No down mods yet - not on that post. In fact, it’s now up to “3”. I think it’s worth digging deeper into what’s likely going on.

Star Wars always had politics but not so blatantly aligned with “the message” and especially its flattening effects - forcing “identity group oppression” binaries into the fore over individual agency, pluralism, etc.

But what about Andor? How did it manage to succeed despite top down mandate of The Message? I think this is well worth exploring as its the exception that proves the rule. I think there are two broad reasons it slipped under its radar:

1 - Its creators had broad independent control, letting them adhere to the formula of the originals. No one is heroic or evil by demographic default; agency drives the story. Cassian’s radicalization comes from lived experience - actual fully contextual “lived experience” not the kind that is cherry picked kind, or “Mary Sue” kind, but the kind that blends with complex personal grit and failings. So betrayals, and hard won reflection, not innate identity superiority, mold him.

2 - “The Message” folks mistakenly interpreted Andor’s criticism of the banal evil of authoritarian bureaucracy to simply be a stand-in for criticism of their “far right” bogeymen. But Andor’s creators weren’t specifically criticizing the far right or fascism in particular - in fact, per interviews, they specifically studied Bolshevism and Stalin’s Stasi as examples. They essentially adhered to Orwell’s contention that there is little daylight between fascism, Leninism, Bolshevism, and Stalinism as all four, in different ways, simply pioneered or co-opted the extreme ease in which socialism’s highly elitist, centralized bureaucratic vanguardism is corrupted.

Andor proves quality storytelling often integrates both real stakes AND moral complexity, while avoiding cartoonish “friend enemy” binaries. The originals succeeded on similar foundations: individualism evolving into pluralism against empire, a transcendence via agency that integrates “identity” rather than is purely determined by it, and that (often messily) overcomes personal fallibility.

That messiness and complex agency, by the way, is the vehicle that lets zaniness like robots and aliens easily thrive in this story’s milieu - they blend in to become avatars for the overall mythos rather than just performative “identitarian” comic relief and window dressing.

RIP Marcia, you were spot on about the sequels. Quotes from a 2021 interview:

“Now that she’s running Lucasfilm and making movies, it seems to me that Kathy Kennedy and J.J. Abrams don’t have a clue about Star Wars.”

“They don’t get it. And J.J. Abrams is writing these stories—when I saw that movie where they kill Han Solo, I was furious. I was furious when they killed Han Solo. Absolutely, positively there was no rhyme or reason to it. I thought, You don’t get the Jedi story. You don’t get the magic of Star Wars. You’re getting rid of Han Solo?”

“And then at the end of this last one, The Last Jedi, they have Luke disintegrate. They killed Han Solo. They killed Luke Skywalker. And they don’t have Princess Leia anymore.”

“And they’re spitting out movies every year. And they think it’s important to appeal to a woman’s audience, so now their main character is this female, who’s supposed to have Jedi powers, but we don’t know how she got Jedi powers, or who she is. It sucks. The storylines are terrible. Just terrible. Awful.”

“You can quote me—‘J.J. Abrams, Kathy Kennedy—talk to me.’”

My personal take matches hers - the original emphasized rugged individualism and the Hero’s Journey, e.g. Leia as a capable leader without needing Rey’s constant exposition dumps, personal agency, friendship, clear good-vs-evil, earned power, etc. The sequels? They subverted each, purposefully obliterating entire compelling story arcs, so as to artificially force alignment with “The Message” and certainly to make KK happy.

> This is really just semantics, but ... most of that stuff that you define as conservatism and right-wing ideas?

No. I didn’t and don’t define “that stuff” as specifically or solely “conservative and right-wing ideas”. The ideas I listed are enlightenment aligned.

> I would call that stuff "classic liberal".

Me too. That’s the major overlap between conservative and right leaning philosophy. It also overlaps with center left. It has nothing to do with far right or far left - both of which “horseshoe” into rejecting classical liberalism (where Marx meets Duggan).

> You say conservatives and right-wingers are about decentralized government?

Yes.

> Try telling that to the liberal cities where random US citizens are getting curb stomped or executed by ICE agents.

Decentralized government doesn’t preclude centrally enforced (federalized) controlled immigration. This is a position favored by the majority of every racial demographic in the U.S. and virtually every political demographic except progressives. Black Americans have in fact favored controlled immigration since at least the civil war (Frederick Douglass talks about this).

Your “curb stomped and executed” polemicism is obviously intended to agitprop away from this point.

> Your statement about abortion are out of date.

No it isn’t. Your position misleadingly conflates states rights with positions on abortion. Keep in mind Dobb’s was brought to the Supreme Court by progressives unhappy with Mississippi’s desire to set a 15 week limit on abortions - a limit that’s pretty common but not “good enough” for them. Now there are blue states without any limit - progressives opened up a Pandora’s box in their eagerness to eliminate what most would consider reasonable compromise limits.

> Nowadays, most red states have locked abortion down so badly that doctors can't do anything to help a miscarrying woman until she's basically already dead from sepsis. Most pro-life states have passed laws that are literally killing women of child-bearing age.

There are definitely concerning issues - but that take is closer to agitprop than reality - it completely disregards myriad exceptions which protect the life of the mother.

> I can't even bring my self to address the thing about empiricism. No, US conservatism is most definitely *not* about falsifiability and empiricism.

Critical Theory hero Marcuse argued vehemently AGAINST Popper’s concept of falsifiability. The left’s dialectical materialism and the left’s Gramsci pull off a very similar move. The essence of all three arguments is “if you’re not with us then you’re de facto evil” - circular logic that precludes empirical falsifiability. Thus we end up with the lovely chain of logic in Kendi’s “capitalism is racist”.

> No I'm not claiming that US liberals are any better.

Conservatives, right leaners, and the center left embrace Popper. They reject the US far left’s anti-empirical troika of Marcuse, Engels, and Gramsci. Of course the case can easily be made that the far right embraces the same anti-empiric “friend enemy logic” - thus earning the label “woke right”.

That’s Obama, Trump1, Biden, and well into Trump2.

What’s more, he skated in with obviously fake educational and military credentials.

Sigh.

>>> broward: all of social media installed Biden's FBI censors. how quickly they forget.

>> me: They didn’t forget. They “know better”. Thus the down mod. Gotta keep the normies uninformed.

> AC: Maybe it's that we aren't so fucking slow that we need the operations of the federal government reduced like that...?

The “we” “needed” to squash any scientifically backed hint the virus might have come from a lab, or that, maybe, just maybe, California’s particularly draconian lockdowns were unnecessary - going so far as to twist the arms of researchers into publishing a particular narrative against their will, and to canceling reams of social media accounts. Yes there was much genuine uncertainty in 2020, but this wasn’t justifiable, and generally wasn’t seen in nations with a less authoritarian wing.

> AC: Why do you prefer "hurr durr the whole government is the president" to understanding how the functions of actual government actually work?

Strawman. The government isn’t monolithic. It’s obvious the current administration is aware of this, and accounts for it, thus it’s been able to push much of its agenda.

> AC: Why do you gloat about it?

I mourn it happened. There’s not much to stop it from happening again. This is the opposite of “gloating”.

> AC: Why when people have sympathy for you when you're about to drive yourself off a cliff do you put your foot down harder to try to prove they're wrong?

Strawman. Disaster has been predicted to be “coming soon” for many years. And note that this ever present “cliff”, with similar doomerism from, has been continually predicted by the extreme left for virtually every republican president - including Lincoln. Ditto for the extreme right against democrat presidents (that said, they turned out to be correct for the confederate aligned ones).

> AC: Why do you expect people to bail you out later, and why are they able to do things you aren't if they're useless liberal snowflakes? You live in a dreamworld.

There’s a place called “the middle”. It isn’t a “dreamworld” except to the extremes.

Not really, at least not in the modern U.S.

They overlap considerably on the enlightenment contract - individual agency, blind justice, free speech, decentralized government, property rights, falsifiability, the empirical method, etc.

Where they may differ is on dimensions of the social contract - preferring gay marriage be a civil union or (rarely these days) even disallowed, quibbling over abortion maximum weeks or (less common) against it, quibbling over gun laws, putting the ten commandments on a school wall, etc.

I am not talking about the extreme versions - just the common versions.

Accurate. They put center left folks like Maher, Weiss, Phetasy, Bessent, Gabbard, Shellenberger, Kennedy, and Taibbi in the “ultra right wing camp”, plus don’t see it as hypocrisy to celebrate, or even encourage, political violence. They, via the SPLC, put bog standard anti-religious-extremist Ayann Hirsi Ali on an extreme right list. And we’re seeing the “friend enemy” game play out in the horseshoe merging of the left’s red green alliance and the right’s Duggan folks.

This is a bit of an overstatement. The shift of the ALL-IN crowd was a case study in gradual - you could see it happening over time. I highly recommend paying attention to them - they were a bellwether, not a fickle windsock. One started right and stayed right (Sacks), three started center left, but two shifted more and more (Friberg and Chamath) to center right, while one stayed center left (Jason).

They didn’t forget. They “know better”. Thus the down mod. Gotta keep the normies uninformed.

It’s obvious you’re exaggerating to illustrate a valid effect: for example, your “strikes against” rubric doubtless incorporates a huge number of other factors. And over my three decades of interviewing (now taking a break) I’ve had the same temptation. But I ultimately shied away from an “always” heuristic due to significant mitigating factors, many of which I suspect you already keep in mind. Here’s a sampling:

- The older the candidate, the less relevant the effect seems. It appears more pronounced in younger generations.
- It’s a potential plus, or at least neutral, if they got the degree while holding down a full-time job in the industry.
- If the advanced degree is in something other than computer science, it can actually be a plus. For example, I’ve had very good experiences with a virologist PhD (!) and several math PhDs.
- The applicant’s culture may value advanced degrees far more highly than others (e.g., China), which means their pursuit is less likely to indicate an unwillingness to dive into the nitty-gritty of practical engineering.

So in general, when interviewing, I ignored the degree and focused on applicable experience, ability to communicate, and - most of all - enthusiasm plus skill for working through problems. (I tend to deliberately keep the problems “easy,” being far more interested in seeing how deeply they think, how well they communicate, the breadth of their background, and whether their resume is accurate than potentially frying their brains into gridlock.)

Yet where I strongly agree with your sentiment is how poisonous a credentialist workplace can be. It’s great to be in an environment where competency reigns and no one has a clue about anyone else’s educational background - nor feels the need to share it. In the places I worked, it was often years, or even decades, before I found out about a particular person’s education, if ever.

These are the ball-bark yearly numbers confirmed by GPT and Gemini:

    Wind + Solar electricity: ~5,000–5,500 TWh
    Natural Gas (NG) electricity: ~6,500–7,000 TWh
    NG direct heat / non-electric uses: ~10,000–12,000+ TWh equivalent
    All fossil fuel electricity (coal + gas + oil): ~16,000–17,000 TWh
    All fossil fuel direct heat / transport / non-electric uses: ~100,000–120,000+ TWh equivalent

This puts wind and solar yearly TWh as about 4 percent of that from fossil fuels.

Respectfully disagree.

> Anyway, I don't think electricity efficiency is likely the most important factor for a cab vehicle.

It’s arguably still a very important factor in this particular use case - not a secondary factor. The key here is not that improved efficiency lowers electricity costs, which are only a small part of the overhead per mile, but that it in turn allows for a much smaller battery and consequently cheaper construction. This in turn minimizes the cost per mile incurred by depreciation and capital costs.

A 30,000 dollar per cab fleet has significantly less overhead than a 75,000 dollar per cab fleet, which feeds directly into sustainable profitability (less depreciation and capital overhead per ride) and competitiveness (being able to charge less per ride translates directly into more customer demand).

> Charging speed and frequency and vehicle reliability are probably far more paramount, since time is money.

Depreciation and capital overhead are money too. The overall point is that it’s important to optimize across several key interdependent variables.

TLDR: Yes, lowering Watts per Mile isn’t always necessarily a key goal, but it is when it significantly leads to lowered cab fleet capitalization and depreciation overhead.

You shouldn’t want to! The Nazi party is a great example of such anti-individual-agency collectivist red herrings: uniform school curriculums, the government controlling the means of production, censorship of micro-aggression speech, judging by identity instead of individual merit, violence as a means to an end, universal healthcare, etc.

Reminds me of a quote from a friend of mine that runs a “self care” clinic, describing her typical customer:

“Preserving the planet for the children you will never have.”

> That is just not true. There's a massive number of people who do things because of misconceptions or legacy decisions. Also wood isn't all labour, a good portion of it is just ... buying pre chopped pre dried wood from a store, or getting it delivered

The average person isn’t that stupid. Oil and gas are FAR less labor intensive even if you purchase the wood. That wood doesn’t magically fly through the air to feed the wood stove daily - usually need to do this two or three times a day.

People go with wood simply because it’s cheaper - particularly in NY and similar states that purposefully make natural gas, which is both cleaner and cheaper, hard to get, and whose “green” policies make electricity especially expensive.

The flaw in your math is that California, at least, is patently incapable of building HSR, or really any long distance rail, that’s even close to as capital efficient as airplanes.

We see a see a similar math problem in metro rail too. Despite still being grimy, deteriorating, crime infested, and rat infested, NYC’s subways and trains are notoriously expensive to run and *extremely* highly subsidized. The average subway trip costs about 11 bucks, but the rider only pays 3, and around half of that 8 dollar subsidy is paid by tax dollars from outside of NYC (federal and state). Its trains are even more expensive per trip.

Yet, get to NYC suburbia (for example suburban NJ), and realistically assume 1.4 passengers per car, the average car trip of 15 miles costs about 8 dollars per passenger once you add up all costs (gas, car depreciation, car maintenance, insurance, roads, etc), and only 1 dollar of that is subsidized (road building and maintenance, etc).

Yes, some rail pays for itself - Tokyo subways come to mind - but the American “progressive” tendency to generously pad government contracts eliminates that possibility.