> I think people are mature enough to be able to read past a headline

What trainwreck of misconceptions could possibly compel an otherwise reasonable person to believe something so ridiculous?

Messaging is attention-weighted. It always has been, but the exploitation of this fact has been on the rise and in 2026 everyone should know it and internalize the consequences: if you signal boost statement A and bury nuance B, you are promoting statement A, flat out, completely independent of what B brings to the table.

"We can trust you now" has quotations marks in the title. That means a verbatim quote from a source. Sure, messaging should be clear, but we must expect basic reading comprehension and jornalistic literacy from people that participate in a place like a Computer Science forum, while reading The Wall Street Journal.

"Convicted fraudster pardons convicted fraudster therefore you can trust convicted fraudster."

Wild!

It's interesting that both the USA and China found that the prosperity maximum happened when capitalism was kept in line with a firm hand, even though China approached from the left and the USA approached from the right and later departed back to the right.

Exactly, it's the Lex Fridman gambit: a reputation for asking safe questions to powerful people tends to snowball because "safe, popular interview platform" is something they are all looking to self-promote on.

If you want to see the mask slip, watch Lex's interview with Zelensky.

Friedman's Zelensky interview was terrible but I think that has more to do with him being a russian nationalist than a bad podcast host

Is there anything in Georgia not named Peachtree?

Brains turn off if you say Voldemort's name out loud. These ideas need to be rediscovered and rebranded.

In some of those circles, you can play a little game of using statements from Adam Smith, and seeing which ones draw knee-jeek criticism as "Marxist."

Same for Keynes.

Adam Smith had a bit of a Marxist view (though, he did come up with it first) on the land value of real property, considering deriving rent from it as "unearned" without labor, which looks a little too close to comfort to appealing to what we would call today the "labor theory of value" which we now know is a largely useless device for creating or observing markets intended to provide voluntary ~free exchange of the fruits of capital and labor.

Most modern capitalist views do not subscribe to labor theory of value or "earned" value. Though views on landlordism do originate more with Smith than with Marx, it's not wrong to also attribute many of those thoughts to Marx.

Personally, I think it's better to normalize and point out there are a lot of valid points made.

But I suppose change needs both strategies.

Every business leader who makes money is a Marxian! Capturing the surplus value of the labor of others is how a business makes money and that is a value neutral statement.

TechnologyConnections debunked the Phoebus Cartel a while ago.

tl;dw incandescent bulbs can be made more efficient and brighter by running them hotter, but this reduces the lifetime. The obvious Nash Equilibrium involves increasingly hot/bright/efficient bulbs and as much lying about lifetime as a typical consumer would accept, which is a lot. The idea behind the Phoebus Cartel was to force honesty on the dimension where it was most likely to disappear. You are free to disapprove of this and reject bulb lifetime policing, but if so you support the "everybody lies" alternative. Pick your poison.

> TechnologyConnections debunked the Phoebus Cartel a while ago.

A link would be good, to mirror the one in the GP.

WWII revisionism is back in fashion these days, even in spaces that historically would have been only mildly to the right of center.

Death of the author.