Documenting Life

“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”

https://jonn.substack.com/p/the-lessons-of-history

“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 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