R World (Ron Davison muses aloud)
Over the last few years, every HOUR the U.S. economy has created roughly: 50 new millionaires 5 new decamillionaires (households with a net worth of $10 million or more). And yes, the American economy is serving up millionaires like Denny’s serves up meals: 24 hours a day. It takes the U.S. economy about three days to produce a new billionaire. Now for the contrast. (Thank you for the suggestion,…
Sarah Bakewell, on Sartre reading Husserl, in At the Existentialist Café : "All consciousness is consciousness of something." Sartre pushed it: sealing yourself into a shuttered room doesn't preserve you, it erases you. There's no cozy interior to retreat to. Being out on the road is the thing we are. A bookshelf without books is still a bookshelf. A mind without thought is not a mind. Perhaps we…
People love their pets. Also, given pets are animals, they are less protected by FDA norms for regulating new drugs. The result? Dogs are more likely to benefit sooner from age extension treatments than are humans. https://loyal.com/
The stock market boom is financing early retirement. According to recent data from Bank of America, the labor force participation rate for Americans aged 55 and older dropped to 36.9%, a significant decline from the over 40% participation level maintained before the pandemic. Stock market gains that have driven a 40% rise in market indices over the last couple of years have increased wealth enough…
Trump is racist and xenophobic. Why is that an intoxicating blend for so many Americans? He was born a white American and that not only makes him superior but ... it is something that his supporters can identify with. And what makes it intoxicating is that he did absolutely nothing to accomplish either of those great accomplishments (being white and being born in the US). By extension, if you,…
Lenin - and others - had famously said that you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs. Many have since mocked the phrase, looking back at the massive death tolls and economic failures of the 20th century totalitarian states, pointing out that there were piles of broken egg shells and yet no one got to taste any omelets. "Lots of broken eggs, no omelets." [Another insight shared by Yale…
Decision fatigue in the modern world may be one reason people find strongmen appealing. Here, finally, is someone who will simply decide for you. And you don’t have to decide whether this makes sense. I assure you that it does. Just accept it.
If you still like Donald, you might be the odd duck.
The five most valuable publicly traded companies vary quite a bit in the measure of profit per employee. Profit Per Employee NVIDIA: ~$2.02M – $2.86M per employee Apple: ~$400K – $600K+ per employee Alphabet (Google): ~$300K – $500K per employee Microsoft: ~$270K – $400K per employee Amazon: ~$30K – $60K per employee At Nvidia, assuming a 40 hour workweek (surely a low estimate for vested…
To be fair, Tom's conspiracy theory was not typical. It was, in fact, a conspiracy theory about conspiracy theories. Amelia hardly knew whether to flee or ask him to elaborate.
From Marci Shore, Professor of History at Yale. "The child soon learns to exchange pleasure for social respectability" - Freud For Freud, everything is about repression. For Marx, everything is about class struggle. What property is for Marx, sexuality is for Freud. Full disclosure from Deep Mind, Google AI: The quote "the child soon learns to exchange pleasure for social respectability" is not a…
After spending years writing and failing to sell screenplays, he finally found his muse. He began generating conspiracy theories. They were more complicated to monetize, but much easier to find an audience for. At this stage of the information economy, as it turned out, people were less interested in fiction labeled as fiction. They preferred their fiction smuggled in as breathless…
Hofstadter's Law: "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”
"One definition of modernity is the notion of a shift from a cyclical notion of time, a kind of circular notion of time that was focused on the seasons, a focus on the holidays, of time moving in a cycle to linear notion of time, of time having a direction, of moving forward. And this dominance of the notion that time moves forward represents the break between pre-modernity and modernity." - Marci…
It turns out American religion works rather like business: over the last fifty years, the churches that grew fastest were the ones that responded fastest to their members. Curiously, the fastest-growing kind (nondenominational churches) share no national institution at all. What they share is a national market. They preach from the same best-selling books, sing the same praise songs (licensed like…
A wave isn't a thing, it's a pattern passing through a medium. The water in a wave barely travels; it rises, circles, and settles nearly where it was. What crosses the ocean is the form — energy organizing water it borrows and returns. No molecule of a wave came with it from the storm that started it; the wave is the shape, not the substance. The water is moved by the wave but doesn't move with…
Jones' campaign had won the support of the gobemouche, but Carl was skeptical that this support was enough to decide the election. Carl's wife, by contrast, thought Carl might actually be among the gobemouche if he believed this constituency was not enough to swing an election. QI Word of the Day: GOBEMOUCHE - someone who believes anything they're told.
I've just learned that I'm in a liminal state. A liminal state is a psychological, physical, or social condition of being "betwixt and between" two distinct states of existence. Derived from the Latin word limen, meaning threshold, it represents a period of transition where your old identity or environment has dissolved, but your new reality has not yet fully formed.
“Do you have a business card?” “No. That’s behind me. All I have now is a ‘None of Your Business’ card.”
From Wikipedia: "During the French Revolution, liberalism meant the fight to end absolute royal power, religious favoritism, and noble class privileges. It stood for individual freedom, equality before the law, a government based on the consent of the people, and the protection of basic human rights." You were born into a liberal democracy. You don't want that to change.
156 million Americans are in the stock market. 169 million Americans are in the job market. Every American is impacted by both markets. Last month the US lost 23,000 jobs. The rate of job creation during Trump's second term is worse than any presidency except Dubya and - of course - Trump's first term. The stock market during Trump's second term has outperformed every president since Carter except…
"It would be easier to subjugate the entire universe through force than the minds of a single village." - Voltaire, sometime in the 1750s. "It is easier to conquer than to administer. With enough leverage, a finger could overturn the world; but to support the world, one must have the shoulders of Hercules." - Rousseau, in 1762 File these under Enlightenment ideas that were prelude to 1776.
Your 80s: octogenarian. Your 70s: septuagenarian. Your 60s: sexagenarian. Say what you will about my generation, but we understand marketing realities better than, you know, actual reality.
Right now we can do what people a century ago could hardly imagine: see and hear scenes from thousands of miles away — or decades in the past — almost as if we were there. In another decade? We'll taste food from another home or another continent. The word "feed" will finally mean what it says. Cooking shows will become wildly popular, and the cruelest hack will be flooding someone's feed with…
"He's a survivalist." "Aren't we all."