Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’
“Inflation is when you pay fifteen dollars for the ten-dollar haircut you used to get for five dollars when you had hair”*…
Mike Konczal unpacks happens when one takes the AEI graphic of items that have had high and low inflation, but extend it to all categories…
This graphic is in the news again:
Its creator is Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute, who last posted an update to it in July 2022. He’s been doing a version since at least 2016, and if you read enough economics blogs or content you’ve probably seen some iteration of it.
People are talking about it again after Marc Andreessen posted it under the headline “Why AI Won’t Cause Unemployment.” Andreessen describes what people generally take away from it – blue line capitalism and dynamic, red line government regulations and stagnant…
Matt Yglesias noted on twitter that he’s “come to think it’s misleading — by being very selective in which categories of labor-intensive services it chooses to chart, it’s generated a narrative that relative price shifts are just about government regulation.”
That seems correct to me; these categories are pretty loaded. Let’s see if we can do better by including every possible category… let’s download all of the current Consumer Price Index (CPI) data off the BLS download site…
Since the BLS is constantly changing categories, we have to select the items that exist in both January 2000 and February 2023 to duplicate the chart. That leaves us with 62 categories. Doing a quick glance (and seeing in Perry’s own chart) the year-by-year evolution over time doesn’t really tell us much, so we can go with a simple bar chart for overall change. Let’s chart that here in full:
There are a few key takeaways looking at it this way:
In our version of the AEI chart the number one item isn’t health care but ‘delivery services,’ which is “fees for delivery of items such as letters, documents, and packages at non-US Postal Services facilities.”Think UPS or FedEx. This is pretty far from a government monopoly, indeed it’s the private sector alternative to a government program. But it is services and it is labor intensive.
The biggest thing, to me, isn’t “regulations” but whether it’s a service or a good…
More on how and why that matters in “A Better AEI Graphic of Inflation Over the Past 20 Years.”
* Sam Ewing
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As we ruminate in the rise, we might recall that it was on this date in 2006 that Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sent the first tweet.
“If you want to understand today you have to search yesterday”*…
The redoubtable Brewster Kahle on the dangerous ephemerality of civil discourse in our digital times…
Many have now seen how, when someone deletes their Twitter account, their profile, their tweets, even their direct messages, disappear. According to the MIT Technology Review, around a million people have left so far, and all of this information has left the platform along with them. The mass exodus from Twitter and the accompanying loss of information, while concerning in its own right, shows something fundamental about the construction of our digital information ecosystem: Information that was once readily available to you—that even seemed to belong to you—can disappear in a moment.
Losing access to information of private importance is surely concerning, but the situation is more worrying when we consider the role that digital networks play in our world today. Governments make official pronouncements online. Politicians campaign online. Writers and artists find audiences for their work and a place for their voice. Protest movements find traction and fellow travelers. And, of course, Twitter was a primary publishing platform of a certain U.S. president.
If Twitter were to fail entirely, all of this information could disappear from their site in an instant. This is an important part of our history. Shouldn’t we be trying to preserve it?
I’ve been working on these kinds of questions, and building solutions to some of them, for a long time. That’s part of why, over 25 years ago, I founded the Internet Archive. You may have heard of our “Wayback Machine,” a free service anyone can use to view archived web pages from the mid-1990’s to the present. This archive of the web has been built in collaboration with over a thousand libraries around the world, and it holds hundreds of billions of archived webpages today–including those presidential tweets (and many others). In addition, we’ve been preserving all kinds of important cultural artifacts in digital form: books, television news, government records, early sound and film collections, and much more.
The scale and scope of the Internet Archive can give it the appearance of something unique, but we are simply doing the work that libraries and archives have always done: Preserving and providing access to knowledge and cultural heritage…
While we have had many successes, it has not been easy… companies close, and change hands, and their commercial interests can cut against preservation and other important public benefits. Traditionally, libraries and archives filled this gap. But in the digital world, law and technology make their job increasingly difficult. For example, while a library could always simply buy a physical book on the open market in order to preserve it on their shelves, many publishers and platforms try to stop libraries from preserving information digitally. They may even use technical and legal measures to prevent libraries from doing so. While we strongly believe that fair use law enables libraries to perform traditional functions like preservation and lending in the digital environment, many publishers disagree, going so far as to sue libraries to stop them from doing so.
We should not accept this state of affairs. Free societies need access to history, unaltered by changing corporate or political interests. This is the role that libraries have played and need to keep playing…
A important plea, eminently worth reading in full: “Our Digital History Is at Risk,” from @brewster_kahle @internetarchive.
* Pearl S. Buck
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As we prioritize preservation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1940 that MGM released the first in what would be a long series of Tom and Jerry cartoons (though neither character was named in this inaugural outing, and one of the animators referred to them as Jasper and Jinx… Tom and Jerry were their monikers from the second cartoon, on). The basic premise was the one that would become familiar to audiences: “cat stalks and chases mouse in a frenzy of mayhem and slapstick violence.” Though studio executives were unimpressed, audiences loved the film, and it was nominated for an Academy Award.
Find Tom and Jerry at The Internet Archive.
“Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it”*…
Jonathan Haidt ponders the poisonous impact of social media, arguing that “It’s not just a phase,” and what considers we might do about it…
… It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.
Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country’s future—and to us as a people. How did this happen? And what does it portend for American life?
…
The high point of techno-democratic optimism was arguably 2011, a year that began with the Arab Spring and ended with the global Occupy movement. That is also when Google Translate became available on virtually all smartphones, so you could say that 2011 was the year that humanity rebuilt the Tower of Babel. We were closer than we had ever been to being “one people,” and we had effectively overcome the curse of division by language. For techno-democratic optimists, it seemed to be only the beginning of what humanity could do.
In February 2012, as he prepared to take Facebook public, Mark Zuckerberg reflected on those extraordinary times and set forth his plans. “Today, our society has reached another tipping point,” he wrote in a letter to investors. Facebook hoped “to rewire the way people spread and consume information.” By giving them “the power to share,” it would help them to “once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.”
In the 10 years since then, Zuckerberg did exactly what he said he would do. He did rewire the way we spread and consume information; he did transform our institutions, and he pushed us past the tipping point. It has not worked out as he expected…
Social media and society: “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” from @JonHaidt in @TheAtlantic. Eminently worth reading in full.
See also: “The big idea: how to win the fight against disinformation.”
* Clay Shirky
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As we follow Jaron Lanier‘s advice to “go to where you are kindest,” we might recall that it was on this date 1397 that Geoffrey Chaucer “told” (read aloud) The Canterbury Tales for the first time at the court of Richard II.
“A very merry Unbirthday to you!”*…
There’s been a good deal of understandable concern over online platforms and the dangers that they present to our health, both personal and civic. But occasionally it’s good to remind ourselves that there are services they provide that are genuinely crucial– e.g., Is Today Ted Danson’s Birthday?
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As we go to The Good Place, we might recall that it was on this date in 1965 that the FBI exonerated “Louie Louie,” declaring that the lyrics of the 1963 recording by The Kingsmen– widely rumored to be “dirty”– were in fact simply indecipherable. After analyzing the disc at its intended 45 rpm and also at 33 1/3 and 78, and interviewing a member of the band, the FBI Laboratory declared the lyrics to be officially “unintelligible at any speed.”
In fact the song’s creator, Richard Berry, had released “Louie Louie” to mild regional success– and no lyrical controversy– a decade earlier. But the FBI’s verdict notwithstanding, a cloud hovered over the tune: in 2005, the superintendent of the Benton Harbor, Michigan school system refused to let the marching band at one of the schools play the song in a parade; she later relented.
from the FBI’s “Louie Louie” file
“An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog”*…
Digital media are often (fairly) derided for playing to short attention spans. But brevity need not be synonymous with simplicity. New technologies also offer a canvas for creativity—even if the palette is confined to 140 characters. Many an artist or author is adept at using online channels to promote their work, and projects like the Los Angeles Review of Books have embraced an internet-first ethos. But there are also writers producing work with a distinctively online mindset. Though the medium is not quite the message, the limitations imposed by Twitter make for particularly fertile ground, giving rise to what has been called “Twitterature”…
More on aphorisms in the internet age at “The charms of Twitterature”
* Friedrich von Schlegel
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As we concentrate on concision, we might send bawdy birthday greetings to Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade; he was born on this date in 1740. The French aristocrat, revolutionary politician, philosopher, author, and libertine spent much of his adult life in prison. In 1778, de Sade was imprisoned by order of the king; ostensibly his offense was licentious behavior, but historians note that his mother-in-law, at whose urging the king acted, believed that the young Marquis was spending her daughter’s money too quickly. (There were also accusations of an affair with his wife’s sister… and it may have further motivated the mother-in-law that her daughter was rumored to be complicit in de Sade’s sexual escapades.) While in the Bastille, he battled boredom by writing– among other things, The 120 Days of Sodom. He was freed from prison in 1790, and ingratiated himself with the new Republic (calling himself “Citizen Sade”). de Sade began writing again, anonymously publishing works including Justine and Juliette… until, in 1801, Napoleon ordered his arrest (again for indecency and blasphemy). de Sade spent two years in prison, until his family had him declared insane, and moved him to the asylum at Charenton (the scene of Peter Weiss’s remarkable play Marat/Sade), where he died in 1814.
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