Its a good strategy, keep doing the same thing over and over until the enemy is like "there's no way they're going to do that again," and then you do it again, and you win

Mersheimer's not a leftist, is he? He's a good analyst but I always thought he was an institutional intellectual

Intuitively, it makes sense: consume more stuff = less stuff to consume. But its kinda like comparing the credit and finances of a single household to the credit and finances of an entire nation. Its an insidious little slight of hand, that tricks people up because its legit just really hard to conceive of national industry.

That's why I like the groceries example, because it's just as obvious. Connecting wages to unemployment is kinda tricky still, but like we just went through covid-inflation so maybe that helps connect the dots

Citizen Weston is alive and well in the liberal establishment.

Remember, the belief that prices go up as a function of increased wages is not true. Supply and demand have little effect on anything in the long term. We literally just went through a prolonged period of inflation, it did occur after a moderate increase in wages, but it was extremely well established during that period that most of the price increases (about 55%) were driven by corporate profiteering, with the rest driven by actual price increases caused by war profiteering in Ukraine. None of it was due to demand squeezes driven by consumption. When wages went up corporations realized they could raise prices. That's it, that's how the system works.

When workers wages go up, they don't suddenly start buying insane levels of groceries. Like if my family eats a carton of eggs and two gallons of milk per week, having more money doesn't mean we suddenly consume twice as many eggs and twice as much dairy. There may be slight increases in consumption in these areas if people who couldn't afford enough nutritional food can suddenly afford enough. But the effect on the economy, if it causes minor temporary shortages, can be adjusted. Only under capitalist "recession" which is an over production of the means of production, does increasing production to meet human need create a problem.

Actually, the more direct cause of differences in wages is not consumer demand but level of unemployment. This is the real risk of increasing production to meet human need. Ultimately, it would require hiring enough workers to meet it! and then as the labor market becomes less competitive for the worker and more competitive for the employer, the new workers need to be paid more. We also recently saw this go into effect after covid. So many people died from covid that it shrunk the unemployed population in the US by 12%-15%. How did the Federal reserve respond? By raising interest rates, making it more expensive to borrow money, putting restrictions on new hiring. They literally said that this is why they were doing it, to drive down wages, in order to lower inflation. Stop hiring new workers, hire them for less money. Rather than do something about corporate profiteering.

And why is that? Not because it is good business, but because it maintains power between classes. Its actually good for business when workers make more money. Workers pay down debt, spend more on luxury goods, vacations, home ownership, all these objectively good benchmarks of a healthy economy improve. But employers have less control over the movement and activity of workers. I can easily find another job in my field for the same or better pay. As a class, the workers get more power, and the owners give up power. That's how capitalism works. What is good on one side is bad on the other.

We must be absolutely certain not just that raising wages does not increase prices, but specifically why this is the case.

I'm 45 and that feeling has always appeared as the impetus and precursor to change. The thoughts and feelings you are having feel bad but trust that feeling. There's sort of phases of self awareness that develop through adulthood. Maybe you've heard people talk about getting a "fuck it" attitude going into 40. This is probably something similar, but it's like an urge to take things more seriously. We can't really get to the "fuck it" phase without going through the phase where we learn what our priorities actually are and aren't.

My advice: trust yourself and listen to yourself. You can't change everything all at once, but you can make incremental changes which will amount to real change in less time than you realize. My 30's were a period of incredible personal growth, and it started with some of the feelings you're experiencing.

Yeah I'm fine with treating him with an even hand. I'm not sure how useful it is to just paint every president with the same black mark. Pre ww2 was pre USA core imperialism, the rules were a little different. We got the new deal, Germany got Hitler. Understanding why the ascent of the international working class after ww1 led to the defeat of the international working class after ww2, and how the project played out differently in different places at like exactly the same time is the real practical insight afforded by class-based historical analysis IMO. And practical understanding requires understanding the actual history, not just some leftist caricature of it.

I think the model for this is like Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B DuBois. Just straght, unvarnished facts about every aspect of the period, particularly how national and international causes affected individuals on the basis of class antagonisms (and vice versa.) Gramsci talks about Piedmont Savoy empire understanding their historic role in the risorgimento, contrasted with the more progressive Action Party, and how that developed the next 100 years of Italian politics. And how knowing our "historic role" requires knowing the real opportunities and limitations afforded by history, and not what we think they "should be" as historic subjects.

I vaguely remember Blitz ball! But maybe I skipped the harder ones, I honestly don't remember.

Sure, I mean, I did end up skipping them. I wanted to play them but found some of them impossible, and put a lot of time into some of them.

The Wimp Lo, "we designed these areas badly for nostalgia," doesn't really scan for me but whatever. I played FFX, but don't remember of I tried to get ultimate weapons, I was a completionist back then too, but honestly don't remember very much from it

FDR was a moderate, organized labor forced him to make concessions to the working class. FDR got credit for 40 years of labor organizing. Everybody knows about the new deal in 1935, nobody knows about the 1934 nationwide strike wave.

Granted, was he terrible? In some ways yes. Japanese internment was a particularly egregious example. Tbf, Abraham Lincoln was also a moderate re: slavery until historic conditions forced the issue of emancipation. A bad president would have held the line against objective historical conditions and deepened the crisis. This is what Trump does. FDR wasn't a bad president like Trump, but IMO he was more like a guy who did the minimum when wealth inequality and crisis was not just the worst, but when the organized workers demanded change and were able to fairly quickly take over whole cities and industries in order to force our demands.

Since USAmerican big ag companies couldn't compete with Japanese farming, FDR put 120k Japanese people in internment camps, 22k were agricultural workers which made up the vast majority of Japanese farmers and farm laborers. The war was used as an excuse for internment, and USA big ag companies were able to buy these farms for as low as $23 per acre.

There was a war, there was a crime, FDR was responsible = war criminal

I played it a few months ago. I enjoyed it. As a Sekiro player I liked, but didnt love, the parry system. Thought the game was gorgeous, loved the story, music, environments.

Was kinda meh re: most of the gameplay. It was disappointing how many areas just didn't tell any story, i enter it, and theres this dramatic explosive environment, I ooh and ah, and its just a cul du sac with an item. Dozens of.locations like this, and most of the other ones weren't much more interesting.

The jumping puzzles were not very good. The beach puzzles just weren't fun. I especially hated the one where the guy launches explosives at your platform, and you have to use the world attack button which has a ridiculous cool down.

Power scaling was completely broken. The endgame enemies have a trillion HP, and you do 10 billion damage per attack, and the strat is to create a build so broken that you can do a trillion and one damage on the first hit, because you only have a million hit points and if you don't kill them first hit, the enemy attacks 20 times in a row and does 3 million per hit. Like at first the combat was too easy, then it was too hard, then it was easy again, and then it was impossible unless you equipped 300 luminas. Just like zero consideration for game balance.

Coming from Sekiro, the parry timing was pretty wonky. I think there was influence from Sekiro, but also from stuff people already mentioned like Super Mario RPG (a game I absolutely loved as a kid.) Don't really know how to describe it, but Sekiro was literally the last game I played before Exp 33, and I played it 7 times through, beat it charmless on ng6, platinumed and completed everything but the immortal journey. Before that i played Nightreign, like 300 hours only Executor. My shit was tight, Exp 33 was not.

It really just came off like an advertisement for Unreal engine, which is I assume why it won such accolades. It was a good game, I was in the mood for a jrpg, which I hadn't played one I really liked in a very long time. Was expecting multiple playthroughs, but it was a one and done for me. Good, but not goty imo

I had just played Sekiro extensively, and this def had the Sekiro parry/block mechanic but less tight, more tricky timing, as in enemies get more challenging by having weirder parry timings