The Price of Optimism

There's a lot of cash, it's failing, but slowly.

geometry is when topology gets hard. the harder it is, the more geometry it gets

if it's a whole lot of hard, it's analysis

Oh so homotopy theory is analysis. Interesting.

One thing I’m still pissed at Bernie Sanders about is turning a generation against the Democratic Party. Every piece of social progress in the last 80 years, from Social Security to Medicaid to Medicare to integration to the Civil Rights Act to Title IX to Roe v. Wade to labor rights to environmental protections to public health protections to Obamacare to Obergefell, all of it directly or indirectly powered by the engine of change that is the Democratic Party. And then Sanders comes and says this whole apparatus, which he had no hand in building, is corrupt and needs to be completely replaced. Now we have countless young people who think Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are the same partly because they were told that an engine of change and an anchor of stagnation and oppression are equally bad because they were fed the lie that no one in the Democratic Party does anything to improve their lives.

Nothing makes me more embarrassed about my age or generation than BernieOrBust/StillJill/NeverHillary supporters who are basically doing the GOP’s work for them and refuse to acknowledge it. As much as I hate the ageist bullshit I see Baby Boomers come up with, I can see why they think so many millenials need to get their head out of the clouds or don’t know how the real world works when I see the way people my age talk about politics. Like, I know it’s bullshit and I still don’t blame baby boomers for getting mad that young people think they know everything. Because fun story: my university campus is very liberal and very politically active, and during the last quarter there most students strongly supported Bernie Sanders…except for most of us in or connected to the Political Science Department (so Poli Sci majors, International Relations majors, certain other ‘bureaucratic’ majors, etc.) We also loved Bernie, but we all pretty bluntly said we were voting for Hillary and thought she’d be the best President. Most of us were pretty blunt about how “as much as we love Bernie’s message of change, we think Hillary can actually accomplish more of it in the real world”. We were basing our decision on our studies of politics, of what kinds of change have and have not worked in history and why. This support for Hillary, even with our love of Bernie, came from a place of deep understanding of how politics work, of why certain policies or political goals fail, and what various political leaders’ real powers and challenges are. We were called “over-educated elites” because of this.

Nixon, fucking Nixon, signed the core of the ecologic protection laws.

I don’t have a problem voting for “political insiders” because *they freaking know how the sausage is made.* I want a goddamned professional in the job. Wanting an “outsider” strikes me like saying, “I don’t want a surgeon that went to some hoity-toity university and is friends with the the department head! I want some guy who learned how to remove appendixes by pulling himself by his bootstraps and learning by trial and error!”

science has always been political. what gets studied. what doesnt. who gets to do the studying. on and on and on.

the thing is I just don't think intellectual labour is a special class of labour. I just don't think someone who created an intellectual product like a manuscript deserves the rights to extracting rent forever from physical copies of it more than the person who maintains the printers. I will just never be convinced of this.

I agree that intellectual labor is not a special class of labor, but it is different. I can picture someone who maintains the printers making a certain amount of money per hour that they work plus paid time off, sick leave, etc. but how would that model transfer to intellectual labor? for example, how do we quantify the number of hours spent "working" on the project? is it only when they are putting words on paper or editing, or does the conceptual process count as work, too? and, if two people each write a novel of 90,000 words, but one does it in 1500 hours and the other does it in 3000 hours, should they be paid the same amount? or if a printer worker is paid a salary from their employer or syndicate, who will pay the writer's salary? also, I think that when we talk about intellectual labor in terms of writing, specifically (because that's what I know about/do), it's important to recognize that most "professional" writers in the US are making very little! in case OP/the reader isn't familiar with how it works, in the current US publishing industry (which is in shambles), a standard not-Steven-King writer publishing with a mainstream publisher usually gets somewhere between $5000 - 30000 as an advance (flat payment). and some of that goes to taxes, and 15 - 20% goes to their agent. so a writer who spends 1500 hours on a book and gets a $20000 advance ends up with a wage of maybe $10 / hour. then, if the book sells enough to "earn out" the advance, the writer can get around 5 - 15 % of profit from sales in royalties. what I mean is, it feels unfair to characterize writers as having "the rights to extracting rent forever." -- especially because most books DON'T earn out. the person who created the manuscript isn't getting money forever, their publisher is -- or I should say the publishing company's stakeholders, because it's increasingly impossible to make ends meet on an editorial salary much less as a copyeditor. so from my point of view, the problem as it stands right now is that intellectual work that results in a "product" like a manuscript is considered as a special category in that it is considered to be not real labor worthy of fair compensation.

the thing is I just don't think intellectual labour is a special class of labour. I just don't think someone who created an intellectual product like a manuscript deserves the rights to extracting rent forever from physical copies of it more than the person who maintains the printers. I will just never be convinced of this.

Thank you, this is a beautiful answer

the thing is I just don't think intellectual labour is a special class of labour. I just don't think someone who created an intellectual product like a manuscript deserves the rights to extracting rent forever from physical copies of it more than the person who maintains the printers. I will just never be convinced of this.

crazy to me how there are just some people who don't get into shit randomly. like they stay inside their house at night and don't go scrumping for apples in farmer Pritchard's orchard just so they can say they went "scrumping for apples last night" because that's the technical term and they want to say they've at least scrumped something in this life, only to get lost and end up talking to some sheltering ponies on a ring road, and weirdly mad for hours afterwards that they couldn't find the orchard, and they've never thrown up twelve consecutive times after they hit their head off of a beam in an abandoned Renault service station. Nobody does shit. They don't even put their hands in weird holes in trees to risk bat bites for fear of rabies. it's all gone to hell is what has happened. nobody wants to fucking die during the hangout anymore

NOBODY WANTS TO RISK DEATH AT THE FUCKING HANGOUT ANYMORE

But I've heard that if you die during the hangout you die in real life!!

it's a good morning to be a phonologist

I'm really bad at understanding rhythm/meter in poetry. This is the first one where I see any of it. Every three syllables are DA da da. I guess.