Category: links_read

“And Americans have largely been very confused at the idea of this genuinely very famous man that they have never heard of before.

I, too, was very confused when I first learned of Williams while I was living in London many years ago. I was even more confused by his Whole Deal, which I guess I’d compare to Mark Wahlberg, if Wahlberg never went into acting and, instead, blew up into a Justin Timberlake-level pop star”

https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-ai-guys-were-lying-the-whole-time

“But my visceral response to this kind of thinking – and even aside from ordinal lists of importance, the smartphone-supremacy attitude is very common – is to say, wow, these people must really enjoy shitting in the yard.

Plumbing – bringing fresh water from one place to another and disposing of human waste via engineering – goes back to antiquity, and you occasionally find claims of affordances like flush toilets in ancient times. Today, modern people in most developed parts of the world have constant access to free-running clean water and toilets that can remove physical waste to a secure processing facility or holding unit, with heated water on demand a very nice extra. That’s largely a 20th-century and forward phenomenon”

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-shitting-in-the-yard-test

“Indeed, it appears that the dominant manufacturers have managed to turn their delivery failures into financial advantage. Using the purported difficulty of projecting material costs over a 2-3-year lead time as an excuse, they have imposed “floating” price clauses onto their customers — allowing them to increase the final price of a rig when it finally goes into production”

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/did-a-private-equity-fire-truck-roll

“More and more, I find myself relieved by endings. When I put on a record on, it ends. When I turn the last page of a book, it’s over. When I finish a comic, it’s done. That can feel inconvenient, but it is actually a moment of empowerment. You will now decide whether you want to hear the album again, or listen to a different one, or do something else entirely. You are not just lost in this endless conveyor belt of content, which you long ago stopped considering with a critical eye”

https://iandunt.substack.com/p/how-to-resist-the-tech-overlords