> What’s the point in generating writing … if it gives next to zero feelings of accomplishment?
Getting promoted, getting a better job, generating sales leads, things of that nature. A depressing number of blogs or LinkedIn posts exist only because the author is under some vague belief that it’s part of what they’re supposed to be doing to get ahead in their career.
I think it’s perfectly germane. When a medium is both a means for making a good living _and_ a form of artistic expression, there’s a natural tension that emerges from people who pursue both those paths at once, in addition to the people who eschew either path entirely. Obviously many people avoid cynical reasons for doing the things they do - I’m among them - but you can’t fail to recognize that there’s always a demographic that doesn’t care about the art.
I think somewhere along the way something has gone terribly wrong in the way we allocate capital to incentivize behavior. Somehow as a society we incentivize (aka distribute capital to) the people who educate our next generation and the people who care for our elders less than the people who smoke weed on podcasts and talk for hours into a camera or a microphone…
On average and in total, we pay more to teach children than we do on podcasts.
US podcasts have a total valuation of $8-9B with a revenue of $1.9B; total K-12 spending is $950B a year (about 500x higher). Education receives nearly three orders of magnitude more money per year.
Most people sitting on a couch smoking weed on camera make little to nothing, while 3.8M teachers are paid an average of $65,000 per year.
You’re comparing one-in-a-million outlier podcasts to the average case teacher in order to reverse the overwhelming amount more we put into education, both in total and on average.
Someone said "attention", and that is right. We are in the attention/extraction economy now. You are no longer a citizen - you are a walking number with a wallet.
Did you see the NYC ball drop by any chance? It was plastered with ads. Ads on screen, ads on people, giant KIA ad below the ball that ruined the shot on purpose. Everything is a money grab now, because we are just eyeballs that see shit and buy it.
Attention is where capital is applied because the demand is so high for it. Society can control supply and demand about as well as it can control the weather.
The language pattern the author refers to is called litotes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litotes), but to say that English doesn’t use them is… not quite right.
Not quite right, but not quite wrong, no? The pattern seems similar, but I think of litotes (as the Wikipedia article suggests) as a rhetorical device: the assertion-by-negation carries an ironic charge, and strikes the (Western) ear by standing out from the ordinary affirmative register.
If I'm understanding the author's account of Chinese assertion-by-negation correctly, doesn't it sound like assertion-by-negation is the ordinary case in that linguistic tradition, and it's the assertive case that jars the ear? Same pattern, different effect?
This is all very familiar with this North Eastern American English speaker except the "quite good" one. The rest seem normal to me in my American English. Perhaps it's too many Dr Who and or Monty python as a youth. Though in New England the language can be very sarcastic and indirect.
Really? I read the same sentence (as an American) and immediately thought that they must be referring to British English. Certainly nobody says brilliant as an affirmation here.
And "no problem" and "not bad" are both common colloquial statements in American English.
> If I'm understanding the author's account of Chinese assertion-by-negation correctly, doesn't it sound like assertion-by-negation is the ordinary case in that linguistic tradition, and it's the assertive case that jars the ear?
No? Assertion by assertion is the ordinary case, just like you'd expect for everything.
But it's easy to say 他没猜错, because it takes advantage of a common element of Chinese grammar that doesn't match well to English.
Think of 猜错 as a verb with an inherently negative polarity, like "fail" or "miss". There is no difficulty in saying "he didn't miss", even though there is difficulty in saying "he didn't not hit" and missing is always the same thing as not hitting. 猜错 is similarly easy to use. (Though it's less opaque; it is composed of the verb 猜 "guess" and the verbal result complement 错 "wrong".)
The opposite of 猜错 is 猜对 ("guess right"), and it's very common.
I (American) regularly use litotes both for ironic emphasis (like saying "not bad" at an amazing restaurant) and when I genuinely mean "it's not great but it's not terrible". Honestly not sure which is more common. It all depends on context and tone.
American english doesn't use them as much. But british english uses them more. English spoken by someone from finland, sweden or norway would use them even more
I don’t think BART employees really have any say in where BART stations do and don’t go, or how many trains they get. Try city councils instead, although none of them take BART anyways so they won’t know the difference.
I generally find that Waymos are cheaper than Uber/Lyft including tip.
I’ve also seen that, although Uber and Lyft peak times seem correlated to each other, they seem uncorrelated to Waymo peak activity. But this might be stabilizing as Waymo ridership increases.
The real question is why tip on either of those? You pay through the app, the driver is compensated for their time, why tip extra? If you feel that Uber/Lyft are mistreating their drivers, stop using their service, not pay them on the side?
Note that, at least in Thomas Malory’s telling, the arm holding Excalibur out of the lake is not the Lady Of The Lake, who is nearby on the lake. The arm holding Excalibur is neither named nor explained.
San Francisco’s “Main Street” is in no way a major artery, however. Market Street served that function.
Here’s an 1853 map https://rumsey.geogarage.com/maps/g3463000.html in which today’s Main Street is only a block long. The map calls it Front St, although there’s another Front St nearby which kept the name – perhaps it was renamed Main to disambiguate once the streets connected?
That map also showcases another example of this - Townsend Street is named after one James Townsend, who was the alcalde [1] in 1848, not for its location at the end of town. (Geary, Leavenworth, and Bryant are also named for pre-statehood alcaldes, but their names are less amusingly coincidental.)
I worked on Main for years and nobody mentioned this urban legend. while the street is not long, I would not put it past bureaucrats to name a random street Main
Clement Greenberg wrote that "Hopper simply happens to be a bad painter. But if he were a better painter, he would, most likely, not be so superior an artist".
As a careerlong DevOps guy, I’ve heard many times that “if your job title has DevOps in it, your company is doing DevOps wrong” – overwhelmingly from people with “DevOps” in their job title, delivered with a mordant laugh.
People are also not really expected to be individually responsible for mitigating flood or fire risk; they buy insurance. People can’t buy insurance for getting locked out of their Google account. We’re currently in a “well it’s your own fault for not owning and furnishing a second house in case the first one burns down” situation for digital property.
That might actually be interesting, because then there'd be actors who could give Google and the other BigTechs a lot more heat than any individual user can over unjustified account deletions (to avoid having to pay out the insurance premium).
Getting promoted, getting a better job, generating sales leads, things of that nature. A depressing number of blogs or LinkedIn posts exist only because the author is under some vague belief that it’s part of what they’re supposed to be doing to get ahead in their career.