(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]


Diary for Today

2023-11-06 22:18:32+00:00

It’s been a bit of a non-day, really, mostly from operating on about 4h sleep overall; woken by toddler around 02:30 and didn’t really recover from that. Still feeling washed-out and will turn-in soon.

Daycare freed up the space to do household chores so I cleared and racked about 3.5x loads of laundry for the dehumidifier to attack – to some that may sound odd, but my Kill-a-Watt meter says that I can run the dehumidifier for a day against several loads of laundry vs: a few hours for one or two, with the fringe benefit of not having to sort and refold clothing which has been dried this way.

Geek stuff included reporting a bug in WP Supercache which was rapidly triaged and found by the devs, and which will greatly help this blog survive occasional heavy loads. In contrast it appears that a lot of my Mastodon federation from this blog is broken at the far end due to a history of recent flaky local engineering work, and with no apparent way to kick the remote Mastodons to try and get them to pay attention once more. Needs more checking to find out where the blame lies, but basically the Mastodon follower mechanism appears to have give up, which is weird for a pubsub.

Also spent some time listening to Part 1 of an Ian Dunt podcast double-episode on the history of Keynes; we have to wait for Part 2 to get into the nitty-gritty economics stuff, but one critique sprang into my head where Ian said something like: (paraphrase)

[Keynes said] that ‘The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead,’ is a plea to be human and intervene in the face of letting (and to mitigate the pain caused by waiting for) “the market [to] sort itself out” and other forms of anti-/interventionism. Origin Story Podcast

And I was like:

“Yeeeeeeees, bad things can happen whilst there is a market adjustment / crash / recession / bank run / whatever, I agree, and yes I would like the worst of them to be somewhat mitigated for humanity’s sake… BUT ALSO…”

But also: the debate around trust and safety has led me to conclude that (equally) “in the long run” taking ongoing measures to protect an (especially: abstract) cohort from (even: clear and present) harm, constitutes actual abuse to that cohort.

One cannot and should not wrap one’s children in cotton wool forever. People who have never seen traffic will not know how to walk amongst it. Those who have never been exposed to ideas will not know to agree with some and argue against others, and in the latter case will either flee or fight rather than engage and dispel.

Our challenge as parents, mentors, leaders… is to rise above our emotion and pick – or to balance – one observation against the other, in terms of which has the better outcomes both short-term/tactically, and also long-term/strategically. When to tell our charges about harms, versus when to let them experience it to bolster their anti-fragility, as Taleb would probably put it.

But hey, I’m not a brilliant economist shagging my way through the Bloomsbury Set, so who cares what I think?

But I wish someone had asked Keynes.

ps: oh yes, I also rebuilt one of the salvaged cottage-style spindle-back kitchen chairs which we got for free off Marketplace. Not terribly pretty but rustic and solid and in keeping with the kitchen. Much fun with PVA and rubber mallet.
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[1] URL: https://alecmuffett.com/article/108221
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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