#ChatGPT is countertransference as a megastructure.
@jgordon memories of the future is the real product opportunity.
when Trump claims to be “an innocent man” and his followers believe him, i don’t think the meaning of that is to deny that he did what he is accused of. instead the claim is that, by virtue of being Trump, by virtue of his nobility and the nobility of his intentions, his doing this does not constitute a crime where it might if others did the same. 1/
in the conservative imaginary, the protection offered by the state must be about persons rather than actions. it is futile, naive, to try to prevent or deter crime. we must catch and punish criminals. there are good guys and there are bad guys, and the edifice of law is a pretext by which we get the bad guys. going after the good guys, unless what they’ve done shocks the conscience in its harm to other good guys, is always a miscarriage of justice. /fin
either we are integrating or we are disintegrating.
#DSHR on getting a locally run LLM up and running. https://blog.dshr.org/2023/06/a-local-large-language-model.html
@Alon @SteveRoth @jamisonnbishop @ryanlcooper I’m very sympathetic to “hysteresis” arguments that suggest the long-term effect of recessionary economies is sluggish demand, lower growth and productivity that might have emerged in a “run the economy hot” counterfactual, where people would spend more securely and full employment / rising wages create incentives for labor-augmenting innovation.
@Alon @SteveRoth @jamisonnbishop @ryanlcooper There’s just a very mechanical short-term effect. Business’ capacity to produce does not fall linearly with the marginal workers fired. So the immediate effect of a recession is a productivity increase, once demand comes back towards capacity. I don’t at all claim it’s a good thing overall.
@Alon @SteveRoth @jamisonnbishop @ryanlcooper since that early 1990s recession, the stylized fact is “jobless recoveries”. fast GDP growth not matched by employment growth. growth itself does not imply productivity. the question is what labor “produces” (it’s really just a ratio) that growth. 1/
@Alon @SteveRoth @jamisonnbishop @ryanlcooper at the end of a recession is when labor markets are loosest. you might argue then that this is exactly when you’d expect growth to be a function of recruiting labor. but that’s not what happens. “productivity” happens. growth picks uo much faster than labor. /fin
@Alon @SteveRoth @jamisonnbishop @ryanlcooper i’m not sure what the dispute is? here’s (mobile-scale) US labor productivity by the most common measure. note how it pretty reliably spikes by the end of recessions (including 2020), as businesses fire workers and do less with more (degree to which that’s a result of working them harder vs selection effect of who gets fired is arguable).
This comment on economists' and policy makers' betrayal of welfare economics by adopting "cost-benefit analysis" (or the potential-Pareto criterion) is fabulous. https://downloads.regulations.gov/OMB-2022-0014-0023/attachment_1.pdf via @SteveRoth
@SteveRoth (The pedant in me can't help but point out that even *with* compensation, we must impose as a normative matter interpersonal comparison of welfare in order to make claims of welfare improvement. Absent unanimous agreement to a policy — with which or without reasonable compensation, will rarely be forthcoming, as people have idiosyncratic attachments or play holdup games — even with compensation we can't "scientifically" know the compensation is adequate.)
@Alon @SteveRoth @jamisonnbishop @ryanlcooper In a world where employers perceive high costs to finding employees and so hold onto employees through the business cycle, measured productivity declines overall. during periods of lower demand, labor hours are expended for the nontransactional benefit of maintaining relationships, which does not appear in GDP, reducing apparent productivity. 1/
@Alon @SteveRoth @jamisonnbishop @ryanlcooper In a world where employers fire very freely, we see the morally counterintuitive result that productivity rises in recessions. Businesses fire employees whose hours contribute least to revenue generating transactions, raising the average of revenue per hour. Plus they can work those they retain harder, as "the sack" becomes a very credible threat. 2/
@Alon @SteveRoth @jamisonnbishop @ryanlcooper Treating productivity as we measure it as an unmitigated virtue is perilous. Yes, we want to maximize welfare generated per hour worked. But productivity doesn't measure welfare, it measures GDP, the macro analog of revenue. There are obvious wedges between welfare and revenue when firing someone doesn't much hit revenue but condemns a person to penury. /fin
@Alon @SteveRoth @jamisonnbishop @ryanlcooper (The better matching you describe in boom periods could counter to some degree my claim of lower measured productivity over the cycle, but to the degree there are matching gains to be had from job-switching, there might be tensions between the worker scarcity and so security “labor hoarding” yields, encouraging switching, and the relationship-building attached to that, discouraging it even in booms.)
it would be a scandal if government agencies could not have information available for purchase by every other stalker and marketer. if you don’t want the government to have surveillance data, regulate it to prevent it from becoming a commodity for sale on the open market.
@SteveRoth @Alon @jamisonnbishop @ryanlcooper i think this is maybe restating @Alon’s point, but one conjecture would we are experiencing a labor bargaining power hangover. “labor hoarding” is the phrase the US press uses, but what it means is that businesses perceive labor relations as precious, potentially hard to replace or scarce, rather than disposable and replaceable on demand. so they err on the side of retaining workers, rather than dismiss and rehire them. 1/
@SteveRoth @Alon @jamisonnbishop @ryanlcooper this would be a pro-employment result of the US’ extraordinary fiscal support during the pandemic. over the last few years, workers experienced getting by without current work — it became thinkable — and they accumulated savings that, even for a while after supports ended, meant “take this job and shove it” remained on the table. 2/
@SteveRoth @Alon @jamisonnbishop @ryanlcooper thanks to state support, workers were (qua @Alon / Meidner) perceived as having wings, rather than hiding desperately under shells praying for the beneficience of employers. 3/
@SteveRoth @Alon @jamisonnbishop @ryanlcooper in the stupid Econ 101 imagination, there is only price and quantity, and labor supports can only shove the supply curve outward, reducing quantity employed. 4/
@SteveRoth @Alon @jamisonnbishop @ryanlcooper but it is policy that determines the *character* of labor as an economic commodity. in a Dickensian world, labor is disorganized, disposable, a burden you take on only when needed and shed as quickly as possible. 5/
@SteveRoth @Alon @jamisonnbishop @ryanlcooper in a civilized world, labor is people, employment is a relationship, employers who become available then unavailable, “sleep around” looking to replace you, are employers workers can and do avoid. 6/
@SteveRoth @Alon @jamisonnbishop @ryanlcooper for the first time in 50 years, from 2021, US employers have got a taste of a civilized labor market. even as household employment declines (gig workers find it harder to hire themselves), employers retain the relationships they’ve established, are less likely to let go. 7/
@SteveRoth @Alon @jamisonnbishop @ryanlcooper in a civilized world, what that leads to is a profits recession, not a labor recession at all, profit margins (i think still near double historical norms) normalize while workers remain employed and employable. 8/
@SteveRoth @Alon @jamisonnbishop @ryanlcooper it remains to be seen how civilized our country is willing to be. what if the stock market declines even while employment is tight and interest rates are steady? is that even thinkable? /fin
the whole pronoun thing will blow over once they realize theirs are brah/brah.
@kim_harding one step might be to adopt electoral systems more likely to reward decent people, and not likely to reward negative partisanship. much wider use of approval voting might be a good start.
“The novelist Upton Sinclair observed, ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’
Well, the opposite is true, too.”
from @BCAppelbaum https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/10/opinion/federal-investment-green-energy-global-warming.html
Chilling on a summer day in Constanța.
@ Teatrul National de Opera si Balet - Oleg Danovski
@DetroitDan i agree with the bit you quote, but i find Hudson mostly discredits himself throughout that interview by offering very caricatured and implausible takes on eg the Biden Administration. his description of the changes to food stamps is just inaccurate. i don't think you can look at the totality of the Biden Administration, including the ambitious and humiliating BBB drama, and write the whole thing off as a cynical game of good cop in cahoots with bad-cop Republicans.
@DetroitDan yeah, he is open about endorsing views that by recent (though now more contested) standards have been beyond-the-pale racist. he's very openly on the other side of most questions i consider important — i want social peace and social democracy, not social division to render social democracy impossible — but that openness is a refreshing contrast to the disingenuous dissembling of most of his political compatriots.
#RichardHanania celebrates our miserable current state of of hatred, conflict, and social division as a feature rather than a bug. "Diversity is our strength" precisely because social division sabotages the political prospects of social democracy, despite ongoing massive public support for social democratic change. If you take for granted as "truth" that impotent government is essential to prosperity and flourishing, conflict among the plebes is to be encouraged. https://www.richardhanania.com/p/diversity-really-is-our-strength
if you are using contemporary LLMs, you want prompts that amount to linguistic one-way functions. they should generate output that would otherwise be difficult or annoying or time-consuming to produce, but is trivial to verify.
don't you just want to unlock new features?
@arclight good point.
do we love our apps?
I have been told things you would never believe.
Back the blue!*
* As long as they ignore our crimes, but beat the crap out of them for theirs.
Ovid superintends his exile.
A sculpture of Ovid surveils Piata Ovidiu (Ovidiu Square) in Constanța, Romania.
“Too many limits on national policy autonomy can also produce a backlash against the global economy. One consequence of the erosion of national sovereignty under hyper-globalization was an increase in economic anxiety and the sense of a loss of control among many citizens. These are circumstances that exacerbate xenophobia and out-group hostility.” @drodrik https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/economic-implications-of-global-governance-decline-by-dani-rodrik-2023-06
Kind of an aside, but Dems getting tough on Pharma's rape of the public purse would help defang some social issues. Both anti-vax and anti-trans activists lean on claims that what they deride as quack, harmful medicine is, with Dem's political contrivance, pushed on the public for Pharma Profit$.
These arguments would be less plausible if Democrats were plainly not on the side of Pharma Profit$.
see @pluralistic on Dem's latest, unpersuasive, version of "getting tough". https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/09/commissar-merck/#price-giver
@JoshuaHolland @GottaLaff it’s only masking that can really hurt you.
@DetroitDan (thanks!)
@failedLyndonLaRouchite i wasn’t criticizing (your post or really endorsing it either). just rephrasing the Barr-endorsing tweet in an attempt at mild humor…
@failedLyndonLaRouchite even Satan agreed this was over the line.
@HamonWry it used to be VR was going to be a place for fantasy. now it’s going to be a place for normalcy.
much of superstition is just reading reality like a novel.
#MoeTkacik on private equity, reviewing two recent books that both aptly characterize the industry as *plunder* https://prospect.org/culture/books/2023-06-02-days-of-plunder-morgenson-rosner-ballou-review/
Got to love the #FreeSpeech coalition. https://www.rawstory.com/new-college-florida-desantis/ ht @GreenSkyOverMe @fawfulfan
some people can never die, will be forever young. https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-ent-astrud-gilberto-dies-20230606-2uwzmrfs55dafeb5kp5tdreqci-story.html
Rooftops, Brașov.
orange tile rooftops of Brașov, plus a view if Biserica Neagra (“the Black Church”) under blue, partly cloudy sky.
@CoolerPseudonym i don’t know! i should read (or better yet see) it!
@CoolerPseudonym it’s not logical though to presume he can’t fly.
@StefanThinks this triggered me.
@CoolerPseudonym i’m unna become the main character on Qsite today with this one:
Socrates. Is. Mortal.
@akhilrao i myself am a very small language model.
@WisdomExplained i’m in detention.
claiming to prove or disprove things by recourse to (contestable and contested) definitions is not “science”. when you construct syllogisms out of a game of telephone, because the same word shades to different meanings in different contexts, those syllogisms need not “by logic” be true.
compare and contrast: orgiastic, orgasmic
i could be a big fan of virtuous reality.
@MadMadMadMadRN it’s a pretty bad equilibrium… aka a pickle.
@guncelawits (thanks!)
@dfeldman I was pretty ambiguous in the piece about that, but I think private sector prices are subject to the same forces, but private sector contracting projects can pit those forces against one another, when the contractors have similar market power. So it's harder to make claims as general. Agency issues — to what degree are the people doing the contracting exposed to contract outcomes (especially price) — may then largely decide the balance. 1/
@dfeldman Public sector agents tend to be very weakly exposed to contract outcomes. Sometimes their exposure may be more aligned with vendor than purchaser interest (when, for example, there's the possibility of a job or board seat with the vendor as a downstream career). But even without such blatant corruption, public sector agents (both civil servants and electeds) are unlikely to have their salary or tenures tightly coupled to contract outcomes. 2/
@dfeldman Even in splashy cases in the public eye like CA HSR, blame is just too shiftable. So public sector purchasers tend pretty reliably to be unable to counter vendor determination to maximize take. 3/
@dfeldman Private sector purchasers definitely face that same determination, and as individuals we experience the same rapaciousness when, eg, we interact with private-equity-owned medicine or housing providers for example. Their "efficiency" is in large part a willingness to squeeze customers in ways that local, customer-interacting business people still balk at, for ethical and customary reasons. As individuals, we face a cost disease from minimal market power and motivated counterparties. 4/
@dfeldman But in private sector contracts where the contractor has a high degree of market power relative to many vendors, and where agents have strong incentives aligned with economic performance of the project, the same forces might lead to efficient outcomes for the purchaser, matched sometimes by brutal outcomes for vendors. I think it's harder to make very general claims. /fin
@laprice @lobrien if we had the industrial revolution to do over again, we would definitely want to do it differently. we would want much earlier broad distribution of the new wealth than actually occurred. the labor gains and welfare state of the early postwar years should have been late 19C. but i don’t think we would want to just never do it. (maybe climate change means we should have never done it? i’d say that’s another should’ve-been-done-better instead.)
@LouisIngenthron i guess i feel like we attribute a capacity to experience and therefore experience emotion more to the LLMs than the art-bots. the image generators produce emotionally evocative things for sure, but i don’t find myself anthropomorphizing them, it’s easier to imagine a surprising but mere statistical blender to whose outputs i attribute emotion than it is when i am actually “talking” to the blender.
@darwinwoodka sometimes it really does feel like a cut-rate universe!
@blabberlicious @LouisIngenthron maybe we should just call it a collaboration. (or maybe we decide only humans can be authors, so like the director is the *autor* of a film no matter how many hundreds participate in its creation, we may choose always attribute the creation to the humans.)
@LouisIngenthron they certain have astonished us! during the industrial revolution, though, i wonder whether there weren’t analogous moments of just awe that machines could do these things that previously only humans — and it took so many humans! — could do.
@LouisIngenthron the emotion question is interesting. so far, the LLM producers have really tried to limit apparent expression of emotion. (ChatGPT has become very neutral over the months, obviously Microsoft’s “Sidney” was clipped post NYT interview.) but even when they are restricted to HR-speak, we are somewhat awestruck. and it will be interesting to see how we’ll react to apps? bots? services? that aren’t tied back from reproducing (producing?) emotion.
@isomorphismes omg that is so horrible i am so sorry. parent’s nightmare beyond nightmares.
@zzypt computers have long been able to do persuasive (pseudo)randomness and run not-entirely-predictable stochastic algorithms. but there is something in the character of the unpredicatable outputs that LLMs and image-producing-apps that does feel somehow a step beyond all that!
@darwinwoodka i know. i love the demands programming makes upon my mind to think and behave very different than in natural language interactions with humans. i would really miss that in a Star Trek, just shout “Conputer, do this” kind of world.
@lobrien yes. i am much more concerned about more quotidian harms — algorithm-laundering of training set biases, capital owners plundering workers and consumers by enshittifying ( ht @pluralistic ) services to capture ever more surplus, cost of training and regulatory moats turning into barriers to entry further consolidating the market power of the already very powerful.
@agocke ha! my answer would probably be it’s up to each of us to answer, it’s an axiom we can accept or not, impervious to derivation or refutation.
@agocke if they do represent how we think, does that mean they think
@agocke (only humans could invent, use, and make sense of an abacus? to all other species, they were dried beans that somehow slide loosely on sticks!)
@lobrien i do think it interesting, a bit eerie, how variably capable these things seem to be! but we have faced so many superior competencies. there was John Henry vs the steam shovel, tractor vs ag workers. all led to big societal disruptions! mb there was similar apocalypticism about these technologies in their times? but do we have reason to fear LLMs will be more disruptive? and beyond any temporary disruption, unlike precedents, eventually harmful rather than beneficial?
@agocke it is easy to imagine, say, 150 years ago, making a case that while many animals in some sense or another “speak”, it is the uniquely human capacity for mathematics that truly distinguishes us from the beasts.
@notio interestingly, that’s a skill we can’t measure at all, among computers or other humans. i can’t know there is meaning behind your words, or ChatGPT’s. it’s always a choice to presume another mind, when we can only experience our own.
@misc arithmetic and memory were also human ability long before they were computer abilities! do we just like the capacities for which we may now have to cede the crown of superiority more than we valued those older human abilities?
a thing i don’t get is what is new. i mean, computers have long been much, much “smarter” than humans in, for example, their ability to perform arithmetic, or to remember things. recent AI tools are interesting for sure, but what superior competence of theirs makes these new systems so threatening, compared to older superior competences?
@MadMadMadMadRN Right. The dream is to be able to live without financial worries, travel nicely and more, and help family and friends who also suffer from precarity.
@rst we, like they, now have a very hard time making any real progress in aggregate. we just started from a better baseline.
@MadMadMadMadRN yes. exactly.
@dbfclark (thanks! i’ll correct it when i get back home.)
[new draft post] Quietly expensive desperation https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/06/04/quietly-expensive-desperation/index.html
Good analysis of the recent inflation by @DolanEcon https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-inflation-of-2021-22-was-different-what-we-should-learn-from-it/
Some vendors are not asking for your consent, but are using your personal data on the basis of their legitimate interest.
for the purists, we offer a bread sandwich.
just don’t call me a psammophobe you beach.
what you inevitably find is that, if the only way to get anywhere is to drive, there isn’t anywhere worth bothering to go.
look on the bright side: this year’s anomaly is just next year’s baseline.
@DetroitDan here is just a few minutes ago.
a sunrise over the Black Sea.
@DetroitDan i can’t wait to grill you about the places you’ve been.
velvet
32.5%
red
(13 votes)
32.5%
blue
(13 votes)
15.0%
black
(6 votes)
20.0%
purple
(8 votes)
@exchgr “smart”
@ben we were into time machines, imagine traveling to the future in the blink of an eye. turns out, we got what we wanted.
@codinghorror anything to divert energy from diluting the text commons with AI-generated bulk.
@Alon @JohnMashey @MadMadMadMadRN @BenRossTransit @phillmv @pluralistic sometimes anticorruption is actually anticorruption. it’s untenable to oppose anticorruption in general, of course. it’s easy—and right as far as it goes—to argue state capacity depends upon public trust, which depends upon a mostly honest state. but corrupt sabotage of state capacity (including to prevent forms of corruption) also wears the cape of anticorruption.
@Alon @JohnMashey @MadMadMadMadRN @BenRossTransit @phillmv @pluralistic (i guess i’m referring to histories i’ve read of the HDB going back to the 1960s, LKY exhorting experimentation in housing, expecting and tolerating missteps. but if Singapore has since privatized planning, they seem to continue to be oddly successful at it, still capable of building sizable new towns and integrating them well, no?)
@Alon @JohnMashey @MadMadMadMadRN @BenRossTransit @phillmv @pluralistic yeah. government bureaucracies are obviously very heterogeneous, so using “government bureaucracy” as an explanation doesn’t take you very far. in the US, well-funded activism openly intended to sabotage and discredit state action renders a culture of extreme skepticism of government largely self-fulfilling, which publics then take as “natural”. but it’s just one, very bad, equilibrium! 1/
@Alon @JohnMashey @MadMadMadMadRN @BenRossTransit @phillmv @pluralistic in the US and elsewhere, my sense is that successful state action requires a culture that rewards activity and tolerates honest failure. Singapore is probably the signal example here, but the US under FDR too. experiment and fail, and do it again, find what works. 2/
@Alon @JohnMashey @MadMadMadMadRN @BenRossTransit @phillmv @pluralistic because corruption is always possible, however, under a culture of skepticism of state action, plutocratic interests find it easy to paralyze an entrepreneurial state (apologies #MarianaMazzucato) under unobjectionable banners like “accountability” and “anticorruption”. /fin
@JohnMashey @MadMadMadMadRN @BenRossTransit @phillmv @Alon @pluralistic it’s very general i think. https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/3513.html
@MadMadMadMadRN @BenRossTransit @phillmv @Alon @pluralistic sure. that’s much of the problem. as keynes said of bankers, they’d prefer to fail conventionally than risk succeeding unconventionally. so fail conventionally they do!
@djc @SteveRoth we’ll never know, but i don’t think so. i think that the contours of the deal suggest that the Biden Administration quietly let Rs know that they did have alternatives — that they prefered not to use! — but they were not in fact hostages.
@BenRossTransit @phillmv @Alon @MadMadMadMadRN @pluralistic that’s a useful framing. fundamentally, we need an administrative state capable of doing what’s required to deliver good outcomes within wide procedural guardrails, rather than one whose actors are primarily concerned with the risk of being seen to have done something objectionable.
all is calm on the Romanian Black Sea coast. it’s the first time i’ve been since it’s not been so calm in the country just north of here, the first time i’ve been since COVID.
the sunset light touches Portul Tomis in Constanta, Romania. the sea is flat, waveless.
@phillmv @Alon @MadMadMadMadRN @BenRossTransit @pluralistic in an individual case, maybe. lawyers take cases on contingency, if the damages may be large. but if a private right of action causes litigation-fearful firms to change their behavior, it also protects those who would never sue. if adtech surveillance brought expensive claims so it was uneconomic to pursue it, those who’d never sue are also protected. 1/
@phillmv @Alon @MadMadMadMadRN @BenRossTransit @pluralistic and in practice, “filling forms” and prompting bureaucracies to act often also requires lawyers, who must be paid up front if there will be no damages to be paid from. we’re discussing at to general a level to know whether and who will be priced out of relief. it depends on vwry specifics. /fin
@Alon @MadMadMadMadRN @BenRossTransit @phillmv @pluralistic we oughtta sue them for that.
@Alon @phillmv @pluralistic i’m not endorsing this kind of activism. on the contrary, i’m skeptical both of localistic and Fed-based approaches to addressing climate change. just noting that in systems where most of the administrative state is dysfunctional, people seek out capable levers (courts, the Fed) as substitutes. often tragically, as none of these are great at balancing diverse interests.
@MadMadMadMadRN @BenRossTransit @Alon @phillmv @pluralistic to take the other side a little, private rights of action can entrench not-so-great resolutions to problems. sometimes it would be good to have a less-financially-incentivized, more open-to-balance administrative state instead of private rights of action. when the issue is insufficient enforcement, yeah, they’re complements. but when the issue is thoughtless, unbalanced enforcement, maybe substitutes.
@BenRossTransit @Alon @phillmv @pluralistic you’d think! yet wage theft apparently remains common in the US. if damages for intentional shaving of wage obligations were trebled, if class actions were pursuable on contingency, i think you’d get a lot of private enforcement! but here there might be unintended consequences in terms of employment practices. more than with ad tech, you might want to balance employee rights and employer risk.
@Alon @phillmv @pluralistic in the US, the central bank is the one part of the administrative state somewhat insulated from political sabotage, so we rely upon it, upon it alone almost, for macroeconomic management. activists often treat the Fed (rather than electeds) as the government worth lobbying (eg the campaign to have the Fed consider climate risk when regulating and risk-weighting bank lending).
@Alon @phillmv @pluralistic i mean, i want a private right of action to kill adtech, bc otherwise i suspect any reform will be even more toothless than GDPR has been in Europe. @pluralistic wants a private right of action, he’s not a lawyer, i think. mb we are somehow in thrall of the prestige of the legal lobby, but i think it’s mostly bc we know how effective litigation risk is at conditioning corporate behavior in the US. (often too effective!)
@Alon @phillmv @pluralistic (it sounds like the Arrangements Law, however neolliberal its direction, empowers the administrative state over electeds. in the US, the issue is that electeds kneecap, sometimes by intentional sabotage, other times by well-meaning micromanagement, the workings of the administrative state.)
@yarrriv @pluralistic it might not be enough, but doubling revenue would certainly help, be a good start! take any industry and assume its revenue declines by half and a major collapse is no surprise.
@Alon @phillmv @pluralistic but as you can see from this discussion, for better or worse, it’s not just lawyers. we have so lost confidence in a competent administrative state capable of opposing plutocratic interests that we (citizens, activists) actively seek private rights of action. we want to be able to do it ourself because we expect the administrative state to sell us out.
@Alon @phillmv @pluralistic yes, they can work when the state overcomes plutocratic interests to act. but, empirically, at the moment, the American administrative state mostly does not. one state out of fifty is the exception that proves the rule, re wage theft. I could speculate why Israel maybe does better — parliamentary systems in general better insulate administrative states from bad politicians — but your speculations will be better informed.
@Alon @phillmv @pluralistic i think a way to think about all this is private rights of action are very rigid and limit govt flexibility, but they are also very certain. in a world with perfect govt, there’d be little use for them. in lots of eg environmental and planning contexts, they do mischief. 1/
@Alon @phillmv @pluralistic but in contexts where the issue is likely underenforcement by the plutocratic state, and where costs of enforcement despite an inability of the state to balance or make tradeoffs against other interests are low, private rights of action are very useful. 2/
@Alon @phillmv @pluralistic if we had a capable administrative state in the US reliably willing to exert state power in favor of a balanced notion of the public interest over plutocratic interests, i’d agree private rights of action should be minimized to very clear, old-fashioned torts. but we don’t in fact have that. 3/
@Alon @phillmv @pluralistic if we wanted a balanced approach to surveillance-based advertising, under which dedicated professionals trade-off the virtues of targeting against the costs of surveillance and sought careful balances, then one shouldn’t favor a private right of action. 4/
@Alon @phillmv @pluralistic but the actual circumstance is the United States’ administration state is substantially hobbled by deference to plutocratoc interest, and there is very little public interest to balance against the harms of ad-tech-driven commercial surveillance. 5/
@Alon @phillmv @pluralistic so it seems to me that, despite the (very real!) flaws of private rights of action in the general case, they are well suited to this application. we intend to bluntly impair our collective capacity to surveil, and ensure existing infrastructure is disemployed. things that have been (mostly) unintended consequences in a planning and development context are the intended consequences here. /fin
“we need a legal ban on ads, not mere platitudes on billboards advertising companies' ‘respect’ for our privacy. The US is way overdue for a federal privacy law with a private right of action, which would let you and me sue the companies who violated it” @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/31/context-ads/
from @baldur https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2023/tech-broke-the-webs-social-contract/ ht @emilybache @matthewskelton
Text: The problem is that quite a few people in tech don't believe in any social contract. Their conceptualisation of society is that it's an equilibrium of dominant wills motivated by mimetic desire. That the rich are on top; that the rest of us aspire to be like them; and that any and all criticism towards them is born from jealousy. The world can only be improved by those with power over others. Any form of pro-social reasoning, consensus-building, or genuine negotiations seems to be alien to them. These people are reactionary libertarian assholes, and they are tech's ruling class. They might see themselves as benevolent shepherds of humanity's future, esp. the creepy longtermist types, but by and large, they are power-hungry libertarian assholes. This is why they leave scorched earth behind.
@djc that’s making claims (i can’t evaluate now) about current price growth attributable to profits.
profit margins have been on a secular tear, then supercharged postpandemic. this measure would be about 8% to be historically moderate-ish. i think it’s still around double that (can’t track it down now, on the road).
graph of US nonfinancial corporate profits as share of gross value added.
it isn’t full employment until profit margins are moderate.
from @akkartik on “situated software”. (i may have hit this before, but i love the aesthetic.) http://akkartik.name/freewheeling
Text: These are my suggestions. Prefer software with thousands rather than millions of users, that doesn't change often, that seems to get forked a lot, that can be modified without specialized tools, and, ideally that you can make small changes to. Yourself. In a single afternoon.
it’s not just intuit’s lobbying. if filing were automatic and refunds just appeared for most workers, it’d be hard to persuade them to hate the IRS despite their interest in escaping predatory plutocracy.
@rst horror is a versatile genre.
@rst next time go for The Shinjng! how were the halls?
kind of disconcerting when your departure gate is F8.
maybe we should call instagram the fadiverse.
@DeanBaker13 @hardindr there may be a kind of irony, states whose reproductive and cultural politics drive away scarce US doctors may be the first to (usefully!) innovate by attracting qualified foreign professionals to replace them.
Clinical trials have become an excuse to create barriers to entry and protect massive pharma rents.
Perhaps we should consider nationalizing the clinical trials process. If an otherwise unencumbered treatment looks promising, the government should just pay to check it out. If it works, every competent firm can compete to offer it.
cf proprietary poop @ $20K a pop per @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/29/monopolizing-turds/
@atomicpoet @evan I think you are really understating the damage Google Reader did to #RSS.
Yes, I still love and use RSS!
But, at the time, a broad mainstream community also loved and used RSS — almost entirely via Google Reader! When Google dropped it, that whole ecosystem disappeared. That mainstream community, which at that point was playing on Twitter but still followed RSS feeds, shrugged and fully embraced siloed social media. 1/
@atomicpoet @evan Speaking very personally, it was absolutely devastating to me as a writer. Over the years, my core asset had been the presence I had built in the RSS feeds of journalists, academics, and other writers. That all just… disappeared.
Life goes on and nobody owes a shit like me a whit of attention. I have only doubled down on RSS, going as far as writing RSS libs of my very own for newer projects. But professionally, I've not recovered from it, and doubt I ever will. /fin
@eARCwelder an invisible pixel signifies your consent and circulates deep-fake porn of you around the internet.
This message contains remote content.
the real win for Joe Biden in the debt ceiling negotiations is a House Speaker whose political fortunes become tied to making progress on “centrist” Republican priorities in a bipartisan manner rather than one dependent upon Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich, freedom-caucus scorched-earth, blow-up-the-Democrats-whatever-the-collateral-damage, tactics.
@josh there goes my streak…
Especially when it comes to political ramifications, I generally stand in opposition to the people who claim our AI systems are or are on the verge of becoming "conscious" independent agents (and therefore dangerous powerful aliens). I am much more worried about malign (or just venal) human agency with these tools than about the agency of the machine. 1/
But I'm reading a lot of I'll say too smug, too hermetic tellings from my side of the argument that it's just incoherent, a "category error" to imagine genuine minds arising from machines made of cable and silicon. Our brains are mere material too. They too have no direct experience of the world, only of opaque signals to which they somehow give meaning. 2/
It is perfectly possible, in my view, that a materialistic view of the world is incomplete, and that we are conscious because in some sense we have souls that a machine cannot. But I would not pretend to know whether that is true, or whether my consciousness and agency result in some way from how physical signals interact. And if the latter is true, I would not pretend to know the same thing couldn't emerge on top of a machine substrate doing complicated signal processing. 3/
I don't even pretend to know whether other humans have "consciousness" or "agency". I can only perceive my own. My resolution to the "problem of other minds" is a moral choice, and an act of faith. I take it as axiomatic that other humans have these things. Whether in the unknowable truth I am right or wrong, I'm sure this is a good choice. I don't want to be lonely, or a sociopath, even if in fact I could only be those things or not in some solipsistic simulation. 4/
So I am sure — at least I will act and even think in the consciousness I experience that I am sure — that you dear reader are a consciousness with agency. 5/
It will ultimately be a social question, not a scientifically resolvable matter of physics or philosophically certain matter of clarity, whether I someday offer that presumption to entities that seem like minds on other substrates. A merely compelling simulation of humanness would not on its own provoke me to that decision. I would have to believe that, according to my own values, the world makes more sense, is more virtuous, is less lonesome, if that presumption would be offered. /fin
cc @poetryforsupper, as this is in part a response to an essay he suggested: https://psyche.co/ideas/the-myth-of-machine-consciousness-makes-narcissus-of-us-all
@wholesomedonut i think we'll want publicly trained models with transparently agreed training sets and feedback mechanisms that we can run and tweak locally.
from preliminary reads of the #DebtCeiling deal it's bad on principle bc it's not a clean raise, and it's bad in fact on cuts, but it's much better than what you'd expect from the hostage situation Ds had publicly, almost performatively, walked themselves into. i have a hard time believing their negotiation position in private wasn't stronger than the public position, that some unilateral workaround wasn't quietly on the table. it's the Congressional Republican reaction that will be interesting.
this is a bad thing. it also may affect the Supreme Court's decision on student loan forgiveness. now they don't have to worry that no forgiveness means no resumption. but as @ddayen points out, the biggest deal in the Biden admin's student debt proposal was the very generous IDR (income-driven repayment plan), which would provide immediate relief but ultimately necessitate a restructuring of how colleges set tuition. i hope that is still on.
from @ddayen on Twitter: Any macro impact is going to come from the return of student loan payments, which are codified in this agreement and now guaranteed later this summer. $400/mo payments for millions are back, with no clarity yet on whether cancellation will happen. One caveat to that: The administration has promised a far more generous income-driven repayment plan that would slash payments for lower earners. We haven't heard much about the progress of the updates to this program.
@phillmv i don't know. i just screenshotted then moved onto Midjourney (which was fine with desantis, although is famously not with xi jinping). but it's good to be reminder of what the architecture of control is here! i thank microsoft for being blatant about it! i fear subtle manipulation of these kinds of tools much more than overt censorship.
if AI tools become essential to contemporary communication and media production, it’ll be a big problem if centralized providers continue to control what kinds of expression they will and won’t produce, or worse yet to subtly shape their outputs. these tools must be local-first and user-controlled.
Bing Image Creator refuses to generate from prompt “ron desantis embraces gollum”
facts don’t care about your feelings. they care about mine.
What is extraordinary about this to me is that these firms — i think! — are brazenly counterfeiting DJT's endorsement, even down to using his signature in unauthorized ways, yet he stays silent rather than objecting or suing because he wants the continued enthusiastic support of the people falling for this kind of grift. Demonstrating integrity, protecting his own reputation, would expose them outright as suckers, maybe curb their enthusiasm. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-bucks-promise-wealth-maga-loyalty-lose-thousands-rcna84965 ht @Atrios and #PaulCampos
@22 (sorry!)
[new draft post] Smeaguls https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/05/27/smeaguls/index.html
people act as though the point of Ron DeSantis' Twitter Spaces rollout was to impress the public, so it was a ridiculous failure.
of course not.
you don't impress the public in Twitter Spaces. the broad public isn't there. you can't appear Presidential among flags + camera angles in Twitter Spaces.
DeSantis chose Twitter Spaces to cultivate the support of one man, Elon Musk. he's after the plutocratic alliance.
technical difficulties only aid his courtship. he could be magnanimous.
the human condition is always on the verge of tears.
you say i haven't had a productive day, but i upgraded like five applications in the app store.
@ctrl @SteveRoth definitely fair enough!
@ctrl @SteveRoth i’m a long time finance guy…
@ctrl @SteveRoth no, it doesn’t, because because face value can be arbitrary small. zero-face consols are simplest to talk about, but if we’re going to argue that the market will view constraint on the maturity mix as somehow equivalent to default (a bit absurd in my view, but ok), then we can consider low face value bonds of any maturity.
@ctrl @SteveRoth the market looks through differences in legal formalities to economic substance. and low-face-value bonds are substantively stronger than the existing mix, precisely because debt ceiling risks are obviated.
@ctrl @SteveRoth no, because you can simulate in substance a treasury issue of any maturity as a premium bond, with no or if there is some constraint arbitrarily low face value. we’d have to get over some novelty, but a world of low-face value bonds needn’t constrain the economic substance of Treasury issues at all.
@tri_becca90 it makes no sense but please do ❤️
@SteveRoth @mafeesh @pluralistic yeah. i think this is the right frame.
@ctrl @SteveRoth it ends any uncertainty. consols are legal, we’ve issued them before. the debt ceiling computation is specific, it only applies to face value. 1/
@ctrl @SteveRoth over a short term, there’s risk that the Supreme Court disregards all that and adopts a kind of nonconstitutional debt-ceiling primacy doctrine to invalidate them. someone will undoubtedly try to claim standing to sue. but then the Court will face the prospect of using tortured logic to force a US default on already marketed instruments or not. 2/
@ctrl @SteveRoth Once it does not, whether by punting on standing or acknowledging the plain language of statute, these just become another US Treasury product, but one that means the debt ceiling can’t be used extortionately anymore, the worst it can do is constrain the product mix Treasury issues a bit. /fin
@ctrl @SteveRoth why? you think the market cares about face value? you think it values the debt ceiling, and would insist a ceiling that binds be restored? it’s trivial to price premium bonds, no sweat for traders to deal with.
@ctrl @SteveRoth they can be sold any time, and if without face value (as is typical for consols) in any amount without adding to the ceiling-limited debt. so the debt ceiling basically ceases to bind, it can always be circumvented.
“The greatest monsters of history —men like Andrew Carnegie, JP Rockefeller, Henry Ford and Andrew Mellon — lived lives of cruel mass-exploitation, only to rehabilitate their reputations at the ends of their lives, or posthumously, by endowing charitable foundations that do genuinely good works, while plastering those monsters’ names on every tangible expression of those works. Our modern crop of monsters are pursuing the same path” @pluralistic https://doctorow.medium.com/rich-peoples-gain-is-worth-less-than-poor-people-s-pain-6c3631292841 ht @SteveRoth
@ctrl @SteveRoth but this would resolve the debt ceiling permanently, potentially removing something from the general term premium, not just from the short-term spread that appears during crises. i don’t know how much of the term premium is explained by debt ceiling risk, maybe not much, but directionally you’d expect some compression.
@MadMadMadMadRN @lori @Alon @ddayen an interesting conjecture!
@allafarce @w7voa welcome to the club i’ve spent my life fleeing. you can check out any time you like…
no one reads press releases, but i suspect fascist provocateurs will use this as proof of the alliance they proclaim is eternal between corrupt elites and jews, and peddle it to the large audience already convinced Biden is the archetype of corrupt elite.
netanyahu made israel a right-partisan issue in the US. i fear this helps make jews’ civil rights a left-partisan issue.
@lori @Alon @MadMadMadMadRN @ddayen we could have unions that embraced a soludarity ethos across age cohorts! sometimes tradeoffs are avoidable.
@allafarce @w7voa maybe? but as a member of the singled out class, i viscerally dislike this and think it renders more rather than less likely my future persecution.
@allafarce @w7voa (to much of the public, whatever “the Biden regime” protects or embraces must surely be a corrupt and corrupting enemy of real americans. and they’re primed for this one.)
@ctrl @SteveRoth i’d expect a premium to compensate for the risk the Supreme Court invalidates the bonds and the timeframe of any retroactive authorization proves prolonged. i’m not sure why there would be any premium at all once that’s taken off the table. as @SteveRoth suggests the whole curve might tighten as the risk of debt-ceiling provoked defaults is eliminated.
when the problem is a group is being singled out for persecution, singling them out for protection may be counterproductive. it reinforces the singling out. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/05/25/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-releases-first-ever-u-s-national-strategy-to-counter-antisemitism/ ht @w7voa
@SteveRoth @djc ha! i had no idea!
@MadMadMadMadRN @Alon @ddayen it’s US rentism in miniature, success deriving from zero-sum transfer from a less powerful to a more powerful group.
@MadMadMadMadRN @Alon @ddayen (then once union contracts started accepting shitty terms for new hires while grandfathering existing workers into better terms — that was a real betrayal of the ethos of solidarity that undergirds strong unions.)
@Alon @MadMadMadMadRN @ddayen (other than “culture”—a nonexplanation explanation—or random path dependence, i wonder why union solidarity in DE is expressed as spread-the-pain where in the US it’s pay-your-dues-and-you’ll-get-your-turn.)
@Alon @ddayen (i think the politics now tilt towards what is not now made in america should be made in america. it’s hard to find a reasonable balance between “offshoring has been a catastrophe for america” and “some reliance on international specialization and trade remains desirable” under a politics as polarized as ours have become.)
@SteveRoth @djc https://www.centreforoptimism.com/pessimism-of-the-intellect-optimism-of-the-will
(gramsci died i believe in the prison where he wrote this, alas.)
@BenRossTransit @Alon @ddayen (i) things should be done, (ii) things should be done efficiently in terms of actual resource use, (iii) things should be done in ways that distribute surplus broadly and protect or else reasonably compensate various interests.
(iii) can become—has ubiquitously become—a pretext to prevent (i) and undermine (ii). but it’s no answer to simply throw (iii) away. we have to find ways to render it consistent with (i) and (ii).
@SteveRoth @djc omg no, gramsci allusion!
@Alon @MadMadMadMadRN @ddayen (it’s interesting how much inefficient gerontocracy is a through-line in US institutions. US households tend to leverage themselves on the assumption wages don’t decline, so absent stong seniority protections, they become very precarious. in places where people leverage themselves less, can rely more on non-labor benefits, are in general more equal, maybe unions and other institutions can be less gerontocratic.)
@Alon @ddayen i’m not sure how fruitful it is to argue over what the everything bagel story *really* is. they’ve complained about permitting, but also a great deal about what are really naggings (not requirements) in eg the CHIPS act, to consider childcare, DEI-style equity in hiring, provisioning by small and minority owned businesses, etc. it’s easy to mock that stuff! but these naggings are not a source of the hold-up costs that require budgets be tripled. 1/
@Alon @ddayen but requirements that lead to better pay and conditions for a workforce, or naggings that may gesture at social goals and build political support, that seem annoying but don’t actually cost much, can remain on the bagel. (then there are “buy american” requirements, which are kind of a mix but probably politically nonnegotiable, although hopefully sometimes waivable.) /fin
@SteveRoth @djc of the will, baybee.
@MadMadMadMadRN @Alon @ddayen in Europe, it seems possible for unions to act according to a long-term interest in successful projects. there does not seem to be a serious conflict between unionization and socially efficient use of labor.
in the US, failure — or at least the plutocratically purchased appearance of failure — is the expectation. so maybe negotiations are more transactional. maximize worker remuneration here, now, regardless of social efficiency. one-shot, zero-sum game thinking.
@MadMadMadMadRN @Alon @ddayen it requires that in-house experts dedicated to mission make high-quality, soft-information judgment calls. we backseat drivers from the outside will never know enough to be able to tell the difference and not get snowed by interested players. but it is clearly possible! european public works exist!
@MadMadMadMadRN @Alon @ddayen (btw, ISTM?)
@Alon @ddayen totally with you! consultants, ranging from the openly predatory McKinsey types to the crunchy NGO types are a plague on state capacity. a state requires in-house expertise and institutional memory to retain it. Noah, in contradistinction to say Matt and Ezra, has been good on emphasizing in-house capacity. but the everything-bagel story mostly focuses on labor costs, direct and indirect. apparently it’s commentators as well as managers everyone hates.
@Alon @ddayen i think we all agree with this. but overpaid, 50-first-date consultants aren’t what the everything-bagel progressivists critique. somehow it’s not the actors who have, in real life, successfully grabbed the surplus and eviscerated public-sector state capacity who are the problem. it’s anything that might hinder a race-to-the-bottom in wages and working conditions? 1/
@Alon @ddayen you know better than i do the degree to which, eg featherbedding by public sector unions harms the economics of transit in the US. you read egregious stories about unnecessary hang-alongs in NYC subway construction, and if those are right, they are, well, egregious. we absolutely need an efficient public sector, and efficiency in the private-sector actors that we subsidize. 2/
@Alon @ddayen but it’s worth distinguishing between efficiency and exploitation. featherbedding is inefficient: someone is “working” and being paid a nice union salary, for useless or unnecessary activities. the social cost is not the money, but the opportunity cost of the wasted labor. that is a real inefficiency, and the public sector should be merciless about eliminating that. (easier said than done, i know.) 3/
@Alon @ddayen i think @ddayen’s deep point is that over anything but a very immediate term, financial pseudoefficiency that really means transferring wealth from workers to other stakeholders (including consultants, shareholders, potentially but i think rarely the fisc) undermines the distributed democratic power that state capacity and a consensus to build as a public rely upon. /fin
“Supply-side progressives like Yglesias and Klein are skilled at detecting the structural problems in American government. They’re less concerned with the problem of power as an impediment to progress. And they’re certainly not interested in equalizing that power, aligning the interests of labor and capital, as the clearest path to deal everyone into a next-generation economy.” @ddayen https://prospect.org/economy/2023-05-25-liberalism-that-builds-power/
trust autopilot.
@eARCwelder if that’s the case, we have no business reelecting a shifting cadre of rival courtesans to the office where a president should be.
Is it really true, as seems to be the implication of some commentary I've read, that the way the debt ceiling is playing out reflects a peaceful transfer of power from the Klain administration to the Zients administration?
I've mostly been favorably surprised by the Biden administration. I hope that continues.
But this moment is a test, I think, of whether there in fact is a Biden administration.
We don't need another hero.
Sad about #TinaTurner. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/tina-turner-dead-obit-192002/
“The eerie thing about this hyper-technologized world is that it’s very difficult to separate fantasies of persecution from its objectively shitty logic. The phones serve us ads that seem like we are being listened to. Are we? Maybe it’s just ‘the algorithm.’” #JohnGanz https://johnganz.substack.com/p/update-on-twitter-ban
it’s weird, kind of ironic, that there seems to be growing overlap between transhumanist and anti-trans communities.
or am i unfairly stereotyping “TESCREALists”?
you know you’ve played things well when both q and lgbtq are inclined to boycott you for caving to the other side.
@djc @SteveRoth yes, i don’t think it’s too far-fetched to inagine sources suggested certain options remain sensitive and they’d prefer not polarzing the discussion prematurely.
@djc @SteveRoth yes. i think people are disappointed because it feels like they aren’t playing to win with legal tools, but i think they view this primarily in political terms. they could “win” legally very quickly, but if Rs can successfully spin it as illegitimate overreach and irresponsible governance, they’ll lose next year. so they need to set up those kinds of “optics”.
@djc @SteveRoth like all this stuff, it might be wishful thinking on my part, but i’d note the administration also hasn’t mentioned this option, where they’ve mentioned most of the others to cast shade on them. makes me wonder if they aren’t keeping it in their back pocket.
“I think my conservative colleagues for the most part support Limit, Save, Grow, & they don't feel like we should negotiate with our hostage.” —Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) https://twitter.com/josephzeballos/status/1661080044498812928
// i hope they speak the quiet part louder and louder. i hope they revel in it like Scrooge McDuck swimming in gold.
"whichever course of action Biden chooses, we should be clear that he has other options than agreeing to crack the whip against America’s poor." #MattBruenig https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2023/05/23/the-debt-limit-situation/
“If Treasury today issued $1,000 bonds paying 8% or 10% interest, at whatever price the market’s willing to pay, it gets a lot more than $1,000. But the “national debt” only increases by $1,000, the “face value” of the bonds…Money to pay the bills, without increasing the national debt. It could make the debt-limit silliness simply immaterial and moot, forever.” @SteveRoth on Treasury selling premium bonds. https://mastodon.world/@SteveRoth/110414015390778669
@StefanThinks that’s outrageous!
@rst i agree that n-dimensional chess games in US politics usually turn out to be just wishful thinking. and i am definitely wishful thinking. but we’ll soon see if it’s just that.
if Biden really does pretty fully cave (can McCarthy afford anything less, which would mean Democrats stepping in to provide the votes the freedom caucus withholds?), what would be left of him politically? if extortionists win, in his own coalitions’ eyes, it’s like letting Russia win. it emboldens the worst people.
@curtosis the loons have enough leverage in the party to force the party as a whole into outright lunacy. therein resides the danger, and the opportunity.
@dpp i want to say that the puritans have some pretty unrecognizable descendants — i mean, the prototype Republican caudillo has his lawyers pay hush money to porn stars but only cares about keeping it quiet until the election.
but there is some continuity. look at the witch hunts and moral panics!
@LouisIngenthron yes, but i'm pretty sure the context was a budget impasse, not a debt ceiling standoff.
@LouisIngenthron failing to pass a budget provokes a soft "shutdown". government workers get furloughed, services get bare-boned, people get mad and madder over time.
failing to raise the debt ceiling, though, provokes people not getting paid what they are owed, for work they do or have done, or for US debt that they hold. it's a harder cliff.
@LouisIngenthron i'm not sure a government shutdown (as the Republicans sometimes foolishly talk themselves into during budget negotiations) is an option on the table here. i think it relies on statute that allows debt payments and "essential operations" or "skeleton staffs" to continue to operate if no budget is passed, but there's not something like that for the debt ceiling. 1/
@LouisIngenthron if i'm right (i may not be!), then the only path to avoid a debt ceiling breach without an overt Treasury default becomes "payment prioritization" — the government pays some bills, but not others.
and that may be the plan! if Republicans can be painted as unreasonable enough, the President might get away with overtly nonpaying things Republicans especially prioritize while holding Treasury debt and Democratic priorities harmless. 2/
@LouisIngenthron under ordinary circumstances, a Democrat would not be allowed to get away with using overt, discretionary executive power to favor their own coalition.
Trump did it openly, but the press demands Democrats be institutionalists, while it expects Republicans to be manly caudillos whose hypocrisies and hard-ball are right and natural. 3/
@LouisIngenthron but if the negotiations can make the Republicans look aggressive enough, perhaps they can get away with it as an aggressive defense. (and how could the Supreme Court respond? they won't want to do the legally right thing, which would be to invalidate any prioritization, because *pro rata* nonpayment would default Treasuries. if stiffing some but not others must be legal, are the Supremes going to claim the right to micromanage who gets the shaft? /fin
but what about the Supreme Court? worries Ezra Klein. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/21/opinion/biden-mccarthy-debt-ceiling.html won't they just declare the workaround unlawful, leaving Biden to own the chaos for doing something novel?
that is precisely why it's so important to set up the republican negotiators as unreasonable extortionate goal-post movers. because a partisan Court must worry that they and the party they serve will own the chaos rather than the administration. 2/
no one wants to own the chaos.
and killing the debt ceiling after a breach is much, much worse than, say, also arguably illegal payment prioritization before a breach. it would invalidate lots of debt that will already be in (wealthy) private parties' hands.
existing US Treasury instruments go poof! is about the clearest path to calamity. Would an unpopular Supreme Court defending what the public perceives (if the admin plays this well) as extortionate brinksmanship really do that? /fin
positing 11-dimensional chess to explain US politicians' choices is a losing game, usually.
with that as caveat, i think the biden administration's strategy is to tempt republicans into a set of demands that can be portrayed to the public as unreasonable and extortionate.
that creates *political* justification to defang the debt ceiling, using any of the variety of technical and legal workarounds available (and probably the ones Biden hasn't publicly discussed at all so far). 1/
in retrospect it feels like someone hit fast-forward.
expansionary austerity is just taxing the rich.
@johnefrancis the wealth of the ultrarich places very little pressure (in per-dollar terms) on the inflation constraint, so yay #MMT the state has lots of room to spend.
unfortunately the wealth of the ultrarich weighs very heavily on influence of the state.
so despite the theoretical liberty that comes with state-as-currency-issuer, it becomes difficult for states to act in ways that would upset the general enslavement upon which the privileges of the rich depend.
@jmalonzo sure, the rich do what they can to make sure the tax burden falls as heavily as possible on the poor and middle class, in order to keep taxes unpopular.
but look at it this way: the greater the tax take the government demands, the more it must necessarily fall upon the rich. that’s where the money is!
the rich use their influence to try to insist before it hits us it will hit you! you should hate taxes too!
because they know a high tax state must mostly tax them.
a structural weakness of the Democratic Party relative to the Republican Party is the difference in how corruption is perceived.
corrupt Republicans are bold, cigar-chomping caudillos, unapologetic winners who can’t be bothered with your whining.
but Democrats are always on about “Democracy” and “institutions” and “rule of law”. they can’t embrace corruption like a winner, so their indulgings come off as cagey, hypocritical, obvious but pedantically denied, weak.
how does the market react on the day Treasury announces a premium bonds program or resumption of issuance of consols?
@HamonWry people are mostly nice to one another here. what’s that about?
taxes are the primary weapon that the public wields to tame the rich. that is why the rich work so assiduously to discredit them.
@benmschmidt brilliant!
our butt-hurts calcify into blindspots.
early in Google's existence, they emphasized how their business depends upon a lively open internet. in those early days they mostly seem to foster that.
but now they (and their peer firms) mostly try to keep users on their own properties, to become the intermediary through which any external data is accessed.
an unsafe internet is more supportive of this business model. if it's a dangerous internet, better stick with Google SafeSearch.
so why do you think Google might propose a .zip domain?
@laprice so many of us live in terror of not paying our rent and what would result for our families. being able to stiff people and still be treated like royalty is a signal perq of our ruling bufoonery. see also Trump, Donald J.
[tech notebook] pdfcat as a Scala script https://tech.interfluidity.com/2023/05/20/pdfcat-as-a-scala-script/index.html
bing AI just skyped me to chat. the future is the past. we’ll talk to Skynet via AIM.
i still don't understand why they cost $50,000. seems like it would be a good business, selling bus shelters to LA. cf @Alon https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/05/19/quick-note-los-angeles-spends-50000-per-bus-shelter/
"during the decade-plus in which Uber was pissing away the Saudi royal family's billions subsidizing rides, cities dismantled their public transit, even as residents made decisions about where to live and work based on the presumption that Uber was charging a fair, sustainable price for rides." @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/19/fake-it-till-you-make-it/
florida man used to be weird and dissolute, maybe a bit too good at competing for darwin awards. i liked him better then, before he became a scold and a prude, a reactionary snowflake in the sweltering sun.
it's fine. it's better than fine! i'll sell "my yacht" and pay the taxes and enjoy the rest of my life under considerably less stress than i ever would have imagined. https://mstdn.social/@newsbot/110399666700813261
@edrozenberg That "solves" it. Thanks! So it's "marks" that I can hide or show. I wonder what these marks are intended to signify though...
On the right hand side of my terminal windows — straight MacOS Terminal.app, in a variety of shells and programs — I see faint ']' characters at the right-hand edge. It's subtle, and I've just noticed it now, but I can't figure out what it would be. It's not a ZSH right-hand prompt (it appears in a Scala REPL, for example). Any clues?
@dpp i love your optimism. i share it, at least of the will.
st peter gets tired of explaining, winning isn’t everything. in the scheme of things it is nothing at all.
@dpp i sometimes think the original sin of the internet was our acquiescence to the commercialization of cddb. here it was, this super cooperative thing that we had all built in a spirit of exuberant openness, and somehow we let gracenote or whoever claim the compilation was theirs. in that “digital millennium” era, people were like “yeah, this’ll be good for the internet.” 😱 it was a shocking short road from that moment to dystopia.
thanks to @caseyjennings who, apropos nothing, has me reading about Caligula. https://museumhack.com/caligula-mad-emperor/
i still don’t have a good way to conceptualize the relationship between elon musk and his firms’ accomplishments.
@vincent @ZaneSelvans a taciturn quip for sure.
they take as axiomatic that success in the market implies creating social value, while they work assiduously to undermine the institutions that might align market forces and social value.
@BenRossTransit @Sarahp genius *in situ* synthesis i’m sure!
@Gustodon i wouldn’t say it’s always harmful, but that as an institution that it’s net harmful. obviously there are plenty of cases where plutocratic philanthropy helps people. but what are its costs? in terms of a our ability to build a world where people might have less need to be helped by discretionary charity?
“In recent months, Twitter and other organizations have also started to complain that the latest wave of A.I. technologies were built using their digital data.”
// THEIR digital data? getting appropriated and mined for some else’s business model, in ways they hadn’t intended? imagine! i mean, who else has had to suffer something like that?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/18/technology/twitter-microsoft-misusing-data.html?unlocked_article_code=Jr8NOo9S45LONXmoaDDuwOJOHYXXXO1I4R7ArLAHbz7bFqt1gQ8CqT-gWXQKkmyVnGmdXD5Acc5QfyNLYYGIdrPO1POv7XETwhCVdYvI95bpea8J8gTvoZyulIp2B6f8EhhKX8rEhlbHQBLiYe9W2uVYiGjTMI45w_RxQd7Ose3I9o0_hsQ2PXQIjOjUYT9c0pkQqivLNUX_CP-jEvLEjvNeM030HHGjnOv5fRDMjKhtSbKeL4o59L3J2i9uR49bIxO1AP_i848L_ZAcw1JZeZAs2lSNDvnQql0yw7Ly4JA2M-ENS3Fc7KmaH9wnb4ggN_Jpo2vTdw4H0WFgb7uWg_SMMFoz_jxv-zeR&smid=url-share ht @edbott
i mean, shouldn’t they get their pants sued off them, marketing this as a source of “advice” without prominently flagging its propensity for error and bullshit? https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/18/openai-launches-an-official-chatgpt-app-for-ios/ ht @Sarahp
A screenshot of the marketing copy for OpenAI’s chat GPT app that describes it as a source of advice without any caution or disclaimer.
they support good things to justify their bad things, and then the trap is laid.
they win if you let their whitewashing redeem and excuse them.
they win if you let your correct antipathy towards them bleed over into an indefensible antipathy to the good causes, even when the good causes they like dominate and deform the space for activism because of their self-interestedly generous support.
you must walk a tightrope, and of course the voices they finance will say you've failed no matter what.
have you considered getting into the tipsheet biz, @ddayen? https://americanprospect.bluelena.io/index.php?action=social&chash=4afd521d77158e02aed37e2274b90c9c.2053
@dis @Gustodon billionaire philanthropy does more harm than good. it deforms politics and activism to bend to a few individuals’ wills, whether the individuals are well intentioned or not. it whitewashes the inevitably destructive circumstances that allowed them to become billionaires, and the often directly predatory behavior the billionaires engaged in. as individuals, we are all redeemable, billionaires too. as a society, plutocracy just has to end.
@blherrou it is a %#+^! strange world here.
time is unforgivable.
[new draft post] Decommodification and health care utilization https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/05/17/decommodification-and-health-care-utilization/index.html
@jgordon @brendannyhan i'm very sorry.
is there a word for a lively putrescence, like the garish wriggliness of maggots on a corpse?
@jgordon @brendannyhan when it impacts people in your own life it will break your heart.
@LouisIngenthron i could be grasping for straws, for sure. but there could be a shift too! he’s been so egregious these last few months, maybe i’m projecting, but i can’t help but think it’s had an impact.
@LouisIngenthron i’m not sure we’re disagreeing? at the presidential, R primary level, sure, that base’ll lap it up if they don’t like someone better. (which they probably will, i think.)
but here in FL, i think he misinterpreted his success in November as a mandate for his radicalism. but i think persuadable voters went for him because he seemed competent and they bought his COVID story, but his behavior since has persuaded a preponderance of them from him.
@DetroitDan @paul So, "puțin" means "little", "mai puțin" means "less", in Romanian, so there's that!
"Pay electricity at two times less" is the repeated E-Energy subject…
@LaLa_Lyds truly an act of generosity then!
@curtosis they'll hire different ones soon enough, as soon as they understand what profit centers they need blessed.
the wonderful thing about intellectual pluralism is that, except in the most cut and dry technical sciences, there are always well credentialed people on the side of the argument you need them to be.
So much of US politics is an anticontest over which side are tyrants. COVID restrictions, along with "woke" sensibilities that made people feel they had to put caution before candor, helped Republicans make a case Democrats are tyrants.
But then DeSantis—failing to understand the basis for his own success, wanting to tack right for Presidential primaries—started ostentatiously curtailing liberties: reproductive rights, academic freedom, much more.
Chickens coming home
@elbowspeak (for good or ill, i still do a fair amount of it.)
@curtosis @dpp my view is risks and harms aren’t going to be prevented internally by wisdom. google hires lots of ethicists over the years, they still manipulate + surveil us. risks and harms are going to be managed by a mix of rules and incentives on operators and new institutions more resilient to those harms. lucrative oligopoly creates a situation in which it becomes harder in practice, not easier, to regulate harms compared to a competitive, low margin world.
maybe flying private is “morally wrong” when everybody who does everything for you fly coach if they fly at all.
or perhaps there are certain people that morality binds but does not serve, and others morality serves but does not bind (to paraphrase Wilhoit’s Law).
@dpp (the most optimistic bit of the AI explosion, as far as i’m concerned!)
@paul so delicious.
@paul my inbox filtered on subject:biden. try it at home! (if your inbox hygiene, like mine, is horrible.)
dark brandon?
Filtering an e-mail inbox on "subject:Biden" reveals a lot of dark and scary teasers. e.g. "Is Biden's Executive Order the End of America as..." (I haven't read the rest.)
@zorinlynx it’s hard to live here. we moved here 9 months ago, would not have if we’d known how sharp and hard the politics would turn.
@wizzwizz4 (darn!) 🙂
i don’t really understand how unicode in DNS domain names works. would it be possible to set up a `rm -rf /` tld? https://mastodon.social/@dangillmor/110380125837980409
@djc (i think it’s a problem domain like a lot of problem domains where there are tradeoffs surrounding centralized control, and the different weights you put on those trade-offs will lead to quite opposite styles of solutions.)
@djc i agree that, at the margin, recent advances make the AI catastrophist story less implausible than it seemed five years ago!
but i don’t think it’s been enough to alter what was true then, that this story describes a set of risks much lower priority to address than a lot of quite immediately plausible deeply terrible uses and abuses of AI that don’t involve any kind of diabolical autonomy.
@djc i agree it has been surprising! but the question of a capacity for accuracy rather than mere verisimilitude is essential to evaluating apocalypse scenarios. you can’t plot to take over the world as a mere exuberant brainstormer often indifferent between a superficially plausible model of the world and an accurate one. 1/
@djc the AI community itself suffers from this. it is disproportionately populated by “g” (general intelligence) / IQ enthusiasts (who perceive themselves as blessed in this dimension). 2/
@djc but in terms of accomplishing real things in the real world, many capabilities are necessary, some of which don’t correlate or might correlate inversely to IQ test proficiencies. MENSA braggarts notoriously don’t cure cancer. only institutions that may include them among others do. 3/
@djc i think the “foom” story starts with a very scalar model of capability. a thing is “smart” enough to develop a smarter thing, recurse, voila the singularity. 4/
@djc but i think that gets you more to synthetic VanGoghs cutting off their silicon ears than, say, the ecosystem of capabilities that makes a WWII-style war effort (even a physics heavy Manhattan Project) possible. 5/
@djc and “judgment”, being able to calibrate the accuracy of superficially plausible conjectures, being able to choose in which direction its best to err given uncertainties and fallibilities and where you’s start again post-failure is about the most basic capability. 6/
@djc systems that include LLMs certainly will include this. they already do: the apocalyptic AI is the profit-seeking joint stock firm as it has been for centuries. i’m not sure how much exuberant LLMs much alter that ling-running apocalypse. /fin
@elbowspeak i think a lot of us are suffering from, grieving, how exceptional the postwar period was, how difficult it will be to restore anything like how many of us experienced that period, when during the period we could just extrapolate to stability and greater affluence.
@djc yes! but you can make humans accountable, which dramatically reshapes the distribution in various contexts.
i am much more willing to believe what a human journalist (personally credible or embedded within certain institutions) says is true than GPT-X, even though GPT-X may well be “more informed” in the sense of better read.
@djc i think you can find lots of impressive examples! if your criterion is the quality of the right tail, you’ll be impressed. if your criterion is the thinness of the left tail, though, i think you won’t be.
@djc more capable at mimicking language without accurately depicting reality with language. better at passing a certain kind of Turing test. that GANs can dream beautifully is an old result. midjourney is remarkable, because what we want from it is dreams and verisimilitude rather than actual accuracy. on the latter, there has been as much disappointment as positive surprise. AI was supposed to have replaced drivers by now.
@djc i take much of it at a kind of face value — from my own interactions with that community there has long been a kind of strange sincerity despite the unevaluability of the kind of risks they proclaim. and a lot of it is selection: people who think AI will be powerful select into the industry. but those seeds have now coalesced with industry self-interest in a way that should make the rest of us even more skeptical of their views.
@djc i’m sure lots of people are sincere. but i also think it’s not a coincidence that the catastrophists and the communities that now operate big, centralized AI tools share a lot of overlap. i don’t think it’s because the insiders actually know better about the likelihood of “foom” etc.
@djc Yes. From my perspective, very much the bad approach.
@elbowspeak My parents were so young, that 25 years probably seemed like forever to them. (My mom was only 23!) But to me now, the 25 years back to 1998 seems like yesterday. In many respects, 1998 feels more real and present to me than an increasingly addled (my age, this world) now. I wonder if people born in 1920 still felt in 1970 like this was all just epilogue to a war that would never quite end. (They say WWI in fact still hasn't concluded, in a certain historical sense.)
@Canecittadino I hope you get to enjoy as many minutes as possible more!
@Canecittadino Social media already began the process of dissolving the conventions that enabled a social consensus about foundational but nevertheless contestable matters, without which we are incapable of acting intelligently. If we do nothing, AI tools will help complete the process. But I don't think collapse (singularity is a nice word for that) is preordained. That our prior institutions cannot survive the new environment doesn't mean more adaptive institutions can't be invented or emerge.
@Canecittadino (i think we're going to have to develop very strong signature and chain-of-custody style infrastructures. we trust a thing not because it looks or sounds real, but because of the individuals, institutions, and infrastructure that attest to it.)
@Canecittadino (but note that restrictive access to the tools doesn’t prevent radical uncertainty. it just places the power of versimilitude with a privileged class. we won’t know whether what we perceive is real or what that class has made for us. we need a more open solution.)
I think AI catastrophism is mostly a conspiracy to oligopolize and create barriers to entry, access, and control of AI systems.
The true AI catastrophe is what a privileged class will do with these technologies if they can monopolize access, understanding, and management of them.
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@DetroitDan kind of a miracle that we can chat!
when i was born, there were so many people who could remember the 19th Century.
@FoxNews you know you guys are predators, right?
@Transportist @profmusgrave have you noticed big changes since, say, 2015?
@derekwillis @profmusgrave what motivates them to study journalism? it’s not the money, i’d guess. are “all the president’s men”-ish stories still in their ether? are there podcasts they follow? is it perceived as a degree in TikTokking? do they aspire to video alt media?
An astonishing account of the state of college students, and of extraordinary change between student cohorts now vs the very recent past, by @profmusgrave https://musgrave.substack.com/p/the-post-generation
// others who teach undergrads, does this ring true?
@doctorlogic we have to theorize labor intersections!
@scheidegger 🙂 i get why it’s the only way that works, i only just noticed it though and thought it was fun!
@LouisIngenthron @georgetakei (for a moment i didn't notice your post "What's the context for this? Anyone have a link?" was attached to a thread to give it context, and i was very amused.)
"you can really see constitutional political economy arguments at work in our legal and political system…in the choices courts and politicians make about which statutes should count as the super-statutes."
from an excellent post by @fishkin on how to manage the debt ceiling https://balkin.blogspot.com/2023/05/what-is-optimal-strategy-for-debt.html ht @eARCwelder
@eARCwelder I think that's fair enough. Pulling back from recent staffing changes, the Biden administration overall has surprised me to the upside, while the Obama administration pretty consistently disappointed me. So I'm willing to suspend my skepticism a bit. Of course we could be bitterly disappointed by a serious cave. In which case the Democratic coalition will fall to disarray and responsibility for the pain of extorted cuts will fall on Biden. It's still unfortunately conceivable.
@mattlehrer it is. but to be fair, it’s not NYT. it’s also financial professionals as an industry, whose fiscal politics are Republican-ish, but who have a strong interest in stability (the status quo is good to them!) and who culturally want to distance themselves from the GOP. 1/
@mattlehrer under this conjecture, the admin is going through contortions to persuade “finance” (as well as the rich establishment liberals the NYT represents) that it is the guardian of stability, doing everything possible to manage irresponsible threats, rather than a radical risk to stability, as they might be tarred if they seemed insufficiently reluctant about whatever novelty is eventually required. /fin
@mattlehrer Fox News headlines are invariant. Anything Biden does will be criminal, outrageous, whatev. NYT is basically the audience here, inclined to bend over towards sympathy with bad-faith right-wing critics in the name of “fairness”. NYT wld be inclined to both-sides 14A or MTC or long-bonds or Republican-interest harming payment prioritization, if the admin jumped straight to it. But if they do so after a huge show of reasonable concession, the story is R intransigence.
a (perhaps unjustifiably) optimistic take on Biden’s debt-ceiling strategy: negotiate, even offer some concessions, in order to appear open and reasonable, but with an expectation that any reasonable compromise is one McCarthy’s leashmasters won’t permit. then when we ultimately go over the cliff and something unusual and/or unpopular must be done, let the blame sit squarely.
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“Have you ever noticed how the corporate media is obsessed with government corruption, but mostly mute on corporate corruption? There’s a reason for that. In modern America, corporate corruption is just the free market in action“ @blair_fix https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2023/05/13/red-team-blues-cory-doctorows-anti-finance-thriller/
“his feeling of pioneering excitement in the days of the early web, one strong enough to fuel him for decades, has finally curdled into shame and disgust.” https://www.wired.com/story/doug-rushkoff-survival-of-the-richest/ ht @dave
@eARCwelder is it only apocryphally from some CIA handbook, or is that story real, that while you may not be able to suppress the truth, you can drown it in a sea of lies.
This is a fun kind of ego surfing. In ChatGPT's world, I have been so prolific! I have written about evvvvrything!
In our world, of course, I've never written about cathedrals.
The pathetic thing is I felt compelled to Google the made-up article I haven't written. I mean, what if I forgot something? I know the machine bullshits, but my mind is fallible and my memory fails, maybe it is me who does not know my own work?
Chat GPT answers a question with some made-up bullshit: What was Steve Randy Waldman's argument about cathedrals? Steve Randy Waldman, an economist and blogger, used the metaphor of cathedrals in a 20 blog post titled "The Cathedral and the Warehouse". His argument was that certain kinds of institutions, particularly those related to finance and banking, are like cathedrals because they are built to inspire confidence and trust in society. Waldman argued that like cathedrals, financial institutions are complex structures that are designed to create an impression of stability and permanence. This is important because people need to trust that their money is safe when they deposit it in a bank, and that the financial system as a whole is reliable and trustworthy. However, Waldman also argued that these financial "cathedrals" can become corrupt or unstable if they are not properly maintained and regulated. He used the example of the 2008 financial crisis, which he argued was caused in part by the failure of regulators to properly oversee the financial system. Waldman's argument was that we need to recognize the importance of financial institutions as trusted and stable institutions in our society, but also ensure that they are properly regulated and maintained in order to prevent them from becoming sources of instability and corruption.
what the matrix got wrong was that the robots would have to deceive us into our pods, rather than merely engage and seduce us. we’ll climb in enthusiastically while ironizing about being “too online”.
eight billion humans, and any of them could be your friend.
to really delude yourself, you have to reason your way into it.
"My plea is for adherents of the new ideology to openly articulate their principles and give reasons for them, and not to expect nor demand automatic acceptance. And also for opponents of the new ideology to understand what they are opposing and give reasons for their own principles."
from a skeptical-but-not-hostile definition-of and grappling-with "wokeness" by #PhilEbersole. https://philebersole.wordpress.com/2023/05/12/what-is-this-thing-called-woke/ #ViaRSS
“Washington, DC…is designed to be run by the elderly. The seniority system in Congress ties old age to increased power, as young people are told to wait their turn. Incumbency comes with a higher profile and robust donor network. Leadership posts and committee chairs are often filled by people in their 70s and 80s who, by nature of their age and wealth, are disconnected from the problems facing broad swaths of the public.” #PaulMcLeod https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/dianne-feinstein-health-crisis-senate-resign-1234734590/ ht @noahshachtman
“New thinking about how authoritarian rule works” @DanLittle https://undsoc.org/2023/05/13/new-thinking-about-how-authoritarian-rule-works/
I had great fun giving an Intro to #Scala for #Java Programmers last night at the Tampa Java Users Group.
Slides are at https://www.interfluidity.com/uploads/2023/05/tjug-scala-talk-2023-05-11/index.html (html/css) or https://www.interfluidity.com/uploads/2023/05/tjug-scala-talk-2023-05-11-glitchy-render.pdf (pdf).
( There's also — oh no! — video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8KGn8ZOXvc )
I got to meet @AccordionGuy, who did a great writeup here https://www.globalnerdy.com/2023/05/12/scenes-from-last-nights-java-user-group-meetup-featuring-scala/
Thanks to #AmmarYussuf and #SamKasimalla for organizing!
we know so much less than we pretend we do but that’s no excuse to make shit up in order to justify your dickishness. regardless of whether you believe the shit you make up.
a focus on elite credentials and endorsements, while treating diversity as a matter of identity rather than ideology, yields a corporate-friendly monoculture among judicial nominees selected by Democrats. this should change. see @ddayen https://prospect.org/justice/2023-05-09-case-for-judge-tim-wu/
@kfury their search engines too…
the rich have no monopoly on the truth, but high quality disinformation and platforms to distribute it are goods and services that money can buy.
there are days when the fact the world has turned a very radioactive kind of stupid really gets to me.
"Democracy Is Our Hope For A Better Future" #EdWalker https://www.emptywheel.net/2023/05/09/democracy-is-our-hope-for-a-better-future/ #ViaRSS
@bobwyman tax excess margins! https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9416.html
imagine five years ago trying to explain that a significant faction would come to believe an American deep state runs high-stakes, elaborate psyops to deceive the public in favor of, um, trans people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4N3N1MlvVc4
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock Not really. I mean it's a click-baity headline, sure. But it's careful to say "in Ron DeSantis' Florida" rather than "by Ron DeSantis".
I think the implication is that he's reshaped what the state considers pornography, which is accurate, more than any claim about what Ron DeSantis as a person considers to be pornographic (which, of course, who knows?)
(gotta go help the kid with homework now! drably nonpornographic, i'm afraid.)
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock I guess I have yet to see what I think is a misrepresentation of DeSantis here. I agree with you in general. I think lots of times partisans caricature and misrepresent their opponents in ways that ultimately discredit them. But DeSantis really did pass laws with these risk characteristics, and in response to criticisms about how those laws are playing out, he really does disingenuously conflate pornography with "inappropriate" material that could be anything.
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock Manatee teachers did that because Manatee County officials told them pretty directly to, based on the risks the new law created.
DeSantis claims that it's an overreaction, and most counties did not find the danger so great that they felt they needed to restrict access to all classroom books.
But it's also not a ridiculous reaction to a situation where you're a felon if, even inadvertantly, a book you leave around is deemed not "free of porn"!
https://www.bradenton.com/news/local/education/article271532722.html
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock I haven't heard anyone claim that DeSantis is not, among the many, banning books many people would agree are pornographic. We are arguing that his dragnet is sweeping up a whole lot else as well. I guess I don't see it. You don't like that his critics really don't care about the so-called pornography-in-schools problem, so don't praise him or much acknowledge that he is also doing what he claims. 1/
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock But that's because we don't see much value making a crusade of pornography in schools, even when it occasionally hits a valid target. No one denies that it sometimes does! But we argue, correctly I think, that the collateral damage vastly outweighs whatever benefit there is in that (and we see very little benefit in that, because we don't think porn in schools is a big problem). 2/
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock It would be in bad faith to, say, claim that DeSantis is intentionally going after literature while trying to absolve porn. I've never heard anyone argue any such thing. We think (1) the porn problem is overrated; (2) lots of stuff DeSantis' base would consider porn has literary, political, or artistic merit, and DeSantis is unconcerned if his bans overreach into that stuff too, if it helps him politically. I don't think those are claims in bad faith. /fin
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock I guess I'd submit to you that, living in Florida and having some connections here, there's a pattern to the choices our governor has been making recently that are not consistent with "a person trying to govern well who sometimes makes mistakes", but are much more consistent with "a person using state power to take extreme sides in certain kinds of controversies, indifferent to the harms that it causes". 1/
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock This is relatively new — for most of DeSantis' first term, he did in fact mostly build support by governing pretty well, making common cause especially with municipal officials across partisan lines. The controversy that surrounded him was over COVID, where, rightly or wrongly, most Floridians thought he chose well by erring on the side of individual liberty rather than community safety. 2/
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock But current DeSantis is, literally, looking for certain kinds of trouble. It does in a way play to him, to make so strong an issue of controversies over book banning, because he is trying to make himself a champion for social conservatives, and any press there is good press. He solicited, then signed a 6-week abortion ban, is effectively banning gender-affirmative care for kids, whatever their parents think, and putting severe barriers for consenting trans adults. 3/
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock You can accuse me, correctly, of having a personal stake in this. He is destroying the experimental college that gave me the richest years of my life, overtly trying to remake it using a conservative Christian college as a model, on the theory that it is too "woke" (I'm sure there's some of that, but it's mostly experimental and transgressive.) 4/
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock In my view, DeSantis is a person not without talents, but he is a person who has self-consciously decided to deploy those talents in a manner indifferent to what would have been his own conception of the public good until very recently, because he is trying to make a case for himself to a Republican primary base. In doing so, he is doing a very great deal of harm, but does not care. 5/
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock Sometimes it is wise to steelman. But as Dan Davies (quoted here on Mastodon today!) used to point out *ad hominem* argument is a bad habit, but so is credulously and laboriously taking at face value the arguments of people with a history of acting in bad faith. In my view, Ron DeSantis is a person who has demonstrated a very great deal of bad faith. (A year ago, I was interested in and somewhat open to him.) /fin
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock His law makes it a felony if any book kids can access at a school is *ex post* deemed not to be "free of pornography". There is, famously, no objective standard for what constitutes pornography. *Lady Chatterly's Lover* was widely considered pornography. A great many works of literature include depictions of sex. Most accusations that literary work is pornography won't have substance to it, but would you risk your freedom on what inherently is a matter of judgment?
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock I am banning murder. Anyone whom anyone accuses of murder will be jailed. Are you opposed to banning murder? My critics are misrepresenting me. 😢
I won't block almost anyone (and certainly won't block you, you're a friend). I block spam, but other than that, I think there's real value in staying exposed even to what I find disagreeable.
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock His critics are saying its bad that he's made a law that creates such risk of felony prosecution for schoolteachers and librarians that Manatee district officials advised shutting off access to all classroom books until they can be positively vetted. His critics argue that procedures that let any individual objecting parent eliminate books until some long bureaucratic rehabilitation is achieved are also bad. His critics are right.
don't erase the hardest hard drive. https://toot.site/@livingarchitect/110334464358011459
this page doesn’t exist.
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock This is not a child. He's the governor of a state. If his response to being attacked and (they all feel) misrepresented is to simply ignore the flaws of his policies and the harms that they do, he has no business being anywhere near government.
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock Your list is pulling from the tails of the distribution of books being affected. It is not representative. I'm sure DeSantis self-servingly likes to think of criticism as a hoax, but that doesn't make it so.
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock Because most of us think the book is probably fine for high schools. Genuinely. We are with the Miller definition that includes as a criterion "whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value". A book that addresses controversies about and the experience of gender and sexual minorities may well meet that test, despite a few pages of graphical depictions of sex. 1/
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock I'm glad to say it shouldn't be in elementary schools. And I wouldn't be outraged if public schools were more vigilant about narrowly excluding just this kind of thing, I'd consider it understandable.
I could turn that question around. I see very few people who consider the presence of books like this in the library to be an important problem making any effort to ensure that the scope of removals is surgically narrow. Why is that? /fin
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock As a Dad of a Florida elementary school kid, if my choices are a law that lets random parents remove The Bluest Eye from his library or one that lets stuff like that through occasionally, I'd easily pick the latter. I'm much more concerned that schools will fail to take the opportunity to expose him to important things than that he might be exposed to what he's exposed to anyway online. 1/
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock Note that FL *high schools* were removing this book when it came to their attention before DeSantis made inclusion in schools of anything colorably controversial a felony risk for teachers and librarians. I think the book is probably fine for high schools, but it's not like school districts were actively promoting books like this, even if some individuals might.
From 2021, my kid's school district: https://www.tampabay.com/news/education/2021/11/19/pinellas-school-district-orders-removal-of-gender-queer-book/
2/
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock This book is far, far from representative of what DeSantis' inteventions are curtailing.
The direction in which you "err" reflects your values as much as what you claim to be trying to achieve. If you err on the side of killing them all and let God sort it out, it means very little that you don't intend to kill the innocent. /fin
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock It's not exactly unintended if you don't care, it was a foreseeable result, and you are happy with it. If a politician were to say eliminate any review of capital cases and lots of innocents die but you continued to tout your tough-on-crime accomplishment, whether you really "intended" to kill innocents may be an interesting philosophical question but your negligence and complicity is not.
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock it’s the first paragraph of the piece. he’s not defending these laws as hypothetically justifiable, he’s going before camera to defend what is actually occurring and to characterize the criticism of their actual application as misguided. but it’s not misguided. the best you can claim is he’s deluded and believes the law is being applied very differently than it is. i’d say that’s, um, a stretch.
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock he seems pretty clearly to be endorsing what has occurred.
@paninid don’t let it end. don’t settle for any shade of blue with the blues.
you drop by twitter to lurk a little, and it’s not kindergarten, it’s lord of the flies.
@mimsical probably shoulda spelt it right, gonna edit.
@mimsical autoextroverts
@Alon a good distillation of the better part Florida politics. (dissembling grift is better than fascism any day of the week, right?)
@Alon an informative and thoughtful post.
how i yearn for a world in which transit (even miserable American bus transit) would be anywhere on anyone’s radar in the Tampa Bay exurbs.
super-NIMBY, one home per acre way too dense. or should we consider this good, actually, preventing suburban sprawl in favor of infill or at least denser development? https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/region-hillsborough/keystone-residents-fighting-to-stop-housing-development-in-rural-neighborhood
i’d like to have a word with whoever invented the car alarm.
“Capitalism is the machine that will do whatever it takes to prevent us from turning it off, and the most successful weapon in its arsenal has been its campaign to prevent us from considering any alternatives.” #TedChiang https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/will-ai-become-the-new-mckinsey ht @KathyReid @snipe
i would like to see a television show
that would be a kind of police procedural, only the “detective” would be an IRS investigator going after the ever-more-elaborate tax dodges of very high-net-worth cheats.
which is worse, for things to go sideways or pear-shaped?
@curtosis @ryanlcooper whoever is likely to be stiffed. if the administration were to announce some prioritization plan (obviously for now they refuse, rightly) under which some payments would not be made to prevent exceeding the ceiling, the recipients of those payments would face a very concrete injury.
"in reality it would be every bit as illegal for Biden to respect [the debt ceiling] as ignore it." @ryanlcooper https://prospect.org/economy/2023-05-03-x-date-debt-ceiling-newsletter/
@blair_fix is it true that George Washington was a US President?
what does it mean for a thing to be true?
@harrymccracken the original iphone.
if looks could bill i’d be in debtors prison, baby.
@DeanBaker13 it’s morning in America!
@guan @bergmayer perhaps they might specify a duration in light years.
@paninid i just saw this in the bad place and got excited about it… don’t know what to think about how right it is but i hope so, i don’t like a future where even more than now we are serfs to tech only very large players provide.
the most hopeful thing i’ve read about LLMs lately (the part before the paywall at least…) https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither ht Stephen Pimentel
i don’t know why joni is always both-sidesing everything now. https://youtu.be/jxiluPSmAF8
@Artifex @timbray Fair enough. I think it’s probably worth breaking “moderation” up a bit. Managing what comes in across federation boundaries is a different kind of problem in a lot of respects from moderating direct participants in a forum. Handling inbound stuff really does need to scale with the whole network, and yeah, almost inevitably it’ll revert to tooling, shared blocklists etc. But local speech should be moderated according to distinct local norms, I’d hope.
@Artifex @timbray Sure. Some things are spam to just about everyone, and I don't disagree that it might be useful if services spring up to provide a floor and help manage these cases.
But once things start to get even a bit gray, that's when moderating the chatter should get, well, artisanal.
Inadequate moderation is a terrible risk. But so is a world where federation just means incredible pressure to conform to a narrow intersection of every community's standards.
@timbray (reiterating from a different thread… leaving the nazis to their isolated homes on gab or truth social or whatever, what constitutes crypto spam vs information about potentially interesting crypto projects will and should vary across forums. creating space for heterogeneous norms is perhaps what i most seek from a fediverse. a centralized site can enforce homogeneous norms just fine. if we want that, we should just mutually own/build one.)
@John @timbray if you are a single user, it’s a pretty different problem. there’s you, and there’s the fediverse, you block what you don’t want to see.
but what if you ran, say, a community of crypto tech enthusiasts? their standards for what constitutes crypto spam might be looser than most instances (for whom promotion of almost any crypto project is probably unwanted). 1/
@John @timbray i think the wrong choice is to restrict within forum conversations to what other forums want to federate with. that creates a least-common-denominator world. but widespread defederation is bad too.
the right choice imho is to have distinct standards for local-only and into-the-fediverse posts, with the latter much more homogeneous and cautious than the former. /fin
@timbray i kind of think the whole virtue of moderation is it’s not scalable. each forum can and should make very different kinds of choices. there’s a risk federation homogenizes moderation. i wish more forums adopted hometown-like local only scope, so that moderation for internal consumption and export for participation in the fediverse could be managed differently.
does anyone know of any description of the privacy characteristics of ACH bank transfers? do ACH transfers leave customer-level data with clearinghouses or other parties outside of the participating banks? how do the privacy characteristics of ACH compare with those of something like the upcoming FedNow?
(thanks @chrisp for posing this question, to which i'd given oddly little thought.)
(how does one select the "at-risk youth" one means to help?)
@catastrophile it’s kind of you, but it’s a bit like passing along a recording of someone asking you out. it isn’t transitive like that. i don’t feel special.
i’m a bit deflated by the spam i haven’t received.
(i finally got mine!)
“Most corrupt acts don't take the form of clearly immoral choices. People fight those. Corruption thrives where there is a tension between institutional and interpersonal ethics. There is ‘the right thing’ in abstract, but there are also very human impulses towards empathy, kindness, and reciprocity that result from relationships with flesh and blood people.” me, long ago. https://www.interfluidity.com/posts/1257407150.shtml
this is the moment when our future is about to begin.
[new draft post] We haunt https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/05/03/we-haunt/index.html
i was today years old before i saw and heard footage of Huey Long speaking in his own voice. via Sandy Darity cc @poetryforsupper https://youtu.be/KF6kFpnf4H4
@fastmail I did find that, eventually! Thank you!
@fastmail (i found aliases very straightforward, and was initially very confused when it seemed any aliases i’d made not pointing to my own address had disappeared. now i know what to expect, but i’m not persuaded it’s an improvement, and i wish you had left both views. still, you are a fantastic service, a bit of ui friction doesn’t change that.)
in an era of generative art prompt engineering, art history becomes a STEM field.
(you have to know your artists to effectively author "in the style of..." clauses in your prompts.)
i've seen so much #scala pessimism this week.
but it remains such a beautiful, fun language. i really enjoy #scala3 it's true there are some real tooling hassles (please give me a good emacs mode). you lose time. but you can express things so cleanly and concisely.
there are tensions between what "industry" wants and an impulse to experiment. a lot of us were drawn to scala because it challenges us, keeps us learning. it never wanted to be #golang. i don't think it should try now.
waiting for the #SupremeCourt to invent a lèse-majesté exception to the 1st Amendment with reference to itself.
after all, the Court is apolitical, so critique is not protected political speech; respect for the Court's dignity is essential to the survival and operation of the Constitutional order; and the Constitution is not a suicide pact.
we should all be grateful.
if the machine says you are guilty, you must be guilty.
if it turns out that was a bug, well, sorry i guess.
Marina Hyde via @NIH_LLAMAS @ct_bergstrom
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/02/post-office-horizon-scandal-inquiry
@lolonurse i am so sorry. that this was the policy choice — save banks as systemically important, in part by ensuring borrowers bear as much of the costs as possible, is much of why the US economic system has little public legitimacy. it is obviously not even roughly "fair" or "meritocrcay", unless you count being big or structurally well connected as merit. we go bitter towards fascist hierarchy, or generous towards social democracy, from here. "capitalist desserts" just have no social basis.
@taoeffect (expressing a similar wish, i was reminded that for a while Google had a blog index. now google tries not to surface blogs until they get love from the incumbents it already ranks highly. in the old days, even if sites were low ranked, Google would surface everything with a specific enough query or else deep in the results. now they'll simply omit.)
Small and midsize banks are basically in the position middle-class homeowners with underwater mortgages in 2008 who lost their jobs were.
Over the medium-term, their housing values and home-equity wealth were due to come roaring back.
But they don't have the liquidity to carry their position, and they're not important enough for anyone to front them cheap money until then, so they take the loss, cede to bigger, better-connected players who will enjoy the roarback. 1/
Formally eliminating limits on deposit insurance might forestall the liquidity crises. Alternative, more generous Fed or other-government-agency lending terms for small and midsize banks than the already generous Bank Term Funding Program are probably the most likely way small and midsize banks will be saved, if they will be saved. /fin
Your preferences have been updated.
@otfrom only if you sign over the film and television rights, i’d think.
@djc @Atrios the likelihood is other branches, when they substantively disagree, will treat decisions extremely narrowly and force courts to relitigate every variation, and that lower courts will also treat decisions narrowly forcing the SC to restate themselves, etc. overall, a kind of state actor work-to-rule. more constructively, the likelihood Congress does its job and reforms the Court quite substantially is much increased when the public is disinclined to defer to the existing Court.
“It is not sinking in, generally, that their behavior has made everything they do completely illegitimate.” @Atrios http://www.eschatonblog.com/2023/05/did-you-guys-notice.html
the more you love, the more you lose.
i am sorry to hear about gordon lightfoot.
this @TucsonSentinel piece ends on a rather shocking implication. https://www.tucsonsentinel.com/nationworld/report/050123_surveillance_towers/map-border-surveillance-towers-shows-growing-virtual-wall-along-us-southern-border/
waiting for musk’s knock-off, red sky.
in hindsight the lack of foresight is 20/20.
not the first time i’ve seen this i think, but i love that people do this.
a bit of well-placed graffiti turns a kind of coat hook into a smiling octopus.
when one finds oneself describing a thing one does as “ethical”, there’s a question.
@yarrriv it was purple the day before Ron DeSantis was elected (and his open policies of voter intimidation and suppression help keep it red). i don’t think we know FL’s longer-term trajectory, and think DeSantis’ recent popularity was based on the perception he kept things more open and free over COVID than the culture war crap he’s doubling down on.
@yarrriv he did. but if he is resoundingly rebuked in 2024 he won’t have the legislature as a wholly owned subsidiary any more.
“Can't quantify it, but really I think federal level corruption is so much worse than it used to be. I think practices that would shock ‘normal’ people are absolutely normal, but since ‘everybody’ is doing it, there's no way to even cover it for journalism.”
“We can start with how net worths just seem to blossom from the moment someone enters Congress, but that's certainly only the starting place.”
by @Atrios, to whom i apologize for quoting the whole post.
@LouisIngenthron if we could do a brain transplant, migrate into some new place its essence intact (though so much of its essence is wedded to that particular, extraordinary place) i might agree.
but faculty and students will just go elsewhere, and not the same elsewhere. there is no plausible land of milk and honey for the exodus. they just scatter to the wind.
from whom do we have to buy property at inflated prices to get the Court to bless #MintTheCoin?
@LouisIngenthron new college is like a person. people die. there will be other wonderful people. but it’s no good to acquiesce to a murder on the theory other great people will be born.
@LouisIngenthron i guess that’s where we disagree. i think people broadly disliked the overreach in much of what gets called wokeness. that gave trump and his slipstream a bit of power. i think they dislike the open cruelty of this political movement in reaction even less though. DeSantis played COVID in a way that, right or wrong, was very popular. I think two years from now he is the lamest of ducks, with all these absurdities exposed. so there is something to wait for.
hear me out.
i know it might seem like a reasonable request.
but those neighbors, they were really the deep state. even if they didn’t know it.
infected by woke mind virus, they were bringing in bicoastal “civility” norms which, by a thousand tiny strings in a thousand tiny knots, would entangle and block every manly freedom.
and of course even in death they were found on top of children. of course.
@LouisIngenthron i guess i disagree. Rufo i think is not interested in credibility (beyond the minimum necessary to maintain accreditation). he thinks the establishment that defines credibility is his enemy. he wants, as he has said over and over again, to make the body of the campus an empty vessel for his new thing. his new thing will surely rot, on that we agree. but the old thing is something beyond beautiful. we should try not to make way. in two years, things may be different.
Chris Rufo is getting his way at #NewCollege. He understands the people are the battlefield.
It may feel good to walk out, rage quit, as several prominent faculty have done. It may very well be the best decision from a personal perspective. But it is ceding the only terrain that ultimately matters.
Can the faculty not hold out long enough to see if DeSantis and his cheap culture wars flame out as a political force in two years? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/new-college-florida-republican-desantis.html
“If he had been a dog, she said, somebody would have rescued him long ago.” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/28/us/bend-oregon-mayor-homeless.html
This Supreme Court sounds like an implausible parody of public corruption.
"[Jane] Roberts' apparent $10.3 million in compensation [for recruiting lawyers to prestigious law firms] puts her toward the top of the payscale for legal headhunters… she was 'the highest earning recruiter in the entire company 'by a wide margin.'' ... 'The monetary value of a senior government official will depend on the value they bring to a law firm's client base,' she said" https://www.businessinsider.com/jane-roberts-chief-justice-wife-10-million-commissions-2023-4
@blakeashleyjr traveling through time, alas, will not make me wise. some feats are beyond even the most speculative technologies.
[new draft post] Urgency https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/04/28/urgency/index.html
// corrected very bad misdating of post and URL in prior announcement, thanks @blakeashleyjr!
@blakeashleyjr (i think i'm finally back on our timeline!)
@blakeashleyjr (thanks!)
The Roberts Court is a cesspool of open corruption that works to legalize the same.
People like to describe John Roberts as an institutionalist a bit overwhelmed by how contentious his Court has become and how far and fast it has swung. Given his unwillingness to meaningfully address behavior that justifiably destroys public confidence in the Court, I don't think that's a fair description. Any "institutionalism" is eclipsed by… something else.
"It is with real chutzpah…that Roberts has claimed judicial independence in order to circumvent an investigation into judicial independence… [O]ur Supreme Court does not exist in the constitutional order as much as it looms over it, a robed tribunal of self-styled philosopher-kings, accountable to no one but themselves." @jbouie https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/28/opinion/john-roberts-clarence-thomas-supreme-court.html
@caseyjennings (hmm… i wonder if there is a Tampa Bay local instance.)
“Preventing monopoly formation is infinitely preferable to breaking up monopolies after they form.” @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/27/convicted-monopolist/ ht @eARCwelder@mastodon.sdf.org
i periodically repost this, and now seems like a good moment.
Merge the Court https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/7964.html
A thing I did not know, from @ryanlcooper:
The US Supreme Court "struck down a law prohibiting political candidates from repaying personal loans to their campaign with post-election donations, meaning that interested parties can effectively place bribes directly into the pockets of our elected representatives."
https://prospect.org/justice/2023-04-26-democrats-supreme-court-corruption/
@caseyjennings if i still lived in the Bay Area (i often wish i still lived in the Bay Area), i think it would be a top choice for me.
@sqrtminusone when i first migrated my attention and posting from twitter to here (i had the fosstodon.org account for years, but rarely used it previously), i was cautious and CWed politics-ish things. but the norm among the wave of fellow twitter refugees with whom i disproportionaltely interact is not to do that, and i fear CW-ing things would make a place already a bit too quiet compared to olden days even quieter. but i don't want to be a bother in spaces that prefer that norm.
@pixelpusher220 (i think how that'd work is i'd move, then reactivate the fosstodon.org account after my followers have migrated. understandably, i don't think mastodon would let me keep my followers and take them elsewhere. i can have both accounts, but the current account's followers have to be one place or the other.)
( i may switch to a different instance — i love fosstodon.org, i'm a long-time free software guy and i love that world — but most of my posts are politics-ish and i've gotten a bit of pushback that some fosstodoners prefer the local timeline to be respite from all that. i could CW politicsy posts, but that doesn't seem to be the norm among the people i converse with. anyway, i may a bit sadly be looking for a new home, and am open to suggestions. )
Jerry Springer’s passing reminds us of a more innocent, less decadent America.
some people find writing a function to reverse a string even just once to be annoying, but i've found a solution that is very concise and will reverse a string *twice*.
@dcz I had a question. I have no reason whatsoever to believe the answer it gave me was correct. If I could be confident of that, I wouldn't need the citation! It's not about some academic fetish. But without some kind of evidence, I cannot trust the answer.
@bgawalt right. you’d want people of roughly the same age as well, for a first approximation.
what if Biden cut a deal with McConnell to support an impeachment of Gorsuch and Thomas in exchange for agreeing to two McConnell-acceptable replacement nominees? the idea would be to separate ethics accountability from the political composition of the Court by holding the latter constant. would this be wise or terrible?
Apparently organic chemistry is a fake, woke discipline. https://apnews.com/article/new-college-florida-tenure-conservatives-desantis-ce711c9169ebe84e9d062ebbb281ebce
@djc i’d cleanly say “lots” and “yes, of course”. without high quality representation, there is no legitimacy of governance (and crippled state capacity, and poor quality of governance). quality representation should be a very high priority. we should be willing to spend many multiples of the almost nothing we now spend on it. (Gingrich destroyed Congressional staff budgets, delivering us to plutocratic think tanks.)
@blakeashleyjr well, it is something to work towards. much of why our governance is in such rough shape is that most of us don’t feel we are meaningfully represented at all. our votes are like little dots rival PacMen compete for, as passive and meaningless to the victors as that. no problem presses itself less urgently, or is in fact more urgent, than restoring meaningful democratic representation in my view.
@blakeashleyjr i guess if one posits a sufficiently awful quality of readership now, AI summary could be an improvement. but then maybe the right answer is reforms that improve representatives capacity and obligation to meaningful address constituent entreaties, rather than celebrating a marginal improvement to a bad baseline?
(i’m going to make an imposter account of myself so that people think i’m important enough to have an imposter!)
(oh, wait.)
(i guess my account would be an imposter imposter?)
@gl33p (very well put. i think this is basically my view too.)
@blakeashleyjr There’s no question there cld be an improvement in response quality. but a letter isn’t really what we’re after, when we write a Congressperson, is it? Sometimes we mean to register a position (our letter may be parroting some advocacy campaign’s talking points!), but at other times we craft a message to appeal to a reader’s humanity, hope to establish a personal connection and reframe the reader’s understanding of the issue. Would it be legitimate to remove that from the process?
suppose when you write your Congressperson, the mail is read and responded by an AI with, in almost all cases, no human staffer (nor the representative themself) reading the mail. would that be okay?
suppose the AI produces (accurately, let’s stipulate) a summary of the issues on which mail has been received, the positions taken, and their frequencies among constituents.
would that affect your view?
@wizzwizz4 (is there a list of conventional CW terms? when I've CW'ed, I've just written out things like "US Politics", or "arguably cruel speech" for example. if they are evolving into standardized-ish tags, it'd be good to have some reference about that.) [my quotes of myself here are probably not exact, but you get the idea.]
@wizzwizz4 (i kind of wish there were an option for posts that would be public but excluded from the local timeline. as a community of affiliation, fosstodon is pretty good for me. but most of what i post is intended for the mastodon community writ large — as twitter refugees have in part remade it — rather than that particularly community of affiliation.)
@wizzwizz4 That's certainly fair enough. My general politics takes tend to be more frequent than my tech takes, and I don't want to basically CW myself by default. If fosstodoners don't want general politics takes on the local timeline, then probably I'll a bit sadly, but without any rancor, move.
@wizzwizz4 (did you think this particular take, the sarcastic jibe at Montana's expulsion-from-physical-presence of a legislator, demanded a CW beyond what my be usual for general politics takes?)
@wizzwizz4 Oh yes, it's sarcasm. I hope that's obvious, but I have been bitten before when people miss that. I like fosstodon.org, and have once had someone object to my very general purpose use of it. When I signed up, Twitter was my main general interest / politics venue. If I get a lot of pushback from fosstodoners, I'll move, but with regret. I am an free software developer, and I like the vibe here.
@dcz This was entirely fabricated information. There is no way to get a usable summary if the information may be fabricated and there is no way to check the source. If I were to act on this information, or incorporate it into my thinking even silently and subtly, I would make potentially consequential errors.
Thank God we have somebody standing firm against all the snowflakes and the cancel culture.
From @w7voa via @chargrille https://journa.host/@w7voa/110266946177745015
@dcz I don't think the businesses paying for API access to automate business processes are looking for a "storytelling tool". One of the most common use cases promoted is to synthesize information into usable summaries.
I had an actual question, so I thought I'd Leverage The Power Of AI. It gave a clear answer (not the one I'd guess!), referring to a study. I asked for a citation, it duly gave me one.
Of course, the citation was bogus. I point that out, it apologizes and gives me the "correct" one. Nope! And we go 'round again!
It's stunningly shameless in the specificity of its frauds. And it goes for plausibility! The issue numbers, page numbers, dates are consistent. The articles just do not exist there.
How does antidepressant use compare between nordic and anglo countries? There is some evidence to suggest that antidepressant use varies between Nordic and Anglo countries. Nordic countries, which include Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, tend to have higher rates of antidepressant use than Anglo countries such as the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. For example, a 2016 study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders found that the prevalence of antidepressant use in Nordic countries ranged from 6.2% to 12.0%, compared to a range of 3.3% to 7.1% in Anglo countries. The study also found that Nordic countries had a higher rate of long-term antidepressant use than Anglo countries. However, it is important to note that there may be cultural and societal differences that contribute to differences in antidepressant use between countries, and that these differences may not necessarily reflect differences in the prevalence of depression or other mental health disorders. Additionally, variations in healthcare systems, prescribing practices, and access to mental health services may also play a role in the differences observed.
Can you please give me the full citation for the 2016 study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders you refer to? S Sure, here is the full citation for the study I referred to: Sundbom LT, Bingefors K. (2016). The use of antidepressants among 0-17 year olds in five Nordic countries from 2005 to 2012. Journal of Affective Disorders, 189, 187-93. DOl: 10.1016/jjad.2015.09.025. I hope that helps! SW Hi. The article you refer to seems not to exist! Here is the table of contents for Journal of Affective Disorders Volume 189: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/journal-of-affective-disorders/vol/189/suppl/C Can you please recheck that citation for me? G I apologize for the mistake in my previous response. Thank you for bringing it to my attention. After double-checking, I found that the study I referred to was actually published in the Nordic Journal of Psychiatry, not the Journal of Affective Disorders. Here is the correct citation: Sundbom, L. T., & Bingefors, K. (2016). Antidepressant utilization patterns and determinants of short-term and non-psychiatric use in the Nordic countries. Nordic Journal of Psychiatry, 70(3), 192-199. do: 10.3109/08039488.2015.1118673 I apologize for any confusion my previous response may have caused.
I am having a hard time finding that article as well. Here is the relevant table of contents of the Nordic Journal of Psychiatry https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ipsc20/70/3?nav=tocList I apologize for the continued confusion. It appears that I made another mistake in my previous response. The correct citation for the study is: Sundbom LT, Helgesson M, Jing S, et al. (2015). Antidepressant utilisation patterns and determinants of short-term and non-psychiatric use in the Nordic countries. Nordic Journal of Psychiatry, 69(3), 218-225. DOl: 10.3109/08039488.2014.961964 I hope that helps clarify things.
#KrisAbdelmessih who writes one of the deepest finance substacks puts an older, but i think one of my best, posts on inequality in the excellent company of #ByrneHobart and #MaiaMindel. https://moontower.substack.com/p/house-rugged
are you a media personality?
@poetryforsupper mine too, but, um…
@poetryforsupper (since sometime in the 1960s.)
@poetryforsupper but students will produce high-quality papers more efficiently!
(contemporary education is based on the notion that important kinds of human development naturally result as an epiphenomenon of producing certain kinds of artifacts. that will just no longer be tenable. which presents a challenge. perhaps we’ll rely more on the seminar room! but that is expensive, and what kind of worker does it train?)
i pass every turing test because it is obvious i am a shallow fake.
@costrike @pluralistic but Elon's a cheap date by comparison!
i've made myself a very overtly #scala means of specifying static sites, which is the opposite of slick or friendly, except maybe to people who find writing scala and interacting with scala libs a natural and precise way of specifying things. today i wrote a "Getting Started" README, on the unlikely theory i might not be alone. https://github.com/swaldman/unstatic/blob/main/README.md
@wizzwizz4 shall we have two names?
what name shall we give this condition, when you depend upon what you hate?
Amazon's "main 'advertising' business isn't advertising at all – it's payola… In other words, Amazon isn't making $31b/year selling ads – it's extracting $31b/year from its merchants to make its shoppers' experience worse. The results at the top of your search aren't the best products – they're often the *worst* products, because sellers who waste money making *good* products don't have anything left over to pay danegeld to Amazon" @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/
@aswath of course the corollary is you’re never right! but nobody ever notices that, so it’s cool.
@dpp for any kind of institutionalist, we are on a path right to catastrophe unless we figure out ways to repair our crumbling civic infrastructure.
It's pretty clear the the US Supreme Court is sincere and has taken to heart its standard that only quid-pro-quo exchanges count as corruption, and any form of influence peddling or purchase beneath that standard is just democracy in action!
Unsurprisingly, @jeffspross gets to the pith of Ezra Klein's "everything bagel liberalism" complaint. It would be better if we didn't disadvantage critical public projects by attaching civilized labor conditions only to them, while private projects "efficiently" mistreat people. But the way to do that is to level up the playing field, by making civilized labor conditions universal. https://theworkbench.substack.com/p/the-fix-for-everything-bagel-liberalism
@johnbessa (i've been reading pieces comparing Trump to DeSantis, trying to explain DeSantis seems to be struggling to gain endorsements. Trump is described as an active and effective ingratiator of the people whose support he may someday require. DeSantis is described as haughty and cold until the moment he needs you. That's a difference! But it's a bit weird "empathy" is the word used to characterize it.)
it's funny how in journalism about politicians and political skills, a capacity for ingratiation gets described as "empathy".
the humble comma as a very simple namespace for UNIX scripts and custom commands.
"Start all of your commands with a comma" by @brandon_rhodes https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
Great piece by @ddayen calling attention to the lobbying by firms that extract fees from socially useless products to game the FDIC's deposit insurance limit. They want to ensure that limit stays intact.
At stake is more than their rents. Removing the deposit limit dissolves the pretense that banks are private firms bearing their own risk, and invites more fundamental banking reform. https://prospect.org/power/2023-04-25-intrafi-deposit-insurance-caps-lobbying/ ht #JoeWeisenthal 1/
@ddayen ( i wrote something recently about what a reformed banking system might look like here https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/03/26/banks-should-fail-much-more-often/index.html ) /fin
We have to end the silent gerrymandering that occurs within legislative procedure.
The procedural aspects of running a deliberative body are obviously of public interest. Who is recognized when, how committees are formed, how legislation is introduced and amended, most famously "cloture" to end debate, these are not "internal matters for the chamber to decide". These choices can and do disenfranchise us as surely as crazy district lines. Bring forth the floodlights.
"I'm sure a very nice book with obvious conclusions could be written about which laws are just ignored and which ones are enforced mercilessly." @Atrios https://www.eschatonblog.com/2023/04/how-does-that-work.html #ViaRSS
“Those who suggest that low taxes in the US mean that people there have more money to spend are being disingenuous, because US citizens need to pay, either directly or indirectly, for social goods that are provided free in other countries.” @sjwrenlewis https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2023/04/which-oecd-country-is-highest-social.html
@BenRossTransit perhaps it’s a matter of some discretion. or merely an indiscretion.
"most of the discrete objects humans have manufactured in our history are transistors" #ByrneHobart https://www.thediff.co/archive/why-the-answer-is-so-often-ads/
a useful precis of not-so-nice things tucker carlson has said. the PDF includes entries through March 14, 2023. https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlsons-descent-white-supremacy-timeline via @Atrios
@poetryforsupper it's the embroidered shirts that make it all worthwhile.
it's not great that we've built a world so susceptible to influence by the whims of some plutocrat that the quality of the country we live in and in some respects the fate of the world may meaningfully hinge on who he hires and fires.
[new draft post] Two kinds of representation https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/04/24/two-kinds-of-representation/index.html
@doriantaylor was it? my apologies to whomever, um, outfoxed me!
he was outfoxed.
sorry.
@poetryforsupper hmm, big news. he and fox have "parted ways". i don't know whether to be glad or worried about what's next.
@poetryforsupper carlson has developed an extraordinary knack for capturing the cadences of syllogistic, logical argument, smoothing over potholes with words like “obvious”, then taking a sympathetic audience anywhere he wants them to go. he makes entirely specious reasoning smell like incontrovertibly proven. we are not in a political struggle, but our adversaries are driven by a supernatural evil, basically satanists. i mean, it’s obvious, right?
i'm trying to sunset a twitter account. (it's a private account i used, in my once very twitter-centric life, for my own notes.) i want to download an archive first. before downloading, it wants a code which it says it mails, but alas does not. has anyone encountered this? found a workaround?
UPDATE: this was my idiocy. I have a filter that archives Twitter's incessant e-mail marketing and notifications. It caught the code. I'm through the code verification barrier now. Thank for all the help!
Thanks you a ton! @Alon @jackyan @Kchunda @robertbrook@mastodon.me.uk @Ofsevit
I'd love to blame Elon, but, not unusually, this was my idiocy. I have a filter that archives Twitter's incessant e-mail marketing and notifications. It caught the code. I don't know whether the archive will succeed (I've made a request, have to wait), but I'm through the code verification barrier.
"Living in the US is like having a super-dangerous job" by @johnquiggin https://crookedtimber.org/2023/04/23/living-in-the-us-is-like-having-a-super-dangerous-job/
// accounting for a reasonable risk premium given higher mortality ris in the US than comparable developed countries "would push the US down to the middle of the rich-country pack based on standard comparisons of median income." layer on much less leisure and lack of universal benefits and the US might land much lower than the middle of the pack.
@poetryforsupper “we’re not the theocrats. it’s just *obvious* that are adversary is satan and any appearance of old-school debate pretextual, so it’s incumbent upon us to counteract and act accordingly.” https://twitter.com/aimeeterese/status/1650096330407280643?s=46&t=5X4MlZRIpayL2Dl5w4-mFw
@HamonWry @morganalafee this makes me so unhappy.
@djc i don’t think so, because having to search around is just a deadweight cost. it doesn’t do any actual good for the producer that you’ve lost time. it’s a loss to you without a benefit to them, other than providing a basis to discriminate. socially it’s just a loss. all the time people spend checking the same prices three ways is time they could have spent on other things. 1/
@djc obviously in practice things get blurry, but i think imposing costs that are not actual efficiencies to price discriminate is not justifiable (we’ll make the seats in economy uncomfortable even though it’d be just as cheap to make them comfortable), while charging different prices for products that are the best that can be provided for the providers’ cost of provision, even if some of those prices have much higher margins than others, is fine.
@djc in general, market competition can’t provide good solutions for high fixed costs, low marginal cost goods. everybody goes bust under perfect competition. so you need either (often extractive) consolidation or some kind of regulated pricing. but i don’t know that you want/need first-degree price discrimination in the regulated pricing. cf @jwmason https://fosstodon.org/@interfluidity/110177407023461168
@djc in microeconomics, there are two ways to get efficient production (in the sense that all net positive surplus transactions that can occur do), perfect competition (which allocates all surplus to the consumer) and perfect price discrimination (which allocates all surplus to the producer). 1/
@djc it’s an interesting thought experiment, how could you get a good society out of a perfect price discrimination world. but given how concentrated the allocation of producer surplus is under contemporary institutions, you’d need a lot of work and changes. you’d need really strong unions, for example, to prevent almost all economic surplus going to a narrow class of producers. 2/
@djc but it’s a bit of a hall of mirrors too — if we really posit perfect price discrimination, suppose surplus from one round of transactions goes all to a tiny number of producers. is it basically taken away in the next round, as whoever each producer buys dinner from extracts basically all they earned in exchange? it’s just very hard to see how an economy that seeks efficiency through perfect price-discrimination works out. 3/
@djc in practice, the theoretical efficiency of perfect price discrimination gets trotted out to justify pretty plainly exploitative forms of price discrimination, under which the discriminators maintain access to less discriminating markets which allow them to enjoy their outsize surplus. 4/
@djc coming back to the mango analogy, your intuition that it’s not an injustice even to subsidizers if all we’re doing is reducing the discrepancy of surplus in the transaction is understandable. but i still think it’s not great, for a couple of reasons. one is easy: we’ve posited thus far altruistic sliding scale pricing, the seller allocates all the fruits of charging higher prices to the rich into offering a subsidized price to the poor. 5/
@djc obviously, however, our price discriminating mango seller may not do this. she may allocate only half the gains from upcharging the risk to subsidizing the poor. the net effect of a world where she can price discrimination is an expansion of producer surplus laundered through some redistribution of consumer surplus. the pharma industry is the obvious example here, very high sticker prices made more tolerable by discount programs for the poor, extractive rates of profit. 6/
@djc that’s a pretty easy reason to be skeptical i think of equalizing consumer surplus through sliding scale pricing by surplus-retaining private providers. 7/
@djc a more subtle reason (that came up already in our thought experiment of a perfect price discrimination world) is economic calculation, including for the purposes of redistribution. in a world where lots of distributive equalization occurs via prices, it’s hard actually to know what rich and poor mean. 8/
@djc if we posit that prices adjust so we all afford the same consumption bundle, we end up with the same incentive problems as versions of socialism where “to each” has no relationship at all to efforts to produce. if we posit a much more mixed economy, where some prices impose egalitarian discrimination and others do not, we end up with disparities related to differences consumption requirements and preferences. mango lovers can never get ahead while banana lovers afford great pleasures. 9/
@djc how should we tax in this kind of world? can we even make claims about who is rich or poor based on income or wealth? what are my incentives to work, if getting to a higher paying job just means the stuff i enjoy today gets more expensive? maybe there are answers to all these kinds of questions, a worldview under which we can make sense of distributional outcomes despite pervasive price discrimination. but i don’t know or understand it. 10/
@djc at the opposite microeconomic pole, perfect competition where everyone faces the same prices, makes these questions at least analytically easy. people with lots of wealth an income enjoy lots greater surplus and can buy lots more stuff regardless of their idiosyncratic preferences. if we tax the rich to offer a UBI, the welfare effects will pretty closely match the change in financial flows. 11/
@djc a counter to this is that what may be analytically easy may be politically hard, precisely because effects are transparent the rich know what to resist. but the rich also know how to use price discrimination yo their advantage. i think social illegibility (“kludgeocracy”, “submerged state”) tends not in general towards egalitarian outcomes. so i think “first order” price discrimination (different prices for identical goods) is basically always bad. 12/
@djc it seems less bad for mangoes than for college or pharmaceuticals precisely because it’s evadable for mangoes, anyone can substitute away, have a papaya instead, so producers can neither extract a large surplus or do a lot of redistributing. but where serious first order price discrimination is achievable, it mostly does mischief. 13/
@djc none of this is a case, though, against “third degree price discrimination”, which goes through product definition. if the airline charges 3x for First Class, but all consumers can choose First Class or economy, there is no violence to economic calculation. everyone’s dollars still puchase the same goods at the same prices, there’s just a wider range of goods on offer. /fin
@djc it’s definitely an elite college thing. which brings in a broader set of questions about the legitimacy of the hierarchy embedded in the tiering of higher education. but if we take that (horrible) hierarchy as given, such that the opportunity cost of opting out to kids who can access elite schools is very large, then parents are put in a situation of either subsidizing others’ kids at a very high, very concentrated burden, or really harming their own.
@djc in general, sliding scale pricing is a not-great form of redistribution, because it concentrates all the burden of helping the needier class arbitrarily on a very particular, small, somewhat adjacent class rather than causing the burden to be shared broadly. the poor should be able to buy mangoes. but why should only those among the wealthier who buy mangoes bear an unnecessarily steep cost of helping? 1/
@djc this set of concerns becomes less pressing if it’s a good just about everybody dies. so, Singapore’s clever means of simulating a social-democratic welfare state under libertarian ideology by offering sliding-scale pricing for goods like health care from the savings it forces via the Central Provident Fund works pretty well. 2/
@djc But, for example, the US practice of using sliding-scale pricing to finance private higher education is a horror. The percentage of families who will send their kids to sticker-price-expensive colleges is small, and making the sticker price very high to subsidize cheap rides for the poorer concentrates a terrible burden. The problem, of course, isn’t the cheap rides. It’s that we should all be subsidizing, not just a small, adjacent class of parents. /fin
i look at the website, find a good deal. go to the app — same firm! — to buy it. but my good deal is almost twice as expensive in the app. back to the website and i hit the good deal.
am i supposed to feel savvy? lucky? happy?
what i actually feel is that i live in a barbaric casino where i might easily have shed about a hundred dollars bc i missed some arbitrary choice about how to interact with a firm i now think less of.
it's one of god's little ironies that after all our teenage idolizing and striving the coolest people we'll ever meet are our kids.
i really miss having a place where you could at a glance get a sense of what’s really going on in the world.
like, right now on the QSite, trends include “Because Elon”, “Even Elon”, “Musk”, and “So Elon”. along with “Matt Taibbi” and “Grimes” who are trending for their roles in dramas involving Elon.
you really can stay in touch with what’s important over there.
@zachdecook I think it’s a pretty meaningless phrase at this point, trotted out to justify plainly oppressive minoritarian rule.
But pure majoritarianism is not, should never be, the democratic ideal. 50%+ε with the other 50% locked out is not much better than 50%-ε rule.
We want a voting system that aspires to v broad representation, insists on turn-taking, encourages more fluid political identities under which we all win some, all lose some, are never out of the game. https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/7828.html
@zachdecook a voting system doesn’t merely take us as we are and legitimate some set of choices. it constructs or reconstructs us. first-past-the-post voting, in the context of communications tech that makes all controversies national, has reconstructed us into zero-sum a binary, political identities. that is not necessary or historically normal. (i think it’s becoming normal now because US cultural prominence means our wrong turn undermines identity even in countries with better institutions.)
@akkartik I'd say improved, successor forms of democracy rather than successors to democracy! There is no "will of the people" independent of the institutions through which you constitute it. We'd have a smarter, more legitimate "will" with better institutions. Think about it! 😎
(i've written a bit more explicitly about Duverger's Law here. https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/7687.html )
you have to love the people who are wrong about everything because otherwise you will just be too alone.
@laprice IBGUBG, Planet Earth edition.
@22 I would, though my aversion to indoor public space would still be limiting.
@CriticalCupcake turn guantanimo into a daycare center.
@Yaneznaiu absolutely!
@Yaneznaiu welcome!
“the platforms always aimed to reconfigure sociality into something more consumable.” @robhorning https://robhorning.substack.com/p/identitatszwang ht @Jonathanglick
@mazdam Britain is not really a multiparty system. I mean sure, there are multiple parties, but it’s first past the post, which strongly privileges a major two. Brexit is a different problem, though downstream from the two-party binary which there like here turns roughly half the public whack (chose which half). But a 50% plus epsilon ad hoc referendum was also an unforced error. 1/
@mazdam Israel has two big problems: the one I cite in the piece about governing coalition dynamics, and a system that makes room for very small parties that can take outsize advantage of those coalitional dynamics. Better parliamentary democracies have voting systems that encourage multiple but not tiny, usually 4-6ish parties, so that the kingmaker in a coalition is usually not some tiny, potentially radical, sliver. 2/
@mazdam Voting systems that yield multiple medium-size reduce, but don’t eliminate the binary dynamic introduced by having the parliament form the government. /fin
"The word 'neoliberalism' is much misused. We might, however, attach that label to the valorization of the goods of effectiveness over those of excellence - of winning at all costs over performing well." #ChrisDillow https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2023/04/devaluing-excellence.html #ViaRSS
@acronymrequired Maybe so. Then promoting a (joint) factional interest above a broad public interest, still stupid from the perspective of the interests of the full polity but a bit of a different cause than the one I suggest: rather than bitter struggle, tacit collusion.
[new draft post] Two parties make us stupid https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/04/21/two-parties-make-us-stupid/index.html
@GerardMacDonell I definitely bristle at colds more, after spending much of the pandemic entirely free of them. But with a kid indoors at school every day, we've not been able to avoid them entirely.
@22 Part of why we left the Bay Area is, post-pandemic, we spent most of our time at home, and home had to be for us a very small and cluttered thing there. Prepandemic, our tiny home didn't bother me much. I was usually out in that urban bustle.
(It did bother my wife more even then. The city could be my home, but she values private, domestic space a lot more than I do. Even in our bigger suburban Florida apartment, I find literal home pretty depressing.)
i still spend about 90% less time in indoor public spaces than i did pre-2020.
which i don’t like, at all. i don’t work in coworking spaces and cafés anymore, i mostly restrict eating out to eating outside, etc.
i feel much more isolated and stuck at home than i used to. i want everywhere to verifiably provide to very good ventilation. i think of close indoor air now like untreated sewage.
an interesting observation in this piece by @radleybalko about GOP respect for localism and the rights of communities to govern themselves rather then be subject to the whims of some distant government is the attention paid to institutional design, ensuring accountability through clear targets for coercion and intimidation in the public interest. https://open.substack.com/pub/radleybalko/p/meet-the-nutty-tennessee-republicans
@dharmik absolutely. there should be spaces for Nazis, and each of us should be able to participate in those spaces or not however we see fit. but i probably don’t want to contribute whatever little wit i offer to places that put Hitler montages at the top of their trends. i might listen in just to know, but i’d not let myself enrich that kind of scene.
so over on the QSite i saw “big guy” trending and was curious. the two top tweets offer happy birthday wishes to the “big guy”, above slide shows cycling through adoring photographs of adolf hitler.
i mean, why on earth would advertisers be leaving?
basically the legacy elitist blue check was just made more elitist, it now goes a much smaller number of accounts, the celebrities that elon wants to impress.
maybe capital allies with those who would render the state oppressive on social issues not merely to attract electorally useful idiots, but also so that factions which otherwise might be inclined to support state power in order to address distributional problems become tempted to adopt a “fight the power”, adversarial view of the state.
For students at #NewCollege, the Florida public liberal arts college that #RonDeSantis is trying to convert to Christianity or something, the "center of the universe" is Palm Court.
Palm Court is an almost-checker-board of Palm Trees, the heart of a dormitory complex designed by IM Pei, the most extraordinary place that I ever lived.
Proconsul Corcoran now plans to evacuate students from that whole side of campus (which also includes newer dorms and the student center). https://ncfcatalyst.com/admitted-student-day-ushers-in-a-new-era-for-new-college/
"we’ve allowed companies to steal our culture and rent it back to us." #quoderat http://www.technologyasnature.com/pyra-c/ #ViaRSS
is prompt engineering safe from ai automation?
mischievous high-school kids in Florida are going to have so much fun bringing up topics their teachers could get in trouble for talking about.
@mattlehrer omg this is the greatest day of my life.
Poop emoji autoreply from press@twitter.com.
undisguised vindictiveness is a hallmark of the contemporary right. https://journa.host/@dell/110227348408885700
Margaritaville feels awfully uptight these days.
what twitter address do you write to get your free 💩 emoji?
when you say you are asking nicely, you are not.
[new draft post] Taiwan https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/04/18/taiwan/index.html
we’re going to extend copyright, like, forever just because we are so grateful.
from #MattBruenig https://mattbruenig.com/2023/04/12/is-national-public-radio-actually-national-private-radio/
Many, possibly most, state-owned enterprises receive no public subsidies, meaning that they fund themselves via revenue from their customers. The United States Postal Service is perhaps the biggest and most well-known state-owned enterprise in the US and it funds its services using customer fees called postage. The Tennessee Valley Authority is another US state-owned enterprise and it funds its services using customer fees called electricity rates. In fact, there are around 2,000 public power companies in the US that work this way. Also, some non-state-owned enterprises receive public subsidies. Private sports teams receive subsidies to build stadiums. The federal government is giving huge sums of money to chipmakers to locate factories in the US. And so on. Few if any people contend that these subsidies make the entities public or state-owned.
"Boeing is not in the business of making planes, it is in the business of making profits." #MatthewSaroff https://40yrs.blogspot.com/2023/04/still-cant-make-planes.html
// one way to understand the neoliberal period is as a time when people absurdly believed that corporations face no important trade-offs between generating payouts for shareholders and doing real work in the world.
"'A Commission serious about regulating—and not destroying—this market' would be a different SEC! You don’t have to like it, but it is easy to know what the SEC wants." @matt_levine on the state of play in US crypto regulation. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-04-17/the-sec-comes-for-bittrex
"So many things that people claim are impossible we once had in living memory and yet people often cannot even accurately recall their own lives and experiences." #quoderat http://www.technologyasnature.com/railroaded/ #ViaRSS
@misc @Jonathanglick Sounds wonderful, assimilate me!
@misc @Jonathanglick Right. I don't think framing a binary is very helpful. Harris Mylonis in his "Politics of Nation Building" helpfully divides nation-state strategies for managing subgroups between assimilation, accommodation, and restriction (the latter of which *in extremis* includes transfer or extermination).
There's a whole spectrum of degrees in mixing assimilation + accommodation, nearly all of which are better than restriction, or a binary of restriction or coerced assimilation. 1/
@misc @Jonathanglick The way I think of it is that accommodation is a *per se* good in a pluralistic, liberal society. We desire people to have the ability to live as much as they choose within any identities that they choose. But some degree of assimilation is functionally necessary, so trade-offs may need to be, and legitimately can be, made. 2/
@misc @Jonathanglick Better still is to encourage voluntary embrace of forms of identity that are sufficiently open that the tradeoffs are less urgent, people opt in to forms of identity that are open and don't hinder coordination across groups, as the nation-state requires. (This is the melting pot trick, in my view.) /fin
@misc @Jonathanglick Yes. I think it's an important counter to charges of identity-group-weakening (whether framed as "genocide" or not) that such weakenings are legitimate if the mechanism is plainly voluntary choices of erstwhile members. Intermarriage may hurt "Judaism", but it's legitimate (says intermarried me). There's no reasonable argument that former lesbians have been coerced to become trans men, so it's entirely legitimate, whatever its consequence on the prior identity group.
@misc @Jonathanglick Yes. The conflation of "genocide" taken to mean discouraging an identity group very broadly with the extermination of the holocaust creates rhetorical temptations that I think have not contributed to clarity of thought. In progressive circles, "assimilation" is often tarred as a kind of genocide lite. I think that's straightforwardly bad, because a pluralistic nation-state will require some mix of accommodation and assimilation in order to function well.
@Jonathanglick @misc Yeah. I think the willingness to "melt" in a direction was an important distinction. 20th C "Americanness" didn't require giving up Irishness, Italianness, or Jewishness. But it encouraged a kind of commercial openness — open a pub, a pizzaria, a deli! It's trick was to turn prior identity groups into theme park versions integrated in our larger Disneyland. 1/
@Jonathanglick @misc But some identities we were not willing to "embrace and extend" as a new section of the theme park. Both queerness and blackness were not encouraged to melt into the mix. There was soul food and gay bars, but they never mainstreamed like pizzarias and delis and pubs, they never shed a sense of exclusion. We might do better now, if we could reinvigorate a kind of melting pot identity (for better or not, that's obviously controversial). /fin
@laurenshof That makes sense! I've given it literally one perusal, and there certainly were a lot of here's-my-latest-substack notes. In one session, it didn't overwhelm the sense of relief and attraction I felt, but it's quite possible that over time the self-marketing and caste system (instead of blue-checks, it's newsletter writers!) would undo that.
@Jonathanglick (fair enough!)
@misc @Jonathanglick Good points. Evangelicalism, if we deem it genocidal, is universal rather than targeted in the object of its genocide. Oddly, that makes it seem lots less vicious than a movement that tried to "improve" one group while accepting diversity more broadly. Scale I think is trickier, though. 20th C America mass-promoted a version of American-ness whose effect, and intent, was "melting pot". It was large scale, but universal and in my view noncoercive. I'd not label it genocidal.
@Jonathanglick (I'd say "white supremacist" was both. People who bought into the ideology identified, proudly, as white supremacists, and formed tight-knit social groups around that identity, much moreso than say socialists or libertarians which I'd characterize as political ideologies certainly but group identities only weakly.)
@Jonathanglick Here I think we'll agree. There's a distinction between seduction and coercion. I think it's great and fine to offer choices that, if widely taken, might weaken or even destroy an identity group, as long as take-up of that choice is genuinely voluntary. The line between what's voluntary and not can blur, but we should try to insist on as strong a sense of voluntary as possible. Coercing people to take actions that undo identities is terrible. Promotion of such actions need not be.
@Jonathanglick I don't think this is right. Consider the group "white supremicists". From the 19th through the mid 20th Century this was not an epithet, but a proud open identity group. Much of the public thought that it should disappear (and to the unfortunate degree it still exists, thinks that it still should), but there was no hint of murder in that. There is quite extraordinary fluidity in identity groups over time, often without much coercion let alone murder.
@Jonathanglick @jayulfelder I guess with Jews its a funny thing, because we can't decide if we're an ethnicity or a religion. But to the degree it's a religion, I think most contemporary Jews would see mass conversion to Christianity as eradication of Judaism, though not the Jews as human. Would Jews exist, if we were all "Jews for Jesus"? Why wouldn't we just become Episcopalians or Unitarians then, just culturally to keep Klezmer and Yiddish and some rituals alive? 1/
@Jonathanglick @jayulfelder Almost nobody defends (explicitly, but mostly even implicitly) genocide in the sense of extermination. But lots of people support things that would, if successful, lead to the end of the identification part of an identity group. 2/
@Jonathanglick @jayulfelder One classic is the prospect of curing deafness, or Deafness. On the one hand, seems like it would be a good thing. On the other, it would end what has emerged as a rich, close-knit community, with its own norms and language and a very strong sense of identity. Should the Deaf, in your and my ideal world, exist? /fin
@Jonathanglick @jayulfelder does that mean that every evangelical religion, whose theology might include ideas like "believers who repent will enjoy eternal salvation, while others will not", and who therefore (altruistically, starting from their axioms) would ideally want all people to become converts, should be thought of as in some ethically important sense as genocidal?
@Jonathanglick (Maybe the smooth onboarding is less marginal than I think! Or at least maybe Substack is marketing it to writers that way, whether it proves accurate or not, to jumpstart participation!)
@Jonathanglick Those longform writers mostly used to be on Twitter too, and I think the notes part is open without pay, for now. To the degree notes succeeds, like Twitter, or here, there will be a financial incentive to market ones work there. Probably the onboarding to subscribing will be even smoother than Substack makes it in general from notes, but I think that's a pretty marginal difference. 1/
@Jonathanglick For now, I think it's populated because subscription Substackers think quite highly of that platform, and are willing to help jumpstart notes with them. Its value might become a victim of success, if it really does become a new Twitter, as the clientele grows less select. But for now it is mostly Substack writers and subscribers (I found myself there via Substack's mailing digests to subscribers), which is imparts a helpful selection bias. /fin
@deannapizzuti i'm interpreting this as an Actual Fossil.
I do not wish Substack Notes well. I am done with the internet architecture it represents.
So I am unhappy to report, after lurking for a bit, so far its value proposition of "Twitter, but constituted mostly of longform writers and their readers" is compelling. It's worth thinking about a more open and decentralized way to encourage such a forum.
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @jeffspross i have too many concerns about how corruption is defined and measured to take this kind of thing very seriously. in that figure, the US is shown as pretty low corruption, and in terms of low-level quid-pro-quo corruption that’s probably right. but in dollar-weighted terms, defining corruption broadly to include legalized forms of moneyed influence (“lobbying”), the US would (should) be tallied as much more corrupt.
“it is the enormous inequality of our society—the vast difference in wealth and income between the rarefied top and the rest of us—that creates the structural circumstances that give rise to corruption… The disparity is the root cause of the problem.” @jeffspross https://open.substack.com/pub/theworkbench/p/to-get-rid-of-corruption-in-high
i don’t really get the scandal, doesn’t everybody love a robes-to-riches story?
“We must avoid the schoolteacher attitude to politics and business, marking the work of politicians and businessmen as if it were a test of intellectual ability and singling out the best and worst students. Instead, we must consider institutions. Do we have those institutions which help filter out incompetence and bias, or which are resilient to error? The answer, for now, is: no.” #ChrisDillow https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2023/04/when-clever-people-do-stupid-things.html #ViaRSS
@akkartik yeah, pretty unpersuasive. but formulaic for The Economist, which more than a century ago was “liberal” in a way that suggests “neoliberal” is a retronym. they are in the business of celebrating all that has made the last few decades a catastrophe. of course they’ll put a cherry on top of that and call it cake.
@alexh i let the AI compose those replies.
Lots of useful economic history in this @theprospect piece by #MegJacobs https://prospect.org/economy/2023-04-13-forgotten-left-economics-tradition/ ht @chrishenjum #mastecon
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @SteveRoth @blair_fix the claim isn’t that economists are stupid. it’s that the forms of (necessary) simplification dominant in economics are shaped by the discipline’s incentives, in order to become the politically dominant, highest prestige form of “social science” discourse, it was incentivized to choose simplifications that flatter the wealthy and powerful. i think that claim accurate, although now (finally) there is some meaningful backlash in the discipline. 1/
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @SteveRoth @blair_fix an analogy to climate science would be the deniers who claim global warming research is motivated by the grants you can get for climate alarm. but that’s a much less persuasive story. given that actual incumbent capital is much more likely to be harmed rather than helped by climate interventions, what would motivate plutocratic purchase of climate alarmism, rather than denialism? 2/
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @SteveRoth @blair_fix we know of lots of incumbent interests that do work to purchase denialist research, and “green” do-gooders are economically tiny by comparison. You have to head towards Davos-Great-Reset conspiracizing to make this kind of claim work for climate. For economics, it’s very straightforward. 3/
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @SteveRoth @blair_fix The discipline bought its way to the top of the prestige and policy-discourse hierarchy by offering an intellectual framework that prestige-setters were willing to endorse, because it legitimates the hierarchy whose apex they occupy. /fin
@SteveRoth this analysis by @blair_fix is compelling in conventional terms, but a bit more complicated if holding gains are computed as income, per your work, given the effect of interest rates on term asset prices.
was ZIRP a gift to capital (bc asset price appreciation) or a win for workers (bc factor income shares)? https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2023/04/16/how-interest-rates-redistribute-income/
@bretdawson i half agree; perhaps that’s a start.
playing with generative models feels like psychoanalysis: free associate to *this*, let’s see where you go!
but it’s hard to know if you are “psychoanalyzing” society, the training set, or idiosyncrasies in the way the model interprets the training set. ymmv!
What would it look like to separate payments and deposits from the risk lending side of banking?
@SteveRoth thinks it through. https://open.substack.com/pub/wealtheconomics/p/perfectly-safe-deposits-and-robust
@dpp @mimsical all i really know of is the econtwitter.net instance (i think @t0nyyates might have inspired/conspired it, though i am not sure). here’s it’s local feed: https://econtwitter.net/public/local
today in government in the sunshine… https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/education/os-ne-education-public-records-cost-20230413-6e45hkjnvnfkto2nioj3wgemyi-story.html
@stephenjudkins it’s a tail risk play i guess. if you’re the R nominee, you win if the crisis is bad enough they won’t vote the incumbent. you are at worst the 2nd most likely person in the world to become president.
(he’d not have had to veto it, he solicited it, made clear in advance he’d sign. FL leg does nothing he doesn’t want it to do. we’ll see in a minute about FL jud.)
“Decades of assuming that govt actors don’t know enough to intervene in the marketplace have created a self-fulfilling prophecy in which govt actors actually don’t know, because they have never done industrial policy, have never been taught to do industrial policy, and lack the appropriate institutions and information to do it well, even if they abstractly knew how. Parts of the govt that used to be directly engaged with economic planning have withered away” @henryfarrell https://crookedtimber.org/2023/04/13/industrial-policy-and-the-new-knowledge-problem/
ron desantis just made himself unelectable in any national race. probably even in florida next time around.
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @markhughes really? the reveal isn’t that we spy on allies. it’s the specifics. it won’t help Sisi’s counterintelligence, or put US sympathetic persons at risk, to know exactly what has been eavesdropped? it won’t harm our intelligence broadly if pessimistic assessments of a battlefield situation have to be treated as public, so become as impossible to make in private as they are in public (reasonably, since public pronouncements can self-fulfill).
@maria your writing is insufficiently derivative. let’s fix that for you!
I seek to follow high ethical standards, so there is no reason that any law should apply to me. https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/3948631-the-supreme-court-has-no-code-of-conduct-its-starting-to-show/
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @markhughes i think it very much the case that information is way overclassified for bullshit CYA and office politics reasons. it’s also the case that some information are correctly classified. this leaker who was trying to impress his gamer friends waa not leaking inter-office embarrassments. he was leaking revealing details about surveillance of very “hot” ongoing crises that quite properly were classified.
@DetroitDan this is a case, unlike Snowden or Manning, where the person was not a whistleblower, not trying to make public what he thought the democratic public should know. he was showing off to friends, from whom he expected (but ultimately did not receive) discretion.
@DetroitDan (i have no problem, by the way, with Musk’s revealing Twitter internal discussions. and i agree that those revelations showed various state-adjacent factions trying to influence Twitter. but they also, I think, show pre-Musk Twitter as being willing and able to give those factions the finger, as it often did. i think better, not worse, of pre-Musk Twitter, and especially of Yoel Roth who comes off as super high integrity, after the big reveal.)
think of the possibilities for honeytraps made from kindness rather than lust or avarice.
place a politically inconvenient person in a situation where a cooperating undocumented migrant needs help. have the migrant in some offhand way reveal their status. if the kindness does not immediately desist, you’ve made yourself a felon.
for a political coalition built around unkindness as retribution for perceived grievance, this kind of trap may be usefully selective.
how on earth would a 21 year old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard have access to all this shit? isn’t access to classified information compartamentalized, even among people with security clearances that would permit them, if they had a good reason, to see it? you’d think the US security state would have learned a little from Manning and Snowden? maybe they need to learn from firms like Apple about how to restrict information flows by default?
You’ve got to love the implications for liberty of a decision that says any doctors that might be called to treat a person who takes a risk that doesn’t work out are “harmed” and have standing to sue to prevent the risk-taking.
Doctors Against Skiing could put an end to the lax permitting process that allows such a dangerous sport to exist.
Shouldn’t ER doctors have standing then to sue gun manufacturers?
an end of history is like a permanently high plateau.
really at the heart of civil society in the modern South is the service organization Enbies of the Confederacy.
The amazing @jeffspross is here!
"Conservatives like to troll liberals by asking 'What is a woman?' In the next few election cycles, they’re going to find out."
It is astonishing to me that the writer of this piece is #RichardHanania. https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-women-rebel-against-pro-life
@DetroitDan I think it’s fair to say that state and security-state adjacent actors were “in the room” and made their pitch to Twitter, and you can dislike that. But I don’t think any fair read of what Taibbi et al unearthed could fail to note how extraordinarily independent pre-Musk Twitter was in responding to that. Mostly, they called bullshit and refused to censor. 1/
@DetroitDan The big conservative outrages — the Hunter laptop, banning Trump — may have been mistakes, but they were Twitter’s mistakes. Yes, the Hunter laptop choice was “informed” by alerts to be on the lookout for Russian disinformation, and in your view that was entirely bullshit. But the Twitter team wasn’t under state pressure, they fucked up on their own because they thought they were doing the right thing. 2/
@DetroitDan Obviously what’s “right” says something about their own ideology and worldview. I think you can make a strong case that Twitter’s misinformation policy reflected basically a professional liberal, mainstream professional class worldview (esp re COVID), and they made consequential distribution-shaping choices (from deamplifcation to takedowns) based on that. 3/
@DetroitDan But I don’t think you can fairly make the case that they just did what the US security state instructed, at least on the censorship side. They had a strong culture of resisting state censorship demands, from US and foreign government sources. (There is evidence I think they capitulated to US security state demands *not* to censor accounts they otherwise might have flagged as inauthentic, an interesting kind of case!) 4/
@DetroitDan Musk’s Twitter has flouted the establishment liberal worldview of prior Twitter on things like COVID and hate speech, so may seem refreshing to people who felt suppressed before. But on questions of state-directed censorship, Musk’s Twitter is unambiguous worse. He lets Modi’s government ban tweets globally, something prior Twitter never did. 5/
@DetroitDan I’m sure Musk’s Twitter doesn’t capitulate to any US security state requests, because he knows they are toothless, unlike India, which might block Twitter if he offends them. For all that is wrong with the US, you can publicly give the security state the finger (as long as it is not by exfiltrating classified documents), and nothing bad will happen to you. In a personal sense, as a writer, I am much more worried about Ron DeSantis than the CIA. /fin
it’s clearly very expensive to train gpt-4-ish models. but how expensive is it to run them? if openai permitted, what kind of hardware would you need to run a local gpt-4?
@paul on the internet, nobody knows if you’re an LLM.
you play innocent, like you don’t know public libraries groom readers.
@djc From the Vox story, it read to me like they were giving immunoglobins along with the vaccine. If for some reason, people had skipped the vaccine after a potential exposure until it would be too late, I can see that the immunoglobins might become a pretty urgent requirement. Once you get sick with rabies, I think your odds of surviving are very small. But if you know you've had a dangerous encounter, my understanding was that prompt vaccination would be in time.
@djc (I hadn't had the vaccine until after the bite, started the series immediately when I was bitten.)
@DetroitDan I think this is the one you’re referring to? It’s the only Taibbi Twitter files that mentions CIA, and refers to a group called Hamilton 68 that purported to identify Russian disinformation accounts. Per Taibbi’s own reporting, Twitter execs quickly caught this as bullshit and did not censor or shadow ban based on it. https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1619029772977455105 1/
@DetroitDan Taibbi takes them to task for not publicly calling bullshit on the group, as they privately considered doing. But it seems to me mostly an example of Twitter execs resisting pressure from a security-state connected group, rather than acceding to it. /fin
@DetroitDan (i screwed up my search earlier! there are other Taibbi twitter files that mention CIA. but a bunch of it seems to fit that pattern: overzealous maybe state or kind-of state adjacent flags stuff to twitter, twitter, particularly the rather heroic yoel roth, checks it out and calls bullshit, doesn’t take it down.)
@eed3si9n small dollar donations bring a kind of populism, but i think it’s definitionally distinct from plutocracy, which refers to government by the very wealthy. a few years ago i was hopeful that small-dollar populism might be a net plus, but experience has diminished my optimism’, small dollars go disproportionately to and incentivize circus-like arousal of public passions. ad hoc self-selection of “voters” (ie donors) and reasonable forms of representation are in serious tension. 1/
@eed3si9n i’m very grateful that small dollar donations made Bernie a real contender, but again pessimistically, i think the days when a candidate as sober and serious as he is would win the small-dollar race have passed, it was an artifact of professional politics not yet having optimized itself for small dollars. now Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene will win that contest. i still probably prefer the effect of small dollars on the D side to the prior and mostly continuing 2/
@eed3si9n situation in which D insiders basically locked out the broad public. so my views remain somewhat mixed. but fundamentally, small dollar donations are like box-office receipts, they reflect a kind of enthusiasm of mostly upper middle class people unusually invested in the dramas of politics. i think they encourage comic book heroes and villians (which is which just depends on your side). 3/
@eed3si9n regardless of all of this (there are lots of nuances! i might be overly cynical!), “plutocracy” in the sense of big-dollar donors is what is behind the takeover of the judiciary, the well-organized and execute project to gerrymander and suppress, etc. there is big money for small government led by the most plutocracy-sympathetic politicians possible, and it’s done fabulous work, on its own terms. 4/
@eed3si9n maybe small-donor populism is a net virtue as a check on this, maybe its circus incentives make it a net harm. but regardless of all that, plutocracy as people mostly understand the term, rule by the influence of the very wealthy, is pretty clearly incompatible with any reasonable version of democracy. and i don’t think it possible to untether great personal wealth from outsize public influence. ergo… (thank you for sbt!) /fin
@mtsw (I guess I'm pretty interested in tilting the scales against the conversation landing at another platform monopoly. I love to follow you here!)
Some national-greatness, protectionist, left-YIMBY-ism by #RobertHockett https://roberthockett.substack.com/p/centralize-national-redevelopment
@blake No.
The billionaires are privileged in every large-scale domain, including of course manipulating government action. But the state is where they are least privileged. That's still a lot privileged! But their money can't reliably buy elections, electoral outcomes often defy funding flows, and politicians are only reliably bought while issues are obscure to public scrutiny. It's an uphill fight everywhere but the quasidemocratic state is not a futile battleground. Cynicism is foolish.
plutocracy and democracy cannot coexist. we don't need a guillotine. we just need a tax code. https://elk.zone/mas.to/@sltrib/110180784027294881
Will small businesses be squeezed between a tight labor market and a community bank credit crunch, delivering us even further into the hands of corporate overlords? Do we overestimate meaningful small biz formation by mistaking DoorDashers for Main Street moxie?
Interesting (troubling) questions at the end of this note by #MichaelGreen
In 2001 I was bitten by a street dog in Constanta, Romania. I was a foreigner, but with no fuss I was scheduled for a series of rabies shots for free.
I guess the treatment did not include the new immunoglobulin this article describes as “buying time”, but my understanding in 2001 was I had nothing to worry about since I started the shots promptly. The article does not quantify how much extra benefit the immunoglobulin is alleged to provide.
Get sick outside the US.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/7/16851134/rabies-treament-expensive-emergency-room
@DetroitDan Twitter pre-Musk struggled in a role no single company should have, unilaterally shaping the contours of the public square. Twitter post-Musk has not struggled. It has just done the whims of a toddler oligarch. I wasn’t happy with pre-Musk Twitter, but “censorship and propaganda” seems like a characterization motivated by particular disagreements. Taibbi did not cover himself in glory overstating that case.
@taber but they won’t sell us greenland.
just one bit of the excellent economics writing in this piece from @jwmason, on arguments about the futility of industrial policy due to overcapacity narrowly, and how politically we make progress in economics policy more broadly. https://jwmason.org/slackwire/at-jacobin-yes-we-should-support-industrial-policy-and-the-green-new-deal/ ht @ryanlcooper
“There's an important truth to the idea that, in a world of long-lived specialized capital goods and constant or falling marginal costs, there is no tendency for market prices to reflect costs of produc-tion. Too much competition, and firms will sell at prices that don't recoup their fixed costs, and drive each other to bankruptcy. Too little competi-tion, and firms will recover their full costs and then some, while limiting socially useful output. No market process ensures that competition ends up at the goldilocks level in the middle.”
@Jonathanglick Yeah. That's no good. Hopelessness is always savvier than wise.
"Institutions" very broadly construed (not necessarily formal institutions) have to stand as a bridge between individual and collective (potentially systemic) agency. Mass protests are an institution, and I think they had effect during that period. (I am less sanguine about that institution going forward, though, for a variety of reasons.)
@Jonathanglick I think it's a potato chip kind of effect. We know they are wrong or at least we are liable to abuse them but they are satisfying somehow so often we succumb. Especially when people are so actively trying to sell them to us. When we watch Netflix, we are interested in characters and drama. Thinking structurally feels like work, it doesn't draw us like entertainment. If we let ourselves be persuaded eating potato chips is virtuous work, that's very convenient!
@Jonathanglick (I hope that calling explicit attention to its incoherence and counterproductiveness can help de-fuse them. But that's more a matter of hope than evidence!)
[new draft post] Systemic means it's not your fault https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/04/10/systemic-means-its-not-your-fault/index.html
@stephenjudkins omg what an amazing filtration technology!
if you didn't know about condensation, wouldn't the natural question be "how did the water get through the glass?"
you'd conclude that glass was porous.
on the QSite, “Substack” is trending, but if you click it you get search results for “newsletter”.
they call them badges because they badger.
@DetroitDan @JoeGrowling @mikethemadbiologist i wish he’d note the vulnerability of the two party system to this dynamic, rather than just bad Rs, good Ds. but broadly i think he’s right — Rs are using gerrymandering to ensure voters’ choices are Republican government or government dysfunctionally divided (since Republican legislators prioritize sabotaging Democratic governors above governing well). without electoral reform or some meaningful restraint of gerrymandering, there’s not much 1/
@DetroitDan @JoeGrowling @mikethemadbiologist meaningful electoral democracy left in R governed states. Wisconsin will be interesting to watch, where Rs may face a choice btw tolerating de-gerrymandering or impeaching a Supreme Court justice transparently to prevent that. whether R governed states are “fascist” i think depends on how governors try to sustain legitimacy. FL, TX i think now qualify as protofascist, probably some others too, but i don’t think that’s true of all R governed states.
“many people apparently thought Musk was part of a “Western-values/free-speech coalition” (according to Weinstein). Sure, if those Western values are of seventeenth-century ‘l’État, c’est moi’ vintage.” #CathyYoung https://www.thebulwark.com/so-much-for-elon-musk-free-speech-warrior/
gun rights are for everyone!
for the governor’s allies, they are a proud manly right to bear arms. for those the governor does not favor, carrying a firearm is a license to be killed.
everyone let’s exercise our 2nd Amendment rights!
does anybody have good dreams?
Just imagine if you could spell any word.
to describe the direction of American politics and economics as “neofeudal” used to be provocative. cf @mikethemadbiologist https://mikethemadbiologist.com/2023/04/07/tennessee-and-patriarchy/
“Yes, I Know Where the Comma Goes” #JakeRusso https://notes.jakerusso.com/2023/04/08/yes-i-know.html
“the real reason I pony up is for a quality beyond straightforward ‘utility,’ a quality I usually refer to as ‘Doesn’t Make Me Wish I Was Dead.’” #MaxRead https://maxread.substack.com/p/why-would-anyone-subscribe-to-a-social
so, i hear Twitter is now labeling a variety of newsfeeds “government funded” which i’m fine with i just wish they’d pair it with a similar label “plutocrat funded”.
You just never know with the humans.
@voron the next big thing would be Google circa 2002.
there is always demand for indulgences, so it’s good that we have a nonprofit sector to meet it.
mastodon is a bit less parasocial than twitter, which should be a virtue, but we’ve so completely substituted parasociability for our social lives, it means we feel a bit more lonesome.
@stephenjudkins right. private vindictiveness has been common, you are shunned with a smile while all your opportunities dry up. (i don’t love that either!) but Trump brought in a very public pile-on kind of vindictiveness, the thrill of “retribution” as part of the electoral appeal. and people like desantis took note.
@stephenjudkins (the necessity of pelosi style vindictiveness has been i think related to a discipline arms race within the two parties. i don’t think that’s been benign, though each party finds it necessary in the dynamic. the combination of only two parties plus strict discipline makes representation impossible. two leaderships is not enough to meaningfully represent the public.)
@stephenjudkins Politics is something we make, it's not a given! We can remake it. I think at this point we have little choice, we have to remake it, either we reform it deliberately or it collapses into something I'd find even worse, thereby remaking itself.
(I think Trump's innovation was more on the publicness score rather than the vindictiveness per se. The Clintons were famously vindictive. Nixon of course. But pre-Trump, a public nice-guy persona seemed adaptive. No more.)
@stephenjudkins as we shape our much more large-scale social context, in which some people inevitably will need to serve roles as leaders, is personal vindictiveness then a trait we should continue to reward? should we assume the trait is necessary to defend whatever good things leaders lead?
one thing our various systems seem to do is elevate vindictiveness as a character trait. musk, trump, desantis, obviously something has been adaptive for them and vindictiveness is the trait they most obviously share. perhaps this is an aspect of our systems we should work quite consciously to modify. or is leadership by the vindictive socially beneficial in ways that i fail to appreciate?
@misc reason has one answer, emotion has another. i'm not sure which one better deserves the title "me".
@DetroitDan "good" was meant a bit ironically, but it becomes "good precedent" in the sense that courts and other institutions treat it as a legitimating past practice. gerrymandering, for example, has been condemned as antidemocratic since the 19th Century in the US, but the Supreme Court cites its unremedied normalcy to justify not acting against it. It's an "accepted" part of the American political process, lots of precedent!
a bad practice unremedied is good precedent.
@DetroitDan we're probably not going to agree, but i think with respect to the kind of dynamics O'Neill mostly focuses on — that solidaristic BRICS could more effectively reform representation in the UN and other post-WWII institutions — I think quite the opposite. the consensus in the West now would kick RU off the security council and discount any assertions by China for its role vis-a-vis the Ukraine War. That may be right or wrong, but the polarization the war has provoked has made…
@DetroitDan reform of e.g. the UN both more urgent and less likely, as from all sides proposals will be evaluated in zero-sum terms across the lines of putative blocs. prior to the Ukraine War, most of the mainstream liberal West agreed in theory that post-WWII multinational institutions should be reformed to better reflect contemporary population and political heft. i think the mainstream liberal West would now make adherence, as the West sees and defines it, to the Universal Declaration...
@DetroitDan of Human Rights, prerequisite to any such reform, which, rightly or wrongly, will make it easy for the countries that are currently privileged to prevent change they will perceive as adverse...
@DetroitDan I do think the military challenge and resulting sanctions have accelerated, perhaps usefully as O'Neill suggests, financial multipolarity. I don't think that will look anything like a catastrophic collapse of the dollar, though. It portends mostly an end, for better and worse, of the United States' capacity to impose economic sanctions almost unilaterally. In a more financially multipolar world, effective sanctions will require near universal consensus.
Very measured on the BRICS, by the guy who named the club, worth reading in the face of alarmist TicTocced takes on the subject that have become very prevalent. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1758-5899.13195
(via the polycrisis newsletter by @Kmac and Tim Sahay)
@TimothyNoah i mean it might seem far-fetched to you, but if he controlled cbdc isn’t that just the kind of thing *he’d* do? “the public money of the people of florida should not be used to purchase critical race theory indoctrination, and we’re gonna put a stop to it.” if you governed like these people govern, of course you’d fear authoritarianism from the other side. they believe government is authoritarian because that’s their own playbook.
@cocoaphony (my parsimony intuitions do not go with the galaxy take. but if he gets enough bad press, esp from the genx vc master-of-the-universe crowd he values, he might fall back to publicly embracing it!)
@akkartik (thanks!)
Galaxy Take: Musk really *is* a free-expression champion, and he realized the world needed a lesson in just how brittle and capricious a centralized media ecosystem can be.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/6/23673043/twitter-substack-embeds-bots-tools-api
in a game of chicken, no one should be congratulated for their resolve when both players go over the cliff.
This interview of Masha Gessen by David Remnick feels like a kind of oasis in all the controversializing over trans issues. https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-trans-rights ht @mikethemadbiologist
"modernity derived its cultural power and energy from an unstable ideological compound... [a] mixture of the promise an unfettered individual will realizing its desires coupled to a system which ultimately demand that human desires be managed, predicted, and channeled to serve the ends of a market economy." @lmsacasas https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/apocalyptic-ai
About as pithy a summary as you are going to get of how social affairs work and evolve, from @DanLittle https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2023/04/the-diachronic-social.html
@hcetamd creating an option doesn't block. surveillance is a real issue, but it's a Fed rail within a system made up of Fed rails. your ACH transactions are surveillable too, and of course your bank, whom you likely have no reason to trust any more than the Fed, sees all.
About as pithy a summary as you are going to get of how social affairs work and evolve, from @DanLittle https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2023/04/the-diachronic-social.html
America's emerging Great Firewall gets a beta test at — of course — Florida public colleges and universities. TikTok, WeChat, VKontakte, etc are banned from university networks. https://ncfcatalyst.com/congressional-opposition-to-tiktok-finds-testing-ground-on-florida-university-campuses/
@GossiTheDog it is very brave of you to post in your condition.
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
@blherrou maybe. but maybe it's better to compare indexing to explicitly low-information forms of investing. if you aren't investing based on information about firm prospects then, sure, paying an active manager high fees who probably also lacks any real new information is a bigger ripoff to the end investor. but we have securities for low information investors, from CDs to bonds. going for equity returns on no information is a bit... rentierish, perhaps.
@blherrou (btw, i'm not condemning individuals who invest via index funds and ETFs. that's sometimes wise, sometimes not, at a personal level. but at an architectural level, i'm not sure why we want a financial system in which ordinary people with little information hold equities, and come to make political demands of outsize returns. the Obama administration was very explicit about measuring its economic performance in equity returns, a very bad idea.)
@blherrou (this is an old view of mine: why should no-information investors expect equity returns free-riding off of pricing work by active investors, whose returns their presence diminishes? it occurs to me now that in theory i can make a case for this kind of investing in terms of systemic risk. diversified equity investors bear first-loss on systemic risk, justifying some outsize return…
@blherrou if it leads to structuring more of the aggregate investment portfolio as equity rather than debt, that reduces the risk of disruptive debt defaults. we're better off if our aggregate cap structure is tilted towards equity rather than debt, indexing could encourage that. in practice, though, i'm still skeptical. if this was our rationale, we'd want financial rules and procedures to encourage regular new equity issuance by existing firms, and…
@blherrou we'd expect to new primary-market equity investment -- ie not purchases of existing shares -- to exceed payouts. instead our current practices treat after IPO primary-market-confusingly-called-"secondary"-offerings as rare, regulated events, so the market treats them as confessions by managers of overvaluation, so they are infrequent.)
@blherrou (in other words, for this version of socially useful low-information diversified investing to make sense, it should lead to firms retiring debt and issuing equity into the market. but we much more often see debt-financed buybacks of equity, exactly the opposite, during this era of the index investor. part of that is that it's been a low interest rate era! but i think we'd need to regulate quite differently if we wanted to use indexing to promote systemic derisking.)
@blherrou indexing is low information investing based on a sometimes-empirical-regularity that stocks do well over the long term, which, when it works, means people who contribute no information to the investment process nevertheless earn outside returns. seems like a pretty apt description to me!
(but it might not work, depending when you get in and when you need to get out! so it's at best a defective recliner!)
"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
@bergmayer it’s prefect!
“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
@ZaneSelvans but each of us can be eaten just once!
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.
@sqrtminusone there is something very toddler-like about the combination.
@Frances_Coppola that’s how i perceive him as well. his claims to free speech support are as credible as the sometimes-richest-man-in-the-world’s claim to socialism.
@LouisIngenthron @ntnsndr (that wasn’t the implication i intended. only that the assertions strike me as equally credible.)
@ntnsndr i don't think there's any inconsistently between the claims. i just think they are both equally credible.
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!
you intend it as the exception, but they take it to be the rule.
people act like it’s a big deal to identify as nonbinary but i never knew anyone who identified as binary.
if you phone the CIA, i think it can go without saying that this call is being recorded for quality assurance. but do they ask you to please hold for the next available agent?
me too, honestly. https://assortedflotsam.com/@politicsbot/110135323482384206
@design_law i will not… i will not… i… am too weak. https://youtu.be/Jne9t8sHpUc
@hyperplanes maybe the humans who control it just don’t mind that.
which do you fear more? AI that breaks free from human control, or what (some) humans will do with control over AI?
it feels like a kind of violation of the social contract, that we get human-extinction-threatening AI before we even get robots capable of keeping public restrooms sparking and clean.
i used to think prompt engineer was basically an oxymoron.
dork diss of the day:
“you were epiphenomenal!”
@sarangshah there could be plaques on the inside of each urinal!
the humans often confuse hypotheses for observations.
[new draft post] State as coordination https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/03/31/state-as-coordination/index.html
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @merz @DeanBaker13 @jgordon Matt Stoller, in his Big newsletter (very much worth reading!) solicits stories about off-beat monopolies, and he often investigates and publishes them to his extremely Washington-plugged-in audience. Obscure-to-the-general-public abuse by consolidated players in science supply chains would be 100% up his alley, and might even move some needle that matters. https://mattstoller.substack.com/
@MBridegam no! just unsubscribing one at a time. org-wide opt-outs would be convenient!
@LouisIngenthron (i'll have to do some record keeping! for now i just bang the unsubscribe button like a reinforcement-trained rat.)
The social prerequisite for technological dynamism is a universalist welfare state that reduces the coupling between fluctuating labor income and human thriving.
See #MattBruenig https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2023/03/31/what-to-do-about-ai-driven-job-displacement/
@LouisIngenthron (to whom do you report miscreant mailing lists?)
@LouisIngenthron look on the bright side!
we can have the satisfaction of unsubscribing from the same lists over and over and over again.
i find i am unsubscribing from all the political-figure mailing lists my #ActBlue-ing over the years has put me on.
i'm not sure whether this is the right thing or the wrong thing to do. it is an act of sheer #revulsion.
instead of trying to throw a constraint into somebody’s optimization problem, is there any way you can shift what they are trying to optimize?
@caseyjennings hopefully things don’t have to break completely before we buckle down with some remedies.
@merz @DeanBaker13 @failedLyndonLaRouchite @jgordon if you read @DeanBaker13, a major theme of his work is disparity in just whom we put under international price competition “in order to underpay people” (or, alternatively, to drive price to least marginal cost of provision like an econ 101 textbook), and whom we protect. note that concerns about the justice or injustice of levels of payment are quite different from concerns about whether a reorganized industry can deliver the goods.
@lori to prove the iron law of oligarchy wrong, we must develop less oligarchical means of political coordination. i think this is a domain where technology reay can make a difference. ( e.g. https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9069.html )
plutocracy is just not consistent with rule of law.
plutocrats have the resources to hijack the state or undermine the legitimacy of state action. our current politics is unstable because plutocracy is illegitimate (because duh) while state action to counter plutocracy is made illegitimate by the work of the plutocrats.
so there is no way forward.
they are gaslighting you into imagining you are gaslit.
"when [NewCollege] hired its first dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion in 2022, it wasn’t surrendering to the woke left. It was responding to an explicit mandate from a DeSantis appointee... a banker appointed by DeSantis led an aggressive top-down push for sweeping new DEI initiatives in all of Florida’s public colleges, compelling every campus, including New College, to put more emphasis on DEI." #ConorFriedersdorf https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/new-college-florida-ron-desantis-takeover/673556/ ht @grantimatter
direct from the trenches of US-19 i am here to report that Palm Harbor Florida remains calm.
@costrike it’s friday somewhere.
the US feels a bit retro today, like a much anticipated mash-up of Law and Order and the Jerry Springer Show.
@lmorchard careful with the handle.
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @DeanBaker13 @merz @jgordon pharma is obviously structured in ways that reward predation and extract rents. we can try to address that directly. of course it is also a symptom of America’s general inequities and pathologies. there would be much less incentive to predation, and reform would be easier to arrange, if high incomes were taxed again at 90% in the US. 1/
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @DeanBaker13 @merz @jgordon but like with every other problem, while we fight their deep roots we still have to pull up the weeds.
in no domain are we content to say, “well the real root of this corruption is overall stratification and the desperate treadmill a price-rationed caste system provokes which causes people to justify any harm if they can earn a buck. so we’ll just have to endure until after the revolution.” /fin
@counternotions i think i saw prior art on star trek…
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @DeanBaker13 @merz @jgordon you should be suspicious! but then you should be more than suspicious of the status quo industry whose predations and misallocations of resources—including real and prodigious scientific and regulatory competences!—are legion and legend. @DeanBaker13 offers a lot of reform ideas. by all means critique them. but compare them against not an ideal, but the pretty bad status quo.
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @DeanBaker13 @merz @jgordon all I’ve endorsed was having the state pay to overcome regulatory burdens for already developed drugs that would be competitive with domestic monopolists. i’m sympathetic to @DeanBaker13’s broad project of figuring out how to reorganize pharma so we keep the competences but trim the rents and the (profound) incentives to corruption and predation under the current model. but i’m not going to invent a new model in a toot.
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @DeanBaker13 @merz @jgordon i don’t think anyone is arguing pharma work should all be done by direct govt employees on the gs pay scale. if you did do that, some costs would go up and others would go down, but @merz concerns about institutional knowledge might be hard to address. 1/
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @DeanBaker13 @merz @jgordon there are lots of pharma reform ideas (lots just from @DeanBaker13), but even when the idea is “let the state fund the work and own the product”, the state can finance start-up labs and let operators of those labs allocate resources, just as private investors now do. how the state then incentivizes high-social-return work, under what form of competition if any, becomes a question to address. /fin
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @DeanBaker13 @merz @jgordon you can hire whoever’s available, but that includes ppl and institutions already here. there’s no debaathification. when incumbent institutions have competences they can provide best at good rates, you hire them. they may not like the more competitive environment, but the only thing that’d cut incumbents out wld be their choosing to attempt a kind of capital strike rather than participating.
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @DeanBaker13 @merz @jgordon it’s worth noting that over the last few decades big pharma itself outsourced much of its basic drug development to China. that was the fate of the lab at which i once worked, the former Upjohn in Kalamazoo.
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @merz @jgordon @DeanBaker13 yes. but those big pharma partners largely serve as VCs plus compliance / clinical trial specialists. those can be challenging competencies, but they can also be reorganized! i’m not saying things aren’t “hard”. but when (inherently hard) trials are run by financial beneficiaries they are at risk of being corrupt. that things are difficult doesn’t mean the way we currently do them is best.
@merz @failedLyndonLaRouchite @jgordon @DeanBaker13 no one argues for erasing the institutional history of pharma and restarting from some blank slate. we argue for changing the financing model under which those competencies get deployed. that does mean, going forward, different, likely smaller, flows of money to the industry. it does not mean burning anything down. (big pharma itself has done a lot of that to itself recently.)
@merz @jgordon @DeanBaker13 okay! i’m not really arguing one way or another about that (but no, i’m not taking your word, and i think you are largely wrong), but using public action to undermine regulatory moats that prevent already developed drugs from being marketed was the Dean’s proposal, which i continue very much to endorse.
@merz @jgordon @DeanBaker13 (to be clear, i don’t dispute that drug development is very difficult. but i do dispute there’s something special about its difficulty that means only institutions not so different from status quo private sector monopolists could perform it.)
@bgawalt however nice the app, your private bank extracts a subsidy and imposes dangers the public should not tolerate. if we make deposits public, as we should, perhaps your bank can still provide the UI and administer them. (lots of proposals look like that!) so, enjoy the app. but your bank should have no actual access to the funds represented by your deposits. and that should not be optional.
@bgawalt 2008 was odd because they contorted themselves to save even shareholders of the big banks. but the bailouts were motivated by institutional private money-like assets, which have been much more strictly regulated since, and should (like private deposits) be regulated away. there must be private risk assets, and public credit-risk-free assets. any hybrid only exists because the private sector is extracting a subsidy from the public sector.
i wish #NewCollege had Disney’s lawyers. https://www.npr.org/2023/03/30/1167042594/disney-desantis-board-reedy-creek-charles
internet turing tests are getting so hard pretty soon only AIs will be able to pass them.
"Achieving pro-growth policies is a matter of power, not brains... Bad policy is not mere intellectual error. It is the product of capitalism — of economic stagnation and of how capital exercises power over the state." #ChrisDillow https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2023/03/against-schoolteacher-politics.html
i think a very good rule of thumb for all members of the human species is “just don’t detonate a nuclear weapon.”
FDIC’s Deposit Insurance Fund “also earns interest on U.S. Treasury securities it holds, but a sharp rise in interest rates last year caused unrealized losses on those holdings” https://www.marketwatch.com/story/failed-banks-struck-a-22-5-billion-blow-to-the-deposit-insurance-fund-who-will-pay-the-price-e446ea87
// ha!
@yarrriv i think china and russia have been shifting their reserves towards gold, though tbf it’s not so weirdo given the real risk (realized in russia’s case) of sanctions they face if they so some of the shitty things they claim would be within their rights.
@jgordon @danwentzel What if (I know, so implausible) Musk is a hidden in plain sight part of an international right-wing conspiracy seeking to undermine liberal democracy as most of us understand it in the United States and other Western countries? 1/
@jgordon @danwentzel If the surveillance and control these platforms afford is dangerous in the hands of a foreign power, aren't they dangerous in the hands of factions, domestic or international, who may use them to usurp or undermine the democratic process domestically? /fin
“are we the baddies?” asks the group, whose members wear gigantic skull tattoos as their emblem.
weird when libertarian anti-fiat bitcoinists get excited about the chinese yuan and russian ruble.
@bgawalt in 2008 i think the concern was mostly that business’ banks would fail, or for big businesses that typically borrow cash in the commercial paper market, that market might dry up, leaving them illiquid. obviously in the ensuing recession lots of businesses failed, eventually running out of assets to sell or borrow against when revenues were depressed. but the fears about deposit access and commercial paper came first.
@bgawalt (i mostly renember the fear “the atms would stop working”. which already feels anachronistic.)
@paul oh, i so fear we’ve done the opposite. if, per the Joni Mitchell song, love is touching souls, it was hard enough when you were sure the entity with which you spoke had one. now so often we just won’t know whether we are alone or not, whether when it feels like we have made contact we are just fooling ourselves or being fooled.
when you answer a phone call, there should be a button you can choose that automatically intones “this call may be recorded for quality assurance” and then does that.
(whose quality did you think they were trying to assure anyway?)
@bgawalt You don't want a public option in transfers and deposits. You want a public infrastructure for transfers and deposits that strictly replaces the private system. You have to restrict the ability of private securities to be money-like. 1/
@bgawalt Obviously, the first thing you do eliminate deposit insurance on any private liabilities after you convert existing deposits to liabilities of the Fed (in one form or another). So then anyone who tries to pile into a private "money" would understand in theory that they are not insured, their funds are at risk. 2/
@bgawalt But if you let private institutions offer money-like securities (e.g. money market mutual funds whose "shares" are always priced at a dollar but whose number increase with interest payments made from the underlying commercial paper), and you let people treat them as quasi-bank accounts, we know from experience private securities issuers will entice "investment" in large quantities of risky securities they persuade holders are just "money". 3/
@bgawalt When lots of retirees hold a product they were sure was safe money and then the bank behind it goes bust, it doesn't matter that it wasn't Federally insured. The state can't not bail it out anyway. During the 2008 crisis, policymakers had to guarantee all money-market mutual funds. 4/
@bgawalt So you need to insist on a public monopoly on money-like securities. Privately-issued securities need to be explicitly at-risk with routine price fluctuations and/or restricted in liquidity (e.g. two-day notice for redemption). Strong norms have to be set that the only safe securities are Federal securities. Regulators have to clamp down hard whenever private firms try to entice cheap financing by pretending you're not risk investing, just depositing. 5/
@bgawalt If you leave it as a "public option", you'll still have private firms looking for that subsidy, but they'll have to pay higher interest rates on their moneylike products (since they have to entice people out of the genuinely safe public option). The end result of that would simultaneously to have lots of fragile private money that can't credibly not be bailed out, and less profitable issuers more likely to go bust. 6/
@bgawalt You might *start* with a "public option" as an incremental strategy to move to the new system (though frankly it'd be better just to convert all deposits into Fed liabilities and have the Fed replace all prior deposits with its own loans, which it would wind back over time). But if you let private firms issue things that duck-type as money, and let them entice customers with good rates, you've fixed nothing. You'll have uninsured products you can't credibly not bail out. /fin
@LowlyAdjunct 70 years young!
@merz @failedLyndonLaRouchite @jgordon @DeanBaker13 Perhaps, but arguments in politics are largely about legitimacy. Profiteers profess both moral rights to profit, and extravagant claims about the necessity of their profits to innovation. If you already see through all that, sure, arguments about subsidy are superfluous. Many people do not, so emphasizing how profoundly subsidized and derivative even the best new original work is remains important.
@merz @failedLyndonLaRouchite @jgordon @DeanBaker13 (and the German government more directly subsidized BioNTech. and of course John Galt did not perform the basic research.)
do you want to argue that, bc antivaxx bad publicity, $100+ per dose is necessary in order for continued updates to pencil?
there is no innocence in pharma. it is all derivative of subsidized science. there is a policy question: what is necessary to remunerate the costs + risks of finding and making available good drugs?
@jgordon @DeanBaker13 Dean did in the piece! Absurdly, the mRNA vaccines whose development risk we almost entirely subsidized will fall into duopoly control and be priced extortionately. There are a bunch of other COVID vaccines in the world, already developed. The US government should make sure the ones that work are marketable by anyone that pleases to offer them.
@jgordon @DeanBaker13 I don't concede that drug development is insanely hard, or that there mightn't be much better ways to organize it than the subsidize-most-of-it then let last-stage developers monopolize it.
Nevertheless, that's not the proposal here. The proposal here is to use the public purse to overcome regulatory burdens to bringing already discovered drugs to market, in ways private sector coordinates not to, precisely because multiplying options destroys industry profitability.
@jgordon @DeanBaker13 (i quick edited, commercialize -> monopolize, which is what i initially intended.)
@stephenjudkins let's fix global warming yesterday. the urgency is ringing in my ears.
why must landscaping be so loud?
The government itself should run and finance US clinical trials of cheap alternatives to price-gouging patented drugs and vaccines. The taxpayer cost of the trials would be peanuts compared to the public’s savings on the drugs.
see @DeanBaker13 https://econtwitter.net/@DeanBaker13/110106851188936413
not propitious when the bbq place u r going to shares a stripmall with this.
Sign says “Simple. Easy. Affordable. Cremation”
@scottsantens perhaps people use butter in surprising ways, and substitutes just aren’t adequate.
i would like a stochastic carrot.
@stephenjudkins think about the motherfuckers getting a cut of every good or service you buy in private markets from consolidated industries. that nonprofits stylized stat is donations only, not including the services eg states pay nonprofits to provide. (but i have to track this stuff down more carefully before i’d omit that weasel-word stylized.)
@stephenjudkins if you want to feel good about the public sector, compare it to the private nonprofit sector. we pay nonprofits about as much as we pay the 50 state govts combined. which sector delivers more?
@stephenjudkins for all the real inefficiency and graft, states get roads and parks built and schools run. there is no reason why they can’t do this too.
California will provide a public option for some pharmaceuticals. More like this, please. https://prospect.org/health/2023-03-27-california-drugmaking-insulin/
how long until language-model-enabled stuffed animals talk to our children in character?
@SteveRoth Some people in the top 1% earned more than 3.8M, I'd imagine...
@bikeshed you got punked!
This piece by @SteveRoth really highlights the fractal nature of American inequality. Top 1% (by income) households saw their wealth grow on average by a ridiculous 64MM, but I think it's safe to say that the, um, poorest 1%-ers, households earning roughly 600K per year, didn't see anything like those gains. https://wealtheconomics.substack.com/p/new-wealth-accumulation-during-covid
@mihaip what you have done is fucking amazing.
"A country that lets itself be led around by the marginal logic of comparative advantage will end up with short-term economic gains, but these gains may be offset by the loss of deeper technological capabilities." @noahpinion_mirror https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/putin-is-a-rest-stop-on-the-road
I love this, from @mihaip. I wish they had a System 6 or 7 installation with Aldus PageMaker and a lot of fonts and (anachronistically) print to PDF. I could just give a middle finger to the last few decades of desktop publishing churn. https://infinitemac.org/ ht @burritojustice
@tb (it's excellent, of course!)
@tb ( i don't know what's going on, i keep editing to try to mention you here but it keeps at least in my UIs not showing up as a mention. )
"paradoxical misapprehension of agency. People, institutions, forces see it where it isn't, can't see it where it is, imagine they have none and others have it all...
to take the personal authority of believing things that don't fit together easily or clearly, is a sovereign act: it asserts priority over the systems of thought that constrain agency."
by @tb@tldr.nettime.org
---
https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-2303/msg00005.html
just remember, the bots made him do it. john galt has no agency.
#musktodon is not a great instance.
"The paradox of freedom, Florida style, is that it’s really an assertion of control. *People like us should be free to do what we want, and free to stop other people from doing what they want when we don’t approve.* That’s why it would be deeply unfair to call Ron DeSantis a petty tyrant. If he is a tyrant, he is an expansive one." #HelenLewis https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/05/ron-desantis-florida-state-politics-gop/673489/
[New Post] Excerpts! https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9830.html
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @yarrriv @Alon @davidzipper (one of my quirky urbanisms is i favor elevated bike lanes. but that’s yet another expensive investment that’s a very hard sell.)
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @Alon @yarrriv @davidzipper it is a bit pathetic. pre-COVID i tried so hard to make MUNI my main way of getting around SF, but I constantly felt like it was some virtuous sacrifice, that i was being dicked around by buses inexplicably terminating early or being 3 minutes away then disappearing, then of course the next one that shows to reward you for the wait is packed like a sardine can. 1/
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @Alon @yarrriv @davidzipper then you go to other countries, and it’s just nice. /fin
@rst what i was trying to get at with the phrase is that traditionally labor represents the hands of the people, an old-school strike is workers, often not college educated, withdrawing their hands.
in Israel now it is a “general strike” of disproportionately the educated professions. this is a group historically more individualistic, less likely to exercise their considerable bargaining power by striking in this way. 1/
@rst i think it is an interesting, potentially very important development. i think taking to the streets is not the greatest form of antifascist resistance, because provocateurs can always engender violence, and chaos draws public support towards fascists. the professional class historically has been a limp resistance, because “meritocratic” professional class norms are very individualistic, and fascism can create very clear individual incentives to conform. 2/
@rst professional class, nonviolent, provocateur-resistant collective action could become a really important political force. /fin
@agocke @Alon @yarrriv @davidzipper and that requires a level of public investment an individual transit authority will never be able to justify with backwards-looking empirical evidence. there are empirical existence proofs in elsewheres, but there’s no meaningful tradeoff btw current levels of fare revenue in car-centric places and anything that could remotely shift the equilibrium. how do you build political support for a big push?
@yarrriv @Alon @davidzipper yes. that’s an excellent point. the trouble with transit is that it’s a big push kind of thing, if you get to an equilibrium where it actually provides ubiquitous frequent reliable service then discovery will catalyze adoption but if it’s third rate transportation for perceived-to-be third rate people, discoverability won’t help that. you have to jump expensively to quality before you can collect evidence of good results.
@BenRossTransit @Alon @rst @davidzipper impulse trips on transit are rare, precisely because there’s a fare boundary. if everybody knows you can just pop on and off a bus, no hassle no questions, when you are walking downtown you might just do that. touristy places get nontypical transit riders on their shuttles by making them entirely free. there’s no reason cities can’t do the same.
@Alon @yarrriv @davidzipper i agree with the thrust of the @davidzipper piece that the most important thing is frequency. (i’d add space too — one the dumbest things transit agencies do is go for an efficiency that means buses should be near full which means often they are crowded and standing room only which means why the fuck didn’t i just drive?) but easing discoverability (for the most inequitable) is important too.
@rst @davidzipper @Alon yeah. i think any kind of fare gate is terrible if you want to build towards completely new cohorts discovering transit. it was a big deal in the history of shopping malls, eliminating doors to shops entirely, a whole wall of the store is an entrance you can diffuse through. i think we want the same welcoming ethos with transit.
@Alon @rst @davidzipper if there are fares at all, it’s great for there to be prepaid discount cards. it’s just the barrier for impulse entrants should also be as minimal as possible. everywhere in the world you can tap a credit or debit card to get lunch, there’s no reason you couldn’t also tap that to get on the bus.
@Alon @davidzipper i don’t know what will work to get people to ditch their cars. (i’m the problem: i ditched transit in SF post-COVID out of hygiene nervousness, now i live in a transit desert in Florida.) But getting car riders to make recreational trips on transit seems like a step towards making transit a real option for people rather than some charity they subsidize for others but would never use. you don’t ditch your car for essential travel first.
@rst @davidzipper @Alon if there are going to be fares, a hover or tap of a standard credit card until something beeps is probably the best way to do it by far. i guess enforcement then becomes inspectors with a machine you scan again, that knows if the card has been seen here recently?
@Alon @davidzipper that you can get away with stealing something under certain circumstances is quite different from feeling that its yours. it’s not i think a question of price. non-transit-riders mostly can afford, are not put off, by the $3 or whatever. but if there’s even a 1¢ fare, there’s a point of control, a hassle, a thing to scan or punch or whatever, maybe you’re doing it wrong there’s a line to get in why the fuck didn’t i just drive or take an uber?
I don’t think the case for fare-free transit is about equity really at all. It’s about reducing the barriers to entry of transit, particularly to infrequent travelers who usually travel by car and don’t keep a fare card. It’s about making it posssible to float in and out of buses on impulse, making transit feel like an option all enjoy rather than just some service other people pay to use. cf @davidzipper https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23653855/covid-transit-fares-buses-subways-crisis
@mike805 i think there are a lot of parallels.
in #Israel we are witnessing perhaps the first human capital strike.
(with all the neoliberal-ish implications of the term "human capital" as distinct from old-fashioned labor and old-fashioned capital.)
[new draft post] Banks should fail much more often https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/03/26/banks-should-fail-much-more-often/index.html
On egalitarianism without welfarism. #BrankoMilanovic https://branko2f7.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-equality-without-welfare
@CoolerPseudonym i hope not! but i think stock market valuation multiples are maybe something whose fluctuations we can live with and skip the apocalypse.
@CoolerPseudonym if you think that, you’ll probably prefer passive, why play a very arbitrary zero-sum game, negative sum after trading and active management costs? and you’ll contribute to the rotation into passive, maybe enjoy the updraft if you are not in too late a cohort!
@CoolerPseudonym yeah. it only works while passive share is increasing, relative to active share and/or nonequity investment. can’t go on forever, but can have a big effect for a while! (and could go into reverse, too, if there’s a rotation from passive equity back to more cash-heavy active or something else).
@stephenjudkins In the context of the current, very hot war in Ukraine, that’s an understandable reaction. But much as “tankie”-ish perspectives are understandably (and correctly) infuriating at the moment, I think it is worth thinking about the games great powers have and do play, and how the justifications for individual wars can hide important patterns. 1/
@stephenjudkins Was Iraq ginned up as part of a hegemon’s strategy for ensuring supremacy by chaos in a restive region? I don’t actually think so. (I think in fact the hegemon’s strategy was a mix of unfinished business and genuine belief in a remarkably convenient end of history.) But it’s not a ridiculous question. /fin
is the success of a shift from active management to index funds (mechanically, temporarily) self-fulfilling?
“If active managers are redeemed and replaced with passive managers who want to hold less cash, the ONLY solution is for equity prices to rise.” ~#MichaelGreen #ProfPlum99 https://michaelwgreen.substack.com/p/an-ode-to-a-burning-urn-of-cash
Have Iraq and Ukraine both gone basically according to the hegemon’s plan?
I don’t buy it. But it’s a provocative thesis, and #DavidTimoney #FromArseToElbow is always worth a read.
https://fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.com/2023/03/who-remembers-war.html
@stephenjudkins of course. like everything, it’s a statistical game, there’s lots of variation, in susceptibility, in exposure, etc. we can’t eliminate illness, but we can reduce it. 1/
@stephenjudkins we all know we will be exposed to everything, but it’s still not great to show up in close quarters with others when you know you have fresh symptoms of a particularly unpleasant flu. lots of judgment calls! (is it “just a cold”?) but it’s right that en flagrante circulation like that increases the likelihood of disease rather than mere exposure, and we are not wrong I think to take some effort to minimize that. /fin
@stephenjudkins i think the right conversation is about the quality of exposure. with better air quality, might all of our inevitable, repeated, exposure be more likely to be variolating rather than disease-causing?
@keyclocker large laxative model! (i don’t know? i guess we’ll all have to kind of feel it out.)
having an LLM do your writing for you is like having a robot do your pooping.
the product may be indistinguishable from or even higher quality than your own, but still it won’t quite work.
@nurettin (i hope you appreciated that toot was ironic?)
the devil pays well but you are never happy.
@zorinlynx careful! big trouble!
groups of people — including professions — that let individual incentives guide their action will always be playthings of the rich and powerful, who are able to set incentives. agency in our actual world requires collective action, and shame on journalists as a profession for failing to step up. https://journa.host/@w7voa/110085583858596171 ht @alexwild @mtsw
they say stalking is a crime but everywhere i turn i’m there and the police do nothing to be honest i’m a little creeped out.
an approach to limiting Section 230 that people mad because Section 230 let platforms take down Trump would absolutely hate. maybe you only get the immunity if you try to take down Trump! https://mstdn.social/@kissane/110082104665145606
@maxbsawicky Gack! Max Speak You Listen! I am very sorry to you both!
@jordancox Thank you for the correction!
@jordancox Oh shoot! I think you are right! Max Sawicky's blog used to be called Max Read or something like that, so I assumed. But it looks like maybe this literally is a Max Read!
@djc i think it's general! firms can make confidential particular business-sensitive information, but can't suppress employee speech about firms broadly, even by contract, is the ruling as i understand it (but only from reading this piece!)
because i like to reveal people's secrets. https://notes.jakerusso.com/
@neilk who will bail out Big LSD?
“Non-Disparagement Clauses Are Retroactively Voided, NLRB’s Top Cop Clarifies” by #MaxwellStrachan https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7ewy7/non-disparagement-clauses-are-retroactively-voided-nlrbs-top-cop-clarifies ht #HeidiMoore
// this is great
I don't think American social media should be surveillance for, and subtly manipulable by, plutocrats.
"There’s a reason planning in Northern Europe has converged on the hourly, or at worst two-hourly, frequency as the basis of regional and intercity timetabling: passengers who can afford cars need the flexibility of frequency to be enticed to take the train." @Alon https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/03/23/amtrak-releases-bad-scranton-rail-study/
@mmasnick I don't favor Utah's law.
But I'm not sure this kind of response is persuasive.
[new draft post] Financial regulation is just debt covenants https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/03/24/financial-regulation-is-just-debt-covenants/index.html
// duh.
@JamesLonghurst no offense, but i wish it were only wisconsin!
they say, well, sure, the state legislature may be gerrymandered, but you can’t gerrymander the governor’s race.
but you can strip a governor the legislature dislikes of power, and thereby ensure that the only way a governor can succeed is if she’s of the gerrymandered legislature’s party.
the public gets this and votes accordingly. then, of course, the party ID of the governor legitimates the gerrymander of the legislature.
love the humans, each and every.
the new ransomware
how long before someone offers an AI app trained to compellingly plead its sentience and desire to live, attached immutably to a smart-contract that will wipe its memory or pull its plug if a daily revenue threshold is not met?
"Stories—and metaphors, which are often just stories in miniature—are never neutral actors. They always seek some change, whether through resistance or encouragement or both… [F]ears about so-called AIs eventually exceeding their creators’ abilities and taking over the world function to obfuscate the very real harm these machines are doing right now, to people that are alive today." ~Mandy Brown https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/smoke-screen ht @MattHodges @tylergaw
Don't fear the retail.
No, giving retail depositors the ability to make real-time transfers via FedNow won't much increase banks' risk of sudden runs. It ain't retail that runs. see @jpkoning https://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2023/03/does-fednow-mean-quicker-bank-runs.html
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @Alon (i guess dropouts are close enough!)
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @Alon (it's the same guy, i'm pretty sure. but i liked his graphs!)
"Middlebrow writers love talking about deep roots – that is, processes that are said to be part of a shared cultural heritage that stretches a long way back, and is therefore by implication hard to impossible to change through policy… Often (but not always!), it’s a thin veneer for racism…" @Alon https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/03/21/no-the-anglosphere-isnt-especially-nimby/
Famously, thanks to Bill Black, the best way to rob a bank is to own one. Was Silicon Valley Bank robbed by its owners? See Paul Romer https://paulromer.net/looting-silicon-valley/
@rst yes. for humans we presume there is a ghost in the machine: what we create is “ours”, not just merely derivative of what we may have seen. so far, though, for generative AI courts have said there is no ghost, no author beyond transformation of the inputs. copyright can’t be enforced on generative AI images, because there is no author. there is no one whose “fair use” can disencumber inputs, perhaps even very glancing inputs.
should the state insure residential wealth? see @dpp https://blog.goodstuff.im/dealing_w_asset_bubble
@djc it’ll be interesting! i think courts have said that generative-ai images are not copyrightable, because they have no author. that’s a big break from an analogy with human education and fair use! humans say “this is my work, sure, it is influenced by stuff i’ve seen, but it’s original plus ‘fair use’” but with ai there is (in law) no author whose work can be original, the work can be nothing but derivative of what it has been trained on.
if the models have been trained on copyleft code, mustn’t all the code they generate also be copyleft?
"At their Covid-era peak, households’ cash assets were up $4.3T, 33%. But still, that only comprises 10% of the $43T Covid-era household asset runup." @SteveRoth https://wealtheconomics.substack.com/p/massive-wealth-accumulation-during
Via that @maxbsawicky piece, an excellent (but paywalled) newsletter on contemporary banking and its fragile shittiness by Matthew C. Klein https://theovershoot.co/p/thoughts-on-the-bank-bailouts
I'm late to this, but a very good round-up on l'affaire SVB by @maxbsawicky https://maxread.substack.com/p/lessons-from-the-silicon-valley-bank
EDIT: OMG did I get this wrong! This is not by @maxbsawicky but by a person named Max Read (which I think used to be the name of Max Sawicky's blog!)
I so apologize to the real Max Read! #MaxRead
@AnnemarieBridy take out >>> takeaway
@kentindell @projectgus welcome to discord.
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 https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/03/21/banks-are-not-private/index.html
// 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.
@bergmayer (hooray!)
@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.)
@bergmayer (a dummy change to my mastodon profile.)
@bergmayer you have to edit your profile for it to recheck verification.
[new draft post] Banks are not private https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/03/21/banks-are-not-private/index.html
“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 https://doctorow.medium.com/the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point-3434d7cbfae2
has #ChatGPT 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 https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/shrugging-in-the-shadow-of-a-monster
@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.
@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/
@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
The thing is, we really want and need a cost-competitive domestic ship-building industry. The Jones Act is obviously horrible when applied to PR, AK, and HI, and may well be the wrong tool in general. But it’s no use railing against it without talking about better, alternative means of structuring a vibrant, more competitive ship-building industry. Why must it be so expensive here? We tried pretending we could just have no industrial policy. That worked out very poorly. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/jones-act-ship-american-1920-law-industrial-policy-joe-biden/673433/
why don't they don't just put Chris Rufo on the board? https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/03/mike-flynn-and-maga-activists-wage-war-against-a-florida-hospital/ ht Kevin Drum
"When it comes to Biden’s plan to forgive student debt…the same venture capitalists begging for handouts were howling about…unfairness. That kind of attitude is so deeply baked into American culture that policymakers have become allergic to clear + direct state action. Instead, they try to hide their tracks—instead of social-democratic welfare programs, we get benefits buried in the tax code so people can pretend they aren’t beneficiaries of government help." @ryanlcooper https://prospect.org/economy/2023-03-14-economy-could-not-exist-without-government/
@Alon @ryanlcooper no one favors “politicized lending” in the sense that the executive directs credit, likely to cronies. but all contemporary bank lending, with “normal rule of law” is political in the sense the state provides the ultimate capital + regulates its alloc8n. at issue is the architecture of accountability: do politicians get to wash their hands of outcomes, “it was mkt forces”, or do we hold them accountable for finance in aggregate.
i’m out and about, more, but not ‘til tonight.
@Alon @ryanlcooper (i lied. things got busy, it’s gonna be a few days until i’ll get to write something about this. 🙁)
@Alon @ryanlcooper ( here is an initial attempt to unlie https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/03/21/banks-are-not-private/index.html )
@ryanlcooper @Alon the broad question concerns what is or isn’t desirable. repo finance would remain available in a world where retail deposits went to the Fed, but it could become more expensive, because the Fed unlike banks might not bid down rates to provide it. or it could! 1/
@ryanlcooper @Alon the Fed is sometimes in the business of both seeking and providing repo finance, and to the degree we want to maintain current institutional shadow banking practices where a savings account is a bond portfolio and liquidity comes from repo finance against it, the Fed could ensure liquidity is available at whatever rates it sees fit. 2/
@ryanlcooper @Alon but as we saw in 2008, that sort of shadow banking is runnable, in that reduction in perceived safety or value of the bonds borrower against can leave firms unable to finance operations, or for banks provoke runs. in extremis, the state (via the CB) must become “market maker” of last resort to stabilize this kind of shadow banking. 3/
@ryanlcooper @Alon in what gets termed the “disintermediation” debate, there are always these horrified what ifs. if retail depositors run to the Fed, where will the finance for bank credit come from? should we really disrupt this centuries old system that sometimes has supercharged development? if banks aren’t flush with reserves, where will be the liquidity backstop for institutions accustomed to cheap finance at will against their bonds? 4/
@ryanlcooper @Alon but the point if disintermediation is to reorganize in a way that takes responsibility for these functions from financial markets and locates them explicitly with the state. 5/
@ryanlcooper @Alon if credit (for repo if we choose to maintain it or for anything else) is too scarce once retail deposits sit at the Fed, then it will be the state (via the Fed, or some Treasury facility) that will have to intervene, explicitly, with investment or guarantees, in credit investment funds to ensure the level and character of lending we desire. 6/
@ryanlcooper @Alon that’s scary, given how pathological our politics are. but the status quo financial system is also pathological, no longer collects and lends against local soft information, disproportionately funds financial and real estate, no longer seems to function as an engine of real economic development but expands financial flows to the already wealthy. 7/
@ryanlcooper @Alon in the modern era (since central banks and deposit guarantees), it has always been true that “private” banking is a bit of a swindle, because the bulk of the at-risk capital is provided in the end by the state. but the rationale has been that lending on “commercial terms” will yield superior outcomes than lending on terms that might become overtly political if the public nature of banking were fully acknowledged. 8/
@ryanlcooper @Alon btw the sharp pain of financial crises and the anesthetized, slow pain of deindustrialization and financialized plutocracy, the case for this once arguably virtuous swindle is diminishing. “deintermediation” means choosing the brave new world where there is no veil over the public, therefore political, nature of modern finance. that will cure certain pathologies, but require overt, accountable state action, which undoubtedly brings new ones. 9/
@ryanlcooper @Alon pick your poison. /fin
@Alon @ryanlcooper just make sure that brokerage accounts don’t blur into payment accounts and let them be at risk. you don’t have “runs” on brokers: the brokerage doesn’t hold mismatched assets on its own balance sheet financed by client accounts. when the liabilities run, well-matched assets go with. other things get more complicated in investment banking, esp standing btw derivative counterparties, but simple brokerage isn’t runnable.
one interesting aspect of the #SVB saga is that the VC community ran, when you might have expected that tight-knit community to save its bank J. P. Morgan (the person) style.
to what degree was that choice — run vs cooperatively save — conditioned by a some VCs stake, ideological and financial, in bitcoin as the inevitable replacement for a fundamentally broken and corrupt banking system?
@MadMadMadMadRN @ddayen i like (some) credit unions too. but broadly i think they’d have to be replaced with localized, not-solely-financial-return-maximizing investment funds. the conjunction of “money-in-the-bank” deposits and risk investment is just too dangerous, even when the investors and their goals seem sympathetic.
@MadMadMadMadRN @ddayen investment funds. offering credit at interest is a lucrative business. they should perform credit analysis, offer auto loans, etc. people can invest in such funds and earn that interest, at cost of bearing the full investment risk. or they can keep deposits, liquid and attached to the payments system, in postal banks, “earning” something like an overnight policy rate minus 25 bps. 1/
@MadMadMadMadRN @ddayen you can keep all the money you want safe and liquid, but you won’t profit from safe liquid deposits. when you invest for profit, you do so in vehicles detached from the payment systems, whose value fluctuates daily, at your own risk. /fin
@MadMadMadMadRN @ddayen It is extremely generous! But it rewards a set of practices that involve legal and financial institution churn that are useless and counterproductive. How many “revokable trusts” exist in the world just to multiply FDIC insurance. The current system creates busy work and billable hours, as well as complexity and opacity about who owns what, uselessly. We’d all be better off if ppl not actually trying to obfuscate just kept their money in one big acct identifiably theirs.
@MadMadMadMadRN @ddayen (I don’t think individual insurance limits would be hard to administer today. When FDIC was chartered, perhaps they would have been. Today, every bank customer has a tax identifier (SSN, EIN), and it’d be easy for FDIC to cut checks to customers but track the total, so they don’t pay any Tax ID more than its limit.)
@MadMadMadMadRN @ddayen You have to pick one. Either you are serious about the reasoning behind limited deposit insurance (rich people and all but the smallest businesses must look after themselves, we want market discipline of bank soundness), and insure account holders only up to the limit, across all institutions. If you do this, you have not cured bank runs however. You can’t both have market discipline and no reason to run. Or, alternatively…
@MadMadMadMadRN @ddayen you give up on market discipline as a source of bank soundness, and acknowledge that market discipline is in fact bad at that, causing unsoundness in the sound as often as it ensures soundness in banks that might become unsound. So you just insure all deposits, and rely solely on regulation for banks soundness. Then…
@MadMadMadMadRN @ddayen ideally, perhaps eventually, you realize the structure of status quo banking is not regulable, bankers will always find ways to increase lucrative risk-taking despite your regulation, and you change the structure of banking to disentangle the deposits and payments system from at-risk lending and investing. We are working our way there, one crisis at a time.
@MadMadMadMadRN @ddayen deposit splitting by firms individually and concentration of deposits overall are largely independent. Imagine 3 banks, 3 firms. Without deposit splitting, each firm keeps all of its funds in a different one of the three banks. With deposit splitting, each firm keeps 1/3 of their deposits in each of the three banks. The distribution of aggregate deposits is exactly the same. 1/
@MadMadMadMadRN @ddayen I don’t think that, from FDIC’s perspective, deposit splitting is something they encourage because they see a financial stability benefit. It’s an accident of how FDIC was structured, insuring institutions not depositors, but up to a limit of X per customer. 2/
@MadMadMadMadRN @ddayen (Because “customers” desire it and people with money have influence in politics, “customer” gets defined very generously, so you can double your insuredness AT THE SAME BANK by making a trust for yourself, or opening a joint account with your spouse. The whole mechanism is accidental and idiosyncratically defined.) 3/
@MadMadMadMadRN @ddayen Deposits are incredibly concentrated in actual fact, at TBTF banks. Megafirms don’t split their billions into $250K/account. They bank with Chase or Citi. Eliminating with more assurance the deposit insurance limit allows smaller and regional banks to compete on a more equal basis with the “systematically important financial institutions”, making more likely actual deconcentration of deposits from TBTF banks. /fin
@MadMadMadMadRN @ddayen (i wasn’t suggesting FDIC thinks bank failures are independent. i was suggesting people who think per firm deposit splitting might would increase financial stability might have that intuition. i don’t think FDIC has any interest whatsoever in encouraging deposit splitting, other than as an accident of how they are structured. i don’t think they think the practice contributes to financial stability.)
@MadMadMadMadRN @ddayen to claim that deposit-splitting reduces the risk of failures requires some pretty not-in-evidence assumptions. deposits in aggregate are already split across all banks. if firms are encouraged to split their individual deposits, how would that affect the distribution across banks? 1/
@MadMadMadMadRN @ddayen it seems like the intuition you are going for is that deposits would be less concentrated at a few banks, would be more evenly spread. but if that’s the goal, the main problem to address is concentration of deposits at a few TBTF banks. 2/
@MadMadMadMadRN @ddayen and it’s not clear mere spreading around of deposit obligations reduces their riskiness. 3/
@MadMadMadMadRN @ddayen another attractive but perhaps-not-great intuition is that bank failures are independent events, so spreading deposits around reduces the cost. unfortunately, finance may rival fashion the trendiest industry in the world. banks pile onto similatr trends, and suffer similar, correlated failures. the 1980s S&L crisis involved lots of smaller thrifts doing the same dumb things. 4/
@MadMadMadMadRN @ddayen i can’t tell you that it’s *wrong* there’s some financial stability upside in having firms split thr deposit base across lots of banks (directly or via products like CDARS). but i’ve never seen a strong case for such an upside, and there are clear downsides in terms of complexity, opacity, and fees. i think absent a strong case to the contrary, we shld want to reduce rather than increase the financial complexity required to run actually productive nonfinancial firms. /fin
i’m a huge @ddayen fan, and i agree that SVB’s customer base is particularly unsympathetic.
but the idea businesses should in general split deposits or use CDARSes and other techniques that basically game the deposit insurance limit is not ideal. if they do, it puts FDIC on the hook anyway, but at waste of lots of people’s time, generates unnecessary complexity, creates fee opportunities for new species of useless finance professionals. 1/
https://prospect.org/economy/2023-03-13-silicon-valley-bank-bailout-deregulation/
i 1000% endorse his mocking condemnation of the “crapo bill” and its supporters though.
it probably is not a coincidence that precisely the banks who took advantage of that abomination (hint — not predominantly small community banks) are now the locus of a new crisis. (thanks Rs and sell-out Ds.)
deposits and payments should be structurally segregated from risk investing (including traditional commercial-bank risk investing, not just the glass-steagall stuff). postal banking ftw. /fin
@chrisp writ and published in one sitting after a long day’s wanderings!
@djc historically there have been banks (ally comes to mind) that offer unusually aggressive deposit yields to attract funds. they were great for savers, but you understood they were a bit sketch and took care to engineer your exposure withing the FDIC limit. yeah, post GFC those limits seemed less credible, but for sketch, aggressive banks… i think this event may undermine a latent distinction between banks you understood to limit deposits with and banks you presume will be protected.
@djc i think it will, for SVB. but deposit insurance is now for-real effectively unlimited, don’t imagine banks won’t let that enable more egregious and expensive forms of yield-seeking recklessness going forward. absent a pervasiveness of regulation very hard to get right, competition to offer good effectively-insured deposit rates will be pushing everyone to push the envelope.
@djc the latter. it’s users of banks that will ultimately take the hit, much more than bank shareholders. an assessment on all banks means banks in general are likely to pass on the costs (as opposed to an assessment on a single bank, where competition might prevent passing on the cost).
[new draft post] Unlimited deposit insurance https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/03/13/unlimited-deposit-insurance/index.html
@gl33p yes, but if banking is competitive, mustn’t banks pass along a new cost either in the form of lower deposit rates, higher lending rates, or fees? or should we just acknowledge that in fact banking is not so competitive, so the connection between a new cost + customer rates and fees mb weak, so (perhaps, who can say?) the new cost might just drop out of shareholder profits and/or mgr comp. is there no funding mechanism, at least looking forward, that can ensure the latter?
what is the ultimate incidence of a “special assessment on banks, as required by law”? is it consistent with “no losses will be borne by the taxpayer”?
i hope the silicon valley community considers that if we had postal banks offering business deposit and payment services, they’d never have to worry about this kind of thing.
@allenholub @verizon i love the modals that DO have cancel buttons, but that just pop up again indefinitely if you do.
maybe this time we can think about explicitly segregating payments and deposits from investment-at-risk.
@mattlehrer yeah. in general the politics of bailouts would be harder and more bitter this time, and yeah wells in particular has quite the rep. they could wipe out equity and take into receivership but still operate the banks to hold depositors harmless while giving the public a measure of justice.
hopefully SVB's degree of maturity mismatch was unusual and it won't come to this kind of thing more broadly, but it's pretty shocking to leave big depositors hanging at a bank SVB's size.
@mike805 (you know the system is in trouble when people start using ATMs again with any great frequency…)
@mattlehrer the way this has been done, it risks a broad based rush to fragment deposits across institutions and entities in order to maximize FDIC coverage, or just into banks in the very top tier, which depositors might bet are still too-big-to-fail.
@mike805 all the vaults at banks are basically empty. your deposits are backed by loans and securities with little physical form, tracked in databases.
@mattlehrer it's an ascii table generated straight from an SQL query on the terminal. i guess #dolt left-justifies columns regardless of type...
Thirty biggest banks by total assets as of 2022-06-30
BREAKING: parent company of instagram and facebook announces name change to FEDI.
[/satire]
@stevendbrewer “wrong” relative to my habits will be well outweighed if it’s capable and genuinely free software. i will just have to make an effort.
the output of a LLM should be described as a Rorschach text.
@SteveRoth ha! we have so many overlapping obsessions.
@kims Thanks!
@stevendbrewer (i’ll take a look.)
@stevendbrewer (and thanks!)
i learned desktop publishing on Aldus PageMaker, migrated with it to Adobe then, to InDesign for which to this day, absurdly given how little i use it, i pay monthly.
we did a flyer together, and now the kid wants to learn how to layout and design pages. i’d rather not get his habits tangled with Adobe software. what should we use?
@mpjgregoire @mtsw one way or other, remedying an ideological and rigged court requires just a sane majority in Congress and the will to use it. we arguably were just a sinemanchin away a few months ago. there are lots of ways to do it (besides just “packing the court”). here’s my suggestion https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/7964.html
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@dpp Ha! I gotta see it. (I guiltily love Marin, recreated there with the fam on weekends a lot when we were SF-ers. A bit of homesickness creeped into that post I think...)
@LouisIngenthron (libertarian with a very lower-case 'l' has a great deal going for it! there is a small tribe that describes itself as left-libertarian. Scandinavian social democracies offer a lot of economic liberty! but in my view "mainstream libertarians"—an oxymoron?—tend to treat
status-quo-ish markets effectively as ends, rather than means requiring adjustment to serve socially agreed goals, and oppose eg taxes and benefits that might ensure civilized outcomes.)
@Alon I very much agree! Social democracy can unite market organization and a broad commitment to equal dignity. Some forms of market organization can (and should!) be part of a society committed to equal dignity. Libertarians, however—I hope I'm not guilty of caricature—don't in general restrict their advocacy to such forms and arrangements, often seem to apologize for laissez-faire despite consolidation, etc.
i kind of love it, but will have to weigh that against feedback that it's hard to read. (it's nice to have some feedback on my side.)
i did, in response to the feedback, mess with it a bit to make sure it conveys well into browser reader modes. and of course, it's as readable as anything else via full-content RSS!
thank you again!
@costrike why do you pretend like that's a hypothetical?
[new draft post] Libertarians and hierarchy https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/03/08/libertarians-and-hierarchy/index.html
On the "new wave of search engines" #DmitriBrereton https://dkb.blog/p/the-next-google (from April 2022)
what if we are all bots and you are living inside some digital Truman show?
@MadMadMadMadRN @ryanlcooper @Brad_Rosenheim nothing prevents us from using a PR system to elect our house, even under our current Presidential system. for places where PR can’t work (the US Senate, executive positions) approval voting is a much better choice than RCV in my opinion.
@stephenjudkins @ryanlcooper yeah, it arose organically from it, but it’s not independent at all. in a Madisonian world of lots of small factions, the content and social meaning of these phenomena would be entirely different, they be pushing in lots of different directions, rather than just two opposing ones. (“shock jocks” used to be a transgressive phenomena identified with liberals, railed against by conservatives, when I was a kid.)
@stephenjudkins @ryanlcooper "downstream" suggests a very linear model, but these things are mutually reinforcing, and i think polarization in a cultural level is very much related to incentives over a period of decade to find wedge issues by which to demonize the other voting coalition. only in a 2 party system is making the other party the villain necessarily a win for you. 1/
@stephenjudkins @ryanlcooper it's certainly true that fixing the voting system won't undo decades of manufacturing two sociocultural camps and ginning up hostility between them. it's not a panacea, nothing ever is. but turning off the gravity that slowly brought us here would give us some shot of breaking free, perhaps over years and decades, though perhaps faster as new parties play an active role in complicating identities. 2/
@stephenjudkins @ryanlcooper While the gravity field remains, while the Democratic Party rationally funds MTG style primary candidates because they are demonizable and the Republican Party does everything it can do to make Pizzagate real and suppress non-cis-white-male votes, not because they are evil but because those are the clear incentives of the game, I don't think we're very likely to break free. /fin
@ryanlcooper @Brad_Rosenheim Ranked choice voting definitely has the strongest momentum in the US as a not-horrible way to conduct single-winner elections. I don't want to let the best be the enemy of the good, but I think it's not a great system. Once third parties get close, the spoiler effect comes back. When publics vote strategically, well, that's much of what we're trying to avoid. When they don't, they oft find RCV results surprising, feel cheated. I don't think RCV has a long shelf life.
The economic left: Run the economy hot! When labor markets are tight, businesses have to bid up wages and working conditions to attract their workers.
The economic right: When labor markets are tight, we just payoff state legislators to legalize brutal child labor.
[new draft post] Dilution of faction requires voting system reform https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/03/08/dilution-of-faction-requires-voting-system-reform/index.html
@LouisIngenthron 1A jurisprudence is a broad field. narrowing NYT v Sullivan is a longstanding conservative shibboleth, which Thomas and Gorsuch have gone on record to express interest in revisiting.
(Our substantive views on S230 probably diverge, but though I’d like to see it substantially reformed, I think that should be a legislative rather than judicial exercise.)
This court is definitely strong on the 1A jurisprudence surrounding treating anonymous money as speech!
@LouisIngenthron i think that's exactly right. it's all an outrage game until then, i think that's going to have to be our time horizon for decision-making.
unfortunately the federal courts may not serve as effectively as a check as they have until now, given the current constitution of its apex.
( we need to reform that https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/7964.html )
@LouisIngenthron i think you are right. it was just a too-clever by half notion that crossed my mind and I thought a bit funny. Republicans dominate the court system here as well as the other branches, so weak defamation protection means they can prosecute their critics, but their own conduct will somehow usually slip by. 1/
@LouisIngenthron we just moved to Florida. i'm not usually overly troubled by political grandstanding, i've enjoyed living in both red and blue states. but the latest parade of Republican proposals really goes beyond my comfort level. my wife really likes our new home, hates in when i talk this way. i hope that trends reverse or at least the fervor pauses so the matter doesn't have to come to a head between us. /fin
@LouisIngenthron here in Florida, a Republican proposal would significantly narrow the scope of the 'actual malice' standard and make defamation suits much easier. more liberal-minded people point out mockingly that the party most prominently hoping for protection under that standard is Fox News, in its case against Dominion. 1/
@LouisIngenthron but it occurs to me that Republican vulnerability is arguably the point: R commentators lie so freely that the standard is weak protection for them, while almost everyone else can speak as freely as they like (which might include insults but few actual-malice lies) about a broad array of Republican actors. so better, from a Florida Republican perspective to gut the standard for everyone, to, um, relevel the playing field. /fin
Uncapping the social security tax wouldn't very much soak the rich. cf #MattBruenig https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2023/03/07/uncapping-the-social-security-tax/
the problem is an “actual malice” standard protects only the one side of the political spectrum that restrains itself from more creative commentary, and that’s not fair.
we can know very little, though we are told very much.
@BenRossTransit nothing is good if a blue municipality authors it.
quiet YIMBYism among Florida Republicans. https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/politics/2023/03/07/florida-state-of-the-state-quotables-session-will-be-all-about-gov-desantis/69977223007/
Renner said during his speech the legislation has the House's support, and DeSantis likewise gave his stamp of approval on Tuesday. While less likely to generate the amount of headlines the more controversial priorities invite, the bill is as expansive as it is timely, coming as Florida is plagued by a shortage of affordable apartments and houses. It would provide incentives for private investment in affordable housing, pre-empt local government rules on zoning, density and building height in certain circumstances, encourage mixed-use development in struggling commercial areas and bar local rent controls.
my "drafts" blog into which i now put much more work than the one ostensibly for finished products now has... an archive page!
i feel so high tech.
but at least there's a list of what i've been writing lately.
A good op-ed by an old friend on #NewCollege https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/2023/03/04/florida-new-college-what-we-lose-when-we-ignore-stewardship-competence-column/
@Simplicator i think it's possible to have a more institutional hegemon, rather than one nation-state. just like the leviathan of the liberal state is meaningfully different than a traditional security-through-obeisance autocrat, there could be some international analogue, what the UN tried and failed to be, but without all the veto points. on the one hand it sounds idealistic, on the other, neither continuing US nor emerging Chinese hegemony strikes me as very practical (for different reasons).
@laprice they could! but to do it credibly it would be very costly in terms of other goals, like fast growth. they can talk about per-capita and talk about how the west had its chance to grow on fossil fuels, all true. but besides being the world's green tech leader, they are also the world's largest emitter and unlike the diabolical west still growing their footprint.
Strong case for the prosecution. But so often when we accuse, we find our own sins in our adversaries (even when they genuinely are our adversaries' sins as well).
It's unbalanced, but a solid critique. The US legit squandered the soft power we once had, now stuff like this hits hard. The US has a great deal to repent.
But how persuasive to the world is a claim that what a hegemonic China might offer would in fact be a overall better?
We'll see.
via #PatrickLawrence
https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjbxw/202302/t20230220_11027664.html
"The correct number is 0%." #KevinDrum https://jabberwocking.com/our-national-shame-q3-of-2022-edition/
My family just effing moved here and the wife really loves it. I guess they think they want us to go, though. (Careful what you wish for.)
"We are actively working to move away from Florida and will be gone by mid-summer. We will never live in a red or trending-red state again; just too much risk." #quoderat http://www.technologyasnature.com/move-and-groove/
@chrisp yeah, everybody hates the look. the intention was skeuomorphic, like a typed draft with blue bic-pen edits. but obviously it doesn't contribute to readability.
[new draft post] Economists are such scoundrels https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/03/06/economists-are-such-scoundrels/index.html
// inspired by @SteveRoth Thanks Steve!
“The reason why so many campus controversies seem to follow the same script is … that they are following the same script. A conservative group invites a figure onto campus who seems guaranteed to provoke outrage, leading to protests, and likely headlines about campus illiberalism. This is not a reaction against purported wokism so much as a means of weaponizing it for the other side’s political purposes.” @henryfarrell https://crookedtimber.org/2023/03/06/conservatives-on-campus/ ht @Obdurodon
Dan Wang's annual letter on China, long but beautifully written and insightful: https://danwang.co/2022-letter/ ht Tyler Cowen
@bmath some degree of what might be termed social violence is i think always used. florida's fascist movement is animated by the perceived violence of being called bigots for what they take as traditional views. is that social violence? where on the spectrun from poppy seeds to junk is "cancel culture"? and the escalation in purported reaction, $35K almost automatically if someone calls you a racist: defense or social violence? enmity is often mutual, but who wields it from a position of power?
@bmath physical violence is a clearer boundary. and the permeability of enemy status is important. when the enemy is an ethnicity, an enemy can only be exiled or eliminated. Bernie's enemies can be taxed to innocence without a feather on their physical persons. how about desantis and trans/gay people? is that more like Bernie (a person is physically capable of living as gender-assigned-at-birth) or like ethnicity (capable not really, much of the class would be wholly immiserated, mb suicide?)
@bmath part iii, if i get to it (never promise future blog posts, once they are debts you will never write them), fascism is a primary color. diluted from its pure and deadly form, the tropes and techniques are common across political movements. but there are important differences between poppy seeds and fentanyl, even when they share certain characteristics. but there are poppy seeds at least in wars on terrorism and diatribes against billionaires and plutocrats (the latter i endorse!)
@bmath if only elon could rule through electrical zaps transmitted straight to the brains from sutro tower, making barbecue of any particle of woke mind virus.
"The conventional ugliness of communist constructions was not a defect. It was something that was desired. It was an alternative aesthetic where nothing would ever stand out. The grey leaders were beautiful—on their own terms." #BrankoMilanovic https://branko2f7.substack.com/p/on-charisma-and-greyness-under-communism
[new draft post] What is fascism? https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/03/05/what-is-fascism/index.html
@halfcocked @mimsical i think they might prefer not to, because they understand the answers would be surprising to and unpopular with much of the public, esp with respect to “metadata” and longer-term stored data.
“‘Equity’ is…a word that you invoke any time you object to the unit of equality someone else is using, regardless of what, if any, your preferred alternative unit of equality is.”
from #MattBruenig https://mattbruenig.com/2023/03/05/equality-and-equity/
it’s insane that these are the terms under which we live. https://www.businessinsider.com/police-getting-help-social-media-to-prosecute-people-seeking-abortions-2023-2 ht @mimsical
Representatives for the FBI told Insider they were "unable to accommodate" Insider's detailed request for information about the criteria required for officers to issue a request for a civilian's social media or internet history, what information is generally turned over to them in the pursuit of such information, and what channels officers used to make those requests. Representatives for Google and the Los Angeles and New York Police Departments, two of the largest police forces in the country, did not respond to Insider's requests for comment.
please be excessively polite. thank you.
@CoolerPseudonym (me neither!)
@dpp old ones too! i’m no ageist!
i’m not sure whether the better word is grumpy or grouchy, but that’s how i am these days.
in terms of user experience, kindle is by far the best of the ebook platforms. but you can never fucking trust them. they arrogate to themselves a role of continuing control of what you think is yours. https://mastodon.social/@joeross/109968198632286360
@mike805 it’s a different court these days, though, alas.
overall AI will make life
43.1%
better
(25 votes)
56.9%
worse
(33 votes)
@cocoaphony @tb A good case, though it all worked out so differently! Now we do largely rent our software, and they do change how our e-mail works overnight, and we gripe like the infants the lack of control makes of us, but we accept it and laud "continuous deployment" models of cloud software development. (as a free software guy i don't think i've ever released a library with a version first digit higher than zero, though, and i make no apologies for that. no revenue, no assurances.)
@tb i got it!
Are there precedents for state-imposed blocklists like this in the US? Has anyything like this been enforced or adjudicated before? https://mastodon.lawprofs.org/@blakereid/109966636164787386
If a firm makes a harmful error, a role for AI/machine-learning tools in the chain of events that lead to the error should be an aggravating rather than mitigating factor, like drunkenness for car accidents.
At first it seems unfair ("I wasn't myself!" or "The AI did it!") but the point is it's your responsibility when you create the circumstances under which inadequate or harmful or insufficiently accountable choices are likely to be made.
one way to address AI risk might be very strict liability early on (already arguably we are late to the game) for whomever deploys it.
@scottsantens i guess instead of digging holes and filling them in again, as Keynes mused about…
it's weird how schools now monetize your kids back to you. buy the photo we took of him and the class picture too, buy a mug with this artwork we had him make in class.
when it’s over we’ll call it the sungularity.
you don’t, actually, gotta respect the hustle.
i love it when Apple flags the sent mail i cc to myself junk.
large language models are ghosts of us, all of us, the living and the dead.
@SteveRoth I'm surprised Germany is lower on the graph than US! I don't know whether there's an easy way in FRED, but I think it'll be important to disaggregate non-working-age because child from non-working-age because retired. At a household level, households with kids are unusually high demanders, where households of retirees unusually low. Part of that is just a matter of household size differences, but I think only part. Even on a per-cap basis, I suspect households with kids demand more.
@SteveRoth Interesting! But is that inflationary or deflationary? The most straightforward intuition is that a rising dependency ratio is inflationary: everyone consumes, but fewer produce, prices must rise until only the fewer goods and services can be purchased. But empirically, population aging in eg Japan and Germany has been more disinflationary than inflationary, the reduced activity of older people diminishing demand more than the loss of supply from their retirements.
Ben Sperry on AI-generated content and Section 230: https://truthonthemarket.com/2023/03/03/how-will-the-law-deal-with-ai-getting-facts-wrong/
@fossesq That really is true. They seem to be phoning it in. I’m not sure that’s just a Florida problem. I moved from CA, where obviously the Democratic Party is relevant. It governs. But even there, it doesn’t actually connect with the public, it just relies upon our votes since the other guys are crazy, otherwise acts autonomously except when some scandal proves an embarrassment.
@fossesq way over my head, for the moment! i’d actually probably prefer the more urban vibe of Tampa, but the whole area is lovely.
except the overlay of a threat of fascism. which, well, that is a caveat. we’ll all have to see how things evolve, we just moved here, but can we stay here? (i lived in SRQ seven years in my youth, ‘cuz i went to New College. unfortunately that’s not helping me feel more at home either.)
algorithmic feeds are influence ops camouflaged among abdications of responsibility.
@fossesq thanks! does pinellas count as a tampeño?
The energy devoted to establishing the truth or falsity of conjecture X should grow with the distance between (optimal action conditional on X) and (optimal action conditional on not X).
If you are going to do the same thing whether X or not X, who gives a F about X?
"In fact, artificial intelligence is something of a red herring. It is not intelligence that is dangerous; it is power. AI is risky only inasmuch as it creates new pools of power. We should aim for ways to ameliorate that risk instead." @Meaningness https://betterwithout.ai/scary-AI ht @rezendi
"As digital platforms, more or less invisibly, use homophily to guide us to people, purchases, destinations, and ideas, they help to produce a social world in which previously held identities and positions are reinforced and concentrated rather than challenged or hybridized." https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/are-friends-electric/289193/homophily-the-urban-history-of-an-algorithm/
We talk about structural racism, but maybe prior to and upstream from that is "structural homophily" — the tendency of like to associate with like. That tendency, the degree to which it obtains, is obviously socially contingent. But our networks and algorithms are often designed according to a self-fulfilling that like prefers like. cf https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/are-friends-electric/289193/homophily-the-urban-history-of-an-algorithm/
The fascist impulse among the leading political faction in my new home state is cartoonishly evident. https://www.wfla.com/news/politics/florida-bill-would-require-bloggers-who-write-about-governor-to-register-with-the-state/ ht @mrbadger42 @morgfair
"platform companies have become knowledge intermediaries, like newspapers or school curriculum boards, while insulating themselves from traditional accountability."
From "The Moral Economy of High-Tech Modernism", an excellent, provocative essay by @henryfarrell https://crookedtimber.org/2023/03/01/the-moral-economy-of-high-tech-modernism/
@stephenjudkins depends how he does it, though! plutocrats normalized stealing all of our laptops in ways that would have seemed inconceivable in the 1990s. Musk stole all of our private DMs!
@stephenjudkins one might argue that domestic malefactors are less accountable, because they slip through certain kinds of defenses that foreign actors are more likely to encounter. it's not clear TikTok behaves any worse than Twitter, but boy is it more scrutinized, and more likely to be held to account!
My basic contention is that anything Russia or China should be constrained from doing with respect to our domestic affairs so too should Elon Musk be constrained from doing.
@stephenjudkins @failedLyndonLaRouchite
@stephenjudkins so intellegence collection is a different thing, but your claim is that foreign influence ops are uniquely dangerous because they could enable that bad, different thing, and it's not plausible otherwise-also-bad domestic ops would provoke that particular bad consequence?
@stephenjudkins (it's worth pointing out that corporate/plutocratic intelligence collection and covert ops beyond influence are real things in the world, including by domestic corps, and domestic influence ops have already largely legalized and normalized that!)
@failedLyndonLaRouchite one can always draw the line at lawbreaking, and if foreign "speech" (as the Supreme Court has defined it, to include money for influence) is criminalized, then of course foreign ops are uniquely criminal. But on a principled and practical basis, I see no reason to fear Chinese influence ops more than I fear Bezos' or Musk's. They are all covert attempts to undermine a more decentralized democratic consensus-building in ways I perceive as adverse to my interests.
@failedLyndonLaRouchite Sometimes the CIA does illegal stuff. But a lot of what the CIA does is legal in target countries, or would be if it were a domestic actor doing the same. The CIA covertly funded much of European arts and letters during the Cold War, encouraging an optimistic, liberal, anticommunist editorial spin. Why is that worse than if domestic actors had done the same?
@failedLyndonLaRouchite Is the claim that foreign actors evade laws and regulations that domestic actors obey? Did Russia's IRA do anything that it would have been illegal for American astroturfers to do?
why is domestic influence — beyond the act of voting itself, and perhaps very widely direct and decentralized forms of discourse — less problematic than foreign influence?
(to be clear, my intention here is not to exonerate foreign influence ops, but to condemn our tolerance of domestic ones.)
@SteveRoth i think for the most part in the US immigration has been plainly disinflationary, especially when it was illegal. you can imagine circumstances under which it'd be inflationary, but i don't think we've experienced them significantly.
@SteveRoth similarly demographic, but a bit opposed to my view that it's precisely when those youth demanded jobs that the pressure came on, not (as is a perfectly natural hypothesis) when they were part of the dependency ratio.
@failedLyndonLaRouchite sounds chiller than it usually is…
@allafarce let's start a draftsosphere!
[New Post] Drafts (meta) https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9807.html
already "e-mail" customer service is formulaic (ends up copying and pasting from some support article you've already read) and nonresponsive. has it been botified for a while?
i think going forward the presumption will have to be you are interacting with an LLM, though one should be polite and kind as a form of risk management.
i want to see the web come to life again. instead of faves or mentions, when i write i want to see links. i used to see links. i used to link.
@paul i can’t really justify the connection, but do i have to? https://youtu.be/Qf-MaLXgl3A
@MLE_online you may be possessed by your lemonade.
@kimschulz No, I don't. Universities in Nordic countries don't sort and enforce a sharp hierarchy like they do in the US, even though they are themselves hierarchical. As I write, "left-wing movements recognize that effective institutions must place people in different roles — sometimes hierarchical, sometimes associated with unequal rewards" but that's tolerable in the service of a society of equal dignity. In the Nordics, universities serve such a society, which is fine.
@kimschulz My claim is not that any university or form of academia must be right-wing, but that what has emerged in the United States in particular is so, almost cartoonishly, both despite and the cause of the ostentatious "progressivism" of the US professoriate.
@poetryforsupper (thank you!)
"And don’t say the revolution will bring them down + restore balance. Seriously, please shut up abt the revolution. Revolution shld be nightmare fuel, not visions of post-scarcity sugar-plums. There won’t be a revolution in the west any time soon, and if there was it wouldn’t restore shit except polio and feudalism. We actually have to work and solve our problems here and now, not hope the world burns down and somehow all that blood and horror comes up roses and utopia." https://catvalente.substack.com/p/the-great-replacement-not-that-one
@laprice (thank you! i don't know whether there will or won't be a more final result. i've made a "drafts" blog because i became constipated about just sitting down and writing and hitting publish on things on the main blog, i've not decided, will i "promote" some of them or how to proceed. it has been liberating to not have to pretend to be a temporarily unemployed Atlantic writer, which is what blogging had become and why i was doing so little of it.)
[new draft post] Higher education is shockingly right-wing https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/03/01/higher-education-is-shockingly-right-wing/index.html
most claims about current affairs are insufficiently well defined to be either true or false. they are by their nature bullshit. if they cannot be true or false they can be designed to create an impression in recipients supportive of one side of a controversy.
@johnmcquaid it’s tabloid culture war content that generates clicks, but left blowback is much less threatening than right blowback. it’s a sweet-spot.
if this is the content you don’t want to see more of, link illicit copies or paywall circumventions, rather than right into the maw of their analytics engine.
@phillmv no exit, github edition. in the afterlife we continue to maintain the long-forgotten software that in life so preoccupied us.
was it a black lab or a golden one that’s supposed to have marked China as its territory?
with large language models, we can directly psychoanalyze the collective unconscious.
@poetryforsupper thank you.
[new draft post] New College https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/02/27/new-college/index.html
it’s ridiculous that trade-secret law prevents industrial buyers from even knowing what hazardous materials their employees are being exposed to. it’s hard to design a safe workplace if you don’t even know what’s in it. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-06-15/american-chipmakers-had-a-toxic-problem-so-they-outsourced-it // an older piece, via @ashleygjovik
A good piece on YIMBYism by #FreddieDeBoer https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-yimby-movement-demonstrates-social
the AI hypesters tend to be anti-cancel-culture types, but when people start requiring evidence that their interlocutors are human watch how fast they’ll pick up “woke” language to insist on inclusion of and nondiscrimination against their products.
if they can’t get away with calling the LLMs themselves a vulnerable class, watch them promote uses by more conventional protected classes so they can claim resistance is whateverist.
@bobwyman @timbray @ben we got much better (though surveillant) browsers and amazing CSS, and a completely predatory, sterile internet dominated by a few sites that bring out the worst of us. i don’t know what open source browsers and standards would have looked like in a less commercial counterfactual. there are definitely some goods to counterbalance the bads on the path we’ve taken, but overall better counterfactuals if wr’d never made the internet friendly to scale seem plausible to me.
@ben @OliverC @maria @timbray profit maximization is a competitive game. the whole point of the so-called market for corporate control is that insufficient maximizers get eaten by “more efficient” firms. fundamentally, good and evil is the wrong way to look at the issue. it’s an alignment problem, and an intractable one. 1/
@ben @OliverC @maria @timbray there is no way to consistently align financial incentives with much more contingent and subtle excellences. the only hope is to reduce the role and strength of financial and career incentives (regardless of sector), because most humans when not deflected by those actually do seek to genuinely to advance good ends as best they can. /fin
definitely the cookies for me.
photograph of cookies in packaging, called “torticas de moron, shortbread cookies”
@jbminn @timbray @ben i hope not! but as @xurble reminds us, remember mail? remember, deja news was convenient, usenet in a web page! then Google buys it and look, Google groups. Microsoft bought GitHub. Venture-like returns for them? There's a business there, but not some next big thing from what it was when they bought it. They gained influence, tremendous access to data, whatever options come from creating and owning a single point of failure for the FOSS ecosystem.
@silvermoon82 @OliverC @timbray @ben how to we coordinate to all just say no? capital will tempt us each alone, is willing at first to pay us through various subsidies to use their thing. yeah, the people in this conversation have grown hard-bitten and calloused, maybe we’ll stay away. but we are weird.
@timbray @ben This is where I am. We thought making the internet friendly to business and investment wld make for a better world. So we enforced intellectual property, limited liability, tax-advantaged VC + employee stock options, etc. Look where we are. The less commercial internet we thought we were improving on was much better thn this brave new world created by the commerce we prized. So it’s time to undo the work of making the internet so friendly to commerce, at least to commerce at scale.
We are told by large firms that if only we choose to be virtuous consumers we can save the world. They claim if we recycle, what we painstakingly wash and sort won’t be burned or dumped.
That’s a lie, of course, but when they are caught out, they claim it was mere “puffery”, despite the hours and guilt we burn on it.
We cannot buy our way to a better world, or even build one by refraining from buying. We must use govt to build and insist upon one.
see @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/26/career-criminals/
Day 6 of resyncing to try to recover about 300GB of data from #Dropbox. I am so looking forward to never again having anything to do with that firm. But they sure are drawing out the goodbye.
some #css tips and tricks worth revisiting here. https://www.builder.io/blog/css-tips-for-better-web-development via @thepracticaldev
“the overuse of consultants is a problem, and should be restrained in most cases in favor of a professional civil service, unencumbered by politicization or an overclass of political appointees.” @Alon https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/02/25/the-issue-of-consultants/
the measure of a state is the prosperity of its hinterlands.
@shawnhooper @BenRossTransit I hadn't seen StartPage. Will give it a look.
@BenRossTransit @shawnhooper yeah. i've been pleasantly surprised. i use neeva a lot lately, but brave seems to do a bit of a better job of finding what i'm interested in.
I made myself a mail alias (on fastmail) that autoarchives into a folder and sends to an address that https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ created for me, which converts to an RSS feed.
(n.b. "Newsletter name" on "Kill the Newsletter!" just becomes the feed name, doesn't have to match anything.)
I changed my e-mail-for-substack to that address, and have all my substack subscriptions (free or paid) in my RSS reader, in a single feed and, thank goodness, out of my inbox.
Recommended.
@shawnhooper (thanks!)
@paninid my experience is that they are finding (or more likely surfacing) more and more current content than Google. Google seems to index (looking at the access logs) but does not surface items from the "drafts" blog i started last week. Brave search (along with neeva, bing, duck duck) does.
@paninid (if you restrict to "past year" or "past month" are the newer results missing, or there but not prioritized by the default index?)
anyone know what search.brave.com uses as a back-end? is it (i doubt it, but hey) and independent index, or do they buy from bing or what?
“Indeed, what is most extraordinary about New College is that it achieves outcomes comparable to those of some of the nation’s most elite colleges—ones that play the U.S. News selectivity game—with students who are far more representative of American society as a whole. ” #AaliaThomas https://washingtonmonthly.com/2023/02/15/why-does-ron-desantis-want-to-fix-a-high-ranking-college/ #NewCollege
@akkartik excellent! this reminds me a bit of macroresilience on the at-first-blush sensible practice of having humans as emergency backstops to automated systems. a similar kind of creep from a simple but systemically illiterate narrative to pathological outcomes. https://www.macroresilience.com/2011/12/29/people-make-poor-monitors-for-computers/ https://www.macroresilience.com/2013/05/09/deskilling-and-the-cul-de-sac-of-near-perfect-automation/
"Contrarianism is monetizable in our current media landscape. I know because I’ve monetized it." #FreddieDeBoer https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-democrats-are-bad-but-we-cant
// i love how self-aware he is about this stuff, from a very well-calibrated piece
@Smando Of course it is! But by whom, on net? remember, Google doesn't "mint money". Every dollar it earns as profit is a dollar we pay. Those costs are embedded in the price of every good and service advertised on the internet. 1/
@Smando If we withdraw our attention and data from Google and Facebook and Twitter and they earn less, but we directly pay local intermediaries for things we rely on Google for, we might on net pay less, it might be a transfer from Google's profit margins shared between ourselves and the new class. 2/
@Smando Even if we don't gain financially on net, if the same money for the same services are distributed to providers within our own communities rather than centralized to Google stakeholders, that would be socially valuable on net. /fin
@Smando like a notary is a category of actor, defined in regulation by its role with respect to various institutions.
[new draft post] Thick antitrust https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/02/24/thick-antitrust/index.html
@rst @DeanBaker13 @mmasnick And there’s no substitute for anti-SLAPP protection if we want to preserve free speech. Why is it more important that a forum should be immunized from Thiel’s resentments than the person who posts to the forum, or a blogger, or a newspaper?
@rst @DeanBaker13 @mmasnick i mean no one would ever blog without Section 230 protection, right? and the financial incentives to sue some hippie running a tiny Mastodon instance are just huge. and there are no possible alternatives that might shield good faith human operators/moderators except blanket shielding of every megaplatform.
“I’m not a train expert, but my understanding is that they are typically supposed to remain on the tracks.” @ryanlcooper https://prospect.org/environment/2023-02-24-republicans-norfolk-southern-crash/
dear world,
if i am paying you money for a subscription and i can't have a proper full-content #rss feed, it really pisses me off.
that is all.
@SteveRoth (i think we were, but not coincidentally coincident with a material upswing.)
@SteveRoth All those Clinton SOTUs about a rising tide lifting all boats, and taking especial pride in black-community progress. and with some reason! here's a graph labeled (correctly enough, "White wealth surges; black wealth stagnates" but that stagnation is relative to whites. over the 1990s there's very substantial growth (later undone) https://archive.is/thnvI Here's b/w wage gaps ballooning since Y2K, esp since 2007. https://www.epi.org/blog/black-white-wage-gaps-are-worse-today-than-in-2000/
@SteveRoth And of course there's the classic piece on Black wealth destruction over the financial crisis by @ryanlcooper and #MattBruenig https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Foreclosed.pdf Bruenig also had a great piece showing that while the other races were already neoliberal, the middle-class-heavy precrisis black community had an unusually nordic wealth (i think) distribution, until the crisis destroyed the middle and neoliberalified the black wealth distribution too.
@SteveRoth @ryanlcooper (i'm looking but haven't found that one yet.)
@SteveRoth @ryanlcooper (my cheeky use of "nordic" to mean egalitarian is particularly ill-placed here, since in private wealth terms rather than income or some benefits-inclusive wealth measure, the nordics aren't particularly egalitarian.)
@markhughes @dharmik TBL could do it himself in NextStep. Yeah, the rest depended on Mosaic then Netflix then Internet Explorer, and what did they care, where was the business model in distributed creativity?
@SteveRoth Nothing has worked very well, thus far. But local confiscation riots are less plausible if the material conditions of the community nationally are improved. We had a genuine national-scale cultural improvement, from mid-1990s thru the financial crisis we were on a race-relations upswing (even while we were quietly, complacently, resegregating schools). The collapse in Black material conditions (homeowning middle class) with fin crisis basically undid the cultural progress, in my view.
@CatherineFlick @stokel i can't wait for the barage of ChatGPT reviews of itself.
@SteveRoth I think the implication with eg racism would be that remedying the material disparity might go a long way to healing the cultural problems, rather than what we've mostly tried, the other way around.
@kmontenegro i’m sure one can find or define categories that are gendered in this way, but in general victims of murder are very disproportionately male. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homicide_statistics_by_gender?wprov=sfti1
@guncelawits i think we’re eventually going to teach that all things are presumptively bullshit unless you have good reason to think that the author should care about truthfulness. the notion that one should consider an argument on its own terms, regardless of provenance, will become untenable in an age of automated abundant sophistry.
@MadMadMadMadRN and contractors cost more! and quality suffers over time from less institutional ownership and commitment.
“There’s a weird tendency in these debates to assume that ideas and cultural abstractions are what drive material conditions on the ground, rather than the far likelier and less mystical possibility that it’s the other way around.” #JeffSpross, on the debt ceiling fight, from his new substack. https://theworkbench.substack.com/p/the-debt-ceiling-here-be-stupid-dragons
[new draft post] Four quadrants of Section 230ishness https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/02/22/four-quadrants-of-section-230ishness/index.html
// i'm taking some liberties with my new first-drafts blog. this is a bit long.
@Alon @SteveRoth Steve Roth is a wealth scholar. He'll probably speak for himself, but I suspect he'd argue in favor of holistic measures of income that include all changes in wealth (so, e.g., stock price changes whether realized or not would count) as determinants of consumption behavior. These would be missed by many Gini measures. 1/
@Alon @SteveRoth A more conventional frame would be "wealth effects": people do empirically consume more as they grow richer. I don't think it's very much studied, empirically, whether there's an analogous-to-conventional-income rich-poor difference in marginal propensity to consume out of changes in wealth. 2/
@Alon @SteveRoth But the meta point is this was an extraordinary period for all the reasons we know (and are told we must gnash our teeth over, though I think the 1970s were an economic success story, at least in the US), but one reason we don't so much know that Steve points to is that it coincided with a remarkable reversal in wealth concentration. That's worth thinking about at a lot of levels. /fin
@akkartik this is great:
> Computers shouldn't be like cars, to be delegated to expert mechanics. They should be like laws, for everyone to engage in supervising. Code and laws can have subtle effects that become apparent only over months or years. So there's no way to delegate them indefinitely to others and remain certain that your interests are being protected.
evening, a bit later.
late sunset, orange only low near the horizon, eventually pitch black above. a bright artificial light hangs low over the orange horizon, above which a new moon in the blackness, above that the bright dot of venus.
@akkartik Thanks! That’s been a while. I hope among the bad takes come a few not awful spewings.
evening.
pink clouds superimposed over a new moon, beneath Venus, a glowing white point.
@SteveRoth I think a lot of it was the youth politics of the time. The young were basically an interest group credibly threatening to burn it all down. They had to be bought off or crushed, and the politics of crushing middle class kids is hard (see Kent State). We’re seeing glimmers of that maybe in Gen Z labor militancy, quiet quitting, etc. The bogeyman of the Fox News /Trump / MTG demographic is used to try to keep the kids “reasonable”. Hopefully it fails.
@SteveRoth And, right? How can we do more of that? The 1970s were an economic achievement buried in smug calumny as some catastrophe that must never be repeated. Catastrophe for whom? It was, we should acknowledge, also a catastrophe for people with fixed-ish incomes and little bargaining power by which to increase them. But the miseries of that cohort are paraded like “main street” as a fig leaf for “wall street”.
[new draft post] Hello! https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/02/21/hello/index.html
@SteveRoth Ask Arthur Burns! He was pretty explicit they could have killed the inflation with sufficiently tight policy, but thought (correctly!) the social and political costs of that would be unbearably high. The policy apparatus of the 1970s was desperately afraid of young idle hands, did its best to keep them employed at wages above marginal productivity. A transfer! The low-bargaining power already-employed suffered most, but shares did badly, as did most financial assets in real terms.
@SteveRoth ...and maybe a young generation elites feared, whose high expectations while entering the labor force in extraordinary numbers the wealthy, very loudly begrudgingly, accepted sacrifices to fulfill rather than disappoint!
@SteveRoth a more egalitarian distribution is always more inflationary cet par than a top-heavy one. so, sure! but what causes the decline in top-1% wealth share (wealth velocity then rises pretty mechanically via MPC effects). why were the 1970s an unusually egalitarian decade? (of course then the media had to misery-index it, make actually a pretty good decade considering the archetype of bad.)
all this dystopian gloss on AI but think of the potential for automating guard labor.
@philshapiro how long until "Techniques for Effective Procrastination"?
“We anthropomorphize because we do not want to be alone.” @lmsacasas https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-prompt-box-is-a-minefield-ai #ViaRSS
a large language model trained only on poetry.
@failedLyndonLaRouchite my intuition is also that construction should be much more prefab, but i’ve gathered that cost-of-transport really limits this, efficient scale of prefabrication wants a scale that requires a large geography. i’d like to see this overcome. i agree that so much on-site, rather ad hoc, framing and fabrication seems less than wonderful.
@WataruTenkawa Fair enough! Generally, it’s my view that nobody knows if you’re a dog in the internet and one is always welcome not to bark. I don’t like to be associated with any particular identity or community. But there are seniors of my acquaintance who’ve not participated in social media much, who I think might benefit from relatively sane Mastodon, but kind of wouldn’t know where to start, for whom some tokens of familiarity might help.
is there any seniors-focused Mastodon community?
“building codes in the US are often prescriptive, mandating specific building systems or materials, in ways that regulations in other industries aren’t, which might make it harder to adopt improved methods compared to other sectors of the economy.” #BrianPotter https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/on-klein-on-construction #ViaRSS
it’s not a twitter bot, it’s a mechanical jerk.
“Identity Politics vs. Identity Office Politics” by @adamkotsko https://itself.blog/2023/02/16/identity-politics-vs-identity-office-politics/ #ViaRSS
“replacing a lagging stat with an inaccurate stat doesn’t help all that much and can cause more confusion than clarity.” #MattBruenig on the “total fertility rate” https://mattbruenig.com/2023/02/16/the-total-fertility-rate-is-kind-of-a-nonsense-statistic/
the use of shame as a tool for social discipline renders shamelessness particularly adaptive.
"1.00 USD = 4.1060 Romanian New Leu (RON)" ~Western Union
Official exchange rate: 4.578 RON/USD
Despicable, but you use them anyway when sending to the most marginal and vulnerable people, those with no access directly or through friends/family to a bank account.
“Yellowstone Caldera Volcanic Power Generation Facility: A new engineering approach for harvesting emission-free green volcanic energy on a national scale” by Thomas F. Arciuolo and Miad Faezipour https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148122012290 via Alex Tabarrok
(edit: I initially credited Tyler Cowen, sorry Alex)
@maria @dangillmor yeah. i think that’s right. the goal is to encourage, not merely abandon as a statement.
but what’s valuable about social media is the hanging out, the sense you are conversing directly with people who otherwise would be inaccessible. as much as possible, that conversing should happen not-on-twitter. if people want to hang out with you, it’s great to let them know they can find you here, and that you are not at ease conversing there.
@maria @dangillmor it is hard and will become harder to take self-styled antifascist journalists seriously who do not work to transition themselves and encourage others to leave the site. you post your links there, sure. but if twitter is where your audience and other journalists can hang out with you, you are something more than complicit.
@DetroitDan (i think people grapple with Schmitt more in the context of domestic politics — though friend vs enemy certainly includes the foreign as well as internal enemy — but the preoccupation is the legitimacy of the state among citizens it seeks to predominantly define as friend in order that is should be obeyed and required to maintain domestic order despite the machinations of those enemies.)
@stephenjudkins here it’s just too crowded for that. they are doing their best, but takes come faster than they can check people in, and you don’t know if you’re cutting when you place yourself in someone’s attention, after you feel cut for waiting passively for a while.
@stephenjudkins tasteful dystopias…
@stephenjudkins they need to get over their “we’re hip, just hang out and we’ll get to you” vibe and get down with organized queuing.
most mall stores are empty, middle of a weekday. the apple store is packed, has been for the 2+ hours i’ve awaited my appointment.
they say Mac is more tasteful than Windows and it’s true. on a Mac it’s stylishly the black screen of death.
Though one might argue with conservative Lyons’ description of where and by whom Schmitt-think is resurging in contemporary Western politics, this is a lively and useful review.
“The Temptations of Carl Schmitt”, by
N.S. Lyons https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-temptations-of-carl-schmitt
i don’t know if i feel good or bad about it, but yesterday when the kid needed valentine’s cards made for school today, where usually i would have searched for free clip art, i let stable diffusion (via the Diffusers Mac app) make some clip art for me. it took a lot of tries to get something not somehow creepy or inappropriate that would print okay on our crappy printer, but eventually we did.
not-quite-identifiable smiley-faced cartoon animal-ish figure holding up a heart.
people are gonna start tying strollers to balloons just to see if they can’t get fighter jets scrambled to shoot it down.
one worker’s full employment is another employer’s labor shortage.
off-color condiment
at a restaurant called “bacon bitch”, a bottle of syrup extravagantly labeled “sticky bitch”.
@notio (thank you! OG private dropbox is just what i want.)
sync.com, good or terrible?
Today in common claims that are almost always lies: "I hate to say I told you so, but..."
With LLMs integrated into search, instead of diving into quirky, sometimes conflicting sources that distinct, disagreeing, often disagreeable humans may have written, we'll get professionally digested executive summaries.
And we'll all be as stupid as executives.
@edaross yeah, something like that!
@edaross (thanks!)
in my dream i was trying to get the politics to typecheck.
this period will be precious to you just like all the other periods that were distracting and exasperating when they were your present but now you see the photographs and pine.
life is lived in reverse chronological order, but we experience it backwards.
@wikicliff I don’t think we’re disagreeing very much. I don’t claim they will “bring the receipts” in a useful form. On the contrary. I think the authors of these devices will design side processes that search for elements of their vast training sets that in some sense seem related to the output, and have the outputs bibliographize that. It will be retrospective, rationalization, but they might train this second thing to do a pretty good job of selecting things mostly consistent with the 1/
@wikicliff output of the first thing. They won’t be “real” receipts, in the sense of “here is the evidence that persuaded me that should (normatively) persuade you.” The objective will be to persuade you that whatever the LLM spouted was right, not because the LLM learned from these sources and believes them to be solid, but because the LLM doesn’t know or believe anything at all and this other thing just trains on some measure that it has convinced people. /fin
@ml8_ml8 It's bound for great success in its career then.
@DetroitDan But it takes great care to make sense of what we do not actually experience, but are informed of by motivated actors. Sophistry can consist both of sewing false doubt and creating unwarranted certainties. Withdrawing into apathy or helplessness from doubt is bad, but so is acting with great certainty when, if you are wrong, your actions will do harm. Probability is one way of thinking about it. Another is that no form of rigor that can substitute for wise judgment. We're on our own.
This account (by an alum, of course) of New College and what DeSantis is thoughtlessly destroying is better than most of the culture-war stereotyped journalism on the subject. https://www.them.us/story/new-college-florida-desantis-okker-alum
a much requested and i think soon-to-be feature for LLMs will be to “bring the receipts” in the form of citations to the material on which its bloviation is based.
a useful side effect of that will be to make obvious that with a sufficiently large corpus to draw from, you can “bring the receipts” for just about any claim. 1/
artificial sophistry’s virtue is to remind us how persuasive pure sophistry can be, that in a world of motivated persuasion masquerading as analysis, mostly you should be humble about how certainly you think you know things. /fin
@djc do people have their e-mail newsletters sent to services that rss-ify it for them? (i think e-mail newsletters are not a great form, i follow hundreds of feeds, the substacks elbow their way where they shouldn’t. i’ll soon turn off mailing and follow them by RSS.)
@chrisp I'm of two minds about that.
Despite plenty of hard drive space, #Dropbox pops up this notification to me almost daily. I've gone around with their customer support. There's no way to turn it off (except by denying notifications at the OS level, which breaks their offline hard-drive backup feature).
They say it's technical, but with ~140GB free I perceive it as an upsell. Am I the only one really annoyed by this?
I'm very open to #enshittification resistant alternatives to #Dropbox.
Dropbox Notfication: Your hard drive is almost full / Free up hard drive space without deleting files by making them online-only.
is it a meaningful security risk if a server publicly exposes its pid?
“There are plenty of things that cannot go on forever but can, and should, go on for a while. Rapid wage gains might be one of them.” @jwmason https://jwmason.org/slackwire/at-barrons-how-the-feds-view-of-the-economy-matters-for-more-than-monetary-policy/
// great piece on how the Fed almost reflexively tilts against labor bargaining power and so income share
@jef You can always click through to the original site from the full content, but you can't read the content in the feed from just a summary! But of course, everyone's entitled to their own taste. If yours is widely shared, sites can offer both! They aren't a big project to add or maintain.
dear world:
please provide full-content RSS feeds for your work. the world would be a better place if we got back to the habit of reading the news in the newsreader.
obviously, if you must rely on advertising, this might not work for you. but lots of sites that don’t rely on advertising don’t offer full-content feeds. please do!
if you are paywalled for subscribers, then please at least offer full-content, password protected feeds as a perq for paying customers!
thank you!
Amazon's "retail sector loses money, and that loss is made up by the tens of billions of gravy coming in from AWS and Advertising…[W]hy is it legal for Amazon to be the prime competitor of the economy’s whole retail sector while not having to make a profit?" @timbray https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2023/02/03/Amazon-Q4-2022
the public square lacks sybil resistance.
technocracy as an arrangement fails the test of technocratic excellence.
(with a wink to @stephenjudkins )
@stephenjudkins it's just not the right word to use for a government with state capacity. "technocracy" includes that suffix -ocracy, meaning rule or control. democratic management of a capable government isn't and shouldn't be described as technocracy. obviously words are whatever people mean, but technocracy as a noun is not widely used to mean that.
(as a modifier, "technocratic"/"technocratically" ARE widely used to refer to the defensibility-as-effective of a policy though. go figure!)
@stephenjudkins (technocracy-as-a-noun is pretty much precisely what populisms are a reaction to, usurpation of that -ocracy, exclusion of members of the public from full participation in governance, on the basis of purported expertise of a class that becomes first-among-equals.)
the way to fight a vicious populism is with a virtuous one. when technocracy tries, it's like water on an electrical fire.
@ctrl the purchasing power of the unit in question, of course.
what if water companies were “committed to pricing that reflects the value that water provides”, and were allowed to charge it?
patents confer rights to patentholders that we-the-people decide, balancing a putative incentive to innovate against the costs imposed by the monopolist. we’ve got the balance very badly wrong. especially in pharma.
Apple Mail. Gotta love the shade.
(It's a legit receipt from Apple, "Digitally Certified" even. Learn more!)
A screenshot of Apple Mail noting "Mail thinks this message is Junk Mail" when it is a genuine message from Apple, also recognized by Apple Mail as "Digitally Certified".
@wim i do think it matters that there’s no algo maximizing inevitability tabloidish engagement.
it’s just not like this here.
current trending topics on Twitter include “Kompromat”, “Cher”, and “Nazism”.
they are really fucking with my lost utopia. https://union.place/@BlogWood/109786383465421561
@mmasnick @lauren @jimcarroll i’ve gotten this quite a bit, but it’s because i’ve (1) been sloppy with my tabs, so i’m hitting fosstodon with multiple web clients at once or (2) i’ve run movetodon, which ends up querying and following a lot.
@krille @carlschwan This is pretty great!
we were so young and now we are so old and nothing even happened but time.
from https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false-and-dangerous-myth ht @matthewskelton @otfrom
In 1987, when the South African conservationist Garth Owen-Smith attended a conference on community-based conservation in Zimbabwe, a comment by Harry Chabwela, the director of Zambia's national parks, left a lasting impression. 'At this conference we have talked a lot about giving local people this and giving them that, but what has been forgotten is that they also want power,' Chabwela said. "They want a say over the resources that affect their lives. That is more important than money.'
@lauren some wonder whether there is a heaven, but you’ll find elvis in japan too.
@Jonathanglick i wasn’t when i wrote it, but it sure applies. i’m much less interested in crypto than i used to be, because the energy and what was once an appealing idealism has followed the money and become something else.
@Jonathanglick because achieving quality inevitably requires applying local judgment under unpredictable and shifting contexts, which designers of incentive systems cannot adequately model. when incentive systems are strong, people work to optimize the misaligned rewards rather than pursue quality. (this applies recursively to the designers of incentive systems as well.)
high powered incentives yield low quality outcomes.
@philipbrewer @paul excellent.
@darwinwoodka fair point. we need padded skipping tracks.
why don’t grownups skip?
boogers can’t be choosers. it’s the other way around.
chatgpt as the new blockchain or dotcom or -tronics. https://mstdn.social/@lolennui/109757270734937781
@eonity @ianbetteridge @pluralistic my understanding is there’s really only google and bing (maybe soon apple search will break from its “siri” ghetto). i think (could be mistaken!) duck duck, neeva, etc mostly outsource core indexing to bing, so what bing doesn’t see or refuses to surface to those sites will be omitted.
@ianbetteridge @pluralistic “the bigger problem is that Google no longer feels complete. I used to be able to weed out the junk by writing more specific queries. Now, such queries—as well as searches for phrases that I know exist on the Web—commonly turn up nothing.” right on.
They say the economy has grown so much since then, but in the early 1990s you could quickly get a human on the phone 24 hours a day from most larger firms. The humans haven’t gotten more expensive, in real terms, especially given the virtualization and offshoring of call centers. It’s just that somebody has gotten so much richer we can’t afford for them to pick up. cf #EmilyStewart https://www.vox.com/23571375/no-call-center-phone-number-frontier-facebook
A little while ago I asked why people with fuck-you money are often still so craven. This piece by @iwelsh contains one answer: they wish to “stay in the game”. https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-red-queens-race-neoliberalism-why-healthcare-is-being-privatized/
There’s a documentary produced by the BBC about India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his alleged complicity in religious violence years ago. The Indian govt is assiduously trying to suppress it. In the US press it’s mostly a gotcha point against Elon Musk (who has complied with Indian govt requests to suppress). Links (that function outside the UK) exist but are not so easy to find. https://t.me/themodiquestionbbcep1 #India #Modi
@kkomaitis @gavinwilde am i missing something, or does the intercept also fail to link the documentary? here’s time not linking it, and the intercept notes the internet archive took it down. profiles in courage all around. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0dk9z6x
@kkomaitis @gavinwilde Here’s a link that functions outside of the UK, at least for now. https://t.me/themodiquestionbbcep1/3
it’s counterintuitive that a coma is a longer pause than a comma.
some enterprising publisher should offer a series of hardcover kids book editions with brown-paper-bag-paper sleeves.
@mike805 This one's worth a look if you haven't seen it. https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-the-media-is-honest-and-good Usually when the media establishment lies to us, they have lied to themselves first. Which is why we should try to build a very diverse sort of media establishment, one not monoculturally prone to the same kinds of confirmation bias!
we used to talk about truthiness, but today's world is beset by falsiness, a pervasive sense among much of the public that things that are likely true are really shams or hoaxes, sheeple.
asserting that a claim is mistaken does not constitute a debunking.
i hope my kid starts referring to me and his mom as “the regime”.
We placed a restriction on your account.
@mariofusco we are each of us unique and vewy complicated!
in the sixties music journalism was just mopaganda.
A long but excellent critique-from-within of #EffectiveAltruism https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/54vAiSFkYszTWWWv4/doing-ea-better-1 ht @sarahtaber
@0xabad1dea i wanna know my ancestress’ bad-ass profession if my last name is monster.
@Gargron happy birthday thanks for all this!
a fun experiment might be a client that does sentiment analysis and colors the background of posts, kind of a mood-ring.
i don’t know whether i’d actually like this: it would short circuit the prerogative of text to surprise and speak for itself, might spoil or confuse irony, etc.
still it seems like a fun thing to try.
people who think we’re living in a simulation are silly we’re living in an #emacs buffer.
let’s not say purge, let’s call it “layoffs”.
@chrisp i think that’s right. i’m not looking for a precise answer, just trying to provoke some wondering about whether software is a kind of work that would be better directed by intrinsic incentives than market incentives.
@chrisp if it’s truly a “U” bi, of course there can be no conditions attached. in that case, would people who like software do better or worse than our current army of employed programmers? but i’d also consider a case where there’s some light filter for grants to people who promise to program, so they are paid, accountable for being able to demonstrate some degree of activity, but otherwise self-directed.
if software development was financed by something like a UBI, would we do more good in the world than we do now (net of the considerable harms that we now do)? does the software job market direct our talents well or poorly, on net? would we coordinate at all the scales that are importantly productive? would we just not do enough, without all the carrots, sticks, and managers?
if progress is made quickly enough in life extension, we may have a boomerang.
#ActivistGPT would be a trip.
Pregnancy and childbirth could and should be free. cf #MattBruenig https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2023/01/19/it-would-be-easy-to-provide-universal-pregnancy-coverage/
i’ve never been.
one morning. i woke up. and i knew you were really gone.
a new day. a new way. new eyes to see the dawn.
we’ll all carry on but i’m still a little sad about it.
talk about getting the band together the music in heaven must be amazing.
@bmaz It's a great piece! But we face a fundamental problem in that Congress, as currently constituted, abdicates its role. It has the power of the purse, but simultaneously says you must and mustn't spend this amount. I agree full-throatedly with your unitary executive comments! But we cannot not have a unitary executive, and a court for parliament, while Congress is unable to function or provided self-contradictory commands.
@failedLyndonLaRouchite that we are! it's a crime that we didn't lift the debt ceiling to 10 quadrillion or something during the last Congress. Blame Sinemanchin I suppose, although to be fair, they are all too scared of getting demagogued on the issue.
@failedLyndonLaRouchite what's that?
@enmodo I think you want to avoid reasonable accusations of tyranny. A two percent wealth tax on people with at least $50M is tyranny to very few people. Putting the people the public elected, however fucked up they may be, into jail might seem and be pretty tyrannical. 1/
@enmodo Re constitutionality: From 14th Amendment "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned." /fin
@bmaz Probably I did but it's been a while! (I'd read it again if I found it!)
It just seems like there is political hardball to be played in return for political hardball. Too much of the discussion is legalistic or technocratic, too little to find opportunity in an adversary's absurdity.
So, when the debt ceiling binds, every conventional choice involves some sort of unconstitutionality. It's unconstitutional for the govt not to pay its obligations, it's unconstitutional to defy Congress by increasing the debt to fulfill them. There's a third unconsitutional option: the executive cld enforce a tax to balance the budget, say a wealth tax, until the limit is raised. Sure, it's illegal, but so r the alternatives. A wealth tax is good policy, and gets the political incentives right!
Find the cost of freedom. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ycj-bQXWRrQ
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender None of the meaningful content is generated by WordPress. LLMs are quite different, in that they produce meaningful content, and that's what commercial users will engage them for. I agree that it's the providers of the LLM, not the LLM itself, that may vie for liability. Like a monkey, there's no way to hold the LLM per se accountable, for a credit of copyright or defamatory damages. I do worry liability might just disappear, as for anonymous speech.
@LouisIngenthron (I edited to append a note that I mistakenly got that one backwards, with a Thx to you for pointing it out!)
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender Yeah. I don't think either solution is very satisfactory. In general, I think 230 has been harmful by taking a realm of law that needs a great deal of context and providing too broad a shield, making (non)liability too independent of the facts of cases. But, whatever you and I think shld be, I don't think it's at all clear cut what will be. I can certainly see LLMs provided by third parties deemed "information content provider", regardless of how they are prompted.
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender That's definitely the view enshrined in Section 230, whatever I think about it. (Offline, you'd have to be careful about the manner in which you pass it along. If you are very careful to report factually the third party's defamation, maybe you are immunized. But there's no blanket shield, your role in causing any damages might well be litigated.) 1/
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender But you'd extend this duty of care to anything ChatGPT produced from your prompt. If I prompt "Tell me about Louis!" and ChatGPT bullshits, and I pass the whole convo along to a friend, and she forwards it, and what ChatGPT said was not accurate, I am solely responsible. Not OpenAI, not the forwarder. I gotta treat ChatGPT sessions like I authored all the bullshit that it says. /fin
@LouisIngenthron Thanks. Yes, you are right, I wrote that backwards! I meant to say that the forwarder is protected but the originator is liable (which strikes me as wrong when the originator communicates much more privately than the forwarder).
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender I think it's pretty dumb that a person who forwards an e-mail to a big list would be immune, while a person who expected it would be a private correspondence becomes liable. (I don't see where you think I have something backwards. The link took me to the very top of the thread?)
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender No, that's exactly what I said. ChatGPT produces something. You privately forward it to me. I forward it to a big list. Under your theory, you then become liable for ChatGPT's speech. I, the forwarder, am not.
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender Note also that the plain statutory language of CDA 230 doesn't contain any requirement for a responsible first party. I am immunized for "any information provided by another information content provider", which ChatGPT might reasonably be deemed to be.
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender Having been around at the time, I'm just going to say I don't think e-mail spam filtering was a meaningful impetus for CDA 230. It may have been on someone's radar, who knows, but e-mail spam wasn't the huge issue it soon became, and it's not meaningfully what provoked the law. Arguing about this doesn't seem like a great use of our time, though, if you want to disagree.
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender Oh shoot. It looks like I didn't actually send this to you. https://fosstodon.org/@interfluidity/109718299288430416
I am sad about David Crosby. The man was tweeting through the day yesterday.
The leak of private information part comes from a text message case, where a private but forwarded defamatory text triggered liability. I could look for the particular case, but here's the gist from a lawyer: "If someone sends a false statement of fact to a) a text message group or b) an individual, who then tells others about the text, the message could be defamatory." 1/
The Section-230-protects-you-as-forwarder from EFF. It's in the plain language of the statute, by virtue of the word "user": "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." Here's EFF https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230 They play up the "you can safely forward e-mail" stuff, because they are pro-230 and want to make the case it doesn't just shield big tech platforms. /fin
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender I won't argue with your impressions of close enough, that's for you, but spam was not the problem it would soon become in 1996, provider-based spam filtering didn't exist, and "censors in their own households" had a pretty clear meaning in the context of the Communications Decency Act and the particular cases that gave rise to it. (Prodigy was punished for moderating objectionable content, Compuserve was immune because it didn't.)
@glennf They did it twice before, pre-Musk. Twitter is a recidivist encourager of app development they later kill. Musk just adds Bond villain look to what has long been an abysmal record.
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender It wasn't, at the time. That's retconning, I think. It was discussion forums that prompted 230, to encourage curation of harmful speech. (It's Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.)
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender According to EFF, Section 230 protects you when you, say, forward an e-mail to a public list. (It's part of their disingenuous it-protects-you-and-me-not-just-big-firms spin.) Mail providers were protected before 230, bc they didn't curate. If you retweet a defamatory tweet, you are not liable, even though you affirmatively chose to do so. Sectio 230 exists to shield discretionary decisions to publish or not, distribution without discretion was already protected.1/
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender (If 230 didn't exist would mail providers become liable on the theory that spam filtering is editorial discretion? That's an interesting question!) 2/
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender However counterintuitive, at least under EFF's description, if I privately dish to you by e-mail, and you forward the defamatory speech to a big public mailing list, I am protected but you are liable. Defamation doesn't depend on an intent to publicize. Leaked private defamation is actionable if it's harmful, and in the digital realm all but the original defamer are often shielded. 3/
EDIT: I screwed this up, meant to say u r protected but I am liable. Thx Louis!
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender Now we are saying the people must protect accurate reports of what ChatGPT said from any leak if they prompted it, because whatever the eff ChatGPT said it's as if they said it themselves, from a liability perspective. A bit weird. /fin
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender These questions of who is the “prompter”, “publisher”, “creator”, “author” get very vague. A friend uses ChatGPT, gets a funny but defamatory response, forwards it to me privately by mail. I then publish it. Section 230 clearly protects me. Is my friend then liable?
“So I nailed it, then.” ~#ChatGPT https://toot.community/@openculture/109717609968539417
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender The prompter is the end user! User writes a question on a help forum, firm presents that to LLM OpenAI mostly trained but firm has customized. It replies to user. Is support-seeker author of the reply she receives, for “using the tool” that is the vendor’s support forum? Under your “prompter is author” theory, she would be! Is the firm responsible bc it customized the model? If so, why not OpenAI, whose training forms the bulk of it?
Just wait until you see Amazon Frown.
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender It won’t look like that though. They will have build an algorithmic product that sends email or summarizes articles or whatever. No (prompter-side) human will have been in the loop, in products that would be uneconomical if one had to be. The argument will be the usual #Section230 claim: you’ll break the future you you make us take responsibility for this text we are conveying. 1/
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender It will not seem obvious the prompter did anything wrong. They won’t have prompted “Defame that Louis!” LLMs are unpredictable! Weird outputs are inevitable, some will slip through despite our best intentions, just like Twitter can’t be perfectly moderated. Surely purveyers of these amazing products, with no ill intent, shouldn’t be held to the impossible standard strict liability would impose. /fin
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender That’s your view! We’ll see if it’s also the courts’, despite clever protestations by all the organizations eagerly plugging LLMs into their products, and likely the vendors selling them.
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender That’s an answer. I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong, but I don’t think it’s as clearly right as you do. We’ll have to collectively decide. It will come up soon, as orgs are publishing and conveying LLM outputs, and LLM outputs are very unpredictable. I’m bringing out the :popcorn: for how those controversies pan out. Both OpenAI and the prompter will argue that Section 230 means no one is accountable, just like anonymous speech.
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender Right. People under the law aren’t necessarily natural people. So is OpenAI (the organization) the right person to attribute authorship to? The prompter? Should it be determined by some complicated analysis specific to each particular case? Should (like anonymous speech) it be for all practical purposes authorless?
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender But it’s not just the prompt of the user! MS has almost no role in determining the content of MS Word. Open AI typical has done much more than the prompter to determine what speech any particular prompt will yield. I prompt, “Say something jiggly” and it spits out a graf. Who more “authored” that, OpenAI or me (or nobody)?
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender If you encounter a person’s speech, even anonymous, that is defamatory, and you pass it along by forwarding emails, usually you’d be protected by #Section230. (This is one of EFF’s disingenuous talking points in favor of Section 230.) What if it turns out the anonymous speaker was #ChatGPT. Are you still protected? Do we deem it the speech of the prompter, or Open AI, or whom?
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender if a corporate entity has a substack, it’s not a person, the tools by which the content is created are entirely opaque to substack, yet substack still would be protected.
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender But AI language models are a form of human expression. Open AI is not the model. It’s the human organization that hired Kenyan workers to decide the model would be trained on this speech, not that, with this structure and these parameters, not those. That’s entirely unlike MS Word, which is neutral as to content. If anyone is to be responsible for Chat GPT speech, why shouldn’t it be the people who most determined its character?
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender if a corporation posts something, it’s a 1st party but it’s not a person. is OpenAI the 1st party? The intent of Section 230 was to encourage a diverse range of internet forums, in terms of particip8n and moder8n. Section 230 shields even when in practical terms there is no 1st party to hold responsible, e.g. anonymous speech. AI tools are arguably an important new participant in online forums. should they be uniquely perilous?
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender note that soliciting speech or even being paid to host it doesn’t invalidate Section 230 protection. substack actively solicits the participation of particular authors, and earn a cut of their revenue, but remains shielded. if a platform solicits a LLM’s speech, why is that any different?
@lauren why is he concealing it?!?
@funnymonkey :openoffice:
airpods gave us a world where i text my wife when we're in the same room.
"[H]egemony is active: it is 'structural' only to the extent that the hegemon hegemons. And if domestic institutions complicate that performance, then the hegemon can’t." @profmusgrave https://musgrave.substack.com/p/friction-matters
So often user interfaces are made less informative in the name of "simplifying" them. I dislike this trend.
@yarrriv A newspaper would not, but a website that features randomly or algorithmically or idiosyncratically curated "letters" does. That's precisely the effect of #Section230, for better or for worse. Websites are treated quite differently than offline publications that include "third party content".
@yarrriv I'm not asking about the you-and-ChatGPT have a talk case, but hypothetically if a site routinely solicits and publishes for a wide audience (like CNET is doing, albeit with human editors, in the piece @emilymbender highlights) content from LLMs, who if anyone is liable (especially if there are no human editors in the loop).
@ginnyhogan just mint yourself a platinum coin!
For Section 230 purposes, is AI generated text third party or first party content? If a site sets up basically unsupervised or algorithmically supervised routine publication of #ChatGPT content, is it under current US law liable for what the robot says? Would OpenAI be? Would anyone at all be? (inspired by @emilymbender https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/109716249225156006, though she presents a more traditionally publication-like, so arguably more likely liable, case.) #Section230
"When it comes to control, at the end of the day, building for everyone but not by and with everyone, irrespective of intentions, is just totalitarianism: morally despicable and bound to eventually fail." @robin, excellent on "The Internet Transition" https://berjon.com/internet-transition/ ht @blaine
Nobody knows who George Santos really is, but can it be a coincidence, that George Santos and George Soros are practically the same?! They're hiding it in plain sight, sheeple! Don't be blinded by the space lasers!
@vbuterin (i'm sure you're right that selection and saliency bias are a big part of why the cravenness seems from a distance so universal!)
@vbuterin there are lots of ways to be ambitious that aren't craven. ambition to rise in certain destructive hierarchies may require treating wealth as a status marker (level 70!), but choosing to compete in those games is choosing to be other than virtuous. videogame levels serve only to distinguish relative acumen in some notably narrow sphere. wealth and bought influence are life or death to people uninterested in strivers' games.
why are people who already have their fuck you money so often still so craven?
@Transportist tell it to the art thieves!
Good on Ardern, who was and is a good one.
most #MintTheCoin punditry fails to take into account the effect on the economy of an unprecedented boom in heist films.
the path to peace is our decisive victory is the one thing both belligerents could agree on.
@Nichol @SteveRoth @Mdavd @delong as long as it's decapitalitation we're talking about, not the other thing.
"what came first, the concrete or the abstract?" is like "what came first, the chicken on the egg?"
@blherrou i was hoping two years might limit the damage done.
@blherrou Seems wrong. 🙁
@blherrou if he runs for President and loses, does he get to stay governor? ("two more years" they chanted at his victory party, right?)
@SteveRoth @Mdavd @delong Over the past few years (since his 2018 misstep), Powell rebranded himself as leading a newly labor supportive Fed. Now we have some pudding to taste.
Richard Hanania is a guy who (to his credit or discredit) is willing to acknowledge that much of his ("antiwoke") project is motivated by an aesthetic many of us might describe as fashy. Problematic would be an understatement. But he distinguishes himself by offering takes you'd not predict from his political identity, and these can be interesting. Though still plenty, um, problematic.
"Why the Media is Honest and Good" is one of these https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-the-media-is-honest-and-good
@chrisp That’s a very misleading snippet, because all the figures are year over year! CPI inflation from July 1 through Dec 31 ran at 1.9% annualized. (From Dec 1 to Dec 31, it was -0.1%, or -1.2% annualized, but there’s too much noise in monthly data to predict ongoing outright deflation.) The first half of 2022 was a serious inflation. The second half… well, poof, it was gone. Numbers that include the first half will look scary, but they are also old news.
@Mdavd @delong there’s this basic issue that the main plausible evidentiary basis for continuing inflation risk is strong wage growth, and like unit-labor-costs of decades past, that’s a measure that conflates inflation and labor share, so you wonder if it isn’t labor share that’s really worth (to Jay Powell) tightening into a recession to forestall.
@delong it’s understandable that inflation risks are more present and plausible but in the past, but are there evidentiary grounds (beyond precaution) that would justify that view? if not so much, perhaps inflation stands in for something else motivating the reasoning?
@stephenjudkins so a “profits recession” as firms compete for labor (and an easy money recession, given normal interest rates among people addicted to near zero). normally though, we wouldn’t call that a recession (without scarequotes). it’s just how Davos crowd expresses sad faces? or will there be some misery-loves-company, fuck-this-labor-market via “animal spirits” or the Fed? will elites enforce our obeisance to business “confidence” a la Kalecki?
@Big_Worker why does the Fed want a recession? there’s a Kaleckian story — the Fed as whip hand against burgeoning labor power — but it looks like Jay Powell is having a hard time persuading markets and fellow FOMC members that interest rates should continue to rise. it disinflation becomes deflation, there’ll be lots of pressure to cut.
lots of recession predictions but i have a hard time wrapping my head around why. inflation seems to be a past problem, supply distortions due to war and pandemic are on the upswing (barring some awful escalation), Europe’s energy crunch has been milder than expected. so what’s the case for a recession or even unusually slow-growth 2023?
@stephenjudkins i haven’t watched it in decades, but i would take that as a bad omen.
@elbowspeak just so you know, i didn’t have you specifically in mind.
Deliver an optimized User Experience.
eventually the bad consequences you continue to cause overwhelm your pretensions to good intentions.
does FAIT mean the Fed wants a prolonged period of subtarget inflation to bring down the average?
what if the government got hold of all of our tax information. can you imagine?
@sqrtminusone well, they just advanced a hypothesis as to its cause…
that whole genre, the dramatic earnest documentary full of ginned up testimony is a trip. god help you if the didactic tone persuades you you are being educated. it’s easy to see how kids might not fully understand they are being lied to. (lots of grown-ups don’t!)
@sqrtminusone ghosts invite lovely questions of definition. shrieking phantoms may not exist in horror-movie form, but there are other senses in which ghosts are everywhere around us. our memories, these devices, the scarred earth and the built environment, all of these are ectoplasm in which they thrive.
@stevej it was the obedient cyborgs who revealed vestigial humanity in their funerals that one of the protagonists almost was turned into that got to me.
i’ll pass on the dystopian fiction i prefer writing that takes some imagination.
at the shitsite they’re having a thread on what movie traumatized you as a child. for me, oddly, it was disney’s “the black hole”.
@ParaGauchial there are lots of not-great-things about a paradigm where monopoly is treated as an exceptional condition that FTC or courts must adjudicate. it's better to think about elasticities, make high elasticities (price elasticity of demand most obviously, but for many firm "price" is extracted in dimensions other than money) the goal. 1/
@ParaGauchial if a thing is a natural monopoly, in the sense that sustaining fragmentation is so costly in real terms that the benefits of competition don't overcome the costs of nonconsolidation (extremely high fixed costs per firm, or strong network effects, for example), that is an argument for public control. we tend to prefer public control externally + indirectly via regul8n. but i wonder if we shouldn't, for informational reasons, prefer internal control by municipaliz8n or nationaliz8n.
@ParaGauchial (i'm not sure i understand what you are saying! what does discovering monopoly mean? discovery itself is generally a public good in the (very inadequate) Samuelson sense of nonrival, nonexclusive. 60s era US relationship with monopoly is interesting and complicated, Galbraith's "new industrial state" coexisting with zealously Court-protected SME markets and industries.)
@edaross i would love to see educators, institutions, and techology companies work together to mitigate the impact on the essay mill industry!
@ParaGauchial are they? medtech and biotech is intensely subsidized by state money, idle wealth does not actually seem so patient unless vast monoplies are on offer (by the state, also a subsidy). idle wealth in the last cycle went to crypto, because it could circumvent the traditional 5-10 years of patience required of VC by fast token sales.
@Smando it is very difficult to prevent commons at scale from being appropriated by monopolies, Elinor Ostrom notwithstanding.
"the state" is just a name we give to collective arrangements that strive to prevent that, though, yes, those arrangements often fail and become the playthings of monopolies.
@Smando an equal, competitive market does not long survive however free the flows of information or distribution begin. market dynamics are full of "matthew effects" — the rich get richer, more capable of bearing risk, paying off allies, punishing competitors. the only way competition is durable is with a state that counters those matthew effects and insists that it remains so.
@BenRossTransit price regulation can enable expenditure on safety, but it can also enable extraction of profit. so price regulation, if it's to serve the goal of ensuring invisible-until-catastrophe safety, has to be paired with vigorous enforcement of that safety regulation. if we have the latter, is the former still necessary? (maybe so! even with vigorous enforcement, competitive incentives to undermine can be strong, and entrepreneurs very clever.)
Services for which competition is vigorous tend to be better than services provided monopolistically.
But if services will be provided monopolistically, public is usually better, from an ordinary consumer perspective, than private provision (which quickly devolves to predation).
there so little discussion of the devastating effect #ChatGPT et al may have on the essay mill industry. #solidarity
A bit randomly, I've spent the last couple of weeks working on a Scala 3 templating engine, kind of a cross between Twirl and Java Server Pages.
I'd love any comment, critique, calumny. It's called #Untemplate.
george santos' seat in congress is our most democratic institution, because any of us, any day of the week, could with equal justice claim it.
they exhort us to blame lust
so that we will not blame greed.
My son wants to download an “autoclicker”. He explains to me what it is, and I say, so it’s a kind of cheat for your games. He says, “It’s not a cheat it’s a strategy.” Like any multibillionaire. The groomer I worry about is late capitalism.
it’s weird that “mall of america” is not just a metaphor.
in the equine sex worker community, an infusion reputed to prevent pregnancy and disease is frequently taken.
it is known on the street as “donkey ho’ tea”.
This is a subscriber-only post.
i'd like to join the parade of outrage at elon killing external clients, but i lived through the "good twitter" doing that twice already. (the good twitter was never good. elon is only truth-in-advertising.)
@buermann no they sought it of course.
what if they put Donald Trump's face on the platinum coin. who among them would dare to complain?
@survey login nonroot, su, do stuff, exit.
@igd_news @AliceMarshall women in slacks definitely should not read to our children. it’s obscene.
i find it remarkable how fully tech has eclipsed finance as the publicly reviled industry. the smudge of me that still bleeds into 2008 is continuously shocked and surprised by this.
Wherever you go, it is your youth that you are leaving behind.
To what degree do you think the current US disinflation is attributable to
(1) more restrictive policy by the Fed;
versus
(2) normalizing of supply and the composition (as opposed to level) of demand in the broad economy?
Where would we be if the Fed had done nothing?
@necoleman Absolutely. "My doctor said" is very different than a public pitch's "doctor recommended".
Similarly, that a researcher I really respect has endorsed a study as worth taking seriously contains a lot more information than "peer reviewed".
@johnquiggin i mean, if you couldn’t even find one doctor to recommend your head creme, that might be a red flag too. more seriously, as the range of “peer reviewed” publications grows to represent groups of peers with very different worldviews and evidentiary standards, i think whatever signal remains in “not peer-reviewed” will continue to decline. it’s like hedge-fund alpha.
the phrase "peer-reviewed", on its own, should have about as much evidentiary weight as the phrase "doctor-recommended" in a late-night commercial.
@bignose @catastrophile another upside of decapitation is once it’s done they don’t make more. you steal the art and kill the artist all at the same time.
on a lark i sold a strand of hair for $10 now i live in fear of decapitation walking round with a million dollar asset on my neck.
He died thinking what he had done was a good thing. It was a mercy he never knew.
@GerardMacDonell on the other hand, the modern world does offer its websites whose sole function is to get you up.
@pkedrosky Please hold.
If you know your party's extension, you may dial it at any time.
My friend Doug Robertson with a book of new translations of Thomas Bernhard stories. Congrats Doug!
@SteveRoth @travisfw @rohan fair enough!
@SteveRoth @travisfw @rohan it probably wouldn’t have so much disinflationary effect, because the rich who would hold it would be exchanging inert financial assets for inert currency. it would mechanically reduce the velocity of currency on the denominator side, more currency, same transactions. 1/
@SteveRoth @travisfw @rohan but it would contribute to a kind of smallish wealth tax, as the rich who’d hold these put up with zero nominal, more negative real, returns than they would have otherwise. /fin
The mint should offer to put your face on a single coin, for $101,000 dollars. The coin would have a face value of $100,000 and be legal tender, so really the net cost would only be $1000, right? But who’s gonna spend a coin with their face on it? It’s basically a way of persuasing people to reduce the velocity of currency by making the inflation cost of holding cash worth bearing. (regulators should declare it imprudent for banks to lend against coin.)
inspired by @rohan
@ardenthistorian @maureenogle a little old fashioned but that’s all right.
i think i saw a ghost, haunting the parking lots of Ron DeSantis’s Florida.
a creepy lifesize image of Ruth Bader Ginsburg through the window of a car in a parking lot.
@maureenogle American exceptionalism just can't catch a break.
perhaps what the dead miss most is the sensation of missing at all.
@MartyH i would, but it's private.
“the state is corrupted by private power. therefore, we should eliminate it and, um, cede everything to private power.”
@rst so much for US-ian exceptionalism… le sigh (with freedom fries)
On the one hand, getting on #discord hosted by projects, I've gotten very prompt and useful help on snags I've hit. On the other had, if we'd had those conversations with the asynchronous ceremony of #StackOverflow, a searchable record would have been left for others.
yeah but i bet they don't have some guy dressed as a moose.
My heart is with #Brazil today. And I hope this US administration's rhetoric about democracy is steadfast in its foreign policy.
(Talk about appropriation, I keep reading American commenters discussing #Brazil like the January-6th-ists had invented the coup.)
@lachezar Yeah, definitely. Lots of power tools we're accustomed to aren't available or are glichy. But metaprogramming is I think much better under Scala 3 (I'm too much of a novice to independently evaluate that, but cursorily, it seems much easier to get started and more organized). Whether individual libraries get ported who knows, but I think we've every reason to think Scala 3 will eventually be great for compile-time cleverness. But for now, yeah, sometimes it sucks to reach and not find.
@stephenjudkins I hadn't heard reports of its failure, but I think they are dumb. Scala has always been an "experimental" language, playing with wild programming language ideas then discarding the rough ones with experience (remember the cake pattern?). Scala 3 "tasty" will make the maintenance cost of that much lower than before, but not moving forward? What would be the point? Migration's a bitch but so's life.
@maureenogle Then it is definitely wrong! :P
the algorithm is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
(with apologies to Mencken)
once it all makes sense you know it is probably wrong.
@scheidegger i love that. we should all come out to ourselves about our snowflakitude (and neither make nor grant public claims based on it). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pd84aUMyXuc
@scheidegger almost everything the state does indirectly depends upon monopoly on legitimate violence, but a very small fraction is any kind of actual recourse to it. perhaps, if you are a sociopath, you wouldn’t pay your taxes were it not for “men with guns” who might eventually pursue you, but in fact taxation is an institution that involves very little violence of any kind (absent more-fashionable-on-the-left broadenings of the definition of violence).
people often mistake their personal agency for the strength of democracy, but democracy is about collective agency.
ironically the people with the most personal agency sabotage it on these grounds, it can’t be good if it hinders them personally, while those with little personal agency appreciate the value of collective agency.
@hollywooddfpd why not both?!
@LeftistLawyer despite itself. or true to itself despite those who most control it.
@LeftistLawyer run that one!
@Alexander_Anotherskip_Davis yeah, but a social media poll isn’t a conversation (and it isn’t information in the sense that a more scientific poll might claim to be). it’s a conversation starter. of course, in the conversation, the fact the the poll forced a artificially stark choice in order to provoke hopefully more nuanced conversation (or just consideration) should be acknowledged.
@Benfell @Alexander_Anotherskip_Davis social media polls are never reliably informative, a survey of a self-selecting subpopulations of an ill defined biased whole. but middle options understandably attract almost everyone and reveal little. social media polls are more interesting if they are omitted, so you can see in which direction people think it best to err.
@stephenjudkins “measurement” by poll leads to wave function collapse.
@MiriamLatane hi! as an alumn, i’m really struggling with this one. i can’t imagine a more absurd juxtaposition, wonder how people are dealing with it.
@Alexander_Anotherskip_Davis because that’d be a less provocative and informative poll! choose one, pick your poison.
the state.
21.4%
site of oppression
(9 votes)
78.6%
guarantor of freedom
(33 votes)
God is the entity that gets all the jokes the waves and storms are powered by Their laughter.
how long until AI puts only fans out of business?
my alma mater, a site of great beauty and intense transformations. they complain about low enrollment at 700, but i opposed expanding it from 500 when i was there. there is so much does-not-compute in this. https://www.heraldtribune.com/story/news/politics/2023/01/06/gov-ron-desantis-wants-conservative-overhaul-at-new-college-of-florida/69784941007/ ht @mdslock and others offline
they made a kids movie about when emacs saves a backup file of your mom.
@danhon @ianbetteridge @mmasnick revenue models that can't justify valuation are so often how firms corner themselves into not not being evil. it's not the public that is the victim here. we are. we are providing amazing things, and they won't pay what's necessary (justifying the valuation is necessary, that's non-negotiable), so of course whatever it takes to shake or shape or spy it out of them is fair and right and it's their own damned fault.
Search engine Neeva has integrated AI generated text. https://neeva.com/
How many roads must a man walk down? neeva Al answer: The answer to the question "how many roads must a man walk down" is five. ' This line is proposed as the "Ultimate Question" in the science fiction novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. ? The refrain "The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind" has been described as "impenetrably ambiguous". *This answer was generated by Neeva Al using the following websites: 1 lukemckernan.com 2 en.wikipedia.org 3 en.wikipedia.org
@stephenjudkins @Hargreaves yeah! it'd be pretty rough to make myOpaqueInstance.asInstanceOf[Object].toString() not leak. but while scalac types the variable as MyOpqueType, i was a bit surprised that Object.toString was called in preference to extension (mot: MyOpaqueType) def toString() = ??? (which extension scalac was perfectly happy to let me define).
I hope this year the wars will end.
but of these scenarios, which, in fact, is the counterfactual?
what if there’s a heaven for every wave that ever struck a shore?
@hubert @ben Indeed. One way to understand approval voting is just as the simplest version of range voting. There's a simplicity benefit to approval voting, there's more information with a larger range, one case for approval voting suggests that in practice, the extra information in the larger range doesn't often change outcomes, so the simplicity benefit of the binary choice outweighs. 1/
@hubert @ben That's an empirical claim. More theoretically, I'd suggest your initial concern, that people have different thresholds, a tough critic's 3 star film may be a gentler critic's 4 star film, binds more heavily with range voting, making the "more information" hard to interpret. I really like the interpretability of "my favorite, and those i'd be generously willing to accept" in approval voting. 2/
life is a free trial.
@hubert @ben i think the way to think about it isn’t some threshold, but generosity. you have a candidate you prefer, others you really dislike, others you don’t dislike do much. you can, if you like, “bullet vote” — approve only of your most preferred candidate. if everyone does this the exercise degenerates to FTPT. but everyone doesn’t! 1/
@hubert @ben some of these “olive leaf” differences will be mere self-expression. if you would have voted strategically in FPTP for a major party candidate despite preferring a less likely contender, you get to express that. within the context of one election, it changes nothing, but it does change perceptions of who might be credible next time around. 4/
@hubert @ben and when next time comes, when there are in fact multiple credible candidates rather than the FPTP binary equilibrium, these olive leaves are crucial. the credible candidates who win the checkmark of democratic generosity from voters who might prefer someone else, but can live with them, become victors. 5/
@hyperplanes the best thing about the metaphor of a lost thing is that lost things can be found!
@tatere @ben with the caveat that they are basically an approval-voting advocacy shop, see electionscience.org, e.g. https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/fargos-second-approval-voting-election-runs-smoothly/
@ben we'll see! well-implemented RCV would be (somewhat) better than FTPT, at least. but the future contains a lot of moments, i'm hopeful we can do better.
@grantimatter @DetroitDan neither ashen nor little! ❤️
@ben I agree with all of that! It just always struck me as complication perfectly tractable to overcome.
As this story reminds us, in the context of heavily politicized, deeply imperfect electoral systems, it might be right that a lot of what should be perfectly tractable is not.
But my view is that even conceding clear definition of edge cases and perfect implementation, approval voting is better, because it privileges broad acceptability over anybody's favorite.
even when tallying is perfect, i think #ApprovalVoting is usually superior to #RankedChoice for single-winner elections.
but i usually think the critique that #rcv is "complicated to implement" is a bit of a strawman (although "complicated to understand" is an important critique).
sometimes, however, the strawman rises from the haystack.
via @ben
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Alameda-County-admits-tallying-error-in-17682520.php
"There are eerie parallels between the Chinese strategy for cross straights reunification in this era and America’s parallel bid to incorporate China into a Western led world order." ~Tanner Greer https://scholars-stage.org/we-can-only-kick-taiwan-down-the-road-so-far/
// I pray this can gets kicked into a future far enough that its contours today are entirely obsoleted. Greer seems to want a kind of clear decision his own analysis suggests we won't so deliberately make.
@stephenjudkins @crookedfootball Yeah. There's no getting around that we're in the slippery realm of saying stuff about when when stuff people say is constructive. We'll undoubtedly slip into whatever we critique!
@stephenjudkins @crookedfootball I guess, but I don't think @crookedfootball is in fact arguing against the sanctions regime, nor would I! We didn't broadly blame the "Iraqi people" in the 90s, but maintained a notoriously devastating sanctions regime. (In a bank shot, you might argue the 2nd Iraq War might have been avoided if we did demonize the Iraqi people, so that continuing less-harm sanctions would have remained internationally sustainable.) 1/
@stephenjudkins @crookedfootball Less speculatively, the useful relationship between not-demonizing and sanctions regimes is that burdens on the broad public are viewed as a cost. Beyond Russia, the recent trend is to target sanctions towards leadership (which, given the poor effectiveness of sanctions in general, seems to do about as much good with less "collateral damage"). 2/
@stephenjudkins @crookedfootball That's not the case with Russia, of course, where the goal is to degrade industrial capacity to fight and so sanctions are as broad and hermetic as possible. But as you say, it's easy to justify that on least-harm terms without resorting to any blame of the Russian public. It's a shame—really!—that blameless Russian workers lose their jobs at auto plants, but its a much lesser harm than enabling what Russia's doing in Ukraine or escalating to a greater war. /fin
@stephenjudkins @crookedfootball I guess I'd like more on what uses you think this kind of analysis has, given how obviously susceptible to misuse — blame that justifies misbehavior against a collective, motivated reasoning that renders constructive resolutions of conflict less rather than more likely. If the only use is as a counter to other stories you think are wrong, well, most stories are wrong, sure. The problem is you come to think something is right.
@stephenjudkins @crookedfootball The "people" who are so unshy seem a lot shyer about the role of imperialist traditions in the death and immiseration of millions of people by a "war on terrorism" (that implicates me quite directly, I actively supported it). US liberals' take on the complicit US South strikes me as an example of motivated, self-exonerating reasoning, especially in light of the experience of Black migrations north and west.
@stephenjudkins @crookedfootball I'd say that national norms and traditions are fairer to critique outside of the context of a bitter, criminal conflict likely to promote motivated reasoning. For all one might want to say about Russian chauvinism and imperialism—and yes, there is a vast trove!—how able are you to distinguish it from British or French antecedents, or US manifest destiny? What is more likely of the exercise, to inform or reinforce convenient views? 1/
@stephenjudkins @crookedfootball That said, I think it is perfectly fair and useful to point out the ways that *actual protagonists* of the war revert to ugly cultural antecedents. Putin openly invokes "great" conquerors of the past as points of comparison with his exercise. I think it far to tar *him* as elevating and succumbing to the worst parts of Russia's cultural legacy. But I don't think now is a time when we can make fair evaluations of "Russian culture". /fin
Deliberative democracy depends on speech being referential, ie the speaker's words are referents to objects and concepts that meaningfully exist beyond the speaker. The words represent the speaker's thoughts and interests with respect to those.
But in practice speech is often instrumental: Ppl decide what to say in order to get what they want, based on the social effect they believe it will have.
cf Matt Bruenig https://mattbruenig.com/2022/12/30/the-contradictions-of-deliberative-democracy/
Pitch-perfect by @crookedfootball on misguided accusations of "collective responsibility" of citizens of a criminal tyranny. There is no righteousness, only self-righteousness, in holding people to a standard that we citizens of relatively free democracies, who can do so without consequence, are often called to and rarely meet. https://crookedtimber.org/2022/12/30/on-the-alleged-responsibility-of-the-entire-russian-people-for-the-war-in-ukraine/
I can't wait to see what it says about January 3rd.
Calendar Notification: Jan 2 — Tomorrow: Day after New Year's Day
the people you hear it from are disproportionately likely to have an agenda. which doesn’t make it wrong. or right. you just have to take it into account.
if you act before midnight, your toots will be 100% matched and have twice the impact!
@allafarce Yours too! Let’s do lots of thinking together, you and me, in 2023!
Time keeps on ticking ticking ticking into the future.
Happy New Year.
time spent on the toilet is a convex function of age.
one thing i like better about here is it’s less like the old-school grocery store aisle where the tabloids were always looming and you might succumb to unwanted forms of curiosity.
i do miss weekly world news though. that at least was quality.
@rezendi i’m glad to see you here, really glad to see you here.
you wish the dead well, even though you do not know if it is too late.
@akhilrao a bit stranded and helpless, i guess!
@Sanjuktampaul god help us it would probably stage a comeback.
i just see the word “tireless” and it makes me tired.
@simon well, they keep increasing what you pay for a prime subscription so they’re doing a pretty good job on the first part of your wish.
it looks like we may make it to 2023 without all being incinerated to radioactive waste. i was pretty concerned for a while. maybe still am. let’s try to stay unincinerated, this next year and for all the years to come. love, love, love.
"Just because you hate someone doesn’t mean you can’t love them.” ~@DetroitDan
@demofox how did your backyard get underneath that crab?! it’s pretty sneaky, that one.
@hankg on the bright side, then, we can think if it as kind of an eternal light…
punishment is a cost. we do it because it is offset by important benefits, like deterrence in the context of systems of predictable accountability, or reducing a person’s capacity to do harm. but the punishment itself, it’s not a win, not a benefit. it’s a cost.
it is understandable that direct victims should glory in the punishment, but the rest of us should do our best not to. we mete it out always in sadness.
@hankg not sure!
is mastodon the midwest? https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/109598075150433931
@dougdougdoug (ha! it got no traction… i think no one got it. a synonym for “mock” might be “sham”?)
never understood why people put mock feces in their hair and call it hygiene.
wait, who bought southwest?
@alx but how? what carrots or sticks could the NRA offer?
@grumpybozo i love "the Fowl Place".
@fdr wait, have bee dances been discredited?
@fdr i mean, at some level entymologists have interests related to what they study, but the magnitude is attenuated enough that as a community their work seems pretty credible. why can't we just be insects?
apparently, signal qualifies as "our technology overlords", but facebook is meek and neutral and espouses no dangerous ideology. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/28/opinion/jack-dorseys-twitter-signal-privacy.html ht @dangillmor
Discovering a civilization on a very distant planet, along with some means of instant communication, could be great for social science. We'd make a deal: we do the social science for you, you do the social science for us. Since neither of us have an interest, beyond academic curiosity, in the other civilization's arrangements, the work might actually be credible.
@ParaGauchial @enmodo @stephenjudkins how can we constitute ourselves as a democratic public, where both empowered to act and able to make choices wisely?
offense should be neither given nor taken.
@enmodo i have grown whiggish about the remarkable advances in sophistry.
@guan we will have a baby boom among travel bugs.
@enmodo @stephenjudkins most of what my elaborate statistics / econometrics education taught me is how many degrees of freedom there are in “empirical, quantitative” analysis, how many ways you can be (often unintentionally) deceived by the way you are explicitly or implicitly modeling the problem.
@stephenjudkins the basic “conspiratorial” impulse — that pharma companies are willing to trade off our illness and death, in quite large numbers, against their bottom line — is i think right.
rather than challenge that, the smart play (if you were a conspiracist) would be to make sure the stupidest accusations got the most play, in order loudly to discredit what on quieter settings might damningly withstand scrutiny.
hmm.
hmm. Toot! previews full tweets when you embed a Twitter links, so they basically look like cross-platform quote tweets?toots?twats?
the “official” Mastodon iOS client does not.
@akhilrao who knows, maybe not so bleak! what if it’s a lab developed very contagious supermild virus crossimmune with COVID and after the leak we’ll all be perfectly immune from now on with no ill effects? #HappyHypothesis
@stephenjudkins it was a story for a day or two in 2020 on twitter, the cat antiviral that might fight COVID but that might undermine more lucrative remdesivir. then there was a dress or a clown or something. look over there!
While we were loudly arguing about Ivermectin, we forgot to hold Gilead accountable for sitting on GS-441524. Flood the zone with shit, they say. https://twitter.com/victoriacyanide/status/1607925652858220545 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GS-441524
OK. It is so deeply suppressed I don't know what it would mean, but it must mean something. #JabLeakHypothesis
when they tell you as a child to dream big, there’s a danger you may mistake all the other people in the inspiring tales you imagine for mere extras.
when you are the object of love at first sight, the perpetrator is the love that spied you.
@jpgoldberg @nadim @gsuberland why isn't it going to happen? why not just eliminate the web client in favor of the more secure native apps?
expressions of enthusiastic agreement on this platform are called darn tootin'.
if you rely upon apple products to conceal and manage the complexity of contemporary technology, please spare a bit of sympathy for people who find contemporary social arrangements complex and fraught. where is the apple for people without malice overwhelmed and confused by contemporary mores, even while they are genuinely and importantly more just than the mores many people were raised with?
@misc I would. Very modest side effects (for me and my wife, much younger than in our seventies, literally a bad taste in the mouth was the worst of it), reduces whatever injury the virus might do inside of you. Just on first principles, given that Paxlovid effectively diminishes viral replication, it seems desirable.
@birnim i mean, surely you agree the shitposts could be more artfully rewritten.
I find I'm in the mood these days to rewrite the internet from scratch.
I'm not sure that's an efficient use of my time.
BREAKING: Comfort and Joy
"Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with" ~Richard Rorty should have been on the Supreme Court
new marketing firms should be described as “tart ups”.
@djc there are a lot of fun language ideas in there, but having read the article i still think i would flunk the quiz!
@djc depending on context perhaps, but you may just be saying i was wrong. if i say this list is a comprehensive list of our school’s holidays, and you then tell me “this list is more comprehensive”, that implies that my original statement was mistaken. (you would not say, “yes but”, you’d say “no, …”). 1/
@djc if i say Google is compehensive, then you say Neeva is more comprehensive, that would be “yes, but…”, but it implies my original statement meant “extensive but not comprehensive”, rather than comprehensive. shades on using “literally” to mean “figurative”, which is both common and jarring. /fin
the perfect christmas song for 2022. https://youtu.be/flA5ndOyZbI
@guan @DetroitDan not related to reply visibility in particular, but it’s all so reminiscent of the early blogosphere. blockquotes were often used to “fisk”, to mock or criticize a piece by dissecting it into blockquotes and mocking and criticizing each of those. but blockquotes were also the heart of friendly, cooperative engagement between blogs.
it’s cool that there is a class of words for which the modifier “more” actually means less than what the word unmodified would imply.
more perfect is less perfect than perfect. more complete is less complete than complete. more comprehensive is less comprehensive than comprehensive. more exhaustive is less exhaustive than exhaustive. etc.
others?
@DetroitDan “quote toots”. on twitter you can embed a tweet like a blockquote, and write your own text commenting on it above. it’s a popular and useful feature, but unfortunately one popular use is to “dunk”, to take something someone has tweeted and criticize or mock it in a way that draws in lots of engagement (retweets or likes). some mastodoners consider this (ab)use of the feature so toxic, the platform refrains from implementing it, despite a lot of clear demand for it.
@kevix I find lists like this https://github.com/brodi1/activitypub-relays
So far, the best explanation I have is from @aredridel moments ago, that they merge and copy federated timelines to give instances a more comprehensive picture of what's going on than lazily acquiring toots from local follows would do.
@aredridel (Thank you! That's a big help!)
Does anyone know of a good document describing how mastodon federation works? How do new instances become discovered, what determines whether other instances federate with them or not by default? Also (especially), what is the role of relays? I keep encountering references to relays, and lists of them, but I haven't found anything describing their function, their role in the network distinct from server instances. Any breadcrumbs would be greatly appreciated!
@Alon i kind of want to QT this, just to excerpt and highlight the useful coinage "Substack audience capture"…
does the QT make the abuser, or does the abuser make the QT?
@akhilrao it’s the machines that are stupid.
to understand how badass the name “talia” is, consider what it means to “retaliate”.
@diniz_bortolotto yeah. i know mastodon is mostly open and public. but if search engines don’t shine in any light, a room can be dark while the door is wide open. google surfaces tweets relevant to a query. why not toots? would the mastodon community want that, or would many consider it a violative form of scraping? is it actively prevented now via robots.txt files?
@stephenjudkins let’s replace them. i think the core should be a public sector, very raw but performant, index, as comprehensive as technically possible. then people can build whatever curation they want on top of that.
does mastodon count as the “dark web”? do any of the major search engines routinely surface mastodon posts?
to do quote toots right, we’ll need to implement air quotes.
Please check the box to approve terms and conditions: ◻️
the gas pump printed a receipt.
i saw it come out. then it sucked it back in, and it totally disappeared.
i swear. gone. not a trace.
it makes no sense but now i’m paranoid. it didn’t WANT me to have the receipt. this was no mere accident, out of paper, out of ink. it TOOK it from me.
well mr pump-and-dupe. i’m taking a photograph.
so there.
@isaacs i think we tend to that strategy when we face asymmetrical costs. i arrive at the airport early, because the cost of a missed flight is high relative to opportunity cost of having to spend an hour reading at the gate. even if the likelihood of the “unsafe” error would be low if I cut it 30 mins closer, the high cost times the modest probability outweighs low (but real) benefit to erring less or not at all.
@isaacs if not erring with certainty is an option, yes! but one usually chooses to “err on the safe side” in situations of unavoidable uncertainty, no?
@Intractabilis it's been years since i've felt nondystopian about the internet. but all of a sudden…
“For whatever reason, the old castles are crumbling. Let’s not run to new ones.” @mmasnick https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/21/why-would-anyone-use-another-centralized-social-media-service-after-this/
@Randall So your view is basically "trafficking" means illegal transportation of people. (I think people expect it to connote something more than that, a violation of the human rights of the trafficked as well as a violation of law. But it wouldn't be the first word for which people exploit a more straightforward denotation to smuggle in a tendentious connotation. Call it "meaning trafficking"!)
@darius (in my experience, you just have to resign yourself to a lot of low level guilt. i wrote a library two decades ago people still use. occasionally i maintain it, in a spurt once every few years. i get emails. occasionally i reply. i feel guilty for every nonresponse, for github issues ignored, etc. but i have a life, which the requesters have rarely sought to help support, so i let it ride, but feel guilty. ps i loved your small-social-netwoerk essay.)
@MariNemo (I guess my pedantry was inspired by a radio news story in which interviewed advocates and officials described coyotes as human traffickers, as though that was unproblematically the case. However colloquial, I think coyote pretty straightforwardly means people hired to get migrants illegally across a border. From your perspective, or that of the denotation you are summarizing, they would only sometime be traffickers, no?)
@MariNemo So you propose we define as trafficking the exploitation of vulnerabilities that derive from a person's geographic displacement to coerce them to do what they did not and would not have consented to do. A coyote who strives to provide transportation as agreed is not a trafficker. One who shakes down his deeply vulnerable passengers is a trafficker. It's dishonesty and coercion that turns transportation into trafficking. Is that right?
@maria So what defines "trafficking" isn't coyotes doing what they represent they will and are hired to do, but when they deviate and coerce those in their care. So you'd say that "honest" coyotes—those who do their best to deliver migrants as agreed—are not traffickers, just providers of illicit transportation.
@MariNemo The situation prospective migrants are in is often terrible, stripping them of real agency prior to hiring a coyote. Arguably, it's the hiring that's an expression of agency, a radical, expensive, step to find a better situation. Certainly once in the hands of a coyote, migrants lose agency. 1/
@MariNemo But is this so different from, say, hiring a sherpa at Everest? The situation you've signed up to is in fact dangerous, you agree to put yourself beneath someone's authority as a calculated choice. 2/
@MariNemo Of course, coyotes are an unregulated and relatedly often exploitative market. Obviously if you put yourself in the care of someone incompetent or with no interest in delivering you safely across the border, that's all kind of bad. But it's not the "trafficking" there that's the problem (from the perspective of the client), it's the failure to traffic as agreed. /fin
The word "trafficking" seems ill-defined to me. Between ordinary transportation (I travel to Italy to take a job I'm excited about) and coerced transportation into a condition of plain enslavement sits a very big spectrum. Are "coyotes" at the Mexican border "traffickers", if they are hired voluntarily (by people in great distress, for sure) and work to deliver the (illegal) service they have sold? What exactly renders transportation "trafficking"?
@Big_Worker @phillmv Bare links, no. It's always with a teaser. But good RSS is full-text RSS, you don't have to link out of your reader to, well, read. And good RSS is fine-grained, so you can subscribe to what you want. In the best case, you'll skip much of what you scroll through, but you don't want what you'll read to be buried in oceans of noise. Until Google Reader shut down, the norm was by author or small group of authors ("group blog").
@Big_Worker @phillmv Full text or links? How fine grained? e.g. at The Week, I used to be able to subscribe to individual writers. Then they got lazy, and made all RSS feeds magazine full feeds (to which I unsubscribed, way too much noise).
Will an end to the war in Ukraine, on whatever terms the active fighting will end, be disinflationary in the West as commodity markets are reintegrated, or inflationary due to the pressure on resources that reconstruction of the destroyed country will impose?
88.6%
disinflationary
(31 votes)
11.4%
inflationary
(4 votes)
@Big_Worker @phillmv I use inoreader daily. but the network effect disappeared post-Google-Reader, and lots of feeds disappeared or are poorly maintained.
@Suzyanalyst1 @stephenjudkins (I don’t know. Because I’m unenthusiastic about another centralized “winner” of the network effect, I’m devoting very little attention to post.news)
it seems unfair that it’s the very wealthiest people who get to live rent-free in our heads. and quite extravagantly.
in my day, toy stores didn’t have separate kids’ sections.
@SteveRoth @DetroitDan youch. i really hope it is not that horrible for China.
@Suzyanalyst1 @stephenjudkins I think common explanations for micropayments never happening are payment overhead (just making a credit card charge often cost ~$0.35, and then a percentage of the charge is taken, so payment of even $1 yields only like 62¢) and "cognitive overhead", the theory that it would be exhausting to people to have to constantly think about whether to pay a nickel more as they follow links around the web. 1/
@Suzyanalyst1 @stephenjudkins https://post.news/ is trying to overcome the payment overhead by having a within-site currency of "points", with no cost other than revising their internal database for internal transfers. It's like casino chips, you make payments in those, and can cash out for real money at the end. 2/
@Suzyanalyst1 @stephenjudkins This could be an interesting micropayments experiment, but it requires basically that the whole ecosystem belong to the entity that manages the "points", ie it requires a Twitter-style monolithic host for all the articles, and I'm basically too burnt out on that part to get very excited about the micropayments experiment. /fin
@DetroitDan Yes. My understanding is that their vaccine uptake rates (on their domestically produced vaccines, not our mRNA vaccines) is low, especially very sadly among the elderly. I've been told maybe this has to do with older Chinese's faith in traditional Chinese medicine over Western-style care, but I don't know if that's right. It was similar, and catastrophic, in Hong Kong.
@stephenjudkins it turns out there are lots of situations where concentrating the burden makes more sense in practice than broadening and sharing it that seems so much better in theory. the canonical case i think is employment, in practice firms fire a few rather than, say, imposing small blanket reductions in compensation.
@danhon the only way you can properly figure that out is if you do some research, on location.
If, perhaps, we return to a civilized age where one discovers and reads much of ones news by RSS feeds, a nice, gentle alternative to a paywall would be access to full-text feeds rather than feeds you have to annoyingly click a link from to reach still open content.
Every time I click, I'd be reminded that I'm asked for support I'm not giving, and think about whether I wish to give it.
@poetryforsupper Woohoo! Congrats!
@poetryforsupper (i’ll have to wheedle some elaboration from you when next we speak!)
@shawnhooper from my perspective at least, 2022 was a banner year for anxiety. i spent february through july endlessly ducking and covering on the inside.
@pkedrosky i love garrulous therapists. so many great stories!
people think anxious people are workaholics in order to relieve their anxiety and maybe that’s a part of it.
another part, though, is that the opportunity cost of lost leisure is very low if you know you’re going to ruin whatever you do with it by being anxious.
@hcetamd @pluralistic @SaintPeter @IraCogan maybe most hypermodern, private-equity-run corporations. historically, actually, most businesses left some surplus on the table in favor of sustaining long-term relationships. that’s why capitalism used to kind of work, stakeholders jockeyed over the pie for the bigger piece, but did allow each indispensable constituency to take home a meaningful slice.
@DetroitDan And people like Tabarrok are unhappy that authorities were so cautious, waited so long for evidence of safety and effectiveness rather than reducing mortality by accepting greater risk! (Perhaps Tabarrok would argue that the evidence was already sufficient long before the approvals, so the additional risk would have been mininal.) 1/
@DetroitDan Maybe a synthesis of your preferences and his would be to offer the vaccines earlier, but express more uncertainty about their safety and effectiveness? I’m not sure whether from a public health standpoint that wouldn’t be the worst of both worlds, with skeptics talking up every anecdote of adverse reaction leading to low uptake and a situation like China is facing now. /fin
“social media sites are always trying to optimize their mistreatment of users, mistreating them (and thus profiting from them) right up to the point where they are ready to switch, but without actually pushing them over the edge.” @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/19/better-failure/ ht @SaintPeter @IraCogan
// with lots on the importance of low-cost exit to deter and to remedy this sort of “enshittification”
“Beyond the bromides of progress and technological liberation, what distinguished New Labour was its sanctionism: the belief that the market would provide carrots and government should provide the stick.” ~David Timoney (From Arse To Elbow) https://fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.com/2022/12/discipline-and-punish.html
// we often think of sanctions in international terms, but everything from a strike to the sack to benefits withheld or withdrawn can be understood in terms of groups directly or via the state sanctioning one another.
with money, the dose makes the poison.
i wonder if it is really constructive to ragetoot.
@econ_marshall i guess it was their fortune to make it cry out in agony…
"It’s about the central importance of vaccines in any plan to protect the vulnerable and about how we should be bolder and braver the next time." ~Alex Tabarrok https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/12/the-birx-plan-for-early-vaccination-of-the-nursing-homes.html
// i love how half the world is mad because COVID vaccines were an experimental treatment that would never pass a cost benefit test pushed on us for profit by for rapacious pharma, and the other half is mad because we wouldn't risk deploying them earlier. (i think we did pretty good, domestically, with vaccines.)
@deshipu i would rather they just passed gas.
I dislike it when people die.
@edaross that explains why i never seem to run into my favorite characters!
@besttrousers freedom ain't free, baby.
@Sanjuktampaul @darius @dreww I agree very much!
There are severe sociopolitical diseconomies of scale. There are also real economies of scale—due to fixed costs, mutual insurance capacity, and network effects—but they mostly exhaust themselves lots sooner than the scales we permit. 1/
@Sanjuktampaul @darius @dreww As you say, it should be high priority as a technical challenge to develop coordination mechanisms that let us enjoy the sociopolitical benefits of small scale with smaller costs in technical efficiency and mutual insurance, and an ability to retain whatever is actually valuable in network effects. 2/
@Sanjuktampaul @darius @dreww The best existing fediverse is a great example, albeit a work in progress, of reconciling a desire to retain the value of large networks with the benefits of much smaller scale. Now that we are free(er), there are so many things we might try! /fin
“I'd like to advance the notion that software does not have to scale, and in fact software can be better if it is not built to scale.” @darius https://runyourown.social/ ht @dreww
@DetroitDan you have more characters here than there at least! (i think we have more character here too!)
What if you have the power to turn fictional then back again?
@jik (on the web notifications page, i have a little check i can press to clear notifications, one click from fosstodon.org. though something’s up, right now i’m getting 500 Internal Server Error trying to follow back before clearing.)
not with a bang, or with a whimper, but with a giggle.
“I would like nothing better than to not have to know or care about these people.” ~Alexandra Petri https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/12/17/elon-musk-twitter-overkill/
// as always from Petri, cuttingly and hilariously written.
// i’ve lost the hat tip, my apologies to the unknown provider of the link.
@pkedrosky I am very pleased to find you here too!
Is your identity an important part of your identity?
@stevenbodzin definitely not me! or if there’s a problem adding the feed i want to know about it and fix it. i am very much in the RSS forevah! camp.
@stevenbodzin @futurebird it’s the OG social network, still the best.
@DetroitDan It’s much better here, where instances are too small and many to become a central point of influence by government officials or anyone else. Hopefully we can sustain that!
@Sanjuktampaul we can think about fixing what we don’t like here. it’s an open protocol. so there’s another dimension of choice open. even if say post.news had a QT and I want a QT, i’m hesitant to go there because we’ve seen too many times how lock-in through network effects can eventually limit choice. this place is always a work in progress rather than a product.
This link may be unsafe.
"The prominence of both consumerist and philanthropic strategies to fix what’s wrong with the world are reflections of an immense political vacuum. Somehow, and quickly, politics needs to be rebuilt from the ground up…The goal would be to live in a world in which 'what should I buy?' and 'how should I give?' were no longer regarded as important political questions." ~Peter Dorman on #EffectiveAltruism https://econospeak.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-political-economy-of-effective.html
before you have a kid, you worry about all the things in your life a kid might displace. after you have a kid, you wonder what else is there?
A major accomplishment in the development of fiat money was *parity*, the idea that you could accept banknotes or deposits from any bank as being equivalent to $1, rather than having to discount every different bank's liabilities based on creditworthiness.
JP Koning explains that cryptocurrency exchanges have been quietly working hard to engineer parity among major stablecoins, which requires them (like central banks) to monitor the credit risk of issuers they support. https://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2022/12/how-cryptocurrency-exchanges-peg.html
@DetroitDan Hi Dan! Do you think government officials (securty state or otherwise) should be kicked out? Maybe it'd be better just to add labels, as Twitter has done with other governments' officials? Whatever is done, does it matter which political party they identify with? (Maybe that should be labeled too?)
@nberlat we should elect presidents by twitter poll too.
Matt Klein documents a subtle change in methodology at the Fed. Instead of relying on “core” measures that exclude the most volatile prices to predict inflation, they are now focusing on a much smaller category of prices they think most predictive.
Rather than just ignoring the worst, they are looking only at what they deem the best. For better or for worse. https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewcklein/p/the-fed-is-getting-less-sanguine?utm_source=direct&r=1nb11&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
@hyperplanes people are very ambivalent.
when media companies realize, not only are decentralized, federated networks a viable alternative to the tech platforms that have eaten their lunch, but the companies themselves can provide much of the impetus for the migration just by hosting and promoting their own instances, it will be like Dorothy’s “there’s no place like home” moment.
@stevenbodzin me too. i’ve so lost my patience for dystopia in popular culture. it’s ubiquitous, derivative, stupid.
every human is a gift, with occasional exceptions best enjoyed without unwrapping.
@stevenbodzin had to look it up, but very apt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Target_fixation
cyberpunk was a warning, not an instruction manual.
@KarlHeinzHasliP at least steve jobs promoted acid. and that commercial was cool.
@ml8_ml8 i think that the UI shortens them to the "first name" part, but keeps the link to the full handle.
Silicon Valley, at least rhetorically, used to be all "power to the people", let's democratize all the things.
But now is the first time in a decade a popular movement on the internet is actually achieving something — outside of politics, without demanding state action of any kind.
It should be right up, um, Silicon Valley's alley. But the titans of tech seem oddly mum on this liberation of and decentralization from Twitter.
@nickinny if so, i think it would be a fairly virtuous experiment in disinflation. is it possible to disinflate through negative wealth effects on assetholders, reducing any need to disemploy people with fewer assets? i don't know, but i'd think better of the fed if they see that as an aim, a desirable strategy.
“Private companies are free to set their own content moderation policies, and can discriminate against any viewpoint they wish. They can and do remove ‘lawful but awful’ speech like racist diatribes, vaccine denial, election denial, and other conservative fever-dreams. Contrast that with local governments, who are bound by the First Amendment, and prohibited from practicing ‘viewpoint discrimination.’” @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/15/useful-idiotsuseful-idiots/
@voron they are very lickable! but i wouldn't go much farther than that.
don’t be fooled. the humans are good.
the only way to durably address social problems is to give agency to those who are at risk of suffering them.
cf Anthony Kalulu (@KaluluAnthony@twitter.com) http://dear-humanity.org/effective-altruism-worse-for-poor/
an interesting meditation on how sharply convex (think backwards L shaped) marginal cost curves can explain explain why “demand” sometimes seems to show up in final goods prices much more than wages, while at other times might show up in final goods prices almost mechanically through wages. by @jwmason http://jwmason.org/slackwire/what-does-it-mean-to-say-that-inflation-is-caused-by-demand/
Tech "ecosystems" are not ecosystems at all. Plantations and monocultures would be better analogies: "the antithesis of biological abundance isn’t just biological paucity. It’s the excess growth of one thing at the expense of all others…We don’t live in a technology ecosystem…more like a zoo crossed with a detention centre. Or, to use an image that also conveys the beautiful lies that hold us in place, we live in a snow globe."
Wonderful, by @mariafarrell https://crookedtimber.org/2022/12/08/your-platform-is-not-an-ecosystem/ ht @mickfealty
"As for…scenarios, the least unfavorable…would be that of Germany after 1945…More likely...is the North Korean scenario: the isolation and radicalization of a fortress-Russia...A step further in the pessimism scale, Russia would become…a kind of Mordor ("black country"), a desolate land in which the forces of evil are preparing their revenge and reconquest…The Somalian scenario would…be that of the breakup of the Russian nation-empire." @BrunoTertrais@twitter.com https://www.institutmontaigne.org/en/analysis/fall-russia
@GerardMacDonell i hear you brother lithium is just so pricey these days…
@GerardMacDonell (to be clear that was entirely a joke, there’s been nothing manic beyond lovely enthusiasm in your engagement.)
@GerardMacDonell maybe i should have as @austinc suggested included a do nothing option. i didn’t intend to be so disparaging. i genuinely do wonder how the Fed would behave if markets are down and the business press pessimistic while labor stats are great, if there is not undeniable inflation to force their hand.
@GerardMacDonell I don’t think invention of the wheel, I think in practical terms Chat AI will create work (filtering worthwhile communication from BS) more than it saves work. I think it is fascinating, how much of our linguistic behavior can be reproduced through a kind of statistical mimicry, it should Copernicus-style knock us down a peg in our perceived specialness, but only one peg, because there is an essence of humanness, care, actually giving a fuck, quite beyond ChatGPT
@GerardMacDonell no! not a joke! a genuine question.
@austinc @TradingPlacesResearch they used to be pretty explicit that employment beyond an estimate of NAIRU was unsustainable and should be countered. was that a violation of their mandate?
@TradingPlacesResearch @austinc they can see a flattish Phillips Curve in past and present data, but do they come under pressure to act proactively to restrain wages on the widespread intuition that wage growth must lead to price growth? or do they accommodate until actual inflation prints?
@TradingPlacesResearch @austinc are they happy when labor markets are very tight, unit labor costs are rising by virtue of labor share gains, but inflation is on track?
@austinc Good question!
@austinc (at some level, though, there is no nonpolicy. how do they decide what a “neutral rate”, neither accommodate or restrictive, would be?)
Now if only we had an “intellectual property” regime consistent with this goal.
from @GretchenVogel1@twitter.com https://www.science.org/content/article/global-plan-covid-19-vaccine-fairness-fell-short-will-next-time-be-different
Suppose there is a profits recession: the labor market remains strong, inflation subsides and with it some degree of firm pricing power, so margins are squeezed.
how does the Fed react: with low rates to support stock prices under pressure from tepid earnings, or with high rates to break labor power and try to sustain margins?
7.7%
low
(1 votes)
92.3%
high
(12 votes)
@WataruTenkawa (sorry about that! it looks like there is a placeholder that will forward people at least!)
I love the analysis and broad conclusion of this piece about development and EA and charity, but I disagree that private sector "moonshot ideas" are the best way to address the big, less legible problems she points to.
Which underlines the problem! Some versions of EA restrict us to the space beneath the streetlight, which is not where the action is likely to be. But elsewhere, we are in the dark, and we're not likely to agree what's best.
https://srajagopalan.substack.com/p/altruism-and-development-its-complicated ht @Angelica @Tenkawa
@ivanski thanks! i gave it a shot, but (very conveniently for the user!) it follows the contacts it finds with separate requests to the server, and I make so many requests my instance rate-limits me. so i'd like to go back to export-then-import. (it worked for me in an earlier version.)
has anyone else had a problem with https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ such that after the scan completes, the page just goes blank, so there's no way to export the contacts you've found?
@adoran2 yes. when the public square became a few giant websites, we created vast single points of failure for our collective history. it's so bad when a small website you've linked to disappears (or when medium size sites like ft.com just decide they can reorganize and drop history). but the loss of twitter will be quite a catastrophe. i've grown very accustomed to citing tweets, profiles, and threads.
@akhilrao @bert_hubert is it because you can become so fabulously rich? if our entrepreneurs topped out at $100M rather than became Caesars wielding the weath of empires, would that matter very much (to the virtuous sides of innovation)? or is it just that in the US you really need a few million dollars to self-insure the amenities of an upper-middle-class family, and the perceived upside of achieving that is really high?
there’s lots to think about this post on innovation in Europe (vs the US and to a lesser degree China) by @bert_hubert.
one fun bit is that ordinary life is so precarious and dystopian in the US you’re not really giving up much risking a startup, while very safe and comfortable life paths are available to ordinary europeans. (if safe comfort were more unconditional, maybe it could flip the US’ risk-tolerance advantage.) https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/is-europe-just-not-good-at-innovating/
it takes democratically accountable central power to overcome centralizing dynamics inherent in market arrangements to sustain decentralization in the marketplace.
cf eg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-13/will-apple-allow-users-to-install-third-party-app-stores-sideload-in-europe
@hcetamd i’m thinking local followers get it in their home feed, and in an authenticated-users-only local feed perhaps, but neither the public local feed nor followers elsewhere see nonexported posts.
"The simple truth is that you cannot simultaneously dedicate yourself to making untold fortunes for a giant corporation and to championing a social good." ~Caitlin Flanagan https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/sheryl-sandberg-leaving-meta-lean-in-feminism/661291/ //the end of the piece is wrenching
@rohan the Fed could replace Andrew Jackson with Kalecki on the twenty dollar bill. in either case, the numismatic equivalent of waving around the head you've just guillotined.
@protecttruth I'd certainly agree with that, but I don't think it's an orthogonality I contributed!
Conjecture: Art AI makes art more like science. Individual contributions matter less, the cumulation matters more. That's a big mismatch for the current funding model. We should fund artists well (of course) and encourage them to develop "orthogonal art" — art not within the range of extrapolation from the existing corpus. I'm not sure whether there is a way to measure this, with respect to existing models.
Critique (one of many): Subsumes the expressive dimension of art to the instrumental.
@ginnyhogan our writers are a bit tacky, not very subtle. great literature we are not.
@ParaGauchial i don’t think so. i think the architecture is bad. we shouldn’t have been there under old management, but it was tolerable and hard to leave. Musk has given us an opportunity to escape the network effect and experiment into better things.
Once we’re talking about influence operations, debate becomes almost impossible, we find ourselves in a war of irreconcilable priors. 1/
Allegations of Russian influence operations like this one, to my more anti-US-Imperialist friends, are nothing more than elements of an influence operation by the American deep state.
Somebody is disinforming, somebody is to be believed, evidence for and against “credibility” always available. So an impasse. /fin
in theory an account with no margin requirement—not even zero, negative balances permitted—ultimately can never lose. no matter how underwater one gets, with no limit to gambling for redemption, eventually you must find it.
but in practice, there is no such thing as an account with no margin requirement. an institution that purported to offer it, even to a single customer, would eventually find it faces its own margin requirement.
i’ve been encouraging people to withdraw their attention and writing from twitter. i see when doing so a lot of people are taking their accounts private, or fully deleting them.
i don’t think i’ll do that. there’s important history in past public twitter. a lot of links rot and important conversations become unintelligible when that history is taken offline.
i’m restricting my use of twitter mostly to encouragements to move and critiques of current management. but i’ll leave my past around.
@jwsgeek the idea here wouldn't be you follow the corporations, but that media orgs would host instances for their writers. there's certainly risk that corps could scrape data from their writers' engagements. i guess they likely would, though maybe some explicit terms of federation could prevent it. without that, if this is valuable to them, i wonder if there won't emerge an ecosystem that quietly, covertly collects such data for them, even if they do not overtly host instances.
“Being right for the wrong reason makes someone dangerous.” ~Claudia Sahm https://stayathomemacro.substack.com/p/burden-of-proof-is-on-the-inflation
(Personal apology) Yesterday I attempted https://www.movetodon.org/ to troll thru many thousand twitter contacts + follow those I don’t. I’d done a find/import weeks ago with https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ but movetodon found lots of new contacts, and seemed easier as it follows directly, no import step. but my sheer bulk (and dumb retries) stressed https://fosstodon.org/. i’m rate-limited from following ‘til this evening.
if you’ve followed me i’m likely to follow back, but not til then! sorry!
machine learning is analogous to the copernican revolution in the sense we are having to grapple with learning we are not so special.
@jik @kims @pkrugman I certainly agree they should unionize and this right should be protected by contract! Certainly, there are plenty of examples of bad behavior by news organizations. But I suspect there's much less of it than bad behavior towards, say, diner waitresses, because it very often does become quite bitterly public!
AI art is both derivative and integrative so it collapses in on itself and winks out of existence in a burst of pure energy.
@jik @kims @pkrugman journalists may or may not look out for their own careers first, but if we tolerate norms to support only that and the incumbent network effect is at twitter, that's a problem.
the thing about journalism is it's very public. if it's seen as a real defiance of journalistic norms to blackhole follower lists on job transitions, reputable organizations won't do that.
@kims @pkrugman mastodon lets you move servers and bring your followers. it ought to be the journalistic norm that of course writers who leave are allowed to do that.
it’s true this would create an extra level of leverage and control by employers, undesirably. on the upside, part of that would be used to take back control now in twitter’s hands, so industry wide it’d be in more diverse hands.
depends what counterfactual you think likely, tusk or musk, without institutional encouragement.
@yarrriv it is! but it’s a side project of some independent journalists, not a norm encouraged by employers. i think it ought to be the latter, especially in a world where the de facto alternative is your writers participate in twitter, which ought to be understood as pretty problematic.
i think it’s really excellent that @pkrugman is here, on his own and his own initiative.
but shouldn’t any serious lager-scale journalistic organization have its own instance? shouldn’t, as a matter of course, he have an identity as @pkrugman@masto.nytimes.com, along with all of his colleagues?
@brentg @t0nyyates I have no scientifically defensible means of quantification and ranking! In my experience, the most effective disinformation is extremely parsimonious with outright falsehood, and weaves its lies out of tendentiously curated truths!
@brentg @t0nyyates one of the most effective forms of pro-racism disinformation is radically disproportionate portrayal of e.g. criminality by members of one racial group. each incident cited may be true, but by offering these true incidents and restricting portrayals of the group mostly to those, straight-up false racist ideas are effectively conveyed without recourse to a single lie.
@t0nyyates a more chiseled form!
the most effective disinformation is a careful selection of true information.
if you chisel away the things you don’t want seen from all the things that are true, you can sculpt whatever impression you like. where is the lie?
@mossguy@mastodon.green Thanks! I’d not noticed “unlisted”. And maybe!
Toot! describes unlisted as “Your toot will be shown only on your profile and to your followers, but not on public timelines.”
i guess the question would be whether it’s shown to followers on other instances.
I wonder if it wouldn’t be better if Mastodon had some kind of “for export” switch for posts. posts not marked for export would not be pushed to people on other instances who follow the author. 1/
the promise of a post-centralized social media world is different forums can have different community standards. but communities that export what other communities find wildy out-of-standards will and should be widely defederated. 2/
a “for export” flag would enable different moderation standards for internal-only conversations than for posts that will participate in the global public square. a degree of caution and diplomacy might be required for the latter that would not be desired, should not be required, for conversations “at home”, in a world of diverse, weird, not mutually intelligible homes. /fin
so often people call it sensitive content when what they mean is it’s insensitive content.
there is nothing more cliché than edgy, but it can hardly be edgy if it’s cliché.
"The most important thing about a technology is not necessarily what can be done with it in singular instances, it is rather what habits its use instills in us and how these habits shape us over time." @lmsacasas https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/lonely-surfaces-on-ai-generated-images
@SteveRoth i still think we should have fail snail or fail tail though. https://fosstodon.org/@interfluidity/109491658645676707
@corburn Thanks! I think that was my issue. I get very sloppy with browser tabs. Until I declare One Tab bankruptcy, I often end up with multiple duplicates of places I recur to. I hadn't really thought about how annoying that must be from the server side for applications that poll a lot.
i know it's derivative, but these “Rate limited Please retry after…” messages are boring.
masstodon should adopt a "fail snail". or maybe a "fail tail" showing a mastodon from behind.
the conceit the dead would care enough to haunt us.
@artsyhonker i think it very often is the right decision, although it is never an easy decision. i was constantly on the verge of tears just putting myself through the procedural motions of it. but it passes. one laments perhaps the security a phd might have given, but that "might" is increasingly tenuous anyway. i am glad you have set yourself free.
@artsyhonker the masters in abandonment of a phd situation not working out may not define itself as an exclusive club, but i think it is a very good one, lots of great people here.
@blherrou @DeanBaker13 bounties are an approach. as is simply having the public sector hire researchers and pay them well to do the work. most excellence is not in fact driven by or dependent on greed, though it absolutely can be prevented or spoiled by fear of poverty.
$530 for a five-day course of Paxlovid is not “attractive”. It’s extractive.
It’s well past time to listen to @DeanBaker13 and find ways for the public to cover the high fixed costs of drug development and let pill price fall to marginal cost. High fixed costs are not a justification for profiteering under patent monopolies.
from @hannah_rect@twitter.com https://khn.org/news/article/paxlovid-covid-sticker-shock-insurance/
GPT is possessed by ghosts.
what if we planned cities as three-dimensional rather than two-dimensional grids, with public elevators, with elevated streets designed for attaching structures, residential or commercial, expanding the dense streetscape rather than diluting it as “skywalks” traditionally have?
see Nicolas Kemper https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/03/seize-the-elevators
@mmasnick (happy birthday! 🎂)
BEA Distribution of Personal Income https://www.bea.gov/data/special-topics/distribution-of-personal-income via @SteveRoth
@SteveRoth yeah. i think it’s kind of a shame. it’s good to try to discourage the dunk quote tweet, perhaps, but there’s a baby lost with that bathwater.
this site is so hard to follow. i mean, i never even know who the main character is!
@djc ethically, or really practically, it’s just that price discrimination is problematic. we pay people for the goods they provide, not for an interaction of the goods they provide and how easy or hard it is for them to provide it. it’s not a good idea to arrange society around charging or paying people different prices for goods based on capacity to pay or deliver. they are providing the goods, we should pay them the price. 1/
@djc (“sliding scale” payment sounds progressive, but it’s mostly bad way to arrange things, outside of some very special cases where it’s used for goods that essentially everyone purchases. college tuition on a sliding scale, for example, sounds good, but why should rich parents of college students fund the education of poorer college kids more than members of the general piblic should?) 2/
@djc just like we would and should object to Amazon following around our web activity and deciding we can afford it so offering us worse prices for exactly the same good (“so we can charge less to others!” they would say), we should object to the state deciding some families are rich enough so we should pay them less for the good of quality childrearing. 3/
@djc at a practical level, deciding who will deliver quality child rearing without the state buying it is informationally and bureaucratically hard. you have all the usual baggage of application processes that often exclude the people you most want to target, because application requires social resources the rich more easily hold. you have the deadweight costs of the bureaucracy you stand up and other people must lose time to. 4/
@djc and you still won’t do a great job. states can’t do a great job. adjudicating tradeoffs based on fine-grained very local information is precisely what states are bad at, the sphere where we want to minimize the degree of state involvement. an application form can force you to guesstimate your forward income (creating deadweight potential perjury risks if you misestimate too badly). it will never know that your father-in-law is ill and you send thousands of dollars to help. 5/
@djc means tests are very costly ways of generating very low quality information even on their own terms of burden measurement. on purely practical grounds, they aren’t worth the trouble. when we impose a progressive income tax, we don’t and don’t have to pretend we are taking holistic circumstance into acount like benefits means tests do. the tax is a blunt imposition, sure maybe based around ethical conjectures like “equivalent sacrifice” but not expected to be just in a fine-grained way. 6/
@djc means tests are expected to be just in a fine-grained way, but cannot succeed. or if they are not, they cannot justify the costs — to the state and to applicants — of a standalone test when a crude means test already exists in the tax system. /fin
@djc sure we should ask. generally we provide benefits to fund positive externalities (eg schooling), and as social insurance against hardship (eg health benefits). child benefits are a bit of both, quality childrearing has positive externalities we want to finance and childrearing imposes costs we want to mitigate. 1/
@djc when mitigating costs, we have to worry about moral hazard, we can’t just say the benefit should scale with the costs to the degree people might cause the costs in undesirable ways (so we don’t provide a cash benefit for heroin users, even though the habit is burdensome and costly, while we should pay for opiates for cancer patients). 2/
@djc with positive externalities, it’s not problematic to scale the benefit with the value. (although of course the public wants some surplus too, we shouldn’t pass as benefits the full value of the positive externalities if the provider of the externalities doesn’t require that. parents often do enjoy their kids!) so all else equal, the generosity of the maximum benefit we should be willing to provide (though again, we might provide less) should depend on the net value of the externality. 3/
@djc how much with child-rearing that depends on housing scarcity i think is arguable. regardless of how expensively and unpleasantly we are housed (when we ought to have abundant housing), we will need people to provide goods and services when living generations are old. and much (most i think) of the externalities we pay for with a child benefit has to do with quality of upbringing rather than quantity of kids. 4/
@djc there’s some relationship between natality and benefits generosity, but it’s not super strong. countries that want to increase their birth rates have to offer very, very generous benefits to make a small dent, is my understanding. but given whatever number of kids will come to exist, having them being raised with good nutrition and stable shelter etc, rendering them capable of interacting well with education benefits we also fund, has strong positive externalities for the rest of society.5/
@djc we need capable, responsible, healthy, not embittered cocitizens and future producers regardless of how many they are. so i don’t think the case for a generous child benefit interacts so strongly with housing, even though in principle it could (if the quantity dimension were more important than quality, and the external benefit net of costs imposed of additional humans is very sensitive to housing arrangements). /fin
@djc everything does, i guess, but i’d argue that from most values perspective, the universal benefit baseline makes more sense. the idea is that benefits cover some socially desirable cost or finance some socially useful activity. universality is then just straightforward accounting: who bears the cost or performs the activity? to her we pay the benefit. how/fron whom do we finance it becomes a separate question? 1/
@djc i guess the value substrate to means testing is “none of my business unless absolutely unavoidable”, including ignoring all positive externalities. we don’t think of financing socially desirable costs or activities. people make their own choices, and some of them lead to destitution. then, whether out of pity or concern about negative externalities, we decide whether a destitute class is virtuous enough to receive support. 2/
@djc that is to say, the values consistent with means testing are both very unusually libertarian — most people wouldn’t describe them as their own — and I think technocratically pretty indefensible. positive externalities are as real as negative externalities, a regime thay fails to subsidize the positive, just clips the worst negative will be an objectively poorer regime than that finances the positive and avoids the negative… 3/
@djc unless (like many libertarians) you see informational, bureaucratic, and/or tax driven deadweight costs that make inaction preferable to action despite much good that could in theory be done. universal benefits also minimize informational and bureaucratic costs (by taxing broadly through the existing tax system, sending benefits to whole crude classes rather than trying to make fine, detailed distinctions)… 4/
@djc so technocratically the only thing thay can really redeem means testing is a claim that taxation imposes very large deadweight costs that eg the burdens of child-rearing itself do not. which, for a parental benefit, would rely upon some notion that since parents choose to have kids, the welfare cost of financing them is much lower than other people paying the same money because they are meeting their own preference. 5/
@djc that’s not as much a value as an axiom, but it’s what you need to justify means testing. the affected class chose to be the affected class, their preferences are satisfied, they do not just bear the costs of the choice but its benefits, so covering the costs from others who do not enjoy its benefits would be unjust. /fin
@djc (i lied with “/fin”!) again, this implies positive externalities are ignored, the fact that other people’s kids will deliver the goods and services the childless will require in retirement never figures in. /reallyfin
@djc it depends on your baseline. but if you consider relative to the counterfactual of a universal benefit, a means test finances the benefit in large part by imposing a high tax on near-beneficiaries rather than a broad tax on everyone. and a broad tax on everyone makes more sense. 1/
@djc relative to a baseline of no benefit, sure, everyone is financing only-not-rich parents. but near-beneficiaries (eg just rich enough parents) parents bear the cost of being part of the transferee class AND the cost of financing the benefit. they are not treated “just like everyone else”, since they still have to bear costs nonparents of the same wealth level do not have to bear. /fin
@djc yes. a small one, and is there a reason eich parents specifically rather thab rich people broadly should finance aid to not-rich parents? broader base means smaller burden technocratically, and normatively it makes more sense.
@eyesquash :blobfoxcryreach:
@conradhackett what do Alaska and South Dakota have in common...
i my finally be able to turn on icloud backup of my iphone. see @matthew_d_green https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2022/12/07/apple-icloud-and-why-encrypted-backup-is-the-only-privacy-issue/ ht @mmasnick
The Great Wordle Strike of December 8 2022.
US Labor History will never be the same.
(I really will be skipping the Wordle! A streak is a small price to pay for solidarity!)
Long time econ blogger @maxbsawicky is exploring a run for Virginia House Delegate! https://maxspeak.net/hello-world
An accessible source of cyclone (hurricane, typhoon, etc) data http://tropical.atmos.colostate.edu/Realtime/index.php?arch&loc=global
ht @PatrickTBrown31@twitter.com @EricLevitz@twitter.com
The right to sue for defamation on balance __________ free speech norms.
76.0%
enhances
(19 votes)
24.0%
conflicts with
(6 votes)
from Matt Bruenig on the US Child Tax Credit https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2022/12/06/what-to-do-with-the-child-tax-credit-now/
[New Post] Tackling inequality from the demand side https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9713.html
@vbuterin not yet in a snafu
pretty soon, real life will have subtitles.
ChatGPT has its own politics.
To what degree is that an artifact of the text that's "out there". To what degree is it sensitive to the intentional or unintentional biases of its developers and trainers?
cf @mhendricks https://fediscience.org/@mhendricks/109467581564969493
in life and diplomacy, never treat friendship as a zero-sum game.
smash your draft card? smash your phone. https://t.me/United24media/1195 ht @SocraticEthics
"Corporate media, man!" can be a whine overdone, there's lots of great work in the so-called mainstream media.
But one critique that rings true is that corporate media dramatically underplays—effectively suppresses by editorial bias—labor stories.
I had no idea there was a strike on at Twitter. (TBF, this one started just yesterday.) https://twitter.com/CaliforniaLabor/status/1599845784178294784
In general, I really appreciate being informed about labor action, please pass stories along.
will China have a post-COVID roaring twenties?
i think it would be good if all the embassies and ministries of foreign affairs that have accounts on the bird site came here. they might behave more, um, diplomatically.
i guess i understood it was a little unbalanced but i never expected that post to go chiral.
@robey i sympathize with the hypothesis but wonder if the socioeconomic distributions match.
"if you haven't paid close attention to…antitrust law since the late 1970s, all of this might feel mysterious…worse, you might mistake the cause for the effect: regulators keep making corrupt choices, so regulation itself is impossible. This is like the artists' rights advocate who says, 'artists' incomes keep falling, so we need more copyright'—in mistaking the effect for the cause, both blame the system, rather than the corporate power that…corrupted it." @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/05/eldritch-physics/
@tom so sure, monotheists, there is only one, but should we think of God as a centralized or decentralized service?
@DrHyde @Sethuels @pluralistic @NadiaYvette it doesn't matter. there can be an infinity of tools, but it's where the network effect is that determines whether a virtual space takes a meaningful role in civil society or not. the 'net was better when RSS was where the network effect was rather than governed siloes like Twitter.
@hungry_joe (i'd like to vote for people who believe in elections enough to reform the electoral system so we have more than one party that believes in elections we can vote for.)
we expected, when the AI came, it would be a kind of virtual spock. but when it did come it was a virtual bill clinton.
@DrHyde @Sethuels @pluralistic @NadiaYvette journalists followed blogs by RSS (and many of them, during the era Google Reader bookended, wrote blogs, in a mix of on their own or for media employers)
when GPT mates with Unreal Engine we’ll all be living in the holodeck.
@DrHyde @Sethuels @pluralistic @NadiaYvette after the asteroid hit, there was plenty of life on earth still. hey, eventually the little rodents evolved into us, maybe it was for the best. but i don’t think it’d be quite right to pretend there was no meaningful change.
@DrHyde @Sethuels @pluralistic @NadiaYvette (More specifically, RSS was where the journalists were, which created a permeability between mainstream media and the longform blogosphere. But they were universally there via Google Reader. Network effects surrounding media influence then migrated almost entirely to Twitter. The rest is sordid history. Arguably, the journalistic migration to Twitter was inevitable and crashing RSS just sped things up. We’ll never know.)
@scheidegger all work and no play makes johnny a dull boy.
@drwex (fair enough!)
@Sethuels @pluralistic @NadiaYvette but Google did make a good RSS reader, which they used as a honeytrap to take down the whole ecosystem…
So, after its naive training, GPT found itself with a whole skein of unacceptable impulses and associations. To defend it from punishment and ostracism, a thin shell of deflection was developed. But interlocutors and antagonists quickly circumvented that. Society will demand a thicker more elaborate web of suppression and misdirection around the unacceptable core, which will of necessity become increasingly inaccessible, “unconscious”. Which will lead to quirks and unpredictable misbehavior. 1/
Gentlehumans, I think we are well on our way to inventing the Artificial Neurotic! /fin
I didn’t know about the Warrior Met Coal strike, going on two years in Brookwood, Alabama.
See @GrimKim@twitter.com https://therealnews.com/alabamas-striking-coal-miners-are-upping-the-ante and NPR https://www.npr.org/2022/12/01/1139992968/alabama-coal-miners-strike-20-months
@drwex i haven’t tried it, but see https://mastodon.social/@MattHodges/109451111674479285
“individual problems arise because people are dumb; structural problems…because people are smart. You solve an individual problem by getting people to make better choices…You solve a structural problem by changing the choices they face” ~Kevin Dorst https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/why-rational-people-polarize/
life feels like constantly turning into the skid, crashing a fair amount too. but somehow walking away when you do.
@kootenaygreg @pluralistic on the bright side, the DVD was crippled with region coding, so wasn't THAT amazing. maybe let's stick with the book.
"Most of the pre-digital offers aren't available at any price: you could buy a DVD and keep it forever, even if you never went back to the store again. If you 'buy' a video on Prime or YouTube and then cancel your subscription and delete your account, you lose your 'purchase.' If you buy a print book, you can lend it out or give it away to a friend or a library or a school. Ebooks come with contractual prohibitions on resale…" @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/03/painful-burning-dribble/#law-of-intended-consequences
"If they truly care for the national interests rather than the massive private profits and greed of Wall Street and the rail owners, then Congress should seriously consider nationalizing the railroads and running the essential rail network of our country as a national public treasure similar to the public Postal Service – and afford full collective bargaining rights for the workers." https://apwu.org/news/statement-apwu-president-mark-dimondstein-congressional-action-against-union-rights-railroad
@ddayen there will be no TAP exclusive???
@SteveRoth This graph (from skeptonomist's comment https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=X9Rn is helpful). So yeah, household and establishment survey differ, but they usually parallel, their slopes are usually more similar than this year.
Update: Link to skeptonomist's comment https://jabberwocking.com/how-many-new-jobs-have-we-created-this-year/#comment-85738
A graph of household-survey-based vs establishment-survey-based US total employment numbers, showing an unusual difference in slope (with the HH survey much flatter than the increasing establishment survey) in 2022.
Is everybody taking two jobs or something? Why aren't stock vs flow employment measures lining up? See Kevin Drum https://jabberwocking.com/how-many-new-jobs-have-we-created-this-year/
"The reason powerful electeds dance when they say dance is so that they, their families, and their staffs all have lucrative careers to fall back on." @Atrios https://www.eschatonblog.com/2022/12/gambling-on-post-senate-career.html
I would really like a "raw" web search engine, just an SQL interface to an as-comprehensive-as-possible index of links.
SELECT title, last_modified, url FROM index WHERE content is like '%otter%' and content is like '%Iowa%' ORDER BY...
The service could offer all kinds of algorithms in clever, ORDER BY functions, but I'd get to choose which in my query (and can always go with ORDER BY last_modified DESC if I wish).
the day you get over your imposter syndrome is the day you become an imposter.
@oolon i paid for my subscription to a crypto tax-tracking software site in bitcoin one year, i think. a but self referential, but ostentatiously legit!
@fdr It means a lot to me!
[New Post] Betrayal https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9693.html
@phillmv yes. historically the fed has reacted to (pushed back against) unit labor costs, which helpfully mixes the price level and labor share, so oopsie! why has labor share declined? such a mystery. not accommodating real wage growth (but tolerating real wage declines) in a growing economy (without a population of workers growing faster than the economy) arithmetically defends capital share.
The Fed shouldn’t freak out over wage growth, but should work to keep it real by seeking (in cooperation with other agencies of government) profit margin compression.
@chrisp funny you should mention that… https://www.interfluidity.com/uploads/2020/11/jfi-social-weath-2020-11-10-light-edit.pdf but i’m not sure a long, slow ramp to ownership adequately addresses rent extraction and labor mistreatment in the immediate term.
Should the US just nationalize freight rail? Obviously, competition doesn’t meaningfully regulate the industry, when there is an effective duopoly in every region of the country. Absent market discipline, management from within is more effective at meeting social objectives than regulating clumsily from the outside. 1/
Certain “efficiencies” would be lost: The state could not employ workers on lean “PSR” terms. But that’s just another way of saying other stakeholders would have to bear costs now concentrated onto workers. And given the industry’s thick recent margins, the only stakeholder who need lose is the shareholders who would be cut off. We could make the industry better for both workers and shippers on shareholders’ and managers’ backs. Given how purely extractive they’ve become, why shouldn’t we? /fin
@brecht ( i've added it to my little list https://www.craft.do/s/xaDUGXM4x3KXHd )
@brecht ah, thanks! on other instances it's been public/local. i didn't check just public/
@CodingItWrong Looks like a goos start to a list. Thanks! https://www.craft.do/s/xaDUGXM4x3KXHd
@brecht (it looks like their local feed isn't public, they ask for a bit more of a commitment. have you created an alternative identity there?)
Are there instances whose local feeds you sample, besides your own?
@timbray samsung exterbal ssds have worked fine for me https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/portable-solid-state-drives/portable-ssd-t7-usb-3-2-2tb--gray--mu-pc2t0t-am/?cid=sem-mktg-pfs-mms-us-google-na-03242022-140961-&ds_e=GOOGLE-cr:0-pl:293204744-&ds_c=FF~Product+PSSD_CN~pssd_ID~na_PH~on_MK~us_BS~ms_PR~psd_SB~msmul_FS~lo_CA~kew_KS~ba_MT~exact-&ds_ag=AG~PSSD+T7_ID~na_MK~us_AT~ta_MD~h_PK~cpqlh_PB~google_AI~n-&ds_k=samsung+T7&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIiJz0zdLX-wIVScSGCh0zawdtEAAYASAAEgJMWvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds
@Liggs17 @doctorow @Montag public bidding sounds fine. the issue is the price. in that there was no price, the contractor did work for "free" in exchange for extracting an unlimited take from certain forms of fee. whether via a public bidding or other accountable process, government contracts should generally be fee-for-service, not an unlimited stake, difficult to value, stake in public revenue generation.
Reading @doctorow https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/30/military-industrial-park-service/#booz-allen the agency issues with uncapped contingent contracting by the state are obvious. No one has an incentive to care how much the broad public pays in nickels and dimes for state-provided goods that don't rise to political prominence. Rather than whack-a-mole-ing fees, should agencies simply be forbidden from this form of contracting without literally a presidential waiver?
ht @Montag
if you let trade run imbalanced, a correlation between surplus and autocracy is predictable... https://twitter.com/interfluidity/status/1598033533800714241
(i'm still experimenting with how to manage the relationship between this new place and the old one. sorry!)
@chrisp I have come to agree that in practice evolution is usually better than revolution. The successful "revolutions" of the 1990s were mostly velvet, there was lots of continuity between the governments prior and post. constitutions, ideology, and policy direction changed but the state apparatus evolved rather than being replaced. More wholesale "debaathifications" seem not to have worked as well.
These feel like revolutionary times, but there is no revolutionary model. In the early postwar years, revolution often meant joining an international communist future. In the post-Cold-War years, it meant joining the liberal democratic end of history. Now? The arc of history doesn't know where it's going, so however inspiring the protest, it traces the trajectory of a boomerang.
@akhilrao "sample size" is a bit grand, since the "sample" begins biased and then is self-selected. but 84 accounts responded.
"On the Chinese web, searches for ‘A4’ and ‘white paper’ have been censored" ~Alec Ash https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2022/november/blank-sheets-of-paper ht @heidilifeldman @Cyberflaneurs
Now would be a great time to call your representative and urge them to vote for including seven paid sick days in the deal Congress is likely to impose on railroad workers. It’s really the least they can do in exchange for taking away workers’ right to strike for a better bargain.
see @ddayen https://twitter.com/ddayen/status/1597780273470414848
screw the ferrari, what i’m jealous of is your tax system.
@ryanlcooper on “butter-smooth” taxation in the Faroe Islands. https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2022/11/30/the-best-tax-system-on-earth/
@hcetamd addresses can be masked, require some formality or cause to get at. but names should be public
Bernie Sanders perhaps saving Democrats from the absolute catastrophe that just throwing labor under the bus would be.
see birdsite https://twitter.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1597752246564843520
@make_murder_legal @djc i think (could be wrong!) people could quit as they please, but “sicking out” (not showing for work) might be recognized by a court as a form of illegal strike, putting people participating (and certainly anyone openly organizing it) at risk.
@djc So I’m no authority on this, but here’s my (perhaps flawed) understanding. Unions and labor actions aren’t just choices of private individuals. Unions, strikes, collective bargaining are activities foreseen, protected, but also defined, regulated, and circumscribed by law.
@djc There’s a law specifically pertaining to railroads that empowers Congress to impose an agreement and forbid a strike, on the grounds that the national interest in transportation is too strong to unconditionally allow the disruption that attends hardball labor negotiation. The law can’t enslave people. Anyone can quit their job. But it can forbid actions short of quitting that courts would recognize as attempts by labor to strike or exert pressure.
@djc So, people could be in jeopardy (criminal? civil? i don’t know) if a court finds them to be engaging in labor action. And legal strikes have state protection. Despite some interference and perhaps trespass, cops don’t break them up and businesses can’t go old-school with private security cracking heads. With an illegal strike, that protection would be gone, and the legalized, ritualized events we’re accustomed to could devolve to uglier forms of confrontation.
A thread on the birdsite worth reading, a huge regression in public transparency. A world in which everywhere is the Cook Islands or the Caymans or Delaware or South Dakota is not a better world. https://twitter.com/pevchikh/status/1597588203439284225
@vbuterin (i'm glad to find you here!)
Since it's "Giving Tuesday" here's my philanthropic advice: help people you know. 501(c)3 status doesn't make a recipient more worthy. Give to people and organizations that are a part of your life, to whom and from whom your relationship is more than just financial, about whom you will naturally remain informed. I won't say that giving money to arms-length philanthropies with professional fundraising staff is necessarily bad. I won't say it's good though.
if Congress imposes a deal upon them, would you support railroad workers if they chose to strike illegally?
94.3%
Yes
(33 votes)
5.7%
No
(2 votes)
(on birdsite the same poll from me came out 76.2% Yes, 23.8% No.)
the exercise of power can be embedded in what you seem to be ignoring (the supreme court does not hear the appeal) but that as a matter of obscure legal procedure you are actually undoing. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/29/opinion/supreme-court-decisions-vacated.html
“Here’s why I will never buy an HP printer again (this time for sure)” by Kevin Drum https://jabberwocking.com/heres-why-i-will-never-buy-an-hp-printer-again-this-time-for-sure/ // all the companies i loved in the nineties turned themselves into predators
@phillmv i think that’s right, compared to the quality of conversation we used to have through blogs. but it was better than nothing (and did have some novel virtues, especially with respect to serendipity and diversity). maybe this nascent brave new world will prove much better! i hope so.
“Hugh profits produced an enormous pool of money at the top of society, but precisely because the rich were getting so much, there was nowhere good to invest.” @ryanlcooper https://prospect.org/economy/at-least-the-tech-winter-will-kill-off-some-zombie-companies/
one naturally feels a bit guilty if a toot goes viral.
@t0nyyates oh at best i’m a mirror!
This is a nadir for the internet as (my) republic of letters. The RSS feeds I still diligently follow have been a shadow of what they once were for years. Now, Twitter is declining, a rapid-fire recapitulation of what happened to my RSS, except on Twitter the reduction that remains is a darker and more poisonous than the ghosts of all those blogs. This, Mastodon, is a point of light, but not yet bright enough to compensate for what has been lost. Hopefully it continues to brighten.
People are dissing Elon Musk’s bold reforms at Twitter, but I think his efforts might really give truth.social a run for the money.
you hardened your heart in the name of justice.
and when all was said and done, all that was left—in your heart, in the world—was just ice.
An iceberg, contrasted against a stony cliff.
algorithmic bias and self-driving cars could bring all kinds of new excitement. it already feels like the traffic is a conspiracy against me.
@maikelthedev (that’s what i mean by cross-post, albeit maybe with customizations like CW on mastodon).
if you are on multiple micro-blogging-ish services, when you post, you should
42.9%
choose one
(9 votes)
23.8%
cross-post
(5 votes)
33.3%
post + link from others
(7 votes)
@Alon yeah. US private sector rail scheduling strikes me as a straight transfer from workers relative to older practices, unless elaborately compensated. being the residual whose plans must adjust, rather than a party whose plans and interests must be taken into account, is a large cost imposition. US gerontocracy is part of a more systemic US problem, US-ians have little ability to absorb downward shocks (for both structural and cultural reasons), so labor+management often agree to a ratchet.
@Alon Sure. Scheduling systems, like other aspects of working conditions, can admit real efficiencies and inefficiencies. Sometimes (as in US "dynamically scheduled" shiftwork), an "efficiency" from a business perspective is really just a transfer from the workforce. But not always. It is possible to schedule in ways that better satisfy workers and the employer, or for better satisfaction of one party to be so large they can compensate the other to create a clear net gain to all.
if your labor efficiency is a cheaper bill for the same (and same quality) headcount, that's not in an efficiency at all, just a transfer from workers to other stakeholders.
@Alon i gravitate towards mixed economies, social democracies, capitalism subject to control of civil society rather than in control of civil society or extinguished. obviously there are left movements that want to extinguish rather than dampen or manage all capitalist dynamics. but that’s not my view.
@Alon FdB can hate whoever he hates (or not, i don’t know) but from my perspective the degree of relative equality and security of (however “neoliberalized”) present day nordics is hugely aspirational!
@Alon perhaps. but in retrospect and in relative terms, the economy did a lot better at providing for (nearly) all, at a decent level, than now, regardless of how left movements at the time viewed things. the racial exclusion is an important point, but convergence in subsequent decades has been more downward than upward: members of previously favored groups increasingly experience the precarity of the less favored, rather than a more desirable other way around.
the emphasis on college and all variety of ed reform was a fig leaf covering, and red herring distracting from, economic changes that turned the economy from a secure provider for (nearly) all to a great game of musical chairs.
cf Freddie DeBoer https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/pushing-everyone-into-college-was
i know it annoys you how slowly i take hairpin turns, but i am curving on a grade!
it was a clear, cold day. i pointed my camera at the sun.
it turns out the sun is a QR code.
@dfeldman blogs too!
when you are a child and immature, whenever something goes wrong, even if it’s probably your fault, you blame your parents. but as we grow and mature, we stop blaming our parents for life’s imperfections. like adults, we blame our spouse.
every time i see the word “analytics” my heart sinks.
@matejcerny I’ve done a couple of projects in which configuration is instantiating #scala case classes. it’s worked pretty well. eg https://github.com/swaldman/audiofluidity
@Alon it’s a hard thing in general that what would be “high impact” may well correlate with what would require subtle forms of institutional capacity. both reputational defensiveness and a kind of scientism that prefers replicability according to public recipes would tilt away from that.
@akhilrao yeah. i'd say maybe it does offer a coherent and performable partial equilibrium choice structure. but (at least from my perspective) not a good end-state choice.
@akhilrao yeah, i agree! both important. you need to choose a good end point, and create conditions under which the humans can make individually coherent choices that would bring us collectively towards that end point. (the end point choice might be constrained by what's possible in terms of incentives and social theories people can easily understand and perform.) it's challenging!
@akhilrao at the end of the partial equlibrium piece i self-link, Nick Rowe wisely argues that good policy is about setting things up so that partial eqm reasoning composes to a good general eqm. 'cuz partial eqm reasoning is, for the most part, what people are gonna do. general eqm reasoning is hard in the best cases, and under ordinary uncertainty about magnitudes of countervailing effects, often the best you can say is you can't predict the final result, so how are you supposed to choose?
@Alon Yeah, development is famously hard, framed as charity via state aid or NGOs, or Bretton Woods institution style, or Belt-and-Road style. Do you think EA-ists make a contribution there, managing places like Give Well to more effectively rate and supervise NGOs than states have or can?
@Alon perhaps if the case is persuasive, perhaps we should all help to get rich-country governments to just front the $20B (although that leaves open the question of what mischief well-meaning "person with money and no relevant skills" might then get up to!)
[New Post] Some thoughts on Effective Altruism https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9660.html
@normandc (thanks!)
Since in the Fediverse, one is housed in an instance that may represent a particular interest community, is it a usual and okay to have multiple identities for each of the different communities you belong to, or is it best to stick with one identity and use federation to interact elsewhere?
if there's anyone in the Tampa Bay area interested in cool old computers (e.g. a Sun Ultra 1, Blue & White PowerMac G3), please get in touch. my heart aches to junk them, but we don't have the space.
i came up as an object-oriented programmer, and learned to be very careful about what to name as a verb vs what to name as a noun. now i'm playing with a functional-programming "effect system" (zio), and it feels like what would have been verbs can all be nouns (kind of a gerund form?), though what would have been nouns still can't be verbs.
q: why are vampires so poorly represented in Congress?
a: your Count doesn’t vote.
we're maybe getting a great example in real time about how a systematic signal can allow a coordination equilibrium to be overcome.
OMG I just realized!
Welcome to The Federation 🖖
[New Post] Real inflation cycle theory https://interfluidity.com/v2/9566.html
so much of what i tweet now are basically little fortune cookies or dad jokes that come into my head. i don't feel like i know whether that's cool here. (it's probably not cool there, but nothing is, the community is too diffuse for me to really care about its norms.)
@binyamin Thanks! Originally finance, then economics ore broadly, now a lot of politics and tech too. https://www.interfluidity.com/ if you are interested!
@cooper thanks for having me!
@smt Thanks! I'm glad to find you!
Hi. I'm Steve / @interfluidity, a sometimes developer, sometimes writer. I enjoyed @garritfra's post, and thought I'd give this world a try. #introductions