- Jun 2021
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www.nathalielawhead.com www.nathalielawhead.com
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There’s no reason that software needs to be this indifferent space meant only to maximize output
Your software should have its edges sanded down so that interchangeable user-cogs may enact their roles within it! The market demands it!
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To me, desktop pets are kind of like this surviving relic from a time when computers were viewed more as our own “personal spaces” and not so much as something we rent from corporation’s like Apple or Microsoft.
At work, my coworkers don't seem to understand why I find it creepy if they leave the default wallpaper in place
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Windows 2000 and Windows XP had thriving communities that specialized in creating themes for these OS’s. People would change everything from the default cursors, screensavers, wallpapers, and even the bootup screen for the OS. They would share all that. It was ridiculously popular, and kind of the era where desktop pets really came into their own.
I remember being so desperately jealous of these...
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Social housing, by contrast, could have units set aside for market-rate, poor people, and middle-income folks. This would provide new housing supply where it is most needed: across the whole income spectrum, from poor to rich.
Integration of poor and rich is something that you absolutely positively have to work for in a society that allows education to be funded and managed by zip code. You have to!
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Rents should be controlled, which will provide more neighborhood stability, and again level the playing field with owners — after all, the 30-year mortgage functions just like rent control for the middle and upper-middle class.
I have heard so many conflicting things about rent control at this point I don't know which way to look.
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First, renters ought to get equal policy priority with owners. Rental vouchers ought to be boosted to something like what homeowners get in terms of subsidy, while the worst ownership subsidies like the mortgage interest deduction (almost all of which is claimed by the rich, and mainly produces pointlessly larger homes at the top end) should be removed
Amen!
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Buying a house ought to be roughly analogous to buying a car — a thing that (with rare exceptions) decreases in value over time, because it wears out. Indeed, that is how it works in countries like Japan.
I would love to ambush politicians with the question "why should we expect the values of all houses to increase on balance".
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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The humanities PhD is still a vocational degree to prepare students for a career teaching in academia, and there are no jobs. Do not get a PhD in history.
I appreciate this kind of thing because in retrospect I'm furious I didn't hear more of it.
If you're smart enough and confident enough, people are happy to watch you get into a human catapult pointed at a wall.
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Saint John's Fires, explained the monk of Winchcombe, were to drive away dragons, which were abroad on St. John's Eve, poisoning springs and wells.
I would love to read more about how wells were talked about -- holy, poisoned...
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In England, the earliest reference to this custom occurs on in the 13th century AD,[17] in the Liber Memorandum of the parish church at Barnwell in the Nene Valley, which stated that parish youth would gather on the day to sing songs and play games.[17] A Christian monk of Lilleshall Abbey, in the same century, wrote:[17] In the worship of St John, men waken at even, and maken three manner of fires: one is clean bones and no wood, and is called a bonfire; another is of clean wood and no bones, and is called a wakefire, for men sitteth and wake by it; the third is made of bones and wood, and is called St John's Fire.[17]
Does bone mean literal bone here?
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If Christ's conception and birth took place on the 'growing days', it was fitting that John the Baptist's should take place on the 'lessening days' ('diebus decrescentibus'), for the Baptist himself had proclaimed that 'he must increase; but I must decrease' (John 3:30). By the late sixth century, the Nativity of John the Baptist (24 June) had become an important feast, counterbalancing at midsummer the midwinter feast of Christmas.— Professor Éamonn Ó Carragáin
By the late sixth century is early enough for me!
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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Neutrophils also harbor one of the immune system’s most terrifying armaments: They can unspool the genetic material that’s normally packed into a tight wad at their center, freckle it with toxic proteins and compounds, and then spew it out their side like a lethal sneeze—a weaponization of their own DNA. The end product is a gummy, poisonous net called a neutrophil extracellular trap, or NET, that can massacre scores of microbes at once. But NETs are a double-edged sword: When cast under the wrong circumstances, they can harm their host, seeding serious blood clots or driving the symptoms of diseases as catastrophic as cancer, lupus, and COVID-19.
I thought DNA was really small relative to the cell, not just packed tight
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www.popularmechanics.com www.popularmechanics.com
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Boiling Wand "This portable water heater—the better to make tea or bouillon in the privacy of your hotel room—was a must for every Soviet traveler," Idov says. "Russians abroad had a reputation for shorting out whole city blocks by plugging these babies into 110-volt sockets. The infinitely more terrifying homemade version consisted of an electrical cord, two matchsticks and two razor blades."
I don't know what the matchsticks are for but this is great
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noahpinion.substack.com noahpinion.substack.com
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And so we wander through our country as if in parallel realities. We walk through teeming, crowded cities where only a few other people really exist — the other residents of our tiny stratum. Our class equals are real to us, manifesting in living color — people we might laugh with, do deals with, make love with, confess our frustrations to. The members of adjacent classes are a bit less real — washed-out caricatures we deal with using simple heuristics. And the members of distant classes are mere shadows to us — moving objects to be avoided on the street, automated kiosks to service our economic needs, statistics in our daily news. The Walgreens cashier, the BART conductor — who could they ever be to you? And who could you ever be to them?
Upper-class people who don't know any lower-class people are real desperate to consider that a universal, huh?
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A rich White boat dealer with a college degree is of a different class than an equally rich White software engineer who went to the same school.
The software engineer may think so, but it's sheep discerning among sheep.
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I find that these people often have in mind an entirely different image of the working class — a member of the educated, downwardly mobile, mostly White “precariat”. In other words…themselves. A deli worker who graduated from Michigan State but can’t figure out what to do with her humanities degree; a struggling public school teacher; a writer for a leftist magazine who gets priced out of superstar cities by dastardly tech workers, etc. It is to the rescue of this precariat and their frustrated expectations that the government must ride, with student loan relief and free college and so on.
This would be a sicker burn if it weren't absolutely evident that the student loan relief and free college would help other groups more.
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bigtechnology.substack.com bigtechnology.substack.com
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Big Tech’s acquisitions might be better evaluated on a case by case basis by regulators
Strong argument
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“Having a buyer always available is what makes the risk worth taking.”
Does this lead to risks being taken that are not optimal for society? (How much investment is spent reinventing the way we snack?)
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Facebook, for instance, began testing its Clubhouse clone in public this week, a move that typically would’ve been preceded by an attempt to buy the company. Facebook’s contemplation of a deal, and the ensuing negotiations, would’ve given Clubhouse some time to grow independently. But instead, Clubhouse is now looking at a carbon copy of itself on a 2 billion-user platform.
If a company is just a shtick, should we cry for it? Shouldn't they be able to do Their Thing better than Facebook can?
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And startups typically press forward even when it’s clear they won’t reach IPO scale, anticipating they’ll sell to a bigger company and deliver a decent “exit” to investors and employees.
This seems like it just feeds the VC industry.
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The prospect of an acquisition — regardless of whether it takes place — tends to encourage productive behavior. Potential acquirers often hold off on copying startups’ products, understanding there’s a chance they’ll one day join forces.
That's bad, not productive behavior, no? If it's not actually protected IP, any good market wants many actors competing over a new way of doing things.
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www.cargocultcode.com www.cargocultcode.com
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To a modern reader, the case of nested relations might seem a rather obscure special case.
Not if the modern reader has spent much time destructuring JSON for queries
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www.sicpers.info www.sicpers.info
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I’ve talked before about the non-team team dynamic that is “one person per task”. Where the management and engineers collude to push the organisation beyond a sustainable pace by making sure that at all times, each individual is kept busy and collaboration is minimised. I talked about the deleterious effect on collaboration, particularly that code review becomes a burden resolved with a quick “LGTM”. People quickly develop specialisations and fiefdoms: oh there’s a CUDA story, better give it to Yevgeny as he worked on the last CUDA story. The organisation quickly adapts to this balkanisation and optimises for it. Is there a CUDA story in the next sprint? We need something for Yevgeny to do. This is Conway’s Corrolary: the most efficient way to develop software is when the structure matches the org chart. Basically all forms of collaboration become a slog when there’s no “us” in team. Unfortunately, the contradiction at the heart of this 19th century approach to division of labour is that, when applied to knowledge work, the value to each participant of being in meetings is minimised, while the necessity for each participant to be in a meeting is maximised. The value is minimised because each person has their personal task within their personal fiefdom to work on. Attending a meeting takes away from the individual productivity that the process is optimising for. Additionally, it increases the likelihood that the meeting content will be mostly irrelevant: why should I want to discuss backend work when Sophie takes all the backend tasks?
A "solution": share the ops burden that arises out of the horrible architectural microchoices so everyone has to learn everyone else's code when they've been woken up at 2AM.
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justingarrison.com justingarrison.com
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In all of my meetings outside of Amazon I had one of three outcomes: * No one read the email/document and I had to explain everything in the meeting * Some people read the document but forgot what it said because they read it days or hours before
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
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(six-pagers are the longest)
Aspirationally
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our scheduling tools have check boxes to automatically create a document.
....what?
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themillions.com themillions.com
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Simply put, one of the major reasons Germany has a healthy book publishing industry, beyond its pricing law, is because Germans (like the English, the Irish, the Japanese, the French, and many other nationalities) tend to read more, and more seriously, than Americans. I can’t cite statistics to prove this, but after traveling much of the world I know in my bones that it’s true.
from What Germans are Reading, "In fact, according to Culture Score Index of the UK-based market research firm NOP World, Germany is tied for 22nd with the United States for the amount of time spent reading per week, just 5.42 hours."
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uch crisp professionalism is the norm in German bookstores because clerks are required to study for several years – literature, accounting, and the mechanics of the book business – then pass a standardized exam before they can become certified booksellers.
It's not that this standard is "unthinkable", but I don't think it necessarily has as much return on its cost as the piece presents...
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modelcitizen.substack.com modelcitizen.substack.com
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The fiscal interests of cities therefore align with the financial interests of property owners in rising property values. Because the quality of public goods and amenities is capitalized into housing prices, homeowners prefer higher to lower quality in public services. At the same time, homeowners prefer lower property tax rates. One way to prop up property values though high-quality public goods without paying exceedingly high property tax rates is to concentrate spending on high-quality services near wealthier homeowners while providing them at lower quality for renters and poorer homeowners. But this is impossible if these populations are mixed in together. To gerrymander the quality of public goods, each population needs to be clustered together and separated in space. Because proximity to poorer populations is bad for property values anyway, the motivation of wealthier homeowners to keep their neighborhoods uniformly higher-class is overdetermined. Segregation allows them to focus public spending on themselves (they’re paying for most of it, after all!) and leave those on the “other side of the tracks” with rusty water, overflowing sewers and self-patched potholes.
Ha ha ha... this is .... depressing
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Whites and wealthier people receive substantially more ideological representation both from local government officials and from municipal policy outputs than do nonwhites and less wealthy individuals. The inequities in representation we identify are frequently shocking in their magnitude. For example, we find that it is only when blacks make up 80–100 percent of the community population that they receive the same amount of ideological representation from elected officials on municipal councils that whites attain when they represent only 20–40 percent of the population.
Holy shit what a number
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[L]ocal institutions, designed to enhance participation, actually empower an unrepresentative group of residents — who we call neighborhood defenders — to stop the construction of new housing.” Compared to all local voters, commenters at public development meetings were considerably whiter, older, more male and much more likely to be homeowners.
YES THANK YOU
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Local land-use power just is delegated state power.
This is a weak argument. The last sentence of the paragraph makes much more sense.
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devonzuegel.com devonzuegel.com
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# V. My questions
I like this section of the piece. I should think to do this kind of thing!
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surrounded by heterogenous political ideas
I wonder if this really does map onto political purpleness, though.
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Miami Beach is famous for its street cats who roam the island. I don't think it's possible to spend more than a few hours exploring Miami Beach without crossing paths with at least one of them.Miami Beach also has adorable wild parakeets that migrate to Miami in early spring and tend to disappear around November.
ngl this may have sold me on a visit
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Miami Beach itself sprays larvicide on the streets so there aren't many mosquitoes here.
The link mentions:
The substance sprayed is not a pesticide but a larvicide - Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis (Bti).
Nontoxic to people and pets! Nice!
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To be honest, I didn't really notice it until my mom texted me "Are you okay?!?!" and shared a CNN article about how Miami Beach had declared a state of emergency due to the Spring Breakers.
Yup, this kind of thing was also really notable with the CHAZ...
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My favorite detail about Key Biscayne is that electric golf carts are one of the primary ways of getting around the island. With 1 golf cart for every 13 residents, they dominate the streets. The speed limit in Key Biscayne is 20mph, and car drivers have seemed to accept that they are guests in the golf carts' kingdom.
This sounds sick as fuck.
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Since WWII, Miami's mayors have alternated between Democrats and Republicans mostly evenly.
If you just look at the equivalent page for NYC Giuliani and Bloomberg and etc. etc. gives a far more centered impression than the reality of the city reflects.
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Among the people I've met here, there's a much greater level of civility and tolerance of others' viewpoints.
My cynical first reaction: is that about "the people ... here" or "the people she's met"?
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In SF, I quickly learned that if a stranger approaches you on the street you should be careful—this is partially because it's not part of the culture for normal people to talk to you on the street, and partially because there is a lot of homelessness and crime and so talking to strangers on the street is a bit unsafe.
I always wonder about this stuff ever since a friend was like "I've gotten in more weird conversations with strangers hanging out with you (a couple times) than I probably have in the rest of my life combined." Is this an attribute of the city? The neighborhood? The person? The time?
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I accidentally went through the back doors rather than the front doors. I looked up in the darkness, and there was a shining gold mammoth fossil gleaming down on me.
I cannot imagine a better way to come across it! I sort of want to visit now...
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lareviewofbooks.org lareviewofbooks.org
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Much as Gladwell carries water for the official AAF position, so does he lend credence to the narrative preferred by the Japanese government. Never mind that the LDP has been led by many of the very people (once designated Class A war criminals) who plunged Japan into its calamitous war. Never mind that most survivors would beg to differ. Gladwell is perfectly content to parrot this interpretation.
Clearly I am very ignorant of Japanese politics and need to learn some more
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What do we get when we finally encounter a Japanese perspective? An expression of gratitude for the raids that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and wiped out over a quarter of housing in the country. “In the end, we must thank you, Americans, for the firebombing and the atomic bombs,” states an unnamed Japanese academic at a conference in Tokyo. Of the millions of Japanese impacted by the firebombings, we hear from a sum total of one, who just so happens to tell an American audience exactly what they want to hear.
...what
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The answer, in reality, lies in the history of air raid survivors and their postwar crusade for remembrance. It’s no accident that the museum sits in the very heart of the neighborhoods targeted for destruction in March 1945 — the Shitamachi (the Low City), the densely packed, working-class district that had long tantalized American air power strategists. The Center is a site of local as much as national memory, a reminder that not all Tokyoites suffered equally. Area bombing, after all, is not nearly as indiscriminate as its name suggests. From the beginning, war planners set out to concentrate their payloads in the densest, most flammable — and thus usually poorest — parts of urban Japan, giving rise to a particular social geography of incendiary destruction.
For all my suspicion of "targeted sanctions", I do appreciate how they are the opposite of this
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The Bomber Mafia is not so much a “case study in how dreams go awry,” as Gladwell claims, as a case study in how narratives of this incendiary campaign sidestep unsettling moral questions about the deliberate targeting of civilians. It pins responsibility for the destruction of 64 cities on one man, thereby absolving the AAF and, by extension, the American government.
Great man theory problematic, sidesteps complicity
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the median salary for a college counselor at independent schools is $94,000 but the median salary for a teacher is $60,000, according to the National Association of Independent Schools
This is a system that needs to be burned down
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Some independent schools enroll a number of low-income students on scholarship, and these “privileged poor,” to use Anthony Jack’s term, account for half the low-income students at some highly selective universities, further evidence of the advantage granted to these schools in the admissions process.
Hahahaha fuck.
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Harvard’s admissions policies gave advantages to legacies, donors, athletes, and underrepresented minorities, which hurt Asian American applicants.
I'm mad about exactly three of these, though
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www.niskanencenter.org www.niskanencenter.org
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The union threatened vendor Kinki Sharyo that it would launch environmental nuisance lawsuits unless the company agreed that the plant be unionized. In reality, the benefits of this style of protectionism go largely to managers and sitework consultants; blue-collar labor only gets scraps.
I am both skeptical and interested. Blue-collar labor must be protected by its unions.
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mackenzie-scott.medium.com mackenzie-scott.medium.com
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Higher education is a proven pathway to opportunity, so we looked for 2- and 4-year institutions successfully educating students who come from communities that have been chronically underserved
YVCC? Sorry, YVC....
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we are all attempting to give away a fortune that was enabled by systems in need of change. In this effort, we are governed by a humbling belief that it would be better if disproportionate wealth were not concentrated in a small number of hands, and that the solutions are best designed and implemented by others.
That last clause brings powerful humility to a project that otherwise might well have been another "let's let Zuckerberg run the schools."
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Any wealth is a product of a collective effort that included them. The social structures that inflate wealth present obstacles to them.
Mackenzie! I like it!
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emacs.love emacs.love
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When I caught her slipping back to the one computer still running Mac OS 9 just to take notes, I knew I was going to have to write her a notepad.
This is a very sweet story. Coding as creative act; creative act as act of love; coding as love.
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I don’t believe in these French-style laws that say you can only work 35 hours a week. If you want to work 100 hours a week, go for it.
🙃
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I think people are really hungry for an alternative to the Chicken Little narrative that the sky is falling and tech is melting our brains. They want to be able to do something about it, and they just don’t know what to do yet. You could be waiting for Washington to do something about the problem, or you could hold your breath waiting for the tech companies to do something about the problem. Or, instead of waiting, you can do something about the problem today. You can learn one technique to manage your internal triggers better. You can plan one day a week in your calendar. You can turn off your notifications on your phone. You can start small.
But will that work? Systemic vs. individual choices? Maybe individual choices work well where only some kind of individual impact is implicated?
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writeandco.com writeandco.com
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Row One = Act 1 Row Two = Act 2A (first half of Act 2) Row Three = Act 2B (second half of Act 2) Row Four = Act 3
Oh great I love having hybrid numbering
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writeandco.com writeandco.com
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Seeing the protagonist come to the smarter, wiser, healthier way of being can be a big part of an emotionally satisfying ending.
also contributes to a hackneyed feel, tho
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As Goldman and McKee say, respectively, endings should be “satisfying and surprising” and “inevitable and unexpected.” So: No, the boy doesn’t get the girl – but here comes another, and maybe she’s The One
This is the kind of thing I love consuming but don't know if I could come up with.
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writeandco.com writeandco.com
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Doing so has the effect of making the achievement of the goal more meaningful to the protagonist.
This also makes more sense than simply external terms.
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So this event increases the opposition because it weakens Clarice’s position by taking away her source of help, but it’s effective because we understand what it means to Clarice emotionally.
Emotional sabotage makes more sense than Yet Another External Obstacle...
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The two most common ways a Midpoint functions to inject new energy are: Increasing the opposition Raising the stakes
One gets the sense we're constantly making things worse and worse for our protagonist. I would love to see some contradiction of this in older fiction.
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writeandco.com writeandco.com
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That can include: how tough the problem is and/or what the protagonist will be up against by taking on the Act 2 Adventure, what the character believes to be the best or only option for addressing the problem the Inciting Incident created (and the reasoning to come to that conclusion, such as eliminating other options), what happens if he doesn’t attempt to solve the problem at all, what the protagonist is risking by taking on this huge task, what he’ll gain if he succeeds, what’s at stake and why those stakes matter enough to the protagonist to embark on the crazy Act 2 Adventure anyway, plus any additional plot-logistical stuff that needs to happen for us to understand how the protagonist moves from the new problem of the Inciting Incident, to embarking on what they think will be the solution to that problem at the Break into Act 2.
This makes much more sense than "no I don't wanna okay I'll do it"
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writeandco.com writeandco.com
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Connect the Inciting Incident and the Break Into Act 2 by creating a problem or opportunity for the protagonist and then showing us how the protagonist intends to solve that problem or take advantage of that opportunity with a solution that is dangerous, risky, or audacious in some way – ingredients for an exciting Act 2.
The debate in between: the stakes!
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kevindriscoll.info kevindriscoll.info
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Instead, the situated needs of letter writers expose the varied historical conditions of what Joy Lisi Rankin terms “acts of computing,” lived experiences with computers almost wholly unrelated to the technical specifications or commercial success of one or another machine.
I want to read more computer history like that!
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For Wicks, being a user is a hobby on the basis that he enjoys computerizing everyday tasks, such as managing his local Mensa group mailing list (the remainder of the letter extensively discusses his experience using Mail List Database from Synergistic Systems). Readers like Wicks represented a new “hobbyist” identity uncoupled from as-sembly language arcana and soldering irons. Much as earlier hobbyists enjoyed master-ing the internals of the Apple II, user-hobbyists like Wicks took pleasure in the expert application of microcomputing to everyday life.
I've run into one of these online, and it's a persona we should have a lot more respect for.
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Dur-ing the magazine’s final year in print, an overwhelming majority—approximately 92 per-cent—of the letters represented an interaction between readers.
It's just stunning to think of public conversation mediated by editors deciding if a response would have public merit to print.
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Microcomputer users were users precisely because they used micro-computers at a time when use still embodied a complex range of technical proficiencies, self-education, and confusing possibilities. Engagements with these machines could not yet be passive, plug-in-and-play, or reduced to input-output (even if that is much of what mainstream consumer computing has become).
Interesting -- the disposition to remain uncharmed engaging with all that shit, paired with the determination to get something done with it...
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For decades, our descriptions and imaginations of computer culture have been powerfully shaped by the anecdotal experiences of those who founded or worked in these industries rather than the impressions, actions, or concerns of a broader public. Yet no individual’s historical experience is entirely transparent to themselves nor singularly adequate to explain the massive technological transformation that was learning to live with computers.
This is so interesting. In some ways I think the discourse these days focuses a lot on the average user, to the exclusion of all hope of a wide understanding of what it is you're really interacting with when you unlock your phone.
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journals.sagepub.com journals.sagepub.com
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ust as the mall, because of its enclosed, surveilled nature, has become a place where parents feel safe leaving their children, the electronic panopticon of the monitored Prodigy network appeals to many parents because they feel their children are somehow safer there.
Network as space here, again
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Rheingold's assumptions about the public nature of cyberspace miss the accelerating shift of new technologies now under public management to private ownership.
Privatization: is there anything it can't undermine?
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What, in the age of virtual environments, is a city, a community, public space, or public life? It is troubling that the illusory language may, if unexamined, subvert the very ideals it promotes, in particular the ideal of 'community'.
I like this. Calling something a community when it isn't is active subversion of people's ability to engage with the concept.
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Cyberspace is the "American Dream II", according to an August 1995 conference organized by supporters and advisers of Newt Gingrich (http://wvvw.townhall.com/pff).
This is disarming! Gingrich!
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alex.flounder.online alex.flounder.online
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its killer feature
There's something almost disturbing about trying to define "uselessness" as a "killer feature" simply because "killer feature" is language of the hyper-competitive startup scene, and really does seek to "kill" its antecedents. Gemini has no such aspirations
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To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system.
Hmm, I need to read this book....
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news.ycombinator.com news.ycombinator.com
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> When i read on HN and realize just how many people there are like me, or that there’s people that are also way too into disc golf, acoustic guitar, or any other semi niche activity i wonder why it is so hard to make more regular connections and interactions with them.That hit me in the truth. I feel like that a lot: if I know these people exist, and care deeply about the things I care about, why am I not building lasting friendships with them?And then I realize that it's not a flaw in the medium but in myself. I lack the confidence and determination to go form those connections. I could write to any of those people and say, hey, I'm coming through Cincinnati, and would love to see your project/talk with you over coffee about your research/drink beer and yell about liberty. But I don't, and that isn't the internet's fault.
Who do I wish I were connecting with more?
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I think it's easy to forget we're not the same people we were 20-25 years ago. I see all sorts of lamentations about various things in the world changing and becoming less magical. But as far as I'm aware, I could still go and argue about bands in chatrooms. I could talk to other writers and dream about my future best-selling novels. I could go read random opinions about any subject and get into an exhilarating flamewar about it.I don't want to do any of those things. I'm in my 40s and I have 3 kids. The internet 15-year-old me experienced was magical because _I_ was a blank slate. Every new friendship was thrilling, every new skill opened up infinite horizons, every nook and cranny felt like somewhere I could belong. But life moves on. I'm more than half-way through my career, perhaps not the one I was expecting. I didn't marry the girl I met on IRC. I don't have strong opinions about Radiohead anymore. I find people, however delightful and kooky they are, quite tiring having got to know 10,000 of them at this point.I know all this is true because my kids love the internet and find their place in it with all the joy I used to. And I'm pretty sure older generations frowning upon it all is part of the rush anyway.
"The way that I got to engage with technology as a kid was way more interesting and engaging than the way I engage with it now as an adult" underpinning a lot of these critiques: an excellent insight.
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eclecticlight.co eclecticlight.co
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That’s not why they code, nor are the skills of writing good documentation even vaguely similar to those for writing good code.
I wonder whether everyone would agree with this
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In common with almost every other initiative of its kind, this approach assumes that the best people to document macOS are its engineers. Those engineers are often selected at interview by posing them a coding challenge, but have you ever heard of candidates for a software engineering post being selected by or for their ability to document their code?
God, can you imagine if they were?
I would genuinely love to see an exercise where someone was given a chunk of mess of code and asked to untangle it a bit and document.
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www.seattletimes.com www.seattletimes.com
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He believes the fish and chips at Proper Fish on Bainbridge Island might be the best in the Northwest.
I love, love, love fish and chips. Maybe I should go while the weather is still a little drizzly and bracing -- the best fried fish weather.
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The best bagels here, such as Rachel’s Bagels & Burritos, Rubinstein Bagels and Loxsmith Bagels “are just as good as the best bagels in New York,” he said.
I don't bother telling this to people from out east because they never believe me, but this is very validating.
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Recently, López-Alt started exploring Seattle’s chicken teriyaki scene and found a favorite, Grillbird Teriyaki in West Seattle. One day at lunch, López-Alt laid out trays of chicken teriyaki, fried cauliflower, braised pork and chicken katsu over the hood of his SUV for a photo, an Instagram shot that would be worth gold to the owner of this teriyaki joint when it appeared in a few hours.He held up the deep-fried cauliflower, admiring how the deep-fried shell remained crispy 20 minutes into our interview. The kitchen must use a starch with maybe rice flour to achieve that crunchy coating, he concluded. (It was indeed cornstarch with rice flour, Grillbird confirmed.)
Don't mind me, just blasting this to everyone I know in West Seattle...
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“I told him, ‘This is the best Chicago pizza I have had anywhere, including in Chicago,’” López-Alt recalled. “I still maintain that.”López-Alt went on social media then as he did again this year to coronate Windy City Pie.
Bold! Bold!!!
We had it a couple of times for work, which I hated because it didn't fit well with the casual happy hour vibe on Fridays -- but I'd like to go try it again and see if a sit-down experience does better by it.
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(The “Food Lab” update may instead turn into an expanded, 10th anniversary edition, tentatively scheduled for 2025.)
Well, I'll be buying it...
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news.ycombinator.com news.ycombinator.com
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even in dating women demand millionaires, average Joes are treated like disposable good for nothing who women say are creeps because they don't have money to build their IG brand and devour women with lavish gifts.
Boy I sure do love a technical discussion board
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www.danielde.dev www.danielde.dev
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"Cancer" was applied to tumors because the swollen veins around a tumor were said to look like a crab. "Cancer" had an alternative meaning, "enclosure" (which is, historically, where the meaning "crab" was derived, because of the way a crab's pincers form a circle). This alternative meaning helped the word evolve into the Latin "cancellus" - a barrier dividing two parts of a building. Applied metaphorically, this eventually became the English "cancel".
Encrabben - surround
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"Pay" takes a slightly longer journey than "peace", coming from Latin "pacare", meaning "appease", as in "appeasing a creditor". So etymologically, to "pay" someone means to "create peace by settling a debt".
Peace is from appeasement, not the other way around...
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hapgood.us hapgood.us
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It’s interesting to me that we so assume that online interaction is about conversation via blogging, tweeting, commenting — and ONLY about conversation that we assume this is the way things must be.
Contrast to Corey Doctorow's view on his own blogging
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the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another.
Am I arranging things as much as I'd like? How can that be a bigger part of my web presence?
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anildash.com anildash.com
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Images were easily discoverable on the public web using simple RSS feeds.
Was this true? Did non-technical people find these tools easier?
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bigtechnology.substack.com bigtechnology.substack.com
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in a structured, commonly used, and machine-readable format.
But will it be stable enough to build anything on top of....
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www.gq.com www.gq.com
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“Made with Love, Not in Lab” is a favorite catchphrase at Akua, a start-up that produces burger patties from farmed kelp. (They are very good, but I wish the company's otter mascot didn't make me think of them as otter burgers.)
Oh nooooooo
I choose to imagine otters patting little patties into shape
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an Impossible or Beyond burger, while environmentally superior to beef, is said to have five times the carbon footprint of a classic bean burger
I mean, yeah, we could just all eat lentils...
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What Impossible and Beyond simulate so perfectly isn't ground beef so much as cheap ground beef—which is to say, precisely the industrially produced meat that I most want to remove from my diet because of its cost to animal, human, and planetary welfare.
Preach!!! (I'm also looking forward to having my first good vegetarian chicken nugget)
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raised on Annie's mac 'n' cheese and trips to Whole Foods
that shit is expensive
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simple fried vegetables are a beautiful thing—and not necessarily the better for being labeled wings or oysters or shrimp.
And they're great restaurant food since I don't want to make them at home :)
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encased in a batter as crisp as tempura
....couldn't it be tempura?
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But when Jolet and his sister resurrected their grandfather's tamale business, they sensed enough demand to invent a vegan corn version, using an ample amount of coconut oil. “It has the look and feel of lard,” he says, a description that may not make the Coconut Oil Council's marketing materials but does impart a satisfying lushness to the sweet corn filling.
My dad had good luck with peanut oil, since it also rounds out flavor like animal fat might.
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about.usps.com about.usps.com
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Lastly, when a carrier feels unsafe, mail service could be interrupted, not only for the dog owner, but for the entire neighborhood. When mail service is interrupted, mail must be picked up at the Post Office. Service will not be restored until the dog is properly restrained.
Good!
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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the company’s habit of encouraging employees “to tear each other’s ideas apart in meetings,”
....not a thing
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“Malarkey” and “C’mon, man” are as fundamental to Joe Biden’s brand as “Lock her up!” was to Trump’s.
Are they? The latter is a clear call to action, not just a signifier of a disposition.
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Many cults and cultish communities—not to mention individuals as disparate as Boris Johnson and my mother—also rely on expressions called “thought-terminating clichés,” which affirm positivity while shutting down debate. Cultish cites some of the catchphrases used by the conspiracy theorists of QAnon as examples: “Trust the plan,” “The awakening is bigger than all of this,” and “Do your research.” Thought-terminating clichés, Montell writes, are “semantic stop signs,” and a cue that everyone present should halt independent inquiry and accept the party line.
I feel like thought-terminating cliches get a bad rap when often they're a response to conversational circumstances -- not always a semantic stop sign so much as a social stop sign. "Well, it is what it is" -> "I want to stop the complaining session", not "we should not consider the origin of our issues"
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Cultish language, she proposes, does three things: It makes people feel unique but also connected to others; it encourages people to feel dependent on a particular leader, group, or product to the extent that life without them feels impossible; and it “convinces people to act in ways that are completely in conflict with their former reality, ethics, and sense of self.” The last two effects are what tend to separate brands or people who inspire cult followings (e.g., SoulCycle) from more malign groups and leaders.
"Feel dependent on" is interesting wording. How do we separate that from preferring a new way of being?
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annehelen.substack.com annehelen.substack.com
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I also have learned that my friends and colleagues without kids are uninformed about how broken, expensive, and unfair our childcare system is. They, too, need to see the kids in their community as everybody’s kids.
I'm aware that it's broken, expensive, and unfair, but I have no clue what can be done about it at the sub-state level, and that's my miss.
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When sociologist Annette Lareau observed 9- and 10-year-olds, she found that affluent children spent time shuttled between adult-organized activities, while poor and working-class children spent much of their time hanging out with neighbors, siblings and cousins. As a result, poor children became used to managing their own time, though they spent leisure time distanced from adults. Their middle-class peers are not used to managing their own time, and have frequent sibling conflicts, but do become practiced at talking to adults as near-equals. They ended up feeling entitled to adult attention.
The wide gap between comfort with peers and comfort with adults/authorities gets really hard when you enter The Workplace.
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overgrowncomic.com overgrowncomic.com
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Obviously, with comics hosting sites like tapas and webtoon becoming more common than self hosting, the main type of hypercomic these days is the vertical scroll format, gifs, and sometimes sound. Anything more complex than that is often not feasible for long running comics. But there are so many amazing possibilities to explore, especially for shorter comics!
This is an open call for anyone who reads this to send me anything they come across that qualifies as a "hypercomic" in the post-Flash era. There's so, so much that can be done more cleanly and more simply than ever before with the modern Web! CSS art, baby, we're doin' it!!!
This comic is also very appealing from just a comic perspective so I recommend it to people with no technical interest as well.
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corvidresearch.blog corvidresearch.blog
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A new study published in The Condor by Dr. Andrea Townsend et al. examines the relationship between urbanization, junk food, and the body conditions of crows.
The study you didn't know you wanted to know about.
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www.ocregister.com www.ocregister.com
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“In 2004, the bulk of the land in Disneyland was taxed at 1975 values, at a rate of five cents per square foot,” CTRA says. “Subsequent Disneyland expansions show land taxed at growing amounts as new properties were acquired, until, in 2002, new property is assessed and taxed at 37 cents/square foot of land. If the under-assessed and under-taxed Disney land were brought up to 2002 values, Disneyland would pay Orange County $4,672,217.74 more per year in tax. This amount is likely to be larger in 2010, because at an increase of 2% per year as permitted by law, the tax difference between the vast amount of property valued at 1975 values becomes even greater.”
This is nutso. Nutso! You can't tell me there's no better way to prevent the instability of needing to move to pay taxes on skyrocketing property values.
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savingjournalism.substack.com savingjournalism.substack.com
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Anyway, it gets even dumber: We understand that nearly everyone who provides material to a reporter is doing so in ways that reflect their worldview, agenda or biases. We have long held that those motives are irrelevant if the information is reliable.This is an … insane statement? — both rationally and morally. Truth can't ever be a sole criteria for publishing. It's necessary, but not sufficient. To suggest otherwise ought to flunk someone out of first year journalism school.
This is... an insane criticism? They're clearly saying that the source's motives are irrelevant if the information is true, not that if the information is true it must therefore be published.
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haptalaon.dreamwidth.org haptalaon.dreamwidth.org
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I've never been a fan of second hand markets as a thing, like these records go like hotcakes and resale for megabucks, and everything about that feels like a perversion; the concept of objects becoming pristine collectables rather than being available to people who want to enjoy them, the concept of finding $400 that won't even go to the artist, label or cover-designer
This sentiment is entirely overruled for me by the idea of the waste and environmental impact inherent to physical production.
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aninjusticemag.com aninjusticemag.com
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You could create communities around ideas and information. It was really exciting for a little while.Then we screwed it up.At some point, we started creating communities of selfish little monsters and internet trolls. We created Swifties and Beliebers. We created a cult around the idea of the autonomous individual.
Is this accurate? Cults centered on individuals certainly predate millennial pop culture.
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Tim Ferriss spends the rest of the book encouraging people not to read, to ignore the news, and to browbeat everyone into giving into their demands. He brags about interrogating college teachers for hours over bad grades instead of, you know, trying to learn something about the world. He recommends treating friends like personal assistants and tasking them with research.
I don't know the dude's work that well so I'm entirely willing to believe he is this much of an asshole.
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jet around impoverished countries where the dollar is strong (a legacy of colonialism) while running businesses online.
I'm not sure I'm sold on the idea that this alone is a very harmful idea. Is it similarly bad for someone from an impoverished country to have a business online that relies on getting paid in dollars?
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It’s a little more rustic, but still light years beyond what most people will ever get to enjoy, regardless of how hard they work.
Is it just me or does the excerpted photo not... look... that... fancy? It's a screened porch dealio in the woods? The table looks hella expensive, sure, but relative to American standards this seems kinda doable.
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www.dispatch.com www.dispatch.com
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Specifically, the lawsuit seeks a legal declaration that Google is a "common carrier," like phone, gas and electric companies, which must provide its services to anyone willing to pay its fee.
I'm going to scream. For the love of god, (symmetrical!) Internet access first, please...
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blog.apaonline.org blog.apaonline.org
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Such a lens pans away from virtue and instead focuses on mere inner tranquility, created by the not becoming perturbed by other people’s thoughts, actions, and problems. In this respect, “indifferents” get wrongfully defined as things not worth being concerned or bothered about!
I would love to read more about how Taoism is interpreted re: this same distinction, because I have a feeling I'm getting indirect misreading, but I don't actually know.
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Agiatis, the Spartan Queen, is another powerful female who plays a significant role in Stoicism’s history. Yet, she is barely mentioned in Stoic circles, despite her role in standing up and succeeding against an oligarchical regime that murdered her first husband, Agis IV, and her in-laws (Agis IV’s grandmother Archidamia, and mother, Agesistrata) and added to their wealth and property by impoverishing and disenfranchising her people. It is rather telling that life-hackers who show such an appetite for Stoicism do not go further than highlighting how a “Spartan” flavored Stoicism can help them lift heavier weights in the gym or become more resilient in the rat race. What can be more Spartan or Stoic than taking the fight to the powerful and passing socioeconomic and land reforms in the name of justice at great personal cost?
All right, this is sick. I'm gonna get the book, you sold me.
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ava.substack.com ava.substack.com
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The rules as I understand them: Protect your good habits at all cost. When you lose them, fight to regain them. Quit before the bad habit fully sinks its claws in or else you’ll spend years trying to get rid of it.Hard work rarely feels good.Choose emotionally healthy people who don't aggravate your attachment issuesIf you lie you’ll have to keep lying. Don’t lie if you can’t sustain it. Get over your fear of rejection. Fear of rejection is very expensive.Continually assert your boundaries.Then there are the more nebulous rules about how to be a good human in the world, which vary person by person (well, depending on how utilitarian you are). But they usually aren’t that complicated, either.In the end all we have to do is to stay faithful to the same basic guidelines. And yet we never learn, do we?
This piece is very good even if these don't resonate with you (e.g.: I have moved mountains while maintaining a fear of rejection, thank you very much)
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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Just America’s origins in theory, its intolerant dogma, and its coercive tactics remind me of 1930s left-wing ideology. Liberalism as white supremacy recalls the Communist Party’s attack on social democracy as “social fascism.” Just American aesthetics are the new socialist realism.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THOSE AMERICAN COMMUNISTS, GEORGE?
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The parameters of acceptable expression are a lot narrower than they used to be.
Is this true? We used to have literal McCarthyism, didn't we? Sinead O'Connor blacklisted for a peaceful statement?
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The jobs their parents took for granted have become much harder to get, which makes the meritocratic rat race even more crushing.
Wait, I thought the professional class was doing great and has ossified into aristocracy. You said that up in the Smart America section.
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Just America is a narrative of the young and well educated, which is why it continually misreads or ignores the Black and Latino working classes.
I am still waiting for the America that includes them, if it isn't Free America, Real America, Smart America, or Just America... see, George, if you'd been willing to cross-examine your idea of America as white, maybe you could have actually written a piece that doesn't miss a huge portion of it!
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In the summer of 2020, the protesters in the American streets were disproportionately Millennials with advanced degrees making more than $100,000 a year.
This is a really interesting datapoint and I would love to see its source.
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I’m exaggerating the suddenness of this new narrative, but not by much.
Where is the data that supports this?
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Just America can’t deal with the stubborn divide between Black and white students in academic assessments. The mild phrase achievement gap has been banished, not only because it implies that Black parents and children have some responsibility, but also because, according to anti-racist ideology, any disparity is by definition racist. Get rid of assessments, and you’ll end the racism along with the gap.
This is bonkers to me because I'm very sure the standard line is that these are effects of poverty and oppression, not just of mismeasurement (though that is of course a real thing also)
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It can’t talk about the complex causes of poverty.
Yes it can, and it does, and you just aren't satisfied with the result until it casts enough blame for you.
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The most radical version of the narrative lashes together the oppression of all groups in an encompassing hell of white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia, plutocracy, environmental destruction, and drones—America as a unitary malignant force beyond any other evil on Earth.
In its intellectually lazy manifestations, the boogieman is not labeled "America" as frequently as "capitalism", actually.
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What had been considered, broadly speaking, American history (or literature, philosophy, classics, even math) is explicitly defined as white, and therefore supremacist. What was innocent by default suddenly finds itself on trial, every idea is cross-examined, and nothing else can get done until the case is heard.
Wow. Wow, wow, wow. If your "American history" was the history that can be explicitly defined as white, you probably should be cross-examining that, yeah.
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Any talk of progress is false consciousness—even “hurtful.”
What is being quoted here? Would its speaker agree that they were describing any talk of progress? Or is this just straw manning the hell out of this portion of the piece?
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Everyone sensed their power. Not everyone resisted the temptation to abuse it.
Irresponsible to segue from this to BLM. Just.... ugh.
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A whole system of oppression can exist within a single word.
This is written by someone who isn't really listening.
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But in identity politics, equality refers to groups, not individuals, and demands action to redress disparate outcomes among groups—in other words, equity, which often amounts to new forms of discrimination. In practice, identity politics inverts the old hierarchy of power into a new one: bottom rail on top. The fixed lens of power makes true equality, based on common humanity, impossible.
Showing his hand, a bit, ain't he?
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The self is not a rational being that can persuade and be persuaded by other selves, because reason is another form of power.
I'm not sure this would be claimed by the members of this chunk of America.
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Critical theorists argue that the Enlightenment, including the American founding, carried the seeds of modern racism and imperialism.
I feel like you can't put this into a piece like this without... I don't know, it's not just that the seeds are in the ideas but that all of the ideas are inextricable from the projects of justification that birthed them.
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American university classrooms, where two generations of students were taught to think as critical theorists.
This is overstated, of course. I wish these people could talk to average college students and not just the ones who interest themselves in participating in The Discourse
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In some versions of the narrative, the country has no positive value at all—it can never be made better.
The strength of this piece is how it contains sentences like these that are very provocative while being entirely accurate.
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But racism alone couldn’t explain why white men were much more likely to vote for Trump than white women, or why the same was true of Black and Latino men and women. Or why the most reliable predictor for who was a Trump voter wasn’t race but the combination of race and education.
Haven't progressives gone on and on about this?
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Early in the campaign, I spent time with a group of white and Black steelworkers in a town near Canton, Ohio. They had been locked out by the company over a contract dispute and were picketing outside the mill. They faced months without a paycheck, possibly the loss of their jobs, and they talked about the end of the middle class. The only candidates who interested them were Trump and Bernie Sanders.
"You're being fucked over" is the only powerful message for people who really are being fucked over. Dilution disintegrates it.
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Self-government didn’t require any special learning, just the native wisdom of the people.
I always wonder about what it means that we have decided "learning", even in this context, has to mean "taking time away from the labor market and paying lots of tuition".
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And because people still live their lives in an actual place, and the nation is the largest place with which they can identify—world citizenship is too abstract to be meaningful—patriotic feeling has to be tapped if you want to achieve anything big.
I wonder to what extent state-level identity has changed. People are so mobile now that I'm quite unusual to have lived such a Washingtonian life, Pacific Northwestern in its totality.
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She meant that she no longer lived with any security.
I suspect the increase in professional-class work hours is due to that class's perception of increased precarity, no matter how crystallized the boundaries are.
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Graduation from an exclusive school marks the entry into a successful life.
I wonder what portion of "Smart America" really does have those bona fides. Less, I suspect, in its general "meritocratic" body than in its culture-defining niches.
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None of this brings them in contact with fellow citizens outside their way of life.
This is invoking ideas I care a lot about, but I wonder if it's really true that "Smart America" has seen a decline in this more than, well, absolutely everyone has.
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The winners in Smart America have withdrawn from national life
Wait, is it withdrawing from local life because of homogenizing nation-level institutions or withdrawing from national life?
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Earnest purpose mingled with self-congratulation; virtue and success high-fived—the distinctive atmosphere of Smart America.
Woof.
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Their assumption was that all Americans could do what they did and be like them.
How many Americans did? How many Americans' jobs started looking more more like those of Smart America even when they weren't paid more? How did this compare to the shifts in other countries?
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It was cosmopolitan, embracing multiculturalism at home and welcoming a globalized world.
I feel very strongly that multiculturalism and globalization aren't nearly as intertwined as this piece keeps repeating.
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As for unions, they hardly exist in Smart America. They’re instruments of class solidarity, not individual advancement, and the individual is the unit of worth in Smart America as in Free America.
aghhhghghghghhhhghgh
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They were early adopters of things that make the surface of contemporary life agreeable: HBO, Lipitor, MileagePlus Platinum, the MacBook Pro, grass-fed organic beef, cold-brewed coffee, Amazon Prime
I think I'm being targeted here, but I still hate it? Thanks?
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You have a hard time telling what part of the country they come from, because their local identities are submerged in the homogenizing culture of top universities and elite professions.
This is a fascinating claim. Who takes up the mantle of local identity? The popular culture of the working class isn't regional anymore, either, is it? Even when Smart America hears a twang in "country" and turns away, that twang is often uniform from California to Virginia, homogenized influences dominant.
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While the sunny narrative of Free America shone on, its policies eroded the way of life of many of its adherents. The disappearance of secure employment and small businesses destroyed communities. The civic associations that Tocqueville identified as the antidote to individualism died with the jobs. When towns lost their Main Street drugstores and restaurants to Walgreens and Wendy’s in the mall out on the highway, they also lost their Rotary Club and newspaper—the local institutions of self-government. This hollowing-out exposed them to an epidemic of aloneness, physical and psychological. Isolation bred distrust in the old sources of authority—school, church, union, bank, media.
The decline of local associations seems like a much larger story than progressive people bother making it.
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After years of high inflation with high unemployment, gas shortages, chaos in liberal cities, and epic government corruption and incompetence, by 1980 a large audience of Americans was ready to listen
I would love to learn more about the incidents of government corruption/incompetence referred to because I think it always seems bonkers to my generation that government is so little trusted to, you know, do stuff.
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Libertarianism speaks to the American myth of the self-made man and the lonely pioneer on the plains. (Glorification of men is a recurring feature.) Like Marxism, it is a complete explanatory system. It appeals to supersmart engineers and others who never really grow up.
I am really, really sick of totalizing ideological systems.
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Republicans emphasized individual enterprise, and Democrats emphasized social solidarity, eventually including Black people and abandoning the party’s commitment to Jim Crow. But, unlike today, the two parties were arguing over the same recognizable country.
My immediate suspicion: whose perspectives didn't make it into the arguments?
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tvtropes.org tvtropes.org
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The favorite era for the Swashbuckler, the 17th Century is the age in Europe when lusty musketeers dueled with each other and got sucked into intrigues involving dauphins, Corrupt Churchmen and vampish courtesans. Hats with large feathers and big bucket-topped boots were in fashion for men. Also The Golden Age of Piracy on the High Seas, when eyepatched and peg-legged buccaneers buried stolen gold, brandished cutlasses, and tied up buxom, bodice-wearing maidens and then forced them to watch as their hapless boyfriends walked the plank.
TVTropes pages on historical eras are... great?
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eli.li eli.li
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WikiJousting is a competitive sport where 2 or more individuals race to reach a target page. Whomever reaches the target page in the fewest steps wins the joust.
This is nutty and fun and I like it. I suppose it doesn't even have to be done synchronously!
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www.npr.org www.npr.org
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The company told the CPSC that it knew of 14 infant deaths in the sleeper as of February 2018, more than a year before it recalled the roughly 4.7 million units that had been sold. Fisher-Price earned at least $200 million in revenue from a decade's worth of sales of the sleeper, the report noted.
This is the kind of thing that makes me think we need the death penalty for (and only for) corporations.
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She noted patients' health insurance plans sometime don't cover weight-loss treatments, putting expensive drugs out of reach.
So long as the real issues of metabolic syndrome are a disease of the poor, don't believe that the solution will come looking like this.
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The Danish company hasn't disclosed Wegovy's price but said it will be similar to the price of Saxenda, an 11-year-old weight loss drug injected daily that now typically costs more than $1,300 per month without insurance.
.....and then you get to this.
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In company-funded studies, participants taking Wegovy had average weight loss of 15%, about 34 pounds (15.3 kilograms). Participants lost weight steadily for 16 months before plateauing. In a comparison group getting dummy shots, the average weight loss was about 2.5%, or just under 6 pounds.
This is significant! So you start reading this, and you think, huh, this might be good...
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pluralistic.net pluralistic.net
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was the algorithm itself designed to overblock third-party ads as potentially fraudulent while applying a more lax standard to the ads that Google sells – and makes more money from?
Google is good enough at machine learning that they know that something like cross-validation for model selection is necessary to not juice the numbers. It doesn't even have to be a "more lax" standard to favor Google if it's shaped just right...
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Ron Wyden has proposed a capital gains tax on unrealized gains:
I like Ron Wyden -- would this have the effect of increasing investment churn? Would that be bad? I guess it wouldn't really matter since rich people just want their money to keep going up, so that upness would still be taxed whether they moved it or left it...
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the orifice they emerged from
Not a fan of this sentence for reasons I feel ought to be obvious.
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In 1920, Rep Cordell Hull ("the father of income tax") warned that the Supreme Court's ruling in Macomber would let rich people "live upon the value" of stock "without ever paying" tax.
Well, huh.
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www.usgennet.org www.usgennet.org
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Siriasis - Inflammation of the brain due to sun exposure
My new "going home sick" card
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Costiveness - Constipation
I'm sure there's some totally incomprehensible sick burn you could do with this
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Cacospysy - Irregular pulse
This makes me suspicious; wouldn't it be "cacospisy" typically if this were right?
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Bone shave - Sciatica
Well this is just better
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Ablepsy - Blindness
Cackling imagining using the word "ableptic" in fiction
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boingboing.net boingboing.net
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Someone recently made me a hot drink containing cinnamon, espresso, oat milk, and lion's mane mushroom powder, and it was delicious
Look I want to respect this but the epitome of "coffee additives" is cardamom and the world needs to know.
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kattahj.tumblr.com kattahj.tumblr.com
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if you cut a perfectly human-shaped hole in an unlocked door do you think more people would open the door or try to squeeze through it
this post is great. (but also I would never open the door, are you kidding, once in a lifetime opportunity to kool-aid-man with no consequences)
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www.hollywoodreporter.com www.hollywoodreporter.com
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In a July 16 policy speech, U.S. Attorney General William Barr took aim at studios, saying they have provided “a massive propaganda coup for the Chinese Communist Party.” Barr added that Paramount told producers of 2013’s World War Z to remove a scene in which characters speculate that a virus, which triggered a zombie apocalypse, may have originated in China. The film, which grossed $540 million globally, never received a release in China, likely because the government frowns upon themes of the undead, ghosts or time travel. (A knowledgeable source says China’s zombie film ban is the biggest reason that Paramount wouldn’t greenlight a $200 million David Fincher-Brad Pitt pairing for a sequel.)
I want more movies with ghosts! I want more movies with skeletons! Are there non-Anglo countries making these?
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www.platformer.news www.platformer.news
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For platforms, there could hardly be a more powerful story about the significance of their amplification mechanics. By now, many of the platform executives I know are tired of the constant drumbeat of stories about how their networks spread misinformation, hate speech, conspiracy theories, and other harmful content. But the Trump story illustrates vividly why they matter. For the worst actors on their platforms, free reach is almost the entire appeal of using them.
Considering a platform as a publisher simplifies this somewhat; we may consider "earned media" vs "paid media."
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The disconnect highlights the actual utility of social platforms for Trump — especially of Twitter, where he focused almost all of his efforts. The power was not that they offered him a place to speak. Rather, it was that they amplified it in crucial ways, for free, to a massive worldwide audience.
There are, of course, cases where people's ability to even have a place to speak on the internet is threatened, but they're much less palatable examples.
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There are two primary questions we wind up asking about problematic users of social networks. The first is whether they should have the ability to post at all — platform-level freedom of speech. And the second is whether the platform should amplify their account or their posts to other users — what the technologist Aza Raskin has called “freedom of reach.”
I am so grateful every time this is distinguished, and yet -- is "platform-level freedom of speech" a coherent concept?
Has "publisher-level freedom of speech" been invoked before? "Printing-press-level freedom of speech"?
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theconvivialsociety.substack.com theconvivialsociety.substack.com
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You’re aimlessly scrolling through your feeds, minding your own business. An un-looked for stray data point catches your attention: a statistic, an anecdote, an image, a video clip, a chart, a meme … whatever. Maybe it’s not even from someone you follow. Perhaps it’s a tweet someone you follow has commented on, so it pops up for you. Or, out of curiosity, you click on a trending topic and inadvertently stumble upon it. But however it happens to cross your path, this stray bit of information sticks with you, like the after-feeling of a dream you can’t quite shake. The truthfulness or accuracy of the thing is not theoretically irrelevant, but may be practically so. Maybe it bugs you, discomfits you, troubles you, makes you anxious for a time, and then fades from memory. Or it lingers unexpectedly and becomes the first step toward a radical re-ordering of your worldview, for better or for worse.
The horrifying part here, for me, isn't that this experience is newly possible, but that the whole industry optimizes for it: maximizing engagement can mean pointing me to squint at endless Facetuned selfies, to contemplate the pros and cons of lip filler I've never seen on a real person in real life. That I have the opportunity to come across these synthetic faces isn't the problem -- it's that Instagram nudges me back towards them. What about your eyelids, it says. Look at this woman who used to look like you, but she fixed her eyelids. It can measure my pause, and that pause says to them that they should dig in more, and they do.
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We are not as narrowly rational in our thinking as many would like to believe. Which is why conventional “solutions” to the problems associated with our information ecosystem prove inadequate and may be intractable. The human person, to say nothing of human communities, is not a cognitive machine susceptible to technical tweaks.
I wonder if this is exactly right. Conventional "solutions" to bad information environments seem like they have the right of it here; it's conventional "solutions" that focus on changing individuals' responses to those environments that get squiggly.
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www.fastcompany.com www.fastcompany.com
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The more seasoned and experienced a UX person is, the more likely they are to be asking whether realizing user-centered values is even possible under capitalism.
Oof. This is one part I'm real, real, real glad to be on the backend for.
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Foundational UX is where the stuff that makes people really care about UX happens: the human insights, the collaborative exploration, the creative experimentation. For people joining the field, the disjunction between the dream and the reality can feel like a terrible bait and switch. Sold in school on UX as a noble and creative pursuit, they hit the job market to find roles where every chance for nobility and creativity has been carved out and cleaned away in the name of shipping product.
To some level I'm skeptical that anyone should expect a noble and creative pursuit at the salaries UX designers (appropriately!) command.
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Research-driven persona development. Concept models. Cocreation sessions. Task flows. These things didn’t get cut out of UX processes because they were unnecessary. They simply didn’t fit a development process that demands clear accountability for every activity and has no space for foundational work that can’t be predictably packaged up into two-week units.
I would love to get everyone to write down the three best things that would make their work better that capitalism has squeezed out of their workplace.
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www.notboring.co www.notboring.co
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Shein’s success is not built upon unfair government subsidies
This is way too important a claim to get this wrong.
Shipping, shipping, shipping, shipping, shipping. The subsidies were changed, but I'd love to know how comparable the rates are now: how much does it cost to get something from Guangzhou to Detroit relative to from Tampa to Detroit, and who is paying that difference.
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Before that sci-fi future, while consumers are still buying online and having things made and shipped to them, the logical interim conclusion is manufacturers going direct on a global scale, cutting out all of the middlemen, and replacing local know-how with algorithms.
Local managerial know-how of course; no one's here talking about being able to automate out the skill of garment manufacture
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Shein understands what clothes consumers want now better than anyone with the possible exception of Amazon.
This feels overly kind to Amazon (she says unofficially in her unofficial capacity as a young woman who's tried to clothes shop on Amazon)
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Everyone knows that China is good at manufacturing. That’s been true for decades. What’s changed is that over the past five years, Chinese companies have caught up, and in some cases surpassed, the rest of the world in its understanding of mobile ecommerce consumer experience.
And specifically how that consumer experience needs to look different for global customers!
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By 2015, the newly rebranded SheIn, moved to Panyu in Guangzhou. Panyu is to clothes manufacturing what Shenzhen is to electronics (i.e. ground zero, global best-in-class supply-chain ecosystem). All of Shein’s suppliers moved with it. It’s not hard to understand why.Shein had built a reputation for doing something completely revolutionary and unheard of in China’s apparel industry—they actually paid people on time.
This is a fascinating detail.
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Believe it or not, wedding dresses were the first killer category for Chinese ecommerce firms exporting direct to markets like America.
Again, please believe me that many women around wedding-dress shopping age knew this.
Can you call it a mystery or surprise when consumers are aware and it's analysts who aren't?
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The company’s logo, branding and products are indistinguishable in their professionalism and quality from global industry peers.
Dubious. I get a different ambient impression; they're above "anonymous instagram dropshipper" but not by much
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Shein describes itself as an “international B2C fast fashion e-commerce platform” with business in more than 220 countries and regions around the world. Nothing Matthew could find on their official website, app or social media accounts references the company’s Chinese origins. In fact, the company is so serious about hiding its Chinese roots that it voluntarily claimed to be from New Jersey. Previously, the About page of Shein’s official website said the company began as “a small group of passionate fashion loving individuals in North Brunswick, New Jersey.” This has since been removed.
nothing less suspicious than a mysterious company being based in Jersey!
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I am a professional tech newsletter writer. I’ve written almost 20,000 words about Chinese giants Tencent and Alibaba. I am an Internet people. And I’d never heard of Shein either.To be fair, though, no one really has.
...this seems gendered
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newleftreview.org newleftreview.org
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In terms of Fraser’s perspectival dualism, one of the main questions raised by contemporary politics is how and why many people who are both economically privileged and culturally included can end up feeling like they are neither of those things.
This is a great sentence
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Arguments about censorship and ‘no-platforming’ of speakers are often driven by the quest for reputational advantage—on the part of institutions, individuals and social movements—and a need to avoid reputational damage.
No, this is where investment in reputation is showing up: if you give Milo Yiannopoulis a speaking slot at a Named University, that's not just you getting to hear his ideas, that's an investment in his reputation that he capitalizes off. That choice can be immoral without reference to how people are going to judge you for making it.
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the task should be to provide a more accurate diagnosis of the decline of liberal norms, not to deny that anything has changed.
Love how this sentence rescues the author from having to substantiate the idea of a decline of liberal norms
(My personal sense is that liberal norms are about as strong as they've ever been, but material conditions have changed such that the old amount of norms produces a different result)
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Emotion, which behaviourists traditionally studied in wholly observable terms, becomes exclusively observable, a type of public performance that splits off from the part of the self which, for Honneth, needs to be recognized to be fulfilled as personhood.
Wait, so, the part of the self that needs to be recognized to be fulfilled as personhood used to house emotion, which was always observable (since how else would you have recognition) but now... "Exclusively observable" is such a huge and ludicrous claim
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the most powerful man in the world, also a celebrity with 73 million Twitter followers, fixating constantly on how unfairly he was being treated, and how he deserved greater recognition—then extinguished
Oh ffs. "Extinguished"? Really?
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Network effects famously produce power-law distributions, in which a few nodes receive an abundance of connectivity and engagement, while the vast majority receive very little.
This is a result of the particular ways in which social media renders "content" fungible, I've always thought...
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processes of representation are replaced by those of curation: a piece of ‘content’ is extracted from the vast archive of data and shared, as a type of investment—or divestment—in a reputation.
This isn't how it works! This isn't how it works!!
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Value becomes established not in exchange, but as a speculation on the future, calculated on the basis of data from the past—that is, in terms of reputation.
This doesn't reflect my experience of social media. I'm not really interested in e.g. whether I expect an illustrator I follow to Get Big.
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eventually, ‘public opinion’ became a disembodied, autonomous phenomenon.footnote12
I don't know if I buy this
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The routinization and industrialization is all at the back-end, where data analytics takes place away from the user’s gaze.
Recommendation algorithms, not hidden analytics!
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In order that the data they collect can be as rich and extensive as possible, platforms—especially social media—need to be spaces where people engage in something like a struggle for recognition.
This seems like it makes sense around the concept of advertising, but I'm not sure how this is more true of Uber than of a taxicab company that might fire its worst drivers
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