Documenting Life

“Baumol recognized that this principle extended across the entire economy, beyond farms and opera houses. Some sectors, such as growing corn and making electronics, have become more efficient and productive thanks to new technology, trade, and automation. But other sectors— especially services, such as haircuts, theater performances, and watching toddlers in daycare—still require as much labor as they did before the Industrial Revolution”

https://www.derekthompson.org/p/why-cost-disease-is-the-secret-force

“big publishing houses are generating hits by trawling self-published offerings on Amazon and scooping up anything with sales momentum. They are ever so slightly moving away from being reliable curators of fine writing and great storytelling to acting as distribution outlets for whatever is hot, because it’s hot. To borrow a term that was popular in the telecom world I briefly inhabited, publishers are edging toward becoming dumb pipes, carrying data across a network without adding any value or control over it.

I don’t want to overstate this, because much of what is being published is being published as ever it was, but there’s definite movement in the dumb pipe direction. The big houses are increasingly relying on upstream signals—whether Amazon rankings or TikTok virality or Goodreads buzz—rather than editorial conviction in their acquisitions”

https://shush.substack.com/p/shy-girl-is-a-window-to-the-future

“In a way the modern big-club coach takes the job with the full awareness that they are basically a narrative device, a reset button to press when things get sticky, a meat sacrifice that allows everyone else to indulge the illusion of renewal. You can’t shift the owners and you can’t sell an entire playing squad. So the purpose of the manager is essentially to be fired: to be responsible for the things they’re not really responsible for, to be immediately disposable, to provide the illusion of a simple solution where none exists”

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/mar/18/liverpool-arne-slot-premier-league-champions-league-football

“The proverb “if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” ought to be seen in this context. If you really are at the stage of development where the only tool you have is a hammer, then it strikes me that it’s incredibly sensible to go around looking at your various problems, and seeing if any of them could be improved by a bit of hammering”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/everything-is-a-nail-or-at-least

“it is important to understand that trolling is not simply about being obnoxious on the internet. It is about baiting people. The term itself arguably comes from a form of fishing. The victory came not from being horrible per se, but from getting people worked up, making them care. It gave rise to a moral economy with a single, absolute rule: the worst thing you can be is someone who meant it”

https://www.joxleywrites.jmoxley.co.uk/p/on-radical-sincerity

“The woman across from you at the coffee shop may be someone who will never ever want to fuck you – that is often the case – but she’s also not a jewel locked in a vault that only a six-foot-three hedge fund manager with a Greek statue’s bone structure can crack. Rather, she’s a human being with free will and a body that wants things, a mind that gets lonely sometimes, a heart that may like very much to find someone else to press against in the dark… a person, in other words”

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-incels-veto-and-other-observations

“You can imagine Trump as Gollum with some of Sauron’s powers, but to his credit, Gollum understood the One Ring was only as good as the powers that went with it. (While I’m at it with the Middle Earth analogies, let’s call Silicon Valley’s overlords orcs who think they are hobbits.)”

https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/visions-of-life-agents-of-death-on-love-thy-neighbor-and-love-thy-nature/

“I can see this all happening. I hate it. Science — and the social sciences, in particular — will get worse, while the capabilities of a few distinct technologies improve. The people who most love these technologies will insist that the future is bright, and they’llspeculate on the wonderful possibilities that have just been unleashed, and they’ll never once notice the obvious parallels between today’s digital future and digital futures’ past”

https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/what-comes-next-if-claude-code-is

“For just one instance, in the run up to Operation Desert Storm, both President Bush and Secretary James Baker openly talked about our reliance on Middle Eastern oil and preventing a recession and therefore the loss of US jobs. But then the administration’s rhetoric shifted, pointing to Saddam’s human rights abuses and how horrible his regime was in general.

As the analysis of one historian contends, the public pretty much bought the oil explanation; the human rights stuff didn’t add much and may have even muddled the overall case, contributing to the rather short political gains of the war.

So maybe Trump has some good reason to believe that being openly rapacious is a better political path than making up fairy tales about democracy and human rights”

https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/crude-ideology