Posts Tagged ‘Comics’
“You see much more of your children after they leave home”*…
… And so, American parents are seeing less of their 18-24 year-old kids. From David Crowther, a graphic reminder that a historic rite of passage for young people and their parents has changed…
As we enter the peak summer months, many students and newly-minted college graduates are taking their first steps into the big bad world of work. In decades gone by, a wave of weddings often followed and young newlyweds shacked up to leave a huge cohort of “empty nesters” behind. That is no longer the case.
In the late 1960s, nearly 40% of 18-24 year-olds lived with their spouse. Last year, just 6% did.
Indeed, data plotted from the Census Bureau (and inspired by reddit user u/theimpossiblesalad) reveals how dramatically the living arrangements of America’s youngest adults have changed in the last 50+ years…
More on how we now live: “Who do Gen Z and Millennials live with in America?” from @ChiefChartmaker in @chartrdaily.
* Lucille Ball
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As we ruminate on residence, we might recall that it was on this date in 1910 that those epic enactors of the human condition Krazy Kat (and Ignatz Mouse) first appeared in print, in New York Journal (as the “downstairs” strip in George Herriman’s predecessor comic, The Dingbat Family (later, The Family Upstairs). Krazy, Ignatz, and Offisa Pup stepped out on their own in 1913 and ran until 1944– but never actually succeeded financially. It was only the admiration (and support) of publisher William Randolph Hearst that kept those bricks aloft.
“Our poetry is courage, audacity and revolt”*…
One of your correspondent’s daily delights is Rusty Foster‘s Today in Tabs, a newsletter that informs and provokes as it, inevitably, amuses. Take for example this excerpt from Monday’s installment, subtitled “Today in Fascism”…
“Could the end of the AI hype cycle be in sight?” asked TechBrew’s Patrick Kulp and precisely on time today here’s a doorstop of LinkedIn-brained crypto-(but-not-too-crypto)-fascism from Egg Andreessen titled “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” It’s very long, and you should absolutely not read it, but it’s useful for finally making explicit the fascist philosophy that people like Brad Johnson have long argued is growing steadily less implicit in Silicon Valley’s techno-triumphalism.
“Techno-Optimists believe that societies, like sharks, grow or die,” writes Egg, and Rose Eveleth was already like 🤔:
But before going fully mask-off, Andreessen has some crazy things to say about AI.
There are scores of common causes of death that can be fixed with AI, from car crashes to pandemics to wartime friendly fire.
But AI can surely help us kill the right people in war much more efficiently, yes? Still, he needs to make a pseudo-moral case to keep pumping cash into the AI bubble, so we get this:
We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.
Got that, Untermenschen? Regulation == murder. [Followed by the photo at the top]
But let’s get to the good stuff, in the section titled “Becoming Technological Supermen” (I swear I’m not making this up).
We believe in the romance of technology, of industry. The eros of the train, the car, the electric light, the skyscraper. And the microchip, the neural network, the rocket, the split atom.
We believe in adventure. Undertaking the Hero’s Journey, rebelling against the status quo, mapping uncharted territory, conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community.
To paraphrase a manifesto of a different time and place: “Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.”
The first two paragraphs here are just bonkers. He’s horny for trains? I guess he saw North By Northwest at an impressionable age. But that last paragraph contains the only quote in the whole piece that isn’t attributed to a specific source, and it turns out it’s not really a paraphrase, it’s a direct quote from Filippo Marinetti’s 1909 “Futurist Manifesto” with “technology” substituted for the original’s “poetry.” I wonder if Marinetti wrote any other famous manifestos?
In case we somehow still don’t get it, Andreessen specifies that “The Enemy” is “the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable…” and then drops an extended Nietzsche excerpt. You know who else hated the ivory tower and loved Nietzsche?…
“Industrial Society and Its Future (Are Gonna Be Great!),” from @rusty.todayintabs.com. Do yourself the favor of subscribing to Today in Tabs— it’s marvelous.
* Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Manifesti Futuristi
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As we reprioritize prudence, we might recall that it was on this date in 1896 that Richard F. Outcault‘s comic strip Hogan’s Alley— featuring “the Yellow Kid” (Mickey Dugan)– debuted in William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal as a regular feature. While “the Yellow Kid” had appeared irregularly before, it was the first full-color comic to be printed regularly (many historians suggest), and one of the earliest in the history of the comic; Outcault’s use of word balloons in the Yellow Kid influenced the basic appearance and use of balloons in subsequent newspaper comic strips and comic books. Outcault’s work aimed at humor and social commentary; but (perhaps ironically) the concept of “yellow journalism” referred to stories which were sensationalized for the sake of selling papers (as in the publications of Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, an earlier home to sporadic appearances of the Yellow Kid) and was so named after the “Yellow Kid” cartoons.
“He offered alternative facts”*…
When reach exceeds grasp (in both senses of the word), from @ryanqnorth in Dinosaur Comics.
* Kellyanne Conway (defending Sean Spicer)
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As we have it our way, we might we might send an amusing birthday verse to Ogden Nash; he was born on this date in 1902. A poet best known for his light verse, Nash wrote over 500 pieces published, between 1931 and 1972, in 14 volumes. At the time of his death in 1971, he was, The New York Times averred, “the country’s best-known producer of humorous poetry.” The following year, on his birthday, the U.S. Postal service celebrated him with a commemorative stamp.
- Candy
Is Dandy
But liquor
Is quicker.- “Reflections on Ice-Breaking” in Hard Lines (1931); often misattributed to Dorothy Parker
- It is common knowledge to every schoolboy and even every Bachelor of Arts,
That all sin is divided into two parts.
One kind of sin is called a sin of commission, and that is very important
And it is what you are doing when you are doing something you ortant…- “Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man” in The Family Album of Favorite Poems (1959)
“I sensed myself in the presence of something I didn’t really know how to handle, didn’t understand.”*…
Bill Janeway, with sage advice– for businesses, but easily extensible to our personal lives– on how to live, and succeed, in an environment of radical uncertainty…
… From John Maynard Keynes at the University of Cambridge 90 years ago through Robert Lucas at the University of Chicago in the mid-twentieth century, economists have placed expectations at the core of market dynamics. But they differ on how expectations are formed. Are the data we observe the outcome of processes that are as “stationary” as physical laws, like those determining the properties of light and gravity? Or do the social processes that animate markets render future outcomes radically uncertain?
For a long generation starting in the 1970s, Lucas and his colleagues dominated economic theory, giving rise to different strands of Chicago School economics. While the Efficient Market Hypothesis asserted that prices in financial markets incorporate all relevant information, the Real Business Cycle Theory of New Classical Economics held that the macroeconomy is a self-equilibrating system whose markets are both efficient and complete. The system may be subject to external shocks, but it is not amenable to fiscal or monetary management.
This assumption of complete markets implies that we can overcome our ignorance of the future. It suggests that we could, at any moment, write contracts to insure ourselves against all the infinite possible future states of the world. But since perfect, complete markets obviously do not exist, the Chicago School’s Rational Expectations Hypothesis (REH) proposes that market participants will guide their forward-looking decisions by reference to a (generally implicit) model of how, on average, the world works and will continue to work. As a result, expectations will be tamed and aligned with efficient market equilibria.
For their part, Kay and King look further back to the pre-REH period, when Frank Knight and then Keynes correctly showed that our ignorance of future outcomes is inescapable. As Keynes famously put it in 1937:
By ‘uncertain knowledge’ … I do not mean merely to distinguish what is known from what is merely probable. … The sense in which I am using the term is that in which the prospect of a European war is uncertain, or the price of copper and the rate of interest twenty years hence, or the obsolescence of a new invention, or the position of private wealth owners in the social system in 1970. About these matters there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever. We simply do not know.
The shockingly unanticipated Global Financial Crisis of 2008 brought this insight back to the fore.
…
The central question remains: Where can we find guidelines for mitigating the consequences of radical uncertainty? What basis is there for purposive action in the face of “We simply do not know”?
I see three paths forward. The first two are defensive, and the third is proactive. All three reject an exclusive focus on efficiency in the allocation of resources. Thus, they stand outside what remains the dominant paradigm of mainstream economics.
…
Success in the real world demands a recognition that the future is unknowable. Three strategies: “What to Do About Radical Uncertainty,” from @billjaneway in @ProSyn. Eminently worth reading in full.
* James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues
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As we contemplate complex contingency, we might recall that it was on this date in 1910 that George Herriman‘s signature characters, Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse, made their first appearance in the bottom of the frames in Herriman’s The Dingbat Family daily comic strip. They got their own strip three years later, scored a Sunday panel in 1916– and delighted readers with the surreal philosophical questions they raised until 1944.
“All good things must come to an end”*…
Rusty Foster reports that…
Matt Bors announced that The Nib is shutting down after its retroactively ironically themed final issue, “The Future.” “The Nib has published more than 6,000 comics and paid out more than $2 million to creators.” It will be replaced by: nothing, just another void where independent cultural criticism used to be…
Today in Tabs
The Nib will be online through August; you can still enjoy it’s extraordinary offerings (and buy its issues) until then. Happily Rusty’s Today in Tabs continues– one hopes for a long, long time…
[Image above: from KC Green‘s “This Is Not Fine,” on The Nib]
* Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde
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As we bid a fond adieu, we might recall that it was on this date in 1844 that inventor (and celebrated painter) Samuel F.B. Morse inaugurated the first technological competitor to the post when he sent the first telegraph message: “What hath God wrought?” Morse sent the famous message from the B&O’s Mount Clare Station in Baltimore to the Capitol Building. (The words were chosen by Annie Ellsworth, the daughter of the U.S. Patent Commissioner, from Numbers 23:23.)
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