Driving Like a Maniac Should Have Consequences
The Winter Olympics are basically over as I write this, and I didn’t watch much of it, though I did notice that drone footage following downhill skiers kicks ass. I understand various safety concerns, but at a certain point, one wonders why drones aren’t used more extensively over soccer matches, baseball games, and other outdoor sporting events where cable-guided cameras over the playing surface are impractical.
This month, I’ve written about a cool philosophy book, how I've been radicalized against cars, a critically-acclaimed TV show I’m finally watching, Barack Obama’s opinion on aliens, our gambling dystopia, and more. LFG.
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- Are You Competitive? Know “The Score”
- Which MLB Teams Are Trying to Win?
- American Gambling Culture Is Bad
- “Halt and Catch Fire”
- Driving Like a Maniac Should Have Consequences
- The Worst Class I Took in College
- Barack Obama Got Asked About Aliens…
- Sam Altman Doesn’t Value Humanity
- A Good Toilet Seat
- More About My Next Book
Are You Competitive? Know “The Score”
“The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game”, by C. Thi Nguyen, a philosopher of games, operates on several different levels. For someone like me, who views games and sports as inherently political and laments that Americans have widely applied capitalist logic to games and sports all the way down to four-year-olds’ competitions, much of the book acted as a clarifier, providing new language and clear analogies to describe feelings I have had about games and sports for many years.
For example, I play in a weekly adult softball league in which being competitive is a core part of the enjoyment, but while winning is fun, the purpose of playing is friendship and fellowship with my teammates and being active with my body. It would not be nearly as fun if we played in a league where we got our asses kicked by far superior opponents, nor if we played in a league where our team was far superior to the others, nor if we were winning but my teammates were solely focused on winning. Nguyen refers to this mode of play as “striving”, versus “achievement” play, in which the result is what matters most.
Though I didn’t watch much Olympics coverage, I did come across this piece by Mary Carillo, in which she explored Norway’s youth sports culture and explicitly contrasted it to American youth sports culture. Most striking — to me, at least — was that every Norwegian interviewed seemed to say that the point of youth sports is to play a part in developing a happy life for a growing child, not to achieve excellence in the sport. Yet, adult Norwegian athletes enjoy considerable success in winter sports that are popular in their country.
Watching the piece, I constantly thought of Nguyen’s book, and how his eloquent advocacy for the value of striving play mirrored the Norwegian ethos.
More: Nguyen appeared on the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast to discuss his book, and it is a fascinating conversation well worth hearing, whether you read the book or not.
Which MLB Teams Are Trying to Win?
Spring training is back, baby! If you’re a fan of an MLB team, are they actually trying to win, or are they merely in a state of preparing to compete? If I’m being generous, I count 19 of the 30 teams going into this season seriously attempting to make the playoffs.
Of the 11 remaining teams, the Cardinals, Nationals, and Twins already waved the white flag; the Diamondbacks, Rays, Marlins, and Pirates made incremental moves with possible thoughts of competing this year, though they took no big swings and are also seemingly OK with mediocrity; the White Sox are making clear moves to improve, but started so far down they’ll probably be bad again; the Athletics locked up their young hitters, but didn’t do much beyond hoping for internal improvement, ostensibly waiting for their move to Las Vegas before actually trying; the Angels signed every former name brand reclamation project in free agency the same way some people buy $50 worth of lottery tickets every week; and the Rockies were hopelessly lost for so long that the new front office will need more than just one offseason to change things, if it’s even possible with that ownership.
All that said, obviously the Dodgers are the favorites to win the championship again, but I think the Mets are going to be the second-best team in the NL, with the Cubs right behind, with both New York and Chicago being hindered by a lack of top-flight pitching unless they swing a midseason trade. In the AL, I feel like the Red Sox, with all their young position-player talent plus pretty good pitching, are most likely to dramatically outplay the projections I’m seeing.
Finally, the team with the biggest risk of collapse that I see might be the Phillies. That outfield looks awfully rickety, it wouldn’t be crazy if Bryce Harper and Kyle Schwarber both plummeted to merely “pretty good” rather than All-Star levels, and the pitching could be exceptionally shaky after Cristopher Sanchez.
Oh, God, we’re still more than a month away from Opening Day, aren’t we?
American Gambling Culture Is Bad
Former NBA MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo recently became an endorser for Kalshi, a so-called “prediction market”. He has since deleted the Instagram post in which he wrote, “We all on Kalshi now,” perhaps because that was uncomfortably close to truth, with many of us unwillingly ensnared in a Kalshi-ed world.
Watch a pro sports event on TV, and you will see many, many (MANY) advertisements for betting, which is what “prediction markets” are. In the case of Kalshi or Polymarket, they pit users against each other on either side of a proposition rather than against the house, which sounds like a great business to be in. That said, gambling is fundamentally different today than it was before widespread deregulation, and given the ease of gambling through one’s phone, paying with credit cards. It’s not a new insight to note that the US is speed-running the legalized gambling arc experienced in the UK, where these days gamblers are not allowed to bet online using credit cards, and a sustained backlash against gambling saturation has influenced the English Premier League’s decision to ban betting sponsorships from the front of teams’ shirts, among other voluntary and legal regulations.
How soon before Americans realize that our gambling culture is extremely bad? There are people betting large sums on things like the length of the national anthem performance at the Super Bowl as a means of gaining attention as an influencer, which seems harmless enough, but then we discover in the same article that people pretty clearly have inside information about, say, which celebrities would appear during Bad Bunny’s halftime show, and therefore they are taking money from someone else. Is it good that people are betting on how many cars will make it through a given intersection during a green light cycle? How do you feel about obvious inside info that resulted in a winning bet on when Nicholas Maduro would be deposed in Venezuela?
I’ve come to believe that we will know It Happened because there will be a huge spike in bets on these markets from the unprincipled chuds in the White House whose primary motivation is always immediate personal gain. It might only be a few minutes before the official announcement, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to break out that way. And all that’s just what will eventually become publicly known. Heaven knows what kinds of inside info are being used for personal enrichment on these platforms.
“Halt and Catch Fire”
Recently, I completed the first two seasons of the TV show “Halt and Catch Fire”. The full four-season run aired on AMC from 2014 to 2017. For those who don’t know, the show’s first two seasons cover a group of people working in the tech industry in 1980s Texas, and I understand they go elsewhere in future seasons. I remember multiple critics praising this show when it was on, but it doesn’t seem to have made a big cultural impact.
That’s a shame, because it’s an exceptionally well-written show with charismatic performances from Lee Pace (exuding Ultra Theater Kid energy), McKenzie Davis (who gets a lot more to do in the second season, thankfully), Kerry Bishé (adding great texture to what could’ve been a cliched put-upon working mom), and Toby Huss (who is great in everything he’s ever done). Scoot McNairy (who also played the husband to Bishé’s character in “Argo”) is the one weak(er) link in the main cast, but that could also just be a function of my tiring quickly of his character’s cluelessness, and it’s nowhere near diminishing my enjoyment of it.
One thing that stands out compared to other modern “prestige” dramas I’ve watched is that characters’ inner turmoil is effectively communicated by dramatizing their actions, and without those characters saying “I am in pain” or otherwise being expository, while at the same time, those characters’ actions have clear antecedents, following logically from their previous actions. I’m stoked for Season 3.
Driving Like a Maniac Should Have Consequences
This story about how San Francisco’s speed cameras are issuing a huge number of citations (gift link) includes a passage in which a man openly admits to driving like a dangerous maniac, but it’s treated as if he’s just another person with an opinion about the cameras.
Drivers, meanwhile, remain perpetually vigilant, alternately trying to follow the rules or find ways to evade camera surveillance.
Among them is Spencer Knight, a self-professed “life-long speeder” who lives in Alameda but works in San Francisco, where he racked up two warnings and a $100 citation after the devices went up. He’s since discovered new hacks, like opening Google maps, or other navigation systems, to pinpoint the cameras’ locations.
“Having said that, I will say I’ve tried to be a better driver,” Knight added. “I realized that I want to be a good citizen, and maybe not go 50 miles per hour down Lombard Street — which is easy to do when nobody is around.”
This guy is a menace! It’s guys like him who have radicalized me against driving. While I still drive because it’s the only practical way to get my child to school and myself to work every day, I’ve come to believe that our country would be far better with robust public transportation that more people would willingly choose to use, privileged bicycle infrastructure, and severe penalties for speeders and other reckless drivers.
For example, I’d be all for mandatory speed governors on new cars and subsidized installation of speed governors on older cars, such that no car can actually exceed 65 miles per hour on freeways or lower speeds in other places. And if people don’t want to install them, they wouldn’t have to — but they’d need to understand that getting clocked going 3 miles per hour above the speed limit would result in a stiff fine and/or license suspension.
People like Spencer Knight should be shamed the hell out of their dangerous behavior, and if they don’t feel shame, they should be prevented from putting other people in danger.
The Worst Class I Took in College
I was amused to read this story about Republican politicians in Kansas proposing a civics test for high school students that would basically require them to reject communism in order to graduate high school. It’s amusing because these guys don’t seem to realize people’s beliefs about such things arise from a combination of their upbringing and lived experience — no one is being browbeaten into being a socialist or an anti-communist.
Moreover, it’s amusing to me because I’m pretty clearly leftist in my politics, but also, by far the worst class I took in college at NYU was a class on socialist theory, taught by avowed socialist activist Bertell Ollman. I can’t dig up any syllabi from that time, but I remember being apalled that he had the Christian Gospels on his syllabus credited to the author “Christ, Jesus”. I do still have my class-assigned journal from that course, which has a lot of reflections with which I would disagree these days, but also has a fiery argument that Ollman didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about when it came to theology and he had wildly misunderstood the biblical story of Jesus, even from a social justice perspective.
All that’s to say that those dudes in Kansas have a pretty low opinion of high school students if they think increasing right-wing sentiment can happen without actually modeling that their beliefs will result in good outcomes for young people in the first place.
Barack Obama Got Asked About Aliens…
He gave a brief answer that got a bunch of people worked up because a former president saying what he did would inevitably cause conspiracy theorists to crank into gear, but his further explanation is plain and makes plenty of sense.
Sam Altman Doesn’t Value Humanity
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, which runs ChatGPT, said some more weird stuff the other day, this time demonstrating a sociopath’s understanding of human value. Setting aside that “AI” couldn’t exist without people, reducing people’s “value” to what they’ve been “trained” to do is batshit and a profoundly anti-human sentiment.
A Good Toilet Seat
I don’t do advertisements, so I from publishing this item… Recently, I had to replace a toilet seat in our home. After trawling Reddit for recommendations — because it’s pretty much the last place online where I can be reasonably sure I’m reading real people’s opinions and not generated or influencer shit — I settled on the Bemis 7900TDGSL. Already, we’re super happy with it because it has all the key things I look for in a good seat, mainly a solid build and slow-close mechanism so it never clacks shut, but also unlike other toilet seats I’ve installed, it has metal bolts to lock it in place. Therefore, it’s far sturdier and able to withstand various movements as people use it.
More About My Next Book
Last month, I mentioned I’ve started working on a new novel, a thriller set at a fictional Silicon Valley company. I’ve actually had this story bouncing in my brain for about a decade and have tried to write it twice before, but was never able to crack the plot. This time, however, I think I’ve found a different approach that both resolves the problems I had with telling the story previously and which will really make it sing.
The working title is “Plug Me In and Let Me Go”, but that could change. I hope to have a first (third?) draft finished by summer, at which point I may share more. I’m looking forward to sharing this story, but I’m also very excited to immerse myself in its making.
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Thanks for reading, you crazy kids. Let’s do this again, sometime.
(Photo: "Aftermath of Car Crash on Randolph at Michigan, January 21, 2015" by Daniel X. O'Neill. Used under CC BY 2.0 license.)