The OG internet moguls were legit Mountain Dew-addled asocial coding savant t-shirt slobs, and that style quickly became a way to intimidate tie clad IBMers and VCs in meetings. “Man, these guys must be geniuses, they don’t even GAF”
The schlubby chic look was part of the con. Made him seem like someone who didn’t care about the money, which sends a subtle anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist, anti-finance bro NLP type message.
https://twitter.com/esaagar/status/1603015654206066688Posted by Noam Blum (neontaster) on Thursday, December 15th, 2022 1:25pm
Then it became sort of a cosplay thing for vaporware charlatans targeting FOMO investors.
“psst, Bob, should we really give $20 million to this guy? He’s picking his nose and wiping it on his cargo shorts rn”
“But remember that last nosepicker we passed on? He made $10 billion”
*fun fact: 8 years ago nosepicking guy was a Ralph Lauren-wearing chairman of the Delta Chi party committee, majoring in Entrepreneurship. And then he took the Silicon Valley Dress Down for Success seminar
There are other stylistic variations on pure slovenliness; the Black Turtleneck Next Steve Jobs gambit, and the coffee-clutching Patagonia Vest & Untuckits Next Steve Bezos thing
Oh, and the hoodies, so many hoodies.
For everybody thinking “tech people need to start wearing IBM suits again”: if you showed up to work or a VC meeting in one you would be thought deranged, building security, or a lunch caterer
For me the peak of Silicon Valley style will always be the pre-internet Assembly Language programmer polyester clip-on tie & short sleeve Sears Towncraft dress shirt look. The effortless nonchalance told you “I can trust this person not to run to the Carribean with my money”
David Burge (@Iowahawk), Twitter, 2022-12-15.
January 1, 2025
QotD: The OG internet moguls
December 30, 2024
Ted Gioia on 2025’s most likely trends
Peeking out from behind the paywall, the latest installment of Ted Gioia‘s arts & culture briefing includes some good news for those of us who still remember when book stores actually sold books (unlike the last time I visited an Indigo store to find that the books were even more of an afterthought than ever):
“Barnes & Noble Book Store” by JeepersMedia is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
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The Barnes & Noble turnaround is really happening — and everybody in the culture business should learn from it.
More than a year ago, I celebrated the arrival of a new boss at Barnes & Noble who actually loves books.
This led him to do all sorts of brave things. He stopped promoting new titles based on kickbacks from publishers, and instead showcased books that people might actually enjoy reading.
This was an example of stealth culture mentioned above. Shoppers had no idea that the promoted books at the front of the store were chosen on the basis of financial incentives, not quality. And new boss Jamie Daunt shook the entire publishing business by turning down the cash.
He also empowered employees in the store, giving them freedom to feature books that they loved. He told his local booksellers to remove every title from every shelf, and “weed out the rubbish”. He wanted the staff to be excited about the books they sold.
I now have a happy update to my previous report.
Barnes & Noble has more than 60 new locations opening this year, and store foot traffic is improving steadily.
In an especially inspiring move, the company recently reopened a huge retail space in DC it had abandoned in 2013. After more than a decade, it returned to the same location and opened a flagship store.
When he took over, Daunt saw that the stores were “crucifyingly boring”. But now the excitement is back. Some visitors even compare Barnes & Noble nowadays to a theme park for books.
Kendra Keeter-Gray, a BookTok content creator with over 100,000 followers, told CNN that she and her friends could spend anywhere between 30 minutes to a few hours inside a Barnes & Noble, usually in the BookTok section where they trade recommendations and flip through currently trending novels.
“When you go to Barnes, it’s like an excursion almost. I would equate it to when I was little and my parents would take me to Six Flags,” she said.
Meanwhile here’s a completely different strategy for the book business …
In Japan, writers can rent out their own shelf at a local bookstore.
The new trend in Japanese bookstores is to sublease the shelves to outsiders. The result is the exact opposite of algorithm-chosen books. Every shelf is filled with surprises.
According to the South China Morning Post:
“Here, you find books which make you wonder who on earth would buy them,” laughs Shogo Imamura, 40, who opened one such store in Tokyo’s bookstore district of Kanda Jimbocho in April.
“Regular bookstores sell books that are popular based on sales statistics while excluding books that don’t sell well,” says Imamura … “We ignore such principles”.
December 28, 2024
How the H1B visa argument follows an earlier political struggle
On the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, ESR points out that the arguments over US work permits for foreigners might well have been prefigured by the now-receding tide of attempts to gut the second amendment:
alexandriabrown @alexthechick
It is difficult to overstate how caustic this is to public debate and public acceptance of legislation. If you give us X, we will accept restriction Y is the basis of all compromise. When a party gets X on the basis of accepting Y, then immediately undermines Y, the deal is void.This was part of a thread about H1B abuse, correctly pointing out that the companies who lobbied for H1B didn’t hold up their end of the deal, leaving many Americans feeling betrayed — especially tech workers who were fired in favor of an imported hire, then told their severance pay would be denied if they didn’t train their replacements.
I am, however, irresistibly reminded of another betrayal. One I’ve written about before — but maybe at least part of this story needs to be told again.
Today in the 21st century most of the American gun culture is bitterly, even fanatically opposed to more “gun control” laws, and howling for all of them clear back to the National Firearms Act of 1934 to be repealed. Donald Trump earned huge support with his promise to get national concealed-carry reciprocity pushed through Congress.
We weren’t always like that. Long ago, before 1990, many of us were less resistant to new gun control measures. Sometimes major gun-rights organizations would even help lawmakers draft legislative language.
(Yes, I was a gun owner then. So I’m not going by legends, but by lived experience.)
What changed?
The quid-quo-pros we were offered were many variations of “If you will accept this specific restriction X, we will stop pushing. We will stop trying to undermine your Second Amendment rights in general. Help us save the chilllldren!”
That promise was never kept. Gradually, we noticed this. It always turned out that the minority of angry suspicious people who said “This won’t be enough, they’ll come back for another bite!” were right.
Eventually, some documents leaked out of one of the major graboid organizations that revealed a conscious strategy of salami-slicing — instead of challenging gun rights directly, they intended to gradually make owning personal weapons less useful and more onerous until the culture around them collapsed.
So nowadays we’re pretty much all angry and suspicious. Even restrictions that do little harm and might be objectively reasonable (bump stocks, anyone?) touch off tsunamis of protest.
People offering us more “deals” (just give up this one little thing, mmmkay?) now have negative credibility.
Are you paying attention, Big Tech? (Particularly you, @elonmusk, and you, @VivekGRamaswamy.) Because you’re almost there, now. Too many people see that H1B has become an indentured-servitude fraud that victimizes both the workers it imports and the Americans it displaces.
You credibility isn’t as shot as the gun-banners’ yet. You still have some room for recovery on “high-skilled immigation” in general, but it’s decreasing.
Your smart move would be to sacrifice H1B so you can keep the O-1 “genius” visas. I advise you to take it, because if you dig in your heels I think you are likely to lose both.
And on the reason so many Americans have become angry about blatant and exploitive H1B visa abuse:
Today’s big beef is between tech-success maximizers like @elonmusk and MAGA nationalists who think the US job market is being flooded by low-skill immigrants because employers don’t want to pay competitive wages to Americans.
To be honest, I think both sides are making some sound points. But I’d rather focus on a different aspect of the problem.
When I entered the job market as a fledgling programmer back in the early 1980s, I didn’t have to worry that some purple-haired harpy in HR was going to throw my resume in the circular file because I’m a straight white male.
I also didn’t have to worry that a hiring manager from a subcontinent that shall not be named would laugh at my qualifications because in-group loyalty tells him to hire his fourth cousin from a city where they still shit on the streets.
It’s a bit much to complain that today’s American students won’t grind as hard as East Asians when we abandoned meritocracy more than 30 years ago. Nothing disincentivizes working your ass off to excel more than a justified belief that it’s futile.
Right now we’re in and everybody-loses situation. Employers aren’t getting the talent they desperately need, and talent is being wasted. That mismatch is the first problem that needs solving.
You want excellence? Fire the goddamn HR drones and the nepotists. Scrap DEI. Find all the underemployed white male STEM majors out there who gave up on what they really wanted to do because the hiring system repeatedly punched them in the face, and bring them in.
Don’t forget the part about paying competitive wages. This whole H-1B indentured-servitude thing? It stinks, and the stench pollutes your entire case for “high-skill” immigration. You might actually have a case, but until you clean up that mess Americans will be justified in dismissing it.
These measures should get you through the next five years or so, while the signal that straight white men are allowed to be in the game again propagates.
I’m not going to overclaim here. This will probably solve your need for top 10% coders and engineers, but not your need for the top 0.1%. For those you probably do have to recruit worldwide.
But if you stop overtly discriminating against the Americans who could fill your top 10% jobs, your talent problem will greatly ease. And you’ll no longer get huge political pushback from aggrieved MAGA types against measures that could solve the rest of it.
Doesn’t that seem like it’s worth a try?
December 26, 2024
QotD: The essence of journalism
It’s not a profession, it’s not a calling and it has no public purpose. Trial and error has shown that peeps out there just won’t go out and buy booklets of adverts. They won’t even pay all that much attention to free books of them stuffed through their letterboxes as local freesheets show.
In order to get people to see the piccies of fine cavalry twill trousers (an ad that has been running beside the Telegraph crossword for at least four decades), or to drool over offers of lushly organic bath salts, experience has indicated that someone needs to be employed to write about the footie – see that parrot bein’ sick? – or the weather – cloudy with a chance of meatballs – or the thespian who should only have been stepped out with – Meghan Steals Our Prince! – or you know what they’re doing with your money – Tax Rise Shocker! – to fill in the blanks between the commercial offers.
And that’s it. That’s what we do.
We can even prove this. The editorial line of absolutely every publication is one that follows the prejudices of its readers. When setting up a new one the big question is, well, who are we going to appeal to? Not what truths are we going to tell but who will look at the ads based upon the truths we decide to tell.
All that speaking truth to power, interrogation of structures and inequalities, that’s for the awards season. It has as much to do with reality as calling politicians statesmen – entirely irrelevant to the working day and something more suited to those dead.
Entirely true that journalism comes in flavours, even layers, styles and stratified along socioeconomic lines. But then so do restaurants come in manners that appeal to different audiences despite their output all ending up in the same place – the U-bend – some limited number of hours after consumption.
Journalism is simply entertainment that is, journalists just those who do so with words. There is a market for that truth-telling to power stuff, just as there is one for vegan meals. But they’re both limited to those who are entertained by such which is why Maccy D’s bestrides the world and the Mail and The Sun outsell Tribune, Counterpunch and Salon.
Tim Worstall, “The Grandiosity Of Modern Journalism”, Continental Telegraph, 2020-05-02.
December 24, 2024
QotD: The real hero of It’s A Wonderful Life
I get the feeling you’re the kind of guy who secretly rooted for Mr Potter.@Iowahawkblog
George Bailey: whines for a public bailout of his grossly mismanaged financial institutionMr Potter: reinvigorates boring small town by developing exciting nightlife district
David Burge (@Iowahawkblog), Twitter, 2022-11-16.
December 23, 2024
QotD: The tedium of work
Elena Shalneva “Work — the Tragedy of Our Age”, Quillette, 2020-01-29.
December 20, 2024
QotD: A’s hire A’s and B’s hire C’s
A’s hire A’s and B’s hire C’s. (and you seriously do not want to meet the people C’s hire)
that’s it. that’s all we need to extrapolate and plot it.
this pattern emerges in response to two simple drives affecting all those who lack ability to compete […]
the essence of this is simple: the highly competent (A’s) wish to be surrounded by other highly competent people. an organization of mostly A’s (or at least A’s in management) thrives and gets lots done. it innovates. it rewards achievement and ability. it’s a meritocracy. because that’s what A’s want.
and B’s hate this. they cannot get ahead and they live in fear of A’s beneath them coming for their jobs and hatred of A’s above them who prevent advancement and who make demands for performance.
they do not want their jobs taken, so they respond to this by hiring only those less competent than themselves to work under them (C’s). this is how they hold position and avoid challenge and threat.
ideally, they’d also like to clear any A’s above them out of the way so they can generate some upward mobility. they cannot do this on a meritocratic axis, so they seek another one to supplant it.
they seek to move hiring and promotion to some other quality than ability then reinforce it with doctrine.
the pretext itself is incidental to this process. it does not really matter what it is.
it just has to be “something other than competence” and you land in this self-referential recursive trap.
el gato malo, “the mediocrity downspiral”, bad cattitude, 2024-09-10.
December 17, 2024
The rejection-in-advance of Bovaer as a “climate-friendly” “solution” to the “problem” of climate change
At Watts Up With That?, Charles Rotter documents yet another imposed-from-above bright idea that consumers are already eager to reject:
When global elites and bureaucrats decide they must “fix” the world, the results often speak for themselves. Take the latest technocratic debacle: Bovaer, a feed additive designed to reduce methane emissions from cows, marketed as a “climate-friendly” solution. It’s now being shelved by Norwegian dairy producer Q-Meieriene after consumers flatly rejected its so-called “climate milk”.
This is more than a simple story of market rejection. It’s a cautionary tale of what happens when governments, corporations, and globalists push policies and products that tamper with the food supply to address a problem that may not even exist.
The Quest to Solve a “Crisis”
Bovaer, developed by DSM-Firmenich, has been touted as a game-changer in the fight against methane emissions — a major target of climate policies. The additive is said to suppress a key enzyme in the cow’s digestive process, reducing methane emissions by up to 30%. Regulatory bodies in over 68 countries, including the EU, Australia, and the U.S., have approved its use.
But let’s step back for a moment. Why are we targeting cow burps and farts in the first place? Methane is indeed a greenhouse gas, but it’s also a short-lived one that breaks down in the atmosphere within about a decade. Moreover, cows and bison have been emitting methane for millennia without triggering apocalyptic climate shifts. Yet suddenly, livestock emissions are treated as a planetary emergency demanding immediate action.
This myopic focus on cow methane is a prime example of how climate zealotry warps priorities. Rather than addressing real and immediate issues — like the energy crises their own policies create — governments and globalists have decided to micromanage how your milk is produced, all to reduce emissions by an imperceptible fraction of a percentage point.
Consumer Rebellion
The backlash against Bovaer has been swift and fierce. In Norway, Q-Meieriene began using the additive in 2023, branding the resulting product as “climate milk”. The response? Consumers overwhelmingly rejected it, leaving supermarket shelves stocked with unsold cartons while Bovaer-free milk flew off the shelves.
Facing dismal sales, Q-Meieriene recently announced it would discontinue the use of Bovaer, stating:
Demand for Q climate milk has not been high enough to continue production … we phased out the use of methane suppressants in cow feed and are putting this project on pause.
https://www.nettavisen.no/nyheter/ville-redde-klimaet-med-prompe-fri-kumelk-snur/s/5-95-2166980
This is not merely a marketing failure. It reflects a broader consumer revolt against the technocratic imposition of “solutions” no one asked for. People are increasingly skeptical of being told that their daily choices — what they eat, how they travel, how they heat their homes — must be sacrificed on the altar of climate orthodoxy.
QotD: Capitalism is a combination of laziness, stupidity, and greed
Tim Worstall, “Folks Are Copying SpaceX – That’s How Capitalism Works”, It’s all obvious or trivial except …, 2024-09-16.
December 14, 2024
Explaining the collapse in North American birth rates
The demographic collapse of both Canadian and American birthrates has many causes, but kulak definitely identifies a major one here:
📜Antidiscrimination law is the reason for the Birthrate Collapse.
In North America, for a guy to marry a girl, it’s basically expected that he must make enough more than her that he can pay for himself and support her while she provides for kids, without a decline in her lifestyle… and his status, quality of wife, and whether the marriage will be rocky or happy is determined by whether or not he can actually materially IMPROVE her lifestyle over unmarried life. Which was very achievable in the 50s and 60s when women were paid poorly and largely couldn’t get high status complex careers, and didn’t want to have to, and couldn’t, compete to male standards…
Whereas after antidiscrimination laws it is MANDATED 30-50% of high paying jobs must go to to women, no matter how many more hours men put in, or how less productive the women are. Ie. It is literally legally impossible for the average man to earn more than the average woman, no matter how hard or effectively he works… and because he WILL work harder to try, and because he competing against other men who are working harder to compete for the few high status jobs men can get, Men across the board are effectively POORER than women, they are doing way more work for equal or less pay and status.
It’s a meme now that girls will goof off at office jobs doing tik toks while the male workers are stressed and annoyed in the corner trying to keep the business afloat for the same pay. As such those girls won’t even date those men… because if you have to be stressed at the job for the same pay, you naturally seem poorer.
This is why western marriage and birthrates are collapsing.
And a follow-up response to another comment:
THis leads to spoiled delusional women convinced men are useless on the one hand, and the few self-aware women having to medicate to overcome their “imposter syndrome” as they subconsciously know they’re dead weight which psychologically breaks them.
December 12, 2024
The Canada Post strike is achieving one thing … strangling the use of cheques
In The Line, Phil A. McBride outlines the one palpable achievement of the postal workers’ strike in the likely fatal blow to the use of paper cheques in Canada:
Bank of Montreal sample cheque
For more than a century, Canadian businesses have been using cheques and the post office to send and receive money across the country and the world. It’s easy: you write a cheque, you put it in the mail, the recipient deposits the cheque at their bank, you wait five business days for it to clear and voila — you’ve got the money.
Except, right now, of course, that’s not happening, due to the ongoing postal strike. In fact, a great number of cheques that are in the mail are stuck there, leaving businesses and Canadians with money stranded in transit. I am increasingly convinced that this strike will be remembered in the future as the death of cheques in Canada, at least as a major medium of business exchange.
The banks won’t miss cheques, if so. Cheques are expensive. In 2015, Scotiabank estimated that the writing and processing of a cheque cost anywhere between $9 and $25. In 2023, approximately 379 million cheques were issued for a combined value of $2.9 trillion dollars. That’s an average value of $7,650.00 per cheque, at an averaged cost of $6.44 billion dollars to the banks and their customers. Very little of that cost is incurred if a payment is made electronically.
But it’s not just the money. Cheques are prone to fraud. Cheques can be counterfeited, signatures can be forged and cheques can be written against accounts that can’t cover the amount they’re issued for. The customer is responsible for sending and receiving them, which means they are prone to loss or interception, which adds further time and cost to an already expensive process.
As a business owner, I happen to agree with the banks: I don’t like cheques. I’m made to wait five business days to access my money, and that’s after I’ve waited for the client to issue the cheque and for the postal service to (once upon a time) deliver it to my office.
Today, all of Canada’s charter banks, as well as most Credit Unions, offer many options for electronic payment. Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT), Interac Electronic Money Transfer (EMT), debit cards, credit cards, even SWIFT wire transfers for international payment. All of these institutions have the ability allow for multiple layers of approval that satisfy corporate accounting, security and reporting requirements. All of these forms of payment are faster, cheaper and more secure than cheques — in most cases, I get access to my money inside 24 hours, rather than waiting for a full week for a cheque to clear.
So why has the cheque endured as long as it has?
Some combination of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and “It’s always been done this way”.
December 11, 2024
Norway finds the perfect tool to drive away those pesky entrepreneurs
Don’t you just hate having all these bothersome start-up companies in your country, creating new jobs and new investment opportunities? Norway sure does, but good news: they’ve found an almost perfect way to not only deter existing entrepreneurs but to punish those who try to leave after they’ve been successful:
Norway is a fantastically beautiful country, but lately they’ve decided they want as few new companies as possible.
“Norway” by Nouhailler is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
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Norway’s entrepreneurs are disappearing. In the past two years alone, 100 of Norway’s top 400 taxpayers, representing about 50 percent of that group’s wealth, have fled the country to protect their businesses.
In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand paints a vivid picture of a dystopian society where government overreach and socialist policies kill innovation and demonize entrepreneurs. Present-day Norway mirrors this scenario in unsettling ways. The Nordic countries have long operated on an egalitarian ideal—citizens pay high tax rates for a generous safety net and effective public services. But Norway has taken the ideal to destructive and bizarre extremes.
Norway spends 45 percent more than Sweden on healthcare per capita with approximately the same health outcomes. Norway spends 50 percent more than Finland on primary and secondary school with worse results. And it splurges on green virtue-signaling with, for example, a $3.2 billion offshore wind project that industry experts believe is financially unworkable. That $3.2 billion, by the way, is roughly equivalent to the total revenue raised by the wealth tax.
To socialist politicians in Norway, entrepreneurs are mere piggy banks to be raided for ever more spending. When confronted with the reality that you can’t pay taxes with money you don’t have, the response is a vague moralism like “those with the broadest shoulders must bear the heaviest burdens.” Any dissent is waved away, deemed invalid because. . . free healthcare.
Earlier this year, instead of scaling back the tax blowout, the government doubled down, not only increasing the wealth tax but adding a vise grip on business owners in the form of an “exit tax” on unrealized gains as well. That means if you move from Norway, you’re immediately liable to pay 38 percent of the market value of your assets. It doesn’t matter if you have no cash on hand, if your assets are risky and could plummet in value, or even if your company fails after you leave—you still owe the tax. (Luckily for me, I left before this tax became law.)
The intent is to corral entrepreneurs inside Norway, impeding them from heading for the exits. The inevitable result: They’ll leave even before starting their businesses. After shooting itself in one foot, the government is now aiming a bazooka at the other one.
December 10, 2024
Countering the “Managerial Revolution”
Tim Worstall discusses the rise of the managerial class — described in 1941’s Managerial Revolution by James Burnham — and how detrimental to individual enterprises and the wider economy managerialism has been:
This, rather joyously, explains a lot about the modern world. We could go back to the mid-1980s and the bloke who ran the ‘baccy company written up in Barbarians at the Gates. In which he, as CEO, had a fleet of private planes, the company paid for his 11 country club memberships and so on. His salary was decent, sure, but the corporation rented him all the trappings of a Gatsbyesque — and successful — capitalist. Until the actual capitalists — the barbarians — turned up at those gates and started demanding shareholder returns.
Or we can think of the bureaucratic classes in the UK in more recent decades. Moving effortlessly between this NGO, that quasi-governmental body and a little light sitting on the right government inquiry. All at £1500 a day and a damn good pension to follow.
Or, you know, adapt the base idea to taste. There really is a bureaucratic and managerial class that gains the incomes and power of the capitalists of the past without having to do anything quite so grubby as either risk their own money or, actually, do anything. They, umm, administer, and the entire class is wholly and absolutely convinced that everything must be administered and they’re the right people to be doing that.
You know, basically David Cameron. Met him once, when he was just down from uni. At a political meeting – drinkies for the Tory activists in a particular council ward, possibly a little wider than that. Hated him on sight which I agree has saved me much time over the decades. And I was right too. There is nothing to Cameroonism other than that the right sort of people should be administering — the managerial revolution.
Sure, sure, we used to have the aristocracy which assumed the same thing but we did used to insist that they could chop someone’s head off first — show they had the capability. Also, they didn’t complain nor demand a pension when we did that to them if they lost office.
But the bit that really strikes me. France — and thereby the European Union — seems to me to be where this Managerial Revolution has gone furthest. Get through the right training (the “enarques“) and you’re the right guy to be a Minister, run a political party, manage the oil company, sort out the railways etc. You don’t have to succeed or fail at any of them, you’re one of the gilded class that runs the place. Because, you know, everything needs to be run and one of this class should do so.
The divergence or even active conflict of interests between the owners and the non-owning managers is part of the larger Principal-Agent Problem.
Microsoft has launched a publishing arm called “8080 Books” – AI-generated books anyone?
Ted Gioia notices that Microsoft and other tech companies are moving into book publishing, likely as a way to generate some additional revenue from their vast investments in artificial intelligence ventures over the last several years:
I never expected Microsoft to enter the book business.
But on November 18, this huge tech company quietly announced that it is now a publisher. But there was an interesting twist.
Microsoft is “not currently accepting unsolicited manuscripts”.
Let’s be totally fair. Nobody at Microsoft claims that it plans to replace human writers with AI slop. But this company has invested a staggering $13 billion in AI — it’s their top priority as a corporation.
So what you do think their goals are in the book business?
If you’re looking for a clue, I note that Microsoft’s publishing arm is called 8080 Books. Yes, they named it after the 8080 microprocessor.
How charming!
And just a few hours after Microsoft announced this move, TikTok did the exact same thing.
According to The Bookseller:
ByteDance, the company behind the video-sharing platform TikTok, has announced that it will start selling print books in bookshops from early next year, published under its imprint, 8th Note Press. 8th Note Press will work in partnership with Zando to publish print editions and sell copies in physical bookstores starting early 2025.
Here, too, nobody is claiming that they will replace humans with bots. But why would a company that has built its empire with online social media have any interest in the slow and stodgy business of selling printed books on paper?
Oh, by the way, TikTok’s parent is investing huge sums in AI. The company has even found a way around export controls on Nvidia chips. Just a few weeks before entering the book business, ByteDance’s sourcing of AI tech from Huawei was leaked to the press.
And as if these coincidences weren’t enough to alarm you, another AI publishing development happened at this same time — but (here too) with very little coverage in the media.
Tech startup Spines raised $16 million in seed financing for an AI publishing business that aims to release 8,000 books per year.
Here, too, the company says that it wants to support human writers. Maybe it will run a new kind of vanity publishing business. But is that a sufficient lure to attract $16 million in seed financing?
It’d be a rearguard action, but it’d be nice to have a requirement that publishers disclose when published works are partly or wholly AI-extruded, wouldn’t it? It would certainly help me to avoid buying books or magazines where AI hallucinations may occur in key sections …
December 9, 2024
QotD: The downfall of Boeing
There’s a lot to love about an engineer-dominated corporate culture. For starters, it has a tendency to overengineer things, and when those things are metal coffins with hundreds of thousands of interacting components, filled with people and screaming through the air at hundreds of miles an hour, maybe overengineering isn’t so bad. These cultures also tend to be pretty innovative, and sure enough Boeing invented the modern jet airliner and then revolutionized it several times.
But there are also downsides. As any Googler will tell you, these companies usually have a lot of fat to trim. Some of what looks like economic inefficiency is actually vital seed corn for the innovations of the future, but some of it is also just inefficiency, because nobody looks at the books, because it isn’t that kind of company. Likewise, being highly deliberative about everything can lead to some really smart decision making and avoidance of group think, but it can also be a cover for laziness or for an odium theologicum that ensures nothing ever gets done. Smart managers steeped in this sort of culture can usually do a decent job of sorting the good from the bad, but only if they can last, because you see there’s a third problem, which is that almost everybody involved is a quokka.
Engineers, being a subspecies of nerds, are bad at politics. In 1996, Boeing did something very stupid and acquired a company that was good at politics. McDonnell Douglas, another airplane maker, wasn’t the best at making airplanes, but was very good at lobbying congress and at impressing Wall Street analysts. Boeing took over the company, but pretty much everybody agrees that when the dust had settled it was actually McDonnell Douglas that had taken over Boeing. One senior Boeing leader lamented that the McDonnell Douglas executives were like “hunter killer assassins”. No, sorry bro, I don’t think they were actually that scary, you were just a quokka.
Anyway, the hunter killer assassins ran amok: purging rivals, selling off assets, pushing through stock buybacks, and outsourcing or subcontracting everything that wasn’t nailed down. They had a fanaticism for capital efficiency that rose to the level of a monomania,1 which maybe wasn’t the best fit for an airplane manufacturer. And slowly but surely, everything went off the rails. Innovation stopped, the culture withered, and eventually planes started falling out of the sky. And now the big question, the question Robison just can’t figure out. Why?
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Flying Blind by Peter Robison”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-02-06.
1. This is how you know this story took place in an era of high interest rates!
