Steve Randy Waldman

There's a version of "institutionalist" that is not remotely interested in defending anything about the substantive character of our institutions, but which simply triangulates itself, always, to the center of whatever the institutions of the moment happen to be, whether they wonderful or abhorrent, no matter how they come to evolve, or to devolve.

2024-07-16 05:25:32

Elon Musk has promised to donate $45 million per month to a pro-Trump super-PAC. He is also working to have the Supreme Coup declare the NLRB unconstitutional. https://onlabor.org/tracking-attacks-on-the-nlrb-spacex-tries-its-luck-again/
Meanwhile, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien gives a barnburner of a speech at the Republican National Convention, extolling in sometimes very personal terms the necessity and value of labor unions, skewering tech firms including Amazon, Uber, and Lyft. (But no Musk firm was directly named.)
Weird times.

2024-07-15 17:16:57

this ice cream shop could only be in one city.
https://cdn.masto.host/zirkus/media_attachments/files/112/791/637/915/484/427/original/afe3540f6b51c9c9.jpeg

2024-07-13 05:28:40

it is in both of our interests that we make common cause, but i am so very angry at you.

2024-07-12 02:17:23

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@npub1jma…0as2 https://zirk.us/@interfluidity/112770728992704471

2024-07-09 19:19:06

"Nor may courts deem an action unofficial merely because
it allegedly violates a generally applicable law."
— Chief Justice John Roberts
United States Supreme Court
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf

2024-07-02 22:48:49

Sometimes when Congressional candidates become unable to contest an election, the spouse has subbed in. (See e.g. Lisa Murkowski, who is still in the US Senate.)
Is Jill Biden a potential candidate?
(I'm not trying to comment one way or another on the advisability or perhaps absurdity of that.)

2024-07-01 19:35:57

Can Democrats run on codifying the criminalization of any substantial gratuity to public officials at every level please?
I mean, this stuff is too basic even for Schoolhouse Rock.

2024-06-21 05:55:18

it can be surprisingly hard sometimes not to be a dick, but it is good work to try.

2024-06-19 01:38:21

is “influencer marketing” unethical? more or less unethical than other forms of advertising? (it strikes me as pretty close to traditional celebrity endorsement advertising, so maybe any critiques apply to that too?)

2024-06-18 18:19:43

how to persuade the public that Donald Trump is not Johnny Cash.

2024-06-13 16:46:25

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@npub1jma…0as2 or perhaps “abstract”.

2024-06-13 16:12:12

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@npub1jma…0as2 i agree. it’s time to renounce this getting older thing.

2024-06-13 15:58:30

sometimes i notice myself disliking people then i dislike myself even more.

2024-06-12 02:59:54

i get mad at apple a lot but elon musk’s ranting can’t help but rehabilitate them a bit to me.

2024-06-10 22:15:19

isn't Apple supposed to be good at UI? remember when they had human interface guidelines that were all about consistency?
i'm reading a story in the desktop Apple News app. i want to find a phrase i've read, so Command-f and start typing, like every other application.
no. command-f puts me in the main search bar, so all of a sudden i'm out of my article and finding others with the phrase.
apparently there is no in-article find in Apple News, just Command-f as "Search". it's too much to ask.

2024-06-10 20:47:37

i think i will have to drive seven miles, physically go to the kid's doctor's office, to make an appointment for him. the online and telephone systems are simply beyond my capacities to penetrate.

2024-06-10 19:30:58

What is the best plaintext editor for less technical people?
Like, if a non technical friend was going to edit some config or a bit of boilerplatey code.
Notepad / TextEdit wouldn't be great, but neither would emacs or vim (and they're not going to mess with any IDE).

2024-06-10 18:32:04

we use "visitation" to describe what ghosts do to mortals, and what the unincarcerated do to the incarcerated.
there is perhaps something hopeful in the analogy.

2024-06-10 18:25:54

It’s frustrating, what of my old policy-centric conversation does not remain with economists-who-don’t-give-a-fuck still on Twitter has mostly migrated to BlueSky rather than Mastodon. But I don’t know that I trust BlueSky not just to be Twitter with a make-over yet. And it's hard for me to track / decide where to post over multiple microblogospheres, so if I ever do jump into BlueSky, I expect to feel torn, friction, confusion, as I do like the community I've found here.

2024-06-10 16:46:18

it used to be that when you write to your senator or congressional representative, you’d always get a response.
usually just a dumb, barely responsive form-letter precomposed about whatever issue you addressed. but still. something.
nowadays i find it is usually nothing. there is just no response, whether the communication is by submitting an online form, or sending certified postal mail.
i know. i am old.

2024-05-21 13:42:44

i have pretty mixed feelings about the whole thing.

2024-05-09 01:24:57

starbucks wrote to say my stars are expiring soon very kind of them to write but they didn't have to tell me man do i feel it.

2024-04-29 19:20:06

This is just a weird movement.
It's just trying to appeal along entirely different dimensions than a conventional campaign. It's parasocial rather than political.
https://cdn.masto.host/zirkus/media_attachments/files/112/356/109/973/356/090/original/028d4813fc93c22a.png

2024-04-19 18:08:15

please connect while i try to hold you.

2024-04-05 01:49:52

[new draft post] Indirection and the character of capitalism (Part I) https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/04/04/indirection-and-the-character-of-capitalism-part-i/index.html

2024-03-30 23:54:09

what if Biden trolled everybody and declared March 31 as the furry day of visibility too and dressed up as the Easter Bunny and bounced around the South Lawn while photo-op kids hunt for colored eggs?

2024-03-30 15:28:35

to whom have you cozied up?

2024-03-29 21:53:26

there's no question that the United States has been a very devoted ally to Israel.
has Israel been a devoted ally to the United States?

2024-03-16 03:01:08

https://cdn.masto.host/zirkus/media_attachments/files/112/103/133/236/042/367/original/9dea50aea81d9bef.jpeg

2024-03-13 20:16:39

i’d support a law that made it impossible for tiktok to operate as it does, as long as it was equitable and made it impossible for facebook, instagram, twitter, and youtube to operate as they do. i trust the Chinese Communist Party to act in the US public interest about as much as i trust Elon Musk to.

2024-02-29 17:37:41

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@npub1jma…0as2 i think to the degree people are conscious that their wealth comes from some sort of predation — think the Sacklers, or the PE looters @npub1hyk…3p33 writes about, or doctors knowingly over-recommending procedures, etc — they hold their victims in contempt, as being a lesser kind of person who might succumb to these kinds of things, and therefore deserving of what they get.

2024-02-29 17:06:20

[new draft post] What you are doing right now https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/02/29/what-you-are-doing-right-now/index.html

2024-02-25 08:03:24

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@npub1jma…0as2 which is another way of saying the public requires governance, because absent governance there is only a brutal game of thrones to usurp power.
anarchists may wish we had a solution to this other than someone, or, better still, some set of responsive and permeable institutions, winning the prize.
we all may wish for a lot of things.

2024-02-25 03:18:59

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(4) the only possible governance, then, becomes the plutocratic authoritarianism which they’d have no incentive to sabotage
(5) since the broad public requires a governed world even more than it requires governance in its interest, eventually it succumbs.

2024-02-23 13:13:20

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@npub1jma…0as2 it’s the imagined people shrieking at you that makes writing text so psychologically difficult, yes.

2024-02-22 22:34:36

as a psychological matter, writing software is so much easier than writing text.

2024-02-12 04:46:02

a graph.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1gpS4
cc @npub1caz…2vwk

2024-02-12 04:02:25

[new draft post] Situated versus unsituated virtues https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/02/11/situated-versus-unsituated-virtues/index.html

2024-02-06 23:22:42

because we assiduously attribute suicide to mental illness alone, and we enforce a shroud of privacy over each occurrence, we as a public have little understanding of why people choose to kill themselves in our society.
is there contemporary, anonymized social science that takes seriously the problems and stated concerns of people who kill themselves? or is it taboo now to consider any sort of attribution beyond a "struggle with mental illness"?
remember Durkheim?

2024-02-04 16:54:24

i stand humbled by your company's bold new vision.

2024-01-31 14:06:19

One thing chat-gpt is good for is a thesaurus.

2024-01-30 19:52:50

Must.
Or else it’s a thousand dollar brick.
https://cdn.masto.host/zirkus/media_attachments/files/111/846/645/135/049/930/original/db24da1a9ac36173.jpeg

2024-01-28 21:08:51

Not the greatest vocabulary lesson for the kids.
https://cdn.masto.host/zirkus/media_attachments/files/111/835/619/372/445/676/original/65635dcf48511ab8.jpeg
https://cdn.masto.host/zirkus/media_attachments/files/111/835/631/995/093/025/original/4be894747f149a3a.jpeg

2024-01-23 14:41:24

people who trust themselves too much are untrustworthy.

2024-01-23 03:18:58

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

2024-01-20 09:22:52

growth is a bad metaphor for economic change, so degrowth is as well.

2024-01-13 22:00:30

Denial is the fundamental human life force.

2024-01-13 11:51:38

they are politicizing politics again.

2024-01-10 10:26:21

An ability to put together gargantuan sums of capital is perhaps the only redeeming feature of what's left of our financial system. Why is it not financing a new engineering-centered competitor to Boeing and Airbus?
(I know. Perhaps there's a clue in that word "competitor". And Boeing, after all, found its current glories by transforming itself into what Wall Street wanted, they'd probably just want more of the same.)

2024-01-10 04:13:45

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@npub1q8n…kct8 love earned implies the possibility of love spurned.

2023-12-29 02:59:51

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@npub1jma…0as2 (i think the irony that i had in my was the antidecolonization people coming to identify as the true, indigenous academics whose authentic culture is being displaced by colonial woke interlopers.)

2023-12-28 19:27:00

reckless driving is quite the opposite of wreckless driving. the english language is so weird.

2023-12-28 17:21:00

critics of decolonization call for the decolonization of academia by its putative proponents.
they have not yet embraced their identity as indigines, but the second law of sociodynamics (irony must always increase) suggests that it will not be long.

2023-12-28 08:22:08

it was the end of history. but history always was unholy and it has joined the undead.

2023-12-13 22:07:25

i was going to post something like
"are you pro-fire or anti-fire?"
as an analogy to the way people set up what i think are foolishly framed questions about e.g. the state as a social institution.
but i realized it doesn't work very well in this era of climate crisis, non-combustion-based sources of heat and energy, electrifying all the things.
looking forward, one can arguably be pretty consistently anti-fire.

2023-12-13 16:12:47

@npub1s4k…xje4 this seems maybe of interest to you: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/13/opinion/european-union-far-right.html

2023-12-07 05:22:05

it’s weird to be both blasé about inequality and concerned about the deficit.
the more concentrated are flows of aggregate income, the more the state has to supplement flows to those left out of the concentration.
to the degree aggregate income is bounded (arguably not the case!), after-tax inequality *causes* deficit spending under a plausible political economy.

2023-12-06 21:56:24

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@npub1jma…0as2 oh, i was just channeling Nietzsche, not making an independent observation of my own. I take the (Nietzschean) sense in which God is dead to mean rationalism disenchanted the world, we can't take that stuff seriously. is the idea of evil then also washed away by a kind of technocracy? if despite disenchantment we can still recognize evil, how should we understand the nature of the good (that cannot be Godly)?

2023-12-06 21:52:02

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@npub1jma…0as2 was virtue then outsourced to the state as well?

2023-12-06 21:09:56

when god died, did the devil die too?

2023-12-05 22:41:15

i tore off the band-aid, and a million corpses floated from the site like so many flakes of dead skin.

2023-12-05 05:06:20

Make a case for antitrust, but say it is a case for "deregulation" instead, because your master thesis is that the problem is "the left" is gumming up the works.
(To be fair, measured productivity can rise in a sclerotic monopolized economy as rents are scored in GDP and the weight of them on purses can lead to underemployment and a smaller denominator. But I don't think that's what Matt's after.)
from #MattYglesias https://www.slowboring.com/p/its-not-just-biden
https://cdn.masto.host/zirkus/media_attachments/files/111/526/067/826/877/832/original/3024f69f3cab4994.png

2023-12-02 19:41:13

i just realized who santa is an anagram of. or vice versa.

2023-12-02 04:23:24

a pretty good distillation of where i am on israel/palestine too, from #KevinDrum https://jabberwocking.com/israel-and-its-enemies/
https://cdn.masto.host/zirkus/media_attachments/files/111/508/910/332/097/813/original/1d1b7708afb217ce.png

2023-12-01 13:57:24

There’s that quote (usually attributed to a 1970s IBM presentation), “A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.”
Isn’t that the precise opposite of our lived experience of management though? Doesn’t the management consulting industry exist, paid billions primarily to relieve managers of accountability for their own decisions? Wouldn’t purchasing deniability by computerization instead be a tremendous cost savings?

2023-11-30 22:18:19

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@npub1jma…0as2 It should be, initially I intended to include that too. But it got long, so I kept to the dometic policy that the Yglesias piece I was responding to focused upon. I think a lot of damage was done to US moral and military credibility during the Obama administration, as well as the poor domestic economics.

2023-11-30 21:22:22

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@npub1jma…0as2 he's the most prominent exponent of "the virtue of nationalism" https://www.yoramhazony.org/tvn/

2023-11-30 21:17:02

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@npub1jma…0as2 ha! he deleted it. paraphrasing from memory, he basically said that israel and gaza both want war so let's just have it and let the chips fall where they may.
"israel" and "gaza" both omit distinctions, like between catastrophic "patriots" and people who just want to live their own lives among friends and family in peace and safety.

2023-11-30 18:33:10

"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

2023-11-30 17:36:37

the chips are corpses.
it's a hard situation. i am not on either side. in fact i have warm feelings for neither.
but war is bad. you can't just opt out but you should always be striving for circumstances under which it can stop without entirely subordinating the interests of one belligerent to another.
that people so feted tweet so glib.
https://x.com/yhazony/status/1730278465918685667

2023-11-29 22:27:32

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@npub1jma…0as2 yeah, that's what i did initially, was surprised to see the ~ left alone. it's a bit annoying, it's a cli, when a user types --dump-dir ~/whatever the shell fixes it by --dump-dir=~/whatever and the tilde stays. oh well. i did it manually, substituting the system property (but rather than using string manipulation, calling homeDir.resolve(...) on a path that truncates the given path through the tilde plus file separator)

2023-11-29 22:09:38

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@npub1jma…0as2 I checked through Java 21.
Path.resolve is different. myPath.resolve( otherPath ) places otherPath beneath myPath. So if myPath is '/home/swaldman' and otherPath is 'foo/bar', myPath.resolve( othetPath ) is '/home/swaldman/foo/bar'

2023-11-29 21:22:41

At some point I turned Google "code tips" on, but I've almost never used it (I no longer default to Google).
I wanted a lazy way in Java to expand '~' in file paths to home dirs , so I tried Google.
It gave me a very clear, precise, plausible answer!
But the method to which it confidently directs me... just does not exist?!
https://cdn.masto.host/zirkus/media_attachments/files/111/495/931/607/099/611/original/0c0314320c788a55.png

2023-11-29 17:25:51

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@npub1jma…0as2 not all that is good for you is pleasing!

2023-11-29 17:13:02

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@npub1jma…0as2 there's a bit of an ambiguity in my initial statement, did i mean pleasing to me, or pleasing to you? (i will helpfully assert that i meant neither exactly, but perhaps some kind of superposition.)

2023-11-29 17:07:38

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@npub1jma…0as2 i'd say we should probably keep our inclinations to ourselves, but this being mastodon, where many social proscriptions are aggressively enforced, that one is honored much more in the breach, whatever sort of breach you might prefer.

2023-11-29 17:03:10

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@npub1jma…0as2 i've never done a spa day. the film looks cool!

2023-11-28 18:10:20

a researcher asks how can we build AI that loves humanity and i think how elon musk talks about how he loves humanity and the juxtaposition makes me a bit nervous. https://www.livemint.com/ai/ilya-sutskever-the-openai-genius-who-told-sam-altman-he-was-fired-11700585228996.html

2023-11-27 21:26:37

the comparison is obscene.

2023-11-21 03:41:17

For most people, the wind-down of the COVID welfare state has hurt more than the genuinely good employment economy and increasing real wage incomes have helped. Improved household balance sheets are mostly in rising home and used car values, wealth nonrich families can't actually tap, since they need their one home and one-to-two cars.
See #MattBruenig https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2023/11/20/how-has-wealth-changed-under-biden/

2023-11-16 14:08:20

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@npub1jma…0as2 i’m subtooting elon musk.

2023-11-16 13:58:51

when people decades younger than you refer to themselves as old people.

2023-11-16 05:34:01

(indistinct chatter)

2023-11-15 15:22:16

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@npub1jma…0as2 undead 🧛‍♂️

2023-11-14 15:11:43

are there any Fediverse / open projects that aim to fill the TikTok niche?
how that could be done without invasive surveillance strikes me as… non-obvious… but i wonder if it's a thing people are working on. i know people who'd like to make TikToks, but prefer they not be, well, TikTok, or Facebook Reels, or YouTube shorts.

2023-11-13 20:44:46

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@npub1jma…0as2 Thanks for the corrections! https://github.com/swaldman/drafts.interfluidity.com/commit/08d929d2e8ab10e48f6eedaa450f1e50d4ea6847

2023-11-13 20:04:20

trump : hitlerspeak :: desantis : woke
they both think (well desantis thought) they had an easy cynical formula for persuading, and they pour it on.
but you can in fact be too cynical about the much maligned US electorate, and both of them are.
one of them might still win, because the US system makes every election a weighted coinflip and candidate idiosyncracies can only weight things so far.
but brilliant communicators or propagandists they are not. trump 's skills have notably declined.

2023-11-13 19:06:22

[new draft post] Pluralism or magnanimity? https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/11/13/pluralism-or-magnanimity/index.html

2023-11-11 19:20:38

“We want interop so that our users are free to move. So our products compete on the basis of performance, features and price, and not lock-in. This is as basic as the Hippocratic Oath that doctors take.” @npub1zms…7qv3 https://this.how/standards/

2023-11-11 04:25:32

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@npub1jma…0as2 i just think he’s an absolute catastrophe of a leader, for Israel and the world, and that his replacement, especially if Israel can muster a genuine mandate for a more civilized coalition with a new leader, is likely a precondition to escape from what now are cycles of violence, hatred, and dispossession.
i have come (despite political-science well-actuallies) to be a huge fan of term limits. long tenure leaders are almost uniformly catastrophic.

2023-11-11 03:15:04

by what process, and on what timeframe, does Netanyahu go? https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/israel-after-netanyahu/675952/
ht @npub12j8…f0tn

2023-11-10 19:20:02

"When creating an IMAP account… login name and password were being transferred to Microsoft's server. Although TLS protected, the data in the tunnel runs to Microsoft in plain text. Without informing or asking, Microsoft grants itself full access to the IMAP and SMTP access data of users of the new Outlook." from a Google translation of this, in German https://www.heise.de/news/Microsoft-krallt-sich-Zugangsdaten-Achtung-vorm-neuen-Outlook-9357691.html ht Technology as Nature

2023-10-31 04:24:40

no leviathan would permit this.