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šŸ”— In praise of Drafts // @ameripie

… an app by Agile Tortoise (AKA Greg Pierce), remarkably won App of the Year for 2025 at Mac Stories, a full thirteen years after its release.

šŸ’Æ

Apps @ameripie uses with drafts - with my annotations

  • Obsidian āœ…
  • Things3 āœ…
  • Fantastical
  • DayOne āœ…
  • Shortcuts - I really should use Shortcuts (more?)
  • Dropbox - I use it - but not with Drafts * Fastmail
  • Apple Notes āœ…
  • ChatGPT - I use it - but not with Drafts * Ulysses
  • Mastodon - not really - my stuff arrived there thanks to Micro.Blog
  • BlueSky - not really - my stuff arrived there thanks to Micro.Blog
  • Micro.Blog āœ…

PLUS

  • Reminders
  • Mail/Spark
  • Craft
  • Notes

As I have written before - 99% of my written words (outside of email) start in Drafts.

The appointment is reminiscent of Meta Platforms’ hiring of former British Prime Minister Nick Clegg as a global affairs executive in 2018 …

šŸ’¬ Martin Peers - The Information - talking about Osborne and OpenAI

No he wasn’t. He was ‘Deputy’ PM - a bit like ‘Winnie’ and ‘Seymour’ in New Zealand at the moment (a thank you from the dominant party that still couldn’t get a majority on its own - so formed a coalition.)

Nick was so good at his job that in 5 short years as Deputy he took the LibDems from 57 seats to just 8. After which he lost his position, resigned from party leader and a year later lost his local election. After that the Brits made him a ‘Knight’ in the UK and Zuck made him whatever it was called for Meta.

Imagine how far he could have gone if he was a success.

( šŸ”— The Link

Consider that in the wake of the national security announcement from Tяump and The Tяump Аппаратчик

What’s most striking to me about this document isn’t any specific policies, but what it reveals about values. Increasingly, the United States and Europe don’t share them. This reflects a change in America far more than a change in Europe. Trump sees a G-Zero world ruled by the law of the jungle, where might makes right and everything can be bought. For all its flaws, institutional quirks, and bureaucratic sclerosis, the European Union stands for something else: rule of law, liberal democracy, human rights, multilateralism. You can roll your eyes at that list all you want, but it’s the foundation of the entire European project. Heck, it’s why America built the transatlantic alliance in the first place. (The alternative, two world wars, didn’t work out too well for anyone.) And it’s now in direct tension with what Washington is selling.

šŸ’¬ Ian Bremmer

šŸ”— Full Piece which also includes this reminder …

The only time NATO’s Article 5 has ever been invoked was by the United States, after September 11, 2001. Every European ally came to America’s defense despite different approaches to free speech, regulation, and countless other policy disagreements. They showed up, fought, and died alongside Americans in Afghanistan.

šŸ’¬ Ian Bremmer

So … Europe is the enemy, China - despite rhetoric seem to be closer and Russia - with no cards but all the influence - blood brothers.

I would note that …

Together, the EU countries hold more US debt than Japan and China put together - to the tune of $2 maybe 2.5 trillion. - well above twice that of China - and that doesn’t include the UK who is in the same ball park as China all by itself.

All that wringing of hands a few months ago about China selling its debt and now we have this.

Of course - they didn’t.

No economist in this house - but I do wonder when a country - any country - will get to do something radical rather than putting up with this shit.

I watched the first and wasn’t really expecting a second … and I am CERTAINLY not expecting a third. PLEASE.

If you have nothing better to do .. in our house it’s one of those that fits in the Venn diagram overlap of ā€˜what movie shall we watch’ twixt the two of us.

Remarkably average .. I had Guy worked out during his second scene. Keira needed to think more.

I was going to publish this in my newsletter - for interest it might have - the audience is possibly something with a broader interest, so here it is - and I will link to it from there.


My Blog: has been around a long time. (Well over 10,000 posts - and my first post recorded there in April 2005) - and I know that isn’t everything - because on my hard drive I have an archive folder called ā€˜blogs over time’ - still waiting to be assimilated.

Beyond that, whatever I post there is automatically routed to;

šŸ”— Mastodon

šŸ”— Bluesky

šŸ”— Threads and even

šŸ”— Tumblr and no - not Twitter

In this way - you can keep up through your preferred social feed of choice - follow along with your own account - reply and everything is routed back to the mothership.

If you want the best way to follow (IMHO) , then RSS is your friend.


My Wiki: on ā€˜Structured Thought (newly launched - early stage) can be found at

https://wiki.philpin.com - with its own RSS or JSON


.. and then there are;

my ā€˜cobbler'**s shoes’ web site at https://philpin.com is under a refurbishment program that I hope to complete soon.


my currently dormant podcast


my public library of public and private documents


… and much more to come.

My friend (and co founder of the original Just Good Music blog) John Parker sent me an email …

I have found that the number of people that really listen to music is vanishingly small, and I KNOW that you are one of the ones that does, hence my email. Every once in a while I need to reach out and touch base just to know that I’m not insane, it’s the rest of the world that is lost.

And

So you motor along and see cool music videos. and you say"yeah!" and “cool!”. And everyonce in a while, you see one that makes you close your computer just go take a walk. Like… goddamn. This is a goddamn video …

This is that video - and DAMN - he’s right.

šŸ”—šŸ“¼ Ren

And if you like this - here is Ren’s YouTube channel .. so you can fill your boots.

šŸ”— Ren on Wikipedia tells a story for sure.


As to John’s throwaway line;

“the number of people that really listen to music is vanishingly small”

Needless to say - I wholeheartedly agree which is why I take solace in podcasts like The Rockenteurs, YouTube channels like Rick Beato and Newsletters like Ted Gioia.



If you are reading this post on my site, the inline video gives an error. Click on the link above. The 'error' is only because the creator wants you to got to YouTube to watch it.

After this, I asked for “the top 5 themes of the entire blog - and how those themes might be categorised.”

āø»

1. Systems vs People

Category: Human-Centric vs Mechanistic Worlds

This is the …

Before I get there - everything below the line below was automatically generated by an AI (does it matter which one?)

šŸ–‡ļø Blog.Philpin.com is a combination of imports of older blogs from other personal spaces together with this latest iteration which has been going since around 2017/18? I am in the process of reorganising my different sub domains into a coherent view of my thinking - it will - I guess be an eternal WIP - but slowly we are getting there.

I was interested as to how much of what sits in what I call my ‘Personal Journal’ - was ‘on topic’ - so to speak. (Hard - when the topic is not clear - even to the author.)

That said - Structured Thought is revealing itself as my broad category - and I have a LOT of material that fits there scattered across my hard drive - enter my new Wiki - where I am starting to collect and curate the material.

So - with thanks to @manton and #micro.blog it took no time at all to export my thousands (no exaggeration) of posts and easily as many replies to zip and json files - upload them to a new project and with that said - let the analysis begin …

I asked the AI just to give me a quick 4 paragraphs on its take of what it found in the archive.


Your blog reads like a long, rolling attempt to make sense of systems that don’t behave the way they pretend to. You’re tracking the gap between how the world is structured on paper and how it actually functions in practice — whether that’s tech, politics, identity, business, or the internet itself. Underneath the commentary, there’s a consistent itch: why do institutions keep choosing the path that works against people, complexity, and common sense? And why do we keep letting them? It’s observational, sometimes wry, sometimes annoyed, but fundamentally grounded in curiosity about how things should work if we weren’t so collectively distracted.

Another through-line: you’ve always been a ā€˜people first, systems second’ thinker, even before you had the language for it. The posts keep circling back to the same tension — humans don’t behave like the tidy diagrams or workflows created to manage them. You poke at corporate theatre, political spin, tech evangelism, and the strange incentives that create distortion instead of coherence. More often than not, you’re tracing the hidden mechanics: the power relationships, the data trails, the business models baked into digital life. There’s a quiet sense of accountability running through it: don’t just look at what a system claims; look at what it rewards.

There’s also a personal arc that floats just beneath the surface. The blog isn’t memoir, but it carries the fingerprints of someone who’s lived enough cycles to spot the patterns early. The tone shifts over time—from early curiosity, to a kind of mid-period frustration, to a more recent strategic clarity. You’ve moved from ā€˜this is odd’ to ā€˜here’s the underlying structure’ to ā€˜and here’s how we might actually fix it.’ The personal reflections act as calibration points, showing how your own lens sharpened while the world got noisier.

And stitched through all of it is the same project you’re running now: trying to build ways of thinking that actually help people navigate complexity instead of collapsing under it. The blog, taken as a whole, is you working that out in public — testing ideas, calling out nonsense, mapping where things go wrong, and nudging toward a more honest, human, future-oriented frame. It’s not a brand play. It’s a long record of someone interrogating the shape of the world and refusing to take shallow explanations at face value.

InterestingšŸ”— read.

Or is it?

My ten cents so you don’t have to wade through the whole thing.

The report sketches a workplace where confidence has thinned, power has tilted back to employers, and employees are left carrying the weight. Trust in leadership keeps sliding as people call out misalignment, muddled communication, and a shift from occasional layoffs to something closer to a permanent drizzle. Remote and hybrid staff have stalled on career progression, which explains the quiet drift back to offices. AI anxiety is loud enough, but the actual impact on job satisfaction is tiny. Job seekers are taking whatever lands in front of them in a flat hiring market, though early-career workers are finally seeing real wage growth again, particularly in the up-and-coming second-tier cities.

So - same old same? B(S)AU.

Takeaways

  • Trust in leadership keeps dropping as workers feel disconnected, insecure, and overlooked amid constant micro-layoffs.
  • Remote workers might love the flexibility, but the career ceiling is showing, which will keep nudging people back into the office.
  • AI disruption is mostly a storyline for now; the data shows only a faint effect on sentiment.

… no shit Dick Tracy.

And the big reveal?

  • The real trust gap isn’t RTO or AI, it’s that workers no longer believe leadership acts in their interest.
    • Newsflash, they never did.
  • Cities like Provo and Boise are beating the big tech hubs on early-career wage growth.
    • Well yes, after what those hubs were paying, reality was always going to bite.

Then again, it’s Glassdoor. What exactly was I expecting?