literal marxist professor

So I'm 36 years old and, you know, out of touch with what's going on at colleges, so maybe this is a dumb question, but did every school in the country lose their fucking minds lol. Why have all these universities baked AI into their graduation ceremonies? What fuck is going on?

Here is a huge positive to modern life that gets no press. I have an old 2009 Toyota, and the AUX port crapped out about a year ago. Went to YouTube. Young, enthusiastic guy explains how to fix it. It is not obvious - involves taking the dashboard apart in a counter-intuitive way, but once you see it, it's a 15 minute fix. There are actually dozens of videos showing how to do this, and they collectively have well over 200k views. Had this happened in 1995, I would have just lived with it. But the combo of the replacement AUX jack available from Amazon and the video of the simple (but not obvious) fix, I fixed it. I HAVE DONE THIS DOZENS OF TIMES. Replaced the control panel of my dishwasher. Replaced the ice maker in the fridge. Fixed a wonky sanding head on my drill press. Mastered a bandsaw technique that I use for my sculpture. On and on and on... I think it is likely no exaggeration to say billions of fixes and skill upgrades have been performed worldwide that would not have been performed if it were not for the instruction freely given peer-to-peer on YouTube. Take a moment to be happy about this. The busted item keeps performing, rather than going to the landfill. The person learning and doing the fix gains a sense of mastery and saves money. It's an unmixed blessing. Stop doomscrolling. Think of what is busted in your house, find the YouTube video on how to fix it, and fix it.

Inflation is back. Real wages are down. But things may already be worse than they look. During the COVID inflation the data said real wages ROSE, providing a buffer against today’s price surges. But my NEW WORKING PAPER finds: those real wage gains were a statistical illusion🧵

*sigh* this is pure slop. Marx wrote in "Private Property and Communism" (1844 Manuscripts) that an individual and community aren't fundamentally opposed, but rather an individual can only manifest their capacities through their community and the community through individuals.

This "economist" is a heterodox crackpot with no scholarly publications, blogging in a socialist webzine about how he thinks all of mainstream economics is wrong. This is akin to invoking a certificate in homeopathic crystal healing as a defense from criticism by a brain surgeon

Re: Rent control Many will say “We can’t set prices in the economy by bureaucratic rule. What about the misallocation that will occur?” And then in the next breath “The best way to set the price of money (interest rate) is to have bureaucrats decide its price”

I'm glad that the author of "Rent Control Is Fine, Actually" calls themself Unlearning Economics, bc it's good to just state things clearly, such as the open animosity that many left economic populists have for the field of economics and economists themselves. Economists aren't gods, and economics isn't a divine truth, but economists are good--better than most--at something critical for making public policy: They're good at identifying tradeoffs. "Rents are too high, so freeze them" is compelling politics. But in the absence of other pro-supply policies, if you make it illegal to increase rents, landlords will stop upgrading units and convert them to condos, which reduces the supply of units for rent, reduces mobility, and drives up rents for everybody else. The left econ populists have some clear, and clearly stated, policy ideas: - Rents are too high, so freeze them. - Electricity is expensive, so stop rate increases. - Homes are too expensive, so ban institutional investors. - Power prices are rising, so ban data center construction. ... All these policies feel like solutions because they're brisk, they name enemies, and they take on the most visible source of frustration. But they are much better as villain-naming exercises than they are as a complete public policy. On their own, each creates other problems: less housing built, less clean electricity built, abdicating energy policy by encouraging AI firms to build data centers abroad in unsavory countries with more emissions, etc. I can't think of a single economic populist idea that wouldn't be helped with a little dose of economics, which is why it's troubling when I see the left participating in, and even celebrating, the great unlearning of economics.

🚨 Praxis Alert 🚨