Wow. I picked up a copy of Hyperion this morning while taking a random stroll through town - something I rarely do during a work day anymore. I popped into a book shop on a complete whim, and picked it up as it had been on my list for a while. The coincidence feels deeply uncanny.
Totally agree with this, too! The books are great and I’ve read all four a few times over, but the audiobooks are something else. The guy who reads them manages to strike a near perfect balance between “reading” and “acting” that is just such a pleasure to listen to. I think we must have listened to it beginning to end about another three or four times as a family during long car trips!
That's the thing. It is acting. All the characters are played by actors. And they just simply nail their parts. You're right that it's an equal and almost perfect mix of acting while not changing the tone or impacting the content via the same acting process.
It legitimately is the best audio book I've ever heard. I think it's because their voices and tone and cadence matches what I hear in my head when reading the book.
I started reading it for the first time this week. It’s just a statistical anomaly… but humans are wired to notice and feel coincidence; it connects us to space and time in a way that must have helped make religion more believable.
The key part is that there are multiple insurgencies going on simultaneously. There are separatist movements that are looking to create new nations states, while simultaneous there are non-violent protests ongoing, generally looking for regime change and a move away from extremists religious tendencies. Both can be true simultaneously.
Kurds are getting abandoned by the west on a weekly basis for the past like century. It's insane what these people have have gone through,still no resolution.
Wikipedia describes it as a “a short-lived Kurdish self-governing unrecognized state in present-day Iran” and “a puppet state of the Soviet Union”. Doesn’t really count as a free and independent state.
>The Kurds had their own state at the end of World War II - the US and UK forced them to dissolve and integrate with Iran.
The Kurds were also supposed to have their own state at the end of World War 1, but western countries abandoned them and didn't force Turkey to honour its obligations, leaving Turkey free to genocide them just like it did the Armenians, Assyrians and Pontic Greeks.
They effectively had their own state in Rojava up until a few weeks ago, and KRG (Iraq) is pretty damn close to a state, it's basically a state in everything but recognition as the immigration, defense, and law system is almost entirely separated. When I lived Rojava, Assad had zero influence, the military and police and borders were entirely separated, there was zero chance you were going to experience the force of law ofthe state of Syria anywhere you went. The state of Rojava dissolved due to tactical loss of alliance with Arab militias when the rebels retook Damascus. I would characterize their recent loss of state in Syria had more to do with being surrounded by Turkey and dependence on wish-wash arab allies than it had to do with the US or UK.
We recently had an employee leave our team, posting an extensive essay on LinkedIn, "exposing" the company and claiming a whole host of wrong-doing that went somewhat viral. The reality is, she just wasn't very good at her job and was fired after failing to improve following a performance plan by management. We all knew she was slacking and despite liking her on a personal level, knew that she wasn't right for what is a relatively high-functioning team. It was shocking to see some of the outright lies in that post, that effectively stemmed from bitterness at being let go.
The 'boy (or girl) who cried wolf' isn't just a story. It's a lesson for both the person, and the village who hears them.
Same thing happened to us. Me and a C level guy were personally attacked. It feels really bad to see someone you actually tried really hard to help fit in , but just couldn’t despite really wanting the person to succeed, come around and accuse you of things that clearly aren’t true. HR got the to remove the “review” eventually but now there’s a little worry about what the team really thinks, whether they would do the same in some future layoff (we never had any, the person just wasn’t very good).
Thankfully it’s been a while but we had a similar situation in a previous job. There’s absolutely no upside to the company or any (ex) team members weighing in unless it’s absolutely egregious, so you’re only going to get one side of the story.
It's a British word for someone or something that's ugly, dirty or unpleasant. Generally it was used to be derogatory about women - ie. "she's minging mate". I believe it originally came from the Scots, where the word 'ming' comes from the old Scottish English word for 'bad smell' or 'human excrement'. It was in wide spread use in the South of the UK while I was growing up.
Long-form news outlets (ie, weekly/monthly/quarterly release) tend to not fall into that scummy, data-mining behaviour the daily news outlets do from my experience. Subscribe to something like the Economist, Private Eye (if in the UK), the Atlantic, or Delayed Gratification instead. They tend to hire well reasoning journalists that do research with due dilligence.
Yes, humans can be greedy - but the question is whether we design our society to encourage and legitimize that greed in every sphere of life, or whether we maintain non-market norms that check it. The journalistic integrity example proves my/Sandel's point; when ethics became profitable, the market accidentally aligned with civic good. But the concern is precisely about areas where market logic systematically corrupts rather than improves outcomes - ie. where introducing money changes the nature of the good itself (like turning civic duty into a fee, or learning into a transaction). The pendulum swings, yes - which is exactly why we need ongoing public debate about where markets belong, rather than passively accepting their expansion into every domain and hoping the pendulum swings back on its own.
Michael Sandel's "What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets" covers it quite well.
Markets create unfairness by systematically disadvantaging the poor when money becomes necessary to obtain certain goods or quality of goods. Market values corrupt non-market spheres by changing the meaning and value of goods being exchanged (e.g., paying for grades undermines intrinsic desire to learn). Monetary incentives crowd out altruistic motivations and civic duty (e.g., fines becoming fees people willingly pay rather than norms to uphold). Commodification degrades human dignity (e.g., treating drug-addicted women as "baby-making machines" in sterilization-for-cash programs). Markets increase wealth inequality and create segregation in previously egalitarian spaces (e.g., luxury skyboxes in sports stadiums). Market exchanges under severe inequality or economic necessity become coercive, not truly voluntary. Purchased tokens of friendship and personal expressions (apologies, wedding toasts) lose their authenticity and dilute social bonds. Wealthy individuals and countries can pay their way out of moral obligations (e.g., carbon offsets instead of reducing emissions). Markets have infiltrated areas traditionally governed by ethical considerations - medicine, education, personal relationships - without public debate about whether this is desirable. The economic approach treats everything in an ethical vacuum, ignoring morality in favor of purely analyzing incentives.
Thank you, but again I'm just paraphrasing Sandel's work. He really puts into words that which I've personally felt without having the vernacular to put it into words myself (alongside one of his inspirations, Michael Young). I attended a couple of his lectures while he was in the UK, and he was fantastic.
I don't think it's even the money. It's the numbers and numerical "scoring".
You see all the same evil dishonest shit behavior in contexts where the $$ is negligible, fixed or not a KPI individuals are really scored on. Organized religion, academia, Internet comments, etc, etc.
One objection here: pay-for-sterilization doesn't match with the rest of these because this is treating it solely as a cost to the woman, rather than recognizing that there's a benefit in not bringing a child into a horrible life.
The objection is that offering cash exploits vulnerable women's desperation, treating their reproductive capacity as a commodity to be purchased. Even if the outcome might prevent more suffering, which is an individually subjective outcome, the means matters: it degrades the women involved by reducing a profound personal decision to a market transaction under conditions of coercion, where drug addiction makes the offer 'too good to resist.'
Monetary incentives are the foundations of Capitalism. There are only two ways that ethics might get in the way of their profits.
The first is government regulation. We saw lots of deregulation of oversight over the ten years before the 2008 financial crisis. None of the ethically compromised C-suite folks went to jail for their behavior because it was suddenly not a crime. Sometimes you have regulation, but you don't have enforcement of the regulations. This is what we get when the government is comprised of or controlled by capitalists. It's called fascism.
The second is public boycott or revolt. Could the new Target CEO be the result of the recent boycott? Same with Starbucks? Has anyone actually bought a Tesla in the past year? The big tech folks are bending over backwards to hide the fact that they have no real AI business model, making it a gigantic bubble that is about to burst. There is a national frenzy that no one is reporting on people ditching their subscriptions. We are going to see affordability get worse very quickly. It will be interesting to see what happens as more and more people start tightening their purse strings, whether by choice or necessity.
> Sometimes you have regulation, but you don't have enforcement of the regulations.
Indeed. Let us quote the Dune books (since they're trending, and for good reason!):
"Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.-Law and Governance (The Spacing Guild)"
And if you would let me indulge one more:
"Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class: whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.
-Politics as Repeat Phenomenon (Bene Gesserit Training Manual)"
If this were cyclical, I'd be inclined to agree, but this seems to be more of a wave. I also think the push back is more than just one against rented compute. It is tied to a societal ennui that comes from the feeling that we no longer own anything, be it music, housing, movies, land, tools, phones, or cars. Everything is moving to either being rented or on credit. There's a push back against this self-made feudal revival, and that scales all the way from individuals through to corporations; in this case, against the idea that a mega-corporation gets to decide how and when you get to use your compute, and at what variable price.
I know it's ironic to say this about Intel, a notoriously management heavy company, but they did do the dual tracks which I always appreciated. A principal engineer was functionally on par with a senior manager, and a fellow with a VP. This meant that good engineers weren't forced into roles they weren't interested in, and why many stayed there 20+ years.
The issue is, even with two tracks, there's every chance that more people end up taking the management path because it's seen as an easy way to climb the ranks. Your success can be built from your teams success, rather than your own individual contribution.
> Your success [as a manager] can be built from your teams success, rather than your own individual contribution.
Well, yes. That's what good managers are: a force multiplier.
A bunch of rockstar devs reporting to a poor manager may never move the needle in an organisation. A bunch of below average devs reporting to a stellar manager will definitely move the needle.
That is populism in a nutshell. It is anti-rationalism at its heart. There's no real ideology - that's how it applies to both Chávez and Trump, Corbyn and Orbán. People want to believe what feels "instinctively" correct, because the intellectual overhead of modern society leaves the majority of the population unable to deal with the reality that political and economic systems are incredibly difficult to understand without hours of study and thought. That is uncomfortable, so people rebel against intellectualism, because it's easier to be told lies through 30-second videos and feel well informed, rather than sitting through a 20-hour session that one might need to truly understand a niche of a niche. The more they read, the less they understand, so disengage from it altogether and go with their gut (designed for tribes of monkeys) because the cognitive overload is too much to bear.
It's so exhausting having the same conversation every time. A friend reads something on reddit, flips out about it. Asks in our signal chat "can anyone explain this" as bait. Occasionally I take the bait and explain the extreme thing through a centrist lens. Now I'm instantly on the side of whoever did the bad thing and spend the next 90 minutes explaining rationality until we arrive at the center. Things calm down. 3 days go by, and my friend visits reddit again...
Please don't reduce decades of friendship with a person to a couple dozen words I posted on a website and think you can judge what friendship means to me.
I was talking about the impact of the current state of the world on existing relationships.
Who said they’re contributing to the problem? Perhaps you are by constantly downplaying what sounds like wilful ignorance on the part of your friend? Some people’s ignorance does not deserve the same respect as others’ reasoning. Your friend sounds like they enjoy trolling you.
Playing the little devil on cheshire's shoulder, I see. Maybe it's not for the best to encourage people to stop being gracious in times of high political turmoil.
It's very sad, but this applies to what seems like everyone now. Required reading for internet users should be The Anatomy of Peace by the Harbinger Institute. I suppose you'd have to peel people away from their social algorithms though, which might be an impossibility due to the decreasing attention span. The more I live in this world, the more I realize that this seems like the new norm, and hate it. I grew up around a lot of great people with big hearts, and I just don't get it. I think John Coffey said it best when hes said "Mostly, I'm tired of people being ugly to each other."
I am still surrounded by people with big hearts, but I think they have separated themselves into a family/friends/acquaintances persona and a "political entity" persona which is increasingly hostile and more frequently exercised due to social media bubbles. People who are openly hostile (and sometimes outright homicidal) on social media are still cuddly teddy bears in person, but the more they access that anger and hate for people they'd normally foster relationships with, the more our ability to find commonality erodes.
I have an uncle that I've always been fond of who recently has spouted some mind-bending support of the current administration, and it was like talking to someone who lives in another dimension. My Dad too was indoctrinated by Fox News (because he was spending a lot of time with my grandparents) and some of his political views are irreconcilable with the man I knew growing up.
This is very well said. I've also noticed the jekyll and hyde thing - for several years now and I've seen people that act basically like extremists online be some of my favorite people in person. Both right and left leaning. Very bizarre and sad stuff. I'm fairly conservative, but we need to be able to call a spade a spade when it comes down to it.
