Dion Ra

THEO SOLOMON

Your "natural scavengers" who "Just have very different ideas of how property works and what counts as theft", with "An optimistic and opportunistic attitude - How was I meant to know you were still using that, when it looked so tempting and so unattended?" who "Interpret these situations to their own benefit"...

The idea of a race of people who are just naturally happy to scavenge the edges of your society, who are cheeky thieves but also resourceful recyclers so any well-ran city should welcome them for keeping the place clean even if it does mean the odd lawnmower goes missing, who just naturally have lower standards than other people so will happily eat roadkill and wear secondhand clothes, and have a parallel society to yours with incomprehensible property laws that always seem to favour them... This is an old, old libel about both Romany Gypsies and An Lucht Siúil and Nawken and the other Traveller ethnicities in the UK, and Roma and Sinti especially in the rest of Europe.

Maybe it's more clear when it's talked about as if it's the present day.

I'm going to vivisect this joke, sorry, I know that's not funny and crucially that the writer of the joke was not thinking consciously of Gypsies, but it's always worth looking at where tropes like this form from.

Over 500 years spent trying to cut down a whole trunk of human culture.

HOLY SHIT THIS IS SO COOL. Making creature rigs to help with acting and motion capture whaaaat

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)

No one owes artists anything.

comments on my work for the

bad depressive dips.

Executive dysfunction comes from a lack of available dopamine. Common advice is wrong. You need to provide your own dopamine before you can start. Otherwise you're trying to run your car on empty.

"But what if I still don't do it" well you already weren't getting it done anyway. Now you have a little treat. Try again later.

You deserve kindness and care even when you aren't being productive.