Sports and Health

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It was a year where I didn’t seriously injure myself and could continuously practice sports. That’s already a huge improvement.

I started going to the gym regularly in the evenings after the kids are sleeping. After some initial hesitance I started doing barbell exercises. The goal is to squat and deadlift at least my bodyweight of 75kg. I’m inching this up very slowly and am currently at 40kg.

Going to the gym is made possible by my Fitbod subscription. Exercising regularly is much easier, if I don’t have to think or plan what I’m going to do. That means either a human or an app should tell me what I need to do. Given that the gym is paid for by my work, I can justify the steep monthly cost of Fitbod (here’s a 14-day guest pass).

I’m doing winter cycling on the trainers at the gym while I debate whether I should get one for at home. That makes me one of those crazy people who wears a chamois to the gym.

It was a great year for cycling. I bought a proper road bike, the Bianchi 2024 Sprint ICR and I managed to join group rides (mostly those of the MAAP LAB Berlin) more or less weekly without having a single mechanical or crash. knocks on wood

But then during a solo ride in the last week of the year I managed to slip and fall over. More than the minor damage to my knee and my carbon frame, it was my ego that was bruised.

Studies

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I read a bunch of papers (one write-up) around LLMs and found the field to be overhyped. I don’t think that single percentage point increases in performance and conversions of BFS algorithms into LLM prompts are worth writing up. Things are moving so quickly that you can’t sit around waiting for breakthroughs to make their way into the literature.

Learning Japanese continues and I’m now at Wanikani level 22. I’m not sure what my next goal is going to be. After my trip to Japan my motivation is somewhat on the rocks.

The main problem is that once you start studying Japanese, you cannot stop. I’m not stopping, but I’m dialing it down to maintenance mode.

Books

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I already posted about how bad of a year 2025 was for reading. Not sure whether I’ll find the time to do better next year.

Movies and TV

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I’ve moved the tracking of everything that I watch over to Trakt saying goodbye to Letterboxd.

Just like with fitness, I need an app that will tell me exactly what I need to do right now. Without it, I’ll very easily lose track of this. Trakt is excellent at this and offers it in the free version. I pay for premium to get some of the more advanced list management versions.

The movies I watched in 2025:

• Wicked
• Moana 2
• Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
• Lilo & Stitch
• KPop Demon Hunters
• Encanto
• The Greatest Showman

Trakt tells me that’s 901 minutes spent on movies.

Wicked was lovely on the big screen. Of the kids movies I watched: KPop Demon Hunters is impeccable, Moana 2 was unnecessary, Encanto was strangely forgettable, Lilo & Stitch not as bad as I would expect. The Greatest Showman may be flawed but it is full of bangers.

The tv series I watched in 2025:

• Bluey S3
• The Wheel of Time S2
• The Bear S1+S2+S3+S4
• Neon Genesis Evangelion
• Dennou Coil
• Asura
• Cyberpunk Edge Runners
• Legend of the Galactic Heroes S1
• Heated Rivalry S1
• Kaiju No.8 S1

All of these were spectacular and interesting in their own way. The Bear really meshes with so many things I like and like to do. Asura is effectively just a very long Kore-eda movie. LotGH is peak.

Trakt tells me that this is 4567 minutes spent on episodes. It’s clear who’s the winner here.

Games

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I don’t really track this anymore, but what I can note are the following.

Expedition 33 was a highlight. I saw it on Tiktok and immediately knew I had to experience it. Not having a console I played it via cloud gaming on my Macbook.

Playing a parry/dodge game over a cloud setup is pure masochism, but with difficulty set to easy, it was kind of doable. The gameplay loop is satisfying but after a while the level design formula gets a bit tedious. What stood out were the music¹, the writing and the major set pieces in the boss battles and in the environment.

Critical Role started their campaign 4 and having followed the online RPG scene through Tiktok clips for a while now, I decided to see what the fuss was about. The first episode together with the rest of the ouverture is spectacular. It’s a narrative victory of setup, emotions, reveals and backstabbing. I’m not sure if they’ll stick the landing, but for now I’m very much bought in.

I’ll have to delve into what makes this worthwhile. For now I can point to two things. There is an element of let’s play parasociality that you have with any game stream or impro podcast. Add to that a very meticulously brewed high fantasy setting that’s better than what we get on television: open ended runtime, infinite production values, no cancellation after one or two seasons.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown was discounted and became the game we played during the Christmas break. I led exploring the city on Mount Qaf with my kids on a lower difficulty following right on my heels.

It’s a great game where the platform mechanics continue to layer on top of each other together with some very nasty puzzles bordering on the outright sadistic. I’m super proud to see the grit and skill my kids have shown because easy only affects combat, not the platforming.

Persia provides a vast and mostly unknown to us landscape of culture, artifacts and mythology to serve as backdrop for this game. A lot of it is undoubtedly historically not accurate, but that does not make it any less nice to look at.

Podcasts

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The two podcasts I listen to most consistently are Ones and Tooze and Past Present Future. Those are both remnants of my Talking Politics period². Maybe I should add Helen Thompson’s podcast as well and have a full lid?

Other than that I semi-regularly listen to:

• The Adam Friedland show
• The Catskills Podcast
• Cortex
• Developer Voices
• Escape Collective (only during the Tour)
• Feminist Shelf Control
• KALT’ın Podacst’ı
• Oxide and Friends
• Podcast Filosofie
• De Shitshow
• Stavy’s World
• Vergecast

I more or less stopped listening to Trashfuture finding the jokes and the commentary repetitive and boring.

Travel

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It was a much better year for travel than most years before this.

London was a work trip in spring and it was one of my best London trips ever. I stayed in Chelsea, I cycled everywhere, drank lots of great coffee, ate a ton of great food, went to a club, went to a play on the West End. I did so much and there’s so much left to do. I don’t know what took me so long to appreciate London like this.

Iceland was the first trip we took our kids on a plane and then round tripped the island on our way to the family horse farm. Iceland is lovely but empty. Not sure what would make me go back there other than to visit family or if I could do some hard hiking/cycling/riding.

Japan drove me crazy with reports from everybody and their mother visiting so I had to go. After missing the summer window, I booked for November not knowing that that’s one of the best months to visit Japan. I walked the Ise-ji for a large chunk and then I ran around Tokyo for a couple of days. It was even better than all the social media.

Iceland and Japan in the same year is low-key ridiculous but this was also the year at work where I get 20 consecutive extra holidays.

End

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Lots more things to cover that happened in 2025 but for now this will have to be it. Despite some marked down periods, all in all it was a good year. On to a much better 2026.

(This update has been delayed for a week because I fell quite ill just as the new year came around.)

That’s my year in books. Shameful after years of reading dozens of books to be reduced to five.¹

Being very busy takes its toll. I don’t really know when I would have the time to read at the moment and it’s not that I consume much more entertainment other than the occasional game and a couple of episodes of some series in a week.

A lot of time goes into kids, work, sports (going to the gym, road cycling and some swimming) and learning Japanese.

Going through the archives of my old blog, I did use to read a lot and got a lot out of it. Maybe I don’t read that much anymore because I don’t get that much out of it anymore?

I’ve looked and struggled to find books that would really level me up in software engineering, leadership or strategy. For instance what I’m reading now from Stafford Beer on operations is nice, but there’s very little in there that I don’t already know. The same for Fredmund Malik about leadership.

One book that would really move the needle and which I have on order, is the classic Types and Programming Languages. But at that point I’m dipping into academic territory.

I don’t mind academic reading. It’s the focus of the “advanced-studies” shelf I maintain on Goodreads and the papers that I read occasionally in distributed systems, resilience engineering and AI. It’s just that reading stuff like that requires a whole different level of commitment in time and focus.

There is the wider trend of de-reading in society but reading seems to be over for me for different reasons.

Most of my thinking on the paper has been confirmed by this post: http://glineq.blogspot.nl/2014/08/my-take-on-acemoglu-robinson-critique.html

Health

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I got on the neurodiversity bandwagon this year.

First I got myself a self-paid diagnosis for ADHD. This result should not surprise anybody who knows me. I’ve forced myself to be very high functioning throughout my life but it can’t be denied that there were always some underlying issues. I’m on medication from the end of the year and have gone off caffeine.

I also got myself tested for giftedness and got a positive result there as well.

Both of these results were validating if nothing else and put a lot of things that happened in my life in a different perspective.

For anybody who’s not sure whether they should pursue this, my recommendation would be: You will only know how differently you can feel if you do.

I got a mole cut out of my skin. It’s a nice scar to have.

I’m fully vaxxed against FSME and got a booster for COVID in November. That brings me to six jabs in total.

Sports and Injuries

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It could have been a great year for sports. After having a great time on our yearly trip to the Alps, I came back to Berlin and badly sprained my ankle after falling off some stairs. I didn’t need any surgery, thankfully, but it did set me back some 8 weeks of physical therapy and having to build up to walking again.

That notwithstanding, I managed to participate in three road cycling group rides this year. MAAP opening up a store here and organising open weekly rides has been really cool. The cycling and the coffee were lit. 🔥

I cycled up the Brocken for my first ever mountain and clocked 4201km in 2024 on Strava.

It’s my goal to weigh 75kgs and I’m still as far away from that as I ever was.

Movies

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Letterbox does a good job tracking this and it was a pretty good year for movies. I review all of them over there in detail but I can say the non-Potter kids movies we watched were nice and the Japanese cinema on the whole was excellent. I saw Evil Does Not Exist two times with the second time in the local theatre live scored by its composer Eiko Ishibashi.

• Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
• Dune: Part Two
• Curious Tobi and the Treasure Hunt to the Flying Rivers
• Glass Onion
• Frozen
• Tangled
• Raya and the Last Dragon
• Shoplifters
• Luca
• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
• Yojimbo
• Drive My Car
• Perfect Days
• John Wick: Chapter 4
• Evil Does Not Exist
• How to Blow Up a Pipeline
• Harakiri
• Evil Does Not Exist
• Die Hard

Television

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Trakt is doing a great job keeping track of which episodes of which television series I need to watch. It’s the only way I can possibly stay on top of this.

• The Last of Us
• Spy x Family S2
• Death Note
• Frieren
• Tour de France: Unchained S2
• Vigil
• The Peripheral
• Kaiju No 8
• Bluey
• Arcane S2

Looks like I’m turning into a weeb just like everybody else in the culture. I watch anime in part as light entertainment and in part as Japanese immersion. It’s very hard to find anime that has any kind of thematic depth. Frieren comes closest because of how it twists the standard fantasy trope into a story about loss and reminiscence.

Books

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It was a fair though not great year for reading.

• Sheaf Theory through Examples, Daniel Rosiak
• Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel
• Min kamp 2, Knausgård, Karl Ove
• Maria Stuart, Friedrich Schiller
• Arkada Yaylılar Çalıyor, Melikşah Altuntaş
• My Tender Matador, Pedro Lemebel
• Kafka Connect: Build and Run Data Pipelines, Mickail Maison
• Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season, Forugh Farrokzhad
• Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault
• The Kubernetes Book: 2024 Edition, Nigel Poulton
• Kafka Troubleshooting in Production: Stabilizing Kafka Clusters in the Cloud and On-premises, Elad Eldor
• Conversational Capacity: The Secret to Building Successful Teams That Perform When the Pressure Is on, Craig Weber

I’m continuing my trend of reading one Knausgård and one Mantel book each year. No reason not to do that again this year.

I picked up some poetry at Perdu during my visit to Amsterdam and have been enjoying reading that.

Every time I see Maria Stuart (which I got put on to by Past Present Future’s fantastic Great Political Fictions series) in the list, I think: “I need to read more Schiller.” but then I keep forgetting to get the files off Gutenberg. Germans sure knew how to write back in the day.

Trips

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Besides the trip to the Alps, I went to the Netherlands once in 2024 for Kars’s viva and we took a trip to idyllic Hiddensee after my foot was healed. Much more travel is slated for next year!

Other Culture

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I don’t go to exhibitions for lack of time. Besides seeing Evil Does Not Exist in the theatre I managed to burn a ticket to the opera and one to a dance show due to conflicting commitments and forgetfulness. I’m not sure whether I’m going to retry this.

I took the kids to see Ronja at an open air show which was fun.

Miscellaneous

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I was a member of the Greens but I cancelled that because even if they’re the least bad political party in Germany, they have been doing a lot of things that I do not wish to support from the inside. I wrote about that here.

I continued to learn and maintain my Japanese level in preparation for my trip in 2025.

I learned a bunch around Kubernetes and Kafka but would have liked to do more programming. I refreshed my algorithms a bit and picked up Factor to play with.

From the Grothendieck biography, funny to see that the legend would express himself in German.

Riemann-Roch’scher Satz: der letzte Schrei: der Diagramm […] ist kommutatif!
Um dieser Aussage über f:X->Y einen approximativen Sinn zu geben, musste ich nahezu zwei Stunden lang die Geduld der Zuhörer missbrauchen. Schwartz auf weiss (in Springer Lecture Notes) nimmt’s wohl an die 400,500 Seiten.
Ein packendes Beispiel dafür, wie unser Wissens und Entdeckungsdrang sich immer mehr in einem lebensentrückten logischen Delirium auslebt, während das Lebens selbst auf Tausendfache Art zum Teufel geht – und mit endgültiger Vernichtung bedroht ist. Höchste Zeit unsern Kurs zu ändern!

—Alexander Grothendieck

In modern justice and on the part of those who dispense it there is a shame in punishing, which does not always preclude zeal. This sense of shame is constantly growing: the psychologists and the minor civil servants of moral orthopaedics proliferate on the wound it leaves.

Instead of insanity eliminating the crime according to the original meaning of article 64, every crime and even every offence now carries within it, as a legitimate suspicion, but also as a right that may be claimed, the hypothesis of insanity, in any case of anomaly. And the sentence that condemns or acquits is not simply a judgement of guilt, a legal decision that lays down punishment; it bears within it an assessment of normality and a technical prescription for a possible normalization. Today the judge – magistrate or juror – certainly does more than ‘judge’.

But we can surely accept the general proposition that, in our societies, the systems of punishment are to be situated in a certain ‘political economy’ of the body: even if they do not make use of violent or bloody punishment, even when they use ‘lenient’ methods involving confinement or correction, it is always the body that is at issue – the body and its forces, their utility and their docility, their distribution and their submission.

The very excess of the violence employed is one of the elements of its glory: the fact that the guilty man should moan and cry out under the blows is not a shameful side-effect, it is the very ceremonial of justice being expressed in all its force.

It was as if the sovereign power did not see, in this emulation of atrocity, a challenge that it itself threw down and which might one day be taken up: accustomed as it was to ‘seeing blood flow’, the people soon learnt that ‘it could be revenged only with blood’ (Lachère).

In short, penal reform was born at the point of junction between the struggle against the super-power of the sovereign and that against the infra-power of acquired and tolerated illegalities.

The right to punish has been shifted from the vengeance of the sovereign to the defence of society. But it now finds itself recombined with elements so strong that it becomes almost more to be feared. The malefactor has been saved from a threat that is by its very nature excessive, but he is exposed to a penalty that seems to be without bounds. It is a return to a terrible ‘super-power’.

the injury that a crime inflicts upon the social body is the disorder that it introduces into it: the scandal that it gives rise to, the example that it gives, the incitement to repeat it if it is not punished, the possibility of becoming widespread that it bears within it.

Nothing so weakens the machinery of the law than the hope of going unpunished;

Let us hear once more what Servan has to say: the ideas of crime and punishment must be strongly linked and ‘follow one another without interruption … When you have thus formed the chain of ideas in the heads of your citizens, you will then be able to pride yourselves on guiding them and being their masters. A stupid despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains; but a true politician binds them even more strongly by the chain of their own ideas; it is at the stable point of reason that he secures the end of the chain; this link is all the stronger in that we do not know of what it is made and we believe it to be our own work; despair and time eat away the bonds of iron and steel, but they are powerless against the habitual union of ideas, they can only tighten it still more; and on the soft fibres of the brain is founded the unshakable base of the soundest of Empires’ (Servan, 35).

If incorrigibles there be, one must be determined to eliminate them. But, for all the others, punishment can function only if it comes to an end.

But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty.

Why would society eliminate a life and a body that it could appropriate? It would be more useful to make him ‘serve the state in a slavery that would be more or less extended according to the nature of his crime’;

Discipline sometimes requires enclosure, the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself. It is the protected place of disciplinary monotony.

it was a change of scale, but it was also a new type of control.

‘The order and inspection that must be maintained require that all workers be assembled under the same roof, so that the partner who is entrusted with the management of the manufactory may prevent and remedy abuses that may arise among the workers and arrest their progress at the outset’ (Dauphin, 199).

By walking up and down the central aisle of the workshop, it was possible to carry out a supervision that was both general and individual: to observe the worker’s presence and application, and the quality of his work; to compare workers with one another, to classify them according to skill and speed; to follow the successive stages of the production process.

This obligatory syntax is what the military theoreticians of the eighteenth century called ‘manoeuvre’. The traditional recipe gives place to explicit and obligatory prescriptions. Over the whole surface of contact between the body and the object it handles, power is introduced, fastening them to one another. It constitutes a body-weapon, body-tool, body-machine complex. One is as far as possible from those forms of subjection that demanded of the body only signs or products, forms of expression or the result of labour. The regulation imposed by power is at the same time the law of construction of the operation.

In becoming the target for new mechanisms of power, the body is offered up to new forms of knowledge. It is the body of exercise, rather than of speculative physics; a body manipulated by authority, rather than imbued with animal spirits; a body of useful training and not of rational mechanics, but one in which, by virtue of that very fact, a number of natural requirements and functional constraints are beginning to emerge.

How can one capitalize the time of individuals, accumulate it in each of them, in their bodies, in their forces or in their abilities, in a way that is susceptible of use and control?

It is this disciplinary time that was gradually imposed on pedagogical practice – specializing the time of training and detaching it from the adult time, from the time of mastery; arranging different stages, separated from one another by graded examinations; drawing up programmes, each of which must take place during a particular stage and which involves exercises of increasing difficulty; qualifying individuals according to the way in which they progress through these series.

the special productive power of the combined working-day is, under all circumstances, the social productive power of labour, or the productive power of social labour. This power is due to cooperation itself (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 311–12)

Thus a new demand appears to which discipline must respond: to construct a machine whose effect will be maximized by the concerted articulation of the elementary parts of which it is composed. Discipline is no longer simply an art of distributing bodies, of extracting time from them and accumulating it, but of composing forces in order to obtain an efficient machine.

While jurists or philosophers were seeking in the pact a primal model for the construction or reconstruction of the social body, the soldiers and with them the technicians of discipline were elaborating procedures for the individual and collective coercion of bodies.

These mechanisms can only be seen as unimportant if one forgets the role of this instrumentation, minor but flawless, in the progressive objectification and the ever more subtle partitioning of individual behaviour.

the ‘admonitors’ were placed in charge of those ‘who talk or hum when studying their lessons and those who will not write and who waste their time in play’

It was also organized as a multiple, automatic and anonymous power; for although surveillance rests on individuals, its functioning is that of a network of relations from top to bottom, but also to a certain extent from bottom to top and laterally; this network ‘holds’ the whole together and traverses it in its entirety with effects of power that derive from one another: supervisors, perpetually supervised.

In a sense, the power of normalization imposes homogeneity; but it individualizes by making it possible to measure gaps, to determine levels, to fix specialities and to render the differences useful by fitting them one to another.

They did not receive directly the image of the sovereign power; they only felt its effects – in replica, as it were – on their bodies, which had become precisely legible and docile.

And it is this inversion of visibility in the functioning of the disciplines that was to assure the exercise of power even in its lowest manifestations. We are entering the age of the infinite examination and of compulsory objectification.

It is an important mechanism, for it automatizes and disindividualizes power. Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up.

It is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work.

The Panopticon, on the other hand, has a role of amplification; although it arranges power, although it is intended to make it more economic and more effective, it does so not for power itself, nor for the immediate salvation of a threatened society: its aim is to strengthen the social forces – to increase production, to develop the economy, spread education, raise the level of public morality; to increase and multiply.

When, in the seventeenth century, the provincial schools or the Christian elementary schools were founded, the justifications given for them were above all negative: those poor who were unable to bring up their children left them ‘in ignorance of their obligations: given the difficulties they have in earning a living, and themselves having been badly brought up

‘Discipline’ may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a ‘physics’ or an ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology.

it is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies.

The ideal point of penality today would be an indefinite discipline: an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation, a judgement that would at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never closed, the calculated leniency of a penalty that would be interlaced with the ruthless curiosity of an examination, a procedure that would be at the same time the permanent measure of a gap in relation to an inaccessible norm and the asymptotic movement that strives to meet in infinity.

What, then, is the use of penal labour? Not profit; nor even the formation of a useful skill; but the constitution of a power relation, an empty economic form, a schema of individual submission and of adjustment to a production apparatus.

It was the most direct way of expressing ‘the intelligence of discipline in stone’ (Lucas, I, 69); of making architecture transparent to the administration of power;12 of making it possible to substitute for force or other violent constraints the gentle efficiency of total surveillance;

all this made it possible to canalize and to recover by a whole series of intermediaries the enormous profits from a sexual pleasure that an ever-more insistent everyday moralization condemned to semi-clandestinity and naturally made expensive; in setting up a price for pleasure, in creating a profit from repressed sexuality and in collecting this profit, the delinquent milieu was in complicity with a self-interested puritanism: an illicit fiscal agent operating over illegal practices.

The political use of delinquents – as informers and agents provocateurs – was a fact well before the nineteenth century.17 But, after the Revolution, this practice acquired quite different dimensions: the infiltration of political parties and workers’ associations, the recruitment of thugs against strikers and rioters, the organization of a sub-police – working directly with the legal police and capable if necessary of becoming a sort of parallel army – a whole extra-legal functioning of power was partly assured by the mass of reserve labour constituted by the delinquents: a clandestine police force and standby army at the disposal of the state.

Police surveillance provides the prison with offenders, which the prison transforms into delinquents, the targets and auxiliaries of police supervisions, which regularly send back a certain number of them to prison.

But he brought with him, at least potentially, a horizon of illegalities that had, until quite recently, represented a threat: this ruined petty bourgeois, of good education, would, a generation earlier, have been a revolutionary, a Jacobin, a regicide;19 had he been a contemporary of Robespierre, his rejection of the law would have taken a directly political form.

The criminal fait divers, by its everyday redundancy, makes acceptable the system of judicial and police supervisions that partition society; it recounts from day to day a sort of internal battle against the faceless enemy; in this war, it constitutes the daily bulletin of alarm or victory.

The combination of the fait divers and the detective novel has produced for the last hundred years or more an enormous mass of ‘crime stories’ in which delinquency appears both as very close and quite alien, a perpetual threat to everyday life, but extremely distant in its origin and motives, both everyday and exotic in the milieu in which it takes place.

In short, one should have a master, be caught up and situated within a hierarchy; one exists only when fixed in definite relations of domination

They were in a sense technicians of behaviour: engineers of conduct, orthopaedists of individuality.

In this panoptic society of which incarceration is the omnipresent armature, the delinquent is not outside the law; he is, from the very outset, in the law, at the very heart of the law, or at least in the midst of those mechanisms that transfer the individual imperceptibly from discipline to the law, from deviation to offence.

The carceral ‘naturalizes’ the legal power to punish, as it ‘legalizes’ the technical power to discipline.

resistance is to be found not in the prison as penal sanction, but in the prison with all its determinations, links and extra-judicial results; in the prison as the relay in a general network of disciplines and surveillances; in the prison as it functions in a panoptic régime.

The case of the Italian Mafia transplanted to the United States and used both to extract illicit profits and for political ends is a fine example of the colonization of an illegality of popular origin.

We’ll say nothing when we should speak up. We’ll quarrel when we should inquire. We’ll remain reticent when we should be resolved. We’ll be closed-minded and critical when we should be open-minded and curious.

On the one hand, a “little voice” in the back of his brain urged him to raise his concern; on the other hand, he didn’t want to be labeled a troublemaker, a non–team player, or a “high-maintenance” flight operations officer.

Put simply, conversational capacity is the ability to have open, balanced, nondefensive dialogue about tough subjects and in challenging circumstances.

But this collegiality came at a cost: their nice culture created a bad business. While the team members enjoyed pleasant meetings and warm relationships, they sacrificed the candor needed for rigorous problem solving and decision making in order to maintain the amiable environment.

The National Transportation Safety Board, the entity responsible for investigating civil aviation accidents in the United States, estimates that 25 percent of aviation accidents occur because someone doesn’t speak up when a mistake is being made.

“To be honest, it makes me mad. I went out of my way to hire the best and the brightest people I could find, but I’m not getting access to all the intellectual firepower I’m paying for.”

A person with high conversational capacity can do just that. He’s able to remain open-minded, nonreactive, and fully engaged in tough circumstances that send his less disciplined colleagues into a highly reactive state of mind. Balancing candor and curiosity, he converses with his teammates in a way that actually increases the conversational capacity of the entire group.

On the one hand, you feel compelled to speak up, but on the other hand, you don’t want to cause trouble, be labeled a troublemaker or non–team player, tarnish your reputation within the team, or damage relationships.

When we minimize, it’s not that we don’t have an agenda, it’s that our agenda is subverted by a strong need to keep things comfortable, to avoid conflict, to keep things calm.

Any issue can set off our need to win, but especially those ideas that contradict our current ways of thinking, our notions of what is acceptable, proper, or right. When we snap into win mode, we circle our cognitive wagons and load our conversational guns, ready to defend our current map of reality from all foes. We become dogmatic and close down when we should get curious and open up.

If they’re not speaking up, they’re being paid for something they’re not providing. But the harsh reality is that our own management behavior may be stifling their abilities to contribute. By failing to compensate for the minimizing effect our authority has on our people, and, even more egregiously, when we trigger into win behavior, we encourage our people to minimize, guaranteeing we won’t get full access to their knowledge, expertise, ideas, and suggestions.

Under what circumstances in life do I find myself minimizing at the expense of my effectiveness?

But awareness is not the same as skill. A drowning man may know he’s drowning, but his awareness is no substitute for the ability to swim.

When we’re making an acquisition, initiating a major change process, or wrestling with a tough decision, we want access to as much information and as many perspectives as possible to expand our options for effectively tackling the challenge. We want to reduce the number of blind spots in our view of the situation we’re facing.

When we’re truly dedicated to expanding our thinking and making informed choices, difference is our greatest ally.

Because our level of internal commitment directly correlates with how much energy we put into enacting the decision.

When we’re dedicated to informed and effective choices, we pull people into decision-making or problem-solving processes because they’re useful in two ways. First, involving key players leads to better information and more robust decisions because we have access to their thinking. Second, those same people feel more connected to the decisions that do get made. It’s a double win; we get better decisions that are more effectively implemented.

Contrast this unilateral approach with the more learning-focused joint control, where we proactively make our goals and concerns explicit and ask others to help us manage them. This is a far more effective way to make informed and effective decisions because we’re involving others in the important decisions for how to best achieve the desired objectives.

The managers who asked, “What do you need more or less of from me so I can help you do your job more effectively?” were in positions to make better choices about how to manage their people, but the conversations that helped them make those choices weren’t always an ego massage.

requires the mindful use of four distinct skills that are extremely difficult to balance under pressure: Stating our clear position Explaining the underlying thinking that informs our position Testing our perspective Inquiring into the perspectives of others

Like a topic sentence in good paragraph construction, a position statement is clear, candid, and concise. It lets others know where we stand on an issue, the specific point we’re putting forward.

To that end, let’s look at more vigorous tests to employ in situations where it may be more difficult for others to push back, or when we’re putting forward a particularly strong perspective: That’s how I see the problem. What does the problem look like from your perspective? Right now I feel like my idea makes perfect sense, and that makes me nervous. Are you seeing something I’m missing? I am more interested in making an informed decision than in winning or being right, so I’d like to hear your point of view—especially if it differs from my own. If I’ve got a blind spot about this issue, please help me to see it. I’ve shared what I think and why I think it. I’m curious to hear how other people are thinking about this problem—especially those who have a different take on it than I do. To help me improve how I’m looking at this decision, I’d really like to hear from someone who has a perspective that challenges mine. I’d like someone to expand my view of this situation. Who has a different way of looking at it? I know I may be wrong about this—what do you think? If you disagree with me, please let me know. I’d really like to hear your point of view. Push back on me here—especially if you think I am being unfair. What would our worst critic say about this decision?

Randy’s handling of this conversation is impressive. Neither accepting the accusation at face value nor dismissing it, he defused the explosive situation by getting curious. By inquiring into the underlying reasoning behind the assertion, he brought the conversation back to a more balanced, data-based dialogue, pulling a tense and divisive parent-teacher conference right back to the sweet spot.

What are you seeing that leads you to that view? I have to admit that I see the issue very differently, but before I jump to conclusions, please tell me what you have seen or heard that leads you to see it the way you do. Tell me more about how you’re looking at this issue. Obviously, you’re looking at this differently. Help me see this through your lens. How are you making sense of X? What does this look like from your (marketing/finance/engineering) perspective? Help me expand my thinking on this. Tell me how you see X. What have you seen or heard that leads you to think X? Can you provide a couple of examples that illustrate your position? Clearly, we don’t agree. Let’s see what our different perspectives can teach us about this issue. Explain in more detail how you’re seeing the situation. I’m intrigued by the way you’re framing this issue. Can you give an additional example or two so I can better understand your thinking? Can you give me an example of X? Can you illustrate why you see this so differently than I do? When team members haven’t even shared their positions, much less their thinking, and we want to invite their perspectives into the conversation, we might say: We’ve been bouncing this idea around for quite some time, and we haven’t heard from you yet. As you’ve been listening to the pros and cons of this decision, what’s your take on the best choice?

Are you seeing anything that the rest of us may have missed? I’d be interested in hearing your views on this problem. Do you have a different perspective than those that have already been shared?

Imagine a team full of such people. Now imagine an organization full of such teams.

Any dolt can shut down or argue when he or she is being challenged, but it requires real strength to remain open to learning, squarely focused on informed choice, even when we’re feeling stressed and vulnerable. Our capacity to rein in our derailing tendencies in circumstances where other people cannot is a sign that we’re in disciplined control of our behavior and not a piteous slave to our emotional reactions.

For a really challenging conversation—a 10/10 (rated 10 on the difficulty scale and 10 on importance)—there is no substitute for practicing with a partner. By having a colleague play the person with whom we need to have the conversation, we can more realistically assess and improve our ability to maintain conversational discipline.

As we build our discipline for working in the sweet spot, we’re seeking the yin and yang of dialogue by being bold, authentic, and direct and, simultaneously, open-minded, unpretentious, and inquisitive.

When a consensus decision is the best option, a more balanced approach helps to level the playing field. It’s far harder for the team member with the strong win tendency to run away with the decision if the team has the capacity to work in the sweet spot

Trust isn’t a prerequisite for effective conversations; it’s the product of effective conversations.

When it comes to building our competence, the workplace is our dojo—an ideal practice space for building and refining our skills.

As these men explore the city, their unique cultural, educational, experiential backgrounds lead them to filter the available sensory input in very different ways.

The key is to lean our ladder into difference. We don’t learn much by engaging people who agree with our views, we learn the most by engaging people who don’t. This dramatically increases our ability to detect and correct errors in how we’re looking at a situation and to generate a far more accurate mental map. With this in mind, we treat anyone who disagrees with us as the most valuable person in the room.

When we double-loop learn we hop off our hamster wheel of thought and question the way we’ve made sense of the problem in the first place.

described to his fellow workshop participants the loud and combative arguments he and his team had in meetings. They were, as he put it, “very intense.”

Like a group of skilled jazz musicians, a team that can deliberately double-loop learn is more nimble and adaptable in the face of unusual, shifting, complex circumstances because team members can better adjust their thinking to fit the new challenge.

Our minds, in other words, have a self-serving, single-loop tendency to resist information that threatens our current view of reality, so they filter the world around us so we see what we want to see.

When people, teams, and organizations react defensively to an idea, what is it they’re defending? Their current idea and the assumptions, beliefs, and mental models on which it stands—the very things they need to question and adjust in order to double-loop learn.

Because conflict is the primary catalyst for double-loop learning, only teams with reliably high conversational capacity can deliberately orchestrate it.

Their research demonstrates that as people consistently practice the replacement behaviors, they actually change the physical structure of their brains, because, just like a muscle, the neural circuits for any activity grow where they’re being used and atrophy where they’re being neglected.

With regular practice, we produce a flywheel effect, where the more we use the skills, the more our skills grow, and the more our skills grow, the more we use the skills. Is it hard work? Sure it is. Any skill worth learning takes effort.

Use every meeting, problem, decision, conflict, or change as an opportunity to build your skills. There should be no such thing as a boring meeting because you’re practicing as you participate, facilitate, or both.

Your naturally self-serving tendency to look outward, in other words, is a defensive routine: You avoid looking at your own behavior by placing all your attention on the behavior of others.

What are my tendencies, and how are they displayed?

When it comes to disciplined dialogue, you do this by listening to what’s being played, and then playing what’s missing.

Acknowledge and reward people who are making a genuine effort, and do it both publicly and privately. “I tested a view earlier, and Jane took me up on it and pushed back. I know that wasn’t easy, and I’m grateful you did it. I’m hoping to see more of that kind of behavior from everyone around the table as time goes on.”

When someone puts out a naked position, they inquire into it. When someone forgets to test, they jump in and test for that person. When they put forward their own perspective they shore up the conversational capacity of the team by intentionally balancing their push and their pull.

One is a routine problem,1 which can be difficult and bothersome, but for which we have ready experts and proven solutions on which we can depend for a fix. In other words, a routine problem is routine not because it happens regularly but because we have a routine for dealing with it.

Far from routine, an adaptive challenge is a problem for which there are no easy answers,2 no proven routines for dealing with the issue, no expert who can ride in and save the day.

They treated the implementation process like a routine checklist, and failed to address its more adaptive aspects—their corporate culture, their old habits, and their instinctively defensive reactions to change.

It makes no sense to march our team into a challenging predicament it’s ill equipped to handle.

They needed the skills to climb out of their dysfunction, but they were too overwhelmed by their dysfunction to acquire the skills.

Adaptive leadership13 is not about coming up with an idea or solution and then convincing the group to adopt it. It’s about orchestrating a process of learning that gets people with different views and agendas learning from each other as they tackle an adaptive challenge.

But when we liberate leadership from authority we empower anyone who wants to foment productive change because we realize that while authority is assigned to us by the organization, leadership is an activity we choose. Seen this way, leadership can be exercised from any point in the system.

Leadership is not about the roles we’re formally assigned; it’s about the roles we choose to perform.

Tina also spent untold hours behind the scenes listening to concerns, smoothing ruffled feathers, and keeping people engaged in the learning. This trio worked together to do the requisite adaptive work—rebuilding relationships, earning back trust, improving how they interacted with each other, and resolving festering conflicts.

“With or without authority, exercising leadership is risky and difficult,” says Heifetz. “Instead of providing answers as a means of direction, sometimes the best you can do is provide questions, or face people with the hard facts, instead of protecting people from change.”

A person with an inflated ego and a strong opinion says, “I know exactly what to do,” and a flock of people passively minimize by going along with the unadulterated bullshit he’s slinging—even when they know, deep down inside, it’s not going to work.

Whenever we choose to head down one of these daring paths we’d better have our demons in check.

We can seek out and enroll partners, colleagues, friends, or teammates as fellow learners—people eager to head up and out of their own sheltered, self-limiting village by acquiring the mindset, learning the skills, and using both to tackle increasingly difficult issues and situations.

It’d be impossible to summarise all the themes, intersections and other tidbits that I got out of Ribbonfarm. I can say how it begun: I was lying on the river-shore in Avignon in 2012 and I had a large part of the blog’s back catalog in my Instapaper and there I read the entire thing while listening to the crickets.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2024/10/10/ribbonfarm-is-retiring/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/alper/7649662628/in/dateposted/

https://decorrespondent.nl/14143/waarom-ik-geen-huis-wil-kopen/b196ee1f-4ff7-00f6-1463-37df41d85bb5

https://decorrespondent.nl/14572/het-kan-de-bouw-van-betaalbare-woningen-overlaten-aan-beleggers/fd05f4ad-ee26-07be-3b42-1576e194f55d

https://decorrespondent.nl/14844/wonen-is-een-publieke-taak-nu-nog-beleid-waar-je-dat-in-terugziet/073e6ebb-bbe3-0615-1ab0-e485bb65a016

https://decorrespondent.nl/14996/niet-minder-asielzoekers-maar-meer-betaalbare-huizen-is-de-oplossing-voor-de-woningnood/11729058-1943-0564-307b-9b18240a1482

Het is ook typisch De Correspondent om een series historische analyses en stukjes over alternative woon-/bouw-projecten neer te zetten. Allemaal dingen waar je je als lezer over goed kunt voelen zonder dat je iets aan het probleem moet doen.

Ze hadden wel een keer een artikel over de LVT maar de samenhang komt niet echt naar voren.

Laten we wel zijn:

• De belangrijkste reden waarom bouwen in Nederland zo duur is is de schaarste van land.
• Land is schaars in Nederland omdat de meeste woningen die verkocht worden in meer of mindere mate verkwistend met land omgaan.
• Beleid wat dat oplost zou erop neer komen dat mensen die land verspillen daar flink voor moeten betalen of moeten verdichten.
• Een significante groep mensen in Nederland hebben baat bij de huidige situatie en zitten op land en woningen waar ze aan verdienen (ten koste van alle andere mensen).
• De Correspondent-lezers en hun ouders horen overweldigend bij de groep mensen die baat heeft bij het huidige beleid.

Dat zorgt ervoor dat wat je bij De Correspondent leest lijkt op journalistiek en diepgravende analyse maar eigenlijk gewoon entertainment is.

But not to worry. This is probably just one shit year in a sequence of many more shit years to come. No sign of anything getting better in our near future and lots of trends pointing downward. Does it have to be like this? Not in any way but the majority of people are stupid and we all suffer together.

ACL

I had messed up my knee in late summer of 2022 during a climbing accident and after a bit of stalling figured out that having my ACL reconstructed would be a good idea.

The surgery was scheduled for February 23rd of 2023. That made a lot of the beginning of the year waiting to go into surgery which was followed by getting the surgery (a supremely weird experience), then recuperating from it at home for a couple of weeks and going back to work while doing physical therapy.

The chronology as far as I could piece it together:

• Feb 23rd, surgery
• Feb 25th, dismissed from the Charité
• Feb 27th, first outing
• March 9th, half weight bearing
• March 12th, 90 degree flexion
• April 10th, walking without crutches
• April 15th, cycled on the Christiania to get coffee
• June 16th, hospital check-up and cleared for cycling
• June 18th, first time road cycling

I got around mostly using ride shares during the first part which was fine. Turns out that I spent €474,55 on cab rides. A fair bit of that was thankfully reimbursed by my saved up mobility budget. I stopped taking cabs and started cycling on the electric Christiania on April 15th and then had my first outing on the road bike on June 18th.

During one of my final check-ups I told my physician at the hospital that if I didn’t rationally knew I had knee surgery, a lot of the time I couldn’t remember it. There was no noticeable difference anymore.

Of course there are still lots of situations where I notice it. The difference in strength between the two legs is still there and catching up very slowly. But that things are more or less back to normal is exactly what was promised.

I’m cleared to boulder again from around Easter if I choose to ever practice that sport again.

Kids

School

The kids started their school year with the German event they call the Einschülung, something that I disagree but I have no shortage of things that I disagree with about the German school ‘system’. That’s for another blog post.

The concept of the school and how classes are setup is very cool and the teachers are young and engaged. If everything worked the way it should, things would be amazing. The only issue is that most of the time there are staff shortages that fully destabilize whatever plans or schedules had been drafted. Those shortages stem from the deep dysfunction of the Berlin civil service and mostly because of a lack of funding for the schools that need it the most.

I’m not sure what we’re going to do there but for now we’re going to see if things look up in the second half of the year.

Let it be clear that Germany is a country that in no way values kids and their education.

Father

Related to our kids going to school, on their first school day morning my dad passed away suddenly in Amsterdam. We knew he was sick but we had no idea that things would progress this quickly.

The funeral was of course in Turkey so I took a flight to Amsterdam to be with my family and see him off and then flew to Turkey with my mother to do the burial in our village. It was the first time I was back in Turkey since 2015.

That was a difficult thing to do and after that everything is different.

Holidays

I heard the news about my dad’s illness on our holiday in the Alps this year. Our first family holiday in a long time and otherwise a resounding success.

After all the affairs were wrapped up we went to Amsterdam for a week during the fall break to keep my mother company and to have the kids experience a bit of the Netherlands again. It was good to be back and to see people we hadn’t seen in a long time.

Studies

I’ve continued the trend of unapologetically self-studying things that I fancy. I can recommend it.

Abstract Algebra

To continue to study category theory I diagnosed a gap I had on basic abstract algebra and tried to close it. I didn’t finish either of the textbooks (Fraleigh and Galian) because it seems that text books are bad for self-studying people.

I worked through a couple of YouTube lecture series on the topic which gave me much more value.

Sheaf Theory

Then I continued on and off in Sheaf Theory Through Examples which is a very mixed book. It’s nowhere near as good as Fong and Spivak’s book and now nearing the end it is getting very obtuse and inaccessible. I’ll finish this and then move on to Bartosz Milewski.

Japanese

I kept studying Japanese for most of the year and on a whim I registered for the December JLPT. During registration I had a choice where I could either go for the safe but relatively irrelevant N5 level or stretch myself and go for N4.

I picked N4 and that turned out to be a lot tougher than expected. I had to push very hard on both vocabulary and grammar to get to a point where I even felt it was worth going to Düsseldorf to take the test. The 1-2 months before the test I was cramming flash cards throughout the day and studying most evenings.

The test itself in Düsseldorf was even harder than I expected and I think that it’s unlikely that I passed it, but who knows… Results are due end of January.

Even if I don’t get the certificate, stretching myself to N4 has made me study much much harder than I would ever have otherwise and I’ve advanced quite a bit. Also I got a quick trip to Düsseldorf out of it where I could eat Asian food at a level and authenticity that’s impossible to get in Berlin.

Cultural

With everything else that was going on, I didn’t have anything significant happen here. No time, no energy, no relevance.

I don’t really know how other people manage to binge dozens of crappy Netflix shows. I can’t really imagine spending entire evenings watching television. Do people do this still?

There are lots of good shows still that I would like to watch (The Last of Us, The Bear, Succession, etc.) but there’s just no time.

Books

I only read 15 books this year with Galian, Genki and the sheaf theory book—none of which are listed below—sucking up most of my reading time.

Cold Enough for Snow was a nice book and it also happened to be the only piece of fiction I read this year. The rest of the books above are all highly situational and none of them are particularly interesting or made a lasting impact.

Video

I watched six movies this year. The only notable one was Heat which I first saw as a teenager in the City cinema in Amsterdam.

When it comes to television things look slightly better:

• The Sandman: We did not finish it but enjoyed the episodes that we watched.
• Spy x Family S1: Exactly the light-hearted fun anime that I needed to watch. Nothing serious here but a fun conceit well executed.
• Tour de France Unchained: An epic dramatization of the world’s biggest cycling event that is a must watch if you’re even slightly interested in the sport.
• The Witcher S3: Nothing of note happened in this season but it was still kinda fun to watch I guess.
• Attack of Titan S4P2: It was good to watch the ending of this epic series but after such a long wait it was kinda hard to pick up the relatively complex storyline.
• Death Note: An anime classic that I started which is well executed but tough as nails and not at all compelling.
• Jujutsu Kaisen S2: The long awaited Hidden Inventory and Shibuya Incident arcs turned into a treat to watch despite the continuously escalating power levels and its sprawling cast of characters and villains.

Games

During my recovery from surgery I started and finished Breath of the Wild. The irony of having had a climbing accident and making Link free-climb epic cliffs on Hyrule was not lost on me.

That was the year. Let’s see what the new one does.

What you need on day one is to ratchet up expectations, energy, urgency, and intensity.

You can engulf your organization with energy, step up the tempo, and start executing the basic blocking and tackling with a lot more focus and higher expectations. It will feel like busting a log jam. All of a sudden, everything is moving and shaking.

Don’t let malaise set in. Bust it up. Raising the bar is energizing by itself.

MBO causes employees to act as if they are running their own show. Because they get compensated on their personal metrics, it’s next to impossible to pull them off projects. They will start negotiating with you for relief. That’s not alignment, that’s every man for himself.

The questions you should ask constantly: What are we not going to do? What are the consequences of not doing something? Get in the habit of constantly prioritizing and reprioritizing.

I always operated as if I owned everything, whether I did or not. That didn’t always sit well with peers or superiors. I have since always tried to increase our people’s sense of ownership so they will act as owners. That mentality needs to be nurtured.

We coped in ways I have used ever since: hire people ahead of their own curve. Hire more for aptitude than experience and give people the career opportunity of a lifetime.

We still say, “Architecture matters”at Snowflake; all of our successes at the three companies where I’ve been CEO trace back to superior architecture.

Underperforming tech assets seemed to follow me around like a bad habit.

I had to explain that there is no such thing as an override for CEOs. I said, “You can go to the board and see if they’d like to fire me and give you your old job back. In the meantime, we are doing as I outlined.”

There are times you need to check your own views at the door and bet on the conviction of others.

Today I am less driven by career ambition than by a hunger for sport, action, excitement, teamwork, and a never‐ending pursuit of self‐improvement.

When you take over a company with a wide range of issues, you have to start solving the more straightforward problems as fast as possible so you can narrow the focus on the harder ones. Bringing in some proven performers was a no‐brainer.

As I got more experience, I realized that I was often just wasting everybody’s time. If we knew that something or someone wasn’t working, why wait? As the saying goes, when there is doubt, there is no doubt.

For a more recent example, remember that when the Coronavirus pandemic first hit the US, lockdowns were described as a short‐term strategy to stop the contagion from overwhelming our healthcare system. But before long, lockdowns became the designated method to control the pandemic indefinitely, dragging on in many states for well over a year. Pandemic responses began to seem like a “make it up as we go along”approach to policy, completely untethered from any clear mission.

Not that there’s anything wrong with financial metrics or showing progress to investors or shareholders. I take those targets very seriously, but they are never our mission.

Investors and executives take huge risks on start‐ups that need to be rewarded when a company is successful.

Urgency is a mindset that can be learned if it doesn’t come to you naturally. You can embrace the discomfort that comes with moving faster instead of avoiding it.

Only the government can print money; the rest of us have to take it from somebody else.

The more high‐achieving people who desert their current employers to join us, the more we are winning.

As long as there are no new challengers with new ideas, you can do fine with an incremental approach. But in free markets, somebody is always thinking about dramatic changes. You’re much better off doing so yourself rather than hoping it won’t happen.

Folks prefer narratives that make them feel safe, however removed from reality those narratives might be. Intellectual honesty is a frequent casualty in business.

If you don’t know how to execute, every strategy will fail, even the most promising ones.

One of my favorite observations is that “good judgment comes from bad judgment.”Experience may be overrated by some, but it’s hard to find a substitute for it.

When we promote inexperienced managers to senior roles, chaos ensues. It becomes the blind leading the blind. Organizations cannot scale and mature around inexperienced management staff.

We sometimes use the expression “that dog won’t hunt”—not in reference to a person but to a strategic approach that just isn’t working, no matter what we do. It’s hard to say that if you’re irrationally attached to a strategy.

A strong product will generate escape velocity and find its market, even with a mediocre sales team. But even a great sales team cannot fix or compensate for product problems.

You should resist this temptation by remembering an old joke: “Consultants are people who borrow your watch, tell you what time it is, and then keep the watch.”

The bottom line is that great execution can make a moderately successful strategy go a long way, but poor execution will fail even the most brilliant strategy.

Hire Drivers, Not Passengers, and Get the Wrong People off the Bus

Passengers are largely dead weight and can be an insidious threat to your culture and performance. They inadvertently undermine the mojo of the organization. They sap the animal instinct and spirits you need in business to thrive.

“How do I know if I’m a driver or a passenger?”My flippant answer was that he’d better figure it out before I did.

Don’t surrender to the temptation to go into wait‐and‐see mode, hoping that time will reveal everyone’s true value. You need to make things happen, not wait around and hope for the best. You have to practice sizing up people and situations with limited and imperfect information—because that is all you are ever going to get.

If you don’t act quickly to get the wrong people off the bus, you have no prayer of changing the overall trajectory. We often believe, naively, that we can coach struggling teammates to a better place. And sometimes we can, but those cases are rarer than we imagine. At a struggling company, you need to change things fast, which can only happen by switching out the people whose skills no longer fit the mission or perhaps never really did in the first place.

those standards, that’s fine too. I know this philosophy may come across as harsh. But what’s even harsher is not doing the job you were hired to do as a leader. If you can’t find the backbone to make necessary changes, you are holding everyone else back from reaching their full potential.

Then I started moving faster to replace people who were badly suited for their roles. And often not even catastrophically bad, just worse than the caliber of people we knew we could hire to replace them. This process of systematically upgrading the talent at each key role is called “topgrading,”a strategy developed by hiring expert Brad Smart.

You can’t wait till you have an acute need; that is a reactive posture. If you wait for a vacancy to open, you can only tap the then‐current supply, which may be quite suboptimal. So create a vetted, prioritized list of possible candidates for each critical role you are responsible for.

The problem is that people don’t learn from posters. Like children and pets, they learn from consequences and the lack thereof. If you want to drive a more consistent set of behaviors, norms, and values, you have to focus on consistent and clearly defined consequences, day in and day out.

Accountability is uncomfortable because we all live with the anxiety of not being good enough and the anxiety of telling others they aren’t good enough. But if you want a great company, you can’t give out free passes for mediocrity. Good enough is never good enough.

Culture doesn’t just happen because of a CEO’s declaration or because senior management exhibits the willingness to act on core values. It happens when most of the organization is willing to defend and promote those values and call out deviations on a day‐to‐day basis.

The paradox is that any business that’s large enough to have functional silos must pull together as if these organizational delineations barely exist.

My role as CEO is to facilitate their initiative and encourage them to reach creative solutions, not simply to tell them what to do. Everyone gets a seat at the table as we hash out challenging issues.

I am generally not a fan of just trying things, throwing ideas against the wall to see if they stick. We lose time and waste resources that way. Let’s try a rifle shot instead of a scatter gun.

Customer grievances are best solved by establishing proper ownership, reducing internal complexity, and removing bureaucratic intermediaries.

Good sales managers are constantly hiring and firing, which helps them develop a clear sense of which candidates are likely to become gunslingers.

Never simply throw them into stone‐cold territories without a viable plan or support. That’s setting them up for failure, which will lead not only to their own failures but to your reputation as a leader who breeds failure.

I have often distinguished between actual profitability and what we call “inherent profitability.”

The question is what would profitability look like if we substantially stopped investing for future periods altogether? Inherent profitability is driven by unit economics, or the gross margin line in the profit and loss statement. If things cost more than what we sell them for, the business will obviously never become profitable. The next question is how operating efficiency will benefit from increased scale. Those answers help us understand what the inherent profitability of the business really is.

So they play it safe. But trying to hang on to a modest business doesn’t mean you have a viable business.

How can I possibly answer those questions for someone else’s business? The answers are relative and situational.

If possible, always own your distribution rather than delegate it to a third party. Nobody cares about selling your product more than you.

It takes intellectual honesty and humility to admit how big a confluence of factors gave rise to your original success. Just because you struck gold once doesn’t mean you know how to do it at will.

I know I said earlier that growth should be prioritized over profitability, but when it costs much more than a dollar to generate a dollar, you don’t really have a business.

I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to have strong financial oversight and discipline on sales compensation. You may be tempted at some point to make your comp plans more generous to recruit and retain top sales talent, but abandoning financial rigor can be a fatal mistake—not just during the planning stages of each year but every day, literally from one sales deal to the next.

But the most valuable leaders are those who can combine the scrappiness of a start‐up leader with the organizational and diplomatic discipline needed in a big company. Those who can scale up or scale down as required. Those who can set aside their experience when necessary, apply first principles, and think through situations in their elementary form.

When a truly new market does appear, it’s usually due to a confluence of industry‐wide factors and circumstances, not the innovations of just one company.

The issues we faced in scope, expansion, and runway now preoccupy my thinking. As a leader, you need to make time to assess these issues from day one; don’t wait for the crush of urgent business to calm down.

Having a bunch of roles on your resume without clear success at each one can become a strike against you. You start to look like a passenger, not a driver.

Start‐ups typically need hard drivers, passionate leaders, goal‐oriented and achievement‐focused personalities—the kind of people who are easily frustrated in larger, more rigid, slower to evolve enterprises. We often liked people with a chip on their shoulder, who had a lot to prove to themselves and others. But it is easy to see how others would be less enamored by such personalities.

The longest‐serving employees tend to be the most prone to nostalgia, constantly reliving the romance of the early days. Those days always seem better in retrospect than they did at the time.

Dan Warmenhoven, the highly successful CEO of NetApp, once remarked that every great CEO has a large ego because you simply could not do this kind of work any other way—but if you can’t keep that ego in check, you’ll be insufferable and therefore ineffective. That’s an uneasy balance.

Even so, continue to share credit as much as possible with the founders. Never lose sight of the fact that success takes a village, and the founders are still honorary members of the village.

Conceding the board’s authority for every major decision isn’t playing it safe. In fact, in the long run it’s much riskier than asserting your own authority and legitimacy and taking responsibility for your own decisions.

You’re not there to make friends or get a gold star for obeying orders; you are there to win.

Apply those experiences, and the insights we’ve discussed in previous chapters, to become a truer, more honed, more effective version of who you already are. Finding your own path, however long it takes, will unlock your personal power.

At the end of the day, great leaders at any level have great outcomes. You can be the most empathetic, charismatic, and popular leader ever, but none of that will matter if your business falls short. And when it does, there will be nowhere for you to hide. No one will care about your legitimate explanations, let alone your excuses. No one will care about the unlucky breaks that were completely beyond your control. Is that fair? Of course not! But it’s the world we live in, the world we have to accept as leaders.

You need to use your time differently. You need to rise above the work. You need to figure out how to make yourself less busy with your current workload to make room to do higher-value work. No one will do this for you.

She was trying to teach her team this lesson: you can’t work yourself to death and succeed over the long term. It was a hard cultural challenge, because her team believed that this overwork was not only highly valued by the company, but demanded.

You don’t win the game for running up and down the court; it’s the points on the board that count.

But if they are successful, the other thing that you will notice is that they have a ruthless focus on the things they care about. It may seem that they are not doing a good job—but maybe that is just on the part that you are looking at. You need to understand: what else are they doing?

Welcome to being a leader. This is your job. Your job is not to deliver work when everything lines up to support you. Your job is to get the most important stuff done despite everything that lines up to kill you.

I know that what I wanted from my staff was for them to catch all the work, analyze it, make judgments about business priorities, and come back to me and negotiate. I wanted them to debate with me about what is most important and why and suggest how to rework the plan to do the most important things first.

This is how you keep your boss from continuing to pile things on. Get him on the hook for the same critical business outcomes—your Ruthless Priorities.

Yes, you need to find a way to succeed if your boss is being stupid, but if your plan requires you to win against your boss, you will lose, even if you are right.

If you’re tempted to work on everything because it feels less risky, just realize that you will remain unremarkable because you have not given yourself the opportunity to really excel on something that has a big impact on the business.

Only when you are mind-numbingly bored with talking about your Ruthless Priorities will your organization really know you are serious and feel confident about acting on them.

Getting big things done is so powerful that you will get smarter as you do it. Getting things done helps you see around corners. You learn, because you can actually test the reality of the impact of what you got done.

But you must focus. If you don’t, you will work very hard but fail to deliver significant business outcomes. So you will fail. This is one of those lonely leadership moments. All leaders face this. The most successful ones get on top of it. They rise above the work.

It’s critical to recognize that your job as a leader is to collect and respond to all of the requests that come from above, but not to try to actually do them all. You are expected to tune the workload, to change the game, to figure out better ways to do things.

If your executive management could figure out which of the things, in all of this work they assign to you, were truly critical to the business, they wouldn’t need you. That’s your job.

It is a core trait of the most successful people to rise above being overbusy. If there are any secrets to what really successful people do, this is one of them. They make more time.

When communications are not clear, the number of questions and individual conversations rises exponentially. Be really clear about decisions, priorities, and issues, and find a communication mechanism to distribute the information. You will increase the capacity of your team greatly if you simply communicate better.

If you are good at fixing things or just can’t stand unanswered questions, open loops, or disorganize data, get over it. You can’t fix everything, and most of it doesn’t matter anyway.

Make three lists on one sheet of paper, in three columns.

In the first column, list the things on your to-do list that you are actually getting done.

In the second column, list things that you have committed to get done to your boss or your customers or your peers or your team—but are not getting done.

In the third column, list the things that you know are really important, but that you have no chance in hell of being able to do because of the existence of the first two lists.

Having more energy multiplies your time. You don’t just work faster; you take on things you wouldn’t otherwise. You solve bigger problems and pursue bigger challenges. You have more to give to others. You help your team and your peers more. You have more confidence and make better decisions.

Do things on purpose that help you recover your energy, but don’t give yourself too hard a time for being in a slump along the way. If you keep moving forward in your life and your work, even if you are not at your most brilliant, the slump will eventually pass.

Once you realize that your job is both your job description and dealing with all the crap that gets in the way of your doing your job description, and that what you are actually getting paid for is dealing with the crap, not the enjoyable parts, it all makes more sense.

The first and biggest hazard of taking your strengths for granted is that you waste too much time trying to fix your weaknesses. As humans we tend to focus on the things we are not good at. I don’t believe in investing in fixing weaknesses. It is a waste of time and energy, especially compared to building on strengths.

They decided it was important to thrive. They redefined the terms under which they were willing to work. They stopped trying to do their job as it was defined for them, focused on what they were really good at, and worked with other people to cover the areas they were not good at.

Leaders emerge because they are seen to get the work done through their leadership, not by their personal effort.

When you are a workhorse, people value you for your work output; they don’t value you. They don’t care how hard you work; they only care that the work gets done. Your company can absorb an unlimited amount of work from you.

It’s about figuring out how to do things better when the world and budgets are set against you

If you don’t enable and allow your team to make you bigger, you shouldn’t have a team.

if, as a leader, you are not sure what to do, talk to everybody.

Build a plan to drive the overall strategy for your team and its contribution to the business. Look for game-changing opportunities.

Clarify Ruthless Priorities. Tune everyone’s workload to ensure that they deliver on the most important things.

Ensure that there is strategic alignment of your team, peers, and boss with priorities and values.

Assess your organization’s fitness for what it needs to do, and make changes, train, and/or upgrade talent where necessary.

Create systems and frameworks to execute, track, and measure the work so you can feel comfortable that you know what is getting done without diving into the details. See also chapter 7, Delegate or Die.

Create a specific learning agenda for your team, such as understanding the financial realities of the business, getting closer to customers, or competitive awareness and positioning.

Develop talent. Help your team become better leaders and support them. Focus on the development of their top talent.

Improve communication inside and outside your organization.

Find ways to steadily reduce the cost of things you do every year to make room for new things. See also chapter 8, Better with Less.

Continually make connections outside your direct organization to create positive visibility for your team and create a broader base of support.

You need to be prepared emotionally for not being the expert any more and for finding your value elsewhere. You need to earn your team’s respect with your leadership skills, not by trying to stay as smart as they are on the detail.

Don’t think of delegating as just giving work to other people; think about it as making sure the highest-value work gets done at the right levels.

Let some important stuff go undone, or get done poorly, so you make it clear that you really need the hire.

Always think of delegating as a teaching opportunity. Remember, delegating is about taking responsibility to ensure that the highest-value work gets done at the right levels. It is about pulling your people up and making them more capable.

You may be more comfortable with the deliverables, but you are completely cutting off the possibility that, with your encouragement and support, they could become even better at it than you. In fact, you are limiting them to never being any better at it than you.

If you overmanage people, they will not be motivated to excel; they will just be motivated to get you off their back.

As a leader it is your job to cut the cost of doing the same stuff year over year—full stop.

Dealing with shrinking budgets and increased responsibility is a way of life. As a leader you can’t let that prevent you from raising the bar and driving higher-value business outcomes each year. No one will help you with this. Your team will get annoyed that they have less money to do the same stuff. It’s up to you to lead.

A high-trust environment is a fast, competitive environment. A low-trust environment is a slow, dysfunctional environment.

If you try to avoid all negative discussion or always put a positive spin on everything, you will be seen as clueless by your people who are experiencing the reality. That will destroy trust. If you acknowledge difficult issues, then get your team focused on what they can do during times of uncertainty, you will build trust.

You must get comfortable with differentiating. Treating everyone equally is not fair to your high performers.

Do this now. With each of your reports, say the following: “As your manager I am going to worry about what matters to you. When I worry about you, what should I worry about?”

But it is imperative that you have a “What happened? This is unacceptable. What are you going to do about it?”conversation.

Although these are not fun, comfortable conversations, if you avoid them, you are degrading trust.

Good work does not stand on its own. Delivering results alone does not ensure you will get recognized and rewarded. It’s sad but true. You need to take it upon yourself to make your work visible and make it count.

You need to show that you can think like a general manager about the whole business and put the business first, at the center of your thinking and discussions.

Doing your job well, as defined, keeps you from getting fired. What makes you stand out is finding additional ways to add value to the business over and above what is in your job description. Otherwise, you are just one more person doing what is expected of them.

Bringing the external voice of the real world back into your business sets you up as highly credible because most people don’t bother.

Being inconsistently good just pisses people off. It creates a high expectation and then a big letdown.

When you observe me at work or life, what is always true? What do you always see?

What is my manner of communicating?

What do I “look like”when I am delivering?

What am I expert in?

How do I relate to others at work: What do I give? What do I expect?

How do my personality and values affect what I offer?

What outcomes do you associate with my being involved in something?

By focusing on her brand, she gave herself the opportunity to sell her strengths without hesitation.

If you operate in your own department most of the time and don’t have personal relationships or functional reasons to talk to your boss’s boss, your boss’s peers, and leaders of other organizations, you can consider yourself invisible. And you can consider yourself stuck.

When the executives talk about who is the best, the people whose names are known (even if nothing else is known about them) come out way ahead of the more-talented people whose names are not known.

You can be doing a fantastic job, but if some of your key stakeholders either don’t know about it or have an incorrect, not-that-impressed perception of your work, it can be a huge block to your success and your ability to get promotions and resources for your team members or approval for projects you care about.

If you are remote, it is up to you to not disappear.

Are you being clear, succinct, and compelling?

Have you tuned the presentation to be highly relevant to each audience?

Do you get to the point? Are you sure you are not boring?

Have you made sure you won’t be tempted to go on and on about details?

Do you show strong personal presence?

Do you show confidence rather than defensiveness?

Can you deal with disagreements and attacks and not get drawn off track?

Can you field questions succinctly and not get nervous?

Can you continue to be succinct and not babble on and on when you get drawn off topic?

Can you regain control of the conversation?

For example, don’t talk about needing data on something. Ask questions like, “What decisions will you be making based on this data?”or “What action do you need this data to inform?”

You first need to get yourself there. Once you are there, learn really fast, do the job, and get more comfortable and confident as you go. Then leap again.

The world is not waiting for you to check all the boxes; they are merely watching to see if you’ll step up.

The ones who step up and go for things are the ones who get them. The ones who are fearless get there faster.

Any executive is much stronger after having spent significant time with customers where the business really happens. Spending time in sales changes your perspective forever, for the better.

This is one of the reasons it is so important to make more time, as we talked about in chapter 3. If you are completely consumed by your current job, you will not have any time or energy to do the things you need to do to get a better or bigger one.

You are already committed to your day job. Your extra work that you volunteer for should serve your personal purpose to get ahead.

A key test of executive presence is to look like you are doing your job with ease and grace. Even if behind the scenes it is chaos, what people should see is you being calm and in control.

The bigger the role, the broader your influence needs to be. As a top executive your impact needs to be on a much broader and more external stage. You need to prove that you know how to impact business growth and transformation internally and externally in a big way, if you want a big job.

However, building your career and letting your life go to hell does not work either. The trick is, if you want to do better at either work or life, you need to get better at both.

Your company wants you to have a good life that you enjoy. They know they will get more out of you at work if you are happy outside of work.

Anything north of half a million a year is the hazard pay for the company acting like it owns you, letting you know your time is not your own, and finding seemingly laser-targeted ways to torture you.

If you have a toxic or useless boss who is damaging you and your career, you need to get out. It’s not worth your time, your health, or the money that lured you into this in the first place.

Bluffing is just another example of why being an executive takes a fair amount of guts, and you need to be OK with the fact that from time to time you are going to be scared and way out of your comfort zone. That is a requirement of the job—get comfortable with it.

As long as you demand rigorous accountability to the business and measure and manage performance accordingly, you can be nice to people.

Along these lines, I often get asked whether you can or should be friends with a boss or employee.

Yes, you can be friends, as long as the friendship does not keep you from being tough on accountability and results in the business.

If you are the kind of person who can keep those separate, friends at work are fine. But if you end up holding your friends less accountable, or not imposing consequences because they are friends, and this makes you uncomfortable, then don’t make friends with employees.

If you don’t seriously manage performance with employees who are friends, everyone will see that you are letting your friend get away with things. You will squander huge amounts of trust. People will accept your friendships as long as they see you being fair.

I am a firm believer that growing businesses come from growing people, and to be highly successful, you need to make the people supporting you successful too.

The punch line of the John Hennigan—Des Moines story—“after two days, he begged to get out of it”—made it part of gambling folklore.

Everything is a bet.

Most people aren’t like poker players, around whom there is always the potential that someone might propose a bet and they will mean it.

Such interactions are reminders that not all situations are appropriate for truthseeking, nor are all people interested in the pursuit.

In the movie, the matrix was built to be a more comfortable version of the world. Our brains, likewise, have evolved to make our version of the world more comfortable: our beliefs are nearly always correct; favorable outcomes are the result of our skill; there are plausible reasons why unfavorable outcomes are beyond our control; and we compare favorably with our peers. We deny or at least dilute the most painful parts of the message.

In fact, as long as there are three people in the group (two to disagree and one to referee*), the truthseeking group can be stable and productive.

“a pretty good blueprint for a truthseeking charter:

• A focus on accuracy (over confirmation), which includes rewarding truthseeking, objectivity, and open-mindedness within the group;

• Accountability, for which members have advance notice; and

• Openness to a diversity of ideas.”

In three sentences, he laid out all the elements of a productive group charter. “I don’t want to hear it. I’m not trying to hurt your feelings, but if you have a question about a hand, you can ask me about strategy all day long. I just don’t think there’s much purpose in a poker story if the point is about something you had no control over, like bad luck.”

We should also recognize that it’s really hard: the norm is toward homogeneity; we’re all guilty of it; and we don’t even notice that we’re doing it.

Coming from a community composed almost entirely of liberal-leaning scientists, the quality and impact of research can suffer.

Liberals would do well to take some time to read and watch more conservative news sources, and conservatives would do well to take some time to read and watch more liberal news sources—not with the goal of confirming that the other side is a collection of idiots who have nothing of value to say but to specifically and purposely find things they agree with.

Anyone can provide the narrative only up to the point of the decision under consideration, leaving off the outcome so as not to infect their listeners with bias.

The way we field outcomes is path dependent. It doesn’t so much matter where we end up as how we got there. What has happened in the recent past drives our emotional response much more than how we are doing overall. That’s how we can win $100 and be sad, and lose $100 and be happy. The zoom lens doesn’t just magnify, it distorts.

At the very beginning of my poker career, I heard an aphorism from some of the legends of the profession: “It’s all just one long poker game.”

Remember, the likelihood of positive and negative futures must add up to 100%. The positive space of backcasting and the negative space of a premortem still have to fit in a finite amount of space.

I listened to the last episode of Bungacast with the authors of the new book “The Covid Consensus”.

https://twitter.com/BungaCast/status/1625430144897671168

Both the book and the episode are highly questionable. There is little more there than pandering to the COVID sceptic horseshoe left ¹ by fishing in the murky pond of anti-authoritarianism, pseudo-science and neoreaction.

Now I wouldn’t think it weird that COVID nutters would write a book. What is odd is that Bungacast would give that much prominence to something which is obviously dumb. Not sure if it’s a cynical play on the alternative/controversial left or whether the podcasters truly believe this way of looking at the world has any merit. In any case, for me this is Schluß with this particular pod.

A while back I had listened to an episode of Politics Theory Other which has long been a favorite podcast of mine where Richard Seymour utterly demolishes that very same book. PTO is actually serious, actually left, actually critical and very much recommended.

That episode is well worth a (re)listen and I’m now a fan of Richard Seymour who comes in like a sledgehammer.

https://twitter.com/MattNoahSmith/status/1625900511223484416

If I lift this one level, the so called “Lockdown” is being used as a scapegoat for anything and everything that people don’t like. Here in Europe the lockdowns felt very long but were brief in retrospect. The longest probably being the 3 month school/daycare closure at the start of the pandemic during which we also suffered immensely. Real hard lockdowns happened in a country like China. Claiming that the relatively mild restrictions that we had for a couple of months (and then twice more) created irreparable damage in the general population is very fucking rich.

They may be right about Lockdown in one way that the concept of it has become big enough and detached from reality enough to house whatever theories or madness anybody wants to house in it. As such, lockdown was a huge psychohistoric event.

Good programmers will naturally start to abstract and develop a model that can do more work. But when this happens only in a technical setting, without collaboration with domain experts, the concepts are naive. That shallowness of knowledge produces software that does a basic job but lacks a deep connection to the domain expert’s way of thinking.

And with typical design approaches, the code and documents don’t express this hard-earned knowledge in a usable form, so when the oral tradition is interrupted for any reason, the knowledge is lost.

Use the model as the backbone of a language. Commit the team to exercising that language relentlessly in all communication within the team and in the code. Use the same language in diagrams, writing, and especially speech.

Object-oriented programming is powerful because it is based on a modeling paradigm, and it provides implementations of the model constructs.

If the people who write the code do not feel responsible for the model, or don’t understand how to make the model work for an application, then the model has nothing to do with the software. If developers don’t realize that changing code changes the model, then their refactoring will weaken the model rather than strengthen it.

But it is the crucial separation of the domain layer that enables MODEL-DRIVEN DESIGN.

Even deficiencies in requirements analysis can be overcome by releasing a prototype to users and then quickly changing the product to fit their requests.

Most flexible languages (such as Java) are overkill for these applications and will cost dearly. A 4GL-style tool is the way to go.

For example, a one-to-many association might be implemented as a collection in an instance variable. But the design is not necessarily so direct. There may be no collection; an accessor method may query a database to find the appropriate records and instantiate objects based on them. Both of these designs would reflect the same model.

Worse, as client code uses the database directly, developers are tempted to bypass model features such as AGGREGATES, or even object encapsulation, instead directly taking and manipulating the data they need.

The sheer technical complexity of applying most database access infrastructure quickly swamps the client code, which leads developers to dumb down the domain layer, which makes the model irrelevant.

You may find that the framework provides services you can use to easily create a REPOSITORY, or you may find that the framework fights you all the way. You may discover that the architectural framework has already defined an equivalent pattern of getting persistent objects. Or you may discover that it has defined a pattern that is not like a REPOSITORY at all.

A MODEL-DRIVEN DESIGN stands on two legs. A deep model makes possible an expressive design. At the same time, a design can actually feed insight into the model discovery process when it has the flexibility to let a developer experiment and the clarity to show a developer what is happening.

But moving the rules out of the domain layer is even worse, since the domain code no longer expresses the model.

Here we have an example of a “simplest thing that could possibly work” that actually becomes possible because of a more sophisticated model. We can have a functioning prototype of a very complex component in a couple dozen lines of easily understood code.

A lot of overengineering has been justified in the name of flexibility. But more often than not, excessive layers of abstraction and indirection get in the way. Look at the design of software that really empowers the people who handle it; you will usually see something simple.

If a developer must consider the implementation of a component in order to use it, the value of encapsulation is lost. If someone other than the original developer must infer the purpose of an object or operation based on its implementation, that new developer may infer a purpose that the operation or class fulfills only by chance. If that was not the intent, the code may work for the moment, but the conceptual basis of the design will have been corrupted, and the two developers will be working at cross-purposes.

I’m all in favor of learning advanced technology and design concepts, but we have to soberly assess the skills of a particular team, as well as the likely skills of future maintenance teams.

If you wait until you can make a complete justification for a change, you’ve waited too long. Your project is already incurring heavy costs, and the postponed changes will be harder to make because the target code will have been more elaborated and more embedded in other code.

Sometimes we overestimate the value or underestimate the cost of such a dependency.

Declare a BOUNDED CONTEXT to have no connection to the others at all, allowing developers to find simple, specialized solutions within this small scope.

Once they have been separated, give their continuing development lower priority than the CORE DOMAIN, and avoid assigning your core developers to the tasks (because they will gain little domain knowledge from them). Also consider off-the-shelf solutions or published models for these GENERIC SUBDOMAINS.

Not knowing what would be needed, it was assumed that it should be flexible enough to handle anything.

He had dutifully set out to build a time zone model a priori.

Reuse does happen, but not always code reuse. The model reuse is often a better level of reuse, as when you use a published design or model.

A team that uses the code as the sole repository of the model might use comments, maybe structured as Java Doc, or might use some tool in its development environment.

People knew roughly where to look for a particular function. Individuals working independently could make design decisions that were broadly consistent with each other. The complexity ceiling had been lifted.

Beş el vardı direksiyonda, babanın iki eli, Nevzat Amca’nın iki eli ve gören görür, ölümün eli…

“Azrail’in piyangosu annenle babana vurdu Nihal!”

Daha doğrusu ikimiz de birbirimizin “âşık” halinden pek hoşlanmamıştık.

Sonra sustum. Çok konuşunca olan şey: Konuşmak, anlatmak, anlamsız gelmişti birdenbire. Belki de, katlanıp kaldırılması gereken şeyleri buruşturmuştum.

Nihal’i karnının üzerinde pençelerini ne zaman etine geçireceği belli olmayan yırtıcı bir hayvanla dolaşıyor gibi düşünmüştüm.

Görüyorsun değil mi Çetin, üç buçuk yaşındaki çocuk bile kendi deneyiminden bir yasa çıkarıyor! Başka türlü nefes alınmaz. Başka türlü yaşanmaz. Başka türlü aşk olmaz. Yaptıklarımızı olumlayan yasalar buluyoruz; sanırım aklımız böyle işliyor: Buyurgan iç huzurumuzun boynu bükük kölesi olarak.

balkonda rakı sofrası kurmak

Bu başarısız öykü de, “Genç şair tekrar kalemine sarıldı.” cümlesiyle sona eriyor.

“Reşit, ömür denen şeyin tedricen yaşanmadığını söylerdi. Gerçekten öyle, her şey birdenbire oluyor. Küçük bir çocukken birdenbire, ilaçlarını plastik bir margarin kabında saklayan bir ihtiyar oluveriyorsun. Kendin için, çocukların için, ülken için güzel şeyler ümit ederken, seni biçimlendiren şeyin güzel bir gelecek hayali olduğunu düşünürken, birdenbire kaderinin, güne ayak uyduramamak, gençliğini, geçmişini özlemek ve hızla dönen dünya tarafından hep kenara savrulmak olduğunu görüyorsun.”

Ama siyasetle ilgilenmemişti, çünkü Reşit Bey’e göre, insanlar birbirlerinden ve tarihten bir şey öğrenmiyor, basit güdülerle hareket ediyordu. Bu yüzden siyasetin yapacağı, başaracağı bir şey yoktu.

Sen de o yağmurdan başlayıp o iş arkadaşlarına hatta oradan sokak çocuklarına sıçrayan kıskançlık alevleriyle her tarafı yakıp yıkarsın, iyiliğe karşı içinde keskin bir öfke duyarsın. “İyiliğiniz batsın!” dersin. Böyledir bahar yağmuru, kötü eder adamı.

Memleketinden uzak insanların dumanlı efkârlı ruh haline bizim küçük kızımız da girmiş, bu ruh haliyle geride bıraktığı her şey çok güzel mi gelmeye başlamıştı?

In dealing with the poverty that still plagued so much of the Indian populace, the Indian government had had to create electricity as fast as they could, and also, since they existed in a world run by the market, as cheaply as they could. Otherwise outside investors would not invest, because the rate of return would not be high enough. So they had burned coal, yes. Like everyone else had up until just a few years before. Now India was being told not to burn coal, when everyone else had finished burning enough of it to build up the capital to afford to shift to cleaner sources of power. India had been told to get better without any financial help to do so whatsoever. Told to tighten the belt and embrace austerity, and be the working class for the bourgeoisie of the developed world, and suffer in silence until better times came— but the better times could never come, that plan was shot. The deck had been stacked, the game was over. And now twenty million people were dead.

India’s electrical power companies were nationalized where they weren’t already

change with us, change now, or suffer the wrath of Kali

The nineteen largest organizations doing this will be, in order of size from biggest to smallest: Saudi Aramco, Chevron, Gazprom, ExxonMobil, National Iranian Oil Company, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Pemex, Petróleos de Venezuela, PetroChina, Peabody Energy, ConocoPhillips, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, Iraq National Oil Company, Total SA, Sonatrach, BHP Billiton, and Petrobras.

“Not good enough?”Mary suggested.

“No, but nothing is ever good enough. We just make do.”

His therapists talked about trigger events. About avoiding triggers. What they were glossing over with this too-convenient metaphor was that life itself was just a long series of trigger events. That consciousness was the trigger. He woke up, he remembered who he was, he had a panic attack. He got over it and got on with his day as best he could.

We are the Children of Kali, and you can’t be one of us, even if you were here during the catastrophe. But you can do something. You can carry a message from us to the world. Maybe that can even help, we don’t know. But you can try. You can tell them that they must change their ways. If they don’t, we will kill them. That’s what they need to know. You can figure out ways to tell them that.”

To be clear, concluding in brief: there is enough for all. So there should be no more people living in poverty. And there should be no more billionaires. Enough should be a human right, a floor below which no one can fall; also a ceiling above which no one can rise. Enough is a good as a feast— or better.

the Food Sustainability Index, formulated by Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition

But look, the violence of carbon burning kills many more people than any punishment for capital crimes ever would. So really your morality is just a kind of surrender.”

So, if your organization represents the people who will be born after us, well, that’s a heavy burden! It’s a real responsibility! You have to think like them! You have to do what they would do if they were here.”

“People kill in self-defense all the time. Not to do that would be a kind of suicide. So people do it. And now your people are under assault. These supposed future people.”

You grew up in Nepal, right? And I grew up in Ireland. In both places there was a lot of political violence. Which really means murder, right? Murder and all that follows murder. Fear, grief, anger, revenge, all that.

The hidden quality of the nistarim is important; they are ordinary people, who emerge and act when needed to save their people, then sink back into anonymity as soon as their task is accomplished.

Avasthana, Sanskrit for survival.

Look, if you have to do something, you have to do it. Don’t keep talking about cost as if that’s a real thing. Money isn’t real. Work is real.

And so India is coming into its own. We are the new force. People around the world have begun to take notice. This too is new— no one elsewhere has been used to thinking of India as anything but a place of poverty, a victim of history and geography. But now they are looking at us with a little bit of confusion and wonder. What is this? A sixth of humanity on one big triangular patch of land, caught under the blazing sun, cut off by a mighty range of mountains: who are these people? A democracy, a polyglot coalition— wait, can it be? And what can it be? Do we make the Chinese, who so decisively stepped onto the world stage at the start of this century, look dictatorial, monolithic, brittle, afraid? Is India now the bold new leader of the world?

We think maybe so.

No one denies future people are going to be just as real as us. So there isn’t any moral justification for the discounting, it’s just for our own convenience. Plenty of economists acknowledged this. Robert Solow said we ought to act as if the discount rate were zero. Roy Harrod said the discount rate was a polite expression for rapacity. Frank Ramsey called it ethically indefensible. He said it came about because of a weakness of the imagination.

The guilty need to know: even in their locked compounds, in their beds asleep at night, the Children of Kali will descend on you and kill you. There is no hiding, there is no escape.

When you lose all hope and all fear, then you become something not quite human. Whether better or worse than human I can’t say. But for an hour I was not a human being.

You could even say that money itself would resist this change. Indeed it seems to be the case that there’s simply a kind of inherent, inbuilt resistance to change!

Our current economics has not yet answered any of these questions. But why should it? Do you ask your calculator what to do with your life? No. You have to figure that out for yourself.

We laughed out loud. For a while we couldn’t stop laughing. Fuck Margaret Thatcher, I said when I could catch my breath. And I say it again now: fuck Margaret Thatcher, and fuck every idiot who thinks that way. I can take them all to a place where they will eat those words or die of thirst. Because when the taps run dry, society becomes very real. A smelly mass of unwashed anxious citizens, no doubt about it. But a society for sure. It’s a life or death thing, society, and I think people mainly do recognize that, and the people who deny it are stupid fuckers, I say this unequivocally. Ignorant fools. That kind of stupidity should be put in jail.

The Austrian and Chicago schools had run with that opinion, and thus neoliberalism: the market rules because it’s the best calculator. But now, with computers as strong as they’ve gotten, the Red Plenty argument has gotten stronger and stronger, asserting that people now have so much computing power that central planning could work better than the market. High-frequency trading has been put forth as an example of computers out-achieving the market proper, but instead of improving the system it’s just been used to take rents on every exchange. This a sign of effective computational power, but used by people still stuck in the 1930s terminology of market versus planning, capitalism versus communism. And by people not trying to improve system, but merely to make more money in current system. Thus economists in our time.

Having debunked the tragedy of the commons, they now were trying to direct our attention to what they called the tragedy of the time horizon. Meaning we can’t imagine the suffering of the people of the future, so nothing much gets done on their behalf. What we do now creates damage that hits decades later, so we don’t charge ourselves for it, and the standard approach has been that future generations will be richer and stronger than us, and they’ll find solutions to their problems. But by the time they get here, these problems will have become too big to solve. That’s the tragedy of the time horizon, that we don’t look more than a few years ahead, or even in many cases, as with high-speed trading, a few micro-seconds ahead. And the tragedy of the time horizon is a true tragedy, because many of the worst climate impacts will be irreversible.

carbon quantitative easing

It’s the vital work of our time. If we don’t fund a rapid carbon drawdown, if we don’t take the immense amount of capital that flows around the world looking for the highest rate of return and redirect it into decarbonizing work, civilization could crash. Then the dollar will be weak indeed.

Apparently he didn’t travel much compared to most people. That felt right. If you were mentally ill your energy use inevitably dropped, because you couldn’t put it together to live a normal life. He had gone to ground, he was living in a hole like a badger. Hibernating maybe. Waiting for some kind of spring to come.

Germans: they had seen the worst. They knew how bad it could get. Even though these were the grandchildren of the ones who had lived through it, or now mostly the great-grandchildren, there was still a cultural memory they could not escape, a memory that would last centuries.

everyone living in the past of their own region’s psyche to one extent or another, because they all lived in their languages, and if your native language was anything but English, you were estranged to one degree or other from the global village.

Always she had been prone to the rash act. She put it down to something Irish. It seemed to her that Irish women doing rash things was precisely how her people had managed to perpetuate themselves.

That pistol, that moment of fear— a jolting spike of fear for her life— she had not forgotten that, or forgiven it. She never would. Nothing was quite like that. But nothing was quite like anything.

The War for the Earth is often said to have begun on Crash Day. And it was later that same year when container ships began to sink, almost always close to land.

The fossil fuel lawyers and executives looked interested when this was proposed to them. The privately owned companies saw a chance of escaping with a viable post-oil business. The state-owned companies looked interested at the idea of compensation for their stranded assets, which they had already borrowed against, in the usual way of the rampant reckless financialization which was the hallmark of their time. Paid to pump water from the ocean up to some catchment basin? Paid to pump CO2 into the ground? Paid how much? And who would front the start-up expenses?

Eleven policies would get it done, they all told her. Carbon pricing, industry efficiency standards, land use policies, industrial process emissions regulations, complementary power sector policies, renewable portfolio standards, building codes and appliance standards, fuel economy standards, better urban transport, vehicle electrification, and feebates, which was to say carbon taxes passed back through to consumers.

As with a move from bank to credit union, instead of the company using the consumer, the consumer used the company, and owned it too. What did the company per se get out of it? Nothing, because a company was nothing. It was just an organization devised to help its employee-owners, nothing more. Like any other company, in the end. If you thought that was what they were.

Fründenjoch

Another banker, Mary thought. Out of seven Swiss presidents, how many came from a banking background? Four? Five?

The rentier class will not help in that project. They are not interested in that project. Indeed that project will be forwarded in the face of their vigorous resistance. Over their dead bodies, some of them will say. In which case, euthanasia may be just the thing.

a land tax properly designed could again swiftly redistribute land ownership more widely, while quickly swelling government coffers in order to pay for public work, thus reducing economic inequality.

This sudden loss of supply sent oil prices and oil futures sharply up. Oil was rarer now, therefore more expensive, which meant that clean renewable energy was now cheaper than oil by an even larger margin than before.

Or perhaps inflation: macroeconomics was no longer so very clear on the ultimate effects of quantitative easing, given that the evidence from the past half century could be interpreted either way. That this debate was a clear sign that macroeconomics as a field was ideological to the point of astrology was often asserted by people in all the other social sciences, but economists were still very skilled at ignoring outside criticisms of their field, and now they forged on contradicting themselves as confidently as ever.

In this case, these people insisted, please go back to the basics. Here’s the true economy, these people said: since the Earth’s biosphere was the only one available to humanity, and its healthy function absolutely necessary to humanity’s existence, its worth to people was a kind of existential infinity. Gauging the price of saving the biosphere’s functions against the cost of losing them would therefore always be impossible.

So until the climate was actually killing them, people had a tendency to deny it could happen. To others, yes; to them, no. This was a cognitive error that, like most cognitive errors, kept happening even when you knew of its existence and prevalence. It was some kind of evolutionary survival mechanism, some speculated, a way to help people carry on even when it was pointless to carry on.

What if the standard, or even the legally mandated, maximum wage ratio was set at say one to ten, being so easy to calculate? With the lowest level set high enough for life adequacy or decency or however you want to call it. Enough for a decent life. Which then, ten times that? That’s a lot! I mean think about it. Count it on your fingers and thumbs, seeing the enough amount on the tip of each digit, all ten stuck together at the end of your arms looking back at you. Enough times ten is fucking luxurious.

We listen to her, but not you.

He said, I am Kali.

Suddenly he felt the enormous weight of that, the truth of it. They stared at him and saw it crushing him. The War for the Earth had lasted years, his hands were bloody to the elbows. For a moment he couldn’t speak; and there was nothing more to say.

Can you make up a new society from scratch at that point? No, you can’t. Things just fall apart and next thing you know you’re eating your cat. So take this in: there has to be a pre-existing Plan B.

Even if you are a degrowth devolutionist, an anarchist or a communist or a fan of world government, we only do the global in the current world order by way of the nation-state system.

All over the world this was happening, they kept saying. All these sad little towns, the backbone of rural civilization, tossed into the trash bin of history.

They kill the good ones, Mary thought bitterly, the leaders, the tough ones, and then dare the weaker ones to pick up the torch and carry on. Few would do it. The killers would prevail. This was how it always happened. This explained the world they lived in; the murderers were willing to kill to get their way. In a fight between sociopathic sick wounded angry fucked-up wicked people, and all the rest of them, not just the good and the brave but the ordinary and weak, the sheep who just wanted to get by, the fuckers always won. The few took power and wielded it like torturers, happy to tear the happiness away from the many.

The hidden sheriff; she was ready for that now, that and the hidden prison. The guillotine for that matter. The gun in the night, the drone from nowhere. Whatever it took.

Another brick in the controlocracy, some said of this recorded money; but if the public kept ultimate control of this new global state, by way of people power exerted by the ever more frequent strikes and non-compliances, then the people too would be seeing where all the money was and where it was going, move by move, so that it couldn’t be shuffled into tax havens or otherwise hidden, without becoming inactivated by law.

the Half Earth projects

and capping personal annual income at ten times that minimum amount

“Revolution comes; not the expected one, but another, always another.”

Many are now tagged, and more all the time. There is coming into being a kind of Internet of Animals, whatever that means. Better perhaps to say they are citizens now, and have citizens’ rights, and therefore a census is being taken.

A cobbling-together from less-than-satisfactory parts. A slurry, a bricolage. An unholy mess.

You have to be part of a wave in history. You can’t get it just by wanting it, you can’t call for it and make it come. You can’t choose it— it chooses you! It arrives like a wave picking you up! It’s a feeling— how can I say it? It’s as if everyone in your city becomes a family member, known to you as such even when you have never seen their face before and never will again. Mass action, yes, but the mass is suddenly family, they are all on the same side, doing something important.

wolverine

Then another five million come to live with you and everyone speaks English to understand each other. Pretty soon your kids speak English, pretty soon everyone speaks English, and then your language is gone. That would be a big loss, a crushing loss. So people get protective of that. The most important thing, therefore, is to learn the language. Not just English, but the local language, the native language. The mother tongue. Their culture doesn’t matter so much, just the language. That I find is the great connector. You speak their language and even when you’re messing it up like crazy, they get a look on their face: in that moment they want to help you.

Tom Athanasiou, Jürgen Atzgendorfer, Eric Berlow, Terry Bisson, Michael Blumlein (in memory), Dick Bryan, Federica Carugati, Amy Chan, Delton Chen, Joshua Clover, Oisí­n Fagan, Banning Garrett, Laurie Glover, Dan Gluesenkamp, Hilary Gordon, Casey Handmer, Fritz Heidorn, Jurg Hoigné (in memory), Tim Holman, Joe Holtz, Arlene Hopkins, Drew Keeling, Kimon Keramidas, Jonathan Lethem, Margaret Levi, Robert Markley, Tobias Menely, Ashwin Jacob Mathew, Chris McKay, Colin Milburn, Miguel Nogués, Lisa Nowell, Oskar Pfenninger (in memory), Kavita Philip, Armando Quintero, Carter Scholz, Mark Schwartz, Anasuya Sengupta, Slawek Tulaczyk, José Luis de Vicente, and K. Y. Wong