Listening to Stuff
Nov. 21st, 2024 05:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
netgirl_y2kAfter a very mild autumn, winter has arrived all at once, and every single conversation I've had this week has gone like this:
"Cold, isn't it."
"Baltic."
And then it'll turn into a weird sort of competitive coldness,
"I had to leave for work at half seven and it was -3 and it took me ten minutes to defrost the car."
"Well, I had to leave at half six and it was -5 and it took me twenty minutes to defrost the car."
And then a third person, who wasn't even involved in the conversation, will wander past and go, "My boiler is broken, so I don't even have hot water."
And so on.
I have been listening to a bunch of audiobooks recently, mostly because I took a bunch of political and current affairs podcasts out of circulation for You Know Nothing, Jon Snow reasons. And I find non-fiction easier to follow on audio, so.
The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron by Bethany McLean - Okay, I love this book, I think it's the best and most readable of the big financial malfeasance books, but I accept that not everybody is in the market for a twenty hour audiobook about skullduggerous accounting practices.
It also turns out that I have strong feelings about the gender of audiobook narrators, at least in nonfiction - it's different in fiction, where you'd be casting more for characters - but I think in nonfiction, where the author is a woman the narrator should be too, especially in something like finance books that are still so male dominated.
When McKinsey Comes to Town by Walt Bogdanich - Or, How Management Consultants Ruined Everything. This one was infuriating on two different fronts; on the one hand there's the genuinely evil stuff, like advising ICE when they were putting kids in cages, or helping Purdue try to boost sales of oxycontin long after everyone knew the harm it was doing; on the other, there was these dumb chucklefucks thinking in early 2008 that the problem was over-regulation of subprime mortgage products, and Dido Harding of grifting her way through failing to make a working test and trace system fame having an infinite license to fail upwards because she'd been a McKinsey consultant for five minutes.
Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth by Ingrid Robeyns - Robeyns makes a very compelling argument for why there should be a wealth cap - albeit one that confirms my priors - and is significantly less convincing on how we get one. She seems to be relying on the super wealthy consenting to give up their wealth, using the example of Patriotic Millionaires and Abigail Disney, and, like, sure, but if that was enough we would be at least a little bit of the way there, right? I'm also not sure that lumping people who have a few million in with people who have tens of billions is helpful to her argument.
Although, the limitarianism book mentioned Perdue Pharma, last seen in the McKinsey book, McKinsey themselves were bit players advising Enron.
And, like, I know it's systemic, I know the incentives are perverse, the thinking short term, and that there are a non-zero number of people who will Kill Us All before they allow the system to be changed, but my God, there being so many crossover characters in these books did nothing to cure me of my conspiratorial belief that there are, like, five bad guys in the world and it should not be beyond the ken of man to find out where they all live.
Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America by Talia Lavin - As someone who seamlessly moved from indifferent Catholicism to indifferent Atheism I have always found extreme or enforced expressions of faith quite scary, and yeah, this scared me.
"Cold, isn't it."
"Baltic."
And then it'll turn into a weird sort of competitive coldness,
"I had to leave for work at half seven and it was -3 and it took me ten minutes to defrost the car."
"Well, I had to leave at half six and it was -5 and it took me twenty minutes to defrost the car."
And then a third person, who wasn't even involved in the conversation, will wander past and go, "My boiler is broken, so I don't even have hot water."
And so on.
I have been listening to a bunch of audiobooks recently, mostly because I took a bunch of political and current affairs podcasts out of circulation for You Know Nothing, Jon Snow reasons. And I find non-fiction easier to follow on audio, so.
The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron by Bethany McLean - Okay, I love this book, I think it's the best and most readable of the big financial malfeasance books, but I accept that not everybody is in the market for a twenty hour audiobook about skullduggerous accounting practices.
It also turns out that I have strong feelings about the gender of audiobook narrators, at least in nonfiction - it's different in fiction, where you'd be casting more for characters - but I think in nonfiction, where the author is a woman the narrator should be too, especially in something like finance books that are still so male dominated.
When McKinsey Comes to Town by Walt Bogdanich - Or, How Management Consultants Ruined Everything. This one was infuriating on two different fronts; on the one hand there's the genuinely evil stuff, like advising ICE when they were putting kids in cages, or helping Purdue try to boost sales of oxycontin long after everyone knew the harm it was doing; on the other, there was these dumb chucklefucks thinking in early 2008 that the problem was over-regulation of subprime mortgage products, and Dido Harding of grifting her way through failing to make a working test and trace system fame having an infinite license to fail upwards because she'd been a McKinsey consultant for five minutes.
Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth by Ingrid Robeyns - Robeyns makes a very compelling argument for why there should be a wealth cap - albeit one that confirms my priors - and is significantly less convincing on how we get one. She seems to be relying on the super wealthy consenting to give up their wealth, using the example of Patriotic Millionaires and Abigail Disney, and, like, sure, but if that was enough we would be at least a little bit of the way there, right? I'm also not sure that lumping people who have a few million in with people who have tens of billions is helpful to her argument.
Although, the limitarianism book mentioned Perdue Pharma, last seen in the McKinsey book, McKinsey themselves were bit players advising Enron.
And, like, I know it's systemic, I know the incentives are perverse, the thinking short term, and that there are a non-zero number of people who will Kill Us All before they allow the system to be changed, but my God, there being so many crossover characters in these books did nothing to cure me of my conspiratorial belief that there are, like, five bad guys in the world and it should not be beyond the ken of man to find out where they all live.
Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America by Talia Lavin - As someone who seamlessly moved from indifferent Catholicism to indifferent Atheism I have always found extreme or enforced expressions of faith quite scary, and yeah, this scared me.