Category: Uncategorized

Arthur Anderson LLP (at the time the world’s largest ever partnership) engineered Enron’s finances by gaming partnership law to the max, by creating convoluted layers of dummy partnerships. The “A” “I” industry is also built on self-dealing, but seems to be structured as “strange loops.” “Computer aided drafting” of contracts (boilerplate in general) and legislative language (cf. ALEC) is a pretty lucrative industry, as it’s a LOT easier to obfuscate information than to unravel obfuscation. I suspect that >90% of what is called “consulting” is basically optimizing business processes for minimal compliance. I even suspect there may be some malice motive (as in malicious compliance) along with the profit motive.

The question is, assuming they are optimizing for longest possible bubble expansion time, how does one strategize against that? That someone wouldn’t be in government, of course (at least not the US federal government). Someone who has resources to strategize against advanced optimization, but also has independence. Resources vs. independence has always been a harsh tradeoff, but the P25 clique, of course, is finding ways to make it harsher, raising the price of entry into cognitively powerful fields of work.

I’ve been unable to watch TV news for at least 20 years. It’s simply too painful, on many levels. The most painful thing is seeing what journalism has allowed itself to become, and how dumbed down the product has become, and how low the signal-to-noise ratio has become…subtract out the fluff stories, promo pieces, B-roll, celebrinews, inspiration corn, persistence corn, struggle corn, and entrepreneurship corn, and you have about 5 minutes of news per hour of airtime, at best.

The way they word things on TV news is one of my pet peeves. All the broadcasters seem to have an editorial policy of avoiding copular verbs, such as “is” or “was”, and this results in the news being read as a sequence of sentence fragments instead of sentences. My autistic mind is probably of the hyperlexic type, as I mentally transcribe practically every spoken word I hear, and I tend to proofread as I go, so the weird sentence structure used in TV news forces me to insert the word [was] in square brackets into almost every sentence. And sometimes [is]. In raw form, verb forms only appear in the “-ing” inflection, which could be a participle or a gerund, and what really drives me crazy is that whether it’s a participle or a gerund is itself often ambiguous. Usually, I could make it a correct sentence by inserting [was] or [is] before the -ing verb, or alternatively by transcribing it as a run-on sentence which is basically a chain of gerund phrases separated by commas. My mind usually goes with the latter, because I want to minimize edits more than I want to minimize run-on sentences, but I always feel tension because of the ambiguity.

I also find the level of sensory overload physically painful, especially on local TV news, everything from their overuse of the breaking news klaxon to the practice of “flashing the screen” for emphasis, or even as a visual punctuation, as I’ve noticed they almost always occur where the period would be if the sentence fragments were converted to sentences with the insertion of [was] or [is].

Then there’s the fact that the local news on all the channels in the Detroit market are almost single-handedly sponsored by Gardner-White, a regional chain of furniture stores. Their commercials are orgies of sensory overload, from turning my TV into a strobe light, to multitudes of fast cuts, to the most exaggerated vocal inflection imaginable (think “carnival barker” times ten). At least two per commercial break, every local news broadcast, every channel.

I’m losing interest in the Medicare For All “branding,” largely because “Medicare” “Advantage” at this point has successfully sold its shit to a majority of Medicare recipients, and their PR people are absolutely gloating with their “Medicare Advantage Majority” website.

I’m deeply worried that at some point our demands for Medicare For All will suddenly find their way into the Overton Window, but the catch will be that it results in “Medicare” “Advantage” for all. Single Payer, I think, is much better branding than Medicare For All, and even Socialized Medicine is starting to seem like better messaging than Medicare For All (even though one of my biggest pet peeves in the world of political messaging is equating socialism with the public sector). I think the rallying cry I most want to hear at this point is “Get The Private Sector The Fuck Out Of Health Insurance!”

Bryan Creely, as a promotion for his job seeker consultancy, has posted an interesting video on YouTube, titled If Your Job Interviewer Asks You THIS, BEWARE!. The thing that jumped out at me is that virtually all the question types he enumerated is a question I would describe as “infantilizing.” Here’s a news bulletin, if you apply for a low status job, say a job in retail, the entire process is infantilization all the way down. I’m from working class stock and although I managed to graduate from college, I never succeeded at deciphering the college-level job market. I suspect that the American economy has been for some time producing college graduates at a much faster pace than it’s been creating “college-level” jobs, but I find myself scratching my head trying to figure out how one might rigorously test that hypothesis.

Global warming is pretty existential as threats go. We can probably survive the loss of the spotted owl, the continuation of a fossil-fueled economy, not so much. I think it’s very likely that the worldwide surge of nationalist ideology is a side effect of climate chaos. Drill-baby-drill as an unadvertised feature of Bidenism is hard to forgive. I chalk it up to global warming response probably being a literally unsolvable coordination problem. That runs the risk of falling into doomerism, but the alternative runs the risk of becoming the kind of leftist who helps fascists by attacking Democrats. Honestly, the entirety of my adult life has been nearly 100% of choices, whether personal or political, being of the “cutting our losses” category; choosing the lowest magnitude of the negative utilities on offer.

Looks like blogosphere trends and the like are back!
h/t Jan-Lukas Else
Here’s the standard list:

📨 Mail Client: 💻 Thunderbird / 📱 K9-Mail
📮 Mail Server: (not serving)
📝 Notes: Xournal++
🟦 Photo Management: (not managing, just shoeboxing)
📆 Calendar: Baïkal with DAVx⁵
📁 Cloud File Storage: nexcess.net
📖 RSS: Thunderbird
🙍🏻‍♂️ Contacts: Baïkal with DAVx⁵
🌐 Browser: Firefox
💬 Chat: IRC in Thunderbird
🔖 Bookmarks: Firefox
📑 Read It Later: (?)
📜 Word Processing: Vim
📈 Spreadsheets: Gnumeric
📊 Presentations: Beamer
🛒 Shopping Lists: astoundingteam.com/shoplist
💰 Personal Finance: GnuCash
📰 News: Mostly MSN
🎵 Music: Radio Free Fedi
🎤 Podcasts: raw audio downloads
🔐 Password Management: Firefox

And here are some additions:

🧑‍💻 IDE and Code Editor: Vim
🔑 VPN: Does TOR count?
👥 Social Media: Mastodon, Friendica
🌦️ Weather: weather.gov
💪 Fitness: (I do work out, but no training diary)

Tim H.

From my (Working class) perspective much of what drives authoritarianism is a desire to not accept criticism from people they don’t respect*, to me, this implies willful ignorance, with a splash of tolerating sociopathy. Not that I expect sociopathy in the service of economic advantage to entirely go away, but its practitioners need to own it. Not be like omnivores who refuse to acknowledge that they’ve consumed parts of creatures who once saw small slices of this world.

Allen Green

Person with capital protects you from the risks of not having capital by charging you money so they can have more capital.

Tim H.

The southern evangelical churches coming to this was set in motion long ago, when their preachers figured out that self-censorship in which scriptures they quoted in sermons led to fewer painful and sometimes lethal visits from enforcers from the local “Important” people. In truth, God & Mammon have always had an uncomfortable coexistence in the hearts of believers, it’s just a bit more obvious with the Southern variety.

segremores

Red Flag #1: If a disease is ever listed as having symptoms that include “being a member of the LGBT” and “Autism,” it is not a real disease.

satyasyasatyasya5746

I honestly think some critical mass will need to be reached where enough of society is SO lost, SO wrong, SO delusional, SO dangerous and SO damaging, that society will have to collapse somehow to snap them out of it. Some epistemological reset because all I see around me is layers and layers of madness which can’t ever be peeled away; it must all be discarded.

I often play around with a thought experiment in which I imagine a big box store such as a Meijer store, but with the merchandise rearranged according to an attraction/repulsion schema in which complementary goods mutually attract and competing goods mutually repel (mathematically a very difficult problem, hence a thought experiment, rather than something more ambitious like a simulation). The Meijer store contains books, which includes cookbooks. So I imagine a cookbook sold by Meijer as having x and y (and z) coordinates within the store. The cookbook contains some number of recipes. I think of each of these recipes as having x,y,z coordinates, even though the recipes are virtual rather than physical objects. The recipes are “attracted” to the cookbook in which they reside, but they are also “attracted” to the ingredients they call for (in grocery) and the kitchen equipment they call for (in cookware, appliances, etc.). The prepared recipes (in the initial state anyway) are, like the written recipes, virtual objects which nevertheless can be assigned locations for the purposes of modeling. These objects in turn would attract to tableware, which would in turn attract to tables (but also to cupboards…and dishwashers…each object has a life cycle!) So dishwashers “attract” dishes and “repel” other dishwashers. Plates attract spoons but repel other plates. Repulsion between like objects serves to distribute them more evenly. The TV sitcom Last Man on Earth explored the idea of someone living a seemingly comfortable lifestyle for some period of time on the merchandise in an abandoned big box store, in a post-apocalyptic setting. In a non-post-apocalyptic setting (hopefully with reasonably functional supply chains) an “efficient” arrangement of things and virtual things, and ultimately people, in the interior space of a big box store (or perhaps even better, a mall) could I imagine house (and support much of the economic activity of) a few hundred people, in some comfort.

Originally appeared as a comment on Reddit.

Another organization name seemingly pulled out of a hat. Web search found nothing about “Blue Collar Dollar Institute” that’s not by “Blue Collar Dollar Institute,” so probably a recently-created astroturf. Tenuous link, but one of their contributing authors is Michael Berghaus, who is or was Director of Economic Researcher & Strategy for Charles L. Shor Foundation For Epilepsy Research Inc., which in turn is a donor to the Conservative Partnership Institute. Certainly BCDI’s published articles have a definitively nationalist tone. My best guess is that this astroturf supports the Trump faction of the American right wing.

From WZZM TV:

West Michigan in a ‘shallow recession,’ GVSU economist says

How shallow it might be is of course wild guesswork, but such is the tightrope walked by financial journalism given the realities of mass psychology. I for one accept that it is in the nature of economies (capitalist and otherwise) to behave cyclically, and that there will never be a last recession. What I can’t forgive is an economic policy framework that insists on reacting to economic conditions instead of planning for them, for example, with countercyclical policies. We allow ourselves a few (but too few) countercyclical tools for financial markets, such as floater bonds, but what we really need badly is some countercyclical tools for labor markets. I would suggest a “floater pool” of civil service employees. Maybe these would be assigned to make-work tasks, and I really don’t care, but dog knows there’s plenty work actually needed by society, that is destined to be undersupplied by the market b/c merit goods or what have you. The floater pool would hire massively during recessions, and (frankly) do mass layoffs during rare times of “labor shortage” such as the (present?/recent past?).