[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
@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
@Jonathanglick (fair enough!)
@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?