scoofy

The solution was, and still is, urbanism and electrification… not living with less.

Literally the leftist dense cities have been the ones pushing back hardest against high rises, sustainable transportation alternatives, and in large part, electrification through overly restrictive environmental laws designed in the 70s.

That’s over now. Climate change is here, and you still can’t convert a house to a duplex in LA without jumping through a thousand hoops.

I completely agree. That still doesn’t make degrowth a sensible position.

It doesn't matter if it's "good" or "bad" if it's not a politically viable position.

That I think it's an idiotic position is beside the point. Things and prosperity generally are not the problem, and can grow pretty much indefinitely for the foreseeable future if it's done in a reasonable and sustainable way.

Third-parties are generally full of eccentrics (remember that the UK is still FPTP, even if they're a multi-party system). Eccentrics typically aren't the "very serious" types looking at tradeoffs.

The large portion of the environmentalist left are degrowthers who literally want people to just live with less, which means "less energy" is actually good. It will never be a politically viable position, but again, we're talking about a party that until recently has never come close to wielding power.

>Authors of the voting rights act understood that the former is so often a veneer for the latter that they are functionally the same thing.

You can't say this with a straight face. Before the civil rights act we literally had white's only sections of businesses. Separate-but-unequal was the apartheid of the South. That just doesn't exist anymore in any kind of open and accepted way, thank god.

>You essentially argue that policymakers should enjoy the right to quietly undermine minority voting power up until the point where they explicitly say "and I'm doing this because I'm a racist targeting minorities".

Again, I'm not saying that at all, the Supreme Court isn't saying that either. You are again conflating minorities as a singular voting bloc with a singular voting interest. The entire point here is that there is plenty of evidence that this is about politics, not about race.

I think gerrymandering is atrocious. I think we should move to a proportional voting system where gerrymandering is no longer achievable. The idea that 25% of a population can dictate government control to the other 75% of the population by drawing arbitrary lines is atrocious. I just think it's quite clear that this isn't happening to suppress the vote along racial lines.

The idea here is that I think it's quite plausible that black republicans are being used along gerrymandering line to help elect republicans. If it were about race... then black republicans would also need to be disenfranchised.

Jim Crow was very obviously terrible... it was also very overt and obvious. I grew up in Texas, and the idea that the right is a secret cabal of racists trying to create some kind of white government is insane. The idea that the general socioeconomic concerns of the black community put most black voters on the political left makes vastly more sense, and it also explains the significantly larger numbers of Hispanic representatives on the Texas right.

It's not one data point. There is plenty of evidence that this is about politics... not about race.

Yea, if we bail out, we should nationalize the failed companies through the failure chain. Not just give them free money.

The presence of many token minorities, some of which are elected by popular vote, does undermine the argument that the point is to stop minorities from achieving elected office.

Again, you are conflating racism with passing policies that harm groups that correlate with race. Those are not the same thing.

The point of the Civil Rights Act was that many southern states were trying to stop black people from achieving office because they were black. They weren't trying to infringe the voting rights of white liberals. There is a world of difference between trying to end Medicare and trying to end Medicare... only for minorities.

I hate this line of thinking. It's hard to argue that Republicans are strictly racist when you have people like Tim Scott in respected positions. Literally Condoleezza Rice was the Secretary of State. If we are going to take racism seriously, race needs to be the causal mechanism... not culture, not politics.

The distinction between cultural differences and something like strict colorism make this a difficult issue to adjudicate. Correlation does not imply causation, and looking at nontrivial counter-examples should be helpful.

It's really difficult to argue the party's goal in gerrymandering is trying to prevent black people from gaining significant positions in government when the same party is electing and appointing black folks to significant positions in government.

I say this as a lefty.

Anti-trust legislation is all well and good, but worthless when politicians are corrupt.

The level of bullshit the tech industry puts up with without unionizing continues to baffle me.

We are two decades past illegal no-poaching schemes. We've live with very obviously maliciously compliant H1-B abuse. We're getting to the point where programmers expecting high compensation to be asked to be professional prompt engineers, when they know the output is likely unsafe for production.

Yet nobody unionizes. Yea, unions have problems, but they don't have to. You don't have to vote for assholes that use protectionist tactics. You can just ask for a 40 hour work week to mean 40 hours, and vacation to mean vacation.

Social recluses do not become president of a major nation state.

I mean, to be fair, the restriction on freedom is the real punishment. I don't think anyone could honestly say that house arrest isn't genuinely undesirable, especially for rich and powerful people.

What's the point of having all that money and power if you can't actually do the things you want?

My point is only that with Amazon stock, even well after the dotcom crash, the valuation only made sense if they were going to become the biggest, most important company in the world.

At the time, I didn't know whether or not they would become the biggest, most important company in the world. They did in the end, but if you live your life betting on every company whose valuation depends on them becoming the biggest, most important company in the world, you're gonna have a bad time.

I'm old enough to remember when IPO's existed to generate equity financing for growing companies. Now they exist to facilitate exit liquidity for mature companies, but a two decades of near-zero interest rates and enough inflation and wealth consolidation to make the "qualified investor" requirements trivial will do that. We're living in the days of the pink sheets again, where you really have to invest in small companies with very little reporting on them, but you already have to be wealthy to have access to those investments.

> My main thing is - why would I buy their stock at the rumored valuation? Regardless of anything else that valuation is basically saying all their growth has been captured, unless they literally take over the world.

I didn't buy Amazon in the early '00s for this reason, and I won't buy Anthropic for this reason. Maybe I lose out, but I like to invest in stocks that look like good investments.