This is the only article I’ve ever read outside of IT-focused media that gets the facts 99% correct about exactly what ISPs are doing (or, rather, not doing) to slow down Netflix and other services to extort more money.

Either Susan Crawford has an enterprise-level networking background or she’s very smart and someone very knowledgeable helped with fact-checking.

Bravo to her – this stuff is quite complicated, and there is a lot of propaganda out there about it so literally every mainstream journalist I’ve read about the issue has been at least 80% wrong in the best case.

Most articles I’ve read about it get the facts 100% wrong.

Even though obviously the Hunger Games movies are very successful, they still get far more derision than other action movies primarily because the audience is over 50% female and because the lead is played by a young woman.

Similar but much, much worse action movies get far less disapprobation.

Is it misogyny?

Fuck yes it is.

(By the way, Catching Fire was one of the best movies I saw last year. It was the apotheosis of what an action movie should be.)

We make tools. But tools also make us.

Thinking about this article on spreadsheets from 1984, I wonder how much spreadsheets and their pervasive use have changed culture, changed the world in nearly-unobservable (directly, anyway) ways.

I call it the tyranny of the quantifiable. A certain class of people believe that if something can be measured and has been measured, it’s all that is important. Conversely if something can’t be measured easily or perhaps at all, no matter how obvious to anyone sane that it exists, it is in fact not real.

This pervades MBA and engineering thinking and seems to be getting worse rather than better, perhaps in reaction to a less-stable world.

A sociological study (formal or informal) of the effects of spreadsheets and spreadsheet-generated thought on the world would be really interesting.