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Category Archives: serious stuff

Road math

The Fourth Power Rule What these researchers found is that damage to the roadbed is proportional to the 4th power of the axle load of the vehicle, and they called this “the Generalized Fourth Power Law.” This means that if you double the weight on an axle, your vehicle does sixteen times the damage to […]

Water

This is Water by David Foster Wallace (Full Transcript and Audio [SoundCloud])

Freud and the plague

Death Drive Nation But distresses to Freud’s metabolisms, psychic and digestive, aside, one wonders if he might not have found in the US a case study in what would prove to be his most controversial idea, an idea which would also resolve his confusion over why Americans might actually be pretty copacetic, even welcoming, towards […]

Raymond Zack

“He uh… had the ability to make a bad decision and did.” “Yeahh-uh.” via Lefty Book Club Commentary with some more perspectives

Do not pass Go

Hey, i wrote something for another blog. Been participating in Lefty Book Club for a few weeks, with weekly assigned readings and group discussions over Zoom. In the subgroup i’ve been attending, we have read Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher and are now into Lost Connections by Johann Hari. Good books, good people, recommended for […]

shipping experts

I’m A Twenty Year Truck Driver, I Will Tell You Why America’s “Shipping Crisis” Will Not End Nobody is compelling the transportation industries to make the needed changes to their infrastructure. There are no laws compelling them to hire the needed workers, or pay them a living wage, or improve working conditions. And nobody is […]

Evopsych

What the caves are trying to tell us Is this writing? Is it language? Clearly it has to mean or do something; these enigmas must have been put there for some kind of a reason. Were our ancestors just playing, with a child’s hesitancy, at the perilous game of turning bits of pigment into an […]

As the shore crunches

Slavoj Žižek: Last Exit to Socialism When we say that the rise of average temperature has to be kept below 2°C (35.6°F), we talk (and try to act) as general managers of life on Earth, not as a modest species. The regeneration of the earth obviously does not depend upon “our smaller and more mindful […]

Dread

What It’s Like To Be Cancelled But recognizing my experience as trauma helped me find the tools to heal from it. I learned that, when you remove the massive scale and severe implications of my specific situation, lots of people could relate to the experience of having their voice taken away, of being shunned from […]

Nonprofits

A Way Out: An activist with an ulcer asks, “Why do nonprofits exist?” The generous answer is that society is imperfect: people have needs that the government cannot meet (and that corporations refuse to meet). But the cynical answer is that there’s money to be made in nonprofits. Not for the people actually working at […]