Link.

For free.

Your actually linking stuff is our only refuge from corporate-controlled algorithms and paid influencers.

The more humans link to work they think excellent or important, the less our thinking, our very being, becomes collectively subject to the small fraction and faction that holds nearly all the purse strings.

Link.

Joyfully. Promiscuously. But with curation, discrimination.

Link.

"the globalized system in which state planning is outsourced to private consultancies, and with time even the supervision of the consultants is outsourced to consultants, is an Anglosphere special, dating from the 1990s onward… It’s turned entire countries, like the United Kingdom, incapable of building more than about one line per generation." @Alon https://pedestrianobservations.com/2024/06/22/meme-weeding-high-wages-and-baumols-cost-disease/

i think we should poll the electorate on their view of politicians who carefully hew to poll numbers when crafting messaging to the public.

@realcaseyrollins this is just a thought experiment, not a proposal. but resilient, credible randomness turns out to be surprisingly doable. you can mix multiple sources such that if any one source is not corrupt, the outcome is truly random even if all other sources are corrupt.

@inkican it’s a thought experiment, not advocacy. the subject of the experiment is the voting public, not the winner.

@kestral it’s made of people.

what if as a third party candidate we had “randomly selected eligible citizen” on the ballot?

would that beat RFK Jr etc? from which major party candidate would it pull more? might it win?

“This has been a key part of China’s success with building large-scale infrastructure. Multiple competent, well-resourced construction firms compete for contracts. If there are any issues, contractors can be swapped out relatively easily. And the parent SOEs help to maintain this balanced set of competitors, making sure that no single subsidiary gets too weak or too dominant.” #KyleChan https://www.high-capacity.com/p/managed-competition-in-chinas-state

#economics

@luis_in_brief @delong i devoted a couple of years to that stuff. https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/7153.html

#JoeWeisenthal captures what makes me sad about the state of crypto. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-06-20/five-things-you-need-to-know-to-start-your-day-americas ht @delong

“If they were stand-alone companies, the three biggest P.B.M.s would each rank among the top 40 U.S. companies by revenue. The largest, Caremark, generates more revenue than Ford or Home Depot.” https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/21/business/prescription-drug-costs-pbm.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

// PBMs are a reaction to the monopoly power of drug companies, theoretically serve kind of as unions of drug buyers to exert bargaining power + secure lower prices. but they are not unions, they are for-profit firms. they collude not to trim the fat but to increase and share it.

it can be surprisingly hard sometimes not to be a dick, but it is good work to try.

“reaching full employment is a key first step, but you then need to use the leverage it provides to actually change the terms of working life in America.” #MaxMoran https://prospect.org/power/2024-06-20-capital-wont-love-you-back-mr-president/

@phillmv i, um, get a bit obsessive… 🙂

[new draft post] It isn't sprawl if it's dense. https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/06/20/it-isnt-sprawl-if-its-dense/index.html

@shane we can be a sorry lot together!

[tech notebook] Sprouted https://tech.interfluidity.com/2024/06/20/sprouted/index.html

@shane oh, i agree for sure. it's an observation of sentiment, my own, sometimes. not intended to be any kind of statement of fact or inevitability. i'm sorry if i framed it that way.