Wednesday Wondering 9.6.23 - Schrodinger's Crisis

Gov't Hostage Crises, Party Crises, and a severe lack of Play

September 06, 2023

And a happy heater of a hump day to you!* Lots of things happening, and if the powers that be smile on us, dispatch on Friday as well! But don’t jinx it.

Group of House conservatives unveils demands to support spending bill and avoid shutdown (Associated Press) & Who Is And Isn't A Terrorist, January 6 Edition (Forever Wars) Our semi-annual Congressional Hostage Crisis is once again upon us, where people pretend they aren’t just going to write blank checks with money they make up anyway. Also some Proud Boy got sentenced like a violent adult male minority, which is a change of pace.

repost child labor Memes & GIFs - Imgflip

Biden’s NLRB Brings Workers’ Rights Back From the Dead (The American Prospect) & More in U.S. See Unions Strengthening and Want It That Way (Gallup) Oddly, after the last few years of layoffs, “Soak the Poor” pricing, and job obliteration through AI, support for Unions is at an almost all-time high. And who would have predicted it, the Biden administration did something decisive and for the worker, for a change. (Editor’s Note: We try to call balls & strikes here, and can admit we had no expectation the NLRB would be useful at all, so hats are off to Jennifer Abruzzo.

Labor Day New York police will use drones to monitor backyard parties this weekend, spurring privacy concerns (Associated Press) Electric Zoo overbooked by 7,000 people, resulting in chaos (PIX 11) After Mayor Adams swagged about drones being used “not to monitor backyards, but to prevent crime” a person was still stabbed and E-Zoo was still a complete freaking nightmare. Overselling a party by 7,000 people is a shock to anyone, until you hear that it’s the people who own Triangle Shirtwaist Factory 2.0, the Brooklyn Mirage. We were this close to Astroworld-on-Randall’s:

The US Is Losing the Corn-Exporting Crown (Bloomberg) & Decline in Americans who think US is greatest country in the world (Pew Research) We’re not even good at the stuff we were best in the world at anymore, which…might actually be sinking in for some people.

Journalism fails miserably at explaining what is really happening to America (Philadelphia Inquirer) Game theory, horse race analysis, and centrist goofiness got us Trump once. It’s weird and great to hear someone from Philly remind us to not lose the plot and do it again.

The play deficit (Aeon) Does unscheduled, unstructured play away from screens, cars, or highways even exist anymore for kids in the West? I mean, outside of private schools charging parents to schedule “free play” for them, I suppose.

Semi-relatedly, they built Minecraft within Minecraft.

As in, all of the computer components needed for a virtual machine that could run a hyper nerfed version of the game, built with Minecraft blocks.

Since people don’t have the time for links, starting to toy with more block quotes around something like a “Thought of the Week:”

“I think the prompt might often or mostly be abstracted away from the end user experience. The prompt will be an API call and ‘prompt engineering’ will the be API parameters. That’s what happened to command lines - the paradox of ChatGPT is that it is both a step forward beyond graphical user interfaces, because you can ask for anything, not just what’s been built as a feature with a button, but also a step back, because very quickly you have to memorise a bunch of obscure incantations, much like the command lines that GUIs replaced. We have software that can do ‘anything’ and maybe that’s the wrong answer.”

~Benedict Evans, whose newsletter I pay for.

Stay to the shadows if you can,T

*Offer only valid in the Northern Hemisphere. South of the equator is less record-breaking in this regard.