@matthewstoller I never understood open source software. People laboring for free to write software that runs profitable businesses. Makes no sense to me.
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mikejz
553 posts
There’s all sorts of free software already. Linux is free. Open source software is free.
All of these statements are intended to hide the politics of how we organize markets.
Rohan Paul@rohanpaul_ai
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei : "Software is going to become cheap, maybe essentially free. The premise that you need to amortize a piece of software you build across millions of users, that may start to be false. But at the same time, there are whole jobs, whole careers that we've built for decades that may not be present. And, you know, I think we can deal with it. I think we can adjust to it. But I don't, I don't think there's an awareness at all of what, of what is coming here and the magnitude of it." --- From "The Wall Street Journal" YT channel (link in comment)
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@HalSinger The thing is that I've never met anyone who aspires to be labor. They want to be management or owners.
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I blanch at the way neoliberals define progress aka “productivity” as “the ability to produce more with the same labour.” It implies that a declining labor share could be a good thing for a society—even a mark of prosperity.
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@MorganRicks1 99 percent of the US population lives within a 2.5 hour drive of a commercial airport. Half of Americans don't take a commercial flight in a given year.
I just don't get the problem this is designed to fix.
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@mikejz Note the trend before deregulation. Hard to evaluate the counterfactual but I gather the best empirical analysis says dereg. reduced fares by ~20% eventually. So the $160 flight today would instead be $200. Some of it would have gone to sustaining service in smaller communities.
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It's a banal point but competition is often dysfunctional in network industries and the more dysfunctional it is, the more likely it is that economic regulation (which has both advantages and disadvantages) may compare favorably.
The Argument@TheArgumentMag
What does Spirit Airlines’ collapse reveal about the bigger fight over competition, deregulation, and antitrust? In this clip, @mattyglesias literally puts on the tinfoil hat and argues that the debate over airline deregulation is a “tell” for a much larger ideological divide: whether policymakers should use antitrust to make markets more competitive — or use the language of competition to justify bringing back older, more heavily regulated economic frameworks. Watch to the full episode of The Argument: bit.ly/4eGxy3e
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@MorganRicks1 Maybe asked better. Who in the public is calling for a return to this travel option?
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@matthewstoller Its hard to see any popular support for flights like this as being practical for anyone today. Why are we wanting to build this again? Who actually benefits flying from Montgomery to Birmingham (an hour drive).
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False. Prices dropped far more quickly in the regulated era than in the period of deregulation. And flight options are far worse today except from a few big cities.
Same bad dynamics across all transportation sectors.
Craig Fuller 🛩🚛🚂⚓️@FreightAlley
Reregulation of transportation would result in much higher costs for consumers, with far fewer flight options.
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@MorganRicks1 Specifically? I get that the CAB had a bunch of short hop routes between smaller cities but in a TSA and Interstate world it would be a laughable longer to fly them vs. drive.
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@MaxJerneck No. They just pay a lower effective tax rate (google statutory vs. effective tax rate). To quote Pete from Mad Men "To hang onto it I might have to buy an apartment building," There were just huge ways to lower reported income in the past, e.g., real estate investments.
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”almost no one actually paid 91% tax rates”
That means the tax worked! Sin taxes should abolish themselves
Jessica Riedl 🧀 🇺🇦@JessicaBRiedl
As other economists have shown, Gabriel Zucman's tax and inequality data is wildly misleading. He turns seemingly every methodological dial to claim that inequality has soared and high-earner taxes have collapsed. In his own data, virtually the ENTIRE drop in high-income taxes come from Zucman's highly unorthodox assumptions about the incidence of the corporate tax - which he claims cost the top 1% of earners 29% (!) of their income in 1951, and yet now costs them 6%. And this questionable data accounts for his ENTIRE claimed "drop" in higher-earner taxes. You see - on the income tax side - Zucman's own data shows that the average individual income tax paid by the rich has RISEN - not fallen - since the 1950s. See gabriel-zucman.eu/usdina/ then click on "Table 2: Distributional series," and navigate to tab TG2b, column T for income taxes (and column U for corporate taxes) As much as Zucman builds up 1950s income tax rates, almost no one actually paid 91% tax rates - or even touched a tax bracket over 50%. And that's why actual income tax revenues - including income tax rates paid by the rich - were *lower* in the 1950s than today. Zucman's rhetoric is peddling a "tax the rich" utopia of the 1940s-1960s that his own data shows did not exist.
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.@elonmusk is planning to take @SpaceX public with the least democratic corporate governance structure ever seen in a major IPO.
No independent Board. Musk would serve as both chair and CEO, with veto power over his own removal. Perpetual super-voting shares. Severe restrictions on shareholder legal action.
I’m joining @NYSComptroller and @CalPERS to urge SpaceX to fix this, to protect shareholder rights and strengthen accountability.
Together our pension funds manage over $1T in assets, including significant exposure to SpaceX. And through indexing, public pension funds and millions of Americans will become major shareholders after the IPO.
Public markets work best when companies are transparent and accountable. For the public-sector workers and retirees we serve—and for millions of Americans with index funds—we strongly urge SpaceX to implement a more open and democratic governance structure.
Reuters@Reuters
Exclusive: New York, California pension leaders oppose 'extreme' SpaceX control structure reut.rs/4dHKhBF reut.rs/4dHKhBF
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We need a halt on data center construction until we can establish meaningful regulations to protect our environment, prevent energy rate increases, prohibit mass surveillance, and preserve our workforce.
If AI must exist, it should exist for the benefit of the working class, not anti-human billionaires and utility monopolies.
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@mcsquared34 Kind of. Most people don't realize that ~60-70% of people that have health insurance, their employer is basically self-insuring and the insurance company is just processing claims and sending the company the bill. They don't have direct skin in the game.
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Insurance companies are the bloated for profit middleman that literally doesn’t even have a product to sell. Health insurance doesn’t improve the quality of healthcare nor contain its costs.
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Pretty much everyone but big tech billionaires hate data centers. So even though an overwhelming majority of Americans oppose new data centers being built in their communities, they’ll be built against their wills anyway, bc USA is a democracy & the best country in the world🦅🇺🇸
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@davidsirota I mean every congressional committee meeting is just congress critters acting to appeal to small dollar donors at this point.
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the fact that Musk’s algorithm forced this into my feed is a reminder of just how much of an oligarch funhouse mirror this website really is
Steven Godofsky@sgodofsk
Since the Citizens United decision it has become quite clear that firstly, small dollar individual donations are way more corrosive to public life than large corporate ones, and secondly, money doesn't buy elections anyway. The campaign finance laws should be repealed.
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NEW: Tech bros are somehow expressing surprise that polls show Americans don't want to live near data centers that jack up utility prices, create noise pollution & suck up tax subsidies - all to enrich tech oligarchs & boost AI ruining kids' minds & making dumb Internet slop.
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@ramit @JayVillas2020 Do you really feel like your underlying advice and guidance to people would change all that much depending on which country you were in?
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Because change doesn't happen simply through individual behavioral change. We need structural reform.
This is why a change in funding for the CTC, for example, brought millions of kids out of poverty. And why urging individuals to invest in their 401K did not work as effectively as simply making it opt out vs. opt in
Personal responsibility matters. So does structural reform.
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I too love “apolitical” money topics like taxes, housing, healthcare costs, access to education, medical bankruptcy, prescription drug pricing, social security, zoning, capital gains qualifications, SNAP, insurance, inheritance, payday lending, & school lunch programs
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@ramit Why are we talking about the ~9% of the population that does not have health insurance? If I want to materially improve my life with limited time and resources make the case the trying to change political outcomes is the best use of my time and resources to achieve that outcome.
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@mikejz How do you go to your doctor if you don't have health insurance? Who decides who gets health insurance? That's politics.
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@NathanJRobinson I thought school enrollment was on the decline in NYC? Why do they need more teachers?
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every day he's just out there doing things that show we don't have to accept miserable incompetence from our government
currentaffairs.org/news/meanwhile…
Democrats Deliver@DemzDeliver
🚨 NEW: Zohran Mamdani to invest $122M in NYC public schools, hiring 1,000 additional teachers.
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