Category: Uncategorized

If I ran the kable kompany, I would sort content by subject and assign to channels accordingly. This is the channel lineup I would offer:

basic methodology

Start by recruiting an army of volunteers. The voluntary activity in question consists of watching television. An additional activity is content curation. This could be done mostly with simply push-button devices resembling the remote controls already in the hands of television viewers. One button would be for marking the boundaries between video montages, or “clips,” of interest, which is to say, the time at which one clip ends and the next begins. For this purpose one clip could be one commercial, or the stretch of actual programming between two commercials. Such an “intercommercial” stretch might or might not be further broken down into clips, for example, one for each “news story.”

Another classification task for first-pass viewing is categorizing by subject. The relationship between clips and subject tags is assumed to be many-to-many. A suggested list of subject category headings follows. A shorter list might be easier to work in a first pass viewing, perhaps buttons for “news,” “sports,” “comedy,” and one or two others.

channel list

able

Everything about disabilities and the people who have them, from inspiration porn, to ads for SSI attorneys (also in lex, to ads for eyeglasses or hearing aids, to programming by and for disability activists.

ag

All things agriculture.

assent

Opposite of dissent. Mostly “person on the street” interviews in which a view is expressed to the effect of “thank goodness such thorough security measures are in place.”

astroturf

Any paid ad insertion that is basically astroturf. Also, any (probably rare) news report about the subject of astroturf. Also, any mention in TV content about astroturf in the sports sense.

atrocity

News reports or historical accounts of human rights atrocities, such as ethnic cleansing, torture, etc. Reports of war crimes trials go here, also cross-posted to war and lex.

barker

Advertising or other content in which an announcer (usually a voice-over announcer) has pronounced “carnival barker” type vocal stylings. These include talking very loudly and having exaggerated pitch modulation and inflection. Primary examples in the Detroit media market are ads for Gardner White furniture stores and Wallside Windows. This is generally more characteristic of local than national advertising (although it is the normal voice-over style in infomercials) and is inserted more in local TV news than any other genre of programming.

baseball

Baseball games and news and talk of baseball.

big3

News coverage concerning General Motors, Ford, and/or Stellantis (cross posted to biz, and car unless about non-automotive divisions of said companies). Also, dealer advertisements featuring “employee pricing.”

biker

All things motorcycle related.

biz

Anything about activities in the for-profit sector.

car

Anything about cars.

cat

Any content in which cats are either mentioned or depicted.

cibus

Anything about food. Recipes go here, as do ads for food. Anything about dupermarkets cross posted here and in retail.

combatsport

Boxing, wrestling, martial arts, fencing. Also fight scenes cross-posted from fiction.

crime

Reports of crimes, including victimless crimes. Drug crimes cross-posted to gurd, burglaries and home invasions to home, crimes at or against places of business (as well as crimes for which there is a business model, basically organized crime) to biz, homicides to obit. Cross post to kid if the alleged perpetrator and/or victim is a kid. Police investigations and arrests go to both this channel and lex, while trials and pre-trial hearings in progress appear exclusively on lex.

cycle

Anything about bicycles, or riding bicycles for sport, recreation or transportation. Also other human-powered vehicles such as tricycles or unicycles.

dfa

De facto advertising. Any item in a news broadcast that is basically promo content. “News” that a new store is opening or a new product is about to be released. The “there’s an app for that” type of “news story.”

dissent

Coverage of protest actions and expressions of dissenting opinions. News about dissidents in authoritarian countries (countries in general).

dog

Any content in which dogs are either mentioned or depicted. Includes the vast majority of ads for (non-veterinary) medications.

econ

Economics. If the subject matter is some economic phenomenon such as prices, wages, interest rates, supply, or demand. Content in biz channel cross-posted here if it concerns an industry’s economic outlook. Content in finance cross-posted here if it concerns economic phenomena such as interest rates or inflation. Anything to do with labor economics is cross-posted to hood.

edu

All things education. Anything pertaining to childhood education (K-12 education other than adult education) cross-posted to kid. Content that is explicitly educational (to the point of being pedantic) also goes here.

energy

Energy is that which is measured in joules.

equus

Everything about horses.

faith

Everything about every faith tradition and every belief system. Including nominally non-religious phenomenon such as magical thinking and mysticism in general. Includes televised worship services. Includes news about faith practices or religious concepts. Includes every spoken sentence that references one or more Deity.

fash

All things fashion. Includes apparel and cosmetics. Content pertaining to cosmetic medicine cross-posted here from med.

fiction

Scripted narrative content. Since the starting base is televised content, most will be either comedy or drama. Includes both TV series and (fictitious) movies that make the TV airwaves. Since very little advertising fits this characterization, viewers of the fiction channel will see mostly ads for pulp novels (those by James Patterson being most likely to be advertised in the television medium), and perhaps commercials that have an especially strong “storyboard” character.

finance

The financial sector is understood to include banking, brokerage (investment), accounting and insurance. News and advertising concerning this sector. Content in biz is cross-posted here if it is specifically about financial aspects of a non-financial business, such as its debt or equity financing, or its share price.

fire

Content about building fires, wildfires, fire department happenings, fire science. Ads for fire prevention equipment and alarms, but also ads for matches, lighters, fireworks and the like. Stuff in cibus about cooking with fire is cross-posted here.

fitness

All things fitness, that aren’t necessarily connected with a specific competitive sport.

flog

All things golf, including miniature golf, and the sport called “long drive.”

futbol

All things soccer.

gamer

Content pertaining to video games, but also board games. Also content pertaining to super heroes, comics, manga/anime/cosplay etc.

gaming

All things gambling. Also, promotion sweepstakes and the like.

gridiron

All things football.

grq

Get rich quick scams. Most content will be cross-posted from infomercial. Also includes news coverage of bunco squad type happenings (also posted to crime, of course).

gurd

Anything about substances known to be mind-altering, in any degree. Includes all uppers, downers and psychedelics. Includes psychiatric medications, and all therapeutic medications known to have psychoactive properties, including anti-seizure meds (benzodiazepines), fast-acting antihistamines (mild downers), real painkillers (opioids) most if not all decongestants (not-so-mild uppers), bronchodialators (basically adrenaline), etc. Includes alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, theophylline (found in tea), theobromine (found in cocoa) and refined sugar. Content relating to coffee, tea, cocoa, alcoholic beverages and dessert foods (and heavily-sugared snacks) is included in this channel and is also cross-posted to cibus.

histo

All things history, from American Experience to Antiques Roadshow.

hokey

All things hockey, including field hockey.

home

Home improvement project programming, honeydew programming, ads for home cleaning products. Home decor ideas and ads. News of fires and crimes and other events in residential settings.

hood

Hood as in livelihood. All things pertaining to employment and self-employment.

hoops

All things basketball.

info

Information about information. This includes computers, software, the Internet and the telecom industry. It also includes informational resources such as libraries. Also includes journalistic coverage of journalistic activities.

infomercial

All long-format ads, but also short-format ads for the types of value propositions that frequent that space; too-good-to-be-true propositions, get rich quick scams (cross-posted to grq), cooking gadgets, fitness gimmicks. Any sales pitch aimed at the audience’s sense of inadequacy.

katastrof

All about disasters, from fires (cross-posted to fire), famines (cross-posted to ag and food), extreme weather events (wx), earthquakes, etc. Reports of fatalities due to disasters are cross-posted to obit

kid

Content about children or childhood. Ads targeting kids are posted to parent channel instead.

lex

Anything about courts, attorneys, law enforcement, law as academic discipline, and legal structures such as contracts.

libris

Anything about books, and reading material in general. Stuff about books that are fiction cross-posted to fiction

med

All things health care, including alternative medicine (much of which will be cross-posted to infomercial). The stock “is food X good/bad for you” news story is cross posted between this channel and cibus.

obit

Any news or other item containing plausibly the first mention of the death of one or more human beings, who might or might not be named. Content from katastrof cross-posted here if there are fatalities. Not a channel for discussion of the subject of death in general; only specific deaths.

paranoia

Use of security concerns as a pretext for distrust directed at the public, both in government and in the private sector.

parent

Everything about parents and parenting.

philanthropy

Fundraising appeals, news about nonprofit organizations, or about people doing volunteer work.

politics

Anything about holders of or candidates for elected office. Anything about political power anywhere.

pr

Public relations. The lion’s share of commercials run on Sunday current events shows will go here. Also, news stories about the public relations industry.

psych

All things psychology.

racquetsport

Tennis, racquetball, ping pong, badminton. Lacrosse? Maybe handball?

realestate

Real estate. Also include business news involving transfer or development of real property.

retail

News about the retail sector (including e-commerce, which is cross-posted to info) and advertising for the same.

sk8

Anything about skating or skateboarding. Things about ice skating cross-posted to wintersport.

soap

Anything about cleaning products. Home cleaning products cross-posted to home, personal products generally to fash, sometimes med. Also, the handful of daytime serials still on the air.

space

Anything about space exploration. Stuff about astronomy, too.

spook

Anything about the intelligence community, or about official secrecy.

terrorism

Any news story or discussion in which an actual or hypothetical event is described as terrorism. This includes ordinary street crime cases in which judges, prosecutors, victims, reporters (or anyone) refers to people being “terrorized” by the crime.

tracksport

Athletics. Charity track events cross-posted to philanthropy

transit

All things mass transit and car-free commuting.

trash

Trash talk. Sports trash talk, of course, cross-posted to channel(s) for specific sport. Fash trash (such as in day-after coverage of awards shows) cross-posted here and to fash. Includes all advertisements for anything that mention the competing brand by name.

vojagx

All things travel.

war

All things military.

weight

Everything about weight gain or loss, or about being overweight or underweight.

wintersport

All things winter sports, except hockey, which has its own channel.

wmd

Anything about nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

womensport

All women’s sports, which are always also cross-posted to the channel for the particular sport.

wx

Weather forecasts and all things meteorology. Also ads for weather-related products such as umbrellas.

zap

News about international peace talks, research and teaching at centers for peace and conflict studies, training efforts in de-escalation in local communities.

flags

geospatial coding

expiry time

queueing algorithm

custom channels and lineups

Let me preface this by saying I’m the kind of people who are most critical of those they love, and harshly critical only of those they love most.

I love me some C4SS. I miss the days before their blog went no-comment; the current no-comment nature of their blog being the main reason C4SS is a recurring subject in the present blog.

Two recent posts have caught my attention—Action Is Sometimes Clearer Than Talk: Why We Will Always Need Trade, by William Gillis and Does Anarchism Skirt the Calculation Problem by Logan Marie Glitterbomb. Gillis in particular is the quintessential anti-anagorist and has produced a large body of work explaining why non-market economics is a non-starter. His recent article is a particularly exhaustive drum-down of the catalog of objections to markets, particularly the market aspect of market anarchism. Many of these objections can be found in my own posts in the present blog over the years. These include hope for the possibility of non-centralized economic planning, the idea of explicitly communicating preferences rather than “revealing” them through painful (i.e. costly) economic transactions, reasonably objective classification of luxuries and necessities, rejection of the capitalist doctrine of infinite want, Red Plenty and Cybersyn, Cockshott and Cottrell, and gift economies. In this article he shoots down both of my pet projects, anagorism, and also pubwan (extreme transparency):

I have grown partial to fully public ledger markets, more akin to the informal markets that emerge prior to state “standardization” and forced anonymization. One of the claims against capitalism is that firm competition drives secrecy, impeding accurate clearing. This is certainly true, and we can argue about the degree to which this norm is able to persist only thanks to the various distortions brought on by state violence, but a market once freed will still reflect an aggregate of our desires and thus our values, we must still work to see our most emphatically held values embodied or normalized. Transparency is a hard won and unending struggle in any context. Removing, marginalizing, or severely impairing anonymous transactions would do wonders for firm transparency, but aggressive reporting and broad social expectations will still be needed. If sometimes actors fail to communicate relevant tacit information to create and exploit asymmetries in markets, well they certainly do the same in collective meetings and every other non-market context ever proposed.

What I increasingly suspect, however, is that just as anarcho-communists and anarcho-collectivists will never be able to fully suppress black markets, we will have to live in a world cut with veins of secrecy, deliberately opaque transactions and relations. The real anarchist economic contest, I believe, will eventually be recognized as over how that secrecy is embraced, contained, and navigated.

My reasons for proposing pubwan, a crowdsourced effort to reverse engineer against data asymmetries between business and society, were motivated largely by the desire to create a volunteer-run, nonproprietary, deeply searchable “catalog of the economy.” The Internet contains many websites that purport to facilitate comparison shopping for various products, but these are invariably for-profit businesses in their own right. They dispense 10 or 20 single data points (embedded of course in bloated web pages) in response to queries, not direct access to the database itself. And which firms’ prices are or are not included in results are most likely a matter of behind-the-scenes exclusivity deals.

Hopefully we will see the development of social norms that disparage secrecy in supply chain matters.

William Gillis is perhaps the closest thing I have to a philosophical arch-enemy, although I consider him a political ally. Logan Marie Glitterbomb takes a different, less confrontational (to my interests) approach, arguing that the economic calculation argument is irrelevant and that the point is that people gonna trade no matter what, so get used to it.

My reasons for being anagorist (that is, anti-market) are deeply personal. The realization of a “freed market” won’t trigger in me an unconditional acceptance of the new status quo.

My own struggle has reached a point where my head is capitalist (I don’t distinguish between markets and capitalism) and my heart is (anarcho-)communist. Since I’m (broadly speaking) an INFJ, my heart has more votes than my head when it comes to the tone and implications of what comes out of my mouth, and I’m not in the market (forgive the pun) for a new personality.

I’m not interested in being a citizen of a nation of shopkeepers.

Voluntary economy is an oxymoron. The relevant question is whether you have as efficient a tradeoff between voluntary and economy as is possible. For me, subjectively, this means stateless society, of course, but with eternal vigilance to make sure cooperation holds its own against competition, and the gift economy against the market economy.

Aral Balkan:

Whoever you are, wherever you are, we have a common enemy: the nationalist international.

Heather Marsh:

Most systems are now run by competitive organizations. Competition creates redundancy, is slow and wastes resources on idea protection, advertisement, and more. Competition also requires secrecy which blocks progress and auditing and causes lost opportunities and ideas.

Michael O. Church:

At a nuclear or higher technology level, post-scarcity automated luxury communism is the only economic system that stands a chance, and we should race to it.

Red Mike:

Every job I’ve ever had has required me to do things and behave in ways I am not comfortable doing, and I don’t think this is unique or rare, its just that the Slasher is an extreme case.

The Fool:

A society free of exploitation and extortion means that nobody gets rich.

I long ago gave up on “right livelihood,” concluding that it’s literally an oxymoron. This is of a piece with my conclusion that there is no possibility of monetization without value subtraction. Consquently, I’ve concluded that the least pro-social jobs are probably those dues-paying jobs for people starting out in some hypercompetitive white collar field such as financial trading or biglaw, which basically amount to hazing by sleep deprivation, and even more importantly (I think), systematic elimination of leisure time from waking hours. I think it should probably be considered a form of brainwashing. The effective altruism community mantra about it taking 10,000 hours to level up to an 80,000-hour career, I’m guessing, can only make matters worse.

But I’m a generation X slacker, so what do I know?

It’s (by definition) not labor-saving technology if more jobs are created than destroyed. The problem with “level up” as a strategy for dealing with it is that the jobs to be “leveled up” to are fewer in number, so it takes a much larger GDP to support the same number of jobs. A red queen race, or perhaps a pyramid scheme, to maintain employment levels. Or a constantly raising bar for workers (and race to the bottom for standards) if we don’t.

“It’s really corporatism you’re against” has become quite a cliché talking point. The problem is, “corporatism” being the problem is always a wind-up for a pitch for “laissez-faire” being the solution, whether that means “separation of economy and state” or a “subsidy-free society” or a society free of “rent extraction.” The underlying theory behind “it’s really corporatism you’re against” seems to be that when private actors do bad things, there’s INVARIABLY a public actor subsidizing them, or otherwise shielding them from what otherwise (according to the theory) would be the consequences of their actions.

I simply don’t buy that theory.

I’m quite certain that wealth would tend toward power in the absence of subsidy; in fact that the problem would be even worse. I’m OK with calling out rent seekers as long as I’m “punching up” when doing so, and even then, I can almost always (and prefer to) frame my objection to their conduct as something other than rent seeking. That’s why I’m always suspicious of people using the “corporatism” frame, they’re invariably libertarians whose rhetorical gambit (toward a left audience) is to bait our “anti-corporate” attitudes and switch us to what is nevertheless a pro-business position. I’m anti-business.

Human escape from natural constrains sounds like a worthy project. Destruction of nature seems, well, destructive, but of course so does nature. I’m of two minds on the subject. I try to sleep at night by imagining that self awareness is unique to humans, but remain aware that notions of human exceptionalism, like notions of pie in the sky, are a feature of religion, not science. Consciousness as a result of evolution, where evolution is a result of natural selection, is quite the trap. Cruel enough to tempt me to pendulum swing all the way past atheism to Manichaeism or some other type of demiurgical belief system.

COVID-19’s effects on media (and on the national Zeitgeist) are reminiscent of those of 9/11. The media have gone into full hero-worship mode, and the professions hailed as heroic are precisely the professions whose vetting process is basically hazing—the military, the police, the firefighters, the doctors and the nurses. Put another way, shit hitting fans in dramatic world-changing ways is the diametric opposite of Jesus’ prophecy about the meek inheriting the earth.

As I see it, the job of a HTTP client (browser) is to correctly implement the open standards that define the web, no more and no less.

I’m political enough about open source that I’ll endure a fair amount of inconvenience in order to avoid proprietary (or even commercial) software, but I also disagree on most points with the direction Firefox has been going, especially with UI and extensions. Maybe being political about open source is an empty gesture like fair trade coffee. It certainly seems sometimes like Firefox is an example of openwashing, which is scary, as browsers are basically the key underlying technology of the web, and the HTTP/HTML/CSS/Javascript standard is getting complex enough that only a multigazillion dollar organization can build a web browser (in particular, a rendering engine) from scratch that correctly implements the standards. I used to laud the idea of industry standards, as I saw them as the correct alternative to proprietary kludges becoming de-facto standards, but since the bodies making the standards are basically industry consortia, or organizations whose members are organizations (mostly of the for-profit type), what standards-making has turned into is a conspiracy of the commercial participants against the noncommercial participants.

This post was originally a comment to /u/DarSakhar’s Reddit post, If, for some unknown reason, this subreddit disappeared completely one day, how would you connect with other AnComs?

In general, choose DIY platforms over commercial platforms. Choose blogging over social media, and if possible self-host a blog (or other type of web site) rather than go with a blog-platform-in-a-can like Blogger or WordPress-dot-com.

Admittedly, I still use commercial social media, as evidenced by the present comment. There are some audiences that I’ll never, ever reach except through social media. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend muting your voice just to say you’re boycotting social media. But one practice I have adopted is, if I notice that I’ve put a fair amount of effort into a post or comment on social media, I immediately copypaste it into my now-self-hosted blog. I want the public domain to have my best work.