• What If We Designed Systems to Work for People, Not Just Profits?

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    Reminder, next month we’re reading A System for Writing by Bob Doto. You can find future books here. If you have suggestions I’d love to hear about them. Systems need balance and buffer, but both of these things can be tricky to keep around in the face of a system that appears to be working.…

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  • Why We Feel Isolated in a Connected World – The Empty Promise of Social Media

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    The guiding star of Alderian psychology is that we derive meaning from connection to community. That we can only feel connection to a community when we are useful in it because we are contributing meaningfully to that community. Why don’t we feel connected? Philosopher: Take, for example, a man who, on reaching retirement age and…

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  • Apple is just a business

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    Many are currently lamenting what they see as the fall of Apple from a tech company that “did it right” to one that goes where the winds of power takes them. They see Apple advertising on X again or donating to the inaguration as some personal affront to their sensibilities. The problem is that people…

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  • A Weird Corner of the Internet – Floor 796

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    In the sea of generic social media and governments speed running their way to Nazism Floor 796 brings back some good old internet oddness. I spent 20 minutes scrolling around absorbing what’s happening and I still could spend time seeing what’s going on. If you know of more odd places online I’d love to see…

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  • The Hidden Addictions of Our Economic Systems

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    Not everyone recognizes that addiction can appear in larger systems and in other guises — such as the dependence of industry on government subsidy, the reliance of farmers on fertilizers, the addiction of Western economies to cheap oil or weapons manufacturers to government contracts. Thinking in Systems Pg 131 We want our systems to be…

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  • When you Don’t Like Books

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    It’s rare that I don’t finish a book, but there have been a few. Most recently I put down The Black Swan because I felt it was a poorly written self agrandizing work written so that Taleb could show how smart he was while making up new names for established principles. Even when I do…

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  • An interview with @amerpie

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    I enjoyed the behind the scenes look with Lou. In general I enjoy the series of blogger interviews.

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  • Manu – Humans are Complex

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    From Manu on Identity. It’s also why I find broad group definitions so annoying. Lumping together potentially billions of people using arbitrary traits as the dividing line is such a lazy way to look at the richness of human diversity and experience. Every time I see people using one of these definitions—in a serious way…

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  • Robert Breen – why keep a blog

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    Robert goes over why he keeps a blog. I still think a blog is great for your career. I’ll be writing more about technical stuff on my business site/blog because I’m learning more about Laravel and Python and want to branch out from WordPress stuff.

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  • Shifting Blame and Taking Responsibility

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    It’s almost irresistible to blame something or someone else, to shift responsibility away from ourselves, and to look for the central knob, the product, the pill, the technical fix that will make the problem go away. Thinking in Systems Pg 4 I love this quote because it relates closely to something I always tell my…

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