[tgma]

There's this old amusing book The UNIX-HATERS Handbook[1] in which Dennis Ritchie has written a funny "Anti-Foreword."

"...Your sense of the possible is in no sense pure: sometimes you want the same thing you have, but wish you had done it yourselves; other times you want something different, but can't seem to get people to use it; sometimes one wonders why you just don't shut up and tell people to buy a PC with Windows or a Mac. No Gulag or lice, just a future whose intellectual tone and interaction style is set by Sonic the Hedgehog. You claim to seek progress, but you succeed mainly in whining..."

This seems quite relevant to Klien & Thompson's new work, which is basically advocating for and co-opting many of the core economic ideas of the current administration; ideas that would be difficult to imagine anyone would else in the government class would be qualified to out-execute them on when the rubber actually meets the road, despite their reservations and the differences they have at the margin. End of the day, somehow they wish they owned the agenda, which is understandable: they are peddling an ideology and it is difficult to see the competitive one win on merits.

[1]: https://archive.org/details/TheUnixHatersHandbook

[sdwr]

My beard isn't long enough to understand any of this.

Is Sonic a reference to crass commercialism, the diminished attention span of young people, or the iteration speed of the platform?

[dralley]

> which is basically advocating for and co-opting the core ideas of the current administration

How on earth do you come to this conclusion?

Trump is famously NIMBY, both in real estate and in infrastructure. He objects to solar and wind purely on the basis that "they ruin the view". He's anti-dense and pro-suburb, he hates zoning except when it actually comes to residential zoning, where he has pretty consistently tried to leverage it to destroy dense housing projects (other than his own presumably).

Aside from that "this administration" has no real consistent policy objectives other than kicking out immigrants. Not even cutting taxes, because tariffs are taxes.

DOGE barely even pretends to be a legitimate effort to make government more efficient as opposed to simply cutting things they don't like or understand without concern for the actual ROI. You don't slash the IRS if you care about government efficiency.

[tgma]

Both advocate deregulation and increasing economic growth.

Of course you can debate the difference at the margin ad nauseam, something the authors are doing more authoritatively than you and I could on every single podcast on the planet, trying hard to differentiate themselves from libertarians that preceded them decades ago. I remain unconvinced.

[pj_mukh]

NIMBY-ism vs YIMBY-ism isn't some margin difference. It's Klein's whole thesis.

[tgma]

It was not me who characterized the respective ideologies with those simplified labels. I don't characterize either of them with those labels to sensibly debate the point.

[pj_mukh]

You're calling a President hammering every nail with a Tariff hammer and who wants every neighborhood to use zoning to sue property rights out of existence but calling it "deregulation", who's using simplified labels here?

[divan]

> Both advocate ... increasing economic growth

Does anybody ever advocate economic decline?

[tgma]

I gave a concrete example to the affirmative to a different commenter, so strictly speaking, yes. Arguably many European politicians don't say this but advocate for policies whose immediate logical conclusion is stagnation or decreasing growth. One example to demonstrate the point is banning fossil fuels (not debating the merits of it, but to demonstrate the point). In fact, the writing of Abundance is implicitly acknowledging such policies are in place.

But that was not the main point: there is a difference in basing your ideology on top of that pillar and betting the farm on it ala Abundance vs. just thinking economic growth is a nice to have blessing.

[dralley]

You're making a fantastic argument for why your earlier accusation that Ezra is advocating "the core ideas of the current administration" is completely ludicrous.

All of MAGA's most core policies are fundamentally degrowth. Tariffs, cancelling the CHIPS act, cutting funding for medical research, pushing expensive fossil fuels like coal above cheaper renewables or even natural gas, pushing resource extraction and commodity manufacturing and agriculture at the expense of advanced manufacturing.

The outcome of all of those policies will be degrowth, even if Trump isn't using that rhetoric.

[dralley]

> both advocate for ... increasing economic growth

Fucking everyone does. That's like saying my moral code is the same as Ted Cruz's because we both think murder is wrong.

Trump wants to throw out most environmental laws and drill baby drill, Ezra wants to prune the ones that prevent us from actually saving the environment, which he highly values. These are worlds apart, you can't just toss them both in the "deregulation" category and call it a day.

[tgma]

> Fucking everyone does

No. Many people don't. Lots more don't have it as a priority. Ted Kaczynski and all the climate-change crowd come to mind.

Also you conveniently deleted my first word "deregulation."

[dralley]

Fine, 98% of the population would like to see increased economic development. The point is that you would be very hard pressed to find any issue in American politics less controversial. Degrowth is incredibly fringe. You wouldn't even get 10% at a Bernie Sanders rally to agree.

Pointing to the unibomber is hardly a great way to prove the position is mainstream.

I started with your latter point because it was just so absurd. I didn't ignore "deregulation", that was what the entire rest of my comment was about.

[TimorousBestie]

Agreed. Even the Greens (0.56% vote share in 2024) do not support either de-growth, no-growth, or low-growth in their platform.

As a non sequitur only tangentially related to the discussion, Kaczynski is dead.

[xnx]

Unintentionally, no modern administration may do more for degrowth than the current one.

[tgma]

It might be absurd to you, but clearly not absurd to the authors who have tried to address some of these explicitly. In any case, I leave it between you and the authors to hash out a left-accelerationist agenda—I am out of here as a simpleton reader.

[ajross]

> basically advocating for and co-opting many of the core economic ideas of the current administration

That seems laughable. Which policies specifically are you talking about? Trust me, no one would more like this to be true than I. But... good grief.

[tgma]

Feel free to act outraged. I am not going to further debate this charged topic. The authors are literally on every podcast trying to contrast themselves from various aspects of DOGE or deregulation and ideas that came before from Peter Thiel et al. That proves the point is not as far-fetched and crazy to debate, even if you disagree with the conclusion.

[ajross]

> Feel free to act outraged. I am not going to further debate this charged topic.

I'd genuinely prefer to engage on specifics. What Trump administration policies do you think Klein is co-opting?

[tgma]

Genuinely interested people in debate would not start by calling the other party's statement "laughable" out of the gate and backtrack later.

[ajross]

To be fair, I said it "seems" laughable. But I'm willing to be educated. The question still stands.