domain:eigenrobot.substack.com
No_one
52m ago
Bureaucrats used to be a lot better in the 40s, accumulation of bloat and it all went to the shitter after Carter on purpose lost that lawsuit over competence exams.
erwgv3g34
20m ago
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
just now
Your semi-trolly comment is based on the shared cultural assumptions that housework = drudgery and art = purpose. We can automate processes, but not purpose, so on the path to eliminating the drudgery of housework, we eliminate the drudgery of soulless art. But people want to do art - not corporate memphis prints of mixed families at a picnic, they want to express themselves. So even while corporations all converge on an art style specifically designed to be 'inoffensive' and mass produced, even as ai makes it trivial to 'bring your imagination to life' and ghiblify your photos, people wistfully dream of the day they can stop working and make art. IGOR beat Father of Asahd in every conceivable metric. We might not notice authenticity, but our brains do.
On a similar note, if you pick a career as an artist to make money, you should get the paint in your house tested for lead. You pick a career as an artist because you want to express yourself more than you want to make money - stupid maybe, but it's true. Sometimes you have to make money anyway though. Does that make your expression inauthentic? No, because it's still driven by purpose. And necessity is the mother of invention. Simply by choosing a life of squalor so you don't have to work 9 to 5 (what a way to make a livin! (fuck that's what I'm singing for the rest of the day now)) positions you to make authentic art. Does that mean you will make authentic art? No, you can still make slop for a paycheck, and that slop might even be popular if you put your soul into it. I don't think anyone would disagree that The Boondock Saints was slop, an attempt to cash in on the Tarantino bubble of 90s movies about hitmen. It is also earnest as fuck and people love it for that.
Artistry is at all times a battle between those who wish to express themselves and those who wish to turn that expression into money. Sometimes and in some places it leans one way, while in other times and places it leans the other. Hair metal and bands like Poison look soulless in comparison to Nirvana and Hair Metal dies, then grunge gets coopted by corporate and refined and streamlined until we get Creed, who look soulless in comparison to The Strokes, and so on, same as it ever was (in case you don't like Dolly).
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
3m ago
Rabbi Balkany, the leading lobbyist for Haredi Jewry in DC, married into one of most important Haredi dynasties, did not blackmail billionaire Steve Cohen in order to reap a meager 180k salary from his school. However, as you note, this is my fault, for not providing the abundant evidence necessary to persuade an unfamiliar and perhaps somewhat naive reader who cannot make the natural extrapolation that a highly influential DC fixer for decades is not blackmailing Steve fucking Cohen just to receive a tiny salary from his Jewish day school.
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His salary was 180k, while his revenue stream from his small business Rite Care was 450k
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One of the two requested subjects of donation was a different Haredi school that he was not involved in, which he had no way of financially benefitting from
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He was involved in “expediting” Jewish school funding through DC connections as early as 1987
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“In 1994, Milton Balkany, a conservative Republican active in political fundraising,[22] tried to have Luchins excommunicated by a Jewish religious court,[13] blaming him for having "caused yeshivas in the land of Israel to lose money",[23] after Luchins had complained about Balkany's efforts to compel Israeli government officials to use U.S. aid money for projects Balkany favored in Israel.[24]”. This is not someone who is in it for greed! He is more like the sacrificing commander of a foreign army. He is in it for his tribe, giving them money and funds. Trying to have another Jew excommunicated because he didn’t want American aid going for Yeshiva funding. This is a very loyal lieutenant of the Jewish cause.
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He helped Jewish funding as far away as Russia
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He worked to ensure orthodox Jews got half of NYC’s school vouchers
This is not a guy who does things for personal benefit. In typical fashion, I imagine he would have pocketed some of Cohen’s money, or sent some of it to another Jewish endeavor. But the overarching real reason behind doing this was to fund the Jewish schools. Haredi corruption is like this. The Cars4Kids, the 1bil in nyc public funds, etc.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6m ago
I mean again, you’re still stuck with having a guy point a real gun at a person’s head with a real bullet in it and really pulling the trigger. It’s a thing you can’t just gloss over. If Trump decided to fake it, he’s either stupid or crazy because if even the slightest thing goes wrong. He moves tge wrong way suddenly, the wind changes, the sun pops out from behind a cloud, tge scope is a few millimeters off, the shooter gets nervous, or he for some reason has to rush tge shot, there’s no way to be sure that this very real bullet fired from a very real gun doesn’t end up in Trump’s very real brain. We know it was a real bullet fired because it hit people in the crowd behind him. And all of this assumes it’s not at 19 year old dietary aide and community college graduate using a rifle he shoots paper targets at in a gun club once a week. A professional sniper wouldn’t dare try it, an amateur would undoubtedly kill his client trying something like this even at close range, let alone off the top of a building several hundred yards away. If you had a top sniper at gun range distance try to graze the ear of a baliastics gel head that’s randomly moving without hitting the rest of the head, I’d be shocked if anyone could do it even 1/20 times.
SkoomaDentist
44m ago
Now let’s not be hasty. Surely you have some less evil alternatives such as a high ranking Scientology cult operative, North Korean prison camp guard or perhaps a mass murderer?
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
14m ago
−10,000 social-credit points for hurting the feelings of the Chinese people.
My father was a career NCO in the USMC, retired in the early 90s. Apparently the military is, or at least was, ripe with various theories and conjectures. His take on UFOs/UAP was that someone(s), somewhere made a decision to deliberately trick a small number of the most gormless, credulous service members in all the branches into having sort of staged experiences to leave them with the impression that there actually was knowledge of UFOs in the USG somewhere, its generally well covered up, but somehow a steady trickle of corporals and specialists were leaving the service absolutely convinced that they saw something they weren't supposed to see or otherwise experienced direct evidence of aliens. I've met a few of these intrepid veterans myself over the years and they really did seem absolutely convinced, though they were quite poor at actually communicating their experiences of describing the 'evidence' they witnessed. As to why the DoD/USG decided to plant misinformation in a subset of the troops and release them in to the general population to spread their stories, this was never clear.
The most common story I heard was usually about them witnessing some technology or phenomena that obviously could only have been reverse engineered from, or made out of, salvaged alien technology. A few attributed nuclear power/weapons generally to this.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
32m ago
Great work! I've included some real lightweight shit in there this year so it's been easy.
God, if only big-business-influenced technical-bureaucratic elites really ran things, instead of the ideologically captured bureaucratic and political and academic progressive elites we actually have (on average, of course). It's so weird to conflate Big Business and Big Government in a world where Lina Khan Thought is popular on Left and Right.
Independent central banks are wonderful inventions it must also be said.
In other words, FDR-loving progressives are responsible for the administrative state's regulatory growth and misadventures, not our kindly corporate overlords, who fundamentally wanna make a buck by increasing consumer welfare.
We have not had "an ostensibly apolitical technocracy" in many government agencies in a long time. The DoD and DoJ were some of the best ones here, but public administration theory gave up on neutrality/objectivity as "impossible" a long time ago as a field.
Sadly, the consistent attempt of political neutrality, or even the pretense, was a load-bearing effort, even if imperfect. Hard to get it back now.
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