@Jonathanglick ha! i looked up Josh Kosh and came up with this.
i'd like to blame Google, but it was Brave Search. recency bias eclipsing important past results is apparently common to both.
@exchgr :disillusioned:
Cover to the record "Who's Next" (the band The Who standing around a bleak monolith)
“…workers become accustomed to being active and engaged, having agency over their lives, participating in a common endeavor, and having a voice…unions have been described as helping build democratic muscle…union involvement in the political realm leads to policies that meet working people’s needs; this creates a virtuous cycle in which civic participation seems more worthwhile, as people see that govt can tangibly improve their lives.” @TerriGerstein https://slate.com/business/2023/09/strikes-autoworkers-writers-actors-unions-democracy.html
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 my excellent, but apparently no longer maintained, e-mail subscription plugin broke.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
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 https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/09/30/on-hierarchy-and-the-civil-service/
Canada has a problem with illegal workers pouring over its southern border into the construction trades. cf @MeanwhileinCanada https://ohai.social/@MeanwhileinCanada/111162579818090415
maybe, in order to promote office conversions, we should legalize windowless AirBnBs.
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.
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/never-seen-anything-like-it-the-biggest
“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 https://cepr.net/team-billionaire-is-winning-they-have-us-cursing-at-markets/ ht @MikeBon