centrally-unplanned - Tumblr blog

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I too love noticing how, when there is no genocide going on, the famous people all fade away and we live in atomized localism, but then when a genocide starts celebrities just start popping out of the woodwork like termites feasting on our political consciousness. Tswift concert ticket sales directly tracking refugee numbers and the like.

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Do I recommend reading The Great Transformation today, you are obviously asking, just bombarding my inbox to know? Presuming you are interested in economic history? No, and not even primarily for the above reason - its a complex book touching on a ton of political economy topics, but time has marched on for many of those topics, and so its just a confusing mess to sort the right from wrong and relevant from irrelevant. It would be the least efficient way to learn about anything it touches.

But if you care about the history of economic history and the "debates" that have raged through it and the related disciplines, its not optional, you have to read it. Not just because its "famous", I try not to do that - you can skip Das Kapital for example, its not a bad work but its a very inefficient way to get to Marx's important ideas, or like Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population you already know, the summary gets you the content, don't worry about it. But The Great Transformation is one of those works that is touching on every one of the big debates of its era in substantive ways and pushing it forward. I could edit it for sure, you prob need only 50% of the chapters - but for our purposes that is a high percentage.

Saw some discussions of people "taking down" Karl Polanyi's 1944 The Great Transformation in response to some other articles mentioning it, which is always amusing to me because its a very dead horse to beat. In short, Polanyi was the founder of the "markets-as-modernity" idea, where before the modern era states and economies did not function on supply and demand, but instead on things like gift and reciprocity. It was never a very coherent idea (Supply and demand is an inherent aggregating feature of human society) but direct evidence has compounded with logic to relegate it into the past. His ideas that say ancient Babylon had centralized prices built around temple donations has been set aside in the face of the evidence of incredibly complex exchange economies that ran through Mesopotamia - we even see things like derivative contracts! Because of course you do, financial risk is inherent to economics, so societies will experiment around mitigating it.

There is a perfectly coherent "steelmanned" version of this idea that is quite robust today - markets are always with us and were never invented, but they are also socially constructed and their scope changes based on context, with a large modern expansion. Did the Roman Empire have a market for wages, alongside goods? Yes, of course it did - but that market was quite "distorted" by the mass-scale slavery endemic to the economy. Slave vs free labor economies both have "markets" and function alongside them, but for the actual lived human experience these are night and day systems, and based on deep social institutions, not at all "inherent abstract forces". Lots of societies had differences like this - sometimes ancient governments did try to dictate prices! They failed, but they tried, its a difference.

And more broadly under low-productivity systems most people engaged in subsistence farming, and interacted minimally with trade systems. If most of your economic "units" don't engage in trade, the markets don't matter as much, but over time this changed, and as more and more people "entered" the market that is both a change in itself and created knock-on effects in urbanization, specialization, financial institutions, etc, that is totally fair to describe as a "transformation". Starting in the 18th century its very clear the world began a rapid shift to specialization & wage labor in a way never seen before, its a new society in many ways.

Problem is none of this steelman is anywhere close to what Polanyi was saying. He was definitely claiming that market exchanges and supply and demand price shifting and all that were optional, and could be (and historically were) replaced by gifts or redistribution policies or the like. He is just wrong about this and there is no reason to bother trying to rehabilitate it. Doesn't make him wrong about everything! States definitely also "constructed" markets and put a lot of work into that, for example, a big point of his. But you see the "pre-market era of history" pop up in discourse, journalism, politics, etc from time to time, and as an economic historian its always a groan moment. No one is debating this anymore.

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Saw some discussions of people "taking down" Karl Polanyi's 1944 The Great Transformation in response to some other articles mentioning it, which is always amusing to me because its a very dead horse to beat. In short, Polanyi was the founder of the "markets-as-modernity" idea, where before the modern era states and economies did not function on supply and demand, but instead on things like gift and reciprocity. It was never a very coherent idea (Supply and demand is an inherent aggregating feature of human society) but direct evidence has compounded with logic to relegate it into the past. His ideas that say ancient Babylon had centralized prices built around temple donations has been set aside in the face of the evidence of incredibly complex exchange economies that ran through Mesopotamia - we even see things like derivative contracts! Because of course you do, financial risk is inherent to economics, so societies will experiment around mitigating it.

There is a perfectly coherent "steelmanned" version of this idea that is quite robust today - markets are always with us and were never invented, but they are also socially constructed and their scope changes based on context, with a large modern expansion. Did the Roman Empire have a market for wages, alongside goods? Yes, of course it did - but that market was quite "distorted" by the mass-scale slavery endemic to the economy. Slave vs free labor economies both have "markets" and function alongside them, but for the actual lived human experience these are night and day systems, and based on deep social institutions, not at all "inherent abstract forces". Lots of societies had differences like this - sometimes ancient governments did try to dictate prices! They failed, but they tried, its a difference.

And more broadly under low-productivity systems most people engaged in subsistence farming, and interacted minimally with trade systems. If most of your economic "units" don't engage in trade, the markets don't matter as much, but over time this changed, and as more and more people "entered" the market that is both a change in itself and created knock-on effects in urbanization, specialization, financial institutions, etc, that is totally fair to describe as a "transformation". Starting in the 18th century its very clear the world began a rapid shift to specialization & wage labor in a way never seen before, its a new society in many ways.

Problem is none of this steelman is anywhere close to what Polanyi was saying. He was definitely claiming that market exchanges and supply and demand price shifting and all that were optional, and could be (and historically were) replaced by gifts or redistribution policies or the like. He is just wrong about this and there is no reason to bother trying to rehabilitate it. Doesn't make him wrong about everything! States definitely also "constructed" markets and put a lot of work into that, for example, a big point of his. But you see the "pre-market era of history" pop up in discourse, journalism, politics, etc from time to time, and as an economic historian its always a groan moment. No one is debating this anymore.

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As is my brand, gonna be the YIMBY in the room who pushes back on this a bit. Repeal parking minimums in Spokane if you want, its a dumb subsidy, but I doubt it would change too much because urbanism isn't one size fits all. Spokane is a "city" of 230,000 people; its not small but its certainly not large, and by city we mean a wide field of suburban lots. And its in Middle Of Nowhere, Washington, it is no exurb of Seattle or anything like that.

If you live in Spokane its because you want to live in a suburban house with a yard and stuff. There is not much of a point in trying to make Spokane like Seattle, Seattle is Seattle, that is where the dense urban living and tech jobs and all that in the area are gonna go. Meanwhile Spokane's big industries are like wheat farming & logging. Many people like suburbia, they want that lifestyle, and Spokane's economic realities are built for that. Which means that everyone is, inherently, going to drive everywhere, which means they want parking next to every place they want to go. Which means stores are gonna build that parking to meet the demand.

If Spokane individually wants to embark on densification & walkability, its welcome to, but most "Spokane's" in America won't because there isn't enough people who want that. And there certainly wouldn't be enough if the actual high-demand cities like Seattle did actually launch more real expansions, which is what urban living people actually want. So its a bit of an "eye on the prize" issue - some places are going to want suburbia, and in suburbia everywhere needs parking. No reason to try to fight the least impactful battles imo.

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The extreme irony of Trump sometimes being the most authentic politician around

one of the greatest to ever do it

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Look they arent doing homework anymore we got to teach them grit somehow

Apparently college campuses across the nation have decided to show their commitment to student safety by inviting armed men to beat their students with truncheons.

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(Source - Jiankun Yu)

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Its doubly funny to try to do this with "incels" - they are pretty much not real! Not in like a political movement sense, it was like some dudes on a subreddit and the rest is just memes. They aren't "taking power" or threatening anything culturally; and ofc they are already at maximum social outcast status, you can't rehabilitate them even if you wanted to. The idea that you need to "fight back" against incels is one of the purest examples of inventing an enemy.

incels on tiktok: women are blackpilled on looksmaxxing after a stacy got 52m views

people in real life: hey man how's it going

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I dont think we consider it acceptable to intentionally inflict pain on animals either though, right? Outside of specific contexts - which we have for babies too ofc, we get them vaxxed or w/e and ignore their cries as we do.

I think the 'care less/no agency' dichotomy is a bit of a trap - we lack agency, therefore we care less. Ethics like most things are forged in the breach.

One bullet I happily bite in debates around animal utils & happiness is a comparison often made of like "you can't say the pain of an animal means less because its less intelligent, that means you would care less about the pain of a baby, its probably not self aware either". Which, yes, is true, which is why I dont care about baby pain as much! I dont think this is a hot take at all actually- babies scream and cry about literally anything and have no clear logic to it, we socially ignore their pain all the time. People dont put it that way but revealed preferences they definitely do not treat baby pain that seriously. We generally do not view them as being in a hellish maelstorm, instead just probably not sensorially developed.

'Not caring as much' is far from not caring, of course, I don't like babies in pain. And this entire analogy is based on the premise that say chickens are dubiously self aware and maybe don't experience pain in the same way, which is not at all proven (just like with babies, this is probabilistic), I'm not really commenting on the object-level debate much at all here. But this isnt the only context where arguments around "you wouldn't treat a *baby* differently ethics-wise, would you?" can come up where the answer is "actually probably yeah I would".

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Me, your aniblogger mutual, getting fucking roasted rn:

where do people go for seasonal previews now?

I have a hard time figuring out what's watchable from a bare list, so I don't have a good sense of “what’s on” and “what’s good”

are there any good “anibloggers” out there?

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That photograph was taken on the last day of our fatal summer and just a few minutes before we made our second and final attempt to thwart fate. Under the flimsiest of pretexts (this was our very last chance, and nothing really mattered) we escaped from the café to the beach, and found a desolate stretch of sand, and there, in the violet shadow of some red rocks forming a kind of cave, had a brief session of avid caresses, with somebody’s lost pair of sunglasses for only witness. I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu.

Rereading Lolita and we don't talk about how fucking funny it is enough. "Four months later she died of typhus in Corfu", no indent, no period, nothing - just the smooth, transitional confidence of a fearless writer delivering his mocking sex to death twist.

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One bullet I happily bite in debates around animal utils & happiness is a comparison often made of like "you can't say the pain of an animal means less because its less intelligent, that means you would care less about the pain of a baby, its probably not self aware either". Which, yes, is true, which is why I dont care about baby pain as much! I dont think this is a hot take at all actually- babies scream and cry about literally anything and have no clear logic to it, we socially ignore their pain all the time. People dont put it that way but revealed preferences they definitely do not treat baby pain that seriously. We generally do not view them as being in a hellish maelstorm, instead just probably not sensorially developed.

'Not caring as much' is far from not caring, of course, I don't like babies in pain. And this entire analogy is based on the premise that say chickens are dubiously self aware and maybe don't experience pain in the same way, which is not at all proven (just like with babies, this is probabilistic), I'm not really commenting on the object-level debate much at all here. But this isnt the only context where arguments around "you wouldn't treat a *baby* differently ethics-wise, would you?" can come up where the answer is "actually probably yeah I would".

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Lmao how is this real, "the ambient sounds of the world were wrong, sir"

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Ah glad someone wrote this, that viral article was definitely overselling its point via muddling medium and demos, I lacked the citations to rebut that this author has mustered well.

Re: how many copies of a book are sold in a year: this article makes the point that it is very easy to use these statistics in a misleading way if you are (say) a publisher who wants to portray themselves as Just A Little Guy to the DOJ, or if you don’t have a detailed breakdown of what publishing statistics represent.

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They say you die three deaths; once when you make your final post, once when your account is deactivated, and once, far into the future, when a post of yours is reblogged for the last time.

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And as is a surprise to few who saw the promotional material, the visuals are just weak. Its "fine" when its doing a close up? But the animation can get choppy, and at distance shots things really start to fall apart - individual elements of the background work, but the compositing of the elements is very flat and they aren't blended together with the right lighting/shadowing. They don't come together as cohesive scenes - and in a fantasy setting that is an issue as you need to world build, you can't just go "whatever its a high school".

Idk prob biased due to my own aesthetics but I feel like the original looks better at a design level? Everything here is just washed out, its the "light bloom" era of anime sure but here its all light, no bloom:

While in the original everything has depth of contrast in the color & the sharper lines:

And ofc its not like the light bloom era doesn't have that depth; Hibike Euphonium is airing right now, its obviously very doable. But I think the way you make a "budget" anime now lends itself towards this style (I don't 100% get the causation on that), and it is effective production-wise but it leaves its mark.

Alright watching the new Spice & Wolf. This is probably going to be an emotionally muddled one for me - when I first saw the original as a college boy, I really loved it. Its conceptually checks off a lot of boxes for me; focus on economics, "realistic" low magic fantasy setting, adult characters with plots built around the struggles of everyday living, and also a hot foxgirl. In particular, it had a "there wasn't anything else like it" factor - you really can't find another mainstream anime with the focus that it has.

Alas in hindsight I was giving the show a lot of credit it didn't deserve because of said premises. It doesn't really delivers on them - its trade/economics plots tend to be either weak, using simple or illogical tricks, or on the flip side convoluted, with all of these like betrayals and counter-deceptions that actual merchant life would never really have. More importantly, its pretty bad at conveying these stories - a lot of time is spent with like two people sitting in chairs discussing exchange rates or w/e via dialogue which is not a great way to do that. This is visual information in a visual medium, make charts or little graphics, make it fun! Take notes from Dr Stone on this one. And since none of this is fun the show tended to throw in like church kidnappers and other "actiony" plots to supplement it, which is a bit of a cop-out

And alongside that Holo & Lawrence's dynamic is very will-they-won't-they, not a ton of progression, the visuals are a bit flat, and has more than its fair share of unneeded fanservice. Its a very "of the era" anime in its style and directing. None of this is to say I hate it or anything, I still like it, but now its more of a "sure why not" show over a favourite, except for the fact that due to history there is a sense of attachment that lingers.

From what I can tell, the current remake is going to repeat every single one of these problems and improve on nothing! Lets find out I guess.