The Fig Economy

Yeah, like I think it’s easy to overstate what may functionally have only ever been a backstop that never got hit. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t really there.

That second question is a genuinely hard one because on the one hand of course we want them to refuse and on the other hand what kind of country do we have in the minutes, hours, days after they do?

I guess this is the thing, like if this just kind of ends here, with the straits open and a new ayatollah, what really even was accomplished except some people dying and some destruction?

Watched Now You See Me, Now You Don’t with the kids this weekend.

Everybody:

9YO, every time Dave Franco was onscreen: I bet what he’s doing would be easier if he took his shirt off.

Sean Penn is a pretty gross dude and his character in OBAA is reprehensible and the character as a whole and his performance of it are incredible.

So this means just shy of 50% of American households would be immediately exempted from federal income tax? I guess I’d be a little interested to know what that rate is now, but you have to jump through filing hoops to figure it out.

I’ll back up a bit and say I’m speaking of my personal experience of composable moderation, with labelers and such, and a couple of flagship examples collapsing early and hard due to some kind of factional infighting, pointing up one of the fundamental hurdles: trust.

Yeah, in retrospect composable moderation at scale could never work.

Mostly I feel like people want something that feels like it just works and aren’t interested that much in the back end. Right now it’s kind of the worst of both worlds because composable moderation is one of the pilots for federated instances and it fell flat on its face.

Bluesky needs to figure out what it wants to be because IMO “one instance of the ATProto fediverse” is essentially not what like 98% of the users of text based social media are interested in.

But this is kind of what I’m saying, we’re not out here saying the same about mail delivery (mostly, some are) or about college degrees that don’t pay for themselves on average. I don’t think on the broad left we have this purely mercenary “economics alone decide everything for us” mindset elsewhere

Which, that’s fine as an argument. Efficiency’s not nothing. But it also tends to come from quarters that would profoundly not argue from cold economic efficiency in lots of other areas (education is the big one that comes to mind).

I tend to think it’s a bigger shift than some are crediting because those models are essentially outposts where it’s not *possible* to do anything but rotational deployments, whereas what’s being proposed here is choosing that where we *could* do otherwise, for efficiency’s sake.

I do get this, and I think it’s probably a good thing, as it’s backbreaking work, and I also have this little twinge in the back of my mind of how it might intersect with immigration debates.

Yeah, and I’m not calling you out so much as pivoting in my mind to the people who kind of presuppose that a complete rural depopulation is desirable or possible. Like you have one guy, he needs to have power and water and food and appliance repairmen and schools and now you’ve got hundreds.

Unless those humans are just deployed in some sort of deployed corps that bivouacs in tent cities for a couple of weeks at a time.

I understand this in concept, but like what is the footprint that this imagines getting down to? Is it a vast farmland populated only by robots and animals? I only ask because the second you need *any* humans, you need *more* humans for services, support, etc.

That sucks so bad. It’s just a ridiculous way to cut the legs out from people who wanted to be civil servants in the first place.

None right now, I don’t think. Still going through processing, who knows what gets held up in court.

Yep, basically guaranteeing themselves a class of people they could fire no matter how people perform, right? But that would also be the grounds for the lawsuit.

Oh for sure, and they’ve done a lot of it and they’re clearly looking to do more. It’s just that this also, if accomplished, would have the effect of *rebalancing* the workforce ideologically at the margins.

I don’t think they have a huge grand plan or anything but I’d bet they realize that their original rounds of firing disproportionately targeted newer employees, so swapping out older ones with newer hires processed through a more ideological hiring process would rebalance the workforce toward them.

Trump administration wants to streamline federal worker layoffs The union for federal workers has argued the proposed changes would remove protections that are in place to prevent “politically motivated layoffs.”

TL;DR: they want to remove seniority as a RIF factor so they can start firing more tenured civil servants.

My dearest Clara,

It has been nigh on one week since I have beheld your visage. I cannot fathom the changes to our home that have transpired during my extended absence.

I mean maybe? I think they’re on a lot more solid ground though, jumping off of someone who already showed a willingness to jump ship

I would have said so before but now?

As of 1/20/2025? Are you accepting that running on a ticket with Trump meant Vance’s election was also illegitimate?

“Listen Javert, you’re a good cop, but the chief inspector has been breathing down my neck, and after nineteen years I think it’s not unfair to ask you to show us some results.”

One thing I never understood about Les Miserables is how Javert managed to convince the higher ups at the police department to commit nearly unlimited time and money to the Bread Crimes Unit.

The entire line of succession ends before you reach a decent person. It just stops. Runs out. There’s no “now the good people in line get to take over.”