Yep, We Need More Blame | Talking Points Memo:

As I’ve been saying for some time, the problem with our policy is that we are not doing enough to place the burden of non-vaccination squarely on the voluntarily unvaccinated. That is both the most equitable and the most effective approach. Here though we can see that public authorities’ effort to work around the problem of the irresponsibility of the unvaccinated actually manages to bring them into a sort of public contempt. The science clearly has changed with the Delta variant. It’s much more transmissible. But the problem remains that Delta is spreading like wildfire among the unvaccinated and it’s lapping up onto the shores on vaccinated America.

So just as we’ve gotten the balance off by having the vaccinated shoulder the burden created by the unvaccinated, we now have public health authorities bringing their own authority into contempt because of too aggressive coddling of the unvaccinated. So now they’re picking up the burden for the unvaccinated too – not at the cost of daily inconveniences but at the cost of their public authority. We all suffer for that.

We need to be placing the burdens on non-vaccination on the unvaccinated. And we need to be clear with the public that the problem is the non-vaccinated. They’re at fault. They’re to blame. And even more, the public influencers, celebrities and political actors who’ve driven resistance to vaccination are to blame.

Listening to this episode of You Are Good really makes me want to watch Dazed & Confused again. I watched it a billion times in the early and mid-90s, but not a single time since then.

We Are Not Ready – by Charlie Warzel – Galaxy Brain:

Climate change is a perfect example of a hyperobject. The change in degrees of warming feels so small and yet the scale of the destruction is so massive that it’s difficult to comprehend in full. Cause and effect is simple and clear at the macro level: the planet is warming, and weather gets more unpredictable. But on the micro level of weather patterns and events and social/political upheaval, individual cause and effect can feel a bit slippery. If you are a news reporter (as opposed to a meteorologist or scientist) the peer reviewed climate science might feel impenetrable. It’s easiest to adopt a cover-your-ass position of: It’s probably climate change but I don’t know if this particular weather event is climate change.

Hyperobjects scramble all our brains, especially journalists. Journalists don’t want to be wrong. They want to react proportionally to current events and to realistically frame future ones. Too often, these desires mean that they do not explicitly say what their reporting suggest. They just insinuate it. But insinuation is not always legible.

LinkedIn is, in general, a pretty terrible place, but the “inspirational” posts really are just the worst—even more awful than the “Look at how awesome my company is!” posts.

Amazon is terrible and you should try to reduce your dependence on it.

What We Learned About Amazon’s Warehouse Workers – The New York Times:

But even before the pandemic, previously unreported data shows, Amazon was losing about 3 percent of its hourly associates each week — meaning its turnover was roughly 150 percent a year. At that rate, Amazon had to replace the equivalent of its entire work force roughly every eight months.

I knew Amazon is a terrible place to work, but this number is staggeringly awful. Just unbelievable and crazy.

Yes, their prices tend to be good and it is super-convenient to click the order button and have stuff show up on your doorstep tomorrow. But you should know that every time you click that button, you are grinding the life out of real human beings.

I am listening to the audiobook of Louis Menand’s The Free World. It is an excellent book and I recommend it.

HOWEVER, in the chapter on John Cage, the reader keeps referring to Cage’s signature composition 4′ 33″ as “Four Feet, Thirty-Three Inches,” and it is driving me crazy. How does an error like that get through the editorial process?

When I rule the universe, the Jeff Buckley version of Hallelujah will be banned. And all other Jeff Buckley songs. Probably the original Leonard Cohen version, too.

A feature that I wish any music player app had is “Stop playing when this song is done.”

When I went to read the New York Times this morning, I got a 503 error instead of the homepage. Turns out Fastly, a major content delivery network service, was having major issues today, and took down a bunch of sites and services that rely upon it.

A little while later, when the Times site was loading again, I came across this article by Kevin Roose:

A few years ago, while on a work trip in Los Angeles, I hailed an Uber for a crosstown ride during rush hour. I knew it would be a long trip, and I steeled myself to fork over $60 or $70.

Instead, the app spit out a price that made my jaw drop: $16.

Experiences like these were common during the golden era of the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy, which is what I like to call the period from roughly 2012 through early 2020, when many of the daily activities of big-city 20- and 30-somethings were being quietly underwritten by Silicon Valley venture capitalists.

It all puts me in mind of the fact that technology often does not solve a problem, but rather shifts it somewhere else.

So with Tomoe River paper apparently no longer in production, what is going to happen to Hobonichi planners?