Technique obeys a specific rationality. The characteristics of technical progress are self-augmentation, automization, absence of limits, casual progression, a tendency toward acceleration, disparity, and ambivalence. Nevertheless, technique is lacking in one of the essential characteristics found in any organized ensemble, reaction. It is not yet able to control its errors and dysfunctions, to react on its source and modify itself. However, we may now be in the presence of the progressive elaboration of such a reactive capability.

This technical milieu involves, on the human side, a complete re-examination of ancient modes of behavior, or physiological capacities

Technique now constitutes a fabric of its own, replacing nature. Technique is the complex and complete milieu in which human beings must live, and in relation to which they must define themselves. It is a universal mediator, producing a generalised mediation, totalizing and aspiring to totality.

The link-anchor is thus a pernicious idea, based on the notion of small numbers of links to eligible locations which must be individually prepared.

Inter features a tall x-height to aid in readability of mixed-case and lower-case text. Several OpenType features are provided as well, like contextual alternates that adjusts punctuation depending on the shape of surrounding glyphs, slashed zero for when you need to disambiguate "0" from "o", tabular numbers, etc.

David Nutt isn’t the UK drug czar anymore. He got fired after he refused to retract a speech in which he stated that cannabis and other “recreational” drugs are less dangerous than legal drugs, particularly alcohol and tobacco. I think it was the comparison with alcohol that really did it. After all, booze is one of the most concentrated industries in the world, with just a few companies producing nearly all the beer and spirits we drink. What’s more, Nutt had made a particular enemy of the booze industry. It’s been long understood that the UK alcohol industry’s profitability was entirely dependent on unsafe binge drinking. If everyone in Britain “enjoyed responsibly” as the industry’s ads urged, they would no longer be in profit.

Consider the tale of David Nutt, an eminent neuropsychopharmacologist who served as the “drug czar” to the British government in 2008. Nutt was in charge of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, the body that sets out the rules for which drugs should be made illegal and under what circumstances. As part of a review of drug rules, Nutt convened an expert panel and asked them to classify an array of substances, ranking each one based on how harmful it was to its users, to their families, and to wider society. He used this quantitative data to group drugs into three categories: drugs that would be considered very dangerous irrespective of how you ranked harms to society, family, and self; drugs that would be considered not very dangerous irrespective of how you ranked harms to society, family, and self; and drugs whose danger-rating would change substantially based on how you ranked harms to society, family, and self. Nutt then took his categories to the UK Parliament and asked them to tell him how they prioritized these different forms of harm: the question of whether we want to protect individuals, families, or society is a political one, irreducibly qualitative, without an empirical solution. However, once those subjective political priorities have been established, there is an empirical solution to how drugs should be classified in light of these priorities.

Today, the Big Six publishers are the Big Four, because Random House, the largest publisher in the world, gobbled up Penguin and Simon & Schuster. When RH, S&S and Penguin were three companies, it was illegal for them to collude on pricing. But after their mergers, the three former CEOs – now presidents of divisions within an unimaginably giant company – can meet in a board room and plan exactly the same price-fixing strategy, and that isn't illegal under "consumer welfare" antitrust – it's "efficient."

As Ellul saw it, technique colonized realms of life to which it did not properly belong. The key, then, is to recognize where and when it is appropriate to allow technique (or quantification or optimization) a place and where and when it would be good to circumscribe its scope. In order to do so we must have before us a clear sense of the good we seek. But, as Ellul warned, technique becomes a problem precisely when it becomes and end in itself. This may happen because we ourselves lose sight of the ends we were originally seeking or because the focus on technique itself gradually blinds us to those ends. It would seem that when a framework within which questions of the good can be meaningfully taken up is unavailable, then quantification rushes in to fill the axial vacuum.

It helps you quickly discover alternative ways to solve problems, write tests, and explore new APIs without having to tediously tailor a search for answers on the internet.

My hobbies include playing guitar, learning French, reading, and passing credit checks. I love credit checks. Ohh I love credit checks so so much. I actually love them so much that maybe we shouldn’t do one. I wouldn’t want to overwhelm you with how much I love them.

     In the play, the father is a traveling salesman.      In life, my father never left us. Not even for a night.

Baba Yaga’s Garden

Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy (Russian: Ядерные взрывы для народного хозяйства, romanized: Yadernyye vzryvy dlya narodnogo khozyaystva; sometimes referred to as Program #7[1]) was a Soviet program to investigate peaceful nuclear explosions (PNEs).

America’s hatred towards the poor and the working class are laid bare in these naked feuds. In 2000, 42 units of federally-subsidized housing for teachers who could no longer afford to live in San Francisco was overthrown by homeowners in the Sunset District who in a fit of cruel hysteria claimed that “[the teachers] don’t even do a good job educating our kids,” and that the project was a slippery slope to public housing tower blocks that would usher in “rampant crime.”

In fact, one study featured in a paper on neighborhood early warning systems for gentrification cites historic architecture as one of five predictors of gentrification in the DC area.

A new way to connect with readers.Break the fourth wall and speak directly to your readers using Author Notes. Readers can also share what they think by giving episodes they like a Thumbs Up and by using Faves to vote for a story they enjoy most each week.

And in 1984, while living on the Mendocino coast of California, he fell in love. With mushrooms. "Outside my cabin were these beautiful mushrooms," he says. "And it was as if these mushrooms looked at me and said, 'Taylor, go out and tell the world how beautiful we are.' And I said, 'OK, I'll do it.' " Lockwood bought camera gear and became passionate about photographing mushrooms. One of his images is even on a U.S. postage stamp. He says sometimes he would dig a hole next to a mushroom for his camera so he could get just the right angle. "I wanted to see them just as a frog would," he says.

Identity issues, far from posing any genuinely liberatory demands, are weaponized time and again against genuine dissent and criticism.

But the concepts that fuel the ascendant ideology come more from the HR department than the grassroots. As in the 1960s they are produced and amplified mainly by the offspring of prosperous elites, for whom genuine exploitation is often involved only as a background abstraction giving a feeling of moral heft to what amounts to office politics.

It helps explain why the current movement tends to accept, echo, and appeal to the general logic of the administrative power structure, rather than genuinely criticizing or resisting it.

These exaggerated rejections of the system ensured their failure by depriving themselves of the resources of rationality and argument necessary for reform

The protests of the New Left began with the recognition of the failures of an over-administered society. The young activists, Adorno’s former assistant Jürgen Habermas wrote in his 1967 book, Toward a Rational Society, sense acutely that something is wrong: “They have become sensitive to the costs for individual development of a society dominated by competition for status and achievement and by the bureaucratization of all regions of life.” Coming predominantly from the upper economic strata of the society, students were uniquely positioned to see the inhumanity of increased bureaucratic control, atomization, and competition that began to colonize every facet of life. They saw more clearly than their prospering parents the hypocrisy of Western institutions using the veneer of “neutrality” and bureaucratic disinterestedness to enable atrocities in the developing world and whitewash historical wrongs. But they also knew nothing else.  So their struggle to find a way outside of it tended to dissolve into fantasy and a rejection of the whole system, root and branch.

Far from being “anti-science” or “anti-Enlightenment”—as Horkheimer and Adorno are sometimes interpreted by commentators both sympathetic and unsympathetic—they were concerned with showing how the Enlightenment fell short of its self-understanding. “On their way towards modern science,” they wrote, “human beings have discarded meaning.” The Enlightenment elevated instrumental calculation and technology as goods in themselves, leaving behind a dangerous ideological vacuum. According to Adorno and Horkheimer’s harrowing account of modernity, reason stopped serving human needs and started generating its own kinds of nightmarish absurdities.

The reason that so many of these “websites as the new emergent artform” sites disappeared is because advertising campaigns aren’t really preserved. In many ways what made Flash the most popular is also what ended up being the least preserved.

You could make a game targeting the Wii because of the Flash Player. This was pretty amazing to a lot of people because now anybody and everybody could make games for the Nintendo Wii, bypassing Nintendo’s very strict development process. Your hobbyist work could be on a Nintendo. All the player had to do was open the Wii browser, and go to one of these Wii specific portals, or the URL you gave them. The community around this even went so far as to release libraries that let the Flash Player interface with the (at the time new and very exciting) WiiMote. Sites like the WiimoteProject.com, and WiiFlash.org served as Wii specific development resources for people. With just a simple bit of ActionScript you could have access to all the buttons and features for the WiiMote AND the end result ran in the browser. It just worked and was accessible to everyone. This was Flash in a nutshell. Because it was easy to run it everywhere, anyone could make things for that once inaccessible platform as long as it had a browser. No approval process. No strict store standards. No licensing agreements to gain access to anything… Just that creative freedom and sharing.

Websites certainly were more culturally relevant.

A lot of pioneering took place here in terms of setting standards for the modern web. Flash is often unfairly equated to being unusable or disability unfriendly, but it had support for things like screen-readers, bookmarking and parsing pages, Google could even search them at one point… The issue was often unfamiliarity with what it could do and how it could be used.

I find that change in how we perceive Flash, and what we remember about it really interesting. In these “professional” communities (among the big brand agencies making The Flash Website), games were almost an afterthought. Flash’s production use, and popular industry use, were these popular, rockstar designer, high end and experimental online experiences. It was at this point too that a lot of pioneering for accessibility was taking place. Ideas for how to merge immersion and accessibility were being explored. I do not exaggerate when I say that these were hugely influential websites. People became famous from making them. They would make or break careers. They were talked about and excitedly shared the same way you would share and talk about games today.

Outcome maximalization across sports has created "smarter" games with less variety and more all-or-nothing play. The fixation with quantifiable success can lead to a collective flattening of the human experience. Perhaps we need to include more randomness in the game. Each home field or home court should have distinctive features, different playing surfaces, or outdoor elements.

Feemasons have historically celebrated two feasts of Saint John: the feast of John the Baptist on 24 June, and that of John the Evangelist on 27 December, roughly marking midsummer and midwinter. Several important masonic events have taken place on those days, including the first meeting of the Grand Lodge on 24 June 1717 and the union of the two English Grand Lodges in London on 27 December 1813.

yes, of course you can give the path name component any valid name, such as "💩": https://www.netmeister.org/blog/urls/💩

The other edge condition is that RFC3986 does not specify a maximum value on the port number (which per RFC1340 / RFC6335 is in the range of 0 - 65535) or how e.g., zero-padding is handled, as that of course depends on the client processing the URL. Which makes this a valid URL: https://www.netmeister.org:0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000443/blog/urls.html

or even a fully decimal address: http://172.217.78 http://1.1 http://2790524771

your username and password cannot contain a ":" or "@", but all sorts of other characters otherwise illegal in the hostname component, making this is a valid URL: https://!$%:)(*&^@www.netmeister.org/blog/urls.html

And of course there is plenty of room for abuse here: imagine a URL like http://accounts.google.com:signin@evil.example.com, which may trick a user into thinking that the site they're connecting to is trustworthy. Phishers gonna phish.

I learned PHP to make changes to the site. I hardened the server to make it less vulnerable to attacks. I decided I wanted to get into Computer Science because of jred.

We make posts on a 5 apps, half of which are screenshots from the another of those apps.

Narcotizing dysfunction is a theory that as mass media inundates people on a particular issue, they become apathetic to it, substituting knowledge for action.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying.

Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life.This may explain why many people who do not read science fiction describe it as “escapist,” but when questioned further, admit they do not read it because “it’s so depressing.”

many officials, including his own India secretary, Leo Amery, an arch-imperialist who crushed wartime Indian anticolonial rebellion ruthlessly, found Churchill’s racist defenses of his decision — that Indians breed like rabbits, that if the famine was so bad why was Gandhi still alive, that the starvation of Bengalis mattered less than starvation of “sturdy” Greeks — remarkable. 

His defiance of his times is evident in the contrarian phrasing of his statement to the Peel Commission on Palestine in 1937: “I do not admit … that a great wrong has been done” to Native Americans and Australian Aboriginals by their replacement by “a stronger race.”

Whether these views were “of” his time is a misleading and impossible question: In every time, including ours, multiple value systems are in contest.

Impressively, the color red is never used in the cockpit except for high-level warnings — that’s how much thought the industry has given to these standards.

the coercive apparatus doesn't have to be the secret police knocking at the door

For fear of losing a job, or of losing an admission to school, or of losing the right to live in the country of your birth, or merely of social ostracism, many of today's best minds in so-called free, democratic states have stopped trying to say what they think and feel and have fallen silent.

Content Warning

I saw a TikTok the other day of a 60-something woman talking about how differently she was treated after a facelift.

It wasn’t until my mid-twenties that I started wondering whether these practices were making me love or hate myself.

no assignment can receive a grade of less than 50%, even if it was never turned in,

The teacher email I mentioned above was from one of the conference threads, but the emails sent to me personally from counselors and administrators have overwhelmingly broken down along these lines: such-and-such a student is feeling stressed, so please excuse her from this set of assignments.  This other student gets nervous about taking tests or giving presentations or working in groups, so please excuse him from work of those types. 

Most teachers seem to take it as a given that of course half the class is going to wander in half an hour late during first period—​it’s so early, you know!—​and during fourth period, because you know how long those lines can get at the lunch places the kids all go to, halfway across town.  I’ve sometimes even had to remind myself that, hey, wait, when I was in school, class started when the bell rang because everyone was there! 

Former council member Bruce Harrell, who’s leading (after “undecided”) in recent polls, has really embraced the idea that private donations will help solve the city’s biggest problems, including not just homelessness but transportation infrastructure.

High technology requires much more tacit knowledge than the American system usually admits. The understanding of how to mass produce a car or solar panel is not stored in a book or patent filing; it exists in the brains and bodies of workers, foremen, and engineers on the line. That’s why the places where engineers, designers, and workers come together—whether in Detroit, Silicon Valley, or Shenzhen—have always been the fount of progress.

R&D might seem like an unfathomably boring topic, akin to arguing about medical data or grant approvals, but it revolves around some of the most profound—and unanswered—questions of industrial civilization: Why do some technologies get developed instead of others? Why do some countries become richer faster than others? How can we materially improve people’s lives as fast as possible—and can the government do anything to help? Above all, where does economic growth come from? This is what we’re fighting about when we fight about R&D.

people would spend hours in them.

There’s no reason that software needs to be this indifferent space meant only to maximize output

To me, desktop pets are kind of like this surviving relic from a time when computers were viewed more as our own “personal spaces” and not so much as something we rent from corporation’s like Apple or Microsoft.

Windows 2000 and Windows XP had thriving communities that specialized in creating themes for these OS’s. People would change everything from the default cursors, screensavers, wallpapers, and even the bootup screen for the OS. They would share all that. It was ridiculously popular, and kind of the era where desktop pets really came into their own.

Social housing, by contrast, could have units set aside for market-rate, poor people, and middle-income folks. This would provide new housing supply where it is most needed: across the whole income spectrum, from poor to rich.

Rents should be controlled, which will provide more neighborhood stability, and again level the playing field with owners — after all, the 30-year mortgage functions just like rent control for the middle and upper-middle class.

First, renters ought to get equal policy priority with owners. Rental vouchers ought to be boosted to something like what homeowners get in terms of subsidy, while the worst ownership subsidies like the mortgage interest deduction (almost all of which is claimed by the rich, and mainly produces pointlessly larger homes at the top end) should be removed

Buying a house ought to be roughly analogous to buying a car — a thing that (with rare exceptions) decreases in value over time, because it wears out. Indeed, that is how it works in countries like Japan.

The humanities PhD is still a vocational degree to prepare students for a career teaching in academia, and there are no jobs. Do not get a PhD in history.

Saint John's Fires, explained the monk of Winchcombe, were to drive away dragons, which were abroad on St. John's Eve, poisoning springs and wells.

In England, the earliest reference to this custom occurs on in the 13th century AD,[17] in the Liber Memorandum of the parish church at Barnwell in the Nene Valley, which stated that parish youth would gather on the day to sing songs and play games.[17] A Christian monk of Lilleshall Abbey, in the same century, wrote:[17] In the worship of St John, men waken at even, and maken three manner of fires: one is clean bones and no wood, and is called a bonfire; another is of clean wood and no bones, and is called a wakefire, for men sitteth and wake by it; the third is made of bones and wood, and is called St John's Fire.[17]

If Christ's conception and birth took place on the 'growing days', it was fitting that John the Baptist's should take place on the 'lessening days' ('diebus decrescentibus'), for the Baptist himself had proclaimed that 'he must increase; but I must decrease' (John 3:30). By the late sixth century, the Nativity of John the Baptist (24 June) had become an important feast, counterbalancing at midsummer the midwinter feast of Christmas.— Professor Éamonn Ó Carragáin

Neutrophils also harbor one of the immune system’s most terrifying armaments: They can unspool the genetic material that’s normally packed into a tight wad at their center, freckle it with toxic proteins and compounds, and then spew it out their side like a lethal sneeze—a weaponization of their own DNA. The end product is a gummy, poisonous net called a neutrophil extracellular trap, or NET, that can massacre scores of microbes at once. But NETs are a double-edged sword: When cast under the wrong circumstances, they can harm their host, seeding serious blood clots or driving the symptoms of diseases as catastrophic as cancer, lupus, and COVID-19.

Boiling Wand "This portable water heater—the better to make tea or bouillon in the privacy of your hotel room—was a must for every Soviet traveler," Idov says. "Russians abroad had a reputation for shorting out whole city blocks by plugging these babies into 110-volt sockets. The infinitely more terrifying homemade version consisted of an electrical cord, two matchsticks and two razor blades."

And so we wander through our country as if in parallel realities. We walk through teeming, crowded cities where only a few other people really exist — the other residents of our tiny stratum. Our class equals are real to us, manifesting in living color — people we might laugh with, do deals with, make love with, confess our frustrations to. The members of adjacent classes are a bit less real — washed-out caricatures we deal with using simple heuristics. And the members of distant classes are mere shadows to us — moving objects to be avoided on the street, automated kiosks to service our economic needs, statistics in our daily news. The Walgreens cashier, the BART conductor — who could they ever be to you? And who could you ever be to them?

A rich White boat dealer with a college degree is of a different class than an equally rich White software engineer who went to the same school.

I find that these people often have in mind an entirely different image of the working class — a member of the educated, downwardly mobile, mostly White “precariat”. In other words…themselves. A deli worker who graduated from Michigan State but can’t figure out what to do with her humanities degree; a struggling public school teacher; a writer for a leftist magazine who gets priced out of superstar cities by dastardly tech workers, etc. It is to the rescue of this precariat and their frustrated expectations that the government must ride, with student loan relief and free college and so on.

Big Tech’s acquisitions might be better evaluated on a case by case basis by regulators

“Having a buyer always available is what makes the risk worth taking.”

Facebook, for instance, began testing its Clubhouse clone in public this week, a move that typically would’ve been preceded by an attempt to buy the company. Facebook’s contemplation of a deal, and the ensuing negotiations, would’ve given Clubhouse some time to grow independently. But instead, Clubhouse is now looking at a carbon copy of itself on a 2 billion-user platform.

And startups typically press forward even when it’s clear they won’t reach IPO scale, anticipating they’ll sell to a bigger company and deliver a decent “exit” to investors and employees.

The prospect of an acquisition — regardless of whether it takes place — tends to encourage productive behavior. Potential acquirers often hold off on copying startups’ products, understanding there’s a chance they’ll one day join forces.

To a modern reader, the case of nested relations might seem a rather obscure special case.

I’ve talked before about the non-team team dynamic that is “one person per task”. Where the management and engineers collude to push the organisation beyond a sustainable pace by making sure that at all times, each individual is kept busy and collaboration is minimised. I talked about the deleterious effect on collaboration, particularly that code review becomes a burden resolved with a quick “LGTM”. People quickly develop specialisations and fiefdoms: oh there’s a CUDA story, better give it to Yevgeny as he worked on the last CUDA story. The organisation quickly adapts to this balkanisation and optimises for it. Is there a CUDA story in the next sprint? We need something for Yevgeny to do. This is Conway’s Corrolary: the most efficient way to develop software is when the structure matches the org chart. Basically all forms of collaboration become a slog when there’s no “us” in team. Unfortunately, the contradiction at the heart of this 19th century approach to division of labour is that, when applied to knowledge work, the value to each participant of being in meetings is minimised, while the necessity for each participant to be in a meeting is maximised. The value is minimised because each person has their personal task within their personal fiefdom to work on. Attending a meeting takes away from the individual productivity that the process is optimising for. Additionally, it increases the likelihood that the meeting content will be mostly irrelevant: why should I want to discuss backend work when Sophie takes all the backend tasks?

In all of my meetings outside of Amazon I had one of three outcomes: * No one read the email/document and I had to explain everything in the meeting * Some people read the document but forgot what it said because they read it days or hours before

(six-pagers are the longest)

our scheduling tools have check boxes to automatically create a document.

Simply put, one of the major reasons Germany has a healthy book publishing industry, beyond its pricing law, is because Germans (like the English, the Irish, the Japanese, the French, and many other nationalities) tend to read more, and more seriously, than Americans. I can’t cite statistics to prove this, but after traveling much of the world I know in my bones that it’s true.

uch crisp professionalism is the norm in German bookstores because clerks are required to study for several years – literature, accounting, and the mechanics of the book business – then pass a standardized exam before they can become certified booksellers.

The fiscal interests of cities therefore align with the financial interests of property owners in rising property values. Because the quality of public goods and amenities is capitalized into housing prices, homeowners prefer higher to lower quality in public services. At the same time, homeowners prefer lower property tax rates. One way to prop up property values though high-quality public goods without paying exceedingly high property tax rates is to concentrate spending on high-quality services near wealthier homeowners while providing them at lower quality for renters and poorer homeowners. But this is impossible if these populations are mixed in together. To gerrymander the quality of public goods, each population needs to be clustered together and separated in space. Because proximity to poorer populations is bad for property values anyway, the motivation of wealthier homeowners to keep their neighborhoods uniformly higher-class is overdetermined. Segregation allows them to focus public spending on themselves (they’re paying for most of it, after all!) and leave those on the “other side of the tracks” with rusty water, overflowing sewers and self-patched potholes.

Whites and wealthier people receive substantially more ideological representation both from local government officials and from municipal policy outputs than do nonwhites and less wealthy individuals. The inequities in representation we identify are frequently shocking in their magnitude. For example, we find that it is only when blacks make up 80–100 percent of the community population that they receive the same amount of ideological representation from elected officials on municipal councils that whites attain when they represent only 20–40 percent of the population.

[L]ocal institutions, designed to enhance participation, actually empower an unrepresentative group of residents — who we call neighborhood defenders — to stop the construction of new housing.” Compared to all local voters, commenters at public development meetings were considerably whiter, older, more male and much more likely to be homeowners.

Local land-use power just is delegated state power.

# V. My questions

surrounded by heterogenous political ideas

Miami Beach is famous for its street cats who roam the island. I don't think it's possible to spend more than a few hours exploring Miami Beach without crossing paths with at least one of them.Miami Beach also has adorable wild parakeets that migrate to Miami in early spring and tend to disappear around November.

Miami Beach itself sprays larvicide on the streets so there aren't many mosquitoes here.

To be honest, I didn't really notice it until my mom texted me "Are you okay?!?!" and shared a CNN article about how Miami Beach had declared a state of emergency due to the Spring Breakers.

My favorite detail about Key Biscayne is that electric golf carts are one of the primary ways of getting around the island. With 1 golf cart for every 13 residents, they dominate the streets. The speed limit in Key Biscayne is 20mph, and car drivers have seemed to accept that they are guests in the golf carts' kingdom.

Since WWII, Miami's mayors have alternated between Democrats and Republicans mostly evenly.

Among the people I've met here, there's a much greater level of civility and tolerance of others' viewpoints.

In SF, I quickly learned that if a stranger approaches you on the street you should be careful—this is partially because it's not part of the culture for normal people to talk to you on the street, and partially because there is a lot of homelessness and crime and so talking to strangers on the street is a bit unsafe.

I accidentally went through the back doors rather than the front doors. I looked up in the darkness, and there was a shining gold mammoth fossil gleaming down on me.

Much as Gladwell carries water for the official AAF position, so does he lend credence to the narrative preferred by the Japanese government. Never mind that the LDP has been led by many of the very people (once designated Class A war criminals) who plunged Japan into its calamitous war. Never mind that most survivors would beg to differ. Gladwell is perfectly content to parrot this interpretation.

What do we get when we finally encounter a Japanese perspective? An expression of gratitude for the raids that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and wiped out over a quarter of housing in the country. “In the end, we must thank you, Americans, for the firebombing and the atomic bombs,” states an unnamed Japanese academic at a conference in Tokyo. Of the millions of Japanese impacted by the firebombings, we hear from a sum total of one, who just so happens to tell an American audience exactly what they want to hear.

The answer, in reality, lies in the history of air raid survivors and their postwar crusade for remembrance. It’s no accident that the museum sits in the very heart of the neighborhoods targeted for destruction in March 1945 — the Shitamachi (the Low City), the densely packed, working-class district that had long tantalized American air power strategists. The Center is a site of local as much as national memory, a reminder that not all Tokyoites suffered equally. Area bombing, after all, is not nearly as indiscriminate as its name suggests. From the beginning, war planners set out to concentrate their payloads in the densest, most flammable — and thus usually poorest — parts of urban Japan, giving rise to a particular social geography of incendiary destruction.

The Bomber Mafia is not so much a “case study in how dreams go awry,” as Gladwell claims, as a case study in how narratives of this incendiary campaign sidestep unsettling moral questions about the deliberate targeting of civilians. It pins responsibility for the destruction of 64 cities on one man, thereby absolving the AAF and, by extension, the American government.

the median salary for a college counselor at independent schools is $94,000 but the median salary for a teacher is $60,000, according to the National Association of Independent Schools

Some independent schools enroll a number of low-income students on scholarship, and these “privileged poor,” to use Anthony Jack’s term, account for half the low-income students at some highly selective universities, further evidence of the advantage granted to these schools in the admissions process.

Harvard’s admissions policies gave advantages to legacies, donors, athletes, and underrepresented minorities, which hurt Asian American applicants.

The union threatened vendor Kinki Sharyo that it would launch environmental nuisance lawsuits unless the company agreed that the plant be unionized. In reality, the benefits of this style of protectionism go largely to managers and sitework consultants; blue-collar labor only gets scraps.

Higher education is a proven pathway to opportunity, so we looked for 2- and 4-year institutions successfully educating students who come from communities that have been chronically underserved

we are all attempting to give away a fortune that was enabled by systems in need of change. In this effort, we are governed by a humbling belief that it would be better if disproportionate wealth were not concentrated in a small number of hands, and that the solutions are best designed and implemented by others.

Any wealth is a product of a collective effort that included them. The social structures that inflate wealth present obstacles to them.

When I caught her slipping back to the one computer still running Mac OS 9 just to take notes, I knew I was going to have to write her a notepad.

I don’t believe in these French-style laws that say you can only work 35 hours a week. If you want to work 100 hours a week, go for it.

I think people are really hungry for an alternative to the Chicken Little narrative that the sky is falling and tech is melting our brains. They want to be able to do something about it, and they just don’t know what to do yet. You could be waiting for Washington to do something about the problem, or you could hold your breath waiting for the tech companies to do something about the problem. Or, instead of waiting, you can do something about the problem today. You can learn one technique to manage your internal triggers better. You can plan one day a week in your calendar. You can turn off your notifications on your phone. You can start small.

Row One = Act 1 Row Two = Act 2A (first half of Act 2) Row Three = Act 2B (second half of Act 2) Row Four = Act 3

Seeing the protagonist come to the smarter, wiser, healthier way of being can be a big part of an emotionally satisfying ending.

As Goldman and McKee say, respectively, endings should be “satisfying and surprising” and “inevitable and unexpected.” So: No, the boy doesn’t get the girl – but here comes another, and maybe she’s The One

Doing so has the effect of making the achievement of the goal more meaningful to the protagonist.

So this event increases the opposition because it weakens Clarice’s position by taking away her source of help, but it’s effective because we understand what it means to Clarice emotionally.

The two most common ways a Midpoint functions to inject new energy are: Increasing the opposition Raising the stakes

That can include: how tough the problem is and/or what the protagonist will be up against by taking on the Act 2 Adventure, what the character believes to be the best or only option for addressing the problem the Inciting Incident created (and the reasoning to come to that conclusion, such as eliminating other options), what happens if he doesn’t attempt to solve the problem at all, what the protagonist is risking by taking on this huge task, what he’ll gain if he succeeds, what’s at stake and why those stakes matter enough to the protagonist to embark on the crazy Act 2 Adventure anyway, plus any additional plot-logistical stuff that needs to happen for us to understand how the protagonist moves from the new problem of the Inciting Incident, to embarking on what they think will be the solution to that problem at the Break into Act 2.

Connect the Inciting Incident and the Break Into Act 2 by creating a problem or opportunity for the protagonist and then showing us how the protagonist intends to solve that problem or take advantage of that opportunity with a solution that is dangerous, risky, or audacious in some way – ingredients for an exciting Act 2.

Instead, the situated needs of letter writers expose the varied historical conditions of what Joy Lisi Rankin terms “acts of computing,” lived experiences with computers almost wholly unrelated to the technical specifications or commercial success of one or another machine.

For Wicks, being a user is a hobby on the basis that he enjoys computerizing everyday tasks, such as managing his local Mensa group mailing list (the remainder of the letter extensively discusses his experience using Mail List Database from Synergistic Systems). Readers like Wicks represented a new “hobbyist” identity uncoupled from as-sembly language arcana and soldering irons. Much as earlier hobbyists enjoyed master-ing the internals of the Apple II, user-hobbyists like Wicks took pleasure in the expert application of microcomputing to everyday life.

Dur-ing the magazine’s final year in print, an overwhelming majority—approximately 92 per-cent—of the letters represented an interaction between readers.

Microcomputer users were users precisely because they used micro-computers at a time when use still embodied a complex range of technical proficiencies, self-education, and confusing possibilities. Engagements with these machines could not yet be passive, plug-in-and-play, or reduced to input-output (even if that is much of what mainstream consumer computing has become).

For decades, our descriptions and imaginations of computer culture have been powerfully shaped by the anecdotal experiences of those who founded or worked in these industries rather than the impressions, actions, or concerns of a broader public. Yet no individual’s historical experience is entirely transparent to themselves nor singularly adequate to explain the massive technological transformation that was learning to live with computers.

ust as the mall, because of its enclosed, surveilled nature, has become a place where parents feel safe leaving their children, the electronic panopticon of the monitored Prodigy network appeals to many parents because they feel their children are somehow safer there.

Rheingold's assumptions about the public nature of cyberspace miss the accelerating shift of new technologies now under public management to private ownership.

What, in the age of virtual environments, is a city, a community, public space, or public life? It is troubling that the illusory language may, if unexamined, subvert the very ideals it promotes, in particular the ideal of 'community'.

Cyberspace is the "American Dream II", according to an August 1995 conference organized by supporters and advisers of Newt Gingrich (http://wvvw.townhall.com/pff).

its killer feature

To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system.

> When i read on HN and realize just how many people there are like me, or that there’s people that are also way too into disc golf, acoustic guitar, or any other semi niche activity i wonder why it is so hard to make more regular connections and interactions with them.That hit me in the truth. I feel like that a lot: if I know these people exist, and care deeply about the things I care about, why am I not building lasting friendships with them?And then I realize that it's not a flaw in the medium but in myself. I lack the confidence and determination to go form those connections. I could write to any of those people and say, hey, I'm coming through Cincinnati, and would love to see your project/talk with you over coffee about your research/drink beer and yell about liberty. But I don't, and that isn't the internet's fault.

I think it's easy to forget we're not the same people we were 20-25 years ago. I see all sorts of lamentations about various things in the world changing and becoming less magical. But as far as I'm aware, I could still go and argue about bands in chatrooms. I could talk to other writers and dream about my future best-selling novels. I could go read random opinions about any subject and get into an exhilarating flamewar about it.I don't want to do any of those things. I'm in my 40s and I have 3 kids. The internet 15-year-old me experienced was magical because _I_ was a blank slate. Every new friendship was thrilling, every new skill opened up infinite horizons, every nook and cranny felt like somewhere I could belong. But life moves on. I'm more than half-way through my career, perhaps not the one I was expecting. I didn't marry the girl I met on IRC. I don't have strong opinions about Radiohead anymore. I find people, however delightful and kooky they are, quite tiring having got to know 10,000 of them at this point.I know all this is true because my kids love the internet and find their place in it with all the joy I used to. And I'm pretty sure older generations frowning upon it all is part of the rush anyway.

That’s not why they code, nor are the skills of writing good documentation even vaguely similar to those for writing good code.

In common with almost every other initiative of its kind, this approach assumes that the best people to document macOS are its engineers. Those engineers are often selected at interview by posing them a coding challenge, but have you ever heard of candidates for a software engineering post being selected by or for their ability to document their code?

He believes the fish and chips at Proper Fish on Bainbridge Island might be the best in the Northwest.

The best bagels here, such as Rachel’s Bagels & Burritos, Rubinstein Bagels and Loxsmith Bagels “are just as good as the best bagels in New York,” he said.

Recently, López-Alt started exploring Seattle’s chicken teriyaki scene and found a favorite, Grillbird Teriyaki in West Seattle. One day at lunch, López-Alt laid out trays of chicken teriyaki, fried cauliflower, braised pork and chicken katsu over the hood of his SUV for a photo, an Instagram shot that would be worth gold to the owner of this teriyaki joint when it appeared in a few hours.He held up the deep-fried cauliflower, admiring how the deep-fried shell remained crispy 20 minutes into our interview. The kitchen must use a starch with maybe rice flour to achieve that crunchy coating, he concluded. (It was indeed cornstarch with rice flour, Grillbird confirmed.)

“I told him, ‘This is the best Chicago pizza I have had anywhere, including in Chicago,’” López-Alt recalled. “I still maintain that.”López-Alt went on social media then as he did again this year to coronate Windy City Pie.

(The “Food Lab” update may instead turn into an expanded, 10th anniversary edition, tentatively scheduled for 2025.)

even in dating women demand millionaires, average Joes are treated like disposable good for nothing who women say are creeps because they don't have money to build their IG brand and devour women with lavish gifts.

"Cancer" was applied to tumors because the swollen veins around a tumor were said to look like a crab. "Cancer" had an alternative meaning, "enclosure" (which is, historically, where the meaning "crab" was derived, because of the way a crab's pincers form a circle). This alternative meaning helped the word evolve into the Latin "cancellus" - a barrier dividing two parts of a building. Applied metaphorically, this eventually became the English "cancel".

"Pay" takes a slightly longer journey than "peace", coming from Latin "pacare", meaning "appease", as in "appeasing a creditor". So etymologically, to "pay" someone means to "create peace by settling a debt".

It’s interesting to me that we so assume that online interaction is about conversation via blogging, tweeting, commenting — and ONLY about conversation that we assume this is the way things must be.

the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another.

Images were easily discoverable on the public web using simple RSS feeds.

in a structured, commonly used, and machine-readable format.

“Made with Love, Not in Lab” is a favorite catchphrase at Akua, a start-up that produces burger patties from farmed kelp. (They are very good, but I wish the company's otter mascot didn't make me think of them as otter burgers.)

an Impossible or Beyond burger, while environmentally superior to beef, is said to have five times the carbon footprint of a classic bean burger

What Impossible and Beyond simulate so perfectly isn't ground beef so much as cheap ground beef—which is to say, precisely the industrially produced meat that I most want to remove from my diet because of its cost to animal, human, and planetary welfare.

raised on Annie's mac 'n' cheese and trips to Whole Foods

simple fried vegetables are a beautiful thing—and not necessarily the better for being labeled wings or oysters or shrimp.

encased in a batter as crisp as tempura

But when Jolet and his sister resurrected their grandfather's tamale business, they sensed enough demand to invent a vegan corn version, using an ample amount of coconut oil. “It has the look and feel of lard,” he says, a description that may not make the Coconut Oil Council's marketing materials but does impart a satisfying lushness to the sweet corn filling.

Lastly, when a carrier feels unsafe, mail service could be interrupted, not only for the dog owner, but for the entire neighborhood. When mail service is interrupted, mail must be picked up at the Post Office. Service will not be restored until the dog is properly restrained.

the company’s habit of encouraging employees “to tear each other’s ideas apart in meetings,”

“Malarkey” and “C’mon, man” are as fundamental to Joe Biden’s brand as “Lock her up!” was to Trump’s.

Many cults and cultish communities—not to mention individuals as disparate as Boris Johnson and my mother—also rely on expressions called “thought-terminating clichés,” which affirm positivity while shutting down debate. Cultish cites some of the catchphrases used by the conspiracy theorists of QAnon as examples: “Trust the plan,” “The awakening is bigger than all of this,” and “Do your research.” Thought-terminating clichés, Montell writes, are “semantic stop signs,” and a cue that everyone present should halt independent inquiry and accept the party line.

Cultish language, she proposes, does three things: It makes people feel unique but also connected to others; it encourages people to feel dependent on a particular leader, group, or product to the extent that life without them feels impossible; and it “convinces people to act in ways that are completely in conflict with their former reality, ethics, and sense of self.” The last two effects are what tend to separate brands or people who inspire cult followings (e.g., SoulCycle) from more malign groups and leaders.

I also have learned that my friends and colleagues without kids are uninformed about how broken, expensive, and unfair our childcare system is. They, too, need to see the kids in their community as everybody’s kids.

When sociologist Annette Lareau observed 9- and 10-year-olds, she found that affluent children spent time shuttled between adult-organized activities, while poor and working-class children spent much of their time hanging out with neighbors, siblings and cousins. As a result, poor children became used to managing their own time, though they spent leisure time distanced from adults. Their middle-class peers are not used to managing their own time, and have frequent sibling conflicts, but do become practiced at talking to adults as near-equals. They ended up feeling entitled to adult attention.

Obviously, with comics hosting sites like tapas and webtoon becoming more common than self hosting, the main type of hypercomic these days is the vertical scroll format, gifs, and sometimes sound. Anything more complex than that is often not feasible for long running comics. But there are so many amazing possibilities to explore, especially for shorter comics!

A new study published in The Condor by Dr. Andrea Townsend et al. examines the relationship between urbanization, junk food, and the body conditions of crows.

“In 2004, the bulk of the land in Disneyland was taxed at 1975 values, at a rate of five cents per square foot,” CTRA says. “Subsequent Disneyland expansions show land taxed at growing amounts as new properties were acquired, until, in 2002, new property is assessed and taxed at 37 cents/square foot of land. If the under-assessed and under-taxed Disney land were brought up to 2002 values, Disneyland would pay Orange County $4,672,217.74 more per year in tax. This amount is likely to be larger in 2010, because at an increase of 2% per year as permitted by law, the tax difference between the vast amount of property valued at 1975 values becomes even greater.”

Anyway, it gets even dumber: We understand that nearly everyone who provides material to a reporter is doing so in ways that reflect their worldview, agenda or biases. We have long held that those motives are irrelevant if the information is reliable.This is an … insane statement? — both rationally and morally. Truth can't ever be a sole criteria for publishing. It's necessary, but not sufficient. To suggest otherwise ought to flunk someone out of first year journalism school.

I've never been a fan of second hand markets as a thing, like these records go like hotcakes and resale for megabucks, and everything about that feels like a perversion; the concept of objects becoming pristine collectables rather than being available to people who want to enjoy them, the concept of finding $400 that won't even go to the artist, label or cover-designer

You could create communities around ideas and information. It was really exciting for a little while.Then we screwed it up.At some point, we started creating communities of selfish little monsters and internet trolls. We created Swifties and Beliebers. We created a cult around the idea of the autonomous individual.

Tim Ferriss spends the rest of the book encouraging people not to read, to ignore the news, and to browbeat everyone into giving into their demands. He brags about interrogating college teachers for hours over bad grades instead of, you know, trying to learn something about the world. He recommends treating friends like personal assistants and tasking them with research.

jet around impoverished countries where the dollar is strong (a legacy of colonialism) while running businesses online.

It’s a little more rustic, but still light years beyond what most people will ever get to enjoy, regardless of how hard they work.

Specifically, the lawsuit seeks a legal declaration that Google is a "common carrier," like phone, gas and electric companies, which must provide its services to anyone willing to pay its fee.

Such a lens pans away from virtue and instead focuses on mere inner tranquility, created by the not becoming perturbed by other people’s thoughts, actions, and problems. In this respect, “indifferents” get wrongfully defined as things not worth being concerned or bothered about! 

Agiatis, the Spartan Queen, is another powerful female who plays a significant role in Stoicism’s history. Yet, she is barely mentioned in Stoic circles, despite her role in standing up and succeeding against an oligarchical regime that murdered her first husband, Agis IV, and her in-laws (Agis IV’s grandmother Archidamia, and mother, Agesistrata) and added to their wealth and property by impoverishing and disenfranchising her people. It is rather telling that life-hackers who show such an appetite for Stoicism do not go further than highlighting how a “Spartan” flavored Stoicism can help them lift heavier weights in the gym or become more resilient in the rat race. What can be more Spartan or Stoic than taking the fight to the powerful and passing socioeconomic and land reforms in the name of justice at great personal cost?

The rules as I understand them: Protect your good habits at all cost. When you lose them, fight to regain them. Quit before the bad habit fully sinks its claws in or else you’ll spend years trying to get rid of it.Hard work rarely feels good.Choose emotionally healthy people who don't aggravate your attachment issuesIf you lie you’ll have to keep lying. Don’t lie if you can’t sustain it. Get over your fear of rejection. Fear of rejection is very expensive.Continually assert your boundaries.Then there are the more nebulous rules about how to be a good human in the world, which vary person by person (well, depending on how utilitarian you are). But they usually aren’t that complicated, either.In the end all we have to do is to stay faithful to the same basic guidelines. And yet we never learn, do we?

Just America’s origins in theory, its intolerant dogma, and its coercive tactics remind me of 1930s left-wing ideology. Liberalism as white supremacy recalls the Communist Party’s attack on social democracy as “social fascism.” Just American aesthetics are the new socialist realism.

The parameters of acceptable expression are a lot narrower than they used to be.

The jobs their parents took for granted have become much harder to get, which makes the meritocratic rat race even more crushing.

Just America is a narrative of the young and well educated, which is why it continually misreads or ignores the Black and Latino working classes.

In the summer of 2020, the protesters in the American streets were disproportionately Millennials with advanced degrees making more than $100,000 a year.

I’m exaggerating the suddenness of this new narrative, but not by much.

Just America can’t deal with the stubborn divide between Black and white students in academic assessments. The mild phrase achievement gap has been banished, not only because it implies that Black parents and children have some responsibility, but also because, according to anti-racist ideology, any disparity is by definition racist. Get rid of assessments, and you’ll end the racism along with the gap.

It can’t talk about the complex causes of poverty.

The most radical version of the narrative lashes together the oppression of all groups in an encompassing hell of white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia, plutocracy, environmental destruction, and drones—America as a unitary malignant force beyond any other evil on Earth.

What had been considered, broadly speaking, American history (or literature, philosophy, classics, even math) is explicitly defined as white, and therefore supremacist. What was innocent by default suddenly finds itself on trial, every idea is cross-examined, and nothing else can get done until the case is heard.

Any talk of progress is false consciousness—even “hurtful.”

Everyone sensed their power. Not everyone resisted the temptation to abuse it.

A whole system of oppression can exist within a single word.

But in identity politics, equality refers to groups, not individuals, and demands action to redress disparate outcomes among groups—in other words, equity, which often amounts to new forms of discrimination. In practice, identity politics inverts the old hierarchy of power into a new one: bottom rail on top. The fixed lens of power makes true equality, based on common humanity, impossible.

The self is not a rational being that can persuade and be persuaded by other selves, because reason is another form of power.

Critical theorists argue that the Enlightenment, including the American founding, carried the seeds of modern racism and imperialism.

American university classrooms, where two generations of students were taught to think as critical theorists.

In some versions of the narrative, the country has no positive value at all—it can never be made better.

But racism alone couldn’t explain why white men were much more likely to vote for Trump than white women, or why the same was true of Black and Latino men and women. Or why the most reliable predictor for who was a Trump voter wasn’t race but the combination of race and education.

Early in the campaign, I spent time with a group of white and Black steelworkers in a town near Canton, Ohio. They had been locked out by the company over a contract dispute and were picketing outside the mill. They faced months without a paycheck, possibly the loss of their jobs, and they talked about the end of the middle class. The only candidates who interested them were Trump and Bernie Sanders.

Self-government didn’t require any special learning, just the native wisdom of the people.

And because people still live their lives in an actual place, and the nation is the largest place with which they can identify—world citizenship is too abstract to be meaningful—patriotic feeling has to be tapped if you want to achieve anything big.

She meant that she no longer lived with any security.

Graduation from an exclusive school marks the entry into a successful life.