Really regretting not having sold more of the S&P500 index fund I hold. Unloaded some shortly after the US election, but I reckon there will be a big big drop on market open and it will not bounce back fast.
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A striking phrase from Brett Deveraux this week writing about the Gracchi:
" ancient tyrants did not demolish the apparatus of the state and declare themselves kings. Instead they subverted the state to run its affairs extra-constitutionally: the courts still functioned, the assemblies still met, councils still voted but one man controlled everything through a web of cronies, clients and the threat of force. "
I don't think he meant this, in context, as any kind of metacommentary on world events right now. But.
https://acoup.blog/2025/01/31/collections-on-the-gracchi-part-ii-gaius-gracchus/
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Friend is a primary principal at a West Auckland primary. Lunch is 1130. The supplier turned up with lunches at 2pm, by which point he had bought lunch for the kids with his own money. Supplier is based in Waikato. How does this make sense.
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"One thing that has happened is that systems and institutions that are key components of a functioning social system have ceased to be considered as such. Either they have been reconfigured on the model of for-profit enterprises and expected to survive by generating their own revenue (e.g. universities) or they have been starved of funding in the interests of "efficiency" with short-term cost-reduction being very much in the minds of policy-makers but the cost of the long-term consequences — probably falling on someone else’s budget — not so much. The human beings who run most public services have often compensated for fiscal neglect by working harder and self-exploiting out of a sense of professional committment. But that has diminished over time as people feel like suckers, especially when treated as punchbags by politicians and derided by right-wing pundits. And while the state can often count on the professional dedication of people who were recruited and trained when there was a proper service they were serving, those people are ageing, retiring, quitting. Attracting smart and competent new people to work in education, criminal justice, social work and so forth is a different matter."
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I think this essay on UK and Euro politics has analogues here. Not the bit about immigration, but the bits about how "progress" has been redefined and past aspirations given up on.
https://crookedtimber.org/2025/01/29/the-death-of-the-hope-of-progress-and-the-fear-of-being-left-behind/
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Can't vouch for the copyright legitimacy but there are downloadable versions of The Black Jacobins linked here https://libcom.org/article/black-jacobins-toussaint-louverture-and-san-domingo-revolution-clr-james
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The article on Eric Williams I stumbled on that made me track down the book: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/23/eighty-years-late-groundbreaking-work-on-slave-economy-is-finally-published-in-uk
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I'm reading Eric WIlliams Capitalism and Slavery, having read C L R James The Black Jacobins earlier, and a thing which has finally sunk in is this: abolition in the UK only succeeded because the American Revolution and the exhausted soil of the West Indies meant that slave owners of Jamaica and Barbadoes lost their economic, and therefore their political power. The change of British policy was because those slave fortunes no longer dominated and it suited the British Empire to try and kneecap the Americans and the French, who still relied on slavery. Morality had nothing to do with it, or at least it had nothing to do with abolition's eventual success as policy. This great crime against humanity
was tolerated and celebrated as long as it was useful, and then it was not. Sometimes by the same people.
This has gloomy implications for climate action: the vast fortunes of oil will continue to work against change, until oil is no longer the source of wealth it is now. But maybe the ever increasing cheapness of solar, and the growing power of countries that don't have oil (China? India?) might help.
Incidentally Williams and James, both West Indian slave descendants, writing decades ago, have wonderful prose styles. Dry, acerbic, arch, ironic, finely turned. Horrible subject matter, great reads.
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There is TRUCulent, PERManent an and indeed CROMulent but contrast aPARTment and also I think the "ole" made me think of sole, dole, role etc.
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That's at least 4 decades of hearing it wrong in my head and never once hearing it said aloud.
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Turns out I had no idea how to pronounce "redolent" and it's RED-uh-lent not re-DOLE-ent. Huh.
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Once again confronted with that fact that past a certain size it's virtually guaranteed a group will have at least one horrible person in it. So best plan in advance.
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This is a very sympathetic article about someone not putting provisional tax money aside, ignoring messages from IRD and then complaining about the consequences?
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/540342/former-business-owner-says-house-on-line-over-34k-tax-debt
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Good news about public transport in Chch: https://talkingtransport.com/2025/01/27/2024-public-transport-patronage/
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Lovely and interesting story about an Indonesian biscuit tin design and Ladybird books. No really.
https://ladybirdflyawayhome.com/the-strange-tale-of-the-missing-father-of-khong-guan/
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Ha! You can put Youtube subtitles offscreen, thus poisoning AI scrapers: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/01/23/youtuber-f4mi-tells-you-how-to-poison-ai-video-scrapers-with-%d0%b0ss-subtitles/
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Repaired a blown-out seam in the seat of some pants with a bit of hand-sewing. A first for me, but not the last. Stoked to have saved the money and done it myself. And a good task for a low energy moment. I may turn into one of those people who has a mending pile. Also now motivated to find some books on hand-sewing and repair at the library.
[#]repair
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I've been looking into the scraping services that offer rotating IPs and proxies. They are all very vague about their provenance. Based on looking up IPs that appear in my logs, am prepared to bet most are actually compromised consumer devices.
This makes blocking by netblock a bit tricky if you don't want a lot of collateral damage.
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A little self-promotion here if I may. You might know that I am very into a thing called capoeira angola, and teach classes here in Christchurch. My Auckland colleague Treinel Eliot put together this page of reasons why students like it - maybe you would too? If so, I can hook you up.
https://capoeiraecamaraotearoa.wordpress.com/2025/01/18/what-do-you-love-about-doing-capoeira/
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My commitment to the open web, which I really believe in, and my opposition to aggressive scrapers and harvesting for AI, are in contradiction, I think, and I don't know how to resolve it. Suggestions welcome.
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