Matt Hickey
“I’m sorry, but I think it’s fucking incredible that a Korean language song is the most popular thing on the planet. That’s so good for humanity. PSY wrote and produced “Gangnam Style” himself and directed the video HIMSELF. No one made PSY. PSY is a genius and I dont think it’s so terrible that he’s been recognized for this. It also doesn’t make him evil. His art is creating a generation of kids that will grow up seeing Asian culture as being as valid as Western culture which they currently don’t.”
—Grimes, on her recently deleted Tumblr
February 2013
2 posts
“
Two days before the election many of the country’s most admired analysts had no idea what was about to happen. Yet within a matter of weeks these same people, unfazed, would be writing articles and giving speeches and being quoted about who was “ahead” and “behind” in the emerging race for the White House in 1996.
…Competing predictions add almost nothing to our ability to solve public problems or to make sensible choices among complex alternatives. Yet such useless distractions have become a specialty of the political press. They are easy to produce, they allow reporters to act as if they possessed special inside knowledge, and there are no consequences for being wrong.
” —James Fallows, ‘Why Americans Hate the Media,’ in The AtlanticJanuary 2013
2 posts
Felix: Kids are overexposed to teachers →
felixsalmon.tumblr.com
There is a very narrow type of personality that would choose to be in a classroom with children all day long. Most elementary school teachers are ESFJs. This type of personality has a lot of overlap with the type of people who choose to take care of kids after school. Which…
“Once you raise money at a certain valuation, there’s no turning back. Either you become a big company, or your write-off value becomes greater than the sum of your parts. You can’t click your heels and go back to playing tight and making a good living.”
—
Beware angel investors, and all VCs. They won’t let you build a solidly profitable company.
Playing for the Royal Flush | LinkedIn
(via felixsalmon)
October 2012
4 posts
“We go through tons of stories on our way to the few that end up on the air. It’s like harnessing luck as an industrial product. You want to get hit by lightning, so you have to wander around for a long time in the rain.”
—Ira Glass on Reddit
“But although the cliche says that power always corrupts, what is seldom said, but what is equally true, is that power always reveals. When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, concealment is necessary: to hide traits that might make others reluctant to give him power, to hide also what he wants to do with that power; if men recognized the traits or realized the aims, they might refuse to give him what he wants. But as a man obtains more power, camouflage is less necessary. The curtain begins to rise. The revealing begins.”
— Robert A. Caro, The Years Of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage Of Power. (via riveroforchids)
“Stock quotes are always to the penny, but real prices can go to six decimal places. No sane person would haggle over a ten-thousandth of a cent. But computers don’t get bored.”
—Raging Bulls: How Wall Street Got Addicted to Light-Speed Trading | Wired Business | Wired.com
“Audience needs + originality: to survive, an artist needs 20 followers; a writer, 20,000; a newspaper, 300,000; a TV station; 1m.”
—Alain de Botton
September 2012
2 posts
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It’s easy to make a simple system complex; it’s pretty much impossible to make a complex system simple. All of us live in a world of contracts and lawyers — and the financial system much more than most. Financial regulation will become simpler the day that contracts become shorter and easier to understand, which is to say, never.
How has the financial-services sector managed to make an ever-greater proportion of total profits over time? By extracting rents from complexity… So while banks opposed Basel III, at least they got increased complexity out of it, which means that the barriers to entry in the industry were raised.
” —Felix Salmon, Why we can’t simplify bank regulation
“Every gram of illicit marijuana currently on the street silently screams the lamentations of innocent blood; its smoke currently rises as unintended incense to the god of Chaos. I take back my earlier assertion about marijuana not destroying lives, but only because the supply chain is scuttled underground, and all means of regulation tend to have either blades or triggers.”
—A former police officer gets poetic in his argument for legalising marijuana. Via Quora.
August 2012
6 posts
“It’s rare for me to read any fiction. I almost only read nonfiction. I don’t believe in guilty pleasures, I only believe in pleasures. People who call reading detective fiction or eating dessert a guilty pleasure make me want to puke. Pedophilia is a pleasure a person should have guilt about. Not chocolate.”
—By the Book with Ira Glass
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The announcement yesterday by Chief Minister Katy Gallagher to establish a needle exchange in the ACT’s Alexander Maconochie Prison is historic. Politicians need votes like the rest of us need oxygen. And they know that there are no votes in prisons. But prisoners are a major concern for public health and human rights.
Despite prison authorities all over the world doing everything in their power to stop drugs entering prisons, they still get in. And they always will. Charles Manson, the most closely-guarded prisoner in the Western world, was still able to obtain illicit drugs behind bars.
” —The opening to this great piece on The Conversation.
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The right to have a view is indeed equally shared, but this is does not imply the same for the idea itself. If all ideas are equal, then all ideas are worthless…
[Ideas] should be subject to critical scrutiny and survive only though articulation and argumentation. The point is, ideas are not people. And people are not just their ideas…
To assume that an idea may not be questioned because it is a part of your identity, and that an attack on it is an attack on you, equivalent to a denial of human respect, is a fallacy, and I name it here the “Fallacy of Deepest Offence” (a variety of the strawman fallacy).
It is a blurring of the line between people and ideas. It is a device by which ideas are rendered immune to critical inquiry.
If you want to believe that the world is made of snow, that women are inferior to men or that homosexuality is morally wrong then go ahead. But the instant you take that belief into the public arena, your ideas will be rightfully tested.
The minute you suggest others should believe it too, you will be challenged. When you ask that the taxes of your fellow citizens support your beliefs, you will be resisted. This is exactly how an open society operates and should operate. You are not immune because you are sincere.
” —Great piece over here on The Conversation.
Great work Visa, now I HATE you (via Felix Salmon) →
felixsalmon.tumblr.com
Those folks up there at Visa sponsored the Olympics under the limitation that no other credit card could be used to purchase stuff in the Olympics, from a cup of coffee to an official hoodie… Which practically means that once you’re inside, you can either use Visa or cash,…
Was it unfair to punish the badminton players so severely in the 2012 Olympics? →
quora.com
Why I love Quora so much.
“It’s been suggested that, given the seriousness of climate change, we ought to adopt something like China’s one child policy. There was a group of doctors in Britain who recently advocated a two-child maximum. But at the end of the day those are crude prescriptions—-what we really care about is some kind of fixed allocation of greenhouse gas emissions per family. If that’s the case, given certain fixed allocations of greenhouse gas emissions, human engineering could give families the choice between two medium sized children, or three small sized children. From our perspective that would be more liberty enhancing than a policy that says “you can only have one or two children.” A family might want a really good basketball player, and so they could use human engineering to have one really large child.”
—
How Engineering the Human Body Could Combat Climate Change - Ross Andersen - The Atlantic
Looking forward to seeing this guy at Sydney’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas.
July 2012
3 posts
“The best way to help Gotham is to have a popular movement that is supported by a broad coalition and not just a narrow elite. This movement should focus not only on replacing the current leaders of Gotham, but should also work to alter the underlying extractive political and economic institutions of Gotham City. Neither Bruce Wayne nor Batman do anything of this sort. At best Batman is doing absolutely nothing to save Gotham, and at worst, he’s contributing to the city’s demise.”
—Is Batman Keeping Gotham City Poor?
“When companies go public, people stop thinking about them as companies, and start thinking about them as stocks: it’s the equivalent of judging people only by looking at their reflection in one specific mirror, while at the same time having no idea how distorting that mirror actually is. Many traders, especially in the high-frequency and algorithmic spaces, don’t even stop to think about what the company might actually do: they just buy and sell ticker symbols, and help to drive correlations up to unhelpful levels. As a result, CEOs get judged in large part by what the stock market in general is doing, rather than what they are doing.”
—Felix Salmon
“One of the most common complaints about a [story] is that it “doesn’t have a second act.” When people are disappointed, it’s usually not because the first act wasn’t good because the first act is the build-up… Nothing gets people to lean forward in their seats as much as, “let me tell you a story.” That’s the promise of something in front of you. “Come with me” is much more exciting as “here it is.”
—Todd Bucholz on our reactions to stories (which he links to the fact that as conscience beings with the gift of foresight, we have evolved to get pleasure or rewards just from planning and thinking ahead).
June 2012
5 posts
“Viewed from the perspective of an ex ante commitment to meritocracy, these all look like giant bugs in the system. But I think they’re actually features of a healthy ecosystem. Ability and hard work and good judgment are more-or-less rewarded in an all-things-equal sense such that it makes sense for people to try to do a good job, but it’s just obvious that a hazy veil of contingency hands over the whole thing. Wall Street, by contrast, has done the best job of any American sector at ensuring that meritocratic values are upheld. By definition, the people who are “the best” at financial manipulation are the people who make the most money. It’s a total disaster, but it’s very much a meritocratic one.”
—Matthew Yglesias shows his cynical side in Silicon Valley Is Not A Meritocracy (And It’s A Good Thing Too)
