This Jewish American Heritage Month, we’re celebrating the diverse Jewish communities across NY-10 — from Park Slope to Boro Park to the Lower East Side.I’m prouder than ever to be a Jewish New Yorker, and I’ll always fight for our community in Congress.
…&…in loads of ways ad hominem attacks on political figures are…doing that wrong
They have created this entire mythology around Justice Jackson being stupid, where her stupidity is refusing to accept the ascendant conservative legal norms
I saw another tweet that called her an idiot because she‘s a purposivist. As if textualism were a *metaphysically correct* way to interpret the law, not merely a doctrine to be debated.
…in the specific instance of…for example…the current & prospective leaders of the israeli government
People were saying that Bennett be[at]ing Netanyahu would be like Magyar beating Orban but in order for that comparison to hold water Hungary would have to have been imposing a military dictatorship on Austria for 60 years and Orban and Magyar would have to agree that this is an unqualified public good.
Every conceivable coalition in Israeli politics has vowed to keep Arab parties out of any governing coalition. It feels like there should be a name for that
There is a subsection of people who genuinely believe that the main reason Israel’s public image has cratered is because of a corruption trial Netanyahu is under that the vast majority of Americans know literally nothing about. You know what they do know about? The occupation of Palestine.
…that
The most likely next PM of Israel, Naftali Bennett, says that he if he wins he will introduce sanctions onto the French wholesale and retail company Carrefour for “boycotting half a million Israelis” aka the Jews who illegally live in occupied Palestinian territory, which Bennett says is Israeli.
…if we’re even remotely honest about it
To put it into more understandable and direct terms, the current Prime Minister is a single state apartheidist who believes in the annexation of all historic Palestine and the next PM will be a single state apartheidist who believes in the annexation of all historic Palestine.
…has been doing the war crime thing like they’re bringing that back…it would probably help not to make out you can’t be mad at those people without being mad at “a people”…we…know this…albeit some of it no more than I know this matches the one in the script I don’t read
…but…the places that let people speak on behalf of those people…sound like the ones that speak for vlad
Jonathan Pollard, former convicted American who spied for Israel, says he is running for parliament and that he supports the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza.
People in the West should really wrap their heads around the fact that the emerging consensus among Iranian leadership, and not just among hardliners, is that it was a mistake not to escalate after Soleimani.
…& it feels like a sick joke that it’s some rhetorically impassable quagmire of unspeakable moral top trumps to try to talk about
Increasingly coming to the conclusion that Carlson’s beat down of both the Economist and NYT interviewers is less because of any independent skillset he possess and more because these interviewers make themselves look ridiculous on first principles by refusing to condemn the murder of Palestinians […] When the Economist interviewer said that the destruction in Gaza was bad for Israel and then it was bad for Palestinians and Carlson got to ask her why she put it in that order, it was very obvious that he doesn’t even have to try that hard.
…like…the person saying all of that is probably wrong about some stuff…but it doesn’t appear as though the stuff they’d be wrong about is any of those bits
It has been called out ad nauseam but the people who are upset about a professor highlighting the achievements of pro-Palestine activists are the same people who gleefully said that campus was not a “safe space” when we tried to deplatform people like Milo Yiannopoulis and Gavin McInnes.
…that’s a different person, for example…talking about only sort-of-the-same-thing
“Our students are not wilting flowers. They can handle controversy. They do not need sentimental, cloying nostalgia. They need encouragement to face a flawed and unjust world head on, using the tools we’ve given them: critical reasoning, careful research, sympathy for the oppressed.”
…technically…that’s yet a different person talking about a different person talking about the same sort-of-the-same-thing
Over the weekend the university president published a statement apologizing for the faculty commencement speaker’s remarks. Every line of Derek Peterson’s reply is worth a read:
…anyway
Rewatched the Economist interview and honestly it’s so absurd.
Carlson literally at one point says that Western civilization doesn’t believe in collective punishment, a total abject lie, but that barely filters through because the interviewer is a totally ridiculous person who can’t bring herself to say some very basic things about Palestine that Carslon can.
And the NYT interviewer is even worse. Smug, condescending, totally unable to look at what Carlson says about, say, Ted Cruz vis a vis Iran, and make any coherent response. All of this is a total misread of where the American public is,
…I don’t think I have the stomach for opining on “where the American public is” when I barely achieve competence in the matter of speaking for myself…but…there’s certainly a surplus of folks willing to give it the ol’ college try…so
This is an interesting piece which makes the case that the Gulf no longer view the US as their sole long term guarantor for security and prosperity due to America’s unique ideological commitment to Israel and the failure of Washington to deter Iran, but I fail to see how the Gulf will act on it.
…either way…I certainly don’t think I’ve got much certainty about where the one person goes off-piste…but I can’t deny the point I’d prefer it be if the goal is for me to be guessing right about some stuff I can’t know…is short of some places it maybe already went
Unlike some, I think it is actually pretty important to read what the Israelis themselves think and say about their own system of Jewish supremacy from the Mediterranean to the Jordan. One reason for that is because it’s markedly more honest and sober than anything mainstream US think tanks produce.
On the whole this is more forthcoming and honest than anything CAP, Brookings, the Center on Foreign Relations etcetera will release in their slop mill.
…I mean…in the words of a man pretending to be a president for tv show purposes…”boy, I dunno”
I mean it’s obvious why for Israeli Jews but I don’t really see what Americans struggle with when it comes to the apartheid question.
My personal theory is that Americans still struggle conceptually with the idea that this isn’t a conflict between two belligerent states but rather a conflict between a state and a people it has excluded and yet nonetheless rules over.
…that’s their personal theory for how/why…this part
A Jewish friend, who ended up refusing to serve in the Israeli army and went to jail for it, quipped to me sometime in late 2024 that, ironically, calling Israel an apartheid state is far more controversial in the US than it is in Israel. The inverse is true about saying there’s genocide in Gaza.
…it’s kinda like if you use the term apartheid…you can only be talking about south africa…not a…feels wrong to call that a policy position…but I don’t personally believe you can qualify that as a philosophy…either way…the “a conflict between a state and a people it has excluded and yet nonetheless rules over” part…sounds…hmmm…call it…reminiscent
This is why the Democratic strategy that keeps getting floated of "gerrymander to win enough seats to pass a ban on gerrymandering" is DOA unless we're willing and able to geld the Supreme Court as well.
Specifically, Pulitzers for:- Washington Post coverage of DOGE- NYT coverage of Trump enriching himself in office- Chicago Tribune coverage of ICE- Reuters coverage of Trump "expand[ing] executive power and exact[ing] vengeance"- And M. Gessen for "essays on rising authoritarian regimes"
"So we noticed that most professors are NOT voting for the party that's defunding higher education, canceling grants for political grievances, banning books, attacking entire fields, placing professors on 'watch lists,' and pushing pseudoscience.""Well, clearly that is the fault of universities."
Why is it always a problem that liberals are over-represented in higher education or media but it's not a problem that conservatives are over-represented in the military or law enforcement? What's the military doing to solve its catastrophic viewpoint discrimination problem?
…what the hell…wordpress still calls this an 8min read…so…maybe it’s not as bad as it feels like it got already…let’s…I dunno…dance with the devil in the pale moonlight?
A consulting company. That’s a fundraising round for a consulting company with AI characteristics.
Me in 2022: "There is no news value in interviewing [Tucker] Carlson. If they try to inform their audiences about the Fox host by talking to him, they will fail, because he is relentlessly dishonest and extremely good at what he does." www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carls…
…seriously, though…what *kind* of DJ…itinerant rural wedding/functions with a playlist that thinks they stopped making music when stock aitken waterman fell off the charts…or…like…john peel without the BBC hookup…because that shit matters…the two tone records lot deserve as comfortable a retirement as anyone…the “see, this is why you hate weddings until you’re old enough it’s your mates getting hitched” kind of DJ…provokes a lesser grade of sympathy…formative grudges are…yeah…gonna leave a mark…thing is…you poke into even the little stuff &
read the cornell’s sun original story which is fucking CRAZY
So, yeah, Hegseth is remaking the US miltary into a bunch of toadies. The favored generals & admirals will try to claim they are just doing their jobs and it isn't their fault, but they will be viewed by everyone as partisan, which will diminish their effectiveness (if they don't already suck). 1/
…it…should…at least in theory…look…different…if you look at matters pertaining to military might of a first world first order global combatant sort of thing…& matters pertaining to a local library…more different than those two things seem from one another
Reminder that Florida voters passed a Constitutional amendment in 2010 banning gerrymandering with 62% of the vote and the Florida GOP just stole the courts and ignored it. By contrast retaliatory gerrymanders in CA and VA passed with the approval of voters. Yet media portrays them as equivalent.
…sigh…ok…so…the other day we went back & forth a bit around the smoking thing…&…I saw this after that
lotta people on here doing "smoking was never cool actually" who've never punched a dart as a form of self-care while covered in blood/well mud/some other horrid fluid
…&…well…I nearly went back to add a bit to the previous thing…but…didn’t…so…here’s the thing that made me think about that I never got around to mentioning when the subject came up that I think might be not nothing if you happen to be me…which…understandably…most people don’t have any reason to want to be
…for my sins…it probably would have gone along these sort of lines
…in that it reminded me of another aspect of smoking that sort of stopped working in some places but started in others around about when the rules shifted about where you could smoke…along with slowing my rate of consumption even when you didn’t *have* to go outside the pub/bar/whatever to smoke…the *option* to…in both social & work settings…the latter of which thankfully continued to be the case after there were next to no workplaces left that tolerated smoking…well…I think there’s a way that smoking has arguably kept me in employment & out of trouble more than a few times over the years?
…it’s not like it makes it any less bad for me…but it’s a different sort of self-destructive & there are probably not a few times I otherwise would have been (only sometimes unfairly) tarred with the “started something” brush once it got out of hand…& hands got thrown…&/or caught
…even find it sort of helps to go the roll your own route…at one point I knew someone who smoked those that was bad at it & consequently were always happy to let me roll several I wasn’t planning to smoke & I found it’s like a lot of simple repetitive tasks…once you get it down it’s somewhere between habit, ritual & meditation…one really trying day & I could knock out several days worth of roll ups for them & feel about as much more relaxed at the end as if I’d smoked a joint instead
…probably best not to overthink that one?
…ideally it wouldn’t involve airborne health hazards…but…something that sort of stands as a physically incarnated “just gonna need to take a minute there, chief” when the alternative is “ok but it’s too late, guv – I already lost it & it ain’t coming back while you got all your teeth”…that…might be a net social benefit the way appropriate lubricants are load-bearing in an internal combustion context if you aren’t trying to blow the block out…kinda…if…that wasn’t too weird of an analogy
Have heard it from IRL friends in science. It's bad. And for no good reason but Project 2025.
Yep. Read it. Also once told @risabrooks12.bsky.social how much her co-authored “Twice a Citizen” fit me when I was young and dumb. www.researchgate.net/publication/…
The US's rise to superpower status after 1945 came through its dominance of scientific research and technological application.Donald Trump and the Republicans are literally unilaterally disarming in the face of our adversaries.It's astonishing, disastrous, and the work of traitors.
to be clear, this isn't something that the Constitution requiresit's something the white supremacists on the Court made upyou can read the Fifteenth Amendment for yourself: it's a concise yet capacious grant of authority to Congress to protect voters of colorballsandstrikes.org/scotus/alito…
Okay, some meta-commentary on this, which I think has troubling implications for good science1. it's good this criticism happened2. criticism was possible because Stacy Et Al were unusually good w/ disclosing data3. criticism is probs bad for stacy et al4. thus, incentives are to not share data
…& I genuinely have little interest in denying folks the solace of their faith…but…more than a little tired of the ones who think the faith bonus is that you can play morality games on rails like bowling with the gutters filled in…& maybe it’ll get me damned in the end…but…if your god is so on board with your plan…& all almighty & shit…maybe they could miracle up a justification that still plays on hard mode when you take out all the god parts & assume personal responsibility for the toils down here on the mortal coil
This is a terrific way to think about this. Southern Baptists used to stand at the forefront of fighting for the separation of church and state and always portrayed Catholicism as the greatest menace to freedom in America, and then they just became what they feared.
In Callais, the GOP justices said Congress *exceeds its authority to protect voters of color under the 15th Amendment* unless a law is precisely calibrated to address ONLY conduct so obviously racist that even Alito admits it's intentional racial discriminationballsandstrikes.org/scotus/alito…
the Voting Rights Act was a plainly appropriate exercise of Congress's constitutional authorityto rewrite the VRA, the Republican justices had to rewrite the Constitution itselfthat's a threat to ANY future congressional effort to build a multiracial democracyballsandstrikes.org/scotus/alito…
“No apportionment plan or individual district shall be drawn with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent.”Florida Constitution, art. III, § 20
Tbh I feel like the easier but still productive law isnt an outright ban (you need data centers for eg Netflix) but a law requiring any data center company build out enough renewables to power their center first and link to the grid
If the Democrats let Republicans have this INSANELY easy W, I am going to be apoplectic. This shit polls like chlamydia. Get on the other side of it now and be loud about it.
Like all the papers citing the direct problems of datacenters are either super localized (like about that atlanta(?) one that totally fucked a town’s limited water table) or really erroneous data (temperature one) — the more material problem is the power plants theyre getting built with
Less glonzo though, so maybe less politically effective
I feel like if you’re a poster on this site who believes that AI is a bubble and the tech isnt viable you should be far more in favor of a renewable buildout requirement rather than a ban, like with a ban you get status quo, with buildout requirement you get dope green power after the bubble pops
I guess if i’m remembering conlaw right it does run into more takings problems than an outright ban would, which is kinda wild
…&…I…might actually lose it if I try to explain how fucking apoplectic it makes me feel to really think about what all is happening under the banner of the umbrella term of “AI” & how it seems like criminal levels of misrepresentation in just about every way I can imagine while also somehow dumping incomprehensible quantities of otherwise perfectly spendable actual money into a machine for making almost all of it vanish to no purpose while the tiny scraps…thanks to the miracle of hyperscale…are staggeringly vast personal fortunes scaled to look like little dribbles on the swing top bin lid into which all the money is getting scraped…but…here’s one of the free-to-read I-can’t-believe-it’s-worse-than-one-of-them-interminable-DOTs ones from your boy ed
…&…they fucking don’t…like…any more than it makes sense to say there’s a sitting president of the US
Before his meeting with Milei, Peter Thiel had “lunch with Santiago Caputo, Milei’s strategic advisor & the administration’s principal link to Washington” and “dinner at the residence of Deregulation & State Transformation Minister Federico Sturzenegger…” 4/23/26 … 1/
like if you think history has a singularity in it–as in, a discontinuity of equations, a great break–then in many ways that frees you from the prison of the past–it lets you both see the past in all its ugliness *without* thereby committing yourself to that ugliness, forever
I assume you mean "if you have the math concepts to write Malthus you can optimize agriculture and industry" but it's fun to parse this as a conspiracy.
Right after I wrote that I thought to myself "but why?" and I'm not sure I know the answer to that question. I feel like there's a reasonable causal linkage and that the math concepts are probably part of that linkage.
My answer would be: because Malthus could see the Malthusian constraints breaking down before his eyes. Remember, this had happened many times before, there had been many brief efflorescences. What Malthus didn't anticipate was that economic growth rates would exceed population growth rates.
…see…it’s not just me that’s this sort of fucked up in the head
my handwavy reply would be to focus less on the math concepts and more on the development of a statistical apparatus for measuring and thinking about population level characteristics as per the relevant bits of John Brewer's The Sinews of Power.
mokyr just won a nobel for advancing more or less this explanation. i tend to think it's wrong but it's not exactly crazy either. the wrong part is this: science itself is a product of the open societywww.nobelprize.org/prizes/econo…
…some might even argue I’m…sometimes…not even this far gone
Mmm science is great but I think the main obstacle to capital accumulation was subjecting all the productive workers and resources to the arbitrary command of a hereditary caste of dipshit tyrants
Want to be clear I mean aristocratic landowners, not merely monarchy
…ok…so…I’m…almost certainly going to make this worse yet…but…that looks like my deadline on the clock
I can talk about all the things Malthus* got right, but it is not what he is famous for in pop culture*Thomas Malthus dad Daniel is an unimportant person and does not have a wikipedia entry but Daniel Malthus was socially connected to other people such as David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Daniel Malthus dies in 1800, and he was a big believer of the revolution and Rousseau.Well Thomas Malthus famous 1798 essay developed due son and dad debating this subject matter right before dad dies at age 70.Simultaneously we know these facts due to family friend William Otter who does have
a wikipedia article for he was Principal at King College when that university became new and was also a Bishop. Thomas and William toured europe together in 1799.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William…Well William wrote the preface of Malthus econ textbook and also wrote a Memoir of him.The dad Daniel
Encouraged his son’s writings and was a believer of the enlightenment whichhe thought his smart but wrong son believed in. Likewise Ricardo is the Sons best friend another famous economist, and Ricardo was the socialist guy trying how to figure out how to do the
( skips over the econ stuff Malthus got right for I had enough econ for **many** lifetimes, signed the econ major who believes we can improve+repair this world )www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4XP…
for the foreseeable future, every llm has enough puppyplay chat and fan fiction in its training that you can jailbreak them by finding new and different ways to allude to treating them like dogs
the opposition bloc is “the literal military which has been committing war crimes, a settler lunatic broadly to the right of Netanyahu, and a center-wing newsreader.”
Blaming all Israelis for the actions of Netanyahu is as senseless as blaming all Americans for the actions of Trump.
otoh the protests against netanyahu have been massive so i feel like i’m misunderstanding something about israeli politics
…any resemblance to persons either living or dead is entirely coincidental…is that how the disclaimer reads?
I do not think Israel is militaristic because they've been treated poorly by western powers. It's exactly the opposite. My concerns about rhetoric begin and end with its effects on the diaspora. When rhetoric is weighed against Israel itself, I'm seeing a scale with 100k dead on the other side
Israel: in order to protect the Druze, we will carve out a narcostatelet in southern Syria by force of arms. Of course, Jordan is welcome to bomb them whenever they see fit
…if any equivalence can beat the false equivalence charges these days because we apparently forgot how to apply those
hey so who wants to bet that the reason for this is that the russian government had a compliant eu state with direct access to eu banks with which to spend russian money in the west on influence operations
Everyone who thought that cutting aid to Ukraine would yield a peace dividend is a massive mark, just spotted fawn levels of naïveté
Meanwhile, the total requested defense spending for the United States for 2027 is approximately $1.5 trillion—a record figure, 50% higher than the current level.
If you’re curious what Tucker Carlson believes just listen to what Tucker says Unearthed audio shows Tucker Carlson using white nationalist rhetoric and making racist remarks www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carls…
Room temperature optimizing twitter politics guy: the leftist hysteria that democrat leadership must combine fascism with kitchen table issues only destroys democratic messaging
Trump: I AM ADOLF HITLER AND I WANT YOU TO PAY INFINITY DOLLARS FOR GASOLINE AS THE PRICE OF LOYALTY TO ME, ADOLF HITLER
graphcel poasters like me: there is no omnicause that combines us imperialist atrocities abroad with cost of living issues at home; in general american hegemony serves the material interests of the electorate, so . . .
Trump: AT LONG LAST I HAVE INVENTED OMNICAUSE, THE WAR CRIME THAT MAKES YOU POOR
…fuck this noise
Lying again that the war is over and Hormuz is open didn't work, berating allies (again) to fix it for us didn't work (again), so we're back to threatening mass war crimes in the hope that the regime that didn't collapse or capitulate in the face of bombing will in the face of threats. Again.
"But we stand firmly by our belief that it’s more important for the press to maintain a hollow facade of impartiality than to risk seeming too biased against planet annihilation."
"The Voting Rights Act actually took away political representation from white people. They went from being wildly overrepresented in Congress to being slightly less overrepresented. Isn’t taking something away from a group of people based on their color racial discrimination?" buff.ly/bwVT63L
When I bang on about “today in neither our media nor our political system is designed to deal with far right authoritarianism,” this is what I’m saying. @nberlat.bsky.social covers the core reasons why it’s hard for so many to call the thing what it actually is, which isn’t “polarization.”
why do people claim our problem is polarization when our problem is clearly fascism? I talk about some reasons.
those reasons are: they like fascist policy, they want to use fascism for power, and/or they are in community with fascists. https://www.everythingishorrible.net/p/the-polarization-discourse-is-bad […] though, tbf, and fwiw, I do think Ezra Klein sounds like he was pushing this anti polarization nonsense out of sincere despair. defaulting to polarization can be a kind of surrender to fascism in that sense.
which is still I think a moral failing, but not exactly bad faith.
…speaking of
Have seen this cycle a lot of times: Paper promotes the benefits of AI in education, paper is hyped in media/LinkedIn/in AI circles. Paper is retracted as bullshit months laterwww.404media.co/nature-retra…
Eh, rents are high, but in 1901 your labor would be spent roughly 40% on food, 15% on clothing, and 23% on rent. In 2026 it's more like 15% on food, 35% on rent, and 3% on clothing. So rent is higher but disposable income is *markedly* higher in both real and relative terms
And the further back you go, the more it sucked. In 1800 the numbers were more like 75% on food, 10% on rent, 10% on clothing, for an "essentials" labor cost of 85-95% of your entire income/labor equivalent
You'd spend ~ 0% of manual labor on clothing back then but only because it's subsidized by some vast amount of the total labor output of all women in that era
Anthropology fun fact – nutrition, dental hygiene & lifespan all decrease with transition from rural/farming to urban/labor environments – until the last 100-150 years, and that was mostly limited to the northern hemisphere.And subsistence cultures had better nutrition & teeth than farmers.
My rent might be ~35% of my post-deductions salary, but I’d also like to see someone from the 1900s react to the central heating system… or the dishwasher… or the tumble dryer… or the washing machine, fridge, oven……Hell even just the bed.
In early c20 London, the average 4 bedroom apartment held 25 families, and the toilet was a piece of paper in the corner. They would be incandescently angry if the average Bluesky Stancil reply guy explained the supposed material suffering that have driven them to vote against labor.
Trump is 30 minutes and counting late to a White House event — he's so late the jazz group warming up for him ran out of tunes and stopped playing — but as I type this he is posting Fox News clips on Truth Social, so we at least know he's still among the living.
…ok…I really will try to give it a fucking rest in a minute…but…I’m not the one who was on a roll?
If you're a young leftist looking for an inspirational model for politics and can't come up with anyone better than Stalin or Mao I'm going to encourage you to read a second book.
But Kevin, everything negative about Stalin and Mao is just Western propaganda. But also they were right to crack down harshly on dissent with slave labor camps and executions because they needed to stop counter revolutions, but also those exaggerated but also highly necessary.
Since 2004, newspapers have lost over 77% of their jobs. That’s the single steepest drop by any of the 532 industries tracked by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. With your help, we’re going to reverse this.
I'm utterly fascinated by the modern art of journalistic simulacrumat no point do this piece's four authors consider wandering anywhere close to the idea of corruption, or that Trump says a lot of things that are utterly meaningless, or that our regulators no longer function in the public interest
Not a controversial take necessarily. But do you know who doesn’t get enough credit? That Ion Cannon crew from ESB. Talk about some accurate and responsive fires. Just wiping out star destroyers left and right directly over the shoulders of the supported alliance spacecraft
ENGAGEMENT BAIT! What is your MOST CONTROVERSIAL Star Wars opinion? And I don’t want embarrassingly lukewarm takes like “Jabba The Hutt was actually a good employer”. I need opinions that could land you in jail. GO!
We won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting @chicagotribune.com! Our entire newsroom covered Midway Blitz with everything we had. I’ve never been prouder of the Tribune or its commitment to the truth. It’s an honor to be part of this team.
…for real…that clone wars show made me lose pretty much all my respect for the moral standing of the good guys in that universe…they treat their clone guys like they treat the “clankers”…& they have no fucking business being in charge of how the fighting part happens when that’s big guns & lots of people not some sort of space-ninja vs samurai honor duel thing…it’s fucking nuts how many of their own people they feed to the meatgrinder like napoleon or some russian loony tune…for…well…for not-realsies?
[…speaking of which…in the draft that post displays but when I load the page it gets a not found tag so apologies if this doubles up but otherwise it looks like the clone wars reference is either stretching a long way to callback the peak star wars thing near the top with the image of lucas…or I’m at least somewhat more far gone than I’d at least attempt to argue I really am/was/tend to be?]
…will see if I can find a way to make time to make a spot down here for something I’d rather listen to but I dunno what my chances are…still…wordpress continues to maintain I thus far haven’t even wasted 20mins of your time today…& that ed zitron link comes with a read-time estimate of 37mins…so…we might be on tardis rules today…&…I’m no doctor…so that’s probably above my pay-grade
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It’s utterly amazing to me that nobody in our current government regime realizes how easy it is to disable and destroy ships. It’s a floating husk of steel that requires incredibly complex equipment to run. Hell, they fall apart on their own, without a drone strike. I guess most people didn’t grow up around lakes and beaches and don’t understand how finicky they are. The standard definition here is “a hole in the water that you pour money into.”
…so…I happened to be listening to hairslick give it the “lane is clear” right when I read that comment…&…since afaik the proof of concept with the ones they “escorted” would be ones that ran in the dark before they announced the red white & blue dome of operation freedom was in effect…& the US navy stuff transiting the channel is not quite the rolling 24/7 sort of traffic the rhetoric appears to imply the way whiskey-dick pete puts it…I dunno…there may or may not actually be a connection to be made…or found…but if I’m honest the very next thing that came to mind for me was this
…& I have not read that story in a long time & when I did it was absent the intermediate layer of translation so maybe I got the wrong end of the stick about some stuff…but…iirc…much of the gist of the thing was that you couldn’t very well say the nazis didn’t occupy paris…but…they didn’t come & do that in the fullness of their pomp & circumstance under a bright blue sky in the light of the sun & mayhap a god…they did it in the night…the way you’d talk about how a thief “steals in” to the place that should have guarded the treasure they plan to loot…& that in a sense that was sensible enough to those with local cultural sensibilities to be real enough to cling to…tacitly…that part was an admission that those asterix comics were on to something about gaul having pockets of indomitable characters…that they could move in & throw their weight about & pretend that was the same as the residents being powerless to do anything about it…but everybody understood they hadn’t “won” paris…they couldn’t make paris be german…& I dunno who’s been to paris…but…it has at least one thing in common with new york & london…there’s all kinds of people & lots of them don’t get along more often than not & they’re all stacked up on each other a little too much not to have ambient levels of stir crazy before you even get to the baseline…but if you want to get pretty much all of them to agree?
…ask them what they think of the tourists
…& those only carry cameras & umbrellas & can’t read the road signs or figure out not to block the top of the escalator in the middle of rush hour like spatial awareness is a thing that only happens to other people…they don’t blow shit up & shoot people…like…hospitals…& schools…& kids…sometimes kids who already got blown up enough to be in the hospital instead of the school…but…everyplace just about agrees that the places with the most money need to spend lots more of that on the blowing shit up & killing people line items than the schools & hospitals ones…because…real politik & ’twas-ever-thus & such
…but also…the event horizon at the bottom of the capex money pit that’s sunk hundreds of billions in hypothetically-could-have-done-some “good” money after a sales-pitch that broke containment in a post-truth information age for a product nobody has & a headline demand that achieves the eye-watering numbers due to the less-than-a-dozen players at the table with pockets deep enough to get away with claiming they’re allowed to convert the most massaged version of their numbers they can get the lawyers to let them say they’re posting now…to invert the loss that nets out of the revenue that’s mostly one of them paying for another one to be able to have something the other one can charge back the other way on a different page of the n-dimensional joint balance sheet that the valuation uses to infer the stock prices of all concerned…has some overlap…working out better for your palantir than your anduril last I heard…although…I also heard palantir referred to as hitler-salesforce…&…kinda can’t see a way to refute that label
…but…for fucks sake…if all this bullshit is justified because it’s important to know whose god could fuck up whose other-god…& it matters so god-damn much to the damned gods…how about we sit the shit out & let those duke it out while we get to heckle & eat hot-dogs or whatever…& quit trying to squander the wealth of nations on a machine for ducking any personal responsibility for the part where we let people in our orbit perpetuate this bullshit like there isn’t any other way any of this shit could work
…let your god take it up with their god…& meanwhile your people can get in touch with their people…& maybe do lunch…break bread…pull your head out of your fucking ass & admit we all fucking live here & acting like there’s a landlord who’s responsible for the shit we aren’t doing is going to fix the plumbing or the heating/air-con is about as helpful as setting fire to the room you’re sitting in
…eh…don’t mind me…I’ll probably just be the regular amount of grumpy again by tomorrow…just…some days…muttermuttergrumblemutter
…ifallyou’regoingtodoismoantheyshouldtakeyourteethaway
…muttergripegrouchgrumble…uhhh…as you were?
…his nominal boss thinks the power move is removing US forces from germany
…neither logistics nor inventory feature in the sizzle-reel version of the briefing process that is the only information either have the cognitive capacity to process
…this continues to be an observable reality exploited by all the places that never claimed to be the “in solidarity with your espoused worldview” allies column & indeed pretty clear about what conveniences needed to remain in the marriage for it to continue to avoid divorce on the grounds of a breach of contract…have…been exploiting…openly…for…time, now…while the erstwhile actual-allies allies from when there was an axis from before the axis of evil one…are all giving it the “well, I thought you invited him – aren’t you meant to be all buddy-buddy” about uncle sam now he’s *that* uncle sam from facebook who threw away the remote so the TV has to stay on & only plays fox news
…&…they’ll show the world…when they…make it so there’s no US military footprint…in…germany
…& it’ll look like an evangelist telethon tent-revival when the “talent” does the tv spot?
They are so hysterically desperate to pin everything on Biden and don’t seem to realize that a) nobody’s buying and b) the more they invoke him, the more ridiculous they look.
I think me getting 90% on the psyche final in my mid 50s is a lot more of a mental flex than being able to remember “Purple, Monkey, Dishwasher”, but who’s kidding who. Trump is the greatest person who ever lived and I’m just a loser nobody…
…long time ago…like…before I even really knew she did music…someone once told me they’d known that lady when she was a kid…& she was like the guy who gets outed as a fake gangsta in the finale rap battle in 8-mile
…I forget the details…but I think maybe her dad was a some-would-say-rebel-some-would-say-dissenters-some-would-say-freedom-fighters-some-would-say-terrorist type big deal in a particular pocket of the world that she consequently didn’t grow up in seemed to be the bulk of the “it’s weird & fake & nothing like she was when I knew her” thing that at the time…which I guess is about as long ago as the intervening career might be said to have lasted…but I mostly remember the whole bit coming at it from the perspective of it being sad because she’d been nice & not at all full-of-herself or given any sign of thinking about the world the way it’s looked like she does for however-many years?
Maybe my most lib-coded belief is that if you put people in a better information system, they would be less inclined to believe in stupid shit. And this is not a pass for Trump voters, who are almost assuredly deeply racist and likely even more sexist, but it is an acknowledgement that the things they believe generally don’t spring from their own brainpans, and if you were to unravel more of this shit globally — and it is absolutely a global thing — you would find that it’s the same players playing the same game everywhere, with just slight local variations.
oh…sorry about that..
figuring out get rich schemes and damn the side effects is kind of our thing here….so whilst i didnt know we were behind it..im not very surprised..
I neglected to fully say this last time but my strongest labor belief is smoking during work should be discouraged but smoke breaks should be legally mandated in all industries. I work a boring white-collar job now but I remember working garbage shifts doing crap and nothing hit the spot like 5 minutes to breathe. (We should also make companies hire more people to make jobs less demanding but that’s a 57,000-word manifesto and we’re not getting into that here…)
I don’t think the capital class is smart enough to have thought of this, but I do think there’s a real through-line between “everyone has zero slack at work” and “everyone is too tired to engage in civic life.”
…one of my favorite running bits in lower decks is the load-bearing bit of a wonderfully orchestrated clusterfuck when he improves efficiency by outing the secret wiggle-room padding all the work/time estimates that’s always let whoever is in scotty’s position appear to work last second miracles that defy the laws of physics in our temporo-spatial locality…& the cascade failure nearly annihilates the whole crew before they manage to go back to pretending
…so…hard agree, I think…kind of dovetails with the thing where your boss wouldn’t have posted you extra work after you went home for the day…& might even not have called the phone that would wake the whole house after whenever might seem polite…if only because they wouldn’t get the most out of you if you were up all night getting the kids down again or rowing with the mrs about not reading your boss the riot act for taking liberties…& the letter wouldn’t get to you until you were back at work anyway
…maybe…if it was a big screaming deal they’d send a telegram like in jeeves & wooster…or…other more serious things…to wherever you were that might take a day or more to turn into being wherever the telegram came from…but could be minutes if you were holmes hotfooting it from baker street to somewhere “in town”
…but mobile phones…email…& text messages…along with apparently maybe leaning in on the irony lever by killing out the social skillset that is actually speaking to other people on a telephone so the phone part either side of the long-way-away tele bit is actual voices, plural…of actual people…not a person opting not to speak communicating in a closed loop composed of a chain of devices & computational elements…until it arguably stops making sense that we call the form factor a phone still…either way all that shit really eroded a lot of the work/life balance stuff that unavoidable daily realities used to hold down when it came to the economic necessity of making provision for downtime…or leisure…the provision of which is after all where many of the largest industries by profit make their bones…which requires people to be not-currently-working to work that way
…when it came to the meaning of gotta work for a living…there didn’t used to be weekends…much less long ones…a few high days & holidays back when those were holy days…maybe a few festivals if the local government weren’t the cromwell/footloose sort…childhood wasn’t really “a thing” & the teenager hadn’t been invented yet much less the gap year
…but…on the other end of the see-saw…until some bloke who could probably have written a whole book just on all the places sand will get that you might not want it to out where they fashioned our numbers for the first time went & codified a 0…&…at least where the sort of “western thought” this guy tried to play geneology games with is concerned
…there being some greek polities that had managed to induce a class of people with the nigh-unthinkable privilege of having…leisure…that might be spent doing such utterly pointless stuff as thinking about thinking about things…until an aristotle falls out…or a pythagoras…& nobody has to learn about omar khayyam because it doesn’t really matter whether newton or leibnitz “invented” calculus if calculus didn’t essentially prove itself in the act of functioning once someone pointed out the moving parts to you in a different medium…that juggled the numbers on nice two-dimensional bounded surface the rules of which are much easier to follow than the workings on the page that past a certain point might as well be glyphs for all the stuff they’re imbued with that aren’t tagged ‘verbose’ in the terminal window of our mind’s eye
…&…I dunno…I’m as much of a fan of the monty python philosophers’ song as most & maybe more than the next person on a statistical probability basis weighted by a demographic or two…but…even so…I tend to think maybe…annoying as the bastards are…people with time on their hands are possibly a big deal on a society basis the way round things with a hole right in the actual middle are kind of a big deal…it’s a neat trick for a smug monkey to pull off with more applications than you could shake the proverbial stick at…&…treated well…it gets you not just crafts but masters thereof…& some of those can work wonders with stuff that’s just…lying around…some of it’s even useful…it’s sort of a miracle really
…downside is you get piers morgan & tucker carslon & hannity & russel brand & people who stan people who mog people & think it’s gay to be married with kids…fuck a mortgage…live in the cloud…it’s more real than real life that’s not even real because echo chamber mainstream media that’s just what they want you to think but actually I should just get to do whatever I like & be told all the time how cool that makes me by lots of people who only might be people & I definitely never met…so someone that probably isn’t me that I have met & think is way-un-cool & don’t really like to be around…makes way more money off the back of it all than I do…because that’s how influence works when it’s your job description…& it’s all about the side-hustle in a paradigm where no interest is too niche to be a gig…say it with me now…”in *this* economy”
[…you know…most times…even when maybe it seems like it goes worse than this…I….don’t generally feel this guilty about what all this taking-it-out-on-a-keyboard sounds like…it might be less of a moral injury to have spent that time chain-smoking…but I never quite took to that the same way I seemed to take to…whatever this is?]
If quality isn’t a major concern — and unless you’re making a luxury item aimed at rich people, it rarely is — then it’s entirely about how little manpower you need to keep the lights on. Jack Welch called it “lean” which is to say “more work for fewer people.”
Moreover, I don’t think productivity studies really capture worker effort or whatever but productivity gains completely decoupled from pay gains in the ’70s and ’80s and, as such, people are expected to handle way more now than they did then for basically the same or less pay vs. inflationary pressure. No wonder people are tired all the time! We’re really not meant to live like this!
My wife used to work for a company that was founded by a couple of former schoolteachers. And one of the things they did was ring bells. They rang a bell when the workday started and they rang them for lunch and they rang them at the end of the day. And they also rang them at 10 am and 2 pm for your break. And you were required to take a break and you could. not. work. for 15 minutes. And then they rang another bell.
Which sounds pretty draconian, but part of the deal was during that 15 minutes, you could do anything you wanted, as long as it wasn’t work-related. Browse the Internet, online shopping, go outside, read a book, make phone calls, have a snack, ANYTHING (no violations of company policy, of course, like looking at p0rn).
And the surprising thing was, people actually got used to it and in a lot of ways, liked it.
Pretty much. I mean, they didn’t restrict bathroom trips or coffee or anything like that. But there were a bunch of knock-on effects that were overall beneficial. Couldn’t schedule meetings during that time, so meetings had a built-in limit. One thing they were firm on was that if you smoked, you did it then. Period. And I’ve worked with a lot of smokers who were highly productive but there are those who are outside for 20-30 minutes every hour. Not a lot, because people tend to notice and that tends to get weeded out, but there’s been a couple in every large company I’ve worked for.
…somewhere there’s a great interview with the guy that’s best mates with bruce springsteen & played the part about the so-meta-it’s-like-meta-meta filming of the scene in the sopranos where it’s him playing sylvio doing an impression that was turned into a sort of semi-recurring bit of the line from the movie that goes “just when you thought you were out…they pull you back in”
…& how between the people who wrote it & made it & advised & consulted & were around the script & the casting & the production & in a few places the actual cast (iirc & I’m not confusing that part with the wire) you had a scene where a guy who you could legitimately call a rock star…not remotely the illegitimate sort of legit…is doing an impression of an actor pretending to be a gangster to pander to the sense of humor of a group of pretend-career-gangsters…for the specific purpose of underlining the scorn they have for the guy they’re bitching about being on tv for broadly the reason the author of the book that movie was based on might be…on the grounds that he never really made it off the shop-floor level of the pyramid scheme & is a bullshit psuedo-authority
…when there’s a natural language interface with a tech construct that can not only parse all of that just watching the show & not need the interview to spell it out for it to play parrot/do-the-chinese-room-thing with until it passes in a forgiving light for the puppy learning a new trick called “knowledge” like a firmware upgrade that gives data emotions in the star trek sense…but…if that…then all this fuss would be burying the lede even at this degree of insanity at the hype horizon
…sigh…ok…today…at least can’t go on like this much longer because I actually have to be places & do things that make typing impractical…which will no doubt be a relief for all…but before this got away from me…again
…sopranos…the friend…wanna say artie…the one with the restaurant
…fat tony was yellow in the simpsons but [speech about stealing bread to feed my family only maybe it isn’t bread & maybe it’s not that sorta family] “à l’orange”…&…I dunno…chicken-fried hawk on the side…with…grits…&…that gravy that really shouldn’t be called that if you claim to respect the king of england…only the restaurant is the white house &/or the edifice of the federal government of what used to be the beacon of the free world
…so…somehow…even as most of me thinks that’s still shocking enough to induce outrage…also…of course they fucking did…that’s how the playbook runs that one…give or take the iceberg basement under the table(s) part?
It’s utterly amazing to me that nobody in our current government regime realizes how easy it is to disable and destroy ships. It’s a floating husk of steel that requires incredibly complex equipment to run. Hell, they fall apart on their own, without a drone strike. I guess most people didn’t grow up around lakes and beaches and don’t understand how finicky they are. The standard definition here is “a hole in the water that you pour money into.”
…so…I happened to be listening to hairslick give it the “lane is clear” right when I read that comment…&…since afaik the proof of concept with the ones they “escorted” would be ones that ran in the dark before they announced the red white & blue dome of operation freedom was in effect…& the US navy stuff transiting the channel is not quite the rolling 24/7 sort of traffic the rhetoric appears to imply the way whiskey-dick pete puts it…I dunno…there may or may not actually be a connection to be made…or found…but if I’m honest the very next thing that came to mind for me was this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Silence_de_la_mer
…& I have not read that story in a long time & when I did it was absent the intermediate layer of translation so maybe I got the wrong end of the stick about some stuff…but…iirc…much of the gist of the thing was that you couldn’t very well say the nazis didn’t occupy paris…but…they didn’t come & do that in the fullness of their pomp & circumstance under a bright blue sky in the light of the sun & mayhap a god…they did it in the night…the way you’d talk about how a thief “steals in” to the place that should have guarded the treasure they plan to loot…& that in a sense that was sensible enough to those with local cultural sensibilities to be real enough to cling to…tacitly…that part was an admission that those asterix comics were on to something about gaul having pockets of indomitable characters…that they could move in & throw their weight about & pretend that was the same as the residents being powerless to do anything about it…but everybody understood they hadn’t “won” paris…they couldn’t make paris be german…& I dunno who’s been to paris…but…it has at least one thing in common with new york & london…there’s all kinds of people & lots of them don’t get along more often than not & they’re all stacked up on each other a little too much not to have ambient levels of stir crazy before you even get to the baseline…but if you want to get pretty much all of them to agree?
…ask them what they think of the tourists
…& those only carry cameras & umbrellas & can’t read the road signs or figure out not to block the top of the escalator in the middle of rush hour like spatial awareness is a thing that only happens to other people…they don’t blow shit up & shoot people…like…hospitals…& schools…& kids…sometimes kids who already got blown up enough to be in the hospital instead of the school…but…everyplace just about agrees that the places with the most money need to spend lots more of that on the blowing shit up & killing people line items than the schools & hospitals ones…because…real politik & ’twas-ever-thus & such
…but also…the event horizon at the bottom of the capex money pit that’s sunk hundreds of billions in hypothetically-could-have-done-some “good” money after a sales-pitch that broke containment in a post-truth information age for a product nobody has & a headline demand that achieves the eye-watering numbers due to the less-than-a-dozen players at the table with pockets deep enough to get away with claiming they’re allowed to convert the most massaged version of their numbers they can get the lawyers to let them say they’re posting now…to invert the loss that nets out of the revenue that’s mostly one of them paying for another one to be able to have something the other one can charge back the other way on a different page of the n-dimensional joint balance sheet that the valuation uses to infer the stock prices of all concerned…has some overlap…working out better for your palantir than your anduril last I heard…although…I also heard palantir referred to as hitler-salesforce…&…kinda can’t see a way to refute that label
…but…for fucks sake…if all this bullshit is justified because it’s important to know whose god could fuck up whose other-god…& it matters so god-damn much to the damned gods…how about we sit the shit out & let those duke it out while we get to heckle & eat hot-dogs or whatever…& quit trying to squander the wealth of nations on a machine for ducking any personal responsibility for the part where we let people in our orbit perpetuate this bullshit like there isn’t any other way any of this shit could work
…let your god take it up with their god…& meanwhile your people can get in touch with their people…& maybe do lunch…break bread…pull your head out of your fucking ass & admit we all fucking live here & acting like there’s a landlord who’s responsible for the shit we aren’t doing is going to fix the plumbing or the heating/air-con is about as helpful as setting fire to the room you’re sitting in
…eh…don’t mind me…I’ll probably just be the regular amount of grumpy again by tomorrow…just…some days…muttermuttergrumblemutter
…ifallyou’regoingtodoismoantheyshouldtakeyourteethaway
…muttergripegrouchgrumble…uhhh…as you were?
They don’t care about the details. That’s for losers and geeks. They’re big picture “men.”
I mean, this but the entire military: “WE NEED WARFIGHTERS”
And how will those warfighters be getting to the battlefield? “WARFIGHTERS!”
And how will those warfighters be resupplied? “WARFIGHTERS”
And how will those warfighters know where to go and what the enemy is up to? “YOU GUESSED IT: WARFIGHTERS”
Now you understand Murrican “Bullshido”
Yep. Fox News cosplayer has zero fucking grasp of modern military or warfare. But he’s got tattoos and can do a few pull-ups, so okay.
…his nominal boss thinks the power move is removing US forces from germany
…neither logistics nor inventory feature in the sizzle-reel version of the briefing process that is the only information either have the cognitive capacity to process
…this continues to be an observable reality exploited by all the places that never claimed to be the “in solidarity with your espoused worldview” allies column & indeed pretty clear about what conveniences needed to remain in the marriage for it to continue to avoid divorce on the grounds of a breach of contract…have…been exploiting…openly…for…time, now…while the erstwhile actual-allies allies from when there was an axis from before the axis of evil one…are all giving it the “well, I thought you invited him – aren’t you meant to be all buddy-buddy” about uncle sam now he’s *that* uncle sam from facebook who threw away the remote so the TV has to stay on & only plays fox news
…&…they’ll show the world…when they…make it so there’s no US military footprint…in…germany
…& it’ll look like an evangelist telethon tent-revival when the “talent” does the tv spot?
They are so hysterically desperate to pin everything on Biden and don’t seem to realize that a) nobody’s buying and b) the more they invoke him, the more ridiculous they look.
Can’t afford beef? Blame those damn ‘Biden vegans.’
Would have been more appropriate yesterday, but it still fits.
It does fit, particularly in light of polls saying people now believe Biden was a better president.
That whole speech yesterday … I know, I know, but each one is somehow more batshit than the one before.
Trump acing cognitive tests is not the flex he thinks it is
I think me getting 90% on the psyche final in my mid 50s is a lot more of a mental flex than being able to remember “Purple, Monkey, Dishwasher”, but who’s kidding who. Trump is the greatest person who ever lived and I’m just a loser nobody…
MIA’s mind went MIA. Another MAHA idiot narcissist gone full MAGAt.
Good. We need to bring back public shaming. You can be as stupid as you want, and we’re allowed to let you know how fucking stupid you are.
…long time ago…like…before I even really knew she did music…someone once told me they’d known that lady when she was a kid…& she was like the guy who gets outed as a fake gangsta in the finale rap battle in 8-mile
…I forget the details…but I think maybe her dad was a some-would-say-rebel-some-would-say-dissenters-some-would-say-freedom-fighters-some-would-say-terrorist type big deal in a particular pocket of the world that she consequently didn’t grow up in seemed to be the bulk of the “it’s weird & fake & nothing like she was when I knew her” thing that at the time…which I guess is about as long ago as the intervening career might be said to have lasted…but I mostly remember the whole bit coming at it from the perspective of it being sad because she’d been nice & not at all full-of-herself or given any sign of thinking about the world the way it’s looked like she does for however-many years?
We can blame Farscythe’s nation. Kind of.
It seems some of the suddenly new channels pushing Alberta Separation are from the Netherlands using US voice actors.
Done strictly for profit?
Maybe my most lib-coded belief is that if you put people in a better information system, they would be less inclined to believe in stupid shit. And this is not a pass for Trump voters, who are almost assuredly deeply racist and likely even more sexist, but it is an acknowledgement that the things they believe generally don’t spring from their own brainpans, and if you were to unravel more of this shit globally — and it is absolutely a global thing — you would find that it’s the same players playing the same game everywhere, with just slight local variations.
oh…sorry about that..
figuring out get rich schemes and damn the side effects is kind of our thing here….so whilst i didnt know we were behind it..im not very surprised..
I neglected to fully say this last time but my strongest labor belief is smoking during work should be discouraged but smoke breaks should be legally mandated in all industries. I work a boring white-collar job now but I remember working garbage shifts doing crap and nothing hit the spot like 5 minutes to breathe. (We should also make companies hire more people to make jobs less demanding but that’s a 57,000-word manifesto and we’re not getting into that here…)
I don’t think the capital class is smart enough to have thought of this, but I do think there’s a real through-line between “everyone has zero slack at work” and “everyone is too tired to engage in civic life.”
…one of my favorite running bits in lower decks is the load-bearing bit of a wonderfully orchestrated clusterfuck when he improves efficiency by outing the secret wiggle-room padding all the work/time estimates that’s always let whoever is in scotty’s position appear to work last second miracles that defy the laws of physics in our temporo-spatial locality…& the cascade failure nearly annihilates the whole crew before they manage to go back to pretending
…so…hard agree, I think…kind of dovetails with the thing where your boss wouldn’t have posted you extra work after you went home for the day…& might even not have called the phone that would wake the whole house after whenever might seem polite…if only because they wouldn’t get the most out of you if you were up all night getting the kids down again or rowing with the mrs about not reading your boss the riot act for taking liberties…& the letter wouldn’t get to you until you were back at work anyway
…maybe…if it was a big screaming deal they’d send a telegram like in jeeves & wooster…or…other more serious things…to wherever you were that might take a day or more to turn into being wherever the telegram came from…but could be minutes if you were holmes hotfooting it from baker street to somewhere “in town”
…but mobile phones…email…& text messages…along with apparently maybe leaning in on the irony lever by killing out the social skillset that is actually speaking to other people on a telephone so the phone part either side of the long-way-away tele bit is actual voices, plural…of actual people…not a person opting not to speak communicating in a closed loop composed of a chain of devices & computational elements…until it arguably stops making sense that we call the form factor a phone still…either way all that shit really eroded a lot of the work/life balance stuff that unavoidable daily realities used to hold down when it came to the economic necessity of making provision for downtime…or leisure…the provision of which is after all where many of the largest industries by profit make their bones…which requires people to be not-currently-working to work that way
…when it came to the meaning of gotta work for a living…there didn’t used to be weekends…much less long ones…a few high days & holidays back when those were holy days…maybe a few festivals if the local government weren’t the cromwell/footloose sort…childhood wasn’t really “a thing” & the teenager hadn’t been invented yet much less the gap year
…but…on the other end of the see-saw…until some bloke who could probably have written a whole book just on all the places sand will get that you might not want it to out where they fashioned our numbers for the first time went & codified a 0…&…at least where the sort of “western thought” this guy tried to play geneology games with is concerned
…there being some greek polities that had managed to induce a class of people with the nigh-unthinkable privilege of having…leisure…that might be spent doing such utterly pointless stuff as thinking about thinking about things…until an aristotle falls out…or a pythagoras…& nobody has to learn about omar khayyam because it doesn’t really matter whether newton or leibnitz “invented” calculus if calculus didn’t essentially prove itself in the act of functioning once someone pointed out the moving parts to you in a different medium…that juggled the numbers on nice two-dimensional bounded surface the rules of which are much easier to follow than the workings on the page that past a certain point might as well be glyphs for all the stuff they’re imbued with that aren’t tagged ‘verbose’ in the terminal window of our mind’s eye
…&…I dunno…I’m as much of a fan of the monty python philosophers’ song as most & maybe more than the next person on a statistical probability basis weighted by a demographic or two…but…even so…I tend to think maybe…annoying as the bastards are…people with time on their hands are possibly a big deal on a society basis the way round things with a hole right in the actual middle are kind of a big deal…it’s a neat trick for a smug monkey to pull off with more applications than you could shake the proverbial stick at…&…treated well…it gets you not just crafts but masters thereof…& some of those can work wonders with stuff that’s just…lying around…some of it’s even useful…it’s sort of a miracle really
…downside is you get piers morgan & tucker carslon & hannity & russel brand & people who stan people who mog people & think it’s gay to be married with kids…fuck a mortgage…live in the cloud…it’s more real than real life that’s not even real because echo chamber mainstream media that’s just what they want you to think but actually I should just get to do whatever I like & be told all the time how cool that makes me by lots of people who only might be people & I definitely never met…so someone that probably isn’t me that I have met & think is way-un-cool & don’t really like to be around…makes way more money off the back of it all than I do…because that’s how influence works when it’s your job description…& it’s all about the side-hustle in a paradigm where no interest is too niche to be a gig…say it with me now…”in *this* economy”
[…you know…most times…even when maybe it seems like it goes worse than this…I….don’t generally feel this guilty about what all this taking-it-out-on-a-keyboard sounds like…it might be less of a moral injury to have spent that time chain-smoking…but I never quite took to that the same way I seemed to take to…whatever this is?]
https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Khayyam/
If quality isn’t a major concern — and unless you’re making a luxury item aimed at rich people, it rarely is — then it’s entirely about how little manpower you need to keep the lights on. Jack Welch called it “lean” which is to say “more work for fewer people.”
Moreover, I don’t think productivity studies really capture worker effort or whatever but productivity gains completely decoupled from pay gains in the ’70s and ’80s and, as such, people are expected to handle way more now than they did then for basically the same or less pay vs. inflationary pressure. No wonder people are tired all the time! We’re really not meant to live like this!
…preach
My wife used to work for a company that was founded by a couple of former schoolteachers. And one of the things they did was ring bells. They rang a bell when the workday started and they rang them for lunch and they rang them at the end of the day. And they also rang them at 10 am and 2 pm for your break. And you were required to take a break and you could. not. work. for 15 minutes. And then they rang another bell.
Which sounds pretty draconian, but part of the deal was during that 15 minutes, you could do anything you wanted, as long as it wasn’t work-related. Browse the Internet, online shopping, go outside, read a book, make phone calls, have a snack, ANYTHING (no violations of company policy, of course, like looking at p0rn).
And the surprising thing was, people actually got used to it and in a lot of ways, liked it.
Pavlov’s Workplace!
Pretty much. I mean, they didn’t restrict bathroom trips or coffee or anything like that. But there were a bunch of knock-on effects that were overall beneficial. Couldn’t schedule meetings during that time, so meetings had a built-in limit. One thing they were firm on was that if you smoked, you did it then. Period. And I’ve worked with a lot of smokers who were highly productive but there are those who are outside for 20-30 minutes every hour. Not a lot, because people tend to notice and that tends to get weeded out, but there’s been a couple in every large company I’ve worked for.
And because I missed this last night: Congrats to @manchucandidate on the grades!
…motion seconded
…well…the belated one…pretty sure the number needs to be higher otherwise?
Agreed.
Thanks very much. I was hoping for better, but the first term showed I had to break a lot of bad habits to get to where I wanted to go.
Remember that ballroom that would be paid for completely by donations? Well, it appears we are ALL donating!
https://www.thedailybeast.com/republicans-make-jaw-dropping-1b-demand-for-donald-trumps-ballroom/
…somewhere there’s a great interview with the guy that’s best mates with bruce springsteen & played the part about the so-meta-it’s-like-meta-meta filming of the scene in the sopranos where it’s him playing sylvio doing an impression that was turned into a sort of semi-recurring bit of the line from the movie that goes “just when you thought you were out…they pull you back in”
…& how between the people who wrote it & made it & advised & consulted & were around the script & the casting & the production & in a few places the actual cast (iirc & I’m not confusing that part with the wire) you had a scene where a guy who you could legitimately call a rock star…not remotely the illegitimate sort of legit…is doing an impression of an actor pretending to be a gangster to pander to the sense of humor of a group of pretend-career-gangsters…for the specific purpose of underlining the scorn they have for the guy they’re bitching about being on tv for broadly the reason the author of the book that movie was based on might be…on the grounds that he never really made it off the shop-floor level of the pyramid scheme & is a bullshit psuedo-authority
…when there’s a natural language interface with a tech construct that can not only parse all of that just watching the show & not need the interview to spell it out for it to play parrot/do-the-chinese-room-thing with until it passes in a forgiving light for the puppy learning a new trick called “knowledge” like a firmware upgrade that gives data emotions in the star trek sense…but…if that…then all this fuss would be burying the lede even at this degree of insanity at the hype horizon
…sigh…ok…today…at least can’t go on like this much longer because I actually have to be places & do things that make typing impractical…which will no doubt be a relief for all…but before this got away from me…again
…sopranos…the friend…wanna say artie…the one with the restaurant
…fat tony was yellow in the simpsons but [speech about stealing bread to feed my family only maybe it isn’t bread & maybe it’s not that sorta family] “à l’orange”…&…I dunno…chicken-fried hawk on the side…with…grits…&…that gravy that really shouldn’t be called that if you claim to respect the king of england…only the restaurant is the white house &/or the edifice of the federal government of what used to be the beacon of the free world
…so…somehow…even as most of me thinks that’s still shocking enough to induce outrage…also…of course they fucking did…that’s how the playbook runs that one…give or take the iceberg basement under the table(s) part?
It’s like the wall Mexico was going to pay for!
…oh…just…fuck off, today…I’m sick of your bullshit
Yes please!
https://substack.com/home/post/p-196355950