“In the 1990s, we believed — nearly every one of us — that we could and would make the world better, that this was achievable, and furthermore that we were well on the way to doing so. That core optimism pervaded everything… This extended yawp of unrecognized grief is what we see now, and not just from those who were alive then and conscious of the zeitgeist. No — we all feel it. It pervades our bones, our minds.” http://www.technologyasnature.com/mourning-in-america/
they are straining at their leashes, these idiot dogs of war.
just wait until they poop, then drag them back into the house and slam the door shut.
@djc (i’d have to go back and see! but that’s not the part that appealed to me.)
@djc i don’t see the piece as very personally directed at yglesias? just explaining why, sure there’s counterproductive politics within the left-ish coalition, but the Obama administration’s “bad boyfriend” theory (yeah they don’t like us but who’s better?) re more left elements conditioned some of todays’s counterproductivity, and rather than mutually complain it’d be better to acknowledge mutual misdeeds and find a settlement. 1/
@djc if there’s some unfairness, i think it’s that MB doesn’t acknowledge how much closer to a European-style coalition the Biden administration has been. Lina Khan, the NLRB, there is real power-sharing “leftward” within the Biden administration. 2/
@djc but the story of what went wrong (and has weakened the D coalition immeasurably by expanding the faction of implacably skeptical “tankies”, who sit elections out, vote third party, or become conspiratorial Trump voters) has never been explicitly acknowledged, the much better state of the D party was a product of quiet discretion by Biden or has staff. it’d be better to acknowledge the Obama period failure and work to institutionalize power sharing. /fin
short-sightedness works better than far-sightedness, for a while.
On the distinction between managerialism and quality management, #ChrisDillow https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2023/10/management-in-question.html
Text: Managerialism has, in many places eclipsed management. And there's a big difference between the two. Managerialism has a messiah complex and belief in great leaders, whereas management looks for good fits (pdf) between bosses and roles. Managerialism tries to apply the same methods everywhere, whereas management knows it is domain-specific; what works in (say) supermarkets might not work in universities. Managerialism valorises top-down control whereas management believes in listening and feedback. And managerialism speaks of vision and strategy whilst management focuses on empirical detail and ground truth.
@wim that's pretty hard even to define, given that Apple in its provision of services is more like a government than a vendor of disjoint products, AppleTV is part of a suite that gives value to its bundles, for which taxes are collected in a variety of ways. By comparison, is Amazon Prime Video profitable or unprofitable? That depends how you allocate Amazon Prime receipts, which supports both the service and other benefits.
"The center-left is very good at spinning up stories about how the wacky left is acting in a wacky way, but very bad at seeing how their approach to working with the left is repulsive and wacky in its own way." #MattBruenig https://mattbruenig.com/2023/10/26/dysfunctional-coalition-politics/
@admitsWrongIfProven copy and paste, of course! we can’t get enough of you!
You have been selected.
@Wolven (sorry! will do!)
@dymaxion @Wolven @why0hy the financial system does finance real world production, and provide goods and services like payments, insurance, and retirement savings.
i think the melange of oligarchical interests, more broadly-based uses and constraints, and intentional or unconscious conflations of the latter with the former might not be so dissimilar.
@Jonathanglick hopefully the space is larger than what i can spitball, but i’d expect we’d do better with one that relies less on attaching tolls to artificially sustained scarcity and probably more on public coordination of how support and rewards get directed. state-funded audience-directed voucher and match systems might be a good place to start.
subscription streaming platforms are a bad way to organize the collaboration of artists with audiences. we should replace them with better models, public or private.
@dymaxion @Wolven @why0hy we saw the same dynamic in the financial crisis.
it was true that bankers had expertise into the systems and technologies they had built that outsiders could not replicate.
it was also true the solutions they would consider, what they would consider serious or even thinkable, were constrained to a space that privileged interests they instinctively saw as universal but in fact were disproportionately theirs.
it was a hard situation. it worked out poorly.
@admitsWrongIfProven i’m sure that’s right, but i suspect even by their own definitions, the proposition often holds.
much less good comes of organized murder than its perpetrators often imagine.
@solar_chase happy birthday!