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/
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
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
"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
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
he was outfoxed.
sorry.
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
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.
