Exciting refrigerator news
We are scheduled to get our fourth visit from a refrigerator repair guy this morning, and this time they plan to actually bring the part they need to repair the fridge. The fridge broke down Nov. 30 — we bought a smaller fridge after about 10 days when we could see this was going to go on for a while and I was feeling like I was getting too close of a personal relationship with the guys at the liquor store where I was buying ice. I am grateful to the missus for many things but particularly for working with the buffoons at the refrigerator repair company on this, and also for shopping for and buying the Emergency Auxiliary Backup Refrigerator.
… while we think of the role of the finance sector as “capital allocation” – that is, using investors’ money to fund new businesses and expansions for existing business – that hasn’t been important to finance for quite some time. Today, only 3% of bank activity consists of “lending to firms and individuals engaged in the production of goods and services.” The other 97% of finance is gambling."
— Cory Doctorow, A perfect distillation of the social uselessness of finance
Newsom Vows to Stop Proposed Billionaire Tax in California. “It’s a big club and you ain’t in it.” — George Carlin
Why Vance Committed So Hard to the Minneapolis Shooter. “For MAGA America, ICE is an instrument for cleansing violence.”
I was kidnapped by idiots. An academic trip to Iraq unexpectedly turned into an immersive field study on the ways authoritarian regimes use brutality.
We're all just content for ICE
Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day: “… it’s impossible to shake the profoundly unsettling feeling that we have clearly stepped across the threshold into a very different political reality. And it’s not a matter of if it arrives in your town, but when.”
The most durable tech is boring, old, and everywhere. COBOL, C, Linux and SQL are old, unglamorous and keep the world running. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols asks: What software from today will we still depend on in 50 or 100 years?
Nostalgia ain't what it used to be
I think I will reread “Funny Papers,” by Tom De Haven, first of a trilogy of novels that I loved, about the writers and artists behind a fictitious newspaper comic strip featuring a boy named Derby Duggan. The novels span New York in the 1890s-1970s, exploring the worlds of the newspaper industry, pop culture and life in those eras. The books are beautiful and sad; the comic strip brings joy to millions of people but not to its creators, who are miserable sods. That doesn’t sound like a fun read, but it is. I am highly romantic about midcentury New York, a place and time that I missed by a few years.