The Iowa disaster is a sign that our economic structures are breaking down, that private enterprise has become a shell game, where who you know matters more than what you can do. The bullshit economy has bled over into politics, with the perfect president but also the perfect amount of grifting and consultant corruption and unbridled tech optimism. This has long been part of politics—anything with that much money sloshing around will invite a little corruption—but the combination of political grift, the ardor for public-private partnerships, and the triumph of ambition over talent has created a fetid stew.
Trump’s responsible for the Iowa disaster.
Are these people stupid or just liars? Party A fucks up royally, this is evidence of some terrible generalised malaise in society, so we must go out and vote for Party A’s candidate to put things right?
They bewail that so much money and power in politics invites corruption, yet it never occurs to them that the solution is government with less power. In fact the ones complaining the loudest are invariably in favor of a more (usually much more) expansive state.
My car wouldn’t start this morning. It’s pretty clear to all except the wilfully ignorant this was a natural consequence of the decrepitude and corruption of late capitalism, exemplified by the twin horrors of Trump and Brexit. Before it is too late we need to rip down this monstrous construction of hate and replace with a new structure based on inclusivity and tolerance.
And maybe some death camps. You know, just to be sure…
“The voters have a rare choice in 2020 to put clamps on the bullshit economy, to end the froth in our financial markets, to put the needs of the people ahead of inflated stock returns…”
But please, not just yet. The American market has been one of the bright spots this past several years.
Yet the Democrats continue to nominate rich grifters as Presidential candidates.
There’s a nice conspiracy theory about Iowa.
The Dem “swamp” planned a routine fake set of results. Just ordinary Dem corruption.
Too late they discovered that Bernie had a couple of operatives at every little caucus, reporting the genuine results to the Bernie campaign. Panic! So they invented the Bad App tale to buy them time while they worked out what to do next.
Question: many years ago I asked an American “Is it true that the Dems – far more than the Republicans – are routinely effective at election corruption?” He grinned: “Yes, we are.” So why don’t the Republicans put a stop to this?
“The story of Shadow, makers of the app that utterly failed to deliver in Iowa, is a perfect example of the bullshit economy. It starts by being a tech solution to a non-existent problem. ”
Which no-one in the world of capitalism would do, OK? For something a company had to do once every 4 years to collect some totals, no-one would build a sodding sideloaded app. You’d create an excel template, prefill the candidate names, send it out and get people to email it in.
This is like building an app to collect the company Xmas dinner orders. You don’t do it. You send emails out asking people to respond and then write them into Excel.
The bullshit is about government. Building a huge sodding dome for a 1 year festival. Building a load of Olympic shit that no-one wants after 3 weeks.
“Somehow, the Iowa Democratic Party got sold that they needed to improve upon this, to “disrupt” the caucus reporting. Already, the party had to increase what they would keep track of and tabulate, reporting the first set of results before the 15 percent viability threshold, the second set afterwards, and how that translated into delegate counts. It wasn’t clear why anyone needed to adding another layer of complexity into this with the app. But the app’s backers must have been persistent, getting $60,000—really nothing for the purposes of app development—to design a tool to forward the results to a central repository.”
“Must have been persistent”. So, what you’re saying is that the Dems were too weak or too stupid to just say no.
“All this doublespeak is a hallmark of the bullshit economy. Your mind doesn’t have to travel to the nether regions of conspiracy, but you can hardly blame people for doing so. This is reflective of the rolling incompetence covered by confidence within the modern economy, especially when you sprinkle on the labor-saving promise of techtopia. When the bullshit economy fails, it robs people’s belief in the basic bargain of commerce, the idea that you get what you pay for, that companies operate in good faith to provide quality service. But when placed in contact with politics, it just demolishes faith in the system. The bullshit economy spurs distrust.”
It’s all going to fail, maaaan. And then we’re going to be back to living off the wild berries and hunting buffalo on the plains. Funny how the evil capitalists like Facebook and Google have stuff that works far being 99.9% of the time.
What BF said.
Most free market advocates fully acknowledge that there is a lot of trial and error, with the errors happening quite often. Failure to generate profits or even collapses bring the errors to an eventual end. However, opposing this are those who are convinced they know what’s best and what’s needed and that they won’t make any of these wasteful errors. Their track record is weak, but they will put forth an example of a money losing operation publicly funded for years and years as a success story.
“Iowa disaster”? What disaster? The only things that died there we the Biden candidacy and the Democrat presidential hopes.
Silly me. I thought the problem in Iowa is RACISM!
As reported on TV the other night. Iowa too white. Doesn’t represent the dahversity of duh Democrat pottie.
@MC +1
…although you forgot to mention the Green New Deal. With efficient eco-friendly public transport, you wouldn’t need your car.
I don’t think the guy is blaming Trump – all his complaints lead back to Clinton and/or Biden.Sounds like he supports Bernie
What you are watching happen to the Democratic Party in 2020 is what you saw happen to the Republican Party in 2016. The parallels are exact.
What is interesting is that, in a way, Dayen is on to something, though he doesn’t understand what. Shadow Inc. is comprised of the same people who mismanaged Hillary Clinton’s campaign to an unimaginable defeat. Shadow Inc. is funded by the same people who funded Hillary Clinton’s campaign. So you have a company staffed by incompetents and funded (and lead) by people who have either failed to identify that incompetence or simply don’t care enough to ensure competence. And Capitalism has taken care of the rest. Iowa is proof that Capitalism and the “bullshit economy” works.
What Daven doesn’t understand is the failure of Shadow, and Wework and other companies is Capitalism doing exactly what is supposed to do… The incompetents have been weeded out. If Daven understood anything at all, he’d understand that those companies that insist on conducting business in a non-businesslike manner (such as Shadow) will suffer in the marketplace. And he also refuses to acknowledge the obvious: The “establishment” wing of the Democratic Party (the Clintons, Obama) are far more interested in retaining control of the party apparatus than they are in defeating Donald Trump. If control, rather than competence, is the priority in staffing your business, you will probably not do well.
Steve McIntyre (he who destroyed Mann’s Hockeystick) demonstrated on Twitter that you could do it with just 6 lines of code – a $6 job, not $60,000.
This must be satire. Incompetent people fucked up, so Capitalism must be replaced?
Incompetent socialists fucked up. All free enterprise must come under the control of incompetent socialists……
New at Nine: Snout-in-Trough “programmers” fail to do what every onine game company is able to do for millions of connections….
Those clowns aren’t even amateurs. An amateur would have cobbled somthing together from Google/Github, and it would have worked, possibly even with [shock] encryption. And it would have worked, possibly full of holes, but it would have worked.
This lot? seriously…
Schiff, Pelosi & Romney have started new impeachment case:
– Trump pressured Ukraine to hack Democrat Iowa caucus
Trump’s State of The Union: Highlights by the numbers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCTsjEb8uLk
Watch Pelosi’s face and behaviour – zero decorum
Pence reacts to Pelosi’s ‘new low’ at the State of the Union
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6BjFuQhomI
Good, and gooder from 11m23s
Pelosi’s good at tearing stuff up look at San Francisco. I’d like Trump say “Nancy, You’re Fired!” … even in a tweet
Mike Pence is a gentleman
@Dennis
+1
dearieme, I love your theory of fake results busted. Plausible to the point of being likely.
Amusing – always is when loon AOC involved
– Senator Lindsey Graham on AOC’s SOTU boycott, Pelosi ripping Trump’s speech
Nancy Pelosi says ripping up Trump’s State of the Union was ‘the courteous thing to do
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcmJmi_lL60
– Susan Collins on her decision to vote to acquit Trump – and Mitt Romney to Impeach
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARP9m7-PzJU
– Mitt Romney becomes first senator to backstab own party’s president
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGLCd34Kipk
Mitt “Judas” Romney: “It was OK for Obama, Biden & EU to withold aid until Biden Jr’s “employer” corruption investigation stopped”
Mitt Romney is a swamp member George Soros little friend
He touts his own “victory” now as the first senator voting to convict his party president, yet he has achieved nothing as a politician other than trough slurping enrichment. Pathetic Mitt
Never trust a Mormon.
“dearieme
February 6, 2020 at 2:37 pm
So why don’t the Republicans put a stop to this?”
That would be assuming most Republicans aren’t RINOs. The reality is that they’re all on the same page of the same workbook. The only difference between the two parties is basically what they consider to be the most important area to regulate – your economic life or your social life. They’re both for more government power because they both know that at some point they’ll have that power. And they both think that *this time* it’ll be forever.
And then take ‘conservative’ media – most of those guys have been poor-mouthing Trump and shilling for impeachment.
‘conservative’ media – CNN, ABC, MSNBC, NPR, that media? Jesus even half of Fox News hates Trump..
The Dems are just incompetent wankers – but still wankers all the same.
Yes. Conservative media seems an oxymoron.