the great thing about the new RBG stamp is that it’s a rare point of unity, each faction in the US has its reasons to celebrate her memory.

the future is a vast dark ocean, and we are caught in a rip current.

@cshentrup not if you’re a cat!

WordPress has been nagging me to update to php 8.0 for sometime, so i did. my excellent, but apparently no longer maintained, e-mail subscription plugin broke. Googling around from an error, i saw `count($somevar)` now has to be typed, and `count((array)$somevar)` is the workaround. So I stupidly went through all the instances of `count(...)`, threw in the `(array)` cast. Insanely it seems to work. I feel a bit dumb and a bit dirty about it though.

@admitsWrongIfProven i think everybody is special.

sometimes i think the nobel prize is what should be given to well-behaved cats.

@Alon @avi oh yes. Italy or India style dwarfism can be a tremendous problem for overall productivity. but that derives i think from different set of problems than potentially talented middle managers alienated from their work product. there are diseconomies of nonscale, and very different social diseconomies of consolidation (even where they seem to the private consolidators to be economies). 1/

@Alon @avi as usual, probably what is desirable is an interior solution, firms large enough to actually have middle managements who might potentially shepherd long-term projects, but not so large they are insulated from (or more accurately, can externalize) the consequences of their own mismanagement. /fin

in reply to self

@Alon @avi little napoleons may be drawn by temptation, but they can be weeded by market forces in ways that giants cannot. like a nation, there’s a lot of ruin in a “market leader”. there’s not so much ruin in a dwarf, before it is actually ruined.

@Alon @avi also in the private sector industry consolidation would have some sway over the degree to which competitive forces might be expected to check bold preening disruption by the great leaders of our time.

middle management won’t devote themselves to high quality work if upper management randomly disrupts their long-term projects by undermining—ahem, boldly overriding—the bureaucracy, taking direct control of lower-level offices.

and the essence of good government is high-quality long-term projects shepherded by middle management.

excellent observations by @Alon pedestrianobservations.com/202

Canada has a problem with illegal workers pouring over its southern border into the construction trades. cf @MeanwhileinCanada ohai.social/@MeanwhileinCanada

maybe, in order to promote office conversions, we should legalize windowless AirBnBs.

@dev who?

It seems almost fanciful, like some kind of unearthly fairy tale, to report there are signs that the system might actually be working.

cf @matthewstoller on antitrust's big month.

thebignewsletter.com/p/never-s

“it…is self-defeating and unnecessary to argue that we want the government to override the market. The issue is not whether the government will override the market, the issue is how the government will structure the market. The right wants to structure the market so all the money goes to its billionaire backers. Progressives want to structure the market so that the benefits of growth are broadly shared.” @DeanBaker13 cepr.net/team-billionaire-is-w ht @MikeBon

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@admitsWrongIfProven right. and the same "in-breeding" (i use the quotes because i don't think genes are the issue, the transmissible problem is a lack of resources) of the poor is unlikely to help them also "stay rich".

@admitsWrongIfProven it's all part of this very longstanding debate about whether the poor should marry before having kids because that's what the rich do and it works for the rich. is doing god's work of pointing out whether marriage will be good for your kids depends on whom you marry, the resources they can bring, and the quality of the marriage. rich and poor might face some different opportunity sets there.

@admitsWrongIfProven i'm not sure i follow here.

"Douthat’s point…is that upper class people should 'preach what they practice,' with proponents of that phrase seemingly thinking that it means that upper class people should tell lower class people to marry. But what upper class people practice is not 'marriage.' It’s 'marriage to upper class people.'" mattbruenig.com/2023/09/30/res

// we can all agree, children of the poor would be better off if a parent had married an Ivy League grad. surely the poor shld delay childbearing until then.