timelets

Three decades ago, the entire middle 40% held a greater share of wealth than the top 1%. Today the reverse is true, with Moody’s Analytics recently estimating that the top 10% of US households now make up about half of all spending.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-01-14/america-s-a-la-carte-economy-is-making-everyone-feel-poorer

It might be that this trend contributes to the changes in media consumption patterns. The traditional media makes money through ads, while influencers are mostly paid by their fan base through subscriptions. Because the purchasing power is now concentrated at the top, advertisers prefer to go after the more affluent and more sane audience, i.e. the top 20%, who consume quality content on the so-called mainstream media. Those people are likely to qualify as "the elite" and almost inevitably, the mainstream media caters to them. By contrast, influencers* cater to the less educated who prefer conspiracy theories and other anti-establishment infogarbage that raises their self esteem, by keeping them inside particular bias-reinforcing, most often right-wing bubbles.

Moreover, the disaggregation of the traditional porn media probably plays a role when it comes to information consumption by young men. That is, before, printed porn magazines, e.g. Playboy, provided a combination of porn images and mainstream articles, including on politics, men's health, etc. Now, porn is served separately by specialized services such as Only Fans and others. The new generation of young men, especially those who are less educated, are "liberated" from reading mainstream and flock to anti-establishment influencers who are free to peddle garbage du jour.

* link via rsokolov

Недавно, еще до изменений с ЖЖ, меня начал интересовать вопрос: чем терпение русского народа отличается от терпения британского народа. Вопрос вырос из истории второй мировой войны, где оба народа показали выдержку в довольно суровых условиях. В обоих случаях, у них был признанный лидер — Сталин и Черчиль соотвественно.

После окончания войны Сталин произнес знаменитый тост про терпение русского народа, закрутил гулаговские гайки и остался диктатором до самой смерти. В то же время, британцы, ценя необыкновенно высоко личную роль Черчилля в победе над Германией, прокатили его партию на выборах. Получается, что оба народа были необыкновенно терпеливы во время войны, а после нее русским пришлось терпеть и дальше. Кажется очевидным, что терпение русских было вынужденным, продиктованным невозможностью противостоять сталинскому режиму. Но так ли это? Можно ли объяснить разницу между народами в запасе терпения исключительно степенью политической свободы в обществе?

Еще можно сравнить современное терпение русского и британского народов по отношению к цензуре в интернете. В чем разница? Как можно было бы измерить propensity for patience в обоих случаях?

И уж совсем вопрос "по касательной": есть ли в британской литературе хоть что-то похожее на тургеневское "Муму"? Почему Герасим терпел от барыни все до тех пор, пока ему не пришлось утопить любимую собаку?

If he succeeds, Trump's disregard for the law is going to create a long-term problem for the country:

Perhaps the biggest test for Congress is Trump’s bid to wrestle power over one of the legislature’s core functions: deciding what programs get funded, and at what cost. In an unprecedented action, the Trump administration offered 2 million federal employees a chance to resign now and receive eight months of pay, implying an expenditure of money not authorized by Congress. Further, Trump and his allies have said they would contest a Nixon-era law that requires him to spend money on programs as appropriated by Congress. Trump allies have said the law is unconstitutional and that the president can impound, or refuse to spend, money for programs he doesn’t like.

The tepid response so far offers the latest measure of how much Congress has ceded its authority since earlier eras in which powerful committee chairmen defended their constitutional turf no matter who was in the White House. Today, Trump dominates his party, and many GOP lawmakers fear that challenging him could cost them their jobs, as the president and his allies could back primary challenges against them.

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-kicks-aside-congress-with-sweeping-claims-of-presidential-power-a3daf68b

About the Grimm Brothers:

“In 1812, the first edition of their anthology, comprising eighty-six stories, came out in an edition of 600, with an apparatus of notes running to hundreds of pages. It was not really intended to be read for pleasure at all by the children and households of its title; it was a learned work setting out to reconfigure the cultural history of Germany along lines that would emancipate it from the monopoly of classical and French superiority. Yet this collection—by the final, standard edition of 1857 the number of tales had grown to 210—was to become the most widely translated work in the world after the Bible and the Qur’an, rendered into more than 160 languages so far, including Xhosa and Tagalog, and still counting.”
...
"Germany wasn’t yet Germany. It was a congeries made up of dozens of principalities and archdukedoms, free Hanseatic ports and archbishoprics. History shows us that the modern nation-state develops long after a national culture and its language: think of Italy and of Dante, writing five hundred years before Italian unification. For centuries, “most of the peninsula had been under German or Austrian or Spanish rule, while the Renaissance, indisputably Italian, was influencing the whole world. The Grimms were living in a time of turmoil and bloodshed. ”
...
“One response to humiliation is to assert cultural riches and distinctiveness, even pre-eminence. ”

--- Warner, Marina;. “Once upon a Time."

FDA approved Airpods2 as hearing aids for people with mild to medium hearing loss. https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/apple-airpods-pro-hearing-aid-features-af0f2714

As soon as it rolls out the software update this fall, Apple will instantly make the AirPods Pro 2 into a medical device, essentially turning every pair of the company’s top-selling headphones into over-the-counter hearing aids.
...
75% of people with hearing loss let it go untreated, according to the Apple Hearing Study, a project run with the University of Michigan. In case you don’t trust medical statistics from a trillion-dollar company trying to sell you something, the audiologists I consulted told me that number sounded right.

По результатам российских выборов можно сделать вывод, что страна прошла еще одну развилку в сторону чеченизации. Реальный выбор был между тем, чтобы делатъ хуйлу KPIs по плану или перевыполнять. Перевыполнили.

I wonder how a second Trump presidency would look like. Two things would be for sure: a) strengthening of the conservative majority on the Supreme Court; b) disaster for Ukraine and lifting (or lack of enforcement) of core economic sanctions on Russia.

We haven’t had a new exciting consumer technology in a while. Online meetings/education, although useful, feels imposed and buggy. To many, mRNA vaccines also feel involuntary and somewhat dangerous. ChatGPT doesn’t have any cool apps that a common person can relate to. All of that feeds into a backlash against tech in general. Musk's antics don't help either. The world wants some kind of penicillin or, at least, Angry Birds. None seems to be forthcoming.

Ответы волка на вопросы Красной Шапочки были новой информацией, но не новым знанием. Знание появилось только после того, как он ее съел.

После начала войны у нас не стало намного больше информации о России. Но прибавилось огромное знание о ней. Информацию можно было игнорировать, а знание - нет. The asymmetry between past and present knowledge is dramatic.

В определенной степени это относится к переходу from Google to the so-called generative AI.