I have a pet theory that a four- or even three-star review would be fine in a rational universe. Ride in an Uber, and the driver gets you there safely, on time and the driver is reasonably personable? Three stars.
Four stars if the driver gets you there on time despite traffic, helps you with a massive amount of luggage, or you have a fascinating conversation.
Save the five-star reviews if you have a cardiac event and the driver restarts your heart.
But because I am not a sociopath, I do like everybody else and routinely give five-star reviews for acceptable service. I rarely give as low as four stars because I know that’s a big deal for the gig worker who provided the service.
AI chatbots lose money every time you use them. That’s a problem.. By Will Oremus at The Washington Post
Businesses are laying off writers because ChatGPT can do the job. What will those businesses do when AI companies stop giving away the product?
On this day of the big annual Apple product launch, I’m remembering that day many years ago when Julie and I went to the Terminator experience at the Universal Studios theme park on vacation.
All these theme park experiences have the same storyline: The audience is supposedly dignitaries taking a VIP tour of some science-fiction location. And Something Goes Terribly Wrong, and the special effects start going off around you.
In the case of the Terminator experience, the audience–which included me and Julie that day–were supposedly journalists at a press conference for Cyberdyne Systems, unveiling its new Terminator model robot soldier.
And, of course, the Terminator runs amok and starts blowing things up and disrupts the press conference.
The funny thing is that I am a journalist, and Julie did tech PR for most of her career. And we have both been to a million product launch press conferences.
So there we were on vacation doing a science fiction simulation of the exact same things we did at work every day.
Writing a corporate blog this morning, I was able to dodge using the word “paradigm,” but I couldn’t resist “holistic” and “actionable.”
Coming back from the grocery store, I dropped six bottles of iced tea in the driveway and gave the neighborhood children vocabulary lessons.
When reading genre novels, often my favorite parts are the parts before the bad things start happening.
That’s particularly true for Stephen King. I want the Torrances to have a nice winter at the Overlook Hotel.
It’s true most of all for one of my favorite of his novels, “11/23/63.” I loved the story of a rootless man from 2010 Maine who finds community and love in 1960 Texas. I was far less interested in the hunt to stop Lee Harvey Oswald.
Idea for the beginning of a horror story: A friend mentioned recently that he works in a six-story building. His job takes him up and down from floor to floor all day. He likes to use the stairs instead of the elevator. To clear his mind, he counts the stairs as he goes.
Here’s the story idea: One day, the count changes.
Stephen King, if you’re reading this—no charge.
Ashton Applewhite: We talk too much about generations. People who happen to have been born at around the same time don’t have much in common. Let’s Climb Out of the Generation Trap..
I read her book “This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism” last year, and loved it.
The Passover origin story of matzoh. It’s not supposed to taste good.
📺 We watched the final two episodes of "Succession." I have thoughts. SPOILERS
I’m seeing some talk that Tom isn’t the winner because he’s just Matsson’s puppet. But Tom is definitely the winner. All he ever cared about was the money, buying luxuries, and the appearance of power and he got all those things. He doesn’t care about the reality of power.
Tom will remain perfectly loyal to Matsson—until the moment Tom sees it as advantageous to throw his loyalty to someone else. Probably Matsson knows this, and sees Tom as a useful tool.
The same person who said Tom isn’t the winner also compared Tom dismissively to Gerri. That’s nuts. Gerri is one of the winners of “Succession.” She was Logan’s loyal consigliere and assassin for 30 years, and she cashed out big and walked away.
Justine Lupe, who played the high-end-callgirl-turned-wife Willa, also played Astrid Weissman, Midge’s sister-in-law on “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” Her role on “Maisel” is extremely different from Willa. On “Maisel,” she’s a the perfect midcentury upper-middle-class American housewife and mother, a shikse who converted to Judaism to marry a Jewish man and is now more Jewish than her Jewish family.
I love the video playing in Conner‘s apartment, and the kids’ faces as they watched it. We saw another side of Logan there, away from the kids and relaxed, affectionate and warm. Frank, Gerri, Karl and Jess were Logan’s real family, the people he loved and who loved him. Kendall, Roman and Shiv were not part of that family, and they knew it. Connor, on the other hand, was part of that family.
The entire four-year “Succession” story could have been told from Frank and Karl’s perspective, and it would be a very different story.
Why did Shiv vote the way she did? I don’t think we ever get a definitive answer in the show, but I think it was because in the end she just couldn’t stand to see Kendall win. According to discussion on Reddit, there’s a scene just before the vote when Kendall puts his feet up on Logan’s desk, and you see a look of disgust cross Shiv’s face. Neither Julie nor I saw that.
As the CEO’s wife, Shiv is in a better position as Kendall’s sister. But I don’t think she was calculating it through that far until after Tom was named CEO.
Of course, Tom isn’t the real successor. Matsson is the successor.
Roman is finally out, and he is relieved. He never wanted the responsibility. He just wanted to pretend to be a playboy and now he’s back to that.
A theme that emerged throughout “Succession” is that the people who appear to be in power—Tom, the President of the United States—are not the people in power. The real people in power are the people who pay those other people: the Logans and Matssons. In “Succession” we spend a lot of two seasons focused on a Presidential election in which one of the candidates is a neo-Nazi, and it turns out to be a minor plot point, not worth resolving in the finale. Because that election just didn’t matter in the universe of “Succession.”
Shiv is the sort of woman misogynist who sees herself as the exception. She is not the exception. She has become her mother, and is married to a man who literally sits in her father’s chair.
I love the rare sweet moment at the end of the show where Logan’s wives and mistresses all came together as this little supportive sorority. Marcia even takes Kerry’s hand. They were all the women that Logan betrayed, and in the end they stood by each other. Although maybe not—in the universe of “Succession,” you never can assume love and decency is real.
Does Willa care about Connor after all? Or is she just in it for the money? Yes.
In the scene at the bar at the end, Roman orders Gerri’s favorite drink.
I don’t know if we actually enjoyed the final season of “Succession.” Watching it had become compulsive.
I kept expecting Roman’s dick pics to go viral on social media. They were Checkov’s dick pics, and they never were fired.
“Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong shares his view on where the characters go after the season finale: Tom isn’t just going to be an empty suit. He’s got a lot of hard work ahead of him. But he will never be anything other than Matsson’s dog.
Armstrong says Roman is back where he started; the whole multi-year arc was just a detour for him.
Armstrong: “Shiv is still in play … in a rather terrifying, frozen emotionally barren place.”
Also Armstrong: “For Kendall, this will never stop being the central event of his life, the central days of his life, central couple of years of his life… Maybe he could go on and start a company, or do a thing. But the chances of him achieving the sort of corporate status that his dad achieved are very low. And I think that will mark his whole life.”
Why does “Succession” get so much more journalism and social media love than “Yellowstone,” which has similar premises and themes and is far more popular among the viewing public? I think it’s because “Succession” centers on the media business and New York, and therefore has more appeal to journalists and the professional-managerial classes that dominate journalism and social media.
I’ve read that “Succession” is a blue show and “Yellowstone” is a red show, and there’s a lot of truth to that. But “Yellowstone” is more nuanced and ethically diverse and more broadly focused across class lines. Go figure.
In our house, we watch both “Succession” and “Yellowstone.”
ChatGPT and other LLM tools have already replaced some marketing and social media writers as many companies decide cutting costs is worth the drop in quality. ChatGPT took their jobs. Now they’re dog walkers and HVAC techs.
The only way to rebel is to be human and aware, Rushkoff said. “Be social, get your feet on the ground, make eye contact, have sex, meet people, breathe the air. The more real-life ballast you have, the less this brittle, ideological, abstracted, social media-mediated universe bears upon your daily existence.”
Cory Doctorow: The long lineage of private equity’s looting
Fans of the Sopranos will remember the “bust out” as a mob tactic in which a business is taken over, loaded up with debt, and driven into the ground, wrecking the lives of the business’s workers, customers and suppliers. When the mafia does this, we call it a bust out; when Wall Street does it, we call it “private equity.”
…
For years, the crooks who ran these ops did a brisk trade in blaming the internet. Why did Sears tank? Everyone knows that the 19th century business was an antique, incapable of mounting a challenge in the age of e-commerce. That was a great smokescreen for an old-fashioned bust out that saw corporate looters make off with hundreds of millions, leaving behind empty storefronts and emptier pension accounts for the workers who built the wealth the looters stole:
https://prospect.org/economy/vulture-capitalism-killed-sears/
Same goes for Toys R Us: it wasn’t Amazon that killed the iconic toy retailer – it was the PE bosses who extracted $200m from the chain, then walked away, hands in pockets and whistling, while the businesses collapsed and the workers got zero severance:
…
It’s a good racket – for the racketeers. Private equity has grown from a finance sideshow to Wall Street’s apex predator, and it’s devouring the real economy through a string of audactious bust outs, each more consequential and depraved than the last.
…
PE shows that it can turn profitable businesses gigantic windfalls, sticking the rest of us with the job of sorting out the smoking craters they leave behind,
…
Today, the PE sector loves a rollup, which is when they buy several related businesses and merge them into one firm. The nominal business-case for a rollup is that the new, bigger firm is more “efficient.” In reality, a rollup’s strength is in eliminating competition. When all the pet groomers, or funeral homes, or urgent care clinics for ten miles share the same owner, they can raise prices, lower wages, and fuck over suppliers.
…
PE’s most ghastly impact is felt in the health care sector. Whole towns' worth of emergency rooms, family practices, labs and other health firms have been scooped up by PE, which has spent more than $1t since 2012 on health acquisitions:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/17/the-doctor-will-fleece-you-now/#pe-in-full-effect
Once a health care company is owned by PE, it is significantly more likely to commit medicare fraud. It also cuts wages and staffing for doctors and nurses. PE-owned facilities do more unnecessary and often dangerous procedures. Appointments get shorter. The companies get embroiled in kickback scandals.
…
As bad as PE is for healthcare, it’s worse for long-term care. PE-owned nursing homes are charnel houses, and there’s a particularly nasty PE scam where elderly patients are tricked into signing up for palliative care, which is never delivered (and isn’t needed, because the patients aren’t dying!). These fake “hospices” get huge payouts from medicare – and the patient is made permanently ineligible for future medicare, because they are recorded being in their final decline:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS
…
Private equity is behind the mass rollup of single-family homes across America. Wall Street landlords are the worst landlords in America, who load up your rent with junk fees, leave your home in a state of dangerous disrepair, and evict you at the drop of a hat:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/16/die-miete-ist-zu-hoch/#assets-v-human-rights
As these houses decay through neglect, private equity makes a bundle from tenants and even more borrowing against the houses. In a few short years, much of America’s desperately undersupplied housing stock will be beyond repair. It’s a bust out.
You know all those exploding trains filled with dangerous chemicals that poison entire towns? Private equity bust outs:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/04/up-your-nose/#rail-barons
…
PetSmart – looted for $30 billion by RaymondSvider and his PE fund BC Partners – is a slaughterhouse for animals. The company systematically neglects animals – failing to pay workers to come in and feed them, say, or refusing to provide backup power to run during power outages, letting animals freeze or roast to death. Though PetSmart has its own vet clinics, the company doesn’t want to pay its vets to nurse the animals it damages, so it denies them care. But the company is also too cheap to euthanize those animals, so it lets them starve to death. PetSmart is also too cheap to cremate the animals, so its traumatized staff are ordered to smuggle the dead, rotting animals into random dumpsters.
All this happened while PetSmart’s sales increased by 60%, matched by growth in the company’s gross margins. All that money went to the bust out.
Governor Newsom Desperately Begs NetChoice To Drop Its Lawsuit Over Unconstitutional AADC Bill.
Mike Masnick on Techdirt:
… nothing in this law actually protects children. Instead, it puts them at much greater risk of having information exposed, as we’ve noted. It will also make it next to impossible for children to research important information regarding mental health, or to find out the information they need to help them deal with things like eating disorders, since it will drive basically all of that content offline
…
… we have Newsom lying about the law, lying about the filings from NetChoice, and now lying about the Surgeon General’s report. I know it’s a post-truth political world we live in, but I expect better from California’s governor.