Everything I share — writing, short curated lists, and links. You can also find me on Threads.
The distributed office is not a placeless space. A Zoom call is a place; a Slack channel is a place; your manager’s inbox is a place. These are all “rooms” in which bosses can evaluate worker performance. It’s a fact of human diversity that different people thrive in different spaces, so we should expect that the virtual spaces of remote work will reward certain skills that went underappreciated in office settings.
Many women discount later-onset depression, thinking postpartum depression only happens right after the baby arrives. This is not the case.
We are now in late-stage performative Twitter, where nearly every tweet is hungry as hell for favorites and retweets, and everyone is a trained pundit or comedian. It's hot takes and cool proverbs all the way down.
Disagreement with their program becomes irrefutable evidence of a dissenter’s ‘white fragility,’ ‘unconscious bias’ or ‘internalized white supremacy.’ I’ve seen this projection of false consciousness on their opponents play out dozens of times in my reporting. Diversity trainers will make an outrageous claim — such as ‘all whites are intrinsically oppressors’ or ‘white teachers are guilty of spirit murdering black children’ — and then, when confronted with disagreement, adopt a patronizing tone and explain that participants who feel ‘defensiveness’ or ‘anger’ are reacting out of guilt and shame.”
But I’ve been in numerous meetings with enthusiasts for cryptocurrency and/or blockchain, the concept that underlies it. In such meetings I and others always ask, as politely as we can: “What problem does this technology solve? What does it do that other, much cheaper and easier-to-use technologies can’t do just as well or better?” I still haven’t heard a clear answer.
What Wheel does phenomenally well is bring together multiple sides of the marketplace to drive better, faster and more affordable access to care.
Most implausible-sounding ideas are in fact bad and could be safely dismissed. But not when they're proposed by reasonable domain experts. If the person proposing the idea is reasonable, then they know how implausible it sounds. And yet they're proposing it anyway. That suggests they know something you don't. And if they have deep domain expertise, that's probably the source of it.
Light a cigarette anywhere in my house, and you’ll be dazzled by the flow of the smoke—up and around, through doorways, swirling toward the ceiling and then back to the floor, inscribing elegant arcs through the air—never resting until it finds its way out a window.
Many pundits seem to delight in observing that the board can’t fix any of the “real” problems with Facebook, a view that is true at the level of questions like “how do we fix our broken information sphere and polarized society?”, and false at the level of many questions of vital importance to to individual users. Questions like: why did Facebook delete a post in which I criticized the government? Why can’t I see strikes against my account? Why are policies enforced inconsistently? Why are US politicians held to a higher standard than foreign leaders? Why aren’t the community standards available in Punjabi? People who don’t see those as “real” problems with Facebook have strangely little empathy for the billions of people who use the company’s services, even as those same critics style themselves as noble sentinels of a free society.
If you’re a programmer and you have no equity and no union representation, then you have no form of ownership or leverage. Any employer who’s trying to make you feel like an owner is setting you up for a rude awakening. So don’t be a chump and buy into it.