Ben Landau-Taylor
@benlandautaylor
Investigating power, society, and industry. Please don't get your ought all over my is.
This has now become my most popular tweet so far. One thing it drove home is that there's a small, loud, and *extremely* confident minority that has a much, much lower bar for what it means to "explain" something than I do.
Wait, what? How is it possible to spend a hundred million dollars a year to make videos of a man at a desk? Is this even true? What do you spend the money on?
One thing I've realized as I’ve grown older is that, above a low threshold of basic functionality, trying to shore up personal weaknesses is mostly a waste of time, and effort is better spent doubling down on strengths.
I'm not surprised that so many people sell out, but I remain very surprised by how absurdly low most sellouts will set their price.
56 years ago today: "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind"
It’s perfectly legitimate to say "I can’t refute your argument, but your conclusion still seems wrong and I don’t buy it". But it's critical to *notice* the "I can’t refute your argument" part, ideally out loud, and to remember it going forward.
If you think the Democratic Party and NGO apparatus is inept now, wait until their pipeline of very liberal Jews willing to work for poor wages dries up.
These political shifts among Ivy League Jewish students are remarkable:
One absolutely required major reform that would improve lives greatly is transparent medical pricing There is absolutely no honest reason why people can never get a straight answer for "how much will this cost?" when dealing with this industry
Yes, to inspire, culture needs to unite people to pursue high aspirations, and more wealth just doesn't suffice.
I dunno that you can actually get massive industrial wealth by aiming at it directly. When it’s created, it seems to be a byproduct of competently-run ideological goals, like Faustian mastery over Nature, or utopian communist fever dreams, or undoing the Century of Humiliation.
I’m having trouble distinguishing patronage from bloat. Yes, there are some ways in which these categories overlap, & some circumstances in which they’re almost identical… but in general there are differences. Like EBT obesity vs EBT fraud. Is the dogmatic waste symptom or goal?
Wait, what? How is it possible to spend a hundred million dollars a year to make videos of a man at a desk? Is this even true? What do you spend the money on?
I dunno that you can actually get massive industrial wealth by aiming at it directly. When it’s created, it seems to be a byproduct of competently-run ideological goals, like Faustian mastery over Nature, or utopian communist fever dreams, or undoing the Century of Humiliation.
Is the specific lifespan of ~1870–1960 the most extreme length of history for someone to see? Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957), Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965), Picasso (1881–1973) Ideally live into your 90s and barely catch Gagarin or Apollo 11
Bertrand Russell's parents died by the time he was 4 and in 1876 he went to live with his grandfather, the last Whig prime minister, who as a young man had met Napoleon at Elba In 1966 at the age of 94 he met Paul McCartney and converted him to his anti-war stance on Vietnam
Apparently the first of the 1848 revolutions was sparked by one guy with no organization putting up posters that basically said "Revolution on the king's birthday, bring your friends."
I’ve often heard that when a dynasty loses the Mandate of Heaven, it's revealed by natural disasters like floods. It’s because the Chinese state was responsible for the canals and levees. If you fuck up the maintenance, you get *huge* megafloods. There's a direct connection.
Check out my new article in Palladium: Archaeology seems to be a very unusual practice, and won't outlast our civilization. Every civilization studies the ancient texts, but there are only three known cases of a civilization studying the ancient artifacts.
Archaeology is almost unique to our contemporary civilization, rather than universal. It is unlikely to be continued by future civilizations. We might know more about our ancestors than anyone will for a long, long time. Read the new article by @benlandautaylor (link below):
As of right now the main purpose of AI is to make information searchable again in spite of the fall of google search.