For ages, I've been meaning to blog/list interesting videos that I've piped onto my hard disk via youtube-dl. Instead I've just been filing them away in '~/tmp/blog'. Time to free up some disk space on the trusty old Thinkpad!

Last August, 2019, I was mostly watching:

• The Merits Of MMT — Martin North interviews Stephen Hail, mainly about MMT:

  I can't remember it at all, frankly, but Stephen must have been on good form, otherwise I wouldn't have kept it.

• Two Of These People Are Lying — The Technical Difficulties:

  I've been a fan of these lads ever since the original reverse trivia quiz podcast. Four quite intelligent chaps. Around a kitchen table. Making each other laugh. What's not to like?

• The Purpose of Education — Noam Chomsky interviewed as a remote contribution to a conference:

  Behind any significant use of contemporary technology — Internet, communication systems, graphics, whatever it may be — unless behind it is some well constructed directive [or] conceptual apparatus it is very unlikely to be helpful. It may turn out to be harmful. For example, random exploration through the Internet turns out to be a cult generator. You pick up a factoid here and a factoid there and somebody else reinforces it, and all of a sudden you have some crazed picture which has some factual basis, but nothing to do with the world. You have to know how to evaluate and interpret and understand.

• Mr Olds’ Remarkable Elevator — Things You Might Not Know:

  Tom Scott demonstrates an invention that should have been invented a century or more earlier, but wasn't because it's a bit of a mind-bender.

• Paying for the Green New Deal — Stephanie Kelton:

  Sigh. Remember when the imminent end of human civilisation seemed a pretty high priority? Happy days.