|||
Usually every fortnight, but this one’s a week late because, yes, new job but also my mum came to visit and, hey, priorities people.
Rege’s style is a bit of an acquired taste (I vividly remember suddenly “getting” him on an overnight train through Wales circa 1999 after years of being bemused) but this is one of his more accessible pieces, where Peter Parker is a furious and bitter 90’s high school nerd. It still stands up.
If, like me, you’ve noticed that despite your computers and phones getting more and more powerful they seem to be running at the same speed, or slower, you’re not alone. The programming industry has some serious bloat issues and is totally doing nothing about them, really. This evisceration from a programmer is like the kid pointing out the emperor has no clothes.
The title says it all and it’s an amusing read, but for once the real interest in the comments. For this is on Medium, home of the Silicon Valley thinkpiece, not known for attracting the Marxist audience, and to question one of the great myths of modern America is just not on.
Apparently most people don’t understand how money actually works, which sounds reasonable because I barely have a grasp on it beyond my personal accounts, which bear no relation to how national banks manage a country’s currency. Basically, they make it up and it becomes borrowing, then they tax the profits made by the people who borrow it to pay for making it up in the first place. Or something. Christ, I dunno. But the main message from this explainer is taxes do not fund government expenditure. Which doesn’t make sense. But there you go. Money is weird.
The story of Dark Matter, the stuff that makes up most of the universe that we can’t see but we know must be there, is fascinating. This is a fun explainer (punctuated with graphs I can’t begin to understand, but that’s cool, the writing makes sense).
There’s a lot going on here, but my hot take would be that abstractions lend themselves to being filled with easy answers, which is what a lot of populist stuff purports to offer, so we shouldn’t be surprised when methods of strengthening ideas through simplification get co-opted by ideologies that attract lazy thinkers. Or something.
The Nemi ships were absurdly large pleasure-boats built by mad emperor Caligula on a tiny land-locked lake, because he was mad. In 1929 the fascist dictator Mussolini insisted the lake be drained and boats raised to restore the glory of ancient Rome. It didn’t end well. A fascinating bit of lost history.
“A beach is a text written by wind, wave, current, and creature. To read it we need to learn its hybrid language.” This breakdown of how shapes in the sand are formed is amazing and needs to be a proper article, or even a book. But we’ll have to make do with this Twitter thread for now.
