Category: noted in passing

Someone suggested that this post is based on some of the writing here. Hard to tell: I suppose the idea of land rents is the connection but there’s nothing there that isn’t a crib from Thomas Paine’s Agrarian Justice, ca 1797. Call it the American Equity Fund or a sovereign wealth fund or a prosperity dividend, as you like.

Most of this piece is the usual techno-utopian twaddle that assumes we all want AI to make more and more decisions (I was reporting about AI — expert systems and neural nets — before the author of this piece was in school) and that we will all just accept the disruption, the loss of opportunity/security as jobs are abstracted away, so that a few people who have managed to fail upwards their short lives can continue to hold power. I suppose one may think this is Luddite or anti-technology crankiness but that just shows a profound misunderstanding of what the Luddites were angry about. All of this Taylorism-adjacent AI stuff is just a way to turn those with local knowledge and skills into cheap labor. James C Scott talks about this in Seeing Like a State, describing this kind of top-down deskilling as high modernism. Just like the capitalists claim about socialism, this really has failed everywhere it has been tried but that won’t stop those who have never learned from failure from trying it again. After all, it’s only other people’s lives they are taking, piece by piece.

There is a way to take someone’s life without killing them: you simply deprive them of the means to enjoy it, reducing them to a meat machine that lacks the means and eventually the desire for anything outside of their labor obligation. This seems to what most of these schemes boil down to, stripmining industries (as with Uber/Lyft and the taxis) or cities, as their inflated salaries distort local housing markets and force workers who don’t command 6 figure salaries to harvest data and put ads in more and more places to leave the cities they built.

Daniel Pink laid out the three components of internal motivation: Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose. Mastery requires no explanation. Autonomy is simply the power to say “no” to work you don’t want, for whatever reason — it doesn’t pay enough, the working conditions are poor, whatever. And Purpose should also be self-explanatory: you feel like your work has some value beyond money. But these masters of the universe don’t know what any of that means. They are well-supplied with autonomy but what are they masters of and what purpose do they serve besides the accumulation of more wealth? Why can’t these lottery winners just take their winnings and go home?

No, I don’t think any of these insular thinkers have read any of my stuff. The few mentions of land in this piece don’t mention split-rate taxation on commercial land, which is really where the action is. Putting a 2.5% tax on all privately-owned property is a non-starter in a city with a 1% rate that people are howling at having to pay.

The roots of this are in the preference for private goods over public ones: it even extends to the techno-utopian chariot of choice, the self-driving Tesla. Imagine making a car no one wants to drive and thinking you’re an automaker.

As anyone who has worked on the internet might appreciate, the better solution here is to make the road network into a real network, where the vehicles are packets, guided by an intelligent network that can receive the desired destination from each vehicle and manage all of them, merging and exiting them, as the passengers require. Rather that waste time and effort designing cars that can read signs, why not built signaling into the signs and all other road infrastructure to guide the vehicles?

But that sounds like public investment, shared/common goods. They would never consider upgrading or innovating in the public space when they could simply create a private version they can control access to.

So this coterie of failsons and upward failing dreamers will continue to invest in systems and ideas that no one but themselves needs or wants. It may take the rest of this century before the effects of this poison are gone.

So what happens if, after trying every means of artistic expression – writing, music, drawing, photography – you come to the conclusion you don’t have any ideas to express?

Here’s what I would recommend: If you still use “admin” as a username on your blog, change it

ORLY?

I’m just lucky that way, I guess.

I changed it in the database as there was no way to change it in the UI. But if I’m not the only WordPress user with this problem, then what?

PS: 50 lockouts on wp-login since I installed that additional layer of security.

I see a lot of garbage had crept in over the course of using different publishing platforms, editors, and other tools. I’m sure there’s a better way to do this (like a stored procedure in MySQL) but I managed to hack back a lot of the weeds with stuff like this:

mysql> UPDATE crank_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '’','\'');

I probably spent more time trying to do this in SequelPro and wrestling with syntax, none of which was necessary: the line above works in the commandline environment. It seems to have worked once but I don’t think I saw the status message saying to: I didn’t realize it til I saw a nonsense test string staring back at me.

Just one more thing that should Just Work.