Over at the QSite, I am only just learning that FedNow — the United States' wayyyy overdue network for enabling many countries have had for years, "real time" (intraday) bank transfers and payments — is a conspiracy to control us, a stepping stone towards (horrors!) CBDC, and the true motive for the murder of Bob Lee.
It's important to remember that Twitter has become basically a successor to Weekly World News in order not to despair too deeply. https://twitter.com/search?q=FedNow
"the 'hard numbers' found in CBO’s baseline tables conceal all the assumptions and uncertainties involved in producing them." #PhilipRocco https://prospect.org/economy/2023-04-06-congress-prisoners-of-their-own-device/
"The Chinese grand strategy, in short, is America’s own forgotten Hamiltonian strategy. That strategy emphasized massive investment in real, productive sectors" #RobertHockett https://roberthockett.substack.com/p/trading-places
[new draft post] Alignment is the problem of God's love https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/04/06/alignment-is-the-problem-of-gods-love/index.html
“these models are deeply and consistently wrong. But ‘wrong’ doesn’t capture the true problem. The deeper problem is that these models are all wrong in the very same way, and in the same direction. They are wrong in a way that massively benefits the rich, and massively disadvantages everyone and everything else.” #NickHanauer https://prospect.org/economy/2023-04-05-six-ways-economic-models-killing-economy/ ht @lou
doom is the potato chip of the attention marketplace.
it’s bullies who most justify their behavior as opposing bullying. not-bullies have few occasions to require so grand a justification.
Elon Musk refers to himself as both a free speech absolutist and a socialist.
"there is nothing *more* political than insisting that your own preferences and assumptions are 'empirical' while anyone who questions them is 'doing politics.'"
"...Incinerating the qualitative and doing arithmetic with the dubious quantitative residue that remains is no way to understand the world, much less run it"
~@pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/03/all-models-are-wrong/
mastodon should clone twitter’s “community notes” feature just so it could be called “well actually”.
Chat GPT seems to be evolving towards a very well-informed, but very conventional and risk-averse persona. It is like they made HR our interface to Google.
"Rhetorically, conservatives love to defend localities against an overweening state. Open any of the loftier right-wing political journals and you’ll find essays, complete with their own nomenclature—'subsidiarity,' 'little platoons'—praising the virtues of localism. In practice, conservative politicians have spent the past decade using state power to crush local initiatives." #PaulGlastris https://washingtonmonthly.com/2023/04/04/in-a-biden-desantis-race-all-politics-will-be-local/
it’s not a möbius strip it’s thinfinity.
I guess the term lèse-majesté comes from the French, but can it possibly be for real that France is prosecuting a person for "insulting the president of the republic" on social media?
This is one of those stories that apparently is real but seems crazy and implausible to me. Via Matthew Saroff.
Via Equality By Lot (a blog that in general advocates sortition-based democratic institutions), a very harsh take on France's "citizen conventions" by law professor Guillaume Drago.
It hits on real critiques (can the organizers of what are often called citizens' juries manipulate them into endorsing a ham sandwich? is the selection genuinely representative?), but is perhaps overly sanguine about *status quo* electoral democracy.
https://equalitybylot.com/2023/04/04/a-democratic-rock-bottom/
@failedLyndonLaRouchite some things just really get your goat. (sorry.)
@failedLyndonLaRouchite it’s just a helluva story.
“It’s a little girl’s goat, not Pablo Escobar.” https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-30/goat-slaughter-shasta-county-fair ht Julia Shumway
a doctor vigilante superhero: Obstetrician of Justice!
