Interesting piece by Rob Long at the Ankler. Long is a writer for TV and movies who has been around long enough to compare the old and new ways of running the entertainment business. He makes a point I’d never considered before. Show biz used to be LEAKY. Everyone along the chain got a share of the profit. Theater owners, movie distributors**, studios.
Now that it’s mostly streaming, there are no leaks, so there is no SHARING and no MODULARITY. All the profit goes to the billionaire who owns the streaming, and those billionaires mysteriously happen to be the SAME billionaires who own the rest of the world. Nobody else has a VESTED INTEREST in seeing the business thrive. If Jeff’s streaming platform is accidentally paying ANYONE OTHER THAN JEFF, it’s gone.
Elon is applying the same principle to the entire US government. If any money is going to ANYONE OTHER THAN ELON, the agency that is paying NEGATIVE EXTERNALITIES must go. SS is serving the neg ext and not paying Elon. It goes. Post Office is serving the neg ext and not serving Elon. It goes. War is killing neg ext and paying Elon. It grows.
Long’s view of show biz matches my perpetual observation about government as a business. Old corrupt cities, and the New Deal, insured that ordinary people were able to profit, and ordinary people were able to BUY things from the government. WPA gave useful jobs to millions of unemployed workers. The workers could eat and live, and they were building a new America. You paid TVA for electricity, or paid a monthly premium to SS, or bought stamps at the PO, and got REAL BENEFITS in return. You could even do your banking at the PO until 1966.
You paid your councilman a few hundred under the table, and he fixed your pothole or gave your block a new sidewalk.
Unfortunately the business parts of government made TrumpElon possible by utterly failing to ADVERTISE their leakiness and benefits. The businesslike councilman disappeared a long time ago thanks to idiotic Good Government Movements sponsored by the billionaires of the time. When negative externalities are taken out of the MARKET for political decisions, only JP Morgan and Rockefeller are in the MARKET for political decisions.
SS and Post Office are still serving but they stopped advertising. The grotesque Trump-helping Democrats refused to advertise their own best products. Since 2015 they’ve solely been playing self-destructive Lawfare games and making horrible crazed meth-raver sounds, all of which helped Trump. Every fake court case prosecuting Trump for non-crimes or ordinary rich fuckhead crimes was a tremendous campaign rally for Trump. Every meth-raving screech about “democracy” reminded people that the Democrats were even nastier and crazier than Trump.
Beyond SS and PO, the Biden admin had a splendid set of new services underway. The stock crime and monopoly enforcers were SPECIFICALLY taking on the corporations that made food and housing unaffordable for neg ext. They were working hard on the REAL PROBLEMS that are killing neg ext by the million. Their speeches and advertising were TOTALLY SILENT about their own good products.
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Language note: I overuse the term Negative Externalities. It comes from a 2011 article by Bryan Caplan, an Effective Altruist type. He made the EA view, which is also the Tech Tyrant view, crystal clear: Only Mensa members deserve to live. Only people who can “think like economists” deserve to live. Lower-IQ people are simply “negative externalities” who obstruct the Godly Goals of the noble Philosopher Kings like Altman.
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** Random personal note. The leaky chain created more business along the way. I worked at a grain elevator repair company in the 70s. We often shipped things to rural coops in Kansas. The items were too big for parcel post. Railroads went past the elevators but couldn’t drop off freight unless there was a proper freight depot. Small towns DID have movie theaters, and Exhibitors Film Delivery made extra money by carrying other items to the same towns. At that time UPS and FedEx weren’t national companies yet.
Polistra's Mill 