Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism

[In a material world, being poor goes beyond what you have to include being undervalued and therefore treated as negligible. The more equal people are in terms of what they have, the happier they will be.]

Scott Galloway: We’re Raising The Most Unhappy Generation In History! Hard Work Doesn't Build Wealth

[Information asymmetry benefits whoever has symmetry and knows the information. Bosses know how much everyone is getting paid but may discourage talking about salaries to avoid someone finding out their colleague makes 30% more for the same work.]

[Everyone you're ashamed to ask for fear of rejection will be dead. Willingness to take uncomfortable risks and endure rejection opens yourself up to outsized returns. Get out a spoon and eat shit.]

[Think of the emotions you want them to feel and practice it every day in your content storytelling.]

the key to capturing clicks is convincing people that you have the answers to their questions—that you hold the proverbial key to all the solutions. If you can over-complicate simple things loudly, people will pay attention.

The Most Valuable Commodity in the World is Friction

we have a world where friction gets automated out of experiences, aestheticized in curated lifestyles, and dumped onto underfunded infrastructure and overworked labor. The effort doesn't disappear; it just moves.

The economic signal (the diploma) still circulates as if the underlying work has occurred. But the work isn’t there. We’ve just shifted the friction offscreen, and have outsourced it to a chatbot and let the system pretend nothing’s changed. So at this moment, we are credentialing fluency with tools that do the thinking for you.

friction has become a class experience. Wealth has always helped smooth over bumps - but when the physical world is such a mess and the digital world is so easy, it’s simple to curate the digital into the physical if you have money.

The American economy has been running a decades-long experiment in removing friction, both through technological advancement and through financial engineering that pushes costs into the future. The resulting prosperity has been very real, but it's been built on the proverbial kicking the can down the road.

When Mark Zuckerberg's Meta builds frictionless social interfaces, that cognitive smoothness is subsidized by somewhere, somehow, right? The same economy that produces simulated friends for the lonely American also produces understaffed air traffic control towers. The same investor class that funds "never think alone" startups also lobbies against infrastructure spending, or perhaps, housing.

Amazon's one-click ordering creates a seamless customer experience by offloading friction onto warehouse workers and delivery drivers.

There's nothing worse than being right and everyone agreeing with you. There's no way to make any cash.

Compliance is the New American Dream

a world built on compliance might function for a while. But it will never lead. And right now, we really need people who can lead.

think, move, listen, cook, hydrate, breathe, music, people, play – every day

For the interview with Goldman I turned up in my hoodie and trainers and I told them that I definitely didn't want the job. They put me through to the second round after that.

Stocks never go down. Stocks only go up. When the economy is good stocks go up, and when the economy is shit, they print so much money stocks go up even more. Same with fucking houses. Everything goes up. The asset holders never lose.

One hundred days

You are NOT right if you stand a man on his head JUST to get attention. You ARE right if you have him on his head to show how your product keeps things from falling out of his pockets.

Why Labour and Trump will both fail

[Money is not a real resource like food or housing; it's used to determining the allocation of real resources.]

there are too many problems i've solved with nail clippers

composing (to place/put together) becomes necessary when you don't have everything

[The economy is people and their ability to live, not numbers. We didn't need to make conversations with our cleaners to understand the lives of everyday people.]

[In the best trades, you use your nose to smell stupidity.]

Surviving Crappy Markets 101

[Market downturns are more the norm than exception, yet bull market gains often make up for them in multiples.]

This is another general rule of trading: you don't necessarily make money by being right, but by being right when others are wrong.

Trevor Noah: My Depression Was Linked To ADHD! Why I Left The Daily Show!

[Growing up in abusive households make you sensitive to your environment to the point where I knew by the sound of his footsteps whether or not my stepfather was coming home drunk.]

[You'll be surprised at how often your 'screw them' choice reflects something you perhaps need to be doing more of.]

[It's easier to burn down a building than build one up.]

['Destroying' someone will not convince them.]

The person who helped me shift never made me feel small. Minds change when they are made to feel large. When they are respected and gently challenged. When they are helped to stretch and make more room for another point of view.

The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber on Blinkist.

[Technical skill alone is insufficient to kickstart a successful business and can easily lead to unsustainable models where the founder does everything.]

[Turnkey businesses are popular because they have a far higher success rate; they consider and plan all aspects of the business beforehand so that the owner doesn't need to be present.]

[Every single process needs to be documented in order for someone to run the business without you.]

[Structure all aspects of the business to support your personal objectives.]

[Your marketing should consider the customer and ignore everything else. Get to know their profile as best as you can and market in ways that are appealing to them. Adapt your strategy as they change.]

[All of this 'business development process' never stops, continuing as you learn while in motion and understand through testing.]

Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche on Blinkist.

One must be a sea to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.

Speed Reading by Kam Knight on Blinkist.

[Note down every recent read and your reason for each; having clear purpose optimizes your perception and naturally goal-seeking tendencies for what's relevant.]

[Perceive the outline or structure beforehand to give yourself a mental model to fill in as you read.]

[Shift your gaze to the spaces between words or slightly off center to use your peripheral vision.]

[Inhibit subvocalization by closing your mouth firmly, humming, or listening to instrumental music.]

[Having an idea of the author's main message before reading helps move beyond a set of random words and into reinforcement of a larger concept. Reflect after each chapter on how the details support the main point. Mark new words and research them after each chapter to put them in better context.]

[Reduce eye strain with exercises such as: looking from side to side without moving your head, rolling them in a circle, or making figure eights.]

Capital by Karl Marx on Blinkist.

[Human labour transforms raw resources into commodities that have a 'use value' and 'exchange value'.]

[Work is a means to survive, rather than express creativity or humanity, and alienates workers from each other by forcing them to compete against one another for limited jobs.]

[Value comes from human labour, and transitioning entirely to mechanized labour generally reduces the rate of profit.]

Atomic Habits by James Clear on Blinkist.

[Habits compound when repeated but results are not noticeable day-to-day.]

[Focus on your trajectory instead of the result.]

[Habits are by being led from cues that triggers you to act, to cravings for a specific outcome, to responses that alleviate yhe craving, to an eventual reward that gives you a positive feeling.]

[Help strengthen your cue by changing your environment and implementing an intention or plan.]

[Bundle habits you avoid with ones you like.]

How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett on Blinkist.

[Our labeling of emotions refers to the culturally created concept rather than a specific universal sensations.]

Let’s make homemade oat milk! 🥣🥛☕️

Ingredients

• 1 cup rolled oats
• 6 cups water
• 1 pinch salt

Method

• Blend everything together and strain with a tea filter.

Behave by Robert Sapolsky on Blinkist.

[Damage or pressure to the amygdala or frontal cortex can spur people to do harmful or negative things without them being aware of it.]

Win Every Argument by Mehdi Hasan on Blinkist.

[As it's uncommon for many people to debate purely with logic, telling stories lets you appeal to their emotions while also making rational arguments.]

How to Read Faster: 11 Ways to Increase Your Reading Speed

[Distract from subvocalization with instrumental music or by chewing gum.]

[Chunk a few words at a time, or vertically divide the text into three sections to try and take in groups of words, covering what's upcoming if needed.]

[Rereading as a habit might not be necessary and can be helped by following your finger or another visual marker.]

[Look at the center of each line to engage your peripheral vision into taking in the whole thing.]

The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith on Blinkist.

[Division of labour enables members to specialize, which encourages focus, innovation, and thus productivity.]

[Money enables a form of labour division by alowing suppliers to specialize rather than providing too broad a selectiong of goods.]

[Trading provides financial compensation to the workers, factory owner, and land owner. This product of labour called "stock" of is used to sustain the recipient and surplus can be directed towards other assets.]

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill on Blinkist.

[You might evaluate your strengths and weaknesses once a year on your own (more subjective) and with someone who knows you well (more objective).]

Limitless by Jim Kwik on Blinkist.

[Avoid task switching as it makes focusing more difficult.]

[Count numbers out loud while reading to inhibit subvocalization from slowing your reading speed.]

Unlimited Memory by Kevin Horsley on Blinkist.

[Convert numbers into sounds based on their shape or story, and use those sounds to create words and corresponding scenarios. For example, 1969 turns into 9 / B, 6 / sh, and 9 / P, which could be a bishop landing on the moon.]

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle on Blinkist

[Bring yourself into observation of your thoughts by asking "What will my next thought be?"]

As it currently exists, foreign reporting implicitly defers to the priorities of the state and of business, occupying itself almost exclusively with events which touch on military, commercial or humanitarian concerns. Foreign news wants to tell us with whom and where we should fight, trade or sympathize[, but] these three areas of interest really aren't priorities for the majority of us.

[We might not find Italian politics interesting if we're living in a different country, yet it's conceivable to watch a two hour Shakespearean play about Julius Caesar. This is because underneath stories that may have a different reality to ours in the specific, there lies the universals which transcend those gaps. The news might not write like Shakespeare, but would do well to pay attention to these universals.]

A journalistic gaffe is something a powerful person inadvertently says or does in a momentary lapse which (as everyone knows) in no way reflects their considered views and yet which the news seizes upon and refuses to let go of, insisting that the gaffe must be an indicator of a deep and shameful truth.

We should at least be somewhat suspicious of the way that news sources, which otherwise expend considerable energy advertising their originality and independence of mind, seem so often to be in complete agreement on the momentous question of what happened today.

the news cruelly exploits our weak hold on a sense of perspective.

having perspective involves an ability to compare an apparently traumatic event in the present with the experiences of humanity across the whole of its history – in order to work out what level of attention and fear it should fairly demand.

With perspective in mind, we soon realize that – contrary to what the news suggests – hardly anything is totally novel, few things are truly amazing and very little is absolutely terrible.

As currently structured, the news does not 'see' the property developer who condemns thousands of people to live in humiliating environments but who nevertheless breaks no laws and steals no money. The most assiduous reporter concerned with fraud won't be able to put a finger on anyone criminally responsible for the commercial messages that subtly erode the dignity and intelligence of public life or find anyone who can be arrested for a decline in politeness or respect between the sexes.

[Religions take a pedagogical approach in conveying what is considered to be important, and the news could learn from this.]

The status quo could confidently remain forever undisturbed by a flood of, rather than a ban on, news.

Many tools make a good toolbox.

[Small talk is a test to see how people respond to meaningless things and determine whether it's worth bringing up more serious things.]

[Having things implies responsibility, and giving them away implies giving away responsibility.]

The news knows how to render its own mechanics almost invisible and therefore hard to question. It speaks to us in a natural unaccented voice, without reference to its own assumption-laden perspective. It fails to disclose that it does not merely report on the world, but is instead constantly at work crafting a new planet in our minds in line with its own often highly distinctive priorities.

leftovers are also for project work: best to ensure them as a goal so that we have a way back in, but also so that we can combine unsuspecting components into a spontaneous composition.

Pickled Onions

Ingredients

• red onions, sliced and packed in a jar
• ½ jar water
• ½ jar vinegar
• 1 tsp sugar
• 1 tsp salt
• spices to toast

Method

• Bring the liquid, sugar, and salt to a boil and pour back into the jar. Top with the spices, shake, and refrigerate overnight.

[Many people avoid writing wills because they don't feel ready to pass on yet, but the universe doesn't care and the government already has one written for you with a higher tax rate.]

[The power of writing down "what occurs to you" can be helpful for gaining clarity.]

[Even if "you're gone when you're gone" and don't care what happens to your stuff, it's wise to make a power of attorney.]

[In some Canadian provinces, probating a will essentially makes it public. One workaround is to use a trust, which is often a private document.]

[For the first year, avoid taking complicated decisions (especially when you're brain is foggy) and just mourn.]

[Trusts can own assets when passed to them by the settlor, and beneficiaries can be classes of definable people or entities (for example, grandchildren not yet born).]

[Those over 65 can create Alter Ego Trusts in place of a will to distribute assets with more privacy, and transfer some assets into a trust without taxation events.]

[Advisors you might deal with include: bankers, investment advisors, estate planners, insurance advisors, lawyers, and accountants. The last two must be fiduciaries (obliged to act in your interest under risk of legal proceedings or loss of license.)]

[Ask progressively squirm-causing questions, about their 1) qualifications and if they're regulated by an organization; 2) experience in years; 3) services and how often you'll meet; 4) licenses to handles specific asset types (like stocks, bonds, etc…); 5) errors and omissions insurance; 6) their team if any to be wary of rookies thrown in later; 7) fees and payment structure; 8) sales quota this week; 9) understanding of fiduciary and if they are one (they must answer this correctly); 10) audited track record of selecting investments; a) answers in writing on company letterhead.]

[Writing a will is unselfish because it mostly benefits your loved ones as opposed to you.]

[Update your will when someone turns 18, gets married or divorced, or if you move to another state or buy real estate. Check it every five years.]

Do not say, "Call me if you need anything," because your friend will not call. Not because they do not need, but because identifying a need, figuring out who might fill that need, and then making a phone call to ask is light years beyond their energy levels, capacity or interest. Instead, make concrete offers: "I will be there at 4:00 p.m. on Thursday to bring your recycling to the curb," or "I will stop by each morning on my way to work and give the dog a quick walk." Be reliable.

To the new griever, the influx of people who want to show their support can be seriously overwhelming. What is an intensely personal and private time can begin to feel like living in a fish bowl. There might be ways you can shield and shelter your friend by setting yourself up as the designated point person-the one who relays information to the outside world, or organizes well-wishers. Gatekeepers are really helpful.

[Compare something unfamiliar with the familiar can nudge us toward taking care for our safety.]

My tragedy is not contagious; you will not catch your children's death from me. I know you don't know what to say. I wouldn't have a few months ago, either. A little advice? Don't platitude me. Do not start any sentences with the phrase "at least," for you will then witness my miraculous transformation into Grief Warrior.

On the page, everything is allowed. Everything has a voice.

Leftovers are the requisite variety I need to feel comfortable cooking at home, so I should consider it the goal instead of avoiding it like an efficiency issue.

When someone you love dies, you don't just lose them in the present or in the past. You lose the future you should have had, and might have had, with them. They are missing from all the life that was to be. Seeing other people get married, have kids, travel-all the things you expected out of life with your person-gone. Seeing other children go to kindergarten, or graduate, or get married—all those things your child should have done, had they lived. Your kids never get to know their brilliant uncle; your friend never gets to read your finished book.

A day (or more) inside a blanket fort of your own choosing is healthy.

[Being kind to yourself means not letting your own mind beat you up.]

[Early grief is liminal: we are no longer who we were and not yet solidified into something new—everything is in flux.]

[Anxiety can be overwhelming as there's no shortage of potential disasters. You can trust yourself.]

Caramelized Onion Pasta

Ingredients

• 5 small onions, sliced
• 1 head garlic, bottom sliced off
• ½ cup sun dried tomatoes, chopped
• 1 tbsp paprika
• 1 tsp dried parsley
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp black pepper
• ½ cup coconut milk
• 3 cups farfalle pasta, cooked
• 1 handful fresh parsley, chopped
• 1 handful fresh basil, chopped
• 1 lemon, juiced

Method

• Preheat the oven to 400°F. Put the onions, tomatoes, and spices in a casserole dish, then toss together. Place the garlic head in the center and drizzle with oil. Cover with foil and bake for an hour or until the onions are caramelized, tossing halfway through.
• Before the the onions are done, prepare the pasta and reserve a cup of the water.
• Remove the garlic from the casserole dish, squeeze out the cloves when safe, and mix together with the fresh herbs, lemon juice, coconut milk, pasta, and pasta water as needed.

[Grief also involves mourning your old life.]

If we were compatible, we’d know exactly what the other person meant all the time, right?

[Language is primarily for internal use to construct our own worldviews, rather than a tool for communication with others.]

in it, but not of it

Fishbowl

[An unconference gathering structure with chairs in the middle of the audience where anyone can sit to speak but it requires another person in the center to leave; one chair left empty invites new people to join anytime.]

Neologisms

Hospice Mode: The stage your when your phone / fitness tracker / laptop is in its final months and you're just prolonging its death through a series of coping techniques. Carrying around extra battery packs. Patiently giving it 10 minutes to restart. Resetting the system at regular intervals.

Manel: Panel made up entirely of men. Usually honouring work done entirely by other men.

Pinkering: Named for Steven Pinker - a common phenomenon among do-gooder elites who cite the long arc of human history in order to downplay and minimise any immediate suffering.

Privacy Veganism: Unnecessarily shaming people who aren't willing to delete their Facebook account when it’s a functional necessity in their social context

If it's obvious to you, it's for someone else.

Mailbag #2

[You can avoid keeping up with news directly by listening to podcasts that might give a sense of important issues indirectly.]

One Pot Pony

A lazy person's guide to delicious meal prep

This is the power of Combinatorial Cooking. From a seemingly limited set of base ingredients, there is a whole universe of food options you can prepare quickly and easily.

The wok lets you boil, saute, stir-fry, and simmer. The spaghetti spoon lets you stir, mix, scrape, and mash. They're both incredibly versatile and easy to clean. It's all you need to make any Combinatorial Cooking recipe. Plus, using a wok makes you look and feel like a real chef, that's just science.

Untools

Thinking tools and frameworks to help you solve problems, make decisions and understand systems.

Open Source Is a Restaurant

Open Source is a restaurant. At a restaurant, you eat your meal first, and then you are expected to pay for it. Yes, we could dine and dash. But we don’t. When presented with a tab for a meal we have just eaten, we pay the tab.

Asymmetry might be a synonym for power.

Listing your options sensitizes you to notice them.

The internet didn’t kill counterculture—you just won’t find it on Instagram

Actual power is controlling the means by which lesser power can be displayed—i.e., congrats on the 500K likes on your polling numbers, @jack still owns all your tweets. Actual power keeps a low profile; actual power doesn't need a social media presence, it owns social media.

Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed

Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.

We've been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don't have, We buy so much because it always seems like something, is still missing,

For the economy to be "healthy", America has to remain unhealthy. Healthy, happy people don't feel like they need much they don't already have, and that means they don't buy a lot of junk, don't need to be entertained as much, and they don't end up watching a lot of commercials.

I enjoy being around people with big hearts.

[When people try to console your loss but make you cringe, there might be an unspoken (and perhaps unintended) "so please stop feeling bad"]

[Life is more about integrating than improvement.]

most things offered as "support" in our culture are really designed to solve problems or to get you out of pain. If it feels wrong to you, it is.

[The doctor who came up with the popular 'five stages of grief' regrets writing them in that way because it's not linear and universal: there is no standard process.]

[The griever and those who care about them may want a road map to guarantee success, but grief isn't predictable or structured.]

[Culture emphasizing happy endings, solutioneering, recovery, overcoming, redemption confuses us into seeing bad things as happening 'for growth']

Disadvantaged people who suffer so that the more privileged can live easier are labelled 'heroes' to keep them working.

A common tech perspective that 'integrating one project at a time isn't "scalable" and therefore we need a protocol' undervalues a relational approach that builds community first and on the way.

More useful than agreeing is to hear why we come to our conclusions.

Reducing psychological burden via '"they shouldn't need to consider that" versus 'bringing them along your process'.

Changing state policy is like repurposing parts of a warship to build a sewing machine.

Cheap non-ugly ULID combining time and a random number using radix 36.

Date.now().toString(36) + Math.random().toString(36).replace('0.', '') // something like lulgjvgkc5mk5sbmfaf

masterWiki

Classes stolen from MasterClass, republished as wikiHow articles.

Controlled Vocabulary

Controlled vocabulary schemes mandate the use of predefined, authorised terms that have been preselected by the designers of the schemes, in contrast to natural language vocabularies, which have no such restriction.

Choices of authorized terms are based on the principles of user warrant (what terms users are likely to use), literary warrant (what terms are generally used in the literature and documents), and structural warrant (terms chosen by considering the structure, scope of the controlled vocabulary).

The terms are chosen and organized by trained professionals (including librarians and information scientists) who possess expertise in the subject area. Controlled vocabulary terms can accurately describe what a given document is actually about, even if the terms themselves do not occur within the document's text.

Let's talk about books to read....

[Types of books you might want to read: 1. a religious text (other than your own if you have one); 2. the perspective of any subculture; 3. making the monster human; 4. a political ideology; 5. your childhood hero or strongest memory memory; 6. the hero of your enemy; 7. favourable about someone you don't like; 8. critical of war; 9. critical of your heroes; 10. about ancient or indigenous peoples (if they were oral, imagine what might have gotten lost by writing); 11. a distopia; 12. about a character you can't relate to at all.]

Literature exposes you to things you wouldn't experience in real life.

[Grief is to be carried, not fixed.]

Inflation means: after working to earn money, you need to work again so that "your money works for you".

SCAMPER is a procedural idea generator

S: Can I substitute a material? A key ingredient? A process? What happens if I substitute an emotion? Can I substitute the packaging for something else?

C: Can I combine different components to create something new? Can I bundle things in a new way? Can I combine different use-cases, such as author and reader, or seller and buyer?

A: Can I adapt a process from somewhere else? A component from something else? Can I adapt it to existing infrastructure? Can I adjust something just 3% to create something new?

M: Can I modify the form factor? Shape? Color? Can I magnify the key idea? What happens if I magnify an attribute beyond all reason? Or minify it?

P: Can I put a component to other uses? A mechanism? A process? An idea? A set of rules? Can I transform a waste product into an input? Can I put it to use in another context? Can I translate it into another medium? Create spinoffs?

E: Can I eliminate a rule? Can I simplify it? Make it compact? Eliminate a feature? Remove a complication?

R: Can I reverse a relationship? An assumption? What happens if I reverse my point of view? Can I rearrange the sequence? The layout? The structure? Can I rearrange the components to create something new?

Jan

[Run AI LLMs locally on your computer]

Yancey Strickler on Metalabel and Post-Individualism

[Revolutions inspired by Catholic church forbidding intra-family marriage gave rise to cities, universities, guilds as ways for people related by blood to meet eachother.]

A Fediverse, if you can keep it

Companies might serve as on-ramps, but at the end of the day this is a network of people sharing things with other people. You’re not blocking Meta; you’re blocking countless people who would otherwise stand to benefit from the open nature of the network. And the cruel irony here is that preemptive blocking is what will ultimately destroy the Fediverse as we know it. People want to connect with one another, and they’re going to do it one way or another. (And we’re right back to WhatsApp again.)

How do we evaluate people for their technical leadership?

Programmers’ chief value does not come from producing code. It comes from knowing enough about the situation to solve automation and scaling problems. Code that doesn’t solve those problems is worthless to the organization. If code that doesn’t solve those problems gets deployed somewhere, it’s worse than worthless because it incurs maintenance costs in addition to being worthless.

Perhaps even more importantly, though, they ensure that the wrong thing does not get done. And that is what makes them look worthless: their chief outcome is the absence of something. […] It’s the breaches that didn’t happen because someone double-checked what this SQL did. It’s the multi-server failure that did not occur because two separate engineers saw the warning signs and one responded to the other in a messaging channel. It’s the disaster feature that got killed because someone who understands inclusion demonstrated how it might be used to attack a marginalized constituency.

It's all about appearing nice so they never have to be kind.

Make time for flowers.

how to disagree better

[Disagree without getting them defensive with phrases like "I see it differently", "I have a different way of getting there", and "I lean towards the opposite".]

Fascism, Beauty and Truth

[Having to argue for equality reveals that the situation is already failed.]

[If that's the best you've got, I can see why you're so eager to use it.]

[There's a difference between agreeing and choosing agreement as your 'move' in a specific context.]

Super glue with baking soda

[Combine baking soda with glue to strengthen the bonding.]

Spreadsheets are like functions with built-in visualization of meaningful inputs and outputs.

What incentivizes a business to treat existing customers better than new ones?

Let's talk about what a concept of Japanese art can teach us about masculinity....

[Masculinity embodies effortless perfection, and a giveaway that someone's pretending is to see them trying.]