I linked to this on my other blog, but wanted to say a bit about this portion.

Up until my teenage years, ordering something meant it arrived in six or eight weeks — now Amazon can get some packages there on the same goddamned day — the first time it happened, I thought it was a prank. I remember when you couldn’t get every kind of fresh produce year-round — they couldn’t just import that stuff from warmer climates like we do now, which is why I didn’t see a mango or avocado until I was in my 20s.

I’m old enough to remember all of this. Even though I grew up in Florida (North Florida), I didn’t see a mango until my late teens. An avocado was something I saw once or twice, but was not common, and was not something I ate until I was in my late 20s.

Cherries were rare and expensive and exotic.

And as the author mentions, ordering anything from a catalog meant a bare minimum of six weeks of waiting — often far longer. When I saw that Amazon was delivering items in two days routinely (much less same day), I thought it was an impossible, doomed to failure marketing stunt that just could not be true.

Now, though, I use this service all the time. I buy more big-ticket and even everyday items from Amazon than I do from local stores because the selection is so superior and the service is just better.

The world has changed so much since I was a kid, and people tell me it has not.

Seattle becomes largest U.S. city to ban plastic straws and utensils.

Good. Never want to go back there anyway. Fucking hate Seattle. One less reason to ever return.

Both Mexico and America are finding out the hard way that you can’t just throw millions of people in the trash because it “benefits everyone” (?) and then not expect blowback and consequences.

The UK, too, for that matter. There will be more.

Humans of even the fairly recent past were not really that similar to people now.

Probability theory was in its infancy in Bayes’s day. Strange as it may seem, before the seventeenth century nobody could calculate even such simple chances as that of a normal coin landing five heads in a row. It wasn’t that the information wouldn’t have been useful. There was plenty of gambling before modernity. But somehow no one could get their head around probabilities. As Ian Hacking put in his groundbreaking The Emergence of Probability (1975), someone in ancient Rome “with only the most modest knowledge of probability mathematics could have won himself the whole of Gaul in a week”.

Julian Jaynes is almost certainly wrong in the details of his “bicameral mind” theorizing, but he’s not wrong in the general idea that the human psyche and cognitive tools (and perhaps consciousness itself) have changed extremely radically from ancient times until now — perhaps several times.

I’m a mathematical moron, and probability makes intuitive sense to me and calculating it is fairly easy. That before 1600 or so no one could really do that is pretty astounding, but also expected in a way. Their minds and their culture just did not work that way, so that sort of probability calculation would have been prima facie senseless to them and to the ancients.

Went to a place for lunch down the road where no English is really spoken. I knew this in advance, and I was able to pull back enough high school Spanish to order lunch.

I’m not used to it as a white dude being the one out of place, with people looking at me suspiciously. I’m sure 3/4 of the people eating there are in the country illegally so I understand their trepidation. I was literally the only white person in the whole store.

Once I ordered in (not that good) Spanish, though, most people relaxed.

The food was great, by the way, and fast. The sandwich shop I ordered from yesterday took nearly 30 minutes to make a single sandwich with no other customers in the store. The Mexican grocery store took less than five minutes.