Q:
You have strong opinions on Magic the Gathering?
yeah, my opinion is that whatever strange symbiote alien that took over the brains of all my friends would release them and let them be sane again
just made a tweet where I call it, as is my habit, the Nobel Memorial econ prize. Which is what it’s called “Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences”. People drop teh word “memorial” which makes it shorter i guess. BUt I don’t, nto even in a tweet when im counting hcaracters
Although not one of the five Nobel Prizes established by Alfred Nobel’s will in 1895,[6] it is commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics,[7] and is administered and referred to along with the Nobel Prizes by the Nobel Foundation.[8] Winners of the Prize in Economic Sciences are chosen in a similar manner as and announced alongside the Nobel Prize recipients, and receive the Prize in Economic Sciences at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony.[6][9]
That the prize is not an original Nobel Prize has been a subject of controversy, with four of Nobel’s relatives having formally distanced themselves from the Prize in Economic Sciences.[10][11]
The award was established in 1968 by an endowment “in perpetuity” from Sweden’s central bank, Sveriges Riksbank, to commemorate the bank’s 300th anniversary.[12][13][14][15] Laureates in the Prize in Economic Sciences are selected by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.[16][17] It was first awarded in 1969 to Dutch economist Jan Tinbergen and Norwegian economist Ragnar Frisch "for having developed and applied dynamic models for the analysis of economic processes".[15][18][19]
i didnt know about this. this is really weird. its an econ award because it was created by the bank? i guess? im having trouble finding much information behind the process of its creation
The way I’ve heard people talk about it here in Sweden from people who were around in the 60s the general vibe is that the people running the central bank are of course all economists who believe economics is an extremely important science. They felt left out because people talked about the Nobel prize as the biggest scientific award but their own field couldn’t get it. So they took advantage of the fact that they ran the ceremony to just invent one of their own, purposefully gave it a longer name no one would use (Sveriges riksbanks pris i ekonomisk vetenskap till Alfred Nobels minne) and handed it out at the same ceremony, hoping people would get confused and think it’s official. And it worked, pretty much. Most people and newspapers just call it the Nobel prize in economics unless they are especially knowledgeable and careful.
The literal translation of the Swedish name is: “Sweden’s central bank’s prize in economic science to the memory of Alfred Nobel”. They want to be seen as a science so bad they made sure to out science in the prize name.
The Central Bank was surely not running the ceremony: they had to approach the Nobel Prize Foundation to establish a new Nobel Prize. The scheme was apparently the brain-child of the director of the Central Bank, Per Åsbrink.
I notice there is a book, The Nobel Factor, which describes the turns like this:
[In the 1950s] Higher interest rates meant that the bank’s profits from government borrowing were paid for by Swedish taxpayers. The bank handed over a small amount to the Treasury every year, and kept the rest in a special account, which built up into a large stock of capital.
In 1962, a parliamentary committee was established to consider what to do with the bank’s surplus account.
It recommended transfer to the Treasury. […] The bank conceded the surrender of two-thirds of its profit account to the Treasury, but wanted to keep something for itself. It would set up a scientific research foundation. […] Parliament signed on. The bank kept some money and prestige. It created the Jubilee Research Fund, and began to construct a new headquarters.
At this point Åsbrink had decided to make a big event at the 1968 jubilee. There would be a big international meeting of bankers, and he considered commissioning a series of scientific books, but such a thing would be hard to organize on short notice.
The jubilee date was fast approaching. Åsbrink had been a journal editor, and his next idea was truly inspired: to create a new Nobel Prize in economics. Deadlines would no longer matter. A new Nobel Prize was sure to attract more acclaim than any scholarly publication. Instead of risky investment in new scholarship, Åsbrink could appropriate the achievements of the past. He put the idea to Lindbeck in one of their late- night conversations in 1967. Åsbrink was a man of wayward brilliance and impulsive coups. He disliked handing back so much money. Would it be possible to use it for a Nobel Prize in economics? The specific question was whether Swedish economists could agree on suitable winners. Lindbeck said it could work. Nobel Prizes in science were awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and Lindbeck suggested consulting with four of its economist members, Gunnar Myrdal, Bertil Ohlin, Erik Lundberg, and Ingvar Svennilson (he was not yet a member himself). Lindbeck contacted Myrdal directly, while the latter two kept in touch. There was resistance in the Academy, primarily from physicists, but the economists pushed hard, insisting that it should be a proper Nobel Prize. The bank’s Jubilee Research Fund already gave it considerable sway over Swedish academics.
The date of 15 May 1968 was chosen for the jubilee. The Nobel Foundation (which managed the prize) was dominated by businessmen. Lindbeck acted as the go-between. He mentioned Wallenberg, one of the brothers Jacob or Marcus, heads of the foremost economic dynasty in Sweden. Both were on the Nobel Foundation board. Lindbeck had dealt with Marcus Wallenberg while writing studies for the business-funded IUI, of which the
banker was the long-standing chair.
Negotiations went down to the wire. The Nobel family had to consent, perhaps to using its name. Peter Nobel, a descendant of the benefactor’s brother and a critic of the prize, says that five days before the jubilee, foundation executives visited the oldest living member of the family, who was eighty-seven at the time. She understood that refusal was impossible [because the Foundation had made up its mind] but insisted on setting the new prize apart by naming it ‘The Prize in Economic Science in Memory of Alfred Nobel’. This showed a remarkable presence of mind, since the awkward title has continued to tarnish the award ever since. Peter Nobel also believes that the foundation was given incentives to cooperate with the Riksbank, either with regard to its tax-free status, or over the range of permissible investments.The new prize was politically controversial at the time, but became much more so in 1976 when it was awarded to Milton Friedman leading to demonstrations on the streets (Friedman was infamous for his work with the Pinochet regime in Chile). I think the Prize Foundation has since indicated that they will not repeat this maneuver, e.g. in 2009 some people called for a prize for global environment, and the foundation replied that, so sorry, that would be wonderful but our hands are tied by Nobel’s will which doesn’t allow for establishing any additional prizes ever.
I think I’ve most often seen economists call it the Bank of Sweden Prize, as a way to acknowledge the complexity of the situation with the Nobel family and the terms of Alfred Nobel’s endowment.
just made a tweet where I call it, as is my habit, the Nobel Memorial econ prize. Which is what it’s called “Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences”. People drop teh word “memorial” which makes it shorter i guess. BUt I don’t, nto even in a tweet when im counting hcaracters
Although not one of the five Nobel Prizes established by Alfred Nobel’s will in 1895,[6] it is commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics,[7] and is administered and referred to along with the Nobel Prizes by the Nobel Foundation.[8] Winners of the Prize in Economic Sciences are chosen in a similar manner as and announced alongside the Nobel Prize recipients, and receive the Prize in Economic Sciences at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony.[6][9]
That the prize is not an original Nobel Prize has been a subject of controversy, with four of Nobel’s relatives having formally distanced themselves from the Prize in Economic Sciences.[10][11]
The award was established in 1968 by an endowment “in perpetuity” from Sweden’s central bank, Sveriges Riksbank, to commemorate the bank’s 300th anniversary.[12][13][14][15] Laureates in the Prize in Economic Sciences are selected by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.[16][17] It was first awarded in 1969 to Dutch economist Jan Tinbergen and Norwegian economist Ragnar Frisch "for having developed and applied dynamic models for the analysis of economic processes".[15][18][19]
i didnt know about this. this is really weird. its an econ award because it was created by the bank? i guess? im having trouble finding much information behind the process of its creation
The way I’ve heard people talk about it here in Sweden from people who were around in the 60s the general vibe is that the people running the central bank are of course all economists who believe economics is an extremely important science. They felt left out because people talked about the Nobel prize as the biggest scientific award but their own field couldn’t get it. So they took advantage of the fact that they ran the ceremony to just invent one of their own, purposefully gave it a longer name no one would use (Sveriges riksbanks pris i ekonomisk vetenskap till Alfred Nobels minne) and handed it out at the same ceremony, hoping people would get confused and think it’s official. And it worked, pretty much. Most people and newspapers just call it the Nobel prize in economics unless they are especially knowledgeable and careful.
The literal translation of the Swedish name is: “Sweden’s central bank’s prize in economic science to the memory of Alfred Nobel”. They want to be seen as a science so bad they made sure to out science in the prize name.
The Central Bank was surely not running the ceremony: they had to approach the Nobel Prize Foundation to establish a new Nobel Prize. The scheme was apparently the brain-child of the director of the Central Bank, Per Åsbrink.
I notice there is a book, The Nobel Factor, which describes the turns like this:
[In the 1950s] Higher interest rates meant that the bank’s profits from government borrowing were paid for by Swedish taxpayers. The bank handed over a small amount to the Treasury every year, and kept the rest in a special account, which built up into a large stock of capital.
In 1962, a parliamentary committee was established to consider what to do with the bank’s surplus account.
It recommended transfer to the Treasury. […] The bank conceded the surrender of two-thirds of its profit account to the Treasury, but wanted to keep something for itself. It would set up a scientific research foundation. […] Parliament signed on. The bank kept some money and prestige. It created the Jubilee Research Fund, and began to construct a new headquarters.
At this point Åsbrink had decided to make a big event at the 1968 jubilee. There would be a big international meeting of bankers, and he considered commissioning a series of scientific books, but such a thing would be hard to organize on short notice.
The jubilee date was fast approaching. Åsbrink had been a journal editor, and his next idea was truly inspired: to create a new Nobel Prize in economics. Deadlines would no longer matter. A new Nobel Prize was sure to attract more acclaim than any scholarly publication. Instead of risky investment in new scholarship, Åsbrink could appropriate the achievements of the past. He put the idea to Lindbeck in one of their late- night conversations in 1967. Åsbrink was a man of wayward brilliance and impulsive coups. He disliked handing back so much money. Would it be possible to use it for a Nobel Prize in economics? The specific question was whether Swedish economists could agree on suitable winners. Lindbeck said it could work. Nobel Prizes in science were awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and Lindbeck suggested consulting with four of its economist members, Gunnar Myrdal, Bertil Ohlin, Erik Lundberg, and Ingvar Svennilson (he was not yet a member himself). Lindbeck contacted Myrdal directly, while the latter two kept in touch. There was resistance in the Academy, primarily from physicists, but the economists pushed hard, insisting that it should be a proper Nobel Prize. The bank’s Jubilee Research Fund already gave it considerable sway over Swedish academics.
The date of 15 May 1968 was chosen for the jubilee. The Nobel Foundation (which managed the prize) was dominated by businessmen. Lindbeck acted as the go-between. He mentioned Wallenberg, one of the brothers Jacob or Marcus, heads of the foremost economic dynasty in Sweden. Both were on the Nobel Foundation board. Lindbeck had dealt with Marcus Wallenberg while writing studies for the business-funded IUI, of which the
banker was the long-standing chair.
Negotiations went down to the wire. The Nobel family had to consent, perhaps to using its name. Peter Nobel, a descendant of the benefactor’s brother and a critic of the prize, says that five days before the jubilee, foundation executives visited the oldest living member of the family, who was eighty-seven at the time. She understood that refusal was impossible [because the Foundation had made up its mind] but insisted on setting the new prize apart by naming it ‘The Prize in Economic Science in Memory of Alfred Nobel’. This showed a remarkable presence of mind, since the awkward title has continued to tarnish the award ever since. Peter Nobel also believes that the foundation was given incentives to cooperate with the Riksbank, either with regard to its tax-free status, or over the range of permissible investments.The new prize was politically controversial at the time, but became much more so in 1976 when it was awarded to Milton Friedman leading to demonstrations on the streets (Friedman was infamous for his work with the Pinochet regime in Chile). I think the Prize Foundation has since indicated that they will not repeat this maneuver, e.g. in 2009 some people called for a prize for global environment, and the foundation replied that, so sorry, that would be wonderful but our hands are tied by Nobel’s will which doesn’t allow for establishing any additional prizes ever.
(via raginrayguns)
FYI I just came across a thread on twitter which says that an author shared on google docs an explicit story with a friend for beta reading and google removed the file due to violation of TOS (apparently it has been updated where you are not allowed to share anything with sexual content). Not sure if it’s just this instance or if it’s going to become a widespread thing but if you guys write in google docs MAKE BACK UPS!!
(Instagram link to the screenshots)
Edit: also wanted to add that it seems that Microsoft word has the same language in their TOS so onedrive is not a safe alternative!
incredible. can people share what they’re actually using as a google docs & microsoft word alternative? it really is time to move.
If the easy sharing and collaboration features are important to you, I highly recommend cryptpad. It’s got the spreadsheets and powerpoints and forms and all that mess too.
had a very stereotypical moment last night. was listening to some Tool in bed, trying to fall asleep. it stopped for a while because spotify is buggy on my phone sometimes, and when it started up again i didn’t recognize the track intro. took me about 30 seconds to realize it was actually the irregular clicking sound made by the baseboard heater as it turned on and thermal expansion happened.
you’re allowed to beat me with sticks for telling this story
once I was listening to some World’s End Girlfriend while driving and the car was thumping rhythmically and I thought “wow I don’t remember the bass being this heavy” and. it was a flat tire.
i feel like people have this idea that “base/manufacturing cost” vs “sale price” is some simple well defined question and idk like. not really. its complicated. theres the cost to manufacture but also the cast to transport it, cost to take up shelf space, cost of development, etc etc. its not that well defined. sometimes there are big marigns and someitmes theyre not. its complicated
Matsui Tamijiro Fighting a Giant Snake by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1825)
“Straight” (meaning hetero) was an absolute stroke of genius, genuinely one of the shrewdest coinings in the history of the English language. It’s all things to all people. Gays who want to express antipathy toward the straight world can take advantage of the derisive connotations “pedestrian”, “conformist”, “unremarkable”, “simple”. But homophobic straights will happily apply it to themselves too, latching onto the side of the word that implies “lawful”, “upstanding”, “honest”. (Naturally this is distasteful to us, but the ability to play both sides against the middle is a strength in a word that aims to become the consensus canonical term for this kind of thing). At the same time, it can sound neutral enough to be used with no particular agenda attached, so that even in communities where sexuality is becoming less of a sociological battlefield it shows no sign of becoming obsolete. And all this while being simply a normal-ass word that doesn’t sound either too slangy or too technical. A tour de force, it’s like straight was born to fill this semantic niche, ten out of ten, mwah.
“Cis”–look, I take no pleasure in this, but if you think people are going to be saying cis fifty years from now you’re insane. As close to a zero out of ten as a word can get. Doesn’t look like a word, doesn’t feel like a word, feels like a fishbone in the mouth (don’t lie to me, yes it does). Cold, thin, opaque. Feels like a word designed by committee, and the committee had only a passing familiarity with the English language (which someone hurriedly researched specifically for the project). Indelibly a piece of terminology, not a natural outgrowth of speech. People deliberately plan out their sentences in such a way as to avoid having to say this word, and do you honestly blame them?
I hope to god something better is on the horizon, this is such an important lexical role in the year 2024 and I cringe to see the position filled by this clueless fucking dilettante.
Apparently, the first attested usage (in 1941) of “straight” didn’t refer to heterosexuality per se.
Rather, it was gay slang describing the inversion of ‘coming out’; a person who decided to stop mingling with the gay community and go back to a 'normal’ (presumptively heterosexual) life was described as “going straight.” My guess is that in turn this is adopted from the more general parlance of criminals, of which the gay underground was a subset– even today, there’s a usage of “going straight” that means “leaving behind a life of crime.”
Anyway, the reason I looked this up is because my basic instinct is that 'cis’ is sort of a stinker because it’s an exonym, and exonyms are always just bad. Going by this etymology, that’s fairly true. This is precisely the 'straight’ from the Biblical book of Matthew: “Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it,” which became the phrase “on the straight and narrow” in the 19th and 20th centuries, which in turn led criminals and some gays to talk about wanting to “go straight”, which ultimately became “straight, the synonym for heterosexual.” The word had centuries (millenia!) of linguistic polishing to really find its best self, and it implicitly codes the values and reference frame of the people it describes- just as 'gay’ does!
'Cis,’ on the other hand, was devised by and for the use of trans people. It encodes trans assumptions (e.g. a specific ontology of gender), which cis people may or may not accept; it has a weird slick mouthfeel that doesn’t move flexibly through English sentences (because trans people are less motivated to advance the aesthetics of cisgender expression); it’s clinical instead of mythic or heroic or exciting (because trans people are less motivated to valorize cisgender experiences). Really it’s just a blank and sad little inversion of 'trans’, which quite naturally bleeds all the fun out of it. But IMO there’s no alternate history where such a word doesn’t have these problems, conditional on trans people being the one to cook it up in their own spaces.
That said, after learning the specific linguistic origins of “straight”, I also think that it has the advantage of being cool crime slang. Subcultures are the ovens where civilization bakes new language, and criminal subcultures are traditional leaders in really awesome neologism.
guy who’s read a lot of Hayek seeing abuse of authority: is this rent seeking?