Elon Musk's Text Messages Explain Everything - The Atlantic - 0 views
-
I’ve begun to think of Exhibit H as a skeleton key for the final, halcyon days of the tech boom—unlocking an understanding of the cultural brain worms and low-interest-rate hubris that defined the industry in 2022. What we see in Exhibit H is only a tiny snapshot of a very important inbox, but it’s enough to make this one of the most revealing documents in a year that’s been absolutely overflowing with tech disclosures
-
the Musk texts demonstrate a decadence, an unearned confidence, and a boy’s-club mentality that coincide with the cultural disillusionment regarding the genius-innovator narrative.
-
I snarkily coined the Elon Musk School of Management to describe the petulant way that some tech founders, such as Musk and Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong, seemed to use confrontational, culture-warring, Twitter-addled thought leadership as a business tactic. The Musk School revolves around two principles: running a company in an authoritarian manner, and ensuring that every management decision is optimized to make news and hijack the attention of those following along on social media
- ...8 more annotations...
Most-read 2022: Is an unknown, extraordinarily ancient civilisation buried under easter... - 0 views
-
I am staring at about a dozen, stiff, eight-foot high, orange-red penises, carved from living bedrock, and semi-enclosed in an open chamber. A strange carved head (of a man, a demon, a priest, a God?), also hewn from the living rock, gazes at the phallic totems – like a primitivist gargoyle. The expression of the stone head is doleful, to the point of grimacing
-
Karahan Tepe (pronounced Kah-rah-hann Tepp-ay), which is now emerging from the dusty Plains of Harran, in eastern Turkey, is astoundingly ancient. Put it another way: it is estimated to be 11-13,000 years old.
-
over time archaeological experts began to accept the significance. Ian Hodden, of Stanford University, declared that: ‘Gobekli Tepe changes everything.’ David Lewis-Williams, the revered professor of archaeology at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, said, at the time: ‘Gobekli Tepe is the most important archaeological site in the world.’
- ...23 more annotations...
Opinion | America, China and a Crisis of Trust - The New York Times - 0 views
-
some eye-popping new realities about what’s really eating away at U.S.-China relations.
-
The new, new thing has a lot to do with the increasingly important role that trust, and its absence, plays in international relations, now that so many goods and services that the United States and China sell to one another are digital, and therefore dual use — meaning they can be both a weapon and a tool.
-
In the last 23 years America has built exactly one sort-of-high-speed rail line, the Acela, serving 15 stops between Washington, D.C., and Boston. Think about that: 900 to 15.
- ...53 more annotations...
Jeremy Grantham Warns of a Massive Stock Market Crash in 2023 Outlook - 0 views
(36) There Is a Reason the American Right Likes Russia - 0 views
-
back to the American right. Here is the logic chain:They hate the press and regard the media as “enemies of the state.”They admire Putin’s Russia.They watch Putin send a Russian journalist to jail for being an “enemy of the state.”Return to step 1.
-
It’s a flywheel. Putin is doing to the Russian press what many American conservatives wish they could do to the American press. They don’t admire Putin in spite of it. They admire him because of it.
Pause or panic: battle to tame the AI monster - 0 views
-
What exactly are they afraid of? How do you draw a line from a chatbot to global destruction
-
This tribe feels we have made three crucial errors: giving the AI the capability to write code, connecting it to the internet and teaching it about human psychology. In those steps we have created a self-improving, potentially manipulative entity that can use the network to achieve its ends — which may not align with ours
-
This is a technology that learns from our every interaction with it. In an eerie glimpse of AI’s single-mindedness, OpenAI revealed in a paper that GPT-4 was willing to lie, telling a human online it was a blind person, to get a task done.
- ...16 more annotations...
Knocking on the Wrong House or Door Can Be Deadly In a Nation Armed With Guns - The New... - 0 views
-
Each of them accidentally went to the wrong address or opened the wrong door — and each was shot. They had made innocent mistakes that became examples of the kind of deadly errors that can occur in a country bristling with guns, anger and paranoia, and where most states have empowered gun owners with new self-defense laws.
-
The maintenance man in North Carolina had just arrived to fix damage from a leak. The teenager in Georgia was only looking for his girlfriend’s apartment. The cheerleader in Texas simply wanted to find her car in a dark parking lot after practice.
-
many other cases have attracted far less attention. In July 2021, a Tennessee man was charged with brandishing a handgun and firing it after two cable-company workers mistakenly crossed onto his land. Last June, a Virginia man was arrested after the authorities say he shot at three lost teenage siblings who had accidentally pulled onto his property.
- ...14 more annotations...
Carole Hooven On Harvard's Existential Crisis - 0 views
-
The most salutary aspect of this whole affair is that it has really helped expose the core disagreement in our current culture war. One side believes, as I do, that individual merit exists, and should be the core criterion for admission to a great university, regardless of an individual’s racial or sexual identity, and so on. The other side believes that merit doesn’t exist at all outside the oppressive paradigm of racial and sexual identity, and that membership in a designated “marginalized” group should therefore be the core criterion for advancement in academia.
-
so they discriminate against individuals on the grounds of their race before they consider merit.
-
For example: If you are black and in the fourth lowest decile of SATs and GPAs among Harvard applicants, you have a higher chance of getting into Harvard (12.8 percent admitted) than an Asian-American in the very top decile (12.7 admitted). It’s rigged, which is why it was shut down by SCOTUS.
- ...11 more annotations...
Who's Holding Up the Ivory Tower? - WSJ - 0 views
Working from home and the US-Europe divide - 0 views
-
there is one explanation that seems almost too simplistic: that “Americans just work harder”,
-
The numbers do in fact bear out this assertion—a rare case of national stereotypes being empirically provable
-
On average Americans work 1,811 hours per year, according to data from the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries. That is 15% more than in the EU, where the average is 1,571 hours
- ...26 more annotations...
How Bad Are Ultraprocessed Foods, Really? - The New York Times - 0 views
-
scientists have found associations between UPFs and a range of health conditions, including heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, obesity, gastrointestinal diseases and depression, as well as earlier death.
-
That’s concerning, experts say, since ultraprocessed foods have become a major part of people’s diets worldwide. They account for 67 percent of the calories consumed by children and teenagers in the United States
-
What are ultraprocessed foods, exactly? And how strong is the evidence that they’re harmful? We asked experts to answer these
- ...42 more annotations...
Biden Needs to Learn From the Democrats' Disaster in '68 - WSJ - 0 views
-
The conventional wisdom of 1968 was that Humphrey lost to Nixon because he couldn’t find the courage to break with Johnson on a war that a majority of Americans had come to oppose.
-
That’s almost certainly wrong: Disaffected liberals ultimately came back, but disaffected blue-collar voters, who largely supported the war and abhorred the chaos in the streets, defected to Nixon or to George Wallace. (A Harris Poll found that two-thirds of respondents supported the Chicago cops’ tactics.)
-
The shrunken Democratic base that emerged from the election is very much the one the party relies on today: Blacks and well-educated white liberals.
To Live Past 100, Mangia a Lot Less: Italian Expert's Ideas on Aging - The New York Times - 0 views
-
Valter Longo, a nutrition-obsessed Italian Ph.D. student, wrestled with a lifelong addiction to longevity.
-
“For studying aging, Italy is just incredible,
-
Italy has one of the world’s oldest populations, including multiple pockets of centenarians who tantalize researchers searching for the fountain of youth. “It’s nirvana.”
- ...24 more annotations...
Opinion | The Deification of Donald Trump Poses Some Interesting Questions - The New Yo... - 0 views
-
The video, along with Eric Trump’s claim that his father “literally saved Christianity” and the image Donald Trump reposted on Truth Social of Jesus sitting next to him in court, raises a question:
-
Does Trump believe that he is God’s messenger, or are his direct and indirect claims to have a special relationship with God a cynical ploy to win evangelical votes?
-
“Over the years since, there has been a growing chorus of voices saying Trump is the defender of Christians and Christianity. Trump says this himself all the time, ‘When they come after me, they’re really coming after you.’”
- ...25 more annotations...
Opinion | A Strongman President? These Voters Crave It. - The New York Times - 0 views
-
. I have studied and written about authoritarianism for years, and I think it’s important to pay attention to the views and motivations of voters who support authoritarian politicians, even when these politicians are seen by many as threats to the democratic order.
-
My curiosity isn’t merely intellectual. Around the world, these politicians are not just getting elected democratically; they are often retaining enough popular support after a term — or two or three — to get re-elected. Polls strongly suggest that Trump has a reasonable chance of winning another term in November.
-
Why Trump? Even if these voters were unhappy with President Biden, why not a less polarizing Republican, one without indictments and all that dictator talk? Why does Trump have so much enduring appeal?
- ...23 more annotations...
Best of 2023: The Decadent Opulence of Modern Capitalism - 0 views
-
while we tend to focus on stories about everything that has gone wrong, in the long run, the bigger news always ends up being the impact of growth and innovation. But because we’re so pre-occupied with everything else, it tends to sneak up on us.
-
In the left’s view, market crashes and recessions reveal the real essence of the capitalist system. In reality, they are just temporary glitches and setbacks in a larger story of persistent innovation and growth.
-
new figures showing the widening gap in wealth between the US and Europe. Jim Pethokoukis describes it as a Doom Loop of Decline and attributes it partly to the impact of heavy European regulation.
- ...18 more annotations...
Can things get any worse for Olaf Scholz? | The Spectator - 0 views
-
A survey earlier this month suggested that only a fifth of voters are currently satisfied with the chancellor’s work – the worst result recorded since this type of polling began a quarter of a century ago
-
If they could pick a chancellor from any political party, only 5 per cent said they would choose Scholz.
-
This year has also been a difficult one for Germans.
- ...11 more annotations...
In Silicon Valley, You Can Be Worth Billions and It's Not Enough - The New York Times - 0 views
-
He got a phone call about the imminent sale of a tech company and allegedly traded on the confidential information, according to charges filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The profit for a few minutes of work: $415,726.
-
rarely has anyone traded his reputation for seemingly so little reward. For Mr. Bechtolsheim, $415,726 was equivalent to a quarter rolling behind the couch. He was ranked No. 124 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index last week, with an estimated fortune of $16 billion.
-
Last month, Mr. Bechtolsheim, 68, settled the insider trading charges without admitting wrongdoing. He agreed to pay a fine of more than $900,000 and will not serve as an officer or director of a public company for five years.
- ...16 more annotations...
« First
‹ Previous
3261 - 3280 of 3297
Next ›
Showing 20▼ items per page