P.O.S.S.E.
“The First World War dominates the culture of the time. It echoes down to us in poetry, literature and film. The flu pandemic which followed infected a third of the global population and killed anywhere up to 100 million people and yet you never really see anything about it. It never comes up. Apart from one informational film, which survives in the BFI National Archive, the 1918/19 pandemic doesn’t appear in British film at all”
“The protest checked every “what we should be doing now” box—bringing community members into the streets, speaking out, remaining unswayed in our beliefs, taking action—but it was all playing out in an America where the mood to push the the kid in the wheelchair into the mud and laugh has taken hold. The mean spirit of nihilistic vengeance is momentarily unleashed. We will stuff it back in its box, sooner or later. But not yet”
https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/a-television-show-called-the-usa
“Enrich estimated that without USAID intervention, more than 16 million pregnant women and more than 11 million newborns would not get medical care; more than 14 million children would not get care for pneumonia and diarrhea (among the top causes of preventable deaths for children under the age of 5); 200,000 children would be paralyzed with polio; and 1 million children would not be treated for severe acute malnutrition. There would be an additional 12.5 million or more cases of malaria this year, meaning 71,000 to 166,000 deaths; a 28–32% increase in tuberculosis; as many as 775 million cases of avian flu; 2.3 million additional deaths a year in children who could not be vaccinated against diseases; additional cases of Ebola and mpox. The higher rates of illness will take a toll on economic development in developing countries, and both the diseases and the economic stagnation will spill over into the United States”
“How does this economy look good when people feel so bad? One reason is that our stats were collected premised on a reasonably equal society that no longer exists. Today, 10% of high earners account for half of consumer spending. That’s insane. There are actually two economies, one with high earners, and then everyone else. But our stats don’t account for that”
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-are-we-headed-into
“But man, for a long while, Skype was singularly amazing, offering high-quality / low-latency audio calls at a time when everything else seemed low-quality / high-latency. I continued using Skype to record The Talk Show until a few years ago, and I can’t say I miss it. But I used Skype to record at least around 400 episodes — which means I’ve spent somewhere around 1,000 hours talking to people over Skype. I can close my eyes and just hear Skype’s kinda clunky but distinctive ringtone. In the early days of podcasting, seemingly every show used Skype because it was so much better than anything else. And it was free! It felt like the future. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that if not for Skype, podcasting would’ve been set back several years”
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/02/28/microsoft-skype-eol
“There are other reasons the “far-right on the march” story might appeal. It’s easier to spot and tell than the one about Die Linke because the results are obvious rather than something you have to drill down into crosstabs to spot. It’s an easier sell to the powers that be, too, because bad news stories are always an easier sell, and also because everybody else is writing them so no one is going to yell at you for missing the real story. The sense of a Europe hovering above the abyss is exciting, too, and a not insignificant proportion of the people who go into journalism are history nerds who always kind of wanted to cover a world on fire”
“In many ways, Military MAGA resembles the parallel development of far-right politics after the Vietnam War. Again, this politics was rooted in the trauma of defeat, and again it came to revolve around the idea that an effete liberal class was holding the country back and needed to be forcibly uprooted. It played a large role in the rise of the white power movement in the 1990s, as you can read in the great book Bring the War Home by Kathleen Belew. This post-Vietnam movement didn’t really ever fade away, instead bleeding and merging into Military MAGA in the years after 9/11”
“So the Stafford Beer-approved crisis strategy is – find a list of actions which could potentially stabilise the situation in a useful time frame, then pick the one which causes the least organisational damage. Bearing in mind at both stages that the option you pick will determine the way you have to behave, and that this will have consequences for you, and for the organisation. If this process doesn’t identify any viable course of action, then move to a “war footing”, and consider tradeoffs which had previously been rejected, in the knowledge that you are going to have to spend time repairing fences afterwards; if there’s still no answer, you have to resign”
https://backofmind.substack.com/p/resign-and-do-not-fail-to-do-so
There may even be trade-offs between certain types of intelligence: Simon Baron-Cohen and other researchers, for instance, have postulated that there’s an inverse correlation between systematizing and empathizing: people tend either to be interested in abstract ideas or interested in other people, but not so often both.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/elon-musk-and-spiky-intelligence
“If Trump was out to Bolster The Republican Party, he would only be slashing budgets in blue states and protecting red ones. Instead he is lashing out at everything, ignoring every rule. The humiliating ritual of forcing Republican allies to come and beg him to restore cuts he has already made is the point. This process reflects the success of the system that Trump wants: All control of all things in his own hands. Rules and laws—even the ones that Republicans traditionally like!—are impediments to his own control of all decisions. Therefore rules and laws must be smashed, discarded at a whim, openly violated, ignored. Do not search for some archaic form of ideological conservatism at work here. The goal of all this is not “remaking the government in a conservative image”—it is “if you want anything, you have to ask me for it”