Bendini

Soft-spoken Artists whose Stature is matched Only by their Humility; Fraught Sea-captains who maintain a Meticulous Daily Journal; Gentlemen of Science whose Pride does not prevent them from seeking Truth; Sons of the Landed Gentry with Charitable Ambitions; And, Emphatically, Curly-haired Footmen.

But what if your problem is that you’re insane? They leave a dish in the sink, and maybe for five minutes you’re able to restrain your internal monologue to “They left a dish in the sink! Too bad!”. But then you find yourself getting angrier and angrier, and your brain starts figuring out the best way to hurt them, the exactly optimal series of words to make them think leaving that dish in the sink was a horrible atrocity that completely invalidates them as an at-all-acceptable human being. You spin this whole narrative where ever since you met them you’ve been a model of altruism and innocence, naively placing all your trust in them and running yourself ragged catering to their needs; likewise, ever since they met you every one of *their* actions has been perfectly calculated to inflict misery on you, turning you into an anxiety-wracked husk of a human being. And the climax of this whole story of woe, this years-long complicated cycle of selfless service met with wicked exploitation, was them leaving the dish in the sink today.

You put a lot of work into this, so that it has parentheticals and footnotes and pat explanations for all the apparent counterevidence. And it turns out you’re a semi-professional author of persuasive writing, so you’re actually kind of good at this, and even though you don’t believe it, you can’t honestly swear that every part of your limbic system is 100% cooperative with the whole not-believing-it task. How do you communicate *then*?

If you say “Hey, you left a dish in the sink, don’t do that”, then they say “Oh, sorry” and wander off, and you haven’t really communicated anything at all, have you? You’re still letting everything fester.

But if you say “Hey, seems like everything you’ve ever done has been one long attempt to hurt me as much as possible, culminating in that dish you left in the sink yesterday,” then even assuming they’re a patient enough person to respond at all instead of just storming off, they probably say something like “Actually, I was running really late this morning and I was so rushed I forgot to put the dish away”, and you’re left feeling like an idiot, because of course it was that.

It sounds like maybe the best strategy would be to go up a meta-level, and communicate that you’re having this problem. “Hey, just wanted you to know I spend half my time crafting really good ways to hurt you and make you feel bad about yourself, wanna hear the latest?” But then if they say yes, you end up hurting them. And if they say no, it’s still festering. And probably they don’t do either of those, and just file a restraining order or something.

In your case it's not sex, but civility. When your whole soef identity is wrapped up in being nice and reasonable and compassionate even to your enemies, it doesn't leave you much room for normal human failings.

Suppose it turns out that the DNA that makes up Scott Alexander is decent but occasionally prone to being a grumpy bastard, a rigid moral narrative that requires him to be a saint at all times is probably going to lead to something like this.

You have essentially all scientific institutions and independents all over the globe in all natural fields under all political environments reporting phenomenon consistent with a sudden, significant shift in global climate trends.

There is absolutely nothing they have to gain by backing one another up. They don’t share money. They don’t even share cultural reasons that would ever explain sharing the same “bias.” There is no “big science.” The majority aren’t even doing for-profit work or ever CAN make more money depending on their findings, nor has the scientific community proposed any solutions that they even get paid for. They’re literally telling corporations and politicians how to fix their own shit and how to do it with extremely minimal loss in profit margins.

“Unlimited Vacation” means “We don’t pay it out when you leave, and also, we can say Yes or No depending on how we’re feeling that day”.  Sometimes, this means “Use it and get fired”, sometimes it means “Effectively 3 weeks if you have the bravery to ask for it”.  

Quite a lot of tech companies are starting to give official vacation policies, usually in the 3-4 week range for that exact reason.  Because state governments were raising the old side-eye.  

The REAL value-add is in Work From “Home”, where home is often “Dad’s, which I flew to a week before Thanksgiving so it didn’t cost $1000 for a 2-hour flight” or “The airport from which I have a 6:30 Friday evening flight to Reno”

If for some reason you actually want to have 6-8 weeks of vacation, the dirty secret here is comp time.  A couple jobs back, I was working 17 weekends a year and getting 17 extra vacation days, which I then used to great effect.   If you don’t actually mind working random nights and evenings a lot, this is incredibly valid.  

/Unfortunately, I have a mortgage, so my limiting factor is now money instead of time, and I don’t have enough of either.  

Of course, I could have started with Glen Weyl’s papers (and initially I did), but a pop-econ book is something I’ll actually finish, and I think Posner & Weyl have done a really good job. I’m impressed by their ability to explain theorems without using a single equation. 

I basically share a left-libertarian perspective with them: free & competitive markets are good, command economies are bad, and our present mixed economy is extremely full of command-economy-like and monopolistic features.  Big business != free markets. Concentration of wealth, lack of income mobility, and stagnant growth are at the very least a sign of something unhealthy going on in an economy.  In particular, land monopolies are Not Great for population-level prosperity.

I’m intrigued by their COST proposal for a self-assessed property tax combined with auctions. Not sure I support it, but it does have some nice features.

The way it works is: you self-assess a price on your property (like a house) and you pay a tax proportional to it, something like 7%. You also are obligated to sell your house at any time to anyone who offers you at least the price you set.  

This means you have an incentive to self-assess accurately.  If you set your house price too high, to avoid losing it, you’ll have to pay more tax; if you set it too low, to avoid tax, you could lose your house. 

This makes it much easier for property to change hands. Which is good, if your model is something like real estate in the Bay Area, where owners can hold onto their homes perpetually even when developers could use the land much more profitably and grow the local economy.  

It also reduces the transaction costs of bargaining over resources that aren’t sold on the public market. This is a headache I’m familiar with. How much does a patent cost? Hell, how much does a mass spec machine cost? Well, that’s a negotiation. It’s a pain, and it depends on subjective factors, and it sucks if you’re new to the industry and don’t know the ropes. With COST, everything has a price and they have to give it to you at that price.

The one thing I’m doubtful about is whether this disincentivizes investment in one’s own property too much. Effectively, this makes owning more like renting. Your possessions are yours to use only until someone makes a bid for them at the right price. And renters, compared to homeowners, are both less free to trash their houses and less free to make improvements. I’ve heard that there’s a deep psychological relief that kicks in when you own your home free and clear, because you can finally invest in it without worrying that you’ll have to leave.  You can customize. You can buy furniture that’s heavy and hard to move. In a world where it was much easier to lose your home, you wouldn’t dare do any of that, right? Houses would be more like hotel rooms and Ubers, easy to move in and easy to leave.

Or maybe it would be just the opposite – you could guarantee that you’d never get a bid for your house if you personalized it in a way that you like but nobody else does. Maybe we’d see a boom in eccentric decorating?

1. Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax

Alleged problem: people accumulating wealth through ownership of private property.

Proposed solution: a market based system that abolishes the notion of private property by putting everything up for sale all of the time.

This is almost identical to the Finnish banger racing rule that prevents people making their cars nice by allowing anyone to buy your car from you at a fixed price.

2. Quadratic voting

Alleged problem: first past the post vote systems lead to the tyranny of the 51%.

Proposed solution: allow people to pile votes into specific causes they care about, allowing a small and vocal minority to overrule the 51%.

We already have this, it's called lobbying by special interest groups. There also seems to be a misunderstanding of what existing voting systems are meant to achieve, they are not nor have they ever been the optimal way to weigh up human preferences. At best, they are a check on power, and upending democracy in an attempt to squeeze an extra 10% efficiency is a pretty bad idea.

3. Visas between individuals program

Alleged problem: immigration is good on net but the benefits are captured by the migrants and the costs are assigned to the citizens of the host country.

Proposed solution: have individuals in the host country assume some of the risk, but also get rewarded by an income sharing agreement.

This isn't terrible if the problem is the one that is alleged, but many people who oppose immigration have more intangible concerns about culture, which this proposal does nothing to address.

Any opposition polical campaigner worth their salt is going to pounce on this as reinventing slavery. They would be wrong for nuanced reasons, but it wouldn't matter in the slightest.

4. Antitrust reform (dismembering the octopus)

Alleged problem: lack of competition between big corporations causing low productivity growth.

Proposed solution: ban all investors from buying stock in more than 1 company in the same industry.

There are various problems with this. One is that current antitrust laws are being flouted by companies pretending they are not monopolies (see Peter Thiel's explanation in 0 to 1) so it's pretty reasonable to suspect the same sort of dynamic could occur here when regulators are happy to take flimsy claims of not being a monopoly at face value.

Second, how on earth is this supposed to solve the problem?? We have a lack of competition between large corporations, so we will create laws that cause shareholders to pressure companies to ...compete with their competitors. What?? This would make sense if every large company was in a secret cartel with every other player in its industry, but otherwise it just restricts the choices available to investors and will drive capital to countries that haven't implemented the law.

5. Data as labor

Alleged problem: big tech is profiting off the exploitation of the data proletariat by monetizing their data without compensation.

Proposed solution: force tech companies to pay for the use of consumer data.

While there are arguments that big tech misuses our data, there is a pretty compelling reason no startup has spotted a gap in the market to pay for it: Facebook tier privacy invasion yeilds advertising data worth only $50 per user per year. For all that orwellian snooping, you couldn't even buy a Netflix subscription. Your data is nearly worthless.

Conclusion

For starters, if you notice your devs start making a lot of random, unnecessary, aggravating UX changes to your website: such as palette changes, button rearrangement, sometimes just deleting entire features. This is a sign your dev does not have enough enrichment in their enclosure. They will resort to these self-destructive behaviors if they are not properly cared for!! This is a serious problem that not many website owners seem to acknowledge. Your devs are living beings, and though you think it might be cute to have them program your website, you need to be responsible for them. Without proper stimulation and enrichment and guidance in their environment they will start ordering posts by popularity, instead of in chronological order.

Devs need reliable project management in their lives, I cannot stress this enough. Engineers cannot reason out good aesthetic design like most people can! Their brains are logic-driven and they wear the same three outfits in rotation every day, they do not understand UI design. “Well my family had a dev growing up and they designed our wesbite just fine.” I’m tired of hearing excuses like this. It just gives other people a pass to mistreat their devs. Don’t do this.

Furthermore, devs need at least two full-sized monitors, a well-maintained team git repo, and a fully stocked snack bowl. Devs are grazers who eat chips and pretzels while actively doing their work. You can’t expect devs to abide by certain meal times. (Their natural habitat is in soggy basements with mothers providing doritos and snacks, so they need similar care in your home). Also, the old wives’ tale about devs needing rubber ducks in their environment is actually just a myth –  any inanimate object to yell at will do just fine. 

In the new Netflix show Salt Fat Acid Heat — based off the bestselling book by, and starring, chef Samin Nosrat — all the food production is extremely inefficient. Whether it’s traditionally brewed soy sauce in Japan (which ferments in the barrel for two years) or flavored honeys in Mexico (which are delicately extracted from a hive via tiny syringe), Nosrat goes out of her way to tell us how little the producers can make compared to industrial factories. (One Tixcacaltuyub bee hive yields less than a liter of honey each year, compared to 30 to 40 kilos annually for a more traditional hive.) Her point isn’t to communicate the rarity of these ingredients in a Most Expensivest kind of way — there are few purchases and no prices on the show. The inefficiencies in SFAH are just a component of what makes the show so enjoyable: its vision of unalienated labor.

In one of what are called the 1844 Manuscripts, Karl Marx described his theory of estranged labor: workers under capitalism encounter their product as something “hostile and alien.” Value is sucked from the worker’s body, through the commodity produced, into the owner’s pocket. Unlike the sole proprietor (such as the proverbial ox-cart man), the harder an employee works, the less they have. No wonder the products seem hostile. Think about the difference in the way you’d feel toward a hamburger you make for a drive-thru customer versus one you prepare for yourself or with a loved one. One is depleting, the other nourishing.

Reality food TV (distinct from the instructional cooking show) tends to focus on the second kind of production, and for good reason. We like dropping in on the roadside barbecue owned by the pitmaster, the grandmother’s traditional kitchen, the seventh-generation butcher, the buddies with a food truck. The back of the house at a local Olive Garden franchise? Maybe on Undercover Boss, but workplace reality shows usually focus on conflict — think Bravo and Vanderpump Rules. Without alienation and the daily miseries of employment, those shows don’t work.

Alienation is not only a feeling of detachment from the world, in Marxism it is a condition of literal theft. Workers exit the day with less than they had when they entered — Americans know this instinctively if not explicitly, which is why our national dream is to “work for myself” before a company “uses me up.” A reality show about the line cooks at a moderately expensive brunch place wouldn’t feel anything like Nosrat’s slow-food explorations; there’s nothing calming or even appetizing about the corner-cutting necessary to cook for someone else’s profit. When it comes to food, industrial efficiency is often gross.

Contrariwise, unalienated labor is sublime. This is virtuosity performed for its own sake, and it’s the truth behind the saying “the best things in life are free.” For example, hallowed above all on fine-dining TV from Top Chef to Chef’s Table is the concept of the “family meal” — the pre-service food that chefs cook for their restaurant staff. Unlike the alienated dinners they’ll serve later, family meal is a place for experimentation and risk. You can’t buy your way in, it’s the workers’ privilege alone. Most creative professions have their version of the family meal, and those of us who work in those jobs are willing to trade a lot for the occasional unalienated moment when we can give and/or receive work directly.

To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, something given is always better than something simply bought, and SFAH we see how this is about more than feelings. In the “Acid” episode, when we meet a group of women shaping tortillas by hand, they explain that the alternative mechanical process pushes the oil from the cornmeal and dries it out. Their product is better precisely because it’s incompatible with mass production. It’s nice to imagine being part of the circuits of unalienated exchange — which partly explains the “artisanal” craze — and Nosrat enters on behalf of the viewer; the difference between us and her being, of course, that she has her elite cooking skills to offer.

Unalienated work isn’t just better for the majority of humans involved, it’s much more ecologically sensitive. The beekeepers from the “Acid” episode are in a caring relationship with the bees. They show Nosrat the moat they’ve built around the hives to keep out predator ants — no pesticides obviously — as well as the plants they’ve installed on the small island to improve the “vibe.” A Japanese soy sauce brewer in the “Salt” episode talks with the microbes, verbally encouraging them. This is far from the instrumentalization of factory farming, it’s genuine cross-species collaboration, with output limited by the capacities of other living things rather than us limiting other living things in rationally small pens and cages to extend our output capacity.

SFAH doesn’t make an argument for local or slow food per se, but that’s what we see. The dishes are simple, with few ingredients, made traditionally and with pleasure. For a certain kind of Marxist, this all reeks of conservatism or the hippie primitivism that some on the left call “folk politics.” Better to abolish our dependence on food through technology and automation — then we can cook if and only if we feel like it. Just as Shulamith Firestone wrote that artificial wombs would free women from gendered oppression, so could Soylent free them from the kitchen. There’s plenty in Marx to support this scientism, but he’s got his ecologist moments, too. “All progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer,” he writes in Capital Vol. I, “but of robbing the soil.”

Marx’s identification of the worker with the soil should make us think critically about a left-wing perspective on food production. What would it look like not to see the world as natural “resources” to “exploit,” but as our external body? What would it mean to reconcile our alienation from our labor and from the soil as well? Netflix isn’t about to tackle those questions, but SFAH hints at the feelings (emotional, sensual) we might go looking for.

#Not just exclusive to this one bad take writer

Yeah, there’s a pretty remarkable amount of class “analysis” written by aristocrats who don’t realise they’re aristocrats. Which leads to authenticity fetishism, among other things.

which is : something with a specific range of taste and texture, to a fucking scam

no, not snobbery, it’s possible to get industrial efficiency with a pipeline of product two-years-long, it just takes space, which can be amortized in little time

as for chocolate, don’t begin to try telling me that cutting like 20% of the raw materials price changes affordability when there exists real chocolate for €$£ 5/Kg (though see my old post about it to see why it’s not necessarily good just because it is made from only the correct ingredients (and exactly how the pattern of “[food] products get worse” happens))

syringe-extracted honey is maybe inefficient for the hell of it, but i’ll reserve judgement for when i’ll have tried it (dafuq kind of difference in end-product can that possibly make? but owell, i know that i know enough about the other two examples to allow that i might just not know things about a product i don’t know as well)