Good morning. Hello. How are you? #578
Spotify stuff, 90's stuff, Kids' Vax stuff, applying Galbraith's tenets of bubbles to Web3, and an unexpected Coldplay appearance.
Good morning, hello, etc. etc. How’s tricks? I’m good, I’m good. I felt like ass yesterday, I think maybe I feel a bit better today? Fine line these days between feeling like ass and feeling all right. My neck hurts, my fingers are arthritic. The headaches were worse yesterday, they seem a bit better today, so I guess that’s good.
Really kind of surprised about the people who belittle Neil Young’s actions. Saw one Facebook comment that called it “virtue theater.” Some people think he’s cutting off his nose to spite his face, that he’s cutting himself off from a new, young audience. There’s an overwhelming sense that nothing will ever make a difference so what’s the point. It feels very Gen X, and indeed almost everyone I see belittling the effort belongs to Gen X. It’s really interesting to me that we still can’t shake our slouching mantle of impotence. This dude does not need extra money. I have a strong suspicion that Spotify is already going the way of Facebook and its audience is aging and I don’t think it’s going to hurt or help Neil Young’s career with the kids anyway, and in any case, the dude is 76 years old and worth $300 million. If you can’t take a mildly non-economic stand for your principles when you’re worth $300 million, when can you? What is the point? Why is this bad?
Also, there still seems to be a massive amount of false equivalency, ignoring the very straightforward fact that Spotify is giving Joe Rogan a hundred million dollars. That’s not a free speech argument: they are taking your money and giving it to Joe Rogan. I honestly don’t understand why this is so complicated for some people. You know who Apple gives a hundred million dollars to? HCBUs. Actually, its $130 million now.
The craziest is when I see other musicians mocking Neil and Joni’s actions. People that already hate Spotify. It’s like… their cynicism is so ingrained now, the fact that anyone tries anything to do any amount of good, even when it’s against someone they are also against, is still mainly worthy of mockery and belittlement.
Man. People ignore Gen X in the cultural dialoge, but my god, I do not blame them.
At the very least, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell got Joe Rogan to issue an apology, even it was one of those bullshit “I’m sorry you’re hurt while I’m hitting you” apologies, and literally had the qAnon “do your own research” trope encoded into it to assuage his audience that the apology wasn’t real. He also tried to name a Joni Mitchell song and named a Ricki Lee Jones song, which is mockworthy, but I couldn’t name a Joni Mitchell song either, just albums (ducks).
Anyway, my personal journey to migrate off of Spotify is at a temporary standstill. I am going to have to start over. After praying on the topic for a day, I have decided I’ll stick with Apple Music, I am going to move my entire iTunes library of local music to a different computer, where I can continue to rip CDs as I sell them. Not a different user or library, where I think it’ll be more trouble than it’s worth. And start fresh. But that is a giant pain so it will be a weekend project. All my MP3s are already on Dropbox, though, so it’s just a matter of syncing them down to that computer, at least. Ugh.
Speaking of Gen X, even though it seems too long at 384 pages, and even though most of the time when I read shit about the 90’s I get annoyed because it was very far from my cultural experience, I am going to give Chuck Klosterman’s new book The 90’s: A Book a shot. He put out a playlist for the book, and even it has no Ride or Slowdive or a single goth band, it’s still a pretty good slice of 90’s music:
Just as soon as I finish this John Kenneth Galbraith book about financial bubbles, A Short History of Financial Euphoria, which I gotta say is really pretty disappointing. It was written in 1990, well after Galbriath established himself as an elder statemen genius, so I guess at that point he felt no need for, like, footnotes or actual useful information. On paper, one would think that a chapter by Galbraith about tulipomania would yield some interesting new historical tidbits and insight, but, nah. He just sort of rambles, and there is a distinct sense of him rehashing anecdotes and presenting them as facts, because nothing is footnoted. This sort of book would not fly now. Or, rather, it would not fly from an economist or a historian. It would fly in, like, a high-profile, high-advance book from some pop culture lightweight like a politician or talking head, but it really is beneath Galbraith and somewhat of a disappointment. His lack of sourcing is in marked contrast with the copious footnotes in The New Industrial State and The Affluent Society.
He does make some good larger points, things that are directly applicable to the bubbles of our time, NFTs, fascism, etc. His insights about America being founded on hyper-inflationary, poor monetary policy, while I already knew the historical facts of unbacked paper money paying Washington’s army, the hundred years of rampant unbacked banks in America, he does do a good job of weaving all of that into a nice, neat gift of a thesis. One thing I thought was very interesting is that when the bubble pops, the participants always need someone to blame, and it will never be themselves, it will never be the speculators, it will never be the people who participated. Whole societies will pretend it wasn’t their fault, that they had nothing to do with it, even as they knew that their participation meant that they were willing to harm someone else. They just ignore it. That is 100% how certain aspects of Crypto are going to end.
And there is an interesting theory here, because, as we all know, whenever you get fucked in Crypto, and you complain and say that there should be better guardrails, the community turns on you and says it was your fault. But over time, it seems inevitable, especially in the defi space, that the vast majority of them will get screwed, and Galbraith would posit that eventually the community will hit critical mass and the voices of dissent will drown out the hyper-libertarian “you did this to yourself” crowd, and, if that theory plays out as it has in all past bubbles, well, that’ll be interesting.
But come on, man. Gimme a footnote.
There’s a rumor going around that the COVID vaccine may be available for kids by the end of February. This comes with a giant caveat, though. Ever since Fauci casually dropped a hint that it might be coming soon, even though the Moderna trial isn’t near completion, and the second round of the Pfizer trial, with three doses, isn’t near completion either, I have been wondering how Fauci could have any grounds for dropping that hint, and whether it wasn’t wildly irresponsible. And we have our answer. The idea is that they are going to assume that Pfizer’s three-dose trial is going to yield positive results (there seems to be some indication that they are looking at preliminary data and it is promising, not just that they’re crossing their fingers and hoping). And in preparation for this positive data, they are going to let kids under 5 start taking the first two doses, because you gotta space em out, so let’s get the kids started right now.
This seems simultaneously batshit but also exactly what I would have wanted, and logical. There is, obviously risks: the first being that the three-dose regemin proves ineffective, though I suppose even if that happens, oh well, your kid’s no worse off having two doses of Pfizer in them. The additional potential complication that I still can’t quite wrap my head around is what happens if, in the middle of this three-dose, three-month regemin, Moderna comes out with great positive data and gets approved for a one-dose kids shot, and you’re stuck, then, waiting for your three month regemin to finish up, when you could have gotten the Moderna instead, and been done two months earlier. Not sure if that is a real risk or not, will need to do more research into where Moderna is on the path. If they’re not even going to submit until end of March, by the end of April when the FDA finally approves them, you might be no worse off than you were with a 3-month regemin starting in early March. So even though this whole thing seems… well, kind of crazy, and it’s definitely not enough, yet, for me to get my hopes up, because there’s still no concrete clear path…it does seem like it’s rational at least, and probably the right thing.
Finally: did you know that Coldplay has broken up… in advance? Sort of? They have announced that as of 2025, they will no longer make new albums. They might keep playing shows, now and again, but no more new music. I can’t think of another band that broke up in this manner. But I kind of love it? It’s like they’re the old Instagram API, and they’re deprecating the API and giving all of the developers plenty of notice and time to adjust. It’s so corporate, it seems so fitting for Coldplay, I am surprised that U2 didn’t think of it first.
Okay, moody and quiet one today, kinda a weird one, but I enjoy it. I will never stop stanning that Mandy Moore song, and I don’t know why but I’ve been listening to a bunch of late-period Lionel Ritchie this morning. Very consistent guy, Lionel Ritchie. Kinda pop-to-alternative migration going on on this playlist, but why not.
Here’s to a headache-free, child-tantrum-free, generally finely-sanded-down, smooth day of no trouble. Please, no trouble. Mommy has a headache. Where is my robe.
This made me laugh out loud: "It’s so corporate, it seems so fitting for Coldplay, I am surprised that U2 didn’t think of it first." BTW, U2 would never break up in advance, bc they have always considered new music, and the promise of new music, as crucial to their purpose and identity (which is also why the Joshua Tree anniversary tour was such a surprise).