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.
“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.
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.
#rss
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
"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
“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.
@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.
“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.
all this dystopian gloss on AI but think of the potential for automating guard labor.
