i'm not a fan of substack on principal, but just in a day-to-day way, one thing really annoying about it is a lot of substackers have their front page in some splashy newspaper-like format when i just want a reverse chronological list of wtf they have written recently. is there some trick to just get that?
"This is in the tech playbook. When you're growing, you want everything to be open. When there aren't any more users to get from other places, well, that was a nice idea." @davew http://scripting.com/2024/03/20.html#a163628
[new draft post] A simple theory of the stock market https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/03/20/a-simple-theory-of-the-stock-market/index.html
On philanthropy by sortition (or the stratified selection it often misguidedly devolves to). #YoramGat https://equalitybylot.com/2024/03/20/heiress-is-letting-50-strangers-give-her-e25-million-fortune-away/
does anyone maintain a list of neotwitter’s many censorship scandals and fascist-far-right favoring double-standards in moderation? https://kolektiva.social/@strandedia/112128209725895517
“The specific thing that has transfixed a global audience of idealistic young people is the concrete suffering of Palestinian civilians. That’s something that could be resolved far short of dissolving the State of Israel.” #MattYglesias https://www.slowboring.com/p/what-israel-does-matters
it's been weeks since i've observed any kind of a sign.
i can't decide whether that's a good or a bad sign.
So much has been enshittified.
I keep finding myself getting screwed by having formed expectations in civilized times, expectations that are now just wrong. 1/
* brokerages used to sweep cash balances into money markets and pay reasonable interest rates. in the new post-ZIRP era, i found my brokerages are just paying less than 1% on cash and pocketing the difference. 2/
* my bank used to charge a fixed fee of $10 for international atm uses. i'd amortize the cost by making large withdrawals. now my same bank charges $5 fixed plus 3%. you can't amortize away a 3% fee no matter how much you withdraw. /fin
in the photograph they are smiling at you, but in reality they neither know or care who you are.
Just a moment.
Your estimated wait time is less than 1 hour.
[tech notebook] c3p0 and loom https://tech.interfluidity.com/2024/03/18/c3p0-and-loom/index.html
a frozen conflict is not a peace.
why is it that people concerned about “lowering standards” in, for example, medicine, because “people will die”, seem so unconcerned with things like private equity rollups that starve hospitals and medical clinics of resources, which very definitely cause people to die every day, here and now 1/
everything involves tradeoffs. most critiques are narrowly correct. there are real downsides to every intervention. there are upsides too, that’s why the intervention is proposed. what you choose to criticize versus not to criticize reveals a great deal about your values. /fin
“Scam compounds staffed with trafficked and enslaved manpower have become common in Southeast Asia.” #LauraDobberstein https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/18/phillipines_cyberslavery_gang_busted/ ht @John
is it more that really terrible people are disproportionately likely to accumulate plutocratic wealth?
or that ordinary human inclinations like perceiving ones own rewards as deserved and “protecting what’s mine” provoke even those who accumulate great wealth accidentally to become terrible?
(inspired, of course, by scrolling on twitterx for just a few minutes.)
a big brown bird, eying me suspiciously.
it’s not a body modification, it’s a reformity.
kids museums hit differently outside of the puritan US.
(from Parque Explora, Medellin Colombia.)
Sculpture of a naked female figure with massively oversized hands, head, and tongue.
Explanation:
Text: Animunculi Grandma, What Big Nose You Have! The human brain assigns a great quantity of its nervous circuits to the most sensible areas: hands, lips and tongue. • When any spot of your body touches an object, the sensation travels until reaching the brain. There, the space assigned for each body part is not proportional to its size but to its sensibility. Sensorial homunculi show this proportion. The same goes when it comes to movement: for the body areas with the greatest mobility, the brain assigns them more area in the motor cortex, as motor homunculi show. What if we did a model for the wolf? We would have a wolf with a big nose!
“You and I have money. But it isn’t tidal-force money. There are meaningful gradations of money among normal human beings — the poverty line, food insecurity, a living wage, the cost of housing, student debt, retirement planning, etc. These are all vitally important, and/but they can all be grouped under a heading that we might term ‘normal-people shit.’ Public policy and govt funding, if well-administered, can have measurable, predictable impacts on normal-people-shit.” https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/the-gravitational-force-of-tech-money
i’d support a law that made it impossible for tiktok to operate as it does, as long as it was equitable and made it impossible for facebook, instagram, twitter, and youtube to operate as they do. i trust the Chinese Communist Party to act in the US public interest about as much as i trust Elon Musk to.