Subject: Re: Trump's fascist tilt
There are some voters (like most of us on this board) that derive enjoyment from following political matters. Most voters don't, and there's little benefit to trying to get them to do more. They almost certainly won't, and for the few that do you'll be inflicting more cost on them than it's worth.

I guess it might SEEM that way to some, but speaking for myself only, I do NOT follow politics as a source of amusement or diversion from other things. I follow political matters because they address issues related to economics and civil / human rights that, in the absence of a functioning political system, would be addressed via tyranny, intimidation and violence. The political system we have may suck, but the alternatives waiting in the wings are far worse for all involved.

In my narrow minded, bigoted opinion, those who DON'T follow "politics" do so at their own (future) peril -- economically and socially. It frustrates me that we have created a culture that has figured out a way to spend $100 million dollars producing a movie with CGI that can earn $1 billion at the box office, yet we haven't figured out how to make the ACTUAL issues of importance to citizens more understandable (and yes, "entertaining") to citizens. I thought we might be getting close to this point after seeing those series that aired on Netflix in the past 5-10 years that reviewed decades-old criminal cases and proved how a suspect had been railroaded by criminal prosecutors, forensic scientists, etc. Those shows started making inroads with explaining to the public that our criminal justice system had much larger SYSTEMIC problems. The shows weren't really about the particular CASE but the PATTERN of failures that produced that case. Yet that "genre" of entertainment seems to have fizzled and disappeared.

The bizarre conspiracy theory explanations for how the country reached a particlar point with a particular problem often cannot hold a candle to the ACTUAL combination of events, legislation, people and randomness that drive what happens and explain what we see every day. Here's one economic example:

WHY ARE THERE FEW OR NO SMALL-SIZE PICKUPS LIKE THERE WERE IN THE 1980s?

The auto market used to be flooded with "mini pickups" like the Datsun B2000, Ford Ranger, Toyota (Hilux), Dodge D50, etc. You couldn't haul a full sheet of plywood in the bed, you couldn't tow anything but they had the pickup form factor which was useful for odd-sized hauling and got decent gas mileage, even by today's standards. In 2024? The smallest pickups (like the Ford Ranger) are the size of full-sized pickups from the 1980s and there are no "mini" pickups to be found. Why?

Because of flawed logic implemented in emissions and mileage regulations and perverse incentives followed by car makers. CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards were intended to raise MGP standards across each maker's actually sold fleet of cars. For example, a maker offering ten models with nine averaging 25 MPG and one averaging 10 MPG would be an "average" of 23.5 MPG. That's pretty good unless that maker's SALES were 70% based on the 10 MPG vehicle with 1,000,000 units sold. With that "sold" mix, that maker's "fleet MPG" would be (700,000x10 + 300,000x25)/1,000,000 = 14.5 MPG. HORRIBLE.

BUT... The CAFE regulations "accepted" that vehicles used as commercial trucks would never reach the fuel efficiency levels of passenger vehicles so exemptions for trucks were added to the regulations so "trucks" didn't count or were held to a much lower standard. As CAFE standards became more strict over time, the definition of "truck" wasn't driven by a fixed description of form factor or functionality but instead by the vehicle's "wheelbase area" -- essentially its wheelbase times its track width. Vehicles with an area over a certain value were considered "trucks" even if used predominately / exclusively as passenger vehicles. Vehicles NOT matching that exemption limit were subjected to higher and higher MPG targets that generated fines if the maker didn't achieve that year's CAFE MPG goal.

This is what drove the SUV segment to grow exponentially with the Jeep Cherokee, Ford Explorer, Chevy Suburban, etc. But this is also why the mini-trucks disappeared. The cheap, small pickup designs with simple but old engines were TOO SMALL to meet "truck size" requirements for exemption from emissions and mileage rules but the makers didn't want to spend money redesigning them so they dropped them and focused on continuing to make and sell larger trucks that met the exemption threshold.

I find that chain of legal, engineering, marketing and regulatory decisions FASCINATING, in the train wreck sense. With that perspective, Americans might realize we didn't "WANT" giant SUVs that get 12 MPH, sit nine feet high and make any pedestrian closer than 20 feet to the front of the vehicle invisible below the hood. We have been conditioned into wanting vehicles like that because they were the easiest and most profitable thing for failing vehicle makers to build rather than actually working to achieve the true goal of the original regulation.

Flaws in the political system prevent that flaw from being corrected because the vehicle makers have enough influence over politicians to squelch any attempt at correcting that flawed regulatory incentive system. Instead, the present state is one where

* buyers might be perfectly happy with a mini pickup that gets 25 MPG
* a vehicle with that footprint is required to get 35 MPG under current standards
* car makers don't want to figure out how to meet that requirement so that mini pickup isn't available
* instead, the customer can only buy a large truck or SUV that gets 16 MPG
* instead, roughly 12.4 million large trucks are sold every year and used mainly as commuter vehicles
* and we could have had nearly 8.6 million of those getting 25 MPG which would be better for everyone

That is economic and environmental insanity.

An equally frustrating example involves the growth of giant healthcare corporations whose business models evolved in lock step with Medicare and schemes to exploit payment rules as efficiently as possible. For more on this "financialization" of healthcare, read this review of a recent book The Big Fail by Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean.

https://watchingtheherd.blogsp...

Of course, a key reason why a culture that can figure out how to net $1 billion from a movie that cost $100 million to make CANNOT figure out how to make stories like the above at least mildly interesting is that it is not in the economic interest of most companies in the entertainment business to do so. They are either owned by or dependent upon the firms profiting from the status quo. Sure, there are examples of shows like 60 Minutes or Last Week Tonight that attempt to occasionally air content that bites a large corporate hand but most shows like these have either disappeared or devolved into insipid murder-mystery hoodunits.


WTH