drew mca
@drewmca.net
1K followers 2.1K following 790 posts
software @ mathematica.org media & public engagement @colorado.edu research @medlabboulder.bsky.social building @pmsky.social cooperatives, protocols, collaboration drewmca.net
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drewmca.net
It’s #bandcampfriday!
Go checkout subvert.fm 😄
drewmca.net
bmann.ca
Boris @bmann.ca · 12d
ATProto OAuth libraries forked and patched to work with Cloudflare Workers
drewmca.net
I did just see @bmann.ca talking about this the other day
drewmca.net
This is the way to phrase it. That part should be in the headline
david.noll.org
Ladies and gentlemen, the meritocracy
Ms. Halligan, who took over on Monday after her predecessor quit rather than prosecute James B. Comey with what he believed was insufficient evidence, had a little trouble with the first two tasks. At one point, she entered the wrong courtroom. When she found the right one, she stood on the wrong side of the judge, then appeared confused about the paperwork she just had signed.
drewmca.net
The most infuriating part of this whole thing is the details being left out.

Headline: Comey Indicted!
By who? An interim? Why did they just start? The AG resigned? Why did they leave?

**because there wasn’t enough evidence to indict Comey**

Why have I only seen that mentioned once????
kylegriffin1.bsky.social
New on MSNBC: According to the court transcript, only 14 of the 23 grand jurors voted in favor of indicting James Comey on the two counts that went forward.
drewmca.net
Closed source / corporate controlled algorithms are a large source of societal ills, ban them
drewmca.net
It’s only been a few months and I’m already nostalgic hah
drewmca.net
Currently cramming the protocol reader ahead of @protocolized.bsky.social’s symposium this week, feels like I’m back in grad school 😄
drewmca.net
Zoning is mostly if not entirely at the city, maybe county level. The major exception is roads, which largely fall under the state’s jurisdiction (afaik)
drewmca.net
It was a 2011 study so that checks out.

There’s also this, from Utah’s Department of Environmental Quality, (ostensibly more recently) claiming 1 3.5hp gas mower is equivalent to 11 new cars

deq.utah.gov/communicatio...
#NoMowDays: Trim Lawnmower Air Pollution - Utah Department of Environmental Quality
Trim lawnmower air pollution by trying #NoMowDays, switching to electric, upgrading your gas can, or mowing later in the day for better air
deq.utah.gov
drewmca.net
Fun fact, there is way less regulation on these things, so their efficiency and carbon output tends to be massively worse.

One study found that running a gas leaf blower for an hour is like driving an F150 from Texas to Alaska and back!
sheridesabike.bsky.social
Ban gas-powered leaf blowers and gardening tools. I am in the 40th minute of listening to this shit for a property that isn't even that big. Even with noise-canceling headphones, it's crap.

Ban ICE and ICE (internal combustion engines).
drewmca.net
Forgot I wrote this thread too when I originally read that piece 😄
drewmca.net
Taking a break to post an enlightening thought experiment from the reading for week 8 of comparative political economy: Robert Bates' 1989 "Beyond the Miracle of the Market". This comes from the introduction, making the case for institutions as a unit of analysis via a thought experiment. (1/13)
drewmca.net
Too lazy to repost but here’s the highlights
drewmca.net
And it still hasn’t stopped, 65 pages in
Page 65 of “Owning the Future” by Buller and Lawrence:
“significant swathes of the economy and set to take more.
Unifying ownership and control, the explosive growth of the sector presages a further concentration of economic power. However, contrary to the industry's claims of investing in a productive post-pandemic future, extensive research details the extractive practices favoured by many private equity firms, including loading companies with debt (thereby reducing tax burdens) and asset stripping (such as selling company assets only to lease them back, with the private equity firm rather than the company retaining the cash from the sale).* The corporate form risks being ransacked further through the historic shifts in ownership underway.
On David and Goliath: a Democratising Agenda for the Corporation
We do not, then, live in the world envisioned by the advocates of shareholder primacy, nor in the socialised corporation imagined by Marx or Keynes. Instead, what has come to pass is a deep and ongoing monopolisation of ownership and control rights in the economy, epitomised by the systemic power of the asset management giants, with corporations increasingly reduced to vehicles for extracting income for passive rentier investors. How then can we reimagine the corporation as a vehicle for democratic production, resuscitating the emancipatory potential many have identified in the corporate form?
There is no way that, on the current institutional foun-dations, we can build a world where production is organised democratically to meet society's fundamental needs. Today, property is privileged over the security and dignity of the vast majority, who are subjected to exploitation, coercive…” Page 67 of “Owning the Future” by Buller and Lawrence
“The task ahead is to replace private authority over production with a truly democratic and social institution that organises investment to meet needs based on work undertaken under conditions of substantive freedom within and beyond the firm. That means ensuring the question of the purpose of production is subject to democratic nego-tiation. The corporation is not in any meaningful sense a
'private institution; to the contrary, it's a thoroughly public space, and one of the few that we have been content to maintain as fundamentally undemocratic. Why submit to the prerogatives of the rentier shareholder, managerial elites, and asset management titans, when economic coordination rights within and beyond the corporation could just as easily be organised to serve the many?* Reimagining the corporate form is no small feat, but in fundamental terms, the democratic economy begins where the primacy of property ends.
Reclaiming the Common Wealth: First Principles
The rights enjoyed by owners of capital are not natural, they have been constructed over time through sustained political effort and cemented beneath layers of legal precedent and codes written to construct and protect wealth generating assets.* In contrast to the idea that societal development has travelled along some inevitable path towards the 'end of history', the rights of different classes and peoples have ebbed and flowed, reflecting historically specific distributions of bargaining power within societies.
We need only look to European or Chinese models of corporate ownership to see the range of possibilities, even within the parameters of the present. The dominance of…”
drewmca.net
I really liked this thought experiment, so I annotated it and posted it here, mostly for my own future reference.

It's pulled from the introduction to Robert Bates' "Beyond the Miracle of the Market," book on midcentury economic development in Kenya after gaining their independence from Britain.
Bates' Gedanken on Property Rights
A thought experiment that shows the primacy of property rights in economic systems
leaflet.drewmca.net
drewmca.net
As another option, in parallel to mandating a maximum pay ratio. Both/and, imo
drewmca.net
So we should make all wages public, and introduce tools that facilitate and enable better collective bargaining.
drewmca.net
How about a thought experiment?

Obviously this trend needs to be reversed, but a mandated max ratio is only one option.

CEO pay ballooned largely because 1) pay is public and 2) smaller group of people, so less of a collective action problem. Anything else I’m missing?
publiccitizen.bsky.social
Starbucks CEO pay: $96 MILLION
Starbucks worker pay: $15,000

Coca-Cola CEO pay: $28 MILLION
Coca-Cola worker pay: $14,000

CEOs used to make like 20x the average worker.
In 2024, the average CEO earned 632x more.

The system is rigged.
drewmca.net
I am a Newhousian on this issue
alexbnewhouse.bsky.social
as a reminder of the newhousian approach to this, I strongly support doubling the size of the House of Reps and making every additional seat proportionally allocated (thus resulting in a mixed-member legislature)

also abolish the senate
gelliottmorris.com
Most voters also say that single-member districts are unfair to the minority party in deep red/blue states. We asked if voters would support a system that allocated House seats by party proportional to the share of the vote they win statewide, and 46% said yes (27% no).
drewmca.net
@adriennebuller.bsky.social and @mathewlawrence.bsky.social’s Owning the Future goes incredibly hard in just the first few pages
drewmca.net
Great choice for the drive - enjoy Cambridge!
drewmca.net
Could a strategy involve city bonds somehow? Idk