Several marble steps up to a bricked-up door

🔗 How startup culture runs on bullshit. — Joan Westenberg:

The enduring appeal speaks to deeper societal myths about individual exceptionalism and meritocracy. Stories of college dropouts turned billionaires reinforce notions that anyone can attain the American dream (or build the next Facebook) by working tirelessly with unwavering vision. But focusing on outliers obscures the limited accessible pathways and how systemic barriers block many with equal talents. Confirmation bias leads investors and journalists to seek individuals fitting the narrow archetypes of what they believe constitutes the ideal founder based more on shared collective delusions than evidence.  

And then these dynamics are multiplied throughout the economy as larger companies attempt to imitate “startup culture” and “lean thinking” as they chase the myths of innovation and growth.

The whole thing is rotten and busted.


Hear me out: a spin-off series in which Artie Bucco, Davey Scatino, and Sal Vitro move to LA, end up as roommates, and have adventures helping people who have gotten themselves into jams and bad situations.


More e-bikes!

I will admit that I have some misgivings and conflicted feelings about the increasing prevalence of e-bikes. I am not going to go into any of those misgivings or concerns here because I don’t think anyone really needs another complainer piece on the topic and I have no desire to join the contrarian pile-on. The only reason I mention the subject at all is to note that whenever I start thinking of any of my gripes about e-bikes, I remind myself that every e-bike I see most likely represents one less car on the road.

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Still parsing Dune: Part 2

A week having passed since I went to see Dune: Part 2, I am still trying to piece together my overall opinion of the movie. Mostly, I continue to feel like it was a lot and I wish that I could watch it on my own TV instead of in the theater. I saw it at the local(ish) Cinemark, in one of their XD theaters—not IMAX, but still quite a large screen and an impressive sound system.

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Handwritten index card

đź”— If You Build It, They Won’t Care - by Addison Del Mastro:

One takeaway from this—which is hardly a unique or even uncommon story—is that (some) people will resist almost any change in the built environment for almost any reason. It will be for poor people, it will be for rich people, it’s too expensive, it’s too cheap, it will bring too much traffic, it will crowd people too closely together, it will be ugly, it will block sunlight, etc. etc. etc. You get this liberal counterculture protest stuff going on to stop a low-slung box store and a parking lot with a lovely walkable mixed-use development which, in any case, is just a couple of city blocks anyway.

That takeaway is kind of grim: nothing is too small to be bargained down or railroaded by NIMBYs who often don’t even have a coherent argument for why the new development is bad or why what’s there already is worth preserving.

But there’s another takeaway: nobody really cares! People don’t really feel that strongly about these things at the end of the day. They think they do; in the moment they get worked up about change and uncertainty and nostalgia. But at the end of the day, very few people in a year, or two years, or five years, will think when they go past the site “I miss when that was a different store” or “I wish that were still a strip mall.”

We have a lot of this kind of stuff—including the hippie who sings at city council meetings—going on in my town, and a small but very active and noisy contingent of NIMBYs. I have harbored similar suspicions, i.e., that a lot of this stuff is a knee-jerk response.


Trying to make sense of Christopher Nolan’s popularity

The kids and I watched Batman Begins earlier this week. It was the first time watching it for them, maybe the third for me (and the first time in quite a number of years). They enjoyed it. I thought it was… fine? That kind of sums up my general feeling about basically all of Christopher Nolan’s movies. He seems like a competent and adequate filmmaker, and that is about as far as it goes for me.

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Not everyone shares your priorities.

There’s a nifty rhetorical jujutsu I have noticed among the set of tech-types who like to shout online about their pet causes. It goes something like this… Anyone who isn’t as outraged about their pet cause as they are is naïve and stupid. But if you suggest that maybe not everyone shares their priorities or that other people might have valid reasons for holding a different point of view, it’s you who is suggesting that people are too naïve or dumb to understand or care about the issue.

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I never really needed flying cars and tbh those ads for them in the back of Popular Mechanics always seemed pretty scammy, but I guess I had hoped that by this point we would have mastered the science of loading tissues into the box so a bunch don’t come out in a wad when you try to grab the first one.


omg.social greenfield.social another weblog yet another weblog