Beth

It’s interesting you see that as nihilistic: I see it as simply explanatory.

Shareholder primacy is a meme a la Blackmore, creating evolutionary pressure on elites.

I find thinking of capitalism as a personified force gives more-accurate predictions, because it captures those incentives.

We’ve seen with other tools, like checklists, that even things that work well when incorporated into a culture can be counter-productive when imposed from above.

Without a culture of empowerment & more-than-sufficient staffing, patient care suffers.

The point I was trying to make was about the adoption of AI.

Workers aren’t being allowed to incorporate it in ways that lead to better outcomes, where they and patients would get the benefits. Instead, it is being imposed from the top down.

Humans + computers beat computers alone.

Unfortunately, capitalism & our tax code don’t care if things work well. They just want to not have to give people jobs.

As for what a “right” is, I think it’s whatever rules we can adopt to stop democracy from sucking.

We’ve basically come up with the current a set of “rights” experimentally: when something shitty happened, we make up a right that would have stopped it.

Though America’s set hasn’t gotten updated

But as we’re seeing right now, that relies on finding a way to give power to judges who care about rules for the sake of rules.

That is the hard question

The most successful approach seems to be making the process to change the process much harder than regular changes, and putting the rights in the rules.

(Technically, any system can be changed if enough people decide to change it. But folks can temporarily agree not to.)

I figure that is what the idea of “rights” is for. Some things should never be put to a vote.

But it is also an example of why I prefer systems that build consensus over systems that let a majority rule. Even if they don’t scale as effectively.

It is too bad the word “refactoring” never escaped computer-land.

Having a way to say “make something better without breaking it” is incredibly useful.

Trying to summarize the news now is wild:

“He announced the hunger games, went after Tomboy X, handed out a donativum by stealing troops’ housing, illegally named a building after himself, murdered five more people, convicted a judge, and ranted for 18 minutes on tv about how great things are.”

I was there when it was written, for I watched music fans born in 1919 meet their first troll.

(Two hours and hundreds of posts later, the server’s 8 MB of RAM was insufficient to the task and that community was no more.)

Did they consider just not having XSS vulnerabilities?

The CSP standard appears to have been written by someone who loves rules and hates web development

Alone is just My Side Of The Mountain for grownups

In 2005 I decided to forever hold a grudge against Larry Summers.

That decision keeps looking better and better.

When Donald Trump said he wanted a war with Canada, I didn’t realize he meant retroactively losing the war of 1812.

Infrastructure is like crochet hooks.

If we only ever buy the hooks we are absolutely sure we need, each project can require a lot of work to get started. We might give up rather than go to the store for just the one idea.

When we invest in a set of typical hooks, we end up making way more things.

The flow of money represents the wants and needs of everyone in an economy.

The problem with having billionaires is the same problem as trying to add huge numbers to tiny numbers using floating point.

Except that in this case the “tiny numbers” that get lost are “normal people’s wants and needs”.

One challenge I am finding on this campaign: I have great political metaphors that work for very niche audiences.

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...

Donate to Beth Andres-Beck Show your support with a contribution.

(If you would like to dream along with me today: secure.actblue.com/donate/bab-b...)

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.