Month: May 2024

“And now, one version of a type of software that has been around for a long time is suddenly on everyone’s minds. It’s being used to make a variety of toys. A number of people are hooking those toys up to heart machines and bombs. And I’m fifty years old and I get to watch it all with a pleasant cola in my hand.

I’m profoundly cynical but I’m not generally apocalyptic. For me, what’s being called “Artificial Intelligence” and all the more reasonable non-anthropomorphizing terms is just a new nutty set of batch scripts, except this time folks are actually praying to them. That’s high comedy”

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5638

“To Wall, it’s beyond comprehension that antitrust enforcers might not actually believe what businessmen are telling them. And any attempt to address a corporation that everyone hates is simply a “populist urge that simply rejects how antitrust law works.” And in contrast to the crazy lunatics today, Wall says, “The Obama Administration saw things differently.” Wall even cites antitrust scholar Herb Hovenkamp’s treatise that these kinds of corporations are usually lawful, though Hovenkamp himself said the case is solid”

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/antitrust-enforcers-to-break-up-ticketmaster

“Ben & David do bring additional research: magazine articles, annual reports, and sometimes notes from conversations with people who worked at or invested in the companies under discussion. And some of their episodes are about companies that haven’t been written up in books, in which case the guys tend to rely on magazine, newspaper articles, and tech blogs. But more often than not, the substance of an Acquired episode is somebody’s book supplemented by Wikipedia. In a sober moment, Ben admitted: “Acquired has an opportunity in the world because people don’t read books. And we just go read books and tell people about them.”

So the essence of Acquired’s schtick is exploiting analog media for a digital audience. Ben & David summarize and riff off great nonfiction by serious historians and business journalists who’ve put ten thousand hours into their books”

https://shush.substack.com/p/how-to-get-rich-with-nonfiction

“Today, by a vote of 6–3, the Supreme Court overturned the lower court’s decision and signed off on the new South Carolina congressional map that dilutes Black votes. It approved the map because, it said, the gerrymander was politically, rather than racially, motivated. And, it said, “as far as the Federal Constitution is concerned, a legislature may pursue partisan ends when it engages in redistricting.”

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-23-2024

“Over and over, I noticed that Jean-Pierre, and her predecessor Jen Psaki, praised big businesses like Google, Ticketmaster, JetBlue, Amazon, etc for vaccine mandates, helping small business, AI safety, whatever. That’s fine, sometimes big companies do good things. But when the administration itself took legal action against big business, Jean-Pierre and her predecessor Psaki retreated into ‘no comment’ and ‘that’s a legal issue.’”

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-does-the-biden-white-house-hate

“After all, a few years ago, Major League Baseball nuked the old minor league system, and, as part of its restructuring, kicked more than 40 teams out of the world of officially sanctioned minor league baseball entirely — and in the process, weakened previous rules that capped the number of teams any one owner could control, opening the door to Diamond Baseball Holdings’ takeover.

A bunch of those suddenly unsanctioned teams ended up folding, and no one wants to be next in line for a relocation or elimination if the major league overlords aren’t kept happy and decide to, once again, arbitrarily rework part of the system”

https://boondoggle.substack.com/p/meet-the-private-equity-firm-squeezing

“I was chatting with a friend who was arguing that traditional online marketing is basically worthless now. I suspect they’re right, and there’s two tactics there. One is to go the other route – more physical, more real space. The other is to try and rebuild an online community, in some way. Not easy.

The physical stuff isn’t any easier. When there was the recent conversation from retailers who were doing poorly, the one story which stuck in my mind was that Covid simply broke the shop model – in a way which is similar how it broke small music venues. People don’t go out for anything but big events and they don’t hang anywhere, and comic shops run off people coming in regularly and so having more chances to be exposed to more comics.

That “footfall” ideas is true digitally. The more folk talk about a book, the more chances someone is exposed to it as an idea”

https://buttondown.email/KieronGillen/archive/285-hiring-ste/

“Cutre captures something I love about Spain, which might be my favorite place to travel. It is unpretentious and unprecious, descriptions that cannot be applied to nearby France (duh) or Italy (too much gravitas in their dolce far niente). The Spanish understand that you might as well stop whatever you’re doing at 3 PM, it’s not that important, and have a vermouth and some olives. Several tiny beers over the course of hours are better than one big one. Low-keyness is its own value; the activity itself is more important than its perfection. Caring too much about the precise quality of where you are is not the point”

https://onethingnewsletter.substack.com/p/spains-word-for-cool-tackiness