Despite these shows’ very different premises — one about the mafia, one about the drug trade in Baltimore, one about advertising on Madison Avenue in the 1960s and one about a chemistry teacher turned meth kingpin in New Mexico — all four contained clear warnings about where the country was headed, and their warnings have come true. Critics, at the time of their release, saw them, collectively, as prestige antihero television. We can now see they all had the same antihero at their core: America itself.
*No pasarán*! From his fetters in the meantime, Zuckerberg only achieved his species-warping goal of networking billions of human beings in real time through social media by age 30. By 32, he built the most unstoppable entertainment and advertising business in history. By 42, his products are used by one out of every 2.3 people currently breathing, more than the total number of humans that existed in 1965. Annual revenue runs well above $200 billion, and Meta’s capital expenditure this year will exceed the military budget of every country on Earth, save the U.S., China, and Russia. Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp *each* have more monthly active users than the number of living adherents to Christianity. Pity the empire held from a prison, the largest ever assembled by a man bound.
Engineers are hired to create business value, not to program things: Businesses do things for irrational and political reasons all the time (see below), but in the main they converge on doing things which increase revenue or reduce costs.
You don't need complex sentences to express complex ideas. When specialists in some abstruse topic talk to one another about ideas in their field, they don't use sentences any more complex than they do when talking about what to have for lunch. They use different words, certainly. But even those they use no more than necessary. And in my experience, the harder the subject, the more informally experts speak. Partly, I think, because they have less to prove, and partly because the harder the ideas you're talking about, the less you can afford to let language get in the way.
“I don’t journal to ‘be productive.’ I don’t do it to find great ideas, or to put down prose I can later publish. The pages aren’t intended for anyone but me…I’m just caging my monkey mind on paper so I can get on with my fucking day.”
The point of my exercise is that most people’s dreams are not gated by money. Sure you need some money, but you probably don’t need as much as you might imagine. You most likely don’t need multi-million dollars to start your dream.
This is your first hint that I've started reading *Infinite Jest*...
it’s incredibly hard, and maybe impossible, to escape the distorted perspective that’s been labelled “temporal chauvinism”: the feeling that the time you’re living in now is the most significant or terrifying one ever – simply because it’s the one you happen to be around to experience.
Donald Trump was not a Manchurian Candidate, created in a secret Russian/Chinese lab to infiltrate and bring down the United States of America. Nor, I believe, is he personally in the pocket of Russian and/or Chinese interests, blackmailed and bribed into weakening his country at the bidding of overseas masters. But sometimes it’s very difficult to distinguish between Trump’s *actual* actions and what he *would* do if he were a foreign plant or catspaw.
Some really good nuggets in here. There’s a LOT to think about these days…