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.)
a big brown bird, eying me suspiciously.
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!
“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/
it’s the freedom agenda. ht @xerophile
i think i’ve had my most kafkaesque customer service experience ever on a Spirit Airlines chat line. more than two hours, allegedly three humans in addition to the chatbot, but i’m disinclined to believe there were any humans in the loop at all. no comprehension, no help, now in addition to the problem we were trying to resolve we’re in danger of missing the plane. this is a brave new world where really, really, there is nobody on the other end who has any inclination or capacity to give a fuck.
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Unsurprisingly, @akkartik is well ahead of me:
"it is all too common for seamless experiences to hide all manner of deeper malfeasance. When we push for more seamless experiences we’re also encouraging the organisms we interact with to grow more tentacles (hiring! HR!), make them more muscular (growth team!), use them more ceaselessly in search of advantage (an ad protruding slickly from the bottom of the pane! Marketing materials persuading people to not organize!)" https://lobste.rs/s/idi1wt/open_source_vs_ux
i have come to have a very negative reaction to high quality user-interfaces. not just dark patterns and stuff like that, but genuine user-interface quality.
UI quality is painstaking and expensive, much more than most backend functionality. i associate investment in UI with well-funded growth-seeking ventures, and i associate those kinds of ventures with traps, enshittification, neofeudalism. 1/
the world of UNIX command lines and emacs/vi-ish editors is, not unreasonably, associated with a kind of bearded-dude elitism, a caste of self-styled wizards not always very inclusive or kind to those who have better things than try master its arcana. 2/
but what has been touted to supplant that caste is capitalist "democratization", which has nothing to do with democracy at all. it just means widespread access to products in the role of often captive consumers, rather than agents who exercise meaningful control. 3/
i think it's probably more helpful expand the circle that enjoys the broad, flexible agency provided by cheap user-interface tools than to treat as progress expensively making capabilities very widely accessible, but always under the control of and largely captive to the people who paid the expense. /fin
winning isn't everything it's the only thing only in places where soon there will be nothing at all.
if you’re going to be mad, be mad you ever had to do “standard” time, not at daylight savings time, which is brilliant and bright.
why can’t one simply make both choices, and then snip away the timeline that least well works out?
"the Americans are arriving at the conclusion that supporting Netanyahu means being harmful to Israel. There is a distinction between Israel’s interests and Netanyahu’s interests." #NogaTarnopolsky https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/the-biden-plan-to-ditch-israels-netanyahu.html
changing the subject to wokeness lets plutocrats find solidarity with broad classes of people who might otherwise realize that, despite sharing a penis and pale skin color, their interests are rather at odds with those of our billionaire caesars.