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Nov 24, 2021Liked by Mackenzie Andersen

I get your points. It seems that I am so far out in the margins, I don't have to make any effort to have a different voice. Works okay for the half-dozen or so who read it. I kept up a blog on Wordpress for several years, now I just pay them an annual fee to archive my material. All blogging platforms seem to work that way.

Search algorithms annoy the hell out of me. So does spell-check. Running battle against AI… as Michael Pollan says of the groundhog, "you may be smarter, he has more time."

Context: I learned the succession of English monarchy because I was interested in furniture styles. That timeline eventually helped me to understand architectural periods, art history, and social and political history. We don't have a shred of "common ground" in the South, because the southern colonies were developed under 18th c. English laws, while your northern colonies were created in the 17th c. That's why I keep recommending Hammond. A lot of our political woes begin with Enclosure.

Two massive financial bubbles, the South Sea Company, and the Mississippi land trade, collapsed simultaneously in July 1720. One led to enclosure, and the industrial revolution; the other to the French Revolution. By all means, tie your story to a deeper history.

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If you want to write a historical story related to all of that, it might work here as a guest post.

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Why not publish your archives on Substack ?

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HCR teaches history at Boston College, and has been writing a daily "letter" on the current political landscape. Delightfully well researched and well written. She just happens to be married to a lobsterman in Maine.

Please, don't take that as criticism. I skim through a lot of reading, if it doesn't grab my attention or if its poorly written (grammar, syntax, logic...) I don't stick. Writing is craft. I'm on your side.

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BTW this post is exceeding the percentage of opens and the number of non-subscriber views of most other posts, which is interesting because I went with a title that doesn't meet any title guidelines. This post is about the Great Resignation, which I put in the subtitle. According to conventional advice, I should have made the Great Resignation part of the title because it is newsworthy, but instead, I went with the title I liked that misses every score point in viral title formula advice that is out there.

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I read BCR's letter. It is interesting but it is all national and global news (resources listed at bottom) While it is filled with interesting facts it is all taken from the news and she does not bring any of her own insights to it beyond the selection of news stories that she combines. She stays in the background as a news curator. I can see how she is able to produce those letters so prolifically every day.

Judd Lugum of Popular Information does more original research and puts it together to make a point that might not otherwise be apparent.

I know I could write about global and national news and develop an audience faster that way but I started writing because I found the media in Maine to be hegemonic and not representative of diverse perspectives. I notice people taking up national causes while there are local causes that are incredibly significant that go unnoticed, often by a clear intent.

I have an unusual distinction as an independent researcher of Maine economic development statutes, focusing on the years since 1976 when Maine became a centrally managed economy. I have been researching the Maine statutes for so long that when I read an act or a bill I do so in the context of many other bills that interact with each other. One does not see the interaction if one considers a stand-alone bill and misses the patterns that recur over time.

I can honestly say I do not know any other independent researchers of state statutes. I wish there were more and they were in every state of the Union, but most people do not read state statutes because it "makes their eyes glaze over" so if I want people to pay attention, I have to weave it into a greater story and use a more complex voice than purely academic reporting delivers.

I see bills discussed in the local news that do not accurately report what is in those bills, at times not even identifying the legislative name or number of the bill so that one must dig for the correct identifying information just to read the bill. For example, in the first attempt to pass a state-owned power company, I read the bill and clicked on a reference link to find that it said that the equity used for the money borrowed to buy the electricity companies would be the private property of Maine residents. I published the text of the reference link in a post that went locally viral. After that, I did not hear much about the state power company, now on its third round of trying to become a reality.

I am not trying to be like anyone else. I am more interested in reporting on what isn't being covered by other media resources and developing my own voice and style. I learn from others but I want to be myself.

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I haven't read Mumford, I've read Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander... enough to understand how urban renewal and red-lining and suburbs and automobiles destroyed communities. I've read Galbraith's Money, and (you should read this one) Jennifer Taub's Other People's Houses.

Lately, I'm reading commentary on David Graber's Debt, and Piketty's Capital. Since you're on Medium, I suggest having a look at Dave Troy. And, particularly since you're in Maine, I hope you're reading Heather Cox Richardson on Substack.

I'm not criticizing your work. The points you're making are valid. If I have difficulty reading something, I assume that most people won't even bother. Something to do with having the attention span of a flea. Jessica has a formula. It works. She's also a damn good writer, connecting two or more ideas in a short essay.

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Those all sound worth reading. I am following David Troy. He connects a lot of ideas as well. I just followed Heather Cox Richardson. At first glance, I do not see the Maine connection. Her focus seems to be national politics, but obviously, I haven't had a chance to read anything yet.

This post is getting views. at a healthy pace, I don't really know how Substack measures a view from a read. It measures opens and views and opens are based on subscribers but the views are more than the opens- so it is being viewed by non-subscribers as well as subscribers.

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Age of Awareness must have had a very different response than you because AoA published it within minutes after I submitted this story to them. If they found it difficult to follow, I doubt they would have done so.

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you have covered this ground before... it seems to me that the historic context of the industrial revolution is a general argument, while the 200-bed homeless shelter is a particular argument. I find it difficult to connect the two, and frankly it comes across as a rant.

Luddites weren't the only ones who objected to early efforts at industrialization (once again, read Hammond), or privatization, or vertical integration. Sawyers burned sawmills, farmworkers destroyed threshing machines. Besides, the name Luddite is inevitably burdened with pejorative associations.

Why are people homeless in the first place? Why are containers piled up on the docks at every major port? These are the results of systemic problems that began in the 1980's, and piled on until we can't conceive of an accessible solution. Localized economies would be a reasonable starting place. Small is Beautiful.

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I am aware of going over ground that I have covered before. It is a continuing subject but I cannot assume that every reader has read every post, so I think it is important to include previous ground.

When I started this post I intended it to be a history of alternate movements but it went off in another direction and so I only briefly mentioned some of those movements. I always assume there are more than I know about because this history is not well recorded.

In this post, I went into what is driving the Great Resignation, which is known through reading the ranters of the workforces, telling their perspective.

I was criticized by someone else for including too much research detail and that I should be more like Jessica Wildfire, who is a ranter whom I have linked to in the past. I like what she does but she is not an independent researcher. I wish the popular ranters would focus more on solutions but we can't arrive at the solution if we don't understand the problem, and the ranters are very informative in understanding what the social problems are.

I want to be influential in affecting real solutions and so I want to reach those that respond to rants and those that recognize the value of research and analysis. I want to connect them. It's akin to what the quantum philosophers said about communicating what was discovered in the quantum domain. It cannot be done with math or general language alone. It takes both.

In terms, of how the Industrial Revolution and homeless shelters with 200 beds in a room are connected it has to do with the fact that during the Industrial Revolution human living and working spaces were made smaller and smaller and smaller. That is also happening today- across demographics. The homeless are just one demographic example. The homeless shelter is just a human warehouse. Have you read Lewis Mumford's Culture of the Cities? He describes human living conditions across the ages in great detail. The Industrial Revolution was the worst of times.

I have been trying to construct a picture of why we are where we are today. In my picture, it begins in 1968 when the federal government passed an act to centralize the national economy using wealth redistribution as its instrument. It instructed the states to follow suit and so in the seventies, the states centralized state economies and that has been expanding ever since.

In Maine, and other places, the homeless problem has to do with gentrification which is built into the centrally managed economy. Locally it especially has to do with Airbnbs. There was never such an extreme shortage of year-round living spaces before the Airbnbs.

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