Not sure we need anymore It’s A Wonderful Life discourse but I’ve seen a couple of professional critics in my timeline completely misunderstanding the point of the film so I feel I must intervene for the sake of reason.

Yes, It’s A Wonderful Life ends with Potter getting away with stealing $8000 and with George still trapped in a town he wanted to leave.

But that’s kind of the point, once you realise the film is about depression, and how depression works.
Imagine you wrote down your life, with all the good things in the pro column and the bad things in the con column. When you have depression you only see the ‘con’ column. The 'pro' column is occluded.
That is the situation that George is in when he contemplates suicide. All that Clarence does when he intervenes is to enable George to see the ‘pro’ column again.
So he still has all the problems, regrets and fears that he had before. But now he is also aware that his life has made a difference, his life has been worthwhile and has been a life well-lived. People are better off with him than without him.
And he is, of course, now aware of the love of his family and friends, and that his ‘pro’ column is actually pretty well-stacked.
And that having a well-stacked ‘pro’ column is going to help him deal with his problems, regrets and fears. It isn’t going to take them away, it's just going to shift the scales.
So it’s not, as some have asserted, a flaw of the film that Potter gets away scot free, or that Clarence doesn’t wave a magic angel wand to solve any of George’s problems for him.
That would defeat the point of the film, which is that there are no magic (or pseudo-religious!) solutions. The only thing that changes in George’s life is that the dark veil of George’s depression is lifted, and he is given the chance to see his life in full, good and bad.
His life has been in black and white, but, with the timely intervention of Ted Turner, he can now see it in glorious full colour.
Or to put it another way, every life is a pile of good things and bad things. The good things don't always soften the bad things, but vice versa, the bad things don't necessarily spoil the good things or make them unimportant. (END)

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1. The death of Silicon Valley, a thread

How did Silicon Valley die? It was killed by the internet. I will explain.

Yesterday, my friend IRL asked me "Where are good old days when techies were


2. In the "good old days" Silicon Valley was about understanding technology. Silicon, to be precise. These were people who had to understand quantum mechanics, who had to build the near-miraculous devices that we now take for granted, and they had to work

3. Now, I love libertarians, and I share much of their political philosophy. But you have to be socially naive to believe that it has a chance in a real society. In those days, Silicon Valley was not a real society. It was populated by people who understood quantum mechanics

4. Then came the microcomputer revolution. It was created by people who understood how to build computers. One borderline case was Steve Jobs. People claimed that Jobs was surrounded by a "reality distortion field" - that's how good he was at understanding people, not things

5. Still, the heroes of Silicon Valley were the engineers. The people who knew how to build things. Steve Jobs, for all his understanding of people, also had quite a good understanding of technology. He had a libertarian vibe, and so did Silicon Valley

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Harvard's discriminatory policies are becoming increasingly well known, across the political spectrum (see, e.g., the recent lawsuit on discrimination against East Asian applications.)

It's refreshing to hear a senior administrator admits to personally opposing policies that attempt to remedy these basic flaws. These are flaws that harm his institution's ability to do cutting-edge research and to serve the public.

Harvard is being eclipsed by institutions that have different ideas about how to run a 21st Century institution. Stanford, for one; the UC system; the "public Ivys".