Month: August 2024

“The British planning system is a least partly one of “consultation by litigation”. And the courts being “open to all, like the Ritz Hotel” is a joke fast approaching its centenary. This makes it a system that’s biased in favour of people who can hire lawyers. Or more generally, it makes it biased in favour of organisations that can bring certain kinds of professional competence to bear in their interest.

Consequently, in my view, the cluster of professional services industries that views infrastructure permissioning as a source of fee income benefits greatly from the reduction of state capacity. “Incompetence” is a bit of a pejorative word, but the inability of the state to provide its own legal, environmental and engineering expertise creates a biased system”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/incompetence-is-a-form-of-bias

“This is how the grind works for many players, scraping and clawing and getting cut and not getting playing time and trying to hang around as best as they can, looking for any opportunity. There are far more of them than there are phenoms who float from big college programs to the draft lottery and guaranteed roster spots. Summer league, ultimately, is for the former kind of player, the kind who has precious few chances to show the world what he can do. Which is my point about Arms – he’s exactly the kind of player who needs summer league the most, who needs the publicity that summer league can generate the most. Again, I understand that it’s summer league. Certainly one good game can’t boost his odds of catching on in the league long-term that much. But with so many incredible players trying to earn one of a limited number of roster spots, every inch counts. Every moment counts”

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/why-is-nepotism-bad-ask-adonis-arms

“But … it’s a big step from noting that things can go off the rails in this way, to presuming that it’s an intrinsic failing of the bureaucratic state, and that it’s all about techne/metis and therefore blah blah anarchism. Couldn’t it just be a design failure? Early rockets and steam engines blew up, a lot, but that didn’t mean that they were intrinsically bound to fail as a means of propulsion – it just meant that when you’re designing something based on the use of heat to expand gases, you need to spend much more time and effort on ensuring that the gas expansion happens in a controlled fashion with ways to vent excess pressure, than on the comparatively easy problem of pushing a piston or directing an exhaust”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/seeing-like-a-state-machine

“The story of this massive change in our economic order is important, because it shows that, while there is no silver bullet for social change, it’s also not that complex to constrain the power of concentrated capital. What’s happening with non-competes is an ideological story, what I’ll call a ‘Gang Tackle for Justice,’ and I’ve seen it happen in other areas”

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/are-non-competes-really-ending