For every invention we make, from mobile phones to online shopping, self-checkout tills, and driverless cars, we eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs elsewhere. Inventions are about doing more with less, allowing people to become more productive, and over time, the newly unemployed move into more productive sectors – from making buggy whips to repairing cars, for instance.So perhaps we should be comforted by the belief that, as in the past, everything will work out just fine in the long term and everyone who’s lost their job will retrain to become a computer programmer or someone who provides services to programmers: to think otherwise would be to cast yourself as a Luddite. But the Luddites may have the last laugh, as suggested by The Economist’s Babbage; in short, whereas the technological advances of the past improved productivity while still requiring decent numbers of human operators, the advances of the future – most notably in artificial intelligence – could start permanently removing human operators from the loop.
One of the biggest complaints about tablets is that they are used to consume, not create. If you give your kid a computer, she can program, write, draw, and endlessly create. Tablets posses a much more unilateral mode of interaction, which can still be awesome — read books! Stream video! Play games! Keep your calendar! Track your baby’s feedings and poops! But some people may still be looking to be creative with their new tablet, specifically, in this case, a Kindle Fire.Amazon makes it plenty difficult, though. They don’t equip it with Bluetooth, which means no external keyboard. It doesn’t have a camera (whereas the new iPad has two), it only comes with apps from the Amazon App Store, and the storage is capped at 8GB.
But it is possible to turn your Kindle Fire into a tool of creation.
The most remarkable attribute Krugman has brought to the Times is rudeness. The social niceties that accompany his exalted position are utterly lost on him. He does not seek out the company of famous politicians and cannot be courted with flattery or access. He understands that you can’t arrive at truth without explaining why mistaken beliefs are wrong.Krugman makes a mockery of the prohibition against arguing with his fellow columnists, larding his columns with rebuttals to unnamed subjects who happen to believe things that were advocated on the Times op-ed page earlier in the week. Thomas Friedman writes a column complaining, “Does anyone know what President Obama’s preferred outcome is? Exactly which taxes does he want raised, and which spending does he want cut?” And the next day, Krugman writes: “Oh, and let me give a special shout-out to ‘centrist’ pundits who won’t admit that President Obama has already given them what they want. The dialogue seems to go like this. Pundit: ‘Why won’t the president come out for a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes?’ Mr. Obama: ‘I support a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes.’ Pundit: ‘Why won’t the president come out for a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes?’ ”
Because Paul Krugman Didn’t Keep His Calm - Reasons to Love New York 2011 – New York Magazine. Two responses:
Re: the first paragraph. If what you’re about is “explaining why mistaken beliefs are wrong,” then you’re not trying to “arrive at truth”: you believe you already possess it. Also, the characteristic Krugman argument is, roughly, “Your argument is wrong because it’s mistaken,” or, when he wants to change things up, “Your argument is mistaken because it’s wrong.”
Re: the second paragraph, note that Krugman’s response to Friedman — if that’s what it is — is a non-response. Friedman asked which taxes the President wants to raise, and which spending he wants to cut — and Krugman doesn’t answer either question. If Krugman had Friedman in mind, then he managed to bluster his way past questions he didn’t have answers to. This too is typical Krugman.
In brief, the more rudely Krugman behaves, the more likely it is that he lacks substantive arguments. (This is equally true of almost every other pundit I can think of, with the possible exception of Christopher Hitchens.) If that’s the kind of thing you want to celebrate, New York, knock yourself out, I guess.
As I see it, the problem with Amazon stems from the fact that though it started out as a bookseller, it isn’t anymore, not really. It sells everything now, and it sells it all aggressively. Maybe Amazon doesn’t care about the larger bookselling universe because it’s simply too big to care. In a way it’s become, like the John Candy character (minus the eager, slobbering benevolence) in Mel Brooks’s movie “Spaceballs” — half man, half dog and thus its own best friend.Like just about everybody I’ve talked to about it, I first attributed Amazon’s price-comparison app to arrogance and malevolence, but there’s also something bizarrely clumsy and wrong-footed about it. Critics may appear weak today, but they may not be tomorrow, and if the wind shifts, Amazon’s ham-fisted strategy has the potential to morph into a genuine Occupy Amazon movement. And even if the company is lucky and that doesn’t happen, what has it really gained? The fickle gratitude of people who will have about as much loyalty to Amazon tomorrow as they do today to Barnes & Noble, last year’s bully? This is good business? Is it just me, or does it feel as if the Amazon brass decided to spend the holidays in the Caribbean and left in charge of the company a computer that’s fallen head over heels in love with its own algorithms?
Now that Toronto’s penguin couple, Buddy and Pedro, have moved on to courting females, it seems their platonic relationship was more of a bromance than a gay romance. It’s only been twelve days since the scientists at the two split the “gay” penguin couple for their own good as a part of an endangered species breeding program, and Buddy has already mated with a female penguin while Pedro has been trying. “Scientists say that when a female shows up, that often spells the end for same-sex male bonds in penguins and other animals. And vice versa for same-sex female pairings,” reports the Toronto Star. The Guardian adds that zoo curator Tom Mason described Buddy and Pedro’s bond as social not sexual. But it was that bond which earned them their gay penguin celebrity status with Brokeback Iceberg jokes on Jimmy Kimmel, fanfare around the world, and the ensuing heartbreak when zoo officials announced they would split the two up for the sake of their species. The Toronto Star rubs salt in the wounds of those true romantics, writing, “Fans worldwide who have been riveted by Buddy and Pedro’s story will be saddened to hear the two recently got into a fight as they sat across from one another in their respective nests … Up to now, Buddy and Pedro had shown little amorous interest in the young females in the flock, preferring to huddle for hours on end beside a wooden post in their enclosure.” At the time of their split, and when everyone still thought they were exclusively gay, there were plans to reunite the two (who had been sharing a nest for a year or so) in the spring. But now that we know Buddy and Pedro are more fragile bromance than enduring Brokeback, we might be more inclined to just leave them be, like zoo officials could’ve done in the first place.
We also hugely underestimate the role of chance in life (this is System 1’s work). Analysis of the performance of fund managers over the longer term proves conclusively that you’d do just as well if you entrusted your financial decisions to a monkey throwing darts at a board. There is a tremendously powerful illusion that sustains managers in their belief their results, when good, are the result of skill; Kahneman explains how the illusion works. The fact remains that “performance bonuses” are awarded for luck, not skill. They might as well be handed out on the roll of a die: they’re completely unjustified. This may be why some banks now speak of “retention bonuses” rather than performance bonuses, but the idea that retention bonuses are needed depends on the shared myth of skill, and since the myth is known to be a myth, the system is profoundly dishonest – unless the dart-throwing monkeys are going to be cut in.
I think the worst consequences [of the literary bas against genre fiction] are:
Wonderful, serious, sophisticated writers who would appeal to a broader audience get stuck in the genre ghettos where “mainstream” readers seldom venture.
Writers of “mainstream” fiction whose taste as readers runs to genre fiction (SF, horror) feel shy or hesitant about attempting to write what they love, for fear of being dismissed or, perhaps, perceived as dabbling.
The range and depth of literary criticism is narrowed and reduced; after nearly 50 years, people are still talking about Kingsley Amis’ “New Maps of Hell” as if there were something remarkable in a “serious” critic writing about [science fiction].
4) Less fun is had.
Defaulting (even in so-called non-recourse states) is still a lot of trouble, and to most people it’s scary. In addition, homeowners are slow to recognize how much the value of their homes has dropped, and have inflated expectations of how much it will rise in the future. The biggest hurdle, though, is social: while companies get called “very smart” for restructuring their contracts, there’s a real stigma attached to defaulting on your mortgage. According to one study, eighty-one per cent of Americans think it’s immoral not to pay your mortgage when you can, and the idea of default is shaped by what Brent White, a law professor at the University of Arizona, calls a discourse of “shame, guilt, and fear.” When the housing bubble burst, the banking industry was terrified by the possibility that homeowners might walk away en masse, since that would have stuck lenders with large losses and a huge number of marked-down homes. So strategic default was portrayed as the act of dishonorable deadbeats. David Walker, of the Peterson Foundation, waxed nostalgic about debtors’ prisons, and John Courson, the head of the Mortgage Bankers Association, argued that defaulters were sending the wrong message “to their family and their kids and their friends.”Paying your debts is, as a rule, a good thing. But the double standard here is obvious and offensive. Homeowners are getting lambasted for doing what companies do on a regular basis. Walking away from real-estate obligations in particular is common in the corporate world, and real-estate developers are notorious for abandoning properties that no longer make economic sense. Sometimes the hypocrisy is staggering: last winter, the Mortgage Bankers Association—the very body whose president attacked defaulters for betraying their families and their communities—got its creditors to let it do a short sale of its headquarters, dumping it for thirty-four million dollars less than the value of the building’s mortgage.
Since 1992, as the technological miracles and wonders have propagated and the political economy has transformed, the world has become radically and profoundly new. (And then there’s the miraculous drop in violent crime in the United States, by half.) Here is what’s odd: during these same 20 years, the appearance of the world (computers, TVs, telephones, and music players aside) has changed hardly at all, less than it did during any 20-year period for at least a century. The past is a foreign country, but the recent past — the 00s, the 90s, even a lot of the 80s — looks almost identical to the present. This is the First Great Paradox of Contemporary Cultural History. Think about it. Picture it. Rewind any other 20-year chunk of 20th-century time. There’s no chance you would mistake a photograph or movie of Americans or an American city from 1972 — giant sideburns, collars, and bell-bottoms, leisure suits and cigarettes, AMC Javelins and Matadors and Gremlins alongside Dodge Demons, Swingers, Plymouth Dusters, and Scamps — with images from 1992. Time-travel back another 20 years, before rock ’n’ roll and the Pill and Vietnam, when both sexes wore hats and cars were big and bulbous with late-moderne fenders and fins — again, unmistakably different, 1952 from 1972. You can keep doing it and see that the characteristic surfaces and sounds of each historical moment are absolutely distinct from those of 20 years earlier or later: the clothes, the hair, the cars, the advertising — all of it. It’s even true of the 19th century: practically no respectable American man wore a beard before the 1850s, for instance, but beards were almost obligatory in the 1870s, and then disappeared again by 1900. The modern sensibility has been defined by brief stylistic shelf lives, our minds trained to register the recent past as old-fashioned.
You Say You Want a Devolution? | Style | Vanity Fair. Even if this argument is right — even if styles really have changed less in the past twenty years than in any comparable 20-period in the past century — it’s noteworthy that Andersen keeps saying, “Well, except for technology.” As though technological change — change in our gadgets, our electronic encounters, our newly-digital lives — don’t really count somehow and aren’t matters of style.
Maybe the real story is that a lot of the energy that once was directed towards altering styles of art and fashion has gone for the past twenty years into figuring out how we engage with the digital world. And maybe, as Neal Stephenson has suggested in an interview I quoted from the other day, that pace of digital development will at some point slow down and the pace of stylistic change elsewhere will accelerate once again.