-billion people, officially (rather more in actual reality). Why does it need to hire entry-level workers from the first and second largest nations? Yes, yes, too many Americans graduate in non-binary studies rather than any serious academic discipline but simply because you’ve bollocksed up your entire education system is no reason to (as my former National Review colleague John Derbyshire puts it) “import an overclass“.
The MAGA objections to mass immigration (ie, not just illegal immigration) are primarily cultural. They didn’t like it eight years ago when Trump would add to his wall-building promises the line about “and that wall will have a big beautiful door”, and he should have got that by now. Besides, to address the counter-argument more seriously than it merits, a nation of a third-of-a-billion that “needs” to import entry-level accountants is so structurally dysfunctional that no amount of immigration can save it. How about entry-level lawyers? Do we need more of those?
As an aside to that, for all you Constitution fetishists, I’m increasingly sceptical that a Constitution designed for an homogeneous population of two-and-a-half million people can be applied to a third-of-a-billion with a cratering fertility rate of 1.6. The only two more populous nations — China and India — are both more or less conventional ethnostates. Which is a great advantage. America is the only large-scale polity founded on a proposition — that, simply by setting foot on US soil, one becomes American. Immigration on the present transformative scale will nullify the Constitution. So the Dance of the Constitution Fetishists will get even sadder.
The Constitution is increasingly for judges rather than citizens. May be time to import more Supreme Court justices.
2) Besides, H1B is what the government calls, correctly, a “nonimmigrant” visa. One of Rupert Murdoch’s minions offered me an H1B thirty years ago. I looked up the terms and declined to sign on to indentured servitude. You’re not importing “the best and brightest”. You’re assisting well-connected corporations in advantaging themselves at the cost of the citizenry among whom they nominally live. [NR: Emphasis mine.]
3) Have you noticed that almost everyone involved in this spat is a billionaire? Today’s rich are not just rich in the old Scott Fitzgerald they-are-different sense. They approximate more to the condition articulated by Lord Palmerston in his observation that England had no eternal friends or enemies, only eternal interests. For a billionaire, friends and enemies come and go, but, like any medium-sized nation-state, he has his interests.
To most Americans, Elon was largely unknown until he started weighing in on and then buying social media; Vivek was entirely unknown until he ran for president; Sriram is still unknown. But they are far above not just the schlubs who lost their jobs to cheaper H1B types but also to the more famous political class whose poll numbers in Iowa so obsess the hamster-wheel media but which are increasingly irrelevant to anything that matters. Among Sriram Krishnan’s minor claims to “fame” is that he’s the guy who introduced Boris Johnson (remember him?) to Elon Musk — and you can bet that was after desperate wheedling and pleading from the Shagger, not because Elon had any desire for dating tips.
This is not a healthy development in world affairs.
4) Vivek Ramaswamy’s sweeping paean to American “mediocrity” as manifested by everything from prom queens to sitcoms was probably ill-advised but it was certainly entirely sincere — and would be widely shared by his fellow members of the Hindu overclass. The Indian tycoon (and David Cameron advisor) Ratan Tata, who died in October, is best remembered in the UK for his 2011 Vivek-like attack on the natives’ “work ethic“. As Sir Ratan marvelled after buying Jaguar-Land Rover:
I feel if you have come from Bombay to have a meeting and the meeting goes till 6pm, I would expect that you won’t, at 5 o’clock, say, ‘Sorry, I have my train to catch. I have to go home.’
Friday, from 3.30pm, you can’t find anybody in the office.
That may well be true, as Vivek’s musings re Urkel and football jocks may be true. On the other hand, as a rather precocious lad, I observed to my mum that, five years after the Gambia’s independence, nothing seemed to work as well as it did under colonial rule. True, conceded my mother, then added: “But in the end people want to be themselves, as themselves. At least it’s their chaos.”
QotD: The OG internet moguls
The schlubby chic look was part of the con. Made him seem like someone who didn’t care about the money, which sends a subtle anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist, anti-finance bro NLP type message.
https://twitter.com/esaagar/status/1603015654206066688Posted by Noam Blum (neontaster) on Thursday, December 15th, 2022 1:25pm
Then it became sort of a cosplay thing for vaporware charlatans targeting FOMO investors.
“psst, Bob, should we really give $20 million to this guy? He’s picking his nose and wiping it on his cargo shorts rn”
“But remember that last nosepicker we passed on? He made $10 billion”
*fun fact: 8 years ago nosepicking guy was a Ralph Lauren-wearing chairman of the Delta Chi party committee, majoring in Entrepreneurship. And then he took the Silicon Valley Dress Down for Success seminar
There are other stylistic variations on pure slovenliness; the Black Turtleneck Next Steve Jobs gambit, and the coffee-clutching Patagonia Vest & Untuckits Next Steve Bezos thing
Oh, and the hoodies, so many hoodies.
For everybody thinking “tech people need to start wearing IBM suits again”: if you showed up to work or a VC meeting in one you would be thought deranged, building security, or a lunch caterer
For me the peak of Silicon Valley style will always be the pre-internet Assembly Language programmer polyester clip-on tie & short sleeve Sears Towncraft dress shirt look. The effortless nonchalance told you “I can trust this person not to run to the Carribean with my money”
David Burge (@Iowahawk), Twitter, 2022-12-15.
December 30, 2024
RIP Jimmy Carter, “The Great Deregulator”, 1924-2024
ReasonTV
Published 29 Dec 2024Nobel-Winning Economist Vernon Smith says the 39th president radically improved air travel, freight rail, and trucking in ways that still benefit us immensely.
______Jimmy Carter was perhaps the most successful ex-president in American history, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his work promoting human rights and economic and social development.
But his single term as president (1977–1981) is largely remembered as a series of failures and missteps, sometimes literally. Gas lines, a record-high combination of unemployment and inflation on the “misery index”, and Americans being held hostage by Iranian revolutionaries for over a year all fueled the perception that Carter was a weak and ineffective leader. When he collapsed during a six-mile run, it personified for many the exhaustion of the country under his leadership.
But there was at least one way in which Carter excelled as president. He was, in the words of 2002 Nobel–winning economist Vernon Smith, the great deregulator. Carter forced the airline industry, along with interstate trucking and freight rail, to compete for business, with powerful and positive effects that continue to this day.
I talked to Smith about Carter, whom he met at a White House event for American Nobel Prize winners, and what it was like to fly in the days when the government controlled air travel.
Ted Gioia on 2025’s most likely trends
Peeking out from behind the paywall, the latest installment of Ted Gioia‘s arts & culture briefing includes some good news for those of us who still remember when book stores actually sold books (unlike the last time I visited an Indigo store to find that the books were even more of an afterthought than ever):
“Barnes & Noble Book Store” by JeepersMedia is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .
The Barnes & Noble turnaround is really happening — and everybody in the culture business should learn from it.
More than a year ago, I celebrated the arrival of a new boss at Barnes & Noble who actually loves books.
This led him to do all sorts of brave things. He stopped promoting new titles based on kickbacks from publishers, and instead showcased books that people might actually enjoy reading.
This was an example of stealth culture mentioned above. Shoppers had no idea that the promoted books at the front of the store were chosen on the basis of financial incentives, not quality. And new boss Jamie Daunt shook the entire publishing business by turning down the cash.
He also empowered employees in the store, giving them freedom to feature books that they loved. He told his local booksellers to remove every title from every shelf, and “weed out the rubbish”. He wanted the staff to be excited about the books they sold.
I now have a happy update to my previous report.
Barnes & Noble has more than 60 new locations opening this year, and store foot traffic is improving steadily.
In an especially inspiring move, the company recently reopened a huge retail space in DC it had abandoned in 2013. After more than a decade, it returned to the same location and opened a flagship store.
When he took over, Daunt saw that the stores were “crucifyingly boring”. But now the excitement is back. Some visitors even compare Barnes & Noble nowadays to a theme park for books.
Kendra Keeter-Gray, a BookTok content creator with over 100,000 followers, told CNN that she and her friends could spend anywhere between 30 minutes to a few hours inside a Barnes & Noble, usually in the BookTok section where they trade recommendations and flip through currently trending novels.
“When you go to Barnes, it’s like an excursion almost. I would equate it to when I was little and my parents would take me to Six Flags,” she said.
Meanwhile here’s a completely different strategy for the book business …
In Japan, writers can rent out their own shelf at a local bookstore.
The new trend in Japanese bookstores is to sublease the shelves to outsiders. The result is the exact opposite of algorithm-chosen books. Every shelf is filled with surprises.
According to the South China Morning Post:
“Here, you find books which make you wonder who on earth would buy them,” laughs Shogo Imamura, 40, who opened one such store in Tokyo’s bookstore district of Kanda Jimbocho in April.
“Regular bookstores sell books that are popular based on sales statistics while excluding books that don’t sell well,” says Imamura … “We ignore such principles”.
December 29, 2024
In Louisiana, gerrymandering is illegal … or is it mandatory?
Louisiana politicians created an electoral map that returned eight Republican congressmen to only one Democrat, despite the Republicans only getting about two-thirds of the popular vote. Clearly a partisan gerrymander that the courts will set aside … but perhaps not:
District 6, pink on the map, is the second black majority district, a long thin diagonal, stretching about two-thirds of the width and height of the state. It is an obvious gerrymander.
Two thirds of the voters getting eight congressional seats out of nine would be anomalous in a proportional representation system, but US congressional elections are first past the post. If the population of Tennessee were evenly distributed, with the same percentage of Republican and Democratic voters in each congressional district, the majority party would win all of them — even if the division of votes was 51/49. With a majority of almost two to one, the only way the Democrats get any seats is if their voters happen to be concentrated in one or a few districts.
I do not know whether Tennessee districts are actually drawn to favor the Republicans but the facts offered in the article are not evidence of it. Compare the outcome of the most recent UK elections, also under first past the post. Labor got 33.7% of the vote and ended up with 63% of the seats, 411 out of 650.
[…]
The difficulty in the claim that the failure of a group to elect a number of representatives proportional to their share of the vote is nicely illustrated by the litigation, still ongoing, over Louisiana redistricting.
In June 2022, Chief Judge Shelly Dick, an Obama appointee to a federal court in Louisiana, determined that state’s congressional maps were an illegal racial gerrymander. Under the invalid maps, Black voters made up a majority in only one of the state’s six congressional districts, despite the fact that Black people comprise about a third of Louisiana’s population. (Vox)
As best I can tell, no evidence was offered by the court of actual gerrymandering beyond the fact that the percentage of districts with a black majority was less than the percentage of blacks in the population.
After some litigation, the Louisiana legislature drew a new map with two black majority districts — and a new set of plaintiffs sued on the grounds that the new map was a gerrymander drawn to create a black majority district, in violation of the Equal Protection guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment. They sued in a different federal appeals court and won, a 2 to 1 majority verdict.
One court was insisting that Louisiana had to create a second black majority district to comply with the Civil Rights Act, the other that it could not create such a district, more precisely that it could not create it in the form the legislature had proposed, in order to comply with the Constitution. The case was appealed to the Supreme Court, which let the legislature’s map stand for the 2024 election, about to happen, but has not yet ruled beyond that.
Louisiana, in other words, is now subject to two competing court orders. The first, from Judge Dick, forbids it from using the old maps. The second, from the two Trump judges in the Western District, forbids the state from using the new maps it enacted to comply with Dick’s order. (Vox)
December 28, 2024
How the H1B visa argument follows an earlier political struggle
On the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, ESR points out that the arguments over US work permits for foreigners might well have been prefigured by the now-receding tide of attempts to gut the second amendment:
alexandriabrown @alexthechick
It is difficult to overstate how caustic this is to public debate and public acceptance of legislation. If you give us X, we will accept restriction Y is the basis of all compromise. When a party gets X on the basis of accepting Y, then immediately undermines Y, the deal is void.This was part of a thread about H1B abuse, correctly pointing out that the companies who lobbied for H1B didn’t hold up their end of the deal, leaving many Americans feeling betrayed — especially tech workers who were fired in favor of an imported hire, then told their severance pay would be denied if they didn’t train their replacements.
I am, however, irresistibly reminded of another betrayal. One I’ve written about before — but maybe at least part of this story needs to be told again.
Today in the 21st century most of the American gun culture is bitterly, even fanatically opposed to more “gun control” laws, and howling for all of them clear back to the National Firearms Act of 1934 to be repealed. Donald Trump earned huge support with his promise to get national concealed-carry reciprocity pushed through Congress.
We weren’t always like that. Long ago, before 1990, many of us were less resistant to new gun control measures. Sometimes major gun-rights organizations would even help lawmakers draft legislative language.
(Yes, I was a gun owner then. So I’m not going by legends, but by lived experience.)
What changed?
The quid-quo-pros we were offered were many variations of “If you will accept this specific restriction X, we will stop pushing. We will stop trying to undermine your Second Amendment rights in general. Help us save the chilllldren!”
That promise was never kept. Gradually, we noticed this. It always turned out that the minority of angry suspicious people who said “This won’t be enough, they’ll come back for another bite!” were right.
Eventually, some documents leaked out of one of the major graboid organizations that revealed a conscious strategy of salami-slicing — instead of challenging gun rights directly, they intended to gradually make owning personal weapons less useful and more onerous until the culture around them collapsed.
So nowadays we’re pretty much all angry and suspicious. Even restrictions that do little harm and might be objectively reasonable (bump stocks, anyone?) touch off tsunamis of protest.
People offering us more “deals” (just give up this one little thing, mmmkay?) now have negative credibility.
Are you paying attention, Big Tech? (Particularly you, @elonmusk, and you, @VivekGRamaswamy.) Because you’re almost there, now. Too many people see that H1B has become an indentured-servitude fraud that victimizes both the workers it imports and the Americans it displaces.
You credibility isn’t as shot as the gun-banners’ yet. You still have some room for recovery on “high-skilled immigation” in general, but it’s decreasing.
Your smart move would be to sacrifice H1B so you can keep the O-1 “genius” visas. I advise you to take it, because if you dig in your heels I think you are likely to lose both.
And on the reason so many Americans have become angry about blatant and exploitive H1B visa abuse:
Today’s big beef is between tech-success maximizers like @elonmusk and MAGA nationalists who think the US job market is being flooded by low-skill immigrants because employers don’t want to pay competitive wages to Americans.
To be honest, I think both sides are making some sound points. But I’d rather focus on a different aspect of the problem.
When I entered the job market as a fledgling programmer back in the early 1980s, I didn’t have to worry that some purple-haired harpy in HR was going to throw my resume in the circular file because I’m a straight white male.
I also didn’t have to worry that a hiring manager from a subcontinent that shall not be named would laugh at my qualifications because in-group loyalty tells him to hire his fourth cousin from a city where they still shit on the streets.
It’s a bit much to complain that today’s American students won’t grind as hard as East Asians when we abandoned meritocracy more than 30 years ago. Nothing disincentivizes working your ass off to excel more than a justified belief that it’s futile.
Right now we’re in and everybody-loses situation. Employers aren’t getting the talent they desperately need, and talent is being wasted. That mismatch is the first problem that needs solving.
You want excellence? Fire the goddamn HR drones and the nepotists. Scrap DEI. Find all the underemployed white male STEM majors out there who gave up on what they really wanted to do because the hiring system repeatedly punched them in the face, and bring them in.
Don’t forget the part about paying competitive wages. This whole H-1B indentured-servitude thing? It stinks, and the stench pollutes your entire case for “high-skill” immigration. You might actually have a case, but until you clean up that mess Americans will be justified in dismissing it.
These measures should get you through the next five years or so, while the signal that straight white men are allowed to be in the game again propagates.
I’m not going to overclaim here. This will probably solve your need for top 10% coders and engineers, but not your need for the top 0.1%. For those you probably do have to recruit worldwide.
But if you stop overtly discriminating against the Americans who could fill your top 10% jobs, your talent problem will greatly ease. And you’ll no longer get huge political pushback from aggrieved MAGA types against measures that could solve the rest of it.
Doesn’t that seem like it’s worth a try?
December 27, 2024
QotD: Adapting to “permanent” food surpluses
More to the point, this is a testable hypothesis. I’m a history guy, obviously, not a biologist, but you don’t need to be a STEM PhD to see it. All our physical structures still look the same in 2021 as they did in 1901, but our biochemistry is far different. Just to take two obvious — and obviously detrimental — examples, we are awash in insulin and estrogen. Time warp in a laboring man from 1901 and feed him a modern “diet” for a week; the insulinemic effects of all that corn syrup etc. would put him in a coma. Even if he didn’t, the knock-on effect of all that insulin — greatly ramped-up estrogen — would deprive him of a lot of his physical strength, not to mention radically alter his mood, etc.
Severian, “The Experiment”, Founding Questions, 2021-09-25.
