AlbertCory

> I have very little time for reading the print magazines

You had me up to there. "I don't have time" just means "I don't prefer to." You have time to do whatever you really want to do.

mostly they are. newspapers.com has 1000's of papers (in image form, not text, unfortunately) going back to the 1800's.

The irony here is that Ted Gioia is at the very top of the power law distribution of writers' incomes: he makes a ton of money on Substack and is very vocal about it. He deserves it all, too, just to be clear.

However, most writers are way out on the long tail of the curve, making next to nothing. I subscribe free to 100's of them, but "upgrade to Paid"??? Nope, nope.

> Nowadays authors at that level would be on Substack, or some other similar platform. That’s because their name would be their personal brand, and they wouldn’t need a periodical—and certainly not a magazine in terminal decline.

They ARE on Substack, and a precious few are like you, Ted: making the big bucks.

I'd be willing to pay for an aggregate of 100 or so of them, where their output this week is omitted if they've got nothing. The catch is, I wouldn't pay huge money for that. This isn't going to bring back the days of Readers Digest and Esquire. There's just too much on the Web that's free to occupy my attention.

> So, what’s the solution? It’s simple, but not easy:

"Make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy again.

Tie lending terms to the value of the degree.

Impose risk-sharing requirements on educational institutions – Schools would face financial penalties or need to contribute to a risk-sharing pool if their graduates default at high rates."

=================

Sounds reasonable. Making people who were either faithful repayers or non-borrowers in the first place, pay for the bad or unlucky choices of a few is obvious bad and unfair policy.

There are always situations where people who make mistakes have them forgiven but pay a price. I think the public would accept something like that, but not a program where the debts are forgiven outright.

Schools need to take a haircut and repay some of the bad debt themselves, just like a bond default does not result in the bondholders receiving 100% of what's owed them.

> No-one knows if Hitler bumped into Trotsky, or Tito met Stalin. But works like Dr Freud Will See You Now, Mr Hitler - a 2007 radio play by Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran - are lively imaginings of such encounters.

Now I want to check this out!

if you're actually a random third person, you need to find a hobby and stop interjecting yourself into other people's conversations.

I think you've got it 100% backwards, so don't be quoting Scripture at me like it means anything.

I know three people who've come home sick. He's the one being skeptical and quoting a well-known meme:

https://tenor.com/search/there-are-dozens-of-us-gifs

Interesting. Those articles make it sound like it's oh, so, wonderful and the hotel chains will actually let you buy it!

I'm not impressed, either.

fast: you know it when you see it.

I have to admit this isn't what I was expecting to read.

One data point; take it for what it's worth.

Every truly great programmer I ever met was a really fast typist. Every one.

The converse doesn't apply, of course.

the personal flaw is not getting irony, and feeling you have to respond with Earnestness to it.

"dozens"?? is that one dozen? Two? More?

how do you know all these patients? Or you just made them up?

It's one data point, so our prior is "death." Unless you have other data points?

that's what "anecdata" means

But it's got its own name, and in French! Much better.

This is anecdata:

I know three people who've come back sick from cruises. The most interesting one was just last week: someone who had Mal de Débarquement Syndrome for six months. She was dizzy all the time. There is no cure.

This might be a good one to try on your boss if you want to avoid business travel: say you suffer from Mal de Débarquement Syndrome!

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/24796-mal-de-...

That's it exactly.

> appreciation of the prose itself

exactly. You hear different things in the music (the secondary melody lines, the bass, etc.) and in books you savor the prose.

IF that's your thing, of course. If it's just "find out how it ends" then you already know.

Sigh. There's always something you can be unhappy about. You must spend all your time on it.

Marijuana IS pretty much legalized in the US.

As for "access to healthcare" : have you heard of Right To Try? Google it.

I'm right now starting my third trip through the 20 Patrick O'Brian books (Master and Commander). There's a whole Facebook group of POB fans who call that a circumnavigation.

For me it's just the beauty of the prose. I just marvel as how he describes things. I just wonder if there's something I can take from that.

"right to try" seems to be enshrined in some US laws. Were you not aware of that?

https://www.fda.gov/patients/learn-about-expanded-access-and...

as for "travel could be infeasible" : I'd suggest you call up some clinic in Mexico and pretend to be terminal and unable to travel. See if they come up with some solution for you.

The point being: there's already a right to try unapproved therapies, even if it sometimes requires extra travel. People who aren't wealthy manage to try them.

As for "anecdotes" -- do you have any actual data? Neither do I.

> Most people understand that large cities have a variety of areas

as do I. However, there are city-wide issues you can't avoid, like:

1) If your house is burglarized, will the police show up, at all?

2) When you call 911 for a real emergency, how long before someone shows up?

3) If you get robbed on the street, do the cops show up?

I know someone whose wife was judged terminal, and he took her to Mexico for some unapproved cancer therapies. This is not a rich guy.

(She's dead now, as you might have guessed.)

Exactly. They've taken a popular term and applied it where it doesn't fit.

You may have a "right to repair" something you bought. You didn't buy your body.

Drug safety is an old, old issue. We can argue about how it's applied without dragging in popular phrases that don't apply.

"you aren't the first person i've seen expressing the transparently nonsensical sentiment that 'people problems are much harder than technical problems'."

No, it's not "transparently nonsensical" -- it expresses a common human experience that techies who are at least somewhat self-aware (obviously that excludes you) have had at work. Their education gave them a toolbox for approaching technical problems, but no training in the people problems.

It's not remotely saying that all technical problems are easy.

> many nice and safe neighborhoods

I think you mean "safer than East International Blvd."

I don't demand that you cite crime statistics by zip code, and compare the good ones to other cities. But that's what you'd need to do to be persuasive.

If I can relate this to movies [1], it might be illuminating:

Watching a movie, you normally get a "home viewing" license. That does not give you the right to show it at your business (even if you don't charge money and only 10 people come).

There's also a Public Performance Rights (PPR) license, and I always had to get PPR's because Google lawyers would shut us down otherwise. PPR costs considerably more than a home viewing license.

When I negotiated PPR's, they always asked three questions:

1. How many in the audience?

2. Are you charging money?

3. Are you advertising this outside Google?

If I were a movie theater taking $15 a head from anyone who showed up, my PPR would cost a lot more.

It seems that what IA wants is to use home viewing rights as though they had PPR's.

"No, they don't!" you retort? You might be right, but asking AG to design a license for them would be a lot more friendly than saying, "Hey, this is fair to you, take it!"

Edit: one thing I forgot to add: lawyers always prefer to start with their own draft. We can hypothesize a conversation between IA and AG (which never actually happened):

[IA] Hey, can we use your books? Write us a new agreement.

[AG] OK, that'll take a few months for a first draft. Then we'll negotiate.

[IA] OMG, we don't have all that time.

[AG] Okey-dokey, we'll see you in court.

[1] https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-part-o...