Ok

No disagreement there but I’m specifically talking about the work of bureaucrats not lawmakers. The tax code sucks in many ways but that’s a law problem not a regulatory problem!

Tax regs are more likely to make things less complicated than more. They’re crafted in dialogue with the tax bar. They’re more likely to protect taxpayers from badly drafted or vague law by providing clarity or safe harbors than to further restrict them. They’re helpful and good and more is better!

Haha I saw, and like… fair. But on a more basic level I just don’t think treasury regulations are a lesser evil or something and I don’t buy that they are “regulations” in anything like the sense of what your libertarian streak (which, in certain moods, I share!) is reacting to

Regulatory capture, public choice problems, kludgy overcomplexity… in environmental regulations? Sure, maybe—I wouldn’t know! But that has not been my experience with Treasury!

The longer I practice in tax the more skeptical I become that there is anything in common among all of the things called “regulation”, or that anything at this level of generality can be said about how good or bad or hard or easy it is

I’ve seen flat fee deals in contexts where to be honest I think it didn’t work that well! But business pressures are what they are

This is more the transactional perspective, admittedly, but I do think even aside from the narrow market competition explanation there is an ambient sense of an arms race and a risk of being left behind, which probably applies to lit as well

It is rumored that a certain M&A-heavy firm does basically everything for a percentage of the consideration at this point, and I know of other Wall Street firms doing flat-fee arrangements for relatively routine transactions

If you don’t, other firms will, and fee-sensitive clients will be happy to pay for 1/3 as many hours for the same deal. That plus the increasing move away from hourly billing and toward flat per-transaction fees or various success-fee arrangements

Being ABD is already such a liminal space if you have me any more existential freedom I’d never make it back out of the abyss!

Something about sitting in an uncomfortable chair under bright fluorescent lights and having to carry everything with you when you stand up, meanwhile you’re in some metaphysical sense in the process of travel but not actually physically going anywhere… use to drive me nuts

(Not exactly, because I never actually did miss a flight that way, but I cut it close enough that there was a significant risk that I would and I just got lucky. But it used to be that if you missed your flight they put you on the next one for free so the risk was just being delayed)

This was my approach when I was a PhD student and my time could not possibly have been less valuable. I just found spending time in airports stressful (until the added vegan burgers to the airport restaurant menus)

Checked in on “For You” again and while the volume of paid accounts posting slop and scams is way down the hole was somehow filled entirely by speculation about how The Pitt cast members privately feel about Noah Wylie

[Me at the APA smoker, wearing a shirt that says “seeking contention philosophers for lifelong mutually respectful friendship”]: can’t you idiots just say what you mean for once???

Incidentally this goes to my real reaction to the underlying blog post, which is that the best antidote to this kind of small-mindedness is having friends. I have friends whose intelligence I respect and who insist that they get a lot out of D&G, so I accept that the limitation is mine!

Part of the evidence for this is the contrast with Deleuze’s solo work, which is quite readable and exists in the recognizable mode of offering an interpretation of texts. The stuff with Guattari is just clearly trying to do something different

I think I’m inclined similarly, if perhaps slightly less so. But just as a descriptive matter if you want to know what they say on their own behalf I think this is often key. E.g. this specifically has been said to me by multiple Deleuze & Guattari fans. Doesn’t speak to me but different strokes!

Ultimately I don’t know how persuasive this is and probably what you say about neutrality carries over, but just as far as what defenders of the prose would say on their behalf I think it’s not (always) (just) neutrality vs. theory-ladenness of language, but what we’re trying to do with it

However successfully or not, part of the self-conception isn’t just about language’s neutrality as a means for describing, stating, or arguing but about whether knowledge, understanding, or edification is best, let alone only, accomplished through describing, stating, and arguing

I suspect part of what’s going on in the bit about prose style is also a differing preference re showing vs. telling. Not that I personally relate to whatever Anti-Oedipus is trying to show me, but I think defenders of “continental” prose style would also point to this methodological difference

Right, 60/40 center right vs. far right can’t be the actual composition or the electorate—this supermajority includes strategic votes by the center left and maybe whatever actual left they have, right? Presumably they’ll have to govern on behalf the everyone-else coalition, one hopes

I was sort of hoping that, as it is often said that the Democrats would be a center-right party in Europe, the Hungarian center-right was going to do year-one Bidenism but with a genuine mandate (enough to pass Build Back Better, for example). Alas!

I am sick with completism and at this very moment slogging through Iron Fist season 2 so that I may be allowed to watch JJ s3 and eventually Born Again, which looked good. Onto Wonder Man thereafter (eventually)!

We talking Merkel center-right? Tories? Macron?

Anyone got a good quick read/overview of what “center right” actually means in Hungary? Same substantive views as Orban but believes in democracy/institutjons? Or further to the left on certain issues—immigration, LGBTQ rights, higher taxes/social safety net, energy transition/climate, EU/Brussels?

I saw people talking about how the Twitter CEO fixed the algorithm and the “For You” tab was finally usable again for the first time in years, so I switched over (for the first time in years) and there, at the top of the feed, was an Obama tweet

I was pretty skeptical of “values lock-in” (along with the rest of the longtermist framework) but I am starting to worry that people ostensibly working under the banner of longtermism are (unintentionally?) advancing the cause of locking in hyper-capitalist nerd fascism

The world does not need a grimdark Robin Hood. Not necessary