A couple of times a day I have to take a deep breath and remind myself that I have savings. That I'm healthy. That I'm allowed to live in an affordable country. That I almost exclusively enjoy doing cheap things. I'm probably going to be just fine and don't need to worry about myself.
Then I remember that the plutocrats are probably going to do everything in their power to make sure my savings increase in value. And I'm like, this is all very fucked up.
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Nice OpEd from @epopp on our fresh hell and the implications of Musk's takeover of the US Treasury. Both solicited and rejected by the NYT lol.
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/personal-discretion-over-the-treasurys-payments-system-means-the-end-of-democracy/
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(of course "American" isn't even a nationality, but you get the picture)
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"Deportees of any nationality, including American"
https://apnews.com/article/migration-rubio-panama-colombia-venezuela-237f06b7d4bdd9ff1396baf9c45a2c0b
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Probably not the worst thing happening, but so relatable.
"Phrases like 'freaking out' are, not surprisingly, used to describe the reaction of the engineers who were responsible for maintaining the code base until a week ago. [...] I want to emphasize that the described changes are not being tested in a dev environment but have already been pushed into production."
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/musk-cronies-dive-into-treasury-dept-payments-code-base
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And it wasn't the gardening or the brownies. This friend was a fellow escapee from our tiny, conservative ag town. She was working on a library science degree at the time, and went on to become president of the American Indian Library Association.
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Over winter break before my last term at Caltech, I freaked out in a fit of depression and ran off to live with some friends in NorCal. I gardened, read, rode my bike and nibbled on pot brownies for 3 months. If it hadn't been for that interlude I think there's a good chance I'd be on the side of the tech oligarchs today.
https://crookedtimber.org/2025/02/02/there-is-an-exit/
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Also discovered today that apparently loctite / thread locking compounds just... aren't a thing in Mexico? I went to like 5 ferreterías and at best got a vague look of recognition when I described what I was looking for and my Spanish isn't that bad.
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Doing some German bike maintenance. Love the make out music they put in the background.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVhtBwXo4AQ
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Truly thankful to @babe & @lzg that I will forever associate this horny french furry Orangina ad with trying to dissociate from Trump halting the payout on the NSF grant we're only 1/3 of the way through.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxBuly8Vblc
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LOL shortly thereafter the prime minister was also assassinated in broad daylight by some rando in the lobby of Parliament. The only PM of the UK ever to be assassinated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Spencer_Perceval
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Reading Blood in the Machine and man, the assassination of William Horsfall sure does rhyme with the United Healthcare dude.
https://ludditebicentenary.blogspot.com/2012/04/28th-april-1812-assassination-of.html
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Now we have movies about crypto "wrench attacks"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCc2BHvfXBE
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But there's also a flood of cheap imported overstock and used clothing for sale everywhere, which makes it harder to justify repairing things. I've never really seen a place with the equilibrium norm of having a small number of high quality things that are worth repairing.
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Dropped off some clothes that need mending at one of several sastrería in the neighborhood today. They'll be ready on Tuesday. I love that repairing things is economical here, but it's only because the cost of labor is so much lower relative to the cost of materials.
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Kunstler was extremely wrong about peak oil (and also toxic) but I think he captured something about the feeling of a Long Emergency. Sociotechnical systems with lots of inertia moving slowly (relative to our attention spans) toward very bad outcomes.
It's just not the Emergency he imagined.
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@interfluidity What are you using to cross post here and on BlueSky? Is there a desktop app you like? I've used @openvibe on mobile, but unless I'm traveling I keep social media off my phone.
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Maybe the US forfeiting the EV market to China will be good for transportation & land use policy in the long run? If US automakers collapse and oil loses its salience in the economy because transport electrifies, will organized motordom still have the same kind of power?
It will suck for autoworkers and the US trade balance though.
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I feel like we're wandering around in the time gap between the story in Cloud Atlas where an old publisher gets involuntarily committed to a nursing home, and the one where Somni-451 leads the rebellion of disposable fabricated workers against their chain-store employers.
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I love Thomas Piketty's proposals for managing wealth distributions, and much of the green industrial policies that we've seen in the last decade around the world. But dayum do they take a lot of administrative capacity to execute.
To the point where now maybe administrative capacity itself feels intrinsically threatening to the plutes and pyros.
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