The Week in Review
AI, Shrinking Campuses, Sweeney
AI Will Wipe Out Humanity?
I have no idea, but I can visualize it: Techno-hubris nerd tells AI to eliminate rust, so AI proceeds to remove oxygen from the air. Got it. Risk noted. I need to change my shorts now.
But if it could do something that awful, couldn't it do something much less awful, like simply destroy all financial accounts: savings accounts, mutual funds, Bitcoin, and everything else non-physical? You think that possibility alone would drive people to hoard cash, bullion, land . . . and staples of living like emergency food rations and liquor. Maybe more people are prepping because of this newest threat to the system/grid/civilization, but I'm not seein' it.
Universities are Getting Pummeled
By everyone, even themselves.
Demographic changes and savvy young people who increasingly understand that a diploma isn't worth much: they've caused regional universities' enrollment to drop by 25-50% over the past ten years.
And educators are doing everything they can to make sure kids have no reason to get a degree by eliminating the use of SATs to filter out morons and steadily reducing, if not eliminating, math and reading minimum requirements to graduate.
Meanwhile, it's increasingly looking like anyone in America can make a lot of money, with or without a degree. Here's a book that has my hand hovering over the "Buy with One Click" button at Amazon:
“Drawing on unprecedented data from a decade of research and vivid real-life stories of entrepreneurs―from a self-made hot-dog stand billionaire to the heirs of an auto dealer―Zidar and Zwick reveal a surprising truth: Prosperity is more attainable, more widely distributed, and closer to home than we imagine.”
Everywhere a Millionaire
J. D. Power III
A look at how affluent Americans live, where wealth is concentrated, and what the country’s changing geography of prosperity reveals.
View the book on Amazon →As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
It explores something I've seen repeatedly for decades as a business attorney: small business owners tend to do well, very well. It's hard work, but normally a work of love, too.
From this week's Scrolling Blog
Sydney Sweeney Derangement Syndrome
That's the best way to describe the Sweeney Outrage Du Jour. But what has allowed Sweeney's new commercial to machine-gun trigger other women like a white girl attending the Annual KKK Cotillion with a black man?
"Rank envy" pops into the mind faster than lustful thoughts after seeing a SS ad. So does the good old-fashioned lesbian dislike of anything that links females to beauty. But those things can't explain the sputtering outrage by female athletes who suddenly don't understand what Madison Avenue has known since the 14th century: sex sells.
Caitlin Flanagan thinks it's just a sad truth: no matter how much better female sports get, they'll always be forgettable when compared to--aye, when contrasted with--men's sports, and Sweeney's new commercial features a female who, let's face it, has nothing to do with sports. It somehow scrapes against the semi-conscious awareness of female athletes that, no matter how hard they try, they'll never come near male athletes.
Caitlin Flanagan
Finds of the Week
First, The Overemployed Reddit
I learned that there's a thing called "over-employment." It's where people hold more jobs than they can do. One dude set a record by holding 11 full-time jobs until the hoodwinked corporate behemoths figured it out and started firing him, but during those handful of glorious months? He probably made enough money to live lavishly in Mumbai for the rest of his life.
Second, The Food Manufacturing Guy at X
He's spreading the word that our junk food is junk and so is our non-junk food. From Nellie Bowles' T.G.I.F.
“SunnyD is 5% juice. The first two ingredients are water and high fructose corn syrup.” Basically, whatever we think we’re eating, we’re eating maybe 5 percent of that and the rest is garbage filler, if we’re lucky. “The Gerber pouch that says Apple Blueberry Spinach on the front has half a spinach leaf in it.” Great, lie to the babies! They can’t read anyhow. And it’s also, of course, the dyes and flavors: “If an ingredient list says carmine, cochineal extract, or Natural Red 4, that’s an insect. A scale insect farmed on cactus, mostly in Peru, dried and crushed. It takes around 70,000 of them to make a pound of dye. It’s in strawberry yogurt, pink candy, juice, some cheese spreads, and most red lipstick.”