Graydon / is on Nostr

Starts-with-X programmer. Fantasy author. The human social function emulator may not function as expected. He/they. Born at 322 ppm

Dubious Prospects: https://dubiousprospects.blogspot.com

Last Notes

2024-11-15 23:13:44

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The reality of aging as slow failure of the immune system, that people look younger today than in the past because your immune system gets hammered on less due to vaccines and public health and water quality regulations, etc., and the age of miracles doing its damndest to save your life don't matter, because none of those keep you from dying.
If what you really want is assurance that you'll live forever and there's no honest, factual way to give it, well, fear does things. People discard facts.

2024-07-07 16:31:00

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Harris is a big part of why this attack against Biden is happening now.
The Right's Obama Doctrine -- that there will never again be another black president -- is something they agree on without dissent.

2024-06-24 11:34:21

The economy has been stagnant since the 1970s. The only source of growth has been computers, a tiny number of firms captured it all, and Moore's Law is over. (It's after the gold rush, and the whole world is a mining town.)
If you were wondering why everything is collapsing into a scam and profiteering on necessity.
The fix, with greater urgency and more agricultural collapse, is what it was in the 1970s; move off fossil carbon and make/build for value.
Pity about those incumbents, isn't it?

2024-06-05 00:38:58

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It is, isn't it?
I still kinda want the musical comedy about the Grants in the White House; Mrs. Grant had been Miss Julia Dent, and the Dents had been slaveholders and opposed to the marriage because the Grants were abolitionists and they didn't like his army career prospects. Awkwardest inlaws of any president. And Mrs. Julia Grant delighted in inviting them to visit because, well, they had to be polite, even if her man had kicked all their asses.

2024-05-31 23:22:47

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The obvious route is for the USSC to observe that, OK, a New York Court has held that there was a fraud related to the conduct of the 2016 presidential election. And the fraud was perpetrated by and to benefit the person who was inaugurated as a result of that election. Thing is, states return electors, and New York's electors went for Clinton in 2016. So the New York court is really saying that some OTHER state's electors were modified by the fraud. That's a federal issue.

2024-05-29 15:40:12

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If the goal is to stop the spread between cattle, it could in principle be "if your herd is infected, you can't ship milk", sure. (This is arguably insufficient if the goal is to prevent spread to humans.)
That opens them up to a lot of lawsuits from (for example) sheppards who've had to cull their entire flock over one case of spontaneous scrappie; it also probably destroys the dairy industry anyway because the margins are not there to absorb not shipping milk.

2024-05-29 15:10:10

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Thing is, anyone paying attention knows the rough shape of the answers already. And it seems likely nigh-all of the spread happened prior to detection, which would mean an extremely unpopular and very expensive cull requirement of "the US dairy industry" at the time of detection. So the political decision is to pretend it's fine and pray the jump to humans doesn't happen.
Never thought I'd see anyone or anything committing escalatio with infectious disease.

2024-05-27 01:23:56

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One the reasons that I could wish everyone would read Grant's autobiography is that it describes his emotional state before commanding his first battle, and the realization that the other fellow was just as scared of him, and how this altered his take on nigh-everything thereafter.
The right is utterly terrified. (With good reason; failure has a price, and the Carbon Binge is the greatest failure in the history of mankind. And there are other failures.)

2024-05-24 18:18:12

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Guns enhance your status. Wearing a respirator says you're as subject to facts as anybody else, and thereby diminishes your status.
Lots of selection pressure for being really focused on status to the exclusion of all else, because like money, you can usually substitute it for whatever you don't have. Occasions like the present plague where you can't shift all the costs on to other, lower status people are rare.

2024-05-21 13:00:18

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https://www.denimsandjeans.com/denim/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-us-denim-industry-1960-2010/1570
Would be a start. It completely lacks the phrase "deliberate union busting", which was critically important, and doesn't address the "you cannot get denim of that quality anywhere today" part where an established profitable productive capacity was destroyed because it didn't optimize profit.

2024-05-21 04:40:37

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It's amazing how many people don't know what happened to jeans in the 80s and why there's a market for new-old-stock 80s jeans even today.

2024-05-13 16:36:41

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There's an ongoing dispute near where I live where a developer wants to just ignore an indigenous land claim on the basis that indigenous land claims are bad for business (that is, would hinder extracting profit). Indigenous displacement is not strictly past tense and the supporting language is all "pro-business" ("this class of people should be guaranteed a profit").
(In the 19th, lots more overtly genocidal language. But the "pro-business" language is there, too.)

2024-05-13 16:03:28

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Laws and regulations tend to falsify prices, on purpose. (Look into indigenous displacement; that land is free because it was declared free and the price backed with troops. Highway expropriations are a two-tier example; the route gets picked to benefit the people who knew where it would go.)
"run like a business" = "decisions will be made on the basis of the profit motive".
The profit measure ("do other people agree this was worthwhile?") is useful; the motive is not.

2024-05-13 15:29:34

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It's only responsible to run things like a business if they're not important.
Lots of people are extremely resistant to this insight.
(One of the reasons is that it's inherently easier to use false accounting than to conduct the business responsibly; observe what we use for fossil carbon prices, which are considered profitable despite being an increasing cost.)