ArkyBeagle

And ( to my ear ) the always reliable Dean Baker addresses "the money thing" in "Rigged". Scott Sumner has also written at length on the subject.

There are two mandates to the Fed - price stability and ( Humphrey-Hawkins ) employment. With the exception of the Greenspan era pre-2000, Fed policy has set employment in the back seat.

Because "Inflation BAAAAD!" ( in the manner of Phil Hartman's Frankenstein's monster ).

So we have 2% growth targets that we undershoot and low growth. The population has adapted in ways described in Tyler Cowen's "The Complacent Class".

New houses are built to what I consider exorbitant prices. People finance 4x annual income or more.

The thing being sold is really the debt instrument, not the house itself.

That's mostly housing, which was financed by debt.

It kind-of is magic - that is how money gets created.

I dunno. I think that at least globalization - as in the easily agreed on definition of globalization - is declining. After all, the various China seas seem to be becoming a Chinese lake, if we can project the construction of sand islands some.

Automation is both already in full sway and at the same time, the remaining things to be automated seem out of reach - not of the technologists, but of the leadership class. But we can't give the techies status enough to do it right :) It is also anything but clear that automation should displace labor necessarily, at least over a long enough time line.

"Inflation is, everywhere, a monetary phenomenon." - Milton Friedman.

I don't think that what Conservatives call "the destruction of the nuclear family" is the goal, but that the models in use don't work to keep Dad jobs available. The nuclear family will most likely evolve out anyway, because we can't even hit low (2%) Fed growth targets. At any rate, Dean Baker, "Rigged", yadda yadda.

All court proceedings are about finding fault.

An anedcote: my boss was PM for building a new building and his claim was that offices with sheetrock and (steel) studs was cheaper than cubes.

We still had cubes. Because you have to have cubes.

And of course the Edifice Complex held - we were sold before everything on the building was done.

Real professional soldiers come from the Service Academies and while they're different from Gates & Zuckerberg, they are among our nations finest people, at least when hubris doesn't get 'em.

It's interesting - Johnny Cash was a SIGINT operative in Europe in the 1950s. I mean headsets and notepads.

That's probably where he got a taste for amphetamines, at least one biographer thinks. "Here, take this, son. It'll keep you awake."

At least in the US, right now, all the hi-tech death machines get maintained by contractors or civilian employees of the services.

The press is being undermined by its economics. Trump just smelled weakness and attacked.

It's not myth, it's narrative. Antebellum slavery and Jim Crow were narratives[1]. Even worse, they're narratives based on phrenological "science".

[1] see also a novel "The Klansman", the Word of that narrative made flesh and into "Birth of a Nation" , i which the modern movie was born.

Sacrificing individual agency to mythic protections has a name. It's collectivism. And it takes quite the storyteller to kill that sort of story.

The housing crisis? "Housing never goes down." Vietnam? "The domino theory." Manifest Destiny? "Go West, young man."

The problem is that we're adapted to narrative as our principle means of information exchange. So we try to construct counter-narratives. Those work just about as well.

The antidote to narrative is rhetoric.

Can anyone shed light on why so many Stoic societies/clubs seem to be essentially religious? The Stoics I have read do not seem to be particularly religious nor of any particular creed - some were polytheist, some were monotheist, some seem to nearly be agnostic or atheist.

The important thing to remember is that this caring is anomalous. I personally find Space Does Not Care to be quite liberating.

Those are slowly being identified as artifacts of trauma[1], at least the pathological cases are. SO imagine how prevalent they were in the Classical world.

[1]] I don't hold that un-self-aware people are pathological...