💬 Quotes
Never base your identity on politics. The world will eventually change, but you won’t.
💬 Mark Manson
… except I don’t agree. Unless I am missing something?
What do you think?
“Wisdom is when you stop over-investing in every shiny new idea, feeling, or person that comes along.”
💬 Mark Manson
Hell yes - tell me about it.
Well, except for apps … and notebooks … and pens of course - don’t forget pens … and that new craft ale … not to mention exploring that new idea that Jim shared last night, Oh and that new blogging tool thingy. Yeah - I think I am covered. Or maybe …..
🎈016/366 | 🌴 Greener Grass Over There
Somebody else’s grass is greener. Always.
Just finished a conversation with a Turkish gentleman who has now lived in New Zealand for 10 years. Came here to learn English. He has. Now moving to Perth …
You can earn twice the money and buy twice the house for half the money. What can go wrong?
Indeed, what can go wrong? So much, but then doing nothing solves nothing and it still can go wrong. Plus his journey time ‘home’ will be halved - as will the cost of the flight.
If people leaving their own country to get a better life in New Zealand are leaving to get a better life in Australia - is it any wonder that so many Kiwis do exactly that?
I hear of this talked about amongst people - a lot. At the policy level - not so much.
If you think housing is expensive where you live, consider New Zealand - where a ’tradie’, a doctor, a teacher, a nurse, a coder, a … pretty much any skill class you can think if can emigrate across the Tasman sea, earn twice the money and buy a similar property for half the price - is it any surprise that they are?
Meanwhile, I know a few Kiwis who have lived abroad for most of their life and will be ‘coming home’ to retire.
Does anyone else see a problem?
🎈014/366 | 💩 The Gamekeeper Is The Poacher
An excellent show from the mighty John Oliver taking on McKinsey in this one. You know … the company that advised Purdue on how to sell more Oxy. Spin through to 15:50 … to hear this one.
Mr. Sternfels they didn’t have experience - they were the identical humans working for both at the same time.
💬 Katie Porter
Cleaning out the swamp, stopping the revolving door of public service and corporate interest … it really doesn’t matter what you call it - what is clear that the swamp / cesspool / revolving doors are very much alive and well - no matter what anyone claims.
🎈011/366 | 🔮 Indie Publishing - Future Vision
A couple of click throughs in this morning’s review triggered this post.
It started here … 🔗 Substack Barely Does The Bare Minimum
which linked to here … 🔗 gilest.org: Make the indie web easier
which then linked to here … 🔗 gilest.org: More on the easier indie web
TL;DR
A few links to interesting places that are about the indie web - but with an undercurrent of something that I have been banging on about forEVER …
If we truly want to open up the web for everyone to publish on, we have to make it easier. Let’s give people choices. Let’s give people options for tools they can set up and use, with no more knowledge than the knowledge they already have.
💬 Giles Turnbull'
YES
There are a few - and indeed MicroBlog is one such example (that is not listed in those links) … although even MicroBlog has its challenges.
I think the overall challenge is two fold;
1] It is not easy.
- so requires significant resources to make it a reality.
2] Does ‘everybody’ care enough?
- because if they don’t - I feel the TAM might be pretty small - and will include a large number of people already in the camp of what we have is good enough.
🎈010/366 | ✍️ Rewriting Future History
🔗 Interesting piece from Om today.
I think he’s right about that up there. What I am not so sure about is this down here.
Why?
Because it will bring all those ‘EEJITS’ out of the woodwork, who maintain that ’Steve’ did everything and Tim has done nothing, isn’t innovative, riding the coat tails etc …
(Count me in the camp of the people that believe that had Tim NOT done what Tim did when he did it, that there wouldn’t even be a significant enough Apple to do what he is doing now.)
🎈007/366 | 🚣♀️ The Pace of Change
A couple of days ago I wrote a little (very little) about Stewart Brand’s 🖇️ Pace layer. It’s worth clicking through - not just to my short piece, but in turn the links in that post.
Still - to the point.
Andy Hamilton dropped a post on LinkedIN a couple of days ago referencing an Australian report called ‘Barriers to collaboartion and commercialization’ asking if there were lessons that can be learned fro New Zealand. And so ‘the people’ weighed in - with the inevitable group waxing lyrical about business and government working hand in hand to innovate and become world leaders in ….
Pipe dreams - and ‘Pace Layers’, illustrated above explain why.
The model was developed by Stewart Brand and Brian Eno of all people. A quick study will reveal why government involvement in innovation is flawed. If you are still missing the challenge comes down to the
The order of a healthy civilization. The fast layers innovate; the slow layers stabilize. The whole combines learning with continuity.
💬 Stewart Brand
It reminds me of something 🔗 Venkatesh Rao wrote about many years ago - and which I in turn referenced in my 🔗 book a couple of years ago.
Bottom Line
I have always had a fundamental problem with government being joined at the hip with business. In principle, it sounds lovely. It can work. It does work … but not if you want to be fast, innovative, different, leading edge, using new technologies - all of these things are not part of a government’s DNA - the pace layer model reveals why it won’t work.
Whatever speed government works at, it still wont be fast enough for business and if you slow down business to more readily accommodate government, then others will beat you to market.
Just three case studies out of the hundreds if not thousands just in the software industry; Uber, AirBNB and Facebook.
And don’t get me started on Tesla, The Boring Compnay, SpaceX, X, xAI, Neuralink and the rest of the ‘Musk Suite.
🎈005/366 | 🎨 Art Imitating Life❓
Continuing on from yesterday’s post (4/366), Martinborough is actually a planned town, originally laid out by
Its center square and the roads running into it were laid out to represent a Union Jack.
Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life
💬 Oscar Wilde
The names of the roads through ‘old Martinborough’ are named after towns in Europe that Mr. Martin travelled to on a world tour before he laid out his new town. Later - as the world moved towards World War 1, some of the more germanic sounding street names were changed to celebrate important Military leaders of the time - hence Kitchener.
Meanwhile - head down Kitchener Street to the square and back out along Jellicoe Road there are three mural on the wall. This is one of them celebrating The Martinborough Hotel.
The Artist seems to have an understanding of how the town came to be - or are the bags on the Fiat actually those of the visitors to Martinborough - and not of Mr. Martin. Then again - when Mr. Martin was traveling, I am not sure the car had been invented, much less the Fiat 500.
Maybe Oscar had it right? Maybe the artist is predicting the arrival of the Fiat 500 - so that life can indeed imitate art?
🎈004/366 | 🏢 Demonstrating The Pace Layer
Over the break, I had the fortune (not committing to whether that’s good or bad, since that is a whole different story) to visit Martinborough in the Wairarapa - one of New Zealand’s wine regions. It’s a cute little town that includes a single ‘supermarket’.
On one visit I noticed two photographs on the wall - the building from the early part of the last century, photographed in 1906 ….
… and a second of a different building (same site) in 1949.
As I took the photographs of the photographs, I commented to a couple passing by and watching me that it was a shame that a beautiful building such as the original was replaced by the ‘flat pack’.
I assumed that some bright spark had decided to pull the old one down in favor of the ‘modern, sleek lined building’.
Never assume.
Yes the old one was pulled down - but after a major earthquake rendered part of it flat and part of it unsafe - and I get why you would want to modernize and I know why the designs changed - but that’s not what this is about.
What it’s about is that the photographs and conversation reminded me of a 🔗 recent post from Stowe Boyd that referenced Stewart Brand’s book 🔗 How Buildings Learn which in turn built on the ideas of British architect Frank Duffy.
Buildings aren’t made out of glass, concrete and stone: they’re made out of time, layers of time.
💬 Frank Duffy
Brand’s model is clear;
… and the two images reveal it in action. No images from the inside of the store - though for the Kiwi’s amongst you, I can say that the Martinborough FourSquare is the nicest (and largest) FourSquare I have ever visited. (For Brits, think of a FourSquare as something like one of those Tesco or Safeways Mini-marts we find in ever increasing numbers around the British Isles. Think of the Martinborough Foursquare as more akin to a mid sized Waitrose. For American readers … Wholefoods? High end Safeways?
All that said - look at Brand’s model carefully and consider buildings you know and how they relate.
🎈003/366 | 💬 A New Purpose
Interesting to read 🔗 this from Om. I definitely did not feel that all of last year, but definitely in the past couple of months, something in me has been coming together. It’s as if bits of Lego have been suddenly snapping together, around writing, my work programmes and the connected thinking.
It’s not just the new year. There’s a fundamental shift I am feeling.
The question is whether it is an aberration, or something that will translate to something that will stay for part of the journey.
I think it’s the latter.
LATER
Funny .. as I published this post, someone sent me this;
🎈002/366 | ♟️ Is There Planning In Strategy❓
In one of my work programmes there is an ongoing debate around planning and strategy .. one of the team going as far as to suggest that ‘strategic planning’ is an oxymoron (my words). This seems to nicely channel an aspect of that thinking.
This particular quote
is taken from 🔗 this article, which in turn arrived with me from discussions over at the UNdaunted. You’ll be hearing more about them over the next year.)
I think it also plays into the old adage (I paraphrase) ..
“All plans are a waste … but planning is essential.”
For me. I think there is truth in this line of thought.
What do you think?
… privacy is mostly a settled issue in the physical world, and a grace of civilized life. Clothing, for example, is a privacy technology. So are walls, doors, windows and shades.
Private spaces in public settings are well understood (…) . This is why no store on Main Street would plant a tracking beacon in the pants of a visiting customer, to report back on that customer’s activities — just so the store or some third party can “deliver” a better “experience” through advertising. Yet this kind of thing is beyond normative on the Web: it is a huge business.
💬 Doc Searls
(Trump is a) bona fide gangster, neo-fascist Pied Piper leading the country for a second civil war.
💬 Cornell West
“Just when you think tastelessness has reached its nadir, along comes a punk rock group called ‘The Dead Kennedys’, which will play at Mabuhay Gardens on Nov. 22, the 15th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination.”
💬 Herb Caen
“The assassinations were in much more poor taste than our band. We actually respect the Kennedy family. . . . When JFK was assassinated, when Martin Luther King was assassinated, when RFK was assassinated, the American Dream was assassinated. Our name is actually homage to the American Dream.”
💬 Raymond John (East Bay Ray) Pepperell (Dead Kennedies)
Somehow Britain now has a refugee policy so bonkers that even the Rwandans are worried it might be a bit harsh. And this is a country that recently shot 12 refugees dead.
💬 Robert Hutton
I’m still puzzled why NPR and CNN and Harvard and other legacy institutions haven’t set up on Substack. But they clearly have zero interest in doing so—even if they could make money and expand their audience. Yet these same institutions launched on Threads the very first day. They couldn’t sign up as soldiers for Mark Zuckerberg’s new empire fast enough.
💬 Ted Goia
Defendant’s four-year service as Commander in Chief did not bestow on him the divine right of kings to evade the criminal accountability that governs his fellow citizens.
💬 Judge Chutkan