P.O.S.S.E.
“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
“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
“Do I think LinkedIn is the digital River Styx, where damned souls clamber over each other and claw at the boat passing overhead in the dim hope of salvation from those who have escaped the shambling horde? I do. But if we’re all in hell together, we might as well try to lift each other up”