Saturday! It’s a Weekend!

I actually started addressing mailers last night, and boy have I become extremely uncertain about where some people are receiving mail these days!

So that’s probably today’s big project, if I get to it.

I read some more Jenny Schwartz last night — I only have one book left in the Shaman’s and Shifters series. “Shattered Earth” is the story of Kohia and Nairo, as they go check out that mining camp on nuclear-wintered-Earth. “Jingle Stars” was Becky Chambers’ _A Closed and Common Orbit_ level grim at times.

I have a couple of things I want to write up here because I’ve been thinking about them a lot and need to get them out of my head.

ETA: Ok, I got the under-analyzed inadequate compensation for risk thing and the role exhaustion thing out, at least in skeletal form. Yay! I cleaned out the fridge and made turkey under biscuit with leftovers and a carrot from the farm share and some celery from the store. Pretty excited about this! I’ve been using more butter cautiously and eating a few things out at restaurants that have butter but no other dairy and so far no ill effects. I used a combination of butter and olive oil for the biscuits this time. I’m all out of soft white, so it’s hard red (and it is the really huge grained Yecora Rojo) for the biscuits and I was a little worried about how wet it looked, but I let it sit for a minute and it hydrated beautifully. Fingers crossed!

ETAYA: turkey under biscuit turned out great. I’m almost done addressing the photo mailers and have started in on the cards. Going smoothly so far.

ETA Still More: I finished reading Schwartz’ Shamans and Shifters, The Ceph Sector. “Jingle Stars” occurs in the middle of it. I just cannot even express how much fun Lelwani is as a character and the Ceph as a community / race / species. Absolutely bonkers fun.

Inadequate compensation for acceptance of risk

Recently, I read this column by Matt Levine: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-12-04/citi-traders-didn-t-know-the-rules, which includes this paragraph:

“That trader argued that “there was scarce compliance training while he was in his role from 2014 and had raised concerns numerous times about the processes.” Nobody told him that he wasn’t allowed to do this, he said, and a court agreed. Citi wasn’t allowed to do it, so it had to fire him, but he didn’t know that he wasn’t allowed to do it, so Citi wasn’t allowed to fire him.”

Shortly before that, I listened to the multi-part Odd Lots about the tournament system in raising chickens, Beak Capitalism.

Here is how that system is presented by the perpetrators: https://www.chickencheck.in/faq/tournament-system/

Obviously, random factors result in a ton of the flock-to-flock variance (did the flock get bird flu, say); it’s not all under the control of the person feeding and housing the flock.

Finally, I think we’ve all absorbed, from direct participation or consuming news or talking to friends who gave it a try, how the Uber/Lyft/Instacart/etc. all offload a lot of investment cost and a disproportionate amount of the risk-that-cannot-be-controlled onto “independent” operators who are locked into a system in which they will be lucky not to lose all their investment and have virtually zero chance of making their money back.

Obviously, franchising systems and MLMs have existed since forever, and are more of the same. Why do people do this? Well, people would like to “be their own boss”, “have more control over their schedule”, struggle to find regular jobs, etc., are all reasons, and often the fairly slick presentation of the people marketing these “opportunities” can pry capital out of the hands of family members that the person wanting to give this a try otherwise are struggling to access. Starting one’s own business is inherently risky, and these presentations provide answers to a lot of the questions people might have and create a sense that Oh, I Know How to Do This Now and If I Work Hard I’ll Be Successful because of course that’s what the company selling this tells them.

I think the thing that I can’t quite figure out is why we keep having journalism around this stuff, including really high quality financial journalism, and it just isn’t made clear how all of these things offload investment costs AND risk onto the people least aware of them and least able to bear them. The companies know they are offloading cost and risk. That’s the whole fucking point of these weird structures.

Are people just not noticing?

Role exhaustion

I have a long-standing issue with the soul / psyche / spirit side of “helping” industries, in that they frequently exist to get people to comply with rules imposed on the person being “helped” by people who are absent from the therapeutic encounter. On the one hand, the person who isn’t complying may or may not be accurately reporting on what is going on. On the other hand, the people who are attempting to get compliance aren’t there to participate in a legit negotiation.

What this used to look like was the idea of “role adjustment”, and was a major target of therapy. So, if you’re a student, and you are doing poorly in school, a psychologist might focus on helping you adjust to “being” a student. Which is ludicrous — it should be a negotiation about what that person wants to learn and how to support them in learning it NOT doing quality control on the Educated Person Production Process. But even ignoring the goal and frame issues, if the only person the therapist is interacting with in person is the student, and they are reading written stuff produced by the people attempting to elicit compliance, I mean. You can see so many problems that are just inevitable.

(I use Student as an example of a role, but Spouse or Parent or Employee or whatever work just fine too.)

We’re all deep enough into the system at this point that we almost don’t need an actual therapist to do a real number on ourselves in this area. We read a grade report or look at a marked up paper or report and we’ll ratchet down the pressure on ourselves. We fear getting caught using an AI on a paper, and we set up self-surveillance in an effort to prove that we really did write it ourselves and the low-perplexity is an artifact of efforts to comply, not a result of “cheating” by using a tool.

Most efforts at prediction are straightforward extensions of current trends into the immediate future and mostly they are accurate until they are not. And I am starting to wonder about how poorly directed compliance measures (including those self-imposed), and the exhaustion they produced, might be producing some surprising and terrifying results (anti-incumbent elections around the world, type of thing). Also, I’m at a phase of life where a lot of people I know have recently suffered a painful relationship experience, are grieving a death, or are anticipating a death, or, for that matter, a painful relationship experience. I’m really seeing a whole lot of people trying really hard, experiencing diminishing returns, and then giving up. In so many various, sad, and dismaying ways.

You are not a role. You are a person. Please take good care, and find your joy whenever you can.