“Þey Knew Þey Were Pilgrimes, & Looked Not Much on Þose things, But Lift Up Þeir Hyes to þe heavens, Þeir Dearest Cuntrie…”, & BRIEFLY NOTED
For 2022-11-24 Th
FOCUS: “Þey Knew Þey Were Pilgrimes, & Looked Not Much on Þose things, But Lift Up Þeir Hyes to þe heavens, Þeir Dearest Cuntrie…”
From Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather William:
William Bradford: History of Plimoth Plantation: ‘At length, after much travell and these debats, all things were got ready and provided. A smale ship was bought, & fitted in Holand, which was intended as to serve to help to transport them, so to stay in þe cuntrie and atend upon fishing and shuch other affairs as might be for þe good & benefite of þe colonie when they came ther. Another was hired at London, of burden about 9. score; and all other things gott in readines.
So being ready to departe, þey had a day of solleme humiliation, their pastor taking his texte from Ezra 8. 21. And þer at þe river, by Ahava, I proclaimed a fast, that we might humble ourselves before our God, and seeke of him a right way for us, and for our children, and for all our substance. Upon which he spente a good parte of þe day very profitably, and suitable to their presente occasion. Þe rest of the time was spente in powering out prairs to þe Lord with great fervencie, mixed with abundance of tears.
And þe time being come that þey must departe, þey were accompanied with most of their brethren out of þe citie, unto a towne sundrie miles of called Delfes-Haven, wher the ship lay ready to receive them. So þey lefte þt goodly & pleasante citie, which had been þer resting place near 12. years; but they knew they were pilgrimes, & looked not much on those things, but lift up their eyes to þe heavens, þeir dearest cuntrie, and quieted þeir spirits.
When þey came to þe place þey found þe ship and all things ready; and shuch of þeir freinds as could not come wiþ þem followed after þem, and sundrie also came from Amsterdame to see þem shipte and to takeþheir leave of þem. Þt night was spent wiþ litle sleepe by þe most, but wiþ freindly entertainmente & christian discourse and other reall expressions of true christian love. Þe next day, the wind being faire, þey wente aborde, and þeir freinds with them, where truly dolfull was þe sight of þt sade and mournfull parting; to see what sighs and sobbs and praires did sound amongst þem, what tears did gush from every eye, & pithy speeches peirst each harte; þt sundry of þe Dutch strangers þt stood on þe key as spectators, could not refraine from tears. Yet comfortable & sweete it was to see shuch lively and true expressions of clear & unfained love.
But þe tide (which stays for no man) caling them away þt were thus loath to departe, þeir Reved: pastor falling downe on his knees, (and þey all with him,) wiþ watrie cheeks comended þem wiþ most fervente praiers to þe Lord and his blessing. And þen wiþ mutuall imbrases and many tears, þey tooke their leaves one of an oþer; which proved to be þe last leave to many of þem...
MUST-READ: Where Will Twitter Get þe Antibodies to Protect Itself from Elon?
A good hypothesis for why Muskker’s spectacular ongoing flameout:
Number One Cat Winner: ‘I was an intern at SpaceX years ago, back it when it was a much smaller company — after Elon got hair plugs, but before his cult of personality was in full swing. I have some insight to offer here. Back when I was at SpaceX, Elon was basically a child king. He was an important figurehead who provided the company with the money, power, and PR, but he didn’t have the knowledge or (frankly) maturity to handle day-to-day decision making and everyone knew that. He was surrounded by people whose job was, essentially, to manipulate him into making good decisions. Managing Elon was a huge part of the company culture. Even I, as a lowly intern, would hear people talking about it openly in meetings. People knew how to present ideas in a way that would resonate with him, they knew how to creatively reinterpret (or ignore) his many insane demands, and they even knew how to “stage manage” parts of the physical office space so that it would appeal to Elon. The funniest example of “stage management” I can remember is this dude on the IT security team. He had a script running in a terminal on one of his monitors that would output random garbage, Matrix-style, so that it always looked like he was doing Important Computer Things to anyone who walked by his desk. Second funniest was all the people I saw playing WoW at their desks after ~5pm, who did it in the office just to give the appearance that they were working late.
People were willing to do that at SpaceX because Elon was giving them the money (and hype) to get into outer space, a mission people cared deeply about. The company also grew with and around Elon. There were layers of management between individual employees and Elon, and those managers were experienced managers of Elon. Again, I cannot stress enough how much of the company culture was oriented around managing this one guy.
Twitter has neither of those things going for it. There is no company culture or internal structure around the problem of managing Elon Musk, and I think for the first time we’re seeing what happens when people actually take that man seriously and at face value. Worse, they’re doing this little experiment after this man has had decades of success at companies that dedicate significant resources to protecting themselves from him, and he’s too narcissistic to realize it…
Very Briefly Noted:
Bryce Elder: Further Reading: ‘A day will come—probably a very distant day, but a day will come nonetheless—when you will be able to go an entire hour without having to think about Sam Bankman-Fried. Today, alas, will not be that day…
Theodore Schleifer: The Lost Gospel of S.B.F.: ‘S.B.F. aides once talked openly about a 50-year campaign for influence that would transform the state of American politics and policy…
TEBI: "Eight key takeaways from 20 years of SPIVA data: ‘Gross of fees, most active managers underperform most of the time…. Most institutional managers underperform most of the time…. When good performance does occur, it tends not to persist. Above-average past performance does not predict above-average future performance…
David Roberts: ‘I'm increasingly of the mind that if you want to understand the (bizarre or seemingly irrational) behavior of powerful people, you have to figure out the character of their epistemic bubble. Who do they listen to? What do they hear?…
Anil Dash: ‘It's impossible to overstate how much the big tech CEOs and VCs are being radicalized by living within their own bubble. The level of paranoia and contrived victimization is off the charts, and they increasingly only consume media that they have funded, created by acolytes…
Dylan Matthews: How one man quietly stitched the American safety net over four decades: ‘Robert Greenstein isn’t a household name. But his career lobbying for the poor has changed the lives of millions of Americans…
Jerusalem Demsas: Housing Breaks People’s Brains: ‘Supply skepticism and shortage denialism are pushing against the actual solution to the housing crisis: building enough homes…
Louis Ashworth: FTX: The Wallet Inspection...
¶s:
Tevi Troy: ‘For Profit’ Review: From Medicis to Modern Corporations: ‘It is sometimes hard to know how corporations make any money. People with firsthand experience of them will tell you that they are bloated and overstaffed, with too many meetings and too few actionable decisions despite all the discussion. The truth is… the Fortune 500 had aggregate sales of $37.8 trillion in 2021…. Making a product or providing a service that is bought by millions of people, if not billions—and then selling it again and again—is a difficult one but amazingly profitable when it works. It is, appropriately, at the heart of William Magnuson’s For Profit: A History of Corporations…. The history of business matters. As Mr. Magnuson writes, corporations “have always and ever exerted an outsize influence on world events”…
Need Advice: How are people buying these 10M+ houses?: ‘Feeling frustrated after years of hard work: I'm mid 30s male in Bay Area, Eng Director at FAANG. Was just starting to make good salary but stock has tanked and both net worth (down to ~2.5M) and income is severely down for me (bunch of my NW was still invested in my company and tech). Meanwhile, I'm looking around the Bay Area and there are so many 10M+ houses, each of them being fantastic and very desirable. I've been a top 1% student and now a top 1%, high performing professional all my life. I've been hard working, bold, driven for as along as I can remember but now worry that I'll never be able to afford a house like these. I'm not even sure if I'm on the right path—don't know if even Senior Directors or VPs at FAANG can afford these even though they are so few in number and they are the very best compensated people in the world. Who are the people that are affording these mega rich homes and how are there so many of them (given there are so many of these lavish houses across the US)? I would assume some of these are owned by businessmen and business families but are there so many successful big businesses in the world that they can account for ownership of all these lavish houses? I thought the chances of running a successful big business was just as rare as being big in any other field. Just feeling down and wondering if I'm on the wrong path…
Zach Beauchamp: How the right’s radical thinkers are coping with the midterms: ‘“Political horse-race types are predicting a GOP blowout in today’s midterm elections, and if it comes to pass, Democrats won’t have much to blame beyond their own insanity,” Sohrab Ahmari, a leading New Right figure, wrote in an Election Day piece for The American Conservative magazine… “drag queen story hour,” masking in schools… “gender ideologues”… permissive immigration…. “There is only so much of it the nation could tolerate,” Ahmari predicted. Two days later, after the voters rendered a different verdict, Ahmari penned a piece in the New York Times blaming the defeat on the GOP’s failure to embrace true populism: blasting the party for “ginning up outrage over ‘woke’ sensitivity trainings in the workplace” while remaining “indifferent to issues like wages and workplace power.” Ahmari’s pivot reflects the difficult spot that the New Right finds itself…
Pallab Ghosh: Gold coin proves 'fake' Roman emperor was real: An ancient gold coin proves that a third century Roman emperor written out of history as a fictional character really did exist, scientists say: The face of Sponsian the first, who was purged from history by experts in the nineteenth century. Researchers have now established that he was a lost Roman emperor. The coin bearing the name of Sponsian and his portrait was found more than 300 years ago in Transylvania, once a far-flung outpost of the Roman empire. Believed to be a fake, it had been locked away in a museum cupboard. Now scientists say scratch marks visible under a microscope prove that it was in circulation 2,000 years ago. Prof Paul Pearson University College London, who led the research, told BBC News that he was astonished by the discovery…
To Need Advice: The farther out you are in a distribution, the greater the relative distance between you and the person just a little farther out. The people buying those $10 million houses are even more frustrated than you that they cannot afford a $100 million house.
Which is why we really ought to raise revenues from high income people. Whatever utility they receive from their marginal dollar is mainly positional.
Here is the Sponsian coin paper: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0274285.
In my reading, the authors do not claim that Sponsian is "a lost Roman emperor", but rather an obscure and not very important regional strongman. From the paper: "Sponsian never controlled an official mint and was unrecorded by all later historians, so he certainly did not rule in Rome."