ELSM - Confident Idiocy, Vampiric Pricing, and Struggling with Mid Fortnite

Welcome to another edition of Easy Like Sunday Morning, the supplement usually only available to paid subscribers! Letting this one out of containment because the Reel-to-Link pairing ratio is lovely this week. Paywalls make me feel weird, something I’m hoping to unpack to all faithful dispatchers this week (cross fingers).

We Are All Confident Idiots (Pacific Standard) An utterly incredible read and reminder about how ignorance and confidence manifests itself. A reminder: “The way we traditionally conceive of ignorance—as an absence of knowledge—leads us to think of education as its natural antidote. But education can produce illusory confidence.”

If you think grocery prices take a big bite out of your paycheck in the US, check out the rest of the world (The Conversation) Just like gasoline, Americans really do need to stfu when it comes to the price of things. Go ask a Nigerian how much their food costs, or better yet, someone who lives in Indonesia.

Private equity: health care’s vampire (Stat) Private Equity should have more guardrails on it than bumper bowling. It is the least helpful bit of any market system, full stop. If you’re wondering why your hospital got worse, it’s private equity.

Why Is Everything So Ugly (N+1) Just an amazing discussion of why mid-21st Century art, design, architecture, and everything else is just so…mid. Gen Z makes amazing words, you’ll never convince me otherwise.

Dozens of police influencers are running for office in Brazil (Rest of World) Cop influencers. Why are there cop influencers? Why are there cop influencers outside of the USA? Why do cop influencers get to run for office? Why am I still asking questions?!

Conceptual Models of Space Colonization (Antipope) I smacked my head a dozen times reading this. It’s so obvious and so utterly alien. We think of colonialism in specific, structured ways, and most of those ways do not transpose to another planet. Like, at all.

Fortnite more than a game. It’s the single most important influence on popular culture (Sherwood) Fortnite is the most important platform, game, and media system anywhere in the world right now. If you don’t believe me, ask anyone under the age of 18.

Market Prices Are Not Probabilities (Quantian) If you think the odds you get from your bookie, gaming app, or prediction market are the actual probabilities the bookie thinks exist in reality, he probably loves you as a customer. Someone shake Nate Silver until he understands this.

Americans Struggle with Graphs (3 is a pattern) I mean, is anyone surprised?

Twilight of the Racist Uncles (The Baffler) Older, but absolute gold from Ed Burmila. Facebook, and increasingly Insta/Threads is a boomer wasteland never to be reclaimed. We need new spaces and new voices, so let’s all go to Fortnite and look for them.

Utterly gorgeous fashion above. And leaving you with some crunchy, symphonic IDM from The Flashbulb, walk in the light when you can.

Keep it going,tn