December 14, 2025
Sunday links, on optimizing ourselves to… something
- Scott Sumner: The Great Depression: Elevator pitch. Wherein Sumner outlines his book on the Great Depression, The Midas Paradox, which I haven’t read but is now on the pile. Even just the outline has brought my level of understanding from zero to a vague sense of what went wrong.
- Ernie Smith: Compartmentalizing. I knew about the shipping container revolution before reading this brief history on Tedium, but I forgot just how much ships themselves transformed to accommodate the new invention to the point of being overoptimized.
- Sasha Gusev: Embryo selection company Herasight goes all in on eugenics. What it says on the tin, and these people are brain-dead morons who want to use polygenic risk scores for the betterment of society. The company’s white paper lists Benefits to future people as the very first item under the section “Moral reasons for embryo screening”. Gusev, a geneticist, has written an excellent overview of why polygenic risk scores are not that straightforward to use for even individual embryo selection and personally I think it is a terrible idea, but to each their own for individual decisions. The betterment of society ploy, however, is playing with fire that already burned through Europe not 100 years ago.
- Jay Caspian Kang for The New Yorker: If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books?. Subtitle: “Books are inefficient, and the internet is training us to expect optimized experiences.” My answer is that it depends, although the author would very much like for us to apply Betteridge’s law in our heads. (ᔥTyler Cowen)
- Kyla Scanlon: Everyone is Gambling and No One is Happy. At this point Scanlon’s essays are starting to blend in with one another, but I would like to highlight this one for pointing out a smart thing Paul Krugman wrote, The link is to his Substack newsletter, not the actual post, because that is for some reason the link Scanlon included in her own essay. Not being a Krugman reader myself I can’t tell if this is what he actually wrote or if it is Scanlon’s clever interpretation. Frustrating. which I understand to be a rare occurrence. Here are three concepts not captured by standard economics analysis that are contributing to the financial malaise:
- Economic inclusion: Can you afford to participate in society?
- Security: Are you one broken tooth away from bankruptcy?
- Fairness: Are you being scammed?
Sounds right.
December 13, 2025
📚 Finished reading: Enshittification by Cory Doctorow, which is a continuation of his blog posts and essays on the word he coined. I was worried that this would be a pointless pad-job, like what David Graber did for his similarly scatological Bullshit Jobs. But no, the topic is deep and Doctorow’s book explores those depths with competency and good humor.
What I most appreciate is that the solutions aren’t of the end-user “use paper straws” type. The point is not to boycott Amazon, leave all social media, move to a Kaczynski-style cottage; rather it is to put pressure on local, state and federal lawmakers to do their jobs and prevent the country’s slide to full-on technofeudalism. This is another delightful term, popularized by Yanis Varoufakis who himself has direct experience working for a feudal lord, Valve. Yes, there is a book and yes, I it is now on the ever-growing pile. Although, I still plan on canceling our household’s Prime subscription and redirecting the money to EFF.
Note that Doctorow describes himself as leftist and calls people “comrade”, a term at which I tend to recoil. He also sings praises to the EU legislature, of which I am profoundly sceptical. Still. We can agree that Big Tech is too big and that their bosses are too cozy with the government, and that between European Union’s incompetence and the American increasingly corporatized state only one has a straight path to totalitarianism, the final destination of end-stage enshittification.
