[new draft post] The coveted interfluidity endorsement https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/11/04/the-coveted-interfluidity-endorsement/index.html
god i hate that these people are still asking for money when it’s plainly too late to spend it. what do campaigns do with the surplus funds they amassed, once an election is past?
@mattlehrer @r0b please give it a shot! i’m glad to help.
here are my old fosstodon and econtwitter archives https://www.interfluidity.com/microblog-archives/fosstodon/ https://www.interfluidity.com/microblog-archives/econtwitter/
it’s pretty customizable as well.
@_dm the battle rages on!
kind of surprised “the enemy within” hasn’t become a t-shirt tagline, like “nevertheless she persisted”.
“he never understood that he was a subject and not the sovereign.” @jbouie on Trump https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/01/opinion/donald-trump-kamala-harris-election-power.html ht @ryanlcooper
the way you find out who will win an election is you hold one.
@skinnylatte “to all the finance bros i leave behind, this doesn’t mean i’m anemone.”
@akkartik personally, being adaptable and adaptive are great virtues. but socially, politically, i think it’s a mistake to presume people are as adaptable as you think it’d be in their own and our collective interest to be. 1/
@akkartik one of the great errors of the neoliberal experiment is i think was a presumption that people would just retrain or move to opportunity, make whatever changes it takes to maximize earnings. 2/
@akkartik in fact, even when the economic basis for their communities disappear, many people hold fast and try to preserve them. when the skills they have relied upon for decades become worthless, they don’t cheerfully start over to take a nurse’s assistant certificate at the community college. 3/
@akkartik one way to understand a lot of political controversy is as battles over who has to adjust as the world inevitably changes, and who gets to live just in the way they have become accustomed. it’s the latter, not the adapters, who represent the winners in politics. 4/
@akkartik descriptively, thinking about eg social networks, i think you’ll prove more correct predicting that most users are guided by inertia, rather than presuming the sane dynamism you might and should cultivate in yourself. /fin
@akkartik but time and attention are finite. Google murdering RSS helped, but I don’t think you can disentangle the rise of twitter from the fall of better alternatives.
@akkartik i don’t really think of these as consumption choices. i am contributing or refraining to contribute to network effects, playing one small part in a game that shapes important contours of the future. there is a sense in which every consumption choice is “a vote”, but where network effects obtain the analogy is unusually strong. so there’s an ethical component. i feel like i did wrong by contributing (extraordinarily much!) to twitter, and feel i am risking sin on BlueSky
“My rule – I don't join a service that I can't leave without switching costs – is my Ulysses Pact, and it's keeping me safe from danger I've sailed into too many times before.” @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast
// i agree, for a long time held this line + abstained from BlueSky. but recently i’ve created a presence, tempted by people i want to converse with. i’m glad to contribute to an evacuation from x, but i feel ick too. i am taking too much on faith, without guard rails. again.
people who style themselves “truthtellers” are usually (at best) better characterized as oversimplifiers.
the etymology of “peer” is that everybody pees it’s a sacred bond that binds us all on fundamentally egalitarian terms.
@dfeldman I certainly agree! I’m sad they haven’t, or haven’t yet been effective.
Maybe it’d be good if, in places like Texas, there were a list of lawyers willing to accompany pregnant patients.
It’s horrible that Texas has made lifesaving care a legal risk from the perspective of providers. Hopefully we find a way to remedy that soon. Maybe in the meantime we could make clear there are legal risks in both directions.
https://www.propublica.org/article/josseli-barnica-death-miscarriage-texas-abortion-ban
@Hyolobrika @dushman It’s not typically what “socialism” is defined as. Socialism is typically defined as a system in which the means of production are collectively or state owned. The collective is a much broader category than “workers” in any society. 1/
@Hyolobrika @dushman Typically ~50% of humans do not work, because they are children, informal carers, retired, or disabled. I think, under contemporary states, we’d all object to a system that restricted the franchise only to those formally employed. 2/
@Hyolobrika “Syndicalism” is the closest word I know to this system that you and @dushman are describing. /fin
@Hyolobrika p.s. @dushman is your name taken from the Romanian duşman?
@admitsWrongIfProven @Hyolobrika I think in practice almost all desirable economic forms will be mixed economies. The details of what gets mixed will be very important! Cooperative worker ownership vs passive absentee ownership might be an important dimension within the sphere of privately held firms. I very much agree that we want a democratic state, where we all have a vote, setting the ground rules under which economic units whatever their form must operate.
@admitsWrongIfProven @Hyolobrika I’m not saying ubiquitous cooperative ownership wouldn’t be meaningfully different or couldn’t be much better than contemporary forms of capitalism. It might! I’m just saying it’s also a form quite distinct from what most people mean by and want from socialism.
@dushman @Hyolobrika It’s not effectively socialism, bc some cooperatives might be extraordinarily successful, earn very high per worker profits, others might yield quite meager incomes, nothing would ensure full employment by some cooperative, guarantee education, housing, medicine, or retirement income. It’d be an interesting economic form, perhaps much better than contemporary capitalism, but still distinct from what most people are after from socialism.