“I mention this because people like to grumble about book reviews being cronyism and favoritism and untrustworthy. That isn’t how they work in my experience. Indeed, book reviews are one of the rare publishing spaces largely free of that. Which is one reason it’s sad that book review sections keep dwindling. Blurbs are often connections,…
Month: January 2024
“Antitrust enforcers block the JetBlue-Spirit merger” – BIG
“Today, recognizing America is in a monopoly crisis has become conventional wisdom, so much so that this judge, an 82 year-old Ronald Reagan appointee, openly talked about the effects of this concentration problem in a merger opinion blocking a deal between two relatively small airlines. And no one batted an eye. That is a stunning…
“Empty Laughter” – Ed Zitron
“I believe that those most excited about generative AI “letting them write” or “letting them create art” are those who do not understand that what we can create is, much like an artist, limited by the person itself. We are not all capable of doing anything we want, and through experimenting with our own limitations…
“Jamie Dimon’s $4 Trillion Machine” – Gary Sernovitz (Intelligencer)
“One of the strangest things about Dimon’s career is that the man who now leads the world’s largest bank has never really worked for a bank. He helped Weill buy and transform financial-services companies. And then he ran banks. During his years with Weill, there was a clear division of labor: Weill was chutzpah and…
“Why big tech could learn big lessons from the Post Office Horizon scandal” – Alex Sheen, TechScape (Guardian)
“If you still want to track down the point where bad IT became a crisis, then you have to look past the tech altogether. The Post Office declared, as fiat, that Horizon worked. From there, everything that happened after was the logical conclusion. If Horizon works, then the errors must be because of what the…
“January 15, 2024” – Letters from an American
“the image of the migrant woman and children drowning is so damaging that Texas troops claim they didn’t see any distressed migrants and Texas governor Greg Abbott today insisted that the migrants were already dead when his troops stopped the Border Patrol from helping, although that claim does not address the fact that the Texas…
“The Digital Equivalent of Wearing a Fake Chanel Bag” – Garbage Day
“the early 2010s, big social platforms transformed the internet from a place of mostly text into a network of visual content. In 2011, Twitter launched the ability to embed images directly into tweets. And a year later, Instagram was purchased by Facebook and began its slow morph from hipster Polaroid app to Facebook 2.0 for…
“The World Is Listening To Less Music In English” – Screentime (Bloomberg)
“The craziest stat of all? There are 45.6 million tracks that generated ZERO streams last year. There were 10 tracks that had more than 1 billion.” https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-01-14/universal-music-layoffs-record-labels-need-a-new-growth-story
“Risky Business” – A Scammer Darkly
“In a business where some level of loss is written in, the last two years have blown a hole in P&Ls and caused an industry-wide panic. Politicians are faced with an uncomfortable choice – let for-profit insurers gouge their customers by hiking rates double digits each year, or have swaths of their citizens unable to…
“The Failed Commodification Of Technical Work” – Ludicity
“There’s plenty of work that consists of simply churning out widgets faster, and I’m happy to see that work disappear (so long as we find a way for people to continue living healthily without it), but it must be acknowledged that many of the things we value in society come from an ill-defined, more vital…