@Gina s/every/ever/ ... yup. 1970s IBM, 1990s Locus, ... #bureaucracy #bad-software

One of the things that irritates me the most is when bureaucracy asks me to pigeonhole my work into categories, for the infamous "Studi di settore" (Industry Sector Studies). Basically, you have to declare how much of your revenue comes from a specific, pre-defined box. The problem is that this is easy for those who sell something (hardware, services, licenses, etc.), but it's almost impossible for someone like me, who tries to have a more varied approach. I always end up having to make approximate choices that are potentially, partially wrong. If I provide a mini PC with a FreeBSD installation inside it as part of a "solution for..." kit, it is neither hardware sales nor software development. But this, clearly, cannot be known to whoever designs these forms.
And, in my eyes, this remains an ideological short-circuit.

#Bureaucracy

Since Die Kathedrale was a bit too tedious for us, we switched to another game: Bureaucracy by Infocom. The author is none other than Douglas Adams of Hitchhiker‘s Guide to the Galaxy fame.
An absurd story about getting caught in the daily horrors of forms and protocol.
#interactivefiction #infocom #douglasadams #bureaucracy

"Apart from their endorsement of Karl Marx’s fettering thesis near the end of the book, Abundance is clearly not a socialist text. It is a manifesto for a broad tent of liberals and centrists, aimed in part at what the authors call “the pathologies of the modern left.” We share concern about these pathologies, but argue the solution is not a retreat from the Left — it is, if anything, a more full-throated socialist politics. Here we can reassert some of those fundamental socialist arguments.

First, socialists understand that the main barrier to abundance is not bottlenecks or the Groups, but capitalism. “Supply-side liberalism” can sometimes rely on a naive neoclassical assumption: supply goes up, price goes down, and voilà — abundance! But this theory ignores the fact that there are very powerful class forces with a vested interest in maintaining artificial scarcity of key goods to maintain their profits. Landlords and real estate developers, for example, do not have an interest in an “abundance” of housing because it would collapse the price of the commodity they wish to sell for a profit. The history of energy is likewise a history of cartels — from the Seven Sisters to OPEC — whose prime goal is withholding supply to maintain prices, rents, and profits for owners. And this only mentions class interests in the sectors covered by Klein and Thompson, to say nothing of the larger political economy that, as Joe Weisenthal notes, “has too much riding on a perpetual rise in the value of financial assets.”"

https://jacobin.com/2025/08/klein-thompson-abundance-liberalism-socialism/

#Abundance#Socialism#Bureaucracy#Capitalism#Inequality

"Apart from their endorsement of Karl Marx’s fettering thesis near the end of the book, Abundance is clearly not a socialist text. It is a manifesto for a broad tent of liberals and centrists, aimed in part at what the authors call “the pathologies of the modern left.” We share concern about these pathologies, but argue the solution is not a retreat from the Left — it is, if anything, a more full-throated socialist politics. Here we can reassert some of those fundamental socialist arguments.

First, socialists understand that the main barrier to abundance is not bottlenecks or the Groups, but capitalism. “Supply-side liberalism” can sometimes rely on a naive neoclassical assumption: supply goes up, price goes down, and voilà — abundance! But this theory ignores the fact that there are very powerful class forces with a vested interest in maintaining artificial scarcity of key goods to maintain their profits. Landlords and real estate developers, for example, do not have an interest in an “abundance” of housing because it would collapse the price of the commodity they wish to sell for a profit. The history of energy is likewise a history of cartels — from the Seven Sisters to OPEC — whose prime goal is withholding supply to maintain prices, rents, and profits for owners. And this only mentions class interests in the sectors covered by Klein and Thompson, to say nothing of the larger political economy that, as Joe Weisenthal notes, “has too much riding on a perpetual rise in the value of financial assets.”"

https://jacobin.com/2025/08/klein-thompson-abundance-liberalism-socialism/

#Abundance#Socialism#Bureaucracy#Capitalism#Inequality