#Live Union Budget News

[millionmovieproject]

New episode of SOCIAL CONTRACT today @ 1pm est!

Discussing the House's nearly trillion dollar military budget, auto enrollment in selective services for a draft & Russia's exclusion from a peace summit.

WATCH: https://youtube.com/live/UoGG0vzqb2Y?feature=share

[don-lichterman]

Mick Lynch: Truss making it 'impossible' for unions to exist

Mick Lynch: Truss making it ‘impossible’ for unions to exist

Mick Lynch: Truss making it ‘impossible’ for unions to exist Source link

[reasonsforhope]

"Mexico’s government recently announced the creation of 20 new protected areas across 12 states and two coastal areas in the country, covering roughly 2.3 million hectares (5.7 million acres). This follows a series of budget cuts to the nation’s environmental agencies.

Officials introduced four new national parks, four “flora and fauna protection areas,” seven sanctuaries, two biosphere reserves and three “natural resources protection areas” under the protection of the National Commission of Protected Natural Areas (CONANP).

“This is a commendable step toward biodiversity conservation and environmental protection,” said Gina Chacón, director of the Wildland Network’s public policy program in Mexico. She told Mongabay these new areas will help preserve the country’s rich ecosystems, foster sustainable practices and protect a broad range of important species and habitats. Though some environmental and Indigenous groups are wary the budget cuts could hinder efforts to conserve these areas.

The newly protected areas will preserve habitat and ecologically important marine areas for various species, including whale sharks (Rhincodon typus), Mexican prairie dogs (Cynomys mexicanus) and jaguars (Panthera onca). They will also help safeguard ecologically important coral reefs and areas of cultural significance to Indigenous communities.

Bajos del Norte, a new national park in the Gulf of Mexico, is the largest new protected area, covering 1,304,114 hectares (3,222,535 acres), almost nine times the size of Mexico City. The area is important to the more than 3,000 families that belong to fishing communities on the Yucatán coast. It is also one of the main grouper fish (Epinephelinae) reproduction sites in the Gulf of Mexico and will safeguard threatened species, such as the rocky star coral (Orbicella annularis) and the hawksbill turtle (Eretmochelys imbricata).

Joaquín Núñez Medrano, the secretary of the UEFAHG or Union of Forestry and Agricultural Ejidos Hermenegildo Galeana A.C. (Unión de Ejidos Forestales y Agropecuarios Hermenegildo Galeana), lives in an ejido — a type of communally owned land used for agriculture and forestry purposes — called Cordòn Grande in Sierra Grande of Guerrero, along the Pacific Coast. For more than 10 years, Medrano’s community has monitored species such as the jaguar and sustainably managed the ejido’s natural resources, without government assistance.

But now, the ejido has been designated a protected area in this latest round of decrees, as it falls inside part of the new Sierra Tecuani reserve. “The goal is to strengthen what we have already been doing but with support to do it much better,” he told Mongabay.

The second- and third-largest newly protected areas are Sierra Tecuani, a 348,140-hectare (860,272-acre) biosphere reserve threatened by illegal logging, forest fires and land use changes, and the Semidesierto Zacatecas Flora and Fauna Protection Area, which is important for the recovery of the Mexican prairie dog.

The state of Oaxaca is where the government created the most new protected areas, numbering three: the 90-hectare (222-acre) Playa Morro Ayuta Sanctuary, the 56-hectare (138-acre) Barra de la Cruz-Playa Grande Sanctuary and the 261-hectare (645-acre) Playa Cahuitán Sanctuary. Other protected areas were created in the states of Quintana Roo, Veracruz, Campeche, Nayarit, Zacatecas, Chiapas, Colima, Durango, Jalisco, Chihuahua, Guerrero and the State of Mexico...

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has protected more areas than any previous administration, with a total of 43 new areas across 3 million hectares (7.4 million acres). But Mexico’s Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT), which works to safeguard the environment, has become severely cash-strapped throughout his six-year term.

SEMARNAT is one of many sectors in Mexico undergoing funding cuts. In recent years, Obrador’s government has implemented a series of strict austerity measures to free up more money for other areas like pensions and wages, boosting the leader’s popularity among citizens, particularly the working-class. Judicial workers, health services and academia have also had their budgets slashed in 2024...

Juan Bezaury-Creel, the director of the organization Fundación BD BioDiversidad Mexicana, said a protected area is better than no protected area because, once a decree is formalized, the government has a duty to protect it. However, this puts “huge pressure on existing personnel because they have to take care of more surface area with less resources,” he told Mongabay.

“The personnel from CONANP are heroic,” he said. “They are putting their lives on the line many times with little budget and little help.”"

-via Mongabay, January 25, 2024

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Advocates and people on social assistance programs are decrying another provincial budget without any extra increases to Ontario Works (OW) and Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) rates.

Toronto resident Al Draghici is one of them.

They've been living off $343 a month for the past year on OW — they said they didn't qualify for the $390 shelter allowance because they were homeless. And while hundreds more in support is expected to come once their transition to ODSP is finalized, they said that isn't nearly enough to make ends meet.

"It's impossible," said Al, who's also on the board of an advocacy group, Toronto Underhoused and Homeless Union. "It's like they're trying to wait you out until you give up, or you die on the street, penniless."

Despite situations like Al's, the Ontario budget tabled last week doesn't include any changes to either program. [...]

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

[astoundingbeyondbelief]

Kaiju Week in Review (December 3-9, 2023)

I made a frame from this shot Wikizilla's Image of the Week. No regrets. Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, I love ya. When I was a teenager, explicit queerness was anathema to most big-name franchises. Those dominoes have been slowly falling, often in lower-profile tie-ins first, and to me this is a huge one: 69 years without a queer live-action Godzilla character are over. And Cate's the main protagonist of the show! I'm not under the delusion that media representation will cure all society's ills, but it sure doesn't hurt. Now, the non-Tumblr parts of the fandom are being completely normal about this, right? Right? Whatever, that's why you'll never get rid of me here. Cate had a couple more sweet moments with May in this episode, and Mariko Tamaki wrote episode 7, so don't expect her to stop kissing girls. Hopefully she's learned a valuable lesson about cheating though.

"The Way Out" is also another gift to those of us who have always wanted to see more of the ramifications of a world where Godzilla exists, from underground towns for the super-rich to ruined cities where federal troops shoot looters and harass people experiencing homelessness. And the show continues to find ways to use kaiju to talk about COVID, from Cate and Kentaro's exchange about San Francisco truthers ("It's easier than waking up every day and thinking, at any moment, the same could happen to you") to the blink-of-an-eye speed at which the threat went from on the news to her front door in the flashbacks.

As I foretold, we got a Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire trailer, an amusing contrast to the weighty Toho flick and Apple show already fore of mind. It's Adam Wingard unbound, that's for sure. The human cast seems pared back, a longstanding Monsterverse problem, and the kaiju fights were far and away the best part of Godzilla vs. Kong, so hopefully this approach will play to his strengths. But that movie also had excellent VFX, and some of the shots in here are rough. There's time to fix them, at least... which probably can't be said of Godzilla's design. I like that he's pink (did some Warner Bros. executive take the wrong message away from Barbie?) and sporting a thagomizer on his tail, but his proportions are uncanny. And I see Kong found the Infinity Gauntlet; good for him.

I am, of course, not done talking about Godzilla Minus One. It added over 200 screens and made $8.3 million in its second weekend in the U.S., a minuscule drop considering that its $11.4 million opening "weekend" spanned five days. Almost a third of all tickets sold this weekend were for Godzilla or Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron, remarkable in a market so allergic to foreign imports. That brings its total to $25.3 million (more by the time you read this). With an avalanche of Christmas blockbusters on the way, its grip on premium-format screens is about to slip. Still, I see it hanging around theaters for a while. I have never seen the fandom so united in praise for a film before, and it's making plenty of new fans.

Some of those fans are in high places. Variety leaked that it's on the 20-film shortlist for Best Visual Effects at the Oscars (to be narrowed to five nominees), something I, again, never expected to read about a Toho Godzilla film. Alas, it's locked out of this year's Best International Film category due to the quirky nomination period.

Much has been made of how great the film looks on a $15 million budget. I have two caveats, one in each direction. No one is quite sure where the $15 million figure came from; Yamazaki said at a recent con appearance that he only wished he had that much to play with. (He has yet to divulge the actual budget, just that it was above ¥1 billion.) Now, unions in the Japanese film industry are much weaker than in Hollywood, so a given production budget goes a lot further in Japan. All the same, I doubt that alone explains Minus One looking better than most superhero movies made for twenty times the cost. I'll offer a couple more reasons: Yamazaki has extensive visual effects experience (he's been the VFX supervisor of all but one of the live-action films he's directed), and the film's big effects scenes aren't as busy or lengthy as many of the Hollywood counterparts. I don't know if Disney will ask Yamazaki to direct the next Star Wars movie (that would require there to be a next Star Wars movie), but the studios here should be taking notes.

the sphinx, a blog with a ton of American Godzilla rarities to share, has outdone itself—behold a continuity and dialogue script for the U.S. version of King Kong vs. Godzilla! Included in the download is a detailed comparison with the film. No huge differences, apart from the script giving the secretary added to the U.S. version a name, but a fascinating piece of history all the same.

The Minus One incarnation of Godzilla (MaiGoji?) has joined Godzilla Battle Line, accompanied by [SPOILER]. To be honest, my enthusiasm for this game has been flagging, and I'm not caught up on the strategies developing around these two, so I'll just refer you to Sir Melee's channel as usual. This Godzilla's also doing a collaboration with the Japanese mobile game Fleet of Blue Flame.

Tiffany Grant, Asuka's original voice actress, will narrate the audiobooks for the Neon Genesis Evangelion: ANIMA light novels which explore an Instrumentality-free path for the show. Seven Seas Entertainment published them in English from 2019 to 2021, which, to be honest, was also news to me.

This one's for my fellow library workers: the obscenely popular Who HQ nonfiction series for children is publishing a book about Godzilla next June. I don't know if this will have quite the same impact on today's young Godzilla fans as the Ian Thorne tome had on Gen Xers and Millennials, what with the Internet and all, but it's certain to be more factual. Expect illustrations instead of licensed photos, and not just because of Toho.

I can finally talk more about the Godzilla x Kong: Titan Chasers mobile game without fearing a DMCA. Not that there's much to talk about; it's freemium through and through and I'm not sure I know a single person who's excited for it. Interesting to see some critters from the comics break into another medium, at least. Here's the trailer.

[cure-icy-writes]

Okay so. A lot of people have been making cute little dungeon meshi aus where it's modern, but specifically the cast lives in one place. Figured I should maybe share mine?

Anyways. Dungeon Meshi but it's midwestern.

-Senshi, i think, is a regular presence in the church but is the kind of christian that the pastor has beef with. He has an apron with two fish and five loaves of bread on it, and can be found at pretty much every barbecue and church potluck. No one's sure if he's really devoted to jesus or just heard the story of a guy feeding an entire crowd and started showing up to church to feed people. He has caused two married men to have their bisexual awakenings.

-The town they all live in has an extremely high density of restaurants, meaning the only thing to do around there is go out to eat. The gang goes out to eat new places a lot together!

-Izutsumi is a warrior cats kid who was probably bullied for hissing and biting the other kids. The gang recognizes that she's not mean, she's just badly socialized and also seventeen. She lives in a group home, but has been running away less ever since she got promised regular meals.

-Related: Chilchuk is a union guy who is covertly making sure every restaurant they go to is up to code. He keeps shutting down places for not having adequate safety measures for their employees.

-Izutsumi has decided she's going to hang out with Chilchuk sometimes and will stop by his workplace. He's insistent that he's not adopting any more children, but has been teaching her how to budget, how to lie convincingly enough to get a job, and the most ethical places to shoplift from with the fewest risks because she's going to steal things anyways.

-Marcille has never been to a cornfield in her life. She's a Chicago kid, who really misses her deep dish pizza and that really good Italian place, but she's here to study some rare microorganisms.

-Marcille studies a very weird field of medicine that involves looking for medical uses in odd places. She's looking to eliminate class divides in lifespan by trying to find more affordable medicines for diseases that primarily affect the lower class.

-Her father died of asbestos poisoning from working in unsafe conditions when she was a kid, so she's especially alert for it, and gets a little neurotic around flu season.

-Laios and Falin used to go to the creek behind their house all the time to catch crawdads, and sometimes he'll still do it for old time's sake.

-Laios flunked out of college because they couldn't handle his autism rizz. He's going to trade school for the culinary arts, but he keeps trying to cook things he shouldn't.

-Laios checked out the massive dragon books from the library and cried when he found out they weren't real.

-He does furry commissions online, but he's not the best with customer negotiations and keeps wondering how many nipples someone's fursona has. Chilchuk helped him build his profile to appeal to commissioners who like speculative biology.

-Falin watched her brother flunk and went "hm, I think I will not." she's an apprentice at a local gardening shop. You think she's a normal sweet cottagecore kind of girl but then she starts gushing about soil nutrients and sustainability and you realize. Oh. Oh this is the kind of girl who would romanticize being buried under a tree and having it consume her bones.

-Laios wears shirts with anatomically correct dinosaur skeletons on them, but he has to order them online and frequently complains that there are no good clothing shops nearby. Senshi heard him say this, and introduced him to fabric paint.

[violetthekiller]

Whilst the WGA and SAG strike are big news (and rightfully so), here in the UK we have Junior Doctors, Senior Doctors, Rail Workers, Teachers, University Staff, Tube staff, Civil Servants, Ambulance Workers and Passport Office staff all either striking, with planned dates or strike proposals in place. This year alone I can’t remember a day when a strike hasn’t been taking place in some sector, mainly public. And today the Tories proposed a shitty resolution of a 6% pay rise for all public sector jobs but no increase of funding so all those extra wages will have to come from the, already highly stretched, budgets. Oh and our Prime Minister is on his way to being a billionaire and MPs decided to give themselves a pay rise recently.

Anyone striking is simply asking for enough pay to live off and better working conditions. Support Unions and Strikers!

[probablyasocialecologist]

Drawing on the life of the 13th-century itinerant preacher St. Francis of Assisi, Boff argues that we must reconfigure how we think about democracy. Because humans are a part of the created world and our lives depend on complex systems in which nonhuman creatures play integral roles, we need a type of political and spiritual philosophy that draws those nonhuman creatures into the democratic equation. Boff calls this “cosmic democracy” in his book Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor. Democracy is about being ruled by people rather than being ruled by monarchs or despots. But because our lives are intertwined with the world we live in, humans need to forge political alliances with nonhuman creatures in dynamic ways. In the U.S., Democrats and Republicans barely managed to negotiate the debt ceiling so that the government could have a functioning budget. But humans need to realize that we’re failing in negotiations with our environment and, as a result, we are facing climate catastrophe. Mandating space to conserve and rehabilitate dwindling species, cutting emissions, and learning to use the land in a sustainable way are critical steps to contributing to a lasting union between humans, nonhumans, and the planet. In his book Francis of Assisi, Boff notes how Francis tried to forge this lasting union “with all things.” Thomas of Celano, a 13th-century monk and one of the earliest biographers of Francis, said that Francis “called all creatures his brothers and sisters, like one who had arrived in the glorious freedom of the children of God.” Francis recognized that to be close to Jesus, one had to be close to the things that were considered to be the lowest in the social order. That meant taking a vow of poverty and even recognizing the sun, moon, animals, rocks, and plants as “siblings.” From this perspective, democracy is something that emphasizes the rule of the people but also considers the vast web of interconnected nonhuman species that are necessary for the survival of our planet. Boff’s Francis-inspired cosmic democracy isn’t just about striving for clearer and more direct democracies; it’s also about cultivating a new spiritual practice focused on recognizing that human life relies on nonhuman life and the environment. Can we reorient ourselves in the world so that we can hear the cries of the poor and the cries of creation? Can we factor their cries into our politics?

[a-birdhorse]

Hey! Everyone should support the writers strike! It’s incredibly important! If you love theatre as well as television, I would like to draw your attention to another group of writers in this country (the USA, unfortunately) that desperately need help.

Playwrights only make on average ten-thousand dollars for each show they produce. This is accounting for royalties, although with incredible luck or a really nice commission those can bring it up to around twenty-thousand. To make matters worse, the average playwright can only produce one show per year. To put that into perspective, in order to make the average American yearly wage of thirty-thousand dollars, a playwright would need to write and produce two to four plays every year in high-end regional theatres. That’s a feature-length original play every three to six months. Most plays take over a year to fully develop.

On top of that, unlike screenwriters who are often employees of a company, playwrights are considered to be owners of capital, as we own the exclusive rights to produce their show. Because of that, we are not allowed to unionize. This means that our only form of protection, the Playwrights Guild of America, can’t do much other than help playwrights avoid bad contracts. This is an extremely valuable service to be sure, but it can’t solve the problem that only the luckiest playwrights in the country can make a living on this art form.

There are a lot of other issues that compound this problem. Most plays only ever receive one run, which means that playwrights don’t usually earn residuals. Many theaters will contract staged readings of a play for which they do not pay the author. While theaters expect playwrights to be present during the development of a new play, they won’t pay them for their time during early production meetings, auditions, or rehearsals. It all combines to make kind of a perfect storm.

If you like live theatre, this should concern you! If you feel like modern theatre is stale and repetitive, it’s because people who are truly passionate about play writing are forced to split their time between multiple forms. Without enough dedicated theatre writers, we lose access to the originality and novelty that set the stage apart from the screen. Don’t get me wrong, there are some extremely talented and devoted playwrights out there who are able to make things work. But how can people expect great work from us when we can’t even do this work full-time?

So what can you do to help? The first thing you can do is SUPPORT THE WRITER’S STRIKE. Because most playwrights can’t make a living writing plays, they often supplement work in the theatre with work on TV or in other spaces. Helping out Hollywood writers will help put a lot of playwrights in better positions.

You can also support theaters like Playwrights Horizons in Washington DC who provide playwrights with full fellowships in exchange for their plays. These are valuable as they allow a playwright to spend all of their time on their chosen medium rather than needing to juggle multiple jobs to make ends meet.

Other than this, it’s hard to say what normal people can actually do here. It would be nice if there could be a union for playwrights like there is for actors, but as long as playwrights own the means of production this would probably only shift the problem from our backs onto the backs of actors, directors, and designers. And budgets for new shows are already tight enough as things stand, it seems like a lot to ask to carve more of that money out for writers when things are already difficult.

Here’s an excellent article about the situation from American Theatre that goes over a lot of the information I did here in more detail (without the pro-union editorialization.) https://www.americantheatre.org/2014/12/10/paying-playwrights-more-than-play-money/

TLDR; Helping screenwriters helps playwrights too, but a lot more needs to be done before we’re out of the woods. The average playwright can’t make a living play writing, and the only writers in the industry who can are extremely lucky. Trying to solve this problem is critical for the future of theatre.

[pearwaldorf]

So I used a personal finance management app that aggregates all the accounts I have in one place. The company that owns it shut it down at the end of the last year and transitioned it to another site they own. It does absolutely fucking nothing that I need it to do, which includes:

show me balances from all my connected accounts

track spending

sort/recategorize/tag transactions

set budgets

Literally the only functionality it retains is the ability to sell me shit. Which I was fine with (lights gotta stay on somehow) when I got use out of the site, but now it has been enshittified.

The other thing this experience has reminded me of is you should find a service that aggregates all your bank accounts. Empower is the one I'm using because it's got the same functionality as Mint, but there are other options*. Your bank/credit union might also offer a similar service.

It's a lot like using a password manager--it's a giant pain to set up initially, but it will ultimately make your life so much easier. All your account balances in one place** so you don't have to log in to each individual site to check! A unified view of your finances!

It is, of course, not a solution for not having enough money, but clarity on your purchases and subscriptions can help you identify things you don't want/need, as well as overcharges and discrepancies.

I know better money management is a popular new year's resolution, and this is a pretty easy step towards that. You don't have to add all your accounts at once. But I find it satisfying to see the picture become clearer. Also, graphs.

--

* Search "mint pfm alternatives" if you want to know more. Most options I found were paid but maybe you're a person who would shell out for useful features. Monarch looks amazing for people with shared finances.

** It's totally safe. I deal with this shit for a living. I can explain more if you want but it's boring.

[ayeforscotland]

Hi Aye,

I live in Aberdeen and the council is about to vote on the budget of the city tomorrow at 10.30am. One of the most extreme option they consider is cutting down up to 40 millions. Including up to £800,000 in the culture sector of the city. Here's an extract from the P&J newspaper (https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/news/5442847/aberdeen-budget-arts-cuts-belmont-cinema-reopening/):

"The local authority faces a black hole of more than £46 million.

In an attempt to try to stem it, a raft of public resources including schools, the arts and support for those living in poverty have been earmarked as areas for severe cuts.

Arts leaders have already warned that slashing Aberdeen’s culture budget would cost jobs and “tarnish the city’s reputation”.

And now a petition has been launched in the hopes of conveying how much the sector means to the people of Aberdeen."

THERE IS A DEMONSTRATION BEING PLANNED TOMORROW AT 10AM outside the town house on Broad Street.

The info has been released in a media release by Aberdeen Trade Union Council.

I was wondering if I could ask you to spread this info. If Aberdonians came across this post on their dash, maybe they'd be happy to know.

I don't belong to any organisations myself but I'll be there tomorrow morning. I'm sick of this circus. They're stealing from the working class over and over again.

There's also a petition launched by the team of the Belmont Filmhouse going around: https://chng.it/BsvY9ZjFdG The Belmont was the only independent cinema venue of Aberdeen and it's been shut last October. They were hoping to re-opening it but with this happening, nothing is less certain. We're being robbed!

Important info for the folks in Aberdeen^^

Council budgets are being passed this time of year. Labour and Tories have banded together in Edinburgh and a few other places so far. It’s not great to see.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Substituting economics for politics is a failure

Most of us believe that we do stuff because we want to be good people, and that other people act the same. But the dominant political philosophy for the last half-century, “economism,” views us as slaves to “incentives” and nothing more.

Economism is the philosophy of the neoclassical economists, whose ideology has consumed both the Democrats and Republicans. They dismiss all “non-market” solutions (that is, projects of democratically accountable governments) as failed before they’re begun, due to the “incentives” of the individuals in the government.

Economism’s major project has been to dismantle the achievements of the New Deal (Social Security, unions, public housing, limits on corporate power) and to discredit the very idea that we can or should attempt those sorts of bold initiatives.

In economicist doctrine, it’s actually impossible to make national parks or social security or public healthcare, and people are naive to even think we should try. To the extent that these things actually exist and thrive and please people in the real world, they are mirages — they don’t work in theory, so they must not work in practice, either.

It’s not that progressives ignored economists. Some 5,000 economists worked with FDR to craft the New Deal. But while FDR employed a lot of economists, his successors set out to create full employment in the profession — by the 1980s, there were 16,000 federal economists.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1818725#metadata_info_tab_contents

In “May God Save Us From Economists,” in the New Republic, Timothy Noah takes us on a whirlwind tour of the disastrous rise of economism and the changing currents that are finally deprecating its ideology and methodology — and not a minute too soon.

https://newrepublic.com/article/168049/tyranny-economists-government

In 1944, Paul Samuelson called World War II “the economist’s war.” JK Galbraith did research for the United States Strategic Bombing Survey that concluded that military doctrine overestimated the usefulness of aerial bombing. Milton Friedman tried and failed to use economics to develop high-temperature alloys. The Rand Institute developed the post-war nuclear “Mutually Assured Destruction” plan using economists, not military experts.

After the war, economics became the language of Washington. By 1967, the DOT’s safety agencies took up economic models to determine when and how to deploy safety regulations. These regulations were weighed against a model that assigned a cash value to the human lives they’d save, and as that value changed from year to year, so did the regulations that were politically possible.

Today, the use of cost-benefit analyses that relied on arbitrary prices assigned to human lives is mandatory for all major regulations:

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12058

That means that federal economists aren’t just in charge of economic policies — at the Fed, say, or the Congressional Budget Office — but rather, they have the final word on all policy matters — every question has become an economic question. That’s the core of economism.

From the middle of the 20th century on, economism gave rise to a near-endless supply of annoyances, miseries and horribles.

For example, economists convinced Carter to deregulate the airlines and turn legroom into a commodity that you pay extra for. That was the brainchild of then-chair of the Civil Aeronautics Board Alfred E Kahn, an economist, who cheerfully declared “I don’t know one plane from another — to me, they are all marginal costs with wings.”

Most consequentially, economists gutted antitrust, declaring monopolies to be efficient and ruling any questions of corporate power out of bounds on the grounds that it couldn’t be measured or modeled in equations. This, in turn, made all other regulation a battle between concentrated sectors dominated by a handful of giant corporations and their would-be regulators. From here, it’s a direct line to both “too big to fail” and “too big to jail.”

Economism has had an enormous — and awful — impact on public health. It’s no coincidence that when Johns Hopkins sent out a call for survey data early in the covid pandemic, two of its signatories were economists and only one was an epidemiologist:

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/from-our-experts/economists-and-epidemiologists-not-at-odds-but-in-agreement-we-need-a-broad-based-covid-19-testing-survey

As Noah writes: “Think about that. Hopkins medical school is consistently rated one of the top five in the country. Yet even there, an epidemiologist dared not make an uncontroversial public health pronouncement in the midst of a pandemic without invoking the unimpeachable authority of two economists.”

Even Trump, who professed a hatred of “experts,” bowed before economism: it was his trade advisor Peter Navarro who got Trump to take covid seriously, not his public health team (Navarro’s PhD is in economics). And it was Navarro who got Trump to recommend useless — and potentially dangerous — hydroxychloroquine therapy for covid.

In 1992, the Nobel Prize in Economics went to Gary Becker, who used economics to explain “criminal justice, marriage, and racial discrimination.”

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1992/becker/facts/

Related to this is the fact that the Economics Nobel isn’t actually a Nobel at all — rather, it is part of economism’s drive to subordinate evidence-based science to economicist ideology. The prize was created 73 years after the Nobel by Sweden’s finance sector, who backed it with a perpetual grant, in a bid to establish that economics was a science:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-economics-nobel-isnt-really-a-nobel/

Economism began to lose its shine after the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, which saw renewed interest in Karl Polanyi’s 1944 anti-economism “Ur-text,” “The Great Transformation,” which argued that “economics was created by society and must be made to serve its needs.”

https://inctpped.ie.ufrj.br/spiderweb/pdf_4/Great_Transformation.pdf

Polanyi railed against the notion that the individual should respect economic law even if it happened to destroy him…. Nothing obscures our social vision as effectively as the economistic prejudice.”

In the years after the GFC, Polanyi’s anti-economism critique was updated and formalized into five major areas:

I. Excessive reliance on models. Famously, Queen Elizabeth visited the London School of Economics and demanded to know why they hadn’t predicted the Great Financial Crisis. Economic forecasting basically sucks, and even though it now consumes vastly more computing power and has vastly more data to crunch, it’s only made the most marginal and tenuous improvements.

Noah rejects the comparison of economic forecasting to weather forecasting: since 1984, economic forecasting has incorporated 20,000 times more variables with few improvements, over the same period, the time horizon for weather forecasts has grown from a few days to a few weeks (“Hurricanes no longer surprise us. Financial crises still do”).

Despite this, economicists continue to claim that models can solve our problems. In 1991, Larry Summers (ugh) said, “the laws of economics, it’s often forgotten, are like the laws of engineering. There’s only one set of laws and they work everywhere.”

Summers’ economicist doctrine was at work in post-Soviet Russia, where the models confidently predicted that an “open economy” would be unleash massive growth. Instead, it delivered “a semi-fascist and not terribly prosperous kleptocracy.”

II. Underreliance on data. As Ely Devons famously quipped, “If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’”

As Robert Skidelsky wrote, an economics that can’t validate its hypotheses empirically “has a strong tendency to slide into ideology.”

In the pre-economicist age, economists focused on “history and the dynamics of change.” These were the New Deal “institutional economists” of the 1930s, who were supplanted by the more math-heavy Keynesians and then the purely theoretical neo-classicals. These economists were seduced by “beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics,” which they “mistook for truth,” in the words of Paul Krugman.

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.html

The difficulty of finding data and the seductive power of models produced an establishment that dismissed the evidence before them, and common sense, as inconsistent with the theory and thus wrong. This is how the “virtual consensus” that minimum wage hikes increase unemployment was born, and it’s why the minimum wage stagnated at $7.25, lower in real terms that the minimum wage MLK marched against in 1963.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2677856#metadata_info_tab_contents

III. A rejection of society. At the core of economism is a rejection of the very idea of society (“There is no such thing as society” — M. Thatcher). The only way to understand our lives is to model us as individuals, making individual choices and expressing individual preferences. Economism gives short shrift to how individuals affect one another.

Nowhere is this more visible than in Garrett Hardin’s 1968 hoax “The Tragedy of the Commons,” which purported to be a factual account of how people in communities persistently and reliably failed to manage common resources (Hardin, a eugenicist, was later revealed to have made the whole thing up):

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/01/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-how-ecofascism-was-smuggled-into-mainstream-thought/

The actual nature of how people manage commons is far more interesting. Elinor Ostrom — one of the few women to have been given an economics “Nobel” — has devoted her career to analyzing and explaining the long, factual history of well-managed commons, some of which have been run successfully for centuries:

https://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-principles-managing-commmons

IV. A failure to understand “irrationality.” In the neoclassical model humans are present as “rational utility-maximizing agents” whose actions can be predicted by asking “What would this person rationally do to get the most out of their situation” (e.g. “What would I do if I was a horse?”).

In the early 2000s, the “behavioral economists” turned the profession upside-down by taking the radical step of observing how people actually behaved, which turned out to bear little relation to the homo economicus of the models.

This “irrationality” could also often be called “ethics” — for example, the decision in various “ultimatum games” to punish selfish people, even if it means getting less for yourself. You can view this as “irrationality” if your sole conception of human motivation is “how do I get more for myself?” But you can equally say, “I don’t like people who betray the social contract and I am prepared to go with less if it means punishing them.”

But by insisting that ethics are irrational, economism can actually do away with them. Michael Sandel’s 2012 book “What Money Can’t Buy,” offers examples of things that you shouldn’t be subject to market forces, like concierge medical services. A decade later, these have gone from examples of the unthinkable to actual products.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374533656/whatmoneycantbuy

V. The prejudices of economism. Economists themselves are more likely to behave like “economic man,” “pursuing self-interest at the expense of cooperation”:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167268111000746

Economists also give less to charity than other sorts of people:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167268111000746#!

It is one of the least racially and gender-diverse of all disciplines:

https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/us-economics-phds-are-less-socioeconomically-and-racially-diverse-other-major

It’s one thing for a profession to be so different from the majority — but when that profession has elevated itself to the final arbiter of all regulation and government, its narrow composition and ideological blinkers start to tell.

Thus far, the response to this critique has been to reform the economics profession — the Hewlett, Omidyar, Ford and Open Society Foundations are all pursuing programs to make economics better. But Noah argues that it’s not enough to fix economics, we also have to restore politics as a project separate from economics.

Economics should be a tool in politics, but not a replacement for it. As a start, Noah proposes three political domains where economics does not belong:

I. Criminal justice. Get rid of private pretrail supervision, where people charged with a crime have to pay a corporation “user fees” for their ankle-bracelet and other monitoring, or rot in jail. Get rid of private prisons. Get rid of private immigration detention.

To the extent that these “save taxpayers money,” they do so by “running their facilities on the cheap.” Private prisons have “more assaults, more inmate grievances, more lockdowns, and nearly twice as many guns and other weapons confiscated from prisoners.”

https://oig.justice.gov/reports/review-federal-bureau-prisons-monitoring-contract-prisons

II. Health care. After a century of “ever-more ambitious experiments to see whether medical services can be made broadly available on a for-profit basis” the verdict is in: “Every experiment failed.” Every private healthcare scheme fails for the same reason: “The market doesn’t want society to share equally in paying the cost of health care. It wants the biggest consumers (i.e., the sickest people) to pay more. A lot more. That’s how markets work.”

Private insurance failed when companies started “charging riskier customers higher premiums and avoiding very risky customers altogether.” That led to HMOs, which failed when “rising health care costs eventually made even premiums for HMOs too expensive.”

Then we let doctors buy interest in labs and drugs and machinery, charge unlimited fees, and become “entrepreneurs.” We shut public hospitals and let for-profits consolidate hospitals into massive chains. Prices went up. Care got worse. Failure.

Obamacare — which tries to have a private system paid for out of the public purse — has also failed, as costs have gone up, premiums have risen, and outcomes have worsened. We’re on track to outspend the budget for Medicare for All on a private system that delivers worse outcomes to fewer patients.

Many, many studies have concluded that private insurers can’t deliver better care at lower prices. Private insurers pay nearly double the rate that Medicare gets from hospitals.

https://www.kff.org/medicare/issue-brief/how-much-more-than-medicare-do-private-insurers-pay-a-review-of-the-literature/

III. The climate emergency. We are barreling towards a planet incapable of sustaining human life. There is no longer a “credible pathway to a 1.5C rise.”

https://www.unep.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2022

The economics trade has an answer. In 2019, 28 “Nobel” laureates in economics called a carbon tax “the most cost-effective lever to reduce carbon emissions at the scale and speed that is necessary.” Three years later, emissions are up, not down.

https://www.econstatement.org/

Thankfully, the economicist answer to the greatest existential risk facing human civilization today is no longer the only answer we’re willing to try. The Inflation Reduction Act puts $369b worth of public money into directly subsidizing green energy and green tech.

It doesn’t include a carbon tax.

Image: Gage Skidmore (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Art_Laffer_(9262959573).jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

[Image ID: Economist Arthur Laffer standing at a podium. A thought-bubble is coming out of his head. In it is a horse.]

[sanshofox]

There’s currently a wave of content, ig or tiktok or youtube, that shows people complaining about berlin. Like they moved here for work or studying and are now disappointed in berlin and germany in general. „Everything‘s so hard here and the people are depressing and it’s dirty and it stinks and bla bla bla“. Even germans moving to berlin are frustrated. There’s even a rating where berlin is in the top 5 of most disappointing travel spots worldwide.

Then why are you still here? Why is berlin still this hyped when there’s obviously better places in or outside of germany? Living space in berlin is nonexistent at this point. It’s a crisis. Cities like paris or positano and others are going through the same thing atm. And people have nothing better to do than complain but still occupy living space?? All those years in media they hyped up berlin to a level that created a large influx which berlin isn’t made for or accustomed to. It created even bigger problems for the city, but there’d be too many to list here now (just me venting). And now after a few years of the hype it’s suddenly the most disgusting and depressing place?? Then why do you buy apartments only to abandon them and then not even rent them out? Ohh?? Because it’s tax benefiting you in berlin (another big problem here).

The thing that annoys me here is those „prestigious“ people making a spot their new it place for business and living without being informed whatsoever, just making up an ideal and then having a tantrum when it’s not fulfilled. But when they leave the problems and changed infrastructure are still here. We have lots of abandoned office space which worsened during covid and inflation, but no plans for new living space whatsoever. Another example would be elon musk planning to do business in brandenburg close to berlin, only for it to be abandoned when millions of euros were already put into this project (one of the reasons again: german culture didn’t live up to hype, especially work ethics wise. Yea guess what musk? We have unions and stricter work environment rules).

I know it’s becoming a worldwide phenomenon but I can only speak from my experience and being born in berlin and ever since living in berlin. You can observe how over the years berlin becomes smth like new york 2. and like I said the city and berliners aren’t made for it. Like berlin never had the best budget and infrastructure to begin with. Technology wise we are more than 10 years behind (like internet can be a mess sometimes).

[peetapiepita]

Thoughts on what general audiences can do for the WGA and SAG strikes

I've read up a lot on the strike situation these past weeks because I'm someone who consumes A LOT OF media content. The strike will affect my daily life and I'm a curious girlie when it comes to show biz rules. So here are some of the takeaways I wanna share with my fellow audience:

1. Understand the strike

The strike is happening for 2 major reasons:

1.) The studios are refusing to pay the creators/actors residuals on streaming services.

This makes it hard for the majority of writers and actors to make a living by doing their respective jobs. They used to rely on residuals from old projects (DVD and blue-ray sales, renting, etc.) to pay bills. That's just not happening today.

To try to get out of paying residuals, the major studios started this trend this year to take old and new shows/movies off their streaming platforms and use them as an excuse for a tax write-off. Disney did this last month and got a 1.1 billion tax write-off. They can currently do that without consulting the people involved AT ALL, taking away their livelihood without warning.

2.) The studios want to retain the rights to use AI writing and performing.

In the negotiation with SAG, they proposed a plan to pay actors only one day's wage to use their AI image FOREVER without paying them ever again. And the actors wouldn't have a ground to argue that. This is straight out of Black Mirror Season 6 Joan is Awful. Netflix is really writing its own villain origin story right now.

So what would happen if the workers budge and give up mid-way?

They'll end up losing their means to survive and have their images stolen. So striking for a few months is definitely better than starving indefinitely.

What's happening right now?

Right now, no projects fiananced by AMTPT companies can film with SAG members or develop with WGA members, which means only a very small percentage of all Hollywood productions can still happen. (More to come about this.)

With finished projects, if they're being released in the next few months, they're going to be released without any promo from the actors. They can't take part in interviews, premieres, fan events, or even post about their projects on social media.

2. Help with the strike.

Now that the double strike has officially happened, what's the best outcome for the workers and the audiences?

If you're just a casual entertainment enjoyer:

Cancel the streaming services not essential to you. The studios are going to panic more when they start losing even more money.

If you're a fan of a fanchise/upcoming blockbuster:

Flood the companies behind it, demanding them negotiate with the SAG and WGA on their own and agree to a fair deal. Threat not to support the projects unless it's settled fairly.

These studios with upcoming big-budget movies are bleeding money and panicking right now, any added pressure is good.

If one company buckles, the others would follow suit.

If you have money to spare: (Congrats on being rich, btw!)

Donate to the unions and support the ones with lower income in the first place, they'd be struggling with bills if the strike goes on for too long.

For everyone:

Call out big studios who are still planning on filming projects during the strike.

Please note there are exceptions to the strike rule:

1.) Foreign productions.

Please note an actor has to be part of the foreign union to work on these. Some of the foreign unions are still in meetings to decide if they'll allow US companies to work with their members, the most notable ones being the UK one and the Canadian one. Fingers crossed they don't fall for the deals the US studios are offering.

2.) Indie productions.

Indie companies can make their own deals with the workers since they're not included in the overall deal. So a very small amount of US projects can still happen. Make sure a project doesn't fall into this category before calling them out for scabbing.

That's about it for now. I might add more later in the replies if I think of anything.

[racefortheironthrone]

I pick Rockefeller just because I assumed the reply would be long just covering those governors.

Your analysis did bring up a question I'm curious about: What was the NYC financial crisis and it's aftermath?

Ah, I see.

I can talk about the NYC fiscal crisis, let me get my lecture notes.

As I talked about with the list of NYC mayors, NYC had been borrowing money for a while. The underlying cause was that NYC's industrial economy had started shrinking in the 1950s, sapping the city's tax base and population. To try to cope with the social consequences of this economic decline, the city had been increasing spending on police, teachers, and welfare benefits. For a good while, the city had been able to paper things over by increasing taxes and various creative accounting measures, and had managed to keep things rolling over.

And then the 1973-1975 recession hit. All of the sudden, the city loses 38,000 jobs, unemployment rises, which means demand on social services increase, and all of the sudden that poor bastard Abe Beame is looking at a $1.5 billion annual hole in the budget that's ballooning NYC's debt.

But at the same time, another part of the story is that NYC's banks aren't doing too hot: as Joshua Freeman notes in Working-Class New York, the same NYC banks that had been encouraging city government to borrow more (because municipal bonds were a good profit source) had lent money very unwisely to developing nations and needed to cover their losses. So they started selling off their municipal debt holdings and started pushing the city to increase the interest rates they were offering.

However, they also asked for major policy changes. They wanted the city to fire public sector workers, they wanted the city to cut spending on social services and capital projects, and until the city agreed to make these changes, they wouldn't buy or underwrite city bonds. To me, the telling detail is that they started asking for more policy changes - raise the subway fares from ¢35, end free tuition at CUNY - that wouldn't affect the city's budget at all, since neither the MTA nor CUNY were city agencies. This wasn't just creditors wanting their debtor to improve their budget outlooks: this was a capital strike aimed at disciplining the unions, poor minorities, and the middle class into accepting a worse standard of living.

And so the city went to the Ford Administration for emergency aid, and Ford turned them down because he wanted to make NYC an example of what happened to liberal governments. Ford's Treasury Secretary said that the Federal government would only provide aid if the rescue package was "so punitive, the overall experience made so painful, that no city, no political subdivision would ever be tempted to go down the same road."

Ultimately, the city was forced to knuckle under. It eventually got a state bailout, but only by giving in to every conceivable demand that capital had made and giving them and the state government control over the city's taxes, bonds, and budget for decades. The result was that:

a quarter of the city's workforce lost their jobs;

the city's schools saw their teacher-student ratios shoot up and their wraparound services cut to shreds;

CUNY shrank by 62,000 students and became 50% whiter as black and brown students could no longer afford to attend;

the subway became more expensive, less reliable, and more dangerous;

public hospitals closed, leading to diverging health outcomes between rich and poor;

fire houses closed, leading to increasing response times that were the key factor behind the Bronx burning;

and on and on.

At the end of the decade, NYC had lost a million residents and would not recover fully until the turn of the millenium. But hey, at least the books were balanced!

[astoundingbeyondbelief]

Kaiju Week in Review (January 7-13, 2024)

Hard to talk about the Monarch: Legacy of Monsters finale without spoilers, so if you haven't watched it yet, skip ahead to the next item. No flashbacks this time (time dilation aside), just our surviving heroes finally all on the same page to solve a seemingly impossible problem. The momentous reunion between Lee and Keiko got the space it deserved, although I was a touch disappointed that the obvious budding romance between Cate and May got shortchanged. And of course we finally got our first kaiju fight of the series, with Godzilla dispatching the Ion Dragon in a quick but ferocious battle. Fun to see this version of the character take on a low-stakes, low-power challenger for a change. I am routinely frustrated by TV seasons ending on cliffhangers (some of which are then never resolved), but they managed to conclude this season's storyline while setting up the next one, should they have the chance to tell it. Good to have some payoff to the Apex episode earlier in the series. I'm wondering if the series is planning to pivot to Kong now. Since Godzilla: King of the Monsters still hasn't happened yet, the Big G still can't make any public appearances without breaking continuity, which is quite the writing complication.

@bog-o-bones has blessed us with an excellent feature-length video essay on the history of the kaiju genre. Even for a walking encyclopedia like me, it was fun to have it all laid out so cleanly—the way the three genre pillars of Godzilla, Gamera, and Ultraman rise and fall in popularity, never entirely in sync and consequently keeping us steadily entertained over the decades. So many narratives about the genre in print are decades out of date and/or act like barely anything past the sixties was worth making. This one's up-to-the-minute and gives the seismic influence of films like Cloverfield and Pacific Rim their due. I have my quibbles (last-minute re-records accidentally omitted GAMERA -Rebirth-; the original Mothra deserved more attention), but I acknowledge the amount of works covered here is staggering and every fan would tell this story a little bit differently. Highly recommended.

IDW's biggest Godzilla comic ever is coming in May, a one-shot anthology called Godzilla: 70th Anniversary. It'll have nine stories over 100 pages, with the writers including Joëlle Jones, Michael W. Conrad, Matt Frank, James Stokoe, Adam Gorham, and Dan DiDio. (Some of these folks will presumably be illustrating their comics as well.) The solicitation doesn't offer many plot hints, given that scope: "From the American Old West to modern Tokyo and beyond, this collection features stories of the King of the Monsters fighting with its allies like Mothra, against old enemies like the terrible Mechagodzilla, and reshaping the lives of all who fall in its path!" I'm surprised they're not waiting until November—hopefully it doesn't get delayed into November.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire will now release in the U.S. two weeks early—March 29. It's taking the place of Bong Joon-ho's Mickey 17, which is now undated. I can hardly complain about being able to see it earlier, though the move comes with some risk, as it's now opening the week after Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.

SRS Cinema has opened preorders for their Yuzo the Biggest Battle in Tokyo Blu-ray. Or is it Yuzo: The Biggest Battle on Tokyo? That's what the product page says, but on the cover the title's unchanged. Oh, SRS. Anyway, bonus features are scant: just trailers and something called "A Brief Introduction To Ishii Yoshikazu."

Here's the teaser trailer for Volcanodon, a short film from Taiwan's Creator Union of Tokusatsu. They're aiming to have it uploaded to YouTube sometime this year, and I'll happily watch it. Obviously low-budget, but it's well-shot and it's nice to see a kaiju movie outside of Japan go all-in on practical effects.