@GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai avatar

GhostOnTheHalfShell

@GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai

opinionated lurker of the intarwebs.

Used to write code, still do. c/c++, java, php, js, c#, gdscript, gnawed on sql, sparql, unix/windows etc etc billions of years ago.

tech, graphics, anything STEM
anything anthropology, history, linguistics
anything blender, gimp (although i scream using it), audacity
prefers not to be run over by cars

I drink Philz.

I do a (non-monetized) video or so a week on yt.

Tyranny and poverty are everywhere a mainstream economics phenomenon.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. For a complete list of posts, browse on the original instance.

GhostOnTheHalfShell , to histodons group
@GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai avatar

@histodons

Here's a question.

In everything I have ever heard about the Fall of Rome, is that its collapse, and I know this did not happen overnight, much happened before Rome itself was sacked is it is never associated with mass starvation etc.

Certainly the headline/marquee notion of an imploded empire is not correct, but its disintegration did not mean regional economies imploded

So can I lure a historian to tell us a tale regarding the disposition of what had been the empire?

#askfedi

TanAn ,
@TanAn@mastodon.social avatar

@GhostOnTheHalfShell @histodons Wealth filtered to the top in the western empire. Cities shrank as the rich retreated to their villas in the countryside and avoided taxes. By the time the barbarians arrived the peasants were happy to join them on the basis that things couldn't be any worse. The eastern half of the empire where wealth was less concentrated survived until 1453.

GhostOnTheHalfShell OP ,
@GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai avatar

@TanAn @histodons

Taxation itself was in part, a consequence of trying to maintain empire. The surrounding cultures offered the provinces relief from Rome’s taxes.

But notably, outside of climate and epidemic related crisis, the ability of its fragments to sustain their populations remained.

The dynamics haven’t changed, they are in play now but globally. A major difference, now, is globalization. Nations or states within them no longer produce everything they need internally.

GhostOnTheHalfShell , to AcademicChatter group
@GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai avatar

Apr 3

@academicchatter

7 min video

Academics know there's something wrong with mainstream economics, yet it's given the most influence in climate or economic policy and it continues to monopolize research funding.

Academics need to bring this field to account. Here's a proposal to do just that.

https://youtu.be/fwqQDVSLylg

GhostOnTheHalfShell OP ,
@GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai avatar

@academicchatter

The idea here is a mass of scientists drawn as widely as possible referee a number of papers orthodox economists had published on the climate as a sanity check. I know most climatologists know the papers are junk, but these papers are used in everything to pension fund risk assessments to guiding wider economic and political policy.

It’s like Flat Earthers writing papers about celestial mechanics. It’s nuts.

GhostOnTheHalfShell , to AcademicChatter group
@GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai avatar

@academicchatter

1 hr talk by Denise Hearn at the Long Now Foundation. Her commentary on the field of economics is of note, which begins at the 11:17 mark (someone has provided a handy index).

https://youtu.be/hN3cUwbmeZk

GhostOnTheHalfShell OP ,
@GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai avatar

@academicchatter

On the technical side, John M Blatt disproved many of the pillars of mainstream economics (like equilibrium) in 1983. This is a marvelously well written book, with the heavy math pushed to appendices. It's hard to imagine an academic discipline given so much credit and influence in legal, climate and economic policy, when it has yet to subject itself to academic discipline. These are the people who think they should run all the disciplines.

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781315496290/dynamic-economic-systems-john-blatt

GhostOnTheHalfShell , to AcademicChatter group
@GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai avatar


@academicchatter

10 min video

Excerpt from Prof Keen's XR presentation. Although longish, he's working on an effort to call mainstream (read neoliberal/neoclassical) economics' methods into question and therefore deference to and funding of economists like Nordhaus wrt to climate risks.

Help spread the word regarding this effort.

https://youtu.be/fs6uHkM1n0U

GhostOnTheHalfShell , to AcademicChatter group
@GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai avatar

@academicchatter

"A fundamental requirement for realistic economics is to abandon the 19th century (in)convenience of assuming equilibrium, and to instead model the economy as a dynamic (and evolving) system. This raises the question of how to treat time itself, and the appalling pun in the title of this chapter highlights the fact that economic modellers in general, ... have habitually treated time as a discrete rather than a continuous ..."

https://profstevekeen.substack.com/p/im-not-discreet-and-neither-is-time-bcb

CassandraVert ,
@CassandraVert@indieweb.social avatar

@GhostOnTheHalfShell @academicchatter
You're right, much more could have been done much earlier since then. It seems like the field has to keep evolving with human culture, as opposed to some fields with immutable foundations.

GhostOnTheHalfShell OP ,
@GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai avatar

@CassandraVert @academicchatter

I think even the Catholic Church has bent more to reality over orthodox economics

GhostOnTheHalfShell , to random
@GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai avatar

@notjustbikes

This never gets old

https://youtu.be/OQE_5MFCekg

GhostOnTheHalfShell , to random
@GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai avatar

Cory, as always on a tear

“ You ask Amazon, "What's your cheapest batteries?" and it lies to you. If you click the first link in a search-results page, you'll pay 29% more than you would if you got the best product – a product that is, on average, 17 places down on the results page.”

Capitalism is premised on markets with price transparency, at least by the marquee claims made in econ101.

🧵

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/26/glitchbread/#electronic-shelf-tags

GhostOnTheHalfShell OP ,
@GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai avatar

@KatLS @thehomespundays @academicchatter

They are working on it. Traditional values and the like

GhostOnTheHalfShell OP ,
@GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai avatar

@thehomespundays @KatLS @academicchatter

I want to point out another distinction, neoclassical economics refuses to respond to explicit evidence, both mathematical and empirical, that their theories are garbage. I don't know how many science departments get away with that.

GhostOnTheHalfShell , to random
@GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai avatar

The essence of our predicament.

The party at the switch are billionaires, the large group of people is the world’s population and the individual on the track is billionaire wealth (not a person, unless we substitute a corporation, then SCOTUS treats it like human embryo).

The billionaires have welded the switch to “kill world population”

The Trolley problem is meant to tease out moral instincts in impossible situations

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

#climatechange #ExtinctionRebellion #economics

courtcan ,
@courtcan@mastodon.social avatar

@GhostOnTheHalfShell Trolley problem solution:

STOP the trolley
RESCUE all the tied-up people
HUNT DOWN AND EAT the persons who chained the innocent and set the fucking trolley in motion in the first place

GhostOnTheHalfShell , to AcademicChatter group
@GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai avatar

@academicchatter

Have a read through (nothing dreary, promise!) and understand how mad orthodox economics is. If y'all understand how benighted neoclassical economics is and how much their policies have effect academic life and that of the economy (think Boeing), the better prepared you are to raise questions, seed students minds to raise questions.

https://profstevekeen.substack.com/p/the-anything-goes-market-demand-curve-015

GhostOnTheHalfShell OP ,
@GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai avatar

@academicchatter

"By means of Hicks's composite commodity theorem and by other considerations, a rigorous proof is given that the newly defined social or community indifference contours have the regularity properties of ordinary individual preference contours (nonintersection, convexity to the origin, etc.)…"

Except no. 😂 These are the folks that think academic departments should be judged on their "growth" potential. This stuff is true fashionable nonsense.

GhostOnTheHalfShell , to AcademicChatter group
@GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai avatar

@academicchatter @breadandcircuses

Be it resolved that neoclassical economics is bereft of logic, reason, good faith, is an ideology legitimizing the ruin of humanity to no good end (not even of its patrons)

how do we cast this ideology out of academia, purge it from legal precedent and law, from business practice, and chase it from polite society?

time is short

https://masto.ai/@GhostOnTheHalfShell/112156757712219915

GhostOnTheHalfShell , to random
@GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai avatar

starting 8 am

https://www.youtube.com/live/CmD79GNVPNs

GhostOnTheHalfShell OP ,
@GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai avatar

@academicchatter

The one thing I hard disagree with Keen on is the idea that colonizing Mars is a way of preserving human species (in all fairness, is reference to the deadliness of climate change)

Existing there are several orders magnitude of more challenging than + plus the expense and resources.

If we could survive/terraform Mars we could do the same on Earth without blowing trillions carting people and materials to Mars.

GhostOnTheHalfShell , to AcademicChatter group
@GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai avatar

#SteveKeen #SteveKeenAndFriends #ExtinctionRebellion #XR

-- edit added @academicchatter

Streaming the 25th. Mark your calendars. Book mark and boost, if you might. All of academia needs to know what kind of deadly dross neoclassical economics is legitimatizing.

https://www.youtube.com/live/CmD79GNVPNs

#climatechange #fediscience

GhostOnTheHalfShell , to random
@GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai avatar

Unlike the dismal Borderlands trailer (DOA movie based on it), the Fallout trailer is firing on all cylinders.

3 min video

https://youtu.be/p8VDNb5-SLs

GhostOnTheHalfShell , to random
@GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai avatar

So, when does the Gaza death camp memorial start posting pictures dead here?

At least with Masada, the consequences of Roman siege, massacres and decimations are lost to the mists of time.

https://youtu.be/z09SkFT7kFA

GhostOnTheHalfShell , to random
@GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai avatar

@pluralistic

“ Optimized for Netscape Navigator.”

this gem. 😂

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