Stuff and Such

"Dollar hegemony means selective austerity at home too. Extravagance is only admissible when it comes to certain kinds of spending. It’s spending that will not promote wage inflation or empower labor or the poor. Why? Because as soon as there’s any threat of wage-price inflation, you will have a flight from the dollar by financial asset holders around the world, as you saw in 1978. The United States can be extravagant with military spending or tax expenditures, but not with redistributive social spending. The supply-side economist Paul Craig Roberts put it succinctly when he said that there are basically two kinds of deficits—Keynesian and non-Keynesian, inflationary and non-inflationary. Obviously, they preferred the latter."

"Life at home with small children requires self-governance. One must be free of slavery to lower passions, lower pursuits, character weakness, and laziness in order to do it really well. And almost no one notices when you do it poorly, particularly in the early years. You could slip into depression and watch soap operas all day while your kid languishes in his crib, and no one would know. You could fail to interact with your child at all—only accomplishing the bare minimum washing and feeding—and most people would shrug and say well, you’re doing your best."

"Assisted dying is the quintessential policy of our times. It is a policy that reflects the fatalistic mindset of those who rule over us, leaders who can no longer promise a good life so instead offer a “good death.” Opponents of assisted dying in Canada and elsewhere have asked how a society can maintain a commitment to preventing suicide with one hand while enabling it with the other. The answer is that our society doesn’t actually value human life and so doesn’t oppose suicide. What it opposes is the lack of a bureaucratic process that oversees, controls, and administers suicide."

"This is why services are so horny to drive you to install their app rather using their websites: they are trying to get you to do something that, given your druthers, you would prefer not to do."

"This is the sort of thing that became Pitchfork’s stock in trade, this confused muddle of politics and pop, stuffed with trendy terms from cultural studies and the insistence that liking music was a form of activism."

"It’s not a question of attention span, because the dominant discursive modes online seems to be the multi-hour-long video essay or the interminable live stream in which literally nothing is said. But digital text makes the distemporality of ordinary text unbearable. To sit still and read a book for hours on the trot, you have to suppress the rising itch that starts on your fingertips and spreads everywhere over your skin. Make this responsive! Make this refresh! You’re experiencing the agony of the dead word of the book, where the future is already set down, waiting for you on the final page, where nothing changes… Digital text, meanwhile, is writing that functions like speech. Like speech it happens in real time, right in front of you, and then afterwards it sinks into the unreachable abysses of the feed. It’s present, it’s alive, while writing is always spectral and disjointed from itself."

"Microsoft and Google keep shoving AI features into their software, and I absolutely should not have to worry about this garbage from Firefox of all places."

"...if you carefully craft random data so that it does not contain a Dunning-Kruger effect, you will still find the effect. The reason turns out to be embarrassingly simple: the Dunning-Kruger effect has nothing to do with human psychology. It is a statistical artifact — a stunning example of autocorrelation."