Thought at 10:45am May 8th, 2018

Had to unfollow Steven Pinker on Twitter today.

The world IS getting better, but others make the case without the “free thinker” bullshit.

Bookmarked at 10:34am May 7th, 2018

I’m Not Black, I’m Kanye by Ta-Nehisi Coates

What Kanye West seeks is what Michael Jackson sought—liberation from the dictates of that we. In his visit with West, the rapper T.I. was stunned to find that West, despite his endorsement of Trump, had never heard of the travel ban. “He don’t know the things that we know because he’s removed himself from society to a point where it don’t reach him,” T.I. said. West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom—a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.

Anon, 2018

3.0 rating

It’s best to think of this as a mid-level Black Mirror episode. Lots of fun stuff if you don’t think about it too hard and some nice graphic design used for the ubiquitous AR everyone in this world has embedded in their noggins.

via LetterboxD

Bookmarked at 2:23pm May 3rd, 2018

An alternate ending to the tragedy of the commons

I recently read Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons and have been evangelizing it so enthusiastically that I figured I’d do a quick writeup of its main points, and why it’s been so transformative to my thinking.

Elinor Ostrom’s work deals with common pool resource (CPR) management, for which she won a Nobel Prize in economics in 2009. She argues that current game theory doesn’t explain why some commons are, in fact, sustainably managed.

Thought at 7:20pm April 26th, 2018

I just had a fantastic customer service experience with American Express.

I had a fraudulent charge on a card. They spotted it and warned us. I then decided to cancel the card since I pretty much never use it anyway, and I was able to cancel the credit card by talking to their toll-free voice assistant. I still can’t quite believe I cancelled a credit card in about 5 minutes without talking to a human about it.

Thought at 2:35pm April 9th, 2018

I’ve updated my blog to a new custom WordPress instance. But after four or five moves between platforms, the whole thing feels really crufty. I need to do a good spring cleaning before inviting people over.