Miriam Posner

@miriamposner

Tired person, fighter. Labor, data, DH, obsolete software, database history, etc. Seeing Like a Supply Chain out Oct 2026: Speaking for myself, not my employer.

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Miriam Posner@miriamposner· 5d

I tried so many different terms! I think there's a real phenomenon here and many of us are struggling to find the right word for it.

Handwriting on an index card reads: convenient useful
discrimiatatin
genu. ne
spasmodie
beneficial sporatic profitable munifactured
deliberati
apacity agnogenesis
vacuum
lacuna
ignorance
bolind spot/ binaness
agnosin
blur
Obscurity disreas
hazinass incomprehensibility void
aperture clou darkness shroud

Handwriting on an index card reads:
unintentional secrecy
obdurate secrecy

genuine bur intentional

beneficial agnostiese

opportune aquos

finerional aacity

pragmatic opacity

cavantagions opacity

bevanicige as agnos
profitable
vagues
convenient

advantageous agnosta

adraugeous apertur
местона

Miriam Posner@miriamposner· 10d

Anyway I need to maybe lay off the FB Marketplace because this was supposed to be a beanbag chair for a 6yo.

An enormous pink beanbag chair occupies most of the floor space in a carpeted area.

Miriam Posner@miriamposner· 11d

Algorithm thoroughly borked at this point

Alarmingly realistic pig head rests on a sofa. Text: Life Size Pig Head Prop Halloween
$175

Description
Huge detailed pig head prop is made of a rubber or latex material with a realistic tan and brown finish.
It has a metal hook attached to the top... See more

Miriam Posner@miriamposner· 11d

Here’s a giant Croc

Giant croc is decorated with a floral design. Text: 12:06
Custom Giant Croc Display Prop | 5'
Oversized Event Sculpture
$2,000 $3,500

Description
$2300 OBO
Custom fabricated oversized Croc display available for sale.

Miriam Posner@miriamposner· 11d

There’s also…this. But you gotta move fast!

Photo shows pile of nondescript light-blue beanbag chairs. Text:
I only have ONE Justin Bieber 's Choachella 2026 After Party Bean...
$200 $400
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Description
One of a Kind VIP Bag Chair from Bieber's Rhode Coachella 2026 After Party
Own a unique piece from the exclusive Bieber x Rhode Coachella 2026 After Party! This VIP bag chair was custom-made in a special color exclusively for the event hosted by Justin Bieber and his wife, Hailey Bieber, for Rhode. This color was never released for retail, making this a truly one-of-a-kind item.

Miriam Posner@miriamposner· 11d

All kinds of stuff for sale on LA’s FB Marketplace

A creepy, apparently deteriorating silicon head stares blankly. Text: Silicone heads for makeup or other porpoises
$100

A goofy-looking Martian holds a scepter and wears a crown. MOVIE PROP LIFE-SIZE MARTIAN
THAT LIGHTS UP ONE OF A KIND B...
$3,800

MINIONS THE RISE OF GRU PROMO FOOSBALL TABLE

A man is dwarfed by a huge none depiction of Paul McCartney as seen in Yellow Submarine. GIANT ONE-OF-A-KIND PAUL
MCCARTNEY BEATLES NEON
$2,250

Miriam Posner@miriamposner· 14d

13yo being helpful

A photo of Miriam is doctored so that lasers shoot out of her eyes against a backdrop of lightning bolts. Caption reads BUY MY BOOK.

Miriam Posner@miriamposner· 27d

😬

But for many folks who get sick, the effects are, let's just say, not pleasant.
"A lot of times with diarrhea, you have an episode and you feel better," says Marrazzo. "With this, it just can kind of go on and on, and it really takes people out."

Miriam Posner@miriamposner· Jul 10

Here's what the UCLA Library page looks like:

"Suggest a Purchase" page for the UCLA Library reads: Suggest a Purchase

If we don't own it, we can purchase it for your research. Use this form to suggest the purchase of non-course reserve materials not already owned by UCLA Library.

Miriam Posner@miriamposner· Jul 10

Libraries put their "purchase request" pages in different places, but often you can get to those pages via the catalog. This is what LAPL's looks like.

"Suggest a Purchase" form for LAPL reads:
Suggest a purchase

To suggest an e-book or digital audiobook title, please use Libby's "Notify Me" functionality. Please note: not all publishers agree to license their e-content to libraries. If a title is not available for the library to license due to publisher restrictions, it will not appear in Libby for recommendation.
E-mail Address
If given, a copy of your submission will be sent to your address.

Miriam Posner@miriamposner· Jul 10

Hey, I have these postcards of my book's cover (by Vera Villanueva for Yale UP). I'd love to mail you one. Will you send me a screenshot of 1) your pre-order OR 2) your (free!!) request that your library purchase the book? And of course an address to mail it to.

Book cover for Seeing Like a Supply Chain: the Hidden Life of Logistics by Miriam Posner shows a colorful arrangement of lines that branch out as they descend.

Miriam Posner@miriamposner· Jul 8

Ooooof

accomplish all sorts of tasks, including modifying metadata. The difference of 30 seconds between the Date Modified Times for Document #3 and the 2023 Cover-Up File is consistent with using Terminal to modify the 2023 Cover-Up File to appear to have the
same file system Date Modified of Document #3, but failing to specify an optional seconds
value. In those circumstances, as appears to have happened here, the relevant Terminal
command would default the Modified Date seconds value to 00 (that is, to 6:43:00 p.m.).

Miriam Posner@miriamposner· Jul 6

I guess my grandma saved all my thank-you notes

Dear grandma and grandpa: Do you like the picture? It’s what my piggy bank looks like. I don’t put money in it. It just sits on my desk. You might say it’s a decoraition. Well I guess it sort of is. Bye the way

Dear Grandma and Grandpa,
Sunday, August 1st
Hi! We went to the beach today. We had a lot of fun. We found a pit someone had dug, and we made it bigger. Yesterday we went to see the Music Man. I liked it all except the Music Man’s voice. Not his singing voice, his normal voice.
his normal voice. I sounded wicked.
dove,
Miriam K. Posner

Miriam Posner@miriamposner· Jul 3

My grandfather, the renowned speed typist.

A man in a suit poses in front of a typewriter.

BEN POSNER, renowned speed typist and former holder of the World's Ama teur Typing Championship, has an official International Contest record o 128 net five-stroke words per minute for one continuous hour of writing

Miriam Posner@miriamposner· Jun 19

Oh man

Photo depicts a playset featuring a command center with panels and captain-style seats....
Vintage 1993 Star Trek TNG
Enterprise Bridge Playset by Playm...
$80
DO 31
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Description
Vintage Star Trek: The Next Generation bridge

Miriam Posner@miriamposner· Jun 18

This actually seemed to work? I mean, who knows, but

Assignment description on Canvas:
Synthesis Essay

Description here. Please submit your essay as some kind of document I can read. PLEASE don't use AI to write this (limited grammar and spell-checking is OK)—I'll know and it'll make me depressed.

Miriam Posner@miriamposner· Jun 17

Is anyone knowledgeable about pipes? I don’t have a spigot on my patio but I have…these. Do you know what they are? In an ideal world, I’d like to attach a hose to something.

A PVC pipe emerges from the ground, topped by a metal…possibly a cap?

A metal pipe emerges from the ground, topped by what appears to be a plastic cap.

Miriam Posner@miriamposner· Jun 7

Building Power to Win the Future of Higher Education and Democracy: new proposals from @aaup.org. We won’t survive the next few years unless we learn to fight. www.aaup.org/sites/defaul...

2026 AAUP BIENNIAL MEETING
BUILDING POWER TO WIN THE FUTURE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
& DEMOCRACY
FREEDOM
THE 2026 AAUP BIENNIAL IS A TURNING POINT-not only for our organization, but for the future of higher education and democracy in the United States.
Across the country, faculty, staff, and students are living through a steady erosion of our worldclass system of higher education. The principles of academic freedom, tenure, and shared governance are under sustained and coordinated attack from political actors, governing boards, and administrative leaders who seek to interfere in teaching and research, weaken faculty authority, diminish the speech and expressive rights of staff and students, and impose ideological and economic control over colleges and universities. Decisions are handed down from above with little meaningful input.
Departments are reorganized or eliminated. Tenure lines disappear. Budgets are cut while administrative layers grow. Consultants reshape institutions with no accountability to those who teach, research, and learn. Faculty and staff are asked, again and again, to absorb more work with fewer resources, while the core mission of the university is steadily narrowed.
Students are living this crisis as well. They face rising costs, growing debt, fewer course offerings, reduced support, and institutions that are less able to provide the time, attention, and resources needed for deep learning, discovery, and opportunity. What is being eroded is not only working conditions-it is the quality and promise of education itself.
FREEDOM!
DEFEND
HANDS
•EMO-
OFF
ECRACY
These experiences are not isolated or accidental. They are the day-to-day expression of a broader political and economic project—one that has driven declining public investment, rising student debt, the expansion of a low-wage contingent workforce, attacks on academic freedom and shared governance, and the rapid imposition of new technologies without oversight.

Miriam Posner@miriamposner· Jun 4

This book should come with a warning!

A child, her face obscured with an emoji sticker, holds a sign that reads “Dont do homework virtoul protest.”

Miriam Posner@miriamposner· Jun 3

I would say…probably not?

AI-suggested question about Seeing Like a Supply Chain: Is this suitable for business professionals?

Miriam Posner@miriamposner· Jun 3

“Top new release” in globalization? Is that anything? Sounds impressive! www.amazon.com/dp/030025144...

Amazon page for Seeing Like a Supply Chain by Miriam Posner. Label announces it’s a “top new release in globalization.”

Miriam Posner@miriamposner· Jun 1

Sweet girl.

Worksheet reads: Writing Activity
If you could have one wish, what would it be? Why? Write about it.
In response, a child has written I WISH TO FLY and drawn a picture of a girl flying in a blue sky with rainbow wings.

Miriam Posner@miriamposner· Jun 1

Here’s what I said on the author input form.

1. IDEA
Please tell us an idea, a visual metaphor, or any aspect of the book you think is most important in the jacket design.
I have a soft spot for the design of technical manuals from the 1970s, like these. They're also a major primary source for the book.
An early (abandoned) title for this project was "Dendriform Capitalism," since the signature structure of the supply chain is an upside-down tree. I also talk a lot about networks.
I spend a good deal of time in the book discussing the bill of materials, which is called the BOM in shorthand and is expressed in diagram as an upside-down tree. To process the BOM, you say you "explode" it. When globalization ramped up, I talk about the "atomic BOM."
Writers often refer to supply-chain management as the "nervous system" of the business.
Other potentially evocative images that appear in the book: flow chart, factory, container ship, punchcards, black box, circuit, modules, visibility and invisibility, circulation, globe.

Miriam Posner@miriamposner· Jun 1

They started telling me cover edits were final when I started opining about the kerning. (I was HELPING! First image is before; second is after.)

Two images which each say “Miriam Posner.” The image on the left is CLEARLY better because the kerning between the letters of “Miriam” is slightly more distributed.

Miriam Posner@miriamposner· May 29

One thing I found particularly offensive about the undergrad ed white paper was the use of the language of "equity" and "literacy" to promote the expansion of AI. Why are we pretending to be stupid? This is from my School's response (with footnotes).

We note, also, that measures like ensuring “equitable access to AI” and “AI literacy” are not
widely agreed-upon, commonsense imperatives but hugely controversial efforts to cast LLMs as
a neutral or even universally beneficial technology. It’s not clear, for example, that the best way
to ensure technological equity is to supply every student with a tool whose biases are deep and
well-recognized.3 Similarly, one might ask if the best approach to “AI literacy” is to encourage
the use of a tool whose effects on cognition are extensively documented and whose interior
workings are opaque by design.4

3 Yufei Guo et al., “Bias in Large Language Models: Origin, Evaluation, and Mitigation,” preprint, arXiv, November
2024, https://doi.org/arXiv:2411.10915v1.
4 Again, this literature is vast and growing, but examples include Jenna Burrell, “How the Machine ‘Thinks’:
Understanding Opacity in Machine Learning Algorithms,” Big Data & Society 3, no. 1 (2016): 2053951715622512,
https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951715622512; Nataliya Kosmyna et al., “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of
Cognitive Debt When Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task,” arXiv:2506.08872, preprint, arXiv, December
31, 2025, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2506.08872.

Miriam Posner@miriamposner· May 29

LOLOL "What stood out most was ꜱᴛʀᴜᴄᴛᴜʀᴀʟ ʙᴀᴄᴋ-ᴇɴᴅ ꜱʜɪᴘᴘɪɴɢ ᴛʀᴀᴄᴋɪɴɢ, which feels like the kind of nuance that naturally sparks layered and honest conversation in our group."

Hello Miriam Posner,

I hope you’re doing well.

My name is Aileen, and I’m the founder and organizer of Boozy Bronx Book Club, a 1,400+ member in-person reading community in New York City centered around thoughtful, high-engagement discussions.

I recently came across Seeing Like a Supply Chain, and was especially drawn to its exploration of technological systems of distribution. What stood out most was structural back-end shipping tracking, which feels like the kind of nuance that naturally sparks layered and honest conversation in our group.

Miriam Posner@miriamposner· May 28

The Perfect Human Specimen www.sfgate.com/sports/artic...

Photo of a deeply plastic-looking man in a suit holding a mic. Caption:
Max Martin, co-founder and CEO of Enhanced, speaks during a press conference ahead of the Enhanced Games at Resorts World in Las Vegas on May 23, 2026.
Etienne Laurent/AFP via Getty Images

Miriam Posner@miriamposner· May 23

www.theringer.com/2026/05/22/n... jesus THANK YOU

1. "They were blocking my path." Not an excuse!
2. "They were touching my car." Not an excuse!
3. "They disagreed with my politics." Not an excuse!
4. "They were rude to me." Not an excuse!
5. "They kept asking me hard questions and filming me with their phones, and I'm a powerful man who's used to being treated with deference." Buddy! You cannot ram your Cadillac into a pedestrian just because you're an easily flustered rich guy! This is so obvious!
At least, I used to think it was obvious. That was before the president of Cornell backed his car into a group of students and got away with it scot-free.

Miriam Posner@miriamposner· May 22

I like to give a little talk about the origins of hustle/grind culture when we talk about labor in my classes and talking about Who Moved My Cheese? is surprisingly useful. Being Sniff or Scurry sucks!!

Slide illustrating the themes of Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese? Illustration of 2 mice and 2 people, with a caption reading The 4 Protagonists Which one are you???

Sniff
- sniffs/looks ahead;
anticipates change
Scurry
- scurries ahead and bumps into change
Hem
Haw
"To discuss, deliberate, or contemplate rather than taking action or making up one's mind. (e.g., If you hem and haw long enough, someone else will do it first.)* - Wiktionary

Miriam Posner@miriamposner· May 21

Why would…? What the fuck