This article is too long for you

Short campaign slogans are not modern, dude, nor are summaries, précis, and abstracts of long papers, chapters, and books.

It's as if politicians and media executives all read Orwell's 1984 and took it not as social criticism, but rather as a guide to how to communicate effectively with others while maintaining oneself in power.

Take the author's note on the skyrocketing global energy prices, particular in Europe and Britain. How is this to be explained? Another author, William Gibson, noted in "Spook Country" something called the three-beer rule. If it can't be explained over three beers in a bar, it's too complicated, the average person will lose interest.

To actually understand global energy markets, you'd have to read a lot of books, not just articles. You'd have to understand the current mix of energy production and imports in Europe, who the fossil fuel producing countries were and how they shipped fuel to Europe, what 'balance of payments' and 'current accounts' vs 'capital accounts' are, why Europe's political leaders were blase about relying on energy imports for decades even though that made them highly vulnerable to supply disruptions, why they didn't invest heavily in renewables decades ago, what kind of economic intanglements they had with the USA, the Saudis and Gulf Arabs, and Russia, that tended to prevent such developments - and that's all just background, not even counting the effects of the Ukraine war.

It's too complicated for a long-form article, too complicated for three beers in a bar, you'd have to read a bunch of books, while avoiding the PR garbage put out by those with an active interest in you NOT understanding the details and rationale (yes, many books are published solely for that purpose).

Guess we're all turning into fuddy-duddies, huh? I too learned programming from a book for what it's worth. Not too worried about the next generation, though. Seems ahistorical to imagine the time I came of age was "good" and it's all downhill since. Happy that cliffski's made so much money, way to go!

You can tell when your attention span dwindles, when you keep re-reading the same page of any book because you can't get to the next one, start clicking back to HN if the prior article goes deep, or picking up an iPad when an academic tome gets dense.

Take a break, do a digital detox. Except for windows mid morning or late afternoon when you respond to e-devices, force yourself to only read long form content.

Start with an airport novel, easy breezy attention peasy. After that read fiction with substance until any urge to set it down goes away. Then dig into nonfiction. Finally, back to academic or in-depth domain knowledge.

Things you couldn't read two pages of before, you can now read in a sitting or two.

This article was not too long for me. It was too self aggrandizing, too void of any real topics and just repeating the same argument over and over with no evidence to speak of to back up their points. Wait isn’t that exactly what they complained about at the start? Hmmmm.

There is a lot to say about this but, staying in trend, this is an issue of too much, to quick.

> TL;DR: Read the fucking article.

I was waiting for this punchline; I was not disappointed. Now I can get back to figuring out mbsync has decided to stop fucking synching mailboxes.

This is why I stick to forum based social media applications. I'm still young but I know Instagram and TikTok will poison me.