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"it’s extremely risky for a member of Congress to let an opposite-party president be seen as successful"

Whether that is true or not, that claim is absurdly tendentious. The Democratic congress was entirely willing to make a deal with Trump; they were stymied only by Trump's perversity and intransigence. If I want some fatuous both-sides framing, I'll go to the real New York Times, not private label New York Times.

And anyway, is it true? The best support for this claim is polling that shows voters change their positions once they are informed of their party's positions. But it is the politicians who decide those positions! The possibility that Republican politicians would suffer for cooperating to implement policies favoured by Republican voters is ... extraordinarily remote. The Republican politicians are on record attempting to take credit for Covid relief measures that they voted against!

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"But so far it has been a vein hope that people can be somehow vaccinated against or build immunity to the viruses purveyed by the dopamine-loop engagement-maximization misinformation TechnoPrinces:"

Yet we learned to ignore most advertising. Snakeoil hucksterism was the click-bait of the day and is now a meme about not being fooled. While I once viewed the enticing click-bait that is now added to almost all online news content, I know that it is worse than empty calories and ignore the clever titles. Ad blockers continue to fight an arms-race over online advertising. Any company that demands that I must whitelist them and be forced to watch their adverts are just ignored. (When companies can guarantee that the ads they host with their content is malware free and pay compensation if that guarantee is not met, then I will consider whitelisting them if they can show their content is really worth my attention.)

You have just written about the form of the "attention economy", but much of that is polluted by advertisers treating eyeballs as a commons to be exploited in a way that makes "the tragedy of the commons" seem tame by comparison.

I fully expect in a decade or so that my personal (not corporate controlled) AI assistant will select the ad-free content that it thinks I really want to read or watch and make sure that there are limits to my eyeballs being glued to a screen, We can see the outlines of the pieces that will make this happen, and if I am correct, then your sense that aggregators will capture the profits will prove false, as the assistant can always ensure that the source is accessed directly and not through a corporate "walled garden" like FB. If micropayments can ever be made to work, then that might be a way to pay for content rather than through subscription models, but failing that, a tip-jar will do with the AI noting content use and suggesting suitable tips periodically.

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In defense of my specialty within economics, Industrial Organization did address the role of science and innovation as a part of the Conduct and Performance legs off Joe Bain's the legged stool.

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