Category: personal AnGoL

We have been almost a parody of multiculturalism on our little street. Black and white, Hispanic and Asian; straight, gay, and transgender; families of all kinds—extended, adopted, arranged by convenience or design. Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist. I would come home and see the daughters of our Sikh mailman, before they grew up, playing baseball in the halls. In the evening, I sat at my desk in a little space, in this building cubbyholed with other little spaces and held together by what

Source: The Death of a Once Great City | Harper’s Magazine

People didn’t care about this rational math. People, in general, are terrible at valuing their time, perhaps because for most people monetary compensation for one’s time is so detached from the event of spending one’s time. Most time we spend isn’t like deliberate practice, with immediate feedback.
Wealthy people tend to receive a much more direct and immediate payoff for their time which is why they tend to be better about valuing it. This is why the first thing that most ultra-wealthy people I know do upon becoming ultra-wealthy is to hire a driver and start to fly private. For most normal people, the opportunity cost of their time is far more difficult to ascertain moment to moment.
You can’t imagine what a relief it is to have a single overarching obstacle to focus on as a product person. It’s the same for anyone trying to solve a problem. Half the comfort of diets that promise huge weight loss in exchange for cutting out sugar or carbs or whatever is feeling like there’s a really simple solution or answer to a hitherto intractable, multi-dimensional problem.

Source: Invisible asymptotes — Remains of the Day

By elevating women and distancing themselves from partisan engagement, the members of the SBC appear to be signaling their determination to head in a different direction, out of a mix of pragmatism and principle. For more than a decade, the denomination has been experiencing precipitous decline by almost every metric. Baptisms are at a 70-year low, and Sunday attendance is at a 20-year low. Southern Baptist churches lost almost 80,000 members from 2016 to 2017 and they have hemorrhaged a whopping one milli

Source: Southern Baptists Call Off the Culture War – The Atlantic

By trying to improve our cities, we have only succeeded in making them empty simulacra of what was. To bring this about we have signed on to political scams and mindless development schemes that are so exclusive they are more destructive than all they were supposed to improve. The urban crisis of affluence exemplifies our wider crisis: we now live in an America where we believe that we no longer have any ability to control the systems we live under.

Source: The Death of a Once Great City | Harper’s Magazine

n a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode from 2007, Larry David and his wife Cheryl and their friends attend a ceremony to celebrate his public donation to the National Resources Defense Council, a non-profit environmental advocacy group. Little does he know that the actor Ted Danson, his arch-frenemy, also donated money, but anonymously. “Now it looks like I just did mine for the credit as opposed to Mr. Wonderful Anonymous,” David tells Cheryl. David feels upstaged, as if his public donation has been transformed from a generous gesture to an egotistical one. Cheryl says, about Danson, “Isn’t that great? He donated the whole wing. Didn’t want anybody to know.” “I didn’t need the world to know either!” David says. “Nobody told me I could be ‘anonymous’ and tell people!” He would have done it Danson’s way, he says, but, realizing the contradiction, he fumes, “You can’t have it halfway! You’re either anonymous, or you’re not.” What Danson did, David concludes, is “fake philanthropy and faux anonymity!”

Source: Larry David and the Game Theory of Anonymous Donations

What is clearly needed is new legislation, not an attempt to misapply ancient regulation in a way that is trivially reversible. Moreover, AT&T has a point that online services like Google and Facebook are legitimate competitors, particularly for ad dollars; said regulation should address the entire sector. To that end I would focus on three key principles:

• First, ISPs should not purposely slow or block data on a discriminatory basis. I am not necessarily opposed to the concept of “fast lanes”, as I believe that offers significant potential for innovative services, although I recognize the arguments against them; it should be non-negotiable, though, that ISPs cannot purposely disfavor certain types of content.
• Second, and similarly, dominant internet platforms should not be allowed to block any legal content from their services. At the same time, services should have discretion in monetization and algorithms; that anyone should be able to put content on YouTube, for example, does not mean that one has a right to have Google monetize it on their behalf, or surface it to people not looking for it.
• Third, ISPs should not be allowed to zero-rate their own content, and platforms should not be allowed to prioritize their own content in their algorithms. Granted, this may be a bit extreme; at a minimum there should be strict rules and transparency around transfer pricing and a guarantee that the same rates are allowed to competitive services and content.

The reality of the Internet, as noted by Aggregation Theory, is increased centralization; meanwhile, the impact on the Internet on traditional media is an inexorable drive towards consolidation. Our current laws and antitrust jurisprudence are woefully unprepared to deal with this reality, and a new law guaranteeing neutrality is the best solution.

Source: AT&T, Time Warner, and the Need for Neutrality – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

If You Commit to Nothing, You’ll Be Distracted By Everything By James Clear    |    Grit, Minimalism, Motivation In the northeastern hills outside Kyoto, Japan there is a mountain known as Mount Hiei. That mountain is littered with unmarked graves. Those graves mark the final resting place of the Tendai Buddhist monks who have failed to complete a quest known as the Kaihogyo. What is this quest that kills so many of the monks? And what can you and I learn from it? Keep reading and I’ll tell you. Before

Source: Mental Toughness and the “Marathon Monks”

Very hard. Been living this the past few years.

When you’re a tech lead, you need to put your ego aside (something that, let’s be honest, might not be as easy as it sounds) because you’re basically working for others. You’re between a rock and a hard place, as they say, because you need to look out for your project’s well-being and at the same time, you need to look-out for your team’s well-being, which in certain occasions, are not the same thing.

Source: You’re the Tech Lead, Not the Tech Guru – DZone Agile

To see how much sleep you really need, my professor suggests that when you go on vacation, try to stick to your normal bedtime and then see what time you wake up. With no stressors or time to get up, you’ll just fall into a natural pattern, and that’s probably how much sleep you actually need.

Source: You should be sleeping more than eight hours a night. Here’s why — Quartz

The main mental model in this book is that there are a handful of Tribes. Tribes are loose or strong but connected through a defining belief or mantra. At work, we are all part of one of these tribes. These are our teams. Our co-workers. The people we spend ⅓ of our lives around. As such, our overall happiness and life satisfaction is heavily influenced by the tribes we belong to.

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1. The victim tribe. These are the people that believe life sucks, and everything that happens is evidence of this fact. This is about 2% of groups.
2. The my life sucks tribe. This is when you feel disconnected from your work, its impact, or have a lot of meaningless relationships. This is about 25% of groups.
3. The I’m better than you tribe. These are cancerous people that infiltrate the lives of those in the other tribes. They are not team players; they think that credit is a finite resource they need to hoard. They believe that knowledge is power and do all they can to get a leg up on others. They create and thrive on malicious drama.. These people are the hardest to predict. This is about 49% of groups.
4. The we’re great but you’re not tribe. This is common and if harnessed can be a source of motivation. The bigger the enemy the more potential this tribe has. People in this tribe are externally driven. It’s about winning and beating some other tribe. People are still full of themselves, but everyone seems relatively happy because they are competing as a team. This is about 22% of groups.
5. The life is great tribe. As a team this is when you’re focused on intrinsic mission and customers. Think of the mindset as “How are we going to make history?” and not “how are we going to beat them?” People in this tribe are the most productive. This is about 2% of groups.

When you read the list, which group did you want to be in?

Source: The 5 Stages of Tribal Belonging – Sam Kyle – Medium