P.O.S.S.E.
“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/
“Frustration among electric car buyers is helping to fuel a combustion boom. And it’s not just at Caritas that the shift to electric cars has stalled. The German federal government’s central modernization project is in danger of failing. Not only is the German populace not playing along, but manufacturers haven’t come up with attractive products and the political framework conditions still haven’t been optimized. Electric car purchases remain the domain of those with healthier salaries”
“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.”
“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?”
“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”
“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”
“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
“Elden Ring is a horrible game if you’re trying to complete it as fast as possible with extremely limited time – most games are. It’s a wonderful game if you’re focused on the adventure you’re having in the moment. I spent about 40 minutes in a small smouldering church, trying to beat a red phantom warrior with a gigantic cleaver who could kill me in two hits, just to see if I could. When I got her – after two successful parries and a flurry of desperate sword swipes – I was beside myself. That was a moment I would have missed entirely if I’d been fixated on getting through the game”
https://www.theguardian.com/games/article/2024/jul/02/pushing-buttons-elden-ring-making-time