Yeah, the more I learn about American history, the more I realize American elites were never bought in to the “moral project”, but were happy to use it as PR to a largely religious public.
Though I’m not particularly looking forward to living through the decline of the empire, I cling to the hope that a post-imperial America can emerge and attempt to live up to the dream of FDR, MLK, and that Jesus guy everyone seems to like so much but ignores all the inconvenient tolerance and sharing stuff he was so obsessed with.
I’m curious about the overlap between people that want a keyboard driven experience, but also would prefer a Mac-native GUI rather than a TUI or a vim / emacs distro. Seems like a very narrow audience to aim for.
It’s not that GDP is a poor measure, just that it is isolated as the only measure most policy is based on improving rather than being one metric in a portfolio of related metrics that balance technological progress, accumulation of wealth, and human thriving.
As Gary Stephenson rightly points out the culture of Economics in modern practice is not one of open query and scientific skepticism, but of proselytizing. More akin to a religion than a science.
IMO the problem with GDP is it's basically always normalized in USD, and USD isn't that universally representative of units of production/utility.
I mean, not to be political, but there's probably a place somewhere on Earth selling 10 standard chicken eggs for 540 local coins that's equivalent to $0.01 by the official government rates then-and-there, and the idea of GDP being meaningful means they must be either producing something like thousands of eggs per hour per employee or they live with something like a single pieces of chocolate worth of calories per day. And it's really not like that.
I'm sure GDP figures normalized on local consumer price index will have its own flaws, but especially USD-normalized GDP feels wrong to me in that regards.
GDP just measures the average wealth of a society, on the assumption that production equals consumption. Wealth is unambiguously good, but of course it fails at measuring the full extent of human flourishing.
My take on Economists is that they keep desperately trying to make people understand that prices are set by supply vs demand dynamics, while society keeps refusing to understand it.
Is wealth the right term here? I thought it was supposed to measure production, with the actual measurement usually spending (with qualifiers). And, when comparing countries, you have to account for the different currencies. Currencies are typically trade balanced, which gives a rough equivelence for buying power, but that is not true with the dollar because, as the effective reserve currency, it has international demand outside of trade.
I suspect that the US having better investment opportunities than other countries (tech companies for example) might be more important than reserve currency status.
People tend to pay more attention to trade than investment, but investment flows are just as important. A trade deficit often means that foreign investors are buying and a trade surplus goes along with people investing in foreign countries.
In addition to a class marker, high GPA is also a marker of obedience and conformity, both highly prized attributes when market consolidation relaxes competitive pressure. You don’t need innovative rebel types being all critical and making waves in your org when you can just chill and collect rent.
I don’t totally disagree, insofar as a very low GPA is probably a countersignal of common sense and work ethic. The problem you get is by converting these things from measures to targets, and then putting them on a permanent record.
Suddenly everyone is competing for limited slots, the minimum standard for hiring goes from high GPA to perfect GPA, any misstep in your learning process, any teacher who didn’t like you, any elective that may have enriched you personally but you weren’t particularly good add it, etc… gets distilled down into a numerical value (like a credit score) that bureaucrats treat as some sort of object truth. The ATS filters you out without you ever having had a shot, orgs optimize for low-risk tolerance individuals and organizations are starved of potential creative problem solvers and other types of change agents.
Yeah, I’m amazed at how far the western surveillance apparatus has been able to coast on plausible deniability. Folks, please don’t stick your head in the sand domestically just because there’s an even more obvious or egregious example abroad.
Say it with me: “Living in a police state is bad no matter who’s running it”.
100% this. I honestly can’t remember the last major feature of MacOS / iOS that didn’t feel like a solution searching for a problem, while I was bombarded by weird little bugs and semi-fail states in core functionality. At this point I experience daily at least once:
- iOS keyboard doesn’t appear when it should
- iOS keyboard button press detection and autocorrect have degraded badly
- UI Layers are missing, misaligned, or stacked in such a way that I can’t actually interact with the element I need to proceed
- mystery Internet slowdowns that resolve only after a restart
- security misbehavior such as refusing to allow a usb device I’ve already approved (MacOS resets approval of my main USB hub every update for some reason)
I think there’s a lot of poor incentives at play here. Having to mash everything down into a handful of top line success metrics (annual test scores, attendance rate) is certainly one, alongside this obsession with one-size-fits-all age-cohort based schooling.
It is clear that public schooling in the US was originally designed to build obedient citizens and efficient factory workers. Horace Mann’s love of the Prussian model, the use of bells to condition timely synchronized movement between activities, the focus on testing and measurable output, etc… All other goals over the years were half-heartedly bolted on to that structure and it’s showing its age.
Though I’m not particularly looking forward to living through the decline of the empire, I cling to the hope that a post-imperial America can emerge and attempt to live up to the dream of FDR, MLK, and that Jesus guy everyone seems to like so much but ignores all the inconvenient tolerance and sharing stuff he was so obsessed with.
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