Tom

Shocking but not surprising. Also serves as a cautionary tale about how difficult it is to 'fix the problem from the inside' and how you often end up simply perpetuating the issues that you came in to solve.

Some takeaways:

• Being attacked by a shark sounds almost as bad as having negligent parents
• Mark's staff let him win at Catan and he's too self-important to notice
• The answer to balancing parenting and work at that level is to let other people manage the children for you
• Sheryl is a horrible horrible person, espousing feminist ideals while doing the very opposite
• Joel is even worse, I can't believe these kind of men continue to get away with such obvious sexual harassment
• These people have blood on their hands

A useful collection of Chomsky's thoughts on anarchism. Some takeaways:

• Anarchism helps solve the 'animal' problems but not necessarily the 'human' problems
• All anarchists are socialist but not all socialists are anarchist
• It's important to have a desired political system in mind but not all actions must contribute to bringing this about in the short term
• It is the responsibility of power to justify itself

I don't envy writers that take on complex investigations like this. By design, the financial machinations are obtuse and confusing, deliberately concocted to bewilder even the most experienced outsider looking in. Despite the inherent complexity, I think the author could have done a better job explaining the core aspects of this case study.

That aside, the key points I took from this book were:

1. Private equity moved assets between entities in an attempt to defraud creditors

2. Private equity owners used the size of the company during the bankruptcy to avoid personal liability for aforementioned fraud (just like Perdue)

I initially started with the Re: Dracula podcast which releases episodes on the actual diary entry date. I found the voice acting to be good and I enjoyed the novelty but I could not abide by the ads and content warnings so I eventually dropped off in mid September and I only picked it up again with the audible version several months later. This turned out to be a much better way of listening.

Content wise Dracula is something of an oddity. Its first third is excellent with the parallel stories pushing the story along at a satisfying pace. It starts to slow down as everyone eventually converges on London, at times it feels like we are reading through pages of meeting notes as our heros deliberate endlessly. The final third is so drawn out that I started to suspect that the novel was serialised (it's not).

Another irritation is that the novel is very much a 'male-fantasy'. The women are sidelined except as either recipients of the men's noble blood sacrifices, articles of the men's demeaningly progressive compliments (Mina being told she has a "man's brain") or by parroting just how brave and bold said men are.

This is not to say that the novel is bad, just flawed, and I did enjoy listening to it, especially the first half. It's cultural reach is also undeniable and you can feel it's influence well over a century on.

A concise and clear guide to the prevailing ideology of our time and why it's killing our world. Some takeaways

• Capitalism and Neo-liberalism is inherently reliant on colonial exploitation
• Rent-seeking is the primary mode of increasing wealth
• The rich and powerful launder ideas through think tanks that are uncritically regurgitated by the media
• There is a limitation of imagination when it comes to societal change, incrementalism is not the way

Alistair Reynolds takes relativistic space travel very seriously and it adds natural tension and scale to his work. House of Suns worked better for me than Pushing Ice mainly due to the strength of the characters, there is emotional depth and empathy here that I couldn't find in the other book.

America-centric as expected and can't resist the urge to bring up Moore's Law at every opportunity but otherwise a good history of the micro-chip and it's profound effect on geopolitics. Some observations:

• The steady state that we have reached is one where foundries manufacture chips primarily for fab-less companies, it's easy to imagine an alternative reality in which chip design and manufacturing is done by a limited pool of massive companies
• None of this is possible without the funding, direct or otherwise, of nations
• Chips are becoming more and more specialised for a single use case rather than being 'general purpose'
• Catching up to the incumbents in the race for more advanced chips is basically impossible at this point

At this point in the series Banks has fully realised his vision for the Culture and it is glorious.