i feel therefore i am.
@akhilrao there are questions of control that concern me. NASA always used private contractors, but NASA seemed, at least to the ordinary layperson, to remain in control — they bid out to contractors, and could shift to others. it seems like we are entering an era where SpaceX holds a monopoly on core competences that continued space development and exploration requires. that terrifies me. and a good track record so far is like Amazon being low margin and great for consumers, in the beginning.
when someone is fishing for compliment, take the bait.
who would be your dream-team cast for a reality production of Sartre’s “No Exit”?
@dpp @scottsantens they don’t like stimulus checks either. they hate taxes, and UBI smells like taxes. what they like most is a pliable workforce and a politics hostage to “business confidence”. they like that more than they like a brisk economy. people beyond money in the sense of unmet consumption wants often turn to power as their core concern.
Michal Kalecki called it in 1943 https://mronline.org/2010/05/22/political-aspects-of-full-employment/
@gulovsen soon they will offer fax machine as the new muzak.
@djc I really don't think that's right. On social media, sure, it's a political battlespace and there is all kinds of (in my view destructive) support for the national project. But I think most human beings who follow the news at all either take care not to think too much about or feel terrible sympathy for the humans. and i think lots of the hashtag-free-palestine is a (misguided) way of expressing that sympathy, rather than support first for a political project.
@djc i think Aaron Bushnell is a good example. he died shouting free palestine, but it's clear he was distressed by the killing, the "genocide" and his complicity, "free palestine" was a means of expressing that.
@djc really? certainly it seems like outside of the West almost everyone does, and even here in the US, most Democrats and younger people do. who do you see?
@admitsWrongIfProven i think to the degree people are conscious that their wealth comes from some sort of predation — think the Sacklers, or the PE looters @pluralistic writes about, or doctors knowingly over-recommending procedures, etc — they hold their victims in contempt, as being a lesser kind of person who might succumb to these kinds of things, and therefore deserving of what they get.
@admitsWrongIfProven @pluralistic lots of people become very wealthy in more abstract ways. a hedge-fund mogul who buys and sells only financial securities, while he might know their's oil-and-gas or tobacco or whatever in his portfolio, mostly sees the money as coming from an opaque symbolic process. For this kind of rich person, sure, there's no need for contempt, disregard and cultivated ignorance are sufficient.
akshually, today is January 60!
you all think it's kind of fun, this February 29. but just wait until tomorrow, when it is February 30.
[new draft post] What you are doing right now https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/02/29/what-you-are-doing-right-now/index.html
try to build a world in which it's not worth the trouble to make a dick of yourself just to score a bit more green.
@LouisIngenthron I'm not really going to argue with that, because it's pretty consistent with my views and practices. We'd just be arguing about what the phrase "marketplace of ideas" means.
I'll just say that the version that has not panned out is the idea that mere freedom of speech yields some kind effective meritocracy in which the best ideas thrive and the worst become marginal. If valuable sorting is possible, it would require institutions richer than mere absence of constraint.
@LouisIngenthron We might disagree about the substance of the ideas, but for example ideas I think are bad like strong forms of classical economic liberalism (that a minimal state yields the best economic outcomes) and ethnonationalism (that the best states are largely exclusive and homogenous territories of an extended kinship group) seem very old and openly debated in every marketplace. rather than fall apart, they maintain a share whose fluctuations seem more sociological than intellectual.
@tuban_muzuru a very upscale marketplace, that one.
@LouisIngenthron i don't know that durability and merit are so well correlated either. a lot of really prominent bad ideas have a long pedigree, i think.
@LouisIngenthron @Doug_Bostrom @darkuncle (sounds like a thing to take the kid to.)
@LouisIngenthron is the idea winning out that the best ideas win out?
New candidates for the worst people in the world.
Reported by @scottsantens https://www.scottsantens.com/billionaire-fueled-lobbying-group-behind-the-state-bills-to-ban-universal-basic-income-experiments-ubi/