We Lutherans have confirmation too, I’ll have you know![1]
Here in heathen People’s Socialist Kingdom of Sweden it’s mostly an occasion to awkwardly flirt with the appropriate sex on church away camps and get a lot of presents. But I was quite impressed by my nieces’, organized by a very woke archbishopric. Another neice got to go to Assizi!
[1] I’m confirmed but very much lapsed
Jane Street has an interesting cachet in at least my nerd circles because they require everyone they hire to learn Ocaml[1]. It would not surprise me if they are fash-adjacent, but only because I believe everyone in Wall Street is fash-adjacent.
[1] I think - maybe it’s only the technical staff
This is Hercule Poirot levels of observation. Kudos.
Schrödinger’s essay except the cat is always dead
Does it matter, though?
This was a great essay.
He wanted Nazi Germany with Milton Friedman, he’ll get Argentina without a USA to bail it out.
More on Banks and Elon’s terrible reading of his books
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/07/apes-do-read-banks-elon-they-just-dont-understand-him
This true, but I’m convinced the original poster knows this and is using the term ironically.
Everyone is entitled to their own readership of Banks. I’m not saying mine is the one and only. But the Culture is supposed to be a background character, even if Banks spends a lot of time in the later novels “explaining” it. But if the reader only focusses on the lore, they’ll miss the quite good characters and psychology that Banks was good at too.
My personal favorite is Use of Weapons, where the focus is on the people doing the Culture’s dirty work. In one scene, Zakalwe
spends an inordinate time trying to protect a useless aristocracy from being wiped out by a revolution, only to find out his side was meant to lose for some inscrutable Mind-directed reason. This kind of shit happens all the time to him, and as he’s basically a deeply traumatized individual he’s able to keep doing it.
In Look to Windward
Contact goes too far along the path of optimizing “help backwards civilization” and manages to create a genocidal civil war. The survivors decide to try to destroy a Mind (and the Orbital it’s managing), and you know, you kind of get why.
Also the Galactic Empire as an anti-scientific hellhole with secret police surveillance.
Witness good old Hari Seldon unveiling his plans on Trantor:
It was not a large office, but it was quite spy-proof and quite undetectably so. Spy-beams trained upon it received neither a suspicious silence nor an even more suspicious static. They received, rather, a conversation constructed at random out of a vast stock of innocuous phrases in various tones and voices.
[Seldon] put his fingers on a certain spot on his desk and a small section of the wall behind him slid aside. Only his own fingers could have done so, since only his particular print-pattern could have activated the scanner beneath.
[…]
“You will find several microfilms inside,” said Seldon. “Take the one marked with the letter T.”
Gaal did so and waited while Seldon fixed it within the projector and handed the young man a pair of eyepieces. Gaal adjusted them, and watched the film unroll before his eyes.
Some dweeb:
I would recommend “Consider Phlebas” by Iain Banks, which is part of the Culture series of novels. Very formative for me, and I read that while I was writing Theme Park. And I still think it’s the best depiction of a post-A.G.I. future, an optimistic post-A.G.I. future, where we’re traveling the stars and humanity reached its full flourishing.
The protagonist of Consider Phlebas is working for the Culture’s enemies, a theocratic empire that has slaves literally bred for loyalty, and the conflict they’re engaged in ultimately kills billions of sentient beings. Most of the thoughts about the Culture are his, and he basically decries them as the ultimate wokesters. No wonder HN nerds prefer The Player of Games in which a smart nerd like themselves get recruited as an agent to bring down an empire a bit like our own by being really really good at games.
Picked up by a relatively mainstream US politics blog:
LWronger posts article entitled
“Authors Have a Responsibility to Communicate Clearly”
OK, title case, obviously serious.
The context for this essay is serious, high-stakes communication: papers, technical blog posts, and tweet threads.
Nope he’s going for satire.
And ladies, he’s available!
If you don’t get it, LLMs don’t either, and David’s work here is done.
Managers: “AI will make employees more productive!”
WaPo: “AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings” https://archive.ph/ejC53
Managers: “not like that!!!”
It’s English, but British, Jim.
The Myrdals are probably entirely discredited nowadays, both for being the quintessential social engineers and their son Jan happily destroying their legacy. As you’ll no doubt have learned, fertility has fallen everywhere in the developed world, both in countries with shit welfare for parents (Italy) and quite good (the Nordics). Realistically, the only way to reverse this is to enable draconian abortion laws coupled with a systematic repression of sex ed and contraception. Of course this is congruent with today’s fascists’ goals…
I have 3 kids, 1 bio and 2 bonus, and man it’s a lot of work. (youngest is technically an adult but de facto…)
I also feel there’s insane pressure nowadays not just to have a kid but to have the perfect kid - great childhood, great education - and if you miss just one PTA meeting you’re branded for life
Thanks for digging into this.
Question for someone not versed in US nonprofit law - are there any legal consequences for incorrect statmements in these forms? Or does the IRS just look at the tax situation?