Until very recently, anything voice-enabled tended to suck. When I first plugged in my Echo earlier this year, it sucked a lot less. I realized this is the start of a shift in how we interact with our homes and […]
“Residents of Illinois towns who get their water from a private company rather than a municipal supplier pay far more and say they’re being squeezed for profit.” | learn more
Some of them seem useful, and then there’s others like “cycling will become the state’s official exercise” that make me cringe. I guess the legislature needed to fill the time while failing to pass a budget for so long. | learn more
“[E]xperts are warning that we will soon see a rise in the number of ‘digisexuals’ – people whose sexual and emotional appetites are almost entirely satisfied by the virtual world.” I’m stuck somewhere between facepalm 🤦 and trying really hard not to judge 👨⚖️. | learn more
I first heard of party lines from a customer in rural Canada who said, “when you call me back, it’ll ring for a while before I answer because it’s a party line.” I had no idea what he was talking […]
Shane Parrish writes about how the ancient code created aligned incentives between builders of buildings and their residents, which increased the odds of structures that didn’t collapse once the builder had moved on. | learn more
Retailers trying to compete the old away against Amazon are asking for trouble. Obviously, they need to find an edge in some other way. I expected to skim this article and archive it forever, but ended up reading it in […]
JD Vance does a nice job of story-telling in this book about his hillbilly family and their cultural origins. He really gives a voice to his people that we “urban elites” are unlikely to have seen firsthand. Though I felt […]
“What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they’re all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that […]
A new study based on UK data concludes that most wealth has been accumulated by being idle rather than working hard. | learn more