You know... this is still bugging me two days later. Like it personally insulted my daughter or something.

- I worked a closed-door "futurist" session for Warner Brothers some years ago, where the c-suite drones of every duchy of the far-flung Time Warner empire showed up to learn what the hell they were all supposed to do about this "internet" thing. The VP for programming of HBO was there, as well as the content directors for DC Comics and Youtube (he had just been hired away). And we had this one "futurist" who took to the stage to discuss torrenting. He turned to the audience and said "do you guys really believe that some kid with 80,000 MP3s on his hard drive was going to buy those tracks? Do you honestly think he'll even listen to them all? Of course not! HE'S CURATING!" and everyone nodded thoughtfully.

- Trent Reznor once called Oink.me.UK the best site on the internet. Sony was caught seeding their unreleased shit on there, while also demanding it be shut down. The guys into music enough to be on a private tracker, to pay for a seedbox? They're your influencers. The ones who decide "yes, I will listen to this once and seed it forever because this is how my tribe reaches each other" are the ones keeping the system running. When I need new music to play on the radio I pull down every torrent within a laundry list of micro-genres published since the last time I was dry. Anything good enough that someone else goes through the trouble to create a torrent of? It may not be to your taste but you know it reached someone.

- Jeron Lanier basically predicted NFTs in You Are Not A Gadget by pointing out that physical music sales will never come back, and if bands want to make money they need to focus on collectibles and the fan experience.

- I don't often purchase music off Bandcamp. I purchase shirts. Nearly everything is on Tidal and Tidal integrates with Rekordbox so it's easier just to stream it. But that doesn't make anyone any money except Tidal and AlphaTheta.

That's just fandom. The act of curation is the act of appreciation. Seeking out things you like and sharing them is the whole fucking point. The manifesto I wrote that saved my radio show relied on a "push/pull relationship" with music, stating that there were people who sought out new music and propagated it to their friends ("push") and there were people who were more comfortable listening to things that had already been vetted for social acceptance via MTV, Rolling Stone or television licensing ("pull"). I went further and pointed out that goth-industrial was entirely push because the path to mainstream acceptance had exactly one bridge on it - my show.

But I think the reason this bitch really bugs the shit out of me is because of a conversation I had 25 years ago. I dated this girl who was awful, who had a father who was awful, who had two kids with one of his students (she was not awful). 20 years his junior, she was within 10 years of me and the girlfriend, which means her siblings had young children. They tried to relate to us as peers rather than as youth, which was nice, but they were also young parents, which was interesting. I was talking to one of them about mixing in clubs and she said something that hit hard - "oh, sure, you listen to a lot of music now but trust me, once you have kids, you won't anymore. You'll just want the silence. I haven't listened to a band in five years."

Fuckin' haunting, yo. Also absolutely untrue, no basis in fact, etc etc etc but at the ripe old age of 22, here was a lady going "I have turned old and you shall as well, it is inevitable."

I think of the "pullers." The ones for whom Columbia House existed. The "album of the month" club for people who don't want to decide for themselves what they like, who want someone in authority to tell them that they won't be mocked at a cocktail party for liking the wrong things. The ones who had a subscription to Spin Magazine because their friends had subscriptions to Spin Magazine so they could all stick to what they read in Spin Magazine and rest assured that their lives were Spin Magazine approved. And those of us who considered it the anathema of music appreciation? Well, we just never crossed paths.

THAT is what this column is bitching about:

- There's no authority to assure people like this of what's cool

- If they wander out into the wild wooly world they might encounter people who didn't care for Spin Magazine

- They aren't sure what they should enjoy if there isn't someone to give them permission

IT HAS NEVER BEEN EASIER TO CONNECT WITH THE MUSIC YOU LOVE... BUT YOU HAVE TO LOVE MUSIC.

Spin Magazine, ironically enough, ran a feature entitled "Top Ten Albums Owned By People Who Hate Music." Their argument was that there were some albums that were so universal that people with absolutely no connection to music whatsoever ended up with a copy. I thought of that article when I saw Icona Pop for sale on vinyl at Whole Foods. The article, of course, predated Whole Foods and Icona Pop by decades; their list included Pearl Jam's "Ten" and Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours."

Bjork is currently promoting a new concert film being released called Cornucopia. She's been releasing new photoshoots and interviews almost every day for the past two weeks. For a musician who normally goes into hiding and only emerges when it's time to promote something, it's been a pretty exciting time to be a fan. However, all the information being put out, promoted on social media and reposted on places like Reddit, have all been a little confusing.

This is a woman demanding that Bjork be less confusing for the ease of her musical fandom.

I ran lights for Gary Numan once. It was the Exile tour, well after Cars. And as I came out to the lighting console, all sixteen channels of it, and moved a pair of drinks out of my space, a couple yuppies grew outraged with me. "This is our spot!" they said. "This is the lighting guy's spot," I said. "Well we were here first!" they responded. "Well you aren't anymore," I said, and they wandered off to find a bouncer, then came back in a huff and glowered over my shoulder.

Until the first song, anyway.

The second song was Cars, but they didn't even stick around long enough to hear it. They came for that song they heard on the radio, won't it be fun to think back to that time when everyone took their musical instruction from Rick Dees or Casey Casem?

It makes art (music, film, tv, etc.) seem like one big sludge pile. It makes it feel vast and exhausting, like an endless list of things that you'll never get to the end of. I've been noticing this sentiment with society, this feeling of always being mentally exhausted. How many times have we had a discussion with a friend who was recommending a show and our response was, "Oh yeah, I'll have to see it, but my list of shows is so long!" The reality is we're not going to watch it because we feel like we have no time to get through everything and we don't fully trust other people's recommendations.

This is a lady who wants Bjork to explain the riddles, who wants entertainment to be a puzzle she can solve, who doesn't "fully trust other people's recommendations" unless, apparently, those people work for Viacom. She doesn't want to order a Bedless Bones t-shirt off of Bandcamp because Kadri Sammel's cat might have left cat hair on it.

One of the things I found in the attic was a nasty-gram from Columbia House. Dude was delinquent on some 8-tracks; the one that really stuck with me was Burt Bacharach's Lost Horizon soundtrack. Now - there were a lot fewer ways to connect with music in 1972. It was a pretty forgettable year.

But still.

Speaking as a Billboard-reporting, Nielsen-tabulating, A&R-wrestling radio DJ...

I discovered interesting music like Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Portishead, Tricky, Orbital, Takako Minekawa, Hooverphonic, Poe, Veruca Salt all from sporadically listening to one college radio station in my hometown and, once a week, watching one music program on MTV (usually 120 Minutes or AMP). Then, once a month, I would sometimes flip through a music magazine while at the hair salon (usually Rolling Stone or Spin). And that was literally it.

Everything that ran on 120 Minutes or Amp - a 14-year and a 5-year run, respectively - was on a major label. 120 minutes was the product of the music juggernaut turning to "college radio" when they discovered that they could shove REM down everyone's throats as effectively as Beastie Boys, so long as they shoved it down the right pipe. Amp was the product of Crystal Method and Chemical Brothers colonizing the dance music channels more effectively than the college music channels. Anyone casually referring to Amp is speaking in an extremely specific '90s kid register of speech, an era where online culture was dominated by college kids on dialup. It died about the same time as TRL reverted MTV from countercultural juggernaut to corporate panderbear. If you're sitting there longing for the days when some dude at Columbia told you what to listen to, your problem now is that you've aged out of the demo not that Columbia can't figure out how to shove music down your throat.

The rise of social media has killed the art of curation because, these days, things are rarely curated. Criticism is dead (with Fantano3 being the one exception) and Gen Alpha doesn't know how to find music through anything but TikTok. Relying on algorithms puts way too much power in technology's hands. And algorithms can only predict content that you've seen before. It'll never surprise you with something different. It keeps you in a little bubble. Oh, you like shoegaze? Well, that's all the algorithm is going to give you until you intentionally start listening to something else.

To the contrary, my daughter, all of twelve years old, has gotten pretty damn good at tricking new music out of Tidal. That's because the algorithms don't predict content you've seen before - GraceNote has been doing things the exact same way since nineteen diggity two and it's got sound scientific data saying "this song and this song are similar along the following dozen metrics that decades of focus groups confirm track affinity." Spotify and everyone else have a preposterously large corpus saying "since 9/10ths of our listeners who like Nirvana also like REM, we're 100% going to shove REM down your throat." The author is absolutely right in that it's not going to suggest gregorian chants to go along with your REM because it assumes that rogue appearances of Randy Travis are negative for your listening style - "Aphex Twin" and "Squarepusher" are a pairing, "Portishead" "tricky" "Hooverphonic" "Poe" and "Veruca Salt" are such an agglomeration of major-label "indie" acts that I can basically know exactly what year your Spin Magazine subscription expired.

BECAUSE THAT'S THE PROBLEM: You forgot that you used to pay for curation.

Any streaming service worth their salt has a million curated playlists. You can listen to them. Not your cup of tea? Then you need to find a different curator.

Same with movies. Once a week I would watch Ebert and Roeper, who would discuss and review all the releases of that week, including indie and foreign ones. I would also sometimes flip through film magazines or randomly stumble across something cool being aired on the IFC channel or Bravo2.

Fuckin' nothing on Ebert & Roeper was outside a major studio's distro network. If it was on Ebert & Roeper it opened on a thousand screens. That metric has become so useless that nobody bats an eye when Tom Hanks releases a $150m movie on frickin' Apple TV, when Jeff Bezos somehow squanders $90m an episode on Hobbits. I love me some Lola Rennt as much or more than the next guy but (1) it was Sony (2) it had a six month theater run. I subscribe to the Washington Post and the Seattle Times and they both have theater critics. I ignore both of them because fuck you, that's why, but I mean for fuck's sake

How many times have we had a discussion with a friend who was recommending a show and our response was, "Oh yeah, I'll have to see it, but my list of shows is so long!"

What do you want here, lady

If you pivoted from "I read it in Spin Magazine, it must be good" to "I don't have time to check out a show my friends are recommending" that's a you problem, not a culture problem. Like,

- You can literally stumble across a song on Spotify

- Look it up on Bandcamp

- Find every single person who bought it

- Pick somebody at random and look up every single thing they've favorited or bought on Bandcamp

- See every single person who follows them and see the same thing

- Listen to every single track six times before Bandcamp even asks you for money

But yeah if you're gonna sit there and go nobody is telling me what to listen tooooooooooooooooooo then I know exactly what happened:

1) You gave up everything in favor of social media

2) That was building affinity in order to demonstrate its value to advertisers

3) And now that the advertisers are questioning the metrics

4) Social media is milking you like a goddamn cow and you don't like it.

Anbody sitting there pining for Spin Magazine and waxing nostalgic about Portishead is (1) old (2) tasteless and you know what? If fuckin' Spotify isn't serving you up new shit to go along with your Portishead it's because you don't like it. Here's a Portishead-adjacent band whose new album came out last year:

And I mean... fuck. That's some nostalgic shit right there. 353 whole views! 54k plays on Spotify, 200 album downloads off Bandcamp. Goddamn song is called "Mixtape Days" so it's straight-up pandering to Portishead whiners. Sure doesn't have 47m views, though. If you want the true flavor of this discussion, read the comments on that video, by the way, but hey - how did I find that song? I (1) stumbled across one of their older albums on Tidal (2) followed the band (3) let nine years lapse (4) got a surprise in my "new music" section. GO ALGORITHM This is how you get exciting discoveries like holy shit new Bel Canto or, despite the fact that I almost never listen to Coil and have never played Coil in Tidal, it tells me that The Wraiths and Strays of Paris has been remastered.

I'n'I probably listen to six hours of new music a week. Not "new to me", "came out in the last couple weeks" music. I air about 40 minutes of new music a week. I R A tastemaker. And it's not that fucking hard! All you have to do is have an epiphany like this:

"Huh, it's 2013 and I'm listening to Orb's 'Live '93.'"

"Huh, it came out 20 years ago."

"Huh, the time horizon between me listening to Live '93 when it came out and me listening to Live '93 now is the same as me listening to Live '93 when it came out and the fucking Dark Side of the Moon"

"Holy shit I better find some new fucking music"

And you know what? It's fucking easy. Find a podcast you like. Find a Mixcloud DJ you like. Find a Soundcloud DJ you like. Find someone to follow on Spotify. Find someone to follow on Last.FM. ASK YOUR FUCKING FRIENDS.

And that's where curation comes in. We need critics who devote their lives to browsing through the pile and telling us what is worth our time and what isn't.

AND THE CRITICS JUST WANT YOU TO FUCKING LISTEN

"Oh yeah, I'll have to see it, but my list of shows is so long!"

Speaking as someone who grew up without a college radio station, without MTV's "Amp", who used to have to drive an hour to buy CDs without the opportunity to listen to them, the threshold for discovery has never been lower. here's fucking Angolan industrial music on Youtube. All you gotta do is be willing to go down the rabbit hole instead of bitching about how Spin Magazine isn't telling you how to think anymore.

FFS.

I fuckin' mixed Poe. Nice lady. She's... okay. She added... nothing. If you're nostalgic for this shit?

It's not the industry, it's you.

I mean, clearly aleina thinks you need to become a flexible entity. I can speak only for myself, but I could use a teleportation portal. Not so much with the thorny mazes and god knows I have enough unexpected traps but you win some you lose some, don'tcha know?

I fucking hate Cormac McCarthy and everything he touched and I've learned to honor that in myself. John Gardner made the point that most "classics" are chosen by educators and that they choose not because the books are good but because they allow educators to make easy, simple points. You have to exercise the self-care to honor your own perspectives and needs - the phrase "I can try to keep to a schedule but just trying to do that seems to cause conflict" tells me that sticking up for yourself is something those around you aren't expecting.

What's important is what you value. If you're not sure what you value, try a few things on for size. When my life upended in 2007 and I found myself transitioning from "I have two projects headlining the NYT business section" to "I am about to go to producing school" to "I am a worthless bum" to "I just mixed live for double the population of New Zealand" in six weeks, I discovered an important inner truth: I love pineapple. And while I had no idea what to expect on a day-to-day basis, I knew that seeking pineapple gave me a concrete thing that generally inched my needle an iota or two towards comfort and pleasure.

The other nice thing about pineapple is it's a concrete thing. there's nothing abstract about "pineapple." "I can try to keep to a schedule" is a long goddamn border to defend, d00d. "I listen to 20 minutes of music before bedtime because it helps me relax" is concrete. If you defend that every goddamn day everyone around you will leave it alone because it's easier for them. They'll push on it initially because what they're doing is testing your resolve but if you reveal your resolve to be stronger than their own they'll give over. That gives you a defensible border - you can expand from "20 minutes of music before bedtime" to "I go to bed at 11, you're welcome to join me".

I'd start with the physical therapy and branch out. Anything you're paying for can have the blame shifted. Also I just started Dragon Age:Veilguard and I'm not sure I like it as much as :Origins but it's fun enough.

https://www.404media.co/american-schools-were-deeply-unprepared-for-chatgpt-public-records-show/

Yeah, that thought occurred to me in the waiting room of the ER. "Man, I sure am glad I'm not on a sailboat pointed at Vanuatu right now."

I had to wait two hours for an ultrasound tech to drive up from Albuquerque when I was a kid. And while a fresh medical student at the University of Washington diagnosed the eczema in my fingernails before I'd sat down, three years previously I'd been made to sit as an exhibit while every third dermatologist in the Mountain West wandered through, asked me to hold up my hands, stroked their chins and left. The consensus was leprosy, until they learned that I'd been cultured for leprosy and it came back negative.

I sat down to a taco salad last night. Then I jumped and looked behind me because there was a giant shadow of a snake on the floor.

Unfortunately the snake jumped, too. And started to dissipate. And was only in one eye. "What does it mean when your eye fills with blood?" I asked my wife. "I don't know," she said, "let's call the consulting nurse line." Which came back with "yep, that's an ER visit, which one are you going to" which we answered with "well that depends, which one is in network" which they responded with "let me connect you with someone who can answer that" and that person responded with "bitch, this is the dispatch line, do you need a cabulance" because this is America.

If you're going to go to the ER in America I recommend Tuesday night, ideally in an up-and-coming commuter neighborhood at some remove from downtown. I was triaged before I could take a seat, had blood drawn within ten minutes, had an ultrasound and a CT scan within an hour and a prognosis within two: not a stroke, not a brain hemorrhage, not a detached retina, visit this ophthalmologist ASAP because.... maybe multiple sclerosis? During the entire 2 1/2 hr adventure my eye filled with Dementors three more times.

The 9am call to the ophthalmologist landed us a 10am appointment which landed us a 10:30 diagnosis of retinal tear ("they always under-diagnose retinal stuff") and a 10:35 optical surgery. Unfortunately I'd had another geyser while I was sleeping and it clotted so I have a persistent black jellyfish in one eye. My vision is also yellower. I've been told this will dissipate. The guy who told me was Obama's ophthalmologist so he has my trust. I will follow up in a week.

I bring this up because apparently lots of people go "huh, my vision is full of blood, I'm sure that will pass" which means your retina detaches and you aren't looking at two minutes with a surprise laser you're looking at an operating room and a week of lying on your face recovering. So don't sleep on eye shit. 'cuz i guess as you become an old fart your eye jelly cuts loose and starts rolling around and most people never notice but for a lucky few it rips your retina on the way out and that shit won't necessarily heal itself.

There used to be two schools of thought about the causes of the 2008 financial crisis. The one the wonks were circling around was "we never should have let all these investment firms come up with these crazy-exotic models of money flow and investment risk because they traded models of the models of the models and the whole world blew up." The one the bros were circling around was "nobody could have seen that coming, d00d." Then Michael Lewis wrote The Big Short and the narrative became "nobody could have seen that coming - except my plucky heroes, d00d!"

I lead with this because "except my plucky heroes" is basic narrative storytelling whereas "we should have leashed our wizards" is advanced narrative storytelling. Basic storytelling is necessary to get the point across to The Stupids. Advanced storytelling might actually change things. The basic storytelling allows most of the world to go "well I guess that'll never happen again, good thing they fixed it" while the advanced storytelling, unobserved by nearly everyone, made it hella harder for super-crazy-hyperexotic math to break the world.

And by "super-crazy-hyperexotic math" we might be talking about diff EQ? Because the finance world sucks at math. See this thing? they gave it a Nobel Prize in Economics (which is not a Nobel and never will be) and it's literally "price over earnings times a seasonal coefficient." Which means anybody who can use an equation with an integral in it is a quant. And you don't get to go drinkin' with the boys on Tuesdays if you talk to the quants. Their job is to give us stuff to bet on. I mean sell to investors.

(I'm getting there I promise)

Buried hyper-deep in books that nobody recommends anymore is this very simple fact:

AIG built a model that told them that the odds of housing prices in the United States dropping by an aggregate of more than five percent was a "six sigma event" and described them as such. This makes them sound like they've been reading Taleb. What Taleb meant was "six or more standard deviations away from the mean" but what Taleb really meant was "nobody could have seen that coming, d00d." Taleb starts Black Swan with the assertion that nobody could have predicted Hitler, despite both Churchill and Wilson expressly predicting Hitler at the Treaty of Versailles, in public speeches.

This only matters because AIG used that model to insure the policies of Goldman Sachs, Chase, Washington Mutual, Bear Stearns and all the rest. And those policies underwrote their risk of mortgages going bad. And the riskier those mortgages were, the more of a premium those bonds paid to the bondholders. And the more the premium paid, the more money everyone made. Including AIG.

Who argued, based on fuckall, that the sun was more likely to go nova in 2009 than that housing prices would dip 5%.

NOW

I would argue that not a single "quant" argued that a housing dip was less likely than the sun going nova. But a whole lotta quants put together position papers and equations and arguments and justifications for finance bros to blast clear through any safeguards or lending requirements. What's the Mencken quote that was actually Upton SInclair? “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” Mencken gets credit because Paul Krugman credited him erroneously in 1989. Krugman went on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.

So the problem you will encounter is that the smarter you are, the better you are with numbers, the more easily you can manipulate them, the more likely you are to be asked to lie with them. The finance industry uses math the way RFK uses science - they cherry-pick stuff they don't understand to sell to gullible regulators who already want to believe. The actual money-making portion of the program is back-room deals and insider trading.

The "mathiness" portion of this debacle began with LTCM in 1998. Timeline goes like this:

- 1994: John Merriweather builds a magic new math fund around Myron Scholes' risk model

- 1997: Myron Scholes wins the Nobel Prize in Economics

- 1998: LTCM loses $5b for not predicting that the collapse of the Soviet Union would be economically spicy

When Genius Failed is a good book about that.

Fast forward ten years and everyone who made fun of LTCM (their approach was mocked as "picking up nickels in front of steamrollers") is now discovering the profits to be made if you adopt a Schroedinger's Risk model: things are very risky when making money off them, not risky at all when you're insuring against them. There are dozens of books about what happened next, just watch this instead.

And yes, none of this is relevant to your actual request, which is "how do I do math stuff with finance" and that's not me changing the subject or evading, because the math stuff is all delta gamma zeta options bullshit which isn't really math, it's Advanced Gambling. The book I recommend on finance is A Random Walk Down Wall Street which is now fifty fucking years old but gets to the basics in an extremely accessible way. Here are my caveats:

1) It pretends that markets are perfectly efficient when it's thunderously obvious that they work by insider trading and informational advantage

2) It argues that you make more money by staying in the market at all times rather than admitting that knowing when to fucking bail is a more effective strategy

3) It basically says "don't" about options and exotic mathematical instruments because fucking hell in 1973 John Merriweather was a fresh MBA in the pit at Salomon

Michael Lewis chose Michael Burry as his hero for The Big Short because Michael Burry, autist, went through and read the prospectii of all these credit default swaps and went "wait a minute... this shit only works if the housing market doesn't drop more than five percent!" he was also monied enough that he could go to Goldman Sachs and say "I would like to bet against you, create a credit default swap that pays out when the rest of your shit goes into default and sell it to me." He then got Goldman Sachs to grudgingly pay out after they initially ruled that they didn't have to because the only person who bought this CDO was Michael Burry. I mention this because "it's stupid to presume that the sun is more likely to go nova than for housing prices to drop five percent" isn't arcane knowledge. It's fucking obvious. But the whole "quant" universe of finance is about burying obvious truths in illegible equations so that you can sell them to pension funds.

Now get back to me once you can keep down some apple sauce and oatmeal and we'll continue the purge.

One of my "favorite things" about finance - and by "favorite things" I mean "thing that had I known about it as a child would have colored my impression of the moneyed and their pursuits in a decidedly negative way" - is technical analysis.

"Well of course, klein!" you say. "You're an annoyingly technical person, of course you love technical analysis." Ahhh but here's the thing - "technical analysis" as espoused by the financiers isn't technical, and it isn't analysis. I read a whole goddamn book on technical analysis just to see if there was anything there. There isn't. Burton Malkiel ran a bunch of tests where he gave TA dipshits a ticker that had been generated by a literal coin flip and then asked them how they thought their "analysis" was doing. Some were happy, some were sad, none clued into the fact that they were using all their tools to scry the behavior of a coin toss.

The technical analysts won't even dispute this. They'll argue that technical analysis is so powerful that it can produce false positives and false negatives from random number generators so you'd best try even harder. True practitioners will lock themselves out from all noise sources. Some have even argued that they trade better if they don't know the security they're trading. All that matters is what magic shapes they draw on their graph to determine what the next candle is going to be.

That's literally the way Markov chains work.

The fundamental basis of LLMs is pattern recognition where the process is actually hindered by too much horizon. They work better if they're only looking ahead a little bit. They don't analyze shit, and they can't. They know that in 100 runs of seven times five, the answer is 35, one hundred times over. But if they need to know what seven hundred times five pi is, they don't have 100 runs. So they get it wrong sometimes. Because they're not doing math. They're looking up values in a table and if there are holes, they're extrapolating over the top of it.

I'm willing to bet Apple didn't say "LLMs suck at reasoning, duh" for the same reason they rolled their eyes and coughed up a $3200 nerd helmet - nobody is willing to talk about the emperor's new clothes yet. There is no part of the methodology underlying LLMs that bears even a passing resemblance to reasoning. It's like saying Tesla's Autopilot sucks at conversational Mongolian - Why wouldn't it? Ahhh - but you can set the UI to Mongolian so isn't that conversing?

Here's the other part: It's Pareto principle all the way down. Everything OpenAI or any of the other vendors have ever done is a solid B minus. Everything they do is 80% effort. It's not quite a C? But it's super-close. The ouvre of commercial AI is just good enough not to make your parents sign your homework. But for a lot of stuff, that's plenty. I don't need an A-plus meme, I need a B-minus meme NOW. I don't need an A-plus essay, I need a B-minus essay NOW.

One of the things about being on set is everyone on set can do 80% of everyone else's job on set. We've all been on set long enough that we know the easy steps. Do something hard? yer fukt. You hire the experts because when you're in a pinch, they know what to do. it takes me 15 seconds to explain how to mix major-market house reality television to any schlub who walks through the door - we used to do it as a party trick. Sure, your daughter can sit at the console. Absolutely Miss Celebrity can throw on some headphones. But if things get dicey you'd best get out of the chair quick because I don't even know if I can explain to you how to fix what just happened. Nobody ever asks intelligent questions, they ask the same stupid ones. Except Francis Ford Coppola. He came in and chatted with us (we didn't know who he was at the time, just that the producers were terrified) for a good fifteen minutes and asked some really insightful questions. And yer goddamn right - once I figured out I had been having a lengthy technical conversation with the writer/director of The Conversation I was over the moon.

Marketing schmucks? They don't really understand the Pareto Principle. Some of them are geniuses and they know it. Most of them occasionally catch lightning in a bottle, and that keeps them employed long enough to continue to muddle through. So all their ads for AI are about selling the 80% as if it were the 20%. They don't know, they don't understand it, and they can't tell the difference. The guys writing AI? They hope you can't tell the difference.

Let's talk paint-by-number because I think it's an interesting analogy. The thing about paint-by-number kits is they're generally bought by people who enjoy painting. Painting by number incrementally builds their skills. You do that enough, you might become an artist. I mean, jingle trucks are basically paint-by-number; tell me these guys aren't skilled.

Give 'em a blank spot and they will synthesize. They have their bag'o'tricks for sure but the good ones are novel.

It is physically impossible for LLM-based AI to be novel. It can arrive at an original place on the look-up table but it will never step out of bounds. It will muddle through just fine in the 80% but the 81% is luck only. 85% is a fluke. 90% is virtually impossible.

You mentioned Graeber before, but I'm not sure if that's fair, because the patternmatcher doesn't care if it's matchin' patterns for the next TPS report or at a charity to cure rare cancers. "We've always done it that way" tasks and jobs now have their head put under the guillotine, and they are not few or far between I think. Journalism...yeah, not looking great.

I think with academia and with journalism the problem is nobody needs the 80%. Essays have always been an imperfect analog of knowledge. A journalist can research undiscovered facts and can synthesize unformulated opinions. AIs can do neither but since so much of what both students and journalists produce isn't actually within the purvey of what they're supposed to be doing, the AI can do a B-minus level approximation of that make-work.

That is recognizably a jingle truck. It's not even obviously AI.

holy fuck is it boring tho

Fucking lol it didn't get within a dozen pixels in six different runs

I know a few former EMTs. My take is that it's a good interim career that opens you up to other things - one I know transitioned to property developer, another transitioned to midwife and then pharmaceutical rep, another is transitioning to full-time musician.

My suggestion is to look at it in terms of "I want to spend the next 5-10 years as an EMT" instead of "I want to be an EMT" and see how that hits. We interact with EMTs on the daily and the guys in the rigs generally don't do it forever - they either cycle into admin or they cycle out to other jobs.

Okay. I was going to write one thing. I probably still will. But this made me realize something. So I'm going to write that first. Because it was a "my god it's full of stars" moment.

The reason there are so many of these articles is journalists recognize that AI will expose them as the fucking frauds they are.

Oops, wrong tone hang on a minute

If my deep and abiding hatred for liberal arts education and its practitioners is unclear, here's a refresher. The TL;DR on that is "it's all about the unpaid internships and everyone knows it" but in case that's unclear lemme draw out a couple beats on Our Hero Chungin "Roy" Lee:

Lee was born in South Korea and grew up outside Atlanta, where his parents run a college-prep consulting business. He said he was admitted to Harvard early in his senior year of high school, but the university rescinded its offer after he was suspended for sneaking out during an overnight field trip before graduation. A year later, he applied to 26 schools; he didn’t get into any of them. So he spent the next year at a community college, before transferring to Columbia.

It takes a special kind of NYMag article to start with that guy and roll into "zomfg our students will never learn Keats" or some shit but let's check back on Roy a couple hundred words later:

Interview Coder’s website featured a banner that read F_CK LEETCODE. Lee posted a video of himself on YouTube using it to cheat his way through an internship interview with Amazon. (He actually got the internship, but turned it down.) A month later, Lee was called into Columbia’s academic-integrity office. The school put him on disciplinary probation after a committee found him guilty of “advertising a link to a cheating tool” and “providing students with the knowledge to access this tool and use it how they see fit,” according to the committee’s report.

Note that Columbia disciplined him for coming up with an app that helped people cheat on job interviews, nothing to do with college. Hey, what's Roy up to now?

Before launching Cluely, Lee and Shanmugam raised $5.3 million from investors, which allowed them to hire two coders, friends Lee met in community college (no job interviews or LeetCode riddles were necessary), and move to San Francisco. When we spoke a few days after Cluely’s launch, Lee was at his Realtor’s office and about to get the keys to his new workspace. He was running Cluely on his computer as we spoke. While Cluely can’t yet deliver real-time answers through people’s glasses, the idea is that someday soon it’ll run on a wearable device, seeing, hearing, and reacting to everything in your environment. “Then, eventually, it’s just in your brain,” Lee said matter-of-factly.

This is Roy BTW, in case you were unsure

_____________________________________________________

If I had to guess, this started as an article titled something like "college is a fucking sham" and then the editorial board lost their minds and it turned into "Pearls Clutched; Are Our Children Learning." Because really, what it says is "college is a fucking sham, as finally revealed to one and all via ChatGPT." For my entire goddamn life there's been this hand-wringing "we must teach them the cultuuuur" aspect to education which is entirely about liberal arts majors justifying their degrees. Does anyone else think it's really fucking funny that we created an academic culture so heavily reliant on essays that one in five students have a learning disability diagnosis on file for that sweet, sweet extra test and assignment time?

My sister is working on a teaching certificate right now (until tomorrow, anyway, when she'll likely withdraw because she caught my mother's c-diff). It's some dumb bullshit University of Phoenix thing where she was super-offended that her first homework assignment was poorly graded because of the grammar and spelling (no notes on ideas or concepts whatsoever). I told her to take her essay and have ChatGPT grade it, and once she corrected it it got a 100%. If both sides of the divide are using AI what the fuck is the point.

I've used radar detectors as an analogy for arms races for going on 40 years. First you had cops and you had speeders. Then the cops started using radar. Then the speeders started using radar detectors. Then the cops started using lasers. then the speeders started using laser detectors. now you've got your speed trap reported on Waze. It's an arms race. Here's the funny thing, though: The NHTSA knew that radar detectors improved traffic safety in 1988. The point wasn't safety, though. The point was ticket revenue. So... arms race.

I'm fucking old. I'm so fucking old that I had to deal with "ZOMFG do we let the kids use graphing calculators in Algerbra" and then, four years later, "ZOMFG do we let the kids use calculators on the SAT." 30 years later, fucking of course you do. Because learning how to use a calculator isn't learning how to do math, it's learning how to do computation and the difference between learning to use a calculator, learning to use a trig table and learning to use a slide rule isn't "did you learn" it's "what's your source of error."

"What's your source of error" on liberal arts bullshit has always been a joke. I used to play with my teachers like a cat with a mouse. I'd inject logical fallacies to see if they caught them. I'd use metaphors that undercut my point to see if they'd notice. They never did. They weren't grading on whether or not I learned the material, they were grading on whether I could vomit up a five paragraph essay. Which have always been mad-libs, by the way. I taught my kid how to vomit up a 5-paragraph essay when she was eight years old. It's protective camo. If you say abject fucking nonsense with decent grammar and spelling there isn't a TA or teacher in the world who won't give you a decent grade because they're victims of this structure where they have to grade a hundred 5-paragraph essays a month. Hey pearl-clutching NYMag got anything to say about that

Whenever Wendy uses AI to write an essay (which is to say, whenever she writes an essay), she follows three steps. Step one: “I say, ‘I’m a first-year college student. I’m taking this English class.’” Otherwise, Wendy said, “it will give you a very advanced, very complicated writing style, and you don’t want that.”

Protective coloration, sure. I can write in a bunch of different registers. My wife has handwriting in different fonts.

Step two: Wendy provides some background on the class she’s taking before copy-and-pasting her professor’s instructions into the chatbot.

Right. If you need the anecdotes you need to tell the robot.

Step three: “Then I ask, ‘According to the prompt, can you please provide me an outline or an organization to give me a structure so that I can follow and write my essay?’ It then gives me an outline, introduction, topic sentences, paragraph one, paragraph two, paragraph three.” Sometimes, Wendy asks for a bullet list of ideas to support or refute a given argument: “I have difficulty with organization, and this makes it really easy for me to follow.”

and nothing of value was lost because not a single five-paragraph essay ever written mattered fuckall even six weeks later but academia has been clinging to them for a hundred years anyway. If you can't say anything you fucking want in a 5-paragraph essay intended for an overworked, underpaid TA? you have a learning disability. Go get your doctor's note and another couple hours. Or, I dunno. Feed it to Saltman. It's fucking pointless anyway, liberal arts grading has been where knowledge goes to die anyway.

I did an engineering education at two schools. One of them was good, the other one was the #4 undergrad program in the world according to US News at the time. At the good school we were allowed a single page of hand-written notes for all quizes and exams. It became about density, and about selection, and about prediction - what formulae are you likely to need? easily 60% of our studying was about assembling that tool over and over and over again so that we could walk into class and bang out a decent answer with nothing but a TI-85 and a pencil. At the world-beater we slammed that shit into Excel's "Solver" and TAs literally weighed our Finite Element Analysis reports. I had to have mine regraded because rather than kill five reams of paper I'd do two and then write "etc" so the TA judged my report to be an F even though the answers were right. Yep, Denton's Folly (see above note).

I don't make much of this but I've been interviewed by the Wall Street Journal. I've been interviewed by The Atlantic. I've been interviewed by The Daily Beast. Every article was deeply disappointing because even among these stalwart organizations, they're all fucking phoning it in. I have no Gell-Mann Amnesia because I've had enough personal experience with journalism to know that the only journalists worth bothering with are the ones who actually go visit what they're reporting on and those are few and far between. Why is journalism failing? because most of it is pointless. The entire fucking industry was propped up by classified ads, which is why the existential threat to journalism was never Google or Facebook or whatever it was fucking Craigslist.

The existential threat to academia isn't AI, it's the world discovering the dilution driving enrollment

You wanna solve AI cheating in college? Here walk with me it's fucking easy:

1) assign reading outside of class

2) give over half of class time to small-group discussion

3) Give over the other half to closed-note, no-technology short-answer quizzes.

Have the kids show up with a pencil and paper and demonstrate their knowledge of the subject matter. No more fucking essays. FUCK ESSAYS. I say that as a dipshit with a novel, three graphic novels, two optioned screenplays and a history of being repped at three different marquee agencies - FUCK ESSAYS. They show that you're good at writing essays, not that you know what you're talking about and the fact that the liberal arts have leaned on this shit for a hundred years is why the liberal arts have such a self-inflated regard for themselves.

Liberal arts journalism: "ZOMFG AI is destroying knowledge as we know it"

It’ll be years before we can fully account for what all of this is doing to students’ brains. Some early research shows that when students off-load cognitive duties onto chatbots, their capacity for memory, problem-solving, and creativity could suffer. Multiple studies published within the past year have linked AI usage with a deterioration in critical-thinking skills; one found the effect to be more pronounced in younger participants. In February, Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University published a study that found a person’s confidence in generative AI correlates with reduced critical-thinking effort. The net effect seems, if not quite Wall-E, at least a dramatic reorganization of a person’s efforts and abilities, away from high-effort inquiry and fact-gathering and toward integration and verification.

Finance journalism: "ZOMFG kids are making $60k a year out of high school because they took wood shop"

A teenager can make $20 an hour as a welder’s helper after graduating from high school with technical-education classes, Hughes said. Another year of welding instruction at a community college can boost pay to $60,000 a year for pipeline jobs in Bakersfield-area oil fields. Even with the expansion of the district’s vocational classes, student demand outpaces available seats. Last school year, 6,200 students applied for 2,500 spots at the two vocational campuses. The wait-list for auto shop is 300 students, said Fernando Castro, one of the instructors.

Castro took a $50,000 pay cut when he left his job as an automotive technician in 2015. He said he was inspired by his mother, also a teacher. The district has since adjusted its salary formula to reflect industry experience. Castro now makes $100,000 a year, matching his former income. “It’s the best job I’ve ever had,” he said, helping launch young adults into well-paying careers and having his summers free.

Hey University of Phoenix you got anything to say about this that aged really really well

Let's get back to my buddy Roy. This was likely the biggest event in his parents' life. He "got into Harvard" which means his parents bought their way in. Any idea why, Roy?

When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.”

every.

single.

one.

of these articles.

Is about how students are betraying the hallowed glories of an undergraduate education without the barest acknowledgment of what a naked scam an undergraduate education has been for a generation or more. Journalists in particular are clutching their pearls about this because while nobody can agree about what flavor of bullshit their career is, they all agree it's bullshit.

I'll coin a rule of thumb: if you're worried about AI coming for your job, you should be. If you aren't, it might not be because you're a feckless moron who doesn't know when to listen to journalists, it's maybe because you actually have some expertise.

I told my sister two and a half years ago that our mother was either going to die of MRSA or she was going to die of C-diff. It's looking like C-diff.

"dying of a bacterial infection because you didn't do your physical therapy so you can't wipe your ass cleanly so your UTI hospitalizes you so you catch a killer bug that murders you with diarrhea" is Dante's Inferno stuff for this woman. Fuckn My sister, however, wasn't always mistreated by her so she's trying to save her life. I've been counseling her through it all and providing what advice I can. She ended up extracting the bitch (and her senile husband) to a Romanian-run homecare in Redneckistan, CA, where the C-diff came back super-mean. The senile husband has been busily flushing his diapers which backed up the plumbing which flooded the house which caused three staffers to quit. Meanwhile my mother is such a cantankerous bitch that two skilled nursing facilities (where she did time recuperating from various bouts of c-diff) have already refused to take her back.

There are two things that suck:

1) My sister is neglecting her own kids to deal with this bitch who, now that she's chased away everyone else, is treating my sister the way she always treated me

2) My sister is not having a good time with it so I'm having to be simultaneously sympathetic while also dancing around the subject of "she's been this nasty to me my entire goddamn life"

The bitch disowned me over email about 30 seconds after the offer on the house was accepted. She'll probably be dead before I can move in. My daughter overheard me conversing with my sister in the car and asked what's up; I told her "your grandma is going to die of a nasty infection because she didn't keep up on her exercises enough to be able to wipe her own ass." My daughter responded with "this may be an insensitive question, but are we going to the funeral?" to which I laughed and said "hell nah I doubt there will even be one."

I've been grappling with the certainty that I'll never get to live in this house. I will be dead before that happens. It's just the law of the universe. The silver lining is in counseling my sister through her misadventures, I've been able to explain and rationalize and predict the bitch's behavior in such a way that it helps my sister cope. At one point I said

"she judges her happiness on a relative scale; it's not really important that she's objectively enjoying herself, what's important is that everyone around her is more miserable than she is"

and I heard it

and I realized that my sense of doom about success and personal advancement isn't some superstitious outcome of low self-esteem, it's a learned bias well-grounded in my own personal experiences growing up.

I still don't think I'll live to sleep under that roof. But I now know why I think that.

One thing's for fuckin' sure she never will

I know less than fuckall about the SF housing market but having saddled myself with a project in which

- Plumbing

- Electrical

- HVAC

- Structural

- Architectural

- and Landscaping

have all cried "uncle" at one point or another, I can share a few insights:

1) If it needs a roof, most people looking at it will assume it needs a fuckton more. Changing out the roof is maintenance everyone does with stunning regularity because if you don't you can't insure your house and if you can't ensure your house and also can't afford a cash bond, your city can foreclose on you. My house needed about $400k in plumbing, electrical and HVAC and it had a new roof three months before I bought it.

2) If it has a new foundation but doesn't have a new roof, most people looking at it will assume that there's something deep dark and deadly that the sales agent is hiding.

3) If it has a new foundation but doesn't have a bunch of other new shit, the assumption is that the foundation was necessary to avoid the house being red-tagged and all the stuff that isn't a literal life-safety issue is left to do.

None of these are certain. Think like a flipper, though: money is dumbly expensive and you may be seeing something that another flipper is trying to get out from under. Everyone I talk to assumes I'm flipping my house; the median home price in town is now like $1.8m, why on earth would you buy something that ridiculous to live in when clearly there's money to be made?

Disclosure has also gotten ridiculously stupid in the past 24 months. Used to be you'd have your inspection period and you'd come up with a laundry list of items to knock the price down. You'd throw all the broken shit at them and they'd haggle over what it was worth. Then someone decided to sue a seller for not disclosing something they knew about from a prior inspection and lost so now you get your inspection period, you add up your costs, and you say "we're reducing our offer $25k; you don't wanna know why and we don't want to tell you."

And hey you know what? Maybe they don't want to reduce their price $25k. They tell you to pound sand, they take it off the market for 30 days, and then they relist it. It doesn't show as a reduction. It doesn't show history. It's a brand new house for a brand new set of yokels to come look at. You can literally play this game until someone stupid enough comes along to pay your ask. I have a friend who's been shopping in Reno for 18 months. They made an offer on a place that looked pristine and as soon as they said "we need to do another inspection to see if this is going to cost $50k or $550k to fix" the seller's agent stopped answering the phone and the earnest money reverted.

I'm rather proud of breaking Redfin. I came back with "we will offer you $300k under ask, no reason" and they came back with "ZOMFG so outrageous" (her) "my f'n ex-wife" (him). I came back with "if you take the offer I'll show you why" which was enough for her to go "okay fucking fine" and enough for him to go "see here how this bitch managed to do $350k worth of damage to this house? We're petitioning to have the divorce settlement opened back up so the reduction comes out of her half." Redfin responded by saying that I had gained $450k in equity the very next day, and then 30 days later decided I'd lost $150k in equity in the past 30 days because of the giant crater I put in the housing market. The Seattle Times ran a graph of county sales over the past year and shit was thin enough on the ground that I can literally see where I dragged down the housing market for the whole goddamn county. So I know a thing or two about bargain hunting.

And what I will tell you is that every single person you will find, you will talk to, you will work with? From your realtor to your inspector to the first contractor you call? They're all assclowns. They are nebbishes, they are dipshits, they are morons, they are fucktards, they are woefully out of their depth and the simple fact that they're available to you means that they can only drive you deeper.

I just fired my third architect. She fucking sistered rafters onto rafters she drew at the wrong angle, despite having a picture in the prints showing the correct angle, and then said "well you said yourself this was a complicated project." When I told her that it would have been cheaper to put in a new roof she said "I thought you were."

Then why the fuck are we sistering to rafters we're demoing bitch

And, of course, she submitted prints that show sistered rafters to demo'd rafters. Because she's an incompetent floozy. But they all are.

I had a lot of contempt for the building trades back when I was an architectural consultant. I tempered it somewhat for a while because I've had good luck with some contractors. But I realized a couple months ago that I had five buildings in the national AIA top ten in 2004 and almost nobody gets to work at that level in architecture. The architects who pissed me off back then were the ones with Wikipedia pages, not the ones operating out of the spare bedroom.

It's been alternatively terrifying and edifying that one contractor after another has come back with "oh, I see it now." Or "man this house is going to be cool." Or "yeah, I get it. This just works." Because I've been trying to renovate a great house owned and built by a unique guy who got taken advantage of by parasites. And it's been inches from majesty for thirty goddamn years but there have been too many bloodsuckers and not enough genuine practitioners to even fucking attempt what I'm doing. It's a soul-scouring amount of work and I'm on the verge of tears many times weekly.

And if you're looking at something in the Bay Area that needs a roof?

That's a lot of words and prevarication about a simple process. But then, it's also a post that starts with a story about squirrels and illustrates it with a marmot.

The squirrels don't illustrate an accountability sink, the squirrels indicate that KLM's board were a bunch of cowards. They chose to throw the deck employees under the bus even though they were perfectly clear to throw the government under the bus which is the sort of thing that happens when you're letting the king LARP around as an airline pilot.

The gate attendant doesn't illustrate an accountability sink, the gate attendant illustrates a deflection point. Some airlines give exquisite control to their staff on the ground, some airlines bury things deep in process. Delta, for example, doesn't have much power at the gate but your Skymiles concierge can work a level of magic commensurate with your VIP status. American uses an algorithm that compensates for their overbooking by ranking passengers on their likelihood to fly American again. Alaska and Southwest empower their gate attendants with a great deal more power because as smaller airlines they recognize that a human face is their superpower.

The credit card character count is some made-up bullshit, near as I can tell, and if it's not Mr. Sustrik should post a source. American Express, famously, put first initials only on their credit cards for several decades.

Tim Snyder wrote a whole-ass book about how the majority of the Holocaust wasn't gas chambers, it was Polish farmers shooting their neighbors. Given a choice between "shoot your neighbor and take his land" or "get in the trench, Kowalski" the majority of Poles made the understandable (and haunting) choice. Hannah Arendt regretted coining the phrase "the banality of evil" for the rest of her life because the reality is the Nazis knew they were perpetrating evil but were also in a mutual support structure designed to alienate them from anyone but evildoers.

Yet, the vague feeling of arbitrariness about Nuremberg trials persists. Why blame these guys and not the others?

1) Woodrow Wilson told Harry Truman that he could have vengeance against the Axis powers for WWII, or he could have peace.

2) There was no time to stand up an entire industrial base in Germany so much of it was reconstituted with the existing players in place, as catalogued by David De Jong.

3) it is necessary to post show-trials against hiding Nazis because the whole purpose of Nuremberg was to perform a healing ritual between the victors and the villain vanquished. By passing judgement on the vanquished they were processed into victor society. By avoiding judgement the fugitives were prolonging the conflict.

The Nazi trials post-Nuremberg served the following purposes:

- They reinforce the narrative that the world can move on from the Nazis

- They reward the vanquished for stepping forward to be processed back into society

- They remind the populace that genocide isn't okay

It could be argued that the rise of AfD and National Front are a direct consequence of the cessation of Nazi trials - with no reminder of "Nazis bad" a generation of post-expansion citizens doing worse than their parents ask "Nazis bad?"

The purpose of bureaucratic overhead is to ensure that no single person has the power to destroy everything. This is where Robert's Rules of Order come from - they allow a bunch of people who fucking hate each other to get shit done. Every HOA hates the shit out of Robert's Rules until Joe flies off the handle about Bob's Trump flag and all of a sudden, it's great to have rules. We're in this ridiculous tariff mess because the president of the United States can't arbitrarily cook up a bunch of tariffs without an emergency declaration and the Republican congress is so beholden to their populist that they rolled over and agreed that he had one.

The purpose of corporate overhead is to ensure that no single person has to accept responsibility for any wrongdoing. In the KLM example, the board members could have signed a statement saying "situation sucks, but it is what it is" without having PETA throw stuffed woodchucks at their villas or whatever. Instead they rolled over on their customs team because they're feckless shitheads. There's a great bit in The Corporation where the former chairman of BP talks about sitting down with the protestors on his lawn over a spill, saying "look, man, I'm not a fan of oil spills either, all I can do is try to steer a bunch of people towards making the right decision who can try to steer a bunch of shareholders towards making the right decision" for which he was ousted by corporate raiders. The corporate raiders were smart enough to not make any public statements about oil spills while also championing a corporate culture that wanted less safety, not more.

In any organization, incentives to replace human judgement by process are strong.

This, right here, is where things are wrong: the incentive is to replace human responsibility, not judgement. The Las Vegas hospital and its utter reversion to immediate life-saving practices happened because of primum non nocere - the ethical guideline all healthcare practitioners sign onto says "first, do no harm" and that means "first, don't sit around waiting for EPIC to tell you what to do if your patient is obviously bleeding out." Every hospital guideline in the United States has all sorts of backstops to support practitioners who think they're doing the right thing - every medical malpractice suit you've ever seen takes some form of "the doctor did the wrong thing even though he knew better."

The air traffic controller example is another stupid misunderstanding of how things work - that was an incident review, not a blame-seeking event. The other air traffic controllers rallied around Wascher because (A) she made an honest mistake that she owned up to (B) every other air traffic controller knew that's the sort of honest mistake that can easily happen due to process.

Several events then occurred in quick succession. First, the second Metroliner tuned in to the wrong frequency, and she had to track it down and reissue its clearance to cross the runway. Then a Southwest flight announced that it was ready to enter runway 24L, so she told it to hold short. And finally, another SkyWest flight took off on runway 24R and had to be handed to the next controller. Unfortunately, amid these multiple distractions, she simply forgot that SkyWest 5569 was still sitting on runway 24L, awaiting takeoff clearance. Moments later, she cleared USAir flight 1493 to land, unaware that she was making a catastrophic error.

That was such a process-driven accident that LAX added a second goddamn control tower four years later. The fact of the matter was, they doubled the size of the airport for the olympics and there were areas of the runway that were hard to see from the existing tower. LAX is a monster. Compare and contrast with the 2018 false missile alarm in Hawaii where the initial rumors were "Jerry's a fuckup." Jerry lost his job because he wouldn't cooperate with the investigation because he's a fuckup but also the process experienced some real changes so even if you end up with another Jerry in the seat, you don't send false missile warnings to everyone's cell phones.

My wife has taken part in two separate types of incident reviews - in California they did monthly peer review, where everyone brought cases to say "did I fuck up?" Everyone bent over backwards to say "well you could have done this" instead of "yeah you fucked up" because there but for the grace of god go I and on the day, you don't have time to phone a friend. In Washington it's called incident review and it's protected under official state confidentiality. It's also required for licensure. There's a list of "sentinel events" that require incident review and most of them are "this happened" not "you did this." Part of incident review is "did you fuck something up so badly that in the opinion of your peers, this case needs to be officially investigated by the state." A bigger part of incident review is "this shit comes up and here's the successful way to deal with it."

The author seems to be blown away by the idea that the engineers behind Google were allowed to do whatever was necessary at the moment to keep Gmail running. how is that not an "accountability trap?" That means if the engineer fucks up, the engineer gets blamed. But just like Southwest, it comes down to a confidence in your team to solve the problems in front of them. The people at CMS got out of their accountability trap - they were requisitioners, not engineers, and it wasn't until they were officially ordered to let the engineers cook that they were able to resurrect Obamacare. Prior to that, it was all about their fuckups. That's not "sidestepping" accountability, that's giving it to someone else: The buck stops here. Boris Johnson took the minor responsibility of letting a mercy flight travel to China and back; Congress knows that these aren't their tariffs, they're Trump's and whatever blowback they face from supporting them is vastly less than whatever vengeance they'll face from opposing Trump.

We need an "accountability trap" in Congress. It would be a good thing.

But then this is a guy who called a marmot a squirrel and who thinks VCs are good but the free market is bad.