Tuesday, September 27th, 2022
The American model appeared to demonstrate that capitalism plus democracyled to mass prosperity and deep social stability.
-Walter Russell Mead
ASK
Sunday, September 25th, 2022
If “the Jews” ran America, immigration would not have been restricted and Israel would likely not exist.
Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant (p. 251)
Saturday, September 24th, 2022
Thursday, September 22nd, 2022
A good ol’ rant by everyone against Microsoft in this Hacker News thread, this time about Teams. When o when will this monstrosity of a corporation die already. “Developer-friendly”; may the GitHub guys get what they deserve for selling out to the Borg.
Wednesday, September 21st, 2022
Very ambitious people probably need colleagues more than anyone else, because they’re so starved for them in everyday life.
Paul Graham, What I’ve Learned from Users
Tuesday, September 20th, 2022
Friday, September 16th, 2022
At Nat Con 3, Peter Thiel argues in a speech entitled “The Tech Curse” that while the Democrats have nothing to offer but the California model of gutting the middle classes except state employees, the Republicans nonetheless need something more than simply a negation of it.
One heuristic he offers in order to measure societal success in contrast to California is cheap real estate, but offers no path to get there.
My monomaniacal suggestion: flying cars/eVTOLs, which increase the human daily commute distance from about 50 to 250 miles, multiplying our practicable habitable area by likely an order of magnitude. As well as other unforeseeable boons, surely this would radically lower the cost of homes.
But it requires government support. “If the U.S. doesn’t take a leadership role, either someone else will do it or it won’t get done at all,” said Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-California), co-chair of the Congressional AAM Caucus, along with Rep. Jimmy Panetta (D-California), at Honeywell’s Air Mobility Summit. “We are really at an inflection point in the industry. It’s such a critical time for Congress to get involved.”
Thursday, September 15th, 2022
Wednesday, September 7th, 2022
In Mosaic, Philologos discusses the Biblical use of “and”. The crux of the matter is this:
One reason that the prefixed vav is so ubiquitous in the Bible is that, as everyone familiar with biblical Hebrew knows, it can have a second function that is not a conjunction’s. This is the marking of tense—or more precisely, the reversing of tense, since it is a peculiarity of biblical Hebrew that a prefixed vav, when attached to a verb, can change its tense from past or perfect to future or imperfect, and vice versa.
And:
Biblical Hebrew has no punctuation (the cantillations it is chanted to in the synagogue are a later development) and is a language poor in conjunctions. Although it has its own ways of expressing logical and temporal relationships between parts of sentences, something that is largely done in English by means of commas and periods, dependent clauses, and conjunctions like “when,” “while,” “as,” “though,” “despite,” and so forth, biblical Hebrew rarely puts together sentences by such means. It prefers coordinate clauses joined by a vav—or, in more technical language, paratactic rather than hypotactic constructions in which the vav can do the work of various English conjunctions and mean other things beside “and.”
Tuesday, September 6th, 2022
The Mufti, Qadaffi, King Hussein — I’m vastly enjoying season 2 of the Israeli TV documentary series Enemies (streaming requires an Israeli IP). One thing I can’t help but notice is the impressive living rooms in which the interviewees — mostly military intelligence vets — sit. None of them are in apartments, all have leafy window views, there’s a lot of wood, and most of them aren’t furnished like typical Israeli dwellings. I guess these aren’t military men, they’re men and women of the world.
I can’t tell if I enjoy Israeli docs because they’re so good, or merely because I’m the target audience. If it’s the former, and I think it is, they really should be selling them subtitled to wider audiences, say to Netflix and Amazon Prime.
It’s great, this pounding away at Israeli history, each episode a different prism.
Monday, September 5th, 2022
The reward is that if you give, even at the times when you think you have very little, you’ll teach your brain that there is more than enough.
Tony Robbins, Money: Master the Game
Wednesday, August 31st, 2022
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Neil Postman
♦♦♦♦
Entertainingly caustic albeit a tad ad nauseumly, Neil Postman’s famous book regales us with at least one important historical fact and one historical idea.
The fact: that before showbusiness, Americans were by far the world’s most literate, informed, engaged population, whereas today it must be said have a reputation abroad for ignorance.
The idea: that even while powerful technologies are mindless and agnostic, each nonetheless has its own nature that pushes society in particular directions. Postman argues mostly convincingly that print is healthy for society, television not.
Just like the self-help gurus pointing out that it’s better to totally goof off than do busywork because at least leisure doesn’t feel like work and thereby misguide the mind, so Postman prefers straight-up entertainment shows like Hart to Hart to those that pretend to inform like 60 Minutes.
Now, the book was written in 1985 and is about TV; the big question is what Postman would have thought of the Web and social media. He does write that the potential influence of computers is overrated, which reminds us that nobody’s infallible (which does undermine the book’s credibility, so kudos on the publishers of later editions in not cutting out these throwaway few words).
Tuesday, August 30th, 2022
For those not yet cognizant of the fact that eVTOLs are coming soon and coming fast, Jeff Scallop writes up the rationale at “Still No Flying Cars? eVTOLs Might be the Answer” in Market for Ideas.
The main attractiveness of eVTOLs is their ability to reduce transit times in metropolitan areas, especially those routes subject to heavy traffic jams. Given current battery autonomy, ideal distances for eVTOLs range from 15 to 150 miles.
eVTOLs also offer many advantages when compared to helicopters, such as a lower cost per seat per mile (currently at $3.00, which is comparable to ride-hailing apps even). They also have much lower noise levels, allowing them to fly at lower altitudes and significantly reducing the necessary infrastructure costs (vertiports vs helipads), which could help boost adoption.
Saturday, August 27th, 2022
Friday, August 26th, 2022
Great interview at Berkeley with alum and local Oakland boy Craig Federighi [Dec 2019].
Friday, August 12th, 2022
Tuesday, August 9th, 2022
Friday, August 5th, 2022
Yippee, Conrad Black is back, juicy and crunchy as ever. From “The Triumph of Davos Man”:
Our [hard Left] enemies leapt from the jaws of bitter and total defeat, hijacked the careening gadfly of esoteric conservationism, and transformed it surreptitiously into a well-camouflaged battering ram that has inflicted immense costs and opprobrium on the corporate world and great sadness and inconvenience on the laboring proletariat on whose behalf the Marxist Left has supposedly been crusading these past 150 years.
Thursday, August 4th, 2022
At last, a British publication (The New Statesman, with muchos kudos for the great rebranding) addresses the bonkers British practice of placing washing machines in kitchens and consequently lacking space for dishwashers (or vice versa, the causality is mysterious):
Non-Brits find having a washing machine in the kitchen hilarious (as well as unhygienic, which it is). But the idea of bringing smelly socks near food preparation surfaces apparently pales in comparison to the shady plastic tub in the sink, its fleet of mugs bobbing in the oily foam.
The article even addresses that other bugbear: “UK residents commonly have separate hot and cold taps, whereas single mixer taps have long been the norm in Europe.”
Wednesday, August 3rd, 2022
Tuesday, August 2nd, 2022
Telegraphy made relevance irrelevant.
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining.
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
The act of thinking … is as disconcerting and boring on television as it is on a Las Vegas stage.
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
Ventriloquism, dancing and mime do not play well on radio, just as sustained, complex talk does not play well on television.
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
Monday, August 1st, 2022
At Leeham News, Bjorn Fehrm critiques the efficacy of the Lilium eVTOL. His chief criticism:
The Lilium project is in its seventh year, yet it has not transitioned from hover to forward flight during this period. The widely proclaimed transition in early June was a main wing transition, not a transition for the vehicle (canard + main wing). Such a transition is yet to be made.
The fact that a VTOL developer makes such noise about a transition from hover to forward flight of a part of the vehicle tells you a lot. Other VTOL OEMs transition to forward flight within months of the first hover flight. Why is it such an issue for Lilium?
The use of jets voids Lilium of help from a rotor wash to attach the flow around wings and movables. The integration of jet thrust and movable also voids Lilium of a fast movable control surface to counter the pitch disturbances that are part of a transition. The canard design augments the pitch control problem by forcing a nose-heavy design.
Saturday, July 30th, 2022
Nice on Nietzsche. And nice that reviewer John Gray mentions La Gaya Scienza as one of his best books. Time for a reread.
Wednesday, July 27th, 2022
Really good interview with Seth Godin who had dropped off my radar because his posts felt too brief and too pat unto banality. I love his back-of-the-bottle trick for public speaking. Plus he closes with Eli Goldratt!
Brave of Tablet to publish this inflammatory Hunter Biden laptop story by Lee Smith:
There is so much data on Hunter Biden’s laptop that it’s hard to keep straight the sequence of images and information that have come from it since the New York Post started sourcing stories to the personal computer in October 2020. The most recent release includes 80,000 images that a Switzerland-based cyber expert recovered from deleted iPad and iPhone accounts backed up on the laptop.
There are more pictures, texts, and emails about the younger Biden’s business deals, drug use, sex life, and family relations. Hunter referred to his stepmother, first lady Jill Biden, as a “vindictive moron.” There’s a contact nicknamed “Pedo Peter,” which appears to refer to his father: Joe Biden often used the alias “Peter Henderson,” the name of a character in a Tom Clancy novel, when he traveled.
Thursday, July 21st, 2022
Wednesday, July 20th, 2022
Tuesday, July 19th, 2022
Haaretz travel writer Moshe Gilad writes of hiking Israel’s abandoned Jerusalem line and how it could be put to use but is being stymied by Israel Railways — a reminder of the typical national dysfunction.
Sunday, July 17th, 2022
Israel views Iran’s new suicide UAVs as a top-level, strategic threat, argues the JISS thinktank:
UAVs are precision weapons, hence it is not enough to kill some of them or even many of them: The operational requirement is to kill them all – in the language of missile defense, to achieve a zero or near zero leakage rate. Defending against swarms of UAVs arriving simultaneously from every direction at treetop levels is a formidable challenge to any air defense system, a challenge that may well require the development and fielding of new technologies and operational doctrines.
Saturday, July 16th, 2022
Friday, July 15th, 2022
The maker of Linen, a service to make Slack conversations accessible, talks about how this time he went about starting a startup properly and got income within a month. Impressive.
Tuesday, July 12th, 2022
Paula Wright has done us a service if we are willing to listen with her piece “We Need To Talk About Karen” on the danger of giving women a pass on malignant behavior. She uses some nice literary references as well, such as Les Miserables and Tess of the D’Urbervilles (though of course the feminist-inclined might point out that these are works penned by men).
It’s all fine and dandy lionising supposedly benign female traits, like “empathy” and “equality” but the evidence is right before our eyes that the female of the species can be just as deadly as the male, if by sleight of hand and not yet recorded in official statistics.
Why is this relevant?
As more women enter politics and managerial positions; as workplace policies become shaped by the invisible hand of female strategies of competition, whilst at the same time we remain both ignorant and in denial about them – this is why we must talk about Karen.
Saturday, July 9th, 2022
Walther Russell Mead illustrates his Jacksonian stream of American foreign policy thinking by showing how much affinity it has with Israel. I think for the most part WRM partakes of it himself.
Friday, July 8th, 2022
Melanie Philips soberly points out the parallels between Britain’s Johnson, America’s Trump, and Israel’s Netanyahu:
Despite the singular characteristics of this British implosion, there are striking similarities between Johnson and two other extraordinary world leaders—Israel’s former prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and America’s former president, Donald Trump. All three were brought to power by voters repudiating the defeatist and self-destructive story being told about their nation by a progressive elite that had lost touch with reality.
…
In these different contexts, Johnson, Netanyahu and Trump were all seen to deliver what the public had so desperately sought but been denied for so long. All three, however, are flawed characters.
Thursday, July 7th, 2022
