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.