a frozen conflict is not a peace.
@phillmv what’s intuitive vs what’s hard to explain is very socially determined. methodological individualism is, factually, bullshit, except in a weak sense. yet wealthy professionals take (wrongly) for granted that social outcomes are best understood as an aggregation of individual talents, with more talent yielding better outcomes (without much examining what “better” might mean under their own inadequate framework that emphasizes personal incentives). 1/
@phillmv it’s actually both intuitive and obvious that outcome quality is mostly a function of institution quality, and institution quality does not reduce only to domain-specific skills or talents of individuals who constitute institutions. domain-specific skill is necessary but not sufficient, and it’s far from obvious how frequently domain-specific skill is the scarce factor with respect to institution quality. 2/
@phillmv people who perceive themselves as deserving a good situation by virtue of individual merit tend not to love this sort of analysis. but i think it’s less because there’s anything inherently unintuitive about it, and more because of Upton Sinclair’s observation about it being hard to get people to understand what their salaries depend upon not understanding. /fin
@SteveRoth freud used to hint that money is shit and money is good therefore enshittification is good!
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.)
@GGMcBG we should all have a roadrunner pal we call Clarice.
@ouguoc I think you are right! The wikipedia images and my afternoon friend have “hairstyles” too similar I think to be coincidental.
@ouguoc i… don’t know! it, and we, were wandering around a zoo in Medellin, Columbia. it wasn’t penned, but seemed jadedly accustomed to wandering humans. i don’t know whether it’s a local bird, or something the zoo placed to mingle with the humans.
a big brown bird, eying me suspiciously.
@dpp (i didn’t actually intend to boost that, though yes, i certainly think it very suspicious.)
@dpp ( meanwhile, another boeing incident today from an airport i flew from a week ago today https://abc7news.com/united-flight-missing-panel-sfo-medford-oregon/14529741/ )
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!
@djc I think Musk is an enthusiastic part of a plutocratic axis that is very much aligned with Putinist inclinations to constrain liberalism and make the world safe for hierarchical societies that brook little question. So actually, I disagree. I’m at least as concerned about Musk and Twitter as I am about China and TikTok.
@djc he can decide whether to permit or forbid communications for specific military operations. i’m not afraid of China invading the US. i am concerned about the overall distribution of geopolitical power, but Musk and his colleagues have in fact achieved a level of relevance their, and their interests and mine may not be well aligned.
“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.
“In reality equity and fairness are narrowly defined, contextual notions. When we decide it’s fair to use a FICO score in order to determine an interest rate on a loan, that’s very different from using a FICO score to decide how many weeks of unemployment insurance you should receive after breaking your leg. You cannot decide that ‘FICO scores are legitimate discriminators’ as a universal rule, just as ‘diverse skin tones and genders’ is not a universal good” #CathyONeil https://mathbabe.org/2024/03/12/googles-mistake-with-gemini/
@susannah@octodon.social @xerophile sounds woke. and bad for ranchers. what is bad for today’s ranchers is bad for ‘murica forever.
it’s the freedom agenda. ht @xerophile