Ben Landau-Taylor (@benlandautaylor) / X

Ben Landau-Taylor

6,154 posts

Ben Landau-Taylor

@benlandautaylor

Investigating power, society, and industry. Preserving today's text for the distant future at ennigaldi.org ammoniteinscription.com

San Francisco

Joined June 2018

Ben Landau-Taylor
@benlandautaylor
Jul 18, 2025
Wait, what? How is it possible to spend a hundred million dollars a year to make videos of a man at a desk? Is this even true? What do you spend the money on?
Matthew Belloni
@MattBelloni
Jul 18, 2025
The timing and optics are terrible, but Stephen Colbert’s show costs more than $100M a year to produce and is losing more than $40M a year. CBS execs had been mulling for a long time whether to pull the plug. Details ⬇️⬇️ puck.news/was-colberts-c…
1.1M
Ben Landau-Taylor
@benlandautaylor
Aug 15, 2023
When people talk about selectively adopting technology to preserve culture, they usually bring up the Amish, and that’s fair. But the French ban on paternity testing is a much funnier example.
1.5M
Ben Landau-Taylor
@benlandautaylor
Oct 15, 2025
ben hylak
@benhylak
Oct 15, 2025
the decline of pixar feels very under discussed. they were one of the top 5 most important companies of the last decade. now they make movies that no one watches.
500K
Ben Landau-Taylor
@benlandautaylor
Nov 16, 2025
The absolute lowest-hanging fruit in domestic policy is just "make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy again, like they were before 1998".
673K
Ben Landau-Taylor
@benlandautaylor
Feb 13, 2024
Why the hell has iodized salt become so much less common? Is there some newfangled solution to iodine deficiency I haven’t heard about, or is one of the world’s great public health achievements just lapsing for no particular reason? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
1M
Ben Landau-Taylor
@benlandautaylor
Oct 9, 2025
"Write what you know" was good advice for novelists when most of them had been drafted, or hitchhiked across the country with drug-addled degenerates, or worked as a migrant rancher. It’s bad advice for people who mostly just know how to turn in homework assignments.
218K
Ben Landau-Taylor
@benlandautaylor
Sep 4, 2025
There are almost two hundred countries in the world. The polite fiction is that all of them are fully sovereign, but to me it looks like only six are—the United States of America, Russia, China, India, Iran, and Turkey.
1.2M
Ben Landau-Taylor
@benlandautaylor
Jul 16, 2025
I read a lot of science fiction as a kid, so it's kind of a shock that the most prescient novel from my youth was in Harry Potter when a girl gets into infinite text chat with a magic diary that pretends to be a perfect safe boyfriend while it actually sucks out her life force.
273K
Ben Landau-Taylor
@benlandautaylor
Jul 11, 2025
A scorpion wanted to cross a river, but could not swim. It asked a frog to carry it across. "How do I know you won’t sting and kill me?" said the frog. "I'd love to sting you and will definitely do it," said the scorpion. "I’m sure you don’t mean that," said the frog. "Hop on."
164K
Ben Landau-Taylor
@benlandautaylor
Jun 24, 2025
The "men are romantically turned off by female ambition" thing is clearly not true as stated, but it's gesturing at a real thing: some women believe that men *ought* to be *attracted* to female ambition, so when most men are completely indifferent, they feel cheated.
216K
Ben Landau-Taylor
@benlandautaylor
Nov 3, 2024
Students today might not realize this, but college used to be hard. Back in the day, getting straight As didn’t mean you turned in your homework on time, it meant you were genuinely brilliant.
468K
Ben Landau-Taylor
@benlandautaylor
May 31, 2025
Replying to @colin_fraser
I remember when I'd hear about software getting a new version and feel excited instead of a dull spike of dread.
113K
Ben Landau-Taylor
@benlandautaylor
Aug 9, 2025
Periodic reminder that Wikipedia has a squillion times more money than they need to operate the actual website, and all marginal donations go to the fake paper-shuffling NGO that attached itself to the organization for the purpose of feeding on donations from rubes.
Ben Landau-Taylor
@benlandautaylor
Dec 26, 2023
I have no interest in giving Wikipedia money to blow on fake jobs for ovecredentialed paper-pushers, but if the banner said “Jimmy Wales created Wikipedia and he’d like to buy a yacht” then I’d pull out my wallet immediately.
179K
Ben Landau-Taylor
@benlandautaylor
Nov 1, 2024
Can someone explain to me why it costs like two hundred millions dollars to make a video game? Where does the money go? If you only had forty million, what specifically would you have to cut?
494K