Isaac Grafstein on right-wing anti-interventionism; Ted Gioia's fantasy newspaper; Eric Kaufmann on American Jews at ebb tide; Marc Andreessen on the real source of cost disease
"Newspapers never figured this out. As long ago as 2001, I suggested that newspapers needed to get out of the walled-garden model. I wrote The Club vs. the Silo. Today, Substack is not so far from what I called the club model."
Over the last half year or so, Substack has definitely been trending in the direction of "walled-garden", with dozens of major changes introduced subtlely or at a gradual pace*.
It's kind of a common internet business model to be free and open at first to try and grow as fast as possible and attract users and popular content creators, etc. but then when one hits critical mass or self-sustaining momentum or whatever, start monetizing, monetizing, monetizing (or in the non-profit world, "just paying the bills" or whatever.)
The newspapers that survived and thrived did indeed figure out that they needed subscribers and also 'micropayments' from everybody who read every article. It's just that people pay in the form of having some of their attention drawn by targeted ads, and also by (let's face it, unwittingly) giving away the recent updates of personal behaviors and information which in aggregate is highly valuable to advertisers. Most people can't read the article without giving up however many cents worth of personal info it takes to keep the paper afloat.
Micropayments Triumphed! Just not in the form once hoped for.
*You can tell by looking at how many penetrative scripts and trackers they've added to the web experience, becomming alarmingly "Facebook-esque" in the process. That's also part of why it took forever for them to come out with a simple app for Android Smartphone, despite the (apparent, not actual) almost minimalist need for any functionality, just displaying graphics and text.
That would ordinarily be something you would expect Silicon Valley types to crank out in about 15 minutes.
Yes, I'm sure negotiations with Google about side-payments outside the ecosystem and trying to get them to make an exception to their typical cut of all subscriptions, etc. But I also suspect that Google knows a thing or two about the non-apparent functionality of the long-delayed app ("Uber-esque" i.e., borderline spyware). Maybe they had to trim it back, maybe they came to a deal, who knows.
I never faulted newspapers for trying to increase revenue. I fault a newspaper for trying to make people pay for a traditional bundle of newspaper content, rather than joining with other content sources to create new bundles.
In practical terms, to be "anti-interventionist" with respect to the war in Ukraine is to favor a Russian victory. Ukrainians already have plenty of experience, old and new, of what to expect from Russian rule; that is why they are fighting. Given the historical experience of the Jews in Eastern Europe, I would have expected a Jew to be more aware of the consequences of letting a large, bellicose dictatorship overpower a smaller, peaceful neighbor.
I'm a Jew, a descendant of Jews from the Pale of the Settlement, and I find your use of the 'historical experience of the Jews in Eastern Europe' as an argument that Jews should be siding with Ukraine to be both offensive and ignorant. If you are attempting to draw an analogy between Russia and Nazi Germany, please point me to evidence of Russian gas chambers, concentration camps, mass graves and cattle cars. The only mass grave I've ever seen is located in a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev. It is called Babi Yar, and when I was there in the early 1990s, I looked in vain at the monument overlooking the ravine for any recognition that the victims buried there were disproportionately Jewish. As in neighboring countries where similar events took place (for example, Lithuania), such a heinous crime could not have taken place without the collaboration of a critical number of local residents. Support for Ukraine in the American Jewish community is one of the many baffling things about this war. I recently watched an interview with a Ukrainian Jewish woman who excused the use of Nazi symbols by some Ukrainian groups as an expression of Ukrainian nationalism. Sickening. As a Jew, I have no dog in this fight. As for Zelensky, his being identified as a Jew is bad for the Jews.
I mentioned experience old and new. The old experience includes the Gulag and the Holodomor. The new experience includes, yes, mass graves, in Izium, Lyman, and Kherson; you can easily find the stories online.
Soviet citizens of multiple nationalities and ethnicities were the victims of the Gulag and the brutal collectivization of Soviet agriculture (which resulted in the Holodomor), including ethnic Russians, and the Soviet leader under whom both of these atrocities were perpetrated was Georgian, not Russian. As for the alleged mass graves, so many of the stories put out by the Ukrainian and Western media have proven to be lies and hoaxes (for example, Zelensky's attempt to blame Russia for the Ukrainian missile that landed in Poland, the meme that Russia is running out of missiles and ammunition, or most recently, the preposterous claim that some pro-Ukrainian group carried out the attack on the Nordstream pipeline) that I take these stories with a grain of salt. In contrast, I do believe the stories that Ukrainian paramilitary groups have been lobbing shells at civilian targets in the Donbas since 2014, but atrocities committed by Ukrainians against ethnic Russians don't seem to count with you. You clearly said that Jews should side with Ukraine in this conflict simply because they are Jews, and because of the historical experience of Jews in Eastern Europe. Like other ethnic minorities, Jews should be treated as individuals. I disagree with most American Jews, left or right, on this particular issue as well as many other matters, and I refuse to be blamed or scapegoated as a Jew for this stupid proxy war that has the potential to turn into a broader and perhaps even a nuclear conflict. Your depiction of the war as a black-and-white conflict between a large 'dictatorship' and a small 'peaceful neighbor' is simplistic and ahistorical, but I'm not going to take up space in Kling's Substack to go into that topic.
Obviously, being anti-intervention vis-a-vis Ukraine is not popular now. Perhaps anti-intervention is wrong. But I think it is the position that is most natural for a libertarian to take.
Sketch out in your mind what the likely series of events would be had the US not intervened.
1) Going all the way back to the Maiden Coup or before
2) Since 2014
3) Since 2022
4) After the initial invasion wave (say after the withdrawal from Kiev)
Alternatively, what if the US offered support only with conditions, and what would those conditions be.
What are the likely outcomes? Would they make life better or worse for the people in Ukraine, Russia, or elsewhere compared to what has happened? What degree of confidence would you have in those predictions? Try to construct a theoretical adversarial debate in your head where someone tried to make the best case for the other side.
I'm a right-wing anti-interventionist on the Ukraine war (not that the left-right distinction is very relevant these days), and in hindsight, most interventions beginning with Vietnam (for the record, I got off the interventionist train at the Syrian stop). Having worked in the development field in both Ukraine and Russia in the 1990s, I am relatively well informed about that part of the world. I'm also a skeptic on libertarianism (putting it diplomatically), and don't think being a libertarian is necessary to conclude that this particular intervention is immoral, reckless and grossly incompetent. In lieu of a rant, I thought I'd provide this link to my current favorite Moscow vlogger for those interested in getting a sense of what Russians and Russian life are like these days: https://www.youtube.com/@madeinrussland. The vlogger is an English-speaking Russian woman, and her commentary drips with sarcasm about the effects of sanctions and Western misconceptions about her country. The most recent video, about the newly opened Moscow metro line, invites comparisons with the 'deathtrap' the DC metro system (and perhaps those in other major US cities) was becoming before I retired. As this vlogger illustrates, it is possible for a modern society to have women who are outspoken and strong-willed, and yet somehow manage to avoid the 'feminization' that Dr. Kling and others have written critically about.
re: Kaufmann, I wonder about the rates of Jewish-Asian intermarriage in the US. Anecdotally it seems fairly high. I'd be interested to know what people who have studied it think, whether it is actually true and, if so, why might that be.
Re: "For the same reasons that we are skeptical about government’s domestic interventions, we should be skeptical about government’s foreign interventions."
We should be doubly skeptical about government's foreign interventions. Checks and balances are weaker in foreign interventions. Voter ignorance is greater about foreign affairs. Irrationality predictably emerges and becomes entrenched in wartime psychologies; for example, sunk-cost fallacies, visceral hatred, "face," illusion of control (despite risk of escalation), zero-sum thinking that produces negative-sum interaction.
Re: Ukraine, a particular Reddit forum I frequent has alot of "grey tribe" amoral interventionists. They say things like "it's cheap for the US to keep Russia bogged down in a war, to our benefit." It's the anti-interventionists in this case who are moralists, thinking it cruel to prolong someone else's war and directly inject weapons into it.
"Going forward, will teachers’ unions and legacy universities succeed in keeping the education process backward?"
I agree with grouchy Marc, and will say the teachers' unions and big universities succeed in stifling all innovation while furthering the decline of their own product.
During the pandemic, teachers not wanting to return to class was actually a boon for "ed tech" and private/alternative providers of education. Lefty critics of lockdown were constantly pointing this out, this odd self-immolation by teachers.
I hadn’t previously understood the difference in your position and the Baumol position. That was illuminating. But in essence regulation creates a Baumol condition doesn’t it? Labor costs go up because those who save and make money from the productive areas of the economy spend their dollars on the unproductive part? Here’s how you play the difference. I have a friend who runs a title insurance company. He’s doubled the normal profit margins by moving almost all the labor to the Philippines.
Given that cost disease is being witnessed EVERYWHERE, not just in the US, I submit that it should essentially be treated as a natural force. No one seems to be able to do anything about it. (Not natural like radiation, mind you.)
"Newspapers never figured this out. As long ago as 2001, I suggested that newspapers needed to get out of the walled-garden model. I wrote The Club vs. the Silo. Today, Substack is not so far from what I called the club model."
Over the last half year or so, Substack has definitely been trending in the direction of "walled-garden", with dozens of major changes introduced subtlely or at a gradual pace*.
It's kind of a common internet business model to be free and open at first to try and grow as fast as possible and attract users and popular content creators, etc. but then when one hits critical mass or self-sustaining momentum or whatever, start monetizing, monetizing, monetizing (or in the non-profit world, "just paying the bills" or whatever.)
The newspapers that survived and thrived did indeed figure out that they needed subscribers and also 'micropayments' from everybody who read every article. It's just that people pay in the form of having some of their attention drawn by targeted ads, and also by (let's face it, unwittingly) giving away the recent updates of personal behaviors and information which in aggregate is highly valuable to advertisers. Most people can't read the article without giving up however many cents worth of personal info it takes to keep the paper afloat.
Micropayments Triumphed! Just not in the form once hoped for.
*You can tell by looking at how many penetrative scripts and trackers they've added to the web experience, becomming alarmingly "Facebook-esque" in the process. That's also part of why it took forever for them to come out with a simple app for Android Smartphone, despite the (apparent, not actual) almost minimalist need for any functionality, just displaying graphics and text.
That would ordinarily be something you would expect Silicon Valley types to crank out in about 15 minutes.
Yes, I'm sure negotiations with Google about side-payments outside the ecosystem and trying to get them to make an exception to their typical cut of all subscriptions, etc. But I also suspect that Google knows a thing or two about the non-apparent functionality of the long-delayed app ("Uber-esque" i.e., borderline spyware). Maybe they had to trim it back, maybe they came to a deal, who knows.
I never faulted newspapers for trying to increase revenue. I fault a newspaper for trying to make people pay for a traditional bundle of newspaper content, rather than joining with other content sources to create new bundles.
In practical terms, to be "anti-interventionist" with respect to the war in Ukraine is to favor a Russian victory. Ukrainians already have plenty of experience, old and new, of what to expect from Russian rule; that is why they are fighting. Given the historical experience of the Jews in Eastern Europe, I would have expected a Jew to be more aware of the consequences of letting a large, bellicose dictatorship overpower a smaller, peaceful neighbor.
I'm a Jew, a descendant of Jews from the Pale of the Settlement, and I find your use of the 'historical experience of the Jews in Eastern Europe' as an argument that Jews should be siding with Ukraine to be both offensive and ignorant. If you are attempting to draw an analogy between Russia and Nazi Germany, please point me to evidence of Russian gas chambers, concentration camps, mass graves and cattle cars. The only mass grave I've ever seen is located in a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev. It is called Babi Yar, and when I was there in the early 1990s, I looked in vain at the monument overlooking the ravine for any recognition that the victims buried there were disproportionately Jewish. As in neighboring countries where similar events took place (for example, Lithuania), such a heinous crime could not have taken place without the collaboration of a critical number of local residents. Support for Ukraine in the American Jewish community is one of the many baffling things about this war. I recently watched an interview with a Ukrainian Jewish woman who excused the use of Nazi symbols by some Ukrainian groups as an expression of Ukrainian nationalism. Sickening. As a Jew, I have no dog in this fight. As for Zelensky, his being identified as a Jew is bad for the Jews.
I mentioned experience old and new. The old experience includes the Gulag and the Holodomor. The new experience includes, yes, mass graves, in Izium, Lyman, and Kherson; you can easily find the stories online.
Soviet citizens of multiple nationalities and ethnicities were the victims of the Gulag and the brutal collectivization of Soviet agriculture (which resulted in the Holodomor), including ethnic Russians, and the Soviet leader under whom both of these atrocities were perpetrated was Georgian, not Russian. As for the alleged mass graves, so many of the stories put out by the Ukrainian and Western media have proven to be lies and hoaxes (for example, Zelensky's attempt to blame Russia for the Ukrainian missile that landed in Poland, the meme that Russia is running out of missiles and ammunition, or most recently, the preposterous claim that some pro-Ukrainian group carried out the attack on the Nordstream pipeline) that I take these stories with a grain of salt. In contrast, I do believe the stories that Ukrainian paramilitary groups have been lobbing shells at civilian targets in the Donbas since 2014, but atrocities committed by Ukrainians against ethnic Russians don't seem to count with you. You clearly said that Jews should side with Ukraine in this conflict simply because they are Jews, and because of the historical experience of Jews in Eastern Europe. Like other ethnic minorities, Jews should be treated as individuals. I disagree with most American Jews, left or right, on this particular issue as well as many other matters, and I refuse to be blamed or scapegoated as a Jew for this stupid proxy war that has the potential to turn into a broader and perhaps even a nuclear conflict. Your depiction of the war as a black-and-white conflict between a large 'dictatorship' and a small 'peaceful neighbor' is simplistic and ahistorical, but I'm not going to take up space in Kling's Substack to go into that topic.
“….we should be skeptical about government’s foreign interventions.”
So how would that apply to Ukraine? Would a skeptical libertarian have said no intervention, all-in, or somewhere in between?
Obviously, being anti-intervention vis-a-vis Ukraine is not popular now. Perhaps anti-intervention is wrong. But I think it is the position that is most natural for a libertarian to take.
Someone just sent me this, which seems related:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUdzwzqThu4&t=5650s
Sketch out in your mind what the likely series of events would be had the US not intervened.
1) Going all the way back to the Maiden Coup or before
2) Since 2014
3) Since 2022
4) After the initial invasion wave (say after the withdrawal from Kiev)
Alternatively, what if the US offered support only with conditions, and what would those conditions be.
What are the likely outcomes? Would they make life better or worse for the people in Ukraine, Russia, or elsewhere compared to what has happened? What degree of confidence would you have in those predictions? Try to construct a theoretical adversarial debate in your head where someone tried to make the best case for the other side.
I'm a right-wing anti-interventionist on the Ukraine war (not that the left-right distinction is very relevant these days), and in hindsight, most interventions beginning with Vietnam (for the record, I got off the interventionist train at the Syrian stop). Having worked in the development field in both Ukraine and Russia in the 1990s, I am relatively well informed about that part of the world. I'm also a skeptic on libertarianism (putting it diplomatically), and don't think being a libertarian is necessary to conclude that this particular intervention is immoral, reckless and grossly incompetent. In lieu of a rant, I thought I'd provide this link to my current favorite Moscow vlogger for those interested in getting a sense of what Russians and Russian life are like these days: https://www.youtube.com/@madeinrussland. The vlogger is an English-speaking Russian woman, and her commentary drips with sarcasm about the effects of sanctions and Western misconceptions about her country. The most recent video, about the newly opened Moscow metro line, invites comparisons with the 'deathtrap' the DC metro system (and perhaps those in other major US cities) was becoming before I retired. As this vlogger illustrates, it is possible for a modern society to have women who are outspoken and strong-willed, and yet somehow manage to avoid the 'feminization' that Dr. Kling and others have written critically about.
re: Kaufmann, I wonder about the rates of Jewish-Asian intermarriage in the US. Anecdotally it seems fairly high. I'd be interested to know what people who have studied it think, whether it is actually true and, if so, why might that be.
Worth keeping in mind that the most valuable company in the world, Apple, is still succeeding with its walled gardens, in defiance of Joy’s law.
Re: "For the same reasons that we are skeptical about government’s domestic interventions, we should be skeptical about government’s foreign interventions."
We should be doubly skeptical about government's foreign interventions. Checks and balances are weaker in foreign interventions. Voter ignorance is greater about foreign affairs. Irrationality predictably emerges and becomes entrenched in wartime psychologies; for example, sunk-cost fallacies, visceral hatred, "face," illusion of control (despite risk of escalation), zero-sum thinking that produces negative-sum interaction.
Re: Ukraine, a particular Reddit forum I frequent has alot of "grey tribe" amoral interventionists. They say things like "it's cheap for the US to keep Russia bogged down in a war, to our benefit." It's the anti-interventionists in this case who are moralists, thinking it cruel to prolong someone else's war and directly inject weapons into it.
"Going forward, will teachers’ unions and legacy universities succeed in keeping the education process backward?"
I agree with grouchy Marc, and will say the teachers' unions and big universities succeed in stifling all innovation while furthering the decline of their own product.
During the pandemic, teachers not wanting to return to class was actually a boon for "ed tech" and private/alternative providers of education. Lefty critics of lockdown were constantly pointing this out, this odd self-immolation by teachers.
I hadn’t previously understood the difference in your position and the Baumol position. That was illuminating. But in essence regulation creates a Baumol condition doesn’t it? Labor costs go up because those who save and make money from the productive areas of the economy spend their dollars on the unproductive part? Here’s how you play the difference. I have a friend who runs a title insurance company. He’s doubled the normal profit margins by moving almost all the labor to the Philippines.
Given that cost disease is being witnessed EVERYWHERE, not just in the US, I submit that it should essentially be treated as a natural force. No one seems to be able to do anything about it. (Not natural like radiation, mind you.)