JD Vance says aliens are ‘demons’ — With war escalating in Iran, gas and grocery prices soaring, and U.S. airports in chaos amid a partial government shutdown, Vance thought it was a good use of his time to appear on a podcast to share his deranged UFO theories and obsession.
Market participation is exhausting
Society is optimized for people who love to haggle and think you should haggle for everything, says Cory Doctorow.
“For these people, cheating is just bargaining by another means. They embrace bizarre concepts like ‘revealed preferences,’ the idea that if you say you’re dissatisfied with a bargain, but you accept it anyway, you have a ‘revealed preference’ for the deal. In other words, if someone sells their kidney to Sheryl Sandberg in order to make the rent, they have a ‘revealed preference’ for having only one kidney – and if they sell their privacy to Sheryl Sandberg in order to stay in touch with the people they love, they have a ‘revealed preference’ for having their data extracted and exploited by Facebook.”
‘I Think That MAGA Is Dying’: Inside the Youth Movement at CPAC. “At a sparsely attended Conservative Political Action Conference, young Republicans were eager to start the post-Trump era.” By Nathan Tyler Pemberton at the New York Times
Maybe MAGA is dying — but will be replaced by something worse. These young Republicans still seem attached to nativism and LGBTQ-phobia, with resurgent anti-Semitism added to the brew.
On The Enshittification of Audre Lorde: “The Master’s Tools” in Tech Discourse
The enshittification story, at its most powerful, describes a process by which platforms that once served users well came to exploit them. But this framing assumes a prior state of genuine service, a golden age of the open internet, that was for many people never particularly golden. The early internet was structured around the assumptions of its architects: predominantly white, male, Western, educated, and abled.
— Tara Tarakiyee.
The Edmund Fitzgerald Teaches Men How to Feel
Michael Sebastian writes about the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (the historical event), “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” (the seven-minute folk ballad that somehow climbed to the top of the charts in the disco era), his lifelong and life-changing fascination with the song and ship, and men’s love of shipwrecks.
You’re being rude. Put away your phone. “Log off, tune in, go out.” By Robinson Meyer
I am posting this because it’s clever and also because it’s illustrative of the variety of the podcast universe. Indeed, I listen to 90+ minutes of podcasts daily and the only one of these types that I listen to with any regularity is the “recapping the movie but it’s longer than the movie” type. And it’s usually TV shows rather than movies and I quite enjoy those. And that reminds me — I need to find a good “For All Mankind” recap podcast.
And I know that listening to 90+ minutes of podcasts daily makes me sound like a weirdo — but I’m always doing something else while listening to podcasts, mainly walking the dog, and also driving and chores around the house.
‘Shameless in a Good Way’: Rahm Emanuel Is Already Shaking up 2028
He’s a fighter, which I like. He works hard, which I also like. But he was historically unpopular as mayor of Chicago, which is going to be a problem for him. And he’s already being blamed for everything working people and the left don’t like about the Obama administration. As one opponent says: “The guys who wrecked the economy took their million-dollar bonuses. You never tried to claw them back. It was a disastrous recovery, because you cut it short.”
I don’t support any candidate at this stage, but if I did it would be Pritzger.
I’m an unusual Trek fan in that I just wasn’t into the series in the 80s and 90s. I checked out of TNG and Deep Space 9, which most Trek fans today consider classic Trek.
My history of Trek fandom goes TOS -> TAS -> movies -> Discovery, SNW and Starfleet Academy.
I have never clicked with the current animated Treks, though I did love the 70s animated series, which I rewatched with Julie sometime in the past 25 years or so and it was still pretty good.
I read “Soul of a New Machine,” by Tracy Kidder, who died last week, at about the time I switched from daily newspaper journalism to trade journalism in the technology industry, either just before making the career switch or just after. The book was published in 1981 and I made the career switch in 1989.
In my work, I wrote about Data General, the company that is the subject of “Soul of a New Machine.” I’m pretty sure I interviewed Tom West, the main character of the book, though I did not connect him with the book until after the interview, and the interview was straightforward and unmemorable, focused on company strategy or a new product or something like that.
“Soul of a New Machine” was a major contributor to the belief that a career in the technology industry could be more than just a career — it could be a calling, a life mission. And that was true for my career as well, as a trade journalist. I believed it.
With regard to trade journalism, I now believe that philosophy to be a myth, which of course benefits publishers, who profit from trade journalists’ commitment.
I now think of trade journalism as a trade, like plumbing or carpentry or electrical work. It’s a good job for people like me. It can be an important part of the foundation on which to build a good life. But it should not be your life purpose.