garry’s subposterous

To get today’s levels we’ve relied on the compound interest of attention. Every year a steady stream of new readers and customers have joined the flock while still keeping the bulk from the year before.

Professions where you are paid by the hour are not scalable. A prostitute who charges $100 an hour only has 24 hours in a day. At some point, she will hit a ceiling on her earnings. Similarly, dentists, lawyers, contractors, bakers, and consultants can see only so many clients at a time.

By contrast, scalable professions allow you to make more money without an equivalent increase in labor / time. An author writes a book one time and his effort is the (basically) the same whether he sells 500 or 500,000 copies. A Hollywood actress need not show up at every screening of her movie to make money off it.

This is a simple but remarkably important point.

In this environment, we need to consider some heresies, like the idea that the best way to provide a public good is not necessarily to pour subsidies on middlemen, and then bail them out with more subsidies when they fail at their public function.

We've just published a study that shows that almost all Nobel laureates in the sciences actively engage in arts as adults. They are twenty-five times as likely as the average scientist to sing, dance, or act; seventeen times as likely to be a visual artist; twelve times more likely to write poetry and literature; eight times more likely to do woodworking or some other craft; four times as likely to be a musician; and twice as likely to be a photographer. Many connect their art to their scientific ability with some riff on Nobel prizewinning physicist Max Planck words: "The creative scientist needs an artistic imagination."

People who are trillions of dollars in debt, yelling at people who are billions of dollars in debt.

Stealing money is much more reliable than earning it. You can steal wealth slowly, the old-fashioned way, buried within the operations of trading for the house account. Or you can steal it quickly, by using obscure and poorly understood financial artifacts to produce the illusion of wealth creation. Then you take a piece of the illusionary wealth, as personal cash, now. Then you exit and duck for cover before the entire game blows up.

Those who let their anger out in a constructive manner were more likely to be professionally well-established, as well as enjoy emotional and physical intimacy with loved ones.

There is a lot of talk nowadays about what will replace the dinosaur that is the daily newspaper. So-called citizen journalists and bloggers and media pundits have lined up to tell us that newspapers are dying but that the news business will endure, that this moment is less tragic than it is transformational.

Well, sorry, but I didn't trip over any blogger trying to find out McKissick's identity and performance history. Nor were any citizen journalists at the City Council hearing in January when police officials inflated the nature and severity of the threats against officers. And there wasn't anyone working sources in the police department to counterbalance all of the spin or omission.

I didn't trip over a herd of hungry Sun reporters either, but that's the point. In an American city, a police officer with the authority to take human life can now do so in the shadows, while his higher-ups can claim that this is necessary not to avoid public accountability, but to mitigate against a nonexistent wave of threats. And the last remaining daily newspaper in town no longer has the manpower, the expertise or the institutional memory to challenge any of it.

People who are members of online social networks are not so much networking as they are broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle... Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever.

People don't vote on policy, they vote for leaders, for people whose values seem American to them, for people they feel they can trust.