[HN Gopher] Deals with the devil aren't what they used to be
___________________________________________________________________
Deals with the devil aren't what they used to be
Author : pepys
Score : 65 points
Date : 2024-08-12 17:47 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| office_drone wrote:
| https://archive.is/1jr1B
| jmugan wrote:
| This is written for someone with a higher reading level than me.
| I skimmed the first few paragraphs and have no idea what it is
| about beyond the title.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| It meanders around the history of tales involving selling one's
| soul for worldly power or gratification, then in the last
| sentence says that's what smartphones are, because we trade
| privacy and identity for convenience.
| galdosdi wrote:
| I don't mean this offensively, but if this is beyond your
| reading level and you went to college, your college did not do
| a good job. The vocabulary and structure is nothing out of the
| ordinary for college level reading.
|
| That said, like some college level reading, it definitely
| meanders a bit, is a little self-important and feels padded
| with unnecessary filler, and is just only somewhat but
| ultimately not deeply interesting unless you are already pretty
| interested in how tales of the devil featured in medieval
| Europe. It's ok. I didn't finish it. If you misspoke and meant
| you didn't feel like reading it, but certainly could have
| comprehended it, then never mind I guess
|
| But again, this isn't personal-- but if you are a successful
| educated software engineer who genuinely finds this beyond your
| reading level, your reading level is low for your station in
| life. It will limit your rise. Take it as an insult if you like
| though I don't mean it that way or else a wake up call.
|
| The reason I dare stick my fingers into this fire and possibly
| offend you is, there is a trend of "educated" people who know
| science but completely skipped humanities, and thus have huge
| blind spots. My real audience for this comment is other people
| who will be encouraged to value the ability to read obtuse
| things and write clearly, to understand history and literature.
| And if you are picking a college for your kids, check out the
| readings for some classes. If they are not expected to easily
| be able to read something at this level, then it's a waste of
| money unless it's very cheap.
| acheron wrote:
| You must be old. Nowadays even Harvard students aren't
| expected to be able to read anything complicated. From
| coincidentally, another New Yorker link:
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-end-of-
| the... -- _" The last time I taught 'The Scarlet Letter,' I
| discovered that my students were really struggling to
| understand the sentences as sentences--like, having trouble
| identifying the subject and the verb," she said. "Their
| capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a
| long time ago."_
| galdosdi wrote:
| Ah. So that's why so many people think chatgpt is such a
| boon for drafting trivial things that a competent writer
| could do almost as fast, but with more control. They really
| can't do it.
|
| The deskilling continues. "What can be expected of a man
| who has spent 20 years putting heads on pins?"
|
| PS: I am not that old. I was in the college class '11 at an
| average small liberal arts college with an over 60%
| acceptance rate. I was not exceptional. I think the
| deskilling has accelerated very greatly and very recently.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| The story by E.M. Forster is actually "The Machine
| Stops". The dystopia that came to mind for me was
| Harrison Bergeron, only instead of a human Handicapper
| General enforcing an equality of sub-mediocrity, it will
| be the masses and the tools they were bequeathed by the
| FAANGs. Having also been at uni in '11, I agree - GenZ
| and below are unnerving to observe.
| galdosdi wrote:
| NB- this is in reply to an earlier version of my comment,
| which I edited out purely for brevity, but now guiltily
| am restoring here-- where I worried we're marching
| towards a dystopia like the ones imagined in many works
| like Idiocracy, Wall-E, or The Machine Stops
| (misremembering the title as The Machine Breaks Down or
| something)
|
| You make a very good point. I am starting to hear things
| along the lines of "But it's normal that some people
| learn better from videos" and "Why are you gatekeeping
| this knowledge" and even here you increasingly see
| references to videos that are much lower detail but
| higher time commitment summaries of writing that has much
| more detail available yet could be consumed, skimmed, etc
| more quickly than sitting through a video that your eyes
| have no ability to skip around, rushing past the
| irrelevant and dwelling on the relevant, without ever
| having to click a button.
|
| They already invented telepathic interfaces -- books.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| I was really confused when I posted my comment and didn't
| see any mention of the titles I saw in the original.
|
| A succinct encapsulation of the problem is that the total
| "signal" of civilization is now being eclipsed
| exponentially, in all sorts of ways, by "noise". Some
| people say we're heading towards singularity, and others
| towards collapse; either way I'm confident we'll live to
| see _some_ sort of great Reckoning, because I don 't see
| how the generations after Millennial can sustain the
| current setup and weight of civilization.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Not just Gen Z. 54% of US adults read below a 6th grade
| reading level[1][2][3]. The younger generations might
| skew the results, I haven't dug deep into the links.
|
| 1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2020/09/0
| 9/low-...
|
| 2: https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/lite
| racy-s....
|
| 3: https://map.barbarabush.org
| hyeonwho4 wrote:
| That is terrifying. If the elite of the elite can't
| interact with historical works, how can we trust them to
| make informed decisions about the present? I really don't
| want foreign policy on India set by Harvard grads who have
| never read Ghandi, and I don't want domestic policy set by
| people who haven't read the Scarlet Letter.
| throwanem wrote:
| The nineteenth century, hell. I have to limit the
| grammatical complexity I use _here_ , or expect to be
| fussed at by people asking for summarization.
|
| Or, lately, pasting into ChatGPT, I suppose. There's a
| thought: I wonder if I could develop a style that's
| consistent with the rules of English grammar and reads
| naturally to the fluent, but is also too complex for LLMs
| to reliably summarize. It'd be a pure gimmick, of course,
| but it still might be fun to play around with...
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Yes; alas, "fluent" is mu (nothingness). Barriers,
| barriers are. One may permit it in art, but communication
| thwarted brings pain. (This has absolutely nothing to do
| with a squirrel.)
| throwanem wrote:
| Granted. But are we engineers or aren't we? If we won't
| develop the capacity to reckon with complex thoughts,
| then what can we even claim to offer over a coding model?
|
| (You also suggest my use of "fluent" begs the wrong
| question. How so? Not every thought is trivial of
| expression, or we'd need no words but the commonest ten
| hundred.)
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Say not the straightforward deeply, but the deep
| straightforwardly.
|
| (NP-hard so.) Two words, answering directly yet
| explaining nothing. Shibboleths and CAPTCHAs are
| illusionary protection (and really exclusionary).
| throwanem wrote:
| They're poor, early tools. But a complex world can be
| addressed as if only so simple. Or safely, anyway.
|
| It's not that I don't understand the temptation
| otherwise. But those are sent to be mastered, I heard.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Science is not obscurantism. Of their purpose, these
| tools are early (we hope). Of their ilk, these tools are
| late, almost unsurpassable, and unenviable.
| gowld wrote:
| "Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-
| track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with
| burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly
| vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in
| the soil that had so early borne the black flower of
| civilized society, a prison."
|
| Scarlet Letter was important among the limited works that
| could afford to be published. It touches on important idea.
| But it's stilted language of a different society isn't
| better than modern language. Just as we don't consider
| Nathaniel Hawthorne stupid because he wouldn't easily
| understand a modern sentence like "An open source platform
| for building a writing space on the web."
| galdosdi wrote:
| Why do people like yourself have such an allergy to
| becoming familiar with the past? It is as small-minded to
| be parochially bound to your own time as it is to your
| own country. Think of it as analogous to learning Spanish
| or Chinese so you can understand people from those
| places.
|
| Except it's much much easier because it's almost the same
| language, only a very, very, very slightly different
| dialect, that uses words that are still used, just a
| slightly different distribution of which are popular.
| Read a book or two from the 19th century and you'll find
| the rest easy.
|
| When you admit that this is impenetrable to you you are
| admitting you've never tried for very long.
|
| Not a single word in that sentence is uncommon today
| other than "edifice" (though any romance language speaker
| would understand it), as well as the fact that the
| average urbanite today does not know the names of many
| common weeds (but context makes that irrelevant)
|
| Nathanial Hawthorne had no ability to converse with the
| future, but we have the ability, if we choose it, and a
| responsibility, to understand the past, so we can learn
| from it and make good choices in the future.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| That isn't stilted, nor is it some crazy difficult usage
| of past English. If someone really can't understand it,
| then they really are ignorant.
| romanows wrote:
| And just 19 years later, Mark Twain published The
| Innocents Abroad, which I remember loving. I haven't
| looked at either in decades, but I'd bet that I'd still
| find The Scarlett Letter to be ponderous and boring and
| The Innocents Abroad to be an absolute delight in its
| subject matter, storytelling, and playful use of
| language.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| This happens every time an article from the new yorker is
| posted. Now we will mostly talk about this, about the merits or
| pointlessness of literary nonfiction and literature in general.
| Maybe recommend each other some brandon sanderson or malcolm
| gladwell and all have a great time.
| jonchang wrote:
| Developing media literacy is an important skill!
|
| One way to approach this work is to understand the _genre_ of
| the work you are reading! We can determine genre in a few ways,
| but in this case, we see that the publication is the _New
| Yorker_ , which tells us to expect magazine-style writing,
| specifically longer form feature pieces.
|
| Another important clue is that this is published in the _New
| Yorker_ 's "Books" section, suggesting that this is a book
| review. And, if you know much about the New Yorker's book
| reviews, they often include things such as history of the field
| the book addresses, compares the book to other related books,
| and what the book's thesis might imply about our world today.
|
| This longer form book review can introduce important context
| and enrich your understanding of the world! I encourage you to
| keep an open mind and continue to read pieces that are outside
| of your usual genre.
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Is this written by gpt
| robbiep wrote:
| It absolutely feels like it
| dalmo3 wrote:
| In the style of New Yorker, a joke as old as gpt itself.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| The style matches, but I think that's because it's just a
| median style of writing. It's too... _je ne sais quoi_ , to
| be produced by that algorithm.
| wizardforhire wrote:
| Its making a longwinded comparison between eulas and faustian
| bargains, trading short term gains for long term suffering.
| dylan604 wrote:
| So it's a tale of Boeing?
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| Almost any company now. If you're not growing faster or
| making more profit than you were last quarter, forever, the
| entire world will crash, apparently.
| neves wrote:
| I love deals with the Devil. What's your favorite Deal with the
| Devil tale? Tell me one off the beaten path.
|
| My favorite is the Brazillian "Grande Sertao: Veredas"
| paxys wrote:
| Stingy Jack (namesake for the Jack O'Lantern) -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingy_Jack
| jononor wrote:
| Here is a Norwegian tale of the Devil, in form of a traditional
| fiddle song. Music at the bottom, recommend playing it through
| once before reading the post.
| https://www.norskkornolfestival.no/2019/06/18/fanitullen/
| mac3n wrote:
| https://kasmana.people.charleston.edu/MATHFICT/mfview.php?ca...
|
| "The Devil and Simon Flagg" in which Flagg sells his soul in
| exchange for the proof of Fermat's last theorem. No proof is
| found, but the Devil becomes consumed with mathematics.
| jkaptur wrote:
| It's on the beaten path, but how can you resist (and how did
| the New Yorker resist?) "The Devil Went Down to Georgia"?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_Went_Down_to_Georgia
|
| Most of the deals in the article do not end well for the human,
| but here there's no lesson about hubris, nor the curse of
| knowledge, or anything else. No, Johnny's just a better fiddle
| player, he beats the devil, and he wins a golden fiddle fair
| and square.
|
| (The article might allude to this story: "Satan is not the real
| God, because there is only one God; the Devil doesn't have the
| best tunes.")
| krapp wrote:
| There is a lesson about hubris, but most people miss it. The
| Devil's deal is false, he doesn't play "fair and square."
| Johnny wins the bet but still loses his soul to the sin of
| pride. It's even in the lyrics: "My name's Johnny and _it
| might be a sin_ , but I'll take your bet and you're gonna
| regret 'cause I'm the best that's ever been!"
|
| At least that's how I've always interpreted it.
| jkaptur wrote:
| Very interesting interpretation! I see your point.
| buildsjets wrote:
| Which always seemed to me just a retelling of the Robert
| Johnson "crossroads" legend.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Johnson#Devil_legend
| robbiep wrote:
| Maybe shifting further but _'the silver tongued devil'_ by
| Kris Kristofferson is a beautiful song with a beautiful
| message in my opinion
| bbreier wrote:
| funny enough, "To Beat the Devil" of his is my pick for the
| best riff on the trope of country songs about musicians
| taking on the devil
| butlike wrote:
| A modern take I've always enjoyed is
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1tcj6bUv98
| nox101 wrote:
| If we're mentioning songs then I'd pick T..... & Beer by
| Frank Zappa
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPO1QGhYDjM
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| In "The Master and Margarita", Pilate makes a hard-boiled
| metaphorical, not literal, deal with the devil.
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| Crossroads! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossroads_(folklore)
| microtherion wrote:
| My favorite is the legend of the Devil's Bridge
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schollenen_Gorge where some Swiss
| hired the devil to build a bridge over a seemingly unbridgeable
| gorge, and then tricked him out of his payment.
|
| I've referred to the devil as the Patron Unholy of Swiss
| engineering.
| syarb wrote:
| I love "The Grand Inquisitor" from Dostoevsky's The Brothers
| Karamazov. It's not exactly a deal with the devil, but it does
| have some interesting parallels.
|
| Full chapter:
| https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8578/8578-h/8578-h.htm
| Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Inquisitor
| syntheticnature wrote:
| Been fond of "La Chasse-galerie" for a while:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasse-galerie
| kderbyma wrote:
| Bob Dylan. Said he sold his soul to the Devil and promised to
| play til the end of his days
| gambiting wrote:
| Poland has a tale of "Pan Twardowski"(Mr Twardowski) about a
| man who made a pact with the devil for all kinds of powers, in
| exchange the devil said he will take Twardowski's soul if he
| ever sets his foot in Rome - since he didn't intend to visit
| Rome, he assumed this was the perfect deal. However the devil
| outwitted him, by coming for his soul in an inn called
| Rzym(Rome in Polish).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Twardowski
| alejohausner wrote:
| The story of Faust is about the dangers of knowledge and
| technology. If you know too much, you will eventually lose your
| soul.
|
| As this book review explains, with the enlightenment and
| industrial revolution, this fear of knowledge receded. But the
| myth is still there.
|
| For example, take the "Terminator" movies. They're about the
| dangers of technology: what if we create machines that are
| intelligent enough to turn on their creators and seek to destroy
| them? There is a parallel between gaining forbidden knowledge and
| making artificial creatures. Today, we are afraid that
| corporations and governments will use our inventions to control
| us, but I think that fear has an echo of the old myth that it is
| dangerous to learn forbidden knowledge, or create artificial
| life, because that would be entering the realm once reserved for
| the Almighty.
| hughesjj wrote:
| It's crazy to think that one of the oldest religious stories,
| the whole Adam and Eve don't eat from the fruit of the
| forbidden tree of knowledge, actually has a coincidence (...I
| mean, _I_ believe it was a coincidence) in our past diet
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/03/27/521423216/wh...
|
| I don't believe pre-human primates somehow passed that story
| down or anything but old stories always make me curious into
| their origins. Sometimes cool and interesting stuff comes up
| when you do
| gowld wrote:
| Fruit is great, as described. Knowing fruit is great is of
| course adaptive and this receives selective presure. Most
| life forms naturally seek out the things that they need to
| survive. Intelligent beings will use their intelligence to
| seek out such things, and will understand their value.
| krapp wrote:
| I've been told the whole Genesis narrative was essentially
| political propaganda based on the Babylonian creation account
| in the Enuma Elish and written during the Babylonian exile.
|
| I don't know how accurate that is but they do share
| similarities and given the relative cultural influence of
| Babylon I wouldn't doubt some influence was there.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Those are basically two different theories to account for
| the similarities. The one where the hebrews picked up the
| myth during captivity in babylon is mostly out of favor
| currently though it has some reputable proponents.
|
| "Political propaganda" isn't quite how I would put it but
| yes a slightly more main stream theory is that genesis is
| an intentional reconfiguration of a myth that would have
| been widely known in the region, for the purpose of
| repudiating the mesopotamian religion in favor of the
| hebrew one.
|
| Either way, or both, or neither, the story was "in the air"
| in the eastern mediterranean/west asia at that time. It was
| widely known and incredibly influential, and bits of it
| turn up in basically all significant literature with its
| roots in that place & era. Scholars go back and forth on
| the archeological and linguistic evidence but it's fairly
| commonly held that they are all simply a mesh of mutually-
| influenced variants of an even earlier myth that was lost
| or never recorded in its "original" form.
| trhway wrote:
| And not just fruit - getting ability to metabolize alcohol,
| ie. to efficiently consume those ripe fruits lying around
| under the tree seems to be that jump start in the brain
| development, walking up-right, etc. And the alcohol produces
| that artificial feeling of empowerment and freedom (which are
| basically top temptations by the devil). Btw, in Russia
| alcohol has evil image of the "green serpent" (after the
| biblical Serpent, and the Soviet propaganda used all that
| religious imagery - a 1962 cartoon where moonshine
| distillator is ran by a Witch and a Daemon and it morphs into
| the Serpent, and there is also a Faust's Mefistofele signing
| the famous solo of the opera
|
| https://youtu.be/xa7VHwpCgDk?t=352 and
| https://youtu.be/xa7VHwpCgDk?t=482 )
| x3n0ph3n3 wrote:
| > the whole Adam and Eve don't eat from the fruit of the
| forbidden tree of knowledge
|
| _knowledge of good and evil_
|
| It's so odd how often nuance from the bible is lost. Just
| like people say "money is the root of all evil" when the
| quote is actually " _the love of_ money is the root of all
| evil.
|
| These are actually important distinctions. From a literary
| perspective, _knowledge_ didn 't cause the downfall of Adam
| and Eve, it was _awareness of morality_ that did.
|
| Money is just a tool, but _love of money_ is a motivation
| that leads to evil actions.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| > what if we create machines that are intelligent enough to
| turn on their creators and seek to destroy them?
|
| I disagree with this - it's about creating machines that are
| _powerful_ enough to turn on their creators. Battlestar
| Galactica is more about intelligence /superiority IMO (as well
| as powerful).
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| This was really nice.
|
| I'll just say, it starts out deconstructing the way "magic" in
| the modern world has given way to "engineering" and thus
| mythological things like 'deals with the devil' are no longer
| believed.
|
| But, in my view, a significant part of the appeal of the 'deal
| with the devil' is that it isn't mysterious. A Faustian bargain
| works according to exactly the letter of the deal, and the devil
| always keeps his end of it. Part of what makes it interesting,
| enticing even, is that it looks like there might be ways to
| outwit the devil. The devil then is a force of nature to be
| engineered just like any other branch of engineering in modern
| times, not an arbitrary fact of life beyond our comprehension.
| mrec wrote:
| Coincidentally, I've just finished Thomas' _Religion and the
| Decline of Magic_. It 's very long and massively overexampled,
| but still a good and eye-opening read.
|
| When it came out in 1971 it cost an extortionate PS7; one
| national newspaper had an editorial saying people might be
| forced to pay for it in instalments.
| petschge wrote:
| How is that extortionate? Using the inflation calculator of
| the Bank of England that is 86 pounds now or $110. Admittedly
| that more expensive than the current price of $24 for the
| paper back, but at worst that seems to be twice as expensive
| as a common price for a 850 page book?
| gambiting wrote:
| I cannot imagine paying PS86 for any book tbh. That seems
| crazy high.
| yial wrote:
| At October, 1970, the provisional figures of average weekly
| earnings of full-time manual workers were PS28 Os. 11d. for
| men aged 21 years and over, and PS13 19s. 10d. for women
| aged 18 years and over. Between October, 1965 and October,
| 1970, average earnings of all workers covered by the
| regular inquiry rose by 45.9 per cent. and the general
| index of retail prices by 26.4 per cent.
| https://api.parliament.uk/historic-
| hansard/commons/1971/jan/...
|
| So it would have been around a decent chunk of your weekly
| wage as an average worker, it sounds like. I think what we
| would need to know is how much excess income someone would
| have for something like that at the time.
| robocat wrote:
| > twice as expensive as a common price for a 850 page book?
|
| Costs per page have dropped significantly - so not valid to
| use page count as a fixed comparison point???
|
| So perhaps its price is more reasonable than we might
| assume.
| nine_k wrote:
| Yes, the point, as I have always thought, is not that playing
| with the devil is playing with a deceitful sharper, but playing
| against one's own inability to handle one's desires, one's own
| imperfections and basically facing the corruption of the
| original sin in oneself. The devil just sets things up in such
| a way that the human who yielded to the temptation arrives to
| the state of ruin faster, and initially enjoying the ride, all
| while not being formally lied to at any moment.
|
| The idea is that there _logically_ may be ways to outwit the
| devil, but he will never offer you a deal where you would be
| able to outwit him by the power of your (weak and corrupted)
| mind, so the faith is the only salvation, and rejecting any
| deals is the only non-losing strategy. Remember, _Dr Faustus_
| was not written by an atheist.
| moffkalast wrote:
| So in a nutshell the whole genre can be reduced to "be
| careful what you wish for, you might get it"?
| nine_k wrote:
| Not just that, but also "...and you'll never be able to
| handle it, and the sleek scoundrel on the other side knows
| it".
| throwanem wrote:
| Or "don't think you're as smart as you think you are."
|
| Perhaps there's a line to be drawn from here to the dictum
| that code should be only half as clever as it could be,
| because debugging is twice as hard.
| nine_k wrote:
| Jokes about recursion are always funny, just like this
| one!
| ozim wrote:
| So you want to wave away whole storytelling experience by
| sentence that fits in a tweet.
|
| Gist of it might be true but reading dry sentence doesn't
| do to a brain same thing as reading a story and going for a
| ride along with the imaginary person.
|
| Well done story evokes emotions, makes one think of what
| ifs and what nots.
|
| Also a lot of memes or tweet length life lessons are not
| possible without long form background we share as a
| society.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| It worked for me. The first part did a great job of painting
| the horror of living in an age of ignorance, at the mercy of
| unseen, never understood forces. But I kept thinking... no,
| hold on... that's now too! [0], so was pleased the last stanza
| wrapped up as I anticipated, concluding modern forms of magic
| and Faustian bargains are indeed "exchange in which short-term
| gain threatens long-term security." As a book review it went
| off into the long grass for a bit in the middle.
|
| [0] EDIT; sorry but that SouthPark episode where Butters prays
| to the government just popped into my head; "And if it wouldn't
| be too much trouble, I'd really like to get a puppy for
| Christmas this year. G'night, Government!"
| throwanem wrote:
| This reads as if the author set out to make a point about modern
| traditionalism, got distracted with Renaissance literature
| halfway through, and then gave up on the piece with three or four
| paragraphs still to write.
|
| It's a shame. Something a little trenchant about the vacuity of
| "forward unto the past" would've made a better read than this.
| why_at wrote:
| I agree it seems pretty unfocused. To be fair I read it quickly
| so I might be missing something, but I'm struggling to pull a
| thesis out of this piece.
|
| At the beginning it seems like it's trying to make a point
| about society becoming better after eliminating superstition,
| but then it mostly just goes through a history of Faustian
| bargains in literature before ending with one paragraph that
| implies that the modern equivalent is EULAs in software.
|
| EDIT: I just realized from the URL that this is supposed to be
| a book review? I probably didn't notice because the book isn't
| mentioned in the title or even in the article until four
| paragraphs in.
| throwanem wrote:
| Yeah, on reflection my initial reading was a little unfair.
| The focus makes sense given what it is, although it still
| feels odd to start out with what sounds like it wants to be a
| critique of a critique of materialism.
| turing_complete wrote:
| Especially funny since he calls Goethe's Faust incoherent.
| plg wrote:
| It drives me BONKERS that I can read the new yorker within the
| apple news app (because I pay money) but I cannot in any way
| through any means read the same words via a web browser to the
| actual new yorker site.
|
| I know, welcome to the new internet. Apple sells me discounted
| access via their app because in doing so Apple can monetize my
| eyeballs. I hate it.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| Could this be the New Yorker's problem and not Apple's? I'm not
| super familiar with how Apple News subscriptions work, but
| there's probably a way they could let you log in to the New
| Yorker with your Apple ID or link the accounts somehow.
| jajko wrote:
| Not sure what problem you are facing, but I could read that
| article just fine, no subscription. Win 10, Firefox. For the
| rest there is always archive.is
| mceachen wrote:
| Gosh, one might even characterize this as a Faustian bargain
| with some sort of FANGed daemon.
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| Isn't the faustian bargain a warning against taking money from
| unscrupulous lenders? The promise of riches, but in the process
| you lose your freedom (still true for business owners)
| kderbyma wrote:
| it's selling your soul to the devil for something you desire
| swayvil wrote:
| "Engineering" reflects the popular way of thinking. So when magic
| (or other weird stuff) is explained for the popular mind, it
| looks like engineering.
| excalibur wrote:
| > Jesus again rejects material gain, and finally banishes the
| tempter: Satan is not the real God, because there is only one
| God; the Devil doesn't have the best tunes.
|
| Hard disagree. Though playing them on a golden fiddle certainly
| doesn't help.
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