Yeah I fucking love this. "Sam Altman asks the Saudis for eight trillion dollars" is, to the WSJ, "Sam Altman fundraising off his latest AI idea."

You could ask Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, GE, UnitedHealth, Meta, Pfizer, Anthem, GM, Coca Cola, Ford and intel for all their cash on hand

Then ask Nasa for their entire 2023 budget

Then strip out the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines for two years

Then liquidate Saudi Aramco at current market cap

Then fully absorb Nvidia

and still be 600 billion dollars short

of making Sam Altman's newest plagiarism idea real.

For ten years now I've said that if Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft and Apple disappeared from the face of the earth, and left nothing in their wake, the rest of us would be just fine. More than that, we'd acclimate to our new hubless digital world with surprising aplomb.

George Gilder wrote a great book that nobody on the left read because Gilder is an arch-Reaganite who basically created Intelligent Design and nobody on the right read because it said "no actually the hippies are right this whole technological artifice is about to collapse." His fundamental point is that the past 40 years about technological innovation have been about bottlenecking the spread of information and that blockchain technology just fuckin' straight-up sidesteps that shit. Full stop. All your heavily-moted drawbridges are fucking doomed, best figure out what's next.

I bring all this up because social media is dying, and it's dying quickly. Even the WSJ agrees. I wrote this just yesterday to some friends:

As the Wall Street Journal points out, social media is dying. In the early days there was a lot of pride about being a go-to answer man or the guy who made cool sketches or even someone with timely memes. I was one of the people who got SolInvictus banned. We started /r/IAma because it was clogging up /r/AskReddit and within two weeks we had Israeli whistleblowers from Dimona. It was crazy. But now, as my receptionist puts it, “never be a main character on the Internet.” Everyone who can find something better to do with their time has, leaving social media for shut-ins, autists and attention whores. It’s horseshoe theory incarnate - you’ve got the MAGA ‘boomers on Facebook, you’ve got the tankie zoomers on TikTok and in between you’ve got the normies who recognize that Twitter is basically cigarettes that shout at you.

I think you have to look at it through the sclerotic eye of pragmatism: what are kids getting out of social media? That answer didn't used to be "a giant phatty net negative." But that's all it is now. Both TikTok and Facebook have demonstrated that we're all just grist for the mill and they aren't making half as much money as they used to. TikTok pushed hard into "ackshully Jews should be exterminated" and there are enough people who remember when Nazis were bad that the end result is it ground the precise surgical weapon of social media into a blunt stick.

I do use social media, and have done, at a high level, since it was usenet through a VT100 terminal. I think it's important to note that the early days where there was discovery and things to learn and friends to make and all the rest? That shit's over. What's left is a place where loners don't feel so alone. Not that it's helping them - it's not. But it's making them feel like they're being helped. It's any other addiction - the dopamine hit distracts you from the problem you aren't solving. This is why, in my assessment, it mostly belongs to people on the spectrum. Those with no object permanence and an inability to parse facial expressions do much better online, and they've all found each other. Unfortunately they're no better at interacting with humanity online than they are in person so it just drives them deeper.

That, if anything, is where I think Haidt et. al.'s data is coming from: the simple fact that we've created another channel for addiction but we haven't regulated it in the slightest. Meta knows Instagram is bad for kids the same way RJR-Nabisco knows Lunchables are toxic. it makes them money tho so don't expect that to change without an external force. And I don't think there will be an external force. Do you know what a usage plateau means? it means that young people aren't adopting something.

My daughter is 11. She has yet to ask for a phone. Her principle wants were a rabbit and a hamster. Is she online? She's online AF. That kid will be sitting on the couch with a laptop open to Roblox, a Switch open to Animal Crossing, an iPad open to Facetime and the projector screen playing Okami because she's farming customers in Restaurant Simulator, doing some vegetable picking or some shit in Animal Crossing and the iPad is showing her friend how to get through a tricky part in Okami. This is how she uses "social media" - she and two or three of her friends log into some server and play Sky or Roblox or Minecraft or whatever. I've asked her if she wants a Twitch account because it would simplify things - she can't be sussed. The Internet is where you meet your friends when you aren't at school, and there are Youtube videos that are only useful if they teach you shit about Minecraft otherwise why bother.

But then, she was never likely to be particularly vulnerable to social media - she's good in person.

I feel like we need controls on social media for the same reason we need controls on alcohol - it's a great servant and a terrible master. Most people don't get hooked to cigarettes by never smoking them. Most people have no problems with alcohol but some do. And there are people whose lives are being torn apart by social media. Doesn't mean social media exists solely to tear lives apart.

But as time goes on, it becomes more and more like cigarettes and less and less like alcohol - you can party sometimes with champagne or tequila and have a good time but with cigarettes? If you aren't addicted to them why would you even pick up a pack?

I think we're all just freeballing it and I think it's interesting.

Gourmet Magazine, shortly before it died, lamented the fact that "food culture" had gone from "what do you cook" to "what do you watch." And we're talking an era where they were lamenting the fall of Sarah Moulton (who got her start as an assistant on Julia Child) rather than the rise of Guy Fieri. Their point was that the Craig Claiborne-era New York Times was all about things you make, while the Sam Sifton-era New York Times was all about watching other people make things, eating things made by other people, and watching other people eat things made by other people. Take Allrecipes just as an example - in the interest of grabbing pageviews they turned their site into one you could search for recipes into one you had to "discover" recipes.

It makes sense from a "the only way we make money is by randos cruising through and maybe looking at dirt-cheap banner advertising" standpoint and the reason Gourmet is gone is that nobody fucking cooks anymore. It's like "adulting" - bitch, I adult every goddamn day and have done since I was twelve years old why the fuck do you get ten thousand views on TikTok for doing your laundry. Much like social media has gone from participatory to passive, so has cooking. The rise of the "celebrity chef" was well underway by the time Facebook and Youtube hit the scene but the transcendence of knobs like Guy Fieri nailed the coffin shut. Everyone knows Alton Brown, nobody knows Cooking for Engineers because why make something when you can pay to watch someone else do it? After all, if you don't ever intend to try the recipe you'll never know how bland every single one of Alton Brown's recipes is. Every single one of Claire Saffitz's recipes. Every single one of Martha Stewart's recipes.

Into this, throw "British food culture" - a celebration of the meekest, mildest, most mediocre cuisine to ever grace a plate. We tried "Bake Off: The Professionals" for exactly one show. It was awful except for two things: (1) the fact that of the six teams, two judges and two color commentators, three people were native-born Britons (2) the fact that they had to do some fuckin' riff on a "treacle tart" and one of the Frenchmen said, on camera, "A friend once gave me the recipe for a treacle tart and I thought he was taking the piss." "This is very good, but it doesn't take like treacle," says the Hong Kong restaurateur whose job it is to denigrate and belittle Hungarians for their inability to properly capture the essence of a dessert that no one but the British will eat.

There was a time when British culture was all about conquering, dominating and stealing from people with more color, more flavor, more culture and more history than themselves but that's been one long, slow decline since the Suez Crisis so now the British are all about proclaiming the glory of all the things the British have failed to export to any other region or locality despite a 200 year ability to do it at gunpoint. "Hawaiian pizza is the most disgusting thing the Americans have ever come up with," the Briton said unironically, blissfully unaware that it was invented by a Greek in Ontario, British Commonwealth Nation of Canada, while he gleefully wolfs down a sausage roll.

I once mixed Gordon Ramsay waxing eloquent for ten minutes about fucking sausage rolls. He of the aubergine, he of the courgette, he of the fucking chantilly cream (whipped cream with sugar and a little vanilla, because the British think it's okay to eat whipped cream without), sitting there losing his absolute fucking mind over a goddamn sausage roll, which is basically a fucking Hot Pocket without cheese or sauce. There is no one so smugly superior as a British gourmand and there is nothing he's so superior about as British food.

High, low and middle-brow American foods took a real kick in the nuts with COVID. I think as soon as everyone was stuck in their own kitchen for a while they recognized that it takes an overnight to make proper cinnamon rolls but you can whip out a bitchin' carbonara in about 20 minutes so it's rapidly become (1) what can you sell (2) to who (3) for how much. Avocado toast is goddamn good and it can be anywhere from white bread and a fried egg to artisanal we-bake-it-every-morning with a poached turkey egg and bechamel sauce.

And that, I think, is why Bake-off is so loved: (1) they're all just muddling through, for the most part (2) they are encouraged and told how to get better (3) they're all mutually supportive which is so violently opposed to the Simon Cowell School of Reality TV that it captured an audience that had simply wandered off. Frankly, it's the same formula Master Chef had followed for 20 years before Bake-Off, with the exception that the judges on Master Chef are always dicks.

And that, more than anything, is the crime the British must answer for. What the US imported from Britain, and exported to the rest of the world, is the idea that your host must say "you are the weakest link, goodbye." We were squarely on the Julia Child/Bob Vila path until fucking Idol. And it's contaminated food. You aren't any good unless you shit on someone else.

Well, your two choices in the TESCREAL universe are EA (Effective Altruism), whereby you spend your money on pet projects that will pay off when Hugo Drax has poisoned the world to clear it for the ubermensch, or E/acc (Effective Accelerationism), whereby you spend your money with Hugo Drax.

It's all just fascism and eugenics, with each tribe of sociopaths plotting their allegiance by varying the amount of fascism and eugenics.

Once upon a time in Hollywood, I was invited to a closed-door Writer's Guild event with Tim Kring. The finale of Season 1 of Heroes had just aired, and he was talking about it. I got to get him aside at one point and ask several questions - when did they know this? What made them think of that? What about this other thing?

If you haven't watched Heroes, you don't know that the first season is an impeccably-tightly-plotted little mystery with a whole bunch of interesting things flying about. It lands... not great but better than 90% of the shows on TV at the time. Really, it's an impressive little bit of writing.

But after that?

Thing is? Kring & Co stumbled into Season 1. They thought HRG and The Cheerleader were minor characters. They envisioned the whole of the show as Peter Petrelli vs. Sylar. But what they discovered is that their backup characters were more interesting, had more stuff going on, could have a more fleshed-out backstory, and could generally take things in a more interesting direction.

But they didn't have that direction so they started Season 2 with a whole new set of characters that everyone hated. Kring later said they were lucky in that the Writer's Strike brought things to a premature close, allowing them to back up and start over again with the characters the audience actually cared about. Not that they did a great job. HRG and the Cheerleader are interesting for a season. They drag the fuck on for seven.

My theory with The Expanse is Abraham and Frank had a really cool story idea around a gumshoe and a rich girl that ends with the discovery of a new alien life form on Venus. And they did so well with it they went "we can do anything" rather than "we wrote a closed-loop story with two interesting characters in it that we just killed off and now we need to make Holden and Naomi interesting for as long as we can, despite the fact that their principle character traits are whininess and petulance." It's like trying to write the Jack Reacher series after you've killed Jack in Book 1.

I did The Gates of Europe. it's a good book, gives you good perspective on Central Europe and Russia.

Then I did A Brief History of the Vikings which pretty much makes the point that Europe is nothing but Vikings from Ireland to Turkey.

Then I did War and Punishment which isn't as good a book as The Gates of Europe, but it's got some slightly different slices through history. Also it hates the Russians more.

Then I tried They Can Live in the Desert But Nowhere Else for... the third time? and I mean... that's not some light reading. So I put it down and tried So You Want to Talk About Race but it's pretty much "eat a dick, white person" and I just couldn't.

I was reminded that Clifford Simak is probably the most optimistic person in science fiction and I figured I could use some optimism. So I started City which actually isn't all that optimistic so far.Way Station was great though so I'm not about to give up.

I'm two and a half books into the Arkady Renko series. They're grim as fuck. It's kind of amazing to me how we all knew in the '80s how ghastly desperate life was in the USSR and then we all shined it on until all of a sudden the VDV is parachuting into Kyiv.

No infamy will find Kissinger on a day like today. Instead, in a demonstration of why he was able to kill so many people and get away with it, the day of his passage will be a solemn one in Congress and — shamefully, since Kissinger had reporters like CBS’ Marvin Kalb and The New York Times‘ Hendrick Smith wiretapped — newsrooms. Kissinger, a refugee from the Nazis who became a pedigreed member of the “Eastern Establishment” Nixon hated, was a practitioner of American greatness, and so the press lionized him as the cold-blooded genius who restored America’s prestige from the agony of Vietnam.

I'm not sure that's accurate anymore.

Niall Ferguson centered his thesis in The Square and the Tower on Kissinger and extended Kissinger as a metaphor going back clear through the Bavarian Illuminati all the way to Athenian Greece. Ferguson, notably, had been working on a poorly reviewed authorized biography with Kissinger for ten years at that point so it's safe to say a number of unique insights were available to Ferguson, whether or not he chose to examine them.

Ferguson's whole point on Kissinger is He's important because he knows everybody.

The fundamental point of The Square and the Tower is that the patterns of power throughout history have been the patterns of relationships, not the patterns of oligarchy or democracy or whatever. It's who you know, Ferguson argues, and he makes a number of compelling points. Carter accomplished nothing as president because he ran as an outsider and brought with him a network utterly incapable of plugging into the existing power structure. Trump, likewise, ripped the beating heart out of American bureaucracy and replaced it with a bunch of inexperienced grifters - aside from Paul Ryan's tax cuts, the Trump administration accomplished exactly fuckall.

But Ferguson, maddeningly, does not see this parallel at all with the Nixon White House. Instead, axiomatically argues that where Kissinger goes, there goes power. From your Rolling Stone article:

Once in the White House, Nixon and Kissinger found themselves without leverage to produce a peace accord with Hanoi.

...because they had burned literally everyone who could have helped.

In 1971, the Pakistani government waged a campaign of genocide to suppress the independence movement in what would become Bangladesh. Pakistan’s Yahya Khan, an architect of the genocide, was valuable to Nixon’s ambitions of restoring diplomatic relations with China. So the U.S. let Khan’s forces rape and murder at least 300,000 people — and perhaps three million. “We can’t allow a friend of ours and China’s to get screwed in a conflict with a friend of India’s,” Nixon quoted Kissinger shrugging.

...when you have chased away all but the craven opportunists, your foreign policy reflects craven opportunism.

Kissinger might not have been motivated by hatred of communism. But he was a reactionary who empowered and enabled the sort of reactionaries for whom anticommunism was a respectable channel for America’s racist and exploitative socio-economic traditions. His chief aide on the National Security Council was a rabid anticommunist militarist, Army Col. Alexander Haig, a future secretary of state for Ronald Reagan.

Al Haig famously flamed out for not understanding power structures.

And here's the thing. The post-Nixon political world was absolutely shaped by Henry Kissinger. He was the devil you danced with because he was an influence peddler that knew where all the bodies were buried (because he put most of them there). But that led to an extremely insular power structure - the fact that the entire political class came out of either the Nixon campaigns or the Goldwater campaign is positively shameful. The median age of the Executive branch has been older than the median age of the Soviet Politburo for like ten years now, and those guys were basically "friends of Stalin." The end result with the Soviets was Gorbachev - an up-jumped provincial golden boy who had never played cards with Lenin and who proceeded to crash the whole system. The end result with the Americans is AOC - a politician with a popular groundswell behind her who owes zero allegiance and has zero fucks to give about Kissinger.

All the lying-in-state bullshit that Kissinger is about to experience is the old guard covering their bases. They can't be seen to trash the legacy of the man who held their chains for so many decades. But the lack of reasonable succession within the American polity has caused a total disconnect in the relationship web that makes the country run. I think this is why Mitch McConnell has had nothing to say for about six years now - he's a lot smarter than most of them and I think he realizes that his legacy will be viewed as evil.

The Silents and Boomers didn't bother to drag GenX and the Millennials along in their escapades, preferring to keep power to themselves until the bitter end. The result is a rejection of their idols. Kissinger will be reviled, and the people who do not revile him will be reviled in turn. The Republicans didn't even succeed in their hagiography of Reagan, a man whose heart was substantially closer to human than Kissinger's - in no small part because the Republicans running the show these days are too busy wrapped up in their own craven opportunism.

It's either "who you know" or "what you believe" and "what you believe" tends to build legacy. "Who you know" crashes to the ground the minute your last acolyte falls out of favor.

Bayes' theorem is simple and elegant, but suffers from a critical flaw for many applications, which is that it relies on a priori knowledge of probabilities of certain events happening.

This is an excellent insight. What you are hypothesizing, fundamentally, is that Dunning-Kruger bias among the mathematically-inclined will result in an inappropriate reliance on Bayesian statistics. This in turn creates a virtuous cycle of overconfidence and inappropriate analysis.

By way of extension, I think the core issue is simpler:

The whole of the TESCREAL mindset is "I am a more valuable person than you." That will necessarily result in the deprecation of expertise from the outgroup. This manifests as a practiced philosophy of avoiding/disregarding/deprecating empathy.

"Statistics are human beings with the tears wiped away.”

Paul Brodeur

So yeah. What I want is for Scott Siskind to stop hurting people while the number of people whose deaths his actions have directly and materially contributed to is still in the single digits. What I want is for people to stop listening to his poorly written and poorly argued bullshit. What I want, in fact, is for people to stop listening to all of it: Siskind, Yudkowsky, Moldbug, Thiel, Trump, Bannon, and all of the other fucking idiots helping work towards human extinction. I want them to shut up and go away and stop making the world an actively worse place to live in.

I don’t expect this essay will accomplish that though. So my second choice is that one of the well-meaning people to be suckered in by Siskind’s con will read this and go “oh, shit” because they finally see what’s been done to them and what purposes it served. And they’ll go and be better people afterwards who don’t read eugenicists and sexists and maybe when they hear someone talk about being sexually assaulted they’ll actually listen and work to make a world where that happens less. So by all means, if you find yourself arguing with some Slate Star Codex fan online, link this article. If I can manage this happening once, frankly, all 12,500 words of this and the genuine unhappiness they provoked will be worthwhile.

I admire the sentiment, I admire the work, I admire the sheer labor behind it. Lord knows Hubski has its SSC problems. I think this thread is my most beastly; the closest I've ever gotten to agreeing with Scott Siskind - in my recollection - is "eh, he kinda has a point about that, I can see why he attracts the audience he does."

I think the core flaw with his style of argumentation is summed up in this comment in response to "I can tolerate anything but the outgroup":

I suppose he was just trying to flip the semantics around, in the same way some racist talking-head in the media might bleat about "problems of 'black culture,'" he can do a similar song and dance for "white culture." Ultimately, it didn't really feel like he was railing against himself, or providing some sort of insightful self-critique, he was using it as a code word or dog whistle for the Red Tribe.

blackbootz, among others, would send me SSC screeds on a monthly basis for a while. I have been encouraged to read Scott Siskind for twelve, fifteen years now. My takeaway was "what a bunch of fuzzy-headed thinking" which is different than Ms. Sandifer's assessment of malfeasance. I don't think it really clicked until Emil Torres and others started to dismantle the whole "TESCREAL" constellation, and bless Michael Lewis' black heart, it didn't gel until that fucking Sam Bankman Fried book. Here's SBF arguing against Shakespeare:

Sam was asked, in high school, to write an essay on Shakespeare because he was one of the greatest authors in the English language. Sam sucks at literature (shocker!) and is utterly disinterested in the human experience (I know, right?) so his argument was not against the greatness of Shakespeare's writing, his argument was that studying ancient literature at all was a waste of time because statistically speaking, there are more humans now than there were in the 1600s therefore it is improbable that any author from the 1600s is better than an author from the 2020s from a pure numbers standpoint.

Here's the first move out of the playbook, illustrated at a literally sophomore level: reject conventional standards of evaluation out of hand and substitute your own. Note that Lewis doesn't describe Sam as offering any examples to back up his argument. Note also that Sam Bankman Fried has publicly hated on "books" - "I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post." Which goes to the second move: it's the vibe, not the facts.

The sleight-of-hand at the heart of all this rationalist-effective-altruist-accelerationist-libertarian bullshit is a loose and conditional set of BELIEFS, not rational conclusions, and everything that comes out of it is an exercise in framing to reinforce the convictions of the converted. This, more than anything, is why it drives the rest of us bugshit, I think - you've got a group of people pretending that their every thought has been arrived at through painstaking study and when questioned about it, the opponent is subjected to a bullshit whirlwind of whataboutism, conditionality and cherry-picking that allow other BELIEVERS to chin-stroke and nod thoughtfully about how yes, actually, Hugo Drax should exterminate the world with orchid poison from orbit for the betterment of all mankind.

The core, unassailable belief at the heart of Untitled is "white nerds are worth more than anyone else" and everything around it is prevarication. It's wooly to the world and galvanizing to the believers because the world doesn't view the superiority of the white nerd as axiomatic while the TESCREAL crowd - a famously empathy-bereft group - cannot imagine things any other way. This more than anything is the driving force behind their love of eugenics - they cannot imagine (or tolerate) any use of eugenics that will not benefit them, because who on earth would go after white nerds? The fact that one of their saints, Ayn Rand, was driven from her home and her family's business burned by an anti-intellectual mob with a 200-year policy of racial purity never enters into it because it isn't about the thought. It isn't about the argument. It isn't about the facts. It's about the vibe, and the vibe is "I should be getting more girls than those annoying Hispanics on the swim team because I am a superior being."

The most success I have had in getting people to question these ideas comes from assailing the arguments as stupid, not malevolent. You can't meet them at their level because they're just floating around saying whatever feels good in the moment. If you engage with them as if they were genuine, you make them genuine which is exactly what they're after. I think Ms. Sandifer errs when she argues that Scott Siskind comes from a place of disingenuousness. He clearly believes everything he says, and he clearly believes it quite earnestly. The fact of the matter is, however, that all these people have convinced themselves they've arrived at the only logical conclusion when in fact they've spent 9000 words creating a conditional house-of-cards to say "if you tilt your head and squint, you'll see it my way." And, of course, anyone who refuses to tilt their head and squint is disingenuous. Thus the whole "if you're going to argue with me you have to address these nine bullet points" bit.

Where I seriously disagree with Ms. Sandifer is where she describes it as "beige."

Steve Bannon described this as "flooding the zone with bullshit" while RAND calls it the "firehose of falsehood" propaganda model. Thomas Rid traces it back to the Okhrana of the 19th Century - talkin' Czarist disinformation and propaganda in the Hapsburg era. And it has always been deployed against freer societies.

Sarah Chayes wrote a whole book about how, going back to Thucydides, the hallmark of a failing state is corruption. We hold up the Code of Hammurabi and the Magna Carta for a reason - they establish fairness. They codify rules that say "if this, then that". Society has always advanced on fairness and declined on corruption, a point even Graeber backed up. But in wavering liberal societies based on rules, illiberal societies based on personality can make hay by "flooding the zone with bullshit."

And the thing is? If it's your flavor of bullshit, you just swim in it. You know each particular turd is all just a part of the vibe, none of it really matters, because things are going your way. And you also know that the rules-based world you're railing against is going to have to counter every single fleck of poop because whatabout this whatabout that whatabout the other and fundamentally, conservatives and reactionaries are much more about vibes than debates. And it works for a while, if it's going your way, and you're on the right side of the dividing line. But it never ends well.

The problem with vibe-based political systems is the vibe can shift. There's a reason that the world's most liberal democracies have the most rules. Anyone who has ever operated under Robert's Rules of Order rolls their eyes on the reg over all the procedural nonsense... until someone loses their shit, nobody is friends anymore and holy shit that framework you were just dogging saved your fucking bacon. People always point to Hitler whenever they want to discuss demagoguery but the Weimar Republic was a shitshow of reprisal and recrimination and someone like Hitler was going to come around. This "flood the zone" method? It's how Italy went fascist. It's how The Philippines went fascist. It's how Israel went fascist. And it sure as shit is how Team Trump tried to take America fascist.

Ms. Sandifer mentions Gamergate in passing. She does it a disservice. Dale Beran draws a bright white line between GamerGate and Trump. It's not a dot plot, it's not a trail of breadcrumbs, it's a straight vector from A to B. And it fundamentally comes down to a bunch of underemployed men with no social skills who have nothing better to do than tear shit down.

So does ISIS, btw.

Robert Putnam wrote a book about 25 years ago about how we were all fundamentally fucked because we didn't know our neighbors anymore, we didn't have any civic engagement, we didn't have any friends and how that was fundamentally bad for democracy.

We've [Americans] been able to run a different kind of society. A less statist society, a more free-market society, because we had real strength in the area of social capital and we had relatively high levels of social trust. We sort of did trust one another, not perfectly, of course, but we did. Not compared to other countries. And all that is declining, and I began to worry, "Well, gee, isn't that going to be a problem, if our system is built for one kind of people and one kind of community, and now we've got a different one. Maybe it's not going to work so well."

Putnam matters because he decided society was made up of two kinds of capital - bonding capital (what makes similar people stick together) and bridging capital (what makes dissimilar people stick together). He doesn't matter because he's pretty much entirely known for coming up with a theory of Life Before Facebook. I guess the real question is whether our society has fundamentally changed since 2000? Or whether it's simply oscillating around the same trend line.

Thomas Rid did a pretty good job of making me see Putin behind everything that goes wrong in the free world. Thing about stochastic shit like this is if it costs little and pays back a lot, flood the zone early and often. But the more I look around, the more I see it all winding down the way it historically does. If it doesn't push the wall over, it crashes back to nothing. If there's any good news around all this it's that the harsh sunlight of scrutiny is drying up the money, everyone is sick of the bullshit, and intellectual movements end up looking like lame versions of the Panther Moderns.

The Trump Administration was a vibe-based presidency. You were in good until you were fired on Twitter. You were the best buddy until you were the back-stabber. You were in until you were out. This is also how the Soviet Union ran, and how Russia runs. It's how populism works. The secret to success of representative democracy is the safety to be unpopular. You get to keep playing the game even if you insist on doing that thing that the rest of the polity thinks is no fun. Often, you get to be the one right person five, ten years later when everyone else is proven to be wrong. It moderates everybody else and gives them the courage to be wrong. It allows you to vote your convictions and it allows you to change them when they're wrong.

I can't think of a single success - monetary, social, legislative, spiritual - that the vibes-based process has enjoyed in this latest wave. I think Father Time is coming for Slate Star Codex and its ilk. Effective Altruism, Effective Accelerationism, eugenics of any sort - none of it withstands the harsh scrutiny of the light and the past ten years of financial innovation sure look like rich white sociopaths enabled by rich white sociopaths. You do enough enabling of the wrong thing, you lose the ability. OpenAI just lost its chance to be a money inferno, much the same way WeWork did.

Take away these assholes' money, you take away their power. We wouldn't be here if it weren't for Robert Mercer, and he mostly just wanted to cheat the IRS; all the political bullshit in between is between his daughter and Steve Bannon.

I think nature is healing.

I hope nature is healing.

_______________________________

The image up top, BTW, is William Blake's "Ancient of Days" Copy K, which is probably either an in-joke between the author and herself or some serious in-group signaling, as this whole posse has put a whole lot of symbolism behind one little drawing.

Kid wanted to catch up on Dragon Prince. So after a 3-year embargo I started giving Netflix money again. Which gave me the glistening opportunity to watch intervention again.

I have not done that since having a come-to-jesus with myself about the fact that the life I live is the result of countless challenging but correct choices.

It occurred to me that, as the child of two mentally-ill alcoholics with an ACE score of 6, I was absolutely lined up to appear on that show, had it existed.

And then it occurred to me that, as the child of two mentally-ill acoholics with an ACE score of 6, there would have been no one who would have given enough of a fuck to call A&E.

Now if you'll excuse me I have to drive my Porsche over to my broker to move a few hundred thousand dollars around.

Looks dumb, but I'm a hater and haters are gonna hate, I guess.

Naaaah dawg. My accountant just spent two emails and a phone call trying to make me feel guilty for taking ERTC so I'm going to indulge in a little self care? I'm gonna show you some HATE. You know. For me. And like I'm going to pause every now and then and save a draft and get back to work and come back to this because it's too delicious and I can tell I'ma spend two hours just straight loathing on this fucking Concorde Moment of tech journalism.

because this is the dumbest fucking shit I have ever seen.

I mean, let's start with the endless loop of a hand trivially grasping nothing. Pinch your fingers three times to pause the world's most insipid playlist. "Imagine staring at your empty hand with a logo projected on it." Down to the Sanskrit wedding ring - fuckin' McSweeney's couldn't write this article better. I'ma need that title image as a gif 'cuz this one takes too long:

And it is just so chockablock with cheesy goodness that I'ma have to go inline because holy fucking shit this is self-parody so incising and adept that if it were anywhere but the New York Times, I would accuse them of trolling. But it's the New York Times so naah, it's Principle Skinner And The Children.

____________

A brief aside, though: ever thought much about space helmets?

I have. See, I wrote a short film with a prominent space helmet in it. It's pure science all the way and we hit it out of the park and I'm really pleased with it and so has everyone else been and one of the "a ha" moments of making a movie with a space helmet in it, as a fan of science and technology, is you go "well of course we're not going to project blinding fucking lights on the actor's face like every other film because that's super dumb." Except as soon as you shoot a single frame of an unlit space helmet you realize that the camera doesn't read your actor's facial expressions and the emotion drains right the fuck out of the scene and you run to 7-11 to buy a half-dozen keychain flashlights to gaff tape around the viewport because fuckin' hell you do not have a movie without facial expressions, I'm sorry, and yeah - the actor can no longer see shit and yeah - this is absolutely not what NASA or anyone else would do in this situation but you know what? It's a movie, and what matters is the audience.

Think about that next time you see some jackass flashing gang tags to dismiss their text notifications. Who is the audience here? 'cuz that whole "fuck haptics let's mime" approach that the tech industry loves? They love it because they are the audience, watching their shit up on the big screen, popping a boner over how fyooooooooochur it looks without sparing a single fucking thought of what it feels like to fucking use it. VR helmets, Marcel Marceau moves, those stupid Playmobil creations that Kroger now thinks are their customers? 100% "fuck yeah my shit looks good on someone else." This is why, incidentally, Neal Stephenson will always be a grasping idiot while William Gibson will always be a fucking genius: Gibson invented cyborgs who were fashionable. Stephenson invented "gargoyles" covered in Borg laptops. Everyone wants to be Molly Millions, everyone hits the cons like gargoyles.

And "my shit looks good on someone else" changes with the times. Take the first Star Trek. Phasers that looked like guns, walkie talkies that looked like walkie talkies. Take the second Star Trek. Phasers that looked like hand massagers, walkie talkies that look like lapel pins. The Federation in '66 was a bunch of gunslingers with belts full of domination, the Federation in '86 was a bunch of grief counselors taking in the complexities of the universe in their pajamas. Federation '66 was about giving the actors props to get them into the zone, Federation '86 was about making the actors look good in the minimalist chic your average '86 coke addict thought the future would look like.

So let's get back to the Graspersons:

______________

Inside a former horse stable in the San Francisco neighborhood of SoMa, a wave of gentle chirps emerged from small, blinking devices pinned to the chests of employees at a start-up called Humane.

Douglas Addams could do no better: "Far Out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.”

It was just weeks before the start-up’s gadget, the Ai Pin, would be revealed to the world — a culmination of five years, $240 million in funding, 25 patents, a steady drumbeat of hype and partnerships with a list of top tech companies, including OpenAI, Microsoft and Salesforce.

That's right - we're a quarter billion dollars into ugly brooches. Take it from a jeweler - the only people who wear brooches are postmenopausal grandmothers and they favor rhinestones.

Artificial intelligence “can create an experience that allows the computer to essentially take a back seat,” Mr. Chaudhri said.

What the fuck do you think Youtube is by the way

They’re billing the pin as the first artificially intelligent device. It can be controlled by speaking aloud, tapping a touch pad or projecting a laser display onto the palm of a hand. In an instant, the device’s virtual assistant can send a text message, play a song, snap a photo, make a call or translate a real-time conversation into another language. The system relies on A.I. to help answer questions (“What’s the best way to load the dishwasher?”) and can summarize incoming messages with the simple command: “Catch me up.”

The first appearance of the space helmet: "wouldn't it be cool if some dipshit who didn't know how to load a dishwasher could stare at it like a moron, his hands full of greasy plates, and beg the heavens for guidance? Fuck yeah Sequoia would be all in on that shit." Let's pause to reflect, before moving on, that your average normie doesn't want to take a picture without the ability to look at it. But in the product video we'll just superimpose a perfect snap over his haplessness without having to worry about the fact that generally people want a modicum of QAQC.

The technology is a step forward from Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant.

"Hey Siri how much of a dumpster fire is Alexa" "Hey Alexa How are things going at Google" "Hey Alexa how is Siri generally regarded"

To tech insiders, it’s a moonshot. To outsiders, it’s a sci-fi fantasy.

Or, and I'm just spitballing here, it's the ultimate "if we build it they will come" circlejerk.

Humane will begin shipping the pins next year. It expects to sell around 100,000 pins, which will cost $699 and require a $24 monthly subscription, in the first year. (Apple sold 381,000 iPods in the year after its 2001 launch.)

For $399. With no monthly subscription! And a pretty compelling use case! By 2009, there were 385,000,000 music players sold by Sony alone! "It's like a walkman but it doesn't skip, lasts twelve hours and holds 50 hours of music" is not a hard sell. "It's like a phone but you can't watch videos, scroll Facebook or call people, also

For the start-up to succeed, people will need to learn a new operating system, called Cosmos, and be open to getting new phone numbers for the device. (The pin comes with its own wireless plan.)

..."People will need to learn a new operating system," the NYT said blithely, without the slightest acknowledgement of the simple power of blue bubbles.

They’ll need to dictate rather than type texts and trade a camera that zooms for wide-angle photos. They’ll need to be patient because certain features, like object recognition and videos, won’t be available initially.

Wait wait wait they're expecting this thing to replace your fucking phone? "new phone who dis also don't confuse my AI"

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, said in an interview that he expected A.I. to be “a huge part” of how we interact with computers. He has invested in Humane as well as another A.I. company, Rewind AI, that plans to make a necklace that will record what people say and hear.

For the record, Microsoft abandoned that shit more than ten years ago. Their whole focus was alzheimer's patients. They were winding it down when Google announced Glass because ten years of trying failed to find a use for the fucking thing.

Ms. Bongiorno, 40, and Mr. Chaudhri, 50, have a marriage of contrasts. He shaves his head bald and speaks with the soft, calm voice of a yogi. She sweeps her long blond hair over one shoulder and has the enthusiasm of a team captain. They both dress in Jobsian black.

Let's call it what it is, though - Theranos Black. It's what you wear when you're trying to make people think you're Steve Jobs, not when you're Steve Jobs. See, Dieter Rams also wore all black. So did Karl Lagerfeld. So does Helmut Lang. When Steve Jobs wore all black? He was aping designers to make you think he was a designer rather than a tech nerd. When everyone else wears all black? They're aping Steve Jobs to make you think they aren't grifters.

They met at Apple in 2008. Mr. Chaudhri was working on its human interface, defining the swipes and drags that control iPhones.

In other words, the absolute worst aspects of iOS.

Ms. Bongiorno was a program manager for the iPhone and iPad.

In other words, a bureaucrat.

A Buddhist monk named Brother Spirit led them to Humane. Mr. Chaudhri and Ms. Bongiorno had developed concepts for two A.I. products: a women’s health device and the pin. Brother Spirit, whom they met through their acupuncturist, recommended that they share the ideas with his friend, Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce.

“You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young." Also, Brother Spirit's real name is Denpok

Sitting beneath a palm tree on a cliff above the ocean at Mr. Benioff’s Hawaiian home in 2018, they explained both devices. “This one,” Mr. Benioff said, pointing at the Ai Pin, as dolphins breached the surf below, “is huge.”

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”

Humane’s goal was to replicate the usefulness of the iPhone without any of the components that make us all addicted — the dopamine hit of dragging to refresh a Facebook feed or swiping to see a new TikTok video.

"Like a phone, except you can't see or hear anything"

The device’s most sci-fi element — the laser that projects a text menu onto a hand — started inside a box the size of a matchbook.

Projected haptics - championed by designers and eschewed by consumers since 1992

It took three years to miniaturize it to be smaller than the size of a golf tee.

Huh, wow! Really impressive. Are you sure it took you that long to miniaturize a laser, Mr. & Mrs. Badhaptics Pointyhair? Or maybe it took you that long to negotiate prices on the one you want? cuz here's Forbes in 2012.

Humane also retained Apple’s obsession with design details, from its device’s curved corners and compostable white packaging to the Japanese-style toilets at the company’s stark office.

LOL "what can we say about the office?" "it was... office-ey?" "no, no, something something design." "Well they bought Totos." "Fucking everyone buys Totos you can buy Toto at Home Depot now." "well what you got mister design" "shit I guess write about the toilets"

Mr. Benitez Cong said he was “disgusted” by what the iPhone had done to society, noting his son could mimic a swiping motion at the age of 1. “This could be something that could help me get over my guilt of working on the iPhone,” Mr. Benitez Cong said.

allow me to show you something worse than swiping

A haunting whoosh filled the room, and two dozen Humane employees, seated around a long white table, carefully concentrated on the sound. It was just before the Ai Pin’s release, and they were evaluating its rings and beeps. The pin’s “personic” speaker (a company portmanteau of “personal” and “sonic”) is critical, since many of its features rely on verbal and audio cues.

Mr. Chaudhri praised the “assuredness” of one chirp noise and Ms. Bongiorno complimented the “more physical” sounds for the pin’s laser. “It feels like you’re actually holding the light,” she marveled.

Less assuring: That whoosh, which plays when sending a text message. “It feels ominous,” Ms. Bongiorno said. Others around the table said it sounded like a ghost, or as if you made a mistake, almost. Someone thought it was a Halloween joke.

Ms. Bongiorno wanted the sound for sending a text to feel as satisfying as the trash-can sound on one of Apple’s older operating systems. “Like ‘thunk,’” she said.

must...resist...lowhangingfroooooooot

The device is arriving at a time when excitement and skepticism for A.I. hit new highs each week. Industry researchers are warning of the technology’s existential risk and regulators are eager to crack down on it.

Yet investors are eagerly pouring cash into A.I. start-ups. Before Humane even released a product, its backers had valued it at $850 million.

You are now aware that Facebook has lost $28b on virtual reality.

The company has tried to promote a message of trust and transparency, despite spending most of its existence working in secret. Humane’s Ai Pins have what the company calls a “trust light” that blinks when the device is recording. (A user must tap the pin to “wake” it.) Humane said it did not sell user data to third parties or use it in training its A.I. models.

Of course, that light has a name. And of course, you need users to sell their data.

In September, in an echo of Apple’s fashion-friendly launch of its Watch, the supermodel Naomi Campbell wore Humane’s pin — barely noticeable without knowing to look for it — on a gray Coperni blazer on the runway at Paris Fashion Week.

FUCK YEAH FASHION CAFE

Humane’s supporters have a pat way of dismissing skepticism about its prospects — they invoke the first iPod. That clunky, awkward device had just one use, playing songs, but it laid the groundwork for the real revolution, smartphones. Similarly, Humane envisions an entire ecosystem of companies building features for its operating system — an A.I. version of Apple’s App Store.

But first, raisins. In a demo at Humane’s office of a feature that will be rolled out in a future version of the product, a software designer picked up a chocolate chip cookie and tapped the pin on his left breast. As it whirred to life with a beep, he asked, “How much sugar is in this?”

“I’m sorry; couldn’t look up the amount of sugar in oatmeal raisin cookie,” the virtual assistant said.

Mr. Chaudhri shrugged off the mistake. “To be fair, I have trouble with the difference between a chocolate chip cookie and an oatmeal raisin.”

1) Smell it.

2) Look closely at it.

3) FUCKING PUT IT IN YOUR MOUTH.

4) And also, read the fucking package.

Space helmet design, personified: "I would never do this, but as the audience I would watch somebody do this, and when it doesn't work I will plead idiocy because fundamentally, my customers are fucking idiots."

What we have here is an expensive device that can barely do the things we need, fails miserably at the things we don't need, but has the words "AI" "Apple" and "valuation" attached to it so of course, they're going to sell 100,000 of the fucking things. Thing about Juicero? At least you got juice. This, apparently, is for people who feel the need to ask the air about their cookies, which is all anyone uses their phones for anyway.

Art.

I largely agree with rezzeJ but, of course, feel the need to elaborate.

You're right - "it's only Artnet." But what, then, is Artnet? I would argue it's the venue between eBay and Philips; it's the place for people who recognize they don't know much about art but want to know more. It's for people who go to regional gallery openings and probably own a past catalog or two but there's nobody at Christie's calling them up telling them that it would be in their interests to attend the sale in London next week. It is, in other words, exactly the venue that validates Devon Rodriquez and those like him.

And that's where the hustle is, frankly - if you're one of Damien Hirst's galley slaves you are either up or out (mostly out). If you're Saatchi adjacent you have no worries. If you're anywhere else you're a small potatoes regional artist unless you have substantial hustle and a decent commercial appeal - Hipgnosis makes money. Thomas Kinkade made money. David Wyland makes money. But the more money they make the less "art" they are, ask any art critic.

So the hustle is a given. The question becomes what part is hustle and what part is art? Warhol transcended. But he also made movies and was in photographs; those don't go for nearly as much as his paintings because the paintings are the art. Klein transcended. He also made movies and was in photographs, but if it isn't International Klein Blue it isn't worth nearly as much. Banksy threaded the needle in ways nobody else has: his stuff goes for lots of money but without the hustle it'd be nothing. The world is awash in graffiti artists trying to catch some of that Banksy magic but so far, there's only one.

The important question is whether the value of David Rodriguez is in the painting of the Tiktok video. 'cuz if it's in the Tiktok video? There's no value. None. Tiktok is ephemera. But if it's in the painting?

'member Vine? There were Vine stars. There were Vine influencers. And now there aren't. Is TikTok here forever? I mean fundamentally Tiktok is Vine with the massive revenue gap plugged by the Chinese Communist Party propaganda machine. As soon as Xi stops getting what he wants out of TikTok it's a fucking memory.

And so, argues Ben Davis, is Devon Rodriguez.

- Technically okay, but only okay

- Subway tropes are nothing new

- There's nothing to differentiate his work from anyone else's

- And what value is in the TikTok is eroding, by the way, due to the fact that it's clearly a schtick

I maintain that the "goodness me! Look how outraged the artist and his hoi polloi are!" is 100% calculated and banked on. It proves Davis' point: if he were a real artist, his benefactors wouldn't be so uncouth. And see, here's the thing. This is what Devon Rodriguez' fans are consuming:

They're all thinking I would stop and listen to Joshua Bell because my tastes are refined. Far more than every other lunkhead watching this very video on Youtube for these exact reasons. It allows them to feel cultured without recognizing that they have no clue who Joshua Bell is, what Joshua Bell is playing, or anything about classical music beyond a miasma of Amadeus, Stradivarius, "duh duh duh DUMMMMM" and waving batons around.

Nobody gives a shit about painting anymore either but if you add a schlub on a subway you get to pretend you're cultured. Ben Davis popped that balloon, popped it good, and popped it knowing full well the outcome of its loud bang.

Well, pay attention to the thread, then, because the thread is the problem. There are any number of people - and they tend to be rich and powerful - who are more concerned with the potential rights of a hypothetical artificial intelligence than they are with the actual humans whose rights are being curtailed by actual artificial intelligence.

A Google researcher was convinced his fishing lure was a fish and he swallowed it. This caused the press to do "but he works at Google, obviously fishing lures are fish" which has caused a broad swath of the population to lose track of the tundra becoming the tropics because Skynet is more evocative.

We have a very real, very quantifiable problem in front of us: rich people who think computer programs deserve more rights than people or animals. And their first and only move is to wave their hands and call it unquantifiable. They're not wrong? But they're arguing a lack of quantifiability in the face of something we have quantified since the invention of fire. The philosophizing does not solve the problem, it argues the problem unsolvable, therefore we win because we own software firms.

I can't think of a single industry that has professed so much helplessness in the face of externalities. It's as if the automotive industry argued it was impossible to use unleaded gasoline, rather than simply pleading expense.

Kevin McCarthy is Screwed

UPDATE: Kevin McCarthy is (Politically) Dead

Let's take a step back:

The only criticism I leveled above is the notion that RFK's statements, in that clip you linked, are anything other than pseudoscientific dezinformatsiya straight from the Kremlin. I leveled this criticism on the idea that ethnically-targeted bio-weapons are nonsense. And I say this personally knowing people whose entire job it was to evaluate hostile foreign bio-weapons for USAMRIID.

All the rest of your tag cloud here is about other stuff. It is answers to questions I didn't raise. it is attitudes about subjects I haven't brought up.

I will say this: it is my measured and informed opinion that RFK Jr is the very definition of a useful idiot.. And I will say this: RFK Jr. does not share your ideals. The Kennedys are a transactional family, none more transactional than RFK Jr. He spent what, 15 years as in environmental law? Why isn't he running on the environment? Think about it for a minute. How hard would GenZ lean into a candidate who said "I am a single-issue candidate and my issue is climate change"? But that's not where he's getting his attention from. Because it's not the attention he wants.

Biden will absolutely debate. He will debate any opponents, Republican or otherwise, under the terms of debate agreed upon by the opposing parties. You know that, I don't need to remind you. It's 2023, man. We're a long, long road from there. And you're giving to RFK Jr. to, I dunno, somehow alter history? Show me the debates here.

Biden has not done a lot of press conferences. He's also been dealing with States of the Union where this is the standard level of decorum:

All that to say, "I don't like biden because he doesn't do a lot of press conferences" is telegraphing pretty loud that you don't like Biden for _________________________ (whatever reason is convenient in the moment). I'm not going to tell you to like Biden.

But I am going to tell you that you're too clever to take on RFK Jr's baggage just because you think Biden is old.

Speaking as someone who voted for Clinton? Clinton is the Nixon of the left. She's eminently qualified. She's well-connected. But she's never cultivated trustworthiness or an open appeal to her enemies.

Hilary Clinton has never had much use for people who disagree with her, and she's never felt much need to explain herself to people who don't already get it. Her politics and mine mostly align (mostly) but I'd read the fine print on anything she did because she's a fine print kinda girl.

I think Hilary Clinton is a gifted political operative, but gifted political operatives aren't necessarily electable. They can't be much of the time. Consider how much the Left hates Kissinger, and then consider just how big of a hand-shaped welt Kissinger has left on the ass of history - that dude knew he could accomplish more by not being accountable to voters so he never ran for any elected office.

Hilary won a Senate seat so obviously she's no Kissinger. But I think she's got a little too much Nixon for this political era.

The thing about Biden is he inherited a tabula rasa federal government; the Trump administration cleaned house so thoroughly, on purpose and by accident, that the quiet coersion of conventional government has been borderline revolutionary behind the scenes. My perspective is that Biden is exactly the distraction the Republicans need to keep them from drawing attention to the massive economic and judicial reforms the Democrats are sneaking in during the dead of night.

Government should be boring. Biden is boring. I'm ready to be bored, global warming notwithstanding.

I do cardio. I should do more but it's too much of a chore. So every day, sometimes twice a day, I go for a walk. And I talk on the phone or I listen to audiobooks or I find songs for the radio show.

It's discouraging. I'm probably good for 15-20 miles a week and careful monitoring of my caloric intake has me permanently set at "obese." Those appear to be my biological choices: "obese" or "exercise bulimic and also so light-headed that your teen years go by in a fog."

I recognize on some level that I'm anything but obese, I'm the thinnest of my friends by far, who are all normal-shaped people, can out-pace them in pretty much any activity but I'm irrevocably broken inside. Cousin averred to the fact that he had finally realized that it's a goddamn miracle I came out halfway normal (plutonium adventures continue apace).

But it fucking sucks nuking shoes in three weeks because apparently I have an adamantine skeleton or some shit.

There is a practical point where society basically needs to let people somewhat ethically live out their lives in a contained fashion where they cannot harm others but no more than that.

And wouldn't the world be a simpler place if we all agreed where that point is?

Regardless of what the "sustainable" price is, cost reduction was the proximate cause of the increase in American homelessness from the '70s onward. As far as "a gallows and 6 feet of dirt" is concerned, the civilized world resoundingly condemns your approach.

Oh it's a marvelous contraption.

- Take a quadcopter.

- Make it big enough to haul 200lbs of cargo.

- No, not that big. Make it car-sized.

- Now cover the top surface with venetian blinds.

- Now put a bubble in the middle of it.

- Now turn the bubble.

- Now turn the bubble again.

- Now go through the air perpendicular to the ground.

- No, you don't get control surfaces.

- You get tires for some reason.

- The ones on the right of your craft steer, by the way.

- Enjoy.

________________________________

The ukraine war shitposters dug up something marvelous last week. It reminded me very much of this. May I present the combat debut of the legendary T14 Armata:

I'll accept that for certain people, not for all billionaires.

- Sheldon Adelson threw all his money behind Israel.

- J Paul Getty threw all his money behind owning art.

- Warren Buffett mostly seems to be interested in making more money.

- Melinda Gates apparently convinced Bill to "do something useful with it" like cure malaria

- Cornelius Vanderbilt imagined a world without rules and acted accordingly

- Jeff Bezos and Paul Allen mostly seem(ed) interested in acquiring toys

Julia Philips has a "Yiddish" saying in You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again: "People regard wealth three ways - as blood, to nourish; as semen, to create; and as shit to be thrown away."

Elon Musk wants to be adulated because he was never loved as a kid. Elon Musk is Buddy Pine as Syndrome.

Ever wonder what we would have thought of Henry Ford if he hadn't spent the second half of his life promoting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion?

I kinda feel like Elon Musk would have ended up as the "world's greatest innovator" if he'd only known to keep his fucking mouth shut.

LOL so OK

My wife was a midwife and naturopathic doctor in Westside LA. We're talking APEX woo. And we had a kid, and we were in with the Apex woo community, like "our friend the birth assistant was pretty much the impetus for Ricki Lake making a whole documentary about this nonsense."

So the kid needed baby swim lessons. How hard could it be? Well see there's "go to the YMCA in Compton" swim lessons but then there's "I think I can get you into Dolphinsgate" swim lessons. "I think I can get you in?"

Yeah. Turns out there's an interview process. You have to go to a "discovery session" with this weird Swedish or Austrian lady, at her house. And you don't get to do that unless you're vouched for. So... okay. We'll go to the "discovery session" at this lady's house. Which is in Venice, right there in the section where the houses are like two million dollars but the roads are dirt. It's fuckin' wild. You're a frickin' block off the Pacific Coast Highway and they've just never bothered to put down tarmac, and there's no parking, and there's like two dozen of you milling around because you were told to be here at ten on a Tuesday which is super convenient and it's twenty after and the weird Swedish lady opens the gate to the back yard and is that an above-ground pool?

So now we're all gathered around in a tiny back yard between the yurt and the Bubba Bucket and we're standing under a fig tree and no, we're not, we've been requested to form a circle and be seated and the weird Swedish lady has this giant embroidered Hindu pillow and you don't. And the singing bowl comes out and there's some sort of weird chant that we're all expected to participate in? And she's talking about some fuckin' discovery chakra thing and now we're going to talk about our traumatic birth stories?

Oh god. Yes we are. We're going 'round the circle while uncomfortable men hold their wife's hand while she nurses and tells you about how the trauma of having a baby in a room where the walls were a different color of taupe than what you had in your birth plan and we're just sort of riffing off each other and it's like noon? We've been talking about this shit for two hours? And hey, looks like we're done talking, I wonder if we can -

"And you? What is your traumatic birth story?"

Bitch is looking at me, not my wife? "yeah so my wife is a midwife and naturopathic doctor, we had the baby at home, it took like a couple hours, pretty much smooth sailing, sorry it sucked for everybody else?" 'cuz it's not like my wife can say shit, we've sat through 90 minutes of random strangers slagging on her competition? So I guess we drop the mic?

That was some awkward fuckin' silence, and the weird Swedish or Austrian lady just sorta stares? As if I'm somehow going to draw this out? She turns to my wife who just sorta shakes her head?

"So now it is time to watch the introductory video?" and she gestures us into the yurt and it's been two hours and now there's 20 of us squished into a 15-foot yurt and there's a thirteen inch CRT TV-DVD player combo in the Year of Our Lord 2014 and she slips in one of those purple "burned on my iMac" DVDs and John Tesh peals out and it's Nirvana's Nevermind cover for 20 minutes.

Naked babies. Naked babies everywhere. Nothing but naked babies. Yeah see Dolphins Gate teaches your kid how to swim successfully and safely by making them swim naked, none of that swim diaper bullshit here, just John Tesh and naked frolicking babies and then the credits roll and I'm doing my level best to keep my eyes in my skull and then Color by Technicolor crawls up and I am ALMOST LOSING IT and we somehow get out of there without me ROFLING myself into oblivion and I turn to my wife and say "well at least we don't have to worry about going there" because there is no. way. in HELL they'll let us in after that and frankly isn't that really for the best?

but no two days later we get an email telling us "we made the cut" and at this point I figure this is the most fuckin' LA Story experience we've had this year because fuckin' hell naked baby swimming in a bubba bucket in Venice is fuckin' amazing and since it's free because apparently my wife is all that sure this will make great stories. Color by Technicolor are you shitting me.

So I take the kid to her first swim lesson. Which is super-ultra-culty because parents aren't allowed to hang out it kills the vibe? And bitch is always late and the other person who showed up early and I are talking and I compliment her baby carrier because this is what you do and we talk a little bit and I mention that my wife has been looking at stuff and there's like this weird baby carrier culture in LA where women are paying like $1800 for a frickin' used baby carrier and the lady says 'this one cost me $3500' and I really have nothing to say to that but we soldier on because she showed up in an AMG somethinghuge and i'm driving a '95 Dodge and then the gate opens 15 minutes late and i get to stay long enough to "initiate" my kid through the singing bowl dolphin chant and then I have to leave? And come back when they're done?

And the kid is like 2 so you can't really ask her how things were but you try and she says "bobby pooped." And she gets an ear infection, and you treat it. And you get into this weird-ass routine of abandoning your naked baby in a bubba bucket off a dirt road in Venice in front of AMGs and hearing about someone else pooping and that can't be right, how much are they changing the damn water, that's gotta be expensive and she gets another ear infection, and you treat it, and isn't it nice that Mr. High Priced Crazy Pediatrician is comping you all your care because apparently your wife is all that and then your wife

reads on Facebook

That Austrian-Swedish lady is having to shut down Dolphinsgate because the Venice Health Department found dangerous levels of e.coli in the water and every time your daughter says "x pooped" plays back in your head and you take your kid to the Compton YMCA where she's one of two white people and she learns to swim and never has another ear infection ever again but goddamn your two best LA stories are Dolphinsgate and Goat Yoga and you think I'm joking about all this but Constanzia will still take your money.

- Turns out landlord has been ripping us off on rent an NNN for years to the tune of about $27k; need to figure out how to make that stop and make him leave in such a way that I can buy the building without him selling it to a REIT

- Spent 3 days in Canada which I love; didn't shoot the fireworks again because I don't like being messy and stinky but forgot again that cleaning up the fireworks makes you messy and stinky so I should probably just shoot them

- Weeder broke (boo). It's a cheap part (yay). It's also easy to design and print (yay). But it's tricky (boo). Needed to be iterated seven times to get it to fit (boo). Discovered why I keep insisting that materials science matters; ABS is bullshit and laminated-the-wrong-way ABS is more bullshit (b00). Knuckled down to buy a new weeder for $40 (boo), discovered the old one has a lifetime warranty (yay). Send in my claim, there's a 4-6 week wait (boo). So I may end up with one, two or three weeders depending on how this plays out because I can't wait 4-6 weeks. YOU MIGHT BE AN ENGINEER IF you spend a week off and on iterating a cheap plastic part for a tool with a lifetime warranty

- Been reading Bamford's latest. It has much discussion about NUMEC. My father has many opinions about super-shady super-shit enrichment plants and i hadn't talked to him in a while so I called and asked if he knew anything about it. Not only did he not, he decided to say loudly into the phone "I worked for the supreme organization on the planet where nothing ever went wrong" and got off the phone as quickly as he could because clearly he's figured out the phone's tapped and clearly he thinks I ratted him out to the FBI.

-----let's just pause there and acknowledge the exotic strangeness of that paragraph----

-----because there are other things in Bamford's latest that made me reconsider certain other events of the past seven years that put things in such an absolutely bonkers, absolutely bugshit light that there is

no

fucking

way

even I, the Internet's original over-sharer, will commit to writing------

So I've been dealing with that. I'll probably be dealing with that for the rest of my fucking life. I can't and won't talk about it and it's really fucking tough because my wife is compassionate, empathetic, sensitive and kind but the bugshittery is so bugshit that it doesn't even register with her and it took two fucking days of contemplation just to figure out my obligation to society. I think my past actions have me in the clear, all obligations fulfilled?

But I'm going to have to do a lot of drinking before I'm entirely okay.

Yeah. man. This could go any number of ways.

- Putin has demonstrated that yes indeed, he will sell out senior cabinet members for his personal safety. Shoygu is a loyalist's loyalist, one of the keener political creatures in the menagerie.

- Prigozhin knows full well that Lukashenko has been given the task of making him dead. Lukashenko knows that Prigozhin knows. Putin knows that Lukashenko wants his job; Lukashenko knows that he went to Russia and nearly died.

- The man-on-the-street clearly gives no fucks either way, which should surprise no one.

What was "nobody can replace Putin" could become a full-fledged Game of Thrones where pretty much everyone is Reek or worse. A whole bunch of stuff that has been buttoned down for decades is now flapping in the breeze. This is like when they locked Gorbachev in his dacha but then let him come home.

This is a semantic argument masquerading as a logical one.

At the most basic level, a "cartel" is a collection of entities with some form of sanction and some form of non-compete. The "cable cartel" is Time Warner Cable, Cox Cable and Comcast Cable not selling within each other's territories. The "insurance cartel" is Aetna and Kaiser agreeing to keep consumer prices high, provider remuneration low and certain procedures uncovered. The Dutch East India Company was a cartel; the Knights Templar were a cartel.

My sister's boyfriend murdered a rival at the behest of a drug gang from Mexico. He was likewise murdered by a rival at the behest of a drug gang from Mexico. One of those organizations has been labeled "Sinaloa" for purposes of convenience by the DEA. The other has been labeled "Zetas." Now -

This is how we end up with a certain idea of the drug war—an image of a gunslinger in cowboy boots standing over a dead body. The dead body is real, says Zavala. But the boots are on the feet of a policeman, or maybe even a politician.

...in Amarillo?

Look. The Taliban are a cartel. The Yakuza are a cartel. Cartels happen wherever central authority is weak and commerce is strong. That describes the narcotics enterprise of Mexico to a T.

Once the United States banned marijuana in 1937, running it across the border became good business. Mexican families smuggled alcohol, then marijuana, then cocaine. According to Smith, the Mexican government began cashing in on the trade, too. The first protection rackets emerged in northern Mexico, creating a model that persists today: policemen and politicians take regular payments to look the other way when certain people move drugs, then crack down on their rivals. Everyone is happy: there are arrests to publicize, and those in on the arrangement make plenty of money.

How is that NOT a cartel?

By the Seventies, traffickers were making money hand over fist, and the local protection rackets went national. Drug lords had state police badges.

How is that NOT a cartel?

He is convincing on this point: the extreme escalation of violence is “not so much in the DNA of trading in narcotics as in the DNA of prohibiting the trade.”

you don't say

The United States, he notes, had prohibited marijuana by “repeating the old Mexican prejudices, which linked the drug to insanity and violence.” Tabloid headlines about indigent killers crazed by dope were a staple on both sides of the border before prohibition. Marijuana was associated with hippies and those who opposed the Vietnam War. After Nixon declared the war on drugs, the prison population shot up from 200,000 to 2.2 million. Half the people currently in prison are there for drugs. Most are people of color.

No shit.

That doesn't make it "not a cartel problem."

It was around this time that the DEA started talking about cartels. The agency claimed that one trafficker said, “Let’s put it all in one place, deal with one person and set a price,” and that “it was like the OPEC cartel.” Smith writes that this change likely had “more to do with the DEA’s desire to create an obvious public enemy than with any wholesale restructuring of the drug business.”

Well. And.

On the face of it, the word “cartel” doesn’t make any sense for the drug business in Mexico, then or now. Even if, pace Zavala, you believe that drug traffickers do control extensive territory and supply chains, they shouldn’t be called cartels. If there were a true cartel, operations would be centralized, and there would be less violence.

ORLY

“The formation of a cartel requires an agreement between competing firms or corporations with the aim of controlling prices and production or excluding the entrance of new competitors in a specific industry,” she writes. “Because cartel formation requires cooperation between different firms, the term ‘cartel’ should not be used to refer to drug-trafficking organizations in contemporary Mexico.” In other words, there are no cartels.

I dunno, man, Brian was told "you can deal anywhere but here", he didn't listen, and his head was found in a ditch along I-25. I'm pretty damn comfortable with the word "cartel" for this.

But there are plenty of deaths. In Mexico, the extreme violence of the drug war began in 1975, with the world’s first large-scale herbicide campaign targeting marijuana plants and opium poppies in the Golden Triangle and elsewhere, accompanied by military occupations and widespread torture. DEA agents referred to the campaign as “the atrocities.” The United States provided most of the chemicals and all of the aircraft. It was an utter failure. Trafficking marijuana transitioned smoothly into trafficking cocaine. The protection rackets continued.

Sure - Paraquat led to the rise of Humboldt County and the extinction of Quaaludes led to the proliferation of meth. If you have a business enterprise, and you restrict part of its trade, it will expand elsewhere. It's - dare we say - cartel-like behavior.

Mexico was not fully a democracy until 2000, in the sense that opposition parties could not win national elections. Since the Mexican Revolution, a single political party—the Institutional Revolutionary Party—ruled the country. The peaceful transition of power in 2000 marked a democratic turn, but it also unsettled who would benefit from shaking down traffickers. The biggest change began under Calderón, who was president from 2006 to 2012.

I dunno man I know a lady who was literally part of Vincente Fox's press pool and her husband was kidnapped twice. By - say it with me - cartels.

That violence has extended to the press: it is becoming increasingly obvious that it is not always narcos who are behind the murders of Mexican journalists.

No one was arguing this. No one. The whole reason Mexico's drug war is largely fought from America is, ostensibly, the corruption.

The narrative of the war on drugs is a cover that allows the Mexican government to kill, torture, and disappear its citizens with impunity.

So somehow they're the only ones?

Yeah see here's the thing about that analogy.

Let's say you're King Spez. Your Conquistadors have established Novo Espana and the land is free for the taking. So you give out grants to anyone willing to make the journey.

Once they get there, they have fuckall. They have no military backing. Raiders can murder them, burn their crops, run off with their women. Maybe they can sell excess grain? Maybe they can't. Maybe they can get others to show up and till the land with them? Maybe they can't. Maybe they impose some order? Maybe they don't. Maybe they thrive? Maybe they can't. Maybe they steadily, through unremunerated effort, build up the value of the new land to the point where it makes King Spez rich and powerful -

- and then he calls you 'aristocracy' and takes it from you.

See, there are two ways to do this. Within market economies, the value developed in a land grant becomes the property of the landholder and should the land grant be revoked, the landholder is entitled to fair market value. Within command economies, the landholder is always the king, whose vassals work it under penalty of exile or death.

Market economies run the world now because they incentivize the labor and ingenuity of those who develop resources. Command economies are perpetually laggard because when you imprison the kulaks and drive them off their land you end up with a bunch of schlubs who don't give a shit about the revolution in charge of feeding it.

The only thing that makes a subreddit worth anything is its moderation, and the quickest way to get banned from Reddit is to attempt to gain remuneration from your labor. The security and sanctity of the title is the only thing the moderator class has going for it, and Spez has just decided "yeah fuck off you don't even get that."

Which basically belies their whole deeply libertarian bent - I mean, Reddit basically exists so Alexis and Steve could pimp Ron Paul and then it accidentally became a social network on the side. But the move they're making now is about as Soviet as it gets.

I haven't been over there in years because I have had this discussion, with Alexis, with Steve, with a half-dozen people there. They don't fucking get it because they don't want to get it. They want to do what they want to do because ultimately it's their site and fuck you for thinking otherwise.

Yeah I had an observation in the back of my head about how he romanticized Generation X because he lived in abundance, whereas my take on Generation X was "welcome to Thunderdome, bitch" because I did not.

But realistically, the whole schtick is "we were promised abundance and instead we live in scarcity" which definitely sucks? But at some point you need to put on your problem-solving cap and I think there's a lot of people whose problems have always been solved by their parents. And your parents can't bring the malls back.

What in the cis-hetero-patriarchal bullshit is this?

So... there's actually a point here.

It's not the point he wants to make so he didn't, but fundamentally, ratings in the '80s hinged largely on how much violence was in them, not how much nudity. Blade Runner is a PG with two boobs, Total Recall is a hard R with three. Andromeda Strain is rated G, fer chrissake, because nobody cusses and nobody shoots anyone else. What happened, fundamentally, is the 'boomers took over and started protecting everyone else's children from tits. Now? Now you can show someone blowing someone else's head off in close-up and get a PG-13 but the minute an aureola shows up it's an R.

The President of the Kyiv School of Economics weighs in:

On the one hand, 80% of the population of the United States is urban. On the other hand, 95% of the population of the United States considers themselves to be a high plains drifter, roaming with the tumbleweeds from one lone outpost of humanity to another, vast fields of buffalo grass beneath their feet for weeks at a time as the sun-drenched FREEEEEDUMMMMMMMM of it all surrounds them like their godhood.

And I'm gonna be honest. I grew up in a town of 20,000 people, half an hour from a town of 15,000 people, an hour from a town of 50,000 people and two hours from a town of 400,000 people and I'm here to tell ya - there wasn't a single fuckin' bus in a hundred mile radius until I went off to college.

I'm a big booster of public transit. It makes so much more sense than the alternatives. I love rail, I love carpool lanes, I love vanpools, I love all of it. But for one in five Americans it is simply not an option. Not in any way shape or form.

And whenever the five percent say "I can haz bike lanez" the ninety five percent point at the one-in-five guys and go WHY DO YOU HATE FREEDOM

My LA biking radius was 9 miles. If I needed to go less than 9 miles, it was quicker to take a bicycle just because of parking and traffic. If the sun was out, pedal power was quicker to get more than halfway across the urban core. And LA? Let's be honest, LA is the place where people will pay more on car payments than they will on rent because you're never going to invite anyone over to meet your six roommates.

Maybe things will change. Slowly. I guess this month is the first time the median new car payment is out of reach of the median American family.

So check it, dude. The jobs you're responding to were written by people with bachelor's degrees in human resources or social work, who were taking fifteen minutes of the time of the people who will actually supervise those roles. They've shot them full of "must this" and "experience that" which the HR people barely understand and they've dumped them on a dozen sites where tire-kickers from North Dakota apply so they can tell the unemployment office they've sent out resumes. The flacks who read these resumes have already let the algorithms filter out everything that doesn't match their requirements to a T (they don't understand those requirements anyway so it's safer for everyone) and of the stuff that does? They're selecting based on dumb shit like "I hate people from Georgia."

I'm a small firm. I can fob off my HR on Indeed and Square. I have another service that does my retirement and my wife runs payroll. I had a fuckton of contempt for HR before I had employees. Now? Hoo boy. Lemme tell you a story from the Golden Age of Employment, back when a top-ten in-state engineering program was $1800 a quarter and starting salary was $60k. I found a gig in the paper. I looked them up on the Internet, which was a new thing. I called up the guy who would actually be my supervisor, we had a good chat, and he said "too bad so sad now you need to talk to my headhunter." Went to the headhunter's office and they tested me on my filing, my typing and my 10-key. Ended up turning down the job because the headhunter was gonna take like 30% of my salary for 9 months. Said headhunter proceeded to offer me receptionist jobs for the next 2 years because apparently my filing, typing and 10-key scores set some kind of record.

That's back when things were functional.

You're clever, you come across well, you have a fresh'n'shiny degree from a premier program. You need to look at this a different way. Poke around on Twitter, LinkedIn, PRNewswire, wherever. Find shops that do interesting shit, in the bay or elsewhere. Figure out who at those companies is doing the interesting shit, or at least be able to target the department. Then CALL. Do not email, do not text, do not message on LinkedIn. You will be working for people in their 40s and 50s, and we, as a group, are aghast by how fucking incapable the median GenZer is at interacting with their fellow humans. Not all of them, certainly! But the resume pool you get from Indeed or whatever is filled to the gills with barely-functional favored children who prefer to have their parents drive them to their interviews at the age of 24. We've had a couple who have assumed their mothers will sit in the interviews WITH THEM.

Be up front, be direct. "I read this thing in X, it looks like you guys are doing interesting stuff. I need a job and I figured I'd ask if you might have room in your organization for me." This will go one of three ways: (1) The organization will be too hidebound and hierarchical to accommodate anything outside the rigid strictures of HR and you will have lost nothing (2) The organization will have no openings (or be too hidebound) and the guy you're talking to will go "hmm I got nuthin' but you should talk to my buddy Louie at Spacely Space Sprockets..." (3) the guy you're talking to will go "hmm let me think about that" and proceed to figure out what his organization looks like with a recent grad (aka bargain) in some new role that frees up a dozen other things.

This will also be a lengthy process with a low success rate, but it also puts down a footprint in a small industry. You will be polite, you will follow up after a couple weeks, you will keep your LinkedIn up to date, and you will be honest about where you are willing to relocate to and whether it makes sense to remote. You will have a well-polished resume that fits on a single page (current resume trends are "let it all hang out" because HR employees are the worst humans in the structure, actual supervisors don't have time for that shit) and you will give it freely.

Allow me to be perfectly clear: There is absolutely no honor or utility in adapting to a custom so deeply and thoroughly broken as the modern hiring process. You will get a job by going "nice company you have here, I think I'd like a job" until someone says "...yeah okay that works for me." I'll go one further - based on what I've seen and the trends I've observed, it will work this way for the duration of your career. Get used to it, get comfortable with it, and accept that employment is a partnership. You're giving up a big chunk of your life so you should get a big chunk of their money. They aren't doing you a favor, you aren't "lucky to have the job", you have skills, they have money, it works out in their favor, don't ever forget that.