I think people often misunderstand my position on the Habsburg incest thing as "no, don't make fun of the royals I like!"
When really it is "I find it unnerving how fast people make fun of physical disability and equate it to moral goodness when you make it slightly ok to do so in context."
You wouldn't believe how many history books sound like they want to say slurs when they talk about Ferdinand I having hydrocephalus and epilepsy. Conditions, I must stress, can be caused by other things. Conditions other people have.
Look, if you want to critique the politics of the Habsburgs and the idea of the empire and the whole structure of monarchy, go ham. I will help you in that endeavor if you want.
However, there's so much going on with that approach to it, so here are my thoughts in no particular order:
This idea presumes so much choice that just did not realistically exist for so many people. Archdukes and Archduchesses more often than not had no say in their marriage partner, because marriage wasn't about what they wanted. You, woman in this family, have to marry your cousin because it's what is best politically, and how you feel about the concept doesn't matter one way or another. This happens to men too, though less so, but off the top of my head you can look at Crown Prince Rudolph's marriage being more or less decided over his head. So, preference to marry a cousin you barely know really isn't factored in at all. You're lucky if your parent cares about you being happy in the marriage.
It's not about purity, it's about politics. The rule isn't that you had to marry a relative, it's that you had to marry a Catholic from a ruling dynasty. Add in the idea that this was chosen for you from a set of politically advantageous matches, because daughters and sons are assets to be used strategically, and you get a lot of marriages into the same set of families. As crass as it is, letting your children marry downward is wasting a bargaining tool. For the Habsburgs, the religious bar is also important and pretty constraining, especially when they aren't on good political terms with the other major Catholic powers (France and Spain) so you get Italian state and Bavarian marriages. If you keep reinforcing those alliances through marriage, that also means you're probably marrying a relative. Look at how quickly they leap at having new options when Belgium is established as a friendly Catholic state.
The above problem is complicated when someone in your family becomes Grandmother of Europe. Maria Theresa's extensive marriage politics means that a lot of the possible marriage candidates are almost certainly related. This is also, by the way, how we get Victoria's hemophilia being so widespread in the Courts her children married into, and everyone seemingly being cousins by World War I.
There is a lot of "might" going on with how disability works here. Ferdinand I's Wikipedia page ("citation needed" all over the place by the way) is littered with how his disabilities "might" be caused by heredity. But they could also be caused or compounded by many of the other things that caused birth complications or disability to be more common historically, like insufficient medical knowledge about prenatal care, insufficient maternal nutrition, or infections during pregnancy or after birth. Epilepsy certainly isn't constrained to just when your parents are related to each other.
Look me in the eyes and tell me that historians routinely acting like this man (who actually functioned pretty well in a world without anti-seizure medications) had no sentience because he had a disability from birth is schadenfreude.
Even if it was the product of their parents willfully having a preference to never marry the lower nobility or the bourgeoisie because they think they're gross commoners or something, do we really want to reinforce the idea that disability is a moral punishment?
It wasn't just Habsburgs who married cousins, people, until just a few generations ago, most of the human race lived in small villages and married within them about half the time.
Yes, things are different now, we know what lethal recessives are and also we get more opportunities to travel and meet people from different families. Just like we know more about hygiene and nutrition. But that doesn't mean people who knew less were bad, or didn't care about their children.
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The stupidest imaginable excuses for surveillance pricing
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
With "surveillance pricing," businesses have finally found something AI can do way, way, way better than people: price gouging.
As the name suggests, "surveillance pricing" is the practice of charging every customer a different price for every transaction, based on the massive surveillance dossiers that Big Tech companies and data-brokers have assembled on everyone in the world. Congress hasn't updated federal consumer privacy law since 1988 (when they passed a law banning the disclosure of VHS rentals), so pretty much any form of consumer surveillance is fair game.
This is where the AI comes in. One thing AI is indisputably great for is multivariate statistical analysis. You can feed an AI "behavioral data" (information about where you go, what you do, what you buy, who you talk to and what you say) about all of your customers and ask it to cluster them according to their shared traits. Then you can direct the AI to automatically run a series of small experiments to discover the maximum markup each group will stomach under which circumstances.
This works without you having to direct the AI to rip off certain groups of people – it will simply find the most vulnerable people and rip them off the most. If you're hiring in an industry that practices a lot of tacit racial discrimination, a system like this can figure out on its own that people of color typically accept lower wages because there are fewer employers bidding for their labor, and recommend lowball salary offers, all without you ever typing "please be racist" into your AI prompt.
This works so well that Google has announced that it is their plan for making a profit off of AI, after losing hundreds of billions of dollars on chatbots:
In the before times, marketers and demographers had to dream up demographic categories based on limited data and run focus groups to figure out how to maximize revenue from each market segment. Now an AI can segment the data to any degree you choose, and continuously, automatically experiment on each segment to find their weak spots.
It's "theory-free." You don't have to discover why a group is willing to pay more under a given set of circumstances, you merely have to observe and weaponize this fact. You don't have to know why one group of purchasers consistently accept higher prices between 6AM and 8AM – you can just automatically jack up prices on them without knowing or caring that you're gouging parents of young children who are re-ordering essential supplies while trying to get their kids to school in the morning.
I thought up that example. I don't know if it's really happening. But here's something that really is happening: ecommerce sites charge parents of newborns extra when they order thermometers in the middle of the night. I'm not saying that anyone ever sat down and said, "Parents with sick children will pay whatever we charge for a thermometer at 2AM." They didn't have to: this is the kind of thing an automated system can do without any human intervention:
The goal of surveillance pricing is to shift all the "consumer surplus" (the difference between the highest price you're willing to pay and the price you actually pay) to companies. It's a form of cod-Marxism where you are gouged according to your ability (to pay) and charged according to the desperation of your need:
The problems of surveillance pricing are well documented. Under Biden, the FTC did a landmark study on the practice, developing a rich factual record that documents the role surveillance pricing plays in the affordability crisis:
Companies are already using this technology to rip you off, and they're slavering for the chance to do more of it. Instacart was recently caught marking up some shoppers' items by as much as a third:
The problem is that as much as companies love this, shoppers hate it. Last summer, Delta announced that it was going to surveillance price every seat on every flight, only to face such a massive backlash that they had to make another announcement bemoaning the fact that we'd all misunderstood their (unambiguous and extremely damning) announcement and they were actually going to do no such thing:
One thing the Mamdani campaign impressed upon every politician in the country is that people are pissed about affordability and they will support anyone who stands up for the public against AI-equipped price gougers. The problem of course is that those price gougers are highly organized and have deep treasuries (stuffed with money they stole from us). With surveillance pricing, politicians face a familiar conundrum: if they do the thing that's popular with voters, they'll enrage donors.
One way to cut this knot is to enact legislation that seems to address the problem, but stuff it with so many loopholes that it does nothing. This lets you declare yourself the people's champion without doing anything to protect them from the donors who prey on your voters. That's the approach they took in Maryland:
But in California, they're actually doing something about surveillance pricing. AB-2564 is a smart, well-written bill that bans surveillance pricing. It contains an easily evaluated test for surveillance pricing and carves out legitimate reasons for offering different prices for the same purchase (for example, when it costs more to deliver the product or service):
Now we're in for the hard yards of turning this bill into a law. That's where California's cities come in. When municipal governments pass resolutions supporting a state bill, it makes it much easier to get that bill through the state legislature (and conversely, without support from major cities, it's that much easier to kill the bill before it becomes law).
A few days ago, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors was on the verge of passing a resolution in support of AB-2564. Now, that vote is stalled, thanks to a letter sent by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, an organization that has been pissing in San Franciscans' faces and telling them it was raining since 1850:
The Chamber's letter is – to use a technical term – flaming garbage. It raises the most spurious objections imaginable, claims about the bill's language that are belied by its plain, easily understood text. These objections are demolished in a letter the Electronic Frontier Foundation sent to the Supervisors:
In the letter, EFF explains that claims that surveillance pricing will lower prices are overblown and not borne out by evidence. But more importantly – as EFF points out – privacy is a human right, and the idea that you should have to give up your privacy to get a fair price is just a fancy way of saying that privacy should be the exclusive preserve of people who can afford to pay more:
EFF's letter goes on to address the Chamber's objections. Far from creating uncertainty about which conduct the bill addresses, AB-2564 crisply defines surveillance pricing as:
a customized price for a good for a specific consumer or group of consumers based, in whole or in part, on personally identifiable information collected through electronic surveillance.
The Chamber raises other tired objections, falsely claiming that banning surveillance pricing will end common discounting strategies like offering seniors cheaper movie tickets, or giving cheaper rates to retain customers who call to cancel their service. EFF replies by pointing out that all the Chamber's concerns are covered by the three comprehensive carve-outs in the bill: the ability to charge higher rates when it costs more to service a given customer; offering discounts to retain customers who want to cancel their service; and finally, discounts for criteria anyone can meet (like an "early bird special"), for membership in a broadly defined group (like "seniors"), or for participation in a loyalty program.
The San Francisco Supervisors could have figured out at a glance that the Chamber was bullshitting them. All it takes is a cursory read of the statute. But now they don't even have to do that: EFF has painstakingly debullshittified the Chamber's FUD.
Surveillance pricing is grossly offensive. When a company charges me $0.50 for a product that it charges you $1 for, they're essentially saying that your dollars are worth half as much as mine are. Companies shouldn't be able to reach into your wallet or your bank account and chop your money in half:
A note, because not everyone knows this: if you're driving and another driver flashes their brights at you, this is a signal to be on alert and slow down. There may be debris in the road, a cop out of sight, or an animal crossing ahead of you. (Or, alternatively, your brights are on and they're getting blinded.) Whatever the reason, it's a signal that you need to focus and reduce speed. And possibly turn your own brights off.
This PSA has been brought to you by the four fawns and does that ran out in front of me at various points on my drive home.
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in case you didn't know it, this is also related to how cyclosporiasis spreads. when farm workers are not given adequate bathroom breaks or access to restrooms, they have no choice but to relieve themselves directly into the fields, especially if they are already suffering from diarrheal disease and have been made to work while sick. the pathogen ends up in irrigation ditches and, eventially, all over your food. this is why human rights like sanitation need to be available to everyone in order to be effective for anyone.
I mean......this is one of the most well-known ways AI fucks up! It makes shit up! It hallucinates! That's a big reason why it shouldn't be seen as acceptable to just read AI summaries instead of actually reading the sources themselves, because you can't trust whatever the AI shits back out at you. And the bluesky poster is what gets me, like, people go "oh well that's why you have to check AI in your research!" There's still option B: do this kind of research the way everyone did it up until 20-fucking-23 and don't use Claude or ShitGPT.
More takes from the replies:
(this last one gets down to so much AI discourse lmao)
Now this might alarm you but nearly everything on the internet is being hosted in a data center. You are utilizing a data center right now reading this post
Everything in the digital world has physical infrastructure that supports it and has environmental impact and I don’t get why people act like that’s unique to AI
Magnitude. LLMs needs orders of magnitude more computing processing power than your average online service.
It's like saying "I don't know why anyone cares that they are building that super highway through a protected land when there is already a dirt road there"
For those of us in America (USA, USA, USA... sorry), think of doing some basic stuff on the internet (like tumblr, yay!) is like me driving just over 1 mile to go to the nearest grocery store.
Using something like a streaming service for the same amount of time, is like driving 10 miles to a grocery store.
Using an LLM is like driving 100 miles to a grocery store.
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I do think the Hank Green AI thing makes it abundantly clear that if you have ADHD or any other mental illness and/or you are prone to addiction you need to avoid AI at all costs. This shit will rope you in, and if you have a mental illness that say, starves your brain of dopamine, you're gonna be extra susceptible to that. I won't use AI for a lot of reasons but one of the big ones is knowing how it would fuck with my ADHD and bipolar. Like yes, it's bad for the environment and giving money to rich scumbags and runs on plagarism, but even more than all that, it's straight up not safe at all and you really shouldn't use it if for no other reason than to protect yourself from whatever the fuck it might do to you.
i mean this with absolute sincerity, but given all the discussion we americans have had about this issue in the last couple of decades, i just want to point out, for everyone’s benefit:
(and op, i recognise that you may already know all this and were simply venting!)
eligible jury pools come from county voting rolls. if anyone is still registered to vote where they used to live, that might be one reason someone is still receiving jury duty notices.
as to why someone might still receive a summons (or seven lol) long after they’ve moved away, i can’t say. there could be a specific process for becoming unregistered that people aren’t aware of, voter roll purges are shrinking the amount of people available for jury duty so voter rolls that aren’t otherwise updated frequently are getting more notices than usual, there’s some weird IT issue no one’s aware of, no one’s checking the online form, some random wires are getting crossed, or maybe the county clerk’s office or the local courts just kinda suck. everyone’s mileage will vary on this point.
given the decline in civics education availability in the last forty years or so, the american electorate’s knowledge of the process has also declined, and with midterms right around the corner and many primaries happening right now, it felt like a good time to refresh people on this voting basic.
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like I mean this very seriously as writing advice. the character should experience events and make decisions that make them different at the end of the story. they should be changed. they do not have to be improved.
they can get worse. they can make decisions of an increasingly terrible nature. they can stop taking risks on kindness. they can discover how much they can get away with. they can find religion, or abandon it, with negative effects on their moral creed. the character has to develop. the character does not have to grow.
