Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Courtside Karenina @annajane10000.bsky.social · 14h

The Spurs are very fun. Go Spurs go!

Courtside Karenina @annajane10000.bsky.social · 15h

I really like Harrison Barnes' presence on the Spurs.

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Courtside Karenina @annajane10000.bsky.social · 15h

Marx was really smart! But that's as far as it goes.

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Courtside Karenina @annajane10000.bsky.social · 15h

(My view is that Capital V1, paired down to the readable parts, is the maybe best of the classical economic tomes, though he had prior thinkers to build on, and it really anticipates some of the 20th century problems in marcoeconomics, you don't get that so much in JS Mill.)

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Courtside Karenina @annajane10000.bsky.social · 15h

The funny thing about Marx is that he was always "too conservative" for some! That's how he actually produced the content to be remembered. Radicals got a lot more radical in the period he was writing Capital.

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Courtside Karenina @annajane10000.bsky.social · 15h

Marx was in exile, this was low on the list of things that would have gotten him killed.

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Courtside Karenina @annajane10000.bsky.social · 15h

Marx also went from being a run of the mill Prussian liberal to being Marx as we know him over the course of his early adulthood, and old habits die hard. He had a fair number of conventional mid-19th C liberal intellectual opinions for most of his life. Loving Lincoln = pretty predictable.

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Courtside Karenina @annajane10000.bsky.social · 15h

Musk, like Trump before him, and many others, is probably worth much less than projections suggest he is. Asking IRS bureaucrats to solve this problem which is very much a societal problem, is missing the point.

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Courtside Karenina @annajane10000.bsky.social · 15h

A better tax code might help prevent future Musks of course, which is why a better tax code is helpful. But taxation can't really deal the fact that projected wealth is a function of people's beliefs about the future and nobody in the evaluation process (including the "market") is objective.

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Courtside Karenina @annajane10000.bsky.social · 15h

I think the mechanisms for dealing with Musk wont' really involve much taxation. Tax the rich more (also tax the upper middle class more, tax me more) but our billionaire problem has little to do the tax code!

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Courtside Karenina @annajane10000.bsky.social · 15h

So ... more people should read not just Genji but Heian period literature in general and understand the context!

Courtside Karenina @annajane10000.bsky.social · 16h

I'm no expert and don't even read modern Japanese but one of my fav things I've ever read was Kagerō Nikki in translation by Sonja Arntzen.

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Courtside Karenina @annajane10000.bsky.social · 16h

Content is so good. Please keep it coming.

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Courtside Karenina @annajane10000.bsky.social · 16h

It's downstream from the fact that there's zero $ in news content. No money in content b/c content is abundant so you gotta go where the $s are: telling people with disposable income that their very conventional opinions and prejudices are actually daring anti-establishment stuff.

Courtside Karenina @annajane10000.bsky.social · 16h

Everybody -- the lord, the peasants -- is richer and (probably, all things considered) smarter now, beyond the fact that they're basically literate. But everything is relative. Elites get driven nuts by what the average person thinks or they monetize it.

Courtside Karenina @annajane10000.bsky.social · 16h

In spades. Jesus. it's a haters carnival.

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Courtside Karenina @annajane10000.bsky.social · 16h

Elites thought social media was going to be the agora, and it's a medieval market fair. The local lord would not have supplied the three hogs for roasting and the 10 casks if he could have read what the peasants were saying on social media.

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Courtside Karenina @annajane10000.bsky.social · 16h

The #1 reason for the decline of political media as an effective institution (and it was always bad, but not Olivia Nuzzi/Bari Weiss bad) is that there's no money in content anymore.

The #2 reason is reasonably smart people being confronted with the median voter and not wanting to believe it.

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Courtside Karenina @annajane10000.bsky.social · 17h

(Not dismissing the point. Just saying Stancil Syndrome is a real problem, but it only impacts some very large accounts because of herd behavior.)

Courtside Karenina @annajane10000.bsky.social · 17h

Eh. Getting overly-emotional people whose emotion is making them dumb in your mentions is a nothingburger, at most it's annoying and shouldn't even be that. It gets much, much worse though.

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Courtside Karenina @annajane10000.bsky.social · 17h

People are, sadly, on average very unwilling to accept higher taxes. I have no doubt the share of people who identify as socialist are more willing to accept higher taxes than average, but a lot still are not.

Courtside Karenina @annajane10000.bsky.social · 20h

And in another thread a person was "I ALREADY CAN'T AFFORD TO HAVE KIDS AND NOW YOU WANT TO TAX ME MORE".

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Courtside Karenina @annajane10000.bsky.social · 20h

Yeah -- it's not everybody responding here tbc. But the lefty version of it usually just "tax billionaires" but in the end, a lot of this stuff boils down to "I should have more stuff and have to pay less" and the justification behind it is secondary and adjusts to the context.

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Courtside Karenina @annajane10000.bsky.social · 20h

I think that's mostly true in this particular case given what people are saying, but negative emotions tend to arise whenever we bring up taxing anybody other than "billionaires" and the reasons adjust to the context.

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Courtside Karenina @annajane10000.bsky.social · 20h

So, yes?

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