P.O.S.S.E.
“I do feel for the fans of all the teams that got fucked up gear, because I too suffer from a mutated version of that gene, but it is a load-bearing metaphor for the financialization and commoditization of pro sports by its ghoulish billionaire owners (of which Rubin is one!) that the only team merch you can buy – because a clout-chasing gremlin bought up all the rights – is chintzy dogshit that may actually have your bitter rival’s team on it to boot”
“Among the new releases on Audible are books read by Edward Herrmann, who you might know from his work in Warren Beatty’s Reds or Oliver Stone’s Nixon or Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator or The Gilmore Girls. Herrmann has been dead for ten years. His family gave tapes of his voice to DeepZen, a London-based AI startup. DeepZen is working with a variety of voices to master the full range of human intonation. The results are impressive.
The Wall Street Journal wrote about Edward Herrmann’s books and the intersection of AI and audiobooks. It presented a sample of a DeepZen audio voice and a real voice reading the same text and asked readers to guess which was which. I listen to a ton of audiobooks and consider myself quite sensitive to voices: I guessed wrong”
“I mention this because people like to grumble about book reviews being cronyism and favoritism and untrustworthy. That isn’t how they work in my experience. Indeed, book reviews are one of the rare publishing spaces largely free of that. Which is one reason it’s sad that book review sections keep dwindling. Blurbs are often connections, publicity is paid for, and buzz tends to be a bit of both, but professional book reviews aren’t either”
“Today, recognizing America is in a monopoly crisis has become conventional wisdom, so much so that this judge, an 82 year-old Ronald Reagan appointee, openly talked about the effects of this concentration problem in a merger opinion blocking a deal between two relatively small airlines. And no one batted an eye. That is a stunning intellectual turnaround from an era where consolidation was considered a way to foster efficiency and better corporate behavior”
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/antitrust-enforcers-block-the-jetblue
“I believe that those most excited about generative AI “letting them write” or “letting them create art” are those who do not understand that what we can create is, much like an artist, limited by the person itself. We are not all capable of doing anything we want, and through experimenting with our own limitations we discover our talents, sometimes through sheer force of will, and even then, sometimes we can put hundreds of hours into something without being as good as somebody who barely tried”
“One of the strangest things about Dimon’s career is that the man who now leads the world’s largest bank has never really worked for a bank. He helped Weill buy and transform financial-services companies. And then he ran banks. During his years with Weill, there was a clear division of labor: Weill was chutzpah and vision, Dimon was operations and numbers. He would obsess over downside, integration, and costs, cutting newspaper subscriptions and country-club memberships and jobs. Everyone noticed how good he was, and by 1998, Weill, a complicatedly insecure egotist, could no longer tolerate it. He fired his professional son. Dimon considered CEO jobs at Home Depot and elsewhere and then shocked everyone by agreeing in 2000 to run a hodgepodge of poorly integrated midwestern banks, which overcompensated by calling itself Bank One. In four years in Chicago, Dimon relentlessly fixed the institution”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/jp-morgan-chase-jamie-dimon-biggest-big-bank.html
“If you still want to track down the point where bad IT became a crisis, then you have to look past the tech altogether. The Post Office declared, as fiat, that Horizon worked. From there, everything that happened after was the logical conclusion. If Horizon works, then the errors must be because of what the subpostmasters did. If they say they made no errors, then they must have committed fraud. If they committed fraud, then a conviction is morally just.
But Horizon didn’t work”
“the image of the migrant woman and children drowning is so damaging that Texas troops claim they didn’t see any distressed migrants and Texas governor Greg Abbott today insisted that the migrants were already dead when his troops stopped the Border Patrol from helping, although that claim does not address the fact that the Texas troops had blocked the Border Patrol’s normal surveillance of the river and had assumed responsibility for it. Abbott tried to argue that the deaths were not his fault but rather Biden’s because, he said, Biden’s policies encouraged migrants to attempt the crossing”
“the early 2010s, big social platforms transformed the internet from a place of mostly text into a network of visual content. In 2011, Twitter launched the ability to embed images directly into tweets. And a year later, Instagram was purchased by Facebook and began its slow morph from hipster Polaroid app to Facebook 2.0 for millennials. After that, our social feeds became primarily visual. This was doubly true for brands. Every algorithm suddenly required some kind of image to break through. And after Instagram launched Reels in 2020 to compete with TikTok, you began needing video, as well.
Nowadays, user-generated content platforms are basically just widgets for JPGs. This is especially true for brands using these sites. Which is a problem because digital media is a game of scale and if you need a team of designers, if not an entire video production workflow, to catch the attention of an algorithm, it quickly stops being useful”
https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-digital-equivalent-of-wearing
“The craziest stat of all? There are 45.6 million tracks that generated ZERO streams last year. There were 10 tracks that had more than 1 billion.”