Notices by Steve Randy Waldman (interfluidity@zirk.us), page 6

i'm not a fan of substack on principal, but just in a day-to-day way, one thing really annoying about it is a lot of substackers have their front page in some splashy newspaper-like format when i just want a reverse chronological list of wtf they have written recently. is there some trick to just get that?

So much has been enshittified.

I keep finding myself getting screwed by having formed expectations in civilized times, expectations that are now just wrong. 1/

i think i’ve had my most kafkaesque customer service experience ever on a Spirit Airlines chat line. more than two hours, allegedly three humans in addition to the chatbot, but i’m disinclined to believe there were any humans in the loop at all. no comprehension, no help, now in addition to the problem we were trying to resolve we’re in danger of missing the plane. this is a brave new world where really, really, there is nobody on the other end who has any inclination or capacity to give a fuck.

"Here’s the hidden truth of education: You don’t know what you’re preparing for. You don’t know. Your teacher doesn’t know. Your school doesn’t know. Your future employer doesn’t know. Nobody knows. Not really." @inthehands https://innig.net/teaching/liberal-arts-manifesto

ht @llimllib

cc @chrisp @DetroitDan @poetryforsupper @SteveRoth

“Part-time work can also be a means of control. Because employers have total discretion over hours, they can use reduced schedules to punish employees who complain or seem likely to unionize — even though workers can’t legally be fired for union-related activity — while more pliant workers are rewarded with better schedules.”

My sister #AdelleWaldman has a great op-ed in The New York Times today. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/19/opinion/part-time-workers-usa.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Wk0.v6s_.9JWuaBzNIRdr&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

i might be an idiot, but at least i know i’m not useful.

Have a lot of adjectives. Don't be a noun.

for states, assimilation — a capacity to assimilate, to integrate — is a superpower.

e pluribus unum is our strength, or was, and should be again.

exciting news from the citadel of free speech.

"Blogging was not just a thing you did, a solitary practice: it was a thing you took part in; the thing you did was merely a means of entry, a contribution to a collective thing, a complex emergent system." @PaulGrahamRaven https://www.velcro-city.co.uk/you-can-never-step-in-the-same-blog-twice/

// i think nostalgia and realism are less divorced than we sometimes feel. yes, we can't recreate the past, what will be will be new. but what existed in the past is an existence proof, that kind of thing can exist. from the past we know the possible.

The sun has now set on 2023.

“History is not what happened. It is what gets written down in an imperfect, often underhanded process dominated by self-interested political, economic and cultural authorities.” from Silent Cavalry by #HowellRaines via #MartinPengelly https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/dec/27/howell-raines-silent-cavalry-civil-war

cc @poetryforsupper

"[N]ot all innovations are beneficial to society, with some corporations using tactics that undermine legal rights and increase worker exploitation… [R]obust antitrust enforcement between the 1940s-1970s channeled corporate resources into productive investments rather than employing unfair methods of competition." @danielahanley https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4586770

there are no good guys, just people refraining from doing horrible things right here, right now, and helping others to do the same.

maybe the coming deluge of deep fakes will, paradoxically, restore our privacy.

if most of what we see is fake, then everything is deniable.

"It is the bleakest of historical ironies that a people hounded from country to country, and eventually into camps, by the pestilence of nationalism should seize on nationalism as our saviour, our birth right, our vengeance." #SamAdlerBell https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/11/jews-resist-inhumanity-israel

@perfect_brains the work of states is to conjure nationalisms consistent with stability and internal peace (which often means pluralism). nationalism untethered to a state that incorporates as full citizens all of the residents of the territory it controls is indeed a pestilence, in my view. https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/10/13/national-self-determination-is-a-vicious-idea/index.html

whatever everybody thinks of as the revolution is always just public relations.

i increasingly think the ichoate heart of the true revolution are people quietly building an alternative future in elisp.

the revolution lives not in cells, but in buffers.

#emacs

everything in moderation, especially moderation.

the subject of the e-mail was “band books”, and it was not in error. it was from a music teacher at the kid’s school.