Sup Pup
What's up, a phrase for the mole people
One for the duckstack, two for the show
Here boy, here boy, Who’s a good Duckstack, yes you are! Yes you are! look boy, readers! Sit! Good boy! Lie down. ohhhhh good boy! Okay, roll over. Come on, roll over. I know I taught him this guys, I know he knows it. No, lie down again. Sit. Lie down. Good boy! Rollll over! Roooll over! Heyyy you did it! Okay you can eat them now1
Pod People
Invasion of the Economy Snatchers
Generally speaking, all managers in every position of power in the entire world does not use their brain to make decisions, they use data. Its been this way for a long time, and is one of the massive drivers of our economic homogeneity2. There are very few differences between consumer decisions, and it takes a phenomenally risk tolerant (and peer-pressure defiant) driver to really do anything new, and companies are beholden to boards of directors and shareholders and, basically, anybody but the actual consumer.
There is no reason to make a great product when you can make a “good enough” product and then just sell it via a handshake deal with mega corporations to bundle your nonsense into their t-mobile phone or whatever. There’s no market competition because individuals are simply insignificant players. Elon Musk is a good example of this with twitter, in the way he has consistently been driving insane consumer-spiting policy decisions for months. He is a dynamic innovator, and has essentially ripped out the “social media” part of twitter and replaced with heavy content algorithms and access restrictions for normal people, favoring essentially the top 1% of large accounts.
For example, one of his first policy decisions was to restrict the spread of posts linking to external websites. This decision (and he is quite transparent about his reasoning) was based in “lowering traffic to competitors and increasing user time on site to increase ad revenue”. Of course both of these are fine goals, but this decision rips out a ton of value and replaces it with nothing: Twitter’s original and primary purpose, representing at least 20% of all conversation on the site, is linking external news stories and blog posts, so that people can talk about them, or advertise them, etc. By throttling links to external sites, users are restricted from talking about the news, essentially. Since you cannot reference it.
A second decision came quickly after, to restrict users ability to message people who do not already follow them. The reasoning for this was “hurt bot spammers”. But this decision also alienates a core user market and replaces it with nothing: Artists seeking commissions. If you can’t message an artist offering to commission a work of art for them, then the artist’s entire revenue stream is crippled irreparably, and the entire user base must move off of twitter, and twitter also becomes worthless for commissioning artists, so the seekers are invalidated as well. This represents 15% of all site users.
There is no reason for decisions to be this bad- anyone with an ounce of foresight could see “hey this will alienate a lot of people and provide no benefit” but companies do this over and over again. No update to any social media service in all of history has actually improved anything, but it also applies to most software and even most hardware at this point. And I would say Elon is much better than most, since he pivots quickly and is willing to experiment at least in theory. A recent3 “brand new iphone” did little more than remove the headphone jack in a silly bid to sell apple’s new wireless headphones. Removing functionality is not an upgrade. When your customer base is more or less locked in, you can abuse them with impunity. But leaders don’t even see it as abusing them, because executives are wholly insulated feedback through an abstraction layer called “data”.
There’s a fallacy called “goodhart’s law” which states that when you govern something by a measurement, it quickly ceases to be a good measurement. Like if you have a nail factory, if you measure nail quantity and set targets based on it then you’ll end up with billions of nails, too tiny to be useful, because efficient ways to shoot for the metric will always involve shaving off some other important thing.
Here’s another example. I’m a conservative, right? Or I’m more of a fascist or whatever, whatever you call socially conservative and economically liberal. Anyway there was recently an event where Tucker Carlson, the undisputed most beloved talker on the right, interviewed the various presidential candidates and just kind of grilled them generally.
The results were impressive. Impressively bad, of course. He asked Mike Pence why he would care about Ukraine so much when Americans are in the harshest economic conditions many of them have experienced in their lives, and Pence said “well I don’t care about that.” Some guy Asa said he was in favor of the vaccine mandates and transgender surgery for minors, and said those things aren’t really important and Tucker was like “uh, these are like some of the most important issues to conservatives nationwide?”. Basically the entire “best and brightest” the republican party produced were just incredibly delusional and out of touch from like, regular people. Not that I’m regular, but watching that performance it would hard to be further than these guys.
This is to be expected though. There is nothing anyone can do about it. How do you keep “good enough” from being “good enough”? We need to make it illegal for decision makers to look at bar charts.
Science Corner: Dissection of a Star
You can’t make a bright idea without cracking a few stars
Alright class, today we are dissecting a star not unlike our sun. I’m rolling in the cart with all the jars, we’ve been preserving these things in formaldehyde so be sure you’re wearing our industrial strength science nose plugs or just use your hands. Alright I’m passing out the jars with your star in it, you can name it if you want. When you’re ready, go ahead and dump the star out on the tray in front of you.
Now you’ll notice some slight discoloration from millions of years of formaldehyde but this is normal, in fact if it didn’t do that the stars would actually be too bright to look at, and too hot to touch, so thank that smell next time you smell it! Gross! haha.
Okay, now let me put mine up on the screen here so you can all see it. You can see these flaps here, on the corona? This is called the twinkler. And its actually one long strand that wraps around the sun or star like a big ball of yarn, and its the main way the star gives off light. Peel this ribbon away with your scalpel, and be careful not to actually pierce it or you might let out some highly radioactive rays which at this distance will kill you instantly. Since these suns haven’t been dissected before, there’s no way their digestive tract is wholly vacant, so just be careful there. I’ll give you a minute to remove the corona.
Alright, I’m going to keep going. Its okay to open up the main sun with a lateral incision here, and this should expose the nuclear fusion. You might have heard that stars drink various energy drinks to stay hydrated and energetic, and nuclear fusion is by far their favorite brand. Nuclear Fusion, The energy drink of the stars™.
Order yours today.
History
Chronicle of being asked if he can watch TV NOW? 64 times an hour
Specifically in this case the Bionicle movie, which Jethro pronounces “biontitle movie?” He fixates, and he wanted to watch that, and he will not take no for an answer for the next 6 decades minimum
My son Jethro has discovered a good manipulation tactic is to plead “I never tried that before!” so he will use that on mundane things like asking me for ice water. “I never tried ice water before!” he said to me this week, hoping I would give him some. Yes you can have some but you definitely have had ice water before dude lol
Jethro cleaned our living room this week, for real. He put everything away and the room was actually clean and nice looking when he was done. But there is one condition: He has a sleeveless vest with a lightning bolt on it he calls his “super speed vest” and he has to wear it to clean. But it makes it 10x as fun for him.
Went outside to find Jethro blowing bubbles on his little brother while his brother shouts “water battle!” over and over again
“it was nice of me to tuck you in” says Jethro after he got a blanket for his mama
We went to Curry Pizza near Thanksgiving Point this week and it was actually really nice and the food was good and everyone was nice. A waitress thoughtfully asked if we would prefer some paper plates for the kids, and as she left to get them Jethro was amazed: “how did she know that we're kids? How did she know that?”
Toddler running around singing all around the cobblers bend, except mostly he skipped the whole thing until he ran into the wall with this big slam and then sang “Monkey weasows”
At Curry Pizza, the toddler ate just the toppings off of his pizza one at a time, just grabbing an onion and sticking it in his mouth, but he would articulate “Om nom nyom” with each chew which was really funny.
Horrorscopes
One horrorscope per reader, please
Dripping Oozie Thing: Things are looking up for you! As much as they can, anyway. You are not going to get taller, but in all other ways fortune is with you.
Vampire-Zombie Hybrid: In life or death or undeath, life (or death, or undeath) marches on. You can expect few changes, but rocking the boat is inadvisable for the foreseeable future (you cannot swim)
Giant 15’ Poorly Made Doll: Take time this week to stop and smell the roses, if you can (I don’t know how doll noses work), it is good to slow down and appreciate the little things (pretty much everything that isn’t you)
Flesh Wad With Teeth: Avoid Giant 15’ Poorly Made Dolls this week. Your horroscope is in retrograde. Until you can move your fate you should play it safe and avoid risky venture capital investment attempts. And absolutely do not touch (or whatever you do to interact with) cryptocurrency.
Hinted-At Moaning Shadow Person: As always, you are perfect and can do no wrong. Nothing has changed since your last horrorscope, and never will.
Teleporting Skeleton Cerberus: Beware your own tail, and your loose bones, as both will trap you in place. To progress, you must seek ventures away and apart from yourself. Perhaps ally yourself with Oozie to avoid getting stuck in a rut.
FBI: This is not a threat, this is a “rhetorical device”
Other contributing factors are catastrophically topheavy regulatory aparatus, Human Resources departments, and 60%+ of designers b . . ..eing female (women tend to value innovation less on average)
like 50 years ago or something