TheGRS

Additionally all those emergency vehicles are going to have an easier time shuttling patients to hospitals and firefighters to fires. The whole spectrum benefits from that, not just the rich.

For some of us that's a plus!

I read enough to trust that the writer dug very very deep on this. I was thinking early on "oh yea, probably just an error of the script getting to production and then a producer making a call as they switched locations", indeed it was something like that, but the writer here got down to the exact timeline of events, rewrites and script reads involved, etc. Even for someone like myself who is obsessed with BOTH birds and filmmaking, this is getting a little too deep, but I appreciate the effort!

I think that loyalty counts when the decision-makers are more localized. People who show up and demonstrate that they care will generally get the bonuses from their direct managers or higher up managers who recognize the effort (because it happened to cross their path somehow). But these monetary decisions are more and more just calculations on a spreadsheet - here's your 3% annual pay increase and we can allocate 10% of the workforce gets a larger raise to ensure 80% retention. When the layoffs come it has nothing to do loyalty and often has little to do with competence in the role. Hopefully the guy with the spreadsheet is considering whether they can continue to run the business with certain individuals or not, but I don't think it ever gets that granular. This is the MBA era of business.

Right, but society changes around this stuff pretty substantially. A lot of the discourse gets spent debating whether we like the changes or not, and the solutions to the new problems are usually very pie-in-the-sky or completely unachievable. Like we can't really put the social media genie back in the bottle, its here and society has reshaped around it. But banning phones from schools is pretty tangible and I'd probably argue its for the betterment of students.

Yea, well I would consider it that in the sense that it seems like a mix of his personal interests, history, and promotion of stuff he cares about (his biography and foundation and various projects he's on). Its a unique site because he has the cash to hire people who put a great UX experience on top of it all. I think that's the main difference.

Not that he's unique in this, but I do really appreciate his book lists. I usually grab a few books during the year based on his recommendations.

> In the end, I got enough of the cyber ick, I decided to seek a simpler, less internet-connected solution to my temperature-controlled bed needs.

Great line. And my eyes bugged out a little at this part as I also realized what the implications were:

> - They can know when you sleep

> - They can detect when there are 2 people sleeping in the bed instead of 1

> - They can know when it’s night, and no people are in the bed

I have a more pragmatic question. Do any consumer publications do security reviews for products? I'm thinking like consumer reports and how they should probably publish if a product is a security nightmare or not. At the end of the day you still need people publish this stuff out and for social media to spread to consumers to beware, but maybe a magazine type of publication could take on part of that responsibility.

That's a nice throwback. Totally different subject matter but Matt Levine of Money Stuff on Bloomberg also continues to do that.

Doesn't work in what sense though?

What would lead me to assume that at this point?

I'm honestly just hoping "security by obscurity" is helping things for the moment. There's no way a 20 year old is figuring out the data structures of an entire department and getting all the data in a single day.

Yea so far DOGE doesn't seem like they take any time to ask questions or research before doing anything.

Disagreed, competent businesses analyze this stuff at least a high level. Its why many of us spend so much time classifying various projects and efforts into capital expenditures. Large corps understand the value of a lawyer these days, who are highly specialized, because they can see the sort of returns it gets them. But at the end of the day they need to see why any effort is either earning them more money or costing them less money.

Neat dive on this topic, and I appreciate calling out Timberborn! I'm obsessed with that game currently, big big big recommendation if you haven't checked it out yet. The water physics are like another character in the game and figuring out how to dam up a bunch of water to use in your engines and to water your fields is an essential part of the gameplay loop.

Yep, I should have expected it honestly. This is a pretty great opening for an aspiring Democratic leader right now, there are no sacred topics for political clout anymore.

Yea I had the same thought, its a ticky-tacky thing to say right now, but I wouldn't expect any more from the other side either.

Yes, well the narrative that rocked the stock market is different. Its looking at what DeepSeek did and assuming they may have competitive advantage in this space and could outperform OpenAI at their own game.

If the narrative is actually that DeepSeek can only reach whatever heights OpenAI has already gotten to with some new tricks, then markets will probably refocus on OpenAI's innovations and price things accordingly, even if the initial cost is huge. It also means OpenAI probably needs a better moat to protect its interests.

I'm not sure where the reality is exactly, but market reactions so far have basically followed that initial narrative and now the rebuttal.

The shift to luck part of it could be expanded on more I think, its emblematic of many believing they are hot shit at their new job or hobby. You have the right idea: the product matters and the market and shift underneath the best salespeople. But salespeople like this are also like chameleons who don't really care about the product in the first place, they go on to hock something else that's hot.

It also reminds me of every would-be day trader that posts to /r/wallstreetbets. Many will hit a hot streak after they figure out how the options market works, they start getting fancy and making bigger bets and dreaming about quitting their day job. Suddenly the luck runs out and their accounts hit zero. They thought they had the talent and wisdom to conquer the market, but they were just lucky at the casino for a little while.

Great article, which reminded me of my brief flirting time with sales while I was in college and working retail jobs. Anyone who has worked retail probably knows there are the same level of sales involved, though its pretty low stakes. I'd sell extended warranties on laptops and other equipment at CompUSA. My manager on a few instances refused to let a laptop out the door without talking to the customer 3-4 different times, and sometimes they even relented. One time a large man began getting very angry with me for not selling him the laptop and looked like he was about to punch me in the face. Even though I was sometimes decent at it, I really hated how slimy it was for very measly commissions. I could see the appeal to some people, but I never wanted that to be my life. It was constantly stressful and demoralizing and at the end of the day you're just trying to extract more money from folks by whatever means necessary.

For folks praising their own SaaS salespeople or whatever, that's not really the type of person we're talking about here. And I daresay you probably just don't see that side of them because they know to hide it from non-sales folks.

I'd agree personally. My secret is that I've always considered myself incompetent, but I also have a growth mindset to improve, and so far its worked out for me. But I do meet people often who have a static mindset even in very skilled fields. Some air of "I did all my learning already, now its time to work, I deserve this position because I already did all that learning."

There's a sort of horror to this concept: you realize that everyone, including yourself, is doomed to incompetence. That every successful business you know of is run at a profit in spite of incompetence. Even more horrifying: Most experiences I've had in my professional career validates this premise. I can think of many projects I was a part of that seemed misguided at best, yet the company continued to succeed by momentum and great decisions that were made in the past (and sometimes decisions that were not even very consciously done).

When the stars align and things are successful, its time to celebrate, but maybe don't assume it'll always happen that way. Why this concept is also comforting is that you can kind of relax a bit on some level. I mean do your job of course and make sure things are running, but maybe this new initiative from the CEO isn't quite as important to the success of your company as they may make you believe.

I'm assuming you posted this because of the drone sightings right?

Kitsch feels easier to understand as just guilty indulgence. Some people do look at the calendar at the mall featuring cute babies playing jazz instruments and want to buy it for what it is: a series of cute images to delight you and your desk mates. I would personally buy it ironically, but still get a lot of enjoyment out of its genuine attempt. It would definitely make me smile by making me laugh inside every time I see it. FWIW I think both views validate the concept of kitsch.

Not covered in this article strangely, but kitsch is the most powerful when its genuine. I see the calendar of cats doing yoga poses and it only brings me fleeting joy, its trying to be kitsch, and it doesn't feel like the "artist" really put the effort in. When they do I can feel it, and for some reason I'm weirdly inspired by it (probably because if I really tried, I'd put out something like that).

I know movie examples way better than attempts at painting or sculpture. I watch bad movies weekly and its one of my favorite indulgences. When we watch a Neil Breen movie I can feel the genuine attempt to make a movie that says something...and failing spectacularly at it. When I watch Sharknado I see a pretty cheap attempt at a gag that might delight me for a bit, but feels empty in its attempt to make real entertainment. Ed Wood movies have that sort of charm, they score F's in every department from acting to sound editing, but you can feel the energy of the cast and crew as they try to make something special and fail. Hallmark Christmas movies are probably the best analogous thing to the sort of kitsch we think of when we use the word, they're ostensibly pro-Christmas spirit with a middling cast and plot line, but usually there's an element of genuine attempt to make something your 50-year old aunt would enjoy while she sips on egg nog. Personally, I love that shit.

This is an interesting read, I kind of feel like the author is capturing something interesting about what Mickey D's has become in the last decade or two, but also laying it on a little too thick with the "what does it all mean for America". They're a franchise and huge corporation that keeps a lot of storefronts clean and open, employs a lot of people in thankless low-paying jobs, and puts out pretty middling food that I swear was so much better back in the 90s.

I'll share a quick personal story of my relationship with the restaurant. About 15 years ago I was struggling to find any jobs after college, my bank account was bone dry, and I felt fat from my habit of eating too much fast food. I went to a McDonald's and got some 20-piece chicken mcnugget special (I think it was less than $5). I ate one piece and suddenly felt overwhelmed at all these thoughts and threw the rest of it out. I felt like I was at the bottom. I didn't eat at a McDonald's or any other fast food for another 5 years, lost a bunch of weight and got my career moving. On the rare occasion I go there anymore (usually because someone else wants to go), I feel like I'm eating bland nothing food and some deeper part of me feels sick.

Its true that anise is pretty unpopular. I grew up loving black licorice so its always been a nice treat to me, but the vast majority of people I know hate that taste and are pretty adamant about it.

It just takes time and patience to get the sort of political capital that you need to make change. You wait for disasters to happen because of incompetence and then you pounce. There's also a finesse to it though, half of the battle is convincing the right people that they had these ideas in the first place. I also employ the "whisper campaign" often. Just seeding ideas in various conversations lightly, once people start to say them in conversations without you prompting it you know your job is done.

I remember when absinthe became legal to purchase in the US again and it seemed like it might become a cool drink to get drunk and maybe a little high from. I feel like it mostly got passed over though. The high from it seems like it was over-reported; I mean alternative ways to get high and drunk are pretty common these days, I don't think absinthe could really ever compete with edibles or whatever. The taste is fairly specific and I've only had a handful of cocktails that feature it well, gin/vodka/rum/whiskey are just better bases. In fact most cocktails I've seen it in usually have something else featured with absinthe meant to spruce up the taste and color a bit.

Are we really giving Twitter that much credit these days? I feel like we gave it less credit when it was actually popular. I would give Elon jumping around on stage more credit than what Twitter/X did for this election.

Simplifying the system should be the goal for lawmakers IMO. But that would never really get much traction. Getting care to people who need it has an obvious priority, so we layer more and more complexity over the current system.

I've seen attempts to explain the system, but I've never seen them well-articulated. And I think the complexity is a major part of the problem where many are taken advantage of. Do insurance companies not share at least some of the blame in the system?