Clarence "Sparr" Risher

TL;DR: While "I didn't intend to hurt you" is almost never an appropriate response to "You hurt me [and should change your behavior]", the same doesn't hold for "Hurting you wasn't a reasonably predictable outcome" or "That was the least hurtful choice available".

For the last month, I have been making approximately one long form post per day. I challenged myself to write something every day in June, as an exercise and to get back into the habit of writing. Even though I narrowly failed the challenge, it still achieved most of my goals, and provided some unexpected useful insights as well. I made 28 posts in 30 days, missing four days and having two double-post days. Most of the missing days were spent on legal drafting; I had intended to post motions and memoranda a few times in the month to fill the gaps, but instead ended up spending 35 hours on a single motion that still isn't finished.

Every post, with a few unimportant exceptions, was posted in its entirety to Facebook, Substack, Dreamwidth, Reddit, Glosso, and Paper.wf. Every post was summarized and linked on Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon.social. This is the first time I've done such widespread cross posting, which led to somewhat depressing realizations regarding engagement and reach, which I'll describe later. Wherever you're reading this right now, you can probably find all of the others if you scroll back/up/down/whatever on my profile.

The biggest category I'd sort my writing into is a combination of communication, awareness of how the world works, decision making, and interpersonal interactions. "What to do when my questions indicate I'm more informed than you think?" and "Rooting out fundamental disagreements with hypothetical questions" are attempts to better connect with people who seem to misunderstand certain conversational patterns. "We need a way to ask Maybe/No questions" is about a pattern that's difficult to convey at all. "Cheating is breaking rules that you agreed to" aims to analogize game cheating with relationship cheating. "Why write about a pattern without actionable followup?" describes a pattern in my writing that people express confusion about. "You feel [verb]ed? That's also an accusation and request." is trying to help people understand how what they say can convey more than they intend. "Low success rate does not require low skill" and "Some choices are net positive despite increasing negative outcomes" are attempts to address common misconceptions about particular relationships between choices and outcomes. "We need to popularize "anti-" as an alternative prefix to "a-"" is a proposal to stop using some ambiguous terms in self identification.

Coming in second was intentional community, in general and my experiences and my future plans. Those posts included "Doing chores is a normal part of living alone and it gets easier together", "Lessons from Estate of Mind", "Hunting for improved real estate for a large intentional community", "Setting community norms democratically within dictatorial bounds", "Events that I want to fit at my next place", and "Adventures in parenting 20-40 year old teenagers". "My Ideal Day" is ostensibly about me, but it's really a description of a slice of the community environment I hope to build, and I even illustrated some of the posts with an aspirational schedule for CoDwell that I sketched out years ago. A few of these are topics I've written on before and approached with some years of additional experience this time. A few are strictly forward looking. When it comes time to launch CoDwell or some other next big intentional community project, these posts will serve as source material for putting together the thoughts and ideas that I want to share with people who seem interested in collaborating.

Another common theme was the law. "Legal Situation Update" and "I still need a lawyer" specifically covered my current situation and outlook. "The tyranny of civil court clerk delays" is a not very successful attempt to explain a problem with court rules and deadlines. "How I search for professional assistance" describes how I've tried to find a lawyer, which is also the process I've used to [fail to] find a plumber, a side loader rental, etc.

I made two posts about some failures I've had when trying to work for FAANG companies. "An impossible first task at Google" describes how a confluence of policy changes and management missteps wasted my first few months of effort there. "Ruinous Surprises in Company Culture" was prompted by some comments on the earlier post, and describes some ways ICs are expected to interact with each other and managers at Google and Amazon, but which are conspicuously absent from any new hire onboarding.

That leaves a bunch of miscellaneous posts. "Accurate Confidence is a Trainable Measurable Skill" is trying to explain and expose people to the idea of confidence and confidence calibration. "The internet peaked in 2008" describes a bunch of aspects of being online that have gotten much worse in the last 15-20 years. "Most people don't understand giving 100%" laments that so many people find working (or thinking) to exhaustion to be entirely alien. "More local monopolies deserve limits on the right to deny service" suggests that Uber (among others) shouldn't be able to fire a customer. "My online projects that need more hands" describes three things I've tried to do online which haven't really taken off. "Instant communication and fast travel worldwide is a fad" is a shower thought about our world effectively shrinking for the last 100k years, a trend which will reverse as soon as we start living on the Moon and/or Mars.

The final category is two meta posts, "June 2026 Writing Challenge" made on May 31 to describe what I'd be doing, and this "June 2026 Writing Challenge Post Mortem" today on July 1.

On a positive note, this did renew my love of writing long form posts. I don't know if I can maintain that enthusiasm with so much less engagement today than I had 10-20 years ago, but I'm going to try! I'll be looking for inspiration in others' posts and perhaps trying to figure out the Substack ecosystem a bit better. I may also subscribe to Twitter to extend my reach there; I'd like to be better connected to my friends of friends who post and correspond mostly there.

Also, I made a few new friends, and reconnected with some folks I haven't heard from in years. That's always a possibility when posting a new long form thing, and posting a bunch of them really accelerated the process. TBD what comes of this, but I anticipate some positive downstream effects, and maybe even some IRL [re]connections.

The most annoying takeaway from this challenge is that Facebook remains the platform where I can find the most engagement. I don't mean modern influencer "engagement" metrics; I mean literally actually engaging with other people. I post something, they comment, I reply, they reply, eventually one of the replies spills over to a top level post on their wall, I comment there, etc. With 29 posts, I got about 300 comments across all platforms, 196 of which were on Facebook (not counting my own replies). One post there was shared 63 times, but I haven't tracked down the shares to find more comments yet. FB also accounts for a third to half of my total views across all platforms. I was really hopeful that I'd be finding more interaction after a couple of years of connecting with old friends and finding new followers on other platforms, but even Twitter still feels sorta dead to me, let alone less popular platforms. The one exception among other platforms is Reddit, where I find more than a little discussion when I can find a topical subreddit that accepts cross posts, but that only works out for a small fraction of the things I write.

Another sad realization is that I am less capable of critical thought and research and deep writing than I was 20 years ago. I can still do a good job occasionally, but there's no way I could sustain this pace of posting with even this low level of quality, let alone what I was capable of in college. In addition to scraping the bottom of the barrel for post topic ideas, I also did a not great job of both writing and editing. This is just another item on the checklist of long term cognitive decline, and I've been aware of it for a while, but rarely with such stark examples.

I'm also mildly disappointed that I wasn't able to attract attention from acquaintances who participated in Inkhaven. One of the reasons I postponed this challenge until after that event was in the hope that a little bit of what folks had learned there would rub off through their feedback. Maybe next time!

Overall, this was a positive experience, and I'll probably do it again at a less hectic point in my life. I am definitely not in top form lately, and maybe I can recover some of my capabilities after some down time. Thanks for coming along for the ride!

I have been working in tech for about 30 years now, in both hobby and professional contexts, on open source and proprietary projects, for myself or companies with 10 or 1000 or 100000 employees. I'm no boomer, but the lessons I learned in the late 1900s are less and less relevant today. My last two FAANG positions have involved more than a few surprises. In particular, there are a couple of major components of company culture that I didn't figure out until far too late. Of course, it seems like no one ever tells new hires about these things, instead just hoping for the best. By writing this, I hope that I can help at least a few people not succumb to the same traps that I did.

Everywhere I had worked in the past, the company organizational chart served as a sort of chain of command. If you wanted to meet with your boss' boss, you got your boss involved first. Doing otherwise would be taboo in most circumstances. If you wanted to plan an effort involving two different departments, the heads of both departments would be involved at the level of setting Objectives and Key Results for the departments for the quarter, and then some manager in each organization would be involved in the ongoing collaboration. Those team / department / organization level plans dictated where effort would be spent and how different groups would work together and depend on each other. Violating this chain of command was more likely to lead to censure than productivity.

Contrast this to Google, where individual contributors are expected to coordinate directly with their peers (including at higher and lower levels) elsewhere in the company. Admittedly, my understanding of this phenomenon is limited, because I didn't figure it out until the very end of my time there. If you need work from someone on another team in order to ship your project, you contact that person and convince them your project is worth their time. One IC might be wrangling parallel contributions from multiple other departments to get a single result out the door. If you fail to do this, the scope of things you can succeed at will be significantly constrained. Attempting to approach managers to coordinate this sort of thing will be seen as a sign of weakness or incompetence.

Amazon takes this a step farther. The unspoken expectation is that if you aren't getting the results you need from someone in another team or department, you need to talk to their manager about their project priorities. When I discovered this, I was aghast. The corporate cultures I had "grown up" in were pretty firm in the norm that the only time you talked directly to someone else's manager was if they did something so egregious as to get them removed from a project or maybe even only to get them fired. It was only in the final months of coaching on my lack of success that anyone thought to mention that I could have and should have been reaching out to managers on other teams. Relying on my manager to interface with other managers was perceived as failure.

It has never made sense to me that these wouldn't be things explained to new hires as part of orientation to the company culture and expectations. If I ever work for this kind of company again, I will ask early and often about these sorts of cultural quirks. I hope this inspires you to ask similar questions.

TL;DR: Your great grandparents in North America and Asia couldn't call each other and travel took days to weeks. The situation will be worse for your great grandchildren on Earth and Mars. We live in a narrow window of worldwide communication and travel convenience. The biggest impacts of the return to the slower state of affairs will be in politics and warfare.

For the vast majority of human history, it wasn't possible to send a person or a message to the other side of the globe at all. Whole societies rose and fell without ever even hearing of each other, let alone communicating directly. Eventually improvements in food preservation, horse domestication, and sailing made it possible, but it was rare and took months. Millennia later we got the trip down to weeks with roads and better ships and eventually rails. About 150 years ago we finally had long distance telegraphs, and radio arrived even more recently, finally letting communication outpace travel, with latency down to just hours for relayed messages. In the 1930s we developed international radiotelephone links, allowing connections to be made in minutes followed by communication latency of just seconds. This was shortly followed by international air travel in the 1940s, providing passage around the world in a few days. Finally, in the last few decades, we've seen the rise of jet and supersonic air travel, as well as satellite and internet communications, each providing significant improvements to cost and convenience with minor gains in timing. After those many millennia of accelerating progress, communication and travel time across the breadth of humanity have approximately reached a peak.

Assuming nothing goes horribly wrong, which is not a safe bet with the variety of apocalypses looming ahead, that trend is going to reverse as soon as we have a colony on the moon. There will suddenly be a group of people with a 3 second communication lag, and travel measured in both days and millions of dollars. That's fast enough for an 1800s-style radio conversation, but not realtime control of machines, and the travel lag would make emergency response impossible while the costs will be prohibitive for most purposes. Fast forward another generation and we'll have a colony on Mars or in the asteroid belt, with 6-50 minute round trip communication latency and travel time measured in months. Even approximately realtime communication will be gone at that point, with increasingly many people reduced to sending recorded and written messages to each other, and almost everyone making the trip will be doing so one way. Some time after that, we'll end up with people living in the outer solar system, with hours of communication lag and perhaps years of travel time unless we get a lot better at exotic forms of propulsion. Eventually, if all goes well, we'll send a generation ship or something even stranger out of the solar system, with a destination light years away with matching communication lag, and no way for people or packages to travel there within a lifetime.

Unless we invent faster than light communication or travel, we will never all be closer together than we are right now. Even though it feels like everything is accelerating and a technological singularity might be approaching, these particular trends are likely to be at an end, with major reversals coming in some of our lifetimes.

This isn't just about passenger travel, civilian communication, and business shipping. These changes also affect international politics and warfare. As recently as the mid 1900s it took hours or even days for critical communications to travel from a battlefield to leadership or vice versa, leaving field commanders to make critical decisions on their own. Within living memory, ambassadors were empowered to make deals without the ability to call home in the middle of a negotiation. Only recently has the idea of a head of state making a quick trip to a non-neighboring country become anything other than nonsense. A single commander having direct real-time decision making control over a worldwide military is basically brand new, and doomed to end just as quickly. The mechanisms that governments use to engage with each other and with their populations today will stop working as soon as some of those people and other polities are too far away to reach conveniently. Ask yourself how (or if) the US and China could maintain their international relationships and might if it took their messages a week and their militaries a month or a year to reach each other. Even though these changes are just reversions to the long term norm, I think we've forgotten that and aren't ready for them.

PS: I do look forward to the enforced return to long form communication across asynchronous transport networks. Bring back messages that are minutes long (to read or hear or watch) with minimum possible response times of hours to days. Viva la FidoNet!

Over the last few decades I've started some projects online that didn't attract the contributions from others that would have led to their success. Today I'm describing a few of them that I still have hopes for. My goal is to spark a bit of interest in possibly reviving them, or perhaps just inspire someone to steal one of the ideas and run with it..

Modes of Discourse was a wiki where I attempted to catalog all the mechanisms that people use to communicate with each other. The main pages would be things like "Tiktok", "Facebook", "ICQ", "Email", "Telephone", "Smoke Signals", etc. Those pages would each have a description of the thing in question, covering when and how people use(d) it, how it works, what technologies it is based on, etc. Those descriptions would wikilink to another layer of content describing various common aspects and features, with pages like "asynchronous", "notifications", "follow", "internet", "line of sight", "plain text", "algorithmic feed", "markup", "images", "videos", "instant messaging", and almost any other such thing that multiple different modes have in common. I tried twice to start this wiki, each time putting a few dozen hours into creating content, but never reaching the critical mass necessary to attract outside attention that could have led to more contributors and incoming links. If I try this again, I'll probably hire a human to do the first few hundred hours of content creation then use AI to fill in descriptions and links once the structure and style of the wiki is well established. This might sound like just a subset of Wikipedia, and some of the pages and content might start out from there, but my intention would be to get into a lot more detail of the specific functionality of each app / site / platform, including how they differ and which features they share. The main pages would also describe how the thing had changed over time, such as a social network app adding or removing markup from posts, replacing a chronological feed with an algorithmic feed, launching a mobile app or eliminating mobile or non-mobile functionality, changes in control or ownership of a technology or company, etc.

VGM Extractor is a program that extracts music files from locally installed video games. It's coded mostly in Python, with a bit of custom scripts in other languages for handling specific games, and yaml files describing the music file layout of each game. For games with officially published soundtracks the results are sometimes identical and other times wildly different. For other games this is the only way I've found to get the music into my music library without going hunting for it one game at a time. For some games the extraction process involves just copying mp3/ogg files from the game folder to the music library folder. For others, it relies on third party tools to extract from a wide and growing variety of media and archive formats (e.g. zips, Unity assets, Bethesda archives, XACT wave banks), and can even call out to other scripted tools like QuickBMS. What this project really needs is for people with games installed to find the audio files and contribute descriptions of the names and locations of the archives and files so that the tool knows where to find them for everyone else with the same game installed. I have it working with about 115 games so far, but it needs to work with 1000+ games before most gamers would be interested in using it. Code contributions would also be welcome, such as to support more archive types or the paths of more non-Steam installers, or to add a GUI or modernize the project structure and build process.

Cutting Edge Gaming is a subreddit based on https://xkcd.com/606/, organizing people to play old video games on the 5 / 10 / 20 year anniversaries of their release. There is some demand for something like this in the retro gaming community, but it would take a lot of effort and/or notoriety that I don't have in order to bring together enough players to make this work. One major benefit of doing this as a group is that many old multiplayer games have no players online today, or even no servers, so getting someone to set up a server in advance and then a bunch of people to play on the same day(s)/week(s) would work a lot better than an individual trying to do the same. I never had enough time to keep up with making weekly posts about which games we might play, including links to current distributors, patches, mods, etc. If I tried this again today, I'd probably rely on AI to write those posts, and I'd create multiple other online profiles (e.g. instagram, tiktok) and platforms (e.g. Discord) for getting the word out and bringing the players together.

One of my goals in establishing large intentional communities is to enable hosting events in the large common spaces of such a community. There are many types of events that I like to attend, and a smaller variety that I like to host. Most of them are somewhat to significantly constrained by the price and availability of space to host them, and that's something that can be minimized in a communally owned and managed space. This post is a description of some categories of events that I expect to be able to host, or attend while someone else hosts, at my next place. The features and needs of these events are significant priorities for me when choosing a property.

Camping festivals of 100-500 people. This might be a small regional burn (e.g. the early years of NECTR, Lakes of Fire, To The Moon), a skill share event like Wildfire, a music performance or jam, a community gathering like Vibecamp, or have any of a wide variety of other formats. The general idea is that everyone brings a tent for a [probably long] weekend, with a lot of planned and unplanned activities for people to participate in. Many of those activities would require large clear spaces, indoor and/or outdoor.

Music and stage performances. This will probably require an auditorium or theater, or at least a gymnasium with a stage, although there is also the possibility of an outdoor amphitheater as well. It will also need some sound insulation and/or isolation from neighbors, and a decent amount of power would be nice for non-acoustic musical equipment, lighting, etc. The properties I've looked at so far would support audiences of 200-1000 people for such an event.

Art parties where many participants thoroughly decorate rooms and spaces, possibly including immersive and/or interactive performance. This requires a lot of smaller spaces, perhaps bedrooms or offices or cabins. Some such events might be just one night, while others would likely be long weekends and require some sort of housing on-site. Such events that I am familiar with tend to look like camping festivals or hotel takeovers. I would want to have tens of separate spaces, and hundreds of participants.

Immersive and interactive theater and art events with a single focus. This could include traditional haunted house sorts of events, but also things like murder mysteries, escape rooms, LARPs, etc. There's no single specific necessary amenity for this, but the wider the variety of spaces available, and the more of them, the more of these sorts of things will be viable. Some of these events might have dozens of people involved for the duration, while others might have hundreds or even thousands of people experiencing it for just a short time each.

Educational events such as classes, courses, workshops, lectures, etc. This can be done in arbitrary spaces, but having dedicated spaces like classrooms or auditoriums will help. Spaces dedicated to particular crafts or sciences would enable teaching those specific things, e.g. a wood shop, chemistry lab, commercial kitchen, greenhouse, etc. These wouldn't be much larger than what I've done before, but I want more of them to happen.

Large dinner parties. This requires a large dining space, which could be permanent or temporary. It would also require a large kitchen.

Large scale physical activities, e.g. fitness or sports. The relevant amenities might include a climbing wall, a space tall enough for aerial arts, sports fields, etc. Having a variety would be amazing, but even just one or two such spaces would still be great. Having this sort of thing at home makes keeping fit much easier, as well as providing a focus for social interactions and an opportunity to teach classes or host competitions.

Water recreation, at least swimming, ideally also boating. There's a lot of hot weather festivity to be had around this sort of thing, but having private access is often difficult and/or expensive. Oceanfront property is hard to find without sea level rise concerns, and private lakes are expensive, but I've looked at a few steep ocean properties and plenty of places with frontage on a public river or lake.

There are, of course, many other types of events that I enjoy, but that don't require specific amenities. Having a dining hall with a hundred seats at 15 tables would make for an amazing board game night, but I can also host that event in a single family dining room. A theater with 400 seats will make for an amazing movie night, but so can a living room that seats five people. I'll keep doing many of those sorts of events wherever I end up, while the stuff described earlier has more exotic requirements.

Hopefully at least a few people reading this will be thinking "that sounds like a space I'd also like to host events in". If so, get in touch, and maybe we can collaborate on whatever I'm doing next.

I'm an avid board / card / tabletop gamer, and I also enjoy video games. I like to play a wide range of games, including strategy, deduction, dexterity, party, puzzle, adventure, etc. In some games, particularly games that have some sort of moderator (human or computer), there is little to no opportunity to play in a way that isn't consistent with the rules of the game. Even if you don't know the rules, the moderator won't let you accidentally break them, let alone intentionally. However, in the general case, taking actions that are against the letter and/or spirit of the rules is a relatively straightforward proposition. Doing it without getting caught might be a challenge, but it also might not, at least temporarily.

Sometimes, some or all of the rules of a game are written down right next to the game, so all the players can see them while playing. Casinos print some of the rules for a game right on the table where the game is played. Plenty of tabletop games include reference cards that summarize the most important rules like the order of actions in a turn or round, the valid actions to take, costs for those actions, etc. Almost all professionally published games include a rule book that describes 80-99% of the rules of the game, and hopefully at least some of the players at a given table have read the rule book for the game being played. Some games even require players to explicitly acknowledge the rule set of the game at the start.

Games also have unwritten rules. Some games only have unwritten rules, because they have never been published in any consistent fashion. Many games have rules that are passed down verbally, including ancient tabletop games, playground sports, etc. These rules tend to develop over years and decades as the game is passed from person to person through explanations. They can diverge over time and in different places, so "one game" with one name could be wildly different when played with different people.

Most games without centuries of history have edge cases that haven't been contemplated before and so no rule has even been spoken, let alone written. Players discover these edge cases while playing the game. Perhaps they engineer a totally novel scenario that the rules don't sufficiently cover. Perhaps they are planning a strategy that relies on some ambiguity in the known rules. These cases might require adjudication by an authority, a discussion among the players, and perhaps a compromise.

Most confusingly, sometimes two players will each have a reasonable expectation that they are playing a game with known rules, but the games and rules in question will be different from each other. Perhaps there are two games played with all the same pieces, like Checkers and Draughts. Perhaps there are two popular rule sets for a game, such as the different official published rules for scoring small cities in Carcassonne. Both players think the other player has agreed to play by some specific rules, but they are both wrong.

Sometimes, agreement to a rule can be implicit. If a game has just one set of officially published rules, it is usually reasonable to expect that players are implicitly agreeing to those rules if a game starts without other discussion. Sometimes the agreement is explicit, when players discuss and choose a rule set or house rules at the start of a game.

However, sometimes there is no agreement. Players might discover in the middle of a game that they have been playing by different rules. In that case, no one has done anything wrong. The players should have a discussion and decide if they want to continue playing after ironing out the misunderstanding, or if they want to stop playing.

And, of course, sometimes players intentionally violate the rules, doing things they agreed not to do, taking advantage of the other player. When this happens, the best course of action is usually not just to stop that specific game, but to not game with that person again unless something changes and there is some confidence that the rules moving forward are understood and agreed to and will be followed.

This post is about romantic and intimate relationships. Try reading it again if you didn't realize that the first time through. My goal here is to help people who have trouble with "is this cheating?" or "what should I do when I catch them cheating?" in a relationship but no problem with the same question in a board game. I want them to realize that it's the same question with the same answers in analogous scenarios.

PS: In discussing this post in advance, my favorite parallel is "Person who goes online to complain that a game has been unfulfilling and upsetting repeatedly and they don't want to play again, just to be told by many more experienced people that they [were playing with people who] had failed to read or understand or follow the rules, and that things would almost certainly go much better if they resolved that underlying issue."

One of the rights shared by corporations and individuals is the right to choose when and with whom to enter into contracts, to whom to provide services, etc. You, an individual person, can decide not to sell me your grain or your smart phones, or not to hire out your labor to me to cut my trees or program my computers. A corporation can generally do the same, reserving the right to "fire a customer" and stop doing business with me or with you.

However, this right is not absolute. We have laws that apply to "public callings" and "public accommodations", requiring businesses (whether run by an individual or a corporation) to provide services without discrimination. You're probably already aware that most businesses are generally not allowed to discriminate based on race or religion, or to make their facility inaccessible to wheelchairs. Some of these laws apply to all businesses, and some become more broad or strict the more necessary and monopolistic the nature of the business.

Even further than discrimination, the most critical of such callings and accommodations are restricted from denying a customer unless that customer violates specific reasonable rules that apply to all customers. This is most notably the case for public utilities; e.g. your electric company is (at least in most of the United States) forbidden from declining to provide you service just because they don't like you or don't want to or even have suffered some loss in previous dealings with you. Our society has decided that it would be bad for us all if the water company could shut off water to any vendor that refuses to sell them cheap parts or to any employee that refuses to provide cheap labor.

I believe that this restriction should apply to most local monopolies, and even more so when that monopoly has previously displaced its competitors. When there are a dozen places to buy an apple in your town, you lose little by one of them choosing not to sell you their apples, and each has little power in their ability to deny you. However, when there is only one apple store in town, they have much more power in that ability, and can pressure you much farther than if they had local competitors. We already recognize that their ability to raise prices is a monopolistic abuse that should be constrained in some ways. However, currently there are no restrictions on their ability to fire a customer.

This gap has a chilling effect on individuals seeking to enforce their rights against such a business. If you charge back a credit card purchase against Walmart, make a noise complaint against Simon Property Group (who own the most malls in America), or take your local Amazon store to small claims court, you risk losing access to the only source of many products and services in your neighborhood or city or possibly anywhere. Most people would never consider taking any such action against any of these businesses that they rely on, in any scenario less egregious than physical bodily harm.

That state of affairs is bad for our society and needs to be rectified. Those local monopolies need to have restrictions similar to a utility company, more so the more closely their monopoly approaches absolute. Factors in the closeness of that approach might include the physical, financial, and legal barriers to competition, i.e. how hard would it be for someone else to provide similar competing service? If anyone can open an apple stand in their front yard, the local apple monopoly might be quite weak. If, however, there are years of permits and approvals required, no land available on which to build, million or billion dollar investments required, etc then the restrictions should be near those applied to utilities.

This post reflects hundreds of my own experiences and thousands I have heard about. It was most immediately prompted by a friend posting something like "Uber stole some money from me but I can't demand it back or else I might lose access to the only car hire service in town since they put the taxis out of business". Maybe I'll link back to this when I see posts like this in the future. I'm not the right person to push this cause, but perhaps I can inspire someone else. I dream of seeing some city or state give this idea the force of law in my lifetime.

In the sentence "I feel ______", the part of speech that fills that blank is an adjective, a word that describes a noun. I feel hot; a stove can also be described as hot. I feel sleepy; a cat can also be described as sleepy. I feel uncertain; the outcome of a coin flip can also be described as uncertain. These words are adjectives. These sentences describe my internal personal experience of my state of being. Nouns and adjectives, first person pronouns, the idea of feelings, and sentences of this form exist in most languages.

In English specifically, we also use past and present perfect tense verbs as adjectives. A painted (adjective) thing is a thing that has been painted (verb). A thing that has been improved is an improved thing. A given thing is a thing that has been given. The adjectives in these sentences describe the state of the thing. Even if the thing in question is an animal or person that has an internal experience and might have some subjective feelings, these statements don't necessarily describe that experience. These verb-based-adjective statements also describe some past or ongoing action and tell us about the state of the world. They say that painting happened, that improving happened, that giving happened.

In American English, the bare statement "I feel [verb]ed" always carries the implicit meaning of "I assert that [verb]ing happened". You cannot say just "I feel honored" without also asserting "Someone has honored me". Ditto re "I feel confused" and "Something confused me", "I feel left out" and "Someone left me out", or "I feel hurt" and "Someone or something hurt me". The only way to make those adjective statements without the implication of the verb statement is with an explicit disclaimer and acknowledgement that your mental state does not correspond to reality. In my experience, this often sounds something like "I know this is all in my head and it's not based on anything anyone did, but I feel left out". If you don't make the disclaimer, it's reasonable and appropriate for the other person to interpret the verb meaning of your statement and to respond in that context.

For positive adjectives and verbs (e.g. honored), that's the end of the story. Ditto for neutral valence verbs; you might say "I feel observed" without necessarily conveying any additional obvious meaning or purpose beyond the feeling existing and the observing having happened. For negative verbs, there's another layer. The more negative the verb is, the stronger the implied suggestion that the person doing the verb shouldn't do it and the request that they not do it to you. You cannot say just "I feel neglected" without also conveying "The person that neglected me should not do what they did [in the context in which they did it] to me or in general". Ditto "insulted", "injured", "burned", "abandoned", "hurt", "upset", etc. If you want to express your feelings of this sort without suggesting the person should not do the things in general, that requires explicit clarification. If you don't intend to ask them to not do the thing specifically to you, that requires even more clarification. Those requests are implicit unless you say otherwise. In my experience, the alternative statement from you often sounds something like "I feel hurt, and even though you did something to trigger it I know that you aren't responsible for the hurt. You should keep doing what you're doing.". If you don't make the disclaimer, it's reasonable and appropriate for the other person to interpret the request/suggestion meaning of your statement and to respond in that context. Once you've been made aware of these implications to the things you say, to ignore them would make you responsible for the consequences of the ensuing miscommunications.

Every time I have a discussion about this topic, many people disagree about the certainty of these implications and the reasonableness of responding to them. And yet, every time I ask for counterexamples, they come up empty. So, before you make that sort of response here, please ask yourself, have you ever told someone just "I feel hurt" (re their actions) and not also intended or wanted or expected to convey the meaning of "I request that you not repeat that action (in that context) toward me"? Have you ever told someone just "I feel disrespected" and not also intended or wanted or expected to convey the meaning of "You should not repeat that action (in that context), in general"? Examples of either of those sorts would go a long way to kickstarting a productive discussion on whatever disagreement we might have on the implied meanings I've described above. In the absence of such examples, or some other argument that I've failed to think of on my own, the only conclusion I can reach is that these implications are reasonable to interpret from the original statements.

On a meta level, it says something about me, personally, that I observe this pattern and make use of it in interpreting others' statements and that I think and write and attempt to educate about it. My awareness of this thing affects my conversations about feelings, often in ways that the other people involved think they would prefer to not be. In that sense, I am sorry for spreading this infohazard to you. But that doesn't outweigh the harms caused by people not recognizing this pattern and these implications, so here we are.