#frictionless

[xtrablak674]

Nothing on my mind...

Wanting to write something, and actually having something to write about, are two very different things. My writing usually has to come from a place of strong emotion, repulsion, passion, anger, rage or indecision. I have had some strong feelings about some films I watched recently, a niece who I realized was quite spoiled and maybe my empathy about a friend struggling with familial relations, but none of these items got me to launch a Page in iOs and get down some thoughts, and I missed that. I can't just write to write.

The main reason I wanted to do a post was to use a particular photo that showed up in my For You in the Photos app, just a year old photo of me from behind wearing my hakama pants. As I try to loose twenty pounds I gained I can clearly see that I am thinner in the photo. And even though I am more than a quarter of the way back to where I was I still enjoyed the picture because I felt I look good in it. Striving to look good is a constant worry and struggle, even though its for an audience of one.

Even my issues with this eBay seller who listed an item, then forgot to mail it because allegedly they were moving, but then after I had to reach out to them again two weeks after the purchase the story changed to, they didn't know where the item was. My thing is, you're misrepresenting, just refund my money, why are there further games or discussion? I have already submitted to eBay for a refund, but these kind of people are just messy and get so caught up in themselves they don't notice they are inconveniencing others.

I told a friend today that she needs to work on taking up more space. She went through some traumatic ish this weekend and thinks her feelings aren't worth the tears they are imprinted on. I want to dissuade that and encourage her to not be so apologetic about allowing herself to matter more to those around her. I think sometimes trauma leads folks to want to move through life as frictionless as possible and thats relatable, but life is about friction. And if you are creating friction so you have the room to express your full humanity I am all here for it.

Dionne Warick is now on my spirit I was looking forward to getting that four album collection and right now I am trying to quench that thirst with some Billie Holiday which is an entirely different vibe. But I finished my Sci-Fi Sunday early. I did something I don't usually do I ran of cartoons much earlier than usual. For a few moments I was like what do I do now?

The bulk of me filling my time usually has to do with something I am watching, so when I run of out of things to watch per my regularly scheduled programming I get a bit lost. I did put my walking clothes in the buckets to be washed. I wear them for two weeks than switch to other clothes to wear for a couple of weeks. Its getting cooler and wetter I hope I am able to walk for at least another month albeit I did successfully do at least a couple of sessions of yoga on the rainy days we had.

Well for having nothing on my mind I did find a couple of things to write about and now I can use the photo I want to use the way I want to use it. The thing was I was putting restrictions on myself saying I have a blog that shows naked flesh do I really want to bring any of that over here, and I decided I need to stop partitioning myself and allow me to be me and now try to stick to such a rigid agenda of who I should or shouldn't be in the digital spaces of the interenets.

[Photo by Brown Estate]

[sciencesolutions]

[legionofpotatoes]

I know the discourse well is poisoned and no one hates bioware games more than bioware fans, but I am just 🫠 having so much fun with veilguard it's unreal. It is selfishly the dragon age game I always wanted. with less emphasis on cRPG, a more focused story, curated mission based design that spotlights the high fantasy stuff, slowburn structure with companions, significantly less sidequest bloat, and a fully real-time action-oriented combat system that isn't riddled with the growing pains of previous titles. when I first played origins I imagined something almost exactly like this as my ideal version of a sequel; and it was one of those dirty, selfish thoughts that I knew was disrespectful to the then-established DNA of the thing, but I can't help but feel giddy about having it here and now. like down to the shift away from the childishly dark tone and to something more inherently flexible with a baseline aspirational quality. I hate aesthetically depressing games so much. am I not alive right here and right now already

When I say "aesthetically" there though I do mean it. I'm fully on the opposite side when it comes to tone and positions expressed in the story itself. I am just not including that in my analysis because I am not done yet - so please no spoilers! I think I am where most people consider to be the second act, and I definitely have my gripes with the narrative framework and some of the optics, but I won't put the cart before the horse and will see how it wraps things up first. Above that level, in terms of how it presents itself, of how it plays, of how it balances its core pillars - it is such a bioware-ass game and I could not be any cozier in it. So grateful it exists

[arcticdementor]

A physics joke

Q. What does a frictionless spherical cow say?

A. Nothing, because it has zero mu.

[marlenacantswim]

sure were in time for those stars, huh?

[howmanyholesinswisscheese]

odysseus hug pile RIGHT NOW

[livenudebigfoot]

why does this weird black market drug have such slick marketing materials. Who is designing these.

[rubensmuse]

DA2 comps used to encourage each other to kill themselves

[whewchilly]

I taped a sword to my hand when I was younger. This is an argument about goals.

Logic Richard Siken

India, 2013/ Malaysia, 2013/ India, 2013/ Abu Dhabi, 2010/ Abu Dhabi, 2010/ Germany, 1995/ Maranello, 2014/ Germany, 2018/ Maranello, 2014/ Maranello, 1997

[xtrablak674]

It's A Journey Not A Destination

Attempting to assure my nibling that no one comes out of the womb naturally stylish, but I felt strongly that your aesthetics are there early on, they just need the opportunities to begin to show themselves and grow. They really wanted me to choose things for them to wear, and I had to remind them, that what works for me isn't going to work for them. I could assist in helping them refine their taste and wear things that compliment their body, but I have never really worn female gendered clothes, I am truly not about that life.

Frictionless is the New Normal

There are six days left for Born to Tailor to deliver my money and the goods I paid for. I chatted yesterday with a girlfriend about what are the next steps I can do to get the things that I am owed. After clarifying that this isn't a civil case because its below 10k, we realized that this would be a case for Small Claims Court a forum I have successfully navigated with winning every case I put forth. I decided I would start with a strongly worded letter warning that I would have to pursue legal recourse if my merchandise wasn't forfeited. This kind of frustration had lead me to suspend my spending because I am so tired of having to fight with everyone all the time.

No Regrets Whatsoever

I had thought about my late brother and if I had any regrets about where I relationship was left. And frankly I think I did all that I could humanly could for the three touch-points we had in our brief relationship. From the jump I was fighting his distorted perceptions of me that was filtered through his mother, the same struggle I have now with his kids. Frankly I am so done having to always spend so much energy trying to win folks over who should accept me on the value of who I am, not what someone else has said about me.

Holding On And Letting Go

As I told another friend I am just done with any and all forms of adulting. I don't want anything to do with it because its always more headache than its worth. I am continually have to explain people business to them which is ridiculous. Why are you trying to gaslight me about a form that YOU SENT ME, which obviously you don't know what the instructions on this form are...

At this point I just want my money and book my ticket and reservations and be about this European trip already.

[Photo by Brown Estate]

[frankenshane]

nancy, you can save the smoke filled rooms chatter for november 7th

[mostlysignssomeportents]

What comes after neoliberalism?

In his American Prospect editorial, “What Comes After Neoliberalism?”, Robert Kuttner declares “we’ve just about won the battle of ideas. Reality has been a helpful ally…Neoliberalism has been a splendid success for the top 1 percent, and an abject failure for everyone else”:

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-03-28-what-comes-after-neoliberalism/

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/28/imagine-a-horse/#perfectly-spherical-cows-of-uniform-density-on-a-frictionless-plane

Kuttner’s op-ed is a report on the Hewlett Foundation’s recent “New Common Sense” event, where Kuttner was relieved to learn that the idea that “the economy would thrive if government just got out of the way has been demolished by the events of the past three decades.”

We can call this neoliberalism, but another word for it is economism: the belief that politics are a messy, irrational business that should be sidelined in favor of a technocratic management by a certain kind of economist — the kind of economist who uses mathematical models to demonstrate the best way to do anything:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

These are the economists whose process Ely Devons famously described thus: “If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’”

Those economists — or, if you prefer, economismists — are still around, of course, pronouncing that the “new common sense” is nonsense, and they have the models to prove it. For example, if you’re cheering on the idea of “reshoring” key industries like semiconductors and solar panels, these economismists want you to know that you’ve been sadly misled:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/03/24/economy-trade-united-states-china-industry-manufacturing-supply-chains-biden/

Indeed, you’re “doomed to fail”:

https://www.piie.com/blogs/trade-and-investment-policy-watch/high-taxpayer-cost-saving-us-jobs-through-made-america

Why? Because onshoring is “inefficient.” Other countries, you see, have cheaper labor, weaker environmental controls, lower taxes, and the other necessities of “innovation,” and so onshored goods will be more expensive and thus worse.

Parts of this position are indeed inarguable. If you define “efficiency” as “lower prices,” then it doesn’t make sense to produce anything in America, or, indeed, any country where there are taxes, environmental regulations or labor protections. Greater efficiencies are to be had in places where children can be maimed in heavy machinery and the water and land poisoned for a millions years.

In economism, this line of reasoning is a cardinal sin — the sin of caring about distributional outcomes. According to economism, the most important factor isn’t how much of the pie you’re getting, but how big the pie is.

That’s the kind of reasoning that allows economismists to declare the entertainment industry of the past 40 years to be a success. We increased the individual property rights of creators by expanding copyright law so it lasts longer, covers more works, has higher statutory damages and requires less evidence to get a payout:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

At the same time, we weakened antitrust law and stripped away limits on abusive contractual clauses, which let (for example) three companies acquire 70% of all the sound recording copyrights in existence, whose duration is effectively infinite (the market for sound recordings older than 90 is immeasurably small).

This allowed the Big Three labels to force Spotify to take them on as co-owners, whereupon they demanded lower royalties for the artists in their catalog, to reduce Spotify’s costs and make it more valuable, which meant more billions when it IPOed:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing

Monopoly also means that all those expanded copyrights we gave to creators are immediately bargained away as a condition of passing through Big Content’s chokepoints — giving artists the right to control sampling is just a slightly delayed way of giving labels the right to control sampling, and charge artists for the samples they use:

https://doctorow.medium.com/united-we-stand-61e16ec707e2

(In the same way that giving creators the right to decide who can train a “Generative AI” with their work will simply transfer that right to the oligopolists who have the means, motive and opportunity to stop paying artists by training models on their output:)

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

After 40 years of deregulation, union busting, and consolidation, the entertainment industry as a whole is larger and more profitable than ever — and the share of those profits accruing to creative workers is smaller, both in real terms and proportionally, and it’s continuing to fall.

Economismists think that you’re stupid if you care about this, though. If you’re keeping score on “free markets” based on who gets how much money, or how much inequality they produce, you’re committing the sin of caring about “distributional effects.”

Smart economismists care about the size of the pie, not who gets which slice. Unsurprisingly, the greatest advocates for economism are the people to whom this philosophy allocates the biggest slices. It’s easy not to care about distributional effects when your slice of the pie is growing.

Economism is a philosophy grounded in “efficiency” — and in the philosophical sleight-of-hand that pretends that there is an objective metric called “efficiency” that everyone can agree with. If you disagree with economismists about their definition of “efficiency” then you’re doing “politics” and can be safely ignored.

The “efficiency” of economism is defined by very simple metrics, like whether prices are going down. If Walmart can force wage-cuts on its suppliers to bring you cheaper food, that’s “efficient.” It works well.

But it fails very, very badly. The high cost of low prices includes the political dislocation of downwardly mobile farmers and ag workers, which is a classic precursor to fascist uprisings. More prosaically, if your wages fall faster than prices, then you are experiencing a net price increase.

The failure modes of this efficiency are endless, and we keep smashing into them in ghastly and brutal ways, which goes a long way to explaining the “new commons sense” Kuttner mentions (“Reality has been a helpful ally.”) For example, offshoring high-tech manufacturing to distant lands works well, but fails in the face of covid lockdowns:

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

Allowing all the world’s shipping to be gathered into the hands of three cartels is “efficient” right up to the point where they self-regulate their way into “efficient” ships that get stuck in the Suez canal:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/29/efficient-markets-hypothesis/#too-big-to-sail

It’s easy to improve efficiency if you don’t care about how a system fails. I can improve the fuel-efficiency of every airplane in the sky right now: just have them drop their landing gear. It’ll work brilliantly, but you don’t want to be around when it starts to fail, brother.

The most glaring failure of “efficiency” is the climate emergency, where the relative ease of extracting and burning hydrocarbons was pursued irrespective of the incredible costs this imposes on the world and our species. For years, economism’s position was that we shouldn’t worry about the fact that we were all trapped in a bus barreling full speed for a cliff, because technology would inevitably figure out how to build wings for the bus before we reached the cliff’s edge:

https://locusmag.com/2022/07/cory-doctorow-the-swerve/

Today, many economismists will grudgingly admit that putting wings on the bus isn’t quite a solved problem, but they still firmly reject the idea of directly regulating the bus, because a swerve might cause it to roll and someone (in the first class seats) might break a leg.

Instead, they insist that the problem is that markets “mispriced” carbon. But as Kuttner points out: “It wasn’t just impersonal markets that priced carbon wrong. It was politically powerful executives who further enriched themselves by blocking a green transition decades ago when climate risks and self-reinforcing negative externalities were already well known.”

If you do economics without doing politics, you’re just imagining a perfectly spherical cow on a frictionless plane — it’s a cute way to model things, but it’s got limited real-world applicability. Yes, politics are squishy and hard to model, but that doesn’t mean you can just incinerate them and do math on the dubious quantitative residue:

https://locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-qualia/

As Kuttner writes, the problem of ignoring “distributional” questions in the fossil fuel market is how “financial executives who further enriched themselves by creating toxic securities [used] political allies in both parties to block salutary regulation.”

Deep down, economismists know that “neoliberalism is not about impersonal market forces. It’s about power.” That’s why they’re so invested in the idea that — as Margaret Thatcher endlessly repeated — “there is no alternative”:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/08/tina-v-tapas/#its-pronounced-tape-ass

Inevitabilism is a cheap rhetorical trick. “There is no alternative” is a demand disguised as a truth. It really means “Stop trying to think of an alternative.”

But the human race is blessed with a boundless imagination, one that can escape the prison of economism and its insistence that we only care about how things work and ignore how they fail. Today, the world is turning towards electrification, a project of unimaginable ambition and scale that, nevertheless, we are actively imagining.

As Robin Sloan put it, “Skeptics of solar feasi­bility pantomime a kind of technical realism, but I think the really technical people are like, oh, we’re going to rip out and replace the plumbing of human life on this planet? Right, I remember that from last time. Let’s gooo!”

https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/room-for-everybody/

Sloan is citing Deb Chachra, “Every place in the world has sun, wind, waves, flowing water, and warmth or coolness below ground, in some combination. Renewable energy sources are a step up, not a step down; instead of scarce, expensive, and polluting, they have the potential to be abundant, cheap, and globally distributed”:

https://tinyletter.com/metafoundry/letters/metafoundry-75-resilience-abundance-decentralization

The new common sense is, at core, a profound liberation of the imagination. It rejects the dogma that says that building public goods is a mystic art lost along with the secrets of the pyramids. We built national parks, Medicare, Medicaid, the public education system, public libraries — bold and ambitious national infrastructure programs.

We did that through democratically accountable, muscular states that weren’t afraid to act. These states understood that the more national capacity the state produced, the more things it could do, by directing that national capacity in times of great urgency. Self-sufficiency isn’t a mere fearful retreat from the world stage — it’s an insurance policy for an uncertain future.

Kuttner closes his editorial by asking what we call whatever we do next. “Post-neoliberalism” is pretty thin gruel. Personally, I like “pluralism” (but I’m biased).

Have you ever wanted to say thank you for these posts? Here's how you can do that: I'm kickstarting the audiobook for my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon's Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they're DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

http://redteamblues.com

[Image ID: Air Force One in flight; dropping away from it are a parachute and its landing gear.]

[tubapun]

That sex was terrible. I've been in theoretical science experiments with more grip than your asshole

[aldieb]

we started the three-body problem show last night and i’m still thinking about this shot of a particle physicist’s bedroom that prominently includes the spine of a textbook that appears to just be titled “SCIENCE.” i was trying to find the book but as you might imagine this is a tough one. anyway this really sums up how they’ve done characterization of scientists. if you don’t mention the vague concept of science in every sentence you’re getting thrown out of the lab

[paradife-loft]

do I have homework for my econ class I need to be doing? yes

did I just spend 20 minutes making this instead? also yes

[howmanyholesinswisscheese]

im not sure why i put myself through this. kill me swiftly and painlessly its the least i deserve.