Reading “Lord of the Rings” continues. The scenes about the barrow-wights are pretty good. At least it’s not descriptions of eating or forests and Tom Bombadil doesn’t show up until the end.
The smallest hill I’m willing to die on: I dislike virtual backgrounds that are representations of rooms. Virtual rooms are all bland and dystopian. Just use the blur effect or an abstract virtual background. It is acceptable to use a virtual room or some other real-world image if it is very, very clever — but they never are.
I made a disparaging comment about Los Angeles to an angeleno on a team call, and the angeleno agreed. Angelenos are usually willing to agree heartily with any disparaging remark you make about Los Angeles. Makess needling them less fun.
I went on the San Diego subreddit to see if anyone can see the Northern Lights from here, and I fell down a rabbithole of reading a thread of people ranting about people who don’t pick up dog-poop on the sides of hiking trails. The original poster included photos to make their point. Why did you feel that was necessary, u/Adventurous_Yam_5?
I very nearly quit reading Lord of the Rings. I’m about 350 pages in and a third of that is description of forest. I don’t even like forest — we live very nearly in the desert. Another third of the book is description of food, and none of it is pizza or burritos. They just left Tom Bombadil’s cabin. Tom Bombadil is extremely annoying. He is the guy in “Animal House” who was playing the guitar and singing “I Gave My Love a Cherry” and John Belushi smashed his guitar.
But I will keep reading.
Hofstadter’s law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s law.
This has been much on my mind lately.
Sign of the changing seasons: Today is the first day since the spring that I’ve had to turn on the lights in my home office before dinner.
Chris Arnade: China is "the US, circa 1955 or so, but with the benefit of modern tech"
Chris Arnade walks the city of Zhengzhou, China, and shares his self-described “oversimplified take on all of China, which is that it’s the US, circa 1955 or so, but with the benefit of modern tech.”
The analogy isn’t perfect given the fundamental differences on the essential question of “what is a good life, and how do you obtain it but China has the energy, optimism, and trajectory that the US had then. This isn’t confined to only the narrow minority of the exceptionally fortunate, but rather is manifest across the whole economic bell curve, because the entire population is getting richer at velocities approaching ten percent a year, levels of growth that tend to make everyone giddy and forgiving of other issues. I’m not a rigid ideological materialist, but having your economy double roughly every decade absolves a lot of other sins, and tends to put smiles on people’s faces.
When I was doing my work in the US Rust Belt, talking to the elderly in decaying cities, one of the common laments I heard over and over was some variation of, “Back then, you could walk straight out of high school onto the factory floor, and build a good life. If you worked hard enough, played by the rules, you could get married, buy a house, raise a family, go on a few vacations a year, and see your kids and grandkids do better than you did. You can’t do that now, not without going away to get some fancy college degree that puts you so far in debt you might as well be chained to the bank.”
While the Chinese version differs–“playing by the rules” is more stringent, home is a tiny apartment in a forty-story tower, vacations are to Shanghai’s Disney World rather than Orlando–the trajectory remains intact. They can walk out of high school into the iPhone factory and build themselves a good life, certainly as measured against what their parents had, which is how optimism is forged, through comparison to local expectations.
Last night I felt awful about Senate Democrats capitulating to Republicans, but on further reflection, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Perhaps they looked at the harm that would be caused by a shutdown and decided to just kick the problem down the road. There were never going to be any good outcomes to this particular standoff.
The only good outcome is going to be voting the Trump government out of office and prosecuting its leaders to the fullest extent of the law. No clemency “for the good of national unity.” We did that with the Confederacy, Nixon and after Trump’s first term, and it has brought us 150 years of misery.
“Low skilled” workers are a myth. “[Minimum-wage jobs are] not low-skill. They simply require different skills, ones that not just anyone possesses.” The author, Rachel Moody, is half-right here. I’m not convinced that minimum-wage jobs are not low-skilled. But Moody is right that these jobs are important, and the workers are entitled to dignity and a living wage.