EH S3 E12: this just in: a vertical integration milestone achieved at ELDER HOSTILE
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ELDER HOSTILE announces a major step in our drive for vertical (as well as virtual) integration: a new luxury brand motel with you in mind! it is called Harvey's MOTEL, an EH company. we fill the niche (and itch following your stay) for hotels in which people who want to stay no longer than three hours can do so. a "we'll always have a vacancy for you open within an hour" will be our motto and marketing pitch. [Alas, we had to discontinue the "magic fingers" service; due to the installations of several AI data centers down I-95, resulting in our electric bills skyrocketing through the roof. So sorry, if you also have power issues with EH give Management's customer call center in Azerbaijan a call...operators are standing by]
When you're eventually out there in your automobile chasing something or someone or running away from something or someone, look for the Harvey's MOTEL sign.
when you check in, mention where you found out about us. every 15th customer will win a wonderful souvenir virtual post card! (see below)
if you stay with us you'll be glad you did. [so will your exterminator when you get back home.]
here is a shot of our first glorious property we are so proud of:
Altria Group Inc.
Amazon
Apple Inc.
Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp.
Caterpillar Inc.
Coinbase Global
Comcast Corp.
Hard Rock International
Google
HP Inc.
Lockheed Martin Corp.
Meta Platforms Inc.
never heard of Cameron & Tyler Wanklevoss? neither did we at EH.
seems they both are a lovely product of a transformatiohnal Harvard University education. gotta recruit those athletes! great for Capital Development revenue budgets either crypto or real!They call it the Capital Development avenue.
We are different from all other humans in history This is an interesting and sobering piece by Brian Klaas pointing out various ways in which modern humans are different from virtually all other people in history. As he puts it, “when we compare ourselves to humans past, we, not them, are the weird ones.” I sometimes think this is the single most important thing to remember when reading history.
For instance, Klaas writes, we are still virtually the first people in history to experience jet lag and to know what our planet looks like from space. Until recently, the average parent buried at least one of their children — a scenario which is now extremely uncommon. We are also unprecedentedly disconnected from nature. This graph shows a collapse in the frequency of nature words in books since the 1950s.
I think this point is particularly interesting. One of the strangest things about modernity is the way we have swapped “local instability” for “global instability”:
The past was largely defined by local instability. Day-to-day life was unpredictable. One day you could be healthy, the next day you could be dead, struck down by a mysterious plague. Childbirth was a death trap. Starvation was a constant threat, as crops might inexplicably fail, or animals that were once abundant were suddenly nowhere to be found.
But our distant ancestors also experienced global stability. That didn’t mean that the world never changed, but rather that, broadly speaking, society ticked along more or less in similar ways from one generation to the next. If your parents were agrarian peasants, you were likely to be an agrarian peasant.
In contrast, modern life is highly routinised and predictable on a day-to-day basis (you probably won’t be struck down by a plague or eaten by a lion today) but is also subject to endless transformative technological change that means the experience of generations is wildly different (jet travel, internet, iPhones, AI etc). I think that “global instability” is why generations are an increasing subject of fascination in the media. They really have radically different experiences.
The democratisation of information is destroying democracy Speaking of Brain Klaas, I keep meaning to link to this widely-cited essay of his which articulates something crucial about what is revolutionary about social media. Previous information revolutions scaled up the consumption of information. The internet is the first to scale up the production of information:
Through the long stretch of human history, there have been a series of information revolutions: the printing press, newspapers, the telegraph, the radio, and television. Each technological breakthrough shared a common feature: they expanded the number of people who could consume information, while keeping the production of information in the hands of a comparatively small number of people. Only the rich had printing presses; newspaper barons decided what was fit to print; television executives framed our world.
The internet—followed by the rise of social media and its constellation of information influencers—is the first and only technological revolution that fundamentally altered humanity’s relationship with information. For the first time, the world came to understand itself not through few-to-many communication but through many-to-many communication.
This sounds like it should be a good thing but the destruction of the expert class of information producers has been a disaster for democracy. A democratised system of information production may be fairer in that more people get to speak. But it is also deeply unfair in that a smaller and smaller minority of people (mostly wealthier and better educated) get to be well informed about politics and current affairs. As Klaas says if democracy is sometimes defined as “the informed consent of the governed” what happens when the governed are hopelessly misinformed?
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Remember our famous PWT motto by which we operate 24/7:
"Most people are stupid!"
morris mishegoss, your faithful editor at ELDER HOSTILE
******** when you invent the language, you know how to really use it well. god love the brits! 9999999999999999999999 here at EH we keep a statue of our president on our office windowsill to remind us what America now stands for we know, we know. we get a lot of letters in the mail.....you ask where the fuck are you, EH? it's been since 9/16 and no ELDER HOSTILE post? wtf? you call yourself a good business model? meh! well, you are correct to feel that way, as now we know more about you than you know about yourself and trained you to become attached. as for the absence, we have a slew of valid excuses up the wazoo....to wit three: a little surgery to a lower back slowed us down a bit, tho' we kinda liked the feelings we had during anastasia . things were more peaceful whist under it compared to facing without. we remember blurting while making the transition from unconsciousness to consciousness, coming out from under it...
this just in: Heather Cox Richardson on the Trump/Putin meeting tomorrow (4 min) already a bust for the United Snates of America ********************************************* "I'll have a mocha grande with a spritz of orange peel flavor-made not too sweet, two Splendas, and only made with Surinamese beans..........." 777777777777777777777777777777777777777 999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 The history of authoritarianism teaches that the emergency must never be over, the adversary never defeated, and the number of enemies always expanding. --- Ruth Ben-Ghiat ################ four identity-hidden bounty hunters are needed to arrest a "suspect" who works in my regular pizza shop here in Acton? performance fascism ...is that a word? and, who knows if they are really ICE agents? ELDER HOSTILE is 98% sure this behavior is run by Mr. Stephen Miller-Shanda. here is the full news reporting piece below. ICE Arrest in Acton [5 Oy! rating] $$$$$$$$$...
Roz Chast --------------------------------------------------------------- a very HOPPY STORY for Easter 🐰🐰🐰🐰 @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ (special advice column contribution) How to Be a Happy 85-Year-Old (Like Me) April 13, 2025, By Roger Rosenblatt & Tommy Shelby Mr. Rosenblatt is the author of “Rules for Aging.” Tommy Shelby is a complex dude in Pinky Blinders. Roger: In 2000, I published a book called “Rules for Aging,” a sort of how-to guide for navigating the later years of one’s life. I was 60 at the time and thought that I knew a thing or two about being old. Twenty-five years later, I just finished a sequel, which reflects my advice for growing very, very old. (I have been doing a lot of that lately.) It took me 85 years to learn these things, but I believe they’re applicable at any age. 1. Nobody’s thinking about you. It was true 25 years ago, and it’s true today. Nobody is thinking about you. Nobody ever will. Not your teacher, not your minister, not...
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