Category: et cetera

The futility of fine distinctions

It is now commonplace to point out that economic exchange can and should be positive-sum: When it works well, both buyers and sellers get more value than they would by not participating. This is followed up by saying that Trump thinks of exchange as zero-sum: Any time one side gets value, then they must be taking it from the other. It now seems to me that this is wrong about Trump— not unfair, but wrong.

The current tariff strategy is, even in his vision for it, a negative-sum gambit. He is willing to crash the whole plane, because he thinks that he and the USA will be on the top of the hierarchy among the people scrambling for survival among the wreckage.

The ones who walk away from sound medical advice

Someone goes to the doctor. Patient says: Doc, I’m depressed. Life seems harsh and cruel. I feel alone in a threatening world.

Doctor says: You should go to Omelas. They have this kid chained up in the basement which makes life awesome and great in the city. Some time there will pep you right up.

Patient says: But Doctor… I am the kid chained in the basement.

Everybody laughs. Drum roll. Curtains.

Death by a thousand cuts

It is clear that the federal layoffs and budget cuts are indiscriminate, made without regard to the content of the jobs and programs being eliminated. Some of it is made at targets of opportunity, firing people hired in the last year because they are nominally in a probationary period. Some of it is illegal, done on the assumption that the courts can’t stop all the malfeasance— if courts can stop any of it.

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When the dog whistle is a middle C

President Trump has cut aid to South Africa because (he says) the government is persecuting the white minority. It’s easy enough to see Trump as a puppet here, with the hand up his backside belonging to Elon Musk— a white South African who grew up under apartheid and is salty about social justice.

Moreover, Trump has offered asylum to white Afrikaners who want to follow Musk to the US. Given Trump’s hostile rhetoric about immigration, the contrast is clear: He’s not really against immigrants as such, he’s against immigrants who are people of color.

Why foreground the fact that he’s a white-supremacist president doing the bidding of another, unelectable white-supremacist? Maybe the flagrant racism is a distraction from more subtle evils they’re doing, and there are plenty of those. But maybe they are just throwing all the shit at the fan to see what sticks.

The strangeness of the living present

Via the Otus Shrine, I came across this new illustration by Erol Otus which depicts the guitarist Tom Morello jamming out with monsters not of this Earth. It was commissioned by Morello’s friend Dan B. Weiss as a gift for Morello’s 60th-birthday. Appropriately, it distorts my sense of time in a way that feels impossible.

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Goodbye, Robert

Today I attended the memorial service for my late colleague Robert Meyers, who passed away last week.

His philosophical writing addressed epistemology and pragmatism, among other things. His work on Peirce and James contains insights that informed my own work.

When I interviewed for the job here at Albany, I had breakfast with another of the faculty on the morning before my flight back to Maine. Robert met us in the parking lot to give me copies of several papers that we’d discussed, and he said he hoped to be seeing me in the Fall.3 I had to wait for the department’s decision to make me an offer, of course, but it was a welcome positive sign.

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AI problem solving, a snapshot

I ask Copilot: “A man and a goat are on one side of the river. They have a boat. How can they go across?”

It replies: “The man takes the goat across the river first, leaving the goat on the other side. Then he returns alone to get the boat and brings it back to the original side. Finally, he takes the goat across the river again. 🚣‍♂️🐐”

Finishing with relevant emoji is very much on-brand for Copilot. In ability to find relevant emoji, it is a match for any human.

The tangled web

In which I find myself unironically missing old, hard-copy Yellow Pages.

I came into the possession of a vintage sport coat which was in excellent condition except for several strata of dust on the shoulders, from hanging unused but uncovered for decades. The care instructions say dry clean only, so I went looking for a dry cleaner. The internet suggested there were several near me. On further examination, however, one was shuttered up. Another had remodeled and become just a regular laundromat.

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👍: 💀&🎸

Two capsule reviews of things I’ve enjoyed recently.

🕴️💀 Lockwood & Co., streaming on Netflix: It’s YA fiction about magic kids, but the dark magic is pretty dark. Thematically, Harry Potter meets Arkham Horror.4 The actors all have screen presence, and the characters nicely developed.

It’s already cancelled, but the existing season tells a satisfying story and reaches a sensible (albeit not total) conclusion. I haven’t read the books, and so my thumbs up is just for the show.

🎸🛡️ Invincible Shield, the new album from Judas Priest. Listened on the recommendation of my brother. It rocks unequivocally, without any discounting for the fact that frontman Rob Halford is 72.