The Agents chapter from Chip Huyen’s book “AI Engineering” is clear and enjoyable to read. She’s right that “the concept of an agent is fairly simple” but building something functional still looks like a massive lift.
Category: Reading
It’s rare to find writing in German as lithe and delightful as what Christoph Rauscher puts out. The monthly lists are one particularly good example. I’m learning new and interesting words still in most of his pieces.
I totally agree that “Writing = Design” and you should hire him for Design/Writing/Illustration: https://christophrauscher.de/writing/
RARE: Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning Enhancement for Large Language Models
Medical QA depends heavily on domain-specific knowledge that is not always available within pre-trained models, necessitating knowledge-based retrieval from external sources.
In addition medical knowledge evolves rapidly, and new treatments or updated guidelines may not be included in the model’s pertained corpus.
The question example for the reasoning process in Figure 1 is on a multiple-choice question. That seems overly simple.
In parallel, Commonsense Question Answering shares similar complexities with Medical QA, particularly in its reliance on structured multi-step reasoning and iterative evidence retrieval.
rStar (Mutual Reasoning Makes Smaller LLMs Stronger Problem-Solvers)
The rStar approach seems worth diving into. That will be the paper I read next.
Monte Carlo Tree Search
enabling the open source LLMs (LLAMA3.1) to achieve competitive performance with top closed-source LLMs like GPT-4 and GPT-4o.
We’ll come to this later in the paper. Their conclusion is that they can trick out LLAMA to get similar performance to GPT-4 in these domains.
Upper Confidence Bound applied on trees (UCT)
In contrast, rStar incorporates five distinct actions that enable more adaptive exploration:
A1: Propose a One-Step Thought. This action generates the next reasoning step based on previous steps, allowing the LLM to build the solution incrementally.A2: Propose Remaining Thought Steps. This action enables the LLM to produce all remaining reasoning steps in one inference, similar to CoT, for simpler questions.
A3: Generate Next Sub-question and Answer. This action decomposes the main problem into a sequence of sub-questions, each solved in turn. A4: Re-answer Sub-question. This action allows the LLM to re-answer a previously generated sub- question, increasing accuracy by using few-shot prompting.
A5: Rephrase Question/Sub-question. This action rephrases the question to clarify conditions and reduce misunderstandings, enhancing the LLM’s interpretation of the problem.
I need to trace the rStar algorithm after reading the original paper. The explanation here is too short.
These queries target information that can either support or refute the content of each statement, ensuring comprehensive factual verification.
How does this approach deal with (non-)negation that LLMs often have a lot of trouble with? From a language perspective it could just as easily say I can or can’t eat grapefruit (iykyk) based on the temperature that day but especially in a medical context these kind of errors can be catastrophic.
RARE achieves substantial gains, outperforming rStar by 5.17% on MedQA, 2.19% on MedMCQA and 2.39% on MMLU-Medical.
Even if these numbers are statistically significant (which they don’t say), these increases are really modest. I would not call this in any way “substantial”.
Looking at Table 1, RARE is as much of an increase over rStar as rStar is over the next best approach so from that perspective maybe you could call it significant. The difference between worst and best framework here is around 10% across CoT, RAG, SC, rStar, RARE.
evaluated on StrategyQA (SQA), CommonsenseQA (CQA), Social IQA (SIQA) and Physical IQA (PIQA)
The main question I have is from what percentage accuracy such a system would be reasonably possible to use in a real world context. Even at 90-95% that would seem like it would be too low to rely on when the stakes are high.
By enhancing LLMs with retrieval-augmented reasoning, RARE bridges the gap between open source models and state-of-the-art proprietary systems.
The framework has only been tested on open source models like LLaMA 3.1 and not on larger proprietary models such as GPT-4. This is due to the high number of API calls required by RARE’s iterative retrieval and reasoning process, making evaluation on closed source models prohibitively costly.
So here they repeat the statement that they’ve bridged the gap but they say they haven’t used this approach with a model like GPT-4 because the number of API calls would make it too expensive.
That leaves on the table that these kind of many-call approaches are open to OpenAI because they can do these numbers of calls much more affordably from inside the house. No real gap has been closed here and it shows again how big of an advantage OpenAI has.
That raises the question: What makes GPT-4 so good? Why does it perform so much better than open source models?
RARE is designed to identify a single reasoning trajectory that leads to a correct answer but does not necessarily optimise for the best or shortest path that maximises robustness.
Any integration into medical workflows must be supervised by qualified practitioners to ensure patient safety and ethical use.
Year in Review 2024
It’s been a bit of a grab bag year but overall not as bad as 2023 and a bunch of things seem to be on track.
Health
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Hans de Zwart’s end of the year media overviews are one of the highlights of what still happens on personal blogs for me. He’s a voracious reader and one of the rare people who acts on his moral clarity. Also, Hans is a great guy and I had the chance to briefly catch-up with him last year.
I’ll see if I can pull something together, but definitely go through his list. I always pick up more than a couple of interesting things to explore.
A paper where they fine tune an LLM to be able to answer some questions itself and figure out for which questions it needs to use a specialized tool. Intelligent tool usage seems like it would expand the use cases for LLM driven systems much more than any kind of scaling (real or imagined).
However, scholars note that their abilities are capped at approximately high-school levels
That seems like a noteworthy statement especially if you are looking to LLMs to provide “novel thinking”. It would seem much more that high school problems are abundantly available and relatively trivial so they see a specific focus.
For numerical answers in the MATH and SciBench datasets, we consider answers correct if they fall within a small tolerance range of the true value, specifically within ±5%.
Don’t really see why you could not get exact answers in a mathematical domain.
This performance gap on public benchmarks is likely due to the larger parameter count and specific optimization of state-of-the-art models on the open-source datasets.
Same as with the high school questions. These datasets are easily available and draw attention so the models overfit on them.
The model Ours-Pn demonstrates performance comparable to Base-Pf , both showing a significant improvement over the base model. This similarity indicates successful internalization of distilled knowledge from tools. The transition from Ours-Pn to Ours-Pi showcases further improvement in answer accuracy, resulting from the model’s enhanced ability to intelligently switch to tools for harder questions.
This is the core proposition of the paper. Looking at Table 1 with the accuracy percentages there is something of an improvement but it does not really look dramatic or so convincing that you could use these systems in any critical context.

We’re looking at increases of 10-20% and an accuracy that’s still well under 90% (which I’m also not convinced would be usable).
We introduced a novel two-component fine-tuning approach to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) in solving scientific problems of varying complexity.
One of the key issues with the paper I have is how much work the term “scientific problems” is doing. If this is published, people are going to think that the LLM is solving actual novel issues where in this case it’s just filling in relatively basic question/answer pairs that are well understood. Calling them problems is problematic.
The most interesting part of the paper is the appendix where you can see the actual questions and answers in the various datasets and the prompts they used (with example responses). The answers mostly are multiple choice which already influences how many of them you should expect to be correct.
Monolith: Real Time Recommendation System With Collisionless Embedding Table
I didn’t get that much from this paper, probably because it’s pretty high level and I don’t have a strong background in recommendation systems.
The approach is their Cuckoo Hashmap for embedding from which they can update parameters on the fly using existing data engineering pipeline technology.
Instead of reading mini-batch examples from the storage, a training worker consumes realtime data on-the-fly and updates the training PS. The training PS periodically syn- chronizes its parameters to the serving PS, which will take effect on the user side immediately. This enables our model to interactively adapt itself according to a user’s feedback in realtime.
Eight Things to Know about Large Language Models
A bunch of stuff that maybe was somewhat surprising a year ago but by now should be common knowledge for anybody even half following the developments in this field.
Some interesting bits in there but for the rest it’s a bit rah-rah because the author works at Anthropic.
In particular, models can misinterpret ambiguous prompts or incentives in unreason- able ways, including in situations that appear unambiguous to humans, leading them to behave unexpectedly.
Our techniques for controlling systems are weak and are likely to break down further when applied to highly capable models. Given all this, it is reasonable to expect a substantial increase and a substantial qualitative change in the range of misuse risks and model misbehaviors that emerge from the development and deployment of LLMs.
The recent trend toward limiting access to LLMs and treating the details of LLM training as proprietary information is also an obstacle to scientific study.
Witches Kitchen

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
I thought I’d dive back into history and read the original paper that started it all. It’s somewhat technical about encode/decoder layouts and matrix multiplications. None of the components are super exciting for somebody who’s been looking at neural networks for the past decade.
What’s exciting is that such a simplification generates results that are that much better and how they came up with it. Unfortunately, they don’t write how they found this out.
The paper itself is a bit too abstract so I’m going to look for some of those YouTube videos that explain what is actually going on here and why it’s such a big deal. I’ll update this later.
Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models
I came across this paper after the recent o3 high score on the ARC-AGI-PUB test. It’s a quick read and details how to scale LLMs at inference stage by generating new states at every node and so create a tree on which to perform DFS/BFS search algorithms.
A specific instantiation of ToT involves answering four questions: 1. How to decompose the intermediate process into thought steps; 2. How to generate potential thoughts from each state; 3. How to heuristically evaluate states; 4. What search algorithm to use.
For each of these steps they can deploy the LLM to generate the desired results which then scaled over the search space balloons the number of calls that need to be done (costing almost 200x the compute).
This isn’t your normal LLM stochastic parrot anymore. We’ve gone one up the abstraction chain and here we have a computer science algorithm running with LLM calls as its basic atoms.
Highlights for Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
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.
Highlights for Conversational Capacity
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.
So long Ribbonfarm!
Ribbonfarm retiring is another such ending in a time rife with them. I can’t overstate how influential it has been on my (our) thinking and practice. Tremendously impressive to think all of that was thought up by one person (who I still haven’t met).
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.
Alan Moore definitely is not wrong:
At the same time, I’m sure that fandom is sometimes a grotesque blight that poisons the society surrounding it with its mean-spirited obsessions and ridiculous, unearned sense of entitlement.
I’ve been waiting for an updated edition of “Designing Data-Intensive Applications” and now I see that Kleppmann is working on it. Reading the first edition has given me such an outsized advantage when architecting and building systems.
Wer täglich, manchmal mehrmals die Stunde, die Verdammten belächelt, ist wohl zu Recht in der Hölle. Twitter, so mussten wir uns eingestehen, war der Ort, den wir bewohnten, weil wir sehr schlechte Menschen waren.
Utterly utterly savage feuilleton about Twitter as a medium for poetry.
https://www.zeit.de/2024/45/clemens-setz-twitter-gedichtband-poesie-social-media/komplettansicht
Of course it takes a Dutch guy, an outsider, to blow the lid off Germany’s Nazi Bilionaires. David de Jong is doing great work and the German establishment tries to bury that as much as possible (because they know which side their bread is buttered on).
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/richest-german-nazi-billions
A damning but also entirely correct assessment of Elon Musk:
How degrading it must be: a 53-year-old man, notionally responsible for five companies, endlessly jostling for empty, phatic interactions with strangers. A clown forced to play for an audience he despises, an audience he cannot be sure even exists, and which gains with every tasteless joke a clearer understanding of what he is really worth.
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2024/09/how-elon-musk-killed-twitter
A third truth is that we have a generation in crisis and in desperate need of the best of what science and evidence-based solutions can offer. Unfortunately, our time is being spent telling stories that are unsupported by research and that do little to support young people who need, and deserve, more.
The experts agree that kids need to be cared for better. The experts also agree that people like Haidt are grifters who do not contribute anything into that direction.
Herbert believed that progress was an illusion because he was an ideologically motivated reactionary who hated the New Deal, the welfare state, the Civil Rights Movement, and any political leader who promised to help the oppressed.
Finally a piece about Dune 2 that doesn’t pull any punches.
https://slate.com/culture/2024/03/dune-2-movies-frank-herbert-books-meaning-differences.html
“Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
—Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, Dune
De Correspondent over de Wooncrisis
Grappig om te zien dat De Correspondent een serie maakt over de wooncrisis in Nederland:
https://decorrespondent.nl/14143/waarom-ik-geen-huis-wil-kopen/b196ee1f-4ff7-00f6-1463-37df41d85bb5
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.
From this massive list of science-fiction books by Noah Smith I’ve read and liked half or so which means that I probably should read the other half.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/my-sci-fi-novel-recommendations-888/
2023 Year in Review
Looking back on 2023 I can say that we made lemonade out of an overall pretty shit year.
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.
CulturaI
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.
Listening to the Trash Future team describe CulturePulse.ai and the digital twin profile created for entire populations seems very very reminiscent of “The Red Men” by Matthew de Abaitua which didn’t get the attention it deserved but was quite prescient.
https://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/e/waltz-with-the-sims/ (minute 23 and on)
Elements from the book such as the corporation known as “Monad”(!) and robotic public service utilities called “Dr. Easy”are looking back from our current hellscape period a bit too on the nose.
See Dr. Easy act in this short film: https://vimeo.com/68368877
I don’t think about the Roman Empire that much, but when I do it’s great to have it be because of Mary Beard who in this podcast (from the 18:48) talks about Zuckerberg’s fascination with August and how leadership then and now has not changed that much.
I can stop thinking about the Roman Empire, but this piece that draws an analogy between the Fall of the Romans and the End of Twitter is long overdue to be shared and still really good.
Over at twitter this dance was happening but with weirdo right wingers. They were always mad because no one likes them because they are hateful, stupid, and have absolutely no rizz. Because they only know other weirdo right wingers IRL, however, they were convinced that there was some sort of nefarious plot to dunk on them online and they wanted to know when Twitter would acknowledge them, the biggest victims known to man. At the head of this was, of course, your man there Elon who is mad that he isn’t funny. He became convinced that there was an army of bots or something making fun of him and he demanded to know why twitter was letting people be mean to him. “You say that you want weirdo right wingers to be on this site and yet! You allow people to be very mildly mean to them!!!!! Even when they are the richest man on the planet! So much for free speech, etc.”Anyway, he accidentally got forced to buy twitter for too much money because he is quite stupid, and now here we are.
Finally got around to reading Elizabeth Sandifer’s essay and if there was any doubt, this makes it clear how much of an unserious and malicious person Scott Alexander/Siskind is. Siskind’s writing deliberately pretends to be respectable to provide ideological cover to some real evil.
An amazing read about the first solo unsupported around the world sailing event and the maintenance that goes into doing something like that.
Highlights for Amp It Up
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 neverâ€ending pursuit of selfâ€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 noâ€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 shortâ€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 startâ€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 highâ€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 waitâ€andâ€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 thenâ€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 dayâ€toâ€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 stoneâ€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 startâ€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 industryâ€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.
Startâ€ups typically need hard drivers, passionate leaders, goalâ€oriented and achievementâ€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 longestâ€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.
A useful distinction between “code proofreading” and “code editing” by Hillel Wayne both of which are part of a standard PR process but neither is really a good fit there.
https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/code-review-vs-code-proofreading/
Highlights for Rise
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.
Highlights for Thinking in Bets
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.
Out with Bungacast and their tankie/nutter agenda
Several online situations today where I think I’m going insane so I might as well document them.
I listened to the last episode of Bungacast with the authors of the new book “The Covid Consensus”.
Both the book and the episode are highly questionable. There is little more there than pandering to the COVID sceptic horseshoe left1 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.
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.
- Those on the far left who would be far right if only the wind would blow from a different direction that day. [↩]
Highlights for Domain Driven Design
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.
Highlights for Bizim Büyük Çaresizliğimiz
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?
Highlights for The Ministry for the Future
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, OisÃn 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
Highlights for Executive Presence
But in the finals what distinguished one from another was all of the nonmusic stuff. The way they walked onto the stage, the cut of their clothes, the set of their shoulders, the spark in their eyes, and the emotion that played on their faces. All of these things established a mood either of tedium and awkwardness or of excited anticipation.
We learned that EP rests on three pillars: How you act (gravitas) How you speak (communication) How you look (appearance)
One surprise finding of our research is that, when it comes to communication, eye contact matters enormously. Being able to look your coworkers in the eye when making a presentation, or being able to make eye contact with the audience when making a speech, has a transformative effect—on your ability to connect, to inspire, to create buy-in.
Once you’ve demonstrated that you know how to stand with the crowd, you get to strut your stuff and stand apart. It turns out that becoming a leader and doing something amazing with your life hinge on what makes you different, not on what makes you the same as everyone else.
Like Bob Dudley, he or she projects an aura of calm and competence
Gravitas alone won’t secure you the corner office, of course: You’ve got to have the skill sets, the experience, and the innate talent to qualify for the job.
You will make mistakes. You will suffer the mistakes of others. Accidents completely out of your control will befall you. Each of these represents, however, a monumental opportunity to acquire and exude gravitas: to reach within yourself, at the height of the storm, for that eye of calm, and to speak and act from that place of clarity. Because when you demonstrate that your confidence cannot be shaken, you inspire confidence in others. At worst, you’ll win their forgiveness and forbearance. Very possibly, you’ll win their trust and loyalty.
“You want brutal optimism. Great leaders are brutally optimistic.”
But born leaders are made, oftentimes through their own systematic efforts. They live intentionally, guided by a set of values or a vision for their lives that compels them to seize every chance to put their convictions into practice. We gravitate to them because they telegraph that they know where they’re going—a rare and intoxicating certainty that most of us lack.
Smile more
Show humility
Stick to what you know
Be generous with credit
Surround yourself with people who are better than you
Empower others’ presence to build your own
Snatch victory from the jaws of defeat
Drive change rather than be changed
First, communication is not so much what you say but rather how you say it. And this you can condition and control. The tone and timbre of your voice; your choice and use of words; your inflection, articulation, and delivery; and even your body language determine what and how much your listeners take in—and what overall impression of you they will form and retain as a result. Other people’s perceptions of you are very much yours to shape.
Your communication skills, both verbal and nonverbal, are what ultimately win you the attention and mindshare of colleagues, clients, and friends.
what makes a speaker persuasive are elements such as passion (27 percent), voice quality (23 percent), and presence (15 percent)
Executives I interviewed cited inarticulateness, poor grammar, and an off-putting tone or accent as examples of verbal tics that undermine EP.
“Maybe it’s the weight of history or the depth of ancestry, but a British accent adds to the impression of heft,”
And here’s why: “Shrill voices have that hint of hysteria that drives men into a panic,”says Suzi Digby, a British choral conductor and music educator. “Women with a high-pitched tone will be perceived as not only unleaderlike but out of control.”
It’s imperative you cut to the chase, be highly selective with your data, and whenever possible share an illustrative story.
constantly referring to lists, reading your notes, using eighty-seven PowerPoint slides, shuffling papers or flip charts, and putting on your glasses the better to see what you’re reading are all actions that detract from your gravitas because they focus attention on your lack of confidence.
Know your material cold so that you needn’t rely on notes, and needn’t rely on your glasses to read notes. This will free you up to establish eye contact with the audience. And nothing is more important than eye contact
Demonstrating that willingness impresses people: It shows you have absolute command of your subject matter, and it signals to your audience that you’re so invested in the importance of your message that you’ll scuttle your carefully prepared speech to make sure they grasp it. That’s a recipe for engagement.
In this regard, professionals of color may hold an edge. In focus groups we conducted, countless participants confirmed that being a minority is itself a relentless exercise in reading others in order to anticipate and overcome reflexive bias or unconscious resistance.
“It’s the conversation before the meeting that establishes whether or not you’re worth listening to in the meeting,”one senior executive pointed out—a skill she refers to as “mastering the banter.”It shows, she explained, that you’re part of the larger conversation, someone who’s “one of the tribe.”
No one even bothers to assess your communication skills or your thought leadership capabilities if your appearance telegraphs you’re clueless.
In interview after interview, senior leaders told me that failure to come through on the grooming front signals either poor judgment or lack of discipline.
The signature look of the rock stars of this advertising extravaganza comprised two-day-old stubble, bespoke shorts, and designer flip-flops.
“Pick the most senior nonexecutive member of the board”—the director named the member—“and pick a fight with him. Make a challenging remark. Point out something as absolute rubbish.”
Her manager explained that, by never asking for help and not explaining to others what she was doing, Buck Luce was inadvertently signaling that (1) her agenda was more important than theirs and (2) she didn’t value other perspectives.
BUILD A PERSONAL BRAND THAT GRANTS YOU LOTS OF LATITUDE TO BE YOU—AND BE RELENTLESS IN PROJECTING IT
“It’s so easy to think that every slight might have something to do with your background or gender. It’s not to say there are no real snubs, but I’ve found that more often than not somebody’s coming from a place of ignorance rather than bigotry. If you’re overly sensitive to the possibility of intentional slights and withdraw as a result, you freeze yourself rather than move forward.”
Take a deep breath, walk into the meeting, and present with composure and professionalism, while exhibiting graceful gra
Ignore their questions, hoping they will eventually stop interrupting you and catch up with the rest of the
Standing up to speak with integrity, clarity, and confide
color with the speech impairment because she is clearly the better choice, as her performance measu
You have a glass of water just before you are announced and approach your audience with a welcoming smile, stand
this situation as a professional team
Initiate an off-the-cuff and off-the-record, casual conversat
assertive when speaking in front of the panel as they will find her grace and sub
The authentic and appropriate golf shirt which brings attention to what you migh
More than anything, how we look translates into respect—for ourselves, for others
Highlights for Cosmopolitanism
It’s important to insist, however, that to say that Muslims should go to Mecca for this reason isn’t to agree with Muslims. It is to give our reason for them to do something that they do for a different reason.
We go astray, similarly, when we think of a moral vocabulary as the possession of a solitary individual. If meanings ain’t in the head, neither are morals. The concept of kindness, or cruelty, enshrines a kind of social consensus.
There is nothing unreasonable, then, about my kinsmen’s belief in witchcraft. They think only what most people would think, given the concepts and beliefs they inherited; if you grew up with their beliefs and had their experiences, that is what you would believe, too.
If we are to encourage cosmopolitan engagement, moral conversation between people across societies, we must expect such disagreements: after all, they occur within societies.
Reasoning—by which I mean the public act of exchanging stated justifications—comes in not when we are going on in the usual way, but when we are thinking about change. And when it comes to change, what moves people is often not an argument from a principle, not a long discussion about values, but just a gradually acquired new way of seeing things.
There are Muslims, many of them young men, who feel that forces from outside their society—forces that they might think of as Western or, in a different moment, American—are pressuring them to reshape relations between men and women. Part of that pressure, they feel, comes from our media. Our films and our television programs are crammed with indescribable indecency. Our fashion magazines show women without modesty, women whose presence on many streets in the Muslim world would be a provocation, they think, presenting an almost irresistible temptation to men. Those magazines influence publications in their own countries, pulling them inevitably in the same direction. We permit women to swim almost naked with strange men, which is our business; but it is hard to keep the news of these acts of immodesty from Muslim women and children or to protect Muslim men from the temptations they inevitably create. As the Internet spreads, it will get even harder, and their children, especially their girls, will be tempted to ask for these freedoms too. Worse, they say, we are now trying to force our conception of how women and men should behave upon them. We speak of women’s rights. We make treaties enshrining these rights. And then we want their governments to enforce them.
as the bearer of some bottles of Dutch schnapps (for several centuries now an appropriate gift for a West African royal)
I live a long way away from the home of my earliest memories. Like many, I return there from time to time, to visit family and friends. And, again like many, when I am there I feel both that I do and that I don’t belong.
Cosmopolitans think human variety matters because people are entitled to the options they need to shape their lives in partnership with others.
The problem for Mali is not that it doesn’t have enough Malian art. The problem is that it doesn’t have enough money.
There is no good reason, however, to think that public ownership is the ideal fate of every important art object.
However self-serving it may seem, the British Museum’s claim to be a repository of the heritage not of Britain but of the world seems to me exactly right.
It is a fine gesture to return things to the descendants of their makers—or to offer it to them for sale—but it certainly isn’t a duty. You might also show your respect for the culture it came from by holding on to it because you value it yourself. Furthermore, because cultural property has a value for all of us, it can be reasonable to insist that those to whom it is returned are in a position to take trusteeship; repatriation of some objects to poor countries whose priorities cannot be with their museum budgets might just lead to their decay. Were I advising a poor community pressing for the return of many ritual objects, I might urge it to consider whether leaving some of them to be respectfully displayed in other countries might not be part of its contribution to the cosmopolitan enterprise of cross-cultural understanding as well as a way to ensure their survival for later generations.
My people—human beings—made the Great Wall of China, the Chrysler Building, the Sistine Chapel: these things were made by creatures like me, through the exercise of skill and imagination. I do not have those skills, and my imagination spins different dreams. Nevertheless, that potential is also in me.
Uncle Aviv, though, seemed to be equally open to people of all faiths. Perhaps that made him, by the standards of some of today’s noisiest preachers of Islam, a bad Muslim. But it also made him quite typical of many Muslims in many nations and at many times.
Those we think of as willing to claim that not everyone matters—the Nazis, the racists, the chauvinists of one sort and another—don’t stop with saying, “Those people don’t matter.”They tell you why. Jews are destroying our nation. Black people are inferior. Tutsi are cockroaches. The Aztecs are enemies of the faith. It’s not that they don’t matter; it’s that they have earned our hatred or contempt. They deserve what we are doing to them.
So-called realists about international relations often say that our foreign policy should pursue only our own national interest. They sound as though they’re saying that nobody matters but our own fellow countrymen. But if you ask them whether they think that we should engage in genocide if it is in our national interest, they typically deny that it could be in our national interest, because our national interest is somehow internally connected with certain values. To this line of response, I say, “Good. Then one of our values is that other people matter at least enough that we shouldn’t kill them just because it suits us.”
Still, if people really do think some people don’t matter at all, there is only one thing to do: try to change their minds, and, if you fail, make sure that they can’t put their ideas into action.
This constraint is another that the Shallow Pond theorists are indifferent toward. They think that it is so important to avoid the bad things in other lives that we should be willing to accept for ourselves, our families and friends, lives that are barely worth living.
For if so many people in the world are not doing their share—and they clearly are not—it seems to me I cannot be required to derail my life to take up the slack.
Part of the strategy of Unger’s argument is to persuade us that not intervening to save someone because we have something else worth doing is morally equivalent to killing him in the name of those other values. We should resist the equation.
But responding to the crisis of a child dying because her frail body cannot absorb fluids faster than they pour out of her is not really saving her, if tomorrow she will eat the same poor food, drink the same infected water, and live in a country with the same incompetent government; if the government’s economic policies continue to block real development for her family and her community; if her country is still trapped in poverty in part because our government has imposed tariffs on some of their exports to protect American manufacturers with a well-organized lobbying group in Washington
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/the-dangerous-populist-science-of-yuval-noah-harari
For how popular and questionable Yuval Noah Harari’s writing has been, it has barely seen any scrutiny. This critique by Darshana Narayanan is on point and most of the things in it were—I hate to say it—glaringly obvious from the get-go.
Highlights for Rust for Rustaceans
For example, there cannot be two parallel flows with mutable access to a value. Nor can there be a flow that borrows a value while there is no flow that owns the value.
Freeing the memory twice could have catastrophic consequences.
If you just want to leave some valid value behind, std::mem::take 2 is a good candidate. It is equivalent to std::mem::replace(&mut value, Default::default()); it moves value out from behind the mutable reference but leaves a new, default value for the type in its place.
but as we dive deeper into the more complex parts of Rust, you will need a more rigorous mental model to work with.
The aim of this chapter has been to establish a solid, shared foundation that we can build on in the chapters to come.
False sharing occurs when two different CPUs access different values that happen to share a cache line; while they can theoretically operate in parallel, they both end up contending to update the same single entry in the cache.
Simply stated, the orphan rule says that you can implement a trait for a type only if the trait or the type is local to your crate.
For example, consider a type like SshConnection, which may or may not have been authenticated yet. You could add a generic type argument to SshConnection and then create two marker types: Unauthenticated and Authenticated. When the user first connects, they get SshConnection. In its impl block, you provide only a single method: connect. The connect method returns a SshConnection , and it’s only in that impl block that you provide the remaining methods for running commands and such.
you can see the building blocks in the RawWakerVTable type in the standard library.
In a way, unsafe is misleading as a keyword when it is used to allow unsafe operations through unsafe {}; it’s not that the contained code is unsafe, it’s that the code is allowed to perform otherwise unsafe operations because in this particular context, those operations are safe.
In practice, the safety and performance trade-off for unchecked methods is rarely worth it. As always with performance optimization, measure first, then optimize.
and then document them rigorously.
Not all code is written in Rust. It’s shocking, I know.
Instead, as shown in Listing 3-2, we can introduce a generic parameter on Rocket, Stage, and use it to restrict what methods are available when.
Rust Fuzz Book (https://rust-fuzz.github.io/book/)
Rust Cookbook (https://rust-lang-nursery.github.io/rust-cookbook/), which suggests idiomatic so
the Tokio project has published mini-redis (https://github.com/tokio-rs/mini-redis/), an incomplete but idiomatic implementation of a Redis client and server that’s extr
Philipp Oppermann’s Writing an OS in Rust (https://os.phil-opp.com/) goes through the whole operating system stack in great detail while teaching you good Rust patterns in the process. I also highly recommend Amos’s collection of articles (https://fasterthanli.me/tags/rust/) if you want a wide sampling of interesting deep dives written in a conversational styl
Highlights for It’s Not About the Burqa
I might not have heard the word ‘feminism’ yet, but I knew that the way women and girls were treated in Saudi Arabia was wrong and that this was not the Islam I was taught, nor did it represent the home I was raised in.
I am Indian. Yoga runs through my blood, it’s as natural to me as my vitamin D deficiency.
And yet I was surrounded by a community that disapproved of this sort of independence. Any attempt to challenge the traditional roles was met with disapproval that quickly spread through gossip and manifested as social control.
Ideally the hijab mitigates instances where a woman is valued solely on her appearance and sexuality — though whether it successfully does that in such hyper-sexualized societies is a whole different discussion — rather it aims to place worth on her intellect, her actions, her character, and so forth.
hijab was and is supposed to be an expression of faith and Muslim identity — that’s where it began, and that is where it was supposed to end.
We find ourselves trying to categorize our decision by placing it in a framework that negates the idea of Islam entirely — a framework that believes religion to be contingent, merely a set of historical practices and rituals, that believes in a complete separation of religion governing our affairs; the idea we stick to because our religion dictates our way of life.
But no, I am just the frumpy hijabi on the tube, supposedly beaten into covering myself in this sweltering heat, a mute with no voice and no brain, indoctrinated by an extremist ideology and with no opinion of my own.
It was only after that appointment, once I had a name for what I was going through, that I started researching Islamic ways to cope with my emotions. But when I looked online, on social media and Muslim forums, I was struck by the overwhelming prevalence of one single idea: that you could not be Muslim and depressed, because a true Muslim would be content with what God had planned for them.
Therefore, when a Muslim whose mental health issues are tied up with one of these turns to the community, they often find nothing but judgement, when what they seek is the relief promised by the Islamic principles of mercy and forgiveness.
Muslims are constantly being reminded that we are all one ummah — that we are of one body, and when any limb aches, the whole body reacts with sleeplessness and fever.
But when other Muslims see that you are not praying, regardless of the reason, they can be extremely judgemental.
But there is a problem. This perspective disapproves of the hijab, the burqa, modest culture and other key elements of the Muslim female identity.
Mainstream feminism suggests that my choices and values can’t exist within its framework — if I make the decision to dress for my faith then I must be oppressed or submissive.
I grew up in a Muslim community whose cultural understanding of Islam denied equality of the sexes and rarely left room for female voices, let alone female empowerment.
They can’t entirely explain or point to the oppressor.
I don’t know a single woman who will tell their male manager that it’s period cramps that are hampering their work, and women who need to borrow a paracetamol or a sanitary towel hardly shout it across the office.
I think my father thought that this sudden determination to wear a hijab was down to religious zeal. I can’t really remember. I only knew that wearing it meant that you belonged.
Hijab has served me well. At times, it has covered my scars, allowing me to wear long-sleeved tops without anyone questioning what was hidden underneath. Other times, it has served to cover my earphones while I avoided listening to teachers drone on in class. Sometimes, very rarely, it has kept my head warm during cold winters. My hijab gave me a way to act, a code of conduct: smile courteously at strangers, open doors for people, help the elderly carry their shopping, and politely decline drugs/alcohol/male interaction as they are ‘not allowed in Islam’. My hijab was my armour, something for me to fiddle with when people asked me uncomfortable questions. It would allow me to look down and cover the acne growing on my forehead when someone attractive walked by. At times when I was tired or frustrated, I would untie and retie my hijab. Now, I do so with my hair. It’s not the same.
The fact is, shame is one of the biggest drivers of toxic masculinity within South Asian culture and especially amongst Muslim men.
and until we stop mollycoddling Muslim men there won’t be any substantial change.
There is a difference between guilt and shame. Guilt comes from recognizing one’s own mistake. Shame is heaped upon us by others. And there is a place for shame in society. It should be heaped upon the patriarchal cultures that subjugate women. It should be felt by the women who allow it to continue, both through their silence and their actions. It should be placed upon the men who stand by and allow their mothers, their sisters, their wives and their aunts to oppress women in the name of Islam, men who benefit from their privilege. And it also belongs to the men who abandon us to its effects, simply because they are too afraid to speak up.
My husband told me later that his father had an aversion to skirts and saw my wearing one as a personal affront. He had an aversion to and an opinion on many things, it would turn out.
The actual granting of my divorce was as simple as that, because Islam makes it that easy. It was culture and its contradictions that made my life complicated.
After my second divorce my father told my mother: ‘You will never stop my daughters doing what they want again.’ Having raised us as equals with our brother, he had had enough of his girls being maligned. After this, we stopped pandering to the community. Outwardly, I merged my eastern and western wardrobes, mixing kurtas with jeans and shawls. Inwardly, I stopped giving a damn about gossip. The worst had happened. I was the talk of the town and there was nothing more to lose.
My mother, of course, was still concerned. What decent man would marry me, especially now I was on TV? Nice Pakistani girls did not appear on screen.
The mindset that a woman might do the unthinkable and refuse a man, or that she could even kill a man through the shameful use of her sexuality, means that men believe women need to be controlled, and this theory is conveniently backed up by supposed theology, providing a safety blanket for a wider community that is polluted by chauvinism and fragile male pride.
I wonder if I would have been protected from the heartbreak and pain that came as a result of trying to please a community that demanded I live by their rules only.
Because women in such unregistered marriages cannot get a legal divorce, if the husband refuses to give an Islamic divorce, they are referred to as ‘chained women’.
Imams told me repeatedly that they were under pressure from their congregation not to register marriages as it would lead to women having legal rights.
People are surprised to learn that it is harder nowadays to get out of a UK mobile phone contract than it is to leave an Islamic marriage.
When Muslim women choose to take a stand and vocalize our opinions, there are always consequences to our dissent — especially because it flips the orientalist caricature of a passive, repressed woman being held hostage by the men in her community.
Timothy Mitchell, in Colonising Egypt, explains how colonial officers drew ‘a link between the country’s “moral inferiority”and the status of its women’. He explains that they regularly came back to the argument that ‘the retarded development of the nation corresponded [ . . .] to the retarded development of the Egyptian woman’.
Highlights for Becoming Trader Joe
We witnessed something very interesting: the United States had a quota for imported tuna. Once Peru’s quota had been filled, a biological miracle occurred right there on the canning line. What had been tuna was now pilchard, a member of the herring family, on which there was no quota.
The Adamsons were land-rich but cash-poor; they lacked the funds to develop the magnificent property. They were having to sell off pieces for far less than they potentially were worth.
The convenience store business is 90 percent real estate, 10 percent all other (merchandising, personnel, etc.). In real estate, it’s the tenant’s balance sheet that counts.
The question was never on the employment application forms, and it’s probably verboten to ask these days. But dyslexia lurks in the brain of every left-hander, which means, we see the world differently, sometimes profitably. That’s why, when I interview people, I try to get them to write something. At one point I was accused of running a cabal of left-handers at Trader Joe’s.
Today it would be fought over by the vulture capitalists, but neither ventures nor vultures were common in those days.
If all the facts could be known, idiots could make the decisions. —Tex Thornton
Trying to find an optimum solution in business is a waste of time: the factors in the equation are changing all the time.
This is the most important single business decision I ever made: to pay people well.
We really didn’t pay more per hour than union scale, but we gave people hours. Because union scale is so high, the supermarkets are very stingy with hours and will do anything to avoid paying overtime.
Time and again I am asked why no one has successfully replicated Trader Joe’s. The answer is that no one has been willing to pay the wages and benefits, and thereby attract—and keep—the quality of people who work at Trader Joe’s.
Much as I would like to pose as an altruistic visionary, my policy was grounded partly by the desire to stay un-organized by the Retail Clerks Union, which under the direction of the legendary Joe DeSilva terrorized the market industry of those days.
The problem with unions is not their pay scales; it’s their work rules and seniority rules.
In fairness, however, those work rules did not spring from the ground like dung beetles working it over. They came from inexcusable employer practices.
The buyers at the supermarket chains knew nothing about what they sold, and they don’t want to know. What they did know all about was extorting slotting allowances, cooperative ad revenue, failure allowances, and back-haul concessions from the manufacturers.
But the Byzantine management atmosphere at first Rexall and then Hughes Aircraft had convinced me that the only real security lies in having your own business, and this left-hander was well ahead of the curve on that one.
Also, I was convinced that I was on a holy mission in preserving a company owned significantly by its employees. My hope was that someday it would be 100 percent owned by them. On that one I proved to be wrong.
That’s why, throughout my career, my policy has been full disclosure to employees about the true state of our affairs, almost to the point of imprudence. I took a cue from General Patton, who thought that the greatest danger was not that the enemy would learn his plans, but that his own troops would not.
It absolutely addressed our prime market, the overeducated and underpaid people of California.
Being king of the low-price, high-value wine trade in California was one of the greatest satisfactions of my career.
But bran is a low-value product. They couldn’t afford to deliver it. Since they also packaged nuts and dried fruits, however, we somewhat reluctantly added them to the order. And that’s how Trader Joe’s became the largest retailer of nuts and dried fruits in California!
In the Insider’s Wine Report we gave the results of the wine tastings that we were holding with increasing frequency, as we tried to gain product knowledge. This growing knowledge impressed me with how little we knew about food, so in 1969, we launched a parallel series of blind tastings of branded foods: mayonnaise, canned tuna, hot dogs, peanut butter, and so on.
It’s the problems that create the opportunities. If a business is easy, every simple bastard would enter it.
For forty years supermarkets in California had operated on a simple formula: run weekend ads, promoting Best Foods Mayonnaise and Folgers coffee below cost to get the people in the door, and sell them full-profit milk and alcohol.
The progress of the internet and electronic interfaces is demanding new levels of trust between the retailer and the supplier. Under these new interfaces, the supplier automatically resupplies the retailer on the basis of scanning data, which goes online to the supplier without batch-by-batch purchase orders. Individual internet buying must also operate on severe rules of trust.
In 1982, we employed an Apple II to do most of the number crunching. That was a big help, but it didn’t solve the problem of the nightly communication to the bakers. Young Joe rigged up one of the first voice-activated computer systems in the U.S. to take the orders from the stores. It was daring and full of bugs, but it began to teach us about electronic ordering.
created an electronic ordering system on the Macs that fed into Guy Lundberg’s computer service. This was an enormous breakthrough. You need to understand that we were outsourcing not just the mainframe number crunching but the printing of the documents that it generated. High-speed printers were a big choke point. They had to spew out “picking”documents for the warehouses, “receiving”documents for the stores, and summaries for our Accounting Department.
Look at any supermarket ad. You’ll learn precious little about the provenance of any product in it; you’ll see only name, size, and price. Partly this is because the grocers themselves don’t know anything about the provenance of what they sell, and they don’t want to bring up the subject of individual differences.
A distinction between full-time and part-time is a false dichotomy, when it comes to productivity.
The real limit on what range of products we could carry was our product knowledge. I believe that the greatest advantage of a limited-SKU retailer is that the employees at all levels can become truly knowledgeable about what they sell
Giving discounts to people over sixty is, to borrow a phrase from Charlie Munger, “a type of dementia I can’t even classify.”Here you have the fastest-growing, most affluent part of the population, and you give them a discount? If anyone should get a discount, it’s the shrinking workforce, which subsidizes the old folks through their income and social security taxes.
All members of Central Management, including myself, worked in the stores those days as a matter of morale for the troops.
The same mentality that doesn’t want to rock the boat also tends to hold onto its job. You’ll encounter those guys again and again! Try to help them do a good job; make them feel important; and make them feel that you’re Playing the Game, not trying to abolish it.
Believe me, you have a system for everything that has to happen in your business—you just may not be conscious of it. And you probably have still other systems that are not needed. That’s why The Winning Performance calls for a “constitutional contempt for business as usual.”To practice “constitutional contempt,”you have to arrive at work every day with the attitude, “Why do we do such-and-such that way? Better yet, why do we do it at all?”
Why Did I Want to Get Rid of This “Free”Labor? Some of those guys steal. They steal by doing “fast counts”with your receiving clerk (some of those route men should be dealing blackjack in Vegas). That’s one big reason why the supermarkets went to “electronic receiving.”They also steal by putting high-value items in the “empty”cases they take back to the trucks. That was one reason I welcomed L’Eggs in its egg-shaped containers in the late 1960s: it was harder to hide L’Eggs in an empty soft drink case than flat-pack hosiery. Ask any grocer about this. The bread and cupcake guys are under heavy penalties if they bring too much “stale”back to the bakery. So they pick up out-of-code product from one store and “roll”it into the next. As the drug culture developed in the wake of Vietnam, route men evolved into natural distributors of the stuff. You never know when they’re going to arrive at the store: this makes labor scheduling difficult. Related to this . . . They always show up in your parking lot when it’s jammed. Or have you never been blocked from a parking space by a beer truck?
Because of internal theft, one of the most important non-merchandise suppliers may be a detective agency. It is very hard to find effective agencies. The nature of the work tends to attract unstable people.
And with eleven years of Stanford education between us, we could never be poor, just temporarily impecunious at times.
Not until months after Dan arrived did Thrifty Drug begin to have even the most basic financial reports needed to operate a $1.8 billion business.
This is one of the most important things I can impart: in any troubled company the people at lower levels know what ought to be done in terms of day-to-day operations. If you just ask them, you can find answers.
Wat is geweld? vroeg hij haar. Is het besmeuren van gebouwen gewelddadiger dan het blijven verbranden van kolen, terwijl we weten dat de broeikasgassen die daardoor in de atmosfeer terechtkomen een hoop leed veroorzaken, niet alleen voor toekomstige generaties, maar ook voor de minder gefortuneerde mensen die vandaag leven?
Good article about Malm. The answer to the question above should be: “All climate action is self-defense.”
It’s possible to draw a straight line from Malm’s book to the climate protests happening right now in Berlin where people block the city ring road, which makes him quite effective.
This is why recent developments in fields such as Afrofuturism and Black horror are so crucial. They provide a critical alternative to the alt-right’s exterminationist fantasy of an all-white future. Just as importantly, they offer readers other ways of thinking about time that do not fall in line with the fascist dream of a history that unfolds step-by-step along the lines of the Aryan dictator’s master plan.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/race-consciousness-fascism-and-frank-herberts-dune/
Year Note 2021
The days are long but the years are short.
One more year over and these are starting to look like a blur, so here’s what changed.
Work
I gave notice between Christmas and New Year 2020 and spent the first three months of the year in a weird in-between state mostly done with the old job, waiting for the new one to start, in between daycare closures and being sick.
Then the new job started and I fell into a blur of work that has continued for most of the rest of the year. It’s been a nice change but also very intense. Details are on LinkedIn.
Travel
I haven’t been anywhere in 2021 except to an island in Croatia last September with work which definitely was a highlight.
Will I travel again and why? I have no idea.
Learning
I finished Turkish. I now prefer it over German again especially for writing.
I gave up on Chinese and couldn’t motivate myself or figure out how to book the HSK2. I did learn a couple hundred characters which seem to mean the same thing as in Japanese.
I started learning Japanese which is a lot more enjoyable and for basic conversation seems a lot easier. There also has been some strengthening on the claim for a relationship between Turkish and Japanese so let’s see how it goes.
I should have started this way earlier and not listened to anybody who ever said something is difficult. What they mean is that something was difficult for them. Depending on their intelligence, many things may in fact be difficult for them. It shouldn’t matter to me or anybody else.
Kids
The daycare was closed at the start of the year until March or Easter, not sure anymore. Most of the rest of the year things were up and running.
We had a nasty burn wound on one kid that cut the summer break short and gave us several weeks of grief but in the end all turned out well.
Then at the end of the year we gave notice. We are leaving one very esteemed Kindergarten for another which I didn’t think would be possible with two kids in the middle of the year, but it is. We even had several more places willing to take our kids.
The kids are doing really well. After a brief bout of gymnastics which they enjoyed a lot, COVID made us switch to outdoor ice skating for now.
Sports
I finally killed my old fixie or to be more correct it nearly killed me. With it gone, I could finally shop for a real road bike.
Thanks to a ship blocking the Suez Canal and all the other supply chain difficulties in the world, there was a tremendous bike shortage most of the summer (who knows, maybe it’s still going on?) and I got any random bike I could get my hands on in the €1000 price range.
I also got most of the tools and kit that you would need for cycling. It’s the clichéed guy midlife hobby. The local Rapha store is more convenient and also cheaper than many of the cycling apparel you can buy dropshipped over Instagram.
I seem to have ridden 1231km on it and looking forward to doing many times that in the coming year. The details are on Strava.
I picked up bouldering again which when in a rhythm (every 4-5 days) I’m finding pretty enjoyable.
Health
I got boosted randomly on November 17th which was a lot earlier than I expected and before almost everybody I know. I am now AZ/Comirnaty/Comirnaty.
We survived another year. That’s it. That’s the year note.
Learn You a Haskell is Problematic
A couple of years ago I learned Haskell and to do that I read a book that is universally recommended for beginners and used to be available free online called “Learn you a Haskell for Great Good”.
The website seems to be gone at the moment: https://www.learnyouahaskell.com/
I didn’t think too much about it when I read it but after some other people were asking what they should use to learn Haskell I remembered these weird ‘jokes’ that are in the book to make the code a bit livelier.
Judging from the reviews online not that many people (in this case almost only men) have picked up on this. To be clear, it’s in extremely poor judgement to have picked these slurs in the first place and maybe you could get away with this stuff 5-10 years ago, that’s no longer the case.
I’ve screenshotted the examples below. There must be better books to learn Haskell with by now. I quickly switched to Clojure quickly for a bunch of reasons and you might do well not to take the detour that I did.



There could be more but I think you get the point.
There is a lot of truth to this Economist article about German humour and I refer back to it a lot.
Shortly after moving back to Germany in 2012 after decades of absence, mainly in Anglo-Saxon countries, I took my kids to the Berlin zoo. The children were two, four and seven at the time, and had already developed a keen sense of irony — or at least they understood that dad doesn’t always mean things literally, because, you know, it’s funny. So we queued for our tickets, trading silly jokes. Like me, the kids are dual citizens of America and Germany, though at that time, fresh from California, we still felt more American and more at ease in English. But we deliberately spoke German, to help us acclimatise to our new home. In a mood of levity, we approached the ticket window.
The lady behind it informed me that the price for the elder two was such-and-such and the littl’un was free. “What if I pay you a bit extra and you keep them?”I suggested. The kids chortled and started naming prices that might clear the market.
The lady stared back, horrified. Then, slowly, she leaned forward to look at my children, who stiffened. “Your dad does not really mean that,”she said. “He does not really want to sell you.”
That pretty much killed the mood for all four of us until somewhere between the giraffes and the polar bears. “Why did she say that?”my daughter asked, in English, as though out of an instinct for cultural self-preservation. As I pondered the question, I couldn’t help but think there was something peculiarly German about the lady’s reaction. First, Germans really, really struggle to grasp non-literal meanings. Second, Germans really, really can’t help but say when they think you’re wrong.
(contd.)
This opening story on literalism is great but there are more points in there, like the need to correct people and how isolating and grating this is for foreigners.
The point I take from it which also relates to the fact that street slang is segregated in Germany (as opposed to France). Educated Germans will not use words from the street register in normal conversation for fear of looking uneducated. You can see this for instance in the criticism Rezo gets for his use of mixed language in his serious videos. ‘Wrong’ use of language is used as an excuse to put people down. This happens to me as well every time I make a mistake.
The counterpoint is that anything said in High German is considered to be true or at least intended to be a statement of fact. The literalism is the baseline for all interactions at that level. They are literally incapable of feigning.
You can imagine the problems this creates and how unfixable they are because they are so deeply embedded in the culture. The only way out is through. The Rezo generation needs to create a new culture and the old needs to die off.
Leveled up in Turkish
Hanging out on Clubhouse from the beginning made me realize how lacking my Turkish was. I got on the app when Germany came online and I think Turkey launched shortly after that and only then did it kick off in the Netherlands.
That particular sequencing gave me an interesting perspective on how different cultures adopted the service. Germans went into panel hell. Most of the sessions were dominated by journalists and politicos and therefore were extremely boring. Turkey got online in no time and was dominated by influencers who launched all kinds of funky repeating formats and casual chatrooms where people were going until deep into the night (I would listen until 1-2 at night which in Turkey would be 2 hours later still). The Netherlands went into a marketing fervor with a strong showing of douchebags.
Clubhouse had its moment and fizzled, but tuning into the app again recently, I can say that it’s still there and with all the klout and hype chasers gone, things are again weird. Weird is good.
Lexicography
In the Turkish rooms I would hear words that I didn’t know every other sentence, sometimes entire concepts like kadının beyanı esastır. Finally, I had a situation where I was exposed to a high level of Turkish and I had the motivation to improve this.
I started noting these words down in Anki, which I had bought previously to study the HSK. Adding a word to my deck here and there was slow: switch to dictionary (now I use the official one), switch to Anki and write the card, switch back.
For some extra speed, I dug up a master word list I had made more than a decade ago. Back then I had read most of Orhan Pamuk’s then bibliography (Yeni Hayat, Sessiz Ev, Kara Kitap, Kar, Benim Adım Kırmızı) and then too found lots of words I didn’t know. I passed over them and wrote them down on a piece of paper. I transcribed these papers into a list and looked up some of the meanings. But this being before Anki, I had no real way to systematically learn these words and get better at Turkish. If I had, I would have improved steadily with each book I read and everything would have been great.
I went through this old word list letter by letter and over the course of a month made cards for all of the words in that list. The result of that effort is the 1000-word deck I have made available online now.
And now, after months of revising daily (life during the pandemic has been very exciting, why do you ask?) and also continuing to add words as I go—the recent events in Afghanistan made me add the half-Arab half-Farsi ridiculous Turkish word for charge d’affaires—I finally am out of “New” words. From now on it will just be polishing the lexicography of the deck, adding a word here and there and continuing to revise.
This also means I have capacity again to go back to studying HSK3. Or I might switch back to learning Japanese after all. Watching some anime recently and seeing Japanese speaking gaijin on Tiktok have revived this itch.
A feeling for Turkish (and Arabic)
So now what? I am a lot more confident when it comes to my Turkish after having learned a bunch of the words commonly in use in the higher echelons of society. I can now look for and find complicated words much more easily. My usage will likely be incorrect often, but I should be able to get by with my sizeable intuition for what remains the first language I learned (and learnd to read in). I can also consume complex material far more easily than I used to.
I now realize how many loan words from Arabic Turkey has. The exact numbers are obscure, but almost every uncommon word either is of Arabic origin or has an Arabic equivalent. This also explains why after being in Syria for a while I understood what people were saying without knowing Arabic.
I’ve also been amazed by how overloaded the language is for certain concepts like disaster (afet, badire, facia, buhran), sorrow (ıstırap, üzüntü, matem, yas, kahır, hicran, gam, tasa, keder, nedamet, teessür) and many others. Also all of those words are Arabic in origin except if I had to guess by word shape: üzüntü (I guessed right!).
White Turks
Delving into this part of the language and the people who use it, I came across the concept of White Turks. The division between white and black Turks underlies a lot of the dynamics of the Turkey of the past decades.
The people who I was listening to and whose language I am now emulating are usually white Turks. Me and my family originally are black Turks.
I’m sure I’ll never pass as white, though I’m now in a socio-economically better position than most white Turks in Turkey and most black Turks in Europe. Language is a key aspect of this division and when people clash it is usually the first weapon that they resort to. Now that I have levelled up, I don’t have to be exclusively on the receiving end of that weapon anymore.
Highlights for Site Reliability Engineering
Traditional operations teams and their counterparts in product development thus often end up in conflict, most visibly over how quickly software can be released to production. At their core, the development teams want to launch new features and see them adopted by users. At their core, the ops teams want to make sure the service doesn’t break while they are holding the pager. Because most outages are caused by some kind of change—a new configuration, a new feature launch, or a new type of user traffic—the two teams’ goals are fundamentally in tension.
SRE is what happens when you ask a software engineer to design an operations team.
The use of an error budget resolves the structural conflict of incentives between development and SRE. SRE’s goal is no longer “zero outages”; rather, SREs and product developers aim to spend the error budget getting maximum feature velocity. This change makes all the difference. An outage is no longer a “bad”thing—it is an expected part of the process of innovation, and an occurrence that both development and SRE teams manage rather than fear.
When humans are necessary, we have found that thinking through and recording the best practices ahead of time in a “playbook”produces roughly a 3x improvement in MTTR as compared to the strategy of “winging it.”The hero jack-of-all-trades on-call engineer does work, but the practiced on-call engineer armed with a playbook works much better.
However, some systems should be instrumented with client-side collection, because not measuring behavior at the client can miss a range of problems that affect users but don’t affect server-side metrics.
Toil is the kind of work tied to running a production service that tends to be manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, devoid of enduring value, and that scales linearly as a service grows.
At least 50% of each SRE’s time should be spent on engineering project work that will either reduce future toil or add service features. Feature development typically focuses on improving reliability, performance, or utilization, which often reduces toil as a second-order effect.
A product’s feature velocity will slow if the SRE team is too busy with manual work and firefighting to roll out new features promptly.
This kind of tension is common within a team, and often reflects an underlying mistrust of the team’s self-discipline: while some team members want to implement a “hack”to allow time for a proper fix, others worry that a hack will be forgotten or that the proper fix will be deprioritized indefinitely. This concern is credible, as it’s easy to build layers of unmaintainable technical debt by patching over problems instead of making real fixes. Managers and technical leaders play a key role in implementing true, long-term fixes by supporting and prioritizing potentially time-consuming long-term fixes even when the initial “pain”of paging subsides.
It’s easy to overlook the fact that once you have encapsulated some task in automation, anyone can execute the task. Therefore, the time savings apply across anyone who would plausibly use the automation. Decoupling operator from operation is very powerful.
The main upshot of this new automation was that we had a lot more free time to spend on improving other parts of the infrastructure. Such improvements had a cascading effect: the more time we saved, the more time we were able to spend on optimizing and automating other tedious work.
“Why don’t we gate the code with a flag instead of deleting it?”
If we release 100 unrelated changes to a system at the same time and performance gets worse, understanding which changes impacted performance, and how they did so, will take considerable effort or additional instrumentation. If the release is performed in smaller batches, we can move faster with more confidence because each code change can be understood in isolation in the larger system.
There are many ways to simplify and speed troubleshooting. Perhaps the most fundamental are: Building observability—with both white-box metrics and structured logs—into each component from the ground up. Designing systems with well-understood and observable interfaces between components.
Some on-call engineers simultaneously experienced what they believed to be a failure of the corporate network and relocated to dedicated secure rooms (panic rooms) with backup access to the production environment.
Google relies upon our own tools. Much of the software stack that we use for troubleshooting and communicating lies behind jobs that were crash-looping. Had this outage lasted any longer, debugging would have been severely hindered.
De facto, the commander holds all positions that they have not delegated.
It is important to define postmortem criteria before an incident occurs so that everyone knows when a postmortem is necessary. In addition to these objective triggers, any stakeholder may request a postmortem for an event.
Writing a postmortem also involves formal review and publication. In practice, teams share the first postmortem draft internally and solicit a group of senior engineers to assess the draft for completeness. Review criteria might include: Was key incident data collected for posterity? Are the impact assessments complete? Was the root cause sufficiently deep? Is the action plan appropriate and are resulting bug fixes at appropriate priority? Did we share the outcome with relevant stakeholders?
Make sure that writing effective postmortems is a rewarded and celebrated practice, both publicly through the social methods mentioned earlier, and through individual and team performance management.
one of SRE’s guiding principles is that “team size should not scale directly with service growth.”
Performance Data describes how a service scales: for every unit of demand X in cluster Y, how many units of dependency Z are used? This scaling data may be derived in a number of ways depending on the maturity of the service in question. Some services are load tested, while others infer their scaling based upon past performance.
When deploying approximation to help speed development, it’s important to undertake the work in a way that allows the team to make future enhancements and revisit approximation.
By working one-on-one with early users, you can address those fears personally, and demonstrate that rather than owning the toil of performing a tedious task manually, the team instead owns the configurations, processes, and ultimate results of their technical work.
Load test components until they break. As load increases, a component typically handles requests successfully until it reaches a point at which it can’t handle more requests.
If you believe your system has proper protections against being overloaded, consider performing failure tests in a small slice of production to find the point at which the components in your system fail under real traffic
Its authors point out [Bur06] that providing consensus primitives as a service rather than as libraries that engineers build into their applications frees application maintainers of having to deploy their systems in a way compatible with a highly available consensus service (running the right number of replicas, dealing with group membership, dealing with performance, etc.).
Regardless of the source of the “thundering herd”problem, nothing is harder on cluster infrastructure and the SREs responsible for a cluster’s various services than a buggy 10,000 worker pipeline job.
We don’t make teams “practice”their backups, instead: Teams define service level objectives (SLOs) for data availability in a variety of failure modes. A team practices and demonstrates their ability to meet those SLOs.
Google has also found that the most devastating acute data deletion cases are caused by application developers unfamiliar with existing code but working on deletion-related code, especially batch processing pipelines
The most important principle in this layer is that backups don’t matter; what matters is recovery.
Was the ability to formulate such an estimate luck? No—our success was the fruit of planning, adherence to best practices, hard work, and cooperation, and we were glad to see our investment in each of these elements pay off as well as it did.
In short, we always knew that adherence to best practices is important, and it was good to see that maxim proven true.
At first, this race condition may occur for a tiny fraction of data. But as the volume of data increases, a larger and larger fraction of the data is at risk for triggering a race condition. Such a scenario is probabilistic—the pipeline works correctly for the vast majority of data and for most of the time. When such race conditions occur in a data deletion pipeline, the wrong data can be deleted nondeterministically.
The Google Search SRE team structures this learning through a document called the “on-call learning checklist.”
When standard operating procedures break down, they’ll need to be able to improvise fully.
Because of the rapid change of production systems, it is important that your team welcome any chance to refamiliarize themselves with a system, including by learning from the newest, rather than oldest, members of the team.
At some point, if you can’t get the attention you need to fix the root cause of the problems causing interrupts, perhaps the component you’re supporting isn’t that important.
Once embedded in a team, the SRE focuses on improving the team’s practices instead of simply helping the team empty the ticket queue. The SRE observes the team’s daily routine and makes recommendations to improve their practices.
A default to ops mode usually happens in response to an overwhelming pressure, real or imagined.
Any serving-critical component for which the existing SREs respond to questions by saying, “We don’t know anything about that; the devs own it” To give acceptable on-call support for a component, you should at least know the consequences when it breaks and the urgency needed to fix problems.
Usually, the SRE team establishes and maintains a PRR checklist explicitly for the Analysis phase.
For example, SRE might help implement a “dark launch”setup, in which part of the traffic from existing users is sent to the new service in addition to being sent to the live production service. The responses from the new service are “dark”since they are thrown away and not actually shown to users.
What happened The effectiveness of the response What we would do differently next time What actions will be taken to make sure a particular incident doesn’t happen again
Highlights for Radical Markets
Private property would become public to a significant extent and the possessions of those around you would, in a sense, become partly yours.
Although at first blush you might assume that the auction would allow the rich to buy up everything of value, reflect for a moment. What do you mean by “the rich”? People who own lots of businesses, land, and so forth. But, if everything were up for auction all the time, no person would own such assets.
George was more concerned about inequality than were the conservative followers of Smith, and he recognized that private property could stand in the way of truly free markets.
That paper was published in 1961. Its title, “Counterspeculation, Auctions, and Competitive Sealed Tenders,”
We were promised economic dynamism in exchange for inequality. We got the inequality, but dynamism is actually declining.
Because of these limitations, moral economies can feel constraining and antiquated when confronted with large-scale market societies. Unable to account for the needs of those far away, they may become hostile to outsiders and intolerant of internal diversity, fearing it will erode group values.
The economic wisdom of left and right did not cut to the core of the tensions in the basic structure of capitalism and democracy. Private property inherently conferred market power, a problem that ballooned along with inequality and that constantly mutated in ways that frustrated efforts by governments to solve it. One-person-one-vote gave majorities the power to tyrannize minorities. Checks, balances, and judicial intervention limited such tyranny, but did so by handing power to elites and special interest groups. In international relations, efforts to enhance cooperation and cross-border economic activity empowered an international capitalist elite that disproportionately benefited from international cooperation and faced nationalist backlash from the working class.
Joan Robinson
Beatrice Webb
the common ownership self-assessed tax
That is why governments often take the lead, using the power of eminent domain to create new commercial or residential districts. But eminent domain is often unfair and always politically controversial.
The wealthy were rewarded for doing nothing. Poor people who needed land had to pay vast prices to obtain it or else starve. Critics attacked these circumstances as perverse, and portrayed the rich, in fiction and nonfiction alike, as parasites (sometimes literally, as in Bram Stoker’s Dracula).
Walras believed that land should be owned by the state and the rents it generated should be returned to the public as a “social dividend,”either directly or through the provision of public goods.
Socialists agreed on only one point: that traditional private property and the inequality of its ownership posed significant challenges to prosperity, well-being, and political order.
In 1942, the prominent conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter predicted that socialism would ultimately replace capitalism.21 His view was that most economic activity in capitalist economies took place in corporations and that a corporation is just a bureaucracy in which “management”at the center issues orders to various workers. From this vantage point, it was a small step to an economy in which each industry was dominated by one or two gigantic corporations, with government regulation to ensure that they do not abuse their monopoly power, an outcome not much different from the central planning of socialism.
Most mainstream economists even today continue to assume that bargaining eliminates the monopoly problem.
Most of us think of the liturgy as the words chanted by members of a religious community. But the term originated in ancient Athens where it meant roughly “public works”and referred to the responsibility of the roughly 1,000 wealthiest citizens to fund the operations of the state, particularly the army and navy. How did the Athenians determine which citizens were the wealthiest? According to Demosthenes, any member of the liturgical class could challenge any other citizen he believed was wealthier to antidosis or “exchange.”36 The person being challenged would have to either assume the liturgical responsibility or exchange all possessions with the challenger. The system gives everyone an incentive to be honest despite the burdens of the liturgy. If you falsely claimed to be poorer than the top 1,000 so as to avoid the liturgical burdens, then you could end up being forced to exchange your possessions with someone who is poorer than you are.
Furthermore, control of everything would be radically decentralized; a COST thus combines extreme decentralization of power with partial socialization of ownership, showing that they are, perhaps surprisingly, two sides of the same coin.
As previously noted, our proposal would redistribute roughly one-third of the return on capital and thus would reduce the income share of the top 1% by 4 percentage points, or roughly half the difference between recent levels and the low points in the 1970s.
One cannot develop an attachment to a car that one uses for a few hours, and no one seems the worse for this. Fetishistic attachment to a privately owned automobile—an extremely expensive durable asset, which even enthusiasts seldom drive for more than an hour or two per day—is, thankfully, becoming a thing of the past.
As the economy grows, the revenues generated by the COST would be redistributed back to citizens, just as employees who own stock in their employers benefit when the employer’s profits increase. From Friedrich Engels to George W. Bush, commentators and politicians have argued that owning a share in the national capital stock, usually through the stock market or a home, could help stabilize politics and enhance support for policies that raise the value of the capital stock, a position supported by some research.
Building on Samuelson’s ideas, economist and political scientist Mancur Olson argued that small groups of well-organized special interests can use expenditures, lobbying, and other forms of political action to persuade the government to act in their interest rather than for the
public good.29 Much of the public ignores complex issues, like bank regulation, while the banks who can profit from government fund lobbying organizations that control the agenda. Many economists are cynical about collective decision-making because it seems so easy to manipulate. But not all of them view it this way. Again, enter our hero
First, a passionate minority can outvote an indifferent majority, solving the problem of the tyranny of the majority. Second, the outcome of the vote should maximize the well-being of the entire group, not the well-being of one subset at the expense of that of another.
Despite centuries of progress, markets for public goods are hopelessly deficient. If we are right about QV, then it should bring markets for public goods in line with markets for private goods, with incalculable benefits for all citizens.
QV would offer citizens the chance to feel their voice had been more fully heard, both helping them win on the issue most important to them and reconciling them to the losses they suffer. These features are much like the social effects of market economies for private goods. Because citizens tend to resent and feel coerced by rationing in planned economies, they experience the abandonment of planning as a blossoming of freedom, as was so clear with the collapse of communism in the 1980s and 1990s. When people have the freedom to choose what to spend their money on, they are afforded a sense of dignity and responsibility for the things they have and choose to forgo. A political culture based on such a market mentality could give people a stronger sense of dignity and responsibility in politics.
Yet such large-scale services at present are either provided by monopolistic corporations or by dysfunctional public authorities. Fear of the failures of these providers often leads us to wastefully retreat from public life behind the walls of our homes, our gated communities, our private servers, and our individual cars.
Wealthy countries, by definition, have a greater relative abundance of capital as compared to labor than do poor countries. It is thus natural that trade and migration should both benefit capitalists in wealthy countries and laborers in poor countries at the expense of laborers in wealthy countries and capitalists in poor countries.
Often it is in the rural and economically depressed regions where few migrants reside that opposition to migration is strongest.28 Workers in such areas see migration adding to economic vibrancy in other communities, but not in their own. They gain none of the ancillary social and cultural benefits that dynamic city-dwellers gain from migration, of increased variety in food, color in urban life, or exposure to other cultures that can expand career opportunities. Instead, they see the rest of their country moving in directions that distance it from their experience in ways that increase their isolation and consignment to the cultural periphery.
While migration offers enormous advantages to the migrants themselves and their families back home, to employers and owners of capital, and to the high-skilled workers who they complement and live among, migration offers few benefits to and imposes some costs on most workers in wealthy countries, who are already left behind by the forces of trade, automation, and the rising power of concentrated finance.
A political backlash against massive migration is not inevitable. Even in closed societies, migration receives political support as long as its benefits are widely distributed in a visible way.
Many of the sophisticated cultural elites most likely to object to this sort of unequal relationship should contemplate their own relationships to migrants. In our experience, most people living in wealthy cities who consider themselves sympathetic to the plight of migrants know little or nothing of the language, cultures, aspirations, and values of those they claim to sympathize with. They benefit greatly from the cheap services these migrants offer and rarely concern themselves with the poverty in which they live. The solidarity of such cosmopolitan elites is thus skin deep. But it is better than the open hostility many ordinary citizens of wealthy countries feel toward migrants.
Yet economic research suggests that diversified institutional investors have harmed a wide range of industries, raising prices for consumers, reducing investment and innovation, and potentially lowering wages.
A law firm that sued institutional investors, on the other hand, would be bringing a case against capital as a class.
The primary difference between the scenario we describe above and present practice, other than some advances in chat capacities, is that in the world we imagine, Facebook is open and honest about how it uses data and pays for the value it receives with money. The user’s role as a vital cog in the information economy—as data producer and seller—is highlighted.
The inability to earn money in these environments undercuts the possibility of developing skills or careers around digital contributions, as technoserfs know any investment they make will be expropriated by the platforms.
However, they have attracted only a few users with an ideological attachment to the idea. Most users prefer a network that is used by most of their friends and that offers higher quality services.
Unlike traditional unions, they combine labor stoppages and consumer boycotts—because, as noted, data laborers are simultaneously consumers. During a strike, Facebook would lose not only access to data (on the labor side) but access to ad revenues (on the consumer side). It’s as if autoworkers could pressure GM or Ford not only by stopping production but also by refusing to purchase cars. Also unlike traditional unions, which must struggle to maintain solidarity during strikes, the data unions could enforce the “picket line”electronically.
She realized, too, that in many ways her new cause, fighting to get her old life back, had given her more meaning and not just greater wealth than the past she idealized. She started to wonder what else might supply that meaning and whether her whole movement was not ultimately some sort of self-serving charade.
A COST on human capital might turn out to be politically popular because it penalizes the highly resented educated class and lazy people of all types, while rewarding ordinary workers for their labor.
It would be a mistake, however, to think that the current system is not coercive. In our current system, there is a wide gulf between educated elites whose native or acquired talents are highly marketable and those who have been left behind by changes sweeping the economy. The talented enjoy a kind of freedom, as they can select from among a variety of appealing jobs. These jobs allow them to quickly accumulate capital that they can depend on as they age, if they do not like the jobs that are available, or pick and choose among different levels of labor (part-time, enjoyable or rewarding but low-paying jobs in the nonprofit sector, etc.). Those with fewer marketable skills are given a stark choice: undergo harsh labor conditions for low pay, starve, or submit to the many indignities of life on welfare. Yet the waste of social resources when a talented person fails to realize her potential are far greater, and arguably their failure to work should be punished more harshly.
By giving every citizen a share of national wealth, a COST could make voters attend to the consequences of policies for a nation’s wealth and create a more cooperative spirit across class lines.
Moreover, some scholars have argued that by encouraging selfishness, markets undermine the trust that is necessary for markets to function.
Shalizi considers an estimate by Soviet planners that, at the height of Soviet economic power in the 1950s, there were about 12 million commodities tracked in Soviet economic plans. To make matters worse, this figure does not even account for the fact that a ripe banana in Moscow is not the same as a ripe banana in Leningrad, and moving it from one place to the other must also be part of the plan. But even were there “merely”12 million commodities, the most efficient known algorithms for optimization, running on the most efficient computers available today, would take roughly a thousand years to solve such a problem exactly once. It can even be proven that a modern computer could not achieve even a reasonably “approximate”solution
But if robots can drive cars, they can also make purchase orders, accept deliveries, gauge consumer sentiment, plan economic operations, and coordinate this activity at the level of the economy. At this macro level, the role of artificial intelligence in reshaping social organization has—bizarrely—received little attention.
“Helicopter Story” was one of the best pieces of sci-fi I’ve read in a while. All the more galling that it was ripped apart in a culture war free-for-all.
I have a special amount of hate especially for those people who feel like they’re on the good side but have an understanding of literature that is too shallow to contain something like this. I blame MCU, games and Disney for letting these people believe that what happens there is what’s possible and allowed in fiction.
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22543858/isabel-fall-attack-helicopter
Highlights for The Provos
He believed that the ‘blood sacrifice’ of a few would regenerate the national consciousness and lead, by force of Irish arms, to the eventual withdrawal of Britain from Ireland.
MacSwiney took his place in history not just because of his sacrifice but because of his portentous words. ‘It is not those who can inflict the most,’ he warned, ‘but those who can suffer the most who will conquer.’
Eight months earlier, Lloyd George had likened the prospect of meeting Collins to that of meeting a murderer and had described the IRA as ‘a small body of assassins, a real murder gang, dominating the country and terrorizing it’. Now he described its commander as ‘one of the most courageous leaders ever produced by a valiant race’.
An armed struggle on its own was getting nowhere unless you had the political support of the population.
weeks. There were twenty-seven of us at the beginning. The recruiting officer was very resolute and he put the fear of God into you. He told you that if you’re joining the IRA, it was a total and absolute commitment. It required sacrifice and it required dedication and it required honour above all. He told us everything that was bad about joining: imprisonment, death, very little money in your pocket, very few friends; it was going to be a hard slog, and a long hard road ahead of us. So gradually people st
It’s a situation somewhat analogous to Israel’s West Bank. We’re part of a state which we never wanted to be part of.
The ultimate aim of the Irish nation will never emerge from the political or constitutional platform. Indeed one is now expected to be more conversant with the teaching of Chairman Mao than those of our dead patriots.
You’re all asking me to get the army in?’ And they all said yes. So I picked up the phone and rang him. I said, ‘I’m pleading with you, Jim. Send in the army.’ And I’ll never forget his reply. ‘Gerry,’ he says, ‘I can get the army in but it’s going to be a devil of a job to get it out.’
Seeing British soldiers on the street, I got this sense that there’s someone there now to protect us, to defend us against these incursions into our area.
he had never fully embraced Goulding’s policy of taking the IRA ‘into the never-never land of theoretical Marxism and parliamentary politics’.
We realized that the Dublin crowd and the Dublin leadership were nothing other than con-men. They were only using the North as a base, a springboard to help them in their left-wing political field.
Although republicans could stand in elections to the parliaments at Westminster, Stormont and Dublin, no successful candidate ever took his or her seat since to do so would be to recognize the legitimacy of these institutions. The IRA’s whole existence and self-styled legitimacy rested on its refusal to recognize these parliaments which, to republicans, had no moral or legal authority.
But the people who defended the street stood their ground. The following morning there was just sheer elation and relief that the IRA were there to deal with that situation.
The army had done exactly as the Unionists’ Security Committee had demanded four days earlier — it had got tough. The result was summed up by Gerry Adams. ‘Thousands of people who had never been republicans now gave their active support to the IRA; others, who had never had any time for physical force now accepted it as a practical necessity.’
They are terrorists and that’s the end of the story. No rank, no glamour. They are terrorists. What did we do in Kenya? We didn’t call them Colonels or Majors or Brigadiers. We called them terrorists and they were hung. Same thing in Palestine. Terrorists there were caught and they were executed. No glory. Nobody cries over a dead body too long. A couple of days and they forget all about it.
If any young men had previously held back because they felt morally uncomfortable about killing, ‘Bloody Sunday’ removed any lingering restraint.
Every day they passed the office as they passed by in a black taxi [the ‘People’s Taxis’ that provided cheap transport] up and down the Falls Road and people would say, ‘there’s the Sinn Fein office’. The incident centres gave the party a physical presence.
Scant progress was being made. The British were offering the release of more prisoners but this did not ‘begin to meet the minimum of requirements’.
But the Provisionals were not interested in public relations. They wanted to talk about the declaration of intent which, to them, was the whole point of the truce. Allan and ‘HM’ said the Government could not now give this for three reasons: the Convention ‘must be given a chance publicly’; the Government was waiting for ‘a consensus of opinion to emerge in Britain’; and there was the danger of ‘a Congo-type situation resulting’.
How they fight is a matter of tactics and conditions, but fight they must. There can be no question of that. The enemy allows us no choice. It is an armed struggle because the enemy is armed. Because he establishes and protects his vested interests by force of arms. The cabinet ministers, the politicians, the warlords, the business interests, the profit makers — the Establishment — have all agreed on their objects and the course they will follow. They are armed mercenaries. We must be armed revolutionaries. We must be Active Republicans.
The warning, it said, ‘proved totally inadequate given the disastrous consequences. We accept condemnation and criticism from only two sources: from the relatives and friends of those who were accidentally killed, and from our supporters who have rightly and severely criticized us.’
If you could, you saved a bit of margarine or butter from your breakfast that morning and took it with you when you were brought out of the cell. They took you up to a small room at the top of the wing and all the uniforms were lined up there. As soon as you got the trousers on, you ripped the bottom off them to expose your back-end. Before you went out to the visit, you rubbed a bit of the margarine or butter on your rear-end. So when you got the parcel on the visit, you had to get your hand in between your legs and pass the thing up your rear-end. That’s how most things came in. Radios came in that way. Everything came in that way. It took a wee bit of skill and sleight of hand to do it. And you had to be quick.
The hatred prison officers and prisoners felt for each other was mutual and lasting. Nothing brought it home to me more forcefully than a production of Bobby Sands’ epic ‘The Crime of Castlereagh’ which I watched in a parochial hall in West Belfast. It was staged by former prisoners and prisoners out on parole or home leave. One scene depicted a prisoner being turned upside down whilst a prison officer with rubber gloves gloatingly searched his anus. As the officer was walking off stage, a shot rang out and he fell down dead. It was a dramatic piece of theatre. The packed audience, among whom were many of the Republican Movement’s most prominent figures, including members of the leadership, broke out in spontaneous applause and cheering. It was a chilling moment.
Furthermore, by the mid-eighties, the intelligence on which such interceptions and ambushes were mounted was far more precise, with sophisticated electronic surveillance supplementing the information supplied by agents and informers within the IRA’s ranks.
Such operations were, on the whole, difficult to carry out in urban areas like Belfast and Derry because of the risk to civilians and extremely difficult in South Armagh where the locals knew every suspicious-looking hedge, barn and ditch. Under the right circumstances rural areas like Tyrone offered a perfect killing field.
The IRA took hostage the family of Patsy Gillespie, strapped him into a car loaded with a thousand pounds of explosives and told him to drive to the checkpoint. The IRA told his family he would be released when he had carried out their orders. Patsy Gillespie became a ‘human bomb’ and when he arrived at the checkpoint the IRA detonated the explosives by remote control, killing him and five soldiers.
Because I totally distrust the British Government. I’ve had too many experiences in the past to be so naive as to trust the British Government.
The final solution is union. It is going to happen anyway. The historical train — Europe — determines that. We are committed to Europe. Unionists will have to change. This island will be as one.
Highlights for Nine Lies About Work
And from that point on she micromanaged me, and I realized that she was fear-based, both in how she thought of her bosses and in terms of how she ran her team.
The good news in all this for you, the team leader, is that what people care most about at work is within your control.
The big thing is that only on a team can we express our individuality at work and put it to highest use.
performance: 1. I am really enthusiastic about the mission of my company. 2. At work, I clearly understand what is expected of me. 3. In my team, I am surrounded by people who share my values. 4. I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work. 5. My teammates have my back. 6. I know I will be recognized for excellent work. 7. I have great confidence in my company’s future. 8. In my work, I am always challenged to grow.
The amounts of time and energy it takes to make a plan this thorough and detailed are the very things that doom it to obsolescence. The thing we call planning doesn’t tell you where to go; it just helps you understand where you are. Or rather, were. Recently. We aren’t planning for the future, we’re planning for the near-term past.
Their underlying assumption is that people are wise, and that if you can present them with accurate, real-time, reliable data about the real world in front of them, they’ll invariably make smart decisions.
Planning systems take the interpretation of the data away from those on the front lines, and hand it off to a select few, who analyze it and decipher its patterns, and then construct and communicate the plan. Intelligence systems do precisely the opposite—because the “intelligence”in an intelligence system lies not in the select few, but instead in the emergent interpretive powers of all front-line team members.
Each check-in, then, is a chance to offer a tip, or an idea that can help the team member overcome a real-world obstacle, or a suggestion for how to refine a particular skill.
And their shared insight, across the span of sixty years, is that it is far more powerful for a leader to free the most information and the most decision-making power than it is for that leader to craft the perfect plan.
Self-evaluation of goals isn’t really about evaluating your work, in other words: it’s a careful exercise in self-promotion and political positioning, in figuring out how much to reveal honestly and how much to couch carefully.
The company has asked you to evaluate yourself against a list of abstract goals that were irrelevant a couple of weeks after you wrote them down.
These leaders strive instead to bring to life for their people the meaning and purpose of their work, the missions and contributions and methods that truly matter. These leaders know that in a team infused with such meaning, each person will be smart enough and driven enough to set goals voluntarily that manifest that meaning.
A strength, on the other hand, is an “activity that makes you feel strong.”
The simplest answer is that, though we are deeply aware that each of us is unique, and that no amount of training or badgering will remove that uniqueness, it is still quite overwhelming for a busy team leader to allow himself to come face-to-face with the fact that each of his team members thinks differently, is motivated by different things, responds to relationship cues differently, and gets a kick out of different sorts of praise.
that leaders can’t be in the control business and must be in the intelligence, meaning, and empowerment business—the outcomes business.
As the author and speaker Simon Sinek said recently in his spot as guest editor for Virgin’s workplace blog, “So here’s a way you can fulfill your potential in the workplace: negative feedback . . . Negative feedback is where it’s at . . . After every project or anything that I do, I always ask somebody, ‘What sucks? What can I do better? Where is there room for improvement?’ I’m now to the point where I crave it. That’s what you want. You want to get to the point where you crave negative feedback.”
The truth, then, is that people need attention—and when you give it to us in a safe and nonjudgmental environment, we will come and stay and play and work.
People don’t need feedback. They need attention, and moreover, attention to what they do the best. And they become more engaged and therefore more productive when we give it to them.
For a team member, nothing is more believable, and thus more powerful, than your sharing what you saw from her and how it made you feel. Or what it made you think. Or what it caused you to realize. Or how and where you will now rely on her. These are your reactions, and when you share them with specificity and with detail, you aren’t judging her or rating her or fixing her. You are simply reflecting to her the unique “dent”she just made in the world, as seen through one person’s eyes—yours. And precisely because it isn’t a judgment or a rating, but is instead a simple reaction, it is authoritative and beyond question.
If you see somebody doing something that really works, stopping them and replaying it to them isn’t only a high-priority interrupt, it is arguably your highest-priority interrupt. Get into this habit and you’ll be far more likely to lead a high-performing team.
We tend to think that subjectivity in data is a bug, and that the feature we’re after is objectivity. Actually, however, when it comes to measurement, the pursuit of objectivity is the bug, and reliable subjectivity the feature.
Only certain people have “potential”; everyone has momentum. One team member’s might be more powerful than another’s, or speedier than another’s, or pointed in a different direction, but everyone has some. The question isn’t whether you inherently possess a lot of it or not. Instead, when it comes to momentum, the question is how much of it you have at this very moment, right now.
namely, that the speed and trajectory of her momentum at this very moment are a) knowable, b) changeable, and c) within her control.
And if we then institutionalize this thinking through our people-management processes and systems in the name of bringing predictability and control to our organization, we find that we have sacrificed common sense and humanity at the altar of corporate uniformity, and we shouldn’t be very surprised if our people chafe at the result.
Obviously, triage can be necessary in life, but it surely is not enough—it keeps things at bay, but it takes us away from ourselves. And in the end, balance is an unachievable goal anyway, because it asks us to aim for momentary stasis in a world that is ever changing. Supposing we ever get things just exactly in balance, we know for sure that something will come along and unbalance them and that we’ll be back to pushing our balance rock up the hill again.
You—and your organization—get them only if you create them, and you create them only through love.
Organizations are not powerless, but their power (and their name) comes from their ability to organize what is already there in plain view. Your organization, if it is careless, can crush your spirit, can diminish or ignore your daimon. But only you can animate it. Only you can bring love into your world at work.
This person didn’t find this work—she didn’t happen upon it, fully-formed and waiting for her. Instead, she made it. She took a generic job, with a generic job description, and then, within that job, she took her loves seriously, and gradually, little by little and a lot over time, she turned the best of her job into most of her job. Not the entirety of it, maybe, but certainly an awful lot of it, until it became a manifestation of who she is. She tweaked and tweaked the role until, in all the most important ways, it came to resemble her—it became an expression of her.
The same is true for you, of course. You have a unique relationship with the world, a relationship that reveals to you things that only you can see. It offers thread-weaving opportunities all the time, but the only person who knows if those threads are red is you. The world won’t do your weaving for you—it doesn’t care about your red threads. The only person who can stop and be attentive enough to identify these threads, and weave them intelligently into the fabric of your work, is you.
Ballet, as you know, is an unremittingly technical and demanding craft, but if you build technical craft on a loveless foundation, you net only burnout, because technical mastery absent love always equals burnout. Burnout isn’t the absence of balance but the absence of love.
If the people coming to work on your team could feel more like this, if you could help them take their red threads this seriously—not to make your people feel good about themselves, although that helps, but so they could share more with the world—what a beautiful and lasting contribution you and your team would make.
And yet these characteristics are curiously circumscribed: authenticity is important, right up until the point when the leader, authentically, says that he has no idea what to do, which then fractures his vision. Likewise, vulnerability is important until the moment when the leader’s comfort with her own flaws causes us to doubt her, and to question whether she is sufficiently inspirational. Apparently, we require authentic sureness and reassuring vulnerability, however contradictory those things may be.
If leading were easy, there would be more good leaders. If there were more good leaders, we might be just a little less focused on it.
The only determinant of whether anyone is leading is whether anyone else is following.
More specifically, we follow leaders who connect us to a mission we believe in, who clarify what’s expected of us, who surround us with people who define excellence the same way we do, who value us for our strengths, who show us that our teammates will always be there for us, who diligently replay our winning plays, who challenge us to keep getting better, and who give us confidence in the future.
Your ability to create the outcomes you want in your followers is tied directly to how seriously and intelligently you cultivate your own idiosyncrasy, and to what end. The deeper and more extreme your idiosyncrasy becomes, the more passionately your followers follow—and while this is frustrating to us when we happen to disagree with the ends of a particular leader, it is so nonetheless.
As a leader, you can’t be dismissive of this fear. You can’t tell your people to “embrace change”and to “get comfortable with ambiguity.”
We follow people who are really good at something that matters to us. We follow the spikes.
The truth that no two leaders do the same job in the same way. The truth that as much as we follow the spikes, they can also antagonize us. The truth that no leader is perfect—and that the best of them have learned how to work around their imperfections. The truth that leaders are frustrating—they don’t have all the abilities we’d like them to have. The truth that following is in part an act of forgiveness—it is to give our attention and efforts to someone despite what we can see of their flaws. The truth that not everyone should be, or wants to be, a leader—the world needs followers, and great followers at that. The truth that a person who might be a great leader for me might not be a great leader for you. The truth that a person who might be a great leader for one team, or team of teams, or company, might not be a great leader for another. The truth that leaders are not necessarily a force for good in the world—they are simply people with followers. They aren’t saints, and sometimes their having followers leads to hubris and arrogance, or worse. The truth that leaders are not good or bad—they are just people who have figured out how to be their most defined selves in the world, and who do so in such a way that they inspire genuine confidence in their followers. This isn’t necessarily good or bad. It just is. The truth that leading isn’t a set of characteristics but a series of experiences seen through the eyes of the followers. The truth that, despite all this, we reserve a special place in our world for those who make our experience of it better and more hopeful. And the truth that, through it all, we follow your spikes.
When we feel a fresh rush of energy after talking with someone, we need to stop and ask why. When we feel, in response to another human being, that mysterious attraction tugging on us—like a fish on a line, or like a needle twitching in a compass, an attraction that says Here, something is happening, something true and visceral and substantial, something that will change, however slightly, the arc of our future—we need to stop and ask why.
Rather, there was a clarion vision—“let freedom ring”—and then an unswerving commitment to intervene whenever and wherever progress toward that vision could be made, and to do so regardless of the personal or physical risks that any such action entailed. His approach was contingent, opportunistic, and incremental. It focused on imagined change, not on predictable execution.
Leading and following are not abstractions. They are human interactions; human relationships. And their currency is the currency of all human relationships—the currency of emotional bonds, of trust, and of love. If you, as a leader, forget these things, and yet master everything that theory world tells you matters, you will find yourself alone. But if you understand who you are, at your core, and hone that understanding into a few special abilities, each of which refracts and magnifies your intent, your essence, and your humanity, then, in the real world, we will see you. And we will follow.
I am immensely happy to see two friends launch Branch, a magazine about creating a sustainable internet. The way they put the magazine together mirrors the best practices of the future we should live in right now.
A lovely interview about the magic bus and the hippie period in Istanbul revolving around the Lale Pudding Shop which is still in business.
Een heerlijk artikel over het reilen en zeilen van de Oranjes en hoe het instituut niet veel meer dan een vehikel is voor zelfverrijking en slecht gedrag.
“The technology is not the hard part. It’s already invented, but we have to pay ourselves to install it fast. So, again, that’s an economic question, and it doesn’t work in capitalism. We have the means right now to arrange for everybody alive today to have adequate food, water, shelter, clothing, education, and healthcare, within the biosphere’s carrying capacity.”
A market of some sort may always exist, because we need to trade, but it could be so sharply regulated that it could exist on what economists call the margin, suitable for the toys, but not for the necessities of life, which should all be public utilities and part of a job guarantee and a living wage.
KSR talking about the fight ahead.
Highlights for Progress and Poverty
Foul things fled, fierce things tame; discord turned to harmony! For how could there be greed where all had enough? How could the vice, the crime, the ignorance, the brutality, that spring from poverty and the fear of poverty, exist where poverty had vanished? Who should crouch where all were freemen; who oppress where all were peers?
Where the conditions to which material progress everywhere tends are most fully realized—that is to say, where population is densest, wealth greatest, and the machinery of production and exchange most highly developed—we find the deepest poverty, the sharpest struggle for existence, and the most of enforced idleness.
This fact—the great fact that poverty and all its concomitants show themselves in communities just as they develop into the conditions toward which material progress tends—proves that the social difficulties existing wherever a certain stage of progress has been reached, do not arise from local circumstances, but are, in some way or another, engendered by progress itself.
The new forces, elevating in their nature though they be, do not act upon the social fabric from underneath, as was for a long time hoped and believed, but strike it at a point intermediate between top and bottom. It is as though an immense wedge were being forced, not underneath society, but through society. Those who are above the point of separation are elevated, but those who are below are crushed down.
The miner who, two thousand feet under ground in the heart of the Comstock, is digging out silver ore, is, in effect, by virtue of a thousand exchanges, harvesting crops in valleys five thousand feet nearer the earth’s center; chasing the whale through Arctic icefields; plucking tobacco leaves in Virginia; picking coffee berries in Honduras; cutting sugar cane on the Hawaiian Islands; gathering cotton in Georgia or weaving it in Manchester or Lowell; making quaint wooden toys for his children in the Hartz Mountains; or plucking amid the green and gold of Los Angeles orchards the oranges which, when his shift is relieved, he will take home to his sick wife. The wages which he receives on Saturday night at the mouth of the shaft, what are they but the certificate to all the world that he has done these things—the primary exchange in the long series which transmutes his labor into the things he has really been laboring for?
Increase in the amount of bonds, mortgages, notes, or bank bills cannot increase the wealth of the community that includes as well those who promise to pay as those who are entitled to receive. The enslavement of a part of their number could not increase the wealth of a people, for what the enslavers gained the enslaved would lose. Increase in land values does not represent increase in the common wealth, for what land owners gain by higher prices, the tenants or purchasers who must pay them will lose. And all this relative wealth, which, in common thought and speech, in legislation and law, is undistinguished from actual wealth, could, without the destruction or consumption of anything more than a few drops of ink and a piece of paper, be utterly annihilated.
Thus wealth, as alone the term can be used in political economy, consists of natural products that have been secured, moved, combined, separated, or in other ways modified by human exertion, so as to fit them for the gratification of human desires.
Capital is only a part of wealth—that part, namely, which is devoted to the aid of production.
For labor always precedes wages. This is as universally true of wages received by the laborer from an employer as it is of wages taken directly by the laborer who is his own employer.
For the creation of value does not depend upon the finishing of the product; it takes place at every stage of the process of production, as the immediate result of the application of labor, and hence, no matter how long the process in which it is engaged, labor always adds to capital by its exertion before it takes from capital in its wages.
It is never as an employer of labor that any producer needs capital; when he does need capital, it is because he is not only an employer of labor, but a merchant or speculator in, or an accumulator of, the products of labor.
Nor what Malthus failed to show has any one since him shown. The globe may be surveyed and history may be reviewed in vain for any instance of a considerable country20 in which poverty and want can be fairly attributed to the pressure of an increasing population. Whatever be the possible dangers involved in the power of human increase, they have never yet appeared. Whatever may some time be, this never yet has been the evil that has afflicted mankind.
The millions of India have bowed their necks beneath the yokes of many conquerors, but worst of all is the steady, grinding weight of English domination—a weight which is literally crushing millions out of existence, and, as shown by English writers, is inevitably tending to a most frightful and widespread catastrophe.
The real cause of want in India has been, and yet is, the rapacity of man, not the niggardliness of nature.
Labor was thus applied in the most inefficient and wasteful manner, and labor was dissipated in aimless idleness that, with any security for its fruits, would have been applied unremittingly.
I know of nothing better calculated to make the blood boil than the cold accounts of the grasping, grinding tyranny to which the Irish people have been subjected, and to which, and not to any inability of the land to support its population, Irish pauperism and Irish famine are to be attributed; and were it not for the enervating effect which the history of the world proves to be everywhere the result of abject poverty, it would be difficult to resist something like a feeling of contempt for a race who, stung by such wrongs, have only occasionally murdered a landlord!
I assert that, other things being equal, the greater the population, the greater the comfort which an equitable distribution of wealth would give to each individual. I assert that in a state of equality the natural increase of population would constantly tend to make every individual richer instead of poorer.
Stop labor in any community, and wealth would vanish almost as the jet of a fountain vanishes when the flow of water is shut off. Let labor again exert itself, and wealth will almost as immediately reappear.
Land, labor, and capital are the factors of production. The term land includes all natural opportunities or forces; the term labor, all human exertion; and the term capital, all wealth used to produce more wealth.
The natural order is land, labor, capital; and, instead of starting from capital as our initial point, we should start from land.
Rent, in short, is the price of monopoly, arising from the reduction to individual ownership of natural elements which human exertion can neither produce nor increase.
Thus interest springs from the power of increase which the reproductive forces of nature, and the in effect analogous capacity for exchange, give to capital. It is not an arbitrary, but a natural thing; it is not the result of a particular social organization, but of laws of the universe which underlie society. It is, therefore, just.
Nothing can be capital, let it always be remembered, that is not wealth—that is to say, nothing can be capital that does not consist of actual, tangible things, not the spontaneous offerings of nature, which have in themselves, and not by proxy, the power of directly or indirectly ministering to human desire.
Every one knows the tyranny and rapacity with which capital when concentrated in large amounts is frequently wielded to corrupt, to rob, and to destroy.
For labor and capital are but different forms of the same thing—human exertion. Capital is produced by labor; it is, in fact, but labor impressed upon matter—labor stored up in matter, to be released again as needed, as the heat of the sun stored up in coal is released in the furnace. The use of capital in production is, therefore, but a mode of labor.
One man will not work for another for less than his labor will really yield, when he can go upon the next quarter section and take up a farm for himself. It is only as land becomes monopolized and these natural opportunities are shut off from labor, that laborers are obliged to compete with each other for employment, and it becomes possible for the farmer to hire hands to do his work while he maintains himself on the difference between what their labor produces and what he pays them for it.
Wages depend upon the margin of production, or upon the produce which labor can obtain at the highest point of natural productiveness open to it without the payment of rent.
Three things unite to production—labor, capital, and land. Three parties divide the produce—the laborer, the capitalist, and the land owner. If, with an increase of production the laborer gets no more and the capitalist no more it is a necessary inference that the land owner reaps the whole gain.
And, hence, that the increase of productive power does not increase wages, is because it does increase the value of land. Rent swallows up the whole gain and pauperism accompanies progress.
The changes which constitute or contribute to material progress are three: (1) increase in population; (2) improvements in the arts of production and exchange; and (3) improvements in knowledge, education, government, police, manners, and morals, so far as they increase the power of producing wealth.
Under such circumstances, though nature is prolific, the man is poor. It is an easy matter for him to get enough to eat; but beyond this, his labor will suffice to satisfy only the simplest wants in the rudest way.
For, if labor-saving inventions went on until perfection was attained, and the necessity of labor in the production of wealth was entirely done away with, then everything that the earth could yield could be obtained without labor, and the margin of cultivation would be extended to zero. Wages would be nothing, and interest would be nothing, while rent would take everything. For the owners of the land, being enabled without labor to obtain all the wealth that could be procured from nature, there would be no use for either labor or capital, and no possible way in which either could compel any share of the wealth produced. And no matter how small population might be, if anybody but the land owners continued to exist, it would be at the whim or by the mercy of the land owners—they would be maintained either for the amusement of the land owners, or, as paupers, by their bounty.
The steam plow and the reaping machine are creating in the modern world latifundia of the same kind that the influx of slaves from foreign wars created in ancient Italy. And to many a poor fellow as he is shoved out of his accustomed place and forced to move on—as the Roman farmers were forced to join the proletariat of the great city, or sell their blood for bread in the ranks of the legions—it seems as though these labor-saving inventions were in themselves a curse, and we hear men talking of work, as though the wearying strain of the muscles were, in itself, a thing to be desired.
Free trade has enormously increased the wealth of Great Britain, without lessening pauperism. It has simply increased rent. And if the corrupt governments of our great American cities were to be made models of purity and economy, the effect would simply be to increase the value of land, not to raise either wages or interest.
Periods of industrial activity always culminate in a speculative advance of land values, followed by symptoms of checked production, generally shown at first by cessation of demand from the newer countries, where the advance in land values has been greatest.
Take the case of any one of these vast masses of unemployed men, to whom, though he never heard of Malthus, it to-day seems that there are too many people in the world. In his own wants, in the needs of his anxious wife, in the demands of his half-cared-for, perhaps even hungry and shivering children, there is demand enough for labor, Heaven knows! In his own willing hands is the supply. Put him on a solitary island, and though cut off from all the enormous advantages which the co-operation, combination, and machinery of a civilized community give to the productive powers of man, yet his two hands can fill the mouths and keep warm the backs that depend upon them. Yet where productive power is as its highest development they cannot. Why? Is it not because in the one case he has access to the material and forces of nature, and in the other this access is denied?
The proximate cause of enforced idleness with one set of men may be the cessation of demand on the part of other men for the particular things they produce, but trace this cause from point to point, from occupation to occupation, and you will find that enforced idleness in one trade is caused by enforced idleness in another, and that the paralysis which produces dullness in all trades cannot be said to spring from too great a supply of labor or too small a demand for labor, but must proceed from the fact that supply cannot meet demand by producing the things which satisfy want and are the object of labor.
When we speak of labor creating wealth, we speak metaphorically. Man creates nothing. The whole human race, were they to labor forever, could not create the tiniest mote that floats in a sunbeam—could not make this rolling sphere one atom heavier or one atom lighter. In producing wealth, labor, with the aid of natural forces, but works up, into the forms desired, pre-existing matter, and, to produce wealth, must, therefore, have access to this matter and to these forces—that is to say, to land. The land is the source of all wealth.
The reason why, in spite of the increase of productive power, wages constantly tend to a minimum which will give but a bare living, is that, with increase in productive power, rent tends to even greater increase, thus producing a constant tendency to the forcing down of wages.
Land being necessary to labor, and being reduced to private ownership, every increase in the productive power of labor but increases rent—the price that labor must pay for the opportunity to utilize its powers; and thus all the advantages gained by the march of progress go to the owners of land, and wages do not increase.
That as land is necessary to the exertion of labor in the production of wealth, to command the land which is necessary to labor, is to command all the fruits of labor save enough to enable labor to exist.
No increase of the effective power of labor can increase general wages, so long as rent swallows up all the gain.
Wherever the material condition of the laboring classes has been improved, improvement in their personal qualities has followed, and wherever their material condition has been depressed, deterioration in these qualities has been the result;
To make people industrious, prudent, skillful, and intelligent, they must be relieved from want.
Capital not only ceases to earn anything when not used, but it goes to waste—for in nearly all its forms it can be maintained only by constant reproduction. But land will not starve like laborers or go to waste like capital—its owners can wait. They may be inconvenienced, it is true, but what is inconvenience to them, is destruction to capital and starvation to labor.
The advantage but adds to rent.
We have passed out of the socialism of the tribal state, and cannot re-enter it again except by a retrogression that would involve anarchy and perhaps barbarism.
To affirm that a man can rightfully claim exclusive ownership in his own labor when embodied in material things, is to deny that any one can rightfully claim exclusive ownership in land.
The equal right of all men to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air—it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot suppose that some men have a right to be in this world and others no right.
The wide-spreading social evils which everywhere oppress men amid an advancing civilization spring from a great primary wrong—the appropriation, as the exclusive property of some men, of the land on which and from which all must live. From this fundamental injustice flow all the injustices which distort and endanger modern development, which condemn the producer of wealth to poverty and pamper the non-producer in luxury, which rear the tenement house with the palace, plant the brothel behind the church, and compel us to build prisons as we open new schools.
If chattel slavery be unjust, then is private property in land unjust.
There is nothing strange in the fact that, in spite of the enormous increase in productive power which this century has witnessed, and which is still going on, the wages of labor in the lower and wider strata of industry should everywhere tend to the wages of slavery—just enough to keep the laborer in working condition. For the ownership of the land on which and from which a man must live is virtually the ownership of the man himself, and in acknowledging the right of some individuals to the exclusive use and enjoyment of the earth, we condemn other individuals to slavery as fully and as completely as though we had formally made them chattels.
The ownership of land is the basis of aristocracy. It was not nobility that gave land, but the possession of land that gave nobility.
Whatever be the increase of productive power, rent steadily tends to swallow up the gain, and more than the gain.
The direct responsibility of master to slave, a responsibility which exercises a softening influence upon the great majority of men, does not arise; it is not one human being who seems to drive another to unremitting and ill-requited toil, but “the inevitable laws of supply and demand,”for which no one in particular is responsible.
Because I was robbed yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, is it any reason that I should suffer myself to be robbed to-day and to-morrow? any reason that I should conclude that the robber has acquired a vested right to rob me?
The primary and persistent perceptions of mankind are that all have an equal right to land, and the opinion that private property in land is necessary to society is but an offspring of ignorance that cannot look beyond its immediate surroundings—an idea of comparatively modern growth, as artificial and as baseless as that of the right divine of kings.
The child of the people, as he grows to manhood in Europe, finds all the best seats at the banquet of life marked “taken,”and must struggle with his fellows for the crumbs that fall, without one chance in a thousand of forcing or sneaking his way to a seat.
It is not that there is any real scarcity of land in California—for, an empire in herself, California will some day maintain a population as large as that of France—but appropriation has got ahead of the settler and manages to keep just ahead of him.
E. R. Taylor.
What is necessary for the use of land is not its private ownership, but the security of improvements.
It is not necessary to say to a man, “this land is yours,”in order to induce him to cultivate or improve it. It is only necessary to say to him, “whatever your labor or capital produces on this land shall be yours.”
Give a man security that he may reap, and he will sow; assure him of the possession of the house he wants to build, and he will build it. These are the natural rewards of labor. It is for the sake of the reaping that men sow; it is for the sake of possessing houses that men build. The ownership of land has nothing to do with it.
The complete recognition of common rights to land need in no way interfere with the complete recognition of individual right to improvements or produce.
If the best use of land be the test, then private property in land is condemned, as it is condemned by every other consideration.
A great wrong always dies hard, and the great wrong which in every civilized country condemns the masses of men to poverty and want, will not die without a bitter struggle.
That is to say, while the value of a railroad or telegraph line, the price of gas or of a patent medicine, may express the price of monopoly, it also expresses the exertion of labor and capital; but the value of land, or economic rent, as we have seen, is in no part made up from these factors, and expresses nothing but the advantage of appropriation.
The employers of labor would not have merely to bid against other employers, all feeling the stimulus of greater trade and increased profits, but against the ability of laborers to become their own employers upon the natural opportunities freely opened to them by the tax which prevented monopolization.
All fear of great fortunes might be dismissed, for when every one gets what he fairly earns, no one can get more than he fairly earns. How many men are there who fairly earn a million dollars?
We should reach the ideal of the socialist, but not through governmental repression. Government would change its character, and would become the administration of a great co-operative society. It would become merely the agency by which the common property was administered for the common benefit.
And so in society, as at present constituted, men are greedy of wealth because the conditions of distribution are so unjust that instead of each being sure of enough, many are certain to be condemned to want. It is the “devil catch the hindmost”of present social adjustments that causes the race and scramble for wealth, in which all considerations of justice, mercy, religion, and sentiment are trampled under foot; in which men forget their own souls, and struggle to the very verge of the grave for what they cannot take beyond. But an equitable distribution of wealth, that would exempt all from the fear of want, would destroy the greed of wealth, just as in polite society the greed of food has been destroyed.
Want might be banished, but desire would remain. Man is the unsatisfied animal. He has but begun to explore, and the universe lies before him. Each step that he takes opens new vistas and kindles new desires. He is the constructive animal; he builds, he improves, he invents, and puts together, and the greater the thing he does, the greater the thing he wants to do. He is more than an animal. Whatever be the intelligence that breathes through nature, it is in that likeness that man is made.
There is no such thing as the pursuit of pleasure for the sake of pleasure. Our very amusements amuse only as they are, or simulate, the learning or the doing of something. The moment they cease to appeal either to our inquisitive or to our constructive powers, they cease to amuse.
And it shows how prolific is our human nature. As the common worker is on need transformed into queen bee, so, when circumstances favor his development, what might otherwise pass for a common man rises into a hero or leader, discoverer or teacher, sage or saint.
Consider these things and then say whether the change I propose would not be for the benefit of every one—even the greatest land holder? Would he not be safer of the future of his children in leaving them penniless in such a state of society than in leaving them the largest fortune in this? Did such a state of society anywhere exist, would he not buy entrance to it cheaply by giving up all his possessions?
That each society, small or great, necessarily weaves for itself a web of knowledge, beliefs, customs, language, tastes, institutions, and laws. Into this web, woven by each society, or rather, into these webs, for each community above the simplest is made up of minor societies, which overlap and interlace each other, the individual is received at birth and continues until his death. This is the matrix in which mind unfolds and from which it takes its stamp. This is the way in which customs, and religions, and prejudices, and tastes, and languages, grow up and are perpetuated. This is the way that skill is transmitted and knowledge is stored up, and the discoveries of one time made the common stock and stepping stone of the next. Though it is this that often offers the most serious obstacles to progress, it is this that makes progress possible. It is this that enables any schoolboy in our time to learn in a few hours more of the universe than Ptolemy knew; that places the most humdrum scientist far above the level reached by the giant mind of Aristotle. This is to the race what memory is to the individual. Our wonderful arts, our far-reaching science, our marvelous inventions—they have come through this.
The incentives to progress are the desires inherent in human nature—the desire to gratify the wants of the animal nature, the wants of the intellectual nature, and the wants of the sympathetic nature; the desire to be, to know, and to do—desires that short of infinity can never be satisfied, as they grow by what they feed on.
and this unequal distribution of the wealth and power gained as society advances tends to produce greater inequality, since aggression grows by what it feeds on, and the idea of justice is blurred by the habitual toleration of injustice.
A community divided into a class that rules and a class that is ruled—into the very rich and the very poor, may “build like giants and finish like jewelers;”but it will be monuments of ruthless pride and barren vanity, or of a religion turned from its office of elevating man into an instrument for keeping him down.
It is in this way that petrifaction succeeds progress. The advance of inequality necessarily brings improvement to a halt, and as it still persists or provokes unavailing reactions, draws even upon the mental power necessary for maintenance, and retrogression begins.
Political economy and social science cannot teach any lessons that are not embraced in the simple truths that were taught to poor fishermen and Jewish peasants by One who eighteen hundred years ago was crucified—the simple truths which, beneath the warpings of selfishness and the distortions of superstition, seem to underlie every religion that has ever striven to formulate the spiritual yearnings of man.
What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power.
That our legislative bodies are steadily deteriorating in standard; that men of the highest ability and character are compelled to eschew politics, and the arts of the jobber count for more than the reputation of the statesman; that voting is done more recklessly and the power of money is increasing; that it is harder to arouse the people to the necessity of reforms and more difficult to carry them out; that political differences are ceasing to be differences of principle, and abstract ideas are losing their power; that parties are passing into the control of what in general government would be oligarchies and dictatorships; are all evidences of political decline.
There is a vague but general feeling of disappointment; an increased bitterness among the working classes; a widespread feeling of unrest and brooding revolution. If this were accompanied by a definite idea of how relief is to be obtained, it would be a hopeful sign; but it is not.
This is the truth that we have ignored. And so there come beggars in our streets and tramps on our roads; and poverty enslaves men whom we boast are political sovereigns; and want breeds ignorance that our schools cannot enlighten; and citizens vote as their masters dictate; and the demagogue usurps the part of the statesman; and gold weighs in the scales of justice; and in high places sit those who do not pay to civic virtue even the compliment of hypocrisy; and the pillars of the republic that we thought so strong already bend under an increasing strain.
For the man who, seeing the want and misery, the ignorance and brutishness caused by unjust social institutions, sets himself, in so far as he has strength, to right them, there is disappointment and bitterness. So it has been of old time. So is it even now. But the bitterest thought—and it sometimes comes to the best and bravest—is that of the hopelessness of the effort, the futility of the sacrifice. To how few of those who sow the seed is it given to see it grow, or even with certainty to know that it will grow.
I thought this was a great interview with Kim Stanley Robinson but it turns out the Corona virus has not rewritten our imaginations enough, not enough at all.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/the-coronavirus-and-our-future
Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media
An excellent overview of the issues around Slate Star Codex without having to read a single word of the blog yourself. That’s an excellent service.
I can’t say I’ve read a lot of Beyond the Beyond nor been much of a happy Wired consumer in any case, but it’s passing still marks the end of an era. I remember Bruce Sterling’s closing speeches at SxSWi as one of the highlights of the conference (me being too late an arrival to attend his house parties).
Highlights for Peaceful Parent Happy Kids
Despite the popular idea that we need to “express”our anger so that it doesn’t eat away at us, research shows that expressing anger while we are angry actually makes us more angry. This in turn makes the other person hurt, afraid, or angry, and causes a rift in the relationship. Rehashing the situation in our mind always proves to us that we’re right and the other person is wrong, which again makes us more angry as we stew. What works is to calm down, and then find a constructive way to address whatever is making us angry so that the situation is resolved, and our anger stops being triggered.
The real job is keeping your cup full so you have plenty of joy and presence to share with your child.
Parenting is about nurturing your child, which means noticing what she needs and trying to make sure she gets it. You are, after all, the grown-up. But we can be peaceful parents only to the degree that we “parent”ourselves.
Children freely, even enthusiastically, cooperate when they believe that we’re on their side. When they don’t have that belief deep in their bones, our standards of behavior seem unfair, contradicting what they perceive as their own best interests, whether that’s taking the biggest piece of cake or lying to us.
The happy news is that as you come to terms with your own childhood story, you subtly change your emotional availability to your child, and your child blossoms accordingly, whether she’s an infant or a nine-year-old.
In relationships, without quantity, there’s no quality. You can’t expect a good relationship with your daughter if you spend all your time at work and she spends all her time with friends, screens, or the sitter. So as hard as it is with the pressures of jobs and daily life, if we want a better relationship with our children, we have to free up the time—daily—to make closeness happen.
Every child benefits from Special Time to reconnect with each parent often, if possible every day. Think of it as preventive maintenance to keep things on track in your family. And if you’re having issues with your
Every difficulty is an opportunity to get closer, as you extend understanding and your child feels truly seen, heard, and accepted.
Children need to know deep in their bones that their parents adore them and take delight in their company.
Remember, getting dressed is your priority, not his. Your presence is what motivates him.
To parents, bedtime is the time they finally get to separate from their children and have a little time to themselves. To children, bedtime is the time they’re forced to separate from their parents and lie in the dark by themselves. On top of that, children are exhausted and wound up, and parents are exhausted and fed up.
This isn’t about you right now, and your being upset won’t help. In fact, no matter what your child is talking about, you can process it later.
It may seem impossible, but if we feel the slightest glimmer of desire to turn things around, we can grab it. We don’t even have to know how. We can just choose love. We can always find a way to reach out to our child and reconnect. We can always find a way to heal things, even when we’re in a cycle of negativity that’s gone too far.
By contrast, when we think of ourselves as coaches, we know that all we have is influence—so we work hard to stay respected and connected, so our child wants to “follow”us.
What Empathy Isn’t
But before you can correct, you have to connect.
To know that their parents adore them, love to care for them, and care about their happiness. (Worthiness, security, self-esteem) To feel truly seen, known, accepted, and appreciated—even the “shameful”parts like anger, jealousy, pettiness, and greed. (Unconditional love) To stay connected with each parent through regular relaxed, playful, unstructured, affirming time together. (Intimacy, belonging) To work through challenging daily emotions. (Emotional wholeness, self-acceptance) To master new skills. (Mastery, independence, confidence) To act from one’s own motivations to impact the world. (Self-determination, power) To make a contribution. (Value, meaning)
Acknowledge your child’s perspective and empathize.
Allow expression of emotion, even while limiting actions.
Respond to the needs and feelings behind problem behavior.
When a desire can’t be granted, acknowledge it and grant it through “wish fulfillment.”
Tell the story so your child understands his emotional experience.
Teach problem solving.
Play it out.
Look him in the eye. Stay calm. He will either go blank (numbing himself), look away in shame, or look straight at you in defiance. Regardless, reach out for him.
We’ve absorbed the misguided view that children will be disobedient and manipulative unless we force them to “behave.”
Authoritarian parenting keeps children in a state of stress, worried about the next punishment (which may explain why kids who are spanked have lower IQs5).
But it does mean that babyproofing is better than trying to teach limits at this age.
Until your child has a chance to be heard, those feelings will be looking to spill out, disconnecting her, driving misbehavior and keeping her from being her usual sunny self. That’s why the single best thing you can do for your preschooler is to prioritize reconnecting with her when you’re reunited at the end of the day.
This parenting approach tends to raise kids who are self-centered, anxious, and not very resilient.
Authoritative. The final parenting style is the one that Baumrind’s research showed raises the best-adjusted kids. Her authoritative—as opposed to authoritarian—parents offer their children lots of love and support, like the permissive parents. But they also hold high expectations, like the authoritarian parents. Age-appropriate expectations, of course—they aren’t expecting a three-year-old to clean up her room by herself. But they may well be working with that three-year-old to help her clean up, over and over and over, so that by six she really can clean up her room herself. These parents are involved—even demanding. They expect family dinners, lots of discussion straight through high school, good grades, responsible behavior. But they also offer their children complete support to learn how to achieve these expectations. Importantly, these parents aren’t controlling like the authoritarian parents. They listen to the child’s side of things, they make compromises, and they cede control where possible. Their kids, not surprisingly, stay close to them—they often describe one of their parents as the person they would most trust to talk to about a problem. These kids usually do well in school, and they’re also the ones that teachers describe as responsible and well liked, simply nice kids who are a pleasure to have around.
Every child who has a sibling needs daily private time to bond with each parent.
We’re inviting him in, so that he’s part of the solution. He may have done a monstrous thing, but we’re communicating to him that he isn’t a monster. This is the foundation of his being able to face that he did something that crossed a line—and to forgive himself. It starts with our forgiving him.
Mastery isn’t a one-time feeling. It’s a way of approaching experience that through repetition becomes an acquired trait, a way of living life. It describes a person who loves to explore, learn, grow, apply himself, practice, master something, take joy in the whole creative process whether he “succeeds”or “fails”in the eyes of others, and move on to his next goal.
Every child is born with latent talent. Any child who enjoys the process of mastery has the internal motivation to polish his natural abilities to achieve—as long as the achievement he’s aiming for matters to him.
What might we say? “You really like doing that puzzle. . . . It’s the first one you took out again today.”(Empathize with his feelings.) “You’re trying all the different pieces to see what fits in that spot.”(Notice what he’s doing, which helps him feel seen and valued. In this case, we’re also articulating the strategy we see him using, which helps him be more conscious of what he’s doing, so he can evaluate whether this particular strategy is effective.) “I love doing puzzles with you!”(Communicate your enjoyment of sharing a task or project with him.) “It’s frustrating, isn’t it? But you’ve almost got it!”(Effective encouragement. By contrast, if we show him, we imply that he can’t figure it out for himself, which lessens his self-confidence.) “You did it! You got all the pieces to fit! You must be so proud of yourself!”(We’re mirroring his joy in his accomplishment, but notice we’re not telling him we’re proud of him, which implies that pride in him is something we can also withhold. Instead, we empower him by acknowledging that pride in himself is his, something he can take action to create.)
Blame is simply anger looking for a target, and it never helps us toward a solution.
The truth is, we always have more responsibility than we’d like to admit. And the more responsibility you take, the less defensive your child feels, so the more responsibility she’s likely to take in her own mind and, eventually, aloud.
A very thorough overview of William Gibson’s life and work which touches on a lot of familiar points. It reminds me that I should read Agency and makes me want to dive back and read the previous trilogies again.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/how-william-gibson-keeps-his-science-fiction-real
“Tell them the contours of patriarchy closed in, but haven’t crushed me. I’m the same person I’ve always been, broke but stronger.
Tell whoever asks, that I’m still right here, and I — by which I mean we, us, women voices, mine and others — we’re not going away. We’re speaking up, erasing patriarchal privilege by calling it out.”
A striking story of a woman who writes against all odds.
I had put the Ray Dalio book on my do-not-read pile even before knowing exactly how evil it is.
(kom eens langs)
Eerst praten we over van alles en niets.
Dan schenk ik thee. Doe er nog wat koekjes bij.
Ik had geld geleend van mijn moeder waarmee ik een goed gevulde tafel dek.
Je zegt ‘ik ben op dieet’ en eet niet, ik eet, dat geeft niet.
Dan praten we over ditjes en datjes.
Dan hebben we het over mij.
Ook al wil ik dat helemaal niet.
Je neemt me mijn fouten kwalijk.
We bekritiseren mij dunnetjes en praten over hoe jij alle kansen in het leven gegrepen hebt.
‘Begrijp me niet verkeerd, ik zeg dit omdat ik van je hou’, zeg je, waarom zou ik, mijn hart zet alles wat ik verkeerd opvat toch wel recht. ‘Het geeft niet’ zeg ik. ‘Of ik niet weet hoe close ze zijn.’ Ik lieg. Ik weet niet hoe close ze zijn.
Als je even je mond houdt, praat ik mezelf moed in.
Net als ik het kwijt wil, kijk jij op Instagram.
Je laat me het badpak zien wat je voor deze zomer gaat kopen. Ik zeg dat het heel mooi is.
We zijn twee jaar geleden voor het laatst naar zee geweest zeg ik. Ah nee dat kan toch niet als ik niet zwem dan stérf ik zeg je.
Ik zeg niet dat je niet doodgaat van zwemgebrek.
Dat er ander leed is waar mensen aan sterven, bijvoorbeeld een gebroken hart, weet je dat het echt mogelijk is dat een hart breekt, wetenschappers hebben dat bewezen zeg ik maar niet.
We drinken thee tot we erbij neervallen.
De tafel wordt afgeruimd, de asbakken raken vol.
Ik sta af en toe op, leeg de asbakken, schenk thee in.
Sorry voor de moeite zeg je.
Je zou de keuken kunnen opruimen maar omdat onze keuken klein is word je daar onwel, de muren komen op je af zeg je. Geeft niet.
Blijf zitten, ik ruim wel op.
Als je moet plassen vind je onze badkamer misschien wel leuk. Ik heb een nieuw douchegordijn gekocht op de markt.
Als je die leuk vindt zeg ik dat jij nog veel betere verdient en er valt een stilte. ‘Dank je schat’ zeg je.
Kom langs, we zullen op hetzelfde bankstel de volslagen leegte zijn.
En als je komt, neem dan dat geluk mee dat jou te klein is, misschien past het mij.
Highlights for Escapology
The first lesson Amiga learnt when she started to kill was how easy it is, and how utterly horrifying that can be.
All the homes here are assembled from huge 3D-printed parts and brightly coloured, though it’s hard to see in the meagre lighting. The brainchild of a design genie called Liberty, printed homes have become ubiquitous amongst under-mono communities, transforming them from shantytowns to neat, albeit crowded plastic villages. Everything modernizes eventually.
Having the right parts, being able to bear living inside himself, was more important.
Can’t entertain anything like that, even if he knows it could be true. Shock survives like this: focus on Sendai; forget everything else.
She’s not sure if she’s lying. But saying it makes it real, whether it’s truth or not.
Shoving emotion down should not feel this dangerous, she’s been doing it for years.
That’s why this is his family. People who allow you to be who you are, who’ll await your growth and change patiently, aware that everything happens in good time, they’re hard to come by.
As I said, we are fucked to a monumental degree.
She seemed different though. Less frosty, more like a human being. Odd quirk for a Cleaner. He wonders if it was new. She didn’t seem to know what to do with it. With herself. Only looked certain when she was killing.
She’s what was made of her, and so is he. And both of them want to change it. That’s why they’re here.
“Well, I’m a pragmatist. I say maybe things happen for a reason, maybe they don’t, but when you reach a point where you can take chance and turn it into intent, you don’t walk away. You act.”
Your problem, Amiga, is that you only see people in terms of yourself, and we all fail to match up, whether we could or not. I get it. I get the difference between what you do and what we’ve done.
Am I never going to stop feeling like an absolute shit around you? Not if you continue to be one.
Highlights for Dead Souls
The newcomer was somehow never at a loss and showed himself to be an experienced man of the world. Whatever the conversation, he always knew how to keep up his end: if the talk was of horse breeding, he spoke about horse breeding; if they were speaking of fine dogs, here, too, he made very sensible observations; if the discussion touched upon an investigation conducted by the treasury—he showed that he was not uninformed about legal wiles; if there were some argument about the game of billiards—in the game of billiards, too, he would not go amiss; if they spoke of virtue, on virtue, too, he reasoned very well, tears even came to his eyes; if on the distilling of spirits, then on the distilling of spirits he also knew his stuff; if on customs supervisors and officials, of them, too, he could judge as if he himself had been both an official and a supervisor.
Although, of course, they are not such notable characters, and are what is known as secondary or even tertiary, although the main lines and springs of the poem do not rest on them, and perhaps only occasionally touch and graze them lightly—still, the author is extremely fond of being circumstantial in all things, and in this respect, despite his being a Russian man, he wishes to be as precise as a German.
And in boarding schools, as we know, three main subjects constitute the foundation of human virtue: the French language, indispensable for a happy family life; the pianoforte, to afford a husband agreeable moments; and, finally, the managerial part proper: the crocheting of purses and other surprises.
But Selifan simply could not recall whether he had passed two or three turns. Thinking back and recalling the road somewhat, he realized that there had been many turns, all of which he had skipped. Since a Russian man in a critical moment finds what to do without going into further reasonings, he shouted, after turning right at the next crossroads: “Hup, my honored friends!”and started off at a gallop, thinking little of where the road he had taken would lead him.
A Russian driver has good instinct in place of eyes; as a result, he sometimes goes pumping along at full speed, eyes shut, and always gets somewhere or other.
He is among us everywhere, and is perhaps only wearing a different caftan; but people are light-mindedly unperceptive, and a man in a different caftan seems to them a different man.
Everything is desolate, and the stilled surface of the unresponding element is all the more terrible and deserted after that.
To such worthlessness, pettiness, vileness a man can descend! So changed he can become! Does this resemble the truth? Everything resembles the truth, everything can happen to a man. The now ardent youth would jump back in horror if he were shown his own portrait in old age. So take with you on your way, as you pass from youth’s tender years into stern, hardening manhood, take with you every humane impulse, do not leave them by the wayside, you will not pick them up later! Terrible, dreadful old age looms ahead, and nothing does it give back again!
And so your little shop fell into neglect, and you took to drinking and lying about in the streets, saying all the while: ‘No, it’s a bad world! There’s no life for a Russian man, the Germans keep getting in the way.’
Our ranks and estates are so irritated these days that they take personally whatever appears in printed books: such, evidently, is the mood in the air. It is enough simply to say that there is a stupid man in a certain town, and it already becomes personal; suddenly a gentleman of respectable appearance pops up and shouts: “But I, too, am a man, which means that I, too, am stupid”—in short, he instantly grasps the situation.
a new governor-general had been appointed to the province—an event known to put officials into a state of alarm: there would be reshuffling, reprimanding, lambasting, and all the official belly-wash to which a superior treats his subordinates.
During that time he had the pleasure of experiencing those agreeable moments, familiar to every traveler, when the trunk is all packed and only strings, scraps of paper, and various litter are strewn about the room, when a man belongs neither to the road nor to sitting in place,
but he came out just as the saying goes: ‘Not like mother, not like father, but like Roger the lodger.’
If you please your superior, then even if you don’t succeed in your studies and God has given you no talent, you will still do well and get ahead of everybody.
Don’t keep company with your schoolmates, they won’t teach you any good; but if you do, then keep company with the richer ones, on the chance that they may be useful to you. Do not regale or treat anyone, but rather behave in such a way that they treat you, and above all keep and save your kopeck: it is the most reliable thing in the world. A comrade or companion will cheat you and be the first to betray you in trouble; but a kopeck will never betray you, whatever trouble you get into. You can do everything and break through everything with a kopeck.
without gaining favor beforehand, as we all know, even the simplest document or certificate cannot be obtained; a bottle of Madeira must at least be poured down every gullet
But there are passions that it is not for man to choose. They are born with him at the moment of his birth into this world, and he is not granted the power to refuse them. They are guided by a higher destiny, and they have in them something eternally calling, never ceasing throughout one’s life.
Chichikov just smiled, jouncing slightly on his leather cushion, for he loved fast driving. And what Russian does not love fast driving? How can his soul, which yearns to get into a whirl, to carouse, to say sometimes: “Devil take it all!”—how can his soul not love it? Not love it when something ecstatically wondrous is felt in it?
He began to find myriads of faults in him, and came to hate him for having such a sugary expression when talking to a superior, and straightaway becoming all vinegar when addressing a subordinate.
Where is he who, in the native tongue of our Russian soul, could speak to us this all-powerful word: forward? who, knowing all the forces and qualities, and all the depths of our nature, could, by one magic gesture, point the Russian man towards a lofty life? With what words, with what love the grateful Russian man would repay him! But century follows century, half a million loafers, sluggards, and sloths lie in deep slumber, and rarely is a man born in Russia who is capable of uttering it, this all-powerful word.
Our Pavel Ivanovich showed an extraordinary flexibility in adapting to everything. He approved of the philosophical unhurriedness of his host, saying that it promised a hundred-year life. About solitude he expressed himself rather felicitously—namely, that it nursed great thoughts in a man. Having looked at the library and spoken with great praise of books in general, he observed that they save a man from idleness. In short, he let fall few words, but significant.
“Ah!”the colonel said with a smile, “there’s the benefit of paperwork! It will indeed take longer, but nothing will escape: every little detail will be in view.”
The commission for divers petitions existed only on a signboard. Its chairman, a former valet, had been transferred to the newly formed village construction committee. He had been replaced by the clerk Timoshka, who had been dispatched on an investigation—to sort things out between the drunken steward and the village headman, a crook and a cheat. No official anywhere.
“Now, what could be clearer? You have peasants, so you should foster them in their peasant way of life. What is this way of life? What is the peasant’s occupation? Ploughing? Then see to it that he’s a good ploughman. Clear? No, clever fellows turn up who say: ‘He should be taken out of this condition. The life he leads is too crude and simple: he must be made acquainted with the objects of luxury.’ They themselves, owing to this luxury, have become rags instead of people, and got infested with devil knows what diseases,
I say to the muzhik: ‘Whoever you work for, whether me, or yourself, or a neighbor, just work. If you’re active, I’ll be your first helper. You have no livestock, here’s a horse for you, here’s a cow, here’s a cart … Whatever you need, I’m ready to supply you with, only work. It kills me if your management is not well set up, and I see disorder and poverty there. I won’t suffer idleness. I am set over you so that you should work.’
“He who was born with thousands, who was brought up on thousands, will acquire no more: he already has his whims and whatnot! One ought to begin from the beginning, not from the middle. From below, one ought to begin from below. Only then do you get to know well the people and life amidst which you’ll have to make shift afterwards. Once you’ve suffered this or that on your own hide, and have learned that every kopeck is nailed down with a three-kopeck nail, and have gone through every torment, then you’ll grow so wise and well schooled that you won’t blunder or go amiss in any undertaking.
I often think, in fact: ‘Now, why is so much intelligence given to one head? Now, if only one little drop of it could get into my foolish pate, if only so that I could keep my house! I don’t know how to do anything, I can’t do anything!’ Ah, Pavel Ivanovich, take it into your care! Most of all I pity the poor muzhiks. I feel that I was never able to be …* what do you want me to do, I can’t be exacting and strict. And how could I get them accustomed to order if I myself am disorderly! I’d set them free right now, but the Russian man is somehow so arranged, he somehow can’t do without being prodded … He’ll just fall asleep, he’ll just get moldy.
We were educated, and how do we live? I went to the university and listened to lectures in all fields, yet not only did I not learn the art and order of living, but it seems I learned best the art of spending more money on various new refinements and comforts, and became better acquainted with the objects for which one needs money.
“One needs a supply of reasonableness,”said Chichikov, “one must consult one’s reasonableness every moment, conduct a friendly conversation with it.”
He still did not know that in Russia, in Moscow and other cities, there are such wizards to be found, whose life is an inexplicable riddle. He seems to have spent everything, is up to his ears in debt, has no resources anywhere, and the dinner that is being given promises to be the last; and the diners think that by the next day the host will be dragged off to prison. Ten years pass after that—the wizard is still holding out in the world, is up to his ears in debt more than ever, and still gives a dinner in the same way, and everybody thinks it will be the last, and everybody is sure that the next day the host will be dragged off to prison.
Highlights for Crucial Conversations
As it turns out, you don’t have to choose between being honest and being effective. You don’t have to choose between candor and your career. People who routinely hold crucial conversations and hold them well are able to express controversial and even risky opinions in a way that gets heard. Their bosses, peers, and direct reports listen without becoming defensive or angry.
When two or more of us enter crucial conversations, by definition we don’t share the same pool. Our opinions differ. I believe one thing; you another. I have one history; you another.
when people feel comfortable speaking up and meaning does flow freely, the shared pool can dramatically increase a group’s ability to make better decisions.
People who believe they need to start with themselves do just that. As they work on themselves, they also become the most skilled at dialogue. So here’s the irony. It’s the most talented, not the least talented, who are continually trying to improve their dialogue skills. As is often the case, the rich get richer.
Put succinctly, when you name the game, you can stop playing it.
Asking questions about what we really want serves two important purposes. First, it reminds us of our goal. Second, it juices up our brain in a way that helps us keep focused.
Third, present your brain with a more complex problem. Finally, combine the two into an and question that forces you to search for more creative and productive options than silence and violence.
On the other hand, if you make it safe enough, you can talk about almost anything and people will listen.
When you don’t feel safe, even well-intended comments are suspect.
if you don’t feel safe, you can’t take any feedback.
So instead of taking their attack as a sign that safety is at risk, you take it at its face—as an attack. “I’m under attack!”you think. Then the dumb part of your brain kicks in and you respond in kind. Or maybe you try to escape.
Silence consists of any act to purposefully withhold information from the pool of meaning. It’s almost always done as a means of avoiding potential problems, and it always restricts the flow of meaning.
Violence consists of any verbal strategy that attempts to convince, control, or compel others to your point of view. It violates safety by trying to force meaning into the pool.
The best don’t play games. Period. They know that in order to solve their problem, they’ll need to talk about their problem—with no pretending, sugarcoating, or faking. So they do something completely different. They step out of the content of the conversation, make it safe, and then step back in. Once safety is restored, they can talk about nearly anything.
Mutual Purpose means that others perceive that you’re working toward a common outcome in the conversation, that you care about their goals, interests, and values. And vice versa. You believe they care about yours.
Before you begin, examine your motives. Ask yourself the Start with Heart questions: • What do I want for me? • What do I want for others? • What do I want for the relationship?
Mutual Respect is the continuance condition of dialogue. As people perceive that others don’t respect them, the conversation immediately becomes unsafe and dialogue comes to a screeching halt.
Ask the following question to determine when Mutual Respect is at risk: • Do others believe I respect them?
We Start with Heart by committing to stay in the conversation until we invent a solution that serves a purpose we both share.
We also have to be willing to verbalize this commitment even when our partner seems committed to winning. We act on faith that our partner is stuck in silence or violence because he or she feels unsafe.
Just after we observe what others do and just before we feel some emotion about it, we tell ourselves a story. We add meaning to the action we observed. We make a guess at the motive driving the behavior. Why were they doing that? We also add judgment—is that good or bad? And then, based on these thoughts or stories, our body responds with an emotion.
People who excel at dialogue are able to influence their emotions during crucial conversations. They recognize that while it’s true that at first we are in control of the stories we tell—after all, we do make them up of our own accord—once they’re told, the stories control us.
Question your feelings and stories. Once you’ve identified what you’re feeling, you have to stop and ask, given the circumstances, is it the right feeling?
Don’t confuse stories with facts. Sometimes you fail to question your stories because you see them as immutable facts.
Either our stories are completely accurate and propel us in healthy directions, or they’re quite inaccurate but justify our current behavior—making us feel good about ourselves and calling for no need to change.
These five tools can be easily remembered with the acronym STATE. It stands for: • Share your facts • Tell your story • Ask for others’ paths • Talk tentatively • Encourage testing
To make matters worse, this strategy creates still another self-fulfilling prophecy. We’re so anxious to blurt out our unflattering conclusions that we say things in extremely ineffective ways. Then, when we get bad results (and we are going to get bad results), we tell ourselves that we just can’t share risky views without creating problems. So the next time we’ve got something sticky to say, we’re even more reluctant to say it. We hold it inside where the story builds up steam, and when we do eventually share our horrific story, we do so with a vengeance. The cycle starts all over again.
One of the ironies of dialogue is that, when talking with those holding opposing opinions, the more convinced and forceful you act, the more resistant others become. Speaking in absolute and overstated terms does not increase your influence, it decreases it. The converse is also true—the more tentatively you speak, the more open people become to your opinions.
You should never pretend to be less confident than you are. But likewise, you should not pretend to be more confident than your limited capacity allows. Our observations could be faulty. Our stories—well, they’re only educated guesses.
By tentatively sharing a story rather than attacking, name-calling, and threatening, the worried spouse averted a huge battle, and the couple’s relationship was strengthened at a time when it could easily have been damaged.
You simply have to win. There’s too much at risk and only you have the right ideas. Left to their own devices, others will mess things up. So when you care a great deal and are sure of your views, you don’t merely speak—you try to force your opinions into the pool of meaning. You know, drown people in the truth. Quite naturally, others resist. You in turn push even harder.
Open yourself up to the belief that others might have something to say, and better still, they might even hold a piece of the puzzle—and then ask them for their views.
By holding people accountable, not only do you increase their motivation and ability to deliver on promises, but you create a culture of integrity.
If others don’t want to talk about tough issues, it’s because they believe that it won’t do any good. Either they aren’t good at dialogue, or you aren’t, or you both aren’t—or so they think.
Every time you become aggressive or insulting, you give your spouse additional evidence that crucial conversations do nothing but cause harm.
Make it perfectly clear that once you’ve given an assignment, there are only two acceptable paths. Employees need to complete the assignment as planned, or if they run into a problem, they need to immediately inform you. No surprises. Similarly, if they decide that another job needs to be done instead, they call you. No surprises.
That is, people who improve their dialogue skills continually ask themselves whether they’re in or out of dialogue.
The other person has the ability to choose how to respond to your efforts. These skills are not techniques for controlling others; they are not tools for manipulating behavior or eliminating others’ agency. These skills have limits and do not guarantee that other people will behave in exactly the way you desire.
If yse these skills exactly the way we tell you to and the other person doesn’t want to dialogue, you won’t get to dialogue. However, if you persist over time, refusing to take offense, making your motive genuine, showing respect, and constantly searching for Mutual Purpose, then the other person will almost always join you in dialogue.
An incredibly sad and beautiful story of a father’s last days.
A bit of near-future fiction about crypto as a subsistence work enterprise.
I read this science-fiction short story which is reminiscent of Ann Leckie’s books in how it plays with gender and militarism, but I think this is better.
Highlights for Winners Take All
Instead, the system—in America and around the world—has been organized to siphon the gains from innovation upward, such that the fortunes of the world’s billionaires now grow at more than double the pace of everyone else’s, and the top 10 percent of humanity have come to hold 90 percent of the planet’s wealth.
How can there be anything wrong with trying to do good? The answer may be: when the good is an accomplice to even greater, if more invisible, harm.
For when elites assume leadership of social change, they are able to reshape what social change is—above all, to present it as something that should never threaten winners.
The only thing better than controlling money and power is to control the efforts to question the distribution of money and power.
They were supposed to make democracy more vital and effective for ordinary people, but preferably without challenging their fellow winners too much. They were to grow the public’s trust in institutions without digging too far into why the people leading those institutions were mistrusted.
Such an undertaking would be conflictual; it would name names of offending financial institutions; it would pick fights with people who might one day be useful to you.
you might conclude that you should do something to repair the systems that are working to keep Jacobs poor. But if those problems were solved, you wouldn’t have much of a win-win business to grow.
VCs and entrepreneurs are considered by many to be thinkers these days, their commercial utterances treated like ideas, and these ideas are often in the future tense: claims about the next world, forged by adding up the theses of their portfolio companies or extrapolating from their own start-up’s mission statement. That people listened to their ideas gave them a chance to launder their self-interested hopes into more selfless-sounding predictions about the world.
This power gave them great responsibility and exposed them to the possibility of resentment—unless they convinced people that the future they were fighting for would unfold automatically, would be the fruit of forces rather than their choices, of providence rather than power.
If you want to be a thought leader and not dismissed as a critic, your job is to help the public see problems as personal and individual dramas rather than collective and systemic ones.
The money can liberate the top thought leaders from the institutions and colleagues that might otherwise provide some kind of intellectual check on them, while sometimes turning their ideas into advertisements rather than self-contained work.
“Conversation with a Tax Collector About Poetry,”by Vladimir Mayakovsky
Scaling back her critique of the system had allowed her to be wildly popular with MarketWorld elites and more easily digested by the world at large; and so she became famous, which drew the system of sexism into her life as never before and heightened her awareness of it; and its ferocity convinced her not to take on that system but to conclude that it might never change; and this acquiescence made her turn from uprooting sexism to helping women survive it.
For the aspiring thought leader, it is less important to have an undergirding of scholarly research than it is to be your idea—to perform and hawk it relentlessly.
When a thought leader strips politics and perpetrators from a problem, she often gains access to a bigger platform to influence change-makers—but she also adds to the vast pile of stories promoted by MarketWorld that tell us that change is easy, is a win-win, and doesn’t require sacrifice.
The kinds of changes favored by the public in an age of inequality, as reflected from time to time in some electoral platforms, are usually unacceptable to elites. Simple rejection of those types of changes can only invite greater hostility toward the elites. It is more useful for the elites to be seen as favoring change—their kind of change, of course.
It wasn’t as though you had no choice but to compromise. You could easily develop your ideas and promote them through what he labeled “marginal magazines”and “militant conferences.”
The question of building more inclusive economies would be atomized into endless subcategories, until the human reality all but vanished.
What if these winners didn’t know everything? What if those outsiders who weren’t in the room knew a thing or two?
Instead of listening, absorbing, trying to decipher slowly and respectfully the dynamics of the space one had entered, the high-flying, high-priced consultant was expected to jump in and know things.
Consultants first find the “business need,”or the basic problem, based on evaluating the company and its industry. Then they “analyze.”This step requires “framing the problem: defining the boundaries of the problem and breaking it down into its component elements to allow the problem-solving team to come up with an initial hypothesis as to the solution.”This is the insta-certitude at work—hypothesis-making comes early. Then the consultants must “design the analysis”and “gather the data”to prove the hypothesis, and must decide, based on the results, whether their theory of the solution is right. If it is, the next step is “presenting”in a crisp, clear, convincing way that can win over clients understandably wary of fancy outsiders’ big ideas. At last, the solution comes to the “implementation”phase, through “iteration that leads to continual improvement.”
The protocols and those who employed them did have a lot to offer the world of social problems: rigor, logic, data, an ability to make decisions swiftly. As they spread into the work of battling disease or reforming education, they could do a great deal of good and allow people’s money and time to go further than they could have without it. But there was always a price, and part of that price was that problems reformatted according to the protocols were recast in the light of a winner’s gaze. After all, the definition of a problem is done by the problem-solver and crowds out other ways of seeing it.
Inspire the rich to do more good, but never, ever tell them to do less harm; inspire them to give back, but never, ever tell them to take less; inspire them to join the solution, but never, ever accuse them of being part of the problem.
Leave us alone in the competitive marketplace, and we will tend to you after the winnings are won. The money will be spent more wisely on you than it would be by you. You will have your chance to enjoy our wealth, in the way we think you should enjoy it.
Generosity entitles the winners to exemption from questions like these.
King had argued that the circumstances of economic injustice, when examined, had something to do with the people in power, and that true generosity might mean restrained taking, not just the belated shedding of some of what had been taken.
There Bill Clinton would stand beside you and read your commitment to the room and praise you. This moment would become, among the doing-well-by-doing-good set, the coveted capstone to a career: People who were influential and/or rich but relatively unknown would bask in the celebrity-like glow.
Then there was a flurry of business-speak: “In order to reach the world that we want by 2030, collaboration and co-design are key.”
When private actors move into the solution of public problems, it becomes less and less of the public’s business.
The “they”were the rootless cosmopolitans’ less-rarefied fellow citizens, who in one place after another were gravitating to nationalism, demagogy, and resentful exclusion—and rejecting some of the elites’ most cherished beliefs: borderlessness, market cures for all diseases, inevitable technological progress, benign technocratic stewardship.
It is a way of doing good that allows them to ignore the fact that their democracies aren’t working well. Or, even more simply, it allows them to avoid the duty they might otherwise feel to interact with their fellow citizens across divides, to learn about the problems facing their own communities, which might implicate them, their choices, and their privileges—as opposed to universal challenges like climate change or the woes of faraway places like Rwandan coffee plantations.
“Probably people who get together in these congregations don’t think of what they’re doing as politics,”Rodrik said. “But of course it’s politics. It’s just a politics that has a different locus and has a different view of who matters and how you can change things, and has a different theory of change and who the agents of change are.”
But the same elite help, backed by the same noble intentions, can instead “disrupt”democracy when it “replaces the public sphere with all manner of private initiatives for special public purposes.”These latter works don’t simply do what government cannot do. They “crowd out the public sector, further reducing both its legitimacy and its efficacy, and replace civic goals with narrower concerns about efficiency and markets.”
The seasoned and astute private world-changer seeks to alter “the public conversation about which social issues matter, sets an agenda for how they matter, and specifies who is the preferred provider of services to address these issues without any engagement with the deliberative processes of civil society.”
“So it’s not just the right thing to do,”Verveer said. “It’s the business-smart thing to do.”This was the highest praise a cause could receive.
The only problem-solving approach that worked in the modern world, according to Clinton, was one that made the people an afterthought, to be helped but not truly heard.
One’s American plutocrat friends didn’t necessarily have a problem with more energetic government in Africa. But they preferred win-win solutions in their own backyard, where energetic government sounded like it could end up being expensive.
Economistic reasoning dominates our age, and we may be tempted to focus on the first half of each of the above sentences—a marginal contribution you can see and touch—and to ignore the second half, involving a vaguer thing called complicity.
Her claim, rather, is that citizens of a democracy are collectively responsible for what their society foreseeably and persistently allows; that they have a special duty toward those it systematically fails; and that this burden falls most heavily on those most amply rewarded by the same, ultimately arbitrary set of arrangements.
To live in a society without laws and shared institutions that applied equally to all would be, Cordelli says, to live “dependent on the arbitrary will of another. It would be like a form of servitude.”
She says you are worth nothing without society because there can be no hedge fund managers, nor violinists, nor technology entrepreneurs, in the absence of a civilizational infrastructure that we take for granted.
Then there is the fact that absent a political system of shared institutions, anyone could dominate anyone. Every person with anything precious to protect would be at constant risk of plunder by everybody else.
“When it comes to effecting change in a way that makes them feel good—when it comes to building a business, lobbying for certain things, effectively helping some people through philanthropy, then they are agents,”Cordelli said. “They powerfully and intentionally can exercise change.”However, she went on, “When it comes to paying more taxes, when it comes to trying to advocate for more just institutions, when it comes to actually trying to prevent injustices that are systemic or trying to advocate for less inequality and more redistribution, then they’re paralyzed. There is nothing they can do.
German history reading list
I’ve been meaning to finish reading up on German history. If I read the five books below, I should be in a great place.
- Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire
- Iron Kingdom, the Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947
- History of Germany 1780-1918: The Long Nineteenth Century
- Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy
- Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939
Will Larson (whose new book is lying on my desk at work) writes a welcome long view on the technology career, something we will increasingly need to think about and come to terms with.
Highlights for My Struggle
As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it. Things that are too small to see with the naked eye, such as molecules and atoms, we magnify. Things that are too large, such as cloud formations, river deltas, constellations, we reduce. At length we bring it within the scope of our senses and we stabilize it with fixer. When it has been fixed we call it knowledge. Throughout our childhood and teenage years, we strive to attain the correct distance to objects and phenomena. We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. That is when time begins to pick up speed. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we know what is happening we are forty, fifty, sixty . . .
I do not want anyone to get close to me, I do not want anyone to see me, and this is the way things have developed: no one gets close and no one sees me.
They even squeeze out the most recent past: ask me what I did three days ago and I can’t remember.
Here I have to find other goals and come to terms with them. The art of living is what I am talking about.
I have always had a great need for solitude. I require huge swathes of loneliness and when I do not have it, which has been the case for the last five years, my frustration can sometimes become almost panicked, or aggressive.
When Vanja was around eight months old she began to have violent outbursts, like fits at times, and for a while it was impossible to reach her, she just screamed and screamed. All we could do was hold her until it had subsided. It is not easy to say what caused it, but it often occurred when she had had a great many impressions to absorb, such as when we had driven to her grandmother’s in the country outside Stockholm, when she had spent too much time with other children, or we had been in town all day. Then, inconsolable and completely beside herself, she could scream at the top of her voice. Sensitivity and strength of will are not a simple combination.
Perhaps even, at certain moments, joy. And isn’t that enough? Isn’t it enough? Yes, if joy had been the goal it would have been enough. But joy is not my goal, never has been, what good is joy to me? The family is not my goal either. If it had been, and I could have devoted all my energy to it, we would have had a fantastic time, of that I am sure.
I know I can change all this, I know we too can become that kind of family, but then I would have to want it and in which case life would have to revolve around nothing else. And that is not what I want. I do everything I have to do for the family; that is my duty. The only thing I have learned from life is to endure it, never to question it, and to burn up the longing generated by this in writing.
That does not mean I do not love them, because I do, with all my heart, it simply means that the meaning they produce is not sufficient to fulfill a whole life.
She had a liberating, gentle smile that I admired and found endlessly appealing, both because it did not embrace me or others like me, it belonged to the very essence of her being, to which only she herself and her friends had recourse, and also because her top lip was slightly twisted.
We were utterly hopeless, completely out of our depth, there was not a snowball’s chance in hell of anything coming of this, we wouldn’t even be good enough to perform at a school party, but although this was the reality we never experienced it as such. On the contrary, this was what gave our lives meaning.
But my pleasure was partly due to my father always perking up for such events. He became more friendly towards me, took me into his confidence, so to speak, and regarded me as someone to be considered, but this was not the most important thing, for this friendliness he showed to his son was merely one aspect of a greater magnanimity that infused him on such occasions: he became charming, witty, knowledgeable, and entertaining, which in a way justified the fact that I had such mixed emotions about him and was so preoccupied with them.
I was not exactly invulnerable, my weaknesses were there for all to see and exploit, and the fact that they didn’t, because they didn’t have enough insight to be able to see them, was surely not my problem.
They had been drinking before I arrived, and although he was kindness itself, it was threatening nonetheless; not directly, of course, because, sitting there, I didn’t fear him, but indirectly because I could no longer read him. It was as if all the knowledge I had acquired about him through my childhood, and which enabled me to prepare for any eventuality, was, in one fell swoop, invalid. So what was valid?
I could remember all the places I had been, all the rooms I had been in. Just not what happened there.
You know too little and it doesn’t exist. You know too much and it doesn’t exist. Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself.
What I ought to do was affirm what existed, affirm the state of things as they are, in other words, revel in the world outside instead of searching for a way out, for in that way I would undoubtedly have a better life, but I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t, something had congealed inside me, a conviction was rooted inside me, and although it was essentialist, that is, outmoded and, furthermore, romantic, I could not get past it, for the simple reason that it had not only been thought but also experienced, in these sudden states of clearsightedness that everyone must know, where for a few seconds you catch sight of another world from the one you were in only a moment earlier, where the world seems to step forward and show itself for a brief glimpse before reverting and leaving everything as before . . .
The box of Kleenex was a sign that here weeping and death had undergone inflation.
The zone that had come into existence when we first left the undertaker’s, and that seemed to make everything around me dead, or meaningless, had grown in size and strength.
We laughed, Tonje ran inside for her camera, and when she came out she put one arm around me and took a photo with the other hand outstretched. We were two children.
The fact that he could be more malicious to me than anyone else changed nothing, it was part and parcel of it, and in the context we lived, the hatred I felt for him was no more than a brook is to an ocean, a lamp to the night.
The sole difference, which is the difference between a child’s reality and an adult’s, was that they were no longer laden with meaning.
I didn’t care anymore anyway. But there had been days when I had cared, days when I had been on the outside and had suffered. Now I was only on the outside.
My father was an idiot, I wanted nothing to do with him, and it cost me nothing to keep well away from him. It wasn’t a question of keeping away from something, it was a question of the something not existing; nothing about him touched me.
It is true that Goodreads is a deeply broken website but right now it is the only place that we have that has a critical mass of readers on it.
https://onezero.medium.com/almost-everything-about-goodreads-is-broken-662e424244d5
Highlights for How not to hate your husband after kids
Fisher says there is brain evidence that when women are under stress (say, a new baby has colic), they are inclined to “tend and befriend”(become more empathetic and social), while men under stress are apt to withdraw.
A study of heterosexual couples led by Shiri Cohen, a couples therapist and psychology instructor at Harvard Medical School, revealed that women reported feeling much happier when their male partners understood that they were angry or upset. “This research bore out what I see every day with couples,”Cohen tells me. “When the man can register his wife’s negative feelings, and communicate that on some level, the wife feels better, because she knows that ‘Oh, he gets how I’m feeling.’”She points out that, conversely, men do not derive the same satisfaction in knowing that their wives are upset. “Research shows that men tend to retreat from what feels like conflict to them, because they tend to physiologically get much more negatively aroused,”she said, “so conflict feels way more intense for them.”
so women have better memory and social cognition skills, making them better equipped for multitasking and creating solutions that can work within a group.
Brené Brown calls this tendency to project a motive onto someone without actually knowing the facts “the story I’m making up.”
No surprise there—but the mind-boiling part is that men’s stress levels fell if they kicked back with some sort of leisure activity—but only if their wives kept busy doing household tasks at the same time
meanwhile, found that married couples’ wounds actually healed more slowly when they had hostile arguments compared with so-called low-hostile couples. The stress from a fallout, they discovered, drove up blood levels of hormones that interfere with the delivery of proteins called cytokines, which aid the immune system during injuries.
“Tom, what you’re not getting, and this is true for most men I see, is that it is in your interest to move beyond your knee-jerk selfishness and entitlement and to take good care of your wife, so she isn’t such a raving lunatic all the time.”
“But the idea that you can haul off and be abusive to your partner and somehow get a pass, that you can’t control it, or whatever you tell yourself to rationalize it, is nuts. Also, your whole ‘angry victim’ role is going to get worse. You are extremely comfortable with your self-righteous indignation.”
We construct a plan for his phone to issue a spate of reminders before all school pickups.
A week later, Tom’s crisis negotiation skills are required yet again. It is a school morning, and he is sleeping in after a late night of binge-watching a Swedish crime series. I am up at 6 a.m. with our daughter, making her breakfast and lunch, supervising her homework, ordering a replacement water bottle after she somehow lost hers at school, filling out a form for a class trip, and baking carrot muffins for Tom.
“Men often do best if they know exactly what to do.”Do not use moralistic or shaming language, he continues, which only brings on defensiveness.
Tell your spouse that changing his behavior will directly benefit him because you will be happier and more relaxed.
I’ve learned to be protective of my time, just as my husband is.
“Both boys and girls learn that mothers have needs, too, which is also very important if they have children of their own,”
Those drained respondents negotiated their responsibilities anew every day, starting from scratch—as Tom and I had been doing. This cracked system trapped the participants in an exhausting cycle of “requests and avoidance of these requests.”Conversely, spouses who knew exactly what to do around the house didn’t spend as much time negotiating responsibilities and didn’t tend to monitor and criticize each other. Not surprisingly, “their daily lives seemed to flow more smoothly.”
“So my question to you is, if he waits that long, what does it cost you, other than your obsessive need to not have it pile up? What’s it actually costing you?”
Please, snorts couples therapist Esther Perel. “One important intervention for my clients who are mothers that overmanage—who are overwrought not by difficult life circumstances but by the culture of perfection that has captured parenthood—is that I tell them to go away for the weekend,”she says. I admit to her that I am that over-managing mother. “Then go away alone, go with your friends, go away with someone you haven’t seen in ages!”she says.
The Gottmans categorize couples as masters and disasters. Masters look purposefully for things they can appreciate and respect about their partner; disasters monitor their mates for what they are doing wrong so they can criticize them. Intent on being a relationship master, I order a stack of their books.
This means voicing what the Gottmans call the “three As”: affection, appreciation, and admiration.
When Tom is reading the paper, for example, he occasionally comments, “Hmm, that’s interesting.”This is a “bid,”a sometimes-subtle appeal for attention. If I reply, “Oh, what are you reading?”this response is what Gottman calls “turning toward”my partner—I have given him the encouragement he’s seeking. If I ignore his bid, I am “turning away”from Tom.
My friend Jenny, mother of two, tells her husband that saying “thank you”is the ultimate cheap buy-in. “The average mom does a hell of a lot,”she says. “And unlike at work or school, at home, rarely is anyone saying, ‘Good job.’
Of course, I am still “household manager,”constantly reminding Tom to do fundamental things such as feed the kid breakfast—but he does it.
Sometimes he even says, “Need a hand?”
Oh, that must feel bad. I can see why you feel like that. What can I say or do right now to make you feel better? It’s calculated, but who cares?
One girl mentioned that every morning when she left for school, her father would say, “You go, tiger—you go get them.”
Father-initiated playdates are fairly rare, but they’re important, particularly for daughters.
Research shows that doing chores makes children thrive in countless ways, and is a proven predictor of success,
She found that having children take an active role in the household, starting at age three or four, directly influenced their ability to become well-adjusted young adults.
Those who began chores at three or four were more likely to have solid relationships with their families and friends, to be self-sufficient, and to achieve academic and early professional success.
three-quarters of the garages they studied were so crammed with junk, the homeowners couldn’t store cars
He laughs and says he understands. He explains that he isn’t suggesting that women should pump up the male ego—rather, that the need to feel appreciated is universal. Who among us does not love praise and kindness?
ad for Ariel India, a Procter & Gamble laundry detergent brand
When she was unhappy about making the lengthy commute to her daughter Jennifer’s preschool, her husband, then the chief executive of Microsoft, said he would drive Jennifer two days a week.
If a fight is brewing, start with “I”statements.
Say “Thank you,”and say it often.
All of those gestures—and I’m aware they were mostly gestures—took a total of a few hours, but she was thrilled, it deepened their relationship, and the goodwill he received from me lasted for weeks.
Especially, I would add here, if you can find a therapist who yells at your husband, “Stop with your entitled attitude, get off your ass, and help her out!”
The FBI’s methods of paraphrasing and emotion labeling are remarkably effective.
I can’t get enough of these literary exposés, this one about how Benjamin Moser treats female collaborators and appropriates their work.
Highlights for Agile Application Security
Don’t wait for the perfect time, tool or training course to get started. Just do something.
Lean as a methodology prioritises the principle cycle of “Build”→ “Measure”→ “Learn”.
Many security professionals have a hard time adapting their existing practices to a world where requirements can change every few weeks, or where they are never written down at all. Where design and risk management decisions are made by the team just in time, instead of being planned out and directed from top down. And where manual testing and compliance checking cannot possibly keep up with the speed of delivery.
Agile practitioners argue that while this rule is broadly speaking true, catching a defect later is more expensive than catching one earlier, the solution is not to attempt the impossible task of catching all defects earlier, but instead to focus on reducing the cost of fixing defects by making change safer and easier.
instead you need to be thinking about secure service design, trust modeling, and secure architecture patterns.
The design team should have access to security training or security expertise to ensure that the service they are designing enables security through the user experience.
Security teams should be providing tooling, processes and guidance that helps product managers, architects and developers follow good security practice while designing a new system.
Security checks that happen at this stage need to be automatable, reliable, repeatable and understandable in order for a team to adopt them.
The security team should do everything that they can to ensure that the easiest way to build something inside the organisation is the safe and secure way, by providing teams with secure headers, hardened run-time configuration recipes and playbooks, and vetted third party libraries and images that are free from vulnerabilities which teams can grab and use right away.
When security stops being the team that says no, and becomes the team that enables reliable code to ship, then that’s true agile security.
Truly agile security teams measure themselves on what they can enable to happen, rather than the security issues they have blocked from going out of the door.
or they could be taken care of by training the team in secure coding so that they know know how to do things properly from the start.
Another way to include security in requirements is through attacker stories or misuse cases (instead of use cases). In these stories the team spends some time thinking through how a feature could be misused by an attacker or by another malicious – or even a careless – user.
We’ve had experience in at least one company where the attack trees are stored electronically in a wiki, and all of the controls are linked to the digital story cards, so the status of each story is recorded in a live view. This shows the security team the current state of the threat tree, any planned work that might affect it, and allows compliance officers to trace back from a work order to find out why it was requested and when it was completed.
this kind of interlinking is very valuable for high performing and fast moving teams to give them situational awareness to help in making decisions.
As we’ve seen throughout this book, the speed of agile development creates new security risks and problems. But this speed and efficiency can also offer an important edge against attackers, a way to close vulnerability windows much faster.
Security should be about enabling the organisation to carry out its goals in the most safe and secure manner possible. This means that an effective risk management process should be about enabling people in the organisation to take appropriate risks in an informed manner. The key here being informed: risk management is not all about avoidance but the mindful understanding, reduction, sharing and acceptance of risk as appropriate.
But with an agile team continuously changing the system in response to new information, the context in which a risk is accepted can change dramatically in a fairly short time.
Common change control practices, such as specified by ITIL or COBIT, are designed to deal with waterfall projects that push large change sets a handful of times per year, and cannot possibly keep up with Continuous Delivery or Continuous Deployment approaches.
This means that unlike in some more traditional software engineering shops, Agile teams may resist or avoid review boards, design authorities and other control mechanisms imposed from outside if they believe that these outside forces will get in the way of delivery. This is a problem for security professionals who are used to working with architecture review boards and other central authorities to set guiding principles and rules to ensure the security of all systems.
In a traditional software development lifecycle, risk assessment is done based on the system requirements and design specifications and models created up front. A risk analyst uses those documents to identify the risks that will reside in the system, and puts together a plan to monitor and mitigate these risks. Then audits are done to ensure that the system built matches the documented design specifications and that the risk management plan is still valid.
Nation state attack teams looking to steal data or IP, or conducting reconnaissance or sabotage for cyber warfare (for a vast majority of situations these will be well outside of your threat model and would not be something you would likely be able to discover or prevent).
There are different sources of information about threats to help you understand threat actors and the risks that they pose to your organization. While this is an area of the security industry that is widely considered to be over-hyped and to have not returned on the promises of value that have been made (See Threaty Threats boxout), it can still have a place in your security program.
Some platforms for reporting, detecting, collecting and aggregating threat intelligence include: Open Threat Exchange (https://www.alienvault.com/open-threat-exchange) Open TPX (https://www.opentpx.org/) Passive Total (https://www.passivetotal.org/) Critical Stack (https://intel.criticalstack.com/) Facebook’s Threat Exchange (https://www.facebook.com/threatexchange)
Does a change fundamentally change the architecture or alter a tryst boundary? These types of changes should trigger a risk review (in design or code or both) and possibly some kind of compliance checks.
Quick and dirty threat modelling done often is much better than no threat modelling at all.
Each time that you come back again to look at the design and how it has been changed, you’ll have a new focus, new information and more experience, which means that you may ask new questions and find problems that you didn’t see before.
Because the attack surface is continuously changing, you need to do threat modeling on a continuous basis. Threat modeling has to be done a lightweight, incremental and iterative way.
People (including attackers) are like water when it comes to protective controls that get in their way. They will work around them and come up with pragamtic solutions to get themselves moving again.
You can’t secure what you don’t understand Bruce Schneier
A clean architecture with well-defined interfaces and a minimal feature set is not the same as a simplistic and incomplete design that focuses only on implementing features quickly, without dealing with data safety and confidentiality, or providing defense against run-time failures and attacks.
In many environments, enforcing code reviews upfront is the only way to ensure that reviews get done at all: it can be difficult to convince developers to make code changes after they have already checked code in and moved on to another piece of work.
Probably the best reference for a security code review checklist is OWASP’s ASVS project.
Acceptance tests may also be done manually, in demos with the customer, especially where the tests are expensive or inconvenient to automate.
The advantages to an agile development team of being able to self-provision development and test environments like this are obvious. They get control over how their environments are set up and when it gets done. They don’t have to wait days or weeks to hear back from ops.
Before adding security testing into your pipeline, make sure that the pipeline is set up correctly, and that the team is using it correctly and consistently. all changes are checked into the code repository team members check in frequently automated tests run consistently and quickly when tests fail, the team stops and fix problems imemdiately before making more changes
But instead of treating pen testing as a gate, think of it more as a validation and a valuable learning experience for the entire team.
OpenSCAP (https://www.open-scap.org/) scans specific Linux platforms and other software against hardening policies based on PCI DSS, STIG, and USGCB and helps with automatically correcting any deficiencies that are found. Lynis (https://cisofy.com/lynis/) is an open source scanner for Linux and Unix systems that will check configurations against CIS, NIST and NSA hardening specs, as well as vendor-supplied guidelines and general best practices.
One of the best examples is Dev-Sec (https://github.com/dev-sec), a set of open source hardening templates originally created at Deutsche Telekom, and now maintained by contributors from many organizations.
Security Monkey (https://github.com/Netflix/security_monkey) automatically checks for insecure policies, and records the history of policy changes
Conformity Monkey (https://github.com/Netflix/SimianArmy/wiki/Conformity-Home) automatically checks configuration of a run-time instance against pre-defined rules and alerts the owner (and security team) of any violations
build chains can become highly customized and fragile over time.
6.5 train the development team in secure coding at least annually, and provide them with secure coding guidelines.
Many of the ideas about automating compliance in this chapter are based on the DevOps Audit Defense Toolkit, a free, community-built process framework written by compliance and IT governance experts James DeLuccia IV, Jeff Gallimore, Gene Kim, and Byron Miller.
Reviewers follow checklists to ensure that all code meets the team’s standards and guidelines, and to watch out for unsafe coding practices. Management periodically audits to make sure that reviews are done consistently, and that engineers aren’t rubber stamping each other’s work.
While ITIL change management is designed to deal with infrequent, high-risk “big bang”changes, most changes by Agile and DevOps teams are small and low-risk, and can flow under the bar. They can be treated as standard or routine changes that have been preapproved by management, and that don’t require a heavyweight change review meeting.
Auditors like this a lot. Look at all of the clear, documented hand offs and reviews and approvals, all of the double checks and opportunities to catch mistakes and malfeasance. But look at all the unnecessary delays and overhead costs, and the many chances for misunderstandings and miscommunication. This is why almost nobody builds and delivers systems this way any more.
For teams, compliance should – and has to – build on top of the team’s commitment to doing things right and delivering working software. Teams that are already working towards zero defect tolerance, and teams that are following good technical practices including Continuous Integration should be more successful in meeting compliance.
‘Effective security teams should measure themselves by what they enable, not by what they block’
Lazy security teams default to No as it is a get out of jail free card for any future negative impact that may come from the project they opposed. Ineffective security teams want the risk profile of a company to stay the same so that they do not have to make hard choices between security and innovation.
A security team who can default to openness and only restrict as the exception will do a far better job at spreading knowledge about what they do, and most importantly, why they are doing it.
“I offer this: literature can save a life. Just one life at a time.”
Teju Cole is a treasure.
We do our own flavor of attachment parenting and this is still one of my favorite pieces about motherhood.
Highlights for Temperamentvolle Kinderen
Opvallend is dat ze vaak een groot gevoel voor uiterlijke schoonheid hebben.
Intens: enthousiast, uitbundig, gepassioneerd, diepzinnig, levendig, hartstochtelijk, innig, fanatiek (in plaats van hysterisch, overdreven, driftig, wild, luidruchtig, ongeremd) Gevoelig: inlevend, empathisch, openstaand, zachtaardig, teder, toegankelijk (in plaats van sentimenteel, kwetsbaar, prikkelbaar, overgevoelig, slap) Opmerkzaam: oog voor detail, scherpzinnig, oplettend, alert, aandachtig, waakzaam, kritisch, geconcentreerd, oplettend (in plaats van pietluttig, lastig, kieskeurig, snel afgeleid) Sterke wil: vastberaden, doelgericht, eigenzinnig, onverstoorbaar, krachtig, aanhoudend, standvastig (in plaats van koppig, halsstarrig, onhandelbaar, opstandig, dwars, hardnekkig, eigenwijs)
Ook als je je kind op school ophaalt bijvoorbeeld, helpt het als je even op ooghoogte van je kind komt en zegt: ‘Hé lieverd, fijn dat je er bent’.
Laat je kind vaak weten dat je blij bent dat hij er is. ‘Wat bof ik toch dat ik jouw mama mag zijn’ of ‘Wat gezellig om samen met jou een boekje te lezen’ laten je kind voelen dat hij er mag zijn zonder dat hij daar iets speciaals voor hoeft te doen.
Hoe beter jij door hebt waar hij last van heeft, hoe beter je het voor hem kunt benoemen. ‘Dat was schrikken, hé?’ of ‘Vind je die koffie vies ruiken of is het dat gekookte ei op mijn boterham?’
Puur en alleen al het idee dat ze moeten doen wat een ander bepaalt kan zorgen voor heel veel verzet, zelfs als datgene wat ze moeten doen in feite helemaal niet zo erg is.
De gebiedende wijs doet het vaak erg slecht bij kinderen met een erg sterke wil.
Ze wil dus echt wel rekening houden met wat ik nodig heb, maar ik moet daar dan wel duidelijk over zijn.
Houd gezinsvergaderingen Plan vergaderingen in om met elkaar te bespreken hoe het allemaal loopt. Is iedereen nog tevreden over de gemaakte afspraken, zijn er nieuwe nodig, lukt het iedereen om zich eraan te houden?
Zolang de afspraak geldt, moet iedereen zich eraan houden. Dus ook als je kind er eens geen zin in heeft, zal hij zich aan zijn deel van de afspraak moeten houden. Als je het er gewoon bij laat zitten omdat je geen zin hebt in gezeur, kom je natuurlijk nergens. Afspraak is afspraak. Zeg dit ook tegen je kind.
Zo leer je hem dat hij zelf ergens voor verantwoordelijk blijft en dat hij, ook al kan hij niet waarmaken wat hij heeft toegezegd, het er dan niet zomaar bij kan laten zitten. Vertel hem dat er helemaal niets mis mee is om in gezamenlijk overleg af te wijken van afspraken, maar dat het heel lastig is als iemand zonder enig overleg zijn deel van de afspraak niet nakomt.
Misschien denk je nu wel dat dit allemaal heel tijdrovend is. Deels is dit ook zo. Je moet echt de tijd nemen om met je kind in gesprek te gaan. Toch duren deze gesprekjes in de praktijk vaak maar een paar minuutjes. Deze tijd win je vaak direct daarna al weer terug omdat hij geen weerstand meer heeft tegen wat er moet gebeuren.
Als het dus al lukt om je kind zich goed te laten gedragen door middel van straffen (en die kans is klein bij temperamentvolle kinderen), dan komt dat doordat je zijn wil gebroken hebt. Dat is erg zonde. Je wilt je kind graag in zijn kracht zetten en niet die kracht juist om zeep helpen.
Vrijwel alle ouders geven aan dat, juist als ze hun kind de ruimte geven om zich echt te ontladen, de intensiteit van die ontlading op den duur ontzettend afneemt.
Zet jezelf en je eigen overtuigingen even aan de kant. Hij doet dit niet om jou dwars te zitten of omdat hij niet wéét hoe hij zich moet gedragen, hij kán het nu gewoon niet. En als iemand iets niet kan, heeft hij hulp nodig, geen preek.
Ook wanneer je kind steeds bewust gedrag vertoont waarvan hij heel goed weet dat jij daar last van hebt of wanneer hij de hele tijd zonder duidelijke aanleiding zijn broertje of zusje loopt te treiteren, kan dit betekenen dat hij zich moet ontladen.
Sommige ouders voelen zich aan het einde van de dag vooral rot over wat er allemaal niet goed ging. Als je dat doet, doe je jezelf daarmee enorm tekort.
Bedenk dat je kind minstens één iemand nodig heeft die onvoorwaardelijk achter hem staat, hem altijd volledig accepteert en steeds het beste in hem ziet. Iemand die in hem blijft geloven als hij er een potje van maakt en hem steeds een nieuwe kans geeft.
Boos worden op een temperamentvol kind werkt ontzettend averechts. Hij raakt er alleen maar meer overprikkeld van, waardoor de situatie nog verder escaleert. Wat hij nodig heeft, is een liefdevolle ouder die op een natuurlijke manier leiding neemt als dat nodig is, die zijn eigen grenzen op een rustige manier aangeeft en die een baken van rust is op het moment dat zijn kind volledig overmand wordt door emoties.
Stress ontstaat ook doordat je ergens bent, terwijl je eigenlijk ergens anders wilt zijn.
Laat hem eventueel wat water drinken. Hierdoor gaan zijn darmen namelijk werken en daardoor wordt zijn lichaam ook wakkerder.
‘Ik word gek van de rotzooi’ is voor de meeste kinderen namelijk geen legitieme reden.
Alle frustraties, overprikkeling of emoties die hij onder schooltijd even parkeert, gooit hij jou thuis juist voor je voeten. Hoe irritant dat misschien ook is, het is eigenlijk een goed teken. Bij jou voelt hij zich zo veilig dat hij alles eruit durft te gooien.
Vraag hem in dat laatste geval wat er precies besproken moet worden en wat hij graag zou willen veranderen. Op die manier kun je er wel voor hem zijn en hem helpen, maar neem je het toch niet allemaal uit handen.
Are people paying the Medium article ransom?
A poor man’s instapaper
I’ve stopped using Instapaper for a long time now, but I’m still reading longreads. Let me explain how.
I go through my links in Chrome on my desktop. I close and read whatever I can and anything that’s too long stays in an open tab and floats slowly to the left.

On Chrome on my phone whenever I’m in transit or when I want to read something longer that isn’t a book, I go to the “Recent tabs”screen. Besides those you can also find synced open tabs from all your other Chrome browsers. I then pick something that I want to read.
Now, ideally it would allow me to close the tab on my desktop from my phone but understandably that’s not a feature. So I read a couple of articles, remember those and close the tabs manually next time I’m back on my desktop.
This works surprisingly well. Except for LRB articles. I have no clue what to do about those.
Highlights for Designing Data-Intensive Applications
Amazon RedShift is a hosted version of ParAccel. More recently, a plethora of open source SQL-on-Hadoop projects have emerged; they are young but aiming to compete with commercial data warehouse systems. These include Apache Hive, Spark SQL, Cloudera Impala, Facebook Presto, Apache Tajo, and Apache Drill [52, 53].
In these situations, as long as people agree on what the format is, it often doesn’t matter how pretty or efficient the format is. The difficulty of getting different organizations to agree on anything outweighs most other concerns.
Therefore, to maintain backward compatibility, every field you add after the initial deployment of the schema must be optional or have a default value.
That means you can only remove a field that is optional (a required field can never be removed), and you can never use the same tag number again (because you may still have data written somewhere that includes the old tag number, and that field must be ignored by new code).
If you are using a system with multi-leader replication, it is worth being aware of these issues, carefully reading the documentation, and thoroughly testing your database to ensure that it really does provide the guarantees you believe it to have.
Today, most data systems are not able to automatically compensate for such a highly skewed workload, so it’s the responsibility of the application to reduce the skew.
Unfortunately, these tools don’t directly translate to distributed systems, because a distributed system has no shared memory—only messages sent over an unreliable network.
Safety is often informally defined as nothing bad happens, and liveness as something good eventually happens.
A much better solution is to build a brand-new database inside the batch job and write it as files to the job’s output directory in the distributed filesystem, just like the search indexes in the last section. Those data files are then immutable once written, and can be loaded in bulk into servers that handle read-only queries. Various key-value stores support building database files in MapReduce jobs, including Voldemort [46], Terrapin [47], ElephantDB [48], and HBase bulk loading [49].
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. John Gall, Systemantics (1975)
When copies of the same data need to be maintained in several storage systems in order to satisfy different access patterns, you need to be very clear about the inputs and outputs: where is data written first, and which representations are derived from which sources? How do you get data into all the right places, in the right formats?
It would be very natural to extend this programming model to also allow a server to push state-change events into this client-side event pipeline. Thus, state changes could flow through an end-to-end write path: from the interaction on one device that triggers a state change, via event logs and through several derived data systems and stream processors, all the way to the user interface of a person observing the state on another device.
But this choice is not free either: if a service is so popular that it is “regarded by most people as essential for basic social participation”[99], then it is not reasonable to expect people to opt out of this service—using it is de facto mandatory.
The Theory of Society
I was arguing against Systems Theory today (a necessary evil when you live in Germany) which prompted the thought of searching for the conjunction of Bruno Latour and Niklas Luhmann. That led me to this gem.
It turns out that they met each other for a debate in 1996 in Bielefeld and Latour DESTROYED his opponent (full article).
Luhmann, as expected, failed to engage with the theme of the conference, Science and Technology Studies and didn’t come out of his bubble. The same bubble that he has managed to trap most of the German humanities in.
[Luhmann] only managed to address the theme of the conference—science and its sociological study—with half a sentence where he curtly asserted that science is an autopoietic subsystem of modern society.
An autopoietic subsystem, my ass. Latour quickly riposted into a frontal assault at the entirety of Luhmann-ism.
No, according to Latour, this theory didn’t have anything to offer to him and neither he concluded any of those gathered there. A quick perusal of the conference program should have sufficed to ascertain that the empirically obsessed STSers could not recover their objects in this theory. This may be bemoaned from the high vantage point of the Theory of Society as poor, theoretically “flat” sociology, nonetheless, Latour replied, this empirical Zoology of STS gives an account of this society as it is and not how it may appear from the distance of the chilling heights of systems theory.
Latour clarified that fundamentally, systems theory represents everything that he and his colleagues in science studies have been battling for 20 years—yes, really battle and not just criticize. The purification of science, the simplification of the social by a demarcation with its environment, Luhmann’s work as the embodiment of the “cognitive turn” in epistemology—for Latour these were the old buzzwords that had to miss what’s special about science: its materiality. And in doing so of course also what’s specific for modern society, the large technological networks.
Latour battling ‘the purification of science [and] the simplification of the social’, a true hero of science and society.
Ik dacht dat Arjen van Veelen één van de beste schrijvers op de Correspondent was. Dat is hij misschien nog steeds, maar dan shrijft hij wel dit soort onzin.
Highlights for Interpreter of Maladies
In her estimation, I knew, I was assured a safe life, an easy life, a fine education, every opportunity. I would never have to eat rationed food, or obey curfews, or watch riots from my rooftop, or hide neighbors in water tanks to prevent them from being shot, as she and my father had.
In my son’s eyes I see the ambition that had first hurled me across the world. In a few years he will graduate and pave his way, alone and unprotected. But I remind myself that he has a father who is still living, a mother who is happy and strong. Whenever he is discouraged I tell him that if I can survive on three continents than there is no obstacle he cannot conquer.
Highlights for How to Measure Anything in Cybersecurity Risk
What risks are acceptable is often not documented, and when they are, they are stated in soft, unquantified terms that cannot be used clearly in a calculation to determine if a given expenditure is justified or not.
Measurement: A quantitatively expressed reduction of uncertainty based on one or more observations.
If a decision maker or analyst engages in what they believe to be measurement activities, but their estimates and decisions actually get worse or don’t at least improve, then they are not actually reducing their error and are not conducting a measurement according to the stated definition.
What you want to know is whether you have less uncertainty after considering some source of data and whether that reduction in uncertainty warrants some change in actions.
We can measure the value of art, free time, or reducing risk to your life by assessing how much people actually pay for these things.
If your concern is that upper management won’t understand this, we can say we have not observed this—even when we’ve been told that management wouldn’t understand it. In fact, upper management seems to understand having to determine which risks are acceptable at least as well as anyone in cybersecurity.
Since we know at least one (if not both) must be wrong, then we know qualifications and expertise in cybersecurity alone are not sufficient to determine if a given opinion on this topic is correct.
More fundamentally, does it even matter whether risk analysis works? And by “works,”do we really just mean whether it succeeds in putting on a show for compliance, or should we mean it actually improves the identification and management of risks?
They are all based in part on the idea that not knowing exact quantities is the same as knowing nothing of any value.
All of the operations just described require some source of an input. In this example, we will be using the calibrated estimates of the CISO. Since the CISO is using his previous experience and his calibrated probability-assessment skill to generate the inputs, we call them an “informative prior.”
Practically speaking, there are only so many models that can be run and maintained at any given time.
A lot of very salient thinking on books, metacognition, double-loop learning and the deliberate design of new forms by Andy Matuschak in “Why Books Don’t Work”.
I acknowledged earlier that of course, some people do absorb knowledge from books. Indeed, those are the people who really do think about what they’re reading. The process is often invisible. These readers’ inner monologues have sounds like: “This idea reminds me of…,”“This point conflicts with…,”“I don’t really understand how…,”etc. If they take some notes, they’re not simply transcribing the author’s words: they’re summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing.
I’ve been thinking of doing a talk about how to get the most out of your reading both quantitatively and qualitatively. Many people do not even know how much is possible, let alone that they would have an inkling of how to get there. I think anybody can easily get to at least a doubling of reading quantity and conceptual retention.
Readers must decide which exercises to do and when. Readers must run their own feedback loops: did they clearly understand the ideas involved in the exercise? If not, what should they do next? What should students do if they’re completely stuck? Some issues are subtler. For example, textbook exercises are often designed to yield both a solution to that specific problem and also broader insights about the subject. Will readers notice if they solved a problem but missed the insights it was supposed to reveal?
Work in new aesthetic and educational forms along with opening up systems to allow people to make their own rules for going through them, is all of the stuff we had been occupied with in Hubbub as well.
Americans feel ripped off by the Corres’s bait and switch and it seems now we’re going to seeing a free for all where they will mercilessly rip the site.
It was disappointing to realize — to actually see in the numbers — that while The Correspondent raised $2.6 million in part by stressing diversity and inclusivity, tapping ambassadors like DeRay Mckesson and Baratunde Thurston, the Dutch site is not a model of that diversity.
There is a lot of criticism and hate in the Netherlands as well but it’s not so pronounced because:
- The site has its provenance in the Netherlands.
- It’s a small country and you never know who you’ll need again in the future (“the media in The Netherlands is more tight-knit, insular, and male than it is in the U.S.”).
The USA is not bothered by either of those and that creates a more honest environment because frankly a lot of the criticism is valid.
As you’ll see, everything is slightly approximate, slightly exaggerated — so that each step in the argument takes you further from what you’re prepared to agree to.
It turns out Harari’s books only go downhill after Sapiens.
I can’t really get enough of Haidt takedowns like this one in the Guardian.
The core irony of The Coddling of the American Mind is that, by opposing identity politics, its authors try to consolidate an identity that does not have to see itself as such. Enjoying the luxury of living free from discrimination and domination, they therefore insist that the crises moving young people to action are all in their heads.
In their safe space of TED talks and thinktanks and think pieces, the genteel crusaders against “political correctness”create their own speech codes. As their constituency shrinks, their cant of progress starts to sound hysterical. The minds they coddle just may be their own.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/20/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind-review
An elaboration on High Output Management split into “Running yourself”and “Running your team”by Keith Rabois.
http://delian.io/lessons-3
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
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.