perhaps at first i misunderstood this. https://mastodon.social/@HourlyQuotes/111755251818045673

"Just as nobody is an atheist in a foxhole, no large firm is in the private sector during a financial crisis." @matthewstoller https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-time-to-nationalize-and-then

Denial is the fundamental human life force.

@jonshell (thank you. that is a very kind thing to say.)

they are politicizing politics again.

"Rufo cares about the actual values that sustain a liberal vision of freedom and justice in same way that Israeli war-cabinet minister who calls for 'voluntary resettlement of Palestinians in Gaza, for humanitarian reasons' actually cares about humanitarianism." #RickPerlstein https://prospect.org/politics/2024-01-10-first-they-came-for-harvard/

Clever and wise are very different things.

Are there ActivityPub servers that permit posting of fulltext articles in HTML format?

We have heard too much from me.

Is "technical cantilevers" a better metaphor than "technical debt"? See #LuisPedroCoelho https://luispedro.substack.com/p/technical-cantilevers

@Alon @paninid it seemed a lot more plausible twenty years ago than it does now, i think. the communities have brutalized and polarized one another a great deal since.

Inspired by @paninid, I was looking through some old documents. I found I wrote a letter to the old The New Republic in 2003 on Israel/Palestine.

It would satisfy no one today. Contemporary anti-Zionists might characterize it as patronizing, abrogating Palestinians' individual and national rights to immediate equality, foreseeing and accepting a degree of ethnic cleansing.

Contemporary Zionists would oppose it because it proposes eventual abandonment of the project of a Jewish state.

Institutional details really matter in systems that describe themselves as democratic. Different voting systems and organizational structures lead to radically different kinds of outcomes, despite allegedly expressing the consent and will of the very same demos.

See "Direct Elections for Labor Leaders Make for More Militant Unions" #ChrisBohner https://labornotes.org/2024/01/direct-elections-labor-leaders-make-more-militant-unions via @40Years

instead of drill, baby, drill,
build, baby, build.

when circumstances demand it, heroism is to be encouraged and applauded.

but overall we wish to diminish, rather than increase, the frequency of heroism, by minimizing the occurrence of circumstances that would demand it.

@admitsWrongIfProven @realcaseyrollins I am with you! Wormholians may not stand for the office!

@admitsWrongIfProven @realcaseyrollins that's a fine way of thinking about things, but then "natural-born" would include everything, would be a meaningless restriction, right?

"With Scala, I did not have time to be bored, either because of involvement in FOSS, or because of the awesome projects I worked on at $work. It’s a language that has grown with me, and the ecosystem always provides something new to learn, or some new library to get excited about, while matching my aspirations."

@alexelcu captures much of how I feel. Scala is a very deep language, we are always discovering and teaching ourselves radically new things. I love that https://alexn.org/blog/2024/01/10/scala-future/ #scala

if you were born by C-section, can you run for President?

An ability to put together gargantuan sums of capital is perhaps the only redeeming feature of what's left of our financial system. Why is it not financing a new engineering-centered competitor to Boeing and Airbus?

(I know. Perhaps there's a clue in that word "competitor". And Boeing, after all, found its current glories by transforming itself into what Wall Street wanted, they'd probably just want more of the same.)