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Cake day: October 3rd, 2025

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  • This is why so many festivals just fill up their lineups with tribute acts. People mostly want to sing and dance to songs they know. If the band is a few years old then chances are the tribute act will be more fun, because they’re mostly fans enjoying pretending to be The Stone Roses or whoever, while most artists who were famous a while back resent having to do the songs they wrote 30 years ago.

    Just this summer I was talking to one of the managers at a semi-large festival. They used to always have original artists whose moment had passed, but one year the orgniser was persuaded to go with tributes. His expenditure went down to about 10%, and his takings, reviews, etc, remained the same. It’s been tributes ever since.


  • FWIW, the last time Apple released a new product with the prefix “i” was the iPad in 2010. They favour “Apple” now, as in “Apple Watch”, “Apple TV”, and “Apple Vision Pro”.

    They found that you can’t copyright/trademark “i” as a prefix in and of itself. That means that while nobody else can bring out a product called “iPhone” or “iPod”, they absolutely can bring out a product called, say, “iLaptop”. And that’s what people did for all kinds of products, hoping that people would buy them, mistakenly thinking they were Apple products.

    So Apple abandoned it as branding on everything that wasn’t already well-known for that branding.

    Your point is right in spirit, but wrong on that one specific point.




  • I don’t disagree with your point at all, but I don’t think the divorce thing is separate from feminism. Women became financially independent because of feminism, and felt emboldened and worthwhile enough to leave abusive situations because of feminism.

    It’s perhaps fairer to say that we can, at least partially, credit feminism with these things. It didn’t magically do it in the way that misogynists would like to think, but it’s definitely not unrelated.





  • It’s not just that. Employers think you’re “getting away” with…something…if you can manage to be productive while having something which advantages you.

    For one example, several firms - including Microsoft - have conducted experiments where they move an office to a 4 day, 32 hour week while paying people the same. They unfailingly found that productivity either stayed the same or went up. So, at the end of the experiment they…went back to a 5 day week. Because otherwise people are just getting an extra day off, aren’t they? When they “should” be working.

    Even if productivity went up and it was better for the company and for the workers, it was still ultimately seen as a bad thing because the workers were better off.

    Another example: at a previous job I had we got an hour’s break over the course of the day. 15 minutes 2 hours after start, 30 minutes 4 hours after start, and another 15 minutes 6 hours after start. On a Friday, however, the workday was 7 hours rather than 8. This meant that an hour before leaving people would have a 15 minute break, and then it wasn’t worth actually starting anything because before you’d have a chance to get into it you’d be getting ready to go home. So the workers went to management and said “let’s work through the last break on a Friday and go home 15 minutes early instead”. Management agreed, productivity went up, and everybody was happy at getting off an extra 15 minutes early.

    Then the old upper manager was fired and a new one took their place, and this arrangement was deemed to be “getting away with it”. Taking a final break & going home later was mandated. Suddenly none of the management who had agreed it had anything to do with the initial decision and they’d always thought it was a bad idea.

    So the workers were unhappy because they had a longer workday, less work got done because everybody was unproductive after break, and the company was getting less value for money becuse they were paying people the same amount for less work. But they thought it was a better situation because people were physically in the building for an extra 15 minutes, and therefore not “getting away with it”.

    There’s very often a mindset in management that employees are naughty children, and that strict rules must be good just because they’re rules, rather than because they actually lead to better outcomes for the company.







  • The Stanford Prison Experiment was a sham.

    The broader point, though, is that the scenario of The Lord of the Flies has actually happened. We’ve had a small group of kids trapped on an island for an extended period of time and what happened is that they built a peaceful and harmonious society, which included spending time and resources caring for one of their number who broke their leg.