A post I wrote a while back on diseases of the intellect seems relevant to this moment.
I successfully adjusted the truss rod in my guitar, ama
BBC:
In 2024, Windows was at the centre of a controversy across the German internet. It started with a job listing for Deutsche Bahn, the country’s railway service. The role being recruited was an IT systems administrator who would maintain the driver’s cab display system on high-speed and regional trains. The problem was the necessary qualifications: applicants were expected to have expertise with Windows 3.11 and MS-DOS – systems released 32 and 44 years ago, respectively. In certain parts of Germany, commuting depends on operating systems that are older than many passengers. …
The trains in San Francisco’s Muni Metro light railway … won’t start up in the morning until someone sticks a floppy disk into the computer that loads DOS software on the railway’s Automatic Train Control System (ATCS).
The Detection Club will be a BBC series in which G. K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers solve crimes. Time to start dreaming about ideal casting … but with Richard Griffiths no longer around, the ideal for GKC is not possible, alas. A younger Dawn French would’ve made an excellent DLS … Olivia Coleman for Christie … Must keep thinking about this.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression:
Those students who are the furthest to the left have been the most accepting of violence for as long as we’ve asked the question. That includes very liberal and democratic socialist students. But a rising tide of acceptance of violence has raised all boats. Now, regardless of party or ideology, students across the board are more open to violence as a way to shut down a speaker. What was once an extreme and fringe opinion has become normalized.
That’s what the best science fiction does: It makes us question the social arrangements of our technology, and inspires us to demand better ones.
This idea – that who a technology acts for (and upon) is more important than the technology’s operating characteristics – has a lot of explanatory power.
The Social Media User’s Prayer:
God grant me cacophonous wrath about the things I cannot change, habitual neglect of the things I can change, and absolute ignorance of the difference.
Finished reading: Breakneck by Dan Wang 📚. A really outstanding book, in which we see China’s sometimes thoughtless culture of building for building’s sake contrasted to America’s culture of lawyerly prevention of … well, pretty much everything. Here’s a long representative quotation:
The engineering state is focused mostly on monumentalism. Though there are many public toilets, provision of toilet paper is only a sometimes thing. Nowhere in China is it advisable to drink tap water. Not even Shanghai.
The engineering state has engaged in wild spasms of building over the past four decades. That has achieved considerable wonders and a fair degree of harm. The future would be better if China could learn to build less, while the United States learns to build more.
I’ve come to realize that there are many ways that China and the United States are inversions of each other. Households save a great deal of their earnings in China, while it is really easy to borrow money or spend on credit in America. In terms of national policy, China is much more focused on the supply side of the economy: It suppresses consumption as it favors manufacturers with preferential financing and all manner of policy support. The United States, meanwhile, is focused on regulating demand, for example, by imposing rent control in expensive cities or mailing out checks to consumers during the pandemic.
Both approaches are running into problems. China won’t become the world’s biggest economy by building more tall bridges. It also can’t continue manufacturing more than twice the number of cars it sells at home. And the United States is starting to realize the problems of being too focused on the demand side of the economy.