Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1431
Article queue! Mirror life, adtech, Apple gripes, luddites, Kendrick, Concrete Blonde, Steve Albini, metascience, Statecraft, stanning for environmental reviews, and more
Good morning. Hello. Rain. Took every ounce of my parenting skills to get Jane to use an umbrella at drop-off this morning, but I did it. Yay me. Of course, she also brought a stuffy (gross word) to school. This is… frowned upon? I think? Is it? Why? But my wife points out they have “bring a stuffy day,” which implies that on the other days, they should not be bringing stuffies? But why? Whatever, man. If the current age has taught us anything, it’s that norms don’t matter, you want something forbidden, make an explicit rule, then wait 2-3 years for the courts to do something about the scofflaws. Maybe.
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I bought her this toy stuffed kitty in Alaska. It was sitting there amongst the Alaskan moose and bears and puffins (not that there’s a puffin within 500 miles of Fairbanks), and I could have bought her one of those, but I always buy her one of those. She has enough Alaskan animals, and this kitty was cute. Has a tag oh her. Named Aurora. Great Alaskan name, Aurora. The name of one of my babysitters growing up, the name of my neighborhood growing up. Oh and I saw the aurora this trip did I mention that? I nearly forgot. Once an Alaskan, always an Alaskan. The driver of the airport shuttle pointed it out and after hearing my blasé response he asked: “local?”
We are listening to a band called FACS this morning. Don’t know anything about them. I am on track 2 of their new album, Wish Defense, great name. It is apparently the last album that Steve Albini worked on, one of the albums he was working on at the time of his untimely demise. It is good, and it sounds like a Steve Albini record, so that is nice. Will go listen to their other albums one of these days.
I have a personal workflow regarding long-read articles. When I am going about my day, doing work at my computer or doomscrolling on my phone, and I get to a longread I would like to read at some point, I send it to my kindle. I do this by using an Automator action on my Mac and a “Shortcut” (just the stupidiest name) on my phone. I built both of these. They are very simple. They convert the browser window to Readability mode (underrated, wonderful featue), make a PDF of it, and email it to a dedicated Kindle email address that Amazon provides. It is a GREAT system, I don’t have to read the article right at that moment, I don’t have to deal. I used to use Instapaper, but I think it’s gone? Or it turned into something else? And then Instapaper would email to my kindle, but it would do it in “digest” form, which was kind of a pain, and in any case, the functionality broke and they started charging. Maybe the functionality is back, I don’t know, I haven’t checked in more than a decade.
The big question, of course, is when do I read these articles? And the answer is… never? Or… the official answer is “on long plane and train trips.” And, as you may have noticed from my moaning about it the last two days, I was recently on a few long plane trips. And I was so excited to tackle my article queue. The last time I had tackled it was in October, so I had about four months of articles.
So when the plane took off from RDU, I dove in. And it was great. Until I got too tired and gave up about 10 hours into the trip. I didn’t even try on the flight home. I was too tired. I just sort of staggered through a few chapters of The Treason of Isengard: The History of Lord of the Rings Volume 2: The History of Middle Earth Volume 7 which seems to be the official name of this tome, even though we’re barely dealt with Saurmon’s betrayal (but also: treason against whom, my wife asks. Was there some Middle-Earth-slash-Valinorian government? wow this is a tangent).
All of this is to say that I now present to you, with only the barest of notes, my memories of the 100 or so articles I read last Friday night.
I read like 6 editions of the brilliant, amazing Statecraft newsletter, my absolute favorite newsletter, even if it has a bit of a neocon bent, detailing the inner workings of the government bureaucracy. I was left with a sinking feeling that Elon and his DOGE cronies read it as a road map to eliminating “waste” in the federal government. But it is still really educational and good. The chief takeaway is that there are people who have the patience and fortitude to do amazing things within the government bureaucracy, and those people are rare and amazing. Then there is everyone else who is sad and dumb and can’t play the bureaucracy and therefore assumes its bad and whines a lot.
This newsletter merged a bit with the 8-part podcast Metascience, which, after reading the transcripts of all eight parts, mostly seems a made-up science that consists of “pontificating about how the government can support science.” This is, of course, not a terrible thing to pontificate on. But it does get a bit repetitive, like many podcasts I suppose, when you consume all the issues back-to-back. Not that I listened to it because I do not listen to podcasts. But I read the transcripts.
In them, people say idiotic things like “environmental review is so bad. Imagine if we had it in the old days. They wouldn’t have let us build the Interstates and cover the planet in cars” without once stopping for a moment to think on or acknowledge the fact that our car culture is one of the largest contributors to the destruction of the planet - from emissions to, you know, literally killing all of the bugs and birds.
People fucking love to dig on environmental review. All sides of the political spectrum. Both of these pubs get their jollies off on bringing in people who claim to be liberal but then go on about how we need to build more and that environmental review is terrible.
I did at least learn about that supposedly terrible court decision “gutting” environmental review in America and… it was fine. It did no such thing. I am now not terribly worried about that.
This is a great thing about reading long, analytic pieces about a topic a few weeks/months after the fact. In the immortal words of Flava Flav: Don’t believe the hype.
I read a lot about Syria. Boy our genius government people right now are really whiffing it on Syria. Real once-in-a-lifetime opportunity here going down the toilet. Coulda won Ukraine without sending many more weapons if we were on the ball in Syria right now but nope.
Read an interview with Tim Apple where he proves once again to be the absolute worst interviewer, mostly telling lies, and when not telling lies, just avoiding questions and issuing platitudes. I have a lot of respect for Tim, but also… none? He has ambition — that I deeply respect and agree with — regaring Apple’s dive into heathcare.
But he fails at one of the main things a manager needs to do: keep your team on the same page, and keep them intellectually aligned.
He completely whiffed the whole self-appointed “good tech company on privacy” initiative because he couldn’t reign in Eddie Cue, and thus Apple reeked of hypocrisy.
He could never give the car initiative a coherent strategic mission, and BYD’s success in the car space shows how big of a miss it was. Apple had two paths: rely on their gargantuanity to pursue R&D no one else in the world could, or reinvent the car for the modern age with manufacturing excellence and innovative thinking. They chose to cut the baby, trying both, and commensurately failed. Because he didn’t get his execs in line. And then he just goes and says nothing all the time in interviews.
Every non-answer makes me desperately miss Steve’s long rambling answers about the future of the internet that he would happily give even when Apple was woefully behind on the internet. I mean, I am no Steve apologist, guy was kind of a dick, but at least he mostly treated interviewers and their readers with some respect. Every time I read a bland Tim interview, I respect him less.
Remember that whole thing about shoplifting and retailers freaking out about it? Mostly a moral panic, seems to have magically disappeared. Poof.
Alexy Nalvany kept a diary while in prison and reading the excerpts in the New Yorker made me cry, just bawl like a baby. We lost a real one with him. My god.
I learned that St Louis, Missouri was the first city in America to legalize prostitution. It is also where FRED is, the renowned, cultishly popular economics statistics database. Coincidence? I think not.
Adtech! I read about the ad businesses of lotsa companies and here are my takeaways: Snap and Reddit are doing just great. Snap is a shockingly robust and mature company and making money and lots of people still use it and no, none of that makes any sense to me either.
Instacart and Uber have large and growing ad businesses. Uber’s is sort of what Foursquare aspired to do: advertising related to places you are or going. Honestly, they should have bought them. Alas.
Reddit’s ad business is wholesome and normcore and mostly devoid of adtech and is just sort of issue-based, not even intent-based. It’s great. And they make lots of money. Unfortunately they probably don’t think tney make a lot of money and will inevitably enshittify the whole operation, but at the moment? Pretty swell! Makes me wish I worked there. Good healthy American Adtech circa 2010. Miss those halcyon days.
The LA rock band Concrete Blonde had two members of Sparks in the band at the beginning. The LA rock band Concrete Blonde was given their name by Micheal Stipe. The LA rock band has two late-period albums, Mojave and Group Therapy that I had not heard. While at SeaTac I ordered both of these albums on CD — they are not available on LP and that is just great since I am not buying LPs this year (though I have broken that rule twice, but that is a topic for another time) and they were both like $2 each. Mojave has arrived and I listened to it yesterday and it was really good and had a long spoken-word piece that is clearly a sister piece to the long spoken-word piece on Johnette Napolitano’s solo album. I liked it. Great band, Concrete Blonde. I know they’re old but would not be opposed to one last reunion tour.
I found out Tyler Cohen has a little bit of respect for the Luddites, even as he loves saying shit like “well we gotta make AI because the Chinese might.” He does, at least, factor into his depressing alpha male economics that democracy matters, so I guess that makes him one of the “good guys” and jesus is the bar low AF these day. Esther Duflo rolling over in her grave. HAHA sucker just kidding, Esther Duflo lives. She lives. She’s my age. Lives in the Boston area. Shit maybe she’s my neighbor.
OH SHIT: MIRROR LIFE. Need something new to freak out about? Global and local fascism and climate change not enough for you? Welcome to MIRROR LIFE. You know how DNA spirals? It always spirals the same direction. But, you know, what if it didn’t? What if we built some DNA that spirlaed in the other direction? MIRROR LIFE. This does not, alas, lead to cool Spocks with moustaches. It leads to utter destruction of our entire reality. And the technolgy is being worked on and is only maybe 20-30 years away! We should ban this! The scientists are like “oh hey some scientists are working on this but you guys should not let them.” But, at the moment, we seem to be letting them. Awesome. MIRROR LIFE. Freak out.
Yeah that might have been the moment I was like “eh, I’m gonna put this down and go read Tolkien instead.”
Watched the Kendrick Super Bowl show and, yeah, that was something. Someone on the internet said something like “you are witnessing the only Super Bowl show ever with an artistic vision” and that is hyperbole (I don’t even like late-period U2 but if you felt nothing in their post 9/11 Super Bowl performance you are not human), but it sure did have Artistic vision. Someone else said that it was like the slave hymns of old – encoded with secret messages. I love this, because it was, so much so that I had to watch a (very good) explainer video about it. It really is something to do something like that right in front of our wannabe dictator, who has his finger on the pulse enough to know you are dissing him, but not the cultural literacy to understand how. And it’s really something to do something at that level as well as simultaneously do something as petty as repeatedly diss another rapper. Just phenomenal.
I did not finish my queue, I am sad, I only got to mid-December. I do not want to get in a plane ever again so I don’t know when I’ll finish. Maybe I can get on a train and go to Atlanta and come right back or something. Oh my god. Reading on trains. Is there anything better? I miss it so much.
Oh one last little image from the flying hell. I was walking through the airport, all out of sorts, listening to music, and “Spinal Meningitis” by Ween came on, a song that has given me a nice chuckle since I was like 19 years old (oh, nostalgia for the old City Gardens God Ween Satan days). But this time I was listening to the lyrics and picturing an actual kid about to die of Spinal Meningitis when he says “Am I gonna see god momma” and, well, because seven years in I am still an over-emotional wreck of a parent, tears just rolled down my cheek walking through the terminal.
Parenting, man.
W Hotel Lobby in a Better, Alternate Universe playlist for you today. I really do need to pop into a W Hotel one of these days. Is there one in Raleigh? Nope. Closest one is Atlanta. Guess I gotta stay there for a night on my READING TRAIN trip. Anyway this mix is rad, don’t actually know any of these bands except for SZA and Aphex Twin. Still on my Chandeen deep dive shit. FIZZ is a supergroup of twee Youtube ladies and I am here for it. Love this Claire Rousay remix oh yes I know here too. I know three artists! Or, knew rather. They are all my friends now.
Have a lovely day talk tomorrow ex oh ex oh gossip girl.
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Thanks for reading.
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Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.