P.O.S.S.E.
“I’ve always been keen to the idea that most people pay too much attention to national politics; it’s more or less absurd if you know and care more about some Senate race on the other side of the country than about who is running your kids’ school”
https://mattglassman.substack.com/p/join-the-pta-no-seriously
“Elections force candidates and parties to adopt campaign platforms and promote policies. They also reset the time horizon for officeholders, by eliminating it for lame-duck electoral losers, and pushing it maximally far off for freshly (re)elected officials.
And, perhaps most importantly, elections provides a strong signal to everyone involved about what public policy choices will likely succeed or fail in the public sphere going forward. As everyone struggles to understand the meaning of the blunt vote results, elected officials will consider their public policy opportunities. Will new ideas likely be accepted now? Is it the right time for a bold initiative? Are the conditions now right for me to run for Senate, or President?”
https://mattglassman.substack.com/p/so-whos-going-to-win-the-election
“The world of 2024 is not that of 1941. But you don’t have to look far among the extremely online today to come up with examples of people whose far right politics, one suspects, comes from a similar source: a broken personal life, or professional failure, or a baffled rage that money or success has not brought the popularity or respect they so crave. I could list a dozen of them; so, I imagine, could you. This is not a sufficient condition – many of us have managed to fail in one sphere or another, without feeling the need to avenge ourselves on an entire class of humanity – but nonetheless, one of the recurring themes amongst those who’ve spent the last few years sliding towards the far right is quite how disappointed they seem”
“Since 2018, the chain has been using digital price labels that can change in real-time based on the mountains of data the store collects on shoppers. Kroger expanded this system to 500 of its 2,750 retail grocery stores in 2023.
Kroger has been working with Microsoft since 2018 to put cameras on its so-called EDGE (Enhanced Display for Grocery Environment) shelf displays. These let them do video analytics to enable “personalized offers” based on “customer demographics” — and certainly not price gouging based on age, sex, or color”
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2024/08/13/kroger-unveils-ai-powered-automatic-price-gouger/
“The Online Safety Act is a curious piece of legislation: an attempt to corral the worst impulses of the internet, written by a government that was simultaneously trying to position itself as the pro-free-speech side of a burgeoning culture war, and enforced by a regulator that emphatically did not want to end up casting rulings on individual social media posts.
What came out of it could be described as an elegant threading of the needle, or an ungainly botch job, depending on whom you ask. The Online Safety Act doesn’t, on its own, make anything on the web illegal. Instead, it imposes requirements on social media firms to have specific codes of conduct, and to enforce them consistently”
“Nowhere, it seems, is the debate over the mass-breeding of salmon as bitter and polarizing as it has become in Iceland. Many Icelanders are concerned that sickly, diseased and fattened farm fish could do permanent damage to the country’s ecosystem by causing irreparable harm to the native wild salmon population. Some two-thirds of Icelanders are now opposed to the fish breeding operations off the coast. Protests have been held in the capital city Reykjavík”
“The problem is that everyone is a fool to someone — many someones — along some axis. Perhaps not the axis of cleverness; it could instead be sensitivity, thoughtfulness, precision. It could be etiquette, or kinesthetic grace. The point is: everyone is suffered, all the time, by others. Possibly they don’t realize it, because they are suffered so gladly; so transparently.
How small-minded, then — how foolish — to be the one link in this great chain of forbearance who “does not suffer fools”.
Just … relax, and suffer. It’s the least you can do”
“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