r/wallstreetbets had illuminated something: everyone was now playing the same game, mediated by the same interface. COVID rendered us all crouched, behind screens, contending to steer the same pools of capital in different directions. I think institutional Wall Street is afraid for a reason that’s even more intrinsic than the idea of being liquidated or margin-called. The game that we’d spent decades perfecting and protecting for a select group of insiders was now open to anyone. A great incursion on the social network was unfolding for everyone to witness. The funhouse culmination of Metcalfe’s law.
For my part, as both an anxious and pugnacious dad, the idea of that this great competition in which my wife apparently birthed our children requires us to submit the inner workings of our family to the needs of an alien, immoral, technocratic, utilitarian system of achievement kind of pisses me off. And the idea that I have to suck up to certain guardians and gatekeepers of opportunity within this system, and my parenting should be devoted to urging my kids into this sucking up as well, roils my fatherly pride. It makes me want to recommit to the idea that my family is a place apart, a vantage from which I can look upon these forges and these people and tell them, No.
This defiant retreat has a romantic appeal, I admit, and it might be a healthy move for parents to make in the short term. But as a general outlook it is counterproductive in the longer run. It takes for granted our atomized predicament as families, and thus reinforces it. Admitting this leads to some of ironic conclusions that might be hard for America’s more conservative defenders of family life to accept: that the autonomy of families is actually undermined by our system of individualized competition; that reorienting the nuclear family away from this anxious striving and toward its traditional rewards and inherent virtues might require heightened solidarity in our social outlook.
Made ice cream, needed to clean up 📷
Exploring 📷
Bernita watched Victoria chase the fireflies around the yard for a few minutes. This, she thought, was what a Black kid’s life should feel like - happy and unencumbered. She told Victoria to find a Mason jar. They ran through the grass until Victoria had trapped a single glowing insect. Afterward, they sat on their stoop, researching the specimen on Victoria’s phone. They learned that the bugs belong to the family Lampyridae, and that a bioluminescent enzyme makes them glow.
As Victoria scrolled, Bernita laughed. “You do know this is homeschooling, right?” she asked.
Victoria looked up from her phone. The fireflies lit up around them. “Really?” she asked.
“Yep,” “Bernita said. “This is home schooling. This is science. We about to do this for real.”
Substack, the Read on ReMarkable Chrome plugin, and my first gen ReMarkable have combined for the most pleasurable and useful media consumption system I have experienced in a long, long time.
📍Washington DC. Made with OpenStreetMaps, ggplot2, and love. Available for sale thanks to Shopify.
[W]e must shift our thinking from treating teams as collections of interchangeable individuals that will succeed as long as they follow the “right” process and use the “right” tools, to treating people and technology as a single human/computer carbon/silicon sociotechnical ecosystem. At the same time, we need to ensure that teams are intrinsically motivated and are given a real chance of doing their best work within such a system.
And then it is another day and another and another but I will not go on about this because no doubt you too have experienced time.
From Weather by Jenny Offill. I enjoyed it, and it has some lovely writing, but on the whole it felt more dated than any other fiction I’ve read recently. 📚
NBA Conference Finals: most searched team by state
Dad’s day Caesar 📷
🎈 📷
I found this story indicating that the New York Islanders are the most popular team across the US a little hard to believe, so I took a look at Google Trends. That seems a little more plausible. Then I made my own map, because I like maps. Code here: rentry.co/nhlmap.
I’ve never worked at FAANG so I don’t know what I’m missing. But I’ve hired (and not hired) engineers from FAANGs and they don’t know what they’re doing either.
For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.
My job is easier because I have semi-technical analysts on my team. Semi-technical because they know programming but not software engineering. This is a blessing because if something doesn’t make sense to them, it means that it was probably badly designed. I love the analysts on the team; they’ve helped me grow so much more than the most brilliant engineers.
A lot of progressive companies, especially startups, talk about bringing your “authentic self”. Well what if your authentic self is all about watching porn? Yeah, it’s healthy to keep a barrier between your work and personal life.
Venkatesh Rao has a new subscribers only post out through his Substack, and it’s one of the most interesting things I’ve read in a while. The core idea is the importance of the studio organizational form to the post-COVID reboot, and in particular the “maker studio” where platform technology and other innovation enables a single person to get busy building and creating.
The Instapot is just a slightly fancy pressure cooker with some electronics and automation for safety. Pressure cookers are over a century old, but fell out of favor in the West because they were perceived as dangerous. They continued to be used in the developing world where consumers are both more comfortable with risk, and the upside for quicker cooking of common foods (beans and lentils) is high enough to make it worthwhile. But the small increase in safety and convenience through the integration of electronic smart controls has suddenly made pressure cooking attractive again at developed world levels of consumer risk tolerance. A clear indicator — my American-bred wife has always been too scared to use my low-tech Indian pressure cooker, and used to outsource things like cooking beans to me. But once we bought the Instapot, she was willing to do pressure cooking on her own.
The situation is the same in text media. If you do your accounting right (and this is a big, ongoing debate), a subscriber-based indie publishing activity built around Substack is about a tenth of the cost in time/money/skills acquisition/relationship management as one built around WordPress.
You can go from publication idea to functioning publication in about 20 minutes with no human contact. It’s an Instapot type effect. A small and relatively trivial expansion of the feature set creates a large increase in consumer-grade production capability, primarily via elimination of dependence on 1:1 human relationships.
