You mistakenly thought I said use Ukraine as a fly paper. In response I said Europe would prefer that it be the fly paper.

I didn’t think you said that. I think Ukraine is the obvious fly paper in the analogy. Europe very clearly is not, nor does anyone outside of the continent wish that on themselves.

The UK and France thought that letting Hitler have the Sudetenland would appease him

That’s historical revisionism.

They had no capacity to keep Germans out of Europe. This wasn’t a choice they were making, it was an excuse for their impotency.

Because before the attack, the general narrative was that we need to be worried about what power we give our government

Under Clinton, the narrative was “we need to be worried about what power we give The Democrats because they are Evil America Hating Communists”. Under Bush, the narrative was “we need to support our Jesus-loving Freedom Loving Republican President”.

I would argue that fear of concentrated power in government went up astronomically in the run up to the 2004 election. But so long as Republicans were in control, the fear wasn’t echoed in national media.

Only after Obama took office did we see a re-emergence of Reaganite government skepticism. And that evaporated the moment Trump took office.

ethical human milk

Imagining this overlayed on a man with a big smile on his face.

Listen, I’m going to cast it into the fire, sure.

But then it’s going to get all goopy and crispy and I’m going to pull it back out again to eat it.

If both those premises hold

You’re just doing Pascal’s Wager For Computers.

Problem is the official definition of unemployment disregards the many who drop off the unemployment-insurance rolls, never qualified for unemployment-insurance to begin with so were never counted and those who are long-term unemployed

Because they’re not part of the labor force for reasons independent of a given economic cycle. If I’m on Long Term Disability because of some chronic medical issue, the number of job postings, the current interest rates, and prevailing wage rates won’t incentivize me to look for a job. If I’m retired, there’s not a lot you can do to the labor market to entice me back out of it. If I’m going to college for a professional degree, you’re not going to lure me back into a dead-end service sector job with a marginal change in job availability. If there’s a glut of construction jobs, that won’t impact my search for a nursing position or an IT gig.

Stats are great but go out and do some qualitative data gathering by talking to people.

Sure. But the conclusions you’ll reach are that people are sticky for reasons that have nothing to do with regional economic policy. Looking at U3 gives us a picture of prevailing trends among active job-seekers. Dragging in a bunch of people who aren’t looking for jobs doesn’t give us a clear picture of changes in job availability among people looking for work. You’re just muddying the waters to make the unemployment figure look scarier than it is.

IQ has plateaued or gone down for some western countries while continuing to rise elsewhere

You’re describing the “Reverse Flynn Effect”, which is still hotly debated as happening at all much less happening to this day. And it’s got nothing to do with modern-day school performance listed in OP’s image. The Flynn Effect is more neatly tied to the Lead-Crime Hypothesis, having emerged in the 1990s and largely restricted itself to post-industrial nation states.

Like, you hear people say that fast food would become prohibitively expensive if we raise the minimum wage

You don’t even have to scale this to countries. Cities with a higher min wage have proven better results.

Prison reform in the US in the 1960s felt - for a brief instant - like a truly progressive force. Then Reaganism happened…

🫡

What I said was that Europe would prefer that Russia attack it rather than Ukraine.

That’s an insane thing to say, both on it’s face and based on the last four years of Europeans very strategically avoiding direct confrontation with Russia.

Then the combined forces of Europe would be able to defeat Russia.

Napoleon on line 1. Hitler on line 2. They are both eager to discuss what you have in mind.

The UK and France gave Hitler the Sudetenland

It wasn’t theirs to give. The Sudetenland is in Czechoslovakia, a country that didn’t even exist until 1918. It was full of Austro-Hungarians who were some of the first foreigners to explicitly align with Nazi Germany.

The UK and France weren’t in a position to stop him, any more than they were in a position to stop the proto-fascist war hero Gabriele Annunzio and a rogue force of Italian mutineers from seizing the Adriatic port city of Fiume in 1919.

Might as well claim Obama gave Putin Crimea. Or that Bush gave him South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

The Donbus had similar problems. It was populated by a large number of Russian nationals who were getting propaganda pumped into their brains from across the border. That was kicking off domestic insurgency, which Ukrainian nationalists were eager to squash.

Europeans had neither skin in the game nor influence in the region. All they were willing to do is send mercenaries and cheap military equipment over the border. And we know how that worked out.

Nobody wanted an all out war with Russia.

U6 is around 8%. Pretty bad.

Historically below average.

Things are much worse than the “official” stats are saying.

Then put some real analysis on the table and stop making scary fingers behind every stat you dredge up.

I’m tired of reading the “everyone’s lying to you and things are worse than you realize” line when I’m fucking alive in the world and can see for myself, at a personal level.

I don’t bother reading statistics if I’m just going to add a vibes-based modifier to scare myself.

Ultras fear the scroll.

Well, they should. That’s in a 2-pt font. You’ll blow your eyes out trying to read it.

They don’t understand that, in order to get to the end-goal, you need to leverage the good parts of capitalism—while keeping the capitalists on a short leash—in order to quickly develop the productive forces, especially when the imperialist states are trying to crush you.

.world and it’s shitlib affiliates have pretty neatly expunged anyone who could possibly be called “Ultra” from it’s platform years back.

So, while I agree with the sentiment, idk if that’s what we’re seeing today. More that people in a Western capitalist institution are getting crushed in the machine. And they justifiably don’t like that. So they say “turn the machine off”, without really considering what the machinary of capitalism is doing or why they might still need it or how you can operate heavy machinery without people getting chewed up in the gears.

If you’ve never experienced being around some Russian on vacation, I promise, Americans aren’t the only annoying people out there.

The Americanization of Russia in the 90s/00s was a deeply tragic moment in the country’s history.

Or the English in any part of Western Europe that’s a cheap flight away from London.

Ye Olde Amerikkkans

Maybe Spaceballs was right. Maybe Evil will always win, because Good is dumb.

The irony of that line was the bad guy being very dumb and losing a few scenes later.

I’ve never heard of a job that paid on those terms. Historically, you’ve had hourly contracts on a fixed schedule, so you were functionally guaranteed a minimum number of hours. But modern service workers operate under Zero Hours contracts that don’t guarantee any kind of minimum.

Some institutions have been tracking general intelligence for ages (like the army) it’s been going down since the 1960s

I mean, if you’re talking about IQ, you’re misreading those statistics. It’s not the Intelligence that’s been going down. It’s the Quotient that’s been going up. The baseline (ie, IQ = 100) for intelligence is significantly higher today than it was sixty years ago. That’s in part due to improvements in health and nutrition, but also the end result of people running these tests so regularly that you can effectively study for them in advance.

how can you not think that the ruling elites want to have dumb heards of cattle which they can control?

I don’t think the “ruling elites” have any kind of consensus on what they want, as evidenced by the perpetual infighting culminating in outright violence aimed at one another. I don’t think these economic elites really have a grasp of what they’re trying to do. Half of them thought Jeffery Epstein was a genius based on an email correspondence that suggests he was barely literate. If Musk, Zuck, Bezos, Thiel, and Trump are any indication of how the average Ruling Elite operates, they’re thinking with their dicks half the time and with a nostril full of coke the other half.

That this fractious conglomerate of idiots, assholes, and fuckbois have a plan more sophisticated than “Steal Everything Not Nailed Down and trade it for Pedo-Coins” is not in evidence. A look into their (routinely poorly managed) interpersonal communications suggest that some of them think they’re doing EugenicsPlus super-intelligence breeding programs by getting THOTs on Twitter pregnant. Others want to put their brains on the computer to live forever. Still others think they can achieve world conquest by running a strat from HOI4 set on Medium difficulty.

If there’s an intelligence gap in this country, I would argue that it’s top down. The so-called Elites are the ones getting dumber faster than the rest of us.

They want to fuck and exploit you

So did the Cave Man. But we’re so far off from the 11-D Chess of Allen Dulles and Henry Kissinger, when it comes to socio-economic machinations. This is Charles VI / Henry VI territory. These people are drooling their way into the 21st century and we’re just getting dragged along behind them.

The compounding returns of a capitalist economy reward iterative investments in new productive capital. That’s fine. Good even. At least, according to Marx. If your goal is to approach a post-scarcity economy, you need a period of growth in productive capacity and distribution.

Because we use currency as a token of exchange, and capital improvements require currency to implement, we incentivize a virtuous cycle of re-investment in token-accruing capital as we operate a capitalist system.

The flaws in the system begin to stand out when the process of cycling currency into capital investment fails to value anything without a price-tag attached to it. Go back to the 1970s/80s and you’ll see the neoliberal economists struggling with this paradox of post-Bretton Woods economic modeling. Economic growth has material limits, but our fiat currency system does not. Negative externalities don’t have a built in short-term economic cost, so investors and administrators don’t recognize the accumulating socio-economic friction until a fire breaks out.

But OP’s premise is all wrong. The skill, the creative talent, and the labor that capitalism rewards is all bound up in the rapid recirculation of currency through capital. Neurosurgeons, muralists, and janitors aren’t missing out because capitalism fails to reward them. They’re missing out because they have no vehicle to rapidly compound the returns on their initial efforts.

Even then, there are tools for compounding efforts that all three of these professions can and do exploit. Education is one example. A skilled neurosurgeon can profit more handsomely as a mentor or professor than as a pure surgeon. An art school will generate more professional art than any single artist. And management is another. A veteran service worker who can efficiently direct the efforts of a large number of peers will control more productive forces than if they were hands-on at a single job site. A doctor who operates a clinic full of juniors or a sculptor or prodigious author with a team underneath her will yield far more work product than they could alone.

Without context for the numbers or their significance, this seems like another “AAH! Education Panic!” bit of discourse.

Pretty obvious the big hit happened during COVID and now we’re in a long hangover period. But absent more meat on the bone than “Number was 500 and now it’s 460”. What’s the useful takeaway from this information? Other than to just express more generic Doomerist sentiments in the comments? Hard to say.

Also might be worth asking, if the numbers had gone up instead of down, would anyone here be celebrating? Would it have even been posted? Case in point:

The Test-Optional Paradox: Why Published SAT Scores Keep Rising Even as Fewer Students Submit Them

Is this something we should be happy about or sad about?

Many people are checking entirely out of the economy (no longer looking for work)

Sure, they’re called Retirees. And they’re moving into retirement due to their advanced age. And we’re seeing a glut of them due to the lopsided Boomer age cohort. But, among Millennials and Zoomers, workforce participation is above the historical average. Two-income housesholds are the modern norm. We are not in any kind of unemployment crisis. If anything, we’re experiencing a labor shortage.

We literally have a class of working homeless people in this country.

That’s got nothing to do with workforce participation, either as a useful metric or a share of the population. Far more indicative of our abysmal housing policies and our atrocious criminal justice system.