63 karma · joined May 7, 2020
current affairs, parenting, equity markets, cycling, chomsky, justice & equality, cricket, video games, house music, depression, worcestshire, vodka,
probably socialist. friendly at first. please say hi.
There are fundamentally 2 types of content, although the line is getting blurred : The hobbyist blog, and the publishers magazine.
The first exists for joy, the second only exists to deliver adverts.
THe blurring occurs because some of the blogs became such hot property the founders sold up.
I think there are 2 things at play; the first is a gradual wearing of our attention span in a world where we can scroll through the whole worlds news and everyone's opinion on it, in the time it takes to defecate. A continuous flow of intellectual snacks - some healthy, some junk - is habit forming. Without judgement whether it's a good or a bad thing, it's certainly a thing.
The second (which I think is exacerbated by the first) is plain old cognitive friction : it requires more brain energy to invest in book. A full page of small font text, vocabulary stretching language, vivid images created by words, high concept theories, different plot elements to assemble; all of these represent a much high load on the cranial CPU - and that's not to say we can't do it, but that we are subconsciously reluctant to make the effort.
In the same way that if your loaded gym bag is waiting at the end of the bed, you're much more likely to get to the gym than if you have to hunt through the laundry, search for your membership card, find your car keys etc etc.
I think this is covered by Dan Kahneman in Thinking Fast & Slow, but i could be mistaken.
Anyway, it's a thing.
The Guardian has a compulsion to feed the pearl clutching middle class centre left with stories of exotic oppression.
Sadly, the story here is one of a Billionaire appropriating an even more unequal - and dangerous - portion of the world's resources.
The slaughter of Native American people and the reparations due to them is a vital but nevertheless separate cause.
i dont mind the taste, but the the smell is pungent and it always repeats on me something awful.
They all seemed to me to beat the Sony equivalents, in execution if not in innovation.
> It looks like a lottery nobody wants to play.
I would suggest you tell the people you are referring to here to stay in bed. And if they must get out of bed, at least never go downstairs.
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-o...
People overwhelmingly don't the consider the probability of mortality in their daily lives, so why are they considering it now ?
> leaves no room for honest positive and meaningful work, and at risk of pointing out the obvious, there's a lot of meaningful work to be done.
There's plenty of meaningful work to be done, but most of it doesn't generate profit, so it doesn't get done. That which does get done, often pays poverty wages. Raising good citizens, caring for the elderly, educating our children, producing high quality nutritious food, cleaning our streets of litter - all meaningful and vital, all pay buttons. Many more jobs pay so little, we dont even bother doing in the West anymore and give those jobs to other countries.
> Where does that leave people like doctors who earnestly help their patients?
What percentage of the workers Doctors ? Bonus : why isn't everyone a doctor ?
> Adopting this philosophy is dooming oneself to a neverending feeling of being exploited and the argument that this is what is actually happening in totality is all philosophical opinion so why would I adopt a philosophy that is so personally ruinous, demoralizing, and demotivating?
Pretending you are happy and contributing to society while you are required to piss in a bottle is to concede all human dignity. To pretend that giving up 70 hours a week crunching numbers so a Corporation pays less tax that is to sell your soul and work to the detriment of society. To think anything else, means it's already too late for you.
tldr : meaningful jobs exist, but are rare as rocking horse shit and great swathes of us never get to experience meaningful jobs, because our culture needs obedient workers to make profits ahead of anything else.
He tells a decent story, and you feel like you've learn something after reading him. Scratch below the surface, and it turns out you haven't.
as such, it would be good to pause and contemplate why our governments and media suddenly have a hard on for the well being of an obscure minority, previously unknown, unheard of and indeed unmentioned anywhere in the last several decades.
if you can consider these thing and reach the conclusion that the modern concerns over cotton & uyghurs is sincere, then more power to you. sadly i have much less faith in the earnest benevolence of our governments.
In this article, which frankly is argued less well than an average Reddit comment, the unattributed author suggests only free markets and science can save us and so we should give up on government and the arts.
yawn.
No mention of course, of the public money involved in vaccine development, the publicly funded logistical expertise and good will involved in administering the vaccine, nor (of course) the neo-liberal Capitalist policies that prevented effective restrictions being enacted, thereby prolonging and increasing the severity of this awful pandemic.
What Epic hope to do, is win commercial support and build pressure on apple to lower their fees. Might work too.
"this could ten bag!" someone cries..... and suddenly you've got people not taking profit at 2x 3x 4x 5x and so on, because they're anchored to 10x.
this is what a planted question looks like :-)
Whether his first asking price is £2.00 £12.00 the market will quickly decide the level. If potato's are the hype root vegetable, many buyers will appear, but if carrots are in fashion, the price of potato's must fall until in order to attract buyers
i meet with the farmers. they're offering 10 potatos for £1. My order s at £1 gets filled. Theyh wont sell me any more, because more people have arrived who bid £1. Still More buyers arrive, armed with orders from people prepared to bid £1.10. Those buyers get their orders filled until yet people arrive and start bidding £1.20. potatos are in demand. those orders get filled and £1.20 is the new price.
Later, all the people offering £1.20 have gone home...there's only me left. THe farmers have some potatos left, but no buyers at £1.20 and no buyers at £1, so they lower the price further . I get my 90p order filled. noone else arrives, so farmers lower the price again, and they aceept my 80p offer..
i dont know if that makes any sense ?
its gets a litte more complicated, in that the owner of the market where the deals are done, must commit to filling everyone's orders - so they have some juggling to do . they take a small margin in between the bid price and the offer price, in return.
On the other hand, the more money you have to hide the more you benefit and since wealth is already grossly concentrated toward 0.1% of the worlds people, those without wealth have more to lose than to gain if that wealth is able to vanish from view even more easily than it alrady can.
This is such an important point !
History has many examples of how fatal and disabling diseases were conquered by medicine, giving billions of people healthy lives. Each of these victories is celebrated as human mastery of science, and dominion over its environment.
Fast forward to now, and there is a small but growing rejection of this idea, and instead the concept of individual liberty has become sacrosanct, to a point where it appears to be valued more than public health.
I dont think this is really the case.
I prefer to think that people have become accustomed to living comfortable long lives in excellent health and that people have forgotten how far we've come, and how we got here.
I haven't done empirical research, but most of the sentiment for freedom of choice seems to come from highly developed areas of the world, where people have lived with the expectation of good health and without fear of epidemics, for 2 or maybe 3 generations.
I have yet to read of any such sentiment in developing nations of Africa, Central America, and eastern Europe where they perhaps remain more aware of the dangers of disease spreading in a community.
Except these things began as hobbies before business became involved at all.
It’s a message board for book lovers ffs, pre web people used to build things themselves, at their own expense, just for fun.
At early ages, up to 12 ish, those with older siblings in the sport are a year or two ahead of those that don’t.
At 13 and up it starts to even out, as individual commitment and physical gifts play more of a role.
In the past, this has meant the wrong people are placed on the development programs and a lot of talent being lost, but it’s changing now.
It’s all about retention until well into teenage years
It's a simple model: if you are a VC and you spot an idea, preferrably with an edgy and marketable founder, you throw money at it until you've got 50 million sticky users. Doesn't matter too much what it costs. Lets says its 200 mil.
You then find a unicorn to buy it for 500 mil, either to take you out of the space (if it's a threat) or just to buy your userbase and the sweet sweet data you have on them.
If you can't find a buyer, you hype the shit out of it and place an IPO, becuase retail investors will buy anything.
You can't lose.
My understanding of neuroplasticity leads me to think it could be unlearned, but would take extensive active practice.
Day to day, the best we can do perhaps, is to remain aware of how trivially easy it is to make poor judgement, and more troublingly, be deliberately primed to make poor judgements.
They are frequently newspaper columnists, authors, and TV pundits who benefit directly or indirectly from have a large number of followers (whether they following in agreement or follow out of outrage, it matters not).
Sadly this is true of the left as well as the right; they are all selling something.
These Professionals need large mainstream audiences, which is why they love twitter and twitter loves them, but they are a different animal to the tribalists who want to satisfy their need to mix with like minded people.
Until the fringe sites enable the former as well as the latter it's not immediately obvious how they remain viable.