Tag: Culture Wars

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Chronicle Finance Internet Culture

Day 74 and Unfinished Thoughts

First off I’ll admit that I don’t really feel like writing today but I’ve committed to “putting pen to paper” every day so I’m stuck with it. I have a dozen topics I actually want to discuss but I don’t feel like I’ve got it in me to be coherent.

I’ve been thinking about how the idea that all property rights are a gradient from violence to grift to institutional legitimacy and this is just how civilization codifies worth. I’m particularly interested in it because we’ve reached the NFT is a grift stage of the discourse but I’m not at all convinced that NFTs are a grift for the reasons people think.

And while I’ve made really elaborate jokes about NFTs, finance, crypto and semiotics with illegal.auction I’ve noticed people with vested interests in this category working out, really don’t want anyone to joke about it. It’s likely wise as we all have varying degrees of horror that property rights is always some degree of grift working towards legitimacy.

That we don’t like to touch on it amuses me. I suspect that the internal logic of wealth and money as always being abstraction guarded by state violence is just too much for folks. It hurts too much. It makes us angry. Surely money, wealth and inherent worth must exist in a moral framework? Good hard working people are rewarded with wealth right? If you want a truly excellent read on the subject of property rights, violence and investing I recommend this essay on emerging market investing and Deadwood by Ben Hunt at Epsilon Theory

Another topic I also want to dig into is environmental impact of crypto and energy equity but I don’t think I’ve got all the facts. I’m still very much in a skeptic phase when it comes to moralizing over the energy usage of crypto. As if crypto brought about the carbon apocalypse on its own.

I’m sure “crypto used a lot of energy” is a valid criticism until you remember we subsidize monsoon crops in deserts (they grow rice in California ffs) and we ship plastic trinkets across the globe while a plutocratic elite consumes the majority of our resources. Maybe moralizing about impact should come with some caveats on how many lives it might improve? I haven’t seen much discourse on this topic as American media leans towards a generic tech skepticism stance at the moment which is making them lean in on attacks as it’s the wrong people who are pushing the crypto agenda. But we deserve more than “environmental impact bad” like maybe it’s a net good to use this energy to decentralize finance?

By allowing the global south and the unbanked to have access to capital instruments we actually discover this is the best use of our energy resources and may distribute wealth more equitably. I don’t know yet and I’m not even confident I can find relevant statistics that won’t overstate one tribal position over the other.

At any rate none of these thoughts are coherent or useful yet but I’m thinking about how we codify wealth and property and what energy usages might be valuable for a more equitable planet. Don’t cancel me please.

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Chronicle Internet Culture Preparedness

Day 73 and Trutherism

A significant snowstorm has hit the front range of Colorado. In downtown Boulder it looks like we have about two feet of very dense wet snow accumulated at 4pm Mountain Time.

It however came about 36 hours later than predicted. And this has caused significant consternation. A good chunk of social media in Colorado yesterday turned into “snow truthers” dunking on meteorological work being a scam. Some folks made weed jokes. The National Weather Service even took time to scold the skeptics.

Even a slight miscalculation in timing seemed to break trust as it looked like the hype wouldn’t match the reality for a day. This despite the storm arriving with exactly the quantity predicted and blizzard conditions that closed the major freeways including I-25 and I-70.

I couldn’t help but notice the similarities between the skepticism of meteorology and the current distaste for the epidemiology profession. The tone was distinctly similar to culture warrior angst about how scientists continue to get forecasting wrong. And yes getting it wrong is to the detriment of freedom and business. Except that in both this storms case and with Covid19 it’s been directionally correct. The impacts of policy has been the issue but not the direction of the data.

I’m not the first to worry about people bloc distrust of institutions and their information. I engage in plenty of skepticism on a range of issues from medicine to monetary policy. But no longer trusting basic information on timing, duration and impact no matter what the field because “the powers that be” are always inherently untrustworthy is getting to be exhausting. This is going to cost us lives as we begin to distrust even the banal and easily verifiable.

Public policy isn’t the same thing as public forecasting and we’ve lost sight of that. We should always be updating models and assessing impact. It just seems like a shame that we’ve decided any error in predictive work now negates the entire body of work.

The storm came in Colorado. It was a little late. Covid was a global epidemic. I guess the only upside is that it’s a little harder to dismiss two feet of snow. Truthers eventually got snowed in just like the rest of us. We’ve already seen the consequences of not having the evidence right in your face with covid. Whole portions of the population have split out their realities. The chaos of complete institutional distrust will come to be a defining feature of the next decade. I don’t have a clue how we get it back.

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Chronicle Internet Culture

Day 67 and Virality

There are few more satisfying feelings in the world than seeing your emotions mirrored back to you. It’s what makes us fall in love, form communities, build anything that takes the work of more than one person. I’m not sure that anything matters more to humans than feeling seen.

Feeling seen is valuable. Finance knows it, marketers know it, fashion designers know it and the algorithms really know it. A switch flips when the outside world mirrors us back. The cold reality of being atomistic individuals dissolves just a little with the prospect that the other might not be so far away after all

This is why going viral on social media is such an ecstatic feeling for people. Being mirrored at mass scale is beyond pleasure and pain. Virality is existential. This fact is not lost on Silicon Valley and various expatriates of the culture and even current citizens question the morality. Creating virtual existential experiences feels wrong to us. And I can’t argue that the consequences of virality hasn’t done significant damage to the fabric of civilization. Facebook has more blood on its hands than a small government. But I’m not sold that synthetic experiences are morally worth less than natural ones. Social media replicates religious and cultural experiences but whether it’s “worse” than the other existential experiences is a bit like questioning if opium or fentanyl is worse because plants are morally superior to chemistry labs. The effect is the same more or less. Sure the dosing is what gets you but arguing scale gets you into a “good of the many or good of the one” debates and I’m not the crew of the Enterprise or Spock.

I can tell you that it’s probably best to be cautious about anything that can get you hooked if you know you are an addict. I’ve gone viral on Twitter several times in the past week and probably going on double digits now in the last year. Each time I get a new appreciation for how much it can feel like a god has messed with your reality. If it goes poorly you feel like you got hit by a bolt from the blue. Even if it goes well you worry if maybe Aries has decided to make you his tool. I’m a Christian so I’m no stranger to the feeling of surrender to a higher power, but watching a machine algorithm play like the left hand of God in your life is fucking weird.

By Silicon Valley standards I’m a minor clerical authority in some backwater. I’ve been initiated into the rights but I’m not close to the Vatican or Mecca. Being swept up in the miracle of virality makes some amount of sense to me and I appreciate the benefits of status that it confers. But I know it’s a ritualized way of bringing us closer to the divine that’s not about the individual and is ultimately about the institution. Fortunately I’m also a Calvinist so I have very few illusions about my place in the experience. I’m still a sinner and whether I’m damned or not hasn’t got much to do with human rituals. But I’m not immune to the awesome either.

So if you are inclined to use social media be careful what weight you assign to your actions and words. At any moment a miracle facilitated by the rites of machines can and will occur. I made a stupid joke about a monarchy in decline and a television show about a witch in a massive universe of superheroes. But 31,000 accounts decided to like it and a million discrete instances of it were produced to “others” willing to mirror it back to me. Which is about as stupid a thing as I can imagine happening and also as close to the random miraculously nature of God as I can possibly imagine. Just don’t read too much into it or your faith might have an existential crisis as well.

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Chronicle Internet Culture

Day 65 and Shitposting

Being emotionally vulnerable in public is one of best things I’ve ever done in my life. The second best is easily shitposting.

If you are not extremely online (how did you get here) shitposting is the deliberate act of soliciting a response online. It’s traditionally used as a lower effort way to shape engagement and discourse. Partially because social media has made sharing opinions so easy, the act of crafting a nuanced argument and presenting it to an interested audience has become equally weighted to attracting supporters and advocates.

This isn’t as terrible as it sounds. Audiences can be built by anyone now. Shitposting allows creators who have a firm grasp on concise and comprehensible language to get across their point to anyone. Rather than suffering through pontification by elevated voices protected by institutional gatekeepers, we can hear bursts of truthful hilarity from nobodies. Think of it as somewhere between “the emperor has no clothes” and “from the mouth of babes.”

Having a firm grasp of the shitpost has elevated my voice in a way I’m not sure any amount of power or prestige could have done. Sure on the internet no one knows you are a dog but also don’t know you are a woman either (avatars aside). Quick bursts of wit can penetrate in a way that centuries of systemic bias simply can’t do.

The shitpost is always provocative but generally the best ones are in service to an obvious truth. This is culturally a part of meme sharing. Memes gain traction because they are immediately comprehensible despite containing layers and layers of deep context. In this way they resemble our richest multimedia experiences. It isn’t quite “a picture is worth a thousand words” because shitposta can often be Tweets but there is something to the truth that descriptors and adjectives just can’t reach. Meme and shitposts are often quite funny as humor is the fastest way to be legible to a large audience. But it isn’t necessarily a prerequisite.

Shitposting is also inherently anti-authority. It makes no calls to justice or power. It implodes sacred cows. I suspect one of the reasons I don’t believe in cancel-culture as a massive threat is because any anonymous asshole can put out the fever of a mob.

I highly recommend doing more Shitposting. Start in your private chats if you aren’t brave enough to do it on named profiles. Or create an anonymous account. Just start getting your truest stupidest thoughts out there. You won’t regret it.

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Aesthetics Chronicle Finance Internet Culture Media Startups

Day 62 And Who Can Make Art

My ego dislikes debate, but my heart leaps at tension.

Over the weekend, my friend Phil and I decided to make a functional art installation called Illegal.Auction. The premise is simple: we are selling Fungible Tokens (or NFTs) of Culture. 

Unsettled ideas of generation and representations colliding with abstractions like finance are important issues both culturally and practically.

Art is for itself, so who cares either way. A certain dogmatic insistence that “medium is the message” is pervasive in the critiques. Are movies different than books? I don’t think they have anything to do with the price of milk. It reminds me of the classic Annie Hall scene (speaking of artistic intent and harm) where Marshal McLuhan explodes on a chattering group “you know nothing of my work.” Woody Allen’s character concludes the scene if only real life were like this. Well on Twitter you can recreate this scene everyday!

It is funny because commentary is distinct from creation. And a lot of people have takes on McLuhan that he himself doesn’t agree with. But who cares right? Interpretation of art is ostensibly art.

It’s very interesting to see just how angry people get about the worth and value of culture in particular. As if it’s some monstrosity to comment on the abstract financial value of some creation with worth that cannot be extracted.

If it were so easy to make value judgments about art then we would trade it on the Chicago exchange like pork bellies and orange juice. Not that we don’t already sell art and trade it and frankly it has been a massive tension through the history of human creation how we value that work, but now many have decided to insist that art is non-fungible. Not interchangeable on a one to one basis like an apple. And yet we are acting like everything can be valued and traded so easily with NFTs. By making art tradeable on exchanges, we have made some thing inherently non-fungible, fungible.

This is ultimately where Illegal.Auction came from. These conversations are important and transformative. That we choose to represent the tensions with representations of reproductions of jpgs of art is part of the art installation. That it is a functional sale is in inherent to the tension.

There is a part of me that is really worried that because I am not a practicing artist that is paid for work or represented in a gallery, that I don’t have a right to comment on these issues. I am a technologist and I do work in finance and the overlap of disciplines makes this an inter-disciplinary question in my mind. It seems like some people disagree with my right to create art (and certainly the morality of remuneration).

But if we insist that only artists can make art I don’t have any right to make installations remixing software and representations. But I’m not sure anyone reading this is comfortable with that world. I am not.

I think people want there to be simple yes no questions to these things. Is it legal? Did you steal? Is it a transformative remixing of a cultural artifact? Is it worth $1 million? And the truth is is that there is no easy answer to what political system is best or how much some thing is worth. Trillion dollar industries are based around the fact that we don’t have clear answers. Irate commentary doesn’t help any of us understand the infinite questions of worth and creation. It is good to do and helps further understanding but its crucial to remember indignation and moralizing is a function of ego.

Personally I don’t think that wealth has any moral value. I don’t want to have to be wealthy in order to be valuable. Or if a piece of art I make does make money do you have a right to tell me it is objectionable because this isn’t how you make money? I guess you do. Whether you can stop me from doing it is a central questions for the ages and also literally why it is important to create pieces like Illegal.Auction in the first place.

This commentary I think is worth having. Not whether speculative infinite land grabs with financial instruments make you worth more to billionaires. They probably do. That’s fine! I think people are mostly offended by the idea that non-artists can make art. Especially if a transaction takes place. If we had stamped illegal on the jpgs and blocked out NOT ART on them would it have made it better? Conceptually I’m not sure that that’s true and probably reflects the viewer’s own sense of value and worth more than a legal, political or moral reality. Also I personally think it cheapens the point just to make concessions to dogmatic insistence on ownership in a space that isn’t settled because frankly it cannot be.

Much of the narrative and coverage around NFTs is that they delineate ownership, value and origination more cleanly. I’d argue that they are actually having the opposite effect. NFT’s are ripping away edifice and abstractions that we use to assign value and worth. And that makes people uncomfortable.

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Chronic Disease Chronicle

Day 58 & The Line Between Progress and Woo

While I spent my childhood deep in the western canon, now I spend my leisure hours reading science fiction. I’m just gaga for space operas, singularity stories, transhumanist breakthroughs and anything else you might put in a paperback to showcase “the future” right around the corner.

I’m what you might call an old fashioned technical progressive. Everything the future brings has a bright side. It’s probably the counter cultural hippie heritage I have. A better life is just around the corner.

Add in the additional nuance of having a chronic autoimmune condition and you can see how the line between science fiction and woo is a little blurry for me. One day a supplement is part of your favorite biohacking routine and the next it’s in the business papers making news as the latest breakthrough for life extension. That’s a real drug by the way. It’s called metformin and I take it every day.

I play around with a lot of weird “science-not-yet” stuff like a pulsed electromagnetic field to produce an analgesic effect in my spine. And I get made fun of pretty regularly by scientific method folks who scoff at basic studies that haven’t fully satisfied their curiosity.

But I honestly don’t care. I want to feel well. I want to thrive. Why wouldn’t I be trying out the latest treatments, supplements and pharmaceuticals? Why wouldn’t I experiment on myself. I don’t want to wait for everything to be double blind studied to death in twenty years. Will it kill me? No. Great let’s go.

We’ve given up on the joy of progress in my generation. We’ve let our imagination sour on the birth right of scientific advancement for the human race. It’s sad we’ve become so cynical. And sure, I often critique predatory health care that sell shame cures to the worried well. But are we confident we understand the line? I’m not. That electromagnetic device I thought was woo? My fancy upper east side New York rheumatologist used to have one in his office but found patients would rather take a drug than spend an hour on a machine even if the efficacy was the same.

Why is it so impossible that I might cure my spinal pain and reset my immune system? Is that crazier than landing Perseverance on Mars? I don’t think so. Sure I don’t like hucksters or charlatans either. And I still think places like Goop prey on desperation. But do I want to believe? Yes! Because progress happens. And it is making our lives better. We can expand our lives. Live better ones. It’s not a hopeless spiral to the destruction of the planet and our species. But if you want to come along for the ride you might have to tolerate me doing some weird shit. Till we prove it of course.

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Chronicle Politics

Day 48 and Rush

My high school years had some ups and downs, which is how I ended up in Manhattan as an 18 year old, making up credits from the year I dropped out. I had an interest in news, so I talked my way into a job at a talk radio station 77WABC.

I’d take the 1 train down from 116th St to Penn Station and l, without even going outside, went up into one of the Penn Plaza towers where I screened calls for the block of radio programs that took the afternoon and evening hours. Some of the programs were pretty shoddy “left wing white guy vs right wing white guy” and announcing for New Jersey Devils hockey games.

But the marquee talent was Rush Limbaugh.

In the back of the rabbit warren of sales team cubicles and behind the other recording studios for B-list talent (which at the time included Sean Hannity), Rush had his own recording studio. And yes, the golden microphone was real. It stunk of smoke. His producer had somehow struck a deal with building management to allow him to smoke his cigars when the rest of the station had to plod down to 34th street for a cigarette.

The funny part of him having his own private recording studio is that Rush had already moved to Florida. Sure he recorded at the station, but even at the time he was enough of a star that he maintained multiple private studios. Such was the power of the EIB Network. Dittoheads had made Rush a fortune even before 9/11 and the rise of the neoconservatives. I can still recite the ditties. I can hear Rush recording his commercials. The way he would say Ruth Chris Steaks will stay with me till I die.

I have complex feelings about having spent time in talk radio. I didn’t stay long, I saw the money wasn’t particularly good in media and I decided a college degree was worth pursuing. Conservative chit chat hadn’t yet fully diverged from the overall skepticism of mainstream media into its own behemoth yet. 6 o’clock news on broadcast probably still mattered. Facebook hadn’t been invented. People got their hard news from real television and the side opinions of grumpy white men hadn’t fully turned to grievance culture yet. Sean Hannity was still partners with Alan Colmes.

Seeing what Rush Limbaugh wrought on America has been hard. I don’t doubt that without him January 6th wouldn’t have happened. Trump might not have been president.

But without Rush and my experience in talk radio maybe I wouldn’t have studied economics. Maybe I wouldn’t have pursued business. I might have stayed a comfortable Silicon Valley liberal. But spending my afternoon talking to the weirdos that call into talk radio was an experience I value. I had come from crunchy hippie comfortable white upper class towns like Palo Alto and Boulder. I hadn’t ever considered the kind of politics that bred Republicans and subsequently Tea Party reactionaries and eventually Trumpist alt righters. A lot of ground got covered in the years.

I doubt Rush (or Sean) would have liked where my politics landed. Libertarians are frowned on in “real” conservative circles. Probably worse than the kind of pleasantly socialist left wing politics I had when I arrived.

I hope no one takes any of this as affirmation or justification or even acceptance of what talk radio culture birthed. I’m not even sure how to feel about Rush Limbaugh’s passing. Not that we were close, heck I doubt he knew my name. I was a teenager doing shit work and I spent much more time on other programs. But I still had to take the afternoon off as social media rushed to rejoice in his death. Even knowing the scope of his legacy I just couldn’t take it. My life path might have looked very different without encountering the EIB Network.

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Aesthetics Chronicle Politics

Day 45 & Noblese Oblige

“With great power comes great responsibility” is a comic book classic known as the Peter Parker principle. If you are bestowed with gifts, you must gift them back to your community. Noblese Obliege or “nobility obliges” suggests that nobility comes with a responsibility to fulfill obligations to the people who guarantee your status.

This sounds like a social good, and sure it anchors all the great heroic narratives of our modern age, but it appears to be unraveling in modernity. It used to be that we believed the morally good are the ones with gifts, if you weren’t wealthy it was because you didn’t deserve it. It was a bit of a religious and heroic tautology. But it worked! The nobles and the superheroes felt an obligation to their subjects insofar as publicly demonstrating their inherent goodness was crucial to demonstrating their nobility.

A key component of noblese oblige was showing off moral worth by giving to the people without the insistence that the people be inherently good. The people didn’t need to be worthy to get anything. Being worthy was the job of the nobility not the peasants. Which meant that all gifts from nobility to peasants were inherently gratuitous. No one deserves to be given gifts. Gifts were bestowed at random and in significant largess.

I’d suggest the reason our institutional trust is breaking down is not because we are wising up to inequality, but because the narrative arc of nobility living up to its responsibilities have broken down. America’s first robber baron class understood this with their grand social gifts of libraries, parks and endowments. Some of our Billionaires still do. But we no longer feel the gifts match the obligations. No matter how much this new nobility gifts, the rabble is still pissed.

Maybe it’s the insistence on making charity go to worthy causes. Or welfare go to people that deserve it. That is ass backwards. The nobility are supposed to be good. The peons with outstretched arms never had any worth to begin with. If they did then they would definitionally be noblese oblige too. You can’t ask everyone in the system to be good, moral, and true. That’s fucking exhausting. Even Christianity got that sin was so encompassing that literally only God could be expected to be without it. Probably why we used to let nobility get away with bad behavior. That is fine as long as they did their part. The prodigal son got shit without deserving it. That was the moral of the story.

The trouble with a time that has broken with historical arcs of goodness is that now no one is nobility or peasantry. No one is noble or good. Which means nobody deserves anything they get. Which is about as close to the war of all against all as I can imagine. Hobbes would be pleased.

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Internet Culture Media

Day 44 and The Press Culture Wars

While I am a child of Silicon Valley (literally), I came of age professionally in media soaked New York City. The battle of startups versus the press has been one I’ve largely ignored as I think it represents cultural misunderstandings between two very distinct groups. I love startup life and I love media people. But to say they don’t grok their different motives and power incentives is an understatement.

So watching them fight is a bit like watching your two best friends in a spat. It’s awkward, you don’t want to pick sides, and you just hope everyone simmers down. But I’m beginning to think the beef between the 4th estate and the tech sector is starting to have some collateral damage. Not least of all because bad actors have infiltrated both: on the tech side we’ve got blackpilled monarchic misogynists and their jackbooted political protofascist admirers, on the nominally left wing media side we’ve got neo-reactionary Jacobins. Kinda hard to pick a side when those are your bedfellows.

I have generally sided with skepticism of media as I was raised on AdBusters and am vaguely aware there was a time when corporate media really was dominant. I’ve also been in control of large advertising budgets and seen first hand the little compromises that get made to stay in business. But the newest volley in tech versus media has erupted a new low of bickering and ad hominem attacks that have the memetic mobs of both sides are hungering for blood.

All this to say that I’m finally considering picking sides. And I don’t like it.

In the current narrative tension portrayed as techno-optimists rationalist thinkers (lol) versus the new reactionary left wing media, I’m sad to say I’ll end up siding with media. Not because they are right (they aren’t), but because the fragility of these self proclaimed centrists aren’t worth preserving over the 4th estate. We need the press more than we need “‘well, actually’ reply guys.” Feel free to take bets on how fast I get my first reply correcting me.

Too many of the critics of media have been black pilled by operatives that chose to be fascist influencers when they couldn’t make it in the traditional realm. Gamergate brought us the first wave of directed mobs sent to harass nominal new media figures. A lot of that was misinterpreted, but the end result has been that portions of the technologist and web set adopted too many of their rhetorical gambits. Which is not a winning strategy. Mid tier thinkers would rather martyr themselves on the sharp dicks of clout defenestration than actually win anyone over to their cause. So instead of being decent media critics, which we need, they just throw themselves down on their chosen causes.

Like I get it. I too was once a kid who was convinced being right was the only moral cause. Then I realized what “to the victor go the spoils” actually means.

You have to win so being right matters. Being morally right without a win is Pyrrhic victory.

So to the “rationalists” pissed at the New York Times I want to say you are not fighting a righteous enemy. You are fighting bitchy queens who are better at this narrative thing than you. It’s the fucking styles section for Christ’s sake. It’s normally used to skewer ugly clothing and idiot bourgeoisie real estate trends. Yes, it’s often the source of the most incisive cultural commentaries and the best writers are often housed there. So by all means fear it. Actually you should fear it as if one mean queen has it in for you they can do a lot of damage as they are really good at it. Just understand that it’s also a petty mean clique run by the same people that probably tortured you in high school (or for some of you that you bullied so sorry turn about is fair play).

There’s plenty of good reason to be mad at the New York Times or Washington Post right now. They are owned by plutocrats. Their operations are opaque. But so are the companies where you probably work. And I bet you think they do shady shit now and again you’d like someone to bring to light. Human institutions fail because they are run by humans. And no matter how smart you are you can never be free of bias. You can barely be less wrong. But the alternative of having no 4th estate is pretty bleak. So be careful what you wish for as you just might get it.

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Politics

Day 41 and January 6th

Thirty five days ago feels like a long time. I was only on the sixth day of my daily writing experiment. I was entirely unprepared to have to live through a traumatic national moment let alone speak to it.

Obviously none of this is incisive political commentary. It’s barely coherent. It’s the emotional rambling of a woman who was born into a stable functioning democracy who believed it would be there for her entire life. Our system of government was a given for me. I believed in the American dream.

But as we get further from the moment and I become used to regular writing I see that some core of the moment did get rendered for posterity. I was born into a stable functioning democracy.

Watching the impeachment proceedings has done nothing to make me more confident our democracy will remain stable or functional. The Republicans appear to be in a state of either venial denialism or opportunistic fascism. I don’t know which one I think I worse. And the Democrats are somehow still operating under the delusion that the right gives a shit about rules and parliamentary niceties.

I’ve got some doomer predictions about how this plays out about which I sorely hope I’m wrong. How horrible to be the generation that allows the great American experiment to fail. How embarrassing to get it wrong just as much of the rest of the world is finally getting it right. American exceptionalism on its ass.

I’m not entirely sure that what comes next is bad so much as just “is” what will come. History isn’t reversible. And we are in for a wild ride of institutional chaos as we adapt to new norms. I believe there is a way to ride on top of chaos even succeed because of it. I even think it is possible to thrive as it forces us to solve for more problems more quickly. At least for some of us.