Big Money
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AI and the Current Zeitgeist
Apologies if I'm throwing more AI stuff at you than you care to read, but things in the world of AI are happening fast, and the argument I've been making here for the last couple of years is that what's happening there is more important to understand and to resist than whatever is happening in
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‘Mountainhead’, Late Capitalism, and the Catholic Moment
By his own admission, Armstrong has respect for the intellects of some of the founders he’s satirizing. Perhaps because he’s written from their perspective, he’s empathetic enough that he sees an impulse to help buried deep among the egos and the paternalism. “It’s like how the politician always thinks they’ve got the answer,” he said.
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Worshipping in the Temple of the Invisible Hand
“I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism,” Chiang told me. “And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against
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Milton Friedman: Proto-Sociopath
But while economists still argue over Friedman’s theories, his hot take 50 years ago for nonspecialists — the Friedman doctrine — turned a capitalist truism (profits are essential) into a simple-minded, unhinged, socially destructive monomania (only profits matter). In “A Christmas Carol,” Scrooge is redeemed when he abandons his nasty profit-mad view of life —
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State of the Race 1
Bernie Sanders' position in this cycle is a lot like Trump's in the last one. He has a solid, impassioned base of support that is dwarfed by the majority which is split among the rest of the field. Trump won because the opposition to him could not unify around another candidate to oppose him. This
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Zizek, McCain, Trump, and Big Daddy
I'm no expert on Slavoj Zizek, the Lacanian psychotherapist and edgy philosopher from Slovenia, but I find his distinction between the Oedipal Father Figure and the Primal Father Figure an interesting frame through which to observe the events surrounding the death of John McCain in the last week. Elites in the American media and political
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Perlstein on Sanders
To me, this history reveals the frustrating paradox at the heart of Sanders’s success. The very thing that makes it so exciting—a Democrat dreaming big dreams and who’s rewarded with burgeoning political success beyond anyone’s prediction but his own—is also what makes for such a stark contrast with the rest of the Democratic Party. The
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The Disaster of 2010
From Chapter 10 in Jane Mayer's Dark Money, "The Shellacking: Dark Money's Midterm Debut, 2010" Lifting the donors' [Koch donors' network] spirits further was the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, which had been handed down on January 21, [2010], two days after Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts, and shortly before the Kochs' summit. Brown's race
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Mayer’s Dark Money
I'm three or four chapters into reading Jane Mayer's Dark Money. Mayer is the Ida Tarbell of our generation, and to her we owe a huge debt of gratitude. If Tarbell exposed how the trusts work at the turn of the previous century, Mayer is now exposing how enormous amounts stealth money are working to bring