"a dizzying array of sophisticated and deceitful tricks to…rip you off… Charging you more for less is…'shrinkflation.' Revealing part of the total price up front, only to tack on...fees + service charges [is] “drip pricing.” Stealing…shopping data to predict the maximum…[you'd]…pay…[is] personalized pricing. Using software to coordinate pricing [so] companies…don’t undercut each other [is] algorithmic price-fixing (or plain old-fashioned collusion)." @ddayen https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-03-age-of-recoupment/
"A self-taught miner 70 years ago knew that balance sheets have two sides, whereas an Oxford-educated former Bank of England economist today pretends not to know it. Which is a sign of how politics has been captured by institutionalized stupidity." #ChrisDillow https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2024/06/funding-public-services-a-bevanite-approach.html
[new draft post] The US Federal income tax in pictures https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/06/03/the-us-federal-income-tax-in-pictures/index.html
catastrophe and apostrophe rhyme.
#MattKlein makes an interesting point. Spending seems to be growing at a rapid clip, but stuff like the interest we don't receive on our checking account banks earn more than 5% risk-free is imputed as "spending", as if we pay a bank fee. Much of the spending growth seems to be in these kinds of imputed categories, which may be less inflationary than other kinds of "spending". https://theovershoot.co/p/is-consumer-spending-slowing
@djc i don’t anything makes them egalitarian. i think it was a political project, a thing they did. it’s been successful, but it always faces challenges that might undermine it. “reforms” made when neoliberalism was ascendant altered the tradeoffs, probably for better and for worse. immigration and perceptions that immigrants don’t live up to the reciprocality and solidarity that are the normative scaffolding for Nordic egalitarianism are a contemporary challenge they are working to address.
@djc the Nordics, I’d say.
liberalism without egalitarianism collapses into authoritarianism. egalitarianism without liberalism collapses into authoritarianism. there are tensions between egalitarianism and liberalism. tolerating and managing them is better than the alternatives.
@timberwraith they must be an immigrant.
@timberwraith (i hope it is clear it is not immigrants i am making fun of here.)
@Glubhorn9 well the opposite of its opposite is just this.
That sounds plausible. But so does its opposite.
[tech notebook] Green shoots of sprouts https://tech.interfluidity.com/2024/06/02/green-shoots-of-sprouts/index.html
This sentence kind of breaks my heart:
"Now, at least symbolically, Trump joins America’s greatest democratic socialist, Eugene V. Debs, as a candidate seeking the presidency from a jail cell"
https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-31-martyr-of-mar-a-lago-trump-trial/
why do we see warnings for mature content but not for immature content?
“How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds” https://openrss.org/blog/how-google-helped-destroy-adoption-of-rss-feeds #RSS
They like him because they hate you. Sometimes it’s just that simple.
have you equipped yourself with the knowledge you need?
@dpp @kentwillard there are definitely tradeoffs between the kind of coherence that can come from a small group of dedicated people, and the risk of capture that also comes with that! i am at this point happy to make the trade you are not happy to make. the court's ability to function coherently while Congress cannot is a real problem. it is Congress that must ultimately strategically shape the law, the Court's role should be more WTF fix this! than FTFY. But YMMV!
@Jonathanglick (that would apply both to saving the horses and killing them, right? re logical rigor, yeah. for the most part i treat any ethical or political claim grounded even in part on theology as lunacy, and don't spend much time trying to evaluate. perhaps that's biased, unfair. but though of course some theologically grounded claims are fascinating and wonderful, as a class i think what renders them exceptional is the ease with which they justify the otherwise unjustifiable.)
Is there still any indieweb energy behind decentralizing reviews? Unsurprisingly, Google seems to have ceased supporting the microformat-based review markup discussed by Aaron Parecki here.
I don't want to rely upon or care very much about Google. But I would like to converge on a shared practice with other people trying to desilo-ify the web.