zero-sum game

positive-sum game, cooperative game

Pax Americana[1][2][3] (Latin for "American Peace", modeled after Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, and Pax Mongolica) is a term applied to the concept of relative peace in the Western Hemisphere and later the world beginning around the middle of the 20th century, thought to be caused by the preponderance of power enjoyed by the United States.[4] Although the term finds its primary utility in the latter half of the 20th century, it has been used with different meanings and eras, such as the post-Civil War era in North America,[5] and regionally in the Americas at the start of the 20th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Americana (more)

From the Great Depression through now. 2 separate Economic Transitions. (A Brain Fart started in 2009.) (more)

Kyla Scanlon: FAFOnomics: How Chaos Became America's Economic Strategy. The recent tariff drama- 25% proposed (then unproposed, then maybe-proposed-again) on Canada and Mexico, 10% on China - isn't just trade policy. Add in a sovereign wealth fund, a litany of executive orders, and Elon Musk's DOGE, and you've got something more deliberate: chaos as strategy. (more)

In game theory, the stag hunt, sometimes referred to as the assurance game, trust dilemma or common interest game, describes a conflict between safety and social cooperation. The stag hunt problem originated with philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Discourse on Inequality... The stag hunt differs from the prisoner's dilemma in that there are two pure-strategy Nash equilibria:[2] one where both players cooperate, and one where both players defect.[a] In the prisoner's dilemma, despite the fact that both players cooperating is Pareto efficient, the only pure Nash equilibrium is when both players choose to defect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stag_hunt

see Market Segment

person who does Product Management (more)

Spreadsheet from Google, aka Google Sheets (more)

Venkatesh Rao on Impro by Keith Johnstone. Here’s a quick survey of the contents. (more)

Sending jobs Off-Shore to save on labor (and regulatory) costs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshoring#History Historically done first with manufacturing, then certain services like call centers. (more)

Ben Hunt: Crashing the Car of Pax Americana. "Sometimes when I’m driving… On the road at night… I see two headlights coming toward me. Fast. I have this sudden impulse to turn the wheel quickly, head-on into the oncoming car." (from Annie Hall) (more)

What Is A Project? Can you really manage one? (more)

correlations that turn out to be misleading/meaningless - see data dredging and http://www.tylervigen.com/ (now with GenAI explanations) (more)

Data dredging (data fishing, data snooping, equation fitting, p-hacking) is the misuse of data analysis to find patterns in data that can be presented as statistically significant, thus dramatically increasing and understating the risk of false positives. This is done by performing many statistical tests on the data and only reporting those that come back with significant results... Conventional tests of statistical significance are based on the probability that an observation arose by chance, and necessarily accept some risk of mistaken test results, called the significance. When large numbers of tests are performed, some produce false results, hence 5% of randomly chosen hypotheses turn out to be significant at the 5% level, 1% turn out to be significant at the 1% significance level, and so on, by chance alone. When enough hypotheses are tested, it is virtually certain that some falsely appear statistically significant, since almost every data set with any degree of randomness is likely to contain some spurious correlations. If they are not cautious, researchers using data mining techniques can be easily misled by these apparently significant results. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging

Good interview with Mark Bernstein, capturing some of the early days of East Gate, StorySpace, and HyperText fiction. Also some advice on Writing A Book (rather, on writing a big "publishable" HyperText): Acquire whatever skills you need to create what you have in mind. Do not rely on vague ideas of Collaboration or appropriation to supply what you currently lack. Be prepared to learn new things: Computer Programming, figure Drawing (Sketching), medieval Italian, narratology, or the intellectual life of Victorian parlor maids. Master your computer, and know how to use your tools well. Look for new tools and techniques that can improve your work or open new Creative opportunities. (more)

Steve Ersinghaus's experience in authoring HyperText (in StorySpace). It takes time to understand that in Storyspace, editing is a non-linear process, where linking can take the place of idea moving. In Storyspace, the writer doesn’t move a paragraph, though this is possible to do, he or she simply relates it to something else via a link. Interesting question: what do you leave in, even if shunted off to a part of the bits-network that might never get read? In TLGS, there are many areas of the text the reader will never see because they are simply bypassed. They are a sort of idea-based archaeology, bits of broken pottery that over time, I found no use for in the paths of the novel, such as a stretch of action that appeared at one time to supply the answer to a quandary, but that become too burdensome to keep in the possible flow.

Mark Bernstein sees parallels between Ted Naos' CutUp CardDecks and HyperText. See also https://www.eastgate.com/catalog/TedNaosCollection.html (more)

Umberto Eco on EBooks, memory, HyperText. At the opening of the Library Of Alexandria. WE HAVE THREE TYPES OF MEMORY. The first one is organic, which is the memory made of flesh and blood and the one administrated by our brain. The second is mineral, and in this sense mankind has known two kinds of mineral memory: millennia ago, this was the memory represented by clay tablets and obelisks, pretty well known in this country, on which people carved their texts. However, this second type is also the electronic memory of today's computers, based upon silicon. We have also known another kind of memory, the vegetal one, the one represented by the first papyruses, again well known in this country, and then on books, made of paper. Let me disregard the fact that at a certain moment the vellum of the first codices were of an organic origin, and the fact that the first paper was made with rugs and not with wood. Let me speak for the sake of simplicity of vegetal memory in order to designate books.

John Seely Brown and Estee Solomon Gray: The People Are the Company. Revolutions start in the most unexpected places and with the most unlikely heroes. Who would imagine that the conventional wisdom of the Industrial Age would be challenged by copier repair technicians - "tech reps" - at Xerox? (more)