"Switching costs" are one of the great underappreciated evils in our world: the more it costs you to change from one product or service to another, the worse the vendor, provider, or service you're using today can treat you without risking your business.
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Businesses set out to keep switching costs as high as possible. Literally. Mark Zuckerberg's capos send him memos chortling about how Facebook's new photos feature will punish anyone who leaves for a rival service with the loss of all their family photos.
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I think it behooves us to be skeptical of stories about AI driving people to believe wrong things and commit ugly actions. Not that I like the AI slop that is filling up our social media, but when we look at the ways that AI is harming us, slop is pretty low on the list.
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The real AI harms come from the actual things that AI companies sell AI to do. There's the AI gun-detector gadgets that the credulous Mayor Eric Adams put in NYC subways, which led to 2,749 invasive searches and turned up *zero* guns:
Two decades ago, I was part of a group of nerds who got really interested in how each other managed to do what we did. The effort was kicked off by @mala, who called it "Lifehacking" and I played a small role in getting that term popularized:
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While we were all devoted to sharing tips and tricks from our own lives, many of us converged on an outside expert, David Allen, and his bestselling book "Getting Things Done" (GTD, to those in the know):
A paradox: in 1970, most Americans found it relatively easy to afford a house, and the average US house cost 5.9x the average US income. In 2024, Americans find it nearly impossible to afford a house, and the average American house costs...5.9x the average American income.
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Feels like a puzzler, right? Can it really be true that the average American house is as affordable to the average American earner as it was in 1970?
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If Trump's norm-breaking is a threat to democracy (and it is), what should Democrats do? Will breaking norms to defeat norms only accelerate the collapse of norms, or do we fight fire with fire, breaking norms to resist the slide into tyranny?
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Writing for @TheProspect, @rickperlstein writes how "every time the forces of democracy broke a reactionary deadlock, they did it by breaking some norm that stood in the way":
One of the most consequential series of investigative journalism of this decade was the @Propublica series that @eisingerj helmed, in which Eisinger and colleagues analyzed a trove of leaked IRS tax returns for the richest people in America:
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The Secret IRS Files revealed the fact that many of America's oligarchs pay no tax at all. Some of them even get subsidies intended for poor families, like Jeff Bezos.
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