some domains are private and competitive.

others are public and accountable.

and then there are the motherfuckers in between.

"people spend far too much energy worrying about the cost of bank failures, and far too little worrying about the cost of bank survival… Bank failures…are much less expensive than the things we do to fill holes in bank balance sheets so we need never acknowledge their failures." ~me drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/

// is this kind of self-quote a gross form of self-promotion?

@bergmayer yes, but i find my nose still grows out almost every time i speak.

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@bergmayer (hooray!)

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@bergmayer (when i modified and resaved my mastodon profile it verified for me immediately. i had added the rel=“me” link to the target site a while before and was just waiting, but it didn’t update ‘til i made some dummy change and resaved.)

in reply to @bergmayer

@bergmayer (a dummy change to my mastodon profile.)

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@bergmayer you have to edit your profile for it to recheck verification.

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[new draft post] Banks are not private drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/

@drskyskull ❤️

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“You might have some swivel-eyed loons in your life…Remember that we have common ground. When they say they don’t trust vaccines bc the pharma companies are corrupt…that’s not your signal to defend the manifestly corrupt pharma companies who murdered 800,000 Americans with opioids… Remember…the things they’re right about. Lean into the common ground. Help them understand that corporate power, and its capture of government, is our true shared enemy.” @pluralistic doctorow.medium.com/the-swivel

has achieved full self backseat-driving yet?

RESOLVED: Imperialism is bad, but so is devolution.

a bad pun is not just a calamity, it is a rhyme against humanity.

in the Iraq War retrospectiving today, why did we do it, it was based on lies, etc, i haven’t seen much talk of a mundane, almost bureaucratic driver. the western consensus surrounding continuing sanctions was fraying. unless something was done, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was likely to become increasingly normalized. US hawks perceived this as an unacceptable surrender of the prior Iraq War’s celebrated victory. it was either “finish the job” or accept defeat. (in the end, of course, we got both.)

“This is why rhetoric like Michael Knowles’s is so dangerous. I don’t think Knowles yearns to personally murder trans people. I don’t think he longs to direct other people to murder trans people on his behalf. I don’t think he fantasizes about the prospect of trans people being murdered.”

“But I do think he and too many like him knowingly, willingly, and eagerly court the praise, likes, follows, speech attendances, and novelty gift budgets of people who do”

@radleybalko radleybalko.substack.com/p/shr

@Jonathanglick i’d imagine that’d be very secret service…

how would the secret service protect an ex-president in jail?

@failedLyndonLaRouchite i wasn’t being snarky! self-deprecating, sure. (but actually slime molds are quite brilliant when you get to know them!)

@failedLyndonLaRouchite oh, i'm just a slime mold with an internet connection. those are great people!

@philipncohen studies show that people who eat matter do well, while those who eat no matter at all do poorly. it is inexplicable then that there are circumstances when people refrain from eating matter despite its abundance around them! we need more funding for matter promotion.

in reply to @philipncohen

@failedLyndonLaRouchite autarky is undesirable, but for a large diverse economy like the US an “autarky option”, the capacity if necessary to rely on domestic production at a cost, expensive but not existential, is desirable. we should always have reasonable alternatives should the terms of trade turn, or should somebody threaten to turn them. 1/

@failedLyndonLaRouchite diversification across many, friendly, foreign suppliers is another choice, but “friendly” can change and diversification doesn’t work well when changes can correlate. There are judgment calls here, but for the US simply to lack core industrial capacities it can expand if necessary is terribly foolish. 2/

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@failedLyndonLaRouchite and yes, the fact that the capabilities that make for a domestic ship-building industry are important complements to military production (and can reduce the costs of necessarily more source-selective military procurement) is an important and relevant consideration. /fin

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