📚 Finished reading: Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by Ernst F. Schumacher, so enthralled I was by his guide for the perplexed that I quickly jumped to the more well-known of his works. It was good timing: Abundance is becoming the Sapiens of this generation and Small Is Beautiful is the antidote.
It takes a special kind of negligence to accumulate $200,000 in traffic tickets over 7 years. To post about it on Reddit while whining about your car being impounded is the chef’s kiss. Many thanks to the ANC Commissioner who immortalized the now-deleted posts and to DC Councilmember Charles Allan for making it happen.
📺 Moonflower Murders (2024) had three and a half murder mysteries in a single series, each of them flawless. Part of me wishes it had the production values of HBO — Leslie Manville’s acting certainly deserves it — but then isn’t part of the charm seeing all those British B-listers hamming it up?
“The whole set up cost 2 billion dollars." (ᔥDaring Fireball)
Even if the rich are not “idle rich”, even when they work harder than anyone else, they work differently, apply different standards, and are set apart from common humanity. They corrupt themselves by practicing greed, and they corrupt the rest of society by provoking envy.
This is from E.F. Schumacher’s “Small Is Beautiful”, published in 1973. More than fifty years later, don’t you wish we had more of the idle kind of rich?
My current state of mind about LLMs is ambivalence. ChatGPT helps me with things that Google of 10 years ago may have done just as well. Of course, the reason for Google’s current non-performance — in addition to self-enshittification — is LLM-generated slop. Like a traveling vacuum salesman throwing dirt on your carpet.
Quote of the day from Adam Mastroianni:
[L]ots of people think they need to get better at writing, but nobody thinks they need to get better at thinking, and this is why they don’t get better at writing.
And since writing is thinking, this for many people boils down to: write more drafts and murder your darlings. Or post them online, like I do.
When “I don’t think I need to say much more” is followed by two more paragraphs of text the writer is not making the point they think they are making. The text in question is a defense of plagiarism which amounts to “what I copied wasn’t that original to begin with”. Hardy-har-har. (ᔥNassim Taleb)
A good observation from Christopher Butler: you can be a great designer and be completely unknown. I would also, as Charlie Munger suggested, invert: you can be well-known without being great at what you do.
Fame and skill do not correlate — unless the skill in question is being famous — and by “famous” here I mean famous in the field and not necessarily a widely recognized celebrity. In fact, I can think of reasons for there to be an inverse correlation, of the pick a surgeon who doesn’t look like a surgeon variety. (ᔥMatt Birchler)
Six times out of 10 someone who tells me they “live in DC” are actually from Northern Virginia. The other four times they do live in DC proper. On the other hand, no one from Maryland ever says they are “from DC”, even if they live inside the beltway. Even the tiny sliver of Chevy Chase inside the district considers itself Chevy Chase, not DC.
Why are people territorial about Bethesda, Silver Spring and PG county, but not Clarendon, Vienna and Fairfax?