@etherdiver @jpkoning it's just a foundationally bad model. "upstanding" people — people who by reputation can get into a "good" pool — evade scrutiny, while grubbier people whose tarnish is obvious are virtuously set apart. no one deserves immunity from scrutiny by reputation. no one had a better reputation than Bernie Madoff. indeed, the whole nature of confidence scams, often more lucrative than muckier dealings, is to capitalize on license from a cultivated reputation.
makes you wonder, what does he have on whom? cf @michelle https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/26/opinion/columnists/menendez-democrats-schumer.html
@jpkoning on privacy pools (an idea about which i am on its merits quite skeptical), and likely legal risks faced by those who would enable them. https://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2023/09/thoughts-on-privacy-pools-and-law.html
@enmodo @Atrios from #RutgerBregman https://thecorrespondent.com/4503/the-bizarre-tale-of-president-nixon-and-his-basic-income-bill/173117835-c34d6145
Text: It was like Townsend and Malthus all over again. Even former Nixon advisor Daniel Moynihan stopped believing in basic income, following a fatal discovery upon publication of the final results of the Seattle experiment. One finding in particular grabbed everybody’s attention: The number of divorces had jumped more than 50%. Interest in this statistic quickly overshadowed all the other outcomes, such as better school performance and improvements in health. A basic income, evidently, gave women too much independence. Ten years later, a reanalysis of the data revealed that a statistical error had been made; in reality, there had been no change in the divorce rate at all.
@LouisIngenthron if it's the queen there's still hope of a resurgence.
"We shouldn't encourage people to get married, we should make life fucking easier so they can choose long term partners if they wish." @Atrios https://www.eschatonblog.com/2023/09/they-dont-mean-any-of-it.html
// i wrote several long essays years ago trying to say exactly this. @Atrios is so pithy.
"copyright is alienable, which means you can bargain it away…corporations love copyright, because it means that they can force people who have less power…to sign away their copyrights. This is how we got to a place where, after 40 years of expanding copyright…we have an entertainment sector that's larger and more profitable than ever, even as creative workers' share of the revenues their copyrights generate has fallen, both proportionally and in real terms." @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/25/deep-scrape/#steering-with-the-windshield-wipers
i kind of want my cursor to be an ant whose legs skitter as i move it.
"Amazon now takes 45 cents in fees out of every dollar of third-party sales at its marketplace, according to updated statistics in a new report from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance." @ddayen citing #StacyMitchell #ILSR https://prospect.org/power/2023-09-21-amazons-185-billion-pay-to-play-system/
// omfg
i love that there’s this growing multiplicity of github-ish things, many of them open source.
it’d be great if they were federated or aggregated in some way, so we could choose not-necessarily-github and expect discovability, participation in discussions, pull requests across, etc wherever we host our own repositories. ht @bacchus1234
@MamasPinkyToe and/or software documentation
an interesting nother #scala effect system — kyo: https://github.com/getkyo/kyo
@akkartik i thought there were lots of interesting ideas there! the mechanism <-> organism spectrum seems ripe for revisiting in these days of LLMs.
the thing about past writing is that you have been writing. the opposite of something to be embarrassed about.
@akkartik ha! i got to know you a bit here, but from long ago you just showed up in my referrers. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/04/09/the-legibility-tradeoff/
A couple of weeks ago I announced "fossilphant", a program to turn your mastadon archive into a stand-alone static website. Here are my old instances, archived: https://www.interfluidity.com/microblog-archives/econtwitter/ + https://www.interfluidity.com/microblog-archives/fosstodon/
I didn't get much feedback, wondered if having to clone or download the repository made it unwieldy for people to try.
So I've repackaged it into a single #scalacli script. You need to install scala-cli, but then you can just download and run a single script. See https://github.com/swaldman/fossilphant/
the human condition is inexcusable.
solidarity can turn mere vapor into substance.
it's right there in the word.
"I've set an ambitious goal to raise $50,000 by midnight" means "I've set an ambitious goal to take your money NOW."
different vibes, though. i guess.
“narcissistic rich guys will, as they age, increasingly want to destroy the world as that is preferable to it…existing without them.” @Atrios https://www.eschatonblog.com/2023/09/also-give-us-billions-so-we-can-invent.html
(the elipses elide the word “not” in the original. i think i am fixing an incomplete edit, rather than reversing the author’s intention by doing that. but tell me if i’m wrong!)