https://quillette.com/2022/07/23/stop-sharing-political-memes/
I agree with the sentiment, although “memes” is too broad a category. A quote is a #meme; a blog post is a meme; a chart is a meme. And all that may be useful to advance political understanding
So I'd rather say “stop sharing **simplistic and confrontational** political memes”. That's the truly corrosive, mind-numbing stuff.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/07/stop-drinking-now.html
Fully agree with #TylerCowen on this one.
Last night I dreamt that I went to tutoring with my #literature professor, someone whom I admired greatly (entirely fictional character).
We were casually talking #books and getting along very well. Then he asked me what I was reading at the moment. I said volume three of Proust's “In Search of Lost time”, and his face changed immediately.
He looked very serious, and told me we'd go right then to my place to grab the book and burn it, because it was a waste of time. It was clearly all in good spirits, and he was playing a certain role to amuse me — but at the same time there was no doubt in my mind that he was intent on doing what he had said.
So I had to play along. We walked together to my place, while I questioned him. He explained to me that yes, Proust is indeed good, but that investing so much time in reading >4,000 very dense pages was simply not rational. Very poor ROI. I kinda agreed and felt somewhat relieved of my self-imposed burden of reading the entire series, although I hated the idea of halting the project and burning the book (never mind that I'm reading on an e-reader!).
#MissEntropy walked me up at that moment, and so I don't know what was going to happen in my #dream.
And so I'll have to keep on reading #Proust.
What a curious reading.
I struggle to see the connection between my criticism of home-delivered food and #wokeism.
The Elect are probably the main consumers of home delivery, being mostly affluent urbanites with sleek smartphones, busy lives and a taste for ethnic food and whatever is trendy and immediate. Also, I'm going to claim some originality here — I don't recall reading anything like my toot on vox.com, quoted from AOC, or on the feed of The New York Times (I'm sure you'll be able to find something similar now, if you look for it; I'm just saying I don't think I unconsciously imbibed the idea from woke sources).
I tend to think that we, citizens of rich countries, need less consumerism, more austerity, a higher tolerance to minor discomforts (eg hunger, boredom), and more awareness about the impact of our daily actions — in general. This (quick home-delivered food) is just a phenomenon where those ideas are quite salient, IMHO.
TIL about [_The Thing_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device))
@rastinza That's what I do, too.
tripu
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“The word ‘politics’ is derived from the word ‘poly’, meaning ‘many’, and the word ‘ticks’, meaning ‘blood sucking parasites’.”
— Larry Hardiman
#Q4TD http://q4td.blogspot.com/2022/07/the-word-politics-is-derived-from-word.html
I order home-delivery very rarely, and when I do it I feel a strange guilt.
Home-delivered meals have always bothered me. It looks like the perfect example of overlooked irresponsible #consumerism.
You have a **fridge** where you can store food for days, a **freezer** where you can store food for months, **grocery stores and supermarkets** everywhere around you (some of them open during weekends or at night), convenient **online orders** and cheap **delivery** of those groceries…
…and yet you need that a local restaurant wraps their stuff in way more plastic and paper than is necessary, and that some kid jumps on a dirty moped and whizzes dangerously through the city to get to your door _right now_?
At 11PM?
@rigo I'm just starting to learn more about Parfait's views, but apparently #Kantianism was indeed one of three major schools of thought he tried to reconcile into a unified theory of morality…
Probably the best distillation of #morality in one sentence, by #DerekParfit:
> _“Everyone ought to follow the principles whose universal acceptance everyone could rationally will.”_
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/09/05/how-to-be-good
@rastinza I agree it is expensive in absolute terms. In many regular bars and cafés in Spain you would pay little more than €1 for an espresso or a macchiato. But Starbucks is always expensive, and I'm used to seeing “coffee” there for €3, €4 or even more… Thanks for those kind words :)
tripu
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Lit up city strip; Dusk by Max Hay
You guys who travel, go to gigs, try new restaurants, watch movies, meet friends, improvise, slack, have brunch, play sports… you don't know what you have.
I found myself this afternoon with an unexpected fifteen minutes to spare, wearing my earbuds and listening to my favourite podcasts, next to a huge department store with blissful AC, and with a Starbucks right at the entrance. I even nailed the perfect order (_espresso macchiato_ with a little extra hot milk, only €1.90).
It felt like a luxurious holiday in Maldives. Such is my routine these days. 🤣
tripu
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To future historians—not just of computing, but of humanity—the current period will be a dark age.
How was Facebook used by students in the 2010s? We cannot show you, that version of Facebook is not hosted anywhere.
How did MySpace look around 2009? We don't really know, the Wayback Machine only shows a limited amount of static content, and there may only be a few surviving screenshots
What correspondence did Vint Cerf have as president of the ACM with other luminaries of computing industry and research? We do not know; Google will not publish his emails.
What was it like playing Angry Birds on an iPhone 3G? We do not know; Apple is no longer distributing signed receipts for that binary.
What did the British cabinet discuss when they first learned of the Coronavirus pandemic? We do not know; they chatted on a private WhatsApp group.
What books were published analysing the aftermath of the Maidan coup in Ukraine? We do not know; we do not have the keys for the Digital Editions DRM.
How was the coup covered in televised news? We do not know; the broadcasters used RealVideo and Windows Media Encoder and we cannot read those files.
We have to ask ourselves how we are going to preserve and transmit knowledge about our age to the next generations. Knowledge about an age where information is produced, consumed and discarded within hours, days or months, or where it's only stored on the server rooms of a handful of corporations, with no guarantees that those businesses will exist in the future, and with no way of accessing that information unless a certain set of regulatory, hardware, software pre-conditions are met.
That's why projects like the Internet Archive deserve more recognition and funding. That's why web scraping should not only be a civic right, but a civic duty to the next generations. Otherwise all the knowledge about the great age of information will be transmitted orally - with all the distortions that such transmission implies.
tripu
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Neon Dream by MixoFX
