Welcome to Tuesday, Apexians! I’ve got some super interesting stuff for you today. Take a look.
The myth of moral decline. [Experimental History] — “If you think that morality is declining, then you must think that some switch has been flipped in society, causing it to produce worse humans. No doubt you would want to un-flip that switch, whatever you think it is: smash the social media companies! Kill all the politicians! Ban the bad books! None of that is going to reverse the trend, because the trend doesn’t exist. It’s like activating the sprinkler system in a building that’s not on fire.”
The economy’s doomsday clock has been reset. [Business Insider] — “Despite the year-plus in which analysts have been arguing that a recession is imminent, none of the arguments behind the predictions stand up to scrutiny. And there’s only so long one can keep claiming that the recession is just six months away. Given the increasing number of reasons to be upbeat on the US economy, it’s time for the recessionistas to admit defeat. The economic doomsday clock has been reset.”
Don’t forget to swim now and then. [Raptitude] — “This praise for the caveman days might sound like romance or sentimentality. I won’t pretend I want to live naked in the woods. But when you consider how differently those concrete, premodern activities feel from corralling words on a screen, entering spreadsheet formulae, or parsing a dozen news headlines in the space of a minute or two, it’s clear that there’s a categorical difference between doing what humans have been attuning to for a hundreds of thousands of years, and doing what we’ve been doing only a lifetime or two. It’s the difference between a fish swimming, and a fish operating a hover vehicle.”
Today’s video features a Grammy-winning fifty-year-old song that I first truly heard while on my recent Arctic cruise. I was sitting in the lounge sipping whisky one night when “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” by the Temptations came playing over the speakers. Holy cats!
This song is amazing. But no wonder I’d never really listened to it before. Music like this was never my jam when I was younger. But it’s totally my jam now. I’ve come to truly appreciate funk music. And this is about as funky as they come.
Enjoy.
The folks from Plutus will be here tomorrow. I’ll be back on Thursday.