242 Comments
User's avatar
User's avatar
Comment deleted
Aug 17, 2023Edited
Comment deleted
Expand full comment
Scott Alexander's avatar

I spent way too long trying to figure out how to make it work. Suppose a regular subscription is $5/month. It seems fair in some sense for an antisubscription also to be $5/month and cancel it out. But of the regular subscription, only 15% goes to Substack. If Substack gets 100% of the antisubscription, they're more incentivized to produce antisubscriptions than subscriptions. But if Substack sells antisubscriptions for 15% of $5, so they make the same profit either way, then it's easier to buy an antisubscription than a subscription, and most people end out with below zero income, which is also bad incentives.

I think you've got to charge the full $5 and sent the other 85% somewhere else, but where? One option is to let writers sign on to the antisubscription program, and the other 85% is distributed among all writers who *aren't* the one you're antisubscribing from, as an incentive for them to sign up, maybe proportional to the number of subscribers they have so you can't cheat the system by signing up with a blank Substack. But this incentivizes writers to send antisubscribers after each other! Maybe just send the extra 85% to some generic writing-related charity or something.

Expand full comment
Christophe Biocca's avatar

It's not 85% substack needs to find a new home for, but 170% (the after-fee value of the anti-subscription plus the after-fee value of the original subscription which the author no longer receives).

Which means that if you do anything desirable that people might want to donate to directly, then there will be an incentive to donate through them through the anti-subscription mechanism even if you don't particularly hate the targeted author, just to get that 70% match on your donation.

Expand full comment
Deiseach's avatar

I know I'm dim but how does this work? Okay, I hate John Jones who has a Substack about how great and wonderful Jehan Cauvin was. John has 5,000 Rabidly Reformed subscribers. Apart from I'd like to punch John in the Limited Atonement, I'd also like to take John's subscription numbers down, so I buy an antisubscription.

So how does Substack implement this? Now John's subscriber numbers read 4,999? They randomly pick one RR subscriber to refund? They take my $5 of course, since this is their profit-making subscription model, but if John is going to get paid anyhow, this is no good to me. So they can't pay John, but then what?

The RR subscriber can legitimately argue he's being discriminated against, and so can John argue that they are falsely deflating his subscriber numbers.

I can see this working for "if you want to oppose John Jones' 5,000 subscribers, buy an antisubscription and we will put it to increase the Substack of your choice". Maybe I can put down Gervaise de Gregoire's Tantum Ergo Substack as my choice, but then why wouldn't I simply subscribe directly to that?

If it all goes to "we'll put it into a fund for all Substacks that are anti-Cauvin/pro-Perpetual Adoration in general, so everyone gets a slice", I think that would work better because then Substack is doing the heavy lifting of sorting out all those writers, instead of me having to search for them one by one, and if everyone gets a slice, then more such writers are encouraged and supported than me subscribing to just one.

But that still leaves me with the problem of "I want John Jones to shut up and go away". Ah well, that's probably a me problem, not a them problem!

Expand full comment
Donald's avatar

How about no particular subscriber of RR gets picked on. RR gets the money for 4999 subscribers. Substack keeps your money, and the extra money that RR would get.

You and an RR subscriber have together sent $10 to substack.

Expand full comment
rutger's avatar

Give away anti-subscription funds worth half the total amount you pay in normal subscriptions.

Substack makes money on anti-subscriptions because they keep the 85% of the cancelled out subscription, but they are still incentivised to draw in non-anti-subscriber content because subscriptions bring in more money than anti-subscriptions.

Expand full comment
Desertopa's avatar

I haven't spent a lot of time exploring the consequences, but the first thought that comes to mind is, if you have to be subscribed to *someone* to buy an antisubscription, then writers could all pick selections of charities, and when you buy an antisubscription, the excess money will be distributed among the charities of the writers you subscribe to.

Expand full comment
JamesLeng's avatar

Easy fix: subscribers and anti-subscribers all send in money, substack takes their 15% cut, the other 85% gets split up among every writer on the site proportional to net subscriber count. Suppose there are only two blogs: one about politics, with 99 subscribers and 97 anti-subscribers, and one about cooking, with 4 subscribers and zero anti-subscribers. Substack Accounts Receivable collects 200 x $5 = $1000, takes $150 to cover costs of running the site, then Accounts Payable hands over $283.33 to the politics blog and $566.67 to the cooking blog.

Marginal support of the politics blog pays $5 to give the author less than $3, but subscription to the cooking blog pays $5 to give the author over $140 - a very attractive environment for potential new bloggers looking to produce something positive and uncontroversial, while the anti-subscribers have clearly succeeded in putting their enemy at a fifty-fold disadvantage.

Expand full comment
Sandro's avatar

Split the remainder among the writers you do subscribe to?

Expand full comment
David Piepgrass's avatar

While Substack would be incentivized to produce antisubscriptions, the writers still control the content and are still incentivized to produce subscriptions. Substack relies on the writers, so in that sense is still be incentivized to produce subscriptions even if, say, they raised the writers' cut to nearly 100% on subscriptions.

But Substack would be incentivized to get polarizing writers―just not people so extreme that they refuse to write on Substack because they'd earn nothing. Distributing antisubscriptions (+ negated subscriptions) among all writers should fix the incentive. I am reminded that since Substack controls the rules, they always have an incentive to increase their own share of revenue. I wonder how long before that happens.

I like antisubscriptions, they could encourage writers to be less loathsome.

Expand full comment
Mo Diddly's avatar

““It seems so tokenist to just acknowledge land once, at the beginning of a meeting, then never talk about it again. You think the land stops being stolen from indigenous people just because you’re done with the preliminaries and have moved to reading off the minutes?”

I did an actual spit take

Expand full comment
Chris's avatar

Yeah, that was a choice bit.

Expand full comment
Jeffrey Soreff's avatar

It can share infrastructure with the "Thank you for waiting. Your call is very important to us. If you believe this message, we have a bridge available for 50% off just for you." recordings... :-)

Expand full comment
Crazy Jalfrezi's avatar

The purpose of land acknowledgement is to rub it in the faces of the natives by reminding them that your ancestors defeated theirs in battle/wangled the chief with trinkets and firewater.

I find it to be in very poor taste.

Expand full comment
Bassoe's avatar

>Automated Land Acknowledger

The New National Religion has invented its own analog of the Adham. That’s actually legitimately interesting from a sociological viewpoint, though an unspeakable annoyance from any other one.

Expand full comment
Scott Alexander's avatar

I don't know this reference - what's an adham?

Expand full comment
Bassoe's avatar

Islamic call to prayer.

Expand full comment
Laura Clarke's avatar

Adhan with an n! Or azan, if you're Persian or South Asian or just not persnickety

Expand full comment
Alex Zavoluk's avatar

The "a'dam" is also a fairly horrifying device in the Wheel of Time series, used to psychologically torture channelers (magic users) to the point of wanting to be enslaved and thinking of themselves as subhuman. Just another one of those coincidences, I suppose.

Expand full comment
Elle's avatar

If we're being pedantic, it's more general purpose. It gives the user control over a channeler (won't be more specifics to avoid spoilers), which could and was used for cruel purposes but that wasn't its only function.

Expand full comment
Caba's avatar

To most people, it's the name of the first human.

Expand full comment
Yug Gnirob's avatar

The culture did the subhumanizing bit, the a'dam was just a symptom. They tell everyone mages always explode if they aren't leashed, and all their mages jump to put the leash on.

Expand full comment
Victor Thorne's avatar

It reminded me (in form, not in terms of whether our society is actually like Gilead) of the Soul Scrolls machines from The Handmaid's Tale.

Expand full comment
Viliam's avatar

A cultural appropriation as a remedy for geographical appropriation. Hmm...

Expand full comment
Alephwyr's avatar

We should just resolve problems of inclusivity the way billionaires solve their differences: by challenging each other to MMA fights, then realizing we can't fight and making a bunch of excuses until interest dwindles

Expand full comment
Chris's avatar

I have been and am still hoping that Musk chooses to fight him. There is no way a sloshed up, pantsed has-been sitting in a chair with a hole in the bottom over a money pit can possibly tango with a cyborg. I'm confident that Zuckerberg would atomize the man.

Expand full comment
Feral Finster's avatar

I figure that whoever wins in a death match between Musk and Zuckerberg, society will have one less obnoxious tech billionaire. Addition by subtraction, so to speak.

The problem is that the remaining tech billionaire will be just that much more insufferable.

Expand full comment
MostlyCredibleHulk's avatar

I don't think by this point it is really possible to distinguish the levels of insufferablitty. It's all white out at these levels.

On the other hand, one outcome gives us the potential of a man on Mars, another gives us the potential of a VR screen permanently attached to our faces, forever. I still have a preference in this case.

Expand full comment
Soothsayer's avatar

AI aside, both are doing great things for civilization. I agree that Musk is annoying. But Zuckerberg seems modest and kind.

Expand full comment
Lucid Horizon's avatar

How so?

Expand full comment
Soothsayer's avatar

Wrt which claim?

Expand full comment
Sandro's avatar

> I figure that whoever wins in a death match between Musk and Zuckerberg, society will have one less obnoxious tech billionaire

Nope, nature abhors a vacuum.

Expand full comment
Feral Finster's avatar

You just had to ruin my dreams.

Expand full comment
J Mann's avatar

"There is no way a sloshed up, pantsed has-been sitting in a chair with a hole in the bottom over a money pit can possibly tango with a cyborg."

I honestly had no idea which was which until the next sentence. Was that the joke?

Expand full comment
Gabriel Lucich's avatar

Easily one of the funniest things I’ve read today. It’s also unfortunately very accurate.

Expand full comment
Melvin's avatar

What does the Automated Land Acknowledger do if you take it to Europe?

Expand full comment
Gonff's avatar

Automatically triggers a First Nations invasion of Iceland

Expand full comment
Laurence's avatar

If it acknowledges whichever people last owned the land around the time period when Europeans first started colonizing it, then it'll just say that a lot of countries are built on unceded ancestral land of the Holy Roman Empire, Lithuania, Hungary and the Ottoman Empire.

Expand full comment
Viliam's avatar

> say that a lot of countries are built on unceded ancestral land of the Holy Roman Empire, Lithuania, Hungary and the Ottoman Empire.

I imagine that Hungarian TV does this all the time. :D

Expand full comment
Moon Moth's avatar

Fortunately or unfortunately, they base all that on Herodotus.

Expand full comment
Wasserschweinchen's avatar

Presumably the same thing as most American tech: thinks it's still in America. So probably it just keeps acknowledging the Wabanaki.

Expand full comment
Richard Gadsden's avatar

I once was on a zoom meeting where everyone else started with a land acknowledgement and said "well, the first recorded owners of this land were the Brigantes, but we know from archaeological evidence that they conquered it from a tribe whose name is unknown to us a few centuries before our records begin".

They decided that land acknowledgements were a bad idea in Europe after that.

Expand full comment
Evelyn's avatar

I do legit feel sorry for the Anglish. They got pretty brutally conquered!

Expand full comment
Richard Gadsden's avatar

There were repeated brutal waves of conquest here - first the Romans, then the Angles, then several different waves of Vikings and Saxons before finally the Normans conquered the place - and the "Harrying of the North" was especially brutal, even by the standards of a place that had been fought over for most of the preceding two centuries.

Expand full comment
Evelyn's avatar

I thought that archaeological evidence indicated, contra Bede, that the Angles (&Saxons&Jutes) moved in pretty peacefully, evidenced by a lack of warrior-specific possessions, a lack of destroyed towns from the fifth century, and cemeteries with Germanics and Britons buried virtually side-by-side?

Expand full comment
Richard Gadsden's avatar

The archaeological evidence is much more complex than that these days, AIUI - it wasn't as straightforward a conquest as the Bede version, but there wasn't a lack of violence or subjugation (there's a lot of evidence of Britons as slaves as well as equals, for instance).

Expand full comment
Ch Hi's avatar

Just to consider, lots of places you could be enslaved by members of your own "tribal group". Think of it as a substitute for debtor's prison, as sometimes that was what it was. So evidence of Britons being slaves isn't evidence that they were conquered...well, not sufficient evidence.

It's my expectation that in periods were there was no strong central government, gangs would take over more peaceful settlements...but there's no reason to expect that the gangs were foreigners. Not that sometimes they weren't, but that you need additional evidence.

Try it this way: Even within the same culture, some groups were more militant than others, and the militant bunches went looking for easy places to take over, whether for a quick raid or for a more long term settlement. Some of the militant bunches were large, and we call them armies. Some were smaller, and we call them raiders. There was no central authority making some of them official until after they were done with their business, if then.

Expand full comment
Deiseach's avatar

If we did one round here, it would have to be "Well our foundation myth is pretty much made up out of whole cloth as we were just farmers and tenants, but it's so kick-ass that would you want to give it up?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expulsion_of_the_D%C3%A9isi

" After violently recovering his niece from the depredations of the king's son of Tara, Óengus Gaíbúaibthech* and his followers are dispossessed by the king and sent to wander Ireland. They tarry in Leinster for a period, but are eventually expelled from that kingdom as well. When military prowess fails them, they are able to forge a home for themselves through cunning and magic** in Munster against the Osraige."

*Which apparently translates out to "Aengus of the Dread Spear"

**Baby-eating. Well, maybe not literal babies, but children-eating:

" Section 8 tells the story of Ethne the Dread, daughter of then King of Leinster Crimthann mac Énnai (d. 483) and an eventual fosterling of the Déisi. At her birth a druid prophesies that under Ethne her mother's kindred will seize what will be their homeland; hearing this her parents feed her the flesh of young boys to accelerate her growth."

And shape-shifting:

"With the help of Lugaid Laigde Cosc, the seer-judge of the Corcu Loígde and Cashel, they devise a trick: learning of a prophecy that whichever side draws first blood the next day will be routed, the Déisi druids transform one of their men into a red cow. The men of Osraige kill the cow, thereby sealing their fate; they are pushed across the Lingaun River, which thereafter serves as the border between the Déisi and Osraige."

Expand full comment
Silverlock's avatar

Obviously the forerunner of Blackadder's baby-eating bishop of Bath.

Expand full comment
Evelyn's avatar

Is that founding myth more canonical than the (apparently later-written) Five Invasions? I know virtually nothing about your homeland, but I *do* know that it would be really funny if somebody felt obliged to apologise on behalf of the Tuatha Dé Danann.

Expand full comment
Deiseach's avatar

The Tuatha de Danann are one of the Five Invasions of Ireland which allegedly track the peoples who came to populate the island. EDIT: I'm wrong, it's six invasions, and indeed it would be funny if someone had to stand up and mumble about the unceded land of the people of Nemed and there were demands for apologies from the Fomorians.

Even before the Nemed, there were the people of Partholan, who died out due to a plague and are mentioned in Lovecraft's story "The Moon-Bog":

https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/mb.aspx

The myth of my tribespeople, the Déisi, is much later; it's an 8th century fudging-up (in the best traditions of shiny arrivistes everywhere) to provide a respectable and high-ranking background for the newly ennobled and influential ruling set. So instead of being "well, we started off as tenants and vassals of other, more important, tribes and then eventually worked our way up to the top", it was "congratulations, your majesty, we've discovered your royal ancestors from the distant past" 😁

The same way that, in order to provide some justification for Henry VIII's claims of authority over the Church in England, the scholars went searching for 'evidence' that England was, and had been, an empire (and the pleasant side effect of this was that this made Henry an emperor, and so an equal to his Continental rivals the King of France and the Holy Roman Emperor):

MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Thomas Cromwell: A Life

"Katherine of Aragon proved a capable and popular queen, despite a worrying record of miscarriages or infant death in her essential duty of providing heirs for this still fragile dynasty. Yet even in the early 1520s, there was biological time to spare, and meanwhile King Henry did his best to stride the European stage as if he were one of its really important monarchs, doing his best to equal the Valois King of France, the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor or the Jagiellon King of Poland-Lithuania.

...[In 1531] The other parallel enterprise was a compilation of historical texts found both abroad and in ancient manuscripts in English libraries, whose object was to prove the proposition that kings of England had always exercised supreme jurisdiction in their realms. If this was the case, any competition from other jurisdictions was an offence to God. England was an ‘empire’, which in the political jargon of the period meant a polity with no superior under God – in present circumstances, that would exclude the Bishop of Rome as an intermediary between Heaven and Westminster. Already in early autumn 1530, the King and his ministers were increasingly using this term ‘empire’, with its corollary that the King’s Great Matter could be decided within the realm of England.

The work was never published, nor was meant to be in this form. Its original full compilation remains in a manuscript now in the British Library, on which is scrawled the name by which it has become known, the Collectanea satis copiosa (‘Sufficiently abundant compilation’). It was the foundation for one of the most famous preambles to Parliamentary Reformation legislation legislation written by Cromwell, the Act in Restraint of Appeals of 1533: ‘by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire.’ Never mind that the prize exhibits of these ‘histories and chronicles’ were the twelfth-century Welsh lies of Geoffrey of Monmouth about King Arthur, augmented with various other mendacious specimens of medieval insular self-congratulation. The King, the main intended audience, perused and annotated the Collectanea with evident delight.

...The new phase of the campaign had various elements. One was to go even further in building up a case from history to show that Henry enjoyed an imperial jurisdiction by right, which inexplicably his predecessors had long neglected. The Collectanea satis copiosa had been a start, but who knew what else was sitting in monastic libraries in the kingdom and beyond? So, soon after the city pageants had been dismantled, Cromwell’s deviser of elegant verse for the coronation, John Leland, already marked out as a precocious investigator of antiquity, was dispatched to travel the length and breadth of the kingdom looking for further manuscripts, armed with a royal commission to secure entry to ancient abbeys, priories and friaries. Thus began Leland’s marvellous investigative journeys across Tudor England which have left us so much, but which in their antiquarian excitements, overwhelming possibilities and distressing witnesses of destruction eventually robbed him of his sanity."

Expand full comment
MostlyCredibleHulk's avatar

Do you notice how it always stops when we get to the tribe which kept no records and thus we don't know whom did they conquer to get to this land? The solution is clear - never keep any historical record past 50 years or so, and we'll have no reasons to worry. There could be a special agency tasked with finding and destroying any such records that are deemed too old, for the sake of peace and societal harmony.

Expand full comment
Richard Gadsden's avatar

The problem is that the Brigantes also kept no records - but the Romans made records of them. You can prevent historical records within your territory, but you can't stop outsiders from recording what you're up to. I suspect that if you compared North Korea's records of itself to those held by the rest of the world, you'd see a big differential.

Expand full comment
JamesLeng's avatar

Alternatively, keep the records, establish a unified world government with Georgist LVT, and give surviving members of conquered groups an extra slice of UBI until the total value of back rent for their ancestral lands (from original seizure to when the world government was established) is paid off. Start with most recent, then wrap it all up and just pay everyone equally somewhere around the point where a petition to collect reparations on behalf of neanderthals reaches the front of the line.

Expand full comment
Tasty_Y's avatar

This question made me think of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-evIyrrjTTY, which is as good an answer as any to "what would it say in Israel?"

Expand full comment
Imajication's avatar

“This is unceded land of Homo Erectus”. It will explode if you take it to Israel.

Expand full comment
Melvin's avatar

I'd be tempted to credit the lungfish as the true traditional owners of these lands, although that's probably just vertebrate chauvinism. (And also lack of a good fossil record on the first terrestrial invertebrates)

Expand full comment
Jeffrey Soreff's avatar

Or a Precambrian marine species claiming a 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone onshore (with additional irredentist claims from continental drift). :-)

Expand full comment
Lucas's avatar

It automatically moderates the debate between the Europeans arguing about whose land it originally was.

Expand full comment
Purpleopolis's avatar

"This land is stolen by the creations of the Mad scientist Yukub."

Expand full comment
Mark's avatar

Better yet what happens when you take it to Texas. Does it first acknowledge you’re on unceded Comanche land, then acknowledge that they were on unceded Apache land, then that they were on unceded Witchita land, etc.

Expand full comment
AntimemeticsDivisionDirector's avatar

The product faced massive public outcry when they took it south of Maryland and, due to their failure to set time constraints, it started acknowledging unceded confederate land.

Expand full comment
Yitz's avatar

Eliezer Yudkowsky has been trying to warn us of the result

Expand full comment
Yug Gnirob's avatar

"This land is owed to the Ohlone people in payment of their stolen ancestral land."

Expand full comment
Sergey Alexashenko's avatar

THIS IS THE UNCEDED ANCESTRAL LAND OF THE USENET PEOPLE

Expand full comment
Jack's avatar

Hahaha

Expand full comment
Anonimoose's avatar

If this blog had likes enabled you would have all mine for this post!

Expand full comment
Aron Roberts's avatar

Same, Anonimoose! :) Thanks, Surgey!!

Expand full comment
Imajication's avatar

citizenkaneapplause.gif

Expand full comment
Fang's avatar

The ACX tweaks extension re-enables them (they're just hidden normally) and it currently has 15, which is the most likes I can remember seeing on a single comment here.

Expand full comment
Coco McShevitz's avatar

Very nice!

Expand full comment
Moon Moth's avatar

Thank you.

Expand full comment
TWC's avatar

Well done

Expand full comment
Doug S.'s avatar

I was a USENET person...

Expand full comment
Anonymous Dude's avatar

'Cause, 'cause, 'cause I remember when we used to sit

In the computer lab in college

Oba, observing studies majors, yeah

Mingle with the good people we meet, yeah

Good threads we have had, oh good threads we've lost along the way, yeah

In this dark future you can't forget your past

So dry your tears I say, yeah

[Chorus]

No newsgroup, no cry

No newsgroup, no cry, eh, yeah

Little poster don't shed no tears

No newsgroup, no cry

Expand full comment
Jenny Zito's avatar

I laughed really hard many times while reading this. Thanks

Expand full comment
George H.'s avatar

Oh, I love the anti-subscribers! I want an anti-vote. I don't want to vote for anyone, but I'm happy to vote against.

Expand full comment
Dweomite's avatar

Interestingly, you can do that in approval voting systems by voting for everyone except the person you don't want.

Expand full comment
George H.'s avatar

Hmm, not the same. I want my anti-vote to take away from the vote total. In theory you could then have someone elected with a negative vote total, just less negative than the other candidate(s).

Expand full comment
David Piepgrass's avatar

It's the same in terms of who wins, but yes, people who want to change voting systems are often obsessed with making systems "simple", which is part of why approval voting gets more attention than score voting even though the latter gathers more information and should therefore measure the will of the people more accurately (score voting = "rate each candidate on a scale from 0 to 10")

If I could choose a voting system, I wouldn't add a negativity indicator that doesn't affect the winner, I'd choose, well, Simple Direct Representation of course. https://medium.com/big-picture/simple-direct-representation-cd43becd9837

Edit: adding a "none of the above option" also helps indicate negative sentiment. I'd rather have a "random citizen" option. Who wants to find out how well Mr. Random would govern?

Expand full comment
MaxEd's avatar

I found myself wishing I could donate money to actually hurt some game developers' profits (instead of just pirating stuff, which only hurts imaginary profits, unfortunately). That time when Fallout 3 turned from isometric RPG into a shooter, I wished all the worst on Bethesda.

And if I could do this for musicians, too, I'd go broke.

Expand full comment
FluffyBuffalo's avatar

Most musicians earn little enough as is. Just out of interest, which musicians do you consider worthy of your anti-support?

Expand full comment
MaxEd's avatar

Bunch of Russian pop and rap and "Russian chanson" artists from 00's when I was still riding a lot of "route taxis"/jittneys which blared the worst music they could find.

Also, one PARTICULARLY bad duet I've heard on a budget river cruise. Imagine: wide Volga river all around you, a sunny day, an open deck, an interesting conversation... And suddenly someone decides to play... Really, I don't know any similar artists in America. American pop has STANDARDS. Even the worst of it is at least competently produced, if utterly uninspired. But this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=091A7MBUrU4 I wish I could pay to rid the world of these voices. This woman smoked so much she just cannot sing, should not be allowed to sing. Not to mention trite text, boring music and everything else. This song is simply so awful it should not exist.

Expand full comment
FluffyBuffalo's avatar

I love that idea. Or, in addition to one positive vote, give everyone, say, a quarter of an anti-vote... that could be a solution for extremist parties whom everyone but their fanbase hates and dreads. (I'm looking at you, AfD!)

Expand full comment
Purpleopolis's avatar

There needs to be a binding "none of the above" option in elections. If NotA wins, the other candidates are banned from the ballot for a cycle.

Expand full comment
Erica Rall's avatar

It's all fun and games until Vermin Supreme or Lord Buckethead gets elected to high office because nobody bothered to vote against him so he's the only one with a positive vote total.

Expand full comment
Eileen S's avatar

After the day I had, I needed a good laugh, and I got one. Thank you for that.

Expand full comment
truthscrolling's avatar

Amazing! Probably my favourite in the entire series.

(𝘛𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘸𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘯 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘥𝘦𝘥 𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦)

Expand full comment
Deiseach's avatar

That comment was read from the unceded land of the Déisi Mumhan 😁

Expand full comment
Purpleopolis's avatar

"Comanche" is an epithet from people that were sick of being robbed and murdered by them.

Plus they still use CIB/blood quantum measurements for tribal membership.

Expand full comment
AntimemeticsDivisionDirector's avatar

Yes, Comanche is a variation on the Ute word for "enemy".

Nʉmʉnʉʉ is generally hard for us english speakers to pronounce.

(This comment was written on unceded land of the British Empire)

Expand full comment
SEE's avatar

>You wonder if there is anywhere open at this hour that will serve you a fried egg.

I'll just note that you don't ever need to wonder that. That's why the Denny's chain exists.

Expand full comment
thewowzer's avatar

Ever since covid, my Denny's closes at 10pm :(

Expand full comment
hnau's avatar

In these days, a man who creates a spoof startup pitch is quite apt to be interrupted by some idiot raising a seed round for it.

Expand full comment
Nicholas Weininger's avatar

There needs to be a crossover where Cindy, Larisa, Sky, Hana, and Jane from your previous post appear at the house party-- or at least where you continue their stories. Maybe they could be customers of that reality show thing.

Expand full comment
Anonymous Dude's avatar

I'll second it. Sadly Scott doesn't do character-based writing, he focuses more on ideas, but it would be a fun experiment and I think it would get a lot of attention.

Expand full comment
David Roberts's avatar

Successfully funny. Thanks.

Expand full comment
BankerAtLarge's avatar

“Too cringe to live, too lindy to die”…I’m going to be using this many many times

Expand full comment
Hank Wilbon's avatar

That was so fucking funny. Brilliant.

Expand full comment
TGGP's avatar

The price-discriminating YIMBY reminds me of Robin Hanson's proposal for Universal Basic Dorms:

https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/universal-basic-dormshtml

Expand full comment
Anonymous Dude's avatar

Given how well his suggestion of redistribution of sexual partners went over... ;)

Expand full comment
TGGP's avatar

I do think there's a bit of a difference in that Robin himself doesn't seem keen on redistribution and instead more interested in the question of why supporters of redistribution don't care about that kind of inequality. But since he thinks signalling is important & causes a lot of economic waste*, he's likely more personally invested in this proposal.

* https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/variety-is-shallowhtml

Expand full comment
Anonymous Dude's avatar

Yup, thus the wink ;)

Expand full comment
Moon Moth's avatar

My PTSD is a big proponent of sanity equity, in the form of eating brains until everyone is approximately equivalently sane. I disagree, but it says that that's only because I'm too sane and therefore part of the problem.

Expand full comment
Anonymous Dude's avatar

Oh, that one's easy. You just have to summon Cthulhu.

Expand full comment
Ethan R's avatar

Utterly brilliant.

Expand full comment
Graham Cunningham's avatar

Well I was at that party too.... and nobody asked me a damn thing or even noticed me or anything.

Expand full comment
Andrew Marshall's avatar

When we do our indigenous land acknowledgements at work, we specifically dedicate them to the Gods of the Eagles and the Setting Sun.

Not enough to just have it be a pledge, we expressly make it religious, as I guess no one has ever heard of freedom of religion where I work.

Expand full comment
Bldysabba's avatar

Do these things actually exist?

Expand full comment
Purpleopolis's avatar

Dunno about the Gods of Eagles, but I can confirm the existence of the Setting Sun. I've seen it hundreds of times.

Expand full comment
Bldysabba's avatar

I presume joke? In which case haha. But to clarify, I was curious to know if land acknowledgements are actual things that people do.

Expand full comment
Desertopa's avatar

Land acknowledgements are a thing, although they're not at all popular where I live/in the circles I move in. My first assumption is that you were asking whether the Gods of Eagles and the Setting Sun are a real thing though, and for that I have no idea. It sounds like some generic name someone might come up with for a group of Native American gods who didn't want to be bothered to look up specific ones, which seems counter to the supposed spirit of the whole thing.

Expand full comment
Deiseach's avatar

Cynically, there is much less chance of the God of the Setting Sun turning up in court to ask for three hundred years worth of back rent, than if any specific still-existing local tribe were named where there might be people going "Hey, I'm that tribe, so when are you going to give back stolen goods, Whitey?"

I'd be absolutely enraged were I a native person listening to that garbage. Not alone did they steal the land, now they're appropriating the cultural traditions and religion.

Expand full comment
Andrew Marshall's avatar

We both name the gods as well as mention the most recent tribe who lived on this particular land.

I don't think the religious appropriation enrages the indigenous folks, as most are Christian these days.

Expand full comment
Deiseach's avatar

Ah, I'm Christian (Catholic) and I'd be very huffy if some descendant of Oliver Cromwell got up on stage and started unctuously invoking Gobnait and Bridget, whether as saints or goddesses, because I know darn well they never venerated them or had anything to do with them.

Expand full comment
Andrew Marshall's avatar

I'm presbyterian, and I don't like my office including prayers to other gods, but speaking out against it is approximately the least popular thing I can think of.

Expand full comment
Deiseach's avatar

If they put their money where their mouth is, and sacrificed a high-ranking bureaucrat or manager to the God of Eagles every time they had this ceremony, I think it'd be a lot more popular and would overcome most of my objections.

Expand full comment
Andrew Marshall's avatar

Wait... how high-ranking?

Expand full comment
Feral Finster's avatar

I might join up in that religion, and I thought I was pretty settled in my faith.

Expand full comment
Bugmaster's avatar

I have no hope of ever getting promoted to a management position, so I'm all-in on this plan.

Expand full comment
None of the Above's avatar

Deposed/disgraced CEOs.

Expand full comment
Moon Moth's avatar

Sometimes I worry that the neighborhood birds think that this is unceded therapod land.

Expand full comment
soda's avatar

It is.

Expand full comment
Evelyn's avatar

If the current Max Roser is a great censor, one worries what the next one will be.

Expand full comment
Nolan Eoghan (not a robot)'s avatar

“It seems so tokenist to just acknowledge land once, at the beginning of a meeting, then never talk about it again. “

This whole thing is the most tokenistic bull. The height of the performative signalling.

If I were Native American I’d be enraged. “Oh my people used to live here, on this now hugely valuable real estate, and all we get is this acknowledgement of that. Can we have the land back?”

Expand full comment
Xpym's avatar

That would likely displace other "minorities", so no, a very un-inclusive sentiment. Better of them to voluntarily share the land with those, but obviously not with right-wingers.

Expand full comment
Nolan Eoghan (not a robot)'s avatar

Or you could hand it back as a leasehold, where every properrt owner pays some kind of rent on land to native tribes, however nominal. This happens in Europe a lot - ground rents on leaseholds that could be thousands of years.

Expand full comment
Deiseach's avatar

That is the bullshit element of land acknowledgements, particularly the "never ceded" part.

Okay, so the local Jinglyjangly Tribe "never ceded" the land, which means it was stolen out from under them and they still claim rights to its ownership, and then (illegally?) sold to you, and you now have a multi-million dollar institution sitting on that land. Are you paying a penny's rent to any surviving Jinglyjangly? No, but before every meeting you will read out a statement which in effect boasts "This is your land, we took it, we're not giving it back, sucks to be you".

The only thing this achieves is to make white people (and the minority activists) happy about how wonderful they are to be so sensitive to issues of privilege.

Expand full comment
Nolan Eoghan (not a robot)'s avatar

Well I suppose having a acknowledgment at the start is cheaper than rent.

Expand full comment
rutger's avatar

Depends on how much rent you'd pay versus how much of everyone's time you are wasting.

This is the first I've ever heard about land acknowledgement, but for sufficiently large events I can see a token donation being much cheaper than 5 minutes worth of the accumulated salaries of everyone involved.

Expand full comment
Nolan Eoghan (not a robot)'s avatar

People make the 5 minutes back. If companies thought meetings were non productive they wouldn’t have them. Office workers are measured in output - regardless of the number of company wide meetings. It can be over done anyway.

As for whether the monetary value is a token, probably not.

Expand full comment
None of the Above's avatar

I think the meaningless performative nature of it is kinda the point.

Expand full comment
SimulatedKnave's avatar

A lot of more sensible land acknowledgements mention that something is the traditional territory of a group (since in some cases, well, it damn well WAS ceded).

But yeah, I've seen one land acknowledgement ever that was not phrased in such a way as to prompt questions I am 100% sure the people in question don't actually want to discuss.

Expand full comment
Feral Finster's avatar

Tokenism and performative virtue signaling is the entire point.

Not making concrete material changes that affect the way the pie gets sliced.

Expand full comment
Doug S.'s avatar

"No. We stole it fair and square."

Expand full comment
Moon Moth's avatar

There is a church near me that has a "lament" (their word) at the beginning of each service, for the land the church is on. I can't help but think of the bit about it being easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.

Expand full comment
MaxEd's avatar

OK, there is the most coherent explanation for Moscow real-estate market here that I've ever seen. I always wondered why PIK developer make their new houses so, so very ugly that they look actually worse than 80's Soviet apartment blocks (e.g. https://www.pik.ru/1dubr), and only this answer makes sense.

Expand full comment
Caledfwlch's avatar

Looks fine to me. I guess I'm one of these poor and unclassy

Expand full comment
Garald's avatar

But ancient Romans did have chickens.

PS. Would also antisubscribe to that person - good call.

Expand full comment
Anonymous Dude's avatar

“You have to make the new houses worse somehow. We don’t want them to be less liveable. So instead, we make them uglier. So ugly, that no self-respecting person would live in one by choice. The needy will grudgingly choose them over homelessness, but rich people who want to signal class will still prefer the old houses, letting them keep basically all their value. As a bonus, it prevents gentrification and ensures the houses go to poor people who need them.”

“Sounds like it might work.”

“That’s what we thought. But when we took the proposal to the mayor, she said it wasn’t even original. Apparently the whole United States has been doing this for the past seventy-five years!”

I'm actually starting to wonder if this might be true on some level. Modern architecture is really ugly. Maybe the rich just fund all the architects who make these hideous blocky monstrosities because it makes their old houses more valuable.

Expand full comment
Deiseach's avatar

I don't think anyone is funding architects! If I go by the Celtic Tiger boom construction (which is now showing its age and not wearing well), it was developers slapping up buildings (apartment blocks to housing estates) as fast as possible, as cheap as possible (but the prices were not correspondingly cheap).

So this meant reducing size of square footage to squeeze in extra units on the same amount of land, using the cheapest possible materials, leading to paper-thin walls where you could hear everything your neighbour was doing and vice versa, and poor quality in both materials and construction methods that deteroriated over time but what did the builder care, they had their money.

When you're "pile 'em high and sell 'em cheap", you're not asking for architect designs beyond the bare minimum "slap me together a bunch of flats" blueprints. Aesthetic concerns are not even a wisp of thought in the minds of anyone concerned.

Expand full comment
Xpym's avatar

So, it looks like "progress studies" have been smoothly assimilated into the wider "progressive" movement. To be expected I suppose, it's not like there's a viable alternative paradigm.

Expand full comment
Scott Alexander's avatar

Has it? Are you basing this on my (fictional, silly) story, or something else?

Expand full comment
Xpym's avatar

I thought these were only fictional in the sense that "no celebrities were harmed"? True in spirit, etc.

Expand full comment
Sebastian Garren's avatar

I was confused because no progress studies obsessions (besides YIMBY and Max) appeared at this party.

Expand full comment
Glen's avatar

I have to say that i really like brutalism. Are we not fans here for the most part?

Expand full comment
Deiseach's avatar

Bare grey concrete in the Irish climate doesn't work. I still remember, from *decades* ago, being in a new church that was all this 'trendy' bare concrete. On the west coast of Ireland. Where all the rain hits straight in from the Atlantic. Almost every day.

Imagine for yourself the result 😁 I was wearing my coat indoors huddled up freezing cold and it was also damp. Brutalism is a design that works best on (a) the drawing board and (b) in a dry, warm to hot climate where there is sunshine, dry air, light, and blue skies.

Stacked concrete egg boxes not my favourite style, I have to say.

Expand full comment
Nolan Eoghan (not a robot)'s avatar

Concrete is ok. Brutalism not ok.

I recall that very few brutalist architects lived in brutalist buildings.

Expand full comment
Imajication's avatar

Boston has a brutalist mental hospital that looks like it was designed by hr giger which just seems cruel

Expand full comment
Shabby Tigers's avatar

I love it - it can be sublime and inspiring, intensely humanist -- but, as Deisach says, it’s not really suited to cold wet climates (I learned to love it as a small child in Johannesburg) and I think it’s gotten a bad rap partly because of the difficulty of maintaining it properly in obviously suboptimal locations where it should never have been chosen. There also is, broadly speaking, a sloppy habit out there of referring to anything with visible concrete or clean lines or both as “brutalist,” so people see any old ugly plain boxy-looking car park and are like “oh, that’s brutalist” because that’s what they’ve reasonably gathered from all the other wrong people, and the upshot is that brutalism now has a fulminant and perhaps incurable case of brand poisoning.

Expand full comment
Deiseach's avatar

"the upshot is that brutalism now has a fulminant and perhaps incurable case of brand poisoning."

*Goes to look up Brutalist architeture for fear I'm being unfair and prejudiced about it*

https://www.architecture.com/explore-architecture/brutalism

*Sees the prime examples of the style on this page*

Oh yes, indeed, how.... inspiring with the uplift of human nature seeking after beauty 😕

Expand full comment
Garald's avatar

Oh, come on. What about Chandigarh?

Expand full comment
Deiseach's avatar

Looking at photos online, still not impressed. Even in that climate, there is still the black lichen growing on the bare concrete, and bare concrete is bare concrete, no matter what funky shapes you cast it in.

Expand full comment
Gordon Tremeshko's avatar

Put it this way: if the 9/11 hijackers had targeted a couple of brutalist buildings instead of the Pentagon and WTC, I think there's a decent chance Saddam Hussein or his progeny is still ruling Iraq.

Expand full comment
Deiseach's avatar

And in addition voted the thanks of a grateful people!

Expand full comment
Paul Goodman's avatar

My main problem with brutalism is that bare concrete is not a very attractive color. If they kept the buildings the same but added some paint I expect I'd like it a lot better.

Expand full comment
Moon Moth's avatar

Yeah, that'd be a nice compromise. Build with brutalist concrete, and then hire some Art Nouveau painters to Mucha-ize the exterior.

Expand full comment
Purpleopolis's avatar

No, I'm not a fan of the DC subway. Though the Montreal bureau of prisons HQ does a delightful job of communicating who works there.

Expand full comment
Melvin's avatar

The DC subway overcomes one of the biggest problems of brutalist architecture (bare concrete looks terrible after several decades of exposure to the elements) by being indoors.

It also has the advantage of lack of competition; most subway systems aren't designed with any thought to aesthetics at all (notable exceptions like several stations in Moscow) so with a teensy bit of effort it's easy to outperform.

Expand full comment
beleester's avatar

It depends. You can build a visually interesting building out of concrete cubes, but if you just throw down a huge concrete wall with no decoration then it's exactly as ugly as it sounds.

Expand full comment
AntimemeticsDivisionDirector's avatar

I was going to say the same. Brutalist architecture can be visually stunning. But generic apartment blocks are not.

Expand full comment
Anonymous Dude's avatar

Well, I think it's horrible.

Of course, it's turned (like masks, vaccines, beer choice, music tastes, and even D&D blogs) into a left-right thing these days. This blog has a lot of conservative fans, so no.

To make my point across the aisle, here are some nice articles by a socialist about why modern architecture stinks:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contemporary-architecture

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/04/when-is-the-revolution-in-architecture-coming

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/05/how-to-build-beautiful-places

Expand full comment
Moon Moth's avatar

I like brutalism when I'm doing it to my enemies... Oh, wait, nevermind.

I will say that the best part of living in a brutalist building is not having to look at it.

Expand full comment
Deiseach's avatar

Now that I've stopped laughing (and thanking my lucky stars I don't go to parties):

(1) I think the alt-history restaurant isn't that bad an idea, at least no worse than the usual fusion ideas. Germany already has currywurst, I'm sure they'd be open to teriyakiwurst.

I'm pretty sure the Romans did have fried eggs and pepper, but if it's describing food for 'the modern audience' who are historically illiterate, again I think you're on to a winner. From Max Miller's "Tasting History", a Roman recipe for Parthian Chicken:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LynenQ5h2Y&list=PLIkaZtzr9JDkCHpSx2Kf2XWRcgqjClDff&index=5

(2) I fully expect the Automated Land Acknowledger idea to be implemented any day now. Universities would love them. Just stick a bunch up around campus, let them play all day long, and you've appeased the punctilious without spending an actual dime on reparations to the Natives

(3) "nobody in California is religious enough to meet people at church"

Ahem. I think that should be understood as "nobody *of the kind of people we know* in California is religious enough to meet people at church". The diocese of Orange ended up buying the Crystal Cathedral because they needed more space:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_Cathedral_(Garden_Grove,_California)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EA1VRF5cZ8U

"On July 7, 2011, the Diocese of Orange, which had previously purchased land and started planning for construction of a new and larger cathedral in Santa Ana because growth of the diocese had rendered Holy Family Cathedral in Orange too small for diocesan functions, announced that it was "potentially interested" in buying the Crystal Cathedral campus for future use as its diocesan cathedral. There were three major factors that motivated the interest of the Diocese of Orange in the property:

- Its central location within the diocese made it more accessible to parishioners than the Santa Ana site,

- The cost of renovating the Crystal Cathedral building for Catholic worship would be far less than that of constructing a new building from scratch, and

- The other buildings on the campus would provide facilities for diocesan administrative offices and ministries with little modification, further reducing the cost of the whole project.

...To reflect the diversity of the Catholic community in the region, the reliquary of its altar will conceal donated first-class relics connected to saints of American, Korean, Mexican and Vietnamese descent, including the Canadian Martyrs, Andrew Dũng-Lạc, Junípero Serra, Andrew Kim Taegon, and Rafael Guízar y Valencia."

Expand full comment
Bugmaster's avatar

Oooh, ooh ! @Deiseach ! You might be the one person who can help me out. A long time ago, I recall driving around the residential areas of Los Angeles on my way to an appointment, and getting hopelessly lost along the way (this was before the days of ubiquitous GPS on phones, believe it or not). And as I was rushing by, I happened to see a really striking church. Its facade was shaped like a giant gear, with the engineer's compass (the square-and-compass kind, not the navigational kind) embedded in it, and an abstract figure of Jesus standing in front of it (or perhaps crucified on it, I'm not sure). I could've sworn I saw a sign that said "Chruch of Jesus Christ, Engineer".

I've tried going back and finding this place, but either it had mysteriously vanished, or I dreamed the whole thing. When I tell people about it, they don't believe me, so... was this thing real ? Did I indeed imagine it ? Was this a divine revelation, and if so, what color robes should the priests of my new cult be wearing ?

Expand full comment
Deiseach's avatar

That's a really mysterious one! Are you sure it's not something out of a SF novel? I could Robert Heinlein writing that one 😁 It being Los Angeles, I would believe someone tried that. It sounds like something L. Ron Hubbard might have tried *before* he got into "The science of mental health".

If it's the square-and-compass and gear symbolism, then possibly it's civil engineering. For a new cult, clearly your clerics should be wearing overalls. Hi-vis vests for the higher clergy.

Instead of mitres, hard hats 😁 The different branches of engineering as the different religious orders! You can go all out on this one!

https://online.maryville.edu/blog/types-of-engineers/

I'll go one better with this - thing - I found online, from an Irish Catholic religious supplies store:

https://www.veritasbooksonline.com/jesus-is-my-engineer-childrens-plaque-095177572504-36282/

EDIT: I'm throwing this out there, and I'm not saying it's so, but it *might* have been a Christian Scientist church? They had the Church of Christ, Scientist in LA:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Church_of_Christ,_Scientist_(Los_Angeles)

That's the only connection I can think of, who knows?

Expand full comment
Bugmaster's avatar

> Instead of mitres, hard hats 😁

That's a good idea; maybe I'll even have each member design his own hard-mitre. The best one gets to go up in rank.

> I'll go one better with this - thing - I found online, from an Irish Catholic religious supplies store...

That thing screams "death cult" and "eldritch horrors", not "engineering". I may be a cult leader, but even I have standards ! :-)

> I'm throwing this out there, and I'm not saying it's so, but it might have been a Christian Scientist church? They had the Church of Christ, Scientist in LA...

I thought so too, but I ran into the same problem you did: their actual church is pretty pedestrian-looking. But maybe they have an annex or something ? Hmm...

Expand full comment
Yug Gnirob's avatar

A Google search for "gear and compass church" got me the Freemasons logo.

https://freemason.org/ I'm not seeing a gear-shaped building online but I'd guess it's a Freemasons building.

Expand full comment
Moon Moth's avatar

Japanese "curry" finally made sense to me when I learned that they'd gotten it via the English.

Expand full comment
Estate of Bob Saget's avatar

How did lindyman get so popular?

Expand full comment
Silverlock's avatar

I initially thought Scott was referring to the YouTuber lindybeige. I ended up having to Google lindyman.

Expand full comment
Melvin's avatar

I dunno, but he hasn't been popular for long so he's probably not very good.

Expand full comment
savegameimporting's avatar

"Too cringe to live, too lindy to die" sounds like something that would be written on the gates of Postrat Purgatory.

Expand full comment
heron's avatar

Hilarious and lovely, especially the reference to Oakland award winning housing - tee hee.

Expand full comment
Yosef Hirsh's avatar

Antisuscribe 😁

Expand full comment
Scott Smyth's avatar

This is hilarious. However, I somehow missed the supposed logic being espoused in this bit. Can anyone explain to me in what way the anitsubscribe makes people uncancellable? “Nah, we’re thinking of it as a sort of ultimate defense of free speech. Imagine deplatforming someone for supporting racism or pedophilia, when you could rake in big bucks from collecting antisubscriptions to them instead! All of a sudden, those people are cancelproof.”

I also love the restaurant idea. I would go eat there, and would probably need to obsessively order everything on the menu over subsequent visits out of pure curiosity.

Expand full comment
Man in White's avatar

I got confused as well, best interpretation I have is that they still can have the speech on the platform. Still chilling, but speech is still there. And people would direct the hate into antisubscription rather than target platform to remove it.

Expand full comment
Scott Smyth's avatar

That makes sense. Thanks!

Expand full comment
Ali Afroz's avatar

If anti subscriptions were a thing, then every hated blogger on a platform would earn the platform a load of money via anti subscriptions so there would be a powerful financial incentive not to kick hated bloggers off the platform as that would cost the platform all the anti subscriptions for the blogger. In fact, platforms might be incentivized to try to get more hated bloggers on their platform to get more anti subscription revenue.

Expand full comment
Man in White's avatar

Yeah, Scott talked about it other comments.

They still need "some" support to make it work, so could be worse, I guess?

Expand full comment
Purpleopolis's avatar

" In fact, platforms might be incentivized to try to get more hated bloggers on their platform to get more anti subscription revenue."

Why would this be bad? At worst, the hated people would stop posting since they wouldn't make money, or you'd select for people posting strictly for personal satisfaction.

Expand full comment
None of the Above's avatar

The big scandal comes when we learn that Substack is giving antisubscription kickbacks to its most hated writers.

Expand full comment
Imajication's avatar

Every time I see blocks of the “cute”-style housing going up I sigh to myself and think this is the price of being a YIMBY. Though maybe posting here will get get me kicked out of the YIMBY party, the NYT says this is a Nazi blog!

Expand full comment
Snags's avatar

I'm having trouble picturing what the cute-style housing is. Do you have a link to something in this vein?

Expand full comment
beleester's avatar

I'm guessing he means the 5-over-1s that are the new standard for apartment blocks? They usually have brightly colored concrete panels to make the walls more interesting. I think they're fine, but they're still fundamentally big rectangles and that probably upsets the "we used to build cathedrals" crowd.

Expand full comment
Moon Moth's avatar

They look like something an 3-year-old would make out of a random assortment of legos. Different blocks of color here and there, with different bits sticking out or recessed, and different textures added for no apparent reason.

Expand full comment
Nathan Young's avatar

This is so great. What do we have to do to get you to write more longform?

Expand full comment
Don P.'s avatar

Wait ten minutes.

Expand full comment
Paul Brinkley's avatar

I didn't spit take until just now.

Expand full comment
quiet_NaN's avatar

I think that the Land Acknowledgement as shown is Problematic because it erases almost all of the indigenous people who lived there. The Americas were settled some 18000-10000 BCE.

If the Ohlone people were the ones who settled there ~15000 BCE and held onto the land until the Spanish came along, this form of acknowledgement would be appropriate. I think there is every reason to believe that this is not what happened. While the Ohlone lived in fixed settlements and thus their land changed ownership (if they had this concept) less often than it does with nomadic peoples, I still suspect that changes through violence did occur (and the ancestors of the Ohlone may only have arrived from Siberia 1000 BCE).

Also, per Wikipedia, "[in] pre-colonial times, the Ohlone lived in more than 50 distinct landholding groups, and did not view themselves as a single unified group." Using a term they did not use to self-identify is probably as sensitive as saying "before Christianization, this land belonged to some pagans".

(I am very much not saying that the genocides committed against the First Nations were ok, just that these token apologies seem completely pointless.)

Expand full comment
AntimemeticsDivisionDirector's avatar

There's a video (which for the life of me I can't find now) where a native American speaker is being introduced at some college and they do a land acknowledgement. As soon as the speaker gets up the first thing she says is that the acknowledgement they did was in fact for the group that seized the land from HER people decades before any of them saw a white person...

Expand full comment
Feral Finster's avatar

Van Glorious.

Srslytho, was it not written that any sufficiently developed parody is indistinguishable from the real thing?

Expand full comment
Gary's avatar

Poe's Law

Expand full comment
Hyolobrika's avatar

>There is a bird from the jungles of Burma

The Romans had chickens you know. They did augery on them before battles.

Expand full comment
Anonymous Dude's avatar

"I wonder how one augur can pass another without laughing." -Cato

Expand full comment
Purpleopolis's avatar

"You wonder if there is anywhere open at this hour that will serve you a fried egg."

All-night diners are not a thing in the Bay Area? I thought you people were civilized?

Expand full comment
Doug S.'s avatar

They can't afford the rent. ;)

Expand full comment
Purpleopolis's avatar

Diner food would be ideal for food trucks -- that's where diners came from after all.

Expand full comment
Moon Moth's avatar

I have this brilliant idea to allow egg-frying equipment to be installed in individual houses, so that people can just go into another room and **fry an egg**. All I need is a technical co-founder and an introduction to some VCs.

Expand full comment
Purpleopolis's avatar

I dunno, frying an egg is more complicated than making avocado toast. Are you sure the consumer market is there?

Expand full comment
Greg G's avatar

They just need to put the automated land acknowledger in those new, lower-priced houses. Set the frequency and volume based on the price. I guess you would also want a conservative version too. Maybe it could just play "God Bless the USA" over and over. Or actually, each one should probably alternate land acknowledgement and country music to get a politics-agnostic lower price.

Expand full comment
Yug Gnirob's avatar

You can lower any house's value to rock-bottom if you just put Temporary Secretary on repeat.

...don't listen to it, it can't be unheard. It's too late for me.

Expand full comment
Greg G's avatar

Too late, I did it. Your warning just piqued my curiosity.

Housing problem solved!

Expand full comment
Doug S.'s avatar

"Unceded land" is why British common law invented the doctrine of "adverse possession" - because of all the civil wars and whatnot, people were showing up with zillion-year-old deeds to property that had been "owned" by other people for ages, and the courts made up a rule that says if you've lived on the land for enough years and its original owner hasn't tried to claim it in all that time, you get to keep it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession

Expand full comment
Thasvaddef's avatar

Has any Chinese spritual entrepeneur actually ever rigged up some prayer wheels to high-powered electric motors doing tens of thousands of revolutions per second? Or does a digital script repeating the prayer also count?

Expand full comment
Drea's avatar

The Wat Chedi Luang (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wat_Chedi_Luang) in Chiang Mai, Thailand had robots when I visited earlier this year. But more loud than fast, and I'm not sure how the Theravada Buddhist theology considers the good work done by them.

Expand full comment
Phil H's avatar

Yeah, I've never seen any deliberately designed to maximise speed, but there are certainly motorised prayer wheels in some temples.

Expand full comment
JamesLeng's avatar

I don't think anybody's eager to go down in history as the first temple where an on-duty monk died of Stuxnet.

Expand full comment
Rachel Haywire's avatar

These are hilarious, but there is also something kind of sad about a city full of such brilliant people being so boring. I also wonder if the boredom is what inspires the innovation, but then again...

Expand full comment
Anonymous Dude's avatar

What do you mean by boring?

The innovations that produced ChatGPT are pretty boring to read about for most people, but their results aren't.

An engineer who designs a method of sewage drainage that saves lives is using their creativity, but in a way that is probably boring to most people.

If you mean 'engineers aren't creative in the artistic sense', I'd agree, but there are different kinds of creativity. Maybe Silicon Valley has people who are tech-creative, but not art-creative. There are people who are both, of course, but they don't have a clear outlet...

Expand full comment
Rachel Haywire's avatar

As an art creative who no longer works in tech, I resonate with this. Yet I was speaking more on the types of personalities that attend Bay Area parties that this series captures. After a while, you just feel like you are going through the motions. I wrote about something similar here:

https://culturalfuturist.substack.com/p/the-misalignment-museum-be-careful

Expand full comment
Anonymous Dude's avatar

I guess. I mean, every place has its vibe. You could try the art scene in New York or Austin (I am not an expert here) and see if you like it better.

If I wanted to be psychological about it, I'd say that creative types have a high desire for novelty, and you got bored of SF. I do think the alignment/rationalist crowd isn't huge on aesthetics, which may be why you find them so dull. I imagine the artist crowd has other issues or you'd be hanging out with them.

I don't know if artists bridge nerds and the basic bitches...I think there was some sense in which artists brought a lot of the trends from the *humanities* and *social sciences* into the mainstream, but those people usually aren't nerds. The sciences and arts and humanities have been two cultures at least as far back as C.P. Snow.

There *is* kind of a weird situation where a lot of the nerds and techies are becoming as culturally influential as some New York publishing house writer would have been 70 years ago, with people talking about 'levelling up' their publishing skills like they're Gary Gygax and people interact on social media like they're playing a video game.

I don't know if this is really an answer to your question, but hopefully it's at least food for thought.

Expand full comment
Rachel Haywire's avatar

New York has a great art scene. Austin... probably one of the worst. I still prefer the intellectual community of SF and hope that it finds a renewed creative spirit. There used to be good parties in SF, and are still a few, though the housing situation pushes artists out or into unstable group housing. The best local parties are in the East Bay, though. Ten years ago I found the SF startup parties novel, but got sick of hearing the same names and ideas over and over again, which Scott captured well in this series. A city cannot thrive without new blood. It's like people are on autopilot now.

Expand full comment
Anonymous Dude's avatar

Could be the urban economic collapse with all the empty office buildings thanks to everyone working from home will drop rents to the point the artists come back and history repeats itself. Or SF could just turn into Detroit. But I have a little more hope for SF; the weather's better.

Thanks for confirming he really was parodying a particular social scene; I always had an idea there were people like that, but I guess you've gone there and there are.

Expand full comment
Moon Moth's avatar

Do you mean a sort of cultural involution, where people's potential is being channeled into very narrow paths, such that most of them wind up sounding the same?

Expand full comment
David Atkinson's avatar

I attended a virtual meeting based in the US while I was in Sicily... It started with a land-acknowledgment, I was going to add we should remember the Sicanians, Siculians, Elyminians, phoenecians, Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Muslims, Normans, Swabians, French, Borbouns, Italians and Mafiosi that this land was taken from... But I thought they would get irritated.

Expand full comment
Austin M's avatar

Lol. Lmao even. The double land acknowledgement and lindyman bits. Hahahaaa. Thank you!

Expand full comment
William Lane's avatar

Man, I read this thinking I could be invited to a hip Bay Area house party. Sigh.

Expand full comment
Lackadaisical Enkrateia's avatar

I don't get the title. Why bride?

Expand full comment
Gary's avatar

Probably a reference to Bride of Frankenstein, indicating that this is a sequel.

Expand full comment
Anonymous Dude's avatar

Yeah, there were a bunch of memes (predating the common use of the word) where you'd do 'return of X' and 'son of X' and 'bride of X' after you ran out of 'another' and 'yet another's, I've seen it in old Mad Magazine articles at least.

Expand full comment
CounterBlunder's avatar

I think the “antisubscription” is not a terrible idea hahahaha

Expand full comment
Loweren's avatar

> “You’re talking about a reality TV dating show, marketed to singles, as a dating strategy.”

It already exists on youtube and gets millions of views. It's called The Button and it's equally hilarious and cringe inducing.

Expand full comment
Yug Gnirob's avatar

The next generation of affordable housing will have floors made out of of sideways staircases, and ventilation tubes instead of doors.

Expand full comment
Adler Halbe's avatar

How about a "Motivation Mafia". You give us a contract with milestones on a timeline for your project and sign away our liability for any injuries you incur. To cancel the contract you must give up a significant amount of money to charity (not to us, due to the perverse incentive). Then we regularly send someone to make sure you stay motivated to work on your project. You start missing milestones, you start missing teeth. We get paid only if your project is completed, that way the incentives are perfectly aligned.

Expand full comment
Scott Alexander's avatar

This is beeminder.com (minus the missing teeth)!

Expand full comment
Lucas Van Berkel's avatar

Just brilliant

Expand full comment
Sebastian Garren's avatar

You feel like you've been going around the wheel of YIMBY discussions for a long time, when you overhear a discussion on water wheels. A British voice chimes in:

"All I'm saying is you can prove that coal deposits in north central England were not necessary to start the industrial Revolution by making continuous improvements in water wheels instead. 12th century water wheel technology could have produced 14 times more energy if they just continued innovating in that one field: Gravity buckets, Franklin turbines, and eventually more finely controlled flow systems. We could have had industrial Revolution without coal."

The new Max Roser looks skeptical.

"Well that's what my project's about. We purchased 80 acres off the Ohio River in Indiana and are building a modern housing development whose energy needs are supplied by technology exclusively possible in the 14th century. Once successful, we will make an easily producible version of our technology, release the plans open source, and pitch them to townships and municipalities in the developing world."

"Isn't this project more expensive than just using the best and most efficient modern technology?" You ask, not daring to ask what the houses will look like.

"This isn't about development economics. It's about demonstrating a particular theory of economic history."

Well, you are glad this isn't about YIMBY. But still you wonder what this has to do with progress.

Expand full comment
Charlotte Dune's avatar

So funny

Expand full comment
Greg Connolly's avatar

Delusion much)

Get help.

Expand full comment
Warmek's avatar

Does the fact that I only get about a quarter of these jokes mean that I'm old? Or just out of touch with the Bay Area, these days?

Actually, that last one would make a lot of sense.

Also, I kinda want to go to an alternate history themed restaurant. :D

Expand full comment
Gracchus's avatar

I am so very glad I moved far, far away from San Franshitsco.

Expand full comment