June links

2024-06-30

Some collections, some things I agree with, some places on the internet I want to remember.

EVERY Initiative Method?

Just a list of all the ways to work out combat initiative in RPGs with some light commentary.

Spreadsheet Assassins - A short history of “software as a service”

As one CEO of a content management platform recently put it: “The biggest incumbent in [business-to-business] SaaS is some spreadsheets and one additional headcount.”

This quote reflects my feelings that spreadsheets and people are better value than bespoke subscription software for most things.

‘The Blair Witch Project’ Actors Call Out ‘Reprehensible Behavior’ After Missing Out on Profits for Decades: ‘Don’t Do What We Did’

New features: wet bulb and dew point temperatures

A clear explanation of wet bulb temperature. But the things that I liked most were 1. the graphic with emoji on and 2. The description of colour scale

The color palette gets progressively brighter as WBT increases to a dangerous level. Additionally, the palette has an intentionally rapid change to light blue around 0° C, which is a useful threshold for understanding precipitation type and the timing of strategies to protect against frost damage

By my estimation CSS got good in about 2017/18. Unfortunately this coincided with everyone deciding writing markup and styles as a kind of Javascript was a great idea and so many of the excellent new features of CSS have sort of flown under the radar. This is especially true since the disappointing demise of CSS Tricks. But it feel like some CSS fans are stepping up to fill the gap.

Separating the Weetabix from the Chaff

The subhead reads: “The hidden history of Britain’s favourite breakfast cereal” But this is more about the hidden world of big agribusiness, Chemical companies, commodity traders etc.

Dan Davies: ‘finance is a tool of control’ archive

If there’s a company, and you don’t like the way it’s being managed, then you can just run a proxy battle and try to take it over. But you have much more bang for the buck if you simultaneously leverage the company up, because debt becomes a signal that swamps all other decision-making priorities. An indebted company has paying the debt and generating cash flow as one of its priorities; a very indebted company has no other priorities. The way that turns it into an accountability sink is that things that are decisions can be presented as necessities.

The Imperial Supreme Court

It’s long and detailed and kind of boring but the idea that the locus of the American Empire is now the Supreme Court is pretty convincing and the way this power has accrued thoughtlessly is fascinating and frightening in equal measure

I don’t necessarily think the Court’s new majority is doing this intentionally, aggregating power for its own sake. A more plausible explanation is that a newfound conservative majority is simply doing whatever it wants in the cases before it, consistent with a particularly strong form of the legal realist idea that judges just implement their own policy preferences.106 On that theory, perhaps the restrictions it has imposed on the power of Congress, administrative agencies, lower courts, and the states are simply byproducts of its desire to rewrite the law on the merits. In other words, the imperial Supreme Court may result not from a desire to take power away from other branches of government but from a desire to do what the Court wants and to prune back what it views as obstacles to that goal. Congress or the states are passing laws you don’t like? Restrict their power to do so. Administrative agencies are tackling climate change? Create new obstacles to their doing so. Cases aren’t making their way through the courts fast enough, or are being mooted by events? Reach out and take them anyway.

Everybody Hates a Tourist. On Saltburn, Waugh and Pulp

Huw Lemmey:

Their undisciplined children fill the public schools of England, their unfaithful husbands fill the boardrooms of the City, their untalented wives fill the galleries of Mayfair, their unconscious parents fill the House of Lords. They are cunts, utter, reckless, moronic cunts, to the last drop. Yet they retain a stranglehold on Britain’s land, culture and imagination, both literally through their power and possession, but also figuratively through their dominance of education and the arts.