Welcome to The Notebook, the more personal side of Tertulia. This is generally where I will publish. Some of my thoughts are presentable, maybe even beneficial to my career — some may even prove profitable. Many are just for me and anyone paying attention. This is the space for those thoughts. Nothing written here constitutes medical, financial, or legal advice. Opinions are mine alone, etc.
Yikes, JLPT N2 seats in Washington, D.C. are already filled. I'll have to be on-time and ready-to-go tomorrow to snag an N3 seat. I took the DELE in New York but would prefer not to do that drive again before and after a nerve-wracking test (although I did pass the B2 DELE!)
Ah, negative parallelism, so that's what that tic is called. (That's not X, it's Y.)
Foundations of Institutional Social Democracy
- Growth must be positive and sufficient to expand baseline living standards. No regime can consume its way into prosperity.
- State leverage can and must be used to prevent monopolies from capturing political authority, not only to prevent the extraction of unearned rents from existing infrastructure, but to prevent legal regimes that preemptively outlaw, suppress, or block the creation of public commons (such as a public option in healthcare) in order to force citizens into private tollbooths.
- Given fiduciary duty to shareholders, capture is not deviance but compliance: concentrated private capital will always attempt to gatekeep the commons and foreclose competition, because that is what serving shareholders demands. Regulation alone fails wherever capture is cheap or invisible. Power must therefore be distributed into publicly owned channels with real veto power, designed not to be incorruptible but to be expensive: universal enough to command a mass constituency, transparent enough to make subversion visible, and structured so that capturing them costs more than it returns.
- Bureaucracy does not become benevolent by virtue of being public: insulated administrative systems naturally optimize for self-preservation, opacity, and managerial convenience. Public ownership is only as durable as its friction: it must be subject to adversarial audit, transparent operational benchmarks, and enforceable mechanisms for swift leadership removal, ensuring public channels serve universal utility rather than their own administrative class.
- Labor cannot be treated as a passive recipient of state welfarism. If workers have no institutional veto within the enterprises and agencies they operate, political democracy remains hollow and vulnerable to capital strikes. Codetermination, sectoral bargaining, and worker representation on public governing boards are functional defenses against managerial extraction and private recapture, with the clear institutional boundary that workers wield a veto over extraction (wages, safety, privatization, asset-stripping), but never over accountability (operational benchmarks, transparent audits, or removal for failure to deliver).
- Private enterprise is a tool for decentralized coordination, not an entitlement to sovereign rule. Where competitive markets drive genuine productivity and consumer differentiation, private enterprise is legitimate; two conditions void that legitimacy. Where demand is structurally captive (natural monopolies and life-essential bottlenecks where citizens cannot meaningfully exit), the enterprise belongs in public hands by default, regardless of conduct. Where an enterprise’s margin depends on state-granted position or engineered scarcity (rents extracted through regulatory capture, competition foreclosed by law, or public subsidy farmed as a business model), it has ceased to be a market actor and forfeits private control to public discipline or absorption.
- Surplus must be continuously reinvested into public infrastructure, research, and social stability, not only distributed as material improvements.
Not sure what Angie Nixon is playing at.
If you're a member of DSA, the bare minimum answer to the question, "would you call yourself a capitalist or do you reject capitalism?" or "are you a capitalist?" is that it's false framing, and that private ownership of capital, as a social institution cum legal regime, is flexible according to society's needs; that the existing distribution of capital in American society does not, at present, benefit the vast majority of Americans; and that reform is necessary to solve problems where private ownership has dangerously monopolized resources to the detriment of the public's well-being.
To clarify my position, which I am aware is right-wing so far as left-wing politics more generally are concerned:
Property rights and capital ownership are not natural laws; they are legal regimes created by society to serve human needs. When the private concentration of capital reaches a point where it monopolizes essential resources and starves the public good, democratic government has a duty to restructure those rules. I do not believe in ideological purity or idealisms. The test of an economic system rests with its outcomes: whether the distribution of capital actually works for the people living under it.
Little one is down for the evening, study time! 📖
Eventually, I will probably have the following spaces on Tertulia: public professional, public personal, and private. Some day I'll figure out the best way to share family photos without a bunch of group chats, and context collapse!
96GB GDDR7 Memory; PCIe 5.0 x16 Interface; 188 RT Cores; 752 Tensor Cores
oh my gosh y’all IG is a drug. — Meta employee
https://www.wsj.com/tech/massive-child-safety-trial-against-meta-starts-in-federal-court-130e3739
Gotta try running this:
Build type-safe, boilerplate-less MCP servers and clients in Scala