Things I Like
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On a more philosophical level, this journey has served to remind me again of how terribly delicate is the fabric of civilization, of the vigilance required to protect it and of the slow and painstaking work of mending it once it has been torn. This is hardly an original thought; it is a lesson we were supposed to have learned after Nazi Germany, after Bosnia and Rwanda. Perhaps it is a lesson we need to constantly relearn.
This is an incredibly well done piece. It was the entire NY Times Magazine a few weeks ago and I just finished reading it over the weekend. At the same time we've been watching a documentary about World War I and it's incredible how the echoes of that war have reached into the years since. More so than World War II, World War I changed us and it ushered in an era of change in the world, change we are still dealing with, including in the lands highlighted in this piece. My take away from both this piece and the series on World War I is that democracy is hard, really hard, because it means compromising and respect for the other. And, related to that, the West has traipsed all over the world and decided we know how to do things best and, as history shows repeatedly, we've only made things worse. I will think about the people in this piece for years to come, especially when I see news about this part of the world.
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These 30-hour employees will be salaried and receive the same benefits as traditional 40-hour workers, but they will receive only 75 percent of the pay full-time workers earn. Currently, the company employs part-time workers that share the same benefits as full-time workers. However, the pilot program would differ in that an entire team, including managers, would work reduced hours.
Oh, how I want this to succeed. I've written about this in the past, but I believe that part time is something that could work in our industry, especially now that we work remotely on teams and in different time zones. If you are overlapping less, why can't you also get work done in less time? I've said this before, I would love to work a 30 hour, 4 day a week job. I believe I can produce great code, writing, and ideas in that time, and I think I can benefit a company. Too bad most companies can't take the risk to do this. I can't wait to see what happens at Amazon.
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Building these factories doesn’t require any new technology. In fact, the effort would be much the same as the one that Solomon oversaw at Intel’s semiconductor factory in New Mexico: Pick a site with good roads and a good technical school nearby to supply the workforce; find trained local contractors who can deal with everything from rebar to HVAC; get the local permits; order long-lead-time items like I-beam steel; level the ground and excavate; lay foundations and floors; build walls, columns, and a roof; “facilitate each of the stations for factory machine tooling with plumbing, piping, and electrical wiring”; and train a workforce of 1,500. To match the flow of panels needed to meet the Stanford targets, in the most intense years of construction we need to erect 30 of these solar panel factories a year, plus another 15 for making wind turbines. “It’s at the upper end of what I could possibly imagine,” Solomon says.
This may not be the best metaphor, but for humans who want to think of themselves as ruling over nature and not part of nature, it is a metaphor that could work. And to be quite honest, all I want right now is some action that would spur some action, because without the action soon, we are all fucked. (As you can tell, I'm fairly pessimistic about us doing anything in time to stop catastrophe).
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Practicing waiting is a lifelong practice since, as it turns out, impatience has a particular gravitational pull. But after all that waiting, finding or opening or having that once-future thing feels very much present.
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These are amazing, really, click the link, go look at it.
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And technology can feel miraculous. The application of knowledge and available materials to create new tools allows us to continually rework the world for our needs. We find gaps in our abilities and we make things that fill those gaps. We then look for more gaps. More opportunities. More frustrations. We keep building. We circle back and find that our previous gap-filling technologies had significant consequences and so we find better ways to fill the gaps. In theory we improve our lives.
This is really great and Winston has done great work on accessibility at Vox. And it's a pleasure to read more about what Winston has thought about in regards to it. We all could need affordances at some point in our lives, and it's very easy to forget that.
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This is a really great comic and it speaks to me a lot where I am right now in life. I'm spending August working on a few different things related to my health and feeling better and one of them is drinking. So I've cut way back on how much I consume. I also am on the hunt for interesting drink recipes, because if I'm going to drink a lot less, I want it to be delicious and deliberate. So when out with friends, if I order a drink, I sip it and take time with it. But I find that I prefer to have my limited amount at home, enjoying it with G, and time on the porch (in winter that'll be in front of the fire).
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The more salient point is that they are also forcing their neighbors to make that choice by turning the neighborhood into a commodity as well. The host has forced their neighbors — who see strangers coming and going constantly — to become just a little bit less engaged and connected to their home. It’s not just that they aren’t benefiting financially, it’s that they are incurring the majority of the social costs and losing what they thought their home was when they moved in. Maybe the Airbnb renter is okay with being in a cheaper “hotel,” but their neighbors didn’t sign a lease to live in any kind of hotel.
I'm not a fan of AirBnB and I think this article points out really well how the use of an apartment for full time rental disrupts and changes a neighborhood. There is a lot of things that come along with this and many times it is the neighbors who pay a hidden price while just trying to live their lives in the place they've chosen to do so.
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The distinction’s relevance persists today. Large areas of “real America” are almost entirely white. In Appalachia, that homogeneity, along with the region’s populist tradition, helps explain why white voters there took so much longer to flip from Democrat to Republican than in the Deep South. This does not mean that racism is absent in these areas—far from it. But it suggests that the racism is fueled as much by suspicion of the “other” as it is by firsthand experience of blacks and competition with them—and that political sentiment on issues such as welfare and crime isn’t as racially motivated as many liberal analysts assume. A focus on the South also eclipses places where low-income whites consist mainly of descendants of later European immigrants. (Think of the South Boston Irish, or Baltimore’s Polish American dockworkers depicted in the second season of The Wire.)
This election year in the US has brought out a lot of anger of certain folks who are feeling left behind. And the angry working class white voter is talked about more than almost any other. This piece is really fantastic, drawing on two different books written about the subject of poor whites, but from very different perspectives. I learned a lot and it made me want to read more on the subject.
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Bilinguals overwhelmingly report that they feel like different people in different languages. It is often assumed that the mother tongue is the language of the true self. In many ways, it remains the primal vehicle. A person who has spoken English most of her life is always going to speak English when she stubs her toe (or, according to spycraft, at the moment of orgasm). But, if first languages are reservoirs of emotion, second languages can be rivers undammed, freeing their speakers to ride different currents. People are more likely to say they’d push a man off a bridge—in order to save five other people about to be hit by a train—when the dilemma is presented in their second language.
A really lovely piece about language, love, and communication. I speak a second language and I related to a lot of the bits and pieces that she talked about as she was learning. If you like language, this is well worth reading.
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I know this much: I don’t want to be a part of a community like Twitter if the previous offenses are an accepted part of that community. Twitter isn’t a country, it’s a service. And as a store gets to decide what products it sells, services decide what is and is not permissible. Twitter finds a lot of horrible things permissible, is what I’m saying, and it doesn’t want you to be able to filter or curate your experience. They want to sell you shit. They sure as hell don’t want to behave as responsible community arbiters. It doesn’t want to protect its users or act with any kind of moral authority lest they be judged for daring to not permit everything under the guise of consequence-free first amendment protection.
This is from 2014 and Fraction nails it. Still so true.
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After settling this question, we all moved on to bemoaning the strange tendency of the younger lefty generation to censor or silence speech or opinions they consider in some way wrong: no-platforming, safe spaces, and the rest of it. We were all right about that, too. But then, from the corner, on a sofa, the cleverest among us, who was at that moment feeding a new baby, waited till we’d all stopped bloviating and added: “Well, they got that habit from us. We always wanted to be seen to be right. To be on the right side of an issue. More so even than doing anything. Being right was always the most important thing.”
Really interesting piece on Brexit and the vote. There are lessons here for Americans with what is going on in our current election.
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When we take a “gut feeling” sense of someone’s seniority without specific criteria, there is basically no way to counteract our own biases, but we still make a judgement. It’s completely possible for a person applying to multiple dev jobs to be evaluated as junior at one, mid-level at another, and even senior at another, with very little feedback as to why.
I really like the way this is defined and talked about. Job titles, in particular when you are senior or not, are a difficult thing and the proposed way to define them here is really interesting.
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The “dumbbell” design was conceived to give each tenant its own floor and create an entrance and outdoor common area sheltered from the busy intersection. The result allows for retail space on the ground floors and 10 floors of office space, each 4,000 square feet, which he said was ideal for a 12- to 15-person company. The building is 44 percent preleased as of late last year. Mr. Cavenaugh reserved one floor of the building for co-working space that his company will manage; this will be his third co-working space in Portland.
This building, as you'll see if you click through to see the rendering, has been controversial, to say the least. People either love it or hate it. But that is exactly why I like it. Great buildings often are controversial when built. In addition, the developer is a super interesting guy who does non traditional projects, but his projects are successful (as defined by being fully leased out). He spoke at the Portland Creative Mornings and I recommend that talk as well.
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That tech (and, increasingly, media—and oh, that boundary is nothing if not fluid) also speaks of scalability in religious terms puts Tsing’s contention here in an even more interesting light. Scalability is expressed not only in the external artifacts of an organization—the software, the servers, the business model—but also the people who work for it and the people who interact with it as customers, clients, and, increasingly, inconstant laborers. That latter category—the Uber drivers, TaskRabbits, and Postmates—seems especially relevant to notions of scalability. Uber can scale, but the single parent who works as a driver and can’t predict what they’ll make from week to week cannot.
The book, The Mushroom at the End of the World has now moved up on my reading list. I want to finish what I have started and then it will get to the top. But the way Mandy talks about tech in relation to scale and the questions we should be asking about it are interesting and I think vital. If scale, as she says at the end of this piece, is the solitary success metric, there are problems. Because when you scale what do you lose? What do you leave behind? And how does scale affect people?