Category: Economics

Edit: 2026-05-26 1020 AM

So obviously all this was wrong, but it’s because I thought elections and reform were a thing. I learned A LOT from being this badly wrong. https://innomen.substack.com/p/how-i-came-to-see

Edit: 2019-02-08 0205 AM

A lot of this clearly doesn’t apply anymore, but I’m not gonna edit anything below this edit from now on.

Here’s why:

Please. Convince me. from SandersForPresident

(Obviously I was wrong about a lot of this, but I am not going to edit history and pretend like I’ve always thought as I do now. Then again I’d like to share that evolution, it’s hard to capture that change in a static document, hence the clumsy strike-through edits, which I’ve stopped adding to avoid further confusion.)

Edit: 2016-11-28 0845 AM

Total number of Americans: 324,964,000
Total number of Americans eligible to vote: 218,959,000
Total number of Americans who voted for Trump: 61,900,651

We all know that progressives are not even remotely represented by the DNC and neoliberals. Beating HRC is hardly an achievement. She was the most pathetic candidate in the entire history of politics.

The DNC, in spectacular and fraudulent contravention of the people’s will, put HRC on the general election ticket. A broken system is the ONLY reason Trump won. Wilson from castaway would literally have done better.

We all know Sanders would have crushed Trump.

The DNC failed precisely because it chose to copy regressives. Regressivism is by definition backwards. They’re a bunch of callow, ignorant, wannabe time travelers, when they aren’t straight up psychopaths and bigots or worse.

They’d have been thrown on the ash heap of history already if 2008 hadn’t been won by a smooth talking covert republican psychopath.

Trump never scared me.

My ranked choice for 2016:
1. Sanders
2. Jill.
3. Trump.
4. Johnson.
5. HRC.

Sanders would have won the general and did win the primary.

The rest is cheating.

See you in 2018/2020. 🙂

Congratulations on your last extension regressives. You’re literally the past. Your only possible victory is a slower defeat.

See also: underlore.com/forgiveness-for-bernie/

Ok, many people are upset at Trump’s victory.

Don’t lose heart. Give it time and hear me out…

1. First of all, a lot of what you think you know about Trump’s policies is complete bullshit. When you combine lies to get elected, limits on the office of the presidency, with a psychopathic opponent in full control of the entire media, you get hysterical hyperbole of the first order. Do the homework and vet your sources.
2. *Unknown quantity. We have no idea what he’ll actually do. We KNOW what HRC would have done. For all we know he’ll be the Obama of the right. A republican in name only. He was a democrat for decades. Update: We know some of what he’s doing and so far it appears to be limited to reversible social policy shifts and protectionist economic measures.
3. *This is all short term. 2018/2020 is gonna be a progressive firestorm even if Trump is tolerable. I had hoped that Trump would totally galvanize the left. That seems not to be the case, yet anyway. However, we are certainly still paying more attention to his blunders and treachery than we ever did Obama’s or would have Hillary’s. Though our protesting habits as ever need direction to keep from spinning our wheels in the mud. Turnout is going to skyrocket so long as a Berniecrat like Tulsi is in play. Finally we have an enemy labeled as such. Beyond that, the singularity is still on the way. Technology is the real driver for change and it’s exponential still. Update: Apparently the neoliberal wing of the party is oblivious to its own failure. It blames outside factors and still considers itself relevant. However, we are paying more attention and they are more exposed and weaker than ever before. There’s opportunity here. And 2020 will be a progressive rout if Tulsi or Nina is on the ticket.
4. Speaking of climate change, don’t fret there because that ship has sailed. And we CAN’T run the planet on solar/wind power. (But I’m fine with us trying. I’d rather waste money on windmills than bombs. But solar panels killing people because it’s toxic to make them and dangerous to clean and install them.) There’s a LOT people don’t generally know about intermittent power sources. There’s a reason Germany’s CO2 emissions have actually gone up. But with Trump being a republican on paper, he could do nuclear power as a back bone for solar and wind. If he actually shifts us from bomb war to trade war we’ll have to go nuclear, and that would choke off all the oil wars.
5. With the presidency once again given to a candidate who lost the popular vote maybe we’ll finally revisit the whole system. Perhaps at the state level?
6. *Trump is not your standard republican. He’s not an extremest like Cruz. He literally could be to the left of neoliberalism and to the right of democratic socialism. He might simply be a real centrist ultimately. Which would make sense in someone who was, and donated to, democrats many years. He might even be the Obama of the right. (He speaks like an anti-TPP protectionist after all.) In theory at least he could accomplish new-deal scale improvements that the left, especially under neoliberalism, wouldn’t even try let alone could accomplish. Update: He actually did kill the TPP. That’s undeniably good and more than Obama did. The completely pointless wall could function as a pretty massive jobs program. And like windmills I’d rather waste money on a wall than a bomb. Though of course we’re likely to waste money on both.
7. *All kinds of options for holding the old guard accountable and making a fresh start. He’s got a change mandate similar to Obama’s. It’s just that Obama didn’t use it. How Trump uses his remains to be seen. Update: Looks like this one was a total bust. So far anyway. But ever day that passes it gets less likely.
8. *Neoliberalism is dead or dying. Being the most republican of the democrats is no longer a winning tactic. This will have profoundly positive implications. They’ll have no choice but to be progressives or someone will take their place. Neoliberalism had to lose eventually. The sooner the better. It’s was tumor. Now it’s merely a wound. Update: See point #3.
9. *No war with Russia in Syria. The neoliberal war plan is done. Expect the war on terror to dial back. Update: Though he intends to raise military funding that need not signify more war. It could simply be graft. After all, why waste money dropping a bomb when you can make money selling two to your enemies for dropping on each other?
10. The first woman president won’t be a corrupted, election stealing, neocon. It’ll be someone history can be proud of because:
11. Like him or not, he was elected fairly. DNC whining about Russian hacks makes me more sure of that than ever. The exit polls for the RNC primary match perfectly the results. Democracy has not been canceled. Even if they rigged the general election in his favor he was the only legitimate major party candidate left meaning that it was just either way. It’s foolish and selfish to prefer an illegitimate candidate you like to a legitimate one you don’t. If you disagree then simply own being against democracy itself.
12. We have a real chance to reform elections now from the type to their transparency and accountability.
13. *Obamacare is a bailout of the insurance industry. If the right wingers end it, we’ll finally have a chance to demand single payer without Obama/HRC being there to knife us in the back. Update: It seems Trump is already facing realities of the limits of the office in that he’s admitting no opposition to portions of the ACA.
14. *He’s gonna be the most obstructed president in history either in the government or not. We have a blueprint for obstructionism. The RNC has taught us well how to grind government to a halt. Trump won’t be able to name a post office. Trump can’t help himself. His ego will sabotage everything he tries. Update: He’s showing signs of being able to contain himself and a willingness to change positions in the face of reality, which is ironically what many liked to pretend was a truth about HRC. While the republicans do control the entire government now, more or less, Bernie Sanders has essentially come out as the leader of the democratic party. It should be obvious the power that fact alone has in checking any true madness Trump may attempt. Update 2: And a 2018 blue wave gave us the most diverse House in history.

Some funny tweets:

Clinton HQ is so quiet you can hear an email be deleted. #ElectionNight

— Bryan (@RealBryGuy) November 9, 2016

England: Nothing can be more embarrassing than Brexit.

America: Hold my beer.

— Mad Victor (@Schokovic) November 9, 2016

@KellyO pic.twitter.com/MkcdefpWhv

— Shane Quinn (@shizane) November 9, 2016

@BobbyRead @Hardline_Stance @KellyO @GayPatriot Does Gary know that the election was yesterday?

— Thomas J Edwards (@Conservative4MI) November 9, 2016

July 2016 was the hottest month in recorded history

The main advantages of runaway climate change being here have to do with food, opportunity, war, and general change.

We’re going to end up with more food for a couple of reasons. Firstly, mild winters. Secondly, rainfall changes are going transform a lot of deserts. Thirdly, more co2 in the air means more for plants to work with. Fourth, there will be far less reason to discourage mechanized farming in lower income and developing nations. All of that adds up to more food for more people.

The developing world is going to have access to the same industrial revolutions that the UK and US got. Frankly it’s only fair and it’s morally urgent to raise their standard of living and that means consumption of fuels.

If climate change is annoying to us enough it will force us to shift from prevention to cure which is important for a lot of reasons. Carbon capture and storage is a skill we as a species should master anyway and is the most accessible tool we have for starting to control the weather, which we really should do anyway for a whole boatload of reasons.

Also pulling carbon out of the air allows us to make fuels. All we need to do it is process heat and that’s gonna be abundant once we embrace 4th gen nuclear reactors, or we figure out fusion. Liquid and solid fuels will always have a place in our society because of energy density and relative size. It doesn’t make sense to use a heavy battery when you can use a light tank. And we’ll always need carbon based materials for fertilizer and plastics and polymers etc.

This will all also inspire the deployment and develop desalination technologies. Change rainfall patterns will see to it that making ocean water drinkable becomes a human strong suit. We can already do it well with air craft carriers, (two hundred thousand gallons a day each) so imagine what we can do with purpose build nuclear desalination ships.

I think there will also be a general trend towards less conflict as a shared problem tends to unite people. Humanity’s slow and collective retreat from the coast lines  is going to get us working together more than usual I think. Sure it will cause conflict also, all change does, but on balance I think it’ll be better than what we have now. It’ll break ruts and stalemates all over the planet.

Generally change is good and I think modern humanity needs to embrace the fact that nature isn’t kind. Or evil. It simply is. We’re going to realize that an important choice has been in our face for a long time but we put off making it: Take control of nature, or be killed by it. No matter what our time on this planet is limited and believing we can just freeze it in place with environmental protection and conservation is objectively wrong.

There are life forms that we need to wipe out. Fleas, ticks, and mosquitoes spring to mind, not to mention a whole host of bacteria and viruses. Before climate change our general attitude was that everything was all interconnected in a massive natural system designed for our benefit. That never was the case, and climate change is going to wake up a lot of people to that fact.

We rose to our position by changing the world, not preserving it’s current configuration. Ironically climate change itself is a strong demonstration for how badly we needed it. The very attitude that nature will find a way to make everything ok for us is what allowed us to complacently dump megatons of CO2 in the air every year thinking nothing would happen.

We have command of this planet’s weather, one way or the other. It will change because of us, and it has, and it is still. This means we have the power to fix whatever we deem to be broken. Nature doesn’t care either way. Nature is perfectly fine with mass extinctions and sterile planets. It’s humanity that isn’t. Ironically nature blindly demanded this tactic of us via evolution. It’s only natural that we use it.

This effort over the coming decades will unite us like nothing has ever before.

On a personal level… Honestly I feel better. There’s a cynicism to that feeling, but it’s like this:

We’ve had nuclear power as an option for decades. We instead chose to embrace fear and greed for no good reasons.

Since the climate has reached the tipping point, then the damage is in a sense already done. And there’s a freedom in that.

We no longer have to tell the third world they have to wait to embrace a better western style of life.

Nuclear advocates have tried, as hard as we could, to wake up the species. We failed. We failed vs liars, fools, and the 1% but we were on the right side of history, are on the right side. There’s comfort in that. History will definitely record that had we embraced nuclear power sooner we’d never have faced climate change. But then again, climate change may well force the widespread adoption of nuclear power and maybe that is the greatest silver lining of all. For all we know mastering fusion is another 500 years away for us for some reason.

Fission by comparison is so easy that is has happened spontaneously. It really is a lot like fire. Sure it can burn us but look at what can be accomplished when we handle fire properly. Fission is fire only 1000x better.

With China and India embracing nuclear it seems like we’ll eventually get there, but avoiding climate change is no longer the priority since that ship has sailed. Oil and energy scarcity are the root of most conflicts. Climate change is going to address that, through nuclear power.

Now it’s just about all the other advantages to nuclear, not just climate change prevention, which obviously for humanity at large was never a good enough argument. Now it’s about the space probes, cancer cures, desalination, and lifestyle upgrades for the billions of lives directly impacted by Chinese and Indian energy policy.

I like the idea of selling hope for a high tech future, instead of fear of climate change. The cruel are better at selling fear than we are. One whack job with a book accomplished more socially than benevolent informed nuclear advocates ever did.

Now it’s about what nuclear can do to make climate change survivable. Winter is more lethal than summer. A slightly warmer planet is better for technological humanity.

Climate change means centuries of new weather and new ecology. This will force us to change things, and preventing climate change was essentially all about keeping things from changing, which given how screwed up things are, never sat well with me. Humanity survives far more often than it really lives, and that’s been a solvable problem since we became tool using humans.

My whole world view’s hope value centers on change. I despise how things are. Change is badly needed, and there seems a definite upside to change being more or less imminent.

I feel like there’s more human opportunity than threat here. It’s like a coming slow motion war. A true world war with an enemy we can truly feel good about fighting. We needed this reminder as a species that nature is not our ally. It’s a blind machine that would compost us literally without thought. And now we get to find out if we’re really capable of freeing ourselves from it or taking command of it.

We need to close the loop. And we can. And soonish on global weather time scale, we’re going to have to. I think I like the idea of having to invent new forms of life to survive. I like the idea of converting nuclear silos into nuclear vertical farm robots. I like the idea of growing cloned meat instead of cows. I like the idea of humanity finally embracing the new fire. And learning to treat this planet like what it actually is. A space station.

There’s a huge political I told you so coming down the line here and we might well be able to parlay that into a substantive compassionate shift in human policy. I can’t help but feel hopeful.

I could see this ushering in the end of neocon libertarian thought. The profit above all attitude has driven us off the road. It’ll finally be time to take the wheel from the selfish and let the compassionate ones drive.

I can’t help but feel like we’re already seeing it. Something changed long ago and politically humanity is catching up. I feel like ISIS and Brexit and Sanders and Trump and Corbyn etc etc all came from the same source. The same titanic shifting under our feet.

As I see it there are two real drivers for change in human history: Environment and technology. Everything else stems from them in my opinion.

I feel like the massive political changes of the last decade were likely sourced by climate change and communications technology. And while some of those changes have been bad, I think there’s a pretty clear trend towards the good. The future of humanity seems united in the direct of change we’d like to see.

It is only the old and the foolish and the pathological screaming for austerity and death and torment and exile and all the right wing blame for victims. That bodes well for our collective future.

All the political craziness to me smacks of desperation on the part of the more cruel and dismissive elements of humanity. Their way of life is approaching the end of its viability.

They are rats cornered on a sinking ship. The future no longer belongs to them. We’re going to have really start doing what we uniquely evolved to do in order to live. Commanding nature, changing it, is natural for us. If we really want to worship the natural order we must accept the fact that there is no order beyond the laws of physics and what we impose.

Insects survive because they adapt to the environment. We survive because we change it. It’s time to start changing it on purpose and with commitment.

I say we start by wiping out the mosquito via genetic engineering.