Documenting Life

“One of the funniest biannual traditions in tech journalism is “shocked coverage of tech-industry figures supporting Republicans season,” during which a spate of articles and tweets are published marveling at the fact that many prominent Silicon Valley executives and investors are Republicans, and often quite right-wing Republicans, at that! I’m not sure how many of these cycles we have to go through before it becomes clear that there is (and always has been) a large and influential faction of tech capital (i.e. founders, investors, executives) that is not merely “libertarian” but deeply right wing: militarist, eugenicist, hierarchy-obsessed”

https://maxread.substack.com/p/the-is-twitter-real-election

“What we are witnessing in many Republican-run states across the country is a voucher movement that has caught the car. Millions of parents are receiving educational welfare checks they don’t need to send their kids to private schools, and that money is cut from already impoverished public systems, the only place the poor and working class can afford to send their kids”

https://newsletter.scammerdarkly.com/archive/free-flow-catheters-harvard-school-vouchers-and/

“Proton Mail ran a user survey two months ago. They found some readers saying they were “interested in AI,” didn’t include a “hell no” option, and today, they’ve introduced Proton Scribe, claiming that “interested in AI” constituted user demand for this specific feature!”

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2024/07/18/proton-mail-goes-ai-security-focused-userbase-goes-what-on-earth/

“This idea was (and is), of course, total nonsense. From what I can tell — as Lattice didn’t really elaborate beyond a few screenshots and PR-approved gobbledygook — the company planned to create a profile for AI “workers” within the platform, which would then, in turn, allow something else to happen, though what that is doesn’t seem obvious, because I’m fairly certain that this entire announcement was the equivalent of allowing you to make a profile in a CRM but with a dropdown box that said “AI.”

https://www.wheresyoured.at/put-up-or-shut-up/

“A really good mental model to carry around for analyzing the finance industry is one-shot versus iterated games. Real estate attorneys model (residential, owner-occupied) closings as effectively one-shot with respect to the client but iterated with respect to the other attorney. If one were conspiratorially-minded, one could say unkind words like “conflict of interest” at this point, but this sort of equilibrium doesn’t require anyone to act invidiously. The other attorney is a peer running their business in a socially accepted fashion and very likely quite similarly to how you run your own business. You will see them again both professionally and socially. Why make trouble over nothing”

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/working-title-insurance/

“PBMs are big. Really big. The parent insurance companies of the biggest PBMs top nearly $1 trillion in revenue annually, roughly 4% of the GDP of America. Just the top four equal 22% of national healthcare expenditures, up from 14% in 2016. And no other country has anything like the PBM industry. The revenue of American PBMs is larger than what France spends on its entire healthcare system”

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/inside-the-mafia-of-pharma-pricing

“Jayson Tatum on a three-on-one break pulling up to clang yet another awkward three off the front rim, and doing so because that’s what he’s been explicitly coached to do, doesn’t look like dominance. It looks like an ugly, boring war of attrition. And I don’t care that it’s effective. I don’t care. I’m not a GM. The point of being a fan is not to be a mini GM, despite what Twitter would have you believe. The point of being a fan is to watch and enjoy the product, and I don’t enjoy the product. It’s frenetic, there’s no rhythm, and it gives me exactly the feeling I get when a middle infielder who weighs 180 pounds sopping wet takes a wild hack and flies out with a 3-1 count because he’s been taught to prioritize launch angle. Do you really want to be baseball, NBA? Do you really?”

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/fuck-the-modern-nba

“Once the dust had settled, and new Prime Minister Keir Starmer had begun appointing ministers on the basis of expertise rather than political expediency, and Chancellor Rachel Reeves had used her first speech to talk about the need for growth and the importance of planning reform – an important but politically contentious change which a government needs to do immediately or it simply never will – I felt the first glimmers of hope about Britain I’d had in some time.

It doesn’t matter, right now, that Labour only got 34% of the vote, not 40%. It doesn’t matter, even, that Reform has five MPs. For the next few years, Britain has a Labour government that can do, within reason, what it wants, without constantly worrying about the prejudices of elderly homeowners or the Daily Mail”

https://jonn.substack.com/p/the-dust-settles