Cafe Bedouin
Cafe Bedouin
This is my show. It’s a blog as hupomnemata. Michael Foucault defined hupomnemata as a personal notebook similar to a spiritual journal but with a different goal. He did not want “to pursue the unspeakable, nor to reveal the hidden, nor to say the unsaid [like a spiritual journal does], but on the contrary to capture the already said, to collect what one has managed to hear or read, and for a purpose that is nothing less than the shaping of the self.”
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All posts (325)
Rule 436(g) was a four-line exemption. It said that when a nationally recognized rating agency’s rating appeared in a securities registration statement, that rating did not count as an expert opinion under Sections 7 and 11 of the Securities Act — so the agency never had to consent to being named, and could not be...
“How much do you need? How often should you reapply? The short answer: about two tablespoons, every two hours. For stick sunscreen, that’s four passes back and forth. For sprays, until your skin glistens. Make sure you rub it in fully — yes, even for sticks and sprays, and even if the directions say otherwise. As...
In the autumn of 1998, a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management lost roughly $4.6 billion in about four months and had to be unwound by a consortium of banks assembled at the Federal Reserve’s request, for fear its collapse would take the rest of Wall Street down with it. The fund’s principals included two...
In “Why Sheep Need Pigs in Sheepdog’s Clothing,” Robin Hanson asked three LLMs to score how much status, social skills, and judgment matter for influence across five domains. Judgment came back higher than his argument wanted. So he asked again. The second prompt told the models to focus on “who is selected or is...
Why good innovations mint new elites — and how to tell the dangerous cases from the merely disruptive Every year something like forty thousand Americans die on the roads. The strongest large-scale data we have — from driverless fleets logging hundreds of millions of miles — suggests that within the limited areas...
The wage floor for American farmwork fell by a third. Two different things could have caused that, one defensible and one not, and no one has separated them. In late summer 2025 the USDA discontinued the Farm Labor Survey, the instrument that measured what American farmworkers earn and set the wage floor for the...
A Tale, updated from the papers of the late Diedrich Knickerbocker, who did not live to see the machine that would have made his authentications unnecessary The following was assembled from a case file, a parole record, and a public entry that outlived both. Of the three, only the last still exists in a form anyone...
A hotel manager once told a marathoner he could run a six-minute mile. The marathoner — who had raced twenty-six miles at 7:35 pace and knew exactly what a six-minute mile costs a body — called bullshit. The manager didn’t retreat to “well, in high school.” He doubled down. Nothing about that exchange makes sense if...
A manifesto for the creative affinity group You may already have the group. People you would text a strange idea to at midnight. But, many of us don’t have a circle of friends who build us up, help us transform and transcend our past selves and turn into something more interesting, more strange. How many of us...
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