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2024-10-04: On Port Strikes

The most powerful entities under the sun have vested interest in things being the way they are. For most ordinary people just trying to live a peaceful life, that's a powerfully good thing.

When a disruption is bad for business, phone calls get made.

And people who thought themselves influential realize they are punching *way* over their actual weight class.

There is a refrain heard on Twitter (forever, baby) sometimes that goes, "Nothing ever happens." It is usually a frustrated lament that interesting or exciting stuff always seems to be mitigated before actually having the chance to make a real impact, positive or negative, on the status quo.

I think people generally fail to realize how delicate the balance of our status quo is and how much effort is invested in preserving the subtle tensions that keep things "normal" as we've come to expect them. And I also think people generally underestimate how fantastic it is to live in a world with the kind of stability we enjoy in ours.

Nothing ever happens, indeed—and it's FAR better that way.

The real innovation of Capitalism is that it has made the self-interest of the powerful and unscrupulous align (largely, if incompletely) with the well-being of the disempowered and downtrodden. This is the feature that makes it, while by no means an ideal system free from exploits, at least the best system (that has so far been actually attempted at scale and in practice) for a society, and indeed a world that is doomed to live under the sun.

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