all posts tagged 'capitalism'

Mark Zuckerberg: creators and publishers ā€˜overestimate the valueā€™ of their work for training AI


šŸ”— a linked post to theverge.com » — originally shared here on

I think that in any new medium in technology, there are the concepts around fair use and where the boundary is between what you have control over. When you put something out in the world, to what degree do you still get to control it and own it and license it? I think that all these things are basically going to need to get relitigated and rediscussed in the AI era.

When I downloaded Llama 3.2 yesterday, I had to agree to a rather lengthy licensing agreement which constrained how I could use it.

When you sign up for a Instagram or Facebook account, you have to agree to lengthy terms and conditions in which you give up your rights around the content you create.

If you want to push my buttons, all you need to do is something deeply hypocritical. Like, for example, the kind of insipid, hand-wavy remark that billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg make when they want "rules for thee, not for me" treatment.1

Thereā€™s another pull quote here which deeply offends me:

ā€œLook, weā€™re a big company,ā€ he said. ā€œWe pay for content when itā€™s valuable to people. Weā€™re just not going to pay for content when itā€™s not valuable to people. I think that youā€™ll probably see a similar dynamic with AI.ā€

Seriously, the gall of this guy to say ā€œyour content isnā€™t valuableā€ while raking in billions of dollars serving ads against it.

I keep getting the urge to join Facebook so I can sell some unneeded treasures on marketplace, but this article serves as a reminder that Meta is helmed by an individual who has a truly warped definition of the word ā€œvalue.ā€


  1. Or filibuster for an entire year into blocking a Supreme Court nomination until the next election takes place because ā€œitā€™s the will of the people.ā€ Then, four years later, when an election will take place in less than a month, cram your awful nomination through because itā€™s important to fill those spots as soon as possible. I have tried for a few years now, but Iā€™m not sure Iā€™ll ever be able to forgive that particular instance of hypocrisy. 

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Why We Can't Have Nice Software


šŸ”— a linked post to andrewkelley.me » — originally shared here on

The problem with software is that it's too powerful. It creates so much wealth so fast that it's virtually impossible to not distribute it.

Think about it: sure, it takes a while to make useful software. But then you make it, and then it's done. It keeps working with no maintenance whatsoever, and just a trickle of electricity to run it.

Immediately, this poses a problem: how can a small number of people keep all that wealth for themselves, and not let it escape in the dirty, dirty fingers of the general populace?

Such a great article explaining why we canā€™t have nice things when it comes to software.

There is a good comparison in here between blockchain and LLMs, specifically saying both technologies are the sort of software that never gets completed or perfected.

I think itā€™s hard to ascribe a quality like ā€œcompletedā€ to virtually anything humans build. Homes are always a work in progress. So are highbrow social constructs like self-improvement and interpersonal relationships.

I think itā€™s less interesting to me to try and determine what makes a technology good or bad. The key question is: does it solve someoneā€™s problem?

You could argue that the blockchain solves problems for guaranteeing the authenticity of an item for a large multinational or something, sure. But Iā€™m yet to be convinced of its ability to instill a better layer of trust in our economy.

LLMs, on the other hand, are showing tremendous value and solving many problems for me, personally.

What we should be focusing on is how to sustainably utilize our technology such that it benefits the most people possible.

And we all have a role to play with that notion in the work we do.

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Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars


šŸ”— a linked post to defector.com » — originally shared here on

In these latter days everybody is familiar with concepts like the carbon footprint, sustainability, and the like. Measures of the ecological cost of the things we do. One of the most irksome problems bedeviling Earth's biosphere at present is the outrageous cost of many aspects of many human lifestyles. Society is gradually and too late awakening to, for example, the reality that there is an inexcusable, untenable cost to shipping coffee beans all around the world from the relatively narrow belt in which they grow so that everybody can have a hot cup o' joe every morning. Or that the planet is being heated and poisoned by people's expectation of cheap steaks and year-round tomatoes and a new iPhone every year, and that as a consequence its water-cycle and weather systems are unraveling. Smearing the natural world flat and pouring toxic waste across it so that every American can drive a huge car from their too-large air-conditioned freestanding single-family home to every single other place they might choose to go turns out to be incompatible with the needs of basically all the other life we've ever detected in the observable universe. Whoops!

This article really lays into Elon at the end, which honestly, as Iā€™m getting older, I feel okay with.

Also: one of my main values in life is balance, which is essentially the goal of sustainability. How can we balance our needs with the needs of our planet?

Like any parasite, our species needs to achieve some sort of symbiosis with our host. You canā€™t extract so much that you kill it, but you need to live at the same time, so how do you reach that balance?

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Is this the slow decline of the Apple ā€œcultā€?


šŸ”— a linked post to birchtree.me » — originally shared here on

Iā€™m sure Apple will continue to be very successful for many years to come and I expect to buy many products in the future as well (after all, Microsoft and Google donā€™t feel much better). Iā€™ll surely even give some of those products glowing reviews on this very blog. And yet, I do wonder if the Apple enthusiast crowd as we know is in permanent decline.

You donā€™t need Daring Fireball, Panic, ATP, Birchtree, or anyone else like us to be massively financially successful (just look at Microsoft and Samsung), but I do find it a bit sad to see Apple stroll down the road to being a totally heartless mega corp like the rest. Why does Apple feel itā€™s worth trashing their relationship with creators and developers so that they can take 30% of the money I pay an up-and-coming creator who is trying to make rent in time each month?

If Homer was trying to start an internet business today, Tim Cook would be the one smashing up his home office and declaring he didnā€™t get rich by writing a lot of checks1.

Iā€™ve all but checked out on the Apple community these days. I still follow a few choice folks like David Smith and John Siracusa, but the overall tone of most Apple pundits today feels like that of a kid who was bullied in high school and became the bullyā€™s boss.

Hereā€™s my problem: Apple makes the best products out there today, and they know it. They deserve to be rewarded financially for this, but the problem is that they donā€™t know when to stop.

That mindset tends to be a problem in humans in general. People who are great at saving money tend to be unsure how to spend it when they retire.

Iā€™ve been an Apple supporter since I got my first iPod back in 2003. Whenever I need to get a new electronic item, my first instinct is to grab whatever Apple made and be done with it.

At first, that instinct was pursued with enthusiasm. Now, after twenty years of selfish financial moves, Iā€™m starting to follow that instinct with a funky taste in my mouth, like when you drink a can of pop after not having one in years.

Even if Apple wanted to change their behavior, Iā€™m not sure they even know how to. Just look at how theyā€™ve responded to all the regulations that have been thrown their way.

When theyā€™re told they must allow apps to link to external payment sources, they require you to pay a 5% ā€œInitial Acquisition Feeā€.

When theyā€™re told they need to allow for alternative app stores on their platform, they respond with instituting a Core Technology Fee so developers can ā€œutilize the capabilities that we have introduced, including the ability to direct app users to the web to complete purchases at a very competitive rateā€.2

Even with a market cap of 3.44 trillion dollars, they still feel the need to charge exceptionally high fees for access to their platforms.3

I guess maybe this is inevitable? Call it enshittification, call it the natural order of things, but I canā€™t help feeling like weā€™ve reached peak Apple fandom.

Heh, I suppose this whole blog post could be summarized by this excellent Adam Mastroianni quote:

Notice that, while lots of people are happy to tell you about Golden Ages, nobody ever seems to think one is happening right now. Maybe thatā€™s because the only place a Golden Age can ever happen is in our memory.


  1. I couldnā€™t help but throw in a Simpsons reference, even if the children are wrong

  2. I canā€™t help but lol at the use of the word ā€œcompetitive.ā€ How is this competitive? You are comparing one rate you set yourself to another rate you set yourself! Doesnā€™t the word ā€œcompetitionā€ imply more than one party being involved? Either way, if we have to get this into the weeds with semantic compliance with a rule, then you know that one side is just being obstinate. 

  3. Dangit, I never mean to turn these blog posts into rants against capitalism, but here I go again. 

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The deskilling of web dev is harming the product but, more importantly, it's damaging our health


šŸ”— a linked post to baldurbjarnason.com » — originally shared here on

Of course youā€™re having problems keeping up with everything thatā€™s happening in web dev. Of course!

Youā€™re expected to follow half-a-dozen different specialities, each relatively fast-paced and complex in its own right, and youā€™re supposed to do it without cutting into the hours where you do actual paid web development.

Worse yet, youā€™re not actually expected to use any of it directly. Instead youā€™re also supposed to follow the developments of framework abstractions that are layered on top of the foundation specialities, at least doubling the number of complex fields a web dev has to follow and understand, right out of the gate.

This is immense ā€“ an expectation so mind-boggling that we need to acknowledge just how remarkable it is that each of us has managed as well as we have.

This entire article is an excellent summary of the state of the software development industry from the perspective of a web developer. I think Baldur hit the nail on the head several times here.

I first learned Javascript from a book I got from the library somewhere around 1999. This predated XMLHttpRequest, debuting with IE5 in 2001, which literally enables every single subsequent Javascript framework out there.

In just the last ten years alone, Iā€™ve worked with React, Typescript, Coffeescript, Vue, Angular, Backbone.js, Ember.js, Next.js, ES6, and maybe another dozen Javascript variants that I canā€™t recall right nowā€¦ but I wouldnā€™t consider myself an expert in any of them.

Like Baldur says in this article, ā€œframework knowledge is perishable.ā€ I donā€™t want to spend all my time learning a framework which, if history is any indicator, will be obsolete in a few years.

The underlying Javascript knowledge, though, is not ephemeral. I can dig up webpages I built in fifth grade and render them in moments with ease on my modern day Macbook, whereas dashboards built on React from only five years ago can only be brought up if I spend an entire day setting up an environment with a billion dependencies.

I can do that because the vanilla Javascript that worked in IE5 still works great in any modern browser.

I do have to be a realist, thoughā€¦ the jobs out there today do require you to use these frameworks because the software pipeline is way more complex than it was in 2000. Frameworks provide a standarized way of building software within this modern landscape. For the record, I have no problem picking one up in the course of my work and figuring it out.

I wish more organizations would simpilfy rather than move towards increasingly complex ways of writing and delivering software. I feel like so much more value could be realized by paring back the staggering amounts of dependencies that these frameworks use. Codebases would be much thinner, deploy times would be faster, your footprint for potential security threats would be smaller, etc. etc.

Anyway, I also think the way he wraps up this article is grimly astute:

The tech industry will never be a genuinely free market as long as big tech companies are allowed to be as big as they are today.

What we have today is a centrally-planned economy by MBA sociopaths, operated as a looting ground for the rich.

It will never function on normal competitive, supply-and-demand market principles.

Because, even though a healthier market is the only thing that has a hope of a return to the fast-growing tech industry of prior decades, it would also require big tech companies to accept a smaller slice of the overall pie and allow new competitors to grow.

Why do that when you can strangle the market and keep the entire corpse for yourself?

Literally laughed out loud at ā€œcentrally-planned economy by MBA sociopaths.ā€

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Why the CrowdStrike bug hit banks hard


šŸ”— a linked post to bitsaboutmoney.com » — originally shared here on

I personally tried withdrawing cash at three financial institutions in different weight classes, as was told it was absolutely impossible (in size) at all of them, owing to the Falcon issue.

At one, I was told that I couldnā€™t use the tellers but could use the ATM. Unfortunately, like many customers, I was attempting to take out more cash from the ATM than I ever had before. Fortunately, their system that flags potentially fraudulent behavior will let a customer unflag themselves by responding to an instant communication from the bank. Unfortunately, the subdomain that communication directs them to runs on a server apparently protected by CrowdStrike Falcon.

I have some knowledge of the history of comprehensive failures of financial infrastructure, and so I considered doing the traditional thing when convertibility of deposits is suspended by industry-wide issues: head to the bar.

Iā€™ve ignored the CrowdStrike news primarily because it didnā€™t directly impact me, and secondarily because I made an assumption that this was yet another example of the joys of late stage capitalism.

Iā€™m glad I read this article, though, because it helped put the crisis in perspective.

While it didnā€™t impact me, it certainly caused issues for those in my real life. Software truly has reached a point where it can cause massive headaches for large swaths of society.

When a big part of society gets bumped by an outage like this, the ripples of its consequences will surely be felt by everyone at some point down the road.

Second, I gotta stop being so cynical about capitalism. I should stop pretending Iā€™m above it or better than it. Like it or not, itā€™s the system I have to play in.

It would probably be less stressful for me to accept the game and use it to accomplish my own set of goals.

One of my main goals in life is to build technology that helps make peopleā€™s lives better.1 Say what you will about CrowdStrike, but this article reminded me that itā€™s because of tools like Falcon that we are provided a society in which we all can live better lives.

So instead of sitting here and (a) ignoring the news and (b) complaining about the existence of bad actors in our system, maybe I should instead do my best to help make our system as stable as I can.


  1. Itā€™s so important to me that itā€™s the first thing you see on the main page of this website.  

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I'm getting rid of my iPhone for a month

originally shared here on

Long time readers of this blog may recall that I've been psyching myself up enough to try switching to the Light Phone.

Iā€™m legit embarrassed to admit just how much Iā€™m addicted to my iPhone.

It happened slowly over the course of the last 15 years. Today, I find myself frequently incapable of putting it down, even when itā€™s actively making me feel terrible.

The biggest expense of always being virtually connected is never feeling connected to the physical moment happening in front of me.

That wasnā€™t so much of a problem to me when I was sitting in front of my Compaq desktop in the basement of my parentā€™s house.

Back in those days, I used to hate being away from my computer. The very first thing Iā€™d do when returning from a family vacation was to jump on the computer and catch up on a week of message board posts.

Here in 2024, though, I donā€™t subject myself to that experience.

The other day, I was playing a Lego game with my son and while he was explaining an aspect of the game to me, I pulled out my phone and went to turn on music. Mid sentence, he stops and says, ā€œDad, can you put your phone away? Itā€™s distracting me.ā€

Oof. Thatā€™s not how I want my son to remember me.

Iā€™ve tried all the techniques people say can help limit screen time. Grayscale the screen. Delete apps. Block toxic websites. But because none of those tricks are actually working, itā€™s time to take more drastic measures.

My plan is to move my phone number onto the Light Phone for a month. Just a month.

I'm going to do this during the month of August. That will give me a couple weeks to prepare for it. I am honestly worried about what Iā€™ll be giving up, and so I'm doing what I can to brace myself for that impact.

Iā€™m mostly excited, really. After more than a decade in the comfortable, walled garden of the Apple ecosystem, I think it will be nice to experiment with new tech tools again.

The Light Phone is designed to be as boring and practical as possible. It can make phone calls, send texts, and give driving directions, among a few other things.

But there are certainly some activities that the Light Phone wonā€™t do very well which I am unwilling to give up. So here are those activities, along with how I'm thinking I'll deal with those activities for the time being:

Taking notes and reminders.

A notepad with a pen. āœ…

Next.

Reading.

Sometime in the last couple of decades, I stopped reading books.

Iā€™m not exactly sure why. I used to love reading books when I was a kid. I would go to the library and read every book they had on building websites and computer programs. Iā€™d also read every new edition of Animorphs, Goosebumps, and Harry Potter as soon as my library stocked it.

But beginning in high school, I stopped reading books for fun. Reading felt like a burden, something you were assigned as punishment. I resented reading so much, in fact, that I used to pride myself on not buying books for class in college and finding a way through without them.1

If I read books these days, I almost only read non-fiction, which is fineā€¦ but I miss reading for fun.

Earlier this year, I helped my wife proctor some tests at her school. I wasnā€™t allowed to be on the internet, so I brought a book along that a friend recommended called What You Are Looking For Is In The Library. I burned through it in a day, and it got me interested in reading fiction once again.

I think I wanna try getting into a fiction series. The last series I read was the Left Behind books in high school, so uh, yeahā€¦ Iā€™m a bit out of the loop with whatā€™s good out there.

If anyone has recommendations, let me know!

Taking pictures.

I used to be really into cameras when I was really into making clips2. When my oldest was born, we thought it made sense to buy a good SLR, so we picked up a Canon Rebel T6i.

I do still grab it out of storage and bring it along to the occasional soccer game or choir performance, and the shots feel better to me than the ones I get with my iPhone. It helps that I have a decent assortment of lenses, but I think it also speaks to the joy you get from using a tool that was intentionally built to complete a task.

Of course, I canā€™t realistically carry an SLR with me all the time. I need something more practical.

When I sold cameras at Best Buy3, the camera I recommended the most was the Canon SD800 IS, and it was the camera that documented some of the most fun moments of my life. It was small enough to fit in my pocket alongside my iPod.

Even though it fit, I still didnā€™t carry it with me every day, which makes the pictures I did take with them feel extra special when I browse through them today.

Maybe having a camera on me all the time is less necessary than Iā€™m worried about. I mean, in a normal day for you, how many situations can you envision where you must take a picture of something and can't flag down someone to take one and send it to you?4

So Iā€™m in the market for a camera thatā€™s small like the SD800 was, but perhaps more professional. I remember seeing someone mention the Canon PowerShot G7 X Mark III and I thought the silver one looked kinda dope.

It makes me happy to see Canon keeping these devices up to date. The G7 X can shoot 4k video, and itā€™s got WiFi and USB-C so itā€™ll be easy to get media off of it. Most importantly, its size means it can stay in the drawer by the door and leap into service at a moment's notice.

But anyway, what about yā€™all? Anyone else use something besides their phone to take a picture or a video?

Listening to music.

The whole reason I wanted to make this post is because I wanted to brag about my restoration project with my old fifth generation iPod.

But because of course this is what happens when I brag, Iā€™ve been stuck for a few days trying to debug a hardware failure that is proving exceptionally frustrating to resolve. Chefā€™s kiss.

So instead of bragging about that, Iā€™ll instead confess that Iā€™m one of those sickos who maintains their own library of MP3s.

Iā€™ve always looked at streaming services with squinty eyes. Maybe itā€™s because Iā€™m still mad at what they did to our beloved Napster. Maybe itā€™s because I think itā€™s important to not give complete control of my cultural history to massive corporations5. Maybe itā€™s because buying an MP3 version of an album from an artist will give them vastly more money than my combined streams would ever account for. Maybe itā€™s because I am an aging boomer.

Either way, transitioning away from Apple Music will not be too excruciating for me. Iā€™ll still use it because I have HomePods all over my house, but when Iā€™m not home, I want need a way to bring my music with me.

The Light Phone does have some storage and an MP3 player option, but because of the intentional design, youā€™re limited to a single playlist and 1gb of tunes. That doesnā€™t work for me, brother.

Iā€™ll keep yā€™all posted with my progress on the restoration process. I want to get Rockbox installed on it so I can experience what the home brew community is doing with this old hardware.

In the meantime, if anyone knows how to address issues with an iFlash Solo syncing with an M1 Mac mini, holler at your boy.


Iā€™d like to take this opportunity to express how pathetic I feel that I need to take these extreme steps to reclaim some part of me that I feel like Iā€™ve lost ever since going whole ham on the mobile revolution.

I talk at length about the joy that comes with technology, but I should also recognize the negative impact that tech can make.

We went through an era of unfettered growth from Silicon Valley-powered firms who had nearly no supervision and did everything they could to exploit our political and economic systems for their own gain.

And to be clear, their growth did bestow some incredible tools onto us.

But as much as our society derides subgroups like the Luddites and the Amish for their apparent aversion to technology, there is clearly some merit to how they approach technology. You should adopt technology because itā€™ll help you, not because everyone else is using it.

Every night around 10:30pm, I find myself lying in bed, entering the casino that is my iPhone. Every app is a different section of the game room floor.

My email app is a slot machine, where I hope Iā€™ll hit the big bucks and get an email saying ā€œyay youā€™re hired!ā€, but the odds are better that Iā€™ll see an email saying ā€œlol you owe me money still.ā€

LinkedIn and Reddit are craps tables, where I sometimes roll an 11 and see a post from a friend who had a successful day at work or a post on /r/AskHistorians that teaches me something interesting (like Did President Andrew Garfield ever eat lasagna?). But more often than not, I roll snake eyes and see something which makes me feel like a failure or living in a dumpster fire of a society.

Even my beloved RSS reader app, filled with feeds that I explicitly opted into, can feel like a game of blackjack. Yeah, I often walk away with at least some money, but I still sometimes leave the table feeling unsure why Iā€™m passionate about anything anymore.

I let this happen to myself. And every time I pull my phone out of my pocket during a family dinner, I rob myself of what makes life worth living in the first place.

Like our Silicon Valley overlords like to say, you canā€™t stop the march of progress. Technology is rapidly improving, and major advances in our collective understanding of the universe are unveiled at an overwhelming pace.

Thereā€™s gotta be a way where we can harness the good parts of technology without entirely succumbing to all of its detriments. The first step, I suppose, is defining what I want to get out of life.

And really, itā€™s pretty simple:

  • Play Legos with my son
  • Sing karaoke with my wife
  • Watch Rockoā€™s Modern Life with my daughter
  • Make music, work out, and learn new things
  • Be able to visit the doctor when Iā€™m not feeling well without going bankrupt
  • Build something useful for people
  • Not make other peopleā€™s existences any worse than they already are

If those are the things that are important to me, then why would I burn precious energy spending time on a device which gives me anxiety attacks on a daily basis?

So yeah, come August, Iā€™m signing off from my iPhone for a bit. Itā€™ll feel good to step out of the casino and focus on building legos, taking walks, shredding on the guitar, singing karaoke, hanging out with friends, and listening to music.


  1. At the time, I was extremely anti-book because the book publishing market is an extreme racket, issuing frequent updates to textbooks with minimal tweaks while commanding insane prices. Today, part of me wishes I read the assigned works for most of my liberal arts classes. Maybe I wouldā€™ve picked up more useful facts about the Australopithecus or found useful anecdotes from Cold War geopolitical conflicts. 

  2. This is what we used to call videos before YouTube. We'd record a bunch of segments of a video on someone's dad's camcorder, then use a capture cable to play back the video onto a computer, and then edit it in something like Pinnacle Studio. Wild times, indeed. 

  3. Which seems to be my point of reference for where to look for all of these problems... I worked at Best Buy from 2005 to 2010, so basically, what were the tech solutions we had for these problems before the iPhone came out? And is there anything from the past 15 years that has improved on that tech? 

  4. Maybe this is a hypothesis born out of privilege, but letā€™s call a spade a spade: this entire article and premise is only possible for someone who is drowning in technology and choosing to reduce his consumption. 

  5. Brennan Lee Mulligan recently had an excellent monologue about this topic, but I donā€™t have a direct link to it. Just look at Paramountā€™s recent decision to remove all of MTV and Comedy Centralā€™s backlogs of content as all the proof you need that you should back up what you care about. 


Ā The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again


šŸ”— a linked post to rollingstone.com » — originally shared here on

Thereā€™s not going to be some new killer app that displaces Google or Facebook or Twitter with a love-powered alternative. But thatā€™s because there shouldnā€™t be. There should be lots of different, human-scale alternative experiences on the internet that offer up home-cooked, locally-grown, ethically-sourced, code-to-table alternatives to the factory-farmed junk food of the internet. And they should be weird.

If you missed this one when it was making the rounds seven months ago, Anil Dash did not disappoint with this think piece about the weird internet.

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Music Journalism Can't Afford A Hollowed-Out Pitchfork


šŸ”— a linked post to defector.com » — originally shared here on

It is hard not to see this development as a true indicator that we're nearing the endpoint of robust, meaningful music criticism as a concept. The idea that music journalism has no value is one of the most pervasive thoughts circulating among the suits who control the industry. What those people continue to deprive us of is smart, varied music coverage produced by actual journalists, most of whom now find themselves being squeezed out of an industry that only rewards slavish devotion to the biggest pop stars, or a constant courting of drama, gossip, and violence that is only tangentially related to music.

If there's a better future for music journalism to come, it will perhaps spring from the re-emergence of small-batch music blogs and more localized coverage. But what we're left with now is a corporatized wasteland, and fewer publications than ever equipped to write about music with all the rigor and passion it deserves.

Iā€™m glad Iz mentioned the optimistic part of the situation at the end.

Iā€™m, of course, sad and frustrated by what mega corporations are doing to journalism as a whole (not just music journalism).

But what keeps my hope alive is continuing to support smaller writers who cover their beats with an infectious passion.

I donā€™t see a future where journalism suddenly becomes a six-figure kind of job, because capitalism is not a system where art (and nuanced, considered discussions of art) is valued enough to justify that sort of business investment.

I suppose that could be seen as bleak, but take it from someone who is currently grappling with the costs associated with doing the thing I love in exchange for a salary: itā€™s great for the pocket book, but damn near lethal for my soul.

And I suppose by trading my passions in for money, I can use that money to support artists who are out there making stuff that makes me happy.

On a similar note: how do yā€™all discover new music these days? Are there any good writers or blogs I should be following?

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Is Your Phone the Reason You Feel Broke?


šŸ”— a linked post to nymag.com » — originally shared here on

I wonā€™t argue that smartphones are significantly responsible for Americaā€™s sense of economic malaise. What they are is unusually helpful for understanding and interpreting this malaise in common terms. Theyā€™re a heightened, sped-up microcosm of the weird, sour vibrancy of the economic moment, little worlds in which participants are both increasingly active and increasingly worried. By most measures, the smartphone economy is booming, and yet it also feels like shit in a way that everyone can feel for themselves, together, no matter what soda they drink.

Thatā€™s the thing with creating these cool slot machines that live in our pocket: theyā€™re really fun at first, but once youā€™re addicted to them, you keep going back even when itā€™s painful.

That pain hasnā€™t manifested for me much by way of exorbitant pricing, although I have noticed my subscriptions for things like iCloud storing are increasing.

The way this manifests for me is when my kids look at me and say, ā€œcan you snuggle and watch this episode with me without being on your phone?ā€

I know itā€™ll hurt, but I gotta make the switch to my Light Phone soon. Iā€™m sick of feeling hopelessly addicted to this dumb piece of glass Iā€™m currently typing on while my kids are playing in the water park in front of me.

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