This week: prescribing math for gamblers, the hustle economy as a search function for capitalism, economic planning and control, beef and climate change, and the emerging phenomenon of acquisitions of Amazon sellers.

Mathematics for gamblers, Catalin Barboianu

I always like reading about randomness and probability because it's so counterintuitive and uncertainty/risk management (more broadly, "security") seems to be a decent explanation for so many behaviors. Gambling is one behavior that's sometimes pathologized as a kind of innumeracy/ignorance about probability. If that's the diagnosis, then people with gambling problems are told to "trust" the math...when gambling, like any social problem, isn't just an issue of "irrationality" or ignorance but a complex interaction of personal history, biological/psychological factors, etc. The more interesting objection in the article is: what does it mean for someone to "trust" the math when applying mathematical knowledge is a skill in itself? You need to be able to evaluate what relationships are relevant to what situations, for example, and because probability is so counterintuitive, it's very easy to misapply or misunderstand what you learn about it.

The Hustle Economy, Tressie McMillan Cottom

A great overview of the "hustle economy", where "economic opportunity" as code for "opportunity to hustle" and is increasingly just "the economy" for many people. Existing hierarchies and oppressions are reproduced if not compounded within the hustle economy, e.g. through "subprime" services that provide financing at a higher cost to those who are ignored/excluded by existing entrepreneur infrastructure.

There is a weird romanticism around "the hustle" in a lot of media representations and I wonder how oppressive relationships come to be represented in that way (I'm kind of thinking of Nomadland right now).

In line with above, the hustle economy is risk shifting en masse; e.g. with Uber and other gig economy companies shifting as much risk as possible to their drivers/workers (I take it that the gig economy is a subset of the hustle economy).

One thing that's been in my head wrt to the hustle economy is its "search" function for capitalism: if profits are harder to find, you need more people searching for opportunities for profit. With the hustle economy you have millions of people trying to find a big opportunity for themselves; if they hit upon success they often hit a wall in terms of scaling rapidly. Larger firms or more resourced entrepreneurs are able to swoop in, scale quickly, and push the original people out.

Planning and Anarchy, Jasper Bernes

Planning, or "economic calculation", is a common point of disagreement on the left. "Planning" usually implies "central planning" and evokes a shadowy bureaucracy of distant politicians sending down quotas and reprimands, hoarding and number fudging among local officials or factories, and catastrophes of scarcity and ill-met needs: that is, complete dysfunction. The recent "algorithmization" of life has brought a renewed interest in the idea that perhaps instead of people, computers can do the planning (this is a fun read on how difficult this is in practice). There are varying degrees of this belief: that planning exclusively be left to a single or consortium of AIs à la Iain M. Banks' Culture or that computers have some role to play in planning (seems reasonable). Though I've found the former more extreme position to be fairly common, at least as a desire if not a belief in something that will realistically happen soon, I've seen very little discussion on how that would come about or what that might look like (though there's this article, The Problem of Scale in Anarchism and the Case for Cybernetic Communism, that goes into more technical details). I say this as someone who still views Cybersyn, a cybernetic planning system (incompletely) developed under Allende, as a valuable if flawed utopian project. This article by Jasper Bernes is probably the best thing I've read on this topic lately.

But planning is not just about knowing what resources you have and where (the measurement part of planning) and deciding how much to make of what and where and how those affect whatever it is you're optimizing (the calculation part of planning)—it's also about whether or not those plans can be executed. Bernes puts it well:

Beneath problems of calculation lay much deeper organizational issues. At stake in planning is not simply the question of whether or not all resources and all needs can be recorded and measured in terms of labor time or some other numeric marker, not simply the transparency of that data or its legibility in terms of a single measure. The more important question is about control—whether and how that measure can effect changes in the distribution of those resources in order to satisfy those evolving needs. Inasmuch as humans are involved, this is not only a technical problem to be solved by mathematical formula and computation algorithm but a political one to be solved by class struggle.

This really becomes a question of how you get people to follow the plan, and when states want people to behave a certain way they generally resort to violence:

inasmuch as people are involved in producing things, and inasmuch as those things have as their final end the satisfactions of the needs and desires of people, one cannot so easily separate the administration of things and the administration of people. The USSR had a broken system for administering people, and did so irrationally, relying on violence, and often gratuitous violence, to move the levers of a machinery inherited from capitalism.

This may not look all that different than the typical violence of life under capitalism: the commodification of needs, the linkage of waged labor and survival as a way to "incentivize" your participation as a worker.

Bernes also goes through the more fundamental challenges of planning:

there is a deeper epistemological problem here: preferences are not stable, nor are the types of things available to people. Once one leaves behind the assumption of a fixed and unchanging set of commodities organized by stable preferences then mathematical calculation confronts strong limits: one can't really know what people may want in the future when one doesn't know what will be available. For short-run calculation, one might mobilize the technologies of contemporary logistics, developing algorithmic systems that monitor inventories and stocks and make predictions about needed supply and future demand from such observations. But this would do little to guide decisions about long-term investments in plant and infrastructure, nor the allocation of labor, which can't simply be whipped about from site to site, like a pallet of toilet paper. At some point, the planners themselves would have to choose between incompatible developmental paths based on only speculation about the future. Though they would be advised by referenda and juries, one might question whether a group of people should have such power in the first place.

Or that with central planning: "the planners would make themselves a target for capture by groups or factions wanting to gain privileged access to social wealth."

"Planning" is of course not the same as "central planning", and so these indictments are not against planning more generally. The possibility is left open of some kind of intensely local planning, for example, where it seems that at least some of these problems become more manageable. But it seems like some minimum scale is necessary to reliably fulfill all needs, and that local planning will eventually hit up against a more macro-level planning.

Beef Rules, Jonathan Foley

Beef consumption is a very hot topic wrt to climate change—massive pools of manure creating waste management and contamination problems, huge amounts of agricultural productivity diverted towards feed for livestock, flourishing conditions for disease and antibiotic resistance, methane emissions, not to mention horrendous conditions in CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations). As a solution you have people like Bill Gates advocating for synthetic and/or plant-based meat substitutes. These are problems of industrial beef production and not beef production in general. I'd read about cattle's value in field preparation, e.g. consuming cover crop and incorporating it into the soil, so clearly there are alternatives. But it seems clear that current levels of beef consumption can't be sustained in any other way (I'm not familiar enough with synthetic meat production to comment on that, only that in general we should be skeptical of these proposals). I left my understanding at that until I had more time to read about the topic.

I came across this piece and this Twitter thread by Paige Stanley on the topic via Max Ajl, which mostly confirmed my understanding. Grass-fed (grazing) beef can be beneficial in terms of climate change but can't meet existing levels of consumption, though potentially up to 60% of it, possibly more with improved grazing techniques and with reduced wastage. Maybe the biggest challenge is that grass-fed beef requires more land, but as pointed out in the piece, this land might not have many competing uses (in terms of food production, at least).

The Great Amazon Flip-a-Thon, John Herrman

An emerging phenomenon in the Amazon ecosystem is the acquisition of sellers by investment firms. This isn't something that I'd ever thought about but makes sense in retrospect—surprising to see, via the chart below, that this is really something that only took off over the past year. I wonder what impact it'll have.

h/t Moira

Scene portals

One of the last two scene components were "portals", i.e. the connections to other scenes. I didn't give this a whole lot of thought; I just used Areas that have an associated scene that the player's sent to. It works fine, though there were a couple small snags at first.

The first was infinite scene looping: when the player leaves out of one portal and enters the new scene, they spawn in the portal of the other scene. That immediately sends them back to the previous scene, where they spawn in the portal, thus sending back to the other scene, and so on. I just needed a bit of code that starts with portals deactivated until the player leaves the entrance portal area.

The second was load times. There's some hanging after entering a portal while the new scene loads. I added a very simple preloading system, where a scene preloads any linked scenes. A cache of recent scenes is kept (right now the last ten, but could probably be higher than that) to reduce loading further. I imagine a more sophisticated preloading system might be ideal later, such as one that preloads not only the immediately linked scenes but those that are two jumps out.

Scene boundaries

The other last scene component was scene boundaries, i.e. preventing players from walking out of the camera's view or falling off the map. I don't know what the best practice around this is, but I just used static bodies and collision polygons; basically invisible walls. Godot's collision polygons were pretty frustrating to use at first, but eventually I got the hang of it.

Grass and wind shader

I took a shot at creating my own grass wind shader to emulate the Ghibli effect I talked about last time and didn't produce anything worthwhile. Shaders are still really confusing for me! I ended up following this grass shader tutorial for Godot which gave me a bit more insight into how to implement a shader for a particular effect, but still way above my knowledge level. In any case, it looks amazing and I gave it a try in the outdoor environment. The performance lags a bit (20-24fps) but it's not nearly as bad as I thought it'd be.

What I need to think on more is whether or not the effect needs to be reproduced in the background, and if so, how best to do it. I might be able to layout levels so that I don't even need to do that. For example here I shaped the terrain so that it looks like you're at the top of a hill, which is why you don't see any more grass in the closest part of the background. This is just a trick so I don't have to render more grass than absolutely necessary (I'm realizing a huge benefit of the fixed cameras is that you can do many of these kinds of tricks).

Throughout this whole process I'm learning a lot about how challenging emulating light is, especially in video games where you are far more resource-constrained (i.e. you need to hit a certain number of frames per second). I've kind of known that light/shadow is where a lot of the focus is in better video game graphics (e.g. raytracing) but didn't really appreciate it until now. I thought that by sacrificing mesh complexity and detail I'd have more room for light/shadow effects, but I had it backwards: the light/shadow effects were always the primary bottleneck. This is all to say that one problem with the grass/wind shader above is that shadows aren't cast onto the grass! But I think I have to let that slide. I did have a sketch of a very simple cloud shadow shader for grass; maybe I'll try to combine it with this one in the future.

Background environments and skyboxes

I'm still working on figuring out my general approach to these outdoor environments. I thought I should design the foreground to be more like an "indoor" environment with elements like the grass shader and then just have a pre-rendered skybox as the background. I'd create all the terrains in Blender, then just export the environment render and load it in Godot as a skybox.

I was not very successful at this. I tried creating a terrain of karsts, which itself was fun to do in Blender. The shader system there is powerful and you can generate a variety of environments with noise textures (probably much trickier to do if they have to have concave elements like overhangs though). The snag came when importing into Godot—it just looked terrible. I think skyboxes are literally just for skies.

This was really discouraging...I wasn't sure what to do. Eventually I decided to try just exporting the terrain as a mesh rather than as a background image or skybox and that worked surprisingly well.

There are still some issues with textures here (banding, doesn't seem to be the right resolution), and I simplified the geometry too much (way too pointy). But this captures the gist of what I was going for, and more importantly, the workflow is promising!

What's next

This terrain/environment process needs more tuning, but I'm happy with it for now. That was one of the last big unknowns for me in terms of the art asset workflow (the other one is character design, but I'm holding off on that for now). I think I'll take a step back from the art/game development and dig back into the world-building/narrative side.

As I mentioned in the last devlog, I implemented a two viewport system: one viewport for the half-resolution 3d rendering and then a second main (the root) viewport to render the UI and scale up the 3d output. One problem: shadows weren't rendering anymore. This was easy to fix; by default new viewports don't have a shadow atlas, so I just had to change that value from 0 to 1.

I also continued work on the outdoor/natural environment scenes, which brought up some more issues. The forest clearing scene dropped in performance (down to 11-15fps) once more trees were added, which I kind of expected. I reduced the tree model to about 330 vertices (from ~1.2k), which probably helped a little, but was less impactful than I'd hoped. I ended up playing around with the root viewport settings (which confusingly are mixed into Project Settings > General). By default the root viewport is set to render 3d, but now it's only rendering the 2d image it's passed by the half-resolution viewport. So I set the root viewport's render mode to 2d (under Project Settings > General > Intended Usage) and that boosted the scene to around 24-30fps. Still not the greatest, but fine for now.

I also wanted to set up a baked lightmap for ambient occlusion, but there's a bug where environmental lighting isn't taken into account (a fix should be out in 3.3.1).

I also put together a cave/grotto scene, which went quickly:

I realized the cave and forest clearing scenes are actually closer to indoor scenes: there's no skybox or distant environment to render. So I started playing around with a proper outdoor environment, where the sky is visible and there's distant geometry to handle:

A lot of new things to consider here. One, which is mostly specific to this particular scene, is grass and wind effects. I have a lot of grass here...I want to evoke that wind-sweeping-through-the-grass effect that comes up in a lot of Ghibli films. Of course this is a performance hit, with the scene rendering at 10-15fps.

If you look at the effect in Ghibli films, it's actually very simple. The grass is just a static image with trails moving on top:

So I don't really need actual grass geometry for the effect to look good. I can probably put together some kind of shader that moves these trails over the surface of a static texture.

The other thing I'm not sure about is what to render as a skybox and what to render as in-game terrain. I'm using the HTerrain plugin to generate terrain and in the image above all the terrain is in-game. It's really lacking in detail/richness which is mostly because I'm only using one texture. I'm thinking I should probably only render the foreground as in-game geometry and everything else as skybox for performance's sake. Which means I need to figure out a workflow for modeling and exporting skyboxes from Blender. This is something I'll have to think on more, I'm really not sure how best to approach this.

A few other updates:

• Set up a test character and started giving character animations a try, which I was dreading (I still am, but less so). The whole process was made way easier with Mixamo—this will sound like an ad, but it has an auto-rigger that makes a rigging a character very easy and their library of free motion-capture animations covers a lot of what I need right now. For the character itself I based a mesh off of Kiros from FF8 an am using a texture someone extracted from the game.
  • It's very helpful to have a character for scale. The scale of the indoor test environment, for example, was way too huge.
  • I spent quite a long time tweaking the third-person controls, eventually settling on a system that doesn't use the mouse. Basically, with the default keybindings of WASD: W moves the character forward in whatever direction they're facing, S moves the character backwards (i.e. they literally walk/job backwards), and A/D turns them to their left or right respectively. So far it feels smooth and intuitive.
• Formalized the "scene" system a bit more. I implemented a node type called Scene which contains information like fixed camera configurations and where the player spawns. This is really simple at the moment, but I imagine it'll be more complicated as I need to switch between cameras in a scene, or track the player for certain segments, and so on.

I started experimenting with an outdoor environment to start trying out the various environmental effects and elements I looked into last week.

There were a few small victories: the Waterways add-on worked great for still pools by setting both Flow > Distance and Flow > Pressure to 0. I also found an off-the-shelf cloud shader that looks great. With these elements and the ones from last week the outdoor environment looked dreamy:

But the experience raised an important issue that I kind of hoped I would avoid: performance. The outdoor scene was very choppy. I originally had the ~6.6k vertices trees so I tried simplifying them down to about ~1.2k or so. It didn't seem to help much. After reading up on 3d game optimization, the vertex/triangle count was not as important as I thought.

It's possible that some slowdown is due to Godot, which isn't as optimized as more mature 3d game engines (for example, it lacks occlusion culling, which is when objects blocked/hidden by other objects are discarded). It sounds like major 3d improvements have been pushed to the 4.0 release, which may not happen for awhile.

My GPU (or rather my lack of a dedicated one) is no doubt a major bottleneck here, but I want this game to play well on integrated graphics. I'm going with the low-res textures and low-poly models not only for style reasons but also for performance. I thought that would go a long way in terms of performance, but I was completely wrong. They are important, but not nearly as important as light and shadows.

After some more reading and testing of my own:

• Shadows have a huge effect. Turning off ambient occlusion for the world environment helps a lot and using simpler shadows helps a bit more. Glow doesn't seem to affect FPS that much.
• Mesh amount and complexity still have an impact. Having a lot (~100) of the 1.2k vertices trees did slow things down a lot, if only because they make light/shadows more complicated.
• The wind shader, on the other hand, didn't seem to affect performance much compared to a regular spatial shader. Though it does require dynamic shadows to work; otherwise I could probably bake those shadows.
• The cloud shader also has a pretty substantial impact (10-15fps). Tweaking its settings to do fewer draw passes did help a little. I also tried porting another cloud shader, but that performed even worse and was a hassle to set up.

Throughout this testing I thought this was just an issue with the outdoor scene (with the high number of moving trees, especially), but the indoor test scene also had an FPS of only about 10-11. Turning off ambient occlusion, however, boosted that to around 30fps. I guess I completely underestimated how demanding ambient occlusion is.

Specifically, I'm using Godot's screen-space ambient occlusion (SSAO), which adds a lot of richness to the environment. But it's hard to justify such a massive drop in FPS. Fortunately, the screen shader effect kind of maintains some visual interestingness on its own.

I still wanted to preserve some AO if possible. Baking lightmaps is the usual approach and wasn't too complicated to get set up in Godot. The baked lighting does looks better than having no SSAO, and I get around 30fps consistently—basically same performance as without the baked lightmap. But the baked lightmaps don't look as good as the SSAO. According to the docs SSAO is a different approach that captures details in smaller geometries. But after digging a bit, it seems the main difference is that SSAO has a "Light Affect" parameter that controls the visibility of AO in direct light. Normally it's not visible in direct light, i.e. "Light Affect" is 0, but I set it to 1 to exaggerate corners with deeper shadows. This isn't an option for the AO produced by baking lightmaps.

So I tried another route. The screen shader effect I'm using already simulates half resolution for more pixel texture; it makes sense to just actually render at half resolution and draw fewer pixels in the first place. Below are a few comparisons:

The outdoor scene looks good under all settings. But I imagine the double downscaling looks worse as there are more objects on the screen. That's the case with the indoor scene, which looks too noisy with the double downscaling. But otherwise the FPS gains are very promising and give me enough space to switch SSAO back on for the indoor scene!

One issue here is that this downscales the entire viewport, so the text is also downscaled. Text should probably render at the highest resolution possible for readability. So instead I need to render the player camera to a separate downscaled viewport and then render the non-downscaled resolution text (and other UI elements) on top. This was surprisingly complicated to set up; at least, the way Godot's viewports and scene tree work isn't intuitive to me. I struggled to find a way to specify what node loaded scenes attach to so that I could automatically attach scenes to my downscaled viewport node. But that doesn't seem possible—instead I have my player camera as a child of this downscaled viewport node and let scenes attach to the scene tree normally. The "Main" scene that contains all of this is instantiated as a singleton (i.e. using autoload).

This is the route I'll go with for now. The look of the game is pretty much the same, and I can use SSAO for indoor scenes and maintain high framerates. Similarly, the outdoor scene can use the cloud shader and maintain high framerates. That will likely change though as one tree is obviously an unrealistically simple scene. I need to keep experimenting with simpler trees and laying out the scene differently so I don't actually have to have a small forest's worth of trees. My hope is that with this set up the marginal cost of additional meshes will be pretty small. Not small enough for an entire forest, but small enough that I won't have to worry much about performance again.

A related question is the player camera. Right now the player has free reign over it, and the dialogue system was designed with that in mind. However when I imagine the game being played I see a fixed camera setup. The benefit with that is the player is way more constrained in what they see, so I can be more minimal in scene dressing and maintain better performance that way. For example, I'd only need to seat a few trees at the edge of the camera's view rather than anywhere the player might possibly look.

This was just a quick test to see how it might work. To really see if this is the right approach I should start figuring out the character design more and flesh out the third-person system in general. So I'll probably tackle that next before prototyping more of the outdoor/natural environments.

This week: Had a busy week so a little light...but: junk, ice cream machines, colonialism in the core, emotional intelligence, smallholder yields, and custom Magic: The Gathering sets.

Unwanted Corkpull, Kelly Pendergrast.

A good run through of many of my own anxieties wrt to physical products.

My parents mentioned that they'll need help to start cleaning out the house; on the one hand I'm excited about the nostalgia of going through old books and whatnot I had as a kid but dreading the inevitable pile of unwanted things that needs expedient disposal and forgetting. There's no comforting illusion of recycling or donation, considering that nine times out of ten recycling is effectively landfilling and the fraction of junk that was at one point functional (i.e. not packaging, or memorabilia, and so on) will be in disrepair or obsolete.

The author mentions Robin Nagle, I recommend her book Picking Up. Sanitation is one of the most dangerous jobs, in large part due to the horrendous shit that makes up what we make. Bits that become projectiles in the hopper and toxic sludge spewing out of bags that can kill. And of course the sheer amount of waste that circulates. As pointed out in the article, disposability— along with debt and privatization—is an important strategy for maintaining demand, creating a unending vacuum that pulls products throughout the economy.

Like the author I sometimes fantasize about tools that are well-made, long-lasting, repairable, and excel in their function. There's a subreddit for those products, r/BuyItForLife, although I think there's often conflict over whether or not the sub has lost sight of its original purpose, with people posting things that, in fact, do not last for particularly long (the gold standard seems to be things that are passed down through generations and still in good condition), and there's also the side that the sub drives purchases/is probably a target for advertisers, though mitigating consumption isn't one of its stated goals. And funnily, there are often posts of people complaining that they can't buy anything that's posted on the subreddit, because a lot of these durable products aren't produced anymore.

I hold the corkpull, and I think of the prehistory of its materials extracted from the ground, the chemical manufacturing to form the plastic compounds, the digital piecework of design logistics, marketing, the molding and unfolding and packaging and shipping and handling and retail. It’s such a weight to hold in my hand. The hours aren’t love hours, necessarily — rather chemical hours and deep-time sedimentary hours, pain hours and R&D hours. More hours than I can ever repay.

I think of the other extreme here, of preppers and survivalists and homesteaders and so on who in some sense are desperately trying to escape this bond to global supply chains and waste. I get the draw, but I don't know if you can ever fully escape that pull.

'Colonialism had never really ended': my life in the shadow of Cecil Rhodes, Simukai Chigudu

This was fantastic. I don't have much to add except that I recommend and that it's another angle on the very complicated, challenging, and inescapable tension of needing to play by the rules of oppressive systems to "succeed" enough that you gain some footing to shift them, and the inevitability that playing by those rules leaves its mark on you—marks that you spend years reckoning with and undoing.

Reading throughout I was reminded of my own family history and the relatively little I know from when I've worked up the courage to ask my parents about it. I grew up in the US so there is a generational gulf between me and my family history in China, but not as much as I'd have originally thought. My grandparents consisted of two doctors, a scientist, and a social work, and all had some connection to the US: one had studied in the US, the others were among the first Chinese doctors to work at a western hospital funded by a Rockefeller. My father, who continue this short tradition of western medicine in my family, interestingly grew way more interested in traditional Chinese medicine over the last decade.

Chigudu's necessarily nuanced relationship Mugabe and Zimbabwe independence and the warped binary positions people distant from the country take also reminded me of the internet and media discourse around China. Now is obviously a sensitive time with anti-Asian sentiment rising and continued tensions between the US and China, but it's still extremely common to see positions that are (and I don't think this is really an exaggeration) "China bad" or "China good". People who live in America no doubt have complex feelings about the country because it encompasses so many different things. China is just as complex, but countries outside your own, that you have no connection to, are only ever invoked as a symbol and never as a place.

As someone active in online leftist spaces I come across pro-Mao/pro-China rhetoric very often and am never really sure how to deal with it. My family and their friends were persecuted under Mao as intellectuals; being associated with a western hospital didn't help. It's really hard for me to see how that could have been justified. This is winding away from the original piece so I'll stop here, but maybe I'll write more on this at another time.

They Hacked McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines—and Started a Cold War, Andy Greenberg

Interesting story about the McDonald's ice cream machines that are constantly out-of-service and how a couple, after building a device that made independent maintenance of the machines easier for franchises, came under the fire of McDonald's itself. I recently gave a talk titled "Autonomy vs Automation" themed around asking whether or not a technology enhances autonomy or encourages automation, by which I mean "makes decisions on our behalf", whether or not we realize it. Many new technologies impose some kind of asymmetric relation on its users, whether that is a draconian EULA or a excessive ToS or the cyclic dependency of GMO/fertilizer/pesticide the agrochemical industry entails. The piece described how Taylor, the company behind the notorious ice cream machines, makes independent maintenance of the machines difficult in part because they benefit from lucrative maintenance contracts. You can probably guess where the story goes: McDonald's/Taylor crackdown and Taylor, seeing the interest in the couple's device, make their own copy of it. I can't say I have any emotional investment in any of the parties involved but it was an entertaining read.

It reminds me of the "f'real" shake machines at Wawa—not quite the same as froyo but iirc the approach there is to have the ice cream in a separate container and refrigeration unit, and the machine just does the mixing. Seems way less complicated but I don't know if the same approach would work for froyo.

The Repressive Politics of Emotional Intelligence, Merve Emre

Another entertaining read, where about 3/4 of the way through I realized that "emotional intelligence" as a self-disciplining framework for life under capitalism sounds an awful lot like Confucianism, at least The Analects, which I have to admit is the only Confucian text I've read. The harshest reading of The Analects is that Confucius is basically doing what the author here is criticizing Goleman for—a kind of conservatism with regards to maintaining harmonious but rather regressive relationships and an implication of personal failure if strife occurs in them. Whereas Goleman developed another naturalizing sleight of hand for individualizing the burden of capitalism and disciplining its subjects, Confucius I guess was doing similarly for the state? I don't want to stretch this comparison too far, it was just a briefly striking similarity.

Higher yields and more biodiversity on smaller farms, Vincent Ricciardi, Zia Mehrabi, Hannah Wittman, Dana James & Navin Ramankutty

A promising meta-analysis that finds greater yields and (crop and non-crop) biodiversity with smaller farms. This is a very controversial topic (consider this recent big ag shill piece) and when I read more about it while researching fertilizer I couldn't find anything conclusive. There is just so much variety to contend with—different crops, environments/climactic conditions, unusual weather patterns, variability in crop treatment, soil quality, local socioeconomic conditions, and so on—that it's hard to generalize the outcome of any study (or even set of studies!). But at least this study is more evidence on the side of smallholders. Interestingly, they weren't able to find anything conclusive on GHG emissions and resource efficiency, which, along with crop yields, are the major points of contention in the big-vs-small ag debate. The article hints at labor being a main factor here, which I guess is not all that surprising.

PlaneSculptors

This is an incredible site of custom Magic: The Gathering sets. The quality and creativity of the set and card designs are impressive—I hope to try one of them out at some point. I'm pretty sure some official cards and sets have lifted ideas from this site...which is something I've wondered about. There have been accusations of Wizards of the Coast stealing ideas from fan designs.