The justifications—the lure of the community, the (now-limited) ability to bear witness to news in real time, and of the reach of one’s audience of followers—feel particularly weak today. X’s cultural impact is still real, but its promotional use is nonexistent. (A recent post linking to a story of mine generated 289,000 impressions and 12,900 interactions, but only 948 link clicks—a click rate of roughly 0.00328027682 percent.) NPR, which left the platform in April 2023, reported almost negligible declines in traffic referrals after abandoning the site.

In its last report before Musk’s acquisition, in just the second half of 2021, Twitter suspended about 105,000 of the more than 5 million accounts reported for hateful conduct. In the first half of 2024, according to X, the social network received more than 66 million hateful-conduct reports, but suspended just 2,361 accounts. It’s not a perfect comparison, as the way X reports and analyzes data has changed under Musk, but the company is clearly taking action far less frequently.

According to research from the extremism expert Colin Henry, since Musk’s purchase, there’s been a decline in anti-Semitic posts on 4chan’s infamous “anything goes” forum, and a simultaneous rise in posts targeting Jewish people on X.

X is no longer a social-media site with a white-supremacy problem, but a white-supremacist site with a social-media problem.

"We're probably one of the last few groups that it's still politically correct to make fun of," Wright says. "It's still OK to tell, you know, hillbilly, redneck jokes."

Owen Wright of the Christian Appalachian Project, one of the non-profits that helps Slone, says that outside perception can hurt the self-esteem of the people who live in Appalachia.

Many people here say they're rich in things that aren't included in any official measure of poverty. Things like family and faith. So they're understandably a bit bitter about how they're often seen from the outside.

Poverty, by America

poverty is no equalizer.

Poverty is the feeling that your government is against you, not for you

Poverty is the constant fear that it will get even worse.

poverty is instability.

Poverty is pain, physical pain

Poverty is often material scarcity piled on chronic pain piled onincarceration piled on depression piled on addiction—on and on it goes.Poverty isn’t a line. It’s a tight knot of social maladies. It is connected toevery social problem we care about—crime, health, education, housing—and its persistence in American life means that millions of families aredenied safety and security and dignity in one of the richest nations in thehistory of the world.

In 2019, the medianwhite household had a net worth of $188,200, compared with $24,100 forthe median Black household. The average white household headed bysomeone with a high school diploma has more wealth than the averageBlack household headed by someone with a college degree.

scientists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir call this “the bandwidthtax.” “Being poor,” they write, “reduces a person’s cognitive capacity morethan going a full night without sleep.” When we are preoccupied bypoverty, “we have less mind to give to the rest of life.” Poverty does not justdeprive people of security and comfort; it siphons off their brainpower, too.

Poverty is diminished life and personhood.

There is no flag forpoor rights, after all.

Misery (misère), the Frenchsociologist Eugène Buret once remarked, “is poverty felt morally.”

Poverty is embarrassing, shame inducing.

The criminal-legal system, Weaver has written, “trains people for adistinctive and lesser kind of citizenship.”[16]

The political scientist Vesla Weaverhas shown that those stopped (but not arrested) by the police are less likelyto vote.

Criminal justice agencies levy steep fines and fees on the poor, oftenmaking them pay for their own prosecution and incarceration.

In the latenineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cities passed “ugly laws” banning“unsightly beggars” from public places. In the first half of the twentiethcentury, vagrancy and loitering ordinances were used to expel the poor frompark benches and street corners. Today, municipal regulations still allow thepolice to arrest the homeless for being seen in public, criminalizing abjectpoverty.

Itdisappears them into jails and prisons, effectively erasing them: Theincarcerated are simply not counted in most national surveys, resulting in afalsely rosy statistical picture of American progress. Poverty measuresexclude everyone in prison and jail—not to mention those housed in psych

Poverty is the loss of liberty.

According to the latest national data, one in eighteenpeople in the United States lives in “deep poverty,” a subterranean level ofscarcity. Take the poverty line and cut it in half: Anything below that isconsidered deep poverty. The deep poverty line in 2020 was $6,380annually for a single person and $13,100 for a family of four. That year,almost 18 million people in America survived under these conditions. TheUnited States allows a much higher proportion of its children—over 5million of them—to endure deep poverty than any of its peer nations.

In the land of the free, you can drop all theway down, joining the ranks of the lumpenproletariat (literally the “raggedproletariat”).

Income volatility, the extent to which paychecks grow orshrink over short periods of time, has doubled since 1970.

More than3.6 million eviction filings are taped to doors or handed to occupants in anaverage year in America, which is roughly equivalent to the number offoreclosures initiated at the height of the financial crisis in 2010.

Most renting families below the poverty line now spendat least half of their income on housing, with one in four spending morethan 70 percent on rent and utility costs alone.

the federalgovernment provides housing assistance to only one in four of the familieswho qualify for it.

Thirtymillion Americans remain completely uninsured a decade after the passageof the Affordable Care Act.[4]

poverty is about money, ofcourse, but it is also a relentless piling on of problems.

The architect of the Official PovertyMeasure—the poverty line—was a bureaucrat working at the SocialSecurity Administration named Mollie Orshansky.

Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson paid a visit to Appalachia and sat on therough-hewn porch of a jobless sawmill worker surrounded by children withsmall clothes and big teeth.

But itwill also require that each of us, in our own way, become povertyabolitionists, unwinding ourselves from our neighbors’ deprivation andrefusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.

how some lives are made small so thatothers may grow.

Are we—wethe secure, the insured, the housed, the college educated, the protected, thelucky—connected to all this needless suffering?

In 1890, Jacob Riis wrote about “how theother half lives,” documenting the horrid conditions of New York tenementsand photographing filthy children asleep in alleyways.

America’spoverty is not for lack of resources. We lack something else.

This is who we are: the richest country on earth, with more poverty thanany other advanced democracy.

How could there be, Iwondered, such bald scarcity amid such waste and opulence?

Dadalways griped that the railroad men in town got paid more than he did. Hecould read ancient Greek, but they had a union.

WHY IS THERE SO MUCH poverty in America?

We imagine that their sufferings are one thing and our life another.—LEO TOLSTOY

Poverty, by America Book Club DiscussionQuestions

reality check from bluseky and Nostr perspectives

People do not actually spend a lot of time browsing junk content,

the notes you make about it as you curate it (which tells the AI exactly what you find useful about it)

Which is why you need to agree, as a group, on a collaborative tool everyone is comfortable with (TL:DR; it doesn’t exist for groups larger than 4), and then co-create on one platform while chatting on the other.

ensuring everyone has a say in defining its rules is essential for any village to thrive.

And if your tastes don’t match the village’s, move to another village.

For AI4Communities to work

the model collapse paper now suggests that the training data created by well-managed communities could be the new currency of collective intelligence.

“Very Small Online Platforms (VSOPs)”

“after greed and short-sightedness floods the commons with low-grade AI content… well-managed online communities of actual human beings [may be] the only place able to provide the sort of data tomorrow’s LLMs will need”

I have to add that my own search traffic has been steadily increasing ever since I moved to an indie website setup.

Google AI Overviews is the main culprit and poses an existential threat to publishers.

I had hoped to somewhat emulate the success of ex-Microsoft executive Steven Sinofsky and his Substack serialization project, Hardcore Software (“personal stories and lessons from inside the rise and fall of the PC revolution”). Sinofsky’s project was an inspiration for mine, but I don’t think I’ve reached his level in terms of reader comments and reshares.

Speaking of Substack, I count my migration off that platform and onto an indie online publishing system as one of the successes of this project.

One of the quotes I will use to open the paperback book is this, from Herman Melville's poem 'Clarel': Come, thou who makest such hot haste To forge the future—weigh the past.

So look for this blog to become something like Cory Doctorow’s Memex Method, a commonplace book as a public database — though I prefer to call it the Mathom-house Method. There will be more posts here, I think. But for heaven’s sake if you don’t like, or don’t agree with, or otherwise disapprove of something I quote, don’t send me an email about it.

So, though there was still some store of weapons in the Shire, these were used mostly as trophies, hanging above hearths or on walls, or gathered into the museum at Michel Delving. The Mathom-house it was called; for anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom. Their dwellings were apt to become rather crowded with mathoms, and many of the presents that passed from hand to hand were of that sort.  — J. R. R. Tolkien, “Concerning Hobbits”

He even kept “indexes to indexes,” as Robert D. Richardson describes in his wonderful biography, Emerson: The Mind on Fire: Indexing was a crucial method for Emerson because it allowed him to write first and organize later and because it gave him easy access to the enormous mass of specific materials in his ever-increasing pile of notebooks… Emerson spent a good deal of time methodically copying and recopying journal material, indexing, alphabetizing indexes, and eventually making indexes of indexes. When he came to write a lecture, he would work through his indexes, making a list of possible passages. He then assembled, ordered, and reordered these into the talk or lecture.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the man who encouraged his friend Thoreau to start a journal and the man who had the most success with the journal > lecture > essay > book method, kept elaborate notebooks just for indexing his other notebooks.

Emerson’s creative process is so fascinating, Richardson wrote a wonderful slim volume about it, called First We Read, Then We Write.

“There is then creative reading as well as creative writing,” Emerson said. “The discerning will read…only the authentic utterances of the oracle—all the rest he rejects.”

Emerson is, “I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”

Emerson liked to identify four classes of readers: the hourglass, the sponge, the jelly-bag, and the Golconda. The hourglass takes nothing in. The sponge holds on to nothing but a little dirt and sediment. The jelly-bag doesn’t recognize good stuff, but holds on to worthless stuff. And the Golconda (a rich mine) keeps only the pure gems.

Its roots, though, don’t just lie in explicitly Christian tradition. In fact, it’s possible to trace the origins of the American prosperity gospel to the tradition of New Thought, a nineteenth-century spiritual movement popular with decidedly unorthodox thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James. Practitioners of New Thought, not all of whom identified as Christian, generally held the divinity of the individual human being and the priority of mind over matter. In other words, if you could correctly channel your mental energy, you could harness its material results. New Thought, also known as the “mind cure,” took many forms: from interest in the occult to splinter-Christian denominations like Christian Science to the development of the “talking cure” at the root of psychotherapy. The upshot of New Thought, though, was the quintessentially American idea that the individual was responsible for his or her own happiness, health, and situation in life, and that applying mental energy in the appropriate direction was sufficient to cure any ills.

Surprisingly, the American author who is quoted most in the OED isnot Mark Twain or Emily Dickinson or Edgar Allan Poe, but rather EdwardH. Knight, a patent lawyer and expert in mechanics who wrote the AmericanMechanical Dictionary and The Practical Dictionary of Mechanics. Knight isthe seventy-fourth-most cited author in the Dictionary, quoted morefrequently than Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Eliot or Ralph Waldo Emerson(who comes in at 116, the next-most quoted American).

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.”

A system-grinder hates the truth. Ralph Waldo Emerson

Interstitial Journaling (IJ) was introduced by Tony Stubblebine.

@chrisaldrich Do you have some results from your online sessions? New insights from reading Doto's book?

Interstitial journaling, a term and suggestion from Tony Stubblebine , is about writing down what you did after a task, how it felt or went, plus what you intend to do next.

Doto’s described system provides a ratchet effect to his writing. Such ratcheting I have and experience in my note making and every day usage of my notes, but not yet in my writing. I will incorporate that in my own practice.

Writers block sounds hard to overcome, but who ever has conversation block?

Why the name "CLOG?" Aren't there enough catchy acronyms? Yes! Agreed. We don't need more acronyms. Originally, I used the generic term "log," but quickly realized that whenever I wanted to search for my logs, I would inevitably bring up notes related to "blogs," "logging," "logical," "logrolling," "slog," "flog," and basically any word ending in "-ology." It was a mess. Since I am not a wooden shoe maker, my vault is relatively free of "clog" derivatives.

The term "CLOG" is short for both "catalog" and "creative log."

I’m always negotiating the relationship between micro.blog and my big blog, but I’m getting closer to a system in which micro.blog is a box of delights and the big blog is a Memex. Gonna try to stick with that model.

These repeated acts of public description adds each idea to a supersaturated, subconscious solution of fragmentary elements that have the potential to become something bigger. Every now and again, a few of these fragments will stick to each other and nucleate, crystallizing a substantial, synthetic analysis out of all of those bits and pieces I’ve salted into that solution of potential sources of inspiration.

The act of making your log-file public requires a rigor that keeping personal notes does not. Writing for a notional audience — particularly an audience of strangers — demands a comprehensive account that I rarely muster when I’m taking notes for myself. I am much better at kidding myself my ability to interpret my notes at a later date than I am at convincing myself that anyone else will be able to make heads or tails of them. Writing for an audience keeps me honest.

Peter “peterme” Merholz coined the term “blog” as a playful contraction of “web-log” — like a ship’s log in which hardy adventurers upon the chaotic virtual seas could record their journeys.

The auctorial equivalent to the artist’s sketchbook is the “commonplace book,”

There’s a version of the “why writers should blog” story that is tawdry and mercenary: “Blog,” the story goes, “and you will build a brand and a platform that you can use to promote your work.” Virtually every sentence that contains the word “brand” is bullshit, and that one is no exception.

Do not "dunk wash" your machine. Though some may debate, it is our opinion that this actually does more harm than good. Rusted parts will flash-rust, grime cannot be removed without violent agitation and no matter how thorough you are, you will never get all the water out.

Mineral spirits are still the best for cleaning non-painted metal parts. Magic in a bottle, this is! Be careful to avoid getting it on painted surfaces, rubber, and/or plastic bits.

If you've been dreaming of plunging into this profession, consider the success of Paul Lundy, who took over Bremerton Office Machine Company from nonagenarian Bob Montgomery; or Antony Valoppi, creator of Portland's Type Space, which combines a traditional typewriter shop with a cultural center; or Trevor Brumfield, a young man in his late twenties who has quickly built Dayton's TB Writers Plus into a busy enterprise.

Sidney Redlitch: Ring the bell, close the book, quench the candle. That's how they used to excorcise them.

The key questions at play here