Author: Self

“The dating app paradox: Why dating apps may be worse than ever” – Greg Rosalsky (NPR)

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It’s possible that dating apps face adverse selection. Basically, a new app starts up, and hopeless romantics looking for real love begin flocking to it. But so do sleazy types who lie on their dating profiles. Over time, the earnest daters go on a bunch of bad dates, encountering people who have no interest in real relationships or whose profiles are completely misleading. 

Like lemons driving good cars out of the used-car market, maybe sleazeballs push great catches out of dating apps and ultimately ruin the quality of the whole app experience. So people go to a new app with the hopes of finding something better, and the cycle starts again.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2024/02/13/1228749143/the-dating-app-paradox-why-dating-apps-may-be-worse-than-ever

“The Lure of Divorce” – Emily Gould (The Cut)

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“At the end of the session, we decided to continue with the therapist but in couples therapy instead of divorce mediation. It was a service she also provided, and as a bonus, it was $100 cheaper per session. She didn’t say why she made this recommendation, but maybe it was our palpable shared grief that convinced her that our marriage was salvageable. Or maybe it was that, despite everything I had told her in that session, she could see that, even in my profound sadness and anger, I looked toward Keith to complete my sentences when I was searching for the right word and that he did the same thing with me. As broken as we were, we were still pieces of one once-whole thing”

https://www.thecut.com/article/marriage-divorce-should-i-leave-my-husband-emily-gould.html

“Putting 10,000 EVs on African roads, the hard way” – Damilare Dosunmu (restofworld)

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“Spiro had initially hoped to monetize the old bikes it collected from riders by retrofitting them with EV technology — but that hasn’t worked out. Around 40% of the bikes Spiro collects are converted to scrap metal and sold for less than $20 per unit, Samain said. Rest of Worldvisited four of the company’s branches in Togo and Benin, and saw hundreds of abandoned bikes waiting to be scrapped.

Any bike owner can go to a Spiro exchange center, request a swap, get their credentials verified, and pick up a new EV within a week. Riders then pay a daily fee of 3,200 CFA francs ($5.32) for up to seven battery swaps, and each additional swap costs 500 CFA francs (83 cents). The daily fee also covers insurance and maintenance, and riders can take the bikes for check-ups anytime for free. After 150,000 kilometers, a rider takes full ownership of the bike and is not required to pay the daily swap fee”

https://restofworld.org/2024/spiro-ebikes-africa/

“When we don’t know the true sales figures for consoles, players lose out” – Alexa MacDonald (Pushing Buttons, Guardian)

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“You might think: who cares? What’s 5m PS2s between friends? And it’s true that I find this lack of transparency particularly annoying because I am a journalist, and I like to have answers. But the absence of reported sales figures allows companies to spin narratives that don’t line up with reality, to please the markets and their shareholders. They can claim success on whichever metric best backs up that story”

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/apr/03/pushing-buttons-video-game-console-sales

“SPD, Author’s Equity and distribution” – Notes from a small press

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“It is eminently doable to buy or lease a Xerox or similar machine that prints perfect bound books and use it to do short runs and galley printings. One of these machines could print books for a lot of SPD clients, I expect. I kinda wish I had tried harder to raise the funds for one back then. I even took a meeting with a guy from Xerox! And had some convos with the folks at CMLP! If there is money anywhere in the publishing ecosystem, it might be in printing (or sprayed edges!). And if there is power to be had in publishing—well, the means of production and all that. Fuck superstructure: focus on structure”

https://notesfromasmallpress.substack.com/p/spd-authors-equity-and-distribution

“How airlines fly away from accountability” – Boondoggle

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“In 1978, Congress passed and then-President Jimmy Carter signed into law the Airline Deregulation Act, which was part of a deregulatory zeal that grabbed national lawmakers in the 70s and 80s, and led to the deregulation of vast swathes of the economy, from trucking to railroads to telecoms to, perhaps most famously, banking and finance.

A provision in that law wiped away the ability of anyone in state government to make rules or do any enforcement “related to a price, route, or service of an air carrier.”

https://boondoggle.substack.com/p/how-airlines-fly-away-from-accountability

“What makes Dragon’s Dogma 2 a fiery breath of fresh air” – Keza MacDonald (Pushing Buttons, Guardian)

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“Some players have reacted with dismay to this game’s inflexibility, but I respect Dragon’s Dogma 2’s willingness to ruin your day from time to time. It doesn’t bend to your will; you have to work around its rules – even when, at the beginning, you don’t necessarily know what they are. At first you might be frustrated that, for instance, characters often tell you about intriguing legends and rumours, but the game never marks these things down on your map to tell you where you might find them. Then, as the hours go by, you might find yourself caught out in the wilds at night without a camping kit, and seek shelter in a cavern that turns out to lead to a crumbling mountain shrine, where you find an actual sphinx. You realise that if someone had marked its location on your map, you’d never have felt so awed when you first spied its glowing eyes in the dark”

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/mar/27/pushing-buttons-dragons-dogma-2

“Killing The Messenger: My Final Days Working at a Disaster” – Jordan Hoffman (Intelligencer)

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“But I soon recognized that time-consuming reporting or rich critical essays were less valued by upper management than quick hits. I’ll never forget the day I was told, breathlessly, by the then-head of the entertainment channel that Toni Collette was trending. (Trending, I say, trending! Do you hear me? Toni Collette is trending!!! I believe it was her birthday.)

Swiftly, I put aside whatever it was I was doing to meet this task head-on. I dashed off something to the tune of “8 Toni Collette Performances You Need to See” and was sure to shout-out About a Boy and the Nightmare Alley remake that was somehow nominated for a Best Picture Oscar even though no one watched it. (It’s pretty enjoyable!) If I may be so bold, I wrote a damn good article about Toni Collette. But even working at supersonic speeds, by the time I finished, Toni Collette wasn’t trending anymore. Heck of a way to run a business”

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2024/02/killing-the-messenger-my-final-days-working-at-a-disaster.html

“Trump Haters Turned Trump Voters” – Olivia Nuzzi (Intelligencer)

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“When I returned to the state in September, she invited me over, and for several hours at her kitchen counter, where she showed me the semiautomatic rifle she keeps in a drawer, she explained how a former precinct captain for Teddy Kennedy’s 1980 presidential campaign became the kind of woman who bulldozed through a crowd of protesters outside a MAGA rally with both middle fingers raised in the air”

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/donald-trump-2024-republican-presidential-primary-voters.html