P.O.S.S.E.
“Demand specificity before automation. The rule my team uses is simple. If you cannot describe what the human did, with examples, you do not understand the job well enough to automate it. Generalities about “handling customer queries” or “writing boilerplate” are not descriptions. They are the fog that hides the part the AI cannot do.”
“The historical precedents of Israel and of the United States are quite different, yes, but the basic dynamic of “religious minority feeling the sting of persecution secures homeland by forcefully taking the land of other, weaker people who were not the ones persecuting them, while being extremely self-righteous about it”—well, that should ring familiar to anyone who has ever watched the Dallas Cowboys play the Washington Redskins.
When you stand surrounded by hundreds of flexing young men drunk on rage, testosterone, and politics, you can really feel part of a tradition running through all of human history, and through all of the world’s nation-states. Any country that wants to draw borders and motivate its young men to kill for them must whip up a crowd like this, at scale”
“audiences have kind of settled into a weird middle ground where they want videos to feel like a friend with perfect media training casually FaceTiming them from a professional newsroom”
https://www.garbageday.email/p/there-s-nothing-to-watch-on-youtube-anymore
“To achieve the overall objective of stochastically interdicting crime, the regs are designed to force criminals into repeated unpalatable tradeoffs. One is “You can choose making money, or you can choose never interacting with banks, but it is very difficult to choose both.”
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/nonprofit-indicted-bank-fraud/
“I wonder if as he lies in bed, Donald Trump’s last thought before drifting off to sleep is how wonderful it would be if all of the world was a giant ballroom dripping with gold, the DJ playing his favorite tunes while one hot broad after another in a low-cut gown comes up to the dais to tell him how great he looks, forever and ever”
https://paulwaldman.substack.com/p/kick-him-right-in-the-ballroom
“In other words, during a period in which birth rates and family formation has been falling, and adults living with their parents has been rising, is it such a great puzzle that so many people answer positively to questions about “how are your personal financial circumstances?” but negatively to questions about the performance of the economy?”
https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-new-age-of-diminished-expectations
“I was struck by the familiarity of the tone and structure of the descriptions of these extreme beauty routines: the exhaustively enumerated but still unexplained accessories, the painstaking multi-step cycles, the stubborn personal theories, the air of weary hard-won confidence from long hours of research. Over the years I have read some very similar paragraphs about hi-fi systems, S.L.R. cameras, espresso machines, and other objects of obsessive hobbyism on message boards, mailing lists, and forums”
https://maxread.substack.com/p/what-corporate-thrillers-tell-us
“A few days a notable event happened in the course of not just the Russo-Ukraine War but also in modern, machine-defined war. The Ukrainians assaulted and took a Russian position using only machines—both UAVs and UGVs (drones and pilotless land vehicles). Not a single Ukrainian soldier was put in harms way, while the Russians ended up losing humans, some of which were even filmed surrendering to the Ukrainian machines”
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/the-usa-does-not-understand-war
“Instead, Labour offers up its book of coupons, an ill-formed lattice of sticking-plaster solutions that nobody will feel the benefit of and for which nobody will thank it, coupled with a raft of promises it cannot remotely keep. And of course, the net effect is not zero. Rather, it maintains the dangerous fallacy that household expenditure is not simply an imperfect function of a lucid economy but a kind of lever to be pulled and yanked by politicians, tying this and every subsequent government to the tyranny of the monthly bill”
“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