ArkyBeagle

And ( to my ear ) the always reliable Dean Baker addresses "the money thing" in "Rigged". Scott Sumner has also written at length on the subject.

There are two mandates to the Fed - price stability and ( Humphrey-Hawkins ) employment. With the exception of the Greenspan era pre-2000, Fed policy has set employment in the back seat.

Because "Inflation BAAAAD!" ( in the manner of Phil Hartman's Frankenstein's monster ).

So we have 2% growth targets that we undershoot and low growth. The population has adapted in ways described in Tyler Cowen's "The Complacent Class".

New houses are built to what I consider exorbitant prices. People finance 4x annual income or more.

The thing being sold is really the debt instrument, not the house itself.

That's mostly housing, which was financed by debt.

It kind-of is magic - that is how money gets created.

I dunno. I think that at least globalization - as in the easily agreed on definition of globalization - is declining. After all, the various China seas seem to be becoming a Chinese lake, if we can project the construction of sand islands some.

Automation is both already in full sway and at the same time, the remaining things to be automated seem out of reach - not of the technologists, but of the leadership class. But we can't give the techies status enough to do it right :) It is also anything but clear that automation should displace labor necessarily, at least over a long enough time line.

"Inflation is, everywhere, a monetary phenomenon." - Milton Friedman.

I don't think that what Conservatives call "the destruction of the nuclear family" is the goal, but that the models in use don't work to keep Dad jobs available. The nuclear family will most likely evolve out anyway, because we can't even hit low (2%) Fed growth targets. At any rate, Dean Baker, "Rigged", yadda yadda.

All court proceedings are about finding fault.

An anedcote: my boss was PM for building a new building and his claim was that offices with sheetrock and (steel) studs was cheaper than cubes.

We still had cubes. Because you have to have cubes.

And of course the Edifice Complex held - we were sold before everything on the building was done.

Real professional soldiers come from the Service Academies and while they're different from Gates & Zuckerberg, they are among our nations finest people, at least when hubris doesn't get 'em.

It's interesting - Johnny Cash was a SIGINT operative in Europe in the 1950s. I mean headsets and notepads.

That's probably where he got a taste for amphetamines, at least one biographer thinks. "Here, take this, son. It'll keep you awake."

At least in the US, right now, all the hi-tech death machines get maintained by contractors or civilian employees of the services.

The press is being undermined by its economics. Trump just smelled weakness and attacked.

It's not myth, it's narrative. Antebellum slavery and Jim Crow were narratives[1]. Even worse, they're narratives based on phrenological "science".

[1] see also a novel "The Klansman", the Word of that narrative made flesh and into "Birth of a Nation" , i which the modern movie was born.

Sacrificing individual agency to mythic protections has a name. It's collectivism. And it takes quite the storyteller to kill that sort of story.

The housing crisis? "Housing never goes down." Vietnam? "The domino theory." Manifest Destiny? "Go West, young man."

The problem is that we're adapted to narrative as our principle means of information exchange. So we try to construct counter-narratives. Those work just about as well.

The antidote to narrative is rhetoric.

Can anyone shed light on why so many Stoic societies/clubs seem to be essentially religious? The Stoics I have read do not seem to be particularly religious nor of any particular creed - some were polytheist, some were monotheist, some seem to nearly be agnostic or atheist.

The important thing to remember is that this caring is anomalous. I personally find Space Does Not Care to be quite liberating.

Those are slowly being identified as artifacts of trauma[1], at least the pathological cases are. SO imagine how prevalent they were in the Classical world.

[1]] I don't hold that un-self-aware people are pathological...

I don't think Judaism has ever been a closed faith. I may have missed some interval of time where it was only by birthright or something.

This being said, I don't think conversion is sought as it is in Islam and Christianity.

It's dualistic. On the material plane, I read it as "don't be entropic."

And thank you for your thoughts as well. Your last sentence caps it; what I am saying is that there is a broken tool in the toolbox - we should be able to make profit an ethical value - as an estimator of how much good we do on the world - but because accounting practices don't isolate rents ( SFAIK ) from consumer surplus, then that makes profitability a shakier ethical metric.

But yes - the ethics of a company are a serious part of the architecture. Good ethics are of self-interest even more than they are a collective good.

All those things are much easier to use as values than profit, since profit may include some fairly innocent or some fairly egregious rent-seeking. There is absolutely nothing wrong with any of that - but with one caution - one must still be "competitive".

The problem is that what we mark down on the books as profit may or may not actually reflect any social benefit to the larger society through the mechanism of consumer surplus.

This state of affairs means that any discussion on profit may or may not be all that coherent because we would have to clarify if we mean rent-profit or consumer-surplus-profit.

"consumer-surplus-profit" is a signal to do more. "rent-profit" means you're not both doing good while doing well.

This is a much larger point than designing a corporate architecture. This goes to how we evaluate ethical behavior.

Since we cannot disentangle rents from non-rents profits, I doubt there will ever be a coherent set of ideas on the subject.

I wonder then how we classify a John Muir? Seems "deep green" to me. I think his oeuvre came from the Romantics.

I am not doing Curtis' thesis justice; you'd have to see the ( freely available, SFAIK ) film. He doesn't just paint environmentalism with this brush. I found the idea bracing; I saw myself in it.

I solved that problem by getting married in my musician phase :)

You have me at a loss- I'd say there are certainly alternatives. If I had to guess, I'd say most go that way, but that's purely a guess.

Good point though - neither of them tried to self-learn in high school.

Yes. And it was her, her ... calculus of status.

That's why I asked "If". Apparently, based on the existence of this thread, there's interest in that. :)

It may also expedite the creation of useful products. Why would we consider there is inevitably a tradeoff?

There's a lot we just don't know.

Bluntly, computing was a low-status field. There isn't "computing envy", there is "physics envy". Never mind that computing is critical path to all fields now...

As status has risen, it's become more status-ey. Surprise!

The problem isn't gender per se; the problem is how we define success and how leadership works. We're up to our neck in all sort of hubris sprung from the cultural emphasis on ambition at any cost. As Charlie Sheen might say, "Winning."[1]

[1] if you don't see his story as a parody, intentional or otherwise, look again...

But if diversity is your yardstick, then it's surprising how much better the military services are at it than tech. Indeed, if I were an ambitious woman, I am not sure that's not the path to take for tech.

As anecdata, one daughter felt that pursuing computing wasn't socially acceptable ( she was a cheerleader and all ) and another felt the first instructor was an abject misogynist.

Perhaps women find better things to do :) I'm starting to think there is something wrong with those of us who pursue this.

During the Cold War, if one showed up in one of the weedout classes for EE, you got the "look to your left & right. One of you will not survive this process" lecture. EE was very seriously a defense discipline and the values-pyramid was feeding bodies into the Military Industrial Complex.

I imagine that is part of it.

I raised two girls who found the "alpha geek" phenomenon totally repugnant. One is heading back into a CS degree in her thirties; the other went bio and is an entrepreneur.

I have to wonder if the chasing away is not to their benefit. Perhaps the ugly is not just a ... social artifact but more of a reflection of the nature of the course of study.

Two things spring to mind:

- the curious economics of program-correctness. ( people quickly abandon all hope and despair - the "fixes" are all very tedious )

This one's weird - I hope I do not try your patience with it...

- the observation that is made by Adam Curtis in "All Cared For" that what we now call the "environmental movement" could be an artifact of computing. The mindset that there is a knowable and optimum equilibrium for complex systems is something I find increasingly puzzling. It just seems to be a bootstrap; I can't really come up with an ...epistemology of it that isn't circular. People 100 years ago just didn't care; they do now; there was propaganda; it's a thing now that used to not be.

Now suppose that there are other, irrational "optima" that people in our field become obsessed with.

Finally, I believe that prior to the 1990s, people used things like punch cards and other madness to filter participants. After 1990, the unemployment rate of GenX led to the abuse of computing to find those kids something to do. That, I think, led to the "alpha geek" phenomenon as it is now - we had "alpha geeks" before but they seemed nicer, somehow. Or something.

I'm increasingly attributing thready employment to Fed policy, as per Dean Baker, and Scott Sumner. That's not a main stream view...

I would submit that the tech industry is definitely moving backwards. Whether this is all part of it is a hard question.