The work-first principle (“arbetslinjen”) was instituted for pretty good reason: a welfare state requires a high rate of employment to fund itself.
But in the name of the work-first principle and “austerity”, that higher goal is constantly being undermined both on a primary and secondary level.
On a primary level the welfare state itself being dismantled and destroyed. The entire justification for to the work-first principle was to preserve and treasure and care for the welfore state. That “to each according to need” would be funded by “from each according to ability”. When the work-first principle becomes a means to destroy that welfare state we’ve all been made fools.
On a secondary level the goal of a high rate of employment, even that goal is being undermined. Help is being replaced by requirements. The public sector (our biggest employer and the reason this land survived the 2008 financial crash) is being gutted and looted. Employment rates are plummeting.
Let alone meaningful employment, spending time and labor and resources on things that actually make the world better. We are drowning in meaningless and distracting and ugly ads to buy buy buy while the world is burning and is the hottest it has been in 125000 years.
What’s really going on is this: It’s been the goal of the rich-gets-richer party for hundreds of years to keep the breadline long, cold, and uncomfortable. That is great for them because that means buying labor (“employing workers”) is a buyer’s market where you get the pick of the litter and can keep prices (“salaries”) down, and, the workers that you do have employed are less likely to organize or have demands. Being unemployed is deliberately designed to sting while at the same time as many people as possible are being kept unemployed.
That means that the lived experience for many people is meaningless drudgery. They suffer with meaningless WFTSOC so that the labor that actually is being extracted and exploited for the gainful profit of the owners is cheaper and more compliant.
With a patronizing scoff of pity I looked at a tyrannical app in another land. It was a “Super App” called WeChat or KakaoTalk or LINE or Grab or Gojek. Every human being in that land needed the app. You needed it for transportation, for buying things, for identification, everyone had to have it.
Why didn’t the government intervene and stop that monopoly? Because in some ways the app was beneficial for bad-faith actors in that government. They could more easily monitor and control their population thanks to that app.
It was with relief I looked up and saw that I was here in the good old home where we are not beholden to the “Super App”. But the relief turned to a feeling of crushed ice in my exhale as I thought about it for three seconds longer and realized with fear that we do labor under a super app to rule them all and in the darkness bind them.
That app has two names. Google Play Store and Apple App Store.
And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.
A family member yesterday who is going on an aoroplane vacation said “I know you don’t like that” and I was like… it doesn’t matter what I think. It’s not my opinion that matters. I actually think flying and travel is fun and fascinating. The problem is that millions of people have died from climate change already and many times more that is set to do so unless we change, and the single biggest thing most individuals can do (outside of voting, organizing, and rioting) is to fly less.
(Eating plants is pretty good too.)
Sometimes you still hear that society is polarized and we need to move towards the middle.
Pretty messed up considering how everything’s moved towards the right these past forty years, further than I ever would’ve imagined.
It’s not “polarizing” to want to stand against that.
It’s pretty sickening to see the left following the right wing’s puppy tail towards the bottom of the abyss, “chasing the center voters”. Chasing yesterday’s shadow and tomorrow’s grave.
Okay so I went on this rabbithole of anti-smartphone stuff online (don’t worry, my goody-two-shoes writing-things-down-on-paper self said that I could) and one thing that came up a few times was the whole “phones and social media are actually super necessary and it’s classist and clueless and frankly cruel to say you can just quit that so I’m not gonna quit because that’s impossible, counterproductive, dumb, wrong and elitist” angle. And I get that. (Arguably why did you then make a video about quitting the internet but I get that too.)
Because please, let me zoom out and reframe this issue a bit. Let’s look at the forest and not just this one tree.
Algo silo media with vendor lock-in is wrong and evil. (I’ve said why a hundred times but overshortified: they proprietarized our communal infrastructure and exploited it for huge wealth gaps.) But it’s the corporations (and the politians that kept them legal) that did wrong, not you the user.
Yeah, yeah, at some point one would’ve hoped that people would think for three seconds before signing up to the latest vendor-lock-in algo silo death trap, before it became a critical mass, but once it did become a critical mass I can’t blame any one single user when their friends, housing, job, and family depended on them being on Facebook/LINE/WhatsApp/WhateverTheHeck. I know such dependencies are possible. I have lost housing opportunities, jobs, friends (entire friend groups and even boyfriends) when I had a weird overly-stubborn, mentally-locked brain who refused to go on these silo sites even as that refusal was killing me. (I mean, going on the silo sites would’ve also killed me so it was lose/lose. Join the other lemmings and die from falling off the cliff or don’t join them and die of loneliness.)
I can’t expect or demand anyone else be a weirdo like me and become an offline pariah. That’s not what this is about.
Here’s an analogy: we can look back at the early years of the industrial revolution hundreds of years ago without faulting any one worker for choosing to get torn to shreds on the factory floor over starving herself and her entire family to literal actual factual death by hunger. While we also recognize that as a whole, the system that victimized those workers was bad for them and for the environment and set up generational wealth gaps we’re still reeling from today almost three hundred years later, and we can blame the titans of industry and the politicians that enabled them.
Not everyone can break free. Not everyone who has managed to break free can stay free. (And being able to is a huge privilege that those who manage to do it hopefully do not take for granted.)
We can know that and still say phone is bad.
And, we can keep trying to fight it in any way we can, big or small, together or alone, wholly or partially. If you can’t do that (especially alone), that’s 100% legit. That doesn’t mean the suddenly-gigantic-because-they-fooled-us-all tech corporations are anywhere close to acceptable ethically as they vendorize all human communication, and speaking out against them and their gilded cages is meant as a slag on them, not on their victims.
Sometimes there’s this narrative that “whoops, we humans collectively as a whole when we created all this wonderful and useful information technology, we all together accidentally made a teeny tiny subset of all this wonder have very slight detrimental psychological and physiological effects. But don’t worry, here’s how you can scroll 1% more responsibly in order to keep being a good productive citizen.”
Sometimes I’m complicit in that narrative because it’s such a pervasive narrative. Like the proverbial fish not seeing the proverbial water.
Water in this case being how specific people deliberately proprietarized, vendorized, silofied, and then algoritmified and enheckified our communication protocols in order to make mega bucks. People decided to do that and then did that and that was evil and has created an evil system.
Do not misread this as the just-as-wrong opposite narrative that just says “Oh, Facebook and X just coincidentally happens to have evil people on their respective thrones. If good guys ran those corporations they’d be useful and great for all.”
Naw part one because proprietary silo sites are inherently a societal evil and there’s no “good” way to run one, and naw part two because while evil people did these things, they became evil, and they became thrust upon the evil throne of bone and skulls, as an emergent consequece of an economy system; the “rules” of the “game” we humans are all “playing” more or less inevitably have this outcome and the only way out of is is to change the rules.
And I’m not saying neo-ludditism (or its defanged, scalarly misnomered, watered-down, middle-class-and-tame version “digital minimalism”) is the only solulu. What y’all are doing on email, XMPP, IRC and Fedi (i.e. trying to build and find tools that are owned by everyone-and-no-one, and that benefit human communication and progress instead of exploit it) is another legit approach.
Many moons ago, when our ancestors in the FSF and the SPI correctly foresaw that proprietary software was an evil that would fuel a neocolonialist, planet-eating dystopia, they didn’t just shred their drives in disgust. They got out their keyboards and started hacking.
When we talk about solving climate change (ration energy, leave the fossils in the ground, any DACCS and BioCCS should be funded directly instead of as an excuse to burn more fossils, fix market capitalism’s bugs or replace it outright, tax the rich, get money out of politics) what they hear is akin to as if we would’ve said “Oh, why do you need doors or windows? Just walk through the walls with ghost powers” or “Why do you need stairs? Just stride up the clouds”.
That is how deep their programming goes.
They’re living in a completely cart-before-horse world where the economy as it currently works today is seen as the prereq for any kind of changes. Even though it’s in reality the other way around; we can’t have an economy if there are no people because everyone died and starved and burned from climate change.
The truth is that big changes are possible and have been possible.
When my parents were little we had never been to the moon and here in Sweden we literally drove on the other side of the road. There was a huge traffic reform. And they lived through energy rationing. Actual here let’s divide up how much energy everyone gets to use because we actually realize there is an actual shortage.
When I was little music only came on records and tape and I lived through mp3, GNU, Debian, Wikipedia. And fridges and hairspray were eating up the ozone layer. And Berlin was split by a wall.
Even most of all y’all reading this has lived through the pandemic era when streets where empty once more.
I should’ve had some intro about how this is just such a common pattern when I try to talk about climate to almost anyone. It just happens again and again that the person I’m talking to, almost whoever they are, are like “that’s not possible because the economy” when in reality the economy is not going to be possible because climate change.
I have three different devices with either Google Play or Apple Appstore.
I have three different devices with an NFC reader.
There is zero overlap between these two categories; i.e. I do not own one single device that has both appstore and NFC. (Beyond the six that have either, I have a couple of devices with neither.)
The Swedish police’s new electronic ID that’s about to launch requires both.
This is an empathy exercise, but don’t worry: you’re gonna get to hate someone along the way if you want to. Or if you love them, that’s okay too. The exercise doesn’t hinge on your hatred of them.
Okay, so bring to mind someone you really had a problem with in the past. A school bully or something. Let’s add some twists to that: now they have a lawn sign of your most opposite political party. And they step on kitten tails too. In short, a real jerk. I’m gonna call them “Jones” in the following story.
One morning a li’l earlier than you’d like, it’s before breakfast, before anything, there’s a ring on your door. You open groggily.
Outside are a bunch of police and they put you in the car. Not gently.
It takes a while until they let you know on what charges you’re arrested. Convicted, even. Actually it’s not even until you’re on the firing row that they’ll let you know your supposed crime:
Apparently, Jones (or the political leadership he voted in) killed someone overseas. And that country has an “for each one of us who dies, one of them needs to die” policy. And you won that lottery. Congratulations.
Now that story makes zero sense. It’s an absurd, bad, and awful story. Because the “for each of us who dies one of you needs to die” approach does not make sense.
And the war between Trump and Khameini makes no sense. Here we have leaders who only a small minority of the population in “their” respective country actually approve of, and they’re perpetually “retaliating” by killing “one of them”. Or “ten of them”.
I’ve asked for climate change to permeate every story in news media but oh wow, what a monkey’s paw.
…was that all the thing we humans do that are greenhouse reckless are called out.
For example, whenever there’s a beef subsidy or like a sale on beef, they should have called out how bad that is. How the Earth’s 1⅗ billion bovines, almost ⅖ of our mammalian biomass, a creature with remarkable, unprecedented trophic inefficiency (240 times worse than beans) that humans selectively bred out of aurochs; where each individual emits 50% more methane than an aurochs did and 8000% more methane than a non-ruminant mammal of equivalent size does, and where the sheer number of them are hundreds of times more than there ever were aurochs at their peak (a few million), and uses up somewhere between fifty to a hundred times more land than eating beans.
Or when the rich are being celebrated, instead show how they emit 30 times more CO2e than a normal person; to clarify, that’s only for the top 1%. Normal rich people; the richest person in your neighborhood. The billionaires emit one million times more.
When politicians come up, show how bad their climate track record is and how their future proposals would wreck the world even more. When new “energy deals” are being struck like new oil plants or gas pipelines, show how bad that is. Show how the fossil fuel industry influence and lobby for specific decisions and topics.
When there’s a war, bring up how there’s usually a huge component of contested fossil fuel supplies or transportation or food supplies or climate-related starvation. Venezuela or Iraq, it’s oil directly. The “rare earths” deal Trump extorted out of Ukraine was primarily about fossil fuels, and fossil fuels was also why he wanted Greenland. The whole reason Russia decided to try to steal Ukraine in the first place was fossil fuels and food supplies. They started out by seizing control of 80% Ukraine’s offshore oil and gas fields. Other wars are about pipelines, straits, and other ways to transport or access fossil fuels. Even the Gaza war has a fossil fuel component.
It’s pretty much all other topics too: when they go after CRT, BLM, immigrants, or LGBT+, those groups have deliberately made targets by the fossil fuel industry as distractions from their planet-wreckery.
So you can tell I was frustrated by a lack of climate stuff in the news. Almost all topics were things that directly exarcebated climate change but that aspect was almost never brought up.
I wanted climate in the news and we got climate in the news.
We have page up and page down of catastrophes like heatwaves, the aforementioned wars and famines, storms, record breaking colds and winters that paradoxically also driven by greenhouse gasses since as the Earth globally gets warmer the air can hold more water vapor which when it does get cold, which happens more often since as the arctic heats up the lowered temperature gradient causes cold winds to leak out from there.
But not peep one about why this is happening. “Whoops, there’s another wildfire, what a mystery, how could that have happened?” is more the vibe we’re getting.
Instead states like Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Texas, Florida and Alabama have laws on the books undermining climate education, and in Europe public service media like the BBC have promoted false balance on climate change or like other European countries’ public media (like here in Sweden), have provided platforms for far-right, climate-denying, fossil-industry funded parties and topics.
But you know the right wing has one idea:
rich get richer.
In their backyard grows three cherry trees.
These threes have nothing in common.
These trees do not get along.
But as the right wing craft their policies
in order to get voters, philosophers, and pundits on board
with making the rich richer,
they can always, always find
the perfect cherry to pick.
They have money →
They have media →
They have the throne →
The ymake money
And if it was JUST the Koch brothers
or Manchin
or the Trump family
or Putin
we could defeat them.
But the system’s sickness is such
that whomever in the deep caves
under the Misty Mountains
happens to find
the Exploitation Loophole of Power
will float to the top.
This is called emergence.
Oh, they are evil all right.
Don’t get me wrong on that.
They have mauvaise foi.
“I have a fiduciary duty
to plunder the Earth and the public coffers.”
I’ve mentioned a couple of times that a commensurate carbon tax would have to be infinite or larger than infinite (and that rationing is a better solution).
Here’s the situation. I’ll use Sweden as the example just to get numbers but similar applies to all lands and realms.
Our plan was to go from 21 Mt CO2e in 2010, through 6.3 Mt CO2e in 2030, down to zero, and then into net negative.
Showing someone just shown the first two points on that line and asking them for a solution they might be like “oh, okay, you want to go 21 Mt emissions down to 6.3 Mt? Let’s use a carbon tax! A commensurate number would be somewhere around 11.55 SEK per liter.”
Now, two problems with this. First, what we did was nowhere near 11 SEK per liter. We did 3.27 SEK. That’s among the highest in the world and still nowhere near enough just for the 6.3 Mt CO2e by year 2030 goal.
As bad as that problem is, second problem is the bigger.
Because as we want to move to zero, and through zero to negative. We didn’t show them whe whole problem. We’re not just trying to make the numbers small. We need to make the numbers go away and even flip.
Now, my original thinking on this was:
Price = Demand / Supply.
At low supply (like a 6.3 Mt emission year 2030 goal compared to a 21 Mt emission year 2010 reality), price goes up. You’re dividing the demand by a lower number.
At a zero supply like a 0 Mt emission goal, you’d have to divide by zero which breaks math. (For a tax where absolute values is what matters, it’d have to be infinite.) It breaks math even more at a negative supply. You’d… pay people to emit? So stupid. It’s a singularity pinch. The tax is beyond infinite.
Turns out that’s not really how they do it with these Pigouvian taxes. They use marginal abatement cost curves.
You want the tax high enough that it can often be cheaper to solve the problem in a way that doesn’t require buying the problematic good. I.e. you want to set the tax high enough so people are like “okay, never mind drilling for this project, solar is cheaper”.
So they put all the possible “abatements” (like switching to solar) on a big old curve and used that to guide the tax value. That’s where the 11.55 SEK number above would come from (and that’s before the flat-per-liter energy tax and VAT).
But we need to go to zero and net negative. Net negative even if everyone everywhere 100% stopped emitting (above what the carbon cycle normally can handle) means some sorta CDR. DACCS (direct air capture) or bio-CCS. Sweden has gone all in on the latter with a current contract to jam 0.9 Mt annually into the floor of the North Sea.
0.9 Mt is still only like less than one fifteenth of what just the Swedish transport section today emits, let alone all industries total. So the sequestering corporations are building out the bandwidth to jam things down there (it requires pressurized tanker boats to ship things there).
If the world doesn’t stop drilling & burning, even if we could figure out a way to jam things down there fast enough, the North Sea floor storage site would be full in just over two years. (At the current 1.5 Mt bandwidth—Sweden bought 0.9 Mt of that—it’d take over fifty thousand years to fill it up. But. Looking at what the world emits total in a year it’s almost half of what can total fit down there. The fifty thou years number is only there as a result of how slowly they can currently squeeze things down there.)
So I’m thinking maybe my original “naive” mental model wasn’t so wrong. Maybe I’m a bit Dunning-Kruger here but the more I think about this, it seems more that the marginal abatement cost curve model is what’s naive.
It’s based on carbon storage deposit amounts so big that we might not ever figure out how to do them. I’m all for CDR to the extent that it’s possible, but it’s not an infinite sponge.
We need to actually stop drilling and leave the fossil fuels in the ground!
Solar, hydro, wind, and bioCCS are all great as a consolation to not wreck our qualities-of-life too horribly when we leave it in the ground, but they’re not and can never be an excuse to not leave in the ground.
That’s what I mean with zero or even negative “supply”. Our “supply” of how much we can afford to drill and burn really is limited, even with CDR tech like bioCSS. Our actual physical supply of oil and LNG is way bigger than what we can afford to actually burn up because the bottleneck is CO2e PPM. That’s why “peak oil” spiels are wrong. It’s already way more pinched than that.
Banding was an incredibly powerful and underrated creature keyword in Magic that ended up a bit dysergic together with evasion abilities on cards like Mesa Pegasus. If Mesa Pegasus and Benalish Hero attack in a band, the flying becomes pointless. (Flying + Banding still pretty good on blocks though.) Because if the enemy can trip up the Hero on the ground with a Wall of Brambles or something, well, RIP the pegasus too.
Similarly, the Capital can attack all of us through one of us. That’s why intersectional solidarity is scary. No social movement has successfully overcome its backlash. Labor rights, reproductive rights, BIPOC rights and queer rights are all down.
But if Mesa Pegasus and Hurloon Minotaur join up (the Hero can come along too), then it’s bye-bye Brambles. The Minotaur would’ve just bounced with the Wall of Brambles normally but the Pegasus helps it go over the top, and the Brambles can’t take down a band that has a three-toughness minotaur (or even Dire Wolves with [Grizzly Bears][GB] to both take on one damage each).
Everyone on the banding side come through unscathed, doing a better job than they could alone. That’s why intersectional solidarity is the solution. ¡Les puebles unides jamás serán vencides!
[GB]: https://scryfall.com/card/10e/268/grizzly-bears “Grizzly Bears”
Economics really undervalue future damage. The reason they do that is this:
Imagine I’ve used the time looker-forward tube and seen that a broken staircase step will cause a $10000 Steinway piano to fall down the stairs and break in the year 2126.
Repairing the step will cost $10.
The time-discounting economics say that if I instead invest the $10 in meme stonks, and it compounds to $10000 and 50¢ in the year 2126, I can buy a new piano and have enough left over for a pack of chewing gum too. Ergo we need to time-discount the future disaster’s value to see if it’s worth the $10 today. And this has become mainstream in economics. This is how things are actually priced.
You’ve correctly compounded the opportunity cost. One of the flaws in this is that you haven’t compounded the catastrophe cost. If you think you can buy a piano for $10000 in 2126 or a pack of gum for 50¢ then.
If a stitch in time saves nine, you can’t just compound the one stitch.
Clean water and breathable air are priceless.
Let’s postulate a scenario where I, an open borders lunatic with one immigrant parent and one Swedish parent, could’ve been convinced that Sweden should keep some limit on the amount of people who gets to stay temporarily, and/or some limit on the amount of those who gets to move full citizenships.
I’m not saying it’d be easy to convince me of that. Arguments would have to get pretty tender, like “Okay, we are gonna try to let everyone in later, we just need to get everything ready first and build up a good social safetynet robust enough to handle the influx safely so we can help everyone”. So the point of this essay isn’t gonna be that I’ve gotten on board with “limits on immigration” because I haven’t and that’s not what this is. So put an pin in that worry.
The scenario where you’ve managed to convince me about a limit on either or both of those two “gates” being a good idea is just a hypothetical for the sake a point I’m trying to make:
Even then, 99% of the policy suggestions I see from the far right (and from S in their current “stram migration” hellscape era) are about making the lives of people worse. In the name of limiting migration they instead propose and implement hassling and harassing human beings at various stages through those two sluice gates. In the name of integration they keep furthering segregration.
Personer med dubbla medborgarskap ska kunna fråntas sitt svenska medborgarskap om de döms för brott som allvarligt skadar Sveriges vitala intressen, enligt ett beslut som nu fattats i riksdagen.
So even citizens can never truly feel Swedish. How can we build a shared community when there’s this foundational inequality?
S is now talking about an “integrationsskuld”; an idea trying to convey a racist idea that we “let in too many” immigrants and they messed it up for everyone and now we’ve got to clean up. But if that were true (and again, that’d be a hard sell for me given how that same decade coincided with catastrophic privatization reforms causing massive corruption and furthering segregation in health care and education), it doesn’t make sense how all their political proposals serve to instead further segregation, alienation, and distrust.
Except of course to the extent it binds the outgroup. “Vote for our rich-get-richer policies and we’ll protect you from the muslims, Mexicans, and queers,” just like Mussolini drew it up.
On Fedi, Reverse wrote:
On the 6th of May, the Swedish Parliament decided to accept a new law that is supposed to “strengthen competition”, via harder punishments on public companies that compete “unhealthily” with private companies
This has been widely (and jubilantly) reported by various media operated by Svenskt Näringsliv, which is to be expected. With a quick search I didn’t find any leftist publications talking about this. Perhaps because it’s just a strengthening of an existing law from 2010 that (according to the lizardpeople from the article linked in this message), it proved toothless? So perhaps all the red ink has already been spilled back then about it?
In any case, trying to understand what it means made it seem disgusting in many parts. The classic example given in explanations of both the old and the new law is “what if the state or municipality decides to run a gym at undermarket prices” (I’m paraphrasing but that’s the gist of it).
Oh yes, what a tragedy indeed. The horror.
The project leader for the new rules at Konkurrensverket spells it out:
Offentliga aktörer kan ha fördelar som de privata företagen saknar som exempelvis att verksamheten kan drivas utan vinstkrav
What fucking lizardpeople this government is.
And yes, the law includes things that even I think are reasonable, like that public companies cannot restrict access to infrastructure that they alone can have, so that there can be private actors that offer better terms to the public.
But the most important part is that the law guarantees the opposite: that even the public sector has to offer services at terms that are at least as bad as the private sector.
The public sector is “inefficient” my ass.
Yeah, although I’m not even onboard with that part. I get that you wrote “reasonable”, not “fantastic”, and maybe that’s where I’d land too as in “contrary to the rest of this law which is tyrannical, suffocating, makes a mockery of freedom, and furthers corporate trampling of people power, this part at least makes sense, I ‘only’ disagree with it (reasoning that it’s great if public infrastructure primarily benefit public works, and that this paragraph whiffs of the ‘marknadshyror’ debacle and, like it, will lead to furthering the collapse of what we the people built together and have together), whereas the rest of the law is just complete and thorough cruelty without any amount of reason, motivation, or consistency with self-professed free-trade values, just a blatant money grab and a punch in the face of all of us” kind of “reasonable”.
Thanks for bringing attention to this. I hate it so much. And because of the ratchet effect and the de-leftification of the S party (although thankfully they did vote no on this one), I despair that this won’t be easily fixed or restored anytime soon.
There’s one thing I wish you all could understand.
The way Apple, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon owns the world? It doesn’t have to be that way. It used to not be that way. Their ascendancy should’ve been illegal.
I was on the FOSS bandwagon before those companies took over the world. I belatedly fell off it and drank the proverbial iPad Kool-Aid in 2021 (and have also gotten into the equally proprietary, just more openwashed, “alternative” called Android in the years since) but I don’t think that was a good decision on my part.
I was a weirdo who refused to join Facebook or even have .doc files from the old Microsoft Word era. Not refusing just to be a weirdo, but refusing because these corporations are bad for society.
I have seen the world willingly tether themselves in this poison cage. These days, more and more people can see how that’s a problem but fewer and fewer can actually do anything about it.
My own life as a weirdo is getting more and more difficult. Often I’ve stumbled in my determination and tried to get down with the sickness but been unable because there’s often a bootstrap problem where the apps expect you to already be deep in that toxic “ecosystem”.
When I see our policy-makers knit our fates even closer to the fealty of these monstrous beings I don’t know what to do. The daily gaslight dose is insanely high. The streets and even the inside of the local city busline are full of TV monitors constantly saying “Use apps! Use apps! Use apps! Use apps!” I’ve had to watch that “here’s how you, loyal Apple/Alphabet customer, can activate your app ticket correctly” video loop ten thousand times since it’s blasted directly into our eyes on the bus line here where I live. I can’t handle it! I grew up in an era where there weren’t even any ads on TV, that was illegal! And now the entire city is like a never-ending ad-break.
I come from a world where this wasn’t how it worked. As I always say: we lost the downhill battle in three decisive blows just one after another:
The network effect is a very strong poison. It is an externality that our economic system just isn’t equipped to deal with. I have to keep reminding myself to not really blame anyone for succumbing. It’s a foundational bug in how money works.
But our politicians all around the world have to accept some of the blame here. Corrupted by lobbyist bribes they have enacted things like DMCA, EUCD, TRIPS, ACTA and so on. We could’ve had a much different world. We still can. ♥︎
I’ve longed for so many years for the new Swedish e-id system to finally bring liberation from BankID but it’s going from bad to worse. It shares the incredible drawback of requiring a Google or Apple smartphone, but adds a hard requirement of NFC at all times. (A few years ago I belatedly gave in and got iPad and a GSF/Play-Store enabled Android tablet but neither has NFC (and neither has this Android game handheld) so hello e-waste.)
It’s insane to me that the Swedish police will be literally requiring every citizen to be a customer of one of these two American tech giants that among the richest megacorps in the world. That’s beyond any cyberpunk dystopia I’ve ever seen.
The fact that they trust them (or the OEMs, especially on the Android side) to not spy on their users is also pretty strange but tertiary to the forced customer relationship aspect. It’s as if schools required kids to bring a bottle of Coca-Cola™ every day or the DMV only gave out licenses if you drive Ford™. It’s a complete concession to all ideals whether it’s social democracy or free markets. It’s the billionaire oligarchy stomping on a human face, forever. The only one happy about this is Ayn Rand. She is laughing her head off in hell, making sure the railway there only runs on official Rearden® Metal™.
A new proposal from the Swedish government is to stop welfare and other social help to those convicted of severe felonies.
I’m not onboard with that idea.
We’re not supposed to have the death penalty in Sweden and I don’t like the “once a thief, always a thief” mentality. If they’re not in prison or in psychiatric care, we still wanna prevent more crimes. Not create more homelessness or relegate them to the “shadow society” they’ve been given so much lip service to opposing.
This proposal will create outlaws and lawlessness.
From a “get votes” strategy perspective this move is genius from them. Emotionally it does resonate. It feels bad to have to help villains. So people who protest this law are gonna look bad, look like they’re on the side of the bad guys. It also further conditionalizes the welfare system which is a great win for the employer class. The more miserable the breadline is, the cheaper and more compliant labor becomes, is the idea. They want employing to remain a buyer’s market. Making sure there are “unhelpables” that are just sentenced to die in the streets is a necessary stepping stone for them, it’s a way to try to erode our empathy. (Not saying it’ll work because as long as hearts can beat they can bleed. I know there is love.)
It’s evil genius like that Azarello “Lex Luthor” comic where he tries to make the people of Metropolis to become mad at Superman for saving the life of a criminal. An especially disgusting one that Luthor secretly funded. (That blurb doesn’t spoil the whole thing, there’s more, it’s still a great read.)
Helping the bad guys does feel bad but pushing them into the arms of organized crime feels worse. If you’re declaring them dead this way you might as well pull the trigger for real. One of the best arguments against the death penalty is that it fosters desperation and escalation (“I’m already bound for the mercy seat so I might as well kill a couple of dozen more”) and I agree with that and I do oppose the death penalty and that argument applies even more here, way more actually since they’ll still be living and be even more dangerous and desperate than they would’ve been if they were in the grave.
Another popular argument is that sometimes people are innocently convicted. Yes. Sweden is certainly not immune to that happening. It’s so easy to get tangled up and misunderstood when trying to talk to authorities and institutions.
I actually think AI is fun and good. It’s just that if we don’t solve the problems it’s not worth it (if the problems will destroy us all).
It’s like cars. I oppose cars but I actually love riding in the shotgun seat on the open road bopping to that hecking song that goes “and all that I can see is just another lemon tree”. Yeah, yeah, I get motion sick on small bumpy country roads but being in transit, being on the way between places, feels good somehow. And that joy of course pales in comparison to all the good cars do, what they enable, all the problems that cars solved.
It’s just… We only have one planet and so many ways to mess it up.
Humans, like other eusocial species, have a tendency to create systems and structures larger than themselves. We create these runaway processes like whoops we invented the stock market (or it emerged, rather) and now corporations sort of kinda metaphorically are alive and are trying to kill us. So not only are direct fossil extraction and burnination bad, other runaway systems are also risky AF because look at where we are with these billionaires and corrupt policy processes. Yeah, yeah, maybe the solution will also come in the form of a runaway process but let’s make sure we fix the problems before we wreck ourselves here.
People (including me) make fun of young Earth creationism (that has got to be an exonym, right? Because whaddayamean “young” when in their world view the Earth is literally the oldest thing that exists) but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how even though the actual Earth is super old and it’s in a universe that’s even older, and hominids like us have existed for many hundred thousands of years, the world of writing is actually pretty young. Only a few thousand years.
We’ve managed to destroy the planet in an embarrassingly short time. That to me really goes to show that we’re doing something fundamentally wrong and that wrong thing is called fossil fuels so leave it in the ground. And our entire protcol for resource and task distribution thrives on exploitation loops widening wealth gaps and destroying the environment in many ways.
I’m writing this a few years before Bitcoin’s twentieth anniversary as one of humanity’s biggest mistakes.
Bitcoin is three things:
I’ll try to be brief on why the token thing is bad.
Y’all know I think a post-scarcity, pay-it-forward mindset can be explosively productive in the digital world. Sharing is caring. Introducing a limited, scarce resource—whether it’s an artificially created one or not—into that mix does a lot more harm than good.
The blockchain ledger exists just to enforce the contracts that emulate those money-like tokens. That is why the ledger was invented and the tokens named the project.
Money is bad and I’ve spent the past twenty-five years arguing against market capitalism. The tokens share all the drawbacks of money and add a whole bunch of new ones.
But let’s say for the sake of argument that either you actually like the token thing, and/or that you’ve found other valuable uses for the ledger, so we can get into where Bitcoin really messed up:
The ledger is built on a peer-to-peer network of nodes. If you’re an Xennial like me you’re thinking “that’s awesome! P2p is great!” with fond memories of things like BitTorrent. Hold your horses for three seconds because BitTorrent becomes better the more reciprocators are connected. That’s actually a problem that PeerTube is struggling with; that so many of the clients and federation approaches don’t connect to the WebTorrent part of it and just hotlink the upstream copy of the video, leaving the servers overloaded.
Bitcoin’s not like that. Bitcoin becomes worse the more people are connected. So much worse. It provides the same block rate and transaction speed whether the entire network ran off one dinky li’l pocket computer as it does now when it’s over 70000 nodes, but the more nodes that connect and “help”, the more energy the whole thing uses.
Because they’re not helping, they’re competing. Instead of just making the network more resilient or better, they are racing each other, distrusting each other. The pool that burns the most gets the most rewards.
I know that humanity has a long history of creating systems that reward and exacerbate greed and injustice but this one is a doozy.
Other proof-of-work schemes like the “hashcash” anti-spam proposal and the new “Anubis” website blockers are really bad and I hate them (it’s not fun when my dinky li’l e-reader hangs for five rapidly battery-draining minutes just because I wanna look up a Dominion game card. If you wanna put a penalty or payment for connecting I’m not stoked that that payment is going directly down the drain. It’s like putting a toll sign on a bridge saying “burn a dollar bill in front of the camera in order to pass the bridge”) but at least they have constant difficulty rates that are manually settable by admins. Bitcoin’s difficulty scale is managed by a computer (and increases automatically so that the block rate is constant) which has led to it increasing to 150 trillions times higher.
“It’s not waste, it’s worth it because of the benef—” It is waste. It’s a penalty for participating. It’s a deliberate deterrent as an attempt to mitigate the “Sybil” attack (the risk of someone starting a bunch of extra nodes to overwhelm the network in order to falsify transactions). So in the infinite unwisdom of Bitcoin’s founders, they put in both a deterrent for participating (the recklessly limitlessly scaling “proof-of-work” hashing) and a reward for participating (the “mining” rewards that will be gradually metered out for over a hundred years, if there’s still a civilization then).
So in our “burn a dollar on camera in order to pass the bridge example from earlier, it’s like if on the other side of that dollar-burning-bridge there’s a two-dollar-payout. So lots of money burnery in order to make money. Destructivity that the clumsy invisible hand of the market can’t distinguish from productivity so it runs amok. Instead of creating good and useful products or services it’s pure destruction (repeating myself a bit but the purported “benefits” aren’t increased).
Except it’s even worse than the dollar-burning-bridge for two reasons. First is that instead of one dollar vs two dollars, it’s about 70 k on either side of the equation (margins are pretty tight—that’s how economics work) so it’s a rich man’s game, and the second reason is that dollar burning was an environmental disaster. It’s as if it was a poison dollar that killed birds and even humans as it burned because energy externalities is an unsolved and urgent problem.
“But (setting aside that almost half of it is dirty energy), when we use renewables, it’s making use of extra energy during peak hou—” It’d actually be less bad if that extra energy from solar and wind were wasted than it going into Bitcoin’s ASIC e-waste poison mill because you’re not helping by mining. You’re only increasing the difficulty scale for those dirty coal-fueled Bitcoin miners out there.
Bitcoin is a runaway train, a headless constrictor, a gray goo apocalypse, and it’s incredibly difficult to fight. Some approaches to stop it involve regulating energy externalities (which we need to do anyway in order to stop climate change) or tanking the value of BTC by making it harder to interface it with other goods and currencies.