The Case for Pragmatism

This is a post from four years ago.  After a weekend of robotics I am plain exhausted!

You probably have a better idea about how to do something. But will it work? You’ll never know until you try. When you do give it a go, you may find that getting there requires a lot of compromises along the way before your dream is realized. Or, perhaps, you’ll simply give up – blaming your own inability to make it happen or blaming the world for being so darned unfair.

Both experiences are simply part of human nature meeting reality. We’re all idealists at heart, at least in a certain sense. Only a few people have the skills necessary to make those dreams a reality and much of the time they have to keep their eyes on the prize. A dream is one thing, but getting there requires wide-awake attention.

That is why an open, democratic political system can’t live by rigid ideology alone.

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Culture War Meets Cyber War

The news broke over the weekend, confirming everyone’s worst fears. The 2016 election of Trump and the Brexit vote were indeed engineered by one firm, Cambridge Analytica, which used millions of facebook profiles to build, then manipulate, psychological profiles of voters ready to be led like sheep.

It’s terrifying. It’s everything George Orwell warned us about. And it may be completely legal.

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A Big Week

We have in front of us a big week. This may determine the course of the next year or so in the stock market, the economy, and in politics.

A lot is about to happen. Let’s run it down, day by day.

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I’ll Thrash the Economy For You! (?)

Over the weekend, financial markets were sleeping. They awoke on Monday as if the weekend was a bad dream, filled with chatter about a trade war and how it was actually a good idea.

It’s not a dream, it’s reality. But is this all a stupid attempt to promote a candidate in a tariff-loving industrial district that should be winning a lot bigger? Nevermind the unreality of it, including the fact that the Pennsylvania 18th is certainly going to go away with court-ordered redistricting. There’s a special election on 13 March, and losing it would be very embarrassing.

This might all be a show to avoid losing a place where Trump should be winning bigly.

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Credit the Good Economy

It’s becoming a common theme – the economy is in great shape! Whether you want to give credit to Trump or Obama, it’s definitely all about policy of some kind, right?

Wrong.

Barataria has been revisiting some old arguments to build a new study for how the economy is changing. As the Managed Depression of 2000-2017 moves behind us, the reshaping of how we work, shop, and generally get by is starting to take shape. It’s hard to be sure about much.

One thing we do know – none of this happened overnight. So let’s revisit some old discussion.

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