Tag: washingtonpost

What’s it like to be an instacart shopper

I’ve written a number of things on Instacart from the viewpoint of a user of the service. Now here is something on what it’s like to be an Instacart shopper. The piece is centered on a day in the life of Larry Askew, who works for Instacart early in the morning and Uber at night. Larry alone is worth reading about.

One thing that struck me was how some shoppers use bots to scoop up the best of what Instacart offers its shoppers. I imagine it’s not unlike people using bots to snag tickets for events.

Besides that, I learned a lot about the service I didn’t know before. It’s a good piece, and if you use Instacart, I highly recommend it.

P.S. Always treat your shopper well, and that includes tipping. Do not tipbait, especially. Thank you.

 

Two great pieces about Lego

First off is this piece, on how Lego is finally sells braille bricks. That’s great. Second is this interactive piece on the history of Lego and the various colors they use for their bricks. It’s really well done, and somewhat surprising.

Both pieces are worth a look.

On the inscrutable oddness of Matt Yglesias

If you don’t know who Matt Yglesias is, the Washington Post has a good piece on him that includes this summary:

The Washington ur-blogger’s slightly contrarian, mildly annoying, somewhat influential, very lucrative path toward the political center

He is all of those things. He has been all those things since the early days of blogging. Andrew Sullivan, another major blogger from that era, used to give out something called The Matt Yglesias Award to other writers who were annoying and contrarian too.

Why I call him inscrutably odd is that I cannot tell if that annoying contrarianism is for effect or if it is just who he is. I used to think it was for effect, but I thought something different with his recent comments on Uvalde. As the Post describes:

Hours after the May mass killing at a school in Uvalde, Tex., he tweeted: “For all its very real problems, one shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the contemporary United States of America is one of the best places to live in all of human history …”

Technically true. But …

“[W]hat the f— man,” New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, who also got his start at The American Prospect, replied in a tweet.

“Real people are experiencing actual anguish right now,” tweeted Yglesias’s former Slate colleague Dana Stevens, “and don’t need your middle-of-the-road ‘Well, actually’ garbage.”

For a smart guy to make such a comment makes me think there is something lacking within him that would say: time to give the contrarianism a rest. Perhaps it was a knee jerk reaction, a result of years of being that way that caused him to automatically blurt out something terrible like that. I don’t know. Like I said, he’s inscrutable.

When he is not being contrarian he can write really thoughtful pieces on topics like housing and the economy that I get a lot from. He is also good at skewering bad ideas from the left and right. To dismiss him like some do is a bad idea.

But then he writes something daft like a defense of the Austria-Hungary empire, a piece where he takes a contrarian position and like a good debater arranges the facts to support his argument, even if it means overlooking the obvious or assuming the opposite. No wonder he can drive people crazy.

To form your own opinion, if you haven’t already, you can catch up with him with this Washington Post profile, here:  Matt Yglesias and his Substack newsletter are thriving in Biden’s Washington. If you want more, this is another piece on him.

(Photo: link to the WAPO piece.)

A good reminder that the large social media sites are bad because they choose to be

You might think that there is nothing to be done with the the people who spread lies and misinformation (and worse) on social media. But I believe that there is nothing inevitable about it and it is not impossible to fix.

For a case study of this, see this piece: Vaccine misinformation has run rampant on pregnancy apps in The Washington Post. The What to Expect app was being overrun with misinformation until they decided to clamp down. The result?

The experience of What to Expect shows that, when smaller apps do explicitly prioritize content moderation, the results can be striking.

The Post backed off a bit, but I would not. I think that if bigger apps did this too, the results would also be striking. I think the bigger apps like YouTube and Facebook and TikTok and Twitter only do it when things get too extreme. Otherwise they are happy to have the engagement, even if people think their sites stink.

(Photo by Prateek Katyal on Unsplash )

How to think of climate change/the environment in terms of economics

Forget what Steven Mnuchin said about Greta Thunberg needing to study economics before offering climate change proposals. That was an asinine thing for him to say.. But read that article in the Washington Post for the ideas. They spoke to an economist about climate change and how economics comes in and it’s worthwhile for that.

People might argue that we need to do something about climate change, but we can’t afford it. If you want to argue back, the article can help.

Mario Moore and his paintings of blue-collar workers who ‘really run things’…

…is a fantastic story you can read about here:  Princeton University portraits lacked diversity, so artist Mario Moore painted blue-collar workers who ‘really run things’ – The Washington Post.

His painting is fine, and the subject matter he has chosen especially so. Check out the story: it has many of his works on display too.

On “River”, the sad Joni Mitchell song that became a Christmas classic

A fine and detailed study on Mitchell’s great song from her masterpiece album, “Blue”: www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2018/12/07/how-thoroughly-depressing-joni-mitchell-song-became-blue-christmas-classic/

My impression reading it was that there were no sad or melancholy Christmas songs before it, but “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” and “Blue Christmas” are two that immediately come to mind. And later on songs like “Last Christmas” have shown that the holidays can be sometimes difficult.

Read the piece though. Lots of good commentary by great singers who have covered it, as well as what it really means.