I’ll be proud to live in Berlin when the home owner expropriations are passed and the real estate madness is curtailed.

Article 15 of the Country’s Basic Law states that “land, natural resources and means of production may, for the purpose of nationalization, be transferred to public ownership or other forms of public enterprise by a law that determines the nature and extent of compensation.”

https://www.thenation.com/article/berlin-housing-gentrification-referendum/

Late arrival to Verrücktes Blut

I was supposed to see this play six years ago. Let’s say better late than never. Seen Wednesday, March 20th at the Maxim Gorki Theater.

It starts off very chaotically with everybody shouting. It is very hard to understand what anybody says. This gets better later on but I still had to peek at the surtitles regularly. I guess I’ve been spoiled by Dutch theaters where they strap microphones to their actors.

The premise is clever and the scene surprisingly light-weight. What follows is a bit too drawn out. The physical acting does not impress and you can only threaten to shoot somebody so many times before you actually have to shoot them. If you don’t, things get a bit dull.

The play itself is badly dated and the various debates have far moved on mostly to become irrelevant. The bits of Schiller that they play have held up much better over the past two centuries than Verrücktes Blut has over the past decade. Schiller also lets the actors in this play show their skills.

There is some Islam-criticism that is supposed to be edgy but misses the point. Additionally, we hit the obligatory ethno-clichés, many of which made me laugh during the wrong moments. Neither manages to be actually cutting. The social engagement on display is there for entertainment only.

The troubles with the kids in the play have only worsened and a new generation is now forced to make their rounds through Germany’s broken school system. Nothing about the systemic reasons behind the problems the kids are facing is even mentioned in the play. The situation is unfixable and there is nothing to be done other than ‘acting dumb’.

The actors can’t help the fact that this theater will have to play their break-out hit until the end of days. Especially if it keeps on filling the house. But at some point, it might be good to call the curtains.

Some nice parenting tips from the Inuit.

For example, how do you teach kids to stay away from the ocean, where they could easily drown? Instead of yelling, “Don’t go near the water!” Jaw says Inuit parents take a pre-emptive approach and tell kids a special story about what’s inside the water. “It’s the sea monster,” Jaw says, with a giant pouch on its back just for little kids.
“If a child walks too close to the water, the monster will put you in his pouch, drag you down to the ocean and adopt you out to another family,” Jaw says.
“Then we don’t need to yell at a child,” Jaw says, “because she is already getting the message.”

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/685533353/a-playful-way-to-teach-kids-to-control-their-anger?t=1552778810967

Highlights for Pnin

by a huge, active, buoyantly thriving German Department which its Head, Dr. Hagen, smugly called (pronouncing every syllable very distinctly) “a university within a university.”
Pnin, despite his many shortcomings, had about him a disarming, old-fashioned charm which Dr. Hagen, his staunch protector, insisted before morose trustees was a delicate imported article worth paying for in domestic cash.
desuetude
lozenges
It was the world that was absent-minded and it was Pnin whose business it was to set it straight. His life was a constant war with insensate objects that fell apart, or attacked him, or refused to function, or viciously got themselves lost as soon as they entered the sphere of his existence.
shadowgraph
Therefore he preferred reading his lectures, his gaze glued to his text, in a slow, monotonous baritone that seemed to climb one of those interminable flights of stairs used by people who dread elevators.
cerebration
anent
He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has.
Still more oppressive was his tussle with the wallpaper. He had always been able to see that in the vertical plane a combination made up of three different clusters of purple flowers and seven different oak leaves was repeated a number of times with soothing exactitude; but now he was bothered by the undismissable fact that he could not find what system of inclusion and circumscription governed the horizontal recurrence of the pattern;
The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
surds
amphoric
canthus
Whatever eyes Liza Pnin, now Wind, had, they seemed to reveal their essence, their precious-stone water, only when you evoked them in thought, and then a blank, blind, moist aquamarine blaze shivered and stared as if a spatter of sun and sea had got between your own eyelids.
pharmacopoeial
ovipositing
vernalization
vagitus
“Why not leave their private sorrows to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?”
jocose
Only another Russian could understand the reactionary and Sovietophile blend presented by the pseudo-colorful Komarovs, for whom an ideal Russia consisted of the Red Army, an anointed monarch, collective farms, anthroposophy, the Russian Church and the Hydro-Electric Dam.
Kopffüsslers
cupule
distemper
slattern
“Pity Vladimir Vladimirovich is not here,”remarked Chateau. “He would have told us all about these enchanting insects.”
Literary departments still labored under the impression that Stendhal, Galsworthy, Dreiser, and Mann were great writers.
This did not prevent him from traveling tremendous distances to attend Modern Language conventions, at which he would flaunt his ineptitude as if it were some majestic whim, and parry with great thrusts of healthy lodge humor any attempt to inveigle him into the subtleties of the parley-voo.
poetasters
adumbrations
connubial
calvity
one of those informal gatherings where old-fashioned terrorists, heroic nuns, gifted hedonists, liberals, adventurous young poets, elderly novelists and artists, publishers and publicists, free-minded philosophers and scholars would represent a kind of special knighthood

I loved this summary of Julie Zhuo’s new book “The Making of a Manager”(excellent points in there about one-on-ones, self-awareness, delegation and growth) and I can’t wait to read the entire thing.

“The perspective you have changes everything. With a fixed mindset, your actions are governed by fear — fear of failure, fear of judgement, fear of being found out as an imposter,”says Zhuo. With a growth mindset, you’re motivated to seek out the truth and ask for feedback because you know it’s the fastest path to get you where you want to go.”

https://www.fellow.app/blog/2019/julie-zhuo-the-making-of-a-manager/

I’ve been trying to figure out what makes for the best kind of professional working relationships. Sometimes things work, sometimes they don’t and sometimes they really take off.

I’d not been able to figure it out until I read The Failure of Us where Roy Rapoport says:

From a relationship and communication perspective, I think it comes down to striving to consistently lower the bar to communication and — stay with me, this may be a bit confusing for a moment — being ever-vigilant about the trivial little annoyances the people we work with create, and developing an ever-decreasing tolerance of them.

“An ever-decreasing tolerance”, which is so counter-intuitive and so spot on at the same time. That is probably one of the things that inadvertently have gone right in some cases and wrong in others. So if you’re looking for me, I’ll be here cultivating an ever-decreasing tolerance.

I didn’t think I’d live to hear one, but WIDI is a German language podcast (by Igor and a different Johannes) about technology that adds a unique perspective and a more systemic approach to the mix. If they manage to keep it niche, this will be a must listen for a German language audience.

Scooters in Berlin

Scooters are not legal in Germany yet but in select locations like here in Berlin you can try them out on private land.

This was my first ride and they are an immense pleasure to use once you get your feet positioned properly. I’m not sure yet what happens if you fall off one but I’m pretty sure it will be bad.

The law allowing these on the road has supposedly been signed but still has to work its way through some German institutions. What will happen when these are legal is obvious:

  • People will adopt them en masse because scooters are amazing.
  • Chaos will ensue everywhere because cities like Berlin have near zero infrastructure to facilitate these vehicles and are unable to adapt at the speed required.
  • There will be some accidents which will be blown up by the media.
  • A huge backlash will ensue as has already happened in many other places.
  • The German attitude towards risk and the ever-present machinations of the car lobby will get scooters banned.

I hope I’m proven wrong but it’s hard to see how it would go any other way.

Highlights for Street of Thieves

I choked and turned tail, fled once again, fled faced with myself; I left at a run; there are things that can’t be fixed. Actually, nothing can be fixed.
Men are dogs who rub against each other in solitude
Sometimes we sense the situation is escaping us, that things are getting out of hand; we become afraid and instead of calmly looking, trying to understand, we react like a dog caught in barbed wire, thrashing about madly until it slices open its throat.
All I want is to be free to travel, to earn money, to walk around quietly with my girlfriend, to fuck if I want to, to pray if I want to, to sin if I want to, and to read detective novels if I feel like it without anyone finding anything to object to aside from God Himself.
You say, oh, seventeen, that’s not so much, tell me about a thousand, two thousand, three thousand stiffs, but seventeen, seventeen isn’t anything extraordinary, and yet, and yet, it’s an enormous quantity of vanished life, dead meat, it’s cumbersome, in memory as well as in the cold-storage room, it’s seventeen faces and over a ton of flesh and bone, tens of thousands of hours of existence, billions of memories gone, hundreds of people touched by mourning, between Tangier and Mombasa.
and I said to myself that tourism was a curse, like gasoline, a trap, which brought false wealth, corruption and violence;
I have made use of the world. Life consumes everything—

Highlights for The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

But other foxes say that in that brief second the man realizes that physical life is a stupid and shameful mistake. And the first thing he tries to do is to thank the fox who has opened his eyes. And after that he corrects the error of his own existence.
But this boom doesn’t have much to do with the economy. It’s just that the money from all over Russia flows into Moscow and moistens life here a bit before it departs for off-shore hyperspace.
‘All those French parrots who invented discourse were high on amphetamines all the time. In the evening they take barbiturates to get to sleep, and they start off the morning with amphetamines so they can generate as much discourse as possible before they start taking barbiturates to get back to sleep again. That’s all there is to discourse. Didn’t you know that?’
The greatest of books have few readers, because reading them requires an effort. But it’s precisely that effort that gives rise to the aesthetic effect. Literary junk-food will never give you anything of the kind.
Until I learned from my own experience what love is, I thought of it as a specific kind of pleasure that tailless monkeys can derive from being together, in addition to sex.
Chekhov was right: a woman’s soul is essentially an empty vessel that is filled by the sorrows and joys of her beloved.
Two lonely hearts met among the pale blossoms of the Moscow spring. One told the other she was older than the city around, the other confessed that he had claws on his dick.
They always see me as their last chance. Grown men, and they don’t understand that they themselves are their last chance. But then, they aren’t even aware what kind of chance it is.

Facebook did a half-hearted push towards a more messaging focused experience during the conversational boom, but didn’t manage to make any inroads and abandoned the effort. Whatsapp could have been the beachhead but with the original leadership and vision gone, nothing interesting will happen there. Instagram (also without original leadership) is slowly being turned into sludge by whatever PMs Facebook has left.

There is room for something new to kill Facebook, that is if they don’t buy or copy it in time.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/technology/facebook-zuckerberg-wechat.html

Ilhan Omar is maybe even better than AOC. She definitely is more fearless.

Omar says the “hope and change”offered by Barack Obama was a mirage. Recalling the “caging of kids”at the U.S.-Mexico border and the “droning of countries around the world”on Obama’s watch, she argues that the Democratic president operated within the same fundamentally broken framework as his Republican successor.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/03/08/ilhan-omar-dean-phillips-minnesota-democratic-party-225696

A good argument that agile leadership is about delegating and divesting decision making power as far down as possible into the informal network.

“[Informal authority] is emergent, opt-in, always-on, and ever-informed by the collective knowledge of the group in an Agile way that formal authority can never match.”

https://medium.com/columbus-egg/agiles-ethical-dilemma-decision-distribution-and-the-trojan-war-36306b178fee

The things that will actually allow you to hire great engineers are things that are very hard to quantify, as listed in this article:

  • Permission and encouragement to do my job right
  • Working with and for smart people
  • Making a good career investment
https://www.codewithjason.com/make-organization-attractive-engineering-talent/

German podcast update

I’m swapping out Lage der Nation whose popularity has led them to lose focus and believe in their own hype for FAZ Einspruch.

Einspruch is solely focused on legal issues which is what I listened to Lage mostly anyway. In Lage I had to skip the regurgitation of international issues for a German audience (much better covered elsewhere), the explanation of very basic facts (like where Venezuela is located) and the incessant mansplaining. After a while not that much was left.

A lot of sense and clear rules about tool usage in this article about remote native organizations by Pablo Carranza. It makes me itch to go back to working remote however much I’m enjoying my current office setup.

Measure the health of your team or organization through the number of meetings: the more meetings and synchronous communications required, the worse the health is and the more reactive you are.

https://medium.com/cabify-product/on-site-friendly-fba1f9ba69dc

As soon as AOC got the nomination I already had a strong hunch that she was the real deal. Turns out I had no idea how much of a deal she was going to be.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-congress-interview-797214/

I’ve seen tons of people whose lives were made significantly easier because of parental credit lines which is good for them, but to be fair:

  1. People should disclose what they are receiving.
  2. There should be far more progressive taxation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/02/style/financial-independence-30s.html