Notices by Graydon (graydon@canada.masto.host), page 2

@clacke @katzenberger @cstross @juglugs The country had four hundred years of being the Pirate Kingdom. (And to the extent that it is not now the Pirate Kingdom, that was involuntary and is not acknowledged.) The idea of admiring a big pile of loot, however gotten, is axiomatic.

Axioms never die on their own; you have to replace them, and what you replace them with has to win the inevitable fight with the incumbents.

@cstross @emilygorcenski There is a shedload of wetware specifically to recognize faces. It's why we can see faces in clouds.

The problem with Chomsky's grammar notions is that no one has been able to find it. There's a bunch of developmental stuff about sound order in infants and another bunch of developmental stuff leading up to theory of mind, but the organization of language doesn't seem to be especially constrained.

I think the "psychic illusion" take is much closer.

@joewein Y'all keep refusing to internalize that the GOP is a cult and it wants to bring about the literal end of the world in the everyone dies, smoke-covers-the-land sense.

Failure of non-proliferation is a terrible thing, but not to the GOP.

They're trying to do this enormous act of necromancy to compel God to prove He loves them.

Their objectives make no more sense than that and can make no more sense than that.

@kcarruthers While that's a factual statement, it's also unhelpful.

Moral frames that require people to acknowledge that they're bad are resisted. (Moral frames in general are only effective for rationalizing the awful, awful things you did to benefit the ingroup.)

Opposing hegemonizing normalcy in the service of guaranteeing secure status needs a successful alternative power structure where participation raises people's functional relative social status.

@kcarruthers We can be absolutely sure the incumbent social order will not survive; any one of decarbonization, agricultural collapse, or the rising sea would suffice that.

The trick is not so much to contest the really bad insecurity management that comes with people knowing they're going to lose relative status, but to find a way for people to participate in an increase in absolute measures. (More agency, larger choice space, greater egalitarianism in outcomes, etc.)

@kcarruthers And for that better future to win the inevitable fight with the folks who will burn the world to be sure they're accorded the deference they're sure they deserve.

@clacke > No other country writes an abbreviated adjective/possessive for their country in their hashtags, it's just ukpol, uspol, sepol, hkpol, fipol, etc.

Nobody else uses the heraldic proportions we use on our flag on their flag, either. Things sometimes come out different.

@clacke sometimes CDN is "Canadian", the adjective.

Both your example hashtags expand that way; "Canadian politics", "Canadian media".

@scottsantens It would do nothing but transfer public funds to the very rich, as rents increased, other prices increased, and de facto "sign it over" practices spread.

There is no way forward that is not eternal chattel slavery as the (possibly indirect) possession of an oligarch OR the utter and comprehensive destruction of great private wealth, world-wide.

Once we've done the later, we can have UBI. But not before.

@Flux @scottsantens Modern Monetary Theory supposes a contrafactual, which is that the persons most necessary to tax can be taxed. (Obviously not true. The cost to buy a government is much less than the taxes; existence proofs of this abound.)

It supposes a second contrafactual that taxation is fast enough to impose a functional and sufficiently low lid on great personal wealth. We know that's not true because it was tried and failed hard across generational time.

@Flux @scottsantens I think we're structurally unable to do so.

The cost of buying an election really is quite small compared to the expected cost of effective taxation of great wealth on great wealth; the selective outcome is obvious. (E.g., Michael Bloomberg spent thereabouts of a billion dollars to keep Elizabeth Warren out of consideration in the Democratic primaries because that cost less.)

I'd argue that abolishing great wealth is necessary to functional democracy.

@scottsantens None of that matters.

We live in a system under selection, meaning that we get a present populated by whatever in the past replicated itself.

"Basic income" will function as a transfer of public funds to private wealth if it's possible to copy private wealth into the future. (E.g., "the yard-sale model" for a simple explanation of how this works.)

If we actually want to improve anything, the problem isn't obtaining basic income; it's abolishing persistent wealth.

I could wish people would stop saying "risk" about COVID.

It's not a risk.

COVID is cumulative, every COVID infection does damage, and it's very unlikely anyone ever clears COVID. Some of the damage is permanent; some of the damage is long term. Some of the damage is an unknown matter of the future. Damage, including brain damage, is universal and inevitable.

The variable is how long before you're disabled to a limiting degree.

It's not rolling dice; it's getting punched in the head.

@emilygorcenski Not falling apart is sort of step zero, yeah. So no needing to make a rapid trip to Lowe's trip for jack posts which I was wondering about from the picture.

I will admit to being a bit baffled as to how stringers would ever get that way but after seeing with my own eyes where someone notched nominal 2x12 joists about 10" deep for pipe I should be able to say "old house" to myself and acknowledge that "why" is a frequently unanswerable question.

@emilygorcenski The near end of those stringers looks entirely unstrung.

@clacke It is a terminology and some of the people I have heard use it are lawyers. (One of them was a lawyer AND a librarian.)

I am still pretty sure that a lawyer who was doing it on purpose wouldn't have done it like that.

@clacke You're most welcome but I am by no means certain that was what the court meant to do!

I'd bet it's an editing slip letting a duplicate "professional" through before I bet it was a deliberate distinction.

@clacke There's professional information technology and consumer information technology and public information technology; your corporate document retention and filing system, someone's laptop with the file manager that comes with the OS, and the US GPO system for finding the official text of laws, for example.

So the court is describing a person with professional qualifications in a context of professional information technology. They don't know anything about the Library of Congress.

@cstross @quinn Three interlocking problems.

Money as "a medium of exchange and a store of value" versus "a permanent and never decreasing store of value"; the first one is supportable, the second one isn't, but guess which one existing wealth wants?

Systems structured to accumulate money where "enough money" is undefined.

Policy (ignore climate change; ignore pandemics) creates conditions where "enough money" becomes infinite.

@cstross @quinn Money is only an effective tool to manage your insecurity in a context of good government, and good government cannot use money as an objective.

(Money is an abstraction to facilitate having an accounting system; it's there so you can have units. It's not an expression of natural law, the economy, or effort. It's not even a direct measure of the ratio between effort, lifespan, and outcomes.)