Documenting Life

“From 2016 to 2019—mostly during Trump’s administration—those rural left-behind counties, which make up about 18% of the U.S. population, added 10,000 jobs. In 2023 alone, they added 104,000.

Tankersley notes that Trump overwhelmingly won the support of voters in these counties, but their circumstances did not improve during his administration. Under Biden, they added jobs five times faster than they did under Trump. Still, voters there appear to continue to back Trump”

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-9-2024

“The fan brain thinks about what is. It worries about “canon” and wants to preserve the work like a sacred object from critics, vandals, and barbarians. The artist brain thinks in what could be. It looks at the object not to vandalize it, but to come up with a new object. Actually, let me shift my metaphor to the “artist’s eye.” The artist’s eye is always looking for openings, cracks, and canyons to explore. And yes, fans can have an “artist’s eye” too. Isn’t the main impulse of fanfiction “What if this thing I love had been done differently?”

https://countercraft.substack.com/p/seeing-with-an-artists-eye

“The Michigan Supreme Court found that “a business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders [and that] the powers of the directors are to be employed for that end,” and intimated that cash surpluses should not be saved to invest in upcoming projects, but distributed to shareholders, because Ford had shown that it was good at making money. Ford was directly forbidden from lowering prices and raising employee salaries, and forced to issue a dividend.

To be clear, the statement around corporations’ duty toward shareholders was made “obiter dicta.” This means it was not actually legally binding, despite over a hundred years of people acting as if it was”

https://www.wheresyoured.at/tss/

“One of the key edicts of management cybernetics is that “it is not necessary to look inside the black box in order to understand its behaviour”. But this is only true a) if you’ve made the right decisions about how to divide things up into black boxes and b) if you’re prepared to accept that the behaviour of the black box might often be really quite illogical or pathological. Most of the time, corporate decision-making systems are what Beer called “muddy boxes” – the extent to which you can understand the internal workings depends on how much effort you are prepared to put in. And in my view, it’s often important to spend at least some time wiping the glass on the muddy box, to be sure that you have an accurate picture of the true inputs and outputs”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/being-legible-to-oneself

“A notebook crackles with potential energy. Between the covers, myriad scribbles hold ideas, observations, quotes, anxieties… This is pure thought, suspended in time. Only when an idea is extracted from the book and exposed to daylight does it start to decay. Nothing lives up to the original idea, or at least nothing lives up to the feeling you had writing down that original idea. Structures are imposed on stories, third-party requirements; “Can it be more like…” The original note is the spark of life. As soon as it leaves the womb, it starts to die.

Even the act of writing itself is a process of decay; the translation from thought to word dilutes and distracts. And when you make up stories for a living, they only ever really get worse. Sure, there are good bits, upticks on the graph, but generally the feeling of a new idea is as good as it gets. Everything after that is a compromise”

https://developmenthell.substack.com/p/bits-of-the-minds-string

“Look, I could talk your ear off about how the tech aspect of this alone improves the odds for these new publications. (Content management is business strategy! Open distribution platforms are fundamentally politically radical!) But the more important thing is that regular people, people who aren’t nerds who’ve spent two straight decades worrying about how insufferable writers in Brooklyn can make money publishing snarky but smart shit on the web, are finding value in this work”

https://anildash.com/2024/06/14/the-new-alt-media/

“Economic termites describes where these same forces get into the mostly unseen business foundations of our society and profiteer.

These termites are in the infrastructure or guts of business, like recruiting services, construction equipment or software, the industrial gasses that go into chemicals and electronics, and so forth. It’s the stuff you don’t see that makes our world turn, there’s fortunes to be made, and bottlenecks to foster.

They also explain a dynamic we all face, a profound wariness in our society, a sense that stuff just costs more and is more difficult, for no discernible reason. Added up, these end up sapping our faith in the American system, because they make what seem like simple problems become not just unsolvable, but not even capable of being diagnosed”

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/economic-termites-are-everywhere

“But then, who’s counting? New York mega-projects always take way too long and cost way too much. At least, now that it’s open, commuters from Long Island must be really happy with their shorter commutes? Right?

Unfortunately not.

Here’s the thing: the MTA, the parent agency of the LIRR, built this very expensive new terminal. But they didn’t buy new trains, which were needed to adequately service the terminal.”

https://www.joshbarro.com/p/congestion-pricing-a-good-idea-died