Blergh. Goddamnit. Yes, we need to destroy the American two-party system. But a clueless rich dude - supported by other clueless rich tech dudes - is the fucking LAST thing we need sticking their Libertarian dicks into politics. All they will do is divide the Democratic vote amongst two (or more) parties... because you know that - like space - as soon as one rich white tech dude does it, all the others are going to have to do it, too... but different. Fuck everything about this. The ONLY way to change American politics is to institute Ranked Choice voting at every single level across the country. There is no other way to affect systemic change that will be lasting, impervious to Murdoch's and Zuckerberg's media manipulation, and make room for a truly representative democracy to take hold. And he has the money/clout to push the Ranked Choice message out, and get people engaged with the idea. Why not use his money for good, rather than destruction? Fuck all of this.
Andrew Yang is about as libertarian as Bernie Sanders is. His books are closer to Brave New World than they are to The Fountainhead. The MAGAts hate him because of social credit, yo. He's also a long goddamn way from clueless. I have read every.single.book he references in The War on Normal People and came to the exact same conclusions he did about each and every one of them. I was a major detractor of UBI until I was forced to recognize that a guy who has come to the exact same conclusions I have about everything but UBI, whose big thing is UBI, might have a better understanding of UBI than I do. Know where I've seen the most Yang support? Uber drivers. He's a bookish nerd who inspires bookish nerds. He tends to appeal to people who Google something when they don't understand it. He is the autodidact's candidate. That there's overlap among the tech ecosystem is a testament, not a detraction, especially since the basic Silicon Valley ethos is "keep your filthy hands off my money" and his basic ethos is "we need to take discussions of money completely off the table." 'k. Go ahead. How you gonna do it? The ONLY way to slow global warming in a socially and financially expedient fashion is fusion breakeven so shit in one hand, wish in the other, see which fills up first. Andrew Yang is a wonk. He started writing books and making public appearances because it was the best way to get money and exposure for his pet projects. He ran for president because it was a better way to get money and exposure than writing another book. He didn't get a cabinet appointment out of the Biden administration so he ran for mayor of New York. Guaranteed that's because it was the most cost-effective method of keeping the discussion going. Now he isn't going to be the mayor of New York so the most expedient way to keep the discussion going is to stand up a third party. I mean here you are, bitching about something you haven't given a second thought to, mostly because Facebook has taught you it's the appropriate knee-jerk reaction. Have you... even thought about Andrew Yang in six months? Yet here he is, makin' you maaaad 'cuz you, my friend, are the establishment. Tell me more about the legions of reasonable republicans out there just dying to vote for lower taxes and more independence if only every single candidate out there on both sides wasn't busy eating horse paste and overthrowing the government. Lemme show you Bernie Sanders, staunch Democrat. Parties are useful when parties are useful - and they're not when they're not. It would not surprise me in the slightest to see Yang run on the Democratic (or Republican) ticket the minute it becomes expedient to do so. Switching parties is kind of a thing. So tell me - what electoral nightmares is Yang creating in September, the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty One? 'cuz it seems to me we're what, 14 months out from any national election? Three years and change from anything presidential? Why are your panties in a twist, exactly? Other than your tribe wants them to be?The ONLY way to change American politics is to institute Ranked Choice voting at every single level across the country.
Had a draft here for toooooooo long that I need ta publish, one of b_b's comments about R&D funding jogged my memory. We're still so far away. I think about it every day. The best known way to drive stable magnetic confinement fusion was found by accident, thirty-nine years ago, and we still can't model it right. Obviously doesn't bode well. It might be career-limiting, but I plan to forever refuse private funding. Any remotely orthodox business model will expect some returns, eventually, and I still consider anyone promising scalable success to be crazy. I'm worried that an expectation of eventual profitability hinging on my success would compromise my objectivity. And I think, generally, as much fusion know-how should be in the public domain as is possible, anyway. Even if it took less than ten years to get the world's best tokamak scheme, scalability and mass production are daunting, and for whatever reasons, we're not even rewarding $'s for people trying to think that far ahead. Sucks, but the way I plan to break in and start winning grants will have to be through modeling. Historically, I'm a fan of cowboyin' the way through experimentally testing the gamut of possibilities, but you can ruin millions of dollars worth of lab equipment if you cowboy wrong. No one will grant me millions before I prove I can handle that. Hence why so many physicists are like at least 50 before they make a splash these days. That and the complexity of the problems we're trying to solve. I've already started recruiting people in my field to build a fusion team, but I was kind of appalled at the reaction of most folks at my last conference when I said "In a more just world, almost all of us plasma peeps would be working in fusion". Honestly, I now think our best bet for energy is improving solar cells, wind, battery tech, and clever energy grid engineering. Eventually we'll need fusion reactors for deep space, but this you know. My new perspective has created a moral quandary; if I really wanna maximize a timely, positive contribution to humanity through muh science, I'm probably too far down the plasma physics road to say "OK, now I'll do solid state (applied quantum theory) so I can slog away at improving solar cells". Ugh. Posting the same plot, maybe for the fifth time, for anyone still saying "HURR DURR Y NO FUSION, DUMBY PHYCISTS?": That said, it's probably primarily us physicists' fault that we haven't sold this to the public better. But throw in at least a dash of big oil & gas conspiracy, for fun, as is custom. One of the other Big Problems out there that still fascinates me is quantum computing (QC). QC probably re-enables proof-of-work blockchaining. Maybe a hybrid proof-of-stake/work model is the asymptote most cryto flatlines to. That's like 30 years out, though, I'd guess. Edit: I told wasoxygen that this was in the works, so there ya go.The ONLY way to slow global warming in a socially and financially expedient fashion is fusion breakeven so shit in one hand, wish in the other, see which fills up first.
Hey, I do that to you all the time! I basically wrote a chunk of a WSJ article that I'd not read until now, and took a perspective somewhere between extreme skepticism and VC-fueled overhype. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad the private sector has taken an interest in the industry, but we miiiiiight be living in a bubble at the moment, and people are gonna lose some capital. FTA: Ehhhh, about the accidents... I guess in the sense that maybe only a lab tech and all your lab equipment could get badly burned in a particularly terrible loss of plasma confinement, it's impossible to have an accident? It's fair to say that a "meltdown" is impossible, that's a fission thing. Spot on about "can't be weaponized" and "not terribly radioactive byproducts", though. One more thing I'll add is that the current schemes involve using the generated heat to boil water. Sure, the specific heat of water is high, so it efficiently stores energy, but there's gotta be a better way to output energy directly as a voltage (even AC; a 1/60[Hz] period is basically forever to the fusion regimes of plasmas) instead of going through water to spin turbines. Even if we get room temperature superconductors or other materials science voodoo, there's all kinds of problems to solve. It won't be like "Welp, MIT's VC crew beat us to the punch. Turn it in, team." Job security!“The thing with fusion is, it’s impossible to have an accident; there’s no long-term waste and you can’t weaponize it,” says Christopher Mowry, the chief executive officer of General Fusion, a Canadian startup backed by billionaire Jeff Bezos.
Yeah, I am bitter. I loved Yang the presidential candidate. And yes, he is a policy wonk, and his excitement for, and experimentation with, UBI is laudable. I encourage all that. But then he ran for Governor of New York. Something he is PERFECT for... and completely dropped the ball. Zero execution. No message. No engagement. No coherent message or policy. No coalition building with other like-minded and powerful people like AOC. His mayoral campaign was simply disrespectful to those of us who WANTED to see Yang in office, working on his policies. For me, his NYC mayoral campaign showed him to be the usual clueless tech bro we thought/hoped he wasn't. In short, he failed to lead when leadership was needed. To me, that shows me that he is all hat and no cattle. A windbag of ideas with zero capability to execute. Like every other tech-mogul-fixing-the-world wannabe. I have no idea what the public and chattering classes thing of Yang, honestly. I'm just bitter as fuck. --- Ranked choice voting is EASY. You start with local council and school board positions, and a marketing/awareness campaign targeted at soccer moms and millennials who are frustrated as shit with the political system, see there are good people out there with good ideas, but know they can't vote for them because voting for anyone without a D or R next to their name is throwing away their money. Many local elections are even non-partisan, like the Seattle Port positions. So ranked choice voting makes even more sense. Who has the policies you like the most? Who else has good ideas you want to support? Vote for all of them in ranked-choice voting. That gets people's feet wet and over the initial hurdle of confusion about the process and results. Then people will wonder why they don't have those options for their local state legislature and mayoral races... and then national representation... The ONLY barrier to ranked choice voting is messaging, and the messaging is simple: politics and politicians are fucked because of limited choice and backroom dealings. Get this one simple concept, and suddenly MANY of today's political problems go away... campaign finance, gerrymandering, big issues getting buried under the latest blood-and-guts story, cancel culture, and actually feeling like your vote MEANS SOMETHING, rather than being a purely performative task that only enables you to complain about the status quo. Ranked Choice voting is the magic bullet that can help our country find common ground, and get people engaged again by making them feel like they and their vote actually matter.
So... you're pissed off that a clusterfuck of an election wasn't lost on your terms? That's pretty hipster of you. I've never voted in New York? but I've run projects in New York and it's the one place I've experienced that's shadier than Los Angeles. Granted I've done nothing in Chicago so I'm kind of a virgin. You'd never heard of AOC until she won so... I'ma say conventional wisdom should be taken with a grain of salt when dealing with unconventional politics.Ranked choice voting is EASY.
Two things I loved about Yang's candidacy for president, and the reason I was a supporter, even though I remain skeptical of UBI (though admittedly less so after hearing him out--and I've not read the books you have on the topic), are (1) he was the only guy out there shouting about how bad our tax system is. Not about how taxes are too high or too low, but that they collected in an anachronistic and inefficient way that stifles dynamism and keeps the classes in check. And (2) he was the only guy posing questions like, "Why are there more people on disability than unemployment?" Obviously that last bit was pre-pandemic, so even if the numbers have changed to make it not technically true anymore, the sentiment is still very true. Instead of this actual thinking man we get Kamala Harris. Cool. Really disappointed Uncle Joe didn't give him an impactful job like Labor or Treasury.
Politicians need to be able to lead, and Kamala Harris is a better leader than Andrew Yang. Yang has far more in common with Jeffrey Sachs or Henry Kissinger than he does with Franklin Roosevelt or Jimmy Carter. He's a back-room guy who stands in front of podiums when it's the most useful thing to do but I think he'd rather make other people implement his ideas than slog through the mud himself. Dude is a calibrated triangulator. He plays the game the most advantageous way his skills and liabilities will let him. Being Democratic-adjacent is more useful at the moment than being a Democrat. That's probably why he has such a bone to pick with disability. he's absolutely right - it's a 100% ghastly system. I've read like five books in the past two months that point out the current US penal system is basically slavery under another name but disability? It's a shitty misapplicaiton of deinstitutionalization. If it worked the way it was supposed to it'd basically be AFLAC but instead it's a "congratulations you spent two years in court you never have to work again but you also get to be three meals from homeless for the rest of your life." Something like 60% of Biden's stimulus plan was gonna be paid for by enforcing tax law. That's how fucked up the system is. "I like your current system but - and here me out here - what if we didn't leave eighty percent of our earnings on the table?" And I mean, the reason nobody in this country gave a fuck about the Panama Papers is from a tax haven standpoint, the only thing that beats Nevada and Delaware are like Nauru and Sealand. I'm sure he was, too. But he's not ex-McKinsey, he toes the party line grudgingly and he actually wants to rock the boat. Uncle Joe is too busy cleaning up the Rec Room from the mess that last guy left after his bender to try something new, so Yang is out there attempting to stay relevant. I'm down.Really disappointed Uncle Joe didn't give him an impactful job like Labor or Treasury.
Then he hit the stage. Flub. I love the guy, but he’s not the most charismatic politician. I don’t agree with all of his policies but I like that he’s changing the conversation from the same bullshit football items. Yang will run, siphon some votes and build a coalition only to jump behind the dem at the last minute. Maybe on their ticket? Who knows…. Is it already Silly Season? Dude is a calibrated triangulator. He plays the game the most advantageous way his skills and liabilities will let him.
spot on. I was a very early supporter of Yang, pre presidential debates. Working hard to get him on that stage via donations etc.
American politics will be perpetual until grievance ceases to be identity. I almost convinced a neighbor to get vaccinated day before yesterday. He's a good guy. Heart of gold. Works hard. Loves his mother. Dad died of COVID. So did his aunt. But he "ain't getting the shot." In the course of the discussion we touched on - Removing Robert E. Lee's statue - Drug abuse - Homelessness - Gay marriage - Guns - Reconstruction - Biblical slavery He wasn't going to give up his unvaccinated status because it would break up his Burger King Commemorative MAGA Cup set. A larval theory As we slowly, cautiously, delicately honor and accept the heritage of ethnicities and cultures other than whiteness in the United States, those without an ethnicity or culture other than whiteness are seeing their ethnicity and culture compared for the first time. And they are being told tales that do not jive with their politely scrubbed and polished inherited knowledge. And this is heresy, this is sacrilege, this is an assault on their well-being. Did some Ancestry.com deep-diving recently. I'm 1/4 Belorussian Jew, 1/16th Belgian scam artist, 11/16ths slave-owning plantation WASP. Seen the slave rolls. I have an ancestor that owned nothing but children. I have another that owned slaves so far back he owned them in New York. Now - I hate my family. They're terrible people. So I can go "lol well of course we picked up the hoe as soon as we were forced to put down the whip." I can observe that having our assets turned into citizens provided some serious downward pressure on our mobility, which is about as pure as justice comes. But if I was proud of where I was from? Yer goddamn right I'd triangulate a way to find the bright side of owning five children. When your political alignment shifts from "what I believe" to "who I am" your political spectrum includes populism and fascism. And since well before 1776, "who I am" in American politics has included the belief that some people aren't really people. We've been able to tamp it down from time to time, but I can tell my buddy - who was 120 lbs overweight, then was 80lbs overweight, then his heroin addict brother got out of prison last week after four years so he is now 88 lbs overweight - believes he's going to beat COVID where I didn't. He used to see me jogging every morning and when I told him that I straight up can't anymore because of COVID, his whole rationalization was there to see - "it may have killed my dad, it may have killed my aunt, it may have almost killed two of my buddies, but it didn't kill my brother therefore I'll be fine because I'm better than this guy." Yang tries to build a coalition of beliefs. Biden and Harris won because as a country, more people identified with them than anybody else. Identity needs to be refreshed every time it's challenged. And we've got way too many people in this country who want to challenge the idea of the United States.
Ya know what... I think you have hit on the perfect thing for Yang to do with his skills, knowledge, and money: make the anti-Hertiage Foundation. Call it the Yang Center for American Policy, and be a think-tank and test bed for progressive policies, data, and analyses. Fuck... I want to WORK there. That would be brilliant.
Who said anything about Y Combinator? Venture for America is a DEI-forward, minority-empowering non-profit designed to increase entrepreneurial opportunities for underserved populations in underserved communities. The Heritage Foundation is a memo mill. YCombinator is an LLC.
Yang's Venture for America grooms people to create startup companies. Essentially the graduates of this program are supposed to go into TechStars, or Y Combinator, or some other business incubator and create the next big thing. Web 3.0, or whatever. The Heritage Foundation is a "research" institution that provides cover for the myriad of nutty conservative beliefs and pogroms, by appearing (on the surface) to do research and analysis using scientific methods (har har har), that Republicans can then quote as legitimate sources to back their goofball plans. Yeah, a memo mill, but one that shrouds its real purpose in a white lab coat bought at a second hand store. My point was that Yang could create a legitimate counterpoint to the Heritage Foundation. Not just more tech startups.
And my point is that he's really good at doing what he's good at, and really bad at doing what he's bad at, and "position papers" are not his sweet spot. Venture For America is an attempt to change the country by giving someone other than white libertarians from Yale a chance to shape capitalism. It's very much a club, much like the Heritage Foundation. Both: - Rely on networks of alumni - Work through interaction with existing businesses and "thought leaders" - Are engines for the maximization of capitalism The only reason the Heritage Foundation isn't an incubator is the Heritage Foundation has no fucking use for you if you're not already fucking rich and/or a conservative darling. The Kochs didn't need poor people, either. If you think brown people deserve a voice in the corporate discussion? You need to pay their way. The Heritage Foundation, by the way, was founded to oppose anything the Brookings Institution said.