The Silicon Valley Canon: On the Paıdeía of the American Tech Elite

https://scholars-stage.org/the-silicon-valley-canon-on-the-paideia-of-the-american-tech-elite/

The upshot of all this is that books have an inordinate impact on the Silicon Valley mindspace. Often these books are stilted academic titles, works which at first glance have no obvious connection to software. “It’s interesting how Seeing Like A State has made it into the vague tech canon,” Jasmine Sun comments, “despite being from a random anarchist anthropologist who specialized in Southeast Asian agrarian societies.”

“Vague tech canon” is a clever phrase. Siloed off on so many little mountains, I could not speak of a common DC canon, vague or otherwise. But for Silicon Valley the term is just—there are no formal canonizers in Silicon Valley, and thus no formal canon. But a “vague” canon, the sort that ties together any historical community of requisite intelligence and literacy, certainly exists. I challenged my followers on Twitter to try and define it.

Book Review: The Revolt Of The Public

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-revolt-of-the-public

Our story begins (says Gurri) in the early 20th century, when governments, drunk on the power of industrialization, sought to remake Society in their own image. This was the age of High Modernism, with all of its planned cities and collective farms and so on. Philosopher-bureaucrat-scientist-dictator-manager-kings would lead the way to a new era of gleaming steel towers, where society was managed with the same ease as a gardener pruning a hedgerow.

Some principles of this system: government management of the economy, under the wise infallible leadership of Alan-Greenspan-style boffins who could prevent recessions and resist "animal spirits". Government sponsorship of science, under the wise infallible leadership of Einstein-style geniuses who could journey to the Platonic Realm and bring back new insights for the rest of us to gawk at. Government management of society, in the form of Wars on Poverty and Wars on Drugs and exciting new centralized forms of public education that would make every child an above-average student. Homelessness getting cleared away by a wave of the city planner's pen, replaced by scientifically-designed heavily optimized efficient public housing like Cabrini-Green.

Realistically this was all a sham. Alan Greenspan had no idea how to prevent recessions, scientific progress was slowing down, poverty remained as troubling as ever, and 50% of public school students stubbornly stayed below average. But the media trusted the government, the people trusted the media, and failures got swept under the rug by genteel agreement among friendly elites, while the occasional successes were trumpeted from the rooftops.

Robert Carter III

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Carter_III

Robert Carter III (February 28, 1728 – March 10, 1804) was an American planter and politician from the Northern Neck of Virginia. During the colonial period, he sat on the Virginia Governor's Council for roughly two decades. After the American Revolutionary War saw the Thirteen Colonies gain independence from the British Empire as the United States, Carter, influenced by his belief in Baptism, began the largest manumission in the history of the United States prior to the American Civil War.

Despite strong opposition from family members and neighbors, Carter began emancipating the hundreds of slaves he owned via a deed of gift filed with the Northumberland County, Virginia authorities on September 5, 1791, seventy years before the Civil War. Over the following years, Carter gradually emancipated over 500 of his slaves by filing documents with the Northumberland County, Virginia authorities, and settled many freedmen on land he gave them. Carter died in Baltimore, Maryland in 1804.^[1]

How rich musicians billed American taxpayers for luxury hotels, shopping sprees, and million-dollar bonuses

https://www.businessinsider.com/lil-wayne-chris-brown-covid-relief-funds-svog-grant-2024-12

The money came from a program called the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant. Signed into law by Trump in 2020 and championed by lawmakers including Sen. Chuck Schumer, it was established as a lifeline for struggling independent venues and arts groups during the pandemic.

But pop stars used the program as a piggy bank to keep the party going, reporting by Business Insider shows. [...]

In a statement, the SBA said it followed the law. But the law directed the SBA to examine revenue, not assets. Musicians with huge bank accounts and multiple mansions were still eligible for the awards as long as their loan-out company's revenue had declined.

Kristen Faulkner on mental health

https://www.instagram.com/p/CjhjF1luwo2/

World Mental Health Day 🌍 👏 is important to me because I have struggled with depression & bipolar since I was a kid. I used to blame people for misjudging me, even though I was scared to let anyone know what was going on. The only thing worse than suffering is suffering alone. I finally accepted help 4 years ago, and I am sharing my story because I don’t want anyone to suffer alone. To seek help is to treat ourselves the way we want others to treat us: with love, support, and compassion.

While I would not wish depression upon anyone, I want to celebrate what it has taught me:

1. Compassion towards myself and others. I learned to never judge, because there is so much behind-the-scenes in people’s lives we don’t know about. In being judged, I learned to never judge. Just because we cannot see someone’s suffering does not mean it is not there.

2. Vulnerability. I can be a “strong independent woman” and ask for help. Authenticity is more fulfilling than perfection. The more comfortable I became with my depression, the more comfortable I became with my quirks and my goofiness. It’s different sides of the same coin of self-acceptance.

3. Standing up for myself. It is my responsibility to communicate if I want others understand me. But, I cannot blame myself if they cannot or do not want to understand me.

4. Self-awareness and self-care. I learned to listen to my body and give myself what I need for mental stability. I learned to be curious about myself, rather than convincing myself that I am or should be a certain way.

5. Gratitude. When we’ve suffered through difficult times, we appreciate the good times that much more. I am grateful for the support network I’ve built, the health resources I have access to, and all the times I get to smile.

6. Unconditional Love from those who hold & carry us through our difficult times and are there when we need them. In receiving unconditional love from others, I learned how to give it. We can all do that for someone else.

7. Bravery. Mental illness forced me to develop courage and resilience, and those skills have helped me go after the things I want in life. Dealing with mental illness is incredibly scary. Way scarier that leaving my job and moving to Europe to be a professional cyclist. Mental illness forced me to develop courage, and that courage has helped me go after the things I want in life.

By taking care of our mental health, we can turn our struggles into growth. There is strength in seeking help. There is also so much joy on the other side. Happy World 🌏 Mental Health Day Everyone ❤️

🍫 TABLEAU FINAL DES PRESQUE-MÉDAILLES 🏅

https://x.com/FFLose/status/1822698497755304270

(translation) 🍫 FINAL TABLE OF ALMOST MEDALS 🏅 

I’m a Polio Survivor. I Don’t Want You to Get It.

https://www.voicesforvaccines.org/as-a-polio-survivor-i-dont-want-you-to-get-it/

What is the most effective way to get a family to vaccinate their child? Explain to them in person the nuances and oddities of polio. Many families do not realize polio affects every body system, not just lungs or a paralyzed leg. Families do not realize the day to day reality of disability or the logistics and planning involved to keep functioning in a world not made for disabilities.

Misinformation is why a 20 year old was diagnosed with polio in 2022. Misinformation is why hundreds of thousands unnecessarily died of covid instead of being vaccinated. Misinformation will continue to disable and kill people as long as it remains unchecked. 

When celebrities advocate against vaccines, physicians retweet for attention, and pastors hold church during the height of a pandemic, a human life may pay the price. Polio, along with other vaccine-preventable diseases, will remain prevalent and history may repeat itself.

Asleep at the Wheel in the Headlight Brightness Wars

https://www.theringer.com/2024/12/03/tech/headlight-brightness-cars-accidents

The crusade against bright headlights has picked up speed in recent years, in large part due to a couple of Reddit nerds. Could they know what’s best for the auto industry better than the auto industry itself?

 

u/CdrCosmonaut on challenges finding community

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/1glkm5y/what_is_going_on_with_masculinity/

It's basically impossible to form meaningful relationships these days.

Everyone lost their "third space." There is work or school, and home. Not too many people go to clubs, or social events anymore. Why would you go out and be uncomfortable when you can be at home, on your couch, and use your phone?

It's cheaper, it's safer, it's easier to stop any interaction that you don't enjoy.

If anyone reading this hasn't tried online dating, go make a profile. Try to approach anyone. Especially as a male. Try to make a friend. Try to get a date.

Interactions are nearly worthless. People barely respond. Bare minimum in effort and time. One sided conversation is the most common conversation.

This all culminates in making each person more and more insular. Everyone is more isolated than ever before. Those ever important relationships are dwindling to nothing at an alarming rate.

Metro prepares to crack down on bus fare evasion

https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/transportation/metro-prepares-to-crack-down-on-bus-fare-evasion/3775169/

A major fare enforcement campaign is about to ramp up on Metrobus. WMATA has been getting tough on fare evasion on the rails for some time now, but the transit agency says it's now turning its attention to its buses.

More than 70% of bus riders aren't paying the fares right now, Metro officials say.

WMATA General Manager Randy Clarke has a direct message to bus riders: Pay the fare.

"We've heard loud and clear from people. It's something that we are working on. So, starting the week after Thanksgiving, we are going to go after the bus system much more significantly," Clarke said.

Uniformed officers, plainclothes officers, video monitoring, special police and Metro Transit police will all be used in this effort.

Clarke says most of this enforcement will happen without the bus operator getting involved, protecting them from confrontation.

A space station fell to Earth. An Australian boy brought it to San Francisco

https://www.sfgate.com/sfhistory/article/the-skylab-race-to-san-francisco-18074888.php

After its launch in 1973, Skylab was a successful observatory and laboratory that saw three separate crews climb aboard to conduct experiments over 24 weeks. But by 1979, with the country’s interest in space already waning, diminished budgets and a delay in construction of a shuttle needed to refuel it, the only solely American-owned space station in history was left derelict, and would eventually fall back to Earth.

While the agency insisted that injuries were very unlikely, it did add that if citizens of any country heard that the space station was falling nearby, they should maybe hide out in the lowest floors of their homes.

Skylab was the size of a three-story house and was expected to break into about 500 pieces upon reentry anywhere in a wide band around the Earth that covered 90% of the population. In late June, NASA said that Skylab would hit around July 10 to 14, but that NASA would only have a two-hour period of notice to pinpoint where it would land after the space wreck pierced the atmosphere.

Optical illusion from Yurii Perepadia

https://www.instagram.com/p/BqVQ1fjBF2E/

The AI Productivity Paradox: Why Aren’t More Workers Using ChatGPT?

https://towardsdatascience.com/the-ai-productivity-paradox-why-arent-more-workers-using-chatgpt-a1dfe96a9460

Dedicated time for exploration is a luxury most PMs can’t afford. Under constant pressure to deliver immediate results, most rarely have even an hour for this type of strategic work — the only way many find time for this kind of exploratory work is by pretending to be sick. They are so overwhelmed with executive mandates and urgent customer requests that they lack ownership over their strategic direction. Furthermore, recent layoffs and other cutbacks in the industry have intensified workloads, leaving many PMs working 12-hour days just to keep up with basic tasks.

This constant pressure also hinders AI adoption for improved execution. Developing robust testing plans or proactively identifying potential issues with AI is viewed as a luxury, not a necessity. It sets up a counterproductive dynamic: Why use AI to identify issues in your documentation if implementing the fixes will only delay launch? Why do additional research on your users and problem space if the direction has already been set from above?

WMATA Schematic or Map

https://i.imgur.com/fER7aki.png

You're being targeted by disinformation networks that are vastly more effective than you realize. And they're making you more hateful and depressed.

https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/1gouvit/youre_being_targeted_by_disinformation_networks/

How Russian networks fuel racial and gender wars to make Americans fight one another

In September 2018, a video went viral after being posted by In the Now, a social media news channel. It featured a feminist activist pouring bleach on a male subway passenger for manspreading. It got instant attention, with millions of views and wide social media outrage. Reddit users wrote that it had turned them against feminism.

There was one problem: The video was staged. And In the Now, which publicized it, is a subsidiary of RT, formerly Russia Today, the Kremlin TV channel aimed at foreign, English-speaking audiences.

As an MIT study found in 2019, Russia's online influence networks reached 140 million Americans every month -- the majority of U.S. social media users. 

How I ship projects at big tech companies

https://www.seangoedecke.com/how-to-ship/

The most common error I see is to assume that shipping is easy. The default state of a project is to not ship: to be delayed indefinitely, cancelled, or to go out half-baked and burst into flames. Projects do not ship automatically once all the code has been written or all the Jira tickets closed. They ship because someone takes up the difficult and delicate job of shipping them.

That means that in almost all cases, shipping has to come first. You cannot have anything else as your top priority. If you spend all your time worrying about polishing the customer experience (for example), you will not ship! Obsessing over UX is praiseworthy behaviour when you are an engineer on the team, but a blunder if you are leading the project. You should cherish the other engineers on your team who are doing that work, and give them as much support as you can. But your primary concern has to be shipping the project. It is too hard a job to do in your spare time.

A Real Estate Queen and the Secret She Couldn’t Keep Hidden

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/10/realestate/alice-mason-nyc-real-estate-broker.html

Alice Mason was throwing one of her black-tie dinner parties. For years, she’d been hosting events that New York City’s social pages fawned over, but she didn’t expect that this one would disrupt a secret she’d kept for much of her life.

A Manhattan real estate agent to the elite, Alice typically held six dinner parties a year, almost always with 56 attendees — half women, half men, not too many couples. Her guests, as one socialite put it, were “the A-list of A-lists”: Barbara Walters, Bill Clinton, Gloria Vanderbilt, Alan Greenspan, Norman Mailer, Estée Lauder, Mary Tyler Moore, Jimmy Carter.

“The key to my parties is the small tables,” Alice once told The New York Times. “That way people do not have to talk only to the people on their right or left. They can talk to the whole table.”

Memo shows 76 percent of grades in A range last year, prompting faculty discussion

https://williamsrecord.com/468144/news/memo-shows-76-percent-of-grades-in-a-range-last-year-prompting-faculty-discussion/

Professor of Political Science Justin Crowe said he believes that grade inflation has decreased student learning. “Many faculty — certainly I include myself in that — have seen that grades are something of a motivator for students,” he said. “It’s important to give students honest feedback so they know what they’re doing well, what they’re doing less well, [and] so they can decide whether they want to put the work in to do better.”

Crowe added that he’s observed that grade inflation increases student stress around grades and discourages academic exploration. He noted that a B+ is now in the bottom third of grades awarded to students. “That puts so much pressure on any individual paper, on any individual course, and it sends students’ anxiety and stress through the roof, because there is effectively no margin for error in a world in which the only good grades are A, A+, and A-,” he said.

Holding poor performers accountable can lead to better government

https://www.govexec.com/management/2024/10/holding-poor-performers-accountable-can-lead-better-government/400568/

One place government should mirror the private sector and improve, however, is how it manages its employees. My organization’s polling trust data, for example, shows that over one-quarter of Americans view holding employees more accountable for their performance as one of the top two actions the government could take to become more effective and trustworthy.

Large private sector companies like Walmart, FedEx and Home Depot invest in their people—establishing clear cultural values, employee development programs, and performance appraisal, enforcement and reward systems —and they have incentives that help remove poorly performing employees. 

Unlike the private sector, the current process for addressing poor performers in government is difficult for managers and confusing for employees. While most employees are doing good work on behalf of their agencies, some are underperforming and some need to be fired. This happens in every industry across the private sector. 

There’s Something Very Different About Harris vs. Trump

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/03/opinion/trump-harris-election-day.html

But there’s another axis that politics can polarize along: the basic worth of institutions. To Democrats, the institutions that govern American life, though flawed and sometimes captured by moneyed interests, are fundamentally trustworthy. They are repositories of knowledge and expertise, staffed by people who do the best work they can, and they need to be protected and preserved.

The Trumpist coalition sees something quite different: an archipelago of interconnected strongholds of leftist power that stretch from the government to the universities to the media and, increasingly, big business and even the military. This network is sometimes called the Cathedral and sometimes called the Regime; Trump refers to part of it as the Deep State, Vivek Ramaswamy calls the corporate side “Woke Inc.” and JD Vance has described it as a grave threat to democracy.

Writes and Write-Nots

https://paulgraham.com/writes.html

AI has blown this world open. Almost all pressure to write has dissipated. You can have AI do it for you, both in school and at work.

The result will be a world divided into writes and write-nots. There will still be some people who can write. Some of us like it. But the middle ground between those who are good at writing and those who can't write at all will disappear. Instead of good writers, ok writers, and people who can't write, there will just be good writers and people who can't write.

Is that so bad? Isn't it common for skills to disappear when technology makes them obsolete? There aren't many blacksmiths left, and it doesn't seem to be a problem.

Yes, it's bad. The reason is something I mentioned earlier: writing is thinking. In fact there's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing. You can't make this point better than Leslie Lamport did:

If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking.

Cathedrals: Enormous Sacred Space

https://apricity.me/2024/10/22/cathedrals-enormous-sacred-space/

Joyful indeed, they smiled and hugged, celebrating the journey’s end. The singing was full and exuberant, their ebullient mood infectious. There was no energetic or frenetic shouting that I associated with Protestant charismatic worship. It was a measured exuberance. This time, being present at a cathedral—an ancient structure that I mostly associated with secular history and practices foreign to my Baptist roots—stirred my spirit. Next to the old gigantic stones, my heart was warmed. I cried tears of fond memory. The fervent faith of youth can be naively hopeful and sunny (pray and the world will bend to your prayers), but it also can be inspiring. The Spirit punctured through my assumptions and experiences, and touched me.

Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/

Many of the objectors indeed thought that there would be some other way to get to the same outcome without any of the ickiness of a class action settlement. A refrain throughout the fairness hearing was that releasing the rights of out-of-print books for mass digitization was more properly “a matter for Congress.” When the settlement failed, they pointed to proposals by the U.S. Copyright Office recommending legislation that seemed in many ways inspired by it, and to similar efforts in the Nordic countries to open up out-of-print books, as evidence that Congress could succeed where the settlement had failed.

Of course, nearly a decade later, nothing of the sort has actually happened. “It has got no traction,” Cunard said to me about the Copyright Office’s proposal, “and is not going to get a lot of traction now I don’t think.” Many of the people I spoke to who were in favor of the settlement said that the objectors simply weren’t practical-minded—they didn’t seem to understand how things actually get done in the world. “They felt that if not for us and this lawsuit, there was some other future where they could unlock all these books, because Congress would pass a law or something. And that future... as soon as the settlement with Guild, nobody gave a shit about this anymore,” Clancy said to me.

How Cheerleading Became So Acrobatic, Dangerous and Popular

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/22/magazine/cheerleading-jeff-webb.html

Varsity’s market power has made the cheer world a paranoid place. In my reporting for this story, dozens of people spoke about the company in conspiratorial tones better suited to a spy thriller. My sources were at least right that the company was paying attention. Not long after beginning my reporting for The Times, a managing director from Teneo — the high-powered public-relations firm whose clients have included Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical and Saudi Arabia’s public investment fund — contacted me. I soon found myself dealing with separate P.R. agencies representing two private-equity firms, Varsity and Jeff Webb himself, who invited me to interview him. “I don’t think I’ve done a great job marketing myself,” he told me. “I would rather let the deeds speak for themselves.”

Varsity had been hit with a raft of antitrust and personal-injury lawsuits, which provided an unprecedented glimpse into Varsity’s operations: Thousands of pages of documents and emails showed how Webb, a former cheerleader himself, built a company so powerful that its market position has not been meaningfully challenged by the many lawsuits and controversies. In July, KKR, one of the largest private-equity firms in the world, bought Varsity and its affiliate companies from Bain Capital for a reported $4.75 billion, a clear bet that Varsity’s control of cheerleading will survive the current scrutiny. Since the KKR sale, a sense of foreboding hangs over the world of cheer: Is there any scandal big enough to shake Varsity’s grip on American cheerleading?

Being the adult you needed as a kid by giving out snacks

https://v.redd.it/d54afvz80vud1

People think they already know everything they need to make decisions

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/10/people-think-they-already-know-everything-they-need-to-make-decisions/

The world is full of people who have excessive confidence in their own abilities. This is famously described as the Dunning-Kruger effect, which describes how people who lack expertise in something will necessarily lack the knowledge needed to recognize their own limits. Now, a different set of researchers has come out with what might be viewed as a corollary to Dunning-Kruger: People have a strong tendency to believe that they always have enough data to make an informed decision—regardless of what information they actually have.

The work, done by Hunter Gehlbach, Carly Robinson, and Angus Fletcher, is based on an experiment in which they intentionally gave people only partial, biased information, finding that people never seemed to consider they might only have a partial picture. "Because people assume they have adequate information, they enter judgment and decision-making processes with less humility and more confidence than they might if they were worrying whether they knew the whole story or not," they write. The good news? When given the full picture, most people are willing to change their opinions.

Anand Menon on racism: the UK has made progress, but this year’s riots show there’s a long way to go

https://www.tortoisemedia.com/2024/10/04/anand-menon-on-racism-uk-has-made-progress-but-far-right-riots-show-theres-a-long-way-to-go/

Writing this, I’ve come to realise how appallingly selfish I’ve become. How my relative security made me blind to the insecurity of others. In my anxiety not to appear hypervigilant, I’d not called out as clearly as I should have the careless and provocative rhetoric, the talk of immigrants as vermin, the scaremongering about an “invasion”, the lazy elisions of “British” and “British-born”.

One of the big changes between then and now is the presence of social media and the ease with which fake news can spread (like claims the Southport murderer was an Islamicist who had arrived in a small boat). This has resulted in the paradox pointed out by Sunder Katwala that, in a society with ever-fewer racists, there might be wider experience of racist abuse and threat than was the case 20 years ago.

I’m still sensitive. So, too, I imagine, are all those who were on the receiving end of the casual, cruel, continuous racism of the 1970s. I hope my recollections about my childhood help explain why.

The $1,000 Wheelchair

https://newmobility.com/not-a-wheelchair/

How the YouTubers from JerryRigEverything are Making Affordable Wheelchairs Without the Red Tape

We have cancer

https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/we-have-cancer

When procedures proliferate unchecked, they impair our bureaucratic functions. We should treat this as seriously as we treat cancer.

Ellen DeGeneres Is in Her Boss Era on Her New Netflix Special

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/24/arts/television/ellen-degeneres-netflix-for-your-approval.html

In a serious interlude that stood out among many references she makes to caring what others think of her, she says that in show business you must care, because “it’s the only real currency.”

I believe she believes that. Popularity and how people see you clearly matter a lot. But there are other currencies to measure success: A joke well-told, the satisfaction of a thought perfectly expressed. DeGeneres has had a remarkable, pathbreaking career, but one of her greatest legacies — having her sitcom character, essentially an avatar for her, come out of the closet in the 1990s — led to a drop in the show’s ratings and ultimately its cancellation. Only a doomed worldview sees that as failure.

She probably understands this. But you hear it more in the jokes than in the serious parts, the punchlines about the little lies we tell ourselves. “I used to say I didn’t care what people thought of me,” she says wryly. “Looking back, I realized I said that at the height of my popularity.”

RESCUE AT SEA: Fishermen Reunite With the Girl They Saved 35 Years Ago, the Sole Survivor of Six

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwjR37keKs0

The Canary - Michael Lewis on Chris Mark of the Department of Labor

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/michael-lewis-chris-marks-the-canary-who-is-government/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNzI1NTk1MjAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNzI2OTc3NTk5LCJpYXQiOjE3MjU1OTUyMDAsImp0aSI6ImQyZTIzZDVjLWZiYTgtNGZkMy1iZjdjLWQyNTNlMzdjOGUxOSIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd2FzaGluZ3RvbnBvc3QuY29tL29waW5pb25zL2ludGVyYWN0aXZlLzIwMjQvbWljaGFlbC1sZXdpcy1jaHJpcy1tYXJrcy10aGUtY2FuYXJ5LXdoby1pcy1nb3Zlcm5tZW50LyJ9.Ej8f5wr9mAhAoZixnV0LqwkbifeupQvSVB10tzpLVsY&itid=gfta

Each year, I finish reading the list of nominees with the same lingering feeling of futility: Democratic government isn’t really designed to highlight the individual achievement of unelected officials. Even the people who win the award will receive it and hustle back to their jobs before anyone has a chance to get to know them — and before elected officials ask for their spotlight back. Even their nominations feel modest. Never I did this, but we did this. Never look at me, but look at this work! Never a word about who these people are or where they come from or why it ever occurred to them to bother. Nothing to change the picture in your head when you hear the word “bureaucrat.” Nothing to arouse curiosity about them, or lead you to ask what they do, or why they do it....

But this year, someone inside the Partnership messed up. Spotting the error, I thought: Some intern must have written this one. It felt like a rookie mistake — to allow a reader of this dutiful list a glimpse of an actual human being. Four little words, at the end of one of the paragraphs.

Christopher Mark: Led the development of industry-wide standards and practices to prevent roof falls in underground mines, leading to the first year (2016) of no roof fall fatalities in the United States. A former coal miner.

A former coal miner. Those words raised questions. Not about the work but about the man. They caused a picture to pop into my head. Of a person. Who must have grown up in a coal mining family. In West Virginia, I assumed, because, really, where else? Christopher Mark, I decided, just had to have some deeply personal stake in the problem he solved. His father, or maybe his brother, had been killed by a falling coal mine roof. Grief had spurred him to action, to spare others the same grief. A voice was crying to be heard. The movie wrote itself.

But then I found Christopher Mark’s number and called him.

Herculean tasks, Sisyphean tasks, what else have ya got?

https://another.rodeo/tasks/

The whole thing started on the Midwest Dev Chat Slack, when someone posted a screenshot from their work Slack that read:

The fact that we only have "Herculean task" and "Sisyphean task" feels so limiting. So here's a few more tasks for your repertoire:

Icarian Task: When you have a task you know is going to fail anyways, so why not have some fun with it before it all comes crashing down.

Cassandrean Task: When you have to deal with people you know won't listen to you, despite having accurate information, and having to watch them fumble about when you told them the solution from the start.
Odyssean Task: You'll complete but it will take 20 times longer than it should and involve multiple side quests and mini-adventures.

From those first screenshots it took off, with the wits on Midwest Dev Chat adding more:

‘People need to see it’: How politics hung up a $42B Biden internet buildout

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/04/biden-broadband-program-swing-state-frustrations-00175845

The 2021 infrastructure law contained tens of billions of dollars intended to help rural parts of the country like southwest Virginia — but mounting political snags will mean the administration will have virtually nothing to show for it by Election Day.

 

I Never Expected To Run For Office—Here's What I Learned

https://www.offmessage.net/p/what-i-learned-running-for-office-stancil

“All politics is local,” goes the cliché. It’s wronger today than ever before. In 2024, all politics is, if anything, national. But local politics are where you can glimpse what politics used to be—before 24/7 cable news, before Trump, before social media sloganeering. Today's hyper-polarized elections are simpler, flatter, and meaner. They reduce people to numbers in a bloc, and strip away the voices of everyone in the smaller share. In these local campaigns you can still see the vestiges of a more complicated, less-certain style of democracy than we have today. Once seen, it's hard to unsee, whatever the electoral benefits of doing so.

Into the Valley of Death: The crash of American Eagle flight 4184 and the ATR icing story

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/into-the-valley-of-death-the-crash-of-american-eagle-flight-4184-and-the-atr-icing-story-29e64faee67c

The legacy of American Eagle flight 4184 is not free of controversy, and probably never will be. The answers to some of the questions posed in this article about the safety of the ATR will still depend on who you ask, and although I’ve tried to approach every argument with an open mind, I obviously have my own opinions that not everyone will share. Readers are free to draw conclusions that differ from mine, but I hope this article provides a solid informational basis regardless.

At the very least we can say, all controversies aside, that the tragedy at Roselawn was caused by a failure of imagination, a failure to ask, “what would happen if things were a little bit different?” The pieces of the puzzle were there, and ATR even assembled some of them, but whether due to complacency, arrogance, or disinterest, no one ever quite went far enough. The miracle of flight does not forgive these qualities — not in pilots, not in manufacturers, and not in regulators. One cannot observe an anomaly, no matter how seemingly minor, and leave it unexplained simply because it didn’t matter this time — because next time, it might, and then it will be too late. And because of that careless indifference, flight 4184 rode headlong into the valley of death, and 68 souls were lost, having been ripped from the sky as though by an invisible hand, and yet it was not the hand of god, but the hands of real people who possessed the power to change some small thing for the better, and did not do so. Now it’s up to those who have come after them to ensure it never happens again.

Japanese Medical School Accused of Rigging Admissions to Keep Women Out (2018)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/03/world/asia/japan-medical-school-test-scores-women.html

A Japanese medical school has been accused of manipulating the test scores of female applicants for years to artificially depress the number of women in the student body, a scandal that has triggered sharp criticism.

The revelations have highlighted institutional barriers that women in Japan still face as they pursue work in fields that have long been dominated by men.

Tokyo Medical University reduced the test scores of women to keep their numbers at about 30 percent of entering classes, the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper reported on Thursday.

Two decades of Top Gear and The Grand Tour — by Clarkson, Hammond and May

https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/celebrity/article/top-gear-grand-tour-jeremy-clarkson-hammond-may-tx9m9zrjm

Then again Top Gear was never really a show about cars. It was about three blokes making a show about cars. It scratched some of the laddish itch, but we weren’t laddy. Women watched us as well as men. We got to a stage where if we forgot our lines or cocked up a stunt, everyone was delighted because that’s exactly what they wanted to see. In a weird way at that point we couldn’t lose. But we always believed in what we were doing. An audience can sniff it out if it’s not authentic. Every discussion between us was driven by passion. It still is. We really did care about the difference between oversteer and understeer, and four-wheel and two-wheel drive and 50-50 weight distribution — all of those things.

Seeing America by train

https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/interactive/2024/amtrak-train-travel-diary/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNzI0OTA0MDAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNzI2Mjg2Mzk5LCJpYXQiOjE3MjQ5MDQwMDAsImp0aSI6ImIxNjczYWY5LTJhNmMtNDU3NS05ZGI2LTc5NjNmZGY2NmQyMiIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS90cmF2ZWwvaW50ZXJhY3RpdmUvMjAyNC9hbXRyYWstdHJhaW4tdHJhdmVsLWRpYXJ5LyJ9.6YRU2fjGQ0Csf8P2DilQUC6vSiuJdevXShIRExumEws&itid=gfta

What it’s really like to travel cross-country by rail.

@michaelhobbes.bsky.social‬ on social media

I wonder if this is a side effect of social media. When I post a bit of data or something I learned, I think of it as throwing a fact out into the ether. People who read the post, however, experience it as someone they know telling them *as an individual* something that should be relevant to them.

So when someone like will points out technically the economy is "good", it feels like obliviousness to the overall shitty workings of the system as is at best, and rubbing salt in wounds at worst. It feels like he's gaslighting\bullshitting people, even if that wasn't the intent.

— Space Man (@spaceds8008s.bsky.social) Aug 27, 2024 at 11:39 AM

— Michael Hobbes (@michaelhobbes.bsky.social) Aug 27, 2024 at 11:47 AM

The crank realignment is bad for everyone

https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-crank-realignment-is-bad-for

For reasons that sociologists, anthropologists, and social psychologists are probably better-situation to explain, if you work in an environment where all your colleagues and peer reviewers and people you talk things over with in a seminar are left-wing, you are going to get biased results. Again, not necessarily because anyone is trying to bias the results, but because each individual person has their own biases and when almost all of those biases are mutually reenforcing, you get a bad outcome.

A related issue is that once an expert community obtains a sharp political skew, it’s easy to confuse the interests of the expert community with an ideological vision of the public interest. It’s important to make energy policy in a way that aligns with scientific facts about climate change and public health. But that’s not the same as saying that “the science” dictates specific policy measures. We saw this really clearly during Covid when “defer to public health academics” became constitutive of progressive politics, but public health academics also seemed to feel considerable pressure to align their recommendations with the progressive policy priorities of the moment. Ideally, we’d live in a world where empirical information “pulls sideways” in a way that’s orthogonal to values-based ideological conflict. But we’re not even close.

u/KhanTheGray on Cyprus's tragedy

https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1f1tewj/cyprus_an_island_divided/lk22hct/

The truth is that too much blood has been spilled for a peace to come. People are scared. There are still lot of people around who has seen the days where people would get rounded up and murdered just for belonging to wrong ethnic background.

Lot of people want peace but they don’t know how it’ll happen. Turks fear that if Turkey pulls back its army there will be none left to protect them. I mean, people talk about international law and all that which is all noble and all but look at what’s happening at Gaza in 2024. In this new millennium. Where we thought we’d leave the horrors of WW2 behind.

I have never seen the south side of my country in my life. I left before the borders were open.

To be honest I have a love-hate relationship with Cyprus.

I love the island of my childhood as part of nostalgia and what it had the potential to be one; a place of love and understanding.

But I have no hope for this ever happening. My best friends overseas are Greeks from Greece, my first girlfriend overseas was also a Greek Cypriot, her family were wonderful people, it was incredible how similar we are, yet extremists always played to our differences.

My grandparents used to tell me how they lived in mixed villages and slept with their doors open, and if they lost a wallet their Greek Cypriot neighbours would bring it home to them.

The respect they had for each other, their traditions and religions, was another level.

Turks would have a parade with drums and people would walk through the village road, dancing and singing before weddings, but when they approached the Greek church on their way, with people praying inside, they’d go quiet to avoid disturbing the church service.

Greeks would do the same when they had similar events and they walked past the village mosque.

When their harvest turnout was too much and Turkish farmers didn’t have enough manpower, my grandpa would ask his Greek neighbours if they could let their sons help them with harvest, as thank you, my family would organize a big feast for them in their house with roast lamb and baklavas.

Everyone talks about wars and our differences but I rarely see our similarities and good memories shared.

How California’s Bullet Train Went Off the Rails

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/california-high-speed-rail-politics.html

A review of hundreds of pages of documents, engineering reports, meeting transcripts and interviews with dozens of key political leaders show that the detour through the Mojave Desert was part of a string of decisions that, in hindsight, have seriously impeded the state’s ability to deliver on its promise to create a new way of transporting people in an era of climate change.

Political compromises, the records show, produced difficult and costly routes through the state’s farm belt. They routed the train across a geologically complex mountain pass in the Bay Area. And they dictated that construction would begin in the center of the state, in the agricultural heartland, not at either of the urban ends where tens of millions of potential riders live.

The pros and cons of these routing choices have been debated for years. Only now, though, is it becoming apparent how costly the political choices have been. Collectively, they turned a project that might have been built more quickly and cheaply into a behemoth so expensive that, without a major new source of funding, there is little chance it can ever reach its original goal of connecting California’s two biggest metropolitan areas in two hours and 40 minutes.

Behind the Pageantry of Shen Yun, Untreated Injuries and Emotional Abuse

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/15/nyregion/shen-yun-dance-abuse.html

As the popular dance show grew into an international juggernaut, some of the group’s young performers paid a steep price.

Emily White was dragged for predicting the future of music streaming 12 years ago. Where is she now?

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2024-08-01/the-millennial-messiah-of-spotify-in-exile-emily-white

It seems harmless now, but at the time, the article meant war. “I Never Owned Any Music to Begin With,” read the headline of the 2012 NPR blog post, written by Emily White, then a 20-year-old intern at the public radio institution.

White, an obsessive music fan who had cultivated a substantial digital library through less-than-legal means, had started working on the essay before her internship started, and arrived at the NPR offices in Washington, D.C., with a draft in hand. Floating along in the unsteady musical landscape following the Napster era, White felt compelled to share the vision she saw in front of her: The future was streaming, and it was cheap. In other words, the writing was on the wall, and the CDs were piling up in the trash. For the vast majority of listeners, the days of purchasing individual albums were over, like it or not.

Parks and Degradation: The Mess at Yosemite

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2024-yosemite-national-park-aramark-mess/?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTcyMjk1NzgzMCwiZXhwIjoxNzIzNTYyNjMwLCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJTSFNKU0xEV1JHRzEwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJGQTEyREYyMDg1QUQ0Njk1QkYyNjIwMDYyQzE5MjNENCJ9.bxR7T-Tb2K4JGKbLzDZ5FSJHhjUAf1CTU8fidSCNQ8A

The excitement faded quickly. Within the first year, Aramark was laying off Yosemite staff, including many of the longtime managers whose knowledge kept the place running. The NPS provides basic infrastructure and law enforcement, and it manages trails, interpretation programs and the hundreds of thousands of acres of wilderness within park boundaries. But Aramark is responsible for the majority of visitor services in the 7-mile-long, 1-mile-wide valley where tourists flock and most employees work. Its remit includes nine lodging options, 23 restaurants and cafes, 15 gift shops and grocery stores, a shuttle system, mule and horseback rides, a ski mountain and mountaineering school, four swimming pools, three gas stations, an on-call tow truck service and a golf course. “I don’t think they realized they were going to be managing a city,” says Bob Seddon, a retired California Highway Patrol supervisor who worked as a seasonal driver in Yosemite from 2011 to 2018.

How I Got My Laser Eye Injury

https://www.funraniumlabs.com/2024/07/how-i-got-my-laser-eye-injury/

It has been brought to my attention that I have never actually written this story down before, merely told it in person to many students for valuable lessons and also for laughs over cocktails. It is a litany of bad ideas from several people that all came together at once to reach out and zap me.

Bear Found in Central Park Was Killed by a Car, Officials Say

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/08/nyregion/bear-cub-found-dead-in-central-park-was-hit-by-a-car-investigators-say.html

The initial details of the case were clear: A woman was walking her dog in Central Park when she noticed the dead bear cub, which was lying under some bushes, partially concealed by an abandoned bicycle. The Police Department’s Animal Cruelty Investigation Squad began looking into the bear’s death, and the cub was taken to Albany for analysis by the conservation department’s wildlife health unit.

But so many questions remain unanswered: How did the bear end up in Central Park? Was there foul play involved? Did she die in the park, or was she dumped there?

After revealing the results of the necropsy, Lori Severino, a spokeswoman for the state conservation department, said that the agency still did not know where the bear had come from, only that it was “likely not the park.”

A talk on professional services

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/slight-return

Why does infrastructure cost so much? Because the planning inquiry process takes a long time and generates tens of thousands of pages of documentation.

Why does it take so long and generate so many reports? Because of the need to avoid even slower and more expensive litigation. 

Why is litigation such a risk? Among other reasons, because professional services firms market their services to take advantage of any imperfection in the consultation process to allow a do-over for anyone who lost the argument in the original inquiry.

Why is any small imperfection a potential basis for litigation?  Because a standard has been allowed to develop which effectively makes it a de facto legal requirement for every possible impact of a project to be the subject of a professional report.

Why has this standard been allowed to develop?  Well now, there’s an interesting question.

It’s not that anyone has necessarily set out to manipulate things to reach this way.  It’s self-organising. 

Passing the Buck

https://samf.substack.com/p/passing-the-buck

When this happens you’re encountering an “accountability sink” – a term coined by the writer Dan Davies and discussed in his excellent new book “The Unaccountability Machine” (he also has a substack). The crucial property of an accountability sink is a set of rules that mean no individual can be blamed for a decision. In the customer service example, the person on the helpdesk is genuinely blameless and the person who could theoretically help you is entirely inaccessible.

As Davies says:

“For an accountability sink to function, it has to break a link; it has to prevent the feedback of the person affected by the decision from affecting the operation of the system….If somebody can override the accountability sink and overrule a policy that is in danger of generating a ridiculous or disgusting outcome, then that person is potentially accountable for that outcome.”

One you’ve understood the concept you start seeing them everywhere – a source of so many of the petty frustrations of modern life. The NHS is a sea of accountability sinks. Your MRI got randomly cancelled? “I’m afraid that’s our new booking system that no one here can override”. You can get an emergency same day appointment at your GP or one in four weeks but not one in two days when convenient? “I’m afraid that’s the way the system is set up”.

Who is Stephen Nedoroscik? The quirky stories of Team USA’s Olympic pommel horse hero

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5675559/2024/08/02/stephen-nedoroscik-usa-gymnastics-olympics-penn-state-pommel-horse/

Worcester Technical High School doesn’t have a boys gymnastics team. It was here where Nedoroscik studied Electro-Mechanical Engineering. Michael Meagher, a robotics teacher at the school, taught Nedoroscik for four years.

Meagher laughed when thinking about the happy-go-lucky kid who grasped everything he taught. Those at Worcester Tech used to have no idea Nedoroscik, who was fairly muscular but maybe 5-foot-6, was an athlete.

“That quirky, nerdy guy, that’s Steve. … He’s a kid you remember that’s for sure,” Meagher said. “He was a solid student, was in school all the time and then there were a couple days where he was out. When he came back I said ‘Steve, where the hell have you been?’ He goes, ‘Oh, I was at the Junior Olympics.’ I go, ‘What? Doing what? He goes ‘Oh, I compete on pommel horse.’ We never knew this! I go, ‘Come on. How’d you do?’ He goes ‘Oh, I won.’ It was just as nonchalant and as unassuming as that. … He had his knowledge to do the school program, but extracurriculars, you’d have no idea!”

This 23-Floor Manhattan Office Building Just Sold at a 97.5% Discount

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/01/nyregion/manhattan-office-building-auction.html

The sale price of 135 West 50th Street in Midtown, which is only 35 percent full, was a sign of how much the pandemic upended the market for office buildings in New York City. [...]

The buyer faces an immediate financial challenge: The auction was for the building itself, not the land. That is owned by a publicly traded real estate firm, which collects a monthly lease. But the rent from the building’s current tenants is not enough to cover those monthly payments, which are set to increase every five years and do not expire until 2123.

Inside the Secret Negotiations to Free Evan Gershkovich

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/evan-gershkovich-prisoner-exchange-ccb39ad3?mod=e2tw

At the center of the struggle were the U.S. and Germany, two allies grappling with the moral and strategic calculus of freeing guilty prisoners to bring their innocent citizens home. If the U.S. once claimed a “no concessions” policy, that principle has been steadily eroded by one precedent after the next. To respond to Putin and other hostage-taking autocrats, the State Department staffed an entire office of roughly two dozen personnel, led by a former Green Beret who jetted around Europe and the Middle East to explore prisoner trades that might free Gershkovich and others.

End the Globalization Gravy Train

https://americanmind.org/memo/end-the-globalization-gravy-train/

Take another example: we have known for some time that members of unions are less likely to drink and more likely to maintain their familial commitments. We have also learned that these benefits appear independent of the (obviously important) wage benefits of union membership. Social capital, and the mediating institutions that cultivate it, really are useful. But in virtually every major campaign of recent decades, the donors have demanded the denouncement of unions and their pernicious commercial effects. And so denounce them we have.

 

The secret garden

https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/28/17770988/google-earth-mount-lico-discovery-secret-mozambique-rainforest-expedition

How Google Earth led a team of scientists to discover an untouched mountaintop rainforest

The Blue-Collar Democrat Who Wants to Fix the Party’s Other Big Problem

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/01/magazine/marie-gluesenkamp-perez.html

When Gluesenkamp Perez arrived on Capitol Hill, she tried to find commonalities with her new colleagues. She didn’t have much success. “I’m like: ‘Oh, your bio says you’re a small-business owner. What’s your business?’” she told Politico at the time. “They’re like, ‘Oh, we have a family real estate brokerage firm.’” One of the few friendships she did strike up was with Jared Golden, a third-term Democratic representative from Maine. Golden was first elected in 2018 — part of the anti-Trump wave in which 31 Democrats won in districts that Trump carried just two years earlier. But by 2023, Golden was one of only five Democrats still in Congress who represented Trump districts. He had a little more company in the moderate Blue Dog Coalition, but just barely. At its peak in 2010, the Blue Dogs had 54 members, but after the 2022 elections, only 14 remained. Then half of them left in a dispute over the group’s direction. With the coalition having dwindled to seven members, Golden was asked to lead it.

In his short time in Congress, Golden, a millennial Marine veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, had established himself as one of its most independent-minded members. Representing Maine’s almost entirely rural Second Congressional District, he was one of only four Democrats who deviated from the party during the vote on Trump’s first impeachment (two of them subsequently became Republicans) and the only Democrat to vote against President Biden’s $1.9 trillion Build Back Better Act (over a tax break for the wealthy); at the same time, he voted for a $15-an-hour minimum wage and Biden’s $700 billion Inflation Reduction Act. “The Republican Party spends millions of dollars telling people I’m a progressive,” Golden told me. “The Progressive Caucus spends time telling people I’m a conservative. A lot of people, especially the media, like to call me a moderate. I would say I’m none of these things and I’m all of these things. And my constituents are too.”

I Filmed Plants For 15 years | Time-lapse Compilation

What it took to reopen one of the nation’s busiest ports: Transcript

https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2024/07/02/baltimore-port-ship-francis-scott-key-bridge-collapse

78 days after the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed after it was struck by a cargo ship, the Port of Baltimore is back in business.

The cleanup involved more than 2,000 people, 18 barges, 13 floating cranes, 10 excavators and 22 tugboats.

Today, On Point: What it took to reopen one of the nation’s busiest ports.

Stroads are Ugly, Expensive, and Dangerous (and they're everywhere)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM

It was past time for Aunt Jemima’s image to go

https://andscape.com/features/it-was-past-time-for-aunt-jemimas-image-to-go/

“They feel so adamantly about it they won’t buy the product,” Ron Bottrell, director of media relations for Quaker Oats, told me in 1991. I was writing an article for the Cleveland Plain Dealer about an Aunt Jemima pancake breakfast held at Red Oak Presbyterian Church in rural Ohio, in honor of Rosa Washington Riles, an Aunt Jemima actress. She spent about 30 years touring Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky and parts of Illinois portraying Aunt Jemima and giving cooking demonstrations. She is buried at the church cemetery.

I attended the 1991 breakfast, held during Memorial Day weekend, interviewing the organizers and observing the scene. The breakfast was a fundraiser for the church cemetery, where black and white people are buried. There was a collection of Aunt Jemima memorabilia, including sheet music for the “Aunt Jemima Two-Step,” a cakewalk tune; salt-and-pepper shakers dressed like Aunt Jemima; an “Aunt Jemima Breakfast Club” pin; a penny bank; and a syrup pitcher. There was a portrait of Riles dressed like Aunt Jemima, painted by a California artist who, according to one of the organizers, used a Hershey’s chocolate bar to achieve the right shade of brown.

Fewer than 25 black people attended out of the reported 900 total, which baffled the organizers. Ruth Salisbury, a member of Friends of Red Oak, which coordinated the breakfast, told me: “We tried to get them to be a part of it.” The group received no response after repeated appeals to area black churches and individuals.

“We never asked why,” so few black people attended, she said. “I’m not sure I know why.” She said she had never heard of the negative image of Aunt Jemima. “We thought it was helping the black community as well as the white community to help the cemetery,” said another organizer, Clyde Neu.

“I get a sense sometimes that white people can do whatever they want. I think it offends people. I would never attend,” a black Brown County, Ohio, woman told me.

I had never encountered such a parallel racial divide: white people believing that they are doing a good thing by creating a fundraiser to honor a black woman, and black people who hated the image she represented refusing to attend. That is, white people doing whatever they wanted with racial imagery without asking black people how they felt about it.

Shadows of the coming Dark Age for science in the US

https://www.protagonist-science.com/p/shadows-of-the-coming-dark-age-for

We build our institutions and democratic society based on two assumptions:

1. First, that information should flow freely between citizens.
2. Second, citizens deserve and value good information, meaning content that is factual, timely, relevant, contextual, and truthful.

However, the emergence of broadband internet, smartphones, and social media has fundamentally challenged these assumptions. Maybe they were naive in the first place. Today, the gradual commodification of our attention has transformed the role of information in society into a new type of digital product that we exchange for entertainment, services, profit, or power.

The informative merits of those new digital products, the accuracy or truthfulness of their content, became secondary.

• A viral “get rich” cat meme is more lucrative than an educational essay about poverty alleviation.
• A misleading video clip smearing a political opponent is more persuasive than an analysis of a policy plan.
• A false myth feels more emotionally satisfying than a dry scientific study.

Axios Finish Line: Most difficult media moment ever

https://www.axios.com/2024/06/21/news-media-disruption-will-lewis-washington-post

Everyone in media must understand the indisputable facts:

1. Social media is dying as a reliable source of readers. First, these platforms gobbled up the attention traditional media once dominated. Then, they ate the vast majority of our revenue by micro-targeting ads to their massive audiences. Then, they seduced publishers with promises of riches to create content for them. Now, they're downplaying news. Facebook accounted for 30% of Axios traffic two years ago. It was about 1% in May!
2. Speaking of traffic, almost everyone is losing it. A lot of it. At Axios, we're still growing ours, but that's an anomaly when you look across the landscape. Lewis found the Post has lost half its monthly audience since 2020. Imagine half as many people going to a car dealer or restaurant.
3. Oh, it's going to get worse. Even if generative AI turns out to be wildly overhyped, which I don't think will happen, the one thing it has the potential to do amazingly well — if it solves its problem distinguishing fact from fiction — is synthesize and answer questions about the news.
4. Consumer subscriptions are seen as a possible savior. It's a mirage. The people most likely to pay for news already have, to the benefit of The New York Times, the Journal and a few others who captured these readers early. The new reality: Each new subscription is harder than the last.

Nobody Knows What’s Going On

https://www.raptitude.com/2024/06/nobody-knows-whats-going-on/

Theory feels good. Pithiness and analogy feel good. A tight sentence feels good. Neat and snappy stories about what’s “true” are like candy to the sense-craving part of the human brain.

Notice how many smart people believe things like, “You can’t reason yourself out of a belief you didn’t reason yourself into.” This is a belief nobody would arrive at through reason. It doesn’t stand up to even a minute’s logical scrutiny. You certainly didn’t reason yourself into a belief that North-Pole-dwelling elves made your childhood toys, but you probably reasoned yourself out of it. Both beliefs are just mind-candy, only for different audiences.

In short, human beings are bad at gathering information, inferring the right things from it, and responsibly passing it on to others. It is incredible what we’ve achieved in spite of this — almost entirely by carefully combining and testing our respective reliable slivers — but as a species we remain supremely untalented at knowing what’s true outside the range of our senses.

I Wish I'd Known - Judge Stephen Dillard

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/law_students/resources/student-lawyer/professional-development/judge-stephen-dillard-i-wish-id-known/

So do yourself a favor and don’t fall into the trap of obsessively competing with your classmates or viewing them as adversaries. Grades, awards, and rankings have a way of sorting themselves out over time, and there’s no scholastic achievement that’s worth damaging your reputation or ruining a friendship.

You really are “in this” together, so don’t lose sight of the human dimension of law school. Work hard, but also take time to help your classmates be the very best they can be. If you see others struggling, check in on them. Study together. Share your outlines. Mentor students in the classes behind you as you progress through law school. Encourage each other as you go through exams, competitions, and job interviews.

Your law school experience will be a far more meaningful one as a result of the time you invest in these relationships, and you’ll graduate with a network of close friends and supporters.

And that’s worth its weight in gold.

u/brolybackshots on mortgages

https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/1d2l2we/mortgages_stuck_around_7_force_rapid_rethink_of/l61tvow/

Every other contemporary to America forces mortgage renewal every 3-5 years at most (Canada, UK, Australia, etc) so they could absorb a period of 0% since within a few years all those home owners will have to renew at high rates anyways (which is happening right now)

Americans now have this almost unfixable scenario of far too many mortgages locked in for 30 years at 2-3%. That causes everything to now freeze, as people with existing mortgages can now never move due to the 7% rates they'd never qualify for, and new home buyers cant ever enter the market as existing ones wont ever sell with their low locked in rates.

It creates a sharp dichotomy of haves and have-nots, where those with these tiny mortgage rates and existing home owners will feel fine and dandy with lots of extra savings and discretionary income to keep inflationary spending and demand high, while the "have nots" are now getting shafted due to the inflationary effect of the "fine and dandy" group + their inability to enter the housing market causing their cost of living to explode.