2022
Enjoyable article about Generation Z’s struggle to adapt to communication style in the office workplace, particularly on Slack and email.
Gen Z came to ‘slay.’ Their bosses don’t know what that means.. By Danielle Abril at The Washington Post.
Gen Z gets rococo and complex in its use of emoji, and they interpret full sentences ending periods as passive-aggressive.
Like every generation before them, they adapt to the older generations’ communication styles. And the older generations adapt to them.
I was standing on the sidewalk outside the pet store tapping on my phone. An old guy walked by very slowly, pushing a walker, with oxygen cannulae in his nostrils, wearing a jaunty Tyrolean hat.
“What did you do before you had those things?” he said.
I didn’t miss a beat. “Stared at the wall.”
He continued walking slowly on, laughing out loud.
— From my journal, this date in 2016.
How the Hospice Movement Became a For-Profit Hustle.
Half of all Americans now die in hospice care. Easy money and a lack of regulation transformed a crusade to provide death with dignity into an industry rife with fraud and exploitation.
— Ava Kofman, with Doris Burke, at ProPublica and The New Yorker.
I’ve been sleeping better for the past month or so. I attribute to more consistent bedtimes and wake times, reduced life stress and cooler bedroom temperatures. Even though summer nights here in San Diego are cool, our bedroom stays warm, and I think next summer I may return to my energy-wasting summer habit from the early 90s of sleeping with the a/c on, under a heavy blanket.
Common wisdom says you should avoid screen time before bed, but I have not found a correlation between screen time and insomnia.
What you can learn about sleep from truckers
Stephanie Vozza at Fast Company:
[Dean Croke, principal analyst at DAT Freight & Analytics, an on-demand freight marketplace] says the body is programmed to sleep twice a day, at night and again eight hours after you wake. The second sleep should be a 30-minute or a 90-minute nap to take advantage of the sleep cycles and avoid waking during deep sleep.
Having a bedtime is important. Croke recommends to trucking companies that they have drivers start work at the same time every day.
Starting work the same time every day encourages a fixed bedtime.
If you have a week that wears you down, Croke says you can make up for it on the weekend.
“The brain is incredibly resilient,” he says. “You’ll bounce back quickly if you’ve got two periods of good sleep at the end of the week. I call it the ‘two and seven rule.’ Get two periods of consecutive sleep each week to get rid of the sleep debt from the previous week.”
After two periods of good sleep, the brain washes away that sleep debt, and you can start Monday morning fresh.
Sleeping in on weekends runs contrary to a lot of other sleep advice I’ve read, but I believe it. With regard to sleep advice, a lot of folklore gets passed as science.
Freedom of reach is freedom of speech.
The online debate over free speech suuuuucks, and, amazingly, it’s getting worse… Billionaire dilettantes have their own stupid definitions of all kinds of important words like “freedom” and “discrimination” and “free speech.” Remember: these definitions have nothing to do with how the world’s 7,999,997,332 non-billionaires experience these concepts.
— Cory Doctorow, @pluralistic@mamot.fr
What if failure is the plan?. danah boyd has been studying social media for decades, with a particular focus on young people and other marginalized groups. She applies her insights to the current state of Twitter, with asides on the global war on terror and the real cause of the collapse of local journalism (it wasn’t the internet, Google, Facebook, or Craigslist that killed journalism. It was financiers hungry for the physical real estate—land—that newspaper offices occupied).
I’ve been viewing events at Twitter as an entertaining shitshow with little real world consequence. It’s fun to watch an arrogant billionaire fail spectacularly and publicly. boyd provides sobering perspective.
It is a cold and blustery day here in San Diego. We had brunch with friends. I walked the dog before the rain started. I am spending the afternoon on my keister, reading and blogging, with Julie and the dog. Then I will have dinner and watch some tv. An altogether splendid day.
Also, Julie bought a bag of googly eyes. ⬅️⬅️⬅️ We professional writers call this “burying the lead.”
Blogging is its own form at this point. It isn’t an essay. Nor is it a scholarly article. It has no length requirements: a blog post can be a sentence, a paragraph, 500 words, twice that, or twenty times that. Neither does blogging come with expectations of frequency. Some folks blog daily; others multiple times a day; others twice a week; others unpredictably, as a kind of clearinghouse for random ideas or thinking out loud.
Blogging is the shaggy dog of internet writing. It’s playful, experimental, occasional, topical, provisional, personal, tentative.
— Brad East, Substack vs. blogging.
Yes to this. Also, blogging and posting to social media are different forms of expression. Twitter is obviously different, with its character limitations.
Interestingly, US newspapers from the 19th and early 20th centuries read like blogs. This was before newspapers standardized on the neutral voice from nowhere. They were livelier and had more personality.
Molly White: On anti-crypto toxicity.
I don’t think anyone should be pressured to be nice to evil people. But I think the belief that anyone who engages in crypto is evil has become rampant, and has been used to justify hate towards people who don’t deserve it. There is no doubt that there are plenty of evil people in crypto, but there are a lot of people in there too who, should you care to dig deeper, are after a lot of the same goals that you might be.
…
If you feel the urge to “cyberbully” someone in crypto, direct it at the powerful players behind crypto projects that are actively taking advantage of the vulnerable. Or, just as reasonably, direct it at the powerful tech executives, venture capitalists, elected representatives, and lobbyists who have contributed to the untenable situation we find ourselves in. Or the policymakers and governmental agencies who have failed to uphold their duty in regulating crypto and enforcing existing regulation that would protect people from rampant fraud. But not the artist who hoped to earn a few bucks selling their digital art in what is otherwise an extremely difficult field, or the person who hoped that maybe a lucky crypto buy could help them dig out of crushing debt just a tiny bit faster.
Twitter to Increase Tweet Character Limit to 4,000, Elon Musk Says. By Sami Fathi at MacRumors.
Where Veteran Rockers Go to Reinvent Themselves. How the Hudson Valley and the Catskills became the home to grunge icons, ex-punks and one-hit wonders. By Sal Cataldi at The New York Times.
“Being a dentist up in Woodstock, with all these great musicians, is a pretty great second act. And what other dentist can say he is in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame?”
On 2024, Romney won’t back Trump, even if he’s the GOP nominee. By Steve Benen.
When you live in a semi-arid climate and you only drive a couple of times a week, you can go for years without driving in heavy rain, and then you find out your wiper blades have turned into ineffectual shoelaces.
Highbrow Films Aimed at Winning Oscars Are Losing Audiences. By Brooks Barnes at The New York Times. Audiences aren’t coming to theaters for these movies, and nobody really knows why.
We watched the first half of “Spirited” last night, because I thought I was in the mood for a lightweight Christmas movie, but it turned out I was not – or at least not that one. Julie wasn’t feeling it either.
So instead, we watched the first episode of “Three Pines,” which turned out to be very good and entertaining.
“Three Pines” is a murder mystery, like about three quarters of the shows we’ve been watching over the last few years. But this one is not British for a change. It’s set in Quebec, and stars Alfred “Doc Ock” Molina.
So far, it’s like “Northern Exposure” but French and with a murder.
Yesterday I mistakenly had coffee at four in the afternoon. I thought it was decaf. But I slept soundly last night anyway. Makes me wonder what other superpowers I have evolved.