listening to an NPR segment discussing “Gender Queer” as a “banned book”, i looked up “Gender Queer” on Amazon, and it was there, available to purchase. i looked up “Turner Diaries”, and it was not.
“Gender Queer” is, I am sure, “banned” from many schools and public libraries (which also, I suspect, don’t carry “Turner Diaries”).
should we be outraged by the suppression (“banning”) of “Turner Diaries” too, or are we arguing more about the criteria of suppression than the fact thereof?
@interfluidity if we consider open source a commons and we see a government function in funding commons, what metrics would be appropriate for making funding allocations?
@dpp perhaps promising alternatives are consistent granting of ex post awards for projects that prove notable and/or popular (with lots of subjectivity intentionally baked into notability) and decentralized awarding, allocate small amounts to large groups of people willing to take on a role, on a lightly enforced but strongly telegraphed norm that allocation should be based on project value (also intentionally subjective!) and self- or friend-dealing is prohibited. 2/
@dpp (in general i think we've underexplored the "grant everyone $100 to allocate to public goods of their choice" approach. sure there will be noise and self-dealing, bad anecdotes to inspire clickbaity outrage, but i think the vast majority will be allocated based on people's very diverse perceptions of value, which is what we ought to want.) /fin
@evana@dpp@alice_i_cecile Great points. Maintaining libraries that we already know are valued, but are not so exciting for people to work on, is a tractable target for straight paid work. That is, we could just have an agency that hires developers to maintain and enhance them, doing its best to keep tabs on what remains widely used in allocating developer resources. It's would be state maintenance of public infrastructure, a straightforward public role.
@alice_i_cecile@dpp@evana Yes. Matching subsidy models are very interesting. I like in general terms ideas like quadratic funding, that provider bigger matches to the same dollars by many donors than by a few larger donors. I'd like to see states experiment with these models rather than just cryptophilanthropists biased towards very niche "public goods". https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3243656
Among other gems, this post by @toniogela on crossplatform testing of the @typelevel toolkit includes an example of running scala-cli within a JVM from ordinary #Scala, which could be useful for a bunch of tricks. https://toniogela.dev/testing-typelevel-toolkit/
“…workers become accustomed to being active and engaged, having agency over their lives, participating in a common endeavor, and having a voice…unions have been described as helping build democratic muscle…union involvement in the political realm leads to policies that meet working people’s needs; this creates a virtuous cycle in which civic participation seems more worthwhile, as people see that govt can tangibly improve their lives.” @TerriGersteinhttps://slate.com/business/2023/09/strikes-autoworkers-writers-actors-unions-democracy.html
WordPress has been nagging me to update to php 8.0 for sometime, so i did. my excellent, but apparently no longer maintained e-mail subscription plugin broke. Googling around from an error, i saw count($somevar) now has to be typed, so count((array)$somevar) is the workaround. So I stupidly went through all the instances of count(...), threw in the (array) cast. Insanely it seems to work. I feel a bit dumb and a bit dirty about it though.
middle management won’t devote themselves to high quality work if upper management randomly disrupts their long-term projects by undermining—ahem, boldly overriding—the bureaucracy, taking direct control of lower-level offices.
and the essence of good government is high-quality long-term projects shepherded by middle management.
@Alon@avi also in the private sector industry consolidation would have some sway over the degree to which competitive forces might be expected to check bold preening disruption by the great leaders of our time.
@Alon@avi little napoleons may be drawn by temptation, but they can be weeded by market forces in ways that giants cannot. like a nation, there’s a lot of ruin in a “market leader”. there’s not so much ruin in a dwarf, before it is actually ruined.
@Alon@avi oh yes. Italy or India style dwarfism can be a tremendous problem for overall productivity. but that derives i think from different set of problems than potentially talented middle managers alienated from their work product. there are diseconomies of nonscale, and very different social diseconomies of consolidation (even where they seem to the private consolidators to be economies). 1/
