Someþing

He's a type designed to be a learner's horse, so he's super patient, but that temperament also makes mine basically bombproof. Nothing scares this beastie. He's seen everything and is not impressed. He was supposed to be just for me to learn on, but the more I ask him to do the more he shines, and I just won't trade him for any other!

I've done sporting events like professional production sewing and even film prop work with him and he's a do-it-all kind of horse; answers like a champion to the lightest touches. Truly amazing.

He came to me with good feet, plenty of Go at higher speeds, and he even handles Upholstery and Denim with those powerful 'fat quarters'. Never underestimate the haunches on a sporty lil dude. *Has* been known to snap a needle or two when he's feeling testy, but that's just him letting me know he's annoyed. He's never bitten, and if he balks it's pretty much always a matter of ME getting tension wrong.

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:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/13/minority-shareholder-report/#psychic-damage

It's been 55 years since Milton Friedman – cursed be his name – published his NYT editorial, "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits," in which he invented the idea of shareholder supremacy out of whole cloth and declared it to be a universal, freestanding, inarguable truth:

https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html

Friedman's editorial railed against the idea of "corporate social responsibility," arguing that corporate managers should confine the exercise of their consciences to projects involving their own money and resources. At work, managers must harden their bleeding hearts and do nothing except increase the returns to their shareholders.

Friedman wasn't merely arguing that this would give rise to better companies – the crux of his argument was that by adopting this "fiduciary duty" standard, it would be easy to determine whether a company was being well-managed or run into the ground:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/18/falsifiability/#figleaves-not-rubrics

Friedman argued that "being a good person" was a squishy, undefinable standard that could never be objectively measured. But "maximizing shareholder value" was a crisp, bright-line test that could be readily evaluated by any reasonable person. "Did this manager make as much money as possible for the company's owners?" feels like the kind of question we can all agree on, while, "Did this manager behave in an ethical way?" is much harder to answer.

But even a few moments' thoughts reveal the flaw in this line of reasoning. We can all agree whether a manager made money for the shareholders – but how can we know whether the manager made as much money as possible?

Think about how much "corporate social responsibility" cashes out to performative and insincere nonsense and/or cynical marketing. Target didn't stock Pride merch because they love their LGBTQ friends. They stocked it because they thought they could sell it (same goes for BP marketing its "green" gasoline). Google supports its coders' environmental/queer/antipoverty efforts because being the "don't be evil" company lets you hire in-demand workers who might otherwise go to work for Meta, and every engineer a Silicon Valley firm hires adds an average of $1m to the company's annual bottom line.

The economist Manfred Max-Neef has put forward 9 categories of needs, but with a little thought and practice needs are not difficult to either identify, or distinguish from non-needs (the test for universality is particularly useful). Some examples of needs include food, water, air, shelter, autonomy, intimacy, safety, play, and connection.

Any person can see how these things are critical to every person's life, from cavemen to CEOs—as opposed to, for example, money or a nice car. Under this terminology those are strategies to meet needs.

Rosenberg's version of human need theory has other things to say. Meeting needs drives all human behavior. It is possible to meet everyon's needs (though not via their preferred strategies). Needs are satisfiable. And to resolve a conflict is to satisfy the needs of everyone involved.

This last creates a clear standard for judging the behavior of both inviduals and organizations. And while people can always lie, the satisfaction of a need, at least to the person who has the need, is always directly identifiable. When you have eaten you feel full, when you spend time with loved ones you feel fulfilled, when you play you feel joyful.

So there'is a clear bright line here: satisfaction. And what is satisfied (needs, in the technical sense) can be objectively described and has a foundation in the physical reality of our bodies (as opposed to moral foundations, which are usually axiomatic). That means it successfully avoids the squishiness trap that 'maximizing shareholder profits' shares with every moral system ever invented. (this is explicitly not a moral system, and take an anti-moral realist position on morality)

take the time to check in with the trans men, nonbinary men, intersex men, queer men, disabled men, and men of color that you know

happy pride month to trans men! happy pride month to nonbinary men! happy pride month to male-aligned nonbinary people! happy pride month to intersex men! happy pride month to queer men! happy pride month to disabled men! happy pride month to men of color!

happy pride month to indigenous men! happy pride month to filipino men! happy pride month to romani men! happy pride month to men with ptsd! happy pride month to men with scoliosis! happy pride month to men with alzheimers! happy pride month to men with mental health issues!

happy pride month to trans and/or nonbinary masculine people who instead prefer more feminine language while also identifying as masculine or "man"-aligned so they don't identify with the words "man" or "male"

Scientists at Cortical Labs have successfully trained a cluster of approximately 200,000 living human neurons, grown on a microelectrode array chip, to play the classic 3D video game DOOM.

chatGPT was totally uninteresting to me because it has this dumb framing device where it uses "I" pronouns and frames its outputs like a person's speech. With InferKit, you would just type in whatever input, and it would spit out text that the model decided was the most likely to occur after that.

So if you formatted something like a list, the model would continue to produce a list of things.

I think the training data associated my inputs closely with lists of songs from black metal bands and similar, but also with transcripts of video or audio.

worth noting that when I did this I had "temperature" slider turned up usually to 1.1 - 1.2 (at 1.3 and above, the model's ability to spell words significantly deteriorated)

"temperature" slider controlled the "randomness" of what the model decided was the next chunk of letters in the output, essentially.

People had very strong feelings about Eliza.

I'd watch people engage with it for hours sometimes. One guy swore it was a living, thinking being and I had to stop the program and scroll through the BASIC code to show him how it worked. I'm not sure he was entirely convinced.