I just saw the following meme, What the hell even is a dream job? by PrecisionAcc (Reddit), which highlighted the picture shown below.

What even is a dream job?

Wait. I know that this was picture was just to snark about the term “dream job”, but it also highlights an interesting divergence of opinion about what work is.

I thought antiwork was about being against the drone-job work culture, not against being useful at all.

I understand that it’s hard to even conceive of a world where jobs don’t suck when you have a shitty job. But isn’t... [More]

As I started doing in the previous year, I’ve included a partial, “teaser” review of each book in this article as well as linked a separate article which includes a full review with all notes, as well as citations and rough notes.

I only hit 20 titles this year, but some of them were pretty hefty tomes, though none in German and only one in French. A couple of public-policy books this year, with the accompanying analysis.

Project Hail Mary (2021)

by Andy Weir

Andy Weir manages to comes up... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the third Witcher book, but the first book in what is called the Witcher Saga. Geralt is still the same. The world is worse.

The kingdom of Cintra has fallen to Nilfgard. Queen Calanthe is dead, Ciri is on the run. Nilfgard seeks her with all of its power, bending its will to finding the heiress who could try to take back the throne... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is a play about prison and prisoners. Chris Hedges worked on this play with his friend Boris Franklin. They met when Boris was one of Chris’s students in a writing course in prison in New Jersey. They are still friends today. There were 28 students in all, all of whom contributed to the story. Chris and Boris hammered a play out of their over two dozen stories, with the assistance of Chris’s wife, actress Eunice Wong.

This is a story about prison, and prisoners, but... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

I read this seven-volume, ~500-page treatise on spinning and yarn-production for work. The first four volumes were published in 2008, while the fifth and sixth—rotor-spinning and alternative spinning (primarily air-jet spinning)—were written in 2009, and the seventh volume—on man-made fibers—arrived five years later, in 2014.

• Volume 1 – Technology of Short-Staple Spinning
• Volume 2 – Blowroom & Carding
• Volume 3 – Spinning Preparation
• Volume 4 – Ring Spinning
• Volume... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the first book featuring the Witcher, a magically gifted, preternaturally physically gifted, and potion-enhanced monster-hunter. He wields a silver sword, pulled quickly from a sheath on his back. His hair is long and silver, his eyes jet black. His eyes match his head-to-toe leather armor, studded with spikes along the shoulders. The ladies love him; his enemies fear him. He knows lore; he is good with animals. He is wise and bides his time. He is a bad-ass, an... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is an excellent book. Everyone should read it, but especially every American should read it. It’s not an easy read, but neither is it easy to confront the fact that you’re part of a monstrous machine that chews up poor people and spits out yachts.

This machine runs on war. It runs on conquest, pillage, and piracy and all that war entails. It not only doesn’t care about the overwhelming number of victims of all kinds—those directly killed, those grievously injured,... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is a kind of a meta-plot-twist book: it’s a book with multiple pretty inventive plot twists about an author who becomes famous for having written a book with a nearly shockingly inventive and unique plot twist.

Jacob Finch Bonner is an author who stormed out of the gate, more or less, with a highly critically acclaimed first novel that never landed on the NYT best-seller list, but garnered a few industry awards that left everyone waiting for his next book. He takes a... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is a sequel to The Peripheral that, because of the wormhole technology involved, actually takes place before that book. The story takes place in an alternate future that had suffered through something called the “Jackpot”, which was a climate apocalypse that eliminated pretty much everything we’re being told it will actually eliminate, but from which a tiny portion of humanity managed to escape with technology wildly beyond ours. They have flying cars, cloaking... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

As usual in a Neal Stephenson book, there’s a lot going on. As usual in a Stephenson book of late, every single last character is possessed of a unique and ostensibly fascinating background, is confident, self-sufficient and self-reliant, interesting, eloquent, funny, smart, skilled, and almost invariably independently wealthy. Does that take a wee bit of the tension out of the book? You betcha.

There is the constant undertone that people who are not like the characters... [More]

The article Ukraine Expects to Get All the Western Weapons It Wants by Dave DeCamp (Scheer Post) quotes Yury Sak, an advisor to Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov, who is

“[…] confident Ukraine will get everything it wants. “They didn’t want to give us heavy artillery, then they did. They didn’t want to give us HIMARS systems, then they did. They didn’t want to give us tanks, now they’re giving us tanks. Apart from nuclear weapons, there is nothing left that we will not get,” he said.”

Hiroshima Mushroom CloudBut why stop... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is a wonderfully written and incredibly honest and sobering look at how America treats what it clearly considers to be detritus—the dead and the wounded from its wars. On the one hand, there is an incredible respect and attention to detail for the dead and wounded. The wounded are offered incredible levels of care—right up until they are no longer in danger of dying, but can no longer be of any conceivable use to the military, at which point they are dropped like... [More]

What happens when you hate scrollbars so much that you forget what they were for in the first place?

You end up making a dropdown chooser that looks like this:

SmartVote Menu

The drop-down is for “level of education” and, for a few seconds there, I couldn’t figure out why the highest level of education available was Anlehre (“Apprenticeship” in German). If I hadn’t been familiar with the content, I wouldn’t have suspected that there were more entries.

Yes, you can see that there’s a bit more whitespace... [More]

This time chooser is obviously dumb—because it puts the hours in the wrong place.

A bad time chooser

But what about if it had two concentric sets of hours, with 1-12 on the inside and 13-24 on the outside? You could spin the “hand” to the right position, then adjust the radius to the inner or outer ring, depending on whether you were selecting e.g., 2 or 14.

You could even make a “little” hand that you could spin to the right position, like you were setting a cuckoo clock.

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the story of the press in Great Britain in the 1930s. It paints a decidedly unflattering picture of the entire industry, one that, however hard we would try to claim to the contrary, fits extremely well in describing the media and journalistic culture in this, nearly the end of the first quarter of the 21st century. It is beautifully written, biting satire.

Suffice it to say that absolutely no-one is in any way interested in what actually happened or what the truth... [More]

The United States is the absolute king of searching for ways in which you can suck just enough of the enjoyment out of doing something that it creates the most profit without alienating people to the degree that they stop paying for it.

That’s the topic of the article Perfidious Pricing by Michael Bateman (Passing Time), which deals with a practice he says is called Drip Pricing. I suppose it’s what the inventors deem to be a clever way of describing a process whereby, instead of being presented with a single price, the... [More]

I was chatting with a friend about mistranslations and “false friends” (words that sound like a word in another language, but have a completely different meaning).

He sent me a link to Slowly down the feathers floated… (Imgur), an image without context. Still, in the image, you could see that a menu item on a Chinese menu had been translated to “Fuck the duck until exploded”, which is humorous, but only on a pretty superficial level, if we’re being honest. Using the word “fuck” without seeming to... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is a short lecture delivered by Albert Camus at Columbia University. He spoke of humanity’s moral decline—or more the obvious fact that it was less declining and more failing to rise to any occasion—and how we should continue to strive for peace, despite the hopelessness of the endeavor. He takes particular issue with the intrinsic hypocrisy that underlies every society we’ve known.[2]

It is our hypocrisy that prevents us from truly moving forward because we are... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the ninth and final volume of The Expanse. Whereas the first books were set very firmly in hard sci-fi, with plenty of orbital mechanics, the second half of the series got much more into the quasi-religious, quasi-magical nature of truly advanced technology. The protomolecule technology and its inventors were so advanced that anything we have looks positively Newtonian in comparison. The other-dimensional, multiverse-hopping demons that destroyed them are even more... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the story of a young man named Joe Bonham who wakes up in darkness and silence. The last thing he remembers is that he was in Europe, serving in the army during WWI. He slowly learns that it is dark and silent because he is deaf and blind. He learns that he can’t speak because he no longer has a mouth to speak of: no tongue, no teeth, just a weird emptiness that he can sense, but not feel. He can’t feel because he can’t move his arms and legs. He can’t move any of... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the eighth book of the The Expanse series. It’s four years after Laconia came in and took over everything in Persepolis Rising. Chrisjen Avasarala has finally died and been interred in the capitol city on Laconia. Holden, who is still being held prisoner there, attends the funeral. He attends a lot of state functions, keeping his ear to the ground. Duarte tolerates him because of his first-hand knowledge of the civilization that destroyed the protomolecule engineers... [More]

So there’s a new game called Wordiply that I took for a test drive.

The rules are that you start with a sequence of letters. Your job is to think of the five longest words that you can, that include those letters, in that order. That’s it.

I did the warmup and then took a crack at today’s puzzle. Booyah:

🅦🅞🅡🅓🄸🄿🄻🅈 #33
🌟 Length Score: 100%
💫 Rare long word found!
🚀 Letter Score: 76
🔗 Play Wordiply: https://www.wordiply.com
🎬 Today’s starter:... [More]

The article Robert Reich Is Wrong: ‘Corporate Greed’ Isn’t To Blame for Egg Prices by Joe Lancaster (Reason) lays out all of its information, then comes to the wrong conclusion. Once again, people, revenue != profits. A corporation only very grudgingly declares profits. It must pay taxes on profits. Therefore, it looks for every single possible way to squirrel away profits into different parts of the ledger.

The article is about an over 100% increase in the price of eggs from January to December of 2022. My anecdotal... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

I am often amazed by the holisticity[2] of my research, of how often I happen, by what seems like pure coincidence, to read about several interrelated things. This book starts off in a direction vaguely similar to Amusing Ourselves to Death, but becomes much more. It addresses some of the same topics as No One is Talking About This, but goes much further, investigates the phenomenon of the Internet much more deeply, places it more firmly in the flow of history.

I’ve been a... [More]

I just finished my first jigsaw puzzle in more than 2½ years.

A von Ballmoos Christmas tradition is to put together a jigsaw puzzle. The putting-together of it borders on obsession and we stay up ridiculously late, straining our eyes in the dim winter light and ignoring the telephone.

I got started a bit late this year, but still managed to strain my eyes and go to sleep very, very late.

2023: NY Public Library

This one started off relatively straightforward, but the final ¼ or so was... [More]

The article Revealed: more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by biggest provider are worthless, analysis shows by Patrick Greenfield (The Guardian) reveals what it says in the title. It’s an excellent article proving to us what many of us already suspected strongly or already “knew”: the carbon-offset system looks like a scam and it is a scam. The company Verra, responsible for providing about ¾ of carbon offsets globally, is being accused of having sold 20x more credits than it can actually verify. That is, it is being... [More]