"Even the worst crimes we commit for hate are nothing compared to the crimes we commit for greed." @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/28/5000-bats/
// our greed and hatreds tend to be mutually reinforcing. we find it easy to gin up hate, or at least contempt, for those whom it is profitable to exploit. and then we sleep easily on our hordes because after all they are only getting what they deserve.
@akhilrao @Zamfr kind of at issue is whether space exploration should or shouldn’t be state-dominated. it’s not self-evident that private development is superior or desirable. in defense, we privatized and outsourced much of process and procurement, and the result has been a catastrophe. i think we should be very cautious about repeating that mistake with space.
“Capitalism is like nuclear power. It is a mighty force capable of producing great energy that can be harnessed for human progress—but if you don’t keep it tightly controlled, it will poison everything.” #HamiltonNolan https://defector.com/unions-can-fix-whats-broken ht @BlogWood
With all the noise and gloating surrounding SpaceX, but then also events like the apparently cost-motivated failure to check systems that has kneecapped the current moon landing by Intuitive Machines, I wonder why we don’t hear more about how the greatest space triumph since the Apollo missions — the James Webb Space Telescope — was managed and executed.
Provoked by https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/26/odysseus-moon-lander-intuitive-machines ht @Doug_Bostrom @darkuncle
let's go do some STEM activities!
if you imagine that all contactees at the start of your marketing funnel suffer 1¢ in hassle when processing each communication, what is the externalized cost of your campaign?
#SamKriss on Israel/Palestine, simultaneously perhaps the best and truest thing i’ve read on the conflict, but also in its way one of the darkest and most nihilistic because, absent some sudden plague of bilateral paralytic shame, is there any way forward from here? https://samkriss.substack.com/p/against-the-brave
“The average German worker has ten extra weeks of free time every year (400 hours) compared U.S. workers. Got freedom, much?” @SteveRoth https://angrybearblog.com/2024/02/is-more-work-better-think-again
before the assembly line, there was the plantation. division of labor, “deskilling”, surveillant control were already well developed.
“free”, as opposed to enslaved, labor presented an opportunity and a challenge. “free”-dom cld legitimate the organization of surplus value extraction as an outcome of worker “choice”, rather than the slave’s coercion. but organizing a similar efficiency of extraction presented a sociotechnological problem
see @Mer__edith https://logicmag.io/supa-dupa-skies/origin-stories-plantations-computers-and-industrial-control/ ht @andrewhinton
i mean, if you can get away with it, it was God’s will, right?
think of a UBI as a universal strike fund.
alignments and outcomes:
working class+professional class ⇒ social democracy
professional class+plutocrats ⇒ liberal plutocracy (“neoliberalism”)
working class+plutocrats ⇒ fascism
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( repost of a 2019 twitter post, just to have it somewhere less useless. original https://x.com/interfluidity/status/1183867514389843968 )
@admitsWrongIfProven getting involved in governance! and there’s not just a scalar space in which one ruler or none are extremes. governance can be by institutions rather than by autocrats or oligarchs, and there is a broad range of possible institutions that aren’t on any number line of how-many-rule.
@admitsWrongIfProven which is another way of saying the public requires governance, because absent governance there is only a brutal game of thrones to usurp power.
anarchists may wish we had a solution to this other than someone, or, better still, some set of responsive and permeable institutions, winning the prize.
we all may wish for a lot of things.
rather than respond to their noise, we must learn to sing our own song.
together our harmony can drown out their cacophony.
“We don’t mean ill, I’m sure. Could it be a bad line of code? Have we tried turning ourselves off and on again? It’s a hell of a time for us to go on the fritz, though, because while our government beeps and blinks and turns in circles, a decent world order built by our grandparents’ blood, toil, tears and sweat is being supplanted by a Hobbesian hell of war, terror, savagery, and starvation.” @claireberlinski https://open.substack.com/pub/claireberlinski/p/for-all-our-sakes-wake-up
a sequence:
(1) you let the plutocrats return (by repealing 90%+ top marginal tax rates)
(2) they become phenomenally wealthy and their interests diverge sharply from those of the broad public
(3) they fund industry upon industry — trad media, influencers, think tanks, politics consultants — to heighten conflict and stoke division in order to paralyze democratic governance
(cont’d)
(4) the only possible governance, then, becomes the plutocratic authoritarianism which they’d have no incentive to sabotage
(5) since the broad public requires a governed world even more than it requires governance in its interest, eventually it succumbs.
if you agree we are living out a pretty stupid timeline, it’s time to work on governance.
are they saying they prefer occupational sex to recreational sex?
“Denaturalization and Asylum in Interwar Europe” by #EdWalker https://www.emptywheel.net/2024/02/21/denaturalization-and-asylum-in-interwar-europe/
