Nick McRae

We Are The Slop Your life is my background noise

"We have been posting about our lives for a long time. But now I notice something else, something more than a compulsion to capture and share moments. I see people turning into TV characters, their memories into episodes, themselves into entertainment. We have become the meaningless content.."

I always found the idea that something that intoxicates us could be anything but detrimental to our health a bit strange myself.

Lately I've been thinking about how the written word didn't exist for essentially our entire history. So the idea of being educated and knowledgeable is a recent phenomenon.

The corollary is that minds didn't really evolve to 'know', they evolved to act and survive. Intellectuals are an outlier.

It looks like future historians will say that in all the annals of American economic governance, the appointment of Scott Bessent as Treasury Secretary—alongside the elevation of E.J. Antoni to the Bureau of Labor Statistics—was a critical sea-change away from institutional independence and... /

The “problem” with vaccines? They so effective at preventing deaths that they create generations of people that question whether disease was a problem in the first place because they have never experienced the horrors of a world without vaccines.

I do wonder how the combination of contraception and global warming is going to factor in. People are already foregoing kids because of global warming and things aren't even close to as bad as they're going to get. This feels like a pretty big variable.

We've probably all heard the statement that your brain isn't fully formed until you're 25. However much it "feels" true — it just isn't. Neuroscientist @Garwboy writes for @BBCNews Science Focus about where it comes from, and the reality, and what the consequences would be if it was really the […]

I'm coining a new term: 'Contemporary Bias'

When people see a problem as unique to their era but it's either a solution to a worse problem from a previous era, or a problem that's existed throughout our entire history but they have no historical perspective.

#Sociology #Anthropology

This is bad. But if Trump was the best we could do at this point I don't think pollution is the root of the problem.

Co-workers and the like button.

Stories are a far better method of sharing than a timeline exactly because of the like button and them not being public facing.

They (stories) are a more socially effective way to share what you're interested in or doing. Better UX. And boomers don't know how.

I don't see much evidence that the majority were ever doing much thinking. Before the internet and social media it was TV. From our vantage point social media just looks like a unique problem.

And athletes make tens of millions of dollars. This isn't sustainable.

I figure the underlying cause of their support for Trump is racism. *Because* they are poor they're othering (and angry at / fearful of) other races, and Trump is the one who'll improve their status.

Thoughts on Motivation and My 40-Year Career I’ve never published an essay quite like this. I’ve written about my life before, reams of stuff actually, because that’s how I process what I think, but never for public consumption. I’ve been pus…

The below resonates, having purpose is way underrated:

"And ultimately, I think I’m less interested in my own happiness (whatever that means) than I am interested in doing work that feels worth doing."

That makes sense, the only thing that comes to mind that could be an issue is that we're locked into Microsoft One Drive, but it looks like iPhone has an app for that. And based on other comments porting files and photos from the phone to our computers shouldn't be an issue.

What's your take on the value of getting an iPhone if you have no other Apple products, and have a Linux laptop and desktop?

It is the conceptually simplest system of property organization following what came before.

Marxism etc is symbolic of the desire to equalize things even further, but nobody did the hard work of figuring out how to actually do that in practice.

I wrote a longer mini-essay a couple years ago but I see the driving force behind capitalism as the protection and organization of property, as in literally everything one can own, including money, valuables, physical land etc. Few sovereigns (monarchy) vs many (landowners), and then non-landowners.

In a certain light that actually makes the world now *more* meritocratic, because it's less likely that someone is going to just come and pillage all of your stuff.

That form of capitalism, however, isn't 'what works', as it has serious problems. It's best described as 'what's happening'.

I figure the difference between modern 'capitalism' and the 'capitalizing' of say, hundreds of thousands of years ago, is that we now have states with a robust legal apparatus which codify and secure property ownership.

Hopefully there is value in those posts for you. I guess the underlying idea is that the emotion itself isn't the target of therapy, it's the substrate causing expression and how to keep that in balance so mood stays within normal bounds.

America is sinking, and Canada cannot go down with the ship Donald Trump is blaming other countries for his country’s large trade deficits when the U.S. should be looking at itself

".. close to two-thirds of global financial professionals expect that the greenback will lose its leading reserve-currency status in the next five to 15 years. The global selloff of American bonds last month suggests the U.S. administration’s chaotic actions may have accelerated this timeline."

My team's an outlier. We're lean, have a boat-load of niche business knowledge, and our department would near collapse without us.

I'm curious who in the #Zen community has discovered T'ien-t'ai.

It predated Zen in Chinese Buddhism and one of its seminal works was translated in 2017 by Paul Swanson (The Mo-ho chih-kuan). Swanson's title is called Clear Serenity, Quiet Insight. Well worth checking out.

#Buddhism #Tientai

Chart shows declining expectations across age groups over time in the number of children than US men and women plan to have.

Total number of children that US women aged 20-24 plan to have
2002: 2.4 children
2012: 2.3 children
2023: 1.5 children

www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

I always read advice like this as a 'nice to have' but often removed from the reality of companies actually trying to find developers.

In many cases the best case scenario is hiring someone with potential, and who can be trained. An expert generalist is a unicorn that's very hard to find.

It's wild how influential Marx was / is.

I wonder how much of a difference it would have made if we had described collectivism as 'creating sustainable, healthy communities' and not 'eating the rich'.

Damage done, very hard to undo.

What is scrolling doing to our brains? Why? with Emma Kennedy · Episode

Spoiler alert: multitasking is bad
What is scrolling doing to our brain? Emma Kennedy talks to world leading cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Earl K. Miller, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, to find out what scrolling is doing to our brains. open.spotify.com/episode/46qo...

Some time ago I wondered if replacing the word 'manager' with 'supervisor' would make it make a little more sense. The whole point is to keep an eye on employees.

Linux is the way to go. We switched last year and I'll never go back to Microsoft. Faster, and exactly what you're looking for.