Wait, what............................?

 

.................The Internet is not an honest friend.

Ah, the Internet...........................

 

           more fun here

harboring...........................

 Despite the fact that it had been around for most of my adult life, I harbored a deep distrust for social media of any kind.  The idea of voluntarily revealing all that personal info to strangers had always struck me as dumber than dumb—and I'd seen far too many cases of Internet stalking, fraud, catfishing, and worse to change my mind about it.  Ever since my early twenties, when I'd shut down my meager Facebook account after some jerk tried to blackmail me for nudes via private message, I've used the Internet only for work and for the purchasing of shoes—an approach I believe could lead to world peace if more people shared it.

-Alison Gaylin, Robert B. Parker's Bad Influence: A Sunny Randall Novel

Not feeling the love.............

.........................for the Intertunnel: 

. . . that sort of thing is just an extreme expression of what the internet is: a parasitic digital organism that feeds on human time and emotion, extracting money or attention through the most useless and shameless means possible.

Big Tech is not our friend.............

Why have IT improvements failed to radiate through the broader economy? There are many possible explanations, but the transformation of once-disruptive tech companies into rent-seeking monopolies is surely an important one. The monopolization of information technology arises from the nature of the technology itself: so-called network effects make it convenient to have one venue on which to post political comments and cat pictures, one provider of office software that everyone uses, one giant internet retail marketplace, and so forth. But the fact that technological monopolies have their origin in network effects rather than in the nefarious manipulation of mar­kets does not eliminate the potential for abuse. . . .

Twenty-five years ago, America’s tech companies took risks and disrupted established business models. Today, they are the new utili­ties, earning monopoly rents by controlling markets. Microsoft chased its challengers out of personal computer software; Amazon crushed most of its internet retailing rivals; Apple created a duopoly of hardware and services with its rival Samsung; Google destroyed the commercial prospects of competing search engines; and Facebook, through targeted investments and acquisitions, dominates social media. . . .

 By allowing its tech companies to turn into monopolistic, unregulated utilities, it has high stock prices—for a handful of stocks—and low productivity. U.S. tech companies still innovate, but only where it suits them. Their monopolies for the most part arise from the logic of the marketplace, rather than nefarious practices, but still do damage, and not only in terms of economics. Facebook and Google capture 70 percent of all digital advertising revenue, for example, crippling America’s independent media, which can’t compete for ad revenue. This in turn strengthens platforms that are increasingly controlling and limiting political speech.

-David P. Goldman, from this essay

intrusive everythings..............

 For most of human history, we lived in a world defined by scarcity: could we accumulate enough resources to survive the day?  But now? We are drowning in an abundance of everything. A tsunami of notifications and distractions and a million intrusive everythings vying for our attention.  When we have access to a near-infinite fountain of entertainment and distractions, the ability to focus and avoid distractions is one hell of a competitive advantage.

-Jack Raines, from here

Riding the tiger..................

 By the year 2020, every major institution of American culture had converted to the cult of identity.. . . As I have noted elsewhere, the motive force behind the mass conversion of the elites was a longing for control. Identity is a minority sect that imposes itself by shaming and silencing contrary opinions, even among those it purports to protect. Most Blacks don’t wish to defund the police. Most Hispanics don’t believe in open borders. Most Democrats don’t think government programs should discriminate based on race or sex. But old-fashioned liberalism is dying away with the boomer generation, and the elites, distrusted by the public, deprived of institutional authority, have gambled on riding the tiger of rule by internet mob.

-Martin Gurri, from this essay

All I know is what I read...........

........in the Intertunnel.  But, this one feels right:

more fun here

While wandering through the Intertunnel....

 ..............a few interesting things were found:

The rule, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” creates incentives to demonstrate minimum ability and maximum need. Poverty is the inevitable result.

-via Cafe Hayek

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Unprecedented actions on the scale that we experienced in 2020-2022 will bring unexpected results in 2023.  So, while we never want to ignore a number like the January jobs report, we have to question how much is signal and how much is noise.

The economy is still absorbing the money printed during the pandemic.  Inflation has not been eradicated, the Fed is highly unlikely to loosen policy anytime soon, and earnings are likely to fall as all the stimulus wears off.  That’s not a recipe for a simple forecast or a soft landing.  Like the Super Bowl, until the game is played no one knows exactly what will happen.  Count us less bullish than conventional wisdom.

-via Brian Wesbury

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You learn something new every day; as part of the settlement to the Spanish-American War - Spain agreed to sell the US the Philippines for $20 million. Andrew Carnegie, the richest man in the world at the time, offered to reimburse the government $20 million if they would give the Philippines their freedom instead of making it a US Protectorate. The government rejected his kind offer...

-via and via

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I don't care which party is in power, the State of the Union address has become an embarrassment.  It should be abandoned.

-via the Execupundit

algorithms......................

 

     My own squalid, but I suspect entirely typical, history as a Twitter junkie might serve as a case in point.  Even at the height of my dependency (I'm now in recovery), I rarely spent more that two hours a day glued to the screen.  Yet Twitter's dominion over my attention extended a great deal further than that.  Long after I'd closed the app, I'd be panting on the treadmill at the gym, or chopping carrots for dinner, only to find myself mentally prosecuting a devastating argument against some idiotic holder of Wrong Opinions I'd had the misfortune to encounter online earlier that day.  (It wasn't misfortune really, of course, the algorithm showed me those posts deliberately, having learned what would wind me up.)

-Oliver Burkeman,  Four Thousand Weeks:  Time Management for Mortals

Martin Gurri...............................

.......................................strikes again: 

Think of it this way: The structure of information sets the stage and arranges the props of the human drama. The digital medium, for example, looks like the studio of a Marx Brothers movie. Violent slapstick comes naturally there. Pomposity gets mocked without mercy. Of course, important people—our elites—hate this structure. Since pomposity is their reason for living . . .

Accelerated doesn't necessarily..................

 ..........................mean improved:

Adding more people to the internet has accelerated science, politics and every element of culture. The echos happen faster, the learning is exponential, and connected communities heat up and morph ever faster.

-Seth Godin, from here

If I could have after-dinner cigars and drinks........

 .................with ten people I only know from the Intertunnel, Martin Gurri would be on the list.

And, when you think about it, the news media itself is something like an anxiety dream being dreamed by the articulate classes. Nobody should confuse the news with reality. Attention is fixed steadily on the predatory violence of the human animal, the record of war, crime and exploitation: with journalism, we are always a moment away from snapping awake, screaming. Sometime during the Trump years, that mood swallowed the internet. Once the gathering place of a peasant revolt, the web took on the rage, pettiness and mendacity of elite media and has since degenerated into the dictatorship of the rant.

-Martin Gurri, as culled from here

Bezos..........................

      The initial start-up capital for Amazon.com came primarily from my parents, who invested a large fraction of their life savings in something they didn't understand.  They weren't making a bet on Amazon or the concept of a bookstore on the internet.  They were making a bet on their son.  I told them I thought there was a 70 percent chance they would lose their investment, and they did it anyway.  It took more than fifty meetings for me to raise $1 million from investors, and over the course of all those meetings, the most common question was, "What's the internet?"

      Unlike many other countries around the world, this great nation we live in supports and does not stigmatize entrepreneurial risk-taking.  I walked away from a steady job into a Seattle garage to found my startup, fully understanding it might not work.  It feels like just yesterday I was driving the packages to the post office myself, dreaming that one day we might be able to afford a forklift.

      Amazon's success was anything but preordained.  Investing in Amazon early on was a very risky proposition.  From our founding through the end of 2001, our business had accumulated losses of nearly $3 billion, and we did not have a profitable quarter until the fourth quarter of that year.  Smart analysts predicted Barnes & Noble would steamroll us, and branded us "Amazon.toast."  In 1999, after we'd been in business for nearly five years, Barron's headlined a story about our impending demise "Amazon.bomb."  My annual shareholder letter for 2000 started with a one-word sentence" "Ouch."

-Jeff Bezos, Invent & Wander:  The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

The Wonder that is the Intertunnel...........

 There is this guy I don't know, but whose style I admire.    He advises, via this medium, a friend I do know, and whose style I also admire, to read a certain book.  Sounded good to me, so I ordered it (not from Amazon - I am done with them for a while, but that is another story).  In no time the book arrives and, unsurprisingly, jumped to the top of the stack.   It is a collection of essays from Russell Lynes.  Here is the opening paragraph to the opening essay:

Some years ago a magazine no longer published but then widely read and respected asked me to write a piece about the "rat race."  I did and was paid for it, but it languished in the editor's "hold" file for a long time and then disappeared without a trace.  My thesis, evidently not agreeable to the editor, was that each of us makes his own rat race, that it is not an inevitability imposed by the nature of society, and that those who are caught in it are there essentially because they choose to be.

I'm going to enjoy this book.  Expect to see more.

Bernie and his mittens......................

..........................the non-meme:

..........................a new favorite:

............................some old favorites:

Opportunities arising................

     Every time a technology goes exponential, we find an internet-sized opportunity tucked inside.  Think about the internet itself.  While it seemingly decimated industries—music, media, retail, travel, and taxis—a study by McKinsey Global Research found that the net created 2.6 new jobs for each one it extinguished.
     Over the next decade, we'll see these kinds of opportunities arise in dozens of industries.  As a result, if the internet is our benchmark, more wealth could be created over the next ten years than was over the previous century.

-Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler,  The Future Is Faster Than You Think:  How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives

Whether I am on it, or not..........

“To ensure that there are as few interruptions as possible, immense quantities of electricity are deployed to keep everything running with precision and perfection and permanence.  2 percent of America’s electricity now goes to keeping the Internet cool, to keeping the link unbroken, for America and for the world.”


-Simon Winchester, The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible

Value...............................

The value people place on free things is zero, though they may riot if the giveaways stop. When they must actually pay, or make other sacrifices, they value what they have obtained. This is human nature. It does not change when technology changes; it cannot ever be suppressed for long. But it can be corrupted.

-David Warren, from this disquisition

Hmmmm..........................

via