The discourse (tm) will not be denied: Is he part of the 20% that *would* want to work in a factory or the 80% that would *not* want to work in a factory?
He *looks* like he's probably neo-Republican... but as you note, the sentence "Balmer said his public grievances with the Democratic Party were primarily related to financial issues" has a little bit of 'car ran over some pedestrians at a Christmas fair' kinda feel to it.
Could be anti-elf, could be anti-Christian, could be a cry-for help, could be a principled opposition to the commercialization of a high holy day. Hard to tell where cars stand, really.
He's certainly not as charismatic as Luigi... so I expect his facebook will confirm neo-Republican.
The first major relase for POE2 (0.2.0) landed last week... and to everyone's amazement player power was nerfed more or less across the board.
I won't re-rant my rant from 0.1.0 ... but the salient point for those of us old enough to remember the pre-Streamer days of developers interacting with their players is that we were treated to a very healthy dose of, 'you have to understand that you're not enjoying the game correctly' from the lead designer (Jonathan).
What's changed? Instead of forum warriors whose influence is unknown (or game journalists whose influence is bought), games now have to contend with streamers who have a following semi-independent from the game itself and who can't be accused of not understanding how to play. Plus some of them are very nearly charismatic -- or at least able to communicate within the milieu.
Anyhow, all of a sudden the fawning reviews of 0.1.0 went 'red' immediately. Now, as my past rant suggests, I have no idea why everyone thought 0.1.0 was good (it's sh*te) -- I assume the new shiney was just too overpowering -- but seeing the massive backlash for 0.2.0 is mildly gratifying.
This interview with 'Zizaran' is literally cringe as the lead designer has to talk about why his baby is less than celestially beautiful (Zizaran isn't even combative -- these are basically comments from Steam). What makes the interview interesting (for those who care) is that the second lead designer, Mark, takes an engineering (vs. artistic) stance and can acknowledge that perhaps some things are, um, not at the moment in whack.
https://youtu.be/YiFLwjFI4S4?si=vtVphS0Yr3g1icXX
Towards the middle, Mark just starts saying, yes... that thing is probably bad, I'll fix it today. He says it a lot. The next day? 7GB patch with a lot of the changes that Jonathan was defending on 'Artistic Vision' ground were altered.
The game is still mostly sh*te with far too many bad Lead Designer Vision issues... but I'm almost (but not really) hopeful that the 'Vision of POE2' will be broken so that POE1 may be upgraded into a better game, which was supposed to be the point all along.
Until then, at least Last Epoch's 1.2 release is next week... I'll play that instead.
Thanks for the link... and yes, the Neo-Liberal shills are shilling and to my point, I think they are pursuing intra-Dem fights with the new and likely effective anti-Trump packaging.
Which is to say that the Party realignment (and role reversals) continues apace:
"Not long ago, the political logic of rejecting free trade made a certain degree of sense for Democrats. But events have a way of changing political logic. A trade-skeptical message that worked perfectly well five or 10 years ago is going to sound awfully out of touch after Trump is done turning tariffs into a synonym for catastrophic ineptitude."
The context for his ending the argument thus is spelled out earlier: we (Dems) can't have a 'subtle' or 'nuanced' trade policy or talk about competence in deploying such a policy -- we must abandon all things to oppose Trump and any future policy that might be tainted by Trump. And by the way, my favored policy is the way we should abandon those things.
Electorally, he might even be right -- as we discuss above, Trump often poisons things he touches... it's one of the reasons not to support Trump. So taking opposing positions definitionally isn't a bad electoral strategy.
But, I honestly do think that abandoning 'good' or 'subtle' or 'nuanced' positions just because Trump bigfooted some of them isn't in anyone's long-term interests.
And finally, on a purely electoral note... adopting the opposite of some of your formerly held positions often works at cross purposes with a) your ability to talk to them, b) being perceived as sincere, c) how the new things work with the old things that are still important, and d) how realignment can cross pressure individual reps whose constituencies still adhere to the 'old' party alignment.
Anyhow, this is what I was saying in that there's a lot of pressure to simply become market fundamentalists and abandon positions that were 'reasonable' 5-yrs ago because of optics.
Unfortunately the Trump effect is bad in so many different ways, it's hard to settle on a single one to hate. But one thing I'd personally avoid is simply taking the opposite stance; sometimes it really is better to acknowledge the point and give the opponent a noose of how he's doing it is worse than how you'd do it.
Not doing that is kinda how the R's got Trump in the first place.
Heh, #Notalldemocrats ... now I'm mildly interested in what Chris Deluzio is all about.
From the one paragraph I'm allowed to read:
"The video featured Representative Chris Deluzio, from western Pennsylvania, who calmly intoned, “A wrong-for-decades consensus on ‘free trade’ has been a race to the bottom” and “Tariffs are a powerful tool. They can be used strategically, or they can be misused.”"
Strangely, there are just no incentives for your old OG Republican to do anything other than watch where this goes.
If *they* kill it, then they kill what would have been the biggest, most beautiful success ever. Career ending.
If Trump crashes and burns, whelp they just go back to their safe seats and hope to ride out the failure... some won't make it, but some will. Still better than the sure thing of ending their careers.
Yes, that's a real concern. In fact, it concerns me that the Liberal response has been a sort of libertarian embrace of market fundamentalism.
Credit to AOC and Bernie who are at least pulling out bad ideas from the previous century... but Dem critiques of Tariffs in the service of anti-Trumpism? Eeep.
Agreed, but piling on the 'failed execution' aspect of any Trump project is that the path forward was never just tariffs.
There's a ton of work to do internally with how we invest on infrastructure ... ironically the IRA highlights what many of those reforms need to hit. And then there's separating the objectives by region and geo-strategy. And then there's building new(ish) trading blocs FIRST so that we can detach or provide incentives to new trade policies in other harder to crack areas. And then there's a general requirement for determining what success looks like, and how sub-successes are prioritized... etc. etc. etc.
IMO the thing that you use to detach weak-Trumpers (or anti-Democrats) is 'do you really trust Trump to have done his homework and do you trust him to make things better after he makes things worse for the other team?'
It won't overcome negative partisanship entirely... but if you're in politics for the iterations you have to take the things he's directionally right on -- and prove that you're better than he is to change the ship of state.
In the end, Trump likes tariffs, and he has authority to use tariffs... so his policy is, tariffs. He never ever does the work that's needed to be a successful statesman.
The deliberative body always (tm) delegates the actual negotiations to the Executive because the deliberative body can't really negotiate coherently.
Now, the deliberative body should delegate tasks ad hoc and post hoc the delegated authority should be circumscribed until the next delegated task... but, yes, the point is directionally true.
Double clicking into this... I'm not sure what you're seeing reported is true? Seems Japan holds about $1T total and in Feb reduced it's holdings by (variously reported) $50B - $200B - because yields were increasing.
As of 1.24 pm DOW seems to be bumping along at 38k with a little excitement around a false rumor of a 90-day pause causing the market to perk upwards until rumor popped.
Wasn't sure what to expect... personally felt that another 5% drop would've signaled a lot more pain to come. There's still time...
But I'm also not sure what to make of a 15% overall drop with a floor of 38k. (If that's the case).
My own sense was that we wouldn't know how to interpret things until this coming Friday - or the first set of financial institution failures. But, if it's just a 'correction' with a slow moving recession...?
"he says he would come more often if he could buy and smoke pot at the theater. “How fun would that be?” he says. “They have a bar here so that people can relax and enjoy a drink.""
You'd quite literally have to have a different building... pot invading public spaces is already creating a backlash... you'd nuke non-pot screenings anywhere and any time in your theater. Plus, there's a pretty big lack of awareness comparing (or not comparing) the externalities of Pot vs. Alcohol.
It's a content saturation problem... there are too many alternatives to films. And films as a medium don't offer that much of an upgrade over 4k viewing.
If there's a 'new thing' it will be something along the lines of immersive theaters like you get in a 90second ride at Disney Hollywood.
Heh, I'm not entirely sure I get the comment even if I get the gist? Seems any plan by Trump can be ill-conceived and poorly executed regardless the time allocated for preparation.
Yeah; I think you are right that he sees the American Empire as a thing that was being managed to the benefit of a few; he's using populist language to reorient the goods of empire to a new few and perhaps along the way share some spectacles and low value gluten. It's rather crass, but sharing the benefits of empire was always an option we mostly pretended didn't exist.
This WaPo article is making the rounds from (anonymous) inside sources on how the 'tariff' formula was picked.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/04/trump-tariffs-reason-advisers/
There's also additional (anonymous) reporting on some of the pre-negotiations with other nations... the operative point (IMO) is this: "“It’s not clear what they want to achieve,” the diplomat said."
Putting the two things together... the article suggests that negotiations were unclear on what was needed -- i.e. Tariff reductions or barriers to trade or both and what would happen if they did them. In the end, those 'concessions' were fruitless because the formula Trump selected wasn't one of the ones that factored tariffs and barriers.
And, implied is that now none of the states know exactly how to get out of the box because changing the trade imbalance is downstream of lots of other things and not something govts can simply control by negotiations.
But the reason why Cass (and others) are at least interesting to follow is that the goal of Economic Policy shifts for them *isn't* a friend/enemy reward/punish model... it's a game referee model and the goal is to stop ignoring rules infractions because they benefit the current order (in the short term)... changing the rules *always* causes some disruption somewhere. Changing the rules stupidly (as Cass is implying about Trump) will bring about more and stupid disruptions (and by implication - somewhat unnecessary).
But in the end, the point isn't tariffs or no-tariffs, its addressing the lies about the rules - and who benefits from them.
I think JB is wrong about McCain/Romney and I don't think he's GHWB... so let me see if I can break it down by the good 'ole stool analogy.
Leg 1: Economics/Libertarians
* He's explicitly taking down the Free Market fundamentalists... Markets are good, but markets are basically all about games/rules/incentives. There is no invisible hand.
Leg 2: Foreign Policy/Neo-cons
* He's explicitly acknowledging a multi-polar world order, and the goal isn't maximal containment, but strategic alignment; which means honey/carrots/sticks and the willingness to use whichever is needed. Pax Americana comes with duties from those who participate. But the era of hegemony is over and over-extension will lead to losing our allies in the medium term.
Leg 3: Social/So-Cons
* He's not a bootstrap conservative; he thinks the 47% has been ill-served by the economic policies of Leg #1 and that arbitraging labor *isn't* a comparative advantage in trade; the market should have rules that benefit families and the state has a role in making policies that protect and advance civil society.
None of those things are 'conservative' in the old Republican synthesis kind of way.
But, what Steward missed (this is pretty common) is that challenging the old consensus doesn't mean that the Left's solutions are vindicated -- he's got different ideas from Romney/McCain/Clinton/Obama/Pelosi/Trump/McConnel that he's peddling.
Basically everyone thinks he's wrong about everything, but from different angles. And that's ok.
On “Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s Residence Attacked, Suspect Arrested”
The discourse (tm) will not be denied: Is he part of the 20% that *would* want to work in a factory or the 80% that would *not* want to work in a factory?
"
Dang-it... those financial related issues are nuanced.
"
He *looks* like he's probably neo-Republican... but as you note, the sentence "Balmer said his public grievances with the Democratic Party were primarily related to financial issues" has a little bit of 'car ran over some pedestrians at a Christmas fair' kinda feel to it.
Could be anti-elf, could be anti-Christian, could be a cry-for help, could be a principled opposition to the commercialization of a high holy day. Hard to tell where cars stand, really.
He's certainly not as charismatic as Luigi... so I expect his facebook will confirm neo-Republican.
On “Saturday Morning Gaming: Hollow Knight”
The first major relase for POE2 (0.2.0) landed last week... and to everyone's amazement player power was nerfed more or less across the board.
I won't re-rant my rant from 0.1.0 ... but the salient point for those of us old enough to remember the pre-Streamer days of developers interacting with their players is that we were treated to a very healthy dose of, 'you have to understand that you're not enjoying the game correctly' from the lead designer (Jonathan).
What's changed? Instead of forum warriors whose influence is unknown (or game journalists whose influence is bought), games now have to contend with streamers who have a following semi-independent from the game itself and who can't be accused of not understanding how to play. Plus some of them are very nearly charismatic -- or at least able to communicate within the milieu.
Anyhow, all of a sudden the fawning reviews of 0.1.0 went 'red' immediately. Now, as my past rant suggests, I have no idea why everyone thought 0.1.0 was good (it's sh*te) -- I assume the new shiney was just too overpowering -- but seeing the massive backlash for 0.2.0 is mildly gratifying.
This interview with 'Zizaran' is literally cringe as the lead designer has to talk about why his baby is less than celestially beautiful (Zizaran isn't even combative -- these are basically comments from Steam). What makes the interview interesting (for those who care) is that the second lead designer, Mark, takes an engineering (vs. artistic) stance and can acknowledge that perhaps some things are, um, not at the moment in whack.
https://youtu.be/YiFLwjFI4S4?si=vtVphS0Yr3g1icXX
Towards the middle, Mark just starts saying, yes... that thing is probably bad, I'll fix it today. He says it a lot. The next day? 7GB patch with a lot of the changes that Jonathan was defending on 'Artistic Vision' ground were altered.
The game is still mostly sh*te with far too many bad Lead Designer Vision issues... but I'm almost (but not really) hopeful that the 'Vision of POE2' will be broken so that POE1 may be upgraded into a better game, which was supposed to be the point all along.
Until then, at least Last Epoch's 1.2 release is next week... I'll play that instead.
On “What To Expect When You’re Expecting a Trade War”
Abundance, baby!
"
He's running!
Pretty interesting that he's publicly calling-out Whitmer on Twitter.
"
Thanks for the link... and yes, the Neo-Liberal shills are shilling and to my point, I think they are pursuing intra-Dem fights with the new and likely effective anti-Trump packaging.
Which is to say that the Party realignment (and role reversals) continues apace:
"Not long ago, the political logic of rejecting free trade made a certain degree of sense for Democrats. But events have a way of changing political logic. A trade-skeptical message that worked perfectly well five or 10 years ago is going to sound awfully out of touch after Trump is done turning tariffs into a synonym for catastrophic ineptitude."
The context for his ending the argument thus is spelled out earlier: we (Dems) can't have a 'subtle' or 'nuanced' trade policy or talk about competence in deploying such a policy -- we must abandon all things to oppose Trump and any future policy that might be tainted by Trump. And by the way, my favored policy is the way we should abandon those things.
Electorally, he might even be right -- as we discuss above, Trump often poisons things he touches... it's one of the reasons not to support Trump. So taking opposing positions definitionally isn't a bad electoral strategy.
But, I honestly do think that abandoning 'good' or 'subtle' or 'nuanced' positions just because Trump bigfooted some of them isn't in anyone's long-term interests.
And finally, on a purely electoral note... adopting the opposite of some of your formerly held positions often works at cross purposes with a) your ability to talk to them, b) being perceived as sincere, c) how the new things work with the old things that are still important, and d) how realignment can cross pressure individual reps whose constituencies still adhere to the 'old' party alignment.
Anyhow, this is what I was saying in that there's a lot of pressure to simply become market fundamentalists and abandon positions that were 'reasonable' 5-yrs ago because of optics.
Unfortunately the Trump effect is bad in so many different ways, it's hard to settle on a single one to hate. But one thing I'd personally avoid is simply taking the opposite stance; sometimes it really is better to acknowledge the point and give the opponent a noose of how he's doing it is worse than how you'd do it.
Not doing that is kinda how the R's got Trump in the first place.
"
Heh, #Notalldemocrats ... now I'm mildly interested in what Chris Deluzio is all about.
From the one paragraph I'm allowed to read:
"The video featured Representative Chris Deluzio, from western Pennsylvania, who calmly intoned, “A wrong-for-decades consensus on ‘free trade’ has been a race to the bottom” and “Tariffs are a powerful tool. They can be used strategically, or they can be misused.”"
"
Yes, the Republican party is broken.
Strangely, there are just no incentives for your old OG Republican to do anything other than watch where this goes.
If *they* kill it, then they kill what would have been the biggest, most beautiful success ever. Career ending.
If Trump crashes and burns, whelp they just go back to their safe seats and hope to ride out the failure... some won't make it, but some will. Still better than the sure thing of ending their careers.
The parties are frozen until something breaks.
"
Yes, that's a real concern. In fact, it concerns me that the Liberal response has been a sort of libertarian embrace of market fundamentalism.
Credit to AOC and Bernie who are at least pulling out bad ideas from the previous century... but Dem critiques of Tariffs in the service of anti-Trumpism? Eeep.
"
Agreed, but piling on the 'failed execution' aspect of any Trump project is that the path forward was never just tariffs.
There's a ton of work to do internally with how we invest on infrastructure ... ironically the IRA highlights what many of those reforms need to hit. And then there's separating the objectives by region and geo-strategy. And then there's building new(ish) trading blocs FIRST so that we can detach or provide incentives to new trade policies in other harder to crack areas. And then there's a general requirement for determining what success looks like, and how sub-successes are prioritized... etc. etc. etc.
IMO the thing that you use to detach weak-Trumpers (or anti-Democrats) is 'do you really trust Trump to have done his homework and do you trust him to make things better after he makes things worse for the other team?'
It won't overcome negative partisanship entirely... but if you're in politics for the iterations you have to take the things he's directionally right on -- and prove that you're better than he is to change the ship of state.
In the end, Trump likes tariffs, and he has authority to use tariffs... so his policy is, tariffs. He never ever does the work that's needed to be a successful statesman.
"
The deliberative body always (tm) delegates the actual negotiations to the Executive because the deliberative body can't really negotiate coherently.
Now, the deliberative body should delegate tasks ad hoc and post hoc the delegated authority should be circumscribed until the next delegated task... but, yes, the point is directionally true.
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF10038
On “Group Activity: Manic Monday Market Watchalong”
p.s. for Site admins... I'm getting an error with every post (thought post completes): Warning: Undefined variable...
"
Also curious to see that Gold is dropping too -- although, it had already reached $3.2k from $2k over the past year -- so people riding the wave?
Bitcoin is also down... I mean, if you can't flee to safety in imaginary currents of electric, where *can* you flee to safety?
"
Double clicking into this... I'm not sure what you're seeing reported is true? Seems Japan holds about $1T total and in Feb reduced it's holdings by (variously reported) $50B - $200B - because yields were increasing.
"
To whom did they sell them?
"
As of 1.24 pm DOW seems to be bumping along at 38k with a little excitement around a false rumor of a 90-day pause causing the market to perk upwards until rumor popped.
Wasn't sure what to expect... personally felt that another 5% drop would've signaled a lot more pain to come. There's still time...
But I'm also not sure what to make of a 15% overall drop with a floor of 38k. (If that's the case).
My own sense was that we wouldn't know how to interpret things until this coming Friday - or the first set of financial institution failures. But, if it's just a 'correction' with a slow moving recession...?
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/7/2025”
"he says he would come more often if he could buy and smoke pot at the theater. “How fun would that be?” he says. “They have a bar here so that people can relax and enjoy a drink.""
You'd quite literally have to have a different building... pot invading public spaces is already creating a backlash... you'd nuke non-pot screenings anywhere and any time in your theater. Plus, there's a pretty big lack of awareness comparing (or not comparing) the externalities of Pot vs. Alcohol.
It's a content saturation problem... there are too many alternatives to films. And films as a medium don't offer that much of an upgrade over 4k viewing.
If there's a 'new thing' it will be something along the lines of immersive theaters like you get in a 90second ride at Disney Hollywood.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25”
Heh, I'm not entirely sure I get the comment even if I get the gist? Seems any plan by Trump can be ill-conceived and poorly executed regardless the time allocated for preparation.
"
Yeah; I think you are right that he sees the American Empire as a thing that was being managed to the benefit of a few; he's using populist language to reorient the goods of empire to a new few and perhaps along the way share some spectacles and low value gluten. It's rather crass, but sharing the benefits of empire was always an option we mostly pretended didn't exist.
"
This WaPo article is making the rounds from (anonymous) inside sources on how the 'tariff' formula was picked.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/04/trump-tariffs-reason-advisers/
There's also additional (anonymous) reporting on some of the pre-negotiations with other nations... the operative point (IMO) is this: "“It’s not clear what they want to achieve,” the diplomat said."
Putting the two things together... the article suggests that negotiations were unclear on what was needed -- i.e. Tariff reductions or barriers to trade or both and what would happen if they did them. In the end, those 'concessions' were fruitless because the formula Trump selected wasn't one of the ones that factored tariffs and barriers.
And, implied is that now none of the states know exactly how to get out of the box because changing the trade imbalance is downstream of lots of other things and not something govts can simply control by negotiations.
"
"
I take your point; Part 3 is where the votes are.
But the reason why Cass (and others) are at least interesting to follow is that the goal of Economic Policy shifts for them *isn't* a friend/enemy reward/punish model... it's a game referee model and the goal is to stop ignoring rules infractions because they benefit the current order (in the short term)... changing the rules *always* causes some disruption somewhere. Changing the rules stupidly (as Cass is implying about Trump) will bring about more and stupid disruptions (and by implication - somewhat unnecessary).
But in the end, the point isn't tariffs or no-tariffs, its addressing the lies about the rules - and who benefits from them.
"
It's not the very best Jon Stewart clip... but as far as digesting a pretty boring speaker (Cass), it has some value.
"
I think JB is wrong about McCain/Romney and I don't think he's GHWB... so let me see if I can break it down by the good 'ole stool analogy.
Leg 1: Economics/Libertarians
* He's explicitly taking down the Free Market fundamentalists... Markets are good, but markets are basically all about games/rules/incentives. There is no invisible hand.
Leg 2: Foreign Policy/Neo-cons
* He's explicitly acknowledging a multi-polar world order, and the goal isn't maximal containment, but strategic alignment; which means honey/carrots/sticks and the willingness to use whichever is needed. Pax Americana comes with duties from those who participate. But the era of hegemony is over and over-extension will lead to losing our allies in the medium term.
Leg 3: Social/So-Cons
* He's not a bootstrap conservative; he thinks the 47% has been ill-served by the economic policies of Leg #1 and that arbitraging labor *isn't* a comparative advantage in trade; the market should have rules that benefit families and the state has a role in making policies that protect and advance civil society.
None of those things are 'conservative' in the old Republican synthesis kind of way.
But, what Steward missed (this is pretty common) is that challenging the old consensus doesn't mean that the Left's solutions are vindicated -- he's got different ideas from Romney/McCain/Clinton/Obama/Pelosi/Trump/McConnel that he's peddling.
Basically everyone thinks he's wrong about everything, but from different angles. And that's ok.