It is a delusion to think that merely injecting money will bring back the happy mix of jobs and incomes we’ve lost in the Covid-19 pandemic.
— Read on theintercept.com/2020/09/01/biden-economic-policy-us-economy/
By J K Galbraith. No, not that one. A call for a once in a lifetime rethink of how to recast the system to make it work in the aftermath of the pandemic.
Can Public Shaming be Useful? https://quillette.com/2020/09/01/can-public-shaming-be-useful/
More thinking to be done. There’s the all-or-nothing shame of social media, which as the author says is retributive but doesn’t allow for redemption. There’s the power of the individual who refuses to be shamed (see our President). There’s the emerging societal shame of not wearing a mask during a pandemic, cross-cultural and not about the individual. And there’s the related concepts of forgiveness, sin, conformity in a time when religion is not a power.
I’ve been thinking about shame as a social force lately, and the Catholic idea of the default position of sin and easy redemption before that. The article has some interesting insights on both these things.
onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59
It’s not that Big Tech is so clever. It’s that it’s so big. Compelling.
Review after November.
Personal challenges come at us faster than ever before, but the right approach can turn them into opportunities for change and growth.
— Read on www.wsj.com/articles/learning-to-conquer-lifes-crises-11594393476
Something for me to learn from right now.
I think, in ten years or so, software development will be done in the way project management is done now: as a marshaling of resources rather than the craftwork that currently defines it. The resources will mostly be machine intelligence, bent to the task of mapping fuzzily-defined specifications into executable code. There’ll be a few old crutzers still building things by hand, but such bespoke work will be expensive, and valued more for the aesthetic appeal than the practical benefit.
Ian’s skill set will be much more relevant than mine at that point.
Debbie Dingell is worried.
Godfrey: What could Trump do to change things up and win your district in November?
Dingell: I got yesterday, from somebody, something called a confession. [Editor’s note: It was a viral, anonymous social-media post.] I used to think I was pretty much just a regular person. But I was born white into a two-parent household, which now labels me as privileged, racist, and responsible for slavery. I’m a fiscal and moral conservative, which by today’s standards makes me a fascist because I plan a budget. But I now find out that I’m not here because I earned it, but because I was advantaged … I think and I reason, and I doubt much of what the mainstream media tells me, which makes me a right-wing conspiracy nut. I’m proud of my heritage and our inclusive American culture. It makes me a xenophobe.
That’s what I’m worried about. This letter right here is what worries me.
(from https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/07/debbie-dingell-doesnt-believe-polls/614428/)
You can’t go anywhere but a few Caribbean Islands on a US passport right now, and that’s likely to be the case for at least a year, I think.
In the end, Trump did what he said. He built a wall around America and made the world pay for it. He just never told Americans that they’d be stuck inside.
https://medium.com/@indica/the-plague-states-of-america-53b20678a80e
Getting tired of hearing state reps from around the country whining about how they did the right thing, but the virus infections are going back up. The virus doesn’t care. You can follow recommendations, or not. Recommendations represent everything from our current best guess at how to deal with the problem to politically motivated bullshit. No panacea. Virus doesn’t care which you do.