True. And it replaces the previous policy of forcing an organization to do the bidding of the administration. DEI was foisted on America through government rules and legal activism.

The perfect rhetorical fortress: you don’t have the correct identity to have an opinion. I’m not white. No matter, there’s something else wrong with my immutable characteristics. Too much butt hair? Cannot have an opinion. And let’s assume that I tick all the immutable characteristics to have an opinion on DEI. Well, I have internalized homophobia/white supremacy/misogyny you name it. The perfect rhetorical fortress. Hermetic.

The funny thing about this is that DEI was shoved down the throats of universities and corporate America by government rules! And now reversing those rules — or eliminating them — is someone a huge problem!

The funny thing about this is that the Supreme Court has consistently been narrowing the parameters of what constitutes legal race/sex based discrimination since the 1970s. And universities and activists have blithely been ignoring the law. Affirmative action was always meant to be a temporary measure to achieve a goal, not some perpetual group-based right. The later is the very antithesis of the legal foundation of the country.

That’s the sales pitch. I’m sure someone somewhere had their PR knocked back because they weren’t “cis-gendered white Christian male”. In a world of 8 billion people, it’s entirely plausible that it happened once. A pretty low bar for excusing bigotry against people who don’t think like you though.

Nah, it was a Freudian slip.

DEI is the racism of low expectations. Or the racial supremacy of certain morally compromised minority individuals.

You keep telling yourself that anti-DEI is merely racism. Psychological projection

There has been a long a successful campaign against racism and sexism, known as liberalism. Putting the rights of the individual ahead of collective rights. Liberalism is Martin Luther King. Tribal rights is Malcolm X. The former won the argument in the civil rights era. The later formed Black Studies departments at universities, and went on to reeducate the youth in the “tribal rights of X people”. I’ve left jobs because I’m perceived to be white (by those who don’t know better, as in, appreciate that part of the world I’m from by my facial structure), and that I’m a man. I’m a minority by the letter of the law, but fsck that sh*t. Go ahead with your “the only remedy to past disciminiation is discrimination in the present, and the only remedy to discrimination in the present is discrimination in the future”. That’s some midwit nonsense.

“Not even called for an interview” is utter nonsense. I get the point you’re making. Look up “advocacy research”.

It’s true that the Trump admin (Vance et al really) represents a pre-liberal “tribal rights” American nativist ideology, it is also true that that is precisely what DEI is pushing. Just putting different tribes ahead of others. The “melting pot” ideology come from a genuine commitment to liberalism as an ideal that we strive towards. That means liberty for *everyone*. No “group rights”. That’s what Thatcher meant when she said “there’s no society, just people and the government.” That was aspiration. Not true in practice. But an aspiration that we don’t have “laws for X people” and “laws for Y people”, which is precisely what DEI is pushing. (And Vance et al.) The tell is the successful campaign against means testing entitlement. You see, it’s racist to give people preferential treatment based on need (poverty etc.) No, we have to treat the Obama kids preferentially because of skin colour, irrespective of their actual privilege over, say, 99.9% of the rest of America.

”White people only”

Hardly. Whatever kernel of truth was there was obliterated by moral preening.

All about trying to beat China?

I don't think that's true. Basically all missions are "low earth orbit", unless you create a GIANT rocket... like the Saturn V. The US did this for the Apollo mission; however, even though they have the blueprints, the rockets literally cannot be made any more because it was designed for a different workforce with different skills.

There's also many advances in computing and engine technology to incorporate. And getting all correct is hard.

The Soviets were never able to create a rocket comparable to the Saturn V. They tried, it blew up spectacularly, and ended their space program. It was "cowboy engineering"... not the cautious incremental stuff that NASA did with Saturn V.

China is building the Long March 9 and Long March 10 rocket systems, and that's awesome. However, NASA is building the capability because they do not have it at all, and they want it for Mars/Asteroid/Moonbase missions. There's genuine interest in the USA to do this.

I assume the Chinese will do a much better job than the soviets, and actually get their rockets working. They're way behind NASA though. The first SLS mission is targeted for Feb/2026. The first Long March mission is expected to be 5-10 years later (!). So hardly a competition for who gets there first.

How dare amazon NOT employ people.

The massive distortions in the real estate market have stemmed from the wall of money created by decades of near-zero interest rates. This has driven serious malinvestment.

Was that capitalist? Well, the money supply is indirectly controlled by the Fed, which -- due to political pressure -- attempts to iron out the business cycle by creating walls of money every time it looks like things are getting choppy.

One could argue -- and I would agree -- that this is better than the pure unfettered capitalist alternative, which would see bank failures and people's life savings wiped out for no fault of their own. However, as a consequence, we get this absurd malinvestment problem.

There's more to this. You might ask, why doesn't the Fed just set the interest rate higher, so that people really need to have a productive use for money before they go buy up a bunch of houses? That hits at the heart of the stated goal to create persistent low levels of inflation, which allows the government (and debtors everywhere) to debase their debts. Because otherwise people wouldn't borrow as much money to drive economic growth. I find this nonsensical, because we loosening capital requirements creates precisely the malinvestment we want to stop. However, it's the government likes the ability to continuously debase its debt.

So it's not capitalism, and it's absolutely the result of policy choices, and it doesn't have to be this way. But it is because it suits the needs of powerful people in society.

Communists countries found ways to incentivize people to work. It's just that people ended up doing all the wrong things (in aggregate), and the system became hopelessly byzantine and corrupt. They really needed prices as a signalling mechanism for demand and scarcity. There's a great book on this by an economist. Socialism, the failed idea that never dies. Niemietz spends most of the time talking about the history of how people talk about socialism, but there's sections of the book specifically dedicated to a clear explanation of why it always must fail, and why it always must turn authoritarian. There's a short counter-factual story at the end, where East Germany is a non-authoritarian communist state, with precisely zero human rights abuses, and how the system of socialist incentives lead to complete dysfunction.

Indeed, complete with the "lost decade" that turned out to be 30 years of no-growth, and an aging population causing deflation. Except in China the problems are larger in scope, and the gradients are steeper. I'm not saying that China is going away. I mean, Japan is still there. It's just that the narrative changed on Japan, and it will change on China too.