The Fig Economy

I *think* it hints that Sarah Churchill may be a false name, but I was skimming this thing more than reading it so I couldn’t tell you for sure.

Indeed she is. Except in the last like five pages it turns out she’s a double agent for the French too. Hon hon hon.

That sounds wild and crazy, and offensive, and it is all of those things, but in kind of a boring and flat way. Next time less secret Muslims, more shit about tracking bank accounts and ATM visits.

It’s ultimately a thriller, the good guys* have got to stop the bad guys**

*US agents who laugh about trampling rights
**secret Arabs posting as Frenchmen, an Israeli nuclear scientist helping the secret Muslims to use their attack as a pretext to kill Palestinians, an admiral’s cancer stricken GF

This is a 2003 terrorist thriller where the hero is a forensic accountant tracking the terrorists’ money to figure out their plan. That’s kind of interesting, and there’s some interesting details about hawala and stuff, but ultimately the financial stuff is pretty thin.

Just finished The Devil’s Banker by Christopher Reich. This was very much not my kind of book, but my lovely daughter got it for me for Christmas because it must be scary because it has the word Devil in the title and daddy likes scary books, so I felt I should read it.

I only drove down to and stood at the northern shore just south of Punta Arenas, but it still counts!

Which ones of these have you visited? Me, I’ve been to the edge of Magellan and across the Bosphorus.

I sometimes have trouble locking into a new author’s voice and tone, and in this case it only took until like page three for me to know I was fully on board. I expected as much based on listening to your Dark Tower eps on @talkscaredpod.bsky.social

A good thing that would disgust and fracture his base is kind of a best case scenario.

Babies are good IMO.

Let me remind you about how people felt about democrats when last they did have a leader.

“The only good technology was heroin, invented in 1874, which my shirt in my profile picture entreats everyone to legalize. I am a serious person.”

It’s one of my favorite things ever in the world.

Yep, one of those characters who is 100% locked in every time you see him.

30 rock joke that made me cackle like a fiend:

Dr Spaceman: Tracy, you’re going to die—
Tracy: What???
Dr Soaceman: —when you hear who I’m dating: Squeaky Fromm! She is…difficult.

I think there’s an enormous difference between trying to find a candidate that you think people marginally attached (or unattached) to the party will vote for in the general, and a purported faction of the party saying explicitly that they will do this. Like they’re different things entirely.

Yeah, like I think it’s easy to overstate what may functionally have only ever been a backstop that never got hit. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t really there.

That second question is a genuinely hard one because on the one hand of course we want them to refuse and on the other hand what kind of country do we have in the minutes, hours, days after they do?

I guess this is the thing, like if this just kind of ends here, with the straits open and a new ayatollah, what really even was accomplished except some people dying and some destruction?

Watched Now You See Me, Now You Don’t with the kids this weekend.

Everybody:

9YO, every time Dave Franco was onscreen: I bet what he’s doing would be easier if he took his shirt off.

Sean Penn is a pretty gross dude and his character in OBAA is reprehensible and the character as a whole and his performance of it are incredible.

So this means just shy of 50% of American households would be immediately exempted from federal income tax? I guess I’d be a little interested to know what that rate is now, but you have to jump through filing hoops to figure it out.

I’ll back up a bit and say I’m speaking of my personal experience of composable moderation, with labelers and such, and a couple of flagship examples collapsing early and hard due to some kind of factional infighting, pointing up one of the fundamental hurdles: trust.

Yeah, in retrospect composable moderation at scale could never work.

Mostly I feel like people want something that feels like it just works and aren’t interested that much in the back end. Right now it’s kind of the worst of both worlds because composable moderation is one of the pilots for federated instances and it fell flat on its face.

Bluesky needs to figure out what it wants to be because IMO “one instance of the ATProto fediverse” is essentially not what like 98% of the users of text based social media are interested in.

But this is kind of what I’m saying, we’re not out here saying the same about mail delivery (mostly, some are) or about college degrees that don’t pay for themselves on average. I don’t think on the broad left we have this purely mercenary “economics alone decide everything for us” mindset elsewhere

Which, that’s fine as an argument. Efficiency’s not nothing. But it also tends to come from quarters that would profoundly not argue from cold economic efficiency in lots of other areas (education is the big one that comes to mind).

I tend to think it’s a bigger shift than some are crediting because those models are essentially outposts where it’s not *possible* to do anything but rotational deployments, whereas what’s being proposed here is choosing that where we *could* do otherwise, for efficiency’s sake.