Annie Glass

Wire sculpture

This piece is called Shake by the way

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> "That’s the gist of the argument. The details are more complicated, which is why it’s a journal article and not a blog post." > read the journal article > it's a blog post

what's point of having a substack if you're not going to use it directly for this sort of thing!

this piece sucks, which goes a long way to explain the choice of journal. it did however evoke a certain warm nostalgia for the 80s and 90s when this kind of take was hegemonic, and the "I published my ethics-of-capitalism book with a local cooperative to troll the socialist academics who use major international publishers" bit was genuinely very funny

I guess if I read it I may as well lob some actual comments:

I'm not sure what else "investors" could mean in the context of a publicly-traded corporation?

At the margin you can call someone an investor just because they bought gold bars to hide under their floorboards, but if I hear someone talk about a company's investors I generally assume that they mean creditors as opposed to its shareholders; the term is often used to denote a specific relationship between those parties and the firm. Shareholders by comparison have no relationship other than "owner", and there's a very indirect line from them to the people actually giving the company money -- most part-owners bought their shares from someone else without the company seeing a cent. Of course it's all still connected, demand for the shares is what dictates the cost of capital, but this isn't at all the same thing as every owner being one of the company's investors.

Heath says:

If you had a workers' cooperative where the ownership share was an unrestricted asset that most new hires quickly resold into a liquid market, that wouldn't be much of a "worker's cooperative" at all, would it?

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> "That’s the gist of the argument. The details are more complicated, which is why it’s a journal article and not a blog post." > read the journal article > it's a blog post

what's point of having a substack if you're not going to use it directly for this sort of thing!

this piece sucks, which goes a long way to explain the choice of journal. it did however evoke a certain warm nostalgia for the 80s and 90s when this kind of take was hegemonic, and the "I published my ethics-of-capitalism book with a local cooperative to troll the socialist academics who use major international publishers" bit was genuinely very funny

I guess if I read it I may as well lob some actual comments:

Huge shout to my friend from an undergraduate philosophy program who started working out every single day, not for health benefits or to become conventionally attractive or whatever, but because -- and this is a direct quote -- he was concerned that otherwise he might "become lost in the world of signs and forget the things they signify". I have thought about this every single time that I've worked out since.

imagining a guy who continues on this trajectory and is constantly searching for less and less abstract exercises, avoiding metaphorical and simulated activities like farmer's walks and indoor rock-climbing. jogging is pretty safe but it's better if you're jogging to somewhere

Tree Growing inside an Abandoned Silo

I've attended some meetings of the local community association for a smallish catchment area and they really do just exhaustively (and at present manually) go through every old building looking for cases where they can potentially make a case for heritage designations, things like that. I disagree pretty strongly with the actions and motivation but it does somehow feel sporting to me, like this is how the rules work. It will be bad if they're DDoSing the system with applications that should be thrown out, or if they're submitting incorrect information (which seems like a real risk in this case, with untrained people using an AI tool), but if the planning and review system fails in the face of efficient-but-valid nitpicking then hopefully it will motivate them to improve the system!

"AI-written speeches to deliver to the committees" is amazing, though, oh my god, that's a cut above. You'd think that would be super obvious and counterproductive but many people are insulated from the downside because they already read prepared speeches haltingly from an unrehearsed document

You know, I've seen manuscript abbreviations that looked like text-speak, but hand-drawing emojis to stand in for the word ceann (head) in a passage about Cú Chulainn being beheaded is taking that all to a new level

(The line from another manuscript: "Is ann sin d'éirgedar datha aille iongantacha do cheann Choingculoinn")

Manuscript is RIA 23 H 10, Oidheadh Con Culainn, written in 1808.

BREAKING NEWS HE DID IT AGAIN

"a cheann do bheith ar an ngad" but obviously when talking about heads on sticks we should just draw a ☹️ instead

He just keeps doing it. Every time somebody gets beheaded in this text, the word "ceann" gets replaced with 😐 And a lot of people get beheaded in this text (thanks Conall), so this happens a lot.

"Do bhain an 😐 de" He struck the head from him

There's sort of sensible technocrat thing about the need for politicians and parties to pivot to the median voter, but the technocrat in me thinks that even if it's individually rational it seems bad for the political system as a whole, you get the thing where two people searching for each in the woods never find each other, while if one stayed put then it would be easy. if the politicians stay where they are, then the system works much better.

I feel like a lot of the fundamental grief in democracy stems from the fact that a healthy democracy has well-matched parties and unpredictable elections -- not because that's inherently good, but just because it means "the market clears" in some sense -- and that in turn means that swing voters are disproportionately influential. A lot of talk about winning the middle is really about winning the swing vote, and the problem is just that swing voters are unusual in a way that's hard to strategize about, because if you really treat "whatever wins the swing vote" as the best tactic then you might disrupt the tight equilibrium that makes them important in the first place. It's weird to be a swing voter!

I think sometimes this technocratic bias comes from a faulty model of voter preference -- one where voters are primarily evaluating policy, and the "median voter" is a meaningful concept -- but I also think there's some self-dealing from the experts, here: they're proponents of a very different sort of "centre", and it can be useful to conflate the two "centrisms" since they're mutually antagonistic in reality.

One of the big problems with technocratic strategy like that Deciding to Win report is that it fails to account for brand identity -- for example, immigration is a bad issue for the Democrats, but they can't escape that by pivoting to anti-immigration rhetoric or policy, because the kind of voter who swings on that basis will always recognize them as the pro-immigration brand. They need to avoid getting caught in fights on unfavourable terrain, and that does mean making some concessions, but ultimately they need to focus on the parts of their brand that have the broadest appeal, and the parts of their opponents' that are the most unpopular. If the goal is to win over swing voters without losing the base, the best approach is to field candidates who inspire trust and admiration, but since no one is any good at that -- and certainly, the technocrats can't offer much advice! -- the second-best is to define what the election is about in such a way that undecided voters will choose you out of the two brands they already know.

I think that's where you into fights about the media, not so much "lying" but choosing what issues gets covered.

Yeah, this dynamic has become interesting. It's hard for me to feel sorry for politicians who feel mistreated by the media, because working the media is one of their core job skills and it's a huge reserve of potential free advertising, but strategically we seem to be drifting toward a place where everyone chooses their media diet on the basis of what best flatters and least challenges their biases. This reflects a collapse in an older and healthier media landscape, but I do think technocrats overestimate how healthy it was, because the old establishment media flattered their biases, exaggerating the dominance and inevitability of that worldview and its beneficiaries. Media has become more partisan -- ironically with more factional diversity than politics itself, since it needn't win a majority vote -- and so we have these constant fights over which media sources are "good" and "bad" and over whether they're ultimately controlled by corporations or parties. As the press fragments and decays politicians feel more legitimized in wanting their own version that they can control; being Youtube FDR feels achievable now in a way that it didn't used to.

What's interesting about this is that it reproduces the same conflicts that occur with the issues themselves, right? Within same-party media sources there's fighting over loyalty and affiliation, and it's not really feasible to shoot for friendly coverage in enemy-faction media, or to convince that media's audience to abandon it; but there are media channels that will specifically connect you to swing voters, and these are not the same kind of "centrist media" that a technocrat might envision while lamenting the dethroning of the New York Times.

There's sort of sensible technocrat thing about the need for politicians and parties to pivot to the median voter, but the technocrat in me thinks that even if it's individually rational it seems bad for the political system as a whole, you get the thing where two people searching for each in the woods never find each other, while if one stayed put then it would be easy. if the politicians stay where they are, then the system works much better.

I feel like a lot of the fundamental grief in democracy stems from the fact that a healthy democracy has well-matched parties and unpredictable elections -- not because that's inherently good, but just because it means "the market clears" in some sense -- and that in turn means that swing voters are disproportionately influential. A lot of talk about winning the middle is really about winning the swing vote, and the problem is just that swing voters are unusual in a way that's hard to strategize about, because if you really treat "whatever wins the swing vote" as the best tactic then you might disrupt the tight equilibrium that makes them important in the first place. It's weird to be a swing voter!

I think sometimes this technocratic bias comes from a faulty model of voter preference -- one where voters are primarily evaluating policy, and the "median voter" is a meaningful concept -- but I also think there's some self-dealing from the experts, here: they're proponents of a very different sort of "centre", and it can be useful to conflate the two "centrisms" since they're mutually antagonistic in reality.

One of the big problems with technocratic strategy like that Deciding to Win report is that it fails to account for brand identity -- for example, immigration is a bad issue for the Democrats, but they can't escape that by pivoting to anti-immigration rhetoric or policy, because the kind of voter who swings on that basis will always recognize them as the pro-immigration brand. They need to avoid getting caught in fights on unfavourable terrain, and that does mean making some concessions, but ultimately they need to focus on the parts of their brand that have the broadest appeal, and the parts of their opponents' that are the most unpopular. If the goal is to win over swing voters without losing the base, the best approach is to field candidates who inspire trust and admiration, but since no one is any good at that -- and certainly, the technocrats can't offer much advice! -- the second-best is to define what the election is about in such a way that undecided voters will choose you out of the two brands they already know.

Many JRPG conceits have become ingrained in people's baseline understanding of genre conventions, in the same way that D&D's conceits backwashed into the popular idea of fantasy as a type of story, but one JRPG gimmick I think has gone underappreciated is the thing where spellcasters equip books in their weapon slots, but still just use them as weapons. Like you'll have a character who's textually a philosopher, which manifests mainly in their use of spells that add and remove status effects, and in fights they wield The Phenomenology of Spirit, recently purchased as a replacement for Nicomachean Ethics which you then vendored for a derisory sum, having skipped two intermediate tiers for lack of money (that part is like university). Having the Hegel equipped upgrades their intelligence and maybe lets them use Intelligence to calculate their damage or hit rate, but when attacking they actually just physically hit people with the book.

This is the world's stupidest thing but I love it. The final step is essential important to achieve completion, though: it's tempting to think of the attacks metaphorically or to depict the person reading from the book while shooting wizard lasers, but having the book function as if it were a normal weapon -- a conventional melee strike, subject to ripostes and disarming -- kills the emerging abstraction and leaves everything in a state of unresolvable narrative tension.

This is kind of deviating from the topic above but it got me thinking that you could do "book as equipment" in a non-combat game if you rendered it sort of like a Disco Elysium thought cabinet. What I think has potential here is that you could have an encumberance/equipment damage system for the book you bring with you to read on the train, but you could also have a whole system to emulate the performative aspects of reading, generating reputational effects when seen reading specific things or rapidly going through lots of books, but then if you visibly take too long to read the same thing or change books or topics with improbable rapidity it has a negative effect because it looks like you aren't being serious about it

dilute black (blue) mackerel tabby with low white spotting

what about the other one

paper

Achan & Angair Biong by Justin French for Dazed Digital December 2021

ok so i must be stupid. but look at these graphs

okay so first of all the income before taxes for the bottom 20th percentile is low, but i dont think its THIS low, 5k a year, second of all the after tax is higher than the before tax. which doesnt make any sense. i think the after tax must be for households, and before for individuals? but. the math still doesnt work out. the FRED website is not very helpful

OK the low level seems reasonable since this includes non-earners, but I was really confused about the after-tax thing. It looks like it's an issue with people getting refundable tax credits in excess of their deducted income tax? Like it's just "before-tax income minus taxes" but the taxes can be negative, as mentioned here:

That's still kind of weird, but it sort of makes sense -- a lot of places have some kind of sales-tax refund which isn't based on reported purchases (since you don't report them), and there may be refunds on certain expenses made in excess of income (e.g. for healthcare expenses funded with debt or savings).

I hope they choose a new person to be me tomorrow I kinda don’t feel like doing it

ask not for whom the bell peppers