To be fair to humans, 90% of the workday is spent using bizarre internal corporate speak that has evolved for indirectness approaching meaninglessness.

It’s asking a lot to recognize a real transactional moment, codeswitch, and present effectively to the narrow goal. Even then, the narrow goal (maximize the chance of external funding) might be misaligned with the broad personal goal (don’t overcommit… on fucking anything).

A robot can just maximize on the funding result. It didn’t spend its whole career being lectured in circles about the next “one-corpco initiative” that will replace everybody’s SAP front-ends or whatever.

I file use of the word “entitlement” right alongside use of the word “respect.” The only people who ever use the words inflict them as asymmetrical projections of their own abusive characters.

“I will respect you when you respect me,” always means: “I will respect your right to exist when you respect my authority over you.”

“Your attitude is entitled,” always means, “standing up for yourself reduces the value of my entitlement.”

People with the self-reflection necessary to use these words appropriately will also recognize them as currently abusive and over-spoken barriers to communication. They’ll self-select out of speaking them in the first place.

I love the book on so many levels. My copy is swollen and waterlogged, and held together with packing tape. I love it for all the Latin I relearned, but I love it even more for everything it indirectly teaches about teaching.

I’ve always treasured polished and well edited textbooks, but this thing makes the best textbooks feel like the work of amateurs. I always think of Neal Stephenson’s Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer when I’m reading it. It’s like parts of your brain being unzippered to discover understanding your didn’t know you already had.

I think of Lingua Latina in a surprising number of conversations… it reminds me to be considerate of how much new information can be absorbed, but also to fully trust my audience with that new information. I don’t need to belabor the presentation of ideas. I simply need to share my ideas in the context they matter, as if my audience already understood completely.

As someone afflicted with holding on to junk that might be useful someday, myself, I often pity Trump on the matter of the “boxes.”

It’s so clear that he has 1) desperately insecure compulsions to exploit information asymmetries, but also 2) a shallow bombastic character that probably rarely ever has had access to truly advantageous facts or the subtlety to effectively exploit them.

All the little glimpses into his overactive engagement with those boxes are so intimate and so pathetic. Stepping down from all those secrets beyond even what he always suspected other people had squirreled away, but also that he hasn’t been able to exploit like he always assumed he would…

It’s just a sad sad scene. Well, and also very embarrassingly stupid.

Inflation and rising interest rates sure seem like they can explain so much of the puzzle... especially timing.

But Twitter is an especially interesting piece of that puzzle. It seems to be immolating itself in a deliberate enshitification, closely mirroring every other mega site - yet I doubt it can be related to debt in any way.

I don’t think we can just shrug and chalk it up to a poor decision by eccentric Elon, either. There are only a handful of mega sites. Some (Meta) have had bots between users for a long time. Some (TikTok) were born that way. The rest, including Twitter, seem hellbent on racing to get bots between us as fast as they can.

I think this undermines the debt-urgency argument. I suspect it, instead, highlights a recent growth spurt in the market value for mega sites with bots between users. We’re getting bots everywhere, not because time’s up and bots were the best idea they had, but because bots are exploding in value. We might even look back and shake our heads because Elon so clearly underpaid for Twitter.

I can’t figure out r/sports’s moderation rules. Every now and then I will accidentally reply there because something bubbles up to my front page. I discovered 90% of my comments there get deleted without explanation.

I personally contend that the official Reddit app has already hidden that knowledge. And that it is abusive. As do many others. We are overwhelmed by the urgent imminence of deliberate enshitification. Waiting to be “surprised” is insanity at this point.

I’m not having a fun time with this blackout, but Reddit will be effectively blacked out for me the moment old.reddit goes away. I might as well try changing my diet now, if I’m otherwise going to be forced to change it anyway once doing nothing different leads to diabetes in the near future.

I don’t own my contributions any more than the mods do. My contributions exist only in the context of moderated mass discussion, and in the context of mass audience participation. All broad changes to the context of this collaboration are abusive… and I’m throwing my lot in with the abuses of the mods doing blackout right now.

Lately, I’ve seen comments copied verbatim from lower in the very same comment section.

They’ll find a comment with upvotes rising above its thread neighbors, but with the entire thread neighborhood buried at the bottom of the comment section. Then they’ll just staple that low comment as a response to some visible comment in a thread much higher up the comment section.

I sold my house to PE. I work for a conglomerate that was captured by a vulture capitalist and immediately flipped to PE. I’ve been thinking a lot about PE.

I think PE is this decade’s banks bailout. Bank balance sheets were severely unhealthy in the face of fixed rate loans and skyrocketing inflation. Easy credit was eagerly extended to anyone crooked enough take on variable rates and capture real assets.

The LLCs that the smart firms financed for their small captures (like houses) are going bankrupt while the revenue they booked is already packaged into REITs and held by corporations as part of their supposed inflation hedges (or timebombs).

Meanwhile, the reckless PEs owning multiple corporations are either going to flip them to international bag holders, or drown under the operating costs of servicing 100% debt-financed equity themselves.

When catastrophe comes, and bagholders go under, rotten assets will revert to the banks… and taxpayers will bailout the banks to protect hundreds of PE-owned corporations and thousands of “innocent” corporations saddled with toxic REIT-backed instruments and each other’s default swaps.

All of which means, if you were priced out of a home in the last three years, it might have been your future tax paying self who outbid you… on behalf of the banks who will indirectly own that home.

I lived about 40 years under a sort of social truce with tipping culture. Tipping is inherently too transactional and too patronizing for my comfort. But the social construct, including laws, around server wages and tips was so well established I was able to establish a sort of loose personal policy. This truce allowed me to tip consistently and generously transaction after transaction. Yet, it allowed me to still somewhat abstract each tip from its transactional and patronizing character.

Not only is that social truce now violated, it is violated specifically within our new global environment of every-transaction-of-any-kind-is-a-novel-attempt-at-customer-exploitation. Every supposed price is already a mystery, and every voluntary tip screen is a mystery with an ethical puzzle and a face to face confrontation.

I’ve drastically scaled back my use of services because it is emotionally taxing for me to confront the utter pettiness of trying to guess how much I should be paying for hot noodles from day to day.