It seems to me that Trump's second term foreign policy is obsessed with dismantling the "shadow" oil market -- ending the system where China captures upside when sanctioned countries like Russia, Iran, and Venezuela sell oil, in yuan to boot -- without losing face or deterrence. They have arguably been successful at that objective in Iran and Venezuela, and I forget what's going on with Russia, but you can see the administration working on that front too. (I say this as a Biden stan and someone who thinks the Iran war is bad chess and bad morals.)
The other place I'd push back on this article is its belief that America doesn't want to trim the grass in Iran every few years. We are pretty committed to Iran not having nukes and the American people seem to have liked this war and the earlier strike pretty well.
Think of your product as part "content" and part "container". When I say "content" I mean "stuff that could fit on a content platform". When I say "container" I mean, the bundle of forces that your product exerts to bring the user in contact with the content.
Some learning products are just content with zero container. Books are the limit example. Karpathy's "Let's build GPT" is another.
Most learning products -- and all apps -- live or die by the container they create. (There is no reason to build a learning app other than to build a container. If you feel you have the best content, ship it on a content platform and save yourself a very painful distribution slog.
Duolingo is in the container game. Their container is made of every cheap trick in the book -- notifications, streaks, etc -- because they work. My startup was Hack Reactor, the coding bootcamp, and we did it with pair programming and fixed classroom hours. (We had great content, but our competitors with good containers and bad content did leagues better than vice versa.)
If you're building an app, you're in the container game. You can build a great container with no cheap tricks. I have done so! But you can't build a great learning app with no container, and you can't build a great container if you if you don't want to change your users' patterns of engagement and attention.
So, what is your container? How will you weave a powerful spell that meaningfully transforms the attention and engagement of the app's user? What will cause them to pull up your app again and again, when they would have churned from a simple anki deck or whatnot? Given that you find it distasteful to use the easy levers you mentioned (notifications, "streak" psychology), what alternatives can shift your users' patterns of attention and engagement towards the learning task?
If you have great answers to those questions, great! If you don't want to build a container, build content on a platform with easy distribution. If you want to build a container but you don't want to shape your users' attention or engagement, you are confused.
I don't understand this POV, can you explain what I'm missing?
Usually when people say "corporations aren't people" I think they are confused about the need for an abstraction. But you acknowledged the need for an abstraction.
I don't imagine you are confused about the status quo of the legal terminology? AFAIK, the current facts are: the legal term "person" encompasses "natural person" (ie the common meaning of "person") and "legal person" (ie the common usage of "corporation"). In legalese, owning shares of legal persons is not slavery; owning shares of natural persons is; owning shares of "people" is ambiguous.
I don't imagine you are advocating for a change in legal terminology. It seems like it would be an outrageously painful find-and-replace in the largest codebase ever? And for what upside? It's like some non-programmer advocating to abandon the use of the word "master" in git, but literally a billion times worse.
Are you are just gesturing at a broader political agenda about reducing corporate power? Or something else I am not picking up on?
This article is a midwit dismissal; it may contain valid corrections but it is ignorant on the core topic at hand. This is a shame, because it is extremely interesting and under-reported topic!
The core thesis of the book (per Claude) is: "Traumatic experiences become encoded in the body's nervous system, muscles, and organs, not just in conscious memory."
The perfect exposition of the concept is downthread, in a comment by 'neom, which I will excerpt: "[The acupuncturist] moved the needle, [I did] more crying, deeper, deeper crying, he kept moving the needle till I thought all the needles would burst out of me from how deeply I wanted to cry but he told me not to be scared and I thought I was going to die. Anyway, he left me alone in that room for about 35 minutes while I wailed, I mean, awkwardly wailed. After everything started to calm inside me, I slowly started to be able to think again, and the thought that was there was the memory of the guy who sexually abused me when I was a kid, moving his hand off my hip." (Thank you for sharing, neom.)
I've had two similar experiences myself in the last year. I haven't read the book and don't know how this subject shows up in the scientific literature, but the proprioceptive experience leaves zero room for doubt about what is happening.
People say lots of dumb and wrong things about trauma. Maybe the book contains some of that, but its titular observation is fascinating, true, and maybe even useful!
I'll close with a related theory of mine, also derived through proprioception: one of the functions of the full-body sob is to reorganize muscular patterns which share an origin with (are identical to?) the emotional origin of the tears.
I have loved Cormac's books since I was a child, but never read Larry McMurtry until recently. If you're in the same boat, I implore you to give one of the below a try.
Lonesome Dove -- A great story about washed-up Texas Rangers with achingly beautiful writing.
The Last Picture Show -- More tonally similar to Cormac's stories. Coming of age in a dusty Texas town.
Leaving Cheyenne -- I have never in my life recommended a romance novel until this moment. I'm literally crying as I write this, remembering the closing scene.
I think of you as a direct person, so it's strange to hear you dismiss "stablecoins are regulatory arbitrage" as misguided or incurious. Maybe I am wrong about something.
Would you agree that "actual regulatory evasion" has been a top-three use case across the history of stablecoins? (That is: hackers, money launderers, sanctioned entities, and crypto exchanges do things with stablecoins expressly because doing them with dollars in banks would be illegal in an enforceable way.)
And, would you agree that GENIUS is a formalization of the low-regulation status quo of stablecoins? (That is: the bank system does KYC, AML, and reporting on both sides of every transaction; the stablecoin system generally only does that for onramps and offramps.)
This is not to say "regulatory arbitrage" is the only thing going on with stablecoins. Existing payment rails are imperfect and rent-seeking for reasons that don't have to do with the above. I'm just surprised you're describing the arb as such a non-issue.
"Users don't hate change, they hate arbitrary change that forces them to learn how to use your site again, or that removes features they enjoy."
How does this square with the overwhelmingly negative early responses to facebook's news feed, or reactions? Would you characterize them as "arbitrary"? I use those as examples because they now seem widely loved, so they seem like good (non-arbitrary) design to me, but they were poorly received.
Wow. From where I'm sitting it seems like Reddit went to the ends of the earth to make users happy during periods of change, and wound up with a prevailingly negative reputation (in its own community) for its efforts. Was that the impression internally as well?
The other place I'd push back on this article is its belief that America doesn't want to trim the grass in Iran every few years. We are pretty committed to Iran not having nukes and the American people seem to have liked this war and the earlier strike pretty well.