Random's Random Ramblings

I said, "That's just not true. Sometimes what doesn't kill you leaves you brittle and injured or traumatized."

He stopped and thought about that for a while. He came back later, and said, "It's like wood glue."

He pointed to my bookshelf, which he helped me salvage a while ago. He said, "Do you remember how I explained that, once we used the wood glue on them, the shelves would actually be stronger than they were before they broke?"

I did.

"But before we used the wood glue, those shelves were broken. They couldn't hold up shit. If you had put books on them, they would have collapsed. And that wood glue had to set awhile. If we put anything on them too early, they would have collapsed just the same as if we'd never fixed them at all. You've got to give these things time to set."

It sounded like a pretty good metaphor to me, but one thing I did pick up on was that whatever broke those shelves, that's not the thing that made them stronger. That just broke them. It was being fixed that made them stronger. It was the glue.

Last week Elon Musk broke European law so badly that the lawyers who will finally put the case to rest have yet to be born.

I'm not exaggerating. Here's the thing: America has terrible data privacy laws. A solid technique for an American website owner in times of financial hardship, such as accidentally buying a loss-leading debt-ridden social media platform to avoid going to gaol, is to take all the data harvested from users and to sell it to third parties for lots of money. It is fun and breezy and lets you pay off at least one lawyer for the month. What a lark.

However, the European Union has an even more fun and breezy law called GDPR.

And the thing is, the EU really, really care about GDPR. Like... they really care. This is not one of those grey area laws like jaywalking where it's basically ignored unless you do it in front of a police officer who is having a midlife crisis because his wife left him and the dishes are piling up and he's down to his third day of wearing the same pants and yesterday a man in the pub laughed at him for getting a football term wrong. This is the sort of law that, if you break it, grey men in grey suits with worryingly little humour will get in touch and unroll terrifyingly long scrolls of legal text and then you are in gaol for the rest of your life. This is a big law. The big one. Big boy law. Do not break.

So, if you're going to be a website owner in times of financial hardship who needs some quick money to cover your many billions of dollars of debt who decides to sell the private data you harvested from the user base, the most important thing you absolutely MUST remember is, you can only use the American data, and never the European.

But.

I mean.

Hypothetically.

If someone were to own an American website in times of financial hardship, such as an accidentally bought loss-leading debt-ridden social media platform to avoid going to gaol... but that someone didn't know the difference between American and European law.

Well then. That person would sell the wrong data.

And if that were to happen, on the scale of a global social media platform, with users ranging from the megalomaniacal Uber Rich to literal world governments...

The ensuing court cases would last for decades, as lawyers began the lawsuits at the richest end of the list, and worked their way down.

***

Externalities are the things outside the system that is supposedly dictating how things work but still influencing it. Economic theories, unlike theories of any scientific discipline, are not required to account for externalities.

One of the most common externalities is environmental impact and that was what set the scientist I heard off. The thing he and the economists were talking about was potential nuclear fallout from a space mission.

While not the likely outcome, there was a real potential for the mission to irradiate Earth’s atmosphere.

The scientist was arguing that the potential for the launch vehicle to explode in the higher atmosphere, which has happened - that’s not an abstract possibility, and would result in spreading the nuclear materials powering the mission through the atmosphere and over the entire planet should be accounted for in the process of risk evaluation for the mission.

The economist said that the radiation threat was just an externality. So the possibility should be ignored for risk assessment.

A risk is not a risk if it isn’t what the economist is interested in. Replace risk with factor and you have hit why calling economics the “dismal science” is only half correct. You cannot be scientific if you simply ignore the parts you don’t like.

The factors put in and left out of economic theory make it bs even where it’s correct, the same as a broken clock is not fixed in the moments that it is correct.

The biggest load of bs that economists, and non-economists trying to use economic theory to justify themselves, have been trying to foist off on humanity like it’s perfumed gold for decades in spite of ample proof to the contrary is the idea that selfish individual action results in mass beneficial action.

The most famous real life example of this is trickle down economics but understand that is simply an example. It is based on the underlying idea that if everyone does what is best for themselves it will result, miraculously, in everything evening out to be the best outcome for everybody. This is the idea championed by all of Ayn Rand’s heroes and skewered by the game Bioshock. The extremely well known effects of the Tragedy of the Commons, that any economist will be happy to explain to you like you’re an idiot, are externalities.

The idea that the best possible choice for an individual will inevitably lead to the best possible outcome for everyone is the root of the justification for deregulation as a political policy. Somehow, via the great chain, a business cutting corners to provide cheaper, less safe food so they can increase their profit margin and an underpaid consumer buying the cheapest possible product so that they CAN have a chance at making ends meet will result in everyone being better off.

Perhaps you are an American who is upset about environmental damage and the impact of eating fish. You decide not to eat fish. You remove your $5/month from the system.

Now, here’s where the path forks. If you’re personally changing your consumption habits because knowing what you know about fish has made eating fish unpleasant for you, then it is a complete sentence. That’s one of the best possible reasons to do anything, and may fortune follow your endeavour.

But let’s say you’re changing your consumption habits as part of your plan to SAVE THE WORLD. it is patently obvious that this action won’t save the world, but you feel that “if everyone did it” the world would be saved. In fact, you’re planning to go one step further than virtually anyone else, and as a result of some truly game-changing campaigning and devoting your tremendous talents to this one cause, you have successfully convinced so many people to join you in this behavioral change that you’ve removed $10,000 a month from the fish-buying system. Holy cow, that must be materially saving the world a little bit, right? How shall we quantify this impact? how many fishy lives have we saved with this? How healthy is the ocean getting?? This is pushing the needle in the right direction, right??

Well, in the case of the American fishing industry… no. The American fishing industry made $165 billion in commercial sales in 2019, which means about thirteen billion seven hundred and fifty million dollars a month, which means that it can absorb a change of -10,000 spent in grocery stores without noticing - no Congressman is going to pound his fist on the desk and say “by Jove, the People have changed their minds about fish!” when it’s about the same impact as a freezer in a supermarket breaking down - but honestly, we knew that, what about PUSHING THE NEEDLE IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION? HOW ELSE CAN WE COMBAT OVERFISHING APART FROM BUYING LESS FISH? It feels so goddamn obvious that it HAS to be the path forward! This is the way, guys, let’s try to make it $100,000 and THEN we’ll make a difference -

The most depressing externality here is subsidies. The American government directly subsidizes the American fishing industry to the tune of about $35 billion per year*. Of those, environmental groups estimate that over half of them are actively harmful. In addition to distorting The Economy, these “harmful” subsidies actively encourage increased fishing, support commercial enterprises to take risks, practice damaging behavior, or to simply stay in business when they’re no longer profitable.

* this takes into account a lot of factors, some seemingly innocuous, like state sales tax exemptions on fishing vessels, direct disaster aid payments to businesses, and marketing programs to support the industry and increase sales. Others are the result of quite specific lobbying, like the Fishermen’s Contingency Fund, where the American federal government pays out cash to commercial fishermen inconvenienced by oil and gas works - or the Surplus Fish Buyback programs… which purchase unwanted fish cheaply to put in school lunches. The combinations of direct/indirect payments, encouragements and programmes exist to keep American fishing exactly how it is.

This system means that whatever money you choose to withhold from this machine, the machine simply takes from you. You’re locking your $5 in your wallet to save a fishy life: the industry simply takes $5 from your taxes and kills 10 fish with it. You can’t “hurt a system in the profit” or “hit them in the wallet” or “vote with your dollar” when the machine is designed to extract your money regardless of blips, blips like “you not personally handing them your grocery money.” You’re going to change America’s minds about fish by Going Viral? Your tax dollars fund marketing programs to cancel out that impact. You’re hoping that rising fuel costs and climate-change-storms will make it less attractive to send boats out? Not in a subsidised economy, they don’t - it allows the industry to be disconnected from the market! What about if eVeRyOne did it - if we just scaled it bigger and managed to get 2% of fish-buyers to stop, or something? Well, the government already buys extra/unwanted fish for food programmes like school lunches or federal aid - you’d definitely instantly see more Mandatory Bargain Price Fish Meals being fed in schools, the military, state-owned care facilities, etc. But who knows how many heads the hydra might sprout to defend itself? If a $165billion/year industry backed by $35billion of government encouragement doesn’t want to stop, then it won’t. It is not part of the same market conditions that you are.

The point here is that it’s tempting to think of The Economy as something that notices you. It seems clear and obvious that “the solution to overfishing” would be “not eating fish.” And in a simplified market-led economic system it would probably be the case. You simply do not buy the fish, the supermarket sadly throws it away and tells the fisherman, and the fisherman counts up his dollars, checks the buzz on social media, and decides to run ecological whale-watches from his boat instead; the fishy lives are saved. But we don’t even live in a fantasy approximation of that system. Many parts of The Economy are completely artificial, and the machine is designed to resist market pressure. So the beguiling idea of “not feeding the machine” is easy to repeat! but ultimately it does not stop the behavior of the machine.

Solutions to stopping the machine do exist. It’s a human-made thing. You can break it, replace it, change its parameters, reduce its size, take away its nozzle for feeding itself by extracting cash from your back pocket, send it to China, stop it from emigrating to China, or bully it as much as you like. You can put it in a cage with a sustainable amount of food and tell it that it may make a sustainable amount of profit. You can paint it green and call it Eco. You can destroy its batteries, or install it with a solar panel, or adopt it out to a commune of low-income women. You can make the machine illegal. You can wait for another nation to kill it. You can kill it yourself. You can continue your stop-eating-fish campaign to fund ways to attack the machine. You can get many people together to put pressure on the machine. You can wait for it to run out of food.

fish are unable to hold their breaths. They literally cannot take a deep breath like mammals do.

We have lungs that can take in a specific volume of air, fish have gills that work when they are ventilated enough. There are different kinds of gills, yes. Some fish have something called ‘operculum’ which is like a cap on top of the gills, helping to protect them and increasing the water circulation through the gills. Some fish DONT have this structure and need to swim in order to be able to breathe.

But the fact that they cannot hold their breaths doesnt mean that they cannot survive without water for a while - in fact, fish can (usually) survive being without water WAY LONGER than we could survive being without air.

That fish is having fun, and fish absolutely DO have fun!

There was a regular who came into the store I worked at a lot, and he kept several varieties of chichlids, a very smart, aggressive type of fish.

He would come in and talk to me about all the drama his fish get into. The different territorial disputes they were having, who had paired off with who, who broke up (yes chichlids are like this)

But he had a jack dempsey in particular that LOVED to chase his hand around the tank, not his wife’s hand, not his friend’s hand, it HAD to be him. He said that as soon as he entered the room where this fish’s tank was kept, the fish would TEAR UP the tank decor, knocking things over and acting a fool off his shits until this dude stuck his hand in there and let the fish chase it around back and forth.

He theorized that his fish learned that if he knocked the tank decor around, his owner would obviously have to stick his hand in to fix it. So when he wants to play “chase dad’s hand” thats naturally how he knows he can get the hand to appear. He wont do this behavior for anybody but this one guy and he won’t tear up the tank anymore after he had received sufficient “play time”, usually once a day when the guy got home from work. He likened it to having a dog that wont leave you alone till you play tug o war for a bit.

I had a betta that would spend twenty minutes at a time just swimming up to the waterfall of the filter, letting it push him down to the bottom of the tank, only to swim back up and do it again, like it was a fucking slide.

Bettas are weak swimmers, and they dislike strong currents, but this guy was using the filter current like a slide. Kinda like how we don’t really like getting thrown around, but we still enjoy rollercoasters.

I also have countless stories about goldfish trying to “give hugs” (re: shove themselves into their owners hands during tank maintenance)

My betta knows how to lie and he will only beg for food in front of those he knows have not fed him yet.

There is so much evidence I’ve seen that fish are waaaay smarter and affectionate than we think. They absolutely have fun and I honestly don’t think enough studies have been done on fish brains and fish behavior in general.

And honestly, having worked in a pet store, fish are generally treated like they don’t have brains by even the fish care brands that claim expert knowledge.

I used to have a lovely tank, I think it was 50 gallons, and among other things I kept glass catfish. All the research at the time said they were hard to keep in captivity and prone to refusing to eat and starving themselves, and that they did not live long in captivity. But I was fascinated and had to try it. It took me about three days to realize none of the literature said a word about them being nocturnal. I started feeding them at night right before bed, and had zero problems getting them to eat, saw they were incredibly active as soon as the lights went off (I have exceptional night vision) and I kept them in excellent health for years. Exponentially beyond their captive life expectancy.

Escalators and electric toothbrushes are perfect examples of things that many able-bodied people assume exist for their own convenience, and this post is a perfect example of that unconscious assumption.

An escalator that has broken down is still perfectly functional, right? 

Well, sure–if you could have used the stairs to begin with. 

But for people like me, for whom the escalator was not a convenience but a mobility device, a broken down escalator is not functional. 

An electric toothbrush might seem like something that could be just as easily used turned off as turned on, but for someone with Parkinson’s, or any other number of nerve, coordination, or grip issues, the function of the electric toothbrush is a necessary feature, and without it, the task at hand becomes far more arduous (or even impossible). 

I’m not angry or trying to point out why this post is “bad” or “wrong”–I’m simply trying to point out that people who assume every time or energy-saving invention was created as a means to help able-bodied people be lazier should consider re-examining those assumptions. It might help you become more compassionate toward your disabled friends and family, or at least more aware of the struggles we face daily. 

Remember Snuggies? The blanket with sleeves? It was designed for wheelchair users/people with mobility issues so they could be warm and still use their arms without being trapped under a blanket. They were SO popular for a while, and everyone had one… which meant that if someone who was able bodied came over to your house and saw you had one too, it was less of a chance of being made fun of for it, and more like an opportunity for a conversation on about how they want one too. 

The slap chopper is also another great example. I know so many people who are able bodied that had/currently have one and sure it makes things quicker and easier for them, but someone with motor control issues or bad arthritis can use it. It won’t be an awkward “why do you have this thing” conversation. It is a “woah, I have one too!” or “I love mine, so glad you love yours too” sort of thing 

oh it aint me!!! i bitched to him that he got like 0 fucking people living in his fucking basement village so he was all, then fucking buy me some??

so i went on a miniture dollhouse website and bought him his first citizen and he laughed cuz it was this lil motherfucker

Given the fact that women are constantly watched in our society, and we are constantly REMINDED that we are being watched by people making fun of fat, “ugly”, or gender-nonconforming women, it makes me wonder how many women have messed up important tasks or projects or just day-to-day activities because A PART OF OUR BRAIN is permanently being deactivated?

Like talk about a fucking handicap.

Women are constantly held under the microscope- whether we are attractive or unattractive, the gaze of patriarchy never ends.

Just last week I was walking my dog and bent over to literally pick up poop.  Suddenly I heard whistling and looked up cause I knew I was the only person around.  Sure enough, about 300 feet away, some construction worker was perched on top of a building, grinning at me and calling out stuff I luckily couldn’t hear because he was so goddamn far away.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247434408_That_swimsuit_becomes_you_Sex_differences_in_self-objectification_restrained_eating_and_math_performance_Correction_to_Fredrickson_et_al_1998