The problem we have on the Left is that even though 65% of the American population prefers our ideas (when stripped of D/R labels) they don't really like us. We're not very good at branding, and we've let Capital convince half the country that it's actually a "liberal elite" that is holding them down.
We need to get better at getting our actual message out there. The recent victory is a start, but if it were down to ideas rather than personality politics (and, you know, other stuff the other side uses) we'd be up by 20 points in every state.
The Democratic Party (its representatives and organization, not its voters) is not pro-drug legalization, and when in power has prosecuted the war on drugs aggressively. It's very odd to refer to drug legalization as "our ideas," yet still 1) associate them with the Democratic Party, which does not agree with them, and 2) refer to the election of a Democratic POTUS who has said that he doesn't support drug legalization as a "victory."
This is clearly the democrats biggest problem. Biden just lost Florida largely because Trump falsely called him a socialist. Democrats are absolute losers when it comes to successfully getting people to understand their message.
"Socialism" may be a word we need to retire, not because it's an invalid concept, but because it means different things to different people.
Democratic socialists largely want a saner version of a market economy, where power resides with labor and government aggressively combats capital's worst tendencies, but they aren't calling for old-style command economies like the USSR, Communist China, or Castro's Cuba.
AOC is a fantastically talented politician with a lot of good ideas, but I think she needs to replace the word socialism with something that has less baggage.
This is the general disadvantage socialism has relative to capitalism in terms of appealing to others. Socialism and communism have more than a hundred years of history, including a lot of mistakes we've had to learn from. Capitalism has no memory and therefore on its own terms has no history.
This is in reference to the American standard business practice ("American Rule") whereby each party to a transaction pays its own legal bills. It is not necessarily connected to the more general American work culture (which I agree is as you characterized it, although I hope that changes with the recent defeat of the final boss of Boomer capitalism).
Yeah, I get what it was in actual reference too, I was just inferring a secondary meaning around American business practices and the Must Win culture that is prevalent in American society.
It's a cuck test. They want to know up front that you'll take abuse. If you "fail", by standing up for yourself, then they'll just work with some other interchangeable would-be founder who's more of a "culture fit".
Legal fees are a rounding error to these companies. It's all about the "power move". They don't want to work with people who'll stand up for themselves over "a measly" $50K.
I’m laughing too much at this. Agree “I’m making a $15mm investment I need you to cover my up to $100k in legal fees. If you can’t do that, deal off.” Has always sounded funny to me.
But if you need money it’s just one of those things you have to do.
I think what should happen is the whole syndicate should share in total legal fees pro-rata or something. That way the lead isn’t wearing all the legal fees.
Also think this is based some in the standard practice of banks passing through their legal fees to those they lend to.
For an institutional fund, they can be different, non-fungible pools of capital. The $15M comes from fund limited partner (LP) commitments as part of the investable capital of the fund (i.e. was earmarked for investments and is not the fund manager's money, in a very real sense), but the $100k might (depending on the LP agreement for the fund) come out of the management fees, and if so, is very much part of the P&L for the fund manager.
For a corporate VC, its typically all the same pool, though.
The article does cite how early VCs seek the legal fees because charging the funds might “mis-align incentives.” Could be phrased many ways, but evidently the fee burden is very much a power issue between VCs and investors, if not founders and VCs.
Envy is a negative-sum emotion. It's no fun to be envious, and while people think it must be enjoyable to be envied, it's really not. When you're aware of it at all, it's just uncomfortable. It's a shitty emotion on both sides, but it's great for capitalism.
Comparing yourself against others is a loser's game. If the person is better, you lose. If the person comes out worse, you're taking a dip by comparing yourself at all to that person, so you still lose.
The cultures wars are stoked by the 0.01% because they want working people divided against each other.
If "blue state" workers think their red-state brethren are incorrigible racist assholes, and "red state" working people think the blue states are full of virtue-signaling effete hypocrites... then capital wins because, even though 75% of the American public likes socialist economic ideas (when stated plainly and without a "socialist" label) they are all fighting each other over unrelated stuff, like whether J.K. Rowling's latest misinformed comment means we should stop reading her.
I'm curious: how do people who are tone deaf learn and use tonal languages? Are such languages redundant enough that they can get by, or do they find other ways of adapting, or do they struggle to speak fluently even if the tonal language is their first language?
I grew up in Hong Kong and speak Cantonese as my first language, which is one of the most brutally strict languages in terms of tones. 9 tones, some very similar, words that have the same sound but different tones can have very different meanings, sometimes ones that make the situation embarrassing or make you sound like you're swearing (in a formal situation). Kids in school like to mock you endlessly if you even accidentally say a word in the wrong tone that means something different (especially if it sounds close to swearing words).
With all that pretext in mind -- having grown up there until I was 13, I had never met any native speaker in HK who couldn't pronounce words in correct tones. Not a single person.
Cantonese and other East Asian tonal languages are, more specifically, contour tonal languages; the distinctions between the different tones are based on the change in the tone through the syllable (rising vs. falling, etc.), rather than absolute pitch. This may be easy enough for tone-deaf people to deal with. However, there are other tonal languages, e.g. in Africa, which make use of absolute pitch distinctions.
I researched this a while back, and it turns out that while they can't hear tones (if you play minimal pairs in isolation, they won't be able to hear the difference), they still understand people and reproduce them correctly when they speak. They can also be trained to recognize recognize the difference. There's really no such thing as tone deafness.
Tone deafness is when you sing something badly, people make fun of you, and you stop trying to sing. Not an option when you speak a tonal language, instead you just learn pitch without realizing you're learning pitch, just operating from "feelings" and what "sounds right," which is of course based on an enormous amount of lifetime feedback.
It's like how actual blindsight (when the eyes or their connections to the brain are actually damaged or destroyed) is unrecognized echolocation. We are not aware of our own conscious experience, or the processes we go through to reach some of then conclusions we reach.
That is not true. I know person who cant tell piano keys from each other almost as far as an octave. She cant tell whether you you have hit one or two at the same time. She cant tell whether you have hit different one you you play two keys consecutively. She does hear well.
That is tone deafness and it has zero to do with singing. Tone deafness is not measured by having people sing.
What I've observed with novelists is that there are two kinds. There are those who write with frequency but stop at "good enough", the satificers who are usually quite good at keeping their word count within genre bounds, understand market trends, and if they're working full time can put out two or three books per year.
Then there are the ones who spend years studying rhetoric and linguistics, have worlds and characters they've been building for years, and want to write "Big" novels that often hit 200,000 words or more and can't really be compressed. They're as hard working as the prolific crowd, but from the outside it looks like they're dilly-dallying. When they finally publish, they're putting forward the best 200K words out of 2M... which makes a distinction that a few people care about although, to be honest, most readers don't. It's not an economical way to write. You do it because you're chasing some kind of deified Relevance that you'll never fully know if you've achieved because the real test is whether you're remembered 100 years after you die.
I'm immensely curious to see if He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named gets his book out, just to watch the YCs squirm. Rumor through mutual acquaintances is late 2021, but having never met this person, what do I know.
It's psychological, but it also goes from an understanding that profits, in the rigid economic sense, don't reliably exist.
A profit is gain realized by buying things, recombining them using innovation, and selling at a favorable price. A true profit is something you make, again and again, and with diminishing returns because prices move and the gap closes, as with arbitrages. Rents, which are more reliable, are payments you collect because you own things. (You may use those things, or you may, using the more common sense of the word, rent those things out.)
Most "profits" are actually just rents. Rents extracted because the company owns real estate, rents extracted because of brand presence, interest (which is a rent on money) through financing programs, rents extracted because workers' need for daily survival has them systematically underpricing their labor, and rents on political capital (favorable regulatory environment).
Getting paid because you have a great idea is intermittent, and usually requires taking on a lot of risk, and risk is something established companies hate. Getting paid because you own something is easy-as-shit and forever reliable. Where does the car industry make the bulk of its gains? Not on selling the cars, but in financing. It's an evergreen business, so long as there is capitalism-- there will always be people who need money they don't have, and it will always be an easy business to collect the vig.
Regular businesses eventually stop innovating-- they have plenty of smart people, but the bosses don't want to take risks because they're busy collecting personal rents by holding management positions, and obviously don't want to lose that-- and their "profits" converge to the rent roll on the resources they own. That's just how it works. Average equals mediocre, the latter used non-pejoratively.
That said, it's not sexy to imagine that one is investing into companies that have become mere utilities, that will continue to collect rents on the resources they own (of which a person can buy a tiny fractional share of the ownership) but not really do anything interesting.
These ultra-capitalist non-profits (non-profits-for-now) create the illusion that they're something different... that they're "rocket ship" companies run by people with supernatural talent and "vision", that they aren't rent-seekers using capital's native advantage over labor for reliable but unpulchritudinous gains... which is what all large companies are... but, instead, a kind of "new company" that is going to innovate moonshots and synergize us up a new century of prosperity, freedom, and magical puppies that never poop. Smart investors recognize that all of that is bullshit, and that these tech unicorns are just as exploitative as traditional companies (and, in fact, probably more so) but they also realize that dumber investors get the warm fuzzies and that there is therefore a premium.
As I get older, my theory of charisma is that it's a product, more than it is an innate trait, and that anyone can "become charismatic", although 99.9 percent of people never will, and the worst thing you can do for yourself is try. People seem superhuman-- energetic, brilliant, capable-- when surrounded by people who invest themselves entirely in making them seem so. Steve Jobs had no special social acumen, above-average but not genius-level intelligence, and no more hours in his day than the 24 we all have, but he managed to surround himself with the right people and, for a period of about 20 years, managed to convince the world that he had superhuman powers and a "reality distortion field" when in reality he was just a capitalist who dropped acid once.
Plenty of charismatic people are socially inept, charmless, and unpleasant in close interpersonal relationships, but this doesn't make them any less charismatic on a stage. They often have no genuine friends, but tens or hundreds or thousands of people who will put aside their own concerns to do things for the charismatic individual.
Charisma is a pattern by which other people, for reasons that are hard to parse, and through mechanisms that are invisible, do things for the charismatic person. A charismatic person is threatening because others will kill for him, and he's a desirable benefactor because others will commit resources to his causes, but it seems to be a self-perpetuating phenomenon that snowballs and can carry on for most of a lifetime. It does seem to collapse in old age. This is why charismatic but hideous people like Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump, and Bill Cosby meet such ignominious ends. They're invincible, until they're not.
There are skills that enhance a person's charisma. You can learn rhetoric, public speaking, and the norms of social interaction. But that's all they are: skills. Nothing can guarantee charisma. Nothing can guarantee that you'll get that core set of people to follow you that will produce a snowball effect. On that, it seems to be pretty random who wins and who doesn't.
Charisma exists because people want to be the charismatic person. They want to be someone who can wave a hand and bring ruin to their enemies. What they don't realize is that by following the charismatic, they're defeating their own purpose. It is not traits of the charismatic that generate this feedback loop. It is mostly just luck. That said, the way to improve one's odds to find people who are looking for a charismatic to follow, which means finding new territory, rather than hanging around an existing charismatic in a space where such people are already spoken-for.
> Charisma is a pattern by which other people, for reasons that are hard to parse, and through mechanisms that are invisible, do things for the charismatic person.
Sounds like a great evolutionary advantage if your group is out to kill a mammoth.
I'm a bit older, but I found as well that my mental health didn't fare as bad as I'd feared it would when I first figured out (February) how bad this thing was going to be. In the 2010s, corporate capitalism seemed eternal and unassailable. Dysfunctional, yes, but geared toward entrenchment and self-acceleration (fascism) rather than collapse.
COVID-19 proved corporate capitalism invalid. I would have rather seen socialism succeed than capitalism fail and certain I wish we hadn't had to see over a million people die because of our economic system, but nevertheless, this is an opportunity for the left. Universal basic income is now a mainstream position. Trump, who would have probably be winning if COVID-19 hadn't happened, is now the underdog.
I feel a lot of sympathy for people who are, for the first time in their life, experiencing mental distress, serious ill-health, and disability. I don't mean to understate that. I'm not happy that COVID-19 happened, and I don't think anyone is. For me, though, the uncertainty has kept me going. There's a lot to be afraid of, but there's also cause for hope. It is now not merely a growing sentiment but common knowledge that our economic elite must be overthrown, no matter the cost.
Parts of the US are already like that. You're lucky you don't live in one, but many people do. And unless you have significant savings, even more people are less than six months and a depression/recession job loss away from there.
Venezuela was done-in by so-called "Dutch disease"-- over-reliance on natural resource extraction, including subsidies for gasoline that made it nearly free-- and Chavez's corruption. He allowed his buddies to buy dollars at the "official" exchange rate which was 4 orders of magnitude out of line with the market rate. Flat-out robbery of the Venezuelan people.
Corporate capitalism is theft, but that doesn't mean all socialists are good or that no socialists are thieves.
Socialism has seen plenty of successes. And yes, it has seem some failures.
The problem with communism is that it has too much history. It has a record, some of which is ugly, some of which is littered by some really awful people who claimed (and claim) to be "communists".
The problem with capitalism is that it has no history, no memory. It doesn't get better, and it doesn't learn. It's the same shit today that it was in the time of the Pinkertons. Government did get better at regulating it, but in the past 40 years it has gotten worse at doing so.
Capitalism has yielded more benefits including raising the global GDP per capita since the industrial revolution. Now centuries later its capitalism thats the problem all of a sudden, am I misunderstanding you?
Socialism on full blast will eventually run itself dry especially if enough people just seize to work driving down the profits keeping the system running.
Would be nice if people who downvote were forced to comment as part of the process, if I am wrong tell me why. I post for discussion, disagreeing is part of a discussion. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Here's some reality about the global GDP rising since the industrial revolution:
It is favor politically unsavory right now to acknowledge any good capitalism has done. You’re going to be downvoted because people have been trained to react to what you said like you just suggested slavery wasn’t too bad.
If my country goes socialist I'd move my profits offshore and I imagine most other productive members of society would as well. I think most socialism believers fail to understand how globalism will play into all of this
You write, I reply, you reply to me and so on. You do your neighbour a favor and remember that. If you keep doing them favors and they won't help you, you'll stop helping them. The list of examples is long and and pattern is the same: humans keep track of "balances". This isn't a system that we invented or discovered, it's who we are and how we work.
And don't forget, Venezuela isn't really led by folks that care about their people nor do the elections seem free or fair. I think one of the real issues in doing socialist policies in the US is that the US's level of corruption and lack of care for other folks (at a government level) is more reminiscent of Venezuela and other corrupt regimes - and has been for years. There is not much trust in government and government doesn't seem keen on building such a thing.
We could go and base things more off of Nordic nations, but it is going to require more transparency, front-facing government that simply works without punishing people for not being perfect, and some major trust-building. (Initiatives like the reworking of the Indiana DMV are in order: I no longer hated the DMV there, and it can be even better with some work). We don't necessarily need any of this for some socialist policies, such as health care. There are plenty of examples around the globe we can source from to customize it to our population. We can make the tax code easier for average people in most situations to deal with as well simply to remove some friction.
That term is funny because it basically means capitalism with a human face these days, but if you read Lenin, the big communists were talking about the fight for "Social Democracy" in the early 20th century. Terms get so diluted lol
Like others have pointed out, "socialist democracy" is a thing, and folks trying to pass these sorts of policies are outed as socialists in the US. Like everything else, socialism has a range of ways to see itself through.
There are so many little things you just couldn't do in the US. For example, the largest dairy coop - Tine - has to distribute goods from smaller dairies. I buy my wine and liquor at a state run store, which is nicer than any liquor store I knew in the US.
Health care is so much more efficient and you get things you can't have in the US: For example, they send a nurse to your house up to 6 times a day before you qualify for a nursing home. The nurse is free: The nursing home is a percentage of your pension (and everyone gets one). A bonus is that folks live longer than they did going to a nursing home sooner.
The state inspects chimneys to cut down on fires. Schooling doesn't really depend on the taxes in your local area, though is run more locally (as is some of the health care), and the libraries are nation-wide and can get books from other places.
Venezuela was done in by severe sanctions imposed on the country by USA. Any other excuse is just the typical propaganda you see in American news media.
If you wanna avoid becoming Venezuela, just avoid being specifically targeted by US economic siege ("sanctions"). Which is pretty simple if you are the US.
We need to get better at getting our actual message out there. The recent victory is a start, but if it were down to ideas rather than personality politics (and, you know, other stuff the other side uses) we'd be up by 20 points in every state.