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Super interesting spectrum of comments on this one already! I thought the article was pretty hilarious, but I feel like that's a little easier to achieve when you're being hyper-cynical. I'm a fan of that style of writing in general though, or at least I'm not usually turned off by it.

I never had a LinkedIn account and kind of prided myself on that but I created one about a week ago because @thorgalle told me I had to. I think the only way to really lose is to give too much of a shit about a site like LinkedIn either way; by assigning too much value to it or thinking you're special for abstaining from it.

I was going to say "Of course, this is how it should work everywhere! (minus the unknown clap factor)", but that's only because I was thinking about Readup's concept of time spent reading an article to completion. The Medium model is one of "interaction time" plus additional factors. Makes sense if you want to support reading comics and cartoons as they point out but they don't even seem to factor in the concept of article completion. They even seem to imply that skimming a long article counts towards their "reading time" metric.

All that said, it's still a huge step up from just looking at claps! The bigger issue is that Medium is just another publisher with a walled garden of hard-paywalled content (writers do not get paid for freely-available articles). Publishing on the web has been federated since day one. That's what the web is. We need a monetization model that fits that federated structure. That's what Readup is going to be.

A very well-considered and depressing look at the prospects of many Americans living in impoverished rural areas. Highly worthwhile read.

This is a masterpiece.

This is such an awesome study! Really goes to show how the results of the original study could be misconstrued to demonstrate the dangers of drugs instead of the devastating effects of being trapped in a miserable environment.

When inhabiting a “rat park,” they remarkably preferred the plain water. Even when they did imbibe from the drug-filled bottle, they did so intermittently, not obsessively, and never overdosed. A social community beat the power of drugs.

I've spent hours listening to Hart speak in various talks and interviews over the years and I think his message is an eminently important one. I only wish this interview was longer but I'd still encourage everyone to read it, consider what he has to say and hopefully continue to read more and dig even deeper.

The first paragraph read like the fictional opening to a late 90's dystopian sci-fi novella. I was ready for it but this was way more interesting. Glad the book got the attention it deserved!

Incredibly disturbing but also provides some interesting insight. Well worth the read!

Really great article! I almost wish it were longer or had additional installments. I could easily spend another 30 minutes reading about the custom "squints" machine debacle or any of the other fascinating details each on their own.

Yet, despite the widespread recognition that Marxism has been discredited by history, Marxist categories and ways of thinking maintain their hold and inhibit fresh thinking.

I struggle to understand this as anything other than impatience with the rate of progress of social justice. Such impatience is of course totally understandable but thinking that there's a shortcut to be had in replacing capitalism with some other economic system seems to me to be totally confused.

I just finished listening to a two hour long interview with Ira Glasser, the former director of the ACLU, and found it to be incredibly inspiring; particularly the amount of progress achieved in his lifetime and his long view of the fight for justice as a multigenerational relay race that never ends.

I'm going to take a stab at addressing the searing rage I felt while reading this piece. I'm sure the author is correct that some people were angry because they were made to feel insecure in their "micro-identities", but I've got a different take. I've had conversations before about how capitalism has somehow come to mean something other than the economic system, but the author is literally talking about it in an academic sense here, so I feel like it's appropriate to assume we're using the dictionary definition.

I feel like the author's attacks on capitalism are actually an attack on individuality. I think they have it completely backwards. Capitalism is not doing anything to us. Rather, capitalism is allowing us to be unburdened by traditional restrictions on our individual identity. Like everything, this comes with a cost. It's a struggle to find oneself, but it's preferable to all the alternatives that I can think of.

In other words, capitalism must give us things to make sense of the world because capitalism has taken all our inherent internalized senses of self and community away.

What is this "inherent internalized senses of self and community"? I'd argue it's a code phrase for domination. The domination of strict gender roles and limited opportunities for mobility in primitive societies, the domination of a single religion and the church in theocracies, the domination of the political party and the state in socialist countries, the domination of homogenous ethnicity and traditional culture in ethnostates. We all know about the paradox of choice. It can be easier to have an immutable identity assigned to you at birth, but it's not worth it in exchange for an "internalized sense of self and community."

As for the author's proposed alternative to capitalism:

“A successful contemporary politics has stakes in defining the rhythmic flow between schizophrenic and identificatory impulses,” he writes. “Hopefully, alternative rhythms can challenge, or at least syncopate, the accelerating rhythm of late capitalism.”

If this sounds like the "start of a good solution" to you... well I'm not going to accuse you of being mentally ill, because I do agree that stringent diagnoses and stigmatization are terrible things (seriously that half of the article was a solid 10), but I will say it shows a disturbing lack of knowledge about economics and history, particularly about the tens of millions of human lives that have been lost in the past century to misguided attempts at establishing alternatives to capitalism.

Interesting article and study! I've seen ads before on YouTube showing the unboxing and cooking of meal kits and it always seemed so wasteful to imagine such small portions being packaged up and shipped from who knows how far away.

"We really want to have people to think beyond just what their automatic gut reaction" is in terms of whether a product is good or bad for the environment, Miller says.

Wise words! Always important.

Extremely entertaining to read. The Patrick Byrne details might have been my favorite part.

It's like the craziest episode of The West Wing ever! I've been watching the series for the first time recently and it seems so quaint compared to what we've witnessed over the past four years. It's an unusual case of a TV show being unbelievable because the stories seem too normal and mundane.

Spectacular article!

I'm not as pessimistic as the author. I still think we can handle the post-truth, but the analysis is spot on and filled with many interesting observations.

Since so much of the human environment is man-made by dint, for example, of technological endeavor, we witness a kind of loop of self-actualization driving human history. As Erving Goffman put it in 1974 in Frame Analysis, “Society takes up and freezes into itself the conceptions we have of it.”

Love thinking about cultural loops.

First off, got to credit the author for taking the time to share an unglamorous reality of his business and also for making what I think is the right call about notifying his customers of every recurring charge. That said, putting the blame on Stripe is a bad call in my opinion.

I don't know how or why, but Stripe Checkout - which I use - doesn't seem to do this by default. INSANE!

We all make mistakes so I don't want it to sound like I'm shaming him, but it's 100% his fault for not taking the time to familiarize himself with the payments platform he choose. The Stripe email options are not hidden by any means and the "how or why" of the default behavior doesn't matter as long as it's properly documented which it most certainly is. Many companies will choose to send such billing emails from their own system so it doesn't strike me as an insane default at all.

This is something special.

An incredible story. It’s been exciting watching it all unfold. Roaring Kitty seems like a decent dude. Good for him.

The only quality I want in a sycophant is someone who praises my writing.

This made me laugh. Gotta respect the honesty!

So glad this got AOTD! A 40 minuter that felt like it was over in 10 because it was so captivating. Doug Smith is a great story teller and it seems like he has a very balanced perspective.

Great list! Really valuable, timeless reminders.

I think this is a really good article, but when I'm reading a piece like this I find myself wondering and maybe even worrying about how much life imitates art vs. the other way around. I feel like articles like this must at least have a reinforcing effect and might even be a bit indulgent but maybe that's just me projecting. Either way definitely worth a read!

Great read! Also extremely relevant to Readup:

Instead, as they skimmed the internet in that state of constant distraction that we all recognise, they were carried away with their emotions and their partisanship. The good news is that simply pausing for a moment to reflect was all it took to filter out a lot of the misinformation. It doesn’t take much; we can all do it. All we need to do is acquire the habit of stopping to think.

You've got to have good brakes when you're moving at the speed of light!

This article raises some very important questions and makes some great points! Proper feedback loops are crucial.

Super interesting read if you're into Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies (or retail banking regulation). I fully support Square's position but I think their mother/daughter gifting analogy is a little shaky.

For example, under this Proposal — if a Square customer’s mother gifts her daughter $4,000 in physical cash and the daughter deposits those funds in a bank, the bank would have no obligation to collect information on the customer’s mother. Under the Proposal, if this same transaction were completed in cryptocurrency, the bank would have to reach beyond its customer relationship and intrude upon the mother’s private information in order for the daughter to successfully deposit and freely access her gift.

If Square is acting as the custodian of the daughter's cryptocurrency wallet, wouldn't a closer analogy have the mother attempting to go to the daughter's bank and anonymously deposit the $4,000 into her daughter's account? I'm pretty sure that wouldn't fly.

Great article! Love the overall breakdown and there's nothing I disagree with but I would add a few things:

Crunch is not productive — it is an emergency effort to compensate for the lack of real productivity that is achieved through good planning and sharp focus.

That's for sure at least partially true but sometimes you're going to have to crunch and I think it's very valuable to be able to hit a few speed bumps in the ultra-regimented routine, run some environment/body/mind short-term deficits and be able to recover quickly and gracefully.

Also:

Split big tasks into small ones, so nothing looks overwhelming and daily progress is visible

I mean, yeah! If only it were that easy. I feel like sometimes that's 99% of the actual work. Seeing it as a bullet point feels a bit like "Draw the rest of the fucking owl."

Excellent article!

In the tradition of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Berry also began writing about his surroundings. But unlike Thoreau and Emerson, who were simply visitors to the natural environments they wrote about, Pollan says that Berry was actually engaged with nature: “He wasn’t just a spectator. He was a farmer.”

It says a lot that he returned to Kentucky so soon after graduating college and has been practicing what he's been preaching for over 50 years.

Really inspiring article! I found the counter-arguments compelling and was curious about the person who initially criticized the author. Here's the third result Google returned: https://twitter.com/arthur_affect/status/1347119992462970880

Goes to show what embracing the dark side will do to your soul over time. Count me with the rationalists!

I really appreciate the historical and judicial references here. It's reassuring in a way to be reminded that our system of government has had to deal with contested elections before and that despite all the toxic partisanship the overwhelming majority of those in congress are committed to upholding the Constitution in this instance at least.

Damn, I feel for the author. I know that ever-present "code quality" impulse/obsession and it was tough to see the train going down the wrong track from the beginning, especially since he did a good job of conveying the emotional struggle. It's always difficult to strike the balance between quality and speed when you're building something but I'd say this guy seems to be a rather extreme example of perfect being the enemy of done.

The tough part is that someone could definitely accuse me of the same thing with Readup for refusing to use "app platforms" like Firebase or Heroku but at least I'm posting this comment on a product that I shipped. In fact I remember when you could comment but there were no replies, no markdown/formatting, no comment links, no ability to edit or delete. The commenting experience still isn't perfect, especially within articles, and it probably never will be but if we waited to check all those boxes we might never have shipped anything at all.

I think it would be difficult to pack any more wisdom and good advice into a three minute article. I feel like it applies to programming as well. It's often hard to find the motivation to type out a bunch of code you know isn't quite right and will have to be reworked almost immediately but it's way better than trying to brute-force it all in your head.

No one else wants to read about eels? I didn't think I did either but this article was truly excellent. I didn't want it to end!

Great read! The current situation is bleak but it won't last forever.

Regime loyalty is the herd immunity of the ruling class, a protection against the consequences of their own failures.

The personal spying stuff is super creepy. It's almost hard to believe the ambush scene described at the beginning really happened it seems so absurd. It's also crazy that the bulk data dumps are for sale on the open internet. Don't even have to bother with the dark web! Reminds me of the early days when there were sketchy web sites that hosted pirated MP3 files out in the open before everyone moved to P2P.

Wow! Equal parts horrifying and fascinating. Just give this one a shot, you won't want to stop reading.

I couldn't agree with the author more and I think these are extremely important points to get across. In fact I was saying much the same thing seven months ago!

Maybe I'm overly sensitive because of the pandemic, but I think it should be even more clear now than ever that facts, science and data aren't the be-all and end-all of policy making.

Unfortunately I feel like the problem has only gotten worse since then.

Also related: One of my favorite YouTubers just put out a great video on the issue of Scientism - The Problem with the 'Yay Science!' Crowd

Well told, captivating story. It almost reads like a movie script which might be a hint that Shkreli was always just playing her. Sad either way.

This is seriously depressing. It almost makes it worse that there seems to be broad bipartisan disgust for the process. I'm curious what a proposed solution would look like or if any other country has found a way to solve or at least mitigate the issue of legislation that is impossibly complex and bundled together.

I feel like a "single issue" rule would be hard to define and enforce but it would at least provide some kind of check against an obviously dysfunctional system. Come to think of it that sounds like it would make a great constitutional amendment. They're usually short and to the point.

Yikes! Fun read but unfortunately not too surprising to see how the experiment turned out. If I had to put myself in a political box I'd call myself a libertarian but definitely with a lowercase "L" for many of the reasons highlighted in the article. I'm squarely in the purple quadrant according to the Political Compass but I really think there needs to be an additional z-axis for indicating where you are for different levels of government. There are entire departments of the federal government that I'd like to see done away with but I'm a big fan of local libraries.

There's also the whole social aspect of libertarianism which wasn't even really touched on in the article. I'm much more dogmatic when it comes to supporting policies that allow consenting adults to do whatever they want as long as they're not directly harming anyone else but laws governing drugs, prostitution, gambling, alcohol, etc. are usually not implemented at the local level so there unfortunately wasn't much they could have done in Grafton on that front.

Great motivational read and an excellent mantra!

Excellent article! Love the in-depth background on the philosophy and how it applies to issues with technology and political polarization. We can't fix anything unless we're grounded! The author ties it all together very nicely.