OK, just got up and posted the pending comments, which were only GftNC and wonkie. I'll contact you both off list this weekend and try to figure out what's up.
Just a quick comment here, Russell's comment had to be approved, but I believe that nous' comment wasn't. So whatever nous did and Russell didn't, that is the key
Wordpress is still holding up comments in moderation and I think that people have to become a 'subscriber', so they can enter their username and password. I'm not happy about that, but if I just leave it open, I'm worried about a flood of spam.
I'm glad some others have weighed in. I tend, when in a situation that is uncomfortable, to simply back out the way I came in. In fact, one of the reasons I have spent so much time at ObWi has been to be able to talk about politics with people. Being here in Japan offers a measure of separation, and Japanese usually don't talk about politics unless pressed and even then, they will often not get too deeply into the weeds. They (or at least the people I am with) also don't have much in-depth knowledge of particular people or parties, just a larger sense of this party likes this or this spokesperson feels this. Speeches aren't closely parsed, and problems and fights seem to go into a memory hole.
However, I've had a couple situations that parallel yours, though not dealing with politics. My western upbringing wants me to sit them down, try to figure out what the problem is, work to some resolution. However, I never do that, because it never seems to result in a conclusion that is better.
I realize that is probably a big downer and it is no useful advice, and I'm still wrestling with this, especially as I head into retirement and will not have the outlets to meet and talk to people.
I know it can be confusing, but in this case 'post' is main article/item and 'comment' is something that follows from it. There is NO problem with people writing a long comment with links, it's just very difficult to post an resourced article on breaking news and people shouldn't expect that. For example, trying to write a post about Charlie Kirk, you had a situation where mainstream outlets were posting mistaken information and it is difficult to impossible to link to social media information. I have really felt that lack when looking at the archive and seeing posts that carefully laid out a position that was referenced fully, allowing you to check and understand. So the posts here are probably going to be, at least from me, more conversation starters, especially for things that are in the news.
TSMC also is doing a huge fab in Phoenix which is apparently having lots of problems. I'm really interested in that one because TSMC is also coming to the prefecture I'm living in. Here is a youtube video about the problems
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD1jyk3LhA8
In late 2024, a $40 billion chip factory rises from Arizona's desert, aiming to recreate the magic of TSMC's worldleading Taiwan fabs. The stakes are high. This is where chips for iPhones and AI supercomputers will be born. Yet, early on, engineers faced a baffling dilemma. The facility had to import ultra pure sulfuric acid from 6,500 m away in Taiwan. American suppliers couldn't meet TSMC's standards, and local chemicals cost five times more. Even Intel, the veteran US chipmaker next door, jumped in to buy from these overseas shipments, a fact TSMC's CEO relayed with incredulity. How did you live before? It was very hard before, but now you are here, he recalls Intel saying.
The level of technology for the Hyundai plant wasn't at the level of a chip fab, but I imagine there were a ton of things that required oversight from headquarters. So I just have to laugh with the interviews of MAGAts who say 'just hire American, we have lots of people who could do that.'
Charles, a long term redirect isn't possible, once the servers shut down, it's gone. A short term might be possible, but I think the url is a typepad domain and I can't log in to the typepad interface, (and have no way to contact type pad) I can't imagine how I would do it.
Somewhere in the settings the value of n can be changed.
It's currently set at 2, let me know if you think that should be raised.
I'm not sure how automatic comment approval is working, it looks like you have to log in to your profile. I'm going to explore this on Thursday and will try and make a post explaining the system.
Vance hosting Kirk's podcast seems a natural development. I also didn't realize that Kirk's wife's speech was also 'from' the podcast, as a livestream.
OK, I think comments are back at the archive, please poke around and let me know if there are other things. Next task is to link up with Andrew's stuff, still not sure about how comment approval works, so please feel free to comment to help me figure it out.
Spoke too soon, the comment approval thing does not work as I thought it did. I'm reminded of my favorite joke in Friends. Rachel just discovered a typo on her resume after making 1000 photocopies and getting the gang to stuff them in envelopes and she says 'oh god, do you think it is on all of them?' and Joey replies 'nah, I'm sure the xerox caught a few'.
No worries, the setting is that once people are approved, they are good to go and it transferred people who were already in the comments. Unfortunately, because we made the archive site, people who haven't commented here have to get approved, so it shouldn't be too onerous.
I'm working my way through getting the comments back in, which is tedious, but I am glancing at old posts and names so it's nostalgic at the same time. It's pretty astonishing to me that a simply text file contains all this, and when it is parsed, all these conversations spring up. Though (and it may be fatigue) I thought that I saw a post in the text file with one author, but appeared with another author on the blog, so I'll do some checks to make sure that authorship is correct.
Morning all,
Hartmut, if it happened then, I think that post was lost.
GftNC, it looks like the comments are showing for posts up until Sept 2004. The comments are in the database, but aren't appearing. I'll work on fixing that this week.
DaveC, about the SASE, I'm worried that the new Trump tariffs are going to disrupt that, so I think we may have to go back to smoke signals.
Hey Hartmut, glad you made it! If you can find that post in the wayback machine ( http://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/obsidianwings.blogs.com ) and take a screenshot, I can see if it didn't get transferred over or what.
According to Gemini, the default allowed tags are usually the following:
anchor, blockquote, strong or b for bold, em or i for italic and a couple of others.
Here's the current rough plan
-Going to set up a new site with wordpress after I finish a conference presentation next weekend.
-We will make a second archive site with all the old content, but not be interactive in anyway.
After the new site is up, I'll copy any posts that we make at either site to both sites. The posts here will have the comments closed and a note to go to the new site, so anything going up in the last half of sept will be here, but you'll need to go to the new site to comment.
This way, we can get the site up and not rush migrating the old data, as well as avoiding the problems of integrating everything. This means that we might lose the last few comments here, but this seems like the least fuss. We could also go back and import some key posts or link to them on the front page. I'm thinking particularly of Andrew's last post, but there may be other important ones we want to bring forward.
Also, thanks for all the generous offers of financial support, but it is more of a pain dealing with the problems of international money transfer (along with the added scrutiny, believe it or not), but when I get the site up, I will ask regular commenters to consider making a post with their favorite topic or their introduction/interesting story to populate the blog with some content and discussion. It's not required, but it will be helpful.
One possible path might be to export the current site to a blog that doesn't update, making it an archive, and starting a new blog that we could set up in the most efficient way. That way, we could deal with the deadline and get an archive up later.
It's hard to have much sympathy for John Bolton. After his role in the Bush administration...
Charles, you've piqued my curiosity. What things did Bolton do under Bush that you disapprove of? I've got my own list, but just wondering what he's done that you disagree with.
To me, what is more interesting is Charles' 'who is this Vance person of which you speak' and at the same time eagerly searching for Youtube videos of UK citizens complaining about Muslims taking over the country. Call it the Texas two-step...
It was a youtube video, so I can't find it, but it discussed how a growing number of people are choosing to locate themselves in Dubai and how it is a different way of thinking about citizenship, nationality and identity.
I don't think I want to live in an Islamic country...
Indonesia? Malaysia? I would consider Krygyzstan but I'd give a pass on Kazakhstan.
Dubai is popular, and Türkiye is possible, though a stretch.
I feel like you are thinking of countries in the neighborhood of Israel...
Connected (ever so slightly) to the discussion about being "polite and considerate to the lower level administrative/service people" https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-bitter-lesson-versus-the-garbage One of my favorite academic papers about organizations is by Ruthanne Huising, and it tells the story of teams that were assigned to create process maps of their company, tracing what the organization actually did, from raw materials to finished goods. As they created this map, they realized how much of the work seemed strange and unplanned. They discovered entire processes that produced outputs nobody used, weird semi-official pathways to getting things done, and repeated duplication of efforts. Many of the employees working on the map, once rising stars of the company, became disillusioned.
I’ll let Prof. Huising explain what happened next: “Some held out hope that one or two people at the top knew of these design and operation issues; however, they were often disabused of this optimism. For example, a manager walked the CEO through the map, presenting him with a view he had never seen before and illustrating for him the lack of design and the disconnect between strategy and operations. The CEO, after being walked through the map, sat down, put his head on the table, and said, "This is even more fucked up than I imagined." The CEO revealed that not only was the operation of his organization out of his control but that his grasp on it was imaginary.”
For many people, this may not be a surprise. One thing you learn studying (or working in) organizations is that they are all actually a bit of a mess. In fact, one classic organizational theory is actually called the Garbage Can Model. This views organizations as chaotic "garbage cans" where problems, solutions, and decision-makers are dumped in together, and decisions often happen when these elements collide randomly, rather than through a fully rational process. Of course, it is easy to take this view too far - organizations do have structures, decision-makers, and processes that actually matter. It is just that these structures often evolved and were negotiated among people, rather than being carefully designed and well-recorded.
The Garbage Can represents a world where unwritten rules, bespoke knowledge, and complex and undocumented processes are critical.
I've been thinking about this a bit, and how one overcomes it or at least works around it.
About Cheez Whiz's comment about David Brooks (and the pointer to Driftglass) with the tag David Brooks, definitely worth a look)
his wikipedia entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brooks_(commentator)
has this As an undergraduate, Brooks frequently contributed reviews and satirical pieces to campus publications. His senior year, he wrote a spoof of the lifestyle of wealthy conservative William F. Buckley Jr., who was scheduled to speak at the university: "In the afternoons he is in the habit of going into crowded rooms and making everybody else feel inferior. The evenings are reserved for extended bouts of name-dropping." To his piece, Brooks appended the note: "Some would say I'm envious of Mr. Buckley. But if truth be known, I just want a job and have a peculiar way of asking. So how about it, Billy? Can you spare a dime?" When Buckley arrived to give his talk, he asked whether Brooks was in the lecture audience and offered him a job.
Don't know if it is sucking up to Buckley, or somethingelseentirely (each word is a different link), but the story seems strangely apropros.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Notes about commenting”
OK, just got up and posted the pending comments, which were only GftNC and wonkie. I'll contact you both off list this weekend and try to figure out what's up.
On “Kuzushi and Charlie Kirk”
Hartmut, great minds. I'm working on a post about this and it should be up soon.
On “Notes about commenting”
Tomorrow, when I can get on the university computers that don't have my password saved, I'll see what I can figure out.
On “Guestpost from Wonkie”
Just a quick comment here, Russell's comment had to be approved, but I believe that nous' comment wasn't. So whatever nous did and Russell didn't, that is the key
"
Wordpress is still holding up comments in moderation and I think that people have to become a 'subscriber', so they can enter their username and password. I'm not happy about that, but if I just leave it open, I'm worried about a flood of spam.
I'm glad some others have weighed in. I tend, when in a situation that is uncomfortable, to simply back out the way I came in. In fact, one of the reasons I have spent so much time at ObWi has been to be able to talk about politics with people. Being here in Japan offers a measure of separation, and Japanese usually don't talk about politics unless pressed and even then, they will often not get too deeply into the weeds. They (or at least the people I am with) also don't have much in-depth knowledge of particular people or parties, just a larger sense of this party likes this or this spokesperson feels this. Speeches aren't closely parsed, and problems and fights seem to go into a memory hole.
However, I've had a couple situations that parallel yours, though not dealing with politics. My western upbringing wants me to sit them down, try to figure out what the problem is, work to some resolution. However, I never do that, because it never seems to result in a conclusion that is better.
I realize that is probably a big downer and it is no useful advice, and I'm still wrestling with this, especially as I head into retirement and will not have the outlets to meet and talk to people.
On “Excelsior 2.0: more details about the site and requests”
GftNC, I'll email you with some details.
I know it can be confusing, but in this case 'post' is main article/item and 'comment' is something that follows from it. There is NO problem with people writing a long comment with links, it's just very difficult to post an resourced article on breaking news and people shouldn't expect that. For example, trying to write a post about Charlie Kirk, you had a situation where mainstream outlets were posting mistaken information and it is difficult to impossible to link to social media information. I have really felt that lack when looking at the archive and seeing posts that carefully laid out a position that was referenced fully, allowing you to check and understand. So the posts here are probably going to be, at least from me, more conversation starters, especially for things that are in the news.
On “Hyudai, meet ICE”
TSMC also is doing a huge fab in Phoenix which is apparently having lots of problems. I'm really interested in that one because TSMC is also coming to the prefecture I'm living in. Here is a youtube video about the problems
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD1jyk3LhA8
In late 2024, a $40 billion chip factory rises from Arizona's desert, aiming to recreate the magic of TSMC's worldleading Taiwan fabs. The stakes are high. This is where chips for iPhones and AI supercomputers will be born. Yet, early on, engineers faced a baffling dilemma. The facility had to import ultra pure sulfuric acid from 6,500 m away in Taiwan. American suppliers couldn't meet TSMC's standards, and local chemicals cost five times more. Even Intel, the veteran US chipmaker next door, jumped in to buy from these overseas shipments, a fact TSMC's CEO relayed with incredulity. How did you live before? It was very hard before, but now you are here, he recalls Intel saying.
The level of technology for the Hyundai plant wasn't at the level of a chip fab, but I imagine there were a ton of things that required oversight from headquarters. So I just have to laugh with the interviews of MAGAts who say 'just hire American, we have lots of people who could do that.'
On “Excelsior!”
GftNC, yes he was.
Charles, a long term redirect isn't possible, once the servers shut down, it's gone. A short term might be possible, but I think the url is a typepad domain and I can't log in to the typepad interface, (and have no way to contact type pad) I can't imagine how I would do it.
"
Somewhere in the settings the value of n can be changed.
It's currently set at 2, let me know if you think that should be raised.
I'm not sure how automatic comment approval is working, it looks like you have to log in to your profile. I'm going to explore this on Thursday and will try and make a post explaining the system.
On “Kuzushi and Charlie Kirk”
https://www.npr.org/2025/09/15/nx-s1-5542239/charlie-kirks-chair-is-empty-can-maga-harness-his-movement
Vance hosting Kirk's podcast seems a natural development. I also didn't realize that Kirk's wife's speech was also 'from' the podcast, as a livestream.
On “Excelsior!”
OK, I think comments are back at the archive, please poke around and let me know if there are other things. Next task is to link up with Andrew's stuff, still not sure about how comment approval works, so please feel free to comment to help me figure it out.
"
Spoke too soon, the comment approval thing does not work as I thought it did. I'm reminded of my favorite joke in Friends. Rachel just discovered a typo on her resume after making 1000 photocopies and getting the gang to stuff them in envelopes and she says 'oh god, do you think it is on all of them?' and Joey replies 'nah, I'm sure the xerox caught a few'.
"
No worries, the setting is that once people are approved, they are good to go and it transferred people who were already in the comments. Unfortunately, because we made the archive site, people who haven't commented here have to get approved, so it shouldn't be too onerous.
I'm working my way through getting the comments back in, which is tedious, but I am glancing at old posts and names so it's nostalgic at the same time. It's pretty astonishing to me that a simply text file contains all this, and when it is parsed, all these conversations spring up. Though (and it may be fatigue) I thought that I saw a post in the text file with one author, but appeared with another author on the blog, so I'll do some checks to make sure that authorship is correct.
"
Morning all,
Hartmut, if it happened then, I think that post was lost.
GftNC, it looks like the comments are showing for posts up until Sept 2004. The comments are in the database, but aren't appearing. I'll work on fixing that this week.
DaveC, about the SASE, I'm worried that the new Trump tariffs are going to disrupt that, so I think we may have to go back to smoke signals.
"
Hey Hartmut, glad you made it! If you can find that post in the wayback machine ( http://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/obsidianwings.blogs.com ) and take a screenshot, I can see if it didn't get transferred over or what.
According to Gemini, the default allowed tags are usually the following:
anchor, blockquote, strong or b for bold, em or i for italic and a couple of others.
On “Kuzushi and Charlie Kirk”
I'm not so sure about that Charles. He got his start with a watchlist against university professors
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professor_Watchlist
The watchlist is still up.
On “What to do?”
Here's the current rough plan
-Going to set up a new site with wordpress after I finish a conference presentation next weekend.
-We will make a second archive site with all the old content, but not be interactive in anyway.
After the new site is up, I'll copy any posts that we make at either site to both sites. The posts here will have the comments closed and a note to go to the new site, so anything going up in the last half of sept will be here, but you'll need to go to the new site to comment.
This way, we can get the site up and not rush migrating the old data, as well as avoiding the problems of integrating everything. This means that we might lose the last few comments here, but this seems like the least fuss. We could also go back and import some key posts or link to them on the front page. I'm thinking particularly of Andrew's last post, but there may be other important ones we want to bring forward.
Also, thanks for all the generous offers of financial support, but it is more of a pain dealing with the problems of international money transfer (along with the added scrutiny, believe it or not), but when I get the site up, I will ask regular commenters to consider making a post with their favorite topic or their introduction/interesting story to populate the blog with some content and discussion. It's not required, but it will be helpful.
"
One possible path might be to export the current site to a blog that doesn't update, making it an archive, and starting a new blog that we could set up in the most efficient way. That way, we could deal with the deadline and get an archive up later.
On “I’m forever blowing bubbles”
Thanks nous, research hub lets me request a full text, so I'll try that.
I've made a post out of GftNC's depressing news.
On “The Schadenfreude Express”
It's hard to have much sympathy for John Bolton. After his role in the Bush administration...
Charles, you've piqued my curiosity. What things did Bolton do under Bush that you disapprove of? I've got my own list, but just wondering what he's done that you disagree with.
"
To me, what is more interesting is Charles' 'who is this Vance person of which you speak' and at the same time eagerly searching for Youtube videos of UK citizens complaining about Muslims taking over the country. Call it the Texas two-step...
"
At what point will Charles be replaced by Grok? And how would we know?
"
It was a youtube video, so I can't find it, but it discussed how a growing number of people are choosing to locate themselves in Dubai and how it is a different way of thinking about citizenship, nationality and identity.
"
I don't think I want to live in an Islamic country...
Indonesia? Malaysia? I would consider Krygyzstan but I'd give a pass on Kazakhstan.
Dubai is popular, and Türkiye is possible, though a stretch.
I feel like you are thinking of countries in the neighborhood of Israel...
On “David Brooks in Laodicea”
Connected (ever so slightly) to the discussion about being "polite and considerate to the lower level administrative/service people"
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-bitter-lesson-versus-the-garbage
One of my favorite academic papers about organizations is by Ruthanne Huising, and it tells the story of teams that were assigned to create process maps of their company, tracing what the organization actually did, from raw materials to finished goods. As they created this map, they realized how much of the work seemed strange and unplanned. They discovered entire processes that produced outputs nobody used, weird semi-official pathways to getting things done, and repeated duplication of efforts. Many of the employees working on the map, once rising stars of the company, became disillusioned.
I’ll let Prof. Huising explain what happened next: “Some held out hope that one or two people at the top knew of these design and operation issues; however, they were often disabused of this optimism. For example, a manager walked the CEO through the map, presenting him with a view he had never seen before and illustrating for him the lack of design and the disconnect between strategy and operations. The CEO, after being walked through the map, sat down, put his head on the table, and said, "This is even more fucked up than I imagined." The CEO revealed that not only was the operation of his organization out of his control but that his grasp on it was imaginary.”
For many people, this may not be a surprise. One thing you learn studying (or working in) organizations is that they are all actually a bit of a mess. In fact, one classic organizational theory is actually called the Garbage Can Model. This views organizations as chaotic "garbage cans" where problems, solutions, and decision-makers are dumped in together, and decisions often happen when these elements collide randomly, rather than through a fully rational process. Of course, it is easy to take this view too far - organizations do have structures, decision-makers, and processes that actually matter. It is just that these structures often evolved and were negotiated among people, rather than being carefully designed and well-recorded.
The Garbage Can represents a world where unwritten rules, bespoke knowledge, and complex and undocumented processes are critical.
I've been thinking about this a bit, and how one overcomes it or at least works around it.
About Cheez Whiz's comment about David Brooks (and the pointer to Driftglass) with the tag David Brooks, definitely worth a look)
his wikipedia entry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brooks_(commentator)
has this
As an undergraduate, Brooks frequently contributed reviews and satirical pieces to campus publications. His senior year, he wrote a spoof of the lifestyle of wealthy conservative William F. Buckley Jr., who was scheduled to speak at the university: "In the afternoons he is in the habit of going into crowded rooms and making everybody else feel inferior. The evenings are reserved for extended bouts of name-dropping." To his piece, Brooks appended the note: "Some would say I'm envious of Mr. Buckley. But if truth be known, I just want a job and have a peculiar way of asking. So how about it, Billy? Can you spare a dime?" When Buckley arrived to give his talk, he asked whether Brooks was in the lecture audience and offered him a job.
Don't know if it is sucking up to Buckley, or something else entirely (each word is a different link), but the story seems strangely apropros.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.