If the dollars never comes back, that's actually ideal. The argument is the same as for other imports: dollars are approximately free to produce. An inflation targeting Fed will just print new dollars to make up for the (statistical) loss of the old ones.
Very similar to people setting dollars in fire or burying them in their backyard and forgetting about them.
The comment on prediction markets was a novel idea to me as well, and I agreed interesting--thanks for sharing. But after some thought I think I believe (with low certainty) it ~more or less cannot happen.
One frequently noted issue with prediction markets is: where does the profit come from? If all participants on the market are smart speculators who are well calibrated, then on net they all make zero profit, and in fact once accounting for fees and internal costs (paying quants) they lose money. This isn't sustainable--even if you are better than I, I'll rapidly lose my money to you and quit playing.
But--in a liquid, scalable market where I can trade in large size, which admittedly I think excludes most of them right now--the presence of hedgers provides an opportunity for substantial profit (with gains from trade from both side.) I, as a speculator, am highly incentivized to sell you insurance: I take on risk you don't want and get paid in expectation.
But once it's profitable to have one speculator, it's also profitable for a second speculator to show up: and once we have two speculators (who, we assume, are well calibrated) the prediction market has to be close to correct or the one will drain money from the other.
People can buy eg put options as a insurance on their portfolio, and professionals can eg 'manufacture' hedges for these options out of regular stocks.
Lots and lots of people engaging in prediction markets in order to insure themselves will actually raise those markets' accuracy in the medium to longer term, because they pay for the profits of the speculators and arbitrageurs.
"The thing is that when I *don't* talk about social justice issues in math, nobody asked me if I was worried about putting off those who *do* care about those issues." That's a terrible argument! (If it is an argument and not just an unmotivated expression of feeling.) We don't ask the same question of thousands of other interest groups because there is no particular reason to think we should pander to them. The people in all those groups do not have any expectation that math classes will specifically address them. (A tiny number of possible exceptions aside.)
She goes on to make a reasonable point about making math relevant to more people. It might also put off at least as many people but at least it is an argument to get to grips with.
Oooh, so much stuff! So, Trumpism as a Lower-Class Pride Parade
is a bunch of psychologizing. It is true that everybody wants more if it's low cost or indeed free, but that's as far as it goes. It's also true that there is a great divide in years of education between pro-trumpers and anti-trumpers. Seems to be the new class divide.
But fundamentally, Trump did not make the new forgotten men. The new forgotten men made Trump. The idiots forgot the forgotten men!
I have a memory of Hillary Clinton in a 60-minutes interview with her husband in the 1992 race about some sordid sex stuff. She complained about Tammy Wynette and her song "Stand by your man". Having grown up in New York City and getting shaking hands upon venturing west of the Hudson River, I had never heard of country music. Some years later I listened to some of this stuff. Not my bag, but it didn't hurt me. Leave it alone! Why a vote gathering politician wouldn't says something! That has not changed. They must be thinking something. [My thoughts are for a different occasion.]
I'm a highly educated stiff, but my sympathies have always been with working grunts. So today I mailed my ballot for Trump. I hardly have an in-group [classical liberal], but it makes my out-group [the left] angry. That makes me happy. :-)
"but it makes my out-group [the left] angry. That makes me happy. :-)"
I discussed that feeling in a recent post. It isn't strong enough, in my case, to make me vote for Trump instead of the LP candidate, but it does affect my emotional response to things happening in the campaign.
Oh yes! I was able to formulate here the cause of my actions only with the help of your earlier post. I feel so good. :-)
Please forgive the emotional stuff, there is some rationality behind it. The closest I feel is from a scene in a movie called Rare Steak Reservations, one and a quarter minutes long:
>The Effect Of Artificial Wombs On the Abortion Controversy
We don't have to wait for Artificial Wombs. Coincidentally, a private member's bill has just been introduced into the South Australian parliament "requir[ing] women seeking to terminate a pregnancy from 28 weeks to instead undergo an induced birth, with babies to then be adopted." Pretty clearly, in my view, "My Body, My Choice" implies "Not My Body, Not My Choice", which implies that the (now-viable) fetus in question has the same rights (whatever they are) as any other premature 28-week fetus.
>Would there be a lobby of women who insist that their fetuses need to die?
They don't have to insist that the fetus /needs/ to die, just that it should be the woman's right to decide: "Dr Waterfall said decisions around termination should be left to women and their doctors, 'rather than being made by politicians'". And to justify this they can press even harder on the ownership idea, for, after all, the woman in question created the fetus de novo (material and form), so it seems she must own the fetus by right of labor, and so may do with it what she pleases. "My Labor, My Choice"!
Source: ABC [Australia] News Online, "SA abortion law proposal triggers debate, within and across party lines — what's been proposed?" 25/9/24
"I would feel an awful lot better about the world if a forty-odd-year-old alleged comedy didn't keep accurately having predicted modern political situations." I thought he meant Monty Python (specifically Life of Brian) although that's 45 years ago. But Yes (Prime)Minister is excellent and enduringly relevant.
I would not call Trump's supporters lower class. Their core seems to be working class and small business owners. The latter are arguably middle class (though not the upper middle class who support Harris). The former are not middle class, in general, but also are definitely not lower class. Indeed you will find it hard to find any group with more contempt for welfare recipients than working class people; consider the slogan "I fight poverty—I work."
There's a curious inversion in the way we discuss class that I recently noticed.
Marx's distinction between bourgeoisie and proletariat was owning the means of production versus having nothing to sell but one's labor power.
Now let's consider the archetypal examples of "lower class prole" and "middle class" in today's America.
The archetypal "lower class prole" is someone like Joe the Plumber. Notice that Joe owns his own small plumbing company and thus his own tools. Thus, he'd be bourgeoisie according the Marxian definition.
Now look at the archetypal member of the "middle class", she works for a huge organization likely in some bureaucratic position. While she'd not what Marx would consider a proletariat, she is relying to selling her "labor power". She also quite likely makes less than Joe the Plumber.
While there are deviations from these archetypes, they do provide an interesting contrast.
If you have an opportunity to pass along complaints to Substack, please tell them how bad their iPad app is. It will not allow me to zoom in on graphics. The diagram included in this post is illegible. This is not the author's fault, but substack's. I would be very surprised if Apple did not make this capability (which most apps have) easy to implement.
That is not how I read the post. Describing someone as bullying and shaming homosexuals is a negative, not a positive, description, and Turok is analogizing the people the Trump campaign is rebelling against to such.
That has nothing to do with what I was saying, have no idea how you are getting that out of what I wrote. You seem to be responding to an argument out of your own imagination.
I assume that pro-Trump people would see bullying and shaming homosexuals as a bad thing, just as they would see bullying and shaming them as a bad thing. Hence that they would see the argument in the quote as, if anything, a sympathetic description of the Trump movement, although obviously a very incomplete one.
"One way to think of the Trump movement is that it is, in part,..."
I tire of the notion that all Trump voters are rednecks, and that all rednecks are morons. Just wanted to say that. I also tire of the notion that D voters are the smart ones. "Half" their coalition are on the government dole first of all. And to be excited about a Kamala presidency doesn't radiate intelligence, just tribalism given her blatant vacuousness. Gender ideology, climate alarmism, DEI/CRT, price controls, censorship and "existential threats to democracy" are not the realm of deep thinkers.
I think you, like Jim, are misreading the post. The point is not that all Trump voters are rednecks and morons, it is that that is how the elite media and a lot of high status people view them and they, naturally enough, don't like it.
A Prometheus Award novel of some time back, Victor Koman's Solomon's Knife, offered a different alternative to abortion: transplantation of an embryo (or perhaps fetus) into a different uterus, that of a woman who wants to bear a child. It was quite well written (I voted for it!) and focused on precisely the issue of whether the originally pregnant woman has the right to have the unborn child killed, or only the right to have it removed. Worth reading!
Interesting. I would be reluctant to donate to a sperm bank because I wouldn't want my child reared by people I didn't know to be qualified to do it. I can imagine a woman who had gotten pregnant and didn't want the child to have similar feelings. Was that the source of the conflict in the novel, the reason some women didn't want to go along?
About immigrants sending money abroad:
If the dollars never comes back, that's actually ideal. The argument is the same as for other imports: dollars are approximately free to produce. An inflation targeting Fed will just print new dollars to make up for the (statistical) loss of the old ones.
Very similar to people setting dollars in fire or burying them in their backyard and forgetting about them.
The comment on prediction markets was a novel idea to me as well, and I agreed interesting--thanks for sharing. But after some thought I think I believe (with low certainty) it ~more or less cannot happen.
One frequently noted issue with prediction markets is: where does the profit come from? If all participants on the market are smart speculators who are well calibrated, then on net they all make zero profit, and in fact once accounting for fees and internal costs (paying quants) they lose money. This isn't sustainable--even if you are better than I, I'll rapidly lose my money to you and quit playing.
But--in a liquid, scalable market where I can trade in large size, which admittedly I think excludes most of them right now--the presence of hedgers provides an opportunity for substantial profit (with gains from trade from both side.) I, as a speculator, am highly incentivized to sell you insurance: I take on risk you don't want and get paid in expectation.
But once it's profitable to have one speculator, it's also profitable for a second speculator to show up: and once we have two speculators (who, we assume, are well calibrated) the prediction market has to be close to correct or the one will drain money from the other.
Yes, exactly like in existing financial markets.
People can buy eg put options as a insurance on their portfolio, and professionals can eg 'manufacture' hedges for these options out of regular stocks.
Lots and lots of people engaging in prediction markets in order to insure themselves will actually raise those markets' accuracy in the medium to longer term, because they pay for the profits of the speculators and arbitrageurs.
"The thing is that when I *don't* talk about social justice issues in math, nobody asked me if I was worried about putting off those who *do* care about those issues." That's a terrible argument! (If it is an argument and not just an unmotivated expression of feeling.) We don't ask the same question of thousands of other interest groups because there is no particular reason to think we should pander to them. The people in all those groups do not have any expectation that math classes will specifically address them. (A tiny number of possible exceptions aside.)
She goes on to make a reasonable point about making math relevant to more people. It might also put off at least as many people but at least it is an argument to get to grips with.
Oooh, so much stuff! So, Trumpism as a Lower-Class Pride Parade
is a bunch of psychologizing. It is true that everybody wants more if it's low cost or indeed free, but that's as far as it goes. It's also true that there is a great divide in years of education between pro-trumpers and anti-trumpers. Seems to be the new class divide.
But fundamentally, Trump did not make the new forgotten men. The new forgotten men made Trump. The idiots forgot the forgotten men!
I have a memory of Hillary Clinton in a 60-minutes interview with her husband in the 1992 race about some sordid sex stuff. She complained about Tammy Wynette and her song "Stand by your man". Having grown up in New York City and getting shaking hands upon venturing west of the Hudson River, I had never heard of country music. Some years later I listened to some of this stuff. Not my bag, but it didn't hurt me. Leave it alone! Why a vote gathering politician wouldn't says something! That has not changed. They must be thinking something. [My thoughts are for a different occasion.]
I'm a highly educated stiff, but my sympathies have always been with working grunts. So today I mailed my ballot for Trump. I hardly have an in-group [classical liberal], but it makes my out-group [the left] angry. That makes me happy. :-)
"but it makes my out-group [the left] angry. That makes me happy. :-)"
I discussed that feeling in a recent post. It isn't strong enough, in my case, to make me vote for Trump instead of the LP candidate, but it does affect my emotional response to things happening in the campaign.
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/trump-as-fargroup
Oh yes! I was able to formulate here the cause of my actions only with the help of your earlier post. I feel so good. :-)
Please forgive the emotional stuff, there is some rationality behind it. The closest I feel is from a scene in a movie called Rare Steak Reservations, one and a quarter minutes long:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vtgaAq6ap0&t=1s
>The Effect Of Artificial Wombs On the Abortion Controversy
We don't have to wait for Artificial Wombs. Coincidentally, a private member's bill has just been introduced into the South Australian parliament "requir[ing] women seeking to terminate a pregnancy from 28 weeks to instead undergo an induced birth, with babies to then be adopted." Pretty clearly, in my view, "My Body, My Choice" implies "Not My Body, Not My Choice", which implies that the (now-viable) fetus in question has the same rights (whatever they are) as any other premature 28-week fetus.
>Would there be a lobby of women who insist that their fetuses need to die?
They don't have to insist that the fetus /needs/ to die, just that it should be the woman's right to decide: "Dr Waterfall said decisions around termination should be left to women and their doctors, 'rather than being made by politicians'". And to justify this they can press even harder on the ownership idea, for, after all, the woman in question created the fetus de novo (material and form), so it seems she must own the fetus by right of labor, and so may do with it what she pleases. "My Labor, My Choice"!
Source: ABC [Australia] News Online, "SA abortion law proposal triggers debate, within and across party lines — what's been proposed?" 25/9/24
"I would feel an awful lot better about the world if a forty-odd-year-old alleged comedy didn't keep accurately having predicted modern political situations." I thought he meant Monty Python (specifically Life of Brian) although that's 45 years ago. But Yes (Prime)Minister is excellent and enduringly relevant.
And done by some of the same people who did Free to Choose (the television version).
You should link to DSL...
But in case he doesn't, see this and other fun comments at DSL. Come join the best discussions on the internet here: https://www.datasecretslox.com/
I gather that some people on DSL don't want it to be too visible. Maybe we should discuss that there.
I would not call Trump's supporters lower class. Their core seems to be working class and small business owners. The latter are arguably middle class (though not the upper middle class who support Harris). The former are not middle class, in general, but also are definitely not lower class. Indeed you will find it hard to find any group with more contempt for welfare recipients than working class people; consider the slogan "I fight poverty—I work."
I agree that "lower class" is not quite right. Lower status in the dominant elite status system. "Flyover country" expresses it pretty well.
There's a curious inversion in the way we discuss class that I recently noticed.
Marx's distinction between bourgeoisie and proletariat was owning the means of production versus having nothing to sell but one's labor power.
Now let's consider the archetypal examples of "lower class prole" and "middle class" in today's America.
The archetypal "lower class prole" is someone like Joe the Plumber. Notice that Joe owns his own small plumbing company and thus his own tools. Thus, he'd be bourgeoisie according the Marxian definition.
Now look at the archetypal member of the "middle class", she works for a huge organization likely in some bureaucratic position. While she'd not what Marx would consider a proletariat, she is relying to selling her "labor power". She also quite likely makes less than Joe the Plumber.
While there are deviations from these archetypes, they do provide an interesting contrast.
If you have an opportunity to pass along complaints to Substack, please tell them how bad their iPad app is. It will not allow me to zoom in on graphics. The diagram included in this post is illegible. This is not the author's fault, but substack's. I would be very surprised if Apple did not make this capability (which most apps have) easy to implement.
If there is a way I can pass that point on I haven't found it.
I was surprised to see Eugenia Chang mentioned here. Her book “The Art of Logic in an Illogical World” was the worst 40% of a book I’ve ever read.
Trumpism a lower class pride parade?
Reads to me like a pompous wannabe needing to create a group to look down upon from his imaginary throne high above the unwashed masses.
But hey, if that's what it takes to get him through the day, t'ain't no thang, I'll dip a pinch of snus and allow it don't make no nevermind. ;-)
That is not how I read the post. Describing someone as bullying and shaming homosexuals is a negative, not a positive, description, and Turok is analogizing the people the Trump campaign is rebelling against to such.
Could be. However I'm not aware of pro Trump folks bullying and shaming homosexuals.
That has nothing to do with what I was saying, have no idea how you are getting that out of what I wrote. You seem to be responding to an argument out of your own imagination.
I assume that pro-Trump people would see bullying and shaming homosexuals as a bad thing, just as they would see bullying and shaming them as a bad thing. Hence that they would see the argument in the quote as, if anything, a sympathetic description of the Trump movement, although obviously a very incomplete one.
"One way to think of the Trump movement is that it is, in part,..."
But you seem to see it as a negative description.
I tire of the notion that all Trump voters are rednecks, and that all rednecks are morons. Just wanted to say that. I also tire of the notion that D voters are the smart ones. "Half" their coalition are on the government dole first of all. And to be excited about a Kamala presidency doesn't radiate intelligence, just tribalism given her blatant vacuousness. Gender ideology, climate alarmism, DEI/CRT, price controls, censorship and "existential threats to democracy" are not the realm of deep thinkers.
I think you, like Jim, are misreading the post. The point is not that all Trump voters are rednecks and morons, it is that that is how the elite media and a lot of high status people view them and they, naturally enough, don't like it.
A Prometheus Award novel of some time back, Victor Koman's Solomon's Knife, offered a different alternative to abortion: transplantation of an embryo (or perhaps fetus) into a different uterus, that of a woman who wants to bear a child. It was quite well written (I voted for it!) and focused on precisely the issue of whether the originally pregnant woman has the right to have the unborn child killed, or only the right to have it removed. Worth reading!
Interesting. I would be reluctant to donate to a sperm bank because I wouldn't want my child reared by people I didn't know to be qualified to do it. I can imagine a woman who had gotten pregnant and didn't want the child to have similar feelings. Was that the source of the conflict in the novel, the reason some women didn't want to go along?
I would have to reread the novel to answer that. It's been a long time, though I've kept it on my shelves, because I thought it was well written.