NPR
"He had this one priceless gift, which was a musical ability," Brown notes. "And he was able to create out of this gift these extraordinary records, these grandiloquent dreams of romance and love and escape, and fling those back into the face of the world. It was flinging them at his father, who killed himself; flinging at the kids who wouldn't talk to him at school; flinging it at record industry, who thought he was a madman. These records were Spector's revenge."
Some further thoughts on technology in my life
Some further thoughts on computer technology in my life …
I grew up in the era of Napster and Macintosh System 7, I never liked the changes when they dropped support for classic Macintosh. Instead, I readily embraced Linux, which is more stable and rarely changes, at least if you don’t want to upgrade to the fancy window managers and desktop environments.
Linux does everything that I could ever need. Maybe because I don’t play games or have very specialized needs, I find that Linux really offers everything I could use for my needs. Maybe occassionally a MS Word document gets a bit mangled in translation but even that’s rare these days.
I don’t like commercial programs. Why pay for something you can get for free, plus have access to the source code and ability to modify the programs as need be through editing source code, or even just the configuration files and plugins? It’s also great that if you are curious how something works you can try to study the methods in the program via the source code.
I don’t like change. One of the great things about Linux is you can keep running the same Window Manager and programs forever, as old programs are usually ported forward as new to versions of Linux. Old programs often are often fast loading and if they did the task in the past, they can still do it today. For example, the XFCE Desktop Environment I use remains virtually unchanged from 25 years ago and is pretty similiar to Mac OS 8 or Winders 95.
I’ve never really wanted to learn gee-gaw Winders 10 or Mac OS X. It just seems like those operating systems have so much unnecessary clutter and window effects that provide no benefit to me. They seem to change their interfaces every two years, while Linux remains largely the same with the same stable roots of half a century ago, and the XFCE window manager being very similar for a quarter century.
I don’t mind not really knowing how to use Mac OS X or Winders. I think the last good version of Mac OS was System 7.5.3, after that things got too complicated and slow. Shortly after then I switched over to Linux in recent years I’ve been pretty much using the same basic software, with few changes. QGIS has gotten a lot more powerful and I’ve learned a lot about mapping, but that’s probably far out of the mainstream of computing today with all this smart crap I don’t use.
I like simple programs you can chain together. The classic Unix philosophy is that all programs should be small and modular. While that isn’t always true these days — QGIS and LibreOffice are rather big monolithic programs — you can chain those big berthas to smaller Unix commands. When you look at those big berthas up close they tend to be more reliant on smaller parts of Unix that might not always be apparent.
I like to tinker but I don’t consider myself a computer geek. I find a lot of the “high” technology things like Winders 10 and Mac OS X to be foreign, I don’t have a Firestik unless you consider the radio antenna on my truck to be Firestik. I don’t ever use Amazon and it’s been months since I’ve ordered anything from EBay.
I like electronics and building things with microprocessors, but you’ll never see me with one of those smart home devices. If I can program something with an Arduino or ESP32 microprocessor, that’s neat, but I can’t imagine ever owning one of Amazon Echos or smart light bulbs. I don’t have a permanent Internet connection at any rate.
To this day I refuse to have a wired internet connection at my apartment, although this winter I do have hotspot data through my phone which turns out to be kind of nice for light web-surfing and working on my blog — mainly because I need a reliable internet connection for work and the library is not open for in-person use during the cold of winter. Once the panademic is over, it’s back to walking down to park or library when I want to get on the web on my laptop.
I don’t mind having the Internet on my Smartphone, although I do worry about spending too much time scrolling through Facebook and Instagram. I have sworn off any kind of political comment on Facebook, and generally try to refrain from any comments on social media.
While I wouldn’t want to give up the Internet, I like keeping things simple and my use of it controlled and limited. It’s great for sharing ideas and photos, but I’d rather stay away from confrontational places like social media.
The Story of French Azilum | Pennsylvania Center for the Book
uring the rench Revolution, rench aristocrats fled the extraordinary and prolonged violence in their country and came to the wilderness of present day Bradford County, Pennsylvania. These political refugees began settling into the “AzilumΘ in 1793. uring the colony’s 10-year existence, the settlement was a bustling gritty “frontierΘ settlement inhabited by nobles unaccustomed to the rigors of “commonΘ life. Both American frontiersmen from the area and rench aristocrats had contact with a social class they would have never met otherwise. The settlement slowly grew until it was abandoned in 1803. Azilum would remain lost in history until its revitalization that began in 1953. Azilum today is a historical and archaeological site where anthropologists and sightseers go to witness history first-hand.
Whatβs behind the recent surge in the M1 money supply? | FRED Blog
While the terms “money" and "wealth" often mean the same thing in everyday parlance, economists define money more narrowly as the component of wealth consisting of “transaction balances.Θ That is, if you can use it to buy goods and services and to settle debts, then it’s considered to be money.
Money is distinct from other forms of wealth that first need to be liquidated—that is, converted into money—before their value can be spent. According to this definition, physical currency and checkable bank deposits constitute money. And, indeed, these objects make up the definition of what economists label as the M1 money supply.
Because money is valued as a payment instrument, people are willing to hold a fraction of their wealth in money form for the sake of convenience, even though money earns relatively little interest and cash usually earns no interest at all.
If M1 carries the opportunity cost of not earning much interest, then why has the M1 money supply been increasing?
This increase is shown in the RE graph above (red line), where we measure M1’s opportunity cost as the one-year U.S. Treasury yield (green line). In late ebruary and early March of 2020, the ed cut its policy interest rate dramatically to help ease credit conditions during the COVI-19 crisis. The resulting acceleration in the supply of M1 can be understood largely as banks accommodating an increase in people’s demand for money. However, the opportunity cost of money has remained more or less constant throughout 2020, over which time M1 growth has accelerated. What might account for this behavior?