#7[2025-05-30]StJohn Piano:Roundup |New Post: Presidential Tweet Mode
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stjohnpiano_at-solidi-in-preparation-for-international-activity-7334138828607139840-WdYX
Mood music: Just Like You Imagined, by Nine Inch Nails
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P_YISMJ4sQ
Excerpt from Housing Is Both a Product and an Investment, by Michael Magoon
https://substack.com/home/post/p-136980783
Housing is unusual because it is both a consumer product and an investment. Most products that you buy on the market depreciate rapidly after the initial purchase. This makes them extremely poor investments.
When a person buys a home, however, they are not only purchasing a place to live. They are also purchasing an investment that can potentially accrue more value over time. For many homeowners, their house is their most substantial investment.
...
This places the financial interests of homeowners in direct conflict with those who do not own homes.
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#8[2025-05-31]Guillermo Pablos Murphy:Late-stage Capitalism & Techno-feudalism |I see the term "late-stage capitalism" everywhere online.
Its persistence is proof of Marxism's staying-power as a tool of critique, but I question its usefulness beyond that.
Because of its symbolic implications. Words shape and reveal our beliefs. And each belief allows us _not to think about something_.
"Late-stage capitalism" is fatalistic. The system is spent but can’t die. It lets us avoid alternatives. It aestheticizes collapse. It turns politics into content. Absurdities into punchlines. Organizers into grifters. "Welcome to late-stage capitalism. What did you expect?" Full ironic detachment. It dissuades _action_.
I’m searching for other terms - ones that accurately frame what is happening but also ask "What is to be done?".
"Techno-feudalism" does both. It breaks the liberal frame of profit through commodity exchange for one of rent extraction. It implies that we rank somewhere in a feudal hierarchy. It also suggests change: feudalism has come and gone before.
1 reply
StJohn Piano
Agree. Speaking of where things are going, I was reading Peter Turchin today. Excerpt from: …
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#9[2025-06-01]StJohn Piano:Agree.
Speaking of where things are going, I was reading Peter Turchin today.
Excerpt from: No Revolution without Counter-Revolution, by Peter Turchin
https://substack.com/home/post/p-162797899
Any revolution is a struggle between the ruling elites and counter-elites. Once counter-elites gain power and attempt to build a new social order, the ci-devant (meaning former, or “have-been”) elites face a stark choice. They can accept defeat and acquiesce to downward social mobility, or they can turn into a sort of “counter-counter-elites” or, in more common terminology, counter-revolutionaries. Historical experience shows that there are always substantial segments of such erstwhile elites who chose to plot and fight.
1 reply
Duncan Tertius-Froude
Good article. Thanks for sharing. The author quotes Matt Taibbi, who in turn quotes Anne …
#10[2025-06-01]Sam Gödel-Conway:Conversations with ChatGPT #1 |An exploration of how to make a new, productive online forum that improves the professional lives of its members.
https://chatgpt.com/share/683c0e22-e854-800b-ae9d-c89b2784b4ac
Selected points:
- Let users build recognizable profiles with credibility signals.
- Auto-generate a public user portfolio from high-quality posts.
- Stronger credibility signals come from traceable, structured, exportable proof of value, not just social likes. Make every user look like an author worth citing.
- Require public sponsorship by an existing user for a new user to join.
- Treat reputation as a slow-earned, high-stakes currency, not a social freebie. Make it traceable, limit its issuance, and watch the graph.
- Meta-Point: You’re not building a “forum.” You’re building a reputation graph with social context and visible lineage.
- Data Science is a good target field. Content-rich, collaborative, shareable, professionally helpful.
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#11[2025-06-01]Duncan Tertius-Froude:Good article. Thanks for sharing.
The author quotes Matt Taibbi, who in turn quotes Anne Applebaum:
“Anne Applebaum of the Atlantic suggested a reason resistance hasn’t been more forceful is a divide among protesting demographics, between those playing by old rules, and those ready for obliquely-defined “new” solutions.”
Further, I suspect the counter-revolutionaries are searching for a new sacred cause. BLM and the voter coalition it galvanized were enough in 2020 - it won the streets and the polls, but events have made that winning narrative untenable (especially Israel-Palestine). Now, MAGA has won the polls and could feasibly win the streets if they needed to.
If I was a counter-revolutionary, I'd be scouting for the force that will drive young men to act for those “new” solutions.