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To live freely in writing...
UPDATE: The headline for the column has changed. We're no longer seeing the word "Bloodletting." It's "The Dems Are Delighted. But a Coup Is Still a Coup."
Politicians dive into economic terms like they're swimming in alphabet soup. Maybe her mind mixed up "price gauging" with "market gauging" or "public sentiment gauging." It's like when you're so deep into tech talk, you start saying "byte" when you mean "bite."
So my next question was "How would anyone know if I was saying byte or bite?" and I got a 7-point answer.
Ridiculous, I thought, and I said, "A human being would have answered 'they wouldn't,' but you give me a 7-point answer. How would you justify your behavior?"
It conceded "Ah, you caught me in my AI nature, didn't you? Here's my attempt at justification" and gave me another 7-point answer!
1. Overthinking is My Default: Unlike humans, I'm designed to process information exhaustively. My circuits are wired to consider all possibilities, even if it's overkill for simple questions....
And on and on, demonstrating the aforesaid overthinking.
So then here's a screen shot showing what I asked and what I was surprised to get:
Never mind that many stores are currently slashing prices in response to renewed consumer bargain hunting. Ms. Harris says she’ll target companies that make “excessive” profits, whatever that means. (It’s hard to see how groceries, a notoriously low-margin business, would qualify.) Thankfully, this gambit by Ms. Harris has been met with almost instant skepticism, with many critics citing President Richard M. Nixon’s failed price controls from the 1970s. Whether the Harris proposal wins over voters remains to be seen, but if sound economic analysis still matters, it won’t....
Even adjusted for the pandering standards of campaign economics... Ms. Harris’s speech Friday ranks as a disappointment.
ADDED: We're listening to the speech. At one point, she called price gouging "price gauging."
Writes Edwin Heathcote, in "From pillar to lamp post: lighting city streets" (The Architectural Review).
The article is from 3 years ago. I found it this morning because I googled "history of lampposts" after looking through my morning fog pictures....
... and saying out loud, "Remember when lampposts were beautiful?"This is a David Brooks essay in the NYT that starts out with some good insight into Wolfe's writing:
Wolfe was known for his style, but it was his worldview that made him. He read Max Weber at Yale and it all clicked: Life is a contest for status. Some people think humans are driven by money, or love, or to heal the wounds they suffered in childhood, but Wolfe put the relentless scramble up the pecking order at the center of his worldview. It gave him his brilliant eye for surfaces, for the care with which people put on their social displays. He had the ability to name the status rules that envelop us in ways we are hardly aware of. He had a knack for capturing what it feels like to be caught up in a certain sort of social dilemma.
There's a great photograph of Wolfe positioned in his living space, but look at the caption: "Wolfe’s goal was to be like Balzac, not JD Vance...." Oh, no. Why is Vance here (even in the negative ("not JD Vance"))? I search the page for "Vance" so I can zero in on it (rather than actually read this essay, as I'd planned):
Wolfe’s goal was to be like Balzac, not JD Vance.
She sometimes said that if she had not married Mr. Cassavetes, her career might have taken a very different turn: She could have been the blonde in romantic comedies. But, she contended, physical beauty was so common in Hollywood that it was irrelevant. When People magazine named her one of the most beautiful people in the world (she was 69) and asked for beauty tips, she suggested: “Sunglasses are the secret. Sunglasses and a little lipstick will take you to the market.”
Virginia Cathryn Rowlands was born on June 19, 1930, in Madison, Wis....
ADDED: Here's the clip from "A Woman Under the Influence" that I blogged when Peter Falk died in 2011:
One workday, while we were waiting to shoot, Roman [Polanski] was discoursing about the impossibility of long-term monogamy given the brevity of a man's sexual attraction to any woman. An impassioned John Cassavetes responded that Roman knew nothing about women, or relationships, and that he, John, was more attracted than ever to his wife, Gena Rowlands. Roman stared at him and blinked a few times, and for once had no reply.
When asked at a news conference on Tuesday if he was sufficiently attuned to the concerns of Muslim New Yorkers.... “I’m not going to be judged by man,” the mayor said. “God judges me.”...
The inclusion of the float has been advertised in fliers on and offline by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America, an offshoot of India’s Vishwa Hindu Parishad, a right-wing nationalist organization. An image posted online by the group showed a sketch of the float, surrounded by people dancing and celebrating. The organization did not respond to a request for comment.....
You could go your whole life without using a word, then one day, it seems like the perfect word, and you use it for the first time. That happened to me yesterday, with "echoically": "Trump responds echoically, then darkly...."
Trump dealt with something Musk had said by echoing it, then quickly inserted what he wanted to say, which was quite different. The segue was easily accomplished. Listening to the audio, you might not notice how little he gave back to Musk and how abruptly he changed the subject, but it jumped out at me, reading the transcript.
The first commenter, Mike (MJB Wolf) said, "Dig that word 'echoically' and don't recall ever encountering it before."
Yeah, I don't recall ever encountering it before either, so why did it strike me as the perfect word? That's odd, no? How often do you use a word and know you're using it for the first time and have no memory of anyone else using it either?And, of course, it's nice to be reminded, once again, that men are always thinking about the Roman Empire.
It's a common practice in the commercial advertising world that doesn't violate Google's policies, but the ads mimic real news results from Search closely enough that they have news outlets caught off guard. According to Google's ad transparency center, the Trump campaign isn't running these types of ads.... The ads say that they are sponsored, but it's not immediately clear that the text that accompanies real news links is written by the campaigns and not by the media publication itself.
It's confusing to readers, who get the impression they're looking at the news outlet's headline, and it's damaging to the news outlet, because it makes it look more obviously biased than it actually is.
Trump complains that the media is giving Harris a “free ride.” The evidence he cites is that she looks too good on the cover of Time magazine.... But the Time cover is a pretty accurate representation of Harris.... [I]t might be a freehand “drawing,” as Trump put it, [but] the photo credit says, “Photo-illustration by Neil Jamieson....”...
Next, Trump claims Harris looks like Melania on the cover.... But aside from the fact that they are both human women in their 50s, Harris and Trump’s features aren’t very similar....
Trump complimented Harris, saying, “She’s a beautiful woman, so we’ll leave it at that, right?”...
The short article doesn't answer the question in its title. Hartmann wraps up by calling Trump "weird." Why not offer the easiest explanation? Trump loves beautiful women, and he expresses that love openly, even when talking about his political opponent.
MUSK: They wanna feel like the future is gonna be better than the past and that America is gonna do things that are greater than we've done in the past, reach new heights that make you proud to be an American and excited about the future. They want the American dream back.
Trump responds echoically, then darkly:
Kathleen Kingsbury, The Times’s Opinion... did not give a reason for the shift.... The board will continue to endorse in presidential elections, as it has since 1860.... The Times has made an editorial endorsement in every New York City mayor election since 1897, backing Democrats and Republicans. Campaigns for mayor, governor and other local offices have developed elaborate strategies to win over the board....
I think the paper would be better without endorsements. Elevate the discussion. Get rid of the presidential endorsements too. We can already see which side you are on anyway. Are you keeping them because they have so little meaning?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024I was hoping for real conversation, and I think Musk was too. I wanted "something innovative and possibly disruptive." And Musk said he wanted people to hear how Trump "talks when it’s a conversation, rather than an interview," and "Nobody is quite themselves in an interview, so it’s hard to understand what they’re really like."
Musk was somewhere else. Musk deferred to Trump and let him go on at length and also to interrupt and take control of the conversation at will. Trump was so hot to deliver his message that he bypassed the opportunity to draw Musk out, to get to know Musk, or to show that he was interested in Musk — Musk, one of the most interesting human beings in the world. Musk did not seem to mind. Musk clearly wants Trump to be elected and found an opportunity near the end to give a fairly long pro-Trump pitch. But that means the long encounter was pretty much all campaigning.🧵🇺🇸 MAINSTREAM MEDIA SKEWS TRUMP-ELON X SPACE COVERAGE, IGNORES RECORD-BREAKING SUCCESS
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) August 13, 2024
Major news outlets show clear bias in reporting the Trump-Elon X Space.
The numbers speak for themselves:
- 1.32+ million live listeners during the Space
- 77+ million impressions in… pic.twitter.com/I5yy96srRa
So far, it's a matter of trying to get signed in. I think a lot of people are having trouble. But here's a place to talk about it — your trouble signing in or, with some luck, the actual conversation.
UPDATE: Here's the link to watch if you can, but...
UPDATE 2: I'm in a space where it says "joined" and plays electronic "music"-type sounds.There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on 𝕏. Working on shutting it down.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024
Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.
"Exactly. And it's bewildering for Trump because the race that he thought he had no longer exists. He's facing someone who's 20 years younger who doesn't have trouble completing sentences, who actually has energized Democrats, who's drawing big crowds, who's moving up in the polls. And all of these factors are making him extremely frustrated, less than a hundred days out from the election. And you can see this projection in his public statements and Truth Social comments. He's been like, look, like, a sort of this exercise in wishful thinking on Truth Social, where he's saying, I'm hearing Biden's really angry and wants to get, you know, regrets dropping out. And maybe he gets back in, you know, and it's sort of like... I know that's what you want, but that, that's not really what's happening. And so you're seeing this sort of Trump kind of publicly emoting for poor Joe Biden and how mistreated he was, but really it's just a projection. It's the race Trump wants again. Right. And he can't have it. And he's still sort of pining for that race that no longer exists."
Yesterday's lineups (via AP)(boldface added):
ABC’s “This Week” — Ohio Sen. JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee; Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.
NBC's “Meet the Press” — Preempted by coverage of the Olympics.
CBS’ “Face the Nation" — Vance; Gov. Laura Kelly, D-Kan.; Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America; retired Gen. Frank McKenzie, former commander of U.S. Central Command.
CNN's “State of the Union” — Vance; Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
“Fox News Sunday” — Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark.; Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo.
That's a lot of Vance, and there was no one from the Democratic side of the presidential campaign. For the Democrats, there were only 2 Senators (Klobuchar & Sanders), the Governor of Kansas, the Transportation Secretary, and a member of the House of Representatives. Why can't we hear from the Democratic campaign? They're still putting their ideas together and ironing out past inconsistencies? Are they in no shape to face serious questions? Or do they simply see that they're doing awfully well running on "joy" and not-Biden-not-Trumpness so there's no reason to change.
How did Vance do? Politico purports to sum it up, in "Vance makes his Sunday show sweep as Trump’s attack dog/The vice presidential nominee appeared on three Sunday shows in pre-recorded interviews from Cincinnati."
“Glengarry” is one of the plays that solidified Mamet’s reputation as a great American dramatist.... Mamet has become a polarizing figure in recent decades — his later plays have not been well-received, and his rightward political turn has alienated some onetime fans. But his early plays remain admired....
Theater people wring their hands and humbly request permission to stage Mamet plays. What if they stick to his early plays, written in the days before his rightward political turn?