Dawg, I feel you. I feel you bone deep.

But I was politically conscious for Mondale

Dukakis

Gore

And Kerry

And once we get through the circular firing squad we get to do it all over again

Which, again, comes down to capitalism. When your rule of law belongs to the highest bidder, you end up Republican Lite at best.

Democrats are not doing anything because they’re captured. They take money from the same business interests and banks that the Republicans do.

I think I would temper this by arguing there's no real alternative. The 2024 elections cost $16b. Bill Gates gave $100m, Elon Musk gave $150m. Kamala Harris got 74m votes; in order to counterbalance Elon Fucking Musk every Harris voter would have needed to chip in $2. In order to counterbalance Musk & Gates, they needed to chip in 68 cents.

But now we're talking campaign finance reform and we're both already asleep with boredom.

This is an interesting discussion. I've had an abiding hatred for Kurtzman & Orci for more than a decade but I actually kinda like the direction they dragged Star Trek. A buddy of mine storyboarded the first couple movies; it was abundantly clear that they were doing something completely new while also doing what they could to preserve enough canon to keep the nerds on board.

There's a tricky balance to strike there. On the one hand, Roddenberry & Co populated a pretty interesting universe that has lots of things to explore. On the other hand, it's been tromped through incautiously over the ages so you don't have enough internal consistency to explore it without tripping all over yourself unless you exercise some skill.

Star Trek has traditionally followed a nautical metaphor, which is interesting because Gene Roddenberry was a pilot. Star Wars splits the difference between aerial & nautical with fighters whizzing around everywhere (and bombers... smdh) but Star Trek, for whatever reason, rarely ventures beyond "runabout." That gives you a basic "ocean-going vibe" that, whenever Trek fucks with it, turns to shit. At the same time, one of Roddenberry's maxims was anything that happened during an episode had to be resolved by the end of the episode, returning the show to ground state and enabling the episodes to be watched in any order. Kurtzman's direction has been definitely not that which started out interesting but collapsed under its own weight after a couple seasons. There are only so many places to go if you stick with the nautical metaphor and without the nautical metaphor is it really Star Trek?

Get some young hungry directors, producers, and writers passionate about really great science fiction TV, and tell them to pitch me the next Trek as if nobody had ever heard of Star Trek, Starfleet, the Enterprise, or Kirk.

There was definitely an attempt at this. Kurzman and Orci were the it-girls of sci fi when JJ Abrams lens-flared the shit out of Star Trek in 2009. They blew up Vulcan and tied off the entire prior universe behind a time paradox just to shut up the convention-goers. But they also ignored Ron Moore & Naren Shankar, both of whom grew up on TNG and both of whom have done some stellar shit. Gene Roddenberry was a notorious pain in the ass to work with; I have no way of knowing this but I'll bet Eugene is definitely preserving enough canon that the Roddenberrys keep control of the show.

Set an entire series in the Ferengar. A series featuring the Marquis.

It's worth pointing out that Deep Space Nine was originally envisioned as a vehicle for Ro Laren, newly-promoted Maquis double agent, to operate as a bordertown sheriff out past the easy enforcement of Star Fleet. Unfortunately Gene Roddenberry couldn't keep his dick in his pants and Michelle Forbes noped the fuck out of working in the Star Trek universe until both Gene and his wife were safely dead so we got Hawk from Spencer For Hire instead.

Maybe and entirely Mirror Universe series set in a fascist Federation.

Fuckin' they did an entire goddamn season of this on Discovery and it was super-tedious.

Even the Klingon Empire could be somewhat interesting.

I definitely got the sense that there was a Klingon gambit in the first season of Discovery. Unfortunately the new Klingons were tedious, uninteresting shithead analogs for Islam, rather than the promising culture developed by Ron Moore and explored through a few movies.

But come up with a concept that isn’t “hey, look, we got the TNG crew out of retirement, please clap”

Star Trek is home to what, 5? 6? different concepts and I agree, what started out promising with Picard rapidly became Return to Gilligan's Island. Discovery is definitely an exploration of 'return to zero' writing. Prodigy was a new direction no matter how you slice it. Lower Decks has been almost entirely bereft of vintage characters.

or “Hey, we heard you guys like Harry Potter, but have you seen Star Trek: in school”.

The Starfleet Academy idea became Lower Decks, which knew exactly when it should quit. Clearly the team still loves that Starfleet Academy idea which, if it's done right, might be closer to Riverdale than Harry Potter. I'll withhold judgment as I have done since it first reared its head in 2009. I get the sense that they really want to make that one work which is why they keep shelving it whenever it gets dicey.

In short, start trying to figure out the interesting settings in your universe for great science fiction series, then make episodes that fully explore the concept and the settings.

Again, I feel like they're definitely trying to do this while also servicing the "we herd you leik Spock" contingent. Keep in mind that the median television viewer is sixty fucking five years old.

I had Reddit sockpuppets in the names of every major character in The Dying Earth. In my opinion, Jack Vance and American fantasy are the Bauhaus if Itten didn't leave. Don't get trapped into thinking there's a lot of it; the original Dying Earth is an anthology of short stories written prior to 1950, and then there are two legit Sagas written in the '80s. They're okay but not relevant.

I was entertained, but ended up confused by both detractors and praises.

I think the more an egghead likes a book, the more they make it "important." I've never wanted to bother with Salman Rushdie; prior to his fatwah nobody really gave a shit so all of a sudden his work had to take on enough meaning to support an East V West clash of ideals. What was that shit newspaper in France? Charlie Hebdo? Ain't nobody said anything nice about Charlie Hebdo until AQAP started shooting cartoonists.

My go-to is Margaret Atwood. She's a shitty author (shut up, she is). She's self-important. She's, by all accounts, a dreadful person. But because she writes pulp sci fi along the lines of "fear the Republicans" the eggheads support her in her assertion that she doesn't write sci fi, sci fi is grubby and she's important. Lather, rinse, repeat for David Foster Wallace. Meanwhile, Stephen King was out getting rich in the literary wilderness for 40 years, bane of English teachers everywhere, until he started dissing Trump on Twitter. All of a sudden his shit's literature.

No comment on Dean Brown; that thing practically fizzled out by the time I was in 4th grade.

He's a terrible writer and you don't need to read him ever. All you need is the following:

1) Anthony Burgess' review of Holy Blood, Holy Grail in 1980 was "someone should make this into a novel"

2) Dan Brown did exactly that

3) The authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail sued him for plagiarism

4) Dan Brown argued "holupaminnit, you said yours was non-fiction" and the authors came back with "well... but nobody really believed that, did they"

5) Things went as well as expected

Holy Blood, Holy Grail? A breathless pseudoacademic conspiracy theory. Da Vinci Code? An Encyclopedia Brown mystery. If you ever come across a copy, voice Robert Langdon as Bullwinkle the Moose and Sophie Neveu (yes, really) as Rocky the Squirrel.

I think LotR was the first to have elves and hobbits and dwarves and orcs in the way that's instantly recognizable.

And I would argue that counts for less than you think. One of the things I like about modern fantasy is the trope that Elves are assholes. Tolkien was basically at "look how cool this lost race of ubermensch are" while modern fantasy is basically "elves love the smell of their own farts."

I agree that its a cozy story, and 1000% caste system, though imo LotR is a lot more thoughtful and I'd argue that the whole 'magic is fading and evil will eventually win but we'll fight while we can' tone makes it not all twee feel-good fluff.

On the one hand, it's a bunch of children's books. On the other hand, it very clearly reflects Tolkien's understanding and trauma of The Great War. I think it's the duality that bugs me; by trying to be both it does neither well.

The thing about American fantasy of the era is the good guys and the bad guys were human. You couldn't hide your actions behind ethnic tension. America fought a war over slavery; the British didn't think it was worth fighting a war over genocide until it was on their doorstep.

That enthusiasm basically halved every season after 2. By the time it was "wannabe vulcan chick in the far future for some dumb reason" I was pretty well over it.

Strange New Worlds will occasionally throw up a "...you know that's actually really cool" episode in among the "ZOMFG who told you people wanted to see Klingons rap" episodes.

I do think it's telling that critical acclaim for Trek parodies tends to vastly outstrip core Trek shows.

GEB waxes poetics about recursion for pretty much its entire body, comparing recursive changes of a structure to fugue and drawing parallels. I have no doubt that, just as SICP, it was mind-blowing at its time. But today? I learned about this shit in high school CS and middle school music classes, respectively. Putting it together is perhaps non-trivial, sure, but with the benefit of GEB doing a lot of the work, people who came after can do it all in a matter of 3 hour lecture.

"Cognition emerges from hidden neurological mechanisms" being the author's summaries of not only GEB (1979) but also Dawkin's The Selfish Gene (1976), I am fully ready to argue that GEB was an intellectual's retreat from Reagan. American culture was big on trite wordplay back then. It was largely insufferable.

Now I'm curious - what "modern takes" have you read?

I'm of the opinion that LoTR fucked up fantasy the same way Star Wars fucked up sci fi, but there are a few bright lights.

Still, it's good, but probably suffers from the same problem GEB does: because it's the first one to do its thing, it means a lot of the stuff it inspired have a better flow even if they only tackle one of its themes/aspects.

There's this idea that LoTR was "first" that has no basis in truth. Tolkien no doubt grew up reading Dunsany. Jon Bauer was a celebrity decades before Tolkien sat down to write The Hobbit. While Tolkien was writing it, Robert Howard pumped out 21 stories of Conan the Cimmerian (and died). The magic system in Dungeons and Dragons isn't taken from LoTR, it's taken from (international bestseller) The Dying Earth, which was published four years before Fellowship of the Ring.

The problem with everything else, though, is it's all dangerous. People die. Blood is shed. Endings aren't always happy. A place without civilization is a tricky place to live and wizards tend to fuck up your shit.

Lord of the Rings persists because it makes everything cozy. Frodo is Pooh. Sam is Eeyore. Aragorn is Christopher Robin. My wife loves it? She had a pair of Pound Puppies named Frodo and Bilbo. Me? I'd read Dying Earth, a few Conans and the whole of Vardeman's Cenotaph Road series before taking on The Hobbit in 4th grade which is probably why I've never been able to see LoTR as anything but trite bullshit. It's the era's Harry Potter - "let's make everything cute and British but also inescapably about the English caste system."

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. Sherlock Holmes in SPAA... I mean, medieval HRE.

I think it's fair to say that the enthusiasm behind Bernie Sanders was because of the idea that he'd 'fucking do something.' I think people over 30 were jaded about that because the dude has been in government his whole fucking life and has yet to fucking do something.

It's been interesting to watch AOC turn from firebrand to wallflower. Maybe she's biding her time. Maybe she's been subsumed by the system. It's also abundantly clear that the politicians we see the most are the ones who aren't doing their fucking jobs - MTG, Gaetz, etc. IF: you get into government because you want to 'fucking do something' BUT: nothing can actually be done THEN: (gestures vaguely everywhere)

Jimmy Carter was a populist. Then he got to government and nothing happened. Schwartzenegger was a populist. Then he got to government and nothing happened. FDR came into power by basically taking the wind out of Huey Long's sails; by adopting 70% of the crazy socialist policies Long wanted and dragging them into the mainstream, FDR got four frickin' terms out of it. But that was what, 80 years ago?

The green new deal was a layup. Fuckin' legalized marijuana was a layup. Student loan forgiveness was a layup. Price controls on groceries could have been a goddamn executive order.

And yet.

I've read two of Harari's books. Sapiens is worth a read; it really pisses off liberals for some reason though so gird your loins. I think it's important to note, however, that Harari's academic expertise is on an era without printing presses. His hot takes on artificial intelligence have no more credibility than yours or mine.

The term of art is active measures and there are experts to be consulted. From my armchair, the masterful ploy was shrimp jesus and his ilk - a lengthy and unexplained appearance of fanciful, nonsensical but vaguely plausible images, memes and conversations on Facebook and elsewhere that largely furrowed the brows of Americans everywhere. If I were the CIA? I couldn't do better than Shrimp Jesus to inoculate Americans against disinformatsiya.

Because, you see, it's not about the forgeries. It's about the credibility. The history of mass communications is a history of diminished credibility; the establishment has always faced challenges by upstart channels assuming their mantle of production through innovation and using that credibility to advance its own agenda. Behold, the world's first shoop:

The worry seems to be "how will the hoi polloi know who to trust" without the obvious answer "they'll trust less." This isn't new; we call it 'the Spanish Flu' because the government didn't want people to know it started in Kansas for purposes of morale. It wasn't new then, either; one of the main purposes of yellow journalism was the protection of Tammany Hall. I've heard it argued that the South wouldn't have gone to war if it weren't for plantation control of the press; this theory tends to disregard the plantation control of literally everything for purposes of convenient points-making.

Outfoxed was 20 years ago. By then of course we'd been told by the New York Times about Hussein's "aluminum tubes" and Robert Novak had outted Valerie Plame so really, it was dog-whistle outrage for the Air America Crew. The Bush administration didn't need AI to walk us into war, they had credibility and popular support. If there's one thing AI lacks, it's credibility. If there's another, it's popular support. Would Loose Change have gotten better penetration if it had AI imagery? Would QAnon?

There's this idea that Americans voted Trump because they didn't understand his policies or some shit. And as a contributor to Harris' billion dollar information campaign, that's bullshit. Trump didn't even try for credibility. Neither did any of his surrogates. "they're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats" does not require AI, it just requires belief. Even then it doesn't really fucking matter. Henry Ford wasn't stupid, but he published the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is every bit as batshit as QAnon. Not because he believed it? But because he hated jews. Everyone who voted for Trump chose their flavor of information, same as it ever was. In my dotage, I've come to notice the patronizing nature of liberals towards conservatives when it comes to disinformation - "they'll choose wrong." Yeah, they fuckin' well will. But they'll choose. And you can be disappointed in that? But clearly, you can't expect a surfeit of information to change the choice.

kinda embarrassed that I linked the GPHG twice tbh

I'll say this: "the butterfly" is archetypal Van Cleef & Arpels, whom I dearly love for a number of reasons:

- They started out as a husband-wife team

- They have a history of doing some seriously bonkers shit that's also really cool

- They have done some real innovation in the past and keep leaning into it

- They have created a line of iconic jewelry for nouveau riche and old money alike that they can fabricate for not a whole lot

- They brought back automata for the sole purpose of draining the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund. I called 'em up once and said "so are these things like on tour or something because I would like to see them" and they came back with "so sorry, sir, but they were all sold before we created them" which means MBS has some cool shit on his boat

I only mention this because during Zoom they started doing classes on gem and jewelry history? And they're free and their enthusiasm is infectious.

You are now aware that all that old jewelry that's got white, gold and purple on it? It's a symbol in support of suffrage same as the rainbow flag was gay rights.

And the winners are

Personally I am also pondering if I should re-adjust my belief that people vote for what's best for their country, instead of what feels best for themselves.

Prior to COVID I believed that people will generally do the right thing. After COVID I believe that people will generally do what they see everyone else doing. With liberals that generally means pulling behind a strong leader that has the requisite number of purity points and guttersniping around a weak leader who can't be everything to everyone. With conservatives that generally means following whoever is in charge, regardless of their charge towards the future or off a cliff like lemmings.

One of the few bright spots of demagoguery is it isn't transferable. If you want your party to survive the demagogue you need to find another demagogue with more charisma than the last. I have an inkling I'll be spending some time on Berlusconi just to investigate some personal blind spots.

I think part of the problem with screaming about fascism is that most people are actually fine with fascism. Discussions about government and its failings follow a very predictable path that is wholly dependent on the civic engagement of my conversational partner: the less engaged they are, the more they want "the president" to cut through the red tape and do what they want. We don't lionize bureaucrats, we lionize leaders.

Tony Judt drew a very different lesson from WWII and the post-war period than Arendt or anyone else: everyone was cool with genocide. Not a single home was returned to a Jew. Nobody tried to make surviving concentration camps welcome. The post-war economic expansion in Europe wasn't driven by dynamism, it was driven by the repossession of the 20% of European economic holdings held by a murdered ethnic sect.

I've voted in every presidential election since Bush V. Clinton and I disagree with your assessment. "A danger to democracy" wasn't on the table until 2020. At the same time, most of those elections were still governed by the Voter Rights Act and most of the candidates were credible legislators - the Left lost their fucking minds over the idea of an actor becoming president but he'd also done two credible terms as governor of California. That said? I (barely) remember discussions around gas rationing in 1979, when inflation was 11%. Reagan won that election 44m-35m, 489-49.

I interviewed Beborn Beton Monday. Contrary to what everyone thinks, this song was inspired by The Cure, and is about the MeToo Movement.

The Swedish title is better (Men Who Hate Women). I read the Millennium Trilogy 1 1/2 times because it's super-duper engaging and really fun but my recommendation is don't overthink it because the careening, Scooby-Doo nature of the writing hides some flaws.

They were really fun. Oddly enough they were a recommendation of the BlueSky Book Club, back in that 2-month period where BlueSky wasn't so apocolyptically leftist that I couldn't stand it anymore.

It's funny - I'm reading Walter Jon Wililams' The Praxis right now and there's a huge difference between "space opera written by a dude in his 60s" and "space opera written by a lady in her 20s." What's really funny is they both live in and around Santa Fe, NM so both of them have absolutely no problem with bleakness and poverty? But with Arkady Martine, the problem is violence. With WJW, the solution is violence.

I contain multitudes

The way this works is I look up what's freeleech and if it's at all interesting I add it. Then I'm looking for a book and I go huh. This is why I spent a good 20 minutes querying the internet with "should I read Mein Kampf" (answer: no).

The book that Infinite Game could have been is The Man Who Broke Capitalism. It's not full of platitudes, it's full of facts, anecdotes and narratives.

Of that pile, the recommendations are

- Tainted Cup

- Memory Called Empire

- Mercy of Gods

- Mountain in the Sea

- Red Plenty

- Secondhand Time

- Trading Game

- Have Spacesuit Will Travel

- Ma'am Darling but only if you give the first fuck about the British Royal Family, which I do for reasons of longitudinal perversity

Looking back at it?

I think their only hope would have been going "ohhhh shit inflation is in Carter territory" instead of "fuck yeah our inflation is lower than Germany's" and then come up with a way to bring prices down. I don't think they had a prayer of that. The Biden administration was manipulating the strategic petroleum reserve like crazy and that sorta worked but without price controls there was nothing they could have done.

Carter ate shit because Nixon killed Bretton Woods and inflation went bugshit. Volcker dealt with it by jacking the shit out of interest rates which was the objectively right thing to do but also heinously unpopular and what we got was a smarmy, fatuous oaf most famous for shilling GE, starring opposite a chimp and ratting out his friends to McCarthy. That wasn't much fun either, nostalgia be damned.

The problem is not their understanding of power, the problem is their source of power.

Politicians derive power from consensus - if the party agrees with you, you get to do what you want. Democrats/liberals require that your values align with their values, your policy positions align with their policy positions, your morals align with their morals. Democrats have a long and laborious purity test that every politician must pass whenever the polity feels like testing, and the democratic polity will test whenever anything happens. Republicans/conservatives, on the other hand, assign their values, policy positions and morals to whoever is leading the party.

This worked for the Democrats when they were the party of labor. It's fucked 'em pretty hard since becoming the party of globalist investment treaties. The Republicans are in disarray whenever they can't find a charismatic leader - it's gonna be interesting if Trump has a stroke and they become the party of JD Vance.

My life is now pretty much deal with email, work on the house until 3, pick up my kid, deal with email, take my kid to swimming, collapse in a puddle and "work on the house until 3" and "take my kid to swimming" involves a good 7 hours a day for audiobooks.

We last did this 327 days ago?

Library

- You have to be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin To Live, Paul Kix. The mechanics of MLK's march on Birmingham. Progress is a bitch, and it isn't guaranteed. Recommended.

- Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, Robert Heinlein. I decided to do some of the junior Heinleins because my life is a bummer. This one is cute. Very Golden Age. Recommended.

- The Door Into Summer, Robert Heinlein. I don't even remember this one. I think it was an archetypal "I'm Heinlein, you're stupid" Heinlein.

- Tunnel in the Sky, Robert Heinlein. Eh. Hunger Games before Hunger Games. Definite indications of Heinlein's protofascism on display.

- The Communist Manifesto, Marx & Engels. This takes 45 minutes and is still a waste of time.

- A Desolation Called Peace, Arkady Martine. This is the sequel to A Memory Called Empire which I torrented because I'm impatient. It's f'n GREAT but more on that below.

- The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt. Arendt makes much of the fact that historically, antisemitism is fairly recent. She's big on the ordinariness of it all, which tracks.

- The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt. Haidt has become insufferable. His principle schtick at this point is "if your research disproves my research it's because you're doing it wrong." His recommendations aren't all that tough, though - monitor your kid's internet and keep them off social media until they're sixteen at least. Having seen the drama erupt on chats with my f'n 11-year-old I totally get it. Parenting is a full time job and I guess some people forget that?

- The Trading Game, Gary Stevenson. This book is mostly a lie, at least according to everyone supposedly in it. It's still pretty awesome and i recommend the shit out of it. It's about a punk-ass kid who hustles hard enough to trade Swiss Francs for Citibank and then decides he's a socialist, basically. He spends half the book pickaxeing his bonus out of Citi in a glum and punk-ass way. What fucked me up pretty hard is I've made more money by buying and holding crypto than this poor asshole did hustling 90 hours a week trading gilts or whatever over the same amount of time. I probably shouldn't admit that.

- Battle Cry Freedom, James Mcpherson. I was looking for a decent reference on the Civil War that isn't Shelby Foote's paean to racism. This isn't it. Much like Mary Beard's SPQR, it's a full-throated textbook that feels no compunction whatsoever to make you want to read it.

- Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hanna Arendt. Did you know that Hanna Arendt really really regretted using the phrase "the banality of evil?" Eichmann in Jerusalem isn't about "banality" so much as it's about normalcy; her whole point was that the Holocaust didn't start with a bunch of people going "let's be evil" it was a steady slide of "I guess we're doing this" where each step further was justified by the step directly behind. She basically paints Eichmann up as the Walter Mitty of the Nazi Party, an unremarkable, boring bureaucrat whose focus was on successfully executing bureaucracy, not Jews. She points out more than a few times that Eichmann expressed stress, guilt and severe misgivings about what he was doing but he kept doing it anyway because ultimately, it was his job.

- SPQR, Mary Beard. Much like I wanted a Civil War book, this is the book on the Romans and it's boring AF. There's a breed of historian who assumes that if you're reading their shit it's because you already find it unrelentingly fascinating and I don't. I think the Romans are overblown compared to pretty much every other contemporary culture which means Team Beard has abso-fucking-lutely nothing to say to me. I think I made it 4 hours in?

- Red Plenty, Francis Spufford. This is a weird one because it's kind of a dramatization of soviet economics as told through the eyes of access characters. So it's not really true but it's based on true events? And it's worth it for the insight into another culture and another set of values, I guess?

- The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackon Bennett. This book is dope. Imagine Middle Earth except the ocean is full of monsters, magic has been replaced by genetic engineering and everyone is gay and neurodivergent. Now go follow Holmes and Watson as they solve a Whodunit. Watson is an autistic savant and Holmes is agoraphobic. And.... GO

- Secondhand Time, Svetlana Alexievich. I couldn't finish this. Not because it wasn't good but because it's terrifying. It's an oral history of the Soviet Union, in which a bunch of Muscovites celebrate totalitarianism, deprivation, mass murder and oppression because at least the rest of the world feared them. There's no introspection in it anywhere. Several anecdotes about the wall coming down and White Russians discovering holy shit we better get outta Dagestan because they'll murder us otherwise I never realized these people we oppressed and treated as third class citizens might actually resent us. "Weren't things great under Stalin?" Weren't things great under Trump? Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in Literature for this book and others. She's Belarusian, currently living in exile in Germany.

- The Olympian Affair, Jim Butcher. So Butcher wrote a book about a steampunk magical universe where everyone flies around on airships powered by magic and wind and nobody lives on the ground and also cats can talk for some reason. This book is its sequel. I won't say it makes sense but I will say it's a fun little swashbuckler, just like the last one, and that Jim Butcher can write himself a pithy cat.

- The Mercy of Gods, James S. A. Corey. Our Dynamic Duo has decided to write an apocalyptic alien invasion saga to follow up The Expanse and it's fair-to-middlin' good. It's promising.

- The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler. I think this was a NikolaiFyodorov recommendation? It's funny I've read the influences that made this book and yeah, I guess that's one way to go with it. It's kinda fun. It pretty clearly owes its existence to My Octopus Teacher, The Outlaw Ocean and Wind Up Girl.

- Masters of the Air, Donald L. Miller. This is not the snappy Apple series, which is great. This is an intensive study of the logistics and history of the European air war and I am glad to not be fighting it.

Torrents

- Sundown Towns - a Hidden Dimension of American Racism. Grim AF. A great book. Written by the same guy who wrote "what your teacher didn't tell you about American history" or whatever that book is called. I didn't finish it. My diet of grimness is grim.

- Technofeudalism - What Killed Capitalism. This is the second book by Yanis Varoufakis I've tried to read and they both suck. Economists have this nasty tendency to go "I understand economics, therefore I understand everything" when even the first half of that statement is pretty questionable. Varoufakis ended up being in charge of the Greek economy during the crisis so I guess he's got some credibility? But also he's an idiot.

- The first three Clavell books. Holy shit these are long. I made it halfway through Whirlwind a few years back and quite honestly the best part about Clavell is you can not understand a word he's saying for half an hour at a time because you're hammer-drilling into concrete and you'll change a battery and won't have missed anything. I'm cool with long books but Clavell needed an editor. These things are easily 250% too long.

- The INfinite Game, Simon Sinek. This could be a pamphlet. "If you focus on long-term goals rather than short-term goals your business will last longer." kthxbye

- The Key to Rebecca, Ken Follett. Ken Follett is a much better writer than James Clavell. But like Clavell, he's orientalist AF. These audiobooks are old enough that the narrator does that bullshit Charlie Chan accent and it's really cringe.

- Joe Haldeman, The Forever War. I read this because I needed to get the taste of Starship Troopers out of my mouth and it doesn't really hold up. I've read this book maybe four times, in four different versions, and I should have stopped at three twenty years ago.

- Starship Troopers, Robert Heinlein. This is a shit book, on every level, in every dimension, and people who like it should feel bad.

- Ma'am Darling, Craig Brown. For some reason I felt like reading 75 facts about Princess Margaret. I think I'm really into the idea of the British Monarchy as the canary in the coal mine of the British Empire and Princess Margaret is definitely that.

- Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto. This is the City of Quartz analogue for the Bay Area. It's worth a read. Republicans suck, and always have.

- Raven, Tim Reiterman. Yeah I read a 500 page book on Jim Jones. I am none the wiser.

- SM Stirling, the first book of the Emberverse, at least 4 hours of it. Total shit.

- The Age of Grievance, Frank Bruni. Frank Bruni is an asshole.

- What we Owe the Future, whatever jackass wrote it. This is the Communist Manifesto of the TESCREAL posse and it's just as bad. Longer, though.

- Your Face Belongs to Us, yadda yadda - could also have been a pamphlet. "there is a company. It is bad."

Not gonna lie. Day after the election I poured some scotch and watched a couple episodes of Land of the Lost.

The pro-Israel, vehemently anti-Trump contingent of American liberals will never make sense to me.

Al Franken, in one of his books, answered the "why Israel" question with "because it's the only democracy in the middle east and that ought to count for something." That said, it has become an increasingly illiberal democracy since Rabin was assassinated in 1995 and, if we're being honest, has been about Israel first, last and always from the drop.

Israel has great PR, though, is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world from a lobbying standpoint and has goals that have traditionally aligned with the US often enough for us to let them get away with murder. Should you question this decision they remind you of their PR and lobbying and that's it for you.

Lemme show you a li'l movie about terrorists and terrorism:

From a simplistic, uninvestigated standpoint, the Middle East is full of hook-nosed stereotypes we'll never understand, all of them hell-bent on annihilating those poor people Hitler tried to finish off. Question that narrative and find another line of work.

I'm still left to wonder why the Harris turnout was so bad - according to CNN she did worse than Biden did in every district in the country.

who is surprised to discover I have thoughts

- My paycheck is higher because I rule; grocery prices are higher because the president sucks. Psychologically, every setback has seven times the impact of every advance because we are fundamentally risk-averse. RESULT: if your wages didn't go up seven times as fast as inflation, your psychological experience is as a loss. EXAMPLE: I had lunch with a buddy once. He was mad because we spent $30 on a pair of sandwiches when it would have been maybe $18 in high school. That he made $180k a year working part time did not factor into the equation.

- What does fascism even mean. If you turned 18 on December 7 1941 and immediately enlisted to fight Tojo, you are turning 101 next month. More likely, you are dead. Trump called Kamala Harris a "communist fascist" on the reg. The Democrats can say "no but like, an actual fascist" to which the normies go "you mean like Mussolini" and you say "exactly" and they say "I heard he made the trains run on time" and you say "yeah but like Hitler" and they go "Trump's not Hitler" and let's be honest - we fucking tried that for four years last time and it didn't fucking work so why is it going to work this time.

- The purity police are fucking annoying. There's a whole lotta wypepo who are all about "advocacy" and "being an ally" and other wine-mom bullshit that any minority sees right through as white discomfort but a willingness to engage. That engagement, speaking from experience, includes at least an interlude of Airing of Grievances because fucking hell it sucks being a minority and if you're going to have to put up with this white asshole the least he can do is feel a little uncomfortable about being white. Most white people never even get that far, though, because white people primarily hang out with white people, which means policing your friends and casual acquaintances about pronouns and stereotypes and being dragged through the difference between Latino, Chicano and Hispanic despite the fact that everyone in the room is of German-Irish descent. It's super-valuable in the spaces where actual minorities are? But most wypepo are afraid to go there so they just score purity points off each other by playing woker-than-thou.

- My people will be fine. If you experienced no material harm from the last Trump administration why would you experience any material harm from this one? COVID? Well that happened to everyone. Skyrocketing healthcare costs? That probably wasn't Trump's fault. What was the statistic George Will pulled out? The RNC spent $100 in advertising for every transgender person in America to scare everyone about transgender people. I think if you live in a blue state you encounter transgender people on the reg. I think if you don't, you don't (so why would we give a fuck about pronouns, see above). They aren't coming for my library! People forget - the Holocaust started in Poland. By the time bombs were falling in Germany Hitler had been in power six years.

- The leopard will eat your face last if you're behind it. Lindsay Graham is queer as a three dollar bill and he's done four terms in the house and four in the senate. Did you see how much bullshit the Republicans put up with before they finally shitcanned George Santos? Briscoe Cain is the former cheerleader who booked Four Seasons Total Landscaping - hey, what's he up to lately. But ohhhh shit watch your wide stance. And ohhhhhh fuck never call attention to the leopards.

There's this real desire to go "Americans are stupid" and fuck off, man, people are stupid. Demagogues get votes by leaning into the stupid; this time 'round the Democrats kept going "vibe-cession" as if pointing out that the economic figures meant the electorate wasn't entitled to their feelings rather than remembering what happened to Carter. And, to paraphrase the Durants, human history is largely full of unremarkable people leading happy, unremarkable lives. Sometimes they don't. But I made it half-way through Secondhand Time and the through-line in that book is how much Muscovites miss Communism because at least they were all suffering together (when they weren't ratting each other out for a slightly better apartment).

I'm relatively sanguine about it now, after a long, dark night of the soul. (1) they want this. (2) Billions were spent convincing them otherwise, they still want this. (3) They've seen it before, and they still want this.

The hackneyed liberal angst aphorism is "if you want to know what you would have done during (catastrophe du jour), you're doing it now." Well you know what? There's abso-fucking-lutely nothing any of us could have done to make this turn out any different. People make much of Apted's Up series but almost nobody knows about Bill Moyers' version. Not even Frontline links to the first couple - probably because Apted's is basically "look how posh these posh assholes got, while look how poor these poor assholes got" but Moyers' is basically "let's check in on two families utterly fucked by NAFTA every now and then so we can see how generationally fucked they are."

The Democrats gave up on labor in 1981 and gave up pretending to care about labor in 1994. The Republicans, meanwhile, have been "fear the darkies" for so long that their original darkies now see themselves as Republicans.

The Democrats have gotten my time, my energy, my support and my money across sixteen fucking elections. But I understand the criticisms. And when people are scared, and people are tired, and people are worried, they choose simplicity.

WHAT ARE YOU PAYING FOR

That's the whole game, right there, both on the buyer side and the seller side. Take it back to Yahoo. You were "paying" for a jumping-off place to this new and crazy "world wide web" and you were paying with attention; they'd stuff advertisements in front of you that because of the hype cycle (see above) were radically overpriced. AOL's model was that you were paying for a dial-up number and an email address and that worked right up until Google (A) did a better job than Yahoo (B) didn't charge you for email.

Social media? You're "paying" to keep up with your friends, except it isn't your friends it's the people you wonder about every third month along with the ninety people you would actively avoid at a high school reunion and as it turns out, the Pandemic was a radicalizing social schism and nearly everyone you know on there sucks.

AI? Well, see, if it's the genie out of the bottle that's worth a whole lot, right? But if it's "aromatic water mix" the price comes down.

BTC at this point is just a bearer instrument. Bearer instruments have value, just ask John McClane. NFTs? "here's an easy way to ensure the legal right to buy and sell something" has a lot of value so long as that "something" isn't "garbage memes and jpegs." I do think there's a viable use for LLMs, it's just not nearly as robust as the hypemasters would have you believe:

The thing of it is, "I have specific questions about a specific thing" does not require a data center. Thus, it has no moat. Thus, it makes no money. Thus, hype it while you can.

Where is the business case in the first place?

I recognize this was rhetorical but it's worth digging into.

1) if it will take 24 months for AI to pay off, and your competitors have been losing money for 18 months on AI services, then your competitors are six months from creaming you. One need look no further than Apple Maps to find an example of a massive sunk cost that everyone else slept on.

2) It is better to be wrong together than right alone. If you're the only exec who thinks AI is bullshit you'll be explaining your reasoning at every single meeting you hold. On the other hand, if you're just one of the faceless mob going "I guess we're doing this now" you will face exactly zero blowback when the whole thing comes crashing down because who could have predicted? Even the lone correct voices get no real payback; Bernie Sanders was one of the very few people who opposed the Iraq War and yet he got absolutely zero foreign policy cred from being right.

3) If you are reporting EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation & Amortization) instead of income, wages comes out of your topline number. Services do not. Let's say you have 100 people in the call center earning $45k a year. That's $4.5m (closer to $7m with all the stuff that the employees don't get) right out of your good numbers. If you replace them all with $12m a year in OpenAI server time your "profits" go up. Does it matter that they suck? Not this quarter it doesn't! See also: (2)

Note that (1) through (3) do not require the subject at hand to be artificial intelligence. They could be pet rocks, Transcendental Meditation, meal services, casual Fridays, whatever. It all comes down to "we're all doing it, anyone who isn't is a doodyhead, and the accounting rules allow us to report short-term gains."

This is fundamentally where all bubbles come from: small practitioners who are responsible only to themselves can go "this is a stupid trend" while large practitioners who have diffuse responsibilities must deal with "why aren't you following the trend." If you want to understand FTX, all you need to know is "this guy worked at Jane Street therefore crypto is now a trend."