crazyeddieme

[crazyeddieme]

three different people on my post about installing a trashcan outside my house have now complained that people SHOULD be holding onto their trash instead of just tossing it in random people's yards ("it's not that hard!"). like... good for you; do you want a fucking prize? we could engrave a nice little "congratulations on missing the point!" placard for it and everything.

meanwhile, my yard continues to not have beer bottles in it anymore.

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People loved their work once, and it didn’t matter if they worked in the public sector or in the private one. The men who worked in the CCC would take their grandchildren to see the forests they planted, while the men from the auto plants would point out the cars they’d built as they passed them on the new interstate highway system. The women who fastened the engines on the wings would watch the B-17’s fly off to make a liar out of Goering, and the women who taught in the public schools would point with pride when one of their old students got elected mayor. Work was about making money, certainly. It was about feeding the family and keeping the roof where it was, and maybe having a little left over at the end of the day, or at the end of the week, for some amusement. Maybe a trip to Lincoln Park or White City or a hundred other places, where you could take a moment and enjoy the cool of the evening, music riding the nightwind from a dance pavilion down along the lake.

But it was also about Doing A Job, and doing it well, which was different than simply Having A Job. It was about making good cars and strong steel and sturdy furniture. It was about learning a craft, even if what you were doing wasn’t recognized as one. There was a craft in tightening rivets, or feeding the open-hearth furnace, or planing the wood just so. You had your craft, and the person next to you had theirs, and, when all the work was done, and all the craft was practiced, and practiced well, there was something you could look at with pride and say, that is something I have given to the world. Job well done, as they used to say. You could teach seventh grade civics and then, one day, you’re on a podium outside of City Hall. That kid right there, you could say. That kid is something I have helped give to the world. Job well done, as they used to say.

Unions were greatly responsible for the pride that people took in the work they did, especially in the middle of the last century, when unions helped build the most formidable middle class in human history.

There was an autoworker, Ben Hamper, who wrote a column in the Flint (later Michigan) Voice, which was the alt-weekly Michael Moore first made his name by running. A lot of his columns got collected and repackaged in an excellent book, Rivethead, that I read in college.

I read it in a class with Stuart Blumin, who was my favorite professor and de facto advisor. He was an American historian, focused on labor and class and the development of capitalism, you could tell he was heavily influenced by EP Thompson and the Communist Party Historians Group over in the UK.

He was quite open that he had expected Communism to ultimately triumph, and that he had been wrong about that, and in subtext that he had wanted it to ultimately triumph, and didn’t think he had been wrong about that.

Anyway, Rivethead. The story is that Hamper was born in 1956, a fairly clever kid growing up in Flint, Michigan, the chronological and geographic apex of American industrial unionism, where everyone’s dad worked for GM.

And he could have gone to college but he gets some girl pregnant and so he goes to work on the assembly line not even really out of obligation or Catholic guilt or whatever but because that seems as good a life course as any, it’s what every man he’s known does, under the mighty UAW the pay’s on par with the kind of “educated” jobs you could get anyway, why not.

And so he goes to work on the line and eventually he ends up writing a column about it, and he talks about the color of the factory culture, playing soccer with rivets for balls and cardboard boxes for goals, drinking mickeys of malt liquor in your car on lunch break, the absurd fursuited mascot “Howie Makem, The Quality Cat” that GM would feature at rallies and shop-floor tours, being laid off in economic downturns and put into the “job bank” where you get paid waiting to be rehired in the next upswing, developing a perfect rhythm with your partner, training into a rhythm so perfect you can each trade off doing the two-person job yourself for 4 hours while the other one goes out to a bar on the clock, the dignity and solidarity of the American worker.

And time goes on and eventually his marriage fails but he takes it in stride, and his column gets recognized and he takes pride in that and then eventually he has an epiphany, and a complete breakdown, which are basically the same thing. And the inciting incident is when an older line worker, some guy he’d looked up to as a model of quiet, philosophical stolidity, just shits himself and is barely coherent enough to even notice this and he realizes the guy hadn’t been a Zen master, he’d just been checked-out mindless drunk on the line every day.

And he realizes that the rivethead life is destroying him, that the only thing holding it together was a budding alcoholism, and that it’s doing the same to all his co-workers, and looks back and realizes it had done the same to every grown-up man he knew, his father and uncles that growing up he had looked up to as models of masculine strength and fortitude really had just had their spark snuffed out and the life beaten out of them long before, and whatever pride they took in the cars out on the road was a defensive attempt to locate in an external form the sense of self-value that had been exterminated within them.

When Marx talked about “alienation”, well.

And he went crazy, and couldn’t bear to work on the line anymore, and there’s no redemption, that’s where the book ends.

And that was a theme that cropped up again in Professor Blumin’s class, that there were two great working class traditions that echoed through the ages, and they were

avoiding work

and

drinking

Back in the premechanized age of small-group workshop manufacturing, workers would celebrate “Saint Monday”, which was to say just not showing up for work, hung over after the weekend.

(This was riffing off of Catholic feast days, or holy days, from which we take the word “holiday”, and as time went on counted an increasing share of the days of the year. There was a reason that poor workers were aligned with the Church, and nobility, in “Altar and Throne” coalitions resisting the development of industrial capitalist liberal democracy.)

In the ‘80s, the crap time of American auto manufacturing, one trick that was passed around (pre-internet, so by word of mouth largely) was to look at the codes stamped on car bodies, which would tell you what day of the week they were manufactured, and to avoid Mondays and Fridays. Because those days had the highest defect rates, because the workers tended to be drunk, or hungover, or absent.

And back in the workshop days, you’d drink at work. Apprentices would be sent out for growlers or buckets of beer, there were elaborate rules of who in the hierarchy of workers was expected to buy rounds for who and when. And there was hellacious resistance to attempts to get them to knock this off, as the industrial era kicked into swing.

Those great satanic mills, where women and children worked in shifts at great water- or steam-driven sewing and spinning machines, stories of little kids getting their hands mangled by the machinery? One of the major reasons women and children were preferred was because they would actually show up on time every day, and stay sober around all those hand-manglers.

And I mean, this maybe sounds like an argument for socialism. Though not of any actually-existing- variety, as capitalist propaganda will be glad to tell you, Soviet work culture, at least when the morale thrills of the Revolution and Great Patriotic War faded from personal to institutional memory, was all about shirking and vodka.

So those complaints about how America celebrates Labor Day instead of May Day, ignoring the true meaning of labor - solidarity - in favor of mindless distraction? Psssh. Labor Day is a celebration of the truest, most ancient, most fundamental traditions of labor: not working (especially on Mondays), and getting drunk.

Happy Labor Day!

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what is it with anarchists and being fuckimg NIMBYs

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Climate denialism in the netherlands is so fucking funny like. Bro the floods. They’re coming

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If any of you have articles of clothing with fake pockets or no pockets or barely any pockets, here's who to blame

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i mean this in the gentlest way possible: you need to eat vegetables. you need to become comfortable with doing so. i do not care if you are a picky eater because of autism (hi, i used to be this person!), you need to find at least some vegetables you can eat. find a different way to prepare them. chances are you would like a vegetable you hate if you prepared it in a stew or roasted it with seasoning or included it as an ingredient in a recipe. just. please start eating better. potatoes and corn are not sufficient vegetables for a healthy diet.

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DERRY GIRLS | 3.04 “The Haunting”

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the thing is that if you divorce it from the name and associations of "burning man" i Know there are fucking Plenty of you who would drop $500 in total on expenses to go do drugs and have sex at a music festival in the desert i just Know it

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I think the thing about Americans complaining about the suburbs is that we forget that having your own personal yard and a personal vehicle are both things that most people would rather have than not have, and were not created solely as part of a Machiavellian scheme designed to alienate people.

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As recent empirical work has shown, the neoclassical account’s core assumptions—one, that rent control restricts the supply of new housing; and two, that it misallocates existing housing, thereby causing an irrecoverable collective loss—fail to hold when it comes to the real world. 

You mean the real world where the supply of new housing is also constrained by other stuff?  I mean, yes, now that construction isn’t really happening anyway, rent control might not make a noticeable difference after all.

Given that this is the argument that appears in almost every introductory economics text (with the notable exception of the CORE Econ open-access book, which I use), it should come as no surprise that the vast majority of professional economists credit it. According to a poll of economists at prominent universities conducted by the University of Chicago Booth School, a whopping 81 percent of respondents opposed rent control (while only 2 percent supported it). As the Tufts University economist Gilbert Metcalf said recently, “opposition to rent control is something like an oath of office for the profession.” [...]

There’s just one problem: This neoliberal conventional wisdom is wrong. As recent empirical work has shown, the neoclassical account’s core assumptions—one, that rent control restricts the supply of new housing; and two, that it misallocates existing housing, thereby causing an irrecoverable collective loss—fail to hold when it comes to the real world.

For example, there is abundant evidence that rent control does not constrain housing supply. One study of rent control in New Jersey—a state with a rich history of embracing rent control—found that, over three decades, rent control increased housing supply (though this was largely attributed to landlords slicing up larger units into smaller ones). Other studies have repeatedly confirmed that rent control doesn’t affect the overall supply of housing, though landlords may take advantage of poorly written rent control laws that allow them to convert existing rentals into condos to better capture price increases and skirt the intentions of rent control laws—loopholes that could easily be shut.

Researchers have also studied what happens when rent control laws are repealed. If neoclassical theory is correct, lifting regulations on rent should result in a boom in housing supply. However, researchers find that when rent control measures are undone, there has been no subsequent expansion of new housing.

As with constrained supply, so with the “misallocation” of housing stock. Although it is true that rent control creates “winners” (current tenants) and “losers” (landlords seeking to raise rents), this is no “deadweight loss”; rather, benefits that would have previously been fully captured by landlords—rents in the economic sense—are shared with existing tenants. For example, as a non-rent-controlled area grows in popularity, often due to that area’s current inhabitants, landlords are able to hike rents. This is a pure rent in the economic sense: The landlord didn’t invest in the building to realize a return; rather, the landlord simply benefited from owning a particular property at a particular time. Rent control changes the calculus by limiting the economic rents landlords can extract from tenants, thus more equitably sharing the benefits of local economic growth between landlords and tenants. [...]

[Pro-rent-control] policymakers are simply responding to their constituents. Polling conducted in 2019 by Data for Progress found that a majority of likely voters, including a majority of independents, support rent control, with just 1 in 5 opposing such a measure. More recent polling in Massachusetts found that 68 percent of likely voters want rent control, showing that people are fed up with the exorbitant and unjustified rent hikes that are making the working class collectively poorer.

For those still opposed to rent control, let’s look at the problem through the other end of the telescope, as it were. Some 67 percent of Americans live in owner-occupied homes—meaning they enjoy de facto rent control in the form of the 30-year mortgage. That style of mortgage was a creation of the federal government during the New Deal. Homeowners, who skew white and rich, benefit tremendously from the government’s rules, regulations, and subsidies that allow them to pay a fixed monthly sum for housing over 30 years. It’s high time for the government to extend these benefits—and the economic security that comes with them—by adopting rent control to cover all people in the United States.

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I get the impression that surgery has a reputation for having a very toxic culture and surgeons have a reputation for yelling at their coworkers all the time and being generally abusive. I also get the impression that surgeons often go very long periods without sleep and routinely work while highly sleep deprived. If true, there is literally no way these things aren't directly related.

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not very good at asking for things that I want

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Oklahoma is working to determine how much water remains in its aquifers, information that state lawmakers could use to set limits on pumping. But Christopher Neel, the head of water rights for the Oklahoma Water Resources Board, said people might not necessarily welcome the government telling them that their land is running out of groundwater.

“If we start showing that kind of data, that kind of goes into your property values,” Mr. Neel said. “If we show an area may be depleted in, let’s say, two years, well, if someone tries to sell that property, they’re not going to be able to.” [...]

The National Association of Home Builders, asked about the wisdom of building houses where water is running out, said the industry was responding to the demands of homebuyers who want to live in those areas.

Susan Asmus, the association’s senior vice president for regulatory affairs, said builders follow the rules that local officials establish. She said it was up to governments to determine where and how it’s appropriate to build homes. The officials who approve those developments “obviously think they can manage the challenges,” Ms. Asmus said in a statement. [...]

Any effort to impose federal oversight would very likely face opposition from agricultural groups. The American Farm Bureau Federation, which represents farmers, said states were best suited to address groundwater problems. The federal government’s role should be to spend money on infrastructure projects and help farmers pay for new technology, according to Courtney Briggs, the federation’s senior director of government affairs.

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is that the one where they started turning their noses up at cocaine or the one where they had it so good they all started murdering each other?

While we're all passing around that Substack article about psychology, here's your periodic reminder that Rat Park did not replicate and is considered total bunk by people in the field. Stop citing it in your Takes about atomized urbanist modern ennui or the dating market or whatever.

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pufa = polyunsaturated fatty acid

yudkowsky is on about certain fatty acids causing obesity lately, so that there's good vs bad vegetable oils

idk about that man. I think yudkowsky doesnt know either

but ever since the sequences he's been talking about obesity not being as well understood as people think, and one of his central examples in "Inadequate Equilibria" of a knowable stupid thing that professionals do anyway had to do with the oils used in some kind of supplement for babies

it's a whole thing tied up not just with his concerns about his own health but also with "civilizational inadequacy" "sanity waterline" stuff. Which is why he talks about this stuff even though he doesn't endorse with confidence any particular hypothesis, i think

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Like the answer to why IQ tests are everywhere (including the SAT and the ACT and the Leetcode questions you do in programming interviews) is that hiring people who don't have experience is both essential and a complete crapshoot, and IQ and its proxies are the best tool we've come up with for predicting job performance for new hires

It should be noted that it's still not a very good predictor, especially compared to past performance in a role for non-new-hires, but it's a lot better than nothing, so it comes up everywhere at the high school/college/post grad level

Whereas conversely you hear a lot less about older people taking this or that test because they actually have the history behind them that predicts whether they'll be good at something more accurately