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Cory Doctorow reviews Thomas Pikkety's new book, "Capital and Ideology."

The thesis of the new book is that “the ‘laws’ of economics are actually policies, created to ‘justify a society’s inequalities,’ providing a rationale to convince poor people not to start building guillotines.”

pluralistic.net/2020/03/2…

My $0.02: You see this in one of the main conservative and so-called moderate Democrat arguments against Medicaire-for-All: That we can’t afford it.

If society can’t afford to save lives, then we can’t afford to have that society.

There are other arguments against M4A, namely that it might suck. I do not necessarily share those arguments, but they are reasonable.

Cory:

The elites' indifference to working people is grounded in an alliance between the Brahmin Left (educated, well-paid liberals) and the Merchant Right (the finance sector). Notionally leftist parties, like the Democrats, are dominated by the Brahmin Left.

Me: This is one of the leading Republican criticisms of the national Democratic Party. And it has a lot of merit to it.

But more than any other, Macron epitomizes this alliance: proclaiming his liberal values while slashing taxes on the wealthy — punishing poor people for driving cars, exempting private jets from his “climate” bill.

Life in a “meritocracy” is especially cruel for poor people, because meritocracies, uniquely among ideologies, blame poor people for poverty. It’s right there in the name. French kings didn’t think God was punishing peons, rather, that the Lord had put them there to serve.

Who would you be willing to sacrifice – have them die – to keep the stock market up? Sullen teen offspring? Obnoxious neighbor who runs the lawnmower and/or snowblower at 7 am Saturdays? Coworker who never makes a fresh pot of coffee? Discuss.

A programmer switches gears – so to speak – and takes up a career as a bike courier. From 2005. I wonder what he’s doing today? web.archive.org/web/20050…

Highlights:

The most common sort of bike you will see couriers on is your standard street bike. Light frame, slick tires, no suspension and between 18 and 24 gears. Among veterans however, the favoured bikes are single speeds. There is a large variety among single speeds as well (fixed drive or freewheel, coaster brakes or hand brakes, etc.) but they all share the advantage of being mechanically simple machines. When you are riding eight hours a day, any part that can fail, eventually will. And probably dramatically. Thus, the simpler the mechanism, the lower the mechanic’s bill….

As a courier, you will get hit by cars. It is an occupational hazard…. A certain brash courier from another company who liked to refer to himself as “The Fastest Messenger in Toronto” (and he may well have been, arrogance aside) once told me that he didn’t wear a helmet because having a safety net makes you reckless and that if you are fast enough, you don’t fall. The next week, he went through the back window of an SUV that stopped suddenly and spent two weeks in the hospital. I don’t know a single courier who has worked the job for more than a year and not been hit at least once….

One thing I was surprised to discover is that pedestrians are almost as dangerous to the full-time cyclist as drivers are. Especially if you indulge in sidewalk riding, but frequently even if you stick to the road, people will dart in front of you or suddenly stop or change direction without even the most cursory glance or indication of intent. A car, at least, can’t change its direction of travel by a full 180 degrees in half a second.

My little experiment using micro.blog categories to automate selective syndication to Tumblr and Twitter failed. Posts were not showing up in either place, except for one post that showed up on Tumblr but formatting was screwy.

And even if that problem were resolved, it would drive me crazy to remember to check the little category boxes every time I post to micro.blog.

So for now I’m going back to my previous default: Automatically cross-post everything to Tumblr, which results in duplicate posts when reblogging from Tumblr. And manually post to Twitter.

I may revisit this another day. I expect I will.

@manton said yesterday that using micro.blog automation to cross-post multiple categories might result in problems, and he suggested IFTTT instead for that case. But did I listen? Noooooooo.

Today on Cory Doctorow's Pluralistic.net

  • The Internet Archive is supporting unlimited book-lending during the crisis. “… they buy and scan one copy of every book (pretty much every book, ever) and lend it out to one person at a time. They’ve just announced that during the crisis, they are lifting the one-borrower-at-a-time restriction and allowing unlimited borrowing, ‘to meet the needs of a global community of displaced learners’. They call it the ‘National Emergency Library.'”

  • Kaiser threatens to fire Oakland nurses who wear their own masks. “Nurses who report for work wearing their own N95 masks have been threatened with immediate dismissal for ‘insubordination.'” Those masks don’t just protect nurses; they protect patients too.

  • O’Reilly is getting out of the conference business. Not just now – forever. Can’t plan for the future when they don’t know when the emergency will end.

  • Trump’s bible study teacher, Ralph Drollinger, thinks coronavirus is God’s wrath for Chinese excess, women working outside the workplace, American tolerance for homosexuality, and environmentalism. (I’m a Jewish nonbeliever, but I had the distinct impression that Christ preached loving your neighbor, charity toward the least of us, and not judging others.)

  • The $3/month DoNot Pay service uses an chatbot to automatically petition companies for relief during the coronavirus crisis. “Using a chatbot, you determine which of your bills are eligible for relief. Then it generates a ‘compassionate and polite request’ seeking help. If the company does not comply, it follows up with a firmer letter citing relevant state/federal laws.”

  • “Xi’s enemies sense weakness: Autocracies are only as good as their last crisis-response.

  • Immigrants face infection in ICE lockups.

  • Doctors and dentists are hoarding chloroquine in case it turns out to be an effective Covid-19 treatment, thus depriving people who rely on the drug for conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.

  • The Toilet Paper Splitter is “a DIY project to separate a single two-ply roll into two single-ply rolls.”

  • This year’s science fiction Worldcon has been cancelled. WorldCons began in 1939, and have been held every year since other than 1942-45 during World War II.

  • The United States Postal Service is crucial to emergency response; it’s the only federal agency that can knock on every door in America in a single day. “When (if?) effective covid meds are available, it’s likely a postal worker will deliver them to you. Now is a good time to remember that the GOP have been trying to dismantle the universal, self-funding, vital USPS for decades, so that private carriers like UPS and Fedex can cream off the most profitable parts of its business and leave rural Americans in the cold.”

  • Volante Design is making stylish masks for covid responders – they can protect N95 masks from contamination, prevent you from touching your face, and partly contain coughs when medical masks are unavailable. They’re looking for donations to make and shop more. docs.google.com/spreadshe…

pluralistic.net/2020/03/2…