@ZaidJilani It's our oil & gas regulator, so I assume he means he wants to stop producing any crude and get all of our refineries shut down by international sanctions.
@LabMem765 I was trying to make a joke at the expense of Newark at you and when it gave me an error I got really worried that you'd been annihilated for mentioning Newark.
Just to add on to this, here are the kinds of policies that political leaders are now advocating for, and in many cases actually implementing:
- Massive increases in trade barriers
- Government taking partial ownership of major companies such as Intel
- State-owned grocery stores
- Expansion of rent control
- Banning corporations from building rental housing
- Wealth taxes on billionaires
If economists had any semblance of power or sway, all of these would be non-starters. These are all policies dreamed up by lawyers.
@katieporterca Progressives used to call taxes the price of civilization, but politicians on both the left and right are increasingly taking the view that taxes are something that only "other people" should pay. That's playing with fire, especially for the left.
https://t.co/j264fS8Sac
Out today w/ Shane Ball, our piece in NYT.
I used to think the Trump tariffs were about not understanding economics.
Then I thought they were about disguising a shift in tax burdens.
Those may both be true; yet the dominant aim may well be power/corruption.
Link to follow.
Saying "things" were good enough in the 90s, there is no point in any advancement is not only dumb, but anti-American.
"New car features" have saved ~700k lives since 1990. New drugs have saved millions. Leave that "things are good enough" energy in Europe, where it belongs.
I'm surprised to see people find this surprising, the average person's understanding of economics is exactly this.
The people on the left think of Econ negatively because of it and those on the right use this caricature to justify their policy beliefs as scientific.
There's a shocking number of otherwise educated people who think that:
>Economists believe that infinite growth is possible
>Growth always means using more resources
>Economists have not noticed that Earth only has finite resources and that this is a problem
It's like a high status version of the people who think biologists haven't noticed that monkeys are still around, so how can evolution be true?
@ZaidJilani Those people are nuts. Our diversity is like the one great thing about Houston. Without that all we'd have left is awful weather, crummy traffic, and biannual chemical plant explosions.
"ICE grabbed him and I didn't get to ask his name in time so he's just gone now. No record of arrest, no rights, nothing, just disappeared"
This is crazy to read? The replies from people who are center right confirming this happening makes it even scarier.
@ZaidJilani I think you may be overestimating the financial and logistical capabilities of European militaries to deploy serious forces to a remote and sparsely populated arctic island in the middle of winter.
Watching old movies that include scenes with butlers and maids and thinking of this observation from Agatha Christie.
Productivity growth is the reason we all have cars now and almost no one has servants.
I keep seeing folks citing "1.1 million layoffs so far this year" uncritically.
Folks, I'm sorry to tell you, but even if layoffs have remained unusually low by historical standards, we've had 1.1 million layoffs in the past *20 days*.
The US is a big economy.
AI & Robotics are a complement *and* a substitute for labor. There isn't a fixed set of jobs. Scarce factors get rents - since AI/robots won't be scarce, the rents won't go to them. This way of understanding AI + Labor (via Bernie Sanders in the Guardian) common but totally wrong