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tektology-enjoyer.bsky.social
Tektology Enjoyer
@tektology-enjoyer.bsky.social
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Democratically Planned Economies are good
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tektology-enjoyer.bsky.social
Literally
A black and white fantasy illustration of an armored man waving a holy symbol at 2 skeletons and a zombie. 1 skeleton and the zombie are recoiling in terror, illustrating the Turn Undead ability of clerics in D&D
October 12, 2025 at 12:31 AM
tektology-enjoyer.bsky.social
Pairs well with this imho! www.goodreads.com/quotes/12051...
"The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world." J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come
October 8, 2025 at 7:05 PM
tektology-enjoyer.bsky.social
So what's your preferred method of estimating a question like "could you get pro-M4A candidates into office by primarily trying to mobilize non-voters"? Or are you saying there's no sound way to even try? Btw I'm conflating low-propensity & low-income based on the Politico piece.
It so happens that the gap between voters and non-voters breaks down strongly along class lines. In the 2012 election, 80.2 percent of those making more than $150,000 voted, while only 46.9 percent of those making less than $10,000 voted. This “class bias,” is so strong that in the three elections (2008, 2010 and 2012) I examined, there was only one instance of a poorer income bracket turning out at a higher rate than the bracket above them. (In the 2012 election, those making less than $10,000 were slightly more likely to vote than those making between $10,000 and $14,999.) On average, each bracket turned out to vote at a rate 3.7 percentage points higher than the bracket below it. This class bias is a persistent feature of American voting: A study of 40 years of state-level data finds no instance in which there was not a class bias in the electorate favoring the rich—in other words, no instance in which poorer people in general turned out in higher rates than the rich. That being said, class bias has increased since 1988, just as wide gaps have opened up between the opinions of non-voters and those of voters.
October 8, 2025 at 1:20 AM
tektology-enjoyer.bsky.social
I'll take your word for it but I think The Weight of Evidence also points to "more participation by low-income non-voters favors redistributive policies".
www.politico.com/magazine/sto...
Recent research tells us that this voting disparity—in class and in opinion—has tremendous impact on policy. State-level research suggests that higher voter turnout among the poor leads to higher welfare spending. A 2013 study found that turnout inequality directly predicts minimum wages, children’s health insurance spending and anti-predatory lending policies. And studies at the state level have found that a higher class bias in the electorate actually leads to higher levels of income inequality. Interestingly, this doesn’t just play out on the national level. Vincent Mahler of Loyola University, who has studied international voter turnout extensively, determined that both voter turnout and inequality of turnout are strongly correlated with income redistribution His most recent study of voting in 14 countries, conducted with political scientists David K. Jesuit and Piotr Paradowski, found that increased turnout among the rich leads to less redistribution, while increased turnout among the poor increases redistribution. This confirms his previous two papers, which together draw on nearly four decades of data across more than a dozen countries. As both of his charts show, the United States is unique among developed countries in turnout inequality, and it has the second lowest voter turnout of all OECD countries. The chart below shows the turnout differences between the richest quintile and the poorest quintile in the United States. The average gap across the countries studied is 8.4 percentage points, while the gap in the United States is nearly three times that—23.6 percentage points.
October 7, 2025 at 10:26 PM
tektology-enjoyer.bsky.social
1 time in 1 election, the exact opposite most of the time (including Zohran's, they were the path to victory). www.politico.com/magazine/sto...
Recent research tells us that this voting disparity—in class and in opinion—has tremendous impact on policy. State-level research suggests that higher voter turnout among the poor leads to higher welfare spending. A 2013 study found that turnout inequality directly predicts minimum wages, children’s health insurance spending and anti-predatory lending policies. And studies at the state level have found that a higher class bias in the electorate actually leads to higher levels of income inequality. Interestingly, this doesn’t just play out on the national level. Vincent Mahler of Loyola University, who has studied international voter turnout extensively, determined that both voter turnout and inequality of turnout are strongly correlated with income redistribution His most recent study of voting in 14 countries, conducted with political scientists David K. Jesuit and Piotr Paradowski, found that increased turnout among the rich leads to less redistribution, while increased turnout among the poor increases redistribution. This confirms his previous two papers, which together draw on nearly four decades of data across more than a dozen countries. As both of his charts show, the United States is unique among developed countries in turnout inequality, and it has the second lowest voter turnout of all OECD countries. The chart below shows the turnout differences between the richest quintile and the poorest quintile in the United States. The average gap across the countries studied is 8.4 percentage points, while the gap in the United States is nearly three times that—23.6 percentage points.
October 7, 2025 at 10:21 PM
tektology-enjoyer.bsky.social
www.nytimes.com/2025/06/29/n... Unpaywalled: archive.is/hx7Pi
Some political strategists refer to the group Mr. Mamdani activated as “zero prime voters” — New Yorkers who had not voted in several recent primary elections, and the opposite of the highly coveted “triple prime voters” who can be counted on to vote in every election.
October 7, 2025 at 9:59 PM
tektology-enjoyer.bsky.social
Directionally agree with the sentiment but the importance of social media sites for Egypt's revolution is vastly overstated - they (and the rest of the internet) were blocked almost immediately. www.bbc.com/news/world-m...
Certainly, the Egyptian government reacted quickly: blocking social media sites and mobile phone networks before pulling the plug on Egypt's access to the internet.
October 4, 2025 at 6:27 PM
tektology-enjoyer.bsky.social
Reminds me of this recent article on Bloomberg. Unpaywalled link: archive.is/mXebA
Global clean-tech dominance hasn’t necessarily meant profits for Chinese firms. Beijing has been phasing out subsidies such as the feed-in tariffs that had guaranteed high prices for renewable power. That’s as over-production has driven down prices to near break-even levels. Spazzapan from Systemiq says shareholder interests in China “have been largely disregarded, with chronic overcapacity and relentless price wars eroding company equity.” It’s a system that favors “scale over profitability,” she says. For companies and investors caught in the fray, it’s been “total misery,” says Dan Wang, research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover History Lab and the author of Breakneck. China’s model relies on “a lot of state power, a lot of consumer power, but not very much financial investor benefit,” he says.
October 2, 2025 at 1:38 AM
tektology-enjoyer.bsky.social
Yeah, the doomerism is by far my least favorite orientation here. Cards on the table, I'm coming from the "We don't know what we mean by Intelligence - the 'do submarines swim?' quip doesn't work cuz we know what 'moving through the water' is". But like if we did make AI, we shouldn't be Saturn lol
The famous painting "Saturn Devouring His Son" by Goya - illustrating the attitude we probably shouldn't take to any hypothetical cognitive progeny.
September 20, 2025 at 7:36 AM
tektology-enjoyer.bsky.social
"Signed,"
An image of Naegleria fowleri, an amoeba that can infest and eat parts of people's brains, usually due to insufflating insufficiently clean water (including some cases where a Neti Pot was the vector)
September 10, 2025 at 1:08 AM
tektology-enjoyer.bsky.social
Retvrn to it being normal to interpret "having moral value" here to mean "capability to be culpable".
It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
August 29, 2025 at 5:42 PM
tektology-enjoyer.bsky.social
"You morons, why would you rely on the useless tool we gave you?"
Police Chief Elise Chard has said the department was notified by federal officials that Evans was legally permitted to work in the country, and that the town submitted information via the Department of Homeland Security’s E-Verify program prior to Evans’ employment. Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin then accused the town of “reckless reliance” on the department's E-Verify program.
August 19, 2025 at 7:07 AM
tektology-enjoyer.bsky.social
Theo Von interview a coupla weeks ago (interesting nonstandard Dyson sphere, also possible implicit assumption that we'll finally have done something about the dang speed of light in order to make the latencies work?) fight.fudgie.org/search/show/...
Like, I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time. Do you really? But I don't know because maybe we put them in space. Like, maybe we build a big Dyson sphere on the solar system and say, hey, it actually makes no sense to put these on Earth. Yeah. I wish I had like more concrete answers for you, but like we're stumbling through this.
August 19, 2025 at 6:26 AM
tektology-enjoyer.bsky.social
"No measurement, no problem!" federalnewsnetwork.com/workforce/20...
The Office of Personnel Management has officially canceled this year’s version of the signature survey that assesses governmentwide satisfaction and engagement levels of federal employees.
August 16, 2025 at 2:29 AM
tektology-enjoyer.bsky.social
Most "Never Trumpers" as soon as they think about what Trumpism will do to labor rights and their tax bill
Bender, the robot from Futurama, hugging a golden alternate-universe version of himself with the caption "Aw, I can't stay mad at what is essentially me. I love me."
August 13, 2025 at 9:28 PM
tektology-enjoyer.bsky.social
At the same time, it’s clear that the policy the Union actually pursued—not hanging any Southern officers except the miserable wretch who commanded Andersonville POW camp—failed miserably. A decade after we defeated the Confederacy at the cost of 300,000 loyal Union soldiers’ lives, the same planter oligarchy was running the South again, terrorizing the Freedmen and women who were our only loyal allies during the war, making sure black people never got a chance to vote, running them off their farms, doing their best to recreate slavery without the name. I’m not talking about justice here. Justice would have demanded hanging every Confederate with a rank of colonel or higher. But often the higher the rank, the older the man, the more tired and harmless he was by the time of the Surrender. Jefferson Davis, for example; justice says he should have hanged, if not tortured to death, but Davis was such a disaster as a Confederate symbol that he wasn’t one of the more dangerous post-war figures. Better to let losers like Davis live on as buffoons rather than kill them and start the songs and poems going. No, I’m talking about practical killing. Who were the most dangerous ex-Confederates in 1865? Could they have been identified and killed before they neutralized all the gains of America’s most costly war?
August 4, 2025 at 11:07 PM
tektology-enjoyer.bsky.social
Both, but the kicker is Alex Karp, the current (and equally evil to Thiel) CEO of Palantir, who...

www.unpopularfront.news/p/palantirs-...
he has a PhD in critical social theory from the Goethe University Frankfurt, where Jürgen Habermas was his dissertation supervisor, until they apparently had some sort of disagreement. Ultimately, he wrote his thesis under the supervision of Karola Brede, a sociologist whose work incorporates Freudian psychoanalysis. Karp’s thesis is entitled “Aggression in the Life-World: Expanding Parsons’ Concept of Aggression Through a Description of the Connection Between Jargon, Aggression, and Culture.” In 2020, Moira Weigel wrote a penetrating analysis of the dissertation. And you can read the whole thing translated here. What struck me is that a big part of the thesis deals with Theodor Adorno’s book The Jargon of Authenticity, his critique of the existentialist clichés circulating in postwar Germany, which happens to be a favorite of mine. Adorno, as you probably will not be surprised to learn, thought it was all a bit fascist. But Karp was not satisfied with Adorno’s poetics: he wanted to get into the underlying psychological mechanisms that make such a jargon work
August 3, 2025 at 3:55 AM
tektology-enjoyer.bsky.social
A modification of a meme where Sopranos characters are at a casino that originally said "90% of gamblers quit right before they're about to win big", except figures from the French Revolution are pasted over some heads (Paulie Walnuts is Robespierre, I don't recognize who they replaced Tony with) and replaced the phrase with "90% of Reigns of Terror quit right before they're about to Establish The Republic of Virtue"
July 24, 2025 at 7:22 PM
tektology-enjoyer.bsky.social
Not embodying the spirit of this photo
A black and white photo of Felix Dzerzhinsky ("Iron Felix"), leader of the first few state security orgs in the USSR after the revolution. He's sitting behind a desk with a pen (quill?) in hand with a mess of papers in front of him, and looking at the camera with a look that might be mild disapproval
July 24, 2025 at 6:11 AM
tektology-enjoyer.bsky.social
So, yes, but I think an important part of not replicating the bad parts of AES states will involve more workplace democracy. The aborted experiment in Chile had some tantalizing successes here (and it's not too dissimilar to stuff like the Kaizen process at Toyota). jacobin.com/2015/04/alle...
His government pushed for new forms of worker participation on the shop floor and the integration of worker knowledge in economic decision-making. This political environment allowed Beer, the British cybernetician assisting Chile, to view computer technology as a way to empower workers. In 1972, he published a report for the Chilean government that proposed giving Chilean workers, not managers or government technocrats, control of Project Cybersyn. More radically, Beer envisioned a way for Chile’s workers to participate in Cybersyn’s design. He recommended that the government allow workers — not engineers — to build the models of the state-controlled factories because they were best qualified to understand operations on the shop floor. Workers would thus help design the system that they would then run and use. Allowing workers to use both their heads and their hands would limit how alienated they felt from their labor.
July 22, 2025 at 2:17 AM
tektology-enjoyer.bsky.social
Obligatory Stafford Beer www.kybernetik.ch/dwn/Beer_Lyr...
The Cost Benefit Analysis Song How many bricks constructed this prison And how many grapes went into the wine How many illusions were lost for the vision Of how many angels advancing in line ? How many lifetimes were ended in torment And how many people this day would resign How many bank balances just for this moment And how many grapes went into the wine ? How many units of human compassion And how many grapes went into the wine How many illusions were sacrificed wantonly How many people have looked for a sign ? How many women are need to fashion The how many men who are forced to assign How many excursions to bed were for passion And how many grapes went into the wine ? How many men have been killed by our soldiers And how many grapes went into the wine How many insurgents are listed in Folders And how many children are shot through the spine ? How many truths have run through our fingers And how many credos . . . . Believing in mine How many have led into unthought of dangers And how many grapes went into the wine ?
July 20, 2025 at 6:27 PM
tektology-enjoyer.bsky.social
The more-cooked Qanoners are gonna go hogwild with some of these motifs
A still from the movie Hereditary - a woman looks at a doormat with a number of innocuous-looking symbols that hold occult meanjng
July 18, 2025 at 7:25 PM
tektology-enjoyer.bsky.social
This old piece is a classic on how to make these kinds of determinations imho web.archive.org/web/20210126...
There are some obvious guidelines for thinning the ranks of a dangerous group: You don’t kill the top, the figureheads. They’ve got enough name recognition to become martyrs quickly, and they’ve usually passed their peak by the time of their defeat. You don’t kill incompetents. Keep those incompetents alive as long as possible. You don’t kill the corrupt. You buy them and use them to turn your former enemies against each other. You kill the exceptional, the most ruthless, fearless, unkillable leaders in the defeated army. If you don’t kill them now, at their weakest point, you’ll regret it. I’m not talking about justice here. Justice would have demanded hanging every Confederate with a rank of colonel or higher. But often the higher the rank, the older the man, the more tired and harmless he was by the time of the Surrender. Jefferson Davis, for example; justice says he should have hanged, if not tortured to death, but Davis was such a disaster as a Confederate symbol that he wasn’t one of the more dangerous post-war figures. Better to let losers like Davis live on as buffoons rather than kill them and start the songs and poems going.
July 10, 2025 at 8:40 PM
tektology-enjoyer.bsky.social
You're about to get possessed by Paimon
A shot from the movie Hereditary, a woman looking at a doormat that includes a number of seemingly-unoccuous symbols that are weird and creepy when you actually look at them (including the sigil of a demon taken from the Lesser Key of Solomon)
July 5, 2025 at 11:28 PM
tektology-enjoyer.bsky.social
A devotional image of St Hildegard von Bingen. Orange objects, resembling tentacles, are reaching down from a ceiling and enveloping her head (probably to evoke tongues of flame, but to a viewer in 2025 they probably look a lot like Mind Flayer tentacles)
July 5, 2025 at 6:34 PM