Ben Aldred

PEN counts books that are restricted in access but remain in the library as banned, OIF does not. So a book in a school library that goes from accessible to all students to being limited to high schoolers is considered a ban by PEN but not by ALA.

PEN counts things very differently. The differences in count are because they use different methodologies, not because of staffing differences. They aren't undercounts, they just count slightly different but overlapping things.

We’re coming up on the holidays. If you have a family member in ICE, they don’t get to eat with you, they don’t get to visit, they don’t get the comforts that they deny others. And tell them why.

Definitely is, but they aren’t a juggernaut.

To give a report from the front, this is both egregious and meaningless. They shouldn’t be here, but the idea that they are an overwhelming force is misleading. They want this to seem like a show of strength, but it’s not. They are ultimately weak and we shouldn’t treat them otherwise.

Key thing about the Kimmel censorship debacle. Part of the point was how milquetoast the joke was. They want the overton window so authoritarian that they can censor anyone.

I was eating a salad with cherry tomatoes earlier today and accidentally Denethored my iPad

@xplainthexmen.bsky.social so, in the recent discussion of Pyro, Miles mispronounced the name St. John, which misses the terrible pun. In Australia it would be pronounced sin-jin like the gerund form of singe.

So, everyone is freaked out by AI's capacity to make sense, but Outlook's pattern recognition suggested this to me. As I tried to name a second well known brand of sparkling water, it decided that instead of waterloo, what I was most likely to type was "waterless water".

A peek into my brain: I am describing how the milk and cheerios ratio is important for the infusion of cereal with liquid. My brain goes, the word for that with water is hydrate, so just substitute the root for milk!
Fortunately, my brain works fast enough to keep me from lactating my cheerios.

One of my favorite things to do as a librarian is un-shush people. “You don’t have to whisper here, this isn’t a quiet floor”

Not quite writing, but a recent video by Wendover productions brought up some interesting issues with AI data centers and power infrastructure.

INWO is a gateway drug to HST.

ICE are scared little babies who won’t show their faces because people might be mean to them.
They are snowflakes.

Instead, we need to recognize that a civilization is for the people who are part of it and that the benefits of those shifts belong to everyone.
GenAI shouldn't be used to take prosperity from the displaced, but be part of a conscious transformation of the normal. A normal that is about people.

Right now, we're facing another big shift in the normal with the presumed ubiquity of GenAI.
On the one hand, this is a threat to the normal, with the destruction of jobs and the concentration of wealth.
We need to meet this by challenging normal, stop pretending that we can do the 50's again.

A lot of these errors came to a head in the 1980s when the Reagan administration decided that the growth of the mid century was some sort of natural force that didn't need to be actively sustained and so cut anything that had been built to support actual growth and change. It went...poorly.

The idea that it's normal for people to spread out into more and more new areas is wrong. We should be creating sustainable forms of density with more shared transportation, more accessible services, more local opportunities.

The idea that it's normal for us to increase birth rates to compensate for the oversized boomer generation is wrong. They made too many people, the solution is not for us to also make too many people. That just makes another problem.

All of this created this image of a 'normal' productivity growth rate, population size, and distribution that persists to this day.
The idea that it's normal for every business/economy to constantly grow rather than reach equilibrium is wrong. But that expectation drives our entire system.

The ability to travel independently for things changed dramatically with the rise of the automobile, which allowed for the development of suburbs and sprawl away from cities. This included settlement in areas that weren't settled partially because of unsustainability.

3. We had a transportation and communication revolution, with massive rises in personal transportation ownership and communication technology distribution. In 1900, based on the total equine population, the highest possible rate of transportation ownership was 25%. It was likely much lower.

The baby boom. Where people were having children like child mortality was still high, but all of them were surviving. We made so many people that in raw numbers, the 1950s were higher in total births each year than the 2010s, even though the overall population had doubled.

2. We had a massive mortality drop. Between changes in medical cleanliness and public sanitation(shout out to my boys Semmelweis and Snow) and the development of antibiotics and vaccines, child mortality dropped precipitously. This was part of the cause of the baby boom.

The petrochemical boom transformed the ability to produce material goods, including new fertilizers and pesticides that increased farm productivity, the ability to transport materials, making food chains international and increasing world nutrition tremendously.

One of the biggest problems of society today is the assumption that the mid 20th century is 'normal'
The post-war era in the US was a massive change from other parts of history.
1. We had an energy boom. The world had access to more energy from more sources than ever before.

Good nudge for me to add to that number

Seriously, the right is trying to make laws that can be abused. The left is trying to make laws that can’t be abused. One is much easier than the other.

One of the fundamental problems with us politics is the differing difficulty levels.
The right’s goals are to make a small group rich and hurt people they hate. That’s easy.
The left wants to build a more sustainable and lasting system that benefits the most people. That’s governing in hard mode.

For all that we are bemoaning the horrific cuts to social services, this is the real problem. When future historians look back at how this upcoming calamity was able to happen, today will be the day that lives in infamy.