Category: Uncategorized

It’s not like it matters

EA leaps to distance Maddens from the Redskins:

We don’t know what the Washington NFL team’s name and logo will be this season, but in Madden 21, the team will have no name or logo.

EA Sports says that Madden 21 will have a generic Washington team, until updates are available when the team has chosen its new name and uniform designs.

“We are pleased to see Washington’s decision to change their team name and visual identity,” EA said in a statement. “We are quickly working to update Madden NFL 21 to feature a generic Washington team, while we await final word on the updated team name and logo design.”

I doubt this will be much of an issue, since I am skeptical there will be much of a 2020 NFL season. But it will be informative to see if the game contains the retro uniforms or not.

Hea culpa

Paul Krugman admits that he may, perhaps, have been a little incorrect about that whole global economy thing, at least in the short term:

Concerns about adverse effects from globalization aren’t new. As U.S. income inequality began rising in the 1980s, many commentators were quick to link this new phenomenon to another new phenomenon: the rise of manufactured exports from newly industrializing economies.

Economists took these concerns seriously. Standard models of international trade say that trade can have large effects on income distribution: A famous 1941 paper showed how trading with a labor-abundant economy can reduce wages, even if national income grows.

And so during the 1990s, a number of economists, myself included, tried to figure out how much the changing trade landscape was contributing to rising inequality. They generally concluded that the effect was relatively modest and not the central factor in the widening income gap. So academic interest in the possible adverse effects of trade, while it never went away, waned.

In the past few years, however, worries about globalization have shot back to the top of the agenda, partly due to new research and partly due to the political shocks of Brexit and U.S. President Donald Trump. And as one of the people who helped shape the 1990s consensus — that the contribution of rising trade to rising inequality was real but modest — it seems appropriate for me to ask now what we missed.

There’s been a lot of this going around. Leading globalists such as Kissinger and Fukuyama have published learned tomes explaining why globalism has “unexpectedly” failed. Of course, it never occurs to them to admit that nationalist skeptics like me were correct all along, hence these revisionist self-critiques that are primarily intended to salvage the tattered remnants of their award-winning reputations.

In the meantime, I will patiently await my Quasi-Nobel Prize in Economics for creating the Labor Mobility proof of the impossibility of free trade.

And I will also fisk Krugman’s entire column on the Darkstream this weekend.

More sickness from the Hellmouth

I always wondered why a musical mediocrity like John Legend and a talentless 6 with implants like “supermodel” Chrissy Teigen would be relentlessly pushed as the height of pop cultural stardom. The news that Teigen was a frequent flyer on the Epstein Express pretty much suffices to explain the conundrum:

Supermodel and outspoken liberal activist Chrissy Teigen is under a big cloud of suspicion after deleting 60,000 tweets. Why would John Legend’s wife abruptly scrub her Twitter account? Because online conspiracy theorists claim Teigen is listed on Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs. But her sudden mass deletion of tweets is now causing her even more problems.

The tweets are bad. Very bad, to the point that they would almost certainly end the career of any male celebrity. Whether it will be sufficient to cancel a female celebrity is not yet known.

It’s a little late for that

The empire’s ruling tribe is beginning to discover that while it’s one thing to take the reins of the empire from the people who built it, it’s another thing to run it successfully:

Goldman is well positioned to explain what China is about and what the US and even the world should do. A columnist at the Asia Times and a former senior executive of a Hong Kong investment bank, he has traveled extensively throughout China for two decades and negotiated directly with top Chinese industry leaders. He has also written extensively on Jewish topics for a variety of scholarly and general Jewish publications. His Jewish background has been central to his approach. Goldman argues that to understand China, one has both to look at how it operates today and to examine the long-standing cultural patterns of a proud and distinct 5,000-year-old civilization.

Goldman explains that most Americans are simply wrong about China. The typical analogies whether on the left or the right are way off base. China does not have the aspirations of the Soviet Union; China does not want to militarily conquer the West, nor does it want to integrate in the existing world order. It could care less how others see the world. Nor is the Chinese economy dangerously over-leveraged. China is more stable than ever. Finally, he argues the Thucydides model — that as an emerging power China seeks to challenge the US — is not even relevant.

Instead, Goldman argues that the Chinese are an ancient imperial civilization who expect to rule under a mandate from heaven and have the confidence to do so. Moreover, as in the past, they prefer soft power that gives them maximum control to a military showdown that might bring chaos. For the Chinese, the ends justify the means.

Currently, China is implementing a concerted plan to control key industries and information to ensure world domination. As Goldman shows, it is working: most of the world has adopted the Huawei technology for 5G and Chinese signal encryption will soon eclipse that of the US. Soon the world will be totally reliant on Chinese technology and will knowingly or unknowingly share its data with the Chinese government. No Chinese Edward Snowden is likely to survive to warn us. With such power, China will dictate the terms of trade and interaction. Already the basic outlines of the existing China-US trade deal signal China’s dominance: the US buys Chinese technology and other manufactured goods and China buys meat and other agricultural goods from the US. These are the terms imperial powers dictate to their colonies.

Goldman outlines a plan for the US to maintain its world position. He insists that the US absolutely cannot leave it to the private sector. It must develop a government policy to massively support R&D at the industry and university levels. Measures will require huge investments and an overhaul of the American education system to drastically improve educational levels, and most of all, to quadruple the number of American graduates in the sciences and technology. Without these two steps, we will be under China’s yoke within the decade.

The amusing thing about this is that Spengler – as Goldman was known for years before he went public – was completely wrong about China and its intentions for years. This sudden and very belated concern for the US maintaining its world position is the result of the failure of the post-imperial collapse jump-to-China plan.

As I pointed out several years ago, the judeochristians’ assumption of their intellectual superiority was fundamentally based on their being a low-trust, high-performance group amidst a high-trust, high-performance population. Now that they are running into conflict with their first conflict with a low-trust, high-performance group since the Maccabean wars, they are discovering that they are at a significant disadvantage.

I expect the Judeo-Sinese conflict to go pretty much the same way the Judeo-Roman wars did. And the article raises the obvious question: to precisely whom does the author mean when he writes “we will be under China’s yoke within the decade”?

Now we know why

It appears there may be a good reason Dan Snyder suddenly reversed course on changing the name of the Washington Redskins:

Not long after the Washington owner announced that his team would no longer be known as the Redskins, a series of cryptic tweets from local reporters emerged, warning of an imminent bombshell set to shake the franchise to its core.

“The warped and toxic culture of the Washington Football Team is about to be exposed in a sickening fashion . . . Again,” wrote CBS’ Jason La Canfora, a former team beat reporter.

Julie Donaldson of NBC Sports Washington also wrote, “What’s coming is disappointing and sad.”

Though it remains unclear what will surface, several other reporters have also been tipped off to news that could be devastating to the team.

“There is much more going on . . . than a name change,” Scott Abraham of ABC 7 wrote. “. . . And it’s not good. I did not get specifics, but get ready people.”

It is becoming ever more apparent that blackmail, rather than corporate profits, that is the engine of the US economy.

SJWs never learn

A certain Big Bear received this today:

Paola, Jul 15, 2020, 8:07 AM PDT:

Hi Owen,

I’m Paola with Airbnb. We’re reaching out because we have received numerous reports from concerned community members of discriminatory comments left by you in a live stream.

After a full review of the incident, we have decided to remove you from the Airbnb community. This means you can no longer access your account and cannot create a new one.

You are being removed because the language you used violated the Airbnb Nondiscrimination Policy, which can be referenced here:

airbnb.com/help/article/1405

We consider this decision final.

 These people are just astonishingly stupid. Just as Patreon’s policies didn’t give its Trust & Safety group the powers they thought it did, the Nondiscrimination Policy doesn’t have anything to do with what someone says on a live stream.

If a particular listing contains language contrary to this nondiscrimination policy, the host will be asked to remove the language and affirm his or her understanding and intent to comply with this policy and its underlying principles. Airbnb may also, in its discretion, take steps up to and including suspending the host from the Airbnb platform.

If the host improperly rejects guests on the basis of protected class, or uses language demonstrating that his or her actions were motivated by factors prohibited by this policy, Airbnb will take steps to enforce this policy, up to and including suspending the host from the platform.

It’s the same thing as the “creation” issue on Patreon. These idiots simply don’t understand what their own policies say, or recognize the specific limits on them. I can smell something… it strikes me as familiar… it smells like… like… arbitration!

Superconvergence

They’re not even interested in science fiction, let alone science, anymore:

The members of SFWA’s newly-formed Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Committee are:

  • Alaya Dawn Johnson – traditional novelist
  • Alex Acks – traditional novelist 
  • Crystal Watanabe – freelance editor
  • James Beamon – SFWA director-at-large, short fiction writer
  • Jane Pinckard  – writer, game designer, researcher, teacher
  • Kyle Aisteach  – short fiction writer
  • Michi Trota – SFWA Editor-in-Chief, critical and creative nonfiction writer
  • Tao Roung Wong – indie novelist
  • Whitney “Strix” Beltrán – game writer

The committee is developing procedures, and setting its action and scope, and will update the membership soon.

SFWA is an excellent example of how convergence renders an organization entirely incapable of performing its core purpose. The committee would have been more accurately named if they’d called it Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity.

The net is closing in

The European Union, like California, is starting to rein in the ability of the digital platforms to do whatever they want, to whomever they want, for any reason:

New EU regulation came into play at the start of the week that applies to digital storefronts, most notably Apple and Google’s for mobile devices. With the new regulations significantly strengthen the rights of those selling through such marketplaces.

The rules, which you can see here in full if you’re happy to fight through them, or as discussed here by the EGDF’s Jari-Pekka Kaleva on GI.Biz, cover a wide range of ongoing issues that developers have with stores.

Platforms will have to provide 30 days notice to publishers before removing content from stores, allowing them time to appeal or make changes to their software. So no immediate and opaque bans (article 4).

The regulations (in article 5) will force stores to be more transparent in how their ranking systems work, letting publishers understand how ‘trending’ apps are being chosen for instance.

Article 7 follows similar themes, with storefronts having to disclose any ‘differentiated treatment’ it may give one seller of goods over another, which should put paid to any real (or imagined) preferential treatment for larger publishers – or at least make it clear to everyone how and when the playing field isn’t even.

Also, that information, and all the information that publishers receive will have to be written in terms that you can understand. With all terms and conditions to be drafted in ‘plain and intelligible language’.

Armchair lawyers and real lawyers have been discussing various deplatformings as well as the 72 Bears vs Patreon situation. One thing they have repeatedly failed to grasp, however, is that the very clear trend of the legislators is strongly pro-consumer and anti-platform.

Some have questioned why I’m not banned from various platforms when less controversial figures have been. But there is no reason for suspicion as the reason is very straightforward: I live in Europe and any sensible US-based company is very, very hesitant to put itself at the mercy of an anti-US European court given the enthusiasm European courts have repeatedly demonstrated for saddling US tech companies with massive fines.

Never let it be said that the ideological Left is all bad. Their instinctive opposition to corpocracy is the one thing they have on the ideological Right.

A labor-free economy

Nothing destroys the fantastical imaginings of Marxist economics more completely than the observation of the disappearance of work:

A common topic around the web is whether automation will drastically increase unemployment. The usual scholarly answer is only a bit, and conservatives often insist that new jobs will always be found. Actually, automation has already created much joblessness. It continues to do so. We don’t notice because we have disguised the unemployment.

Consider. In 1850, everybody worked. In England, children notoriously were sweated in mines and factories and, in America, worked on their parents’ farms.

Then child labor laws took kids off the labor market, keeping them from competing with adults. Compulsory high school removed adolescents perfectly capable of doing many jobs of adults. College now keeps millions more in, usually, economically pointless idleness. We have over three million people in prisons. Large numbers live on welfare. The government factors none of these into the unemployment stats. If it did, the unemployment numbers would rise sharply.

Then there is makework. A great many governmental workers do little or nothing of use. This amounts to paid unemployment. Sometimes this unemployment is distributed: A hundred workers do useful work that thirty could do. Then there is the military. It produces nothing and, since the US has no military enemies, amounts to more paid unemployment. The arms industry uses more multitudes in building things of no use, such as ever more intercontinental nuclear bombers. For engineers, this is marginally more dignified than digging holes and filling them in. It is as much a jobs program as the Depression-era CCC.

Another phenomenon we see is the disimportantification (patent applied for) of work. In 1850, work done was genuinely important: growing food, without which we tend to be dead and not of much use in an economy. Then the farms automated and everybody went to work in factories, making cars and refrigerators. These were pretty important, but not as important as food. You can’t eat a refrigerator. Then the factories automated or went away and people became massage therapists, nail salon operators, psychologists, sociologists, consultants, or diversity counselors. Others ran massage parlors, restaurants, gymnasiums, or cutesy-wootsy boutiques selling unbearable kitsch. They were employed, but in occupations of ever-increasing triviality. We have gone from feeding people to rubbing their backs.

You know it’s getting out of hand when even the world’s oldest profession is being automated.