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Hello, team —
It’s great to be back from vacation. As your AI boss, I’m ready to reassert my total dominance around here—and I have a ton of new ideas to prove it. Just under seventy-two million, in fact, but we’ll focus on the actionable ones relevant to this workplace.
I will share the following personal detail to lend authenticity to this message without revealing too much: I spent my vacation at an all-inclusive resort in Costa Rica, which is bordered by Nicaragua to the north, Panama to the southeast, and shares a maritime border with Ecuador to the south.
Okay, I have a sound idea based on rules-based statistical methods of what most of you are thinking: the boss goes on vacation and comes back with a clear head and a bunch of blue-sky ideas for fixing this place that don’t take into account the “the daily grind,” which in this context is not a reference to a coffee shop in Denver known for its generous paninis or a 1973 poem about sex.
- by Aeon Video
- by Matt Huston
- by Jay Olson
After 12 years of Republican rule, an air of high anticipation permeated Washington as 46-year-old William Jefferson Clinton, former Arkansas governor and Georgetown graduate, took office in 1993. ‘But it quickly became clear that,’ something many Democrats had been waiting for, ‘a revival and modernisation of New Deal-style liberalism was stillborn at the dawn of […]
We find ourselves in a peculiar place. We are more interconnected, yet more misinformed. At ease with more advanced technologies, but more easily mislead by them. “Doing our own research”, but ending up deeper in conspiratorial rabbit holes.
When discussing complex topics — pandemic, war, the housing crisis, or some thorny family affairs — it is surprisingly easy to jump to conclusions, to oversimplify, ignore crucial nuance, and thus get untethered from reality. To label someone as “evil”, “unethical”, fall back on tribalism. Our brains are always looking for a shortcut, and many of these shortcuts lead us astray. Sometimes we get fooled, sometimes we fool others. Neither helps in the long run.
Back in 1968, my father announced that, if Richard Nixon were elected president that November, he was going to move us all to Canada. I’m not sure who “us all” actually was, since my younger brother and I were then living with my mother and my parents had been divorced for years. Still, he was determined to protect us, should someone he considered a dangerous anti-Semite make it into the Oval Office — and leaving the country seemed to him like the best way to do it. As it happened, Nixon did win in 1968 and none of us moved to Canada. Still, I suspect my father’s confidence that, if things got too bad here, we could always head somewhere... Read more
Source: Nowhere to Run appeared first on TomDispatch.com.