Happy solstice. Happy indigenous people's day. Happy (delayed) juneteenth. Happy day of royal assent for bill C-15, enshrining a somewhat vague requirement to abide by UNDRIP in Canada's legal system.

I walked to down and got some summer supplies. I did some hobby work, I read some Alison Bechdel, I watched the sun set.

I felt relatively good. Six ( Read more... )

( on induced demand -- longer, snarkier and a bit more archaic/chauvinistic than usual )

But to see mechanization and automation purely as a problem in comparative cost is greatly to minimize their role -- and to pay further for the error of confining economic goals, and economic calculation, to profit maximization. The technostructure, as noted, seeks technical progressiveness for its own sake when this is not in conflict with other ( Read more... )

[CW: slavery, white supremacy, violence]

I had a long-form rambling blog post here about Juneteenth that I ultimately didn't like the tone or arrangement of. But I did like some of its content, so I'll try to reproduce that here in a significantly shorter, hopefully more-readable point-form post.

( some reflections )

If children survived to age seven, their recognized life began, more or less as miniature adults. Childhood was already over. The childishness noticeable in medieval behaviour, with its marked inability to restrain any kind of impulse, may have been simply due to the fact that so large a proportion of active society was actually very young in years ( Read more... )

Observations noted in From Krivine’s machine to the Caml implementations (Leroy, 2005):
In every area where abstract machines help, there are arguably better alternatives ( Read more... )

Rust 2019 and beyond: limits to (some) growth.

This is a blog post (as solicited) about my suggestions for the Rust project in 2019 and beyond.
( observations and advice )

God I love this book!

Until the end of World War II or shortly thereafter, planning was a moderately evocative word in the United States. It implied a sensible concern for what might happen in the future and a disposition, by forehanded action, to forestall avoidable disfunction or misfortune. As persons won credit for competent planning of their ( Read more... )

I am also concerned to show how, in this larger context of change, the forces inducing human effort have changed. This assaults the most majestic of all economic assumptions, namely that man, in his economic activities, is subject to the authority of the market. Instead we have an economic system which, whatever its formal ideological billing, is, ( Read more... )

It's Nov 12 (which is the skip-a-day dislocation of Nov 11 for weekday-holiday reasons), and it's 2018. Which means it's 100 years after the Armistice was signed ending the Great War, a.k.a. WWI ( Read more... )