Liebe, Wissen, Arbeit

Love, work, and knowledge are the wellsprings of life. They should also govern it.

[afloweroutofstone]

My favorite category of government program to run across is "program you've never heard of doing extremely important work to solve a major problem which you have also never heard of." On that note, the US drops millions of pounds of sterile bugs over Panama each week in order to prevent a parasite infestation from moving into North America. Everyone say thank you to the Panama-United States Commission for the Eradication and Prevention of the Cattle Borer Worm (COPEG)

[afloweroutofstone]

This program had its funding cut during the DOGE cuts last year and now the parasitic worm they were trying to slow the spread of has officially arrived in the United States.

[banchie]

i've been phasing the phrase 'google it' out of my vocabulary and going back to 'look it up'. fuck you youve lost your generic trademark privileges

[shituationist]

Just realized my son was born on the second anniversary of Steve Albini's passing. That's kinda neat.

[shituationist]

[shituationist]

Smartest Soviet bureaucrat of all time, gets recalled in 1939 to Moscow from London, just doesn't go.

Aron Sheinman - Wikipedia

[shituationist]

You're telling me the book of Genesis is a metaphor but the communion wafer really is Jesus

[shituationist]

Insurrectionary post-Hoxhaism. Turn every crack in society into bunkers.

[shituationist]

That's my personal defense atlatl

[shituationist]

Castoriadis:

I think that we are at a crossing in the roads of history, history in the grand sense. One road already appears clearly laid out, at least in its general orientation. That's the road of the loss of meaning, of the repetition of empty forms, of conformism, apathy, irresponsibility, and cynicism at the same time as it is that of the tightening grip of the capitalist imaginary of unlimited expansion of "rational mastery," pseudorational pseudomastery, of an unlimited expansion of consumption for the sake of consumption, that is to say, for nothing, and of a technoscience that has become autonomized along its path and that is evidently involved in the domination of this capitalist imaginary. The other road should be opened: it is not at all laid out. It can be opened only through a social and political awakening, a resurgence of the project of individual and collective autonomy, that is to say, of the will to freedom. This would require an awakening of the imagination and of the creative imaginary. For reasons I have tried to formulate, such an awakening is by definition unforeseeable. It is synonymous with a social and political awakening. The two can only proceed together. All we can do is prepare it as we can, where we find ourselves.

[balioc]

From the Am I just taking crazy pills? file:

The marquee output of the contemporary economy is software.

We are all aware - like, I think this is pretty much uncontested by every serious participant in the discourse - that the software made by this economy is noteworthy for being bad, and specifically for being bad when we know for a fact that it could be good. Market incentives have reliably pushed the titans of industry to ruin their own products and make the world immeasurably worse than it has to be. I could name examples, but I don't need to, plenty of examples have already leapt to the forefront of your mind.

...I know that I am more market-skeptical than most of the people with whom I'm in conversation. Not in a lefty way, particularly, just in a "business is reliably broken and bad, and other things are better" sort of way. I also know that we have lots of recent-ish historical examples of Market Alternatives Going Extremely Poorly, and lots of recent-ish examples of Market Systems Going Extremely Well. I am prepared to concede that, for scarce consumer goods in particular, we really haven't discovered anything better than the ol' prices-and-competition system and we probably never will.

But most of life does not consist of scarce consumer goods. Increasingly less of it does. And...is it not the case that the software situation is sending up giant alarms to the effect of The system creating these outcomes is definitely not optimal?

[blogofex]

I was going to discuss this, but got conceptually blocked by the fact that I'm not sure that I can honestly grant the premise.

Is software bad? And in the places where it's bad, what makes us think that it's possible for it to be good?

The problem is that there's multiple kinds of software, and which parts you interact with daily will greatly influence your opinion of what's "good". Desktop software, including OSes, is mostly fine, and where it's bad it's bad in predictable ways that have been like that since forever (eg Microsoft). Video games are as good as they ever have been. Business software (including the B2B SaaS products that I spend most of my day working with) is fine, significantly better than it used to be.

Mainly, the thing that's worse than it used to be are online service-oriented consumer sites, and in particular social media. And here is where I find myself asking if it's even possible for social media to be good. The problems of social media seem intrinsic to the medium. If there's something else on your mind, I'm not sure I know what it is.

[thathopeyetlives]

I mean, Win11 is amazingly worse than Win10. A bunch of stuff that worked well in Windows 10 doesn't work in Windows 11. Releasing Windows 11 was an unforced failure.

MS Outlook has a lot of problems.

A lot of technical software like Adobe products was basically more or less finished a decade ago and has just been acting on an increasingly extractive business model since then. IMO, a just society would do an open source buyout of a lot of this stuff.

Device drivers... Could be a lot better.

[balioc]

Windows 11 is certainly a top-shelf example of the Thing Under Discussion, yes.

Things that were good and are now bad: Google Search, Gmail, Netflix, probably Tumblr counts here, every piece of B2B software that has become infested with actively-unhelpful AI components

Things that were bad and are now unfathomably nightmarish: all other social media

Video games are a little harder to diagnose, but I'm willing to say that there's been a lot of visible structural things-getting-worse-ness that is to some extent counterbalanced by (a) ever-growing budgets and (b) the indie revolution. The scenario where you can't stably churn out good not-super-monetized products unless you are Literally the Top of the World in your genre is a problem.

Amazon has enough non-software components that it maybe belongs in a slightly different discussion, but it has also assuredly gotten much worse.

[shituationist]

Software's not a normal commodity, but even normal commodities, like furniture, have been turned to shit. The kind of mass manufactured furniture that comes out of China, where labor costs are low and the requirements of automation have shaped the design of the product, is just shoddy. We bought a rocking chair for breast-feeding, and it broke after less than a month of use. One part snapped and we have had to repair it ourselves. The chair is made out of the cheapest wood surrogate that could be found and its design is probably optimized for mass manufacture rather than durability or comfort. It being shoddy is actually good for the market, because it means we have to buy more shit (in our case, wood, but in other people's cases, a whole 'nother chair) once the damn thing breaks. Products that suck compel further and further consumption which further enables the accumulation of capital, which gives not a shit for "maximizing" use value, as use value is at best a necessary condition for the actual goal of maximizing the magnitude of surplus value that can be extracted under prevailing market conditions.

Not everything is getting worse. Medical care is better than it's ever been in large part because it's insulated from the dynamic of capital accumulation (less so in the US, which lags behind much of the rest of the world because of this). But you can see a similar dynamic playing out in science over the last decade or two, where capture of academia by MBA-brained administrators has forced scientists to play a similar game of endless production for its own sake, the "publish or perish" dynamic. A reactionary like Rene Guenon might say that the social problem is that we're valuing quantity over quality, output and "velocity" measurements over the collective project of the creation of scientific meaning and shared understanding.

[shituationist]

When I hear talk about "incentives" I take the safety off my Browning.

[swqadie]

[shituationist]

“See the infant, helpless creeping – Swine around it grunt swine-talk – Weeping always, naught but weeping, Will it ever learn to walk? Never fear! Just wait, I swear it Soon to dance will be inclined, And this babe, when two legs bear it, Standing on its head you’ll find.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Encouragement for Beginners

[mattfurie-deactivated20210318]

[shituationist]

Total hippie victory is patchouli oil being as good if not better at repelling mosquitos than DEET.

[shituationist]

Buddhism is incorrect. Longtermism is incorrect because of chaos theory. Communism is correct.

Navayana Buddhism is probably the religion most compatible with communism. Babasaheb Ambedkar may not have consciously intended this (in fact it's very weird that his early economics research coincided with Austrianism) but later in his life, around the time of his conversion to Buddhism, he argued that Gautama Buddha established communism in the Sangha. He also half-joked with a BBC reporter that if democracy in India didn't work, "some kind of communism" would be necessary instead.

I will say though that there are schools of Buddhism that I find totally tedious, and this is probably in keeping with Ambedkar, who did what he could to remove any folklore and superstition, up to the controversial disavowal of the Four Noble Truths and the transformation of Buddhism into a kind of virtue philosophy by upholding the Noble Eight-Fold Path as the means of attaining nibbana. I like that better than esoteric traditions which (arguably over-)emphasize meditation.

[shituationist]

Air wedges are so funny. No way to use them in public without looking you're trying to steal someone's car.