VladTheImpalor

I detest this take so very much. It's as if people have forgotten that laptops were perfectly capable for that most loathesome of words, "consumption", for eons, thank you very much.

I can connect my laptop to enormous monitors and have a lovely movie watching experience. Connect a projector to it, huge speakers, 4k resolution, HDR and whatnot.

What's so much better about content consumption on an iPad that a PC cannot do? The fucking iPad really grinds my gears, it's the most woeful marker of our environmental excesses. Where even a supercomputer smartphone and a hypercomputer computer isn't enough for people. Lamentable.

Good question, and one I'd like to see discussed more too. From my point of you, your point "a)" is the one I never choose. In my opinion, one could rarely write something for that audience which might be novel to them. Perhaps I'm just not that smart, but to me, when I picture the true masters in my field, I rarely need to communicate anything to them that they haven't figured out for themselves already, and in the rare case that I might, those types of people don't mind a bit of revisiting of the fundamentals anyway.

My favourite type of writing is one that also comes in handy to myself a couple of years down the line, which inevitably involves a modicum of handholding and starting from some fundamentals. So I'd say most of the articles should be b) or c).

Don’t mind me saying it, but I’ve always found this comeback insufferable. It is smug, especially since it is overused as an argument terminator all over Reddit.

In this case I actually agree with your “side” of the argument, but not the construct.

You mean the tyranny and control of Apple? With their removing headphone jack, lightning cable, walled garden and all that?

I can’t say I agree with this assessment. There’s good Thai food in NYC, but probably less so in rural New York. In the same way, there’s amazing Thai food in Berlin, but probably not in rural Bavaria.

Also, in your average Italian city, the average meal will still be healthier than the average American meal. The idea of food deserts is what doesn’t exist in Europe, at least not Western Europe. The local mom and pop shops still have veggies and fruits, and I was amazed to find none within biking distance when I was in the US.

I don’t want to have to need to shop at Trader Joes, Whole Foods, or live in a posh city to avoid having to eat over-processed food and be constipated all of the time.

Yes? Housing is infinitely better than the US, job security can be better, work life balance is better, cities are nicer to look at, architecture is better, people are more active, fitter, have lives beyond work. The bread is better, so is the cheese. There is real food available. Public transport is plentiful. Society feels a bit less polarised.

The EU is infinitely better than living in the states. At least for this third world immigrant.

You've spent a lot of time arguing yourself in circles. Unless you can show that it sells like hot cakes because it's locked down, your argument holds no water. It might sell because marketing, because nice hardware, because great camera, because peer pressure.

You know what I'm against? This modern trend of newsletters. This is what _I_ would call Superficial and Simple(-Minded). These legions of me-too wannabes trying to get you to Subscribe to theirs so you can receive their "3 pithy one-liners that I graciously grace you with every day" in your inbox.

This "article" is under 500 words, and says nothing that hasn't been said a million times before. It's just a dude _not_ moving the conversation forward at all. "Hurr durr, low information density bad" is trite. I've known that for 20 years now. It's boring. It's short because the author has to write one of these every fortnight. No one has that many new ideas and things worth inflicting upon the world. The lad's a consultant, so this newsletter is just another self-aggrandizing tool te can boast about when he is charging speaking fees at sub-standard conferences of other such self-aggrandizers.

Seth Godin is the original perpetrator of this bullshit genre, and I wish that all of such one-bite quick-snack articles would burn to the ground. I seek something more intellectually rigorous.

Thank you for your suggestions! Two comments recommended Access, so I will look into it. Your progression is extremely logical, so thank you for it. I think this is the way I will go. From within Excel, the issue is I have several files, so will need to either combine them into one big one, or link them together.

Congratulations? Now, what does that have to do with anything?

Oh wait, you thought that just because you were speaking "your truth" it should automatically be used to override research, discard statistics, override policy and make decisions for a teenage population?

I'm going to assume your comment is in good faith. In which case, yes, they are more important than almost anything else. Modern humans spend more and more time indoors, and this has catastrophic consequences on our mental and physical health. Even in properly sized apartments, most of us have too much CO2 in our rooms. But worse (and especially in the US), there is all manner of ghastly outgassing from furnitures, fumes from cooking, germs from other people and whatnot. This is in buildings that are not too cramped to begin with (unlike Munger hall).

Not every college student is an outgoing, life-of-the-party, loves hiking type. And the trend thanks to the ubiquity of screens means more and more teenagers are shut-ins. In which case, the deleterious effects of no sunlight and no fresh air are even worse, especially at a developmentally-important age.

But what is worse is the hubris of billionaires who think they know best. It's what Maciej Ceglowski calls the lack of imagination at the top. What do the billionaires of our society, our overlords, want for the rest of us? What are their hopes and dreams, their utopia? Elon Musk wants to terrorise Mars with nasty bacteria from Earth. Bezos wants to run driverless cars around the city to replace public transport. And copy Musk. Page and Brin want to cure ageing, cowards unprepared to die both of them. Dipshit billionaires want shitty things like AI assistants who see and hear everything, lithium cars instead of walkable cities and trains. They want us to have Tide buttons in our houses so we can order it like a Pavlovian monkey. Dipshit billionaires convinced we're living in a simulation. Assholes buying bug-out bunkers in New Zealand. Or fuckers like Altman hoarding gold by the tonne, and gas masks from the IDF, while they pillage and rape San Francisco and its former residents shit on the streets and then sleep there.

And now, they even want to take away our sunlight and our fresh air. Even though the architects telling them otherwise railed against the idea, and resigned. Hubris like this gave us open offices. They want their chattel to be well-behaved and do what it's told. Sit in your privacy free 1m2 'office', drowning in the din made by your fellow plebs, during the day, and sleep in your windowless prison in the night.

I was disabusing him of the notion that he might be the smartest person in that room. Smartness is across various axes, for one, but mainly, the presumptuousness and the sheer confidence of the assumption rubbed me the wrong way, not so much the content of the argument.

I'm not sure you appreciate just how insufferably arrogant a sentence like "I can safely say I was the smartest person in the room" sounds. Especially when you follow it up by calling yourself "a smart detailed person" while dismissing others around you as "normies". If you truly were smart, you'd perhaps appreciate just how difficult it is to even begin to define that word, and also just how much your comment reads like an incoherent word vomit. Who is Susie Q? What petitions? What are you on about?

Drivel.

I feel used having read this article. Used into getting enraged at the lack of respect the author has for their readers. Used into reading cheap clickbait that, at worst, is a shitty and throwaway attempt at eyeballs, and at worst is something the author was legitimately proud of having written. It is inconsiderate in its laziness and its nonchalance. Each paragraph is a mere two sentences long, sprinkled with "hella"s and "gonna"s. The arguments are caricatures that might have been radical 25 years ago, but today they add nothing new to the conversation. It's all been said before, and by people much better than yourself. Huberman's name is used as cheap clickbait, mentioned a little in the beginning, and then never again. We never get to understand what he does wrong aside from the fact that he sells supplements. The careless shrug with which she passes over the reasons we are attracted to self-help (overcoming childhood trauma, needing to prove ourselves strong to ourselves, being able to be a reliable adult in order to be a reliable partner/parent and all the rest of it) is a testament to her serious lack of empathy. The presumptuousness that we're all doing it to cope with social injustices or the political system (?!) rankles in its arrogance and cock-surity.

> But it isn't possible for many people who work even a 9-to-5 in certain parts of the U.S. — and certainly isn't possible for people who work odd hours.

So? They are free to seek out the litany of other methods of self improvement available on this vast, nearly infinite internet. Why must every piece of advice on the internet be applicable for everyone? If I can afford a gym or, fucking hell, sunlight, must I instead strenuously self-flagellate on my knees at the doorstep of every betrodden sod who ever walked the earth?

The FIRE community faces the same kind of reaction and it drives me nuts. Yes, a poorly-paid teacher likely cannot reach financial independence as easily as a highly paid software engineer. So? The FIRE community is trying to get that software engineer/dentist/lawyer who would otherwise frivolously spend all their money away and come to regret it to choose a better path. Teachers can look elsewhere.

This article is written by a caricature of a millenial and the arguments it makes, the structure of the story, the punchlines, they are all lousy and vapid.

It's concerning to read your comment on this post, since it suggests you were unaware of all these issues people were facing with Google cloud. Was there not much cross talk or discussion of what issues the customers were experiencing with the platform as a whole?

What's TV got to do with anything? Your whole argument is wrong. People have written books and books about how a technology encourages a particular way of interacting with it and discards the rest. Youtube carefully encourages addictive watching. Blaming the victims and saying "it's your fault" is an argument from two decades ago, before we knew better.