i don't blame anyone for not valuing what i value, nor for being unaware of the things i think are crucial to humanity.

what i learnt i learnt because i was lucky enough to have teachers willing to teach me, be patient with me, and encourage me.

but we must learn this at some point in our lives.

it is the dignity of making something beautiful and being seen as someone who makes beautiful things that is important. it is that dignity that i have learnt from artisans because it is effortless to them.

(it is that dignity that AI folks are attempting to chase and will never find)

and they don't even monetise it in favour of the people actually producing! not only 'all value is monetary value', not only 'if you can't price it it's worthless', but somehow even 'because i tell you how much something is worth i am really the person creating the value of the thing'!

industrialisation was saving the weavers from the drudgery of making clothes. but if you ask the people who make it, they will tell you there is no drudgery in it. that's something industrialists made up so that they can claim robbing people of their work is secretly good for them.

and they could see that dignity being eroded by the market every day. bad enough that their tradition was being mangled. worse that they could not hand it down because the market didn't pay. but worst, perhaps, that the injustice being done to them was being called 'progress'.

i think today we often confuse or conflate the dignity one is afforded in and by work with the joy one can find in and through it.

asking those weavers 'do you enjoy the work' didn't make sense to them. what made sense to them was that their work was dignified.

which is to say - they understood something about work.

that taking pride in it is not the same as enjoyment. that knowing that the work is important is not the same as enjoyment.

years even before that i watched as a dutch researcher asked a series of weavers 'do you enjoy weaving' and be confronted with the answer 'what do you mean do we enjoy it. it is who we are'

like, i am absolutely the monarch and sovereign of we gotta do things to do them. but. i am laughing out loud here.

when i sit next to someone in a cafe and hear them say something silly, i sometimes message a friend and go 'you won't believe what they said'.

then i move on with my life.

it is important to practice this lest i find myself too online.

i saw a screenshot of someone saying something ostensibly stupid. i later saw context of that screenshot suggesting that perhaps it was not stupid. neither of these things needs to disturb me. i can simply be happy instead.

dei

"I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused" though I didn't feel shame or recognition any time in the last 20 years

"I take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein" but not my sexual harassment, which I stand by

you cannot make this shit up

because for some reason we think the physicists are more right than everyone else

some guys at the turn of the 20th century felt bad that economists didn't do calculus like the physicists did and we've all been paying for it since

i'm not asking you to become a post-keynesian but it sure would be useful if we agreed that the labour theory of value does, in fact, have value

any cursory reading of the history of the world reveals that money is a pretty basic idea and that explaining what it is has so far proved impossible