🏒 After being 3 goals behind, the Capitals win with an overtime tie-breaker from Sourdiff. The last time we were there he had a hat trick. Glad do witness both of his big days.
OK, these two are included more for saliency than positivity, but they are also good!
Update: Adam Mastroianni’s latest post fits here like a glove.
❄️ And so comes February, the worst month of the year for those of us in the northern hemisphere. This one will be particularly horrendous for residents of DC and the surrounding suburbs as we deal with snowcrete — DCPS schools are still on a 2-hour delay, but hey at least they’re open!
…doesn’t spend time worrying whether the entertainment industry should work the way it does. She describes how it actually works and moves forward accordingly. “I love money,” she says simply, without apology or shame. This is pragmatism: the view that some approaches succeed and others fail, so you’d better figure out which ones work and act accordingly.
See what makes money and do it! A plan so fool-proof it is a true mystery why everyone isn’t a billionaire.
Pretty much nobody worships billionaires as a class. Most people worship at least one billionaire; that’s THEIR billionaire. Think old school paganism. Pantheon of gods, but a tribe will focus on one. A lot of immigrant Chinese Americans worship Elon Musk. Maybe it’s Donald Trump, or Kanye West, or Beyonce, or Taylor Swift, or Charlie Munger, or Warren Buffet, or Steve Jobs, etc.
Spot on! Somewhat surprisingly, Gelman’s never heard of Charlie Munger but if I had to pick a billionaire to “worship” (not that I would ever do such a thing), he could be the one. Certainly not Stevehole Jobs, and certainly not Munger’s partner Warren B.
One billionaire scratches another’s back; hilarity ensues. The story is outlined further in the NYT, but John Gruber has the correct headline. I hope Mrs. Trump will be able to brush off the harsh reviews and use her $28M direct payment from Amazon to finally gain the much-needed financial independence to which every American woman aspires.
This is the meat of the issue, and kudos to Moriarty for putting it so bluntly. Each billionaire’s billions were built on the backs of real people doing real work while missing family events, growing stomach ulcers and ultimately dying of cancer. If you think this is an exaggeration, do read a few accounts of what happens in even supposedly “good” multinationals. Well-meaning and good-hearted minnows never grow large enough to have to hide their money in Ireland. Financialization squeezed out their blood, sweat and tears and concentrated them into a handful of people who were clearly not well. Mirroring what happens to companies, those who have a firm grasp of morality and a sense of self never get to the first billion. In that light, I don’t think relying on the billionaire class to “fix” anything — or even to correctly identify the problem — is a sensible idea, so it is a good thing indeed that the country celebrating its 250th birthday this year has a track record of putting them in their place.
🏒 After being 3 goals behind, the Capitals win with an overtime tie-breaker from Sourdiff. The last time we were there he had a hat trick. Glad do witness both of his big days.
Today I learned that I paid $200 for audio editing software I can only use while online, which is tough to do when 37,000 feet up in the air. I don’t think this was an issue prior to the latest round of enshittification.
The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet by Yancey Strickler was a valiant attempt to paste together a collection of blog posts about dark forests and the cozy web into a physical object.
The posts were hit-and-miss, as anthologies tend to be. But since the connection between them was tenuous in the first place I didn’t feel like I missed out on anything by skipping one or two that were too steeped in post-modern mumbo jumbo.
A nit to pick: Strickler insists on using the term “dark forests” to denote the cozy bubbles people retreat to in order to escape the methaphorical predators of the Internet dark forest. This is clearly nonsensical: a dark forest ecosystem, one where everyone is quiet as even predators can become prey, is unquestionably anti-human. Dark forests are something you escape from, not into. So, Venkatesh Rao and Maggie Appleton’s “cozy web” is much more apt.
But if you already knew about Strickler, Rao and Appleton’s writing and don’t care much for post-modernism, is there anything of interest left in this collection? The concept of moving castles ended up having more to do with performance art than I hoped for, so not really my thing though of course it may be interesting to some. And two essays by Caroline Busta were thought-provoking, particularly one about (counter)counterculture.
Worth the price in terms of utility? Probably not, unless you are sociologist or a left-leaning artistic type wanting to make your own “collective”, “co-op”, or what not. But then chipping in so that people who seem to care about the same things as you can do something about it is not the worst way to spend money, time and attention.
An update on my recent Internet browser use:
Speed wins.
Antimemetics is a book about anti-memes, but what those are I didn’t quite get because the book itself was written antimemetically.
A part of it may be about inconvenient truths that are important but suppressed: you have to wait for the right time to share them more broadly outside of your group, as “the others” may ignore it or, worse yet, reject it outright. The work of on Curtis Yarvin features here prominently and you know what, maybe his ideas should have been suppressed? Although if I write so I would be a hypocrite, as I have myself recently wrote about the benefits of being more closed which is one of the main antimemes of Yarvin’s that Asparouhova cites.
Or they could be clear truths that are just inconvenient to follow and therefore get ignored, like handwashing. No argument there, although I would take her data point that only around 50% of medical professionals washes their hands at work with a large grain of salt.
And then of course any idea can receive the antimemetic treatment by the way of Straussianism or, what is much more common out there in the wild and is in fact the case with this very blog, by being coated in opaque, obscure and obtuse prose.