Beth

I’ve been promoting @cjsprigman.bsky.social’s proposal to limit jurisdiction by creating exceptions, because it is something that legislators could start trying to put into every bill today.

But I’m also running for Congress because I don’t trust the Democratic Rep I’ve got to even try.

The introduction of machines actually did hurt workers, though, and the recent moves to automate manufacturing have decimated the American middle class.

Yeah, we don’t have a responsibility to robots the way we do to our neighbors. Doing things for robots doesn’t make their life better, because they don’t have one.

That makes taxing automation more useful, tho. Otherwise it is just using public services to take our money & hand it to billionaires.

Thirsty for power and water, AI-crunching data centers sprout across the West With promises of jobs and hopes for tax breaks, server farms are reshaping local grids, plumbing, and politics. Are they a boon for communities, or a burden?

They most certainly do: andthewest.stanford.edu/2025/thirsty...

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When I was poor sometimes my friends & I would buy a lottery ticket. We didn’t think it was a good deal: we knew the odds. But for $2 we could have an entire afternoon of hope, dreaming of a better world that was even remotely possible.

Anyway, I’ve been donating to other people’s primaries lately.

“It is our fingers on the keyboard” is one of the important lessons for programmers.

We are accountable to our users and coworkers for the code we write. When we are told to do our job badly, we don’t even have to say “no”. We can just not do that.

“The Aggregate Demand Curve Is Currently Upward-Sloping” remains the most-accurate protests sign I’ve ever marched with

Measurement is hard!

Companies either do their work in ways that make it less effective but easier to measure, or they have to practice “delegated management” without that visibility.

Robert Austin: Measuring And Managing Performance In Organizations www.dorsethouse.com/books/mmpo.h...

That moment when I was excited to tell @martinfowler.com all about this management book I found that explains why functional companies split into Deserts and Forests, only to discover he had cited the same book twenty years ago in his summary of Agile 🤣

People hate inauthenticity more than they hate almost anything else.

I will say “pregnant people”, like a normal American. I’ve never had anyone in real life so much as notice.

I suspect what is actually radical about “pregnant people” is the idea that women don’t stop being people just because they are pregnant. Which just isn’t controversial in Massachusetts.

Eh, our guesses about what will happen next are more accurate when we believe in consciousness than when we don’t.

I do think there are similar properties at scales bigger than the individual. Like the internet talking about itself, or wanting cat pictures.

But we have more agency than we imagine.

My favorite part of running so far is connecting with skeptics.

People have a picture in their head of a “trans socialist”. It isn’t usually a curious motorcycle-riding homeowner with a pickup truck who is nearly impossible to offend.

That moment of confusion can be the start of a conversation.

It is the process of a somatic system self-constructing, not mere pattern matching.

The AI theorists like the idea that all we do is pattern-match because it makes the math easier. But motivation, relationships and emotions are what lead to the emergence of self-awareness and personal growth.

Personally I see self-consciousness and independent motivation as the two most important aspects.

One must recognize one’s self as distinct from others, and one must change one’s self-concept over time without any external input, or lack thereof, with those changes sparked by intrinsic motivation.

I’d put money on neurons alone being unable to achieve consciousness. In us it takes at least the nervous, endocrine and lymphatic systems, all working in concert.

She points to Discourse 9 (Spring/Summer 1987) www.jstor.org/stable/i4006... One piece in there (Text Out of Context: Situating Postmodernism Within an Information Society) cites Claude Shannon, from Bell Labs. Might be an interesting place to start.

Someone else pointed to French structuralists/feminist philosophers. Haraway accepts their ideas and then theorizes about resistance: “Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly”

The Cyborg Manifesto explores the idea pretty thoroughly but isn’t especially quotable.

It includes the ability of dialect to subvert the algorithms, anticipating algo-speak nineteen years before MySpace came into being.

I am running in the MA-06 because I think the voters are there, whether or not the party is

It’s also what I see in actual conversations with voters.

People outside the political world don’t ask me about policy proposals. They do sometimes ask me what tactics I could possibly use, because our current Representative keeps talking about how powerless he is and they’ve accepted it as true.

Beth for Democracy | Bethany Andres-Beck for Congress Bethany Andres-Beck is a candidate for Congress running to represent Massachusetts' 6th District.

I am, in fact, primarying Seth Moulton, one of those 128 who keeps talking about “compromising” with the GOP: bethfordemocracy.com

I wouldn’t be doing this if he had been willing to stand up for the Constitution, all of his constituents, and the rule of law.

I credit this partially to the myth of the split between mind and body. The stories of our human-ness focus on the brain, and forget about the endocrine system and all the rest of the nerves.

I am reminded of people who were amazed by the Newton’s handwriting recognition.

It genuinely was an achievement. Not a particularly useful achievement, it turns out, but an achievement.

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Done with Seth? Support @beth4ma.bsky.social!

My career is about transforming low-trust engineering cultures into high-trust engineering cultures and even that takes years of energetic optimism.

Oath breakers have no honor.

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