How do you actually use Git, in practice?
The Conduct of Monetary Policy
Some strong opinions on administrative orders
The canal to nowhere
Could we be repeating the mistakes of the Ming Dynasty? Yes! (No.) Maybe?
When MMT and a Job Guarantee were tried before, they didn’t work
Those who forget the mistakes of the past are… something something.
The epistemology of Tiny Train World
When I was learning philosophy in the late 1990s, it seemed very important to figure out the limits of tolerance and free speech. Many people hadn’t fully adopted the postmodern liberal bourgeois lifestyle that was appropriate to the end of the Cold War, and there was always the mostly theoretical problem posed by neo-Nazis. How…
The Armchair Scriptdoctor’s Library
Netflix has changed the incentives for watching bad films. With a monthly flat fee, they encourage you to take a chance on movies you’ve never heard of, even if they turn out to suck, which they usually do. More than that, it makes it easy to stack them up against good and great films. It’s…
The Deal of the Art
Inside the enormous exhibition hall containing the annual Basel art fair, at the Victoria Miro Gallery booth, a young couple is admiring a small watercolour by Chris Ofili. The painting has already been reserved, at a price which the gallery director shares in a hushed voice. “I’ll give you an extra twenty percent,” replies the…
Pastry, stress, and software engineering
At the halfway point of preparing pastry or cake for the oven, it always looks like a bowl of shit. Even if it’s a recipe I’ve made already, like shortcrust pastry, there’s enough randomness involved that it’s unclear if I’ve done it right this time. This makes me feel stress. I’m making a crappy failure,…
We buy cheap books
You’ve Got Mail is an underrated classic. It has many late-nineties “LOL internet” touches which make it look dated, but that’s irrelevant. Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks meet each other and then experience human emotions, which is also irrelevant. What the movie is really about is productivity growth, and our ambivalence toward it. Meg Ryan…
Matthew Yglesias’s knee and the future of human civilisation
A little while ago, Vox journalist Matthew Yglesias injured his knee and needed weeks of rehab. It led to a small epiphany, which he recounted during a podcast discussion of electronic health records. We have apps for booking doctor’s appointments, and you can learn about knees and treatment methods using your phone from the comfort…