I do really appreciate that the ASA grant application form takes direct aim at Ohio State's weird affectation 🦡🦡🦡

I found this bizarre study yesterday while looking through some Philip Morris documents and I can't stop thinking about it...

To pick a random transportation project, the $60bn in metaverse investment would've covered a decent chunk of the funding gap for road and bridge maintenance
www.pew.org/en/research-...

Since the omerta on criticizing LLM infra investment appears to be breaking can we go back and maybe, acknowledge that there were some indicators that these guys have long been pretty cavalier about throwing money into the void? Money that could have been better spent on actual infrastructure?

Came upon some predictions from a southern studies edited volume from 1985 and man, what a swing and a miss there

Going through the archives you run into plenty of articles about apartheid that sound eerily familiar (and, unlike today, have no compunction about analogizing I-P to South African apartheid). Here's some selections from October 1977.

Baseline opinion is much more negative towards him in the segment they're actually trying to recruit (only 24% of 18-20s have a favorable view) vs The Olds (43% of over 65s have a favorable view). No way this brings in anyone who wasn't already gonna sign-up.

today.yougov.com/politics/art...

Here's a bigger chunk of the crosstabs (from carolinaforward.org/blog/the-sep...)

Here are Hasan Piker's avg concurrent viewership figures, for comparison. There have been some stories on him recently, but I still think journalists are underrating the influence of him+his fellow politics streamers. "Online isn't real" doesn't cut it anymore, the center of gravity is shifting.

I had (wrongly) assumed that once I got out of reports produced on typewriters into modern documents that OCR would have an easier time but alas...