Mitch Wagner

Felix Salmon at Axios: Even before the pandemic, young people mistrusted capitalism. “Now, with a strong labor market at their backs, they are increasingly proud of, and being lauded for, turning the tables on their employers – the exploited have become the exploiters.” The behavior now called “quiet quitting” is nothing new: the phrase “phoning it in” dates back to 1938 “and the novelty then was the phone, not the conduct.”

According to Axios, what’s new is that people used to be ashamed of slacking off and now they’re proud of it.

The 1999 movie “Office Space” came this close to making slacking off heroic – but then, in the final scene, it turns out that the protagonist, Peter Gibbons, is perfectly happy to put in an honest day’s work after all. It wasn’t the all-American paragon of hard work he was rebelling against, just soulless corporate drudgery.

…

Hard work used to be part and parcel of the American Dream. For millions of younger workers, that’s no longer the case.

I wonder whether young people are really lazier today, or have they returned to a more healthy view of work being a part of a balanced life? Most people shouldn’t live to work; they should work to live.

Jo Walton at Tor.com: The Dystopic Earths of Heinlein’s Juveniles. Thanks, Cory!

Actor Bruce Horak, who played Hemmer, returns as the Klingon general. In real life, the actor performs in a musical group, the Railbirds, which explains his superior singing chops.

And Christina Chong, who plays La’an, and Celia Rose Gooding, who plays Uhura, both have musical theater backgrounds. Gooding got a Tony nomination for her performance on Broadway in “Jagged Little Pill.”

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 Just Pulled Off a Secret Cameo | Den of Geek

Lin-Manuel Miranda is reportedly turning The Warriors into a stage musical. I’ll watch whatever Lin-Manuel Miranda does next but this seems like maybe not the best idea?

I saw this while walking with the dog today. 📷

“Fighting junk fees is ‘woke’: Visa and Mastercard want you to pay credit card swipe fees to own the libs.”

A dark money campaign is claiming that legislation to rein in credit card junk fees is bad because it’s “woke," and compares reining in credit card fees to Communism.

The campaign is “literally that stupid,” says Cory Doctorow, who notes that Mastercard and Visa skim 3-5% of every of “every single retail transaction in the entire fucking economy.”

Not quite true but close—according to statista.com, cash accounted for just 12% of retail transactions in the US in 2022. Nearly other transaction is either a straight-up credit card or some variation like a debit card, ewallet, or a prepaid card.

Nowadays, the only thing I pay for with cash is my monthly haircut. Until this year, I also paid cash for pizza, but the pizza place we order from finally went to app delivery. Every other retail transaction I do goes through Visa.

The youngs today are burned out on dating apps so they’re posting long personal profiles to the Internet, often using Google Docs or Notion. These are essentially resumes, but for romance instead of jobs.

Connie Li, 33, a software engineer, “described herself as monogamous, short and prone to wearing colorful outfits. She added that she was undoubtedly a cat in a previous life, ‘just one of those weirdo bodega ones that like people.’”

Cooking With Gas: The decades-long marketing campaign by big business to get us to love our gas stoves. On the 99% Invisible podcast.

Casey Newton at Platformer: How the Kids Online Safety Act puts us all at risk. KOSA gives the Republican Party power to censor the Internet and eliminate LGBTQ content and anything else Republicans don’t like. And yet Democrats are on board with it, because if you wave the flag of child protection in front of a politician their brain switches off.

Hard Fork: “Researchers in Korea claim they’ve identified a material that could unlock a technological revolution: the room temperature superconductor.” Kevin Roose and Casey Newton at the Hard Fork podcast explain why that’s a big deal.

Twitter is doing its own research on the subject, including @iris_IGB, who claims to be Russian, uses a manga character for an avatar, and says they’ve reproduced the experiment in their kitchen.