BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-11-27 Sa

Things that went whizzing by that I need to remember:

First:

Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that the New York Times has a union – a strong union. And one would think that a strong union would want above all to avoid the emergence of a nonunion shop within the publication. Yet the workers of Wirecutter appear to be getting very little support from the rank-and-file of the Times newsroom. Why not?:

John Gruber: Wirecutter Union Is Striking: ‘:During two years of bargaining, The New York Times company has slow-walked contract negotiations with unfair labor practices and insignificant wage offers that severely underpay our staff. We, members of the Wirecutter Union, are fed up. To win the fair contract we deserve, we’re prepared to walk out during the Black Friday shopping week. Wirecutter continues to bring in record revenue for the Times, which is sitting on over $1 billion in cash. Yet our members have seen next to no financial benefit from their vital contributions to this success. Times management has offered paltry guaranteed wage increases of only 0.5%, despite soaring inflation and cash flows.“ Choire Sicha, writing at New York Magazine, has the headline of the day, “Here’s the Best Strike for Most People”: ”Many Wirecutter staff realized early on that their Times colleagues weren’t as excited about their arrival…. Wirecutter was always treated as a second-class citizen, isolated in its own Slack, its own offices, and its own reporting structure under Perpich…. The pay scale, as well, is substantially different from Times salaries."… F— ’em, I say. Stay away from Wirecutter this weekend, and tell everyone in your family tomorrow to do the same. There are a zillion other places to find links to Black Friday deals…

LINK: <https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/11/24/wirecutter-union>

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Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Long 20th Century, 1870-2010:

Forthcoming from Basic Books, September 6, 2022:

The 1st paragraph: “What I call the ‘long twentieth century’ started with the watershed boundary-crossing events of around 1870—the triple emergence of globalization, the industrial research lab, and the modern corporation—which ushered in changes that began to pull the world out of the dire poverty that had been humanity’s lot for the previous ten thousand years, since the discovery of agriculture. And what I call the ‘long twentieth century’ ended in 2010, with the world’s leading economic edge, the countries of the North Atlantic, still reeling from the Great Recession that had begun in 2008, and thereafter unable to resume economic growth at anything near the average pace that had been the rule since 1870. The years following 2010 were to bring large system-destabilizing waves of political and cultural anger from masses of citizens, all upset in different ways and for different reasons at the failure of the system of the twentieth century to work for them as they thought that it should.”

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One Video

Addams Family Thanksgiving <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJE3KDxTbWI>:

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Very Briefly Noted:

• Nilanjana Roy: Churails, Djinns & Rakshasas—India’s Monsters Go Mainstream: ‘The country’s writers have used science fiction and fantasy to tackle earthly issues — and the rest of the world is catching up… <https://www.ft.com/content/d707694a-b362-4b96-b3bf-c0638c606450>

• Andrew Cunningham & Lee Hutchinson: Andrew & Lee Continue Watching The Wheel Of Time—& It’s Getting Real: ‘The show’s latest episode gives its characters a minute to breathe, then goes big… <https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/11/wheel-of-time-book-reader-recap-episode-4-who-is-the-dragon-reborn/>

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Paragraphs:

Robert Shrimsley: Along for the Ride at Boris Johnson Land: ‘In Peppa Pig World, everything works. Streets are safe, schools are good, healthcare excellent, there are novel forms of transport and, presumably, the speeches all come with numbered pages. I’m not sure Peppa Pig would say the same about Boris Johnson Land if she were invited to give next year’s CBI speech. But then his amusement park is still something of a work in progress…

LINK: <https://www.ft.com/content/399255ad-5e3c-45e0-8cb5-32d361f50998>

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Nick Gruen (2009): Adam Smith is to Markets as Jane Austen is to Marriage: ‘Whether we take Adam Smith as an apostle of capitalism, or as a trenchant critic of the abuse of power, privilege and wealth–for he was both–his view of the nascent capitalism of his time should interest us, if for no other reason than for its freshness…. Smith gazed upon and theorised capitalism, or as he called it “commercial society”, as it was just emerging…. I propose the following conceit as a sub-theme:  Adam Smith is to markets as his near-contemporary Jane Austen is to marriage…. Not unlike Jane Austen’s novels, Smiths great books were a tour de force in the eighteenth-century rhetorical tradition, with the threefold task of instructing, delighting and persuading their audience. And much of that persuasion was not advice on government policy but rather the presentation of the market as a rich medium through which human life was lived, with an invitation to observe and denounce folly and vice and to embrace the more difficult but rewarding path of virtue…. Pride and Prejudice is about different ways of seeing:  The man’s and the woman’s; thought and feeling; art and nature. What appears as Darcy’s prideful arrogance to Elizabeth is not, in her final realisation improper pride. It is in the service of the code of noblesse oblige. As a gentleman, Darcy will never complain and never explain in response to Wickham’s malicious falsehoods. It is beneath his dignity. Elizabeth’s naturalness in assessing people informs her prejudice against Darcy and nearly leads to the disaster of her more fully succumbing to Wickham’s charms. The happy resolution is a paradigm of eighteenth-century moderation and compromise between perspectives…. Smith saw markets as mediating the same kind of synthesis of alternative perspectives (needs) in which the whole became more than the sum of its parts… a quintessentially human and humanising institution… for conversation, compromise and connection…. Though it will often perhaps mostly be dominated by mercenary motives, the market connection, often between strangers, is, to use Smith’s telling expression, every bit as fit and proper to its own circumstance and context.  Dialogue and mutual accommodation is our best instrument of wisdom, of virtue, and our best chance at happiness. Mere self-love is not sufficient for it…

LINK: <https://clubtroppo.com.au/2009/08/07/adam-smith-is-to-markets-as-jane-austen-is-to-marriage/>

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Izabella Kaminska: The metaverse is Just the Latest Incarnation of Las Vegas: ‘Facebook’s reinvention aims to create a standardised virtual reality where the house always wins…. There is no better metaphor for what’s going on than the story of how Las Vegas was turned from a barren Nevada wasteland into a hedonistic escape from the harsh realities of The Great Depression in the 1930s…. Key was US president Herbert Hoover’s greatest legacy, the Hoover Dam…. The architects of Las Vegas realised early on was that the Hoover Dam’s development would… attract a large but desperate workforce to a highly unappealing region of the country, where not much else was easily available. Once there they could be captured…. Las Vegas’… hedonistic offerings would woo workers like moths to a flame. But rather than offering salvation, or sustainable wealth, Las Vegas only delivered them to another extreme form of exploitation. A scenario where the house always wins while the user’s pockets are plundered, their dreams are often crushed…

LINK: <https://www.ft.com/content/739235bc-c418-4895-a426-3bd245ec6a00>

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Florian Ederer: ’David Romer expressed it best: "David Romer’s Rules for Making It Through Graduate School and Finishing Your Dissertation: ‘Out in Five’: Don’t clutter up your life with other activities; just write. Don’t carry out a thorough and comprehensive search of the literature; just write. Don’t attempt to make sure that every page you write shows the full extent of your professional skills; just write. Don’t write a well-organized, well-integrated, unified dissertation; just write. Don’t think profound thoughts that shake the intellectual foundations of the discipline; just write. If you don’t have a paper started by the spring of your third year, be alarmed. If you don’t have a paper largely drafted by the fall of your fourth year, panic. Have three new ideas a week while you are getting started. Don’t try to game the profession, work on what interests you. Good papers in economics have three characteristics: (i) A viewpoint; (2) A lever; (3) A result…

LINK:

Florian Ederer @florianederer

David Romer expressed it best.

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Phil Libin: mmhmm: ‘Video calls… was never the interesting part. It’s the tip of the iceberg. The really interesting part is how do you manage a distributed live work culture and situation? How do you shift from everything being synchronous in real time to being asynchronous? How do you live in this kind of hybrid reality…. The exciting shift really isn’t so much about people getting off video, it’s about people transitioning…to ’how do I thrive in this new world?’… We are thinking through how do you shift from synchronous to asynchronous life? How do you live in a fundamentally hybrid world? I show off a lot of our upcoming features that change how people can present, consume and interact in the first keynote on our website. It shows a bunch of these concepts that show where we think the product is headed…. ’Do in person what’s best in person. Do on video what’s best on video.’ Those two things aren’t a trade off. Video is not a poor substitute to being in person, it’s a different kind of thing…. We are very clear. We are trying to optimize for impact. We’re not trying to optimize for money and we’re not trying to optimize for a number of users…

LINK:

mmhmm and Phil Libin

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