lenepp

A lot of people who use these machines specifically enjoy the harm they do to others.

It's kind of incredible the article doesn't mention it, but the typical city bus makes sounds at a decibel level that is harmful to the human body (anything above 85 dB is harmful).

There's a scene in Mad Men that I always like to bring up when it comes to things like this, where the Drapers are having a picnic in a bucolic park, and then they just get up and walk away, leaving their trash behind. It looks crazy and stupid to us now, because we all collectively woke up and realized that damaging the world around us makes life worse.

People are using buses less partly for the same reason that they stopped littering, and normal cars have gotten steadily quieter over the years: they're waking up to how painfully awful city buses are.

The day will come when someone will make a show about our times, and it will feature a city bus pulling up and drowning out a conversation, and all the characters in the scene, who ignore it or just start shouting over it without thinking, will look as ridiculous to future viewers, as the Drapers did to us in that scene.

Apologies for being harsh, but this kind of thing is the phrenology of our time. I know it's utterly conventional to think this way about language in some circles that present themselves as doing legitimate science, but the view that you can calculate the amount of information in human speech, except in a super-technical sense that doesn't match any of the reporting on this study or the way people are interpreting it, has to be called out for the total nonsense that it is. It doesn't bear a moment's honest reflection.

And yes, I know information theory. It's language that these folks - many of them prominent and celebrated within their utterly normalized professions, just like in the days of phrenology - are fundamentally mistaken about. What quantity of information do you think there is in the word "trump," for instance? Is it the same over time, to bring up just one feature of how this funny thing called context informs human speech?

Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations is a good place to start if anyone's interested in understanding this issue.

"it also holds onto a significant amount of kung fu tradition"

There is a huge political controversy in the kung fu world that this article doesn't address, which is the Chinese government's perceived hostility to the idea of letting its citizens train to really fight, for pretty obvious ideological reasons.

Essentially, the claim you will hear from some Chinese masters (often part of the diaspora) is that while the Communists discovered that the veneration of martial arts was too deeply engrained in the culture to eradicate, they could transform people's idea of martial arts itself into something more like dance or a gymnastic performance. They did this through the creation and control of various wushu institutions and the transformation of the Shaolin Temple into a training ground for a performance troupe (I said it's a controversial view).

In particular, according to this view, the ancient legends associated with the Shaolin temple allowed the government to create something totally new, that people would nonetheless perceive as part of an old "kung fu tradition."

There's only one really good, trustworthy book out there (that I know of) on the Shaolin temple. It's called The Shaolin Monastery, and it's by a professor of East Asian Studies named Meir Shahar. Definitely worth a read if you're interested in learning more.

I had the great privilege of interviewing Jerry late last year. He generously talked to me for nearly two hours about his life and career. Here's a link to the interview for anyone interested: https://leanpub.com/podcasts/frontmatter/gerald-m-weinberg-3...

One interesting feature of articles like this that I don't really get is that they often leave out a huge huge quality of life benefit that electric vehicles bring: reduced urban machine noise.

I'm a Leanpub cofounder and just wanted to mention here that self-publishing a book while you're writing it is not necessarily incompatible with eventually going with a conventional publisher (though if you have a publisher in mind, you might want to ask them first if this would be acceptable to them). Publishing your book while you write it can help with motivation and the feedback you get from early adopter readers can be really valuable and make the book better in the end.

What a great piece. The point about how the big publishers have more control over printed books gets to the heart of the matter.

Imagine if you were blocked from reading an ebook because you crossed a border. Regional/national licensing of content is a rent-seeking anachronism. It's really sad to see Netflix cave on this.

Incidentally, this is more or less contrary to what's happened with VAT in the EU, where if you buy digital content online, your are charged VAT for your home country if that's where your credit card is from and you choose it as your residing country in a purchase form - even if you are in another country when you make the purchase.

In Europe, as I understand it, Netflix is going to be forced to make sure your home country content goes with you, even when you leave the country (http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35051054). I'm not sure if this means you will also be excluded from seeing content available in the country you've travelled to, if it's not available in your home country, but essentially it means you're sort of carrying around your nationality when you are accessing content online, just like you can now carry around your country's sales tax. It's the worst of all worlds. Imagine if e.g. companies allowed the Chinese government's restrictions to content to be imposed on its citizens outside china too. Yes, the EU looks like it's trying to get rid of some of the weird barriers to portability of content, but there's a chance this could go in the wrong direction.

In any case, the whole system is artificial, profoundly inefficient and unethical in a number of ways.

I totally agree. Actually it would probably be better if small companies, especially small startups, would think about this activity as "Attention" rather than "PR" or "Marketing". What you want when you're a small startup is the right kind of attention from the right people at the right time.

"I'm not sure how you would have a beta version of a fiction book. That would be like selling jumbled ideas."

I know what you mean, though I'd like to point out that there is a serious and successful historical precedent for the publication of unfinished fiction: serial publishing (the way big novels used to be published, cf. Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Dickens, et al). Novelists would publish chapter-by-chapter, before finishing the whole thing, and would even change their plans for their novels in response to feedback from the public.

Now, of course for novels published serially, people do expect that at least each published chapter is finished when it is published, and is not a draft subject to change. However, as a former academic type, I find reading early drafts to be fascinating and meaningful; watching the jumble untangle is an exciting process. I've spent a lot of time reading early drafts of poems, and comparing how different versions of the same work are published by the author over time.

(btw I work at Leanpub)