Dear Sam Harris (Omer Aziz)

Dear Sam Harris,

Just wanted to say that though I am probably in the minority, I would not have asked that you publish the full interview with Omer Aziz. (The Best Podcast Ever: Sam Harris)

I come to your podcast and donate my small bit of change each month because you are a voice of rationality. If you attempted a conversation because you didn't want to assume intellectual dishonesty on the part of Aziz, I applaud that. It worked out in the case of Nawaz and it went badly in the case of Aziz. And some people think you are acting in bad faith by electing not to post it but I do not.

You are not obligated to provide a platform to anyone you consider to be intellectually dishonest. And frankly, I wouldn't worry about your reputation with the people who buy the kind of crap that people like Aziz and Greenwald are spewing because it's clear that rationality isn't part of their criteria.

Do what you do best: Provide clear thinking about hard topics.

I'm glad for your voice on the topic of Islam and, in particular, how liberals in the west can help by not being fellow-travelers.

-Francis Luong (Franco)

Resolved: Everyday At Work I Shall Say That There are Things I Must Choose Not to Work On

At work, we have this arcane practice called a stand-up meeting. The purpose of the meeting is to talk about what you are doing and what is preventing you from doing it.

Until today, I have been violating the spirit of that meeting. I have been working on the things that are not blocked and saying that I am not blocked because I am able to do things. But if I were working on things in priority order then the truth would be that I am blocked.

Today I will confess. For the last week and for every week that will come in the future, I will not write code nor will I submitting any stories against the main code base because I cannot trust that I can get a timely code review. My purpose is not to blame the people who have volunteered to review my pull requests. My purpose is to acknowledge a fact.

It shouldn't be hard to acknowledge a fact except for the idea that perhaps we expect overreaction of some sort. We do not wish to place blame. We do not wish to make our peers feel attacked. We do not wish them to delay our reviews further because of being named a blocker.

Well, delay seems to be the end result in either case. So perhaps it is better to acknowledge the fact than to let it go on unsaid. Perhaps I can trust that people will not take it personally for me to say that:

Our pool of trusted reviewers is too small.

We have no clear process or criteria for incorporating new reviewers. I am rarely called upon to perform a code review for anyone else. I am not in the general pool as a trusted reviewer. Maybe this is as it should be or maybe it is indicative of the problem.

So, without blame and with a bit too much bitterness, I must resolve each day to say that there are things I would work on but I do not because I cannot be sure that they will see the light of day.

We are failing and we need to change the way we are doing things.

Perhaps I should also start an effort today to enumerate the principles to which we adhere in our main code base. If these are written out, would that be sufficient to allow for more reviewers?

In Times of Calamity, Remember It's Act II

There are times when life just sucks. When things are dark. When life has handed you dark, dark bruises to the ego.

And it can be hard to get over those bruises. They seem more like insulting wounds than bruises.

In these times, remember this: You are only in Act II of a story.

In Act I, we come to care about a person. In Act II, we see our new friend faced with a struggle. And we feel the tensions between struggle and the questions of how we will get to resolution.

Act II is not the end of the story. It was never meant to be.

Keep showing up. Keep on hustling. And remember, the show must go on. Give us the best Act III you can deliver.

An Analysis: My Year in Startup Hell at Hubspot by David Lyons

I spent this morning reading a darkly cynical piece on Hubspot: My Year in Startup Hell at Hubspot - Fortune. And since I’m working on my writing skills, I’m going into the meta to try to look at it’s components and how they work together to craft ideas in my mind.

Cairns

Our author is part of the story and is announced with fanfare setting up the initial energy of the piece. It’s about new beginnings for a guy who thought he was washed up and didn’t know about marketing, but reported to the Chief Marketing officer, Cranium.

The Tour

Cranium (my endearing name for the fellow), the chief marketing officer, or CMO, wrote an article on the HubSpot blog announcing that he had hired me. Tech blogs wrote up the story of the 52-year-old Newsweek journalist leaving the media business to go work for a software company.

Then the author goes about setting the stage by describing his initial tour of the Hubspot offices, which he makes sound like a tired but colorful cliche, down to the sex and debauchery in the office.

The office-as-playground trend was made famous by Google and has spread like an infection across the tech industry. Work can’t just be work; work has to be fun.

It’s called the “candy wall,” and Zack explains that HubSpotters are especially proud of it.

On the second floor there are shower rooms, which are intended for bike commuters and people who jog at lunchtime, but also have been used as sex cabins when the Friday happy hour gets out of hand.

Into Darkness

The article subtly starts to turn dark when the author moves on to talking about his two-week orientation.

Training takes place in a tiny room, where for two weeks I sit shoulder to shoulder with 20 other new recruits, listening to pep talks that start to sound like the brainwashing you get when you join a cult. It’s everything I ever imagined might take place inside a tech company, only even better.

This is a sort of pop writing style that suggests enough to make a claim of similarity to a cult without having to substantiate it very much. It creates an image in the mind of the reader. That is the important part.

Changing People’s Lives

A key part of the training is that the trainees are pitched on the company’s mission. They aren’t just making money, they’re changing people’s lives.

“We’re not just selling a product here,” Dave tells us. “HubSpot is leading a revolution. A movement. HubSpot is changing the world. This software doesn’t just help companies sell products. This product changes people’s lives. We are changing people’s lives.”

In fact, like many startups, Hubspot apparently has a lot of material created to help market their ethos and mission.

At HubSpot, employees abide by precepts outlined in the company’s culture code, a document that codifies HubSpot’s unusual language and sets forth a set of shared values and beliefs. The culture code is a manifesto of sorts, a 128-slide PowerPoint deck titled “The HubSpot Culture Code: Creating a Company We Love.”

The author thinks the actuality of what the company does falls short of this.

… the business we’re in: Buy our software, sell more stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that, but that’s not exactly how HubSpot bills itself or describes what it does.

Hubspeak

Things in the article turn more dark and cynical as we dive into the details of the company’s culture code and the way they euphemize. Euphemism is always more visible from the outside looking in, which is likely a product of choosing a lifestyle instead of a job:

Arriving here feels like landing on some remote island where a bunch of people have been living for years, in isolation, making up their own rules and rituals and religion and language—even, to some extent, inventing their own reality. This happens at all organizations, but for some reason tech startups seem to be especially prone to groupthink.

Having and expressing an identity is a matter of choosing what you do regularly and what you never do and wearing that on your sleeve. And the things you do regularly, that happen to be distasteful? Well for those things, we split hairs:

We want to protect people from spam. Spam is what the bad guys send, but we are the good guys. Our spam is not spam. In fact it is the opposite of spam. It’s antispam. It’s a shield against spam—a spam condom.

Our software is magical, such that when people use it—wait for it—one plus one equals three. Halligan and Dharmesh first introduced this alchemical concept at HubSpot’s annual customer conference, with a huge slide behind them that said “1 + 1 = 3.” Since then it has become an actual slogan at the company. People use the concept of one plus one equals three as a prism through which to evaluate new ideas. One day Spinner, the woman who runs PR, tells me, “I like that idea, but I’m not sure that it’s one-plus-one-equals-three enough.”

The hairsplitting doesn’t get any more grand than on the topic of people leaving or getting fired from Hubspot:

Dharmesh’s culture code incorporates elements of HubSpeak. For example, it instructs that when someone quits or gets fired, the event will be referred to as “graduation.” In my first month at HubSpot I’ve witnessed several graduations, just in the marketing department. We’ll get an email from Cranium saying, “Team, just letting you know that Derek has graduated from HubSpot, and we’re excited to see how he uses his superpowers in his next big adventure!” Only then do you notice that Derek is gone, that his desk has been cleared out. Somehow Derek’s boss will have arranged his disappearance without anyone knowing about it. People just go up in smoke, like Spinal Tap drummers.

The Coup De Grace

At this point, Lyons has set his trap and is ready for the kill. His target? The emporer-no-clothes atmosphere of mania around startup companies.

He writes about his reversal from a conventional belief that he thought to be true, that companies started with a product, to the current trend which seems irrational and nonintuitive.

I thought, for example, that tech companies began with great inventions—an amazing gadget, a brilliant piece of software. At Apple, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built a personal computer …

But HubSpot did the opposite. HubSpot’s first hires included a head of sales and a head of marketing… HubSpot started out as a sales operation in search of a product.

And a quote to underscore the deep irrationality of the market investors.

“You don’t get rewarded for creating great technology, not anymore,” says a friend of mine who has worked in tech since the 1980s, a former investment banker who now advises startups. “It’s all about the business model. The market pays you to have a company that scales quickly. It’s all about getting big fast. Don’t be profitable, just get big.”

That’s what investors want to see: a bunch of young people, having a blast, talking about changing the world. It sells.

The author also suggests manipulation of Millenials:

Supposedly millennials don’t care so much about money, but they’re very motivated by a sense of mission. So, you give them a mission.

And ends with himself attempting to resign but “graduating” ahead of schedule.

Summary

This is a damn good article. It hits on something a lot of people talk about but is hard to make predictions about. And likely it is going to sell a lot of copies of the Author’s book.

Startups have a do-no-wrong halo and some of us want them to fall on their faces

It does smack of a bubble and we are all wondering if that bubble is going to burst. Some of us are hoping that it will. Not that we gain anything directly, just a bit of confirmation that staying in our solid but boring jobs was the safe and right thing to do.

We don’t trust mania.

Startups are an emotional subject of speculation.

They represent a disconnection from the way things have been done in years past papered over with a veneer of aspirational manifesto. “Changing People’s Lives.” The line between aspiration and delusion is elusive and the author, Lyons, dances it brilliantly.

Only time can answer whether all of this is delusion or whether the world actually changing in a sustainable way.

Source: http://fortune.com/disrupted-excerpt-hubsp...

Can You Hear Me Now? (Entitlement and Feeling Heard)

A standard pattern for "how to take criticism" and "how to deal with conflict" generally acknowledges that we ought to listen and acknowledge and that people tend to ease up once they feel they have been heard.

An anti-pattern occurs when you feel that you must be heard in order to ease up. In my experience, when I want to be heard, I will tend to feel angry and upset if a difficult conversation drags on and I have not arrived at feeling heard and acknowledged.

It isn't pretty and I'm just going to call this out for what it is. In a moment like that, if my focus is on being heard, I have adopted a posture of entitlement. I am acting entitled to being heard and acknowledged and requiring that it occur in a manner that I recognize as authentic. Yuck!

It's so fascinating to me that the very same thing that is effective when granted to another with generosity, listening and making it clear that you have heard them, is ineffective when I desire (or expect) the same for myself.

Let's consider what happens when two parties in a difficult discussion both think that it's important to hear what the other side has to say, but neither party wants to be the first to listen. Those discussions go nowhere. They go in circles. They maximize suffering for all involved.

The standard pattern works only when granted to others because, in order to break up the log-jam, Leaders have to go first. We, as Leaders, must take the responsibility to act on this understanding that conversations go badly when no one wants to listen first. We have to act on our desire to minimize the conversations that feel pointless and upsetting.

And as for whether we are heard at all, that must be left to trust that we will get to say our piece after the other party has spoken about their concerns and had them acknowledged.

Expiring in 2 Weeks? JNCIE-SP #1999

I have now reached the point where I am in a 2 week countdown until my JNCIE-SP expires. I had been toying with the idea of letting it do so since I spend as much time coding these days as I do network engineering things and more of my energy is on the coding side.

But this morning I changed my mind.

I have decided to renew it for another 3 years as insurance. Increasingly, I dream of a sabbatical. And if I have to provide for this myself, that will mean taking myself out of the work force and then finding a way back in. Having a certification will help.

Renewing involves taking the JNCIP-SP written exam: JN0-660.

My guess is that I can make myself ready after a few days of of study. I plan to put in a couple of hours each day studying and then take and fail the exam a week's time or less. There is no shame in this.

Veterans of the JNCIE-SP practical examination are well aware that failing the actual test is a key part of preparation. This is true for the written tests as well. There is not a good substitute to get you into the flow of thinking like the test other than doing it.

Incidentally, many things in life are like this. The only way to get real and hard data is to actually do something with the understanding that it may not work, but that in attempting to do it, you will learn things.

So... Expiring in 2 weeks? Probably not.

image.jpg

Generosity

Pondering a definition for generosity. Best I can come up with is "the right thing at the right time for someone else when they weren't expecting it."

image.jpg

Report After a Month of V60 Coffee Brewing

I've been using the Tannors clone of the Hario V60 ceramic drip brewer for the last month or so. Happy to report that I have a decent brewing process which is mostly consistent.

Tannors V60

Tannors V60

The Process (As of Today)

I have not changed the amount of coffee, the size of the grind, or the temperature of the water from the process I use for Aeropress. I turn on my hot water kettle to stop at 195 degress fahrenheit.

I use a creased #2 Melitta filter with the bottom folded across for strength and then I fold each side from about 1cm in from the the outside on the bottom toward each top corner. That gives me a good fit for the drip basket.

I heat about my 16 Grande mug in the microwave at 1/3 full of water for 90-sec. Then I run the grinder on two Aeropress scoops on beans, about 4 tbsp I think... I don't do a scale... don't have the room for that. After the microwave is done, I place the paper filter in the ceramic brewer and I run the hot water from the mug through about 3-4 times catching the water with the same mug (and losing a bit each go). This gets the ceramic close to the water temperature.

Add the grains and tap side to level. Pour enough water to cover the top of the grains and then "stir" to ensure even saturation. Wait 10-15 seconds for the coffee to bloom.

This last part I am experimenting with. Options:

  1. pour and fill to the top, stirring the grounds each time
  2. every 10-15 seconds, add water until it's about 1cm over the grounds. Stop when the mug is about half full (or half empty as you like).
  3. suggestions?
AeroPress

AeroPress

Results Compared to Aeropress

Consistency of Process

Main sources of inconsistency come from the shape of the filter after creasing, the amount that I stir, how long the water is able to steep, and the total volume of water used for brewing. These aren't things I am measuring. Just eyeballing them and going on instinct/judgment.

Flavor

The coffee tastes much as I remember the Aeropress as long as I don't water it down too much.

Time

Aeropress felt much faster. Partly because I didn't feel the need to heat up the plastic syringe. And partly because pressing moves the process along at the end.

The Future

I loved using the Aeropress for so long. And I still have fondness for it. But Aerobie is a plastics company through and through and will not likely make a glass or ceramic version.

Unless I try a different brew process at some point, I suspect I will stick with the V60 brewing for a while.

Regardless I think this still gets me enough continuing education credits for maintaining my "coffee hipster" status.

W-9s and 1099s (Oh My!)

Having your own business is really different than being an employee. Apparently, you're supposed to file one if you're paying rent to someone over $600 unless that person is incorporated.

Spent some of the morning searching the Goog on how this all works (for someone else, I don't have a business... yet).

It looks like there is a service that exists to help collect W-9s and 1099s. I found it when searching out "Freshbooks W-9". It's neat to see that someone setup a service like Tax1099.com to streamline paperwork drudgery.

While I find the existence of the service inspiring from a distance as an example of identifying a problem and creating a solution, that's about where the interest ends. I couldn't see being interested in taxes or the IRS long term. Ick.

Just... Ick.

What Does Passion for Work Look and Feel Like?

How do you know that you are passionate about something?

Seems like a strange question to ask, doesn't it? I expect that a lot of people think that passion is something that is self-evident when you are in it.

One might argue: "If you have to ask, you're probably not passionate". But I think this may be a flawed notion because I suspect that passion and pain come together.

I've started reading "The Dip" by Seth Godin and he says, pretty much categorically, that anything worth getting good at is going to include a dip. And he defines a dip as the hard slog that you have to push through in order to become world class at something. This is a kind of pain, yeah?

I'm experiencing a kind of pain at work right now.

I do infrastructure automation. How do you go from empty data center to racks of servers ready to take work? I solve a part of this problem. And it's a big problem.

We've done a good job of coding through the work of cable validation and initial configuration for a rack of compute and network devices. But now that we know which servers need work, we're stuck on the next problem of how to triage and dispatch repairs. And, frankly we've taken steps back, since the vendor recently shipped with different firmware which is incompatible against the code we wrote to employ their auto-provisioning mechanisms.

"The nature of work is inherently unremarkable," says Godin in Poke the Box, which I have read enough to get the gist of it. This sentence is profound to me right now because I have chosen this path and I'm in this slog and I'm wondering if it's something I really want to become world-class at doing.

And so we come back to the question I started with. Am I really passionate about this thing that I am doing? How do I know whether I am or not?

I have tended to measure passion by tirelessness:

  • I don't notice time while doing the work
  • I tend to think about the problems when I'm not working

These can, of course, also indicate that I merely have an obsessive personality.

It's hard to tell but I am clearly in a Dip and I am really deeply wondering if there is something that I should quit. Maybe not the coding... maybe just the infrastructure bit where I work with factory-fresh and us configured hardware... Where I have to work with The Vendor to solve problems.

I suspect there will always be someone else... maybe not a Vendor, but some other group, whose work I will have to depend on. In this case, it happens to be a manufacturer of hardware... In another case, it might be software. Is this sort of dependency with long resolution times ultimately avoidable? Maybe if I worked for a smaller outfit doing a smaller thing.

I haven't quit any aspect of what I am doing though my attitude has wavered. For now, I am leaning in and seeing what impact I can make. This is my default course of action.

I don't love the way the story looks right now. Maybe that's how it is when you're in Act 2 of a 3-Act play.

Hallelujah on Ukulele

Update: I've done a good bit of work on this since I initially wrote this blog post and now I have since settled on the F-major version.

A link to my Google Doc of the tab.

A link to my Google Doc of the tab.

Last weekend at the Northern VA Ukulele Meetup, someone brought a copy of "I only want to be with you" by Dusty Springfield. And the first two chords are C and A minor. And I thought I heard a familiar song and this one shook out of the tree, so to speak.

Hallelujah, which I think is originally written by Leonard Cohen. But, just about everyone has a cover version because it is a gorgeous tune with emotional complexity. It's like a good cup of coffee actually. And I don't mean the sugar-laden version that most people drink.

image.jpg

I also added a transposition to they key of F.

image.jpg

Anything You Want Re-read - #01

"Anything You Want Re-read" is a series of posts where I will publicly post my notes from reading "Anything You Want" by Derek Sivers a second time. In these posts, I will share the things I find interesting, or that I disagree with, or that inspire other thinking, or that reinforce principles I have seen elsewhere.

These are mostly for me but can act as a taste sampler for the book in case you are curious about it.

What's Your Compass?

In Which

Derek Sivers shares a list of directives that he thinks will allow a person to pursue a business that will not end in regret.

Business is not about money. It's about making dreams come true for others and for yourself.

At some point, all activity involves money. Either spending it, or making it, or doing something instead of worrying about it. Contextually one could argue that Derek is wrong because eventually you gotta pay the bills. I think this bullet doesn't stand alone.

It stands better when combined with one of the later bullets:

Never do anything just for the money.

When taken together, I can see what Sivers is getting at. Money has the potential to be a distraction and is dangerous to pursue for its own sake.

It's a way to lose touch with your internal compass.

I think Sivers is saying that chasing money is a way to end up some place you never intended to be and uncertain of why you do what you do.

Don't pursue business just for your own gain. Only answer the calls for help.

Sivers insists that you will know you should start a business by the fact that people are already asking for help; for this thing you will do for your business. Forget about crafting the perfect business plan or waiting until you have enough money... just start helping people.

I think this is very interesting. And, I need more elaboration on how, in this day and age, I can be in a position to hear the calls for help. At my comfy desk job, I am surrounded by very similar people who are hard-working but have solved or resigned themselves to the problems in their context. I don't hear very many calls for help. I am isolated from those calls and I wonder what I could do to increase my exposure to them.

Make yourself unnecessary to the running of your business.

Sivers makes a point that I have seen elsewhere. And it is important. If you go into business you need to go to work on the business, and not just at your business.

You have to make it run whether you are present or not.

This topic is covered in detail by a book called The eMyth Revisited by Michael Gerber, which is a very interesting cautionary tale about what happens when technician types, like me, try to create a business in what the author terms an "entrepreneurial seizure". Often technicians end up self-employed in a business they have to manage as well, which they are not prepared to do. Or they abdicate managing the business to someone else.

Gerber and Sivers are in accord: A business has to be a system that you design (and iterate upon) to achieve a goal without requiring that you are present for the business to happen.

What I notice

Because this section is a list of bullets I put most of what I noticed in line above. One additional observation occurs to me.

Sivers opens with the cash value of his books. I figure that the rest of the stories in the book will reinforce these themes and vice versa. They are predicated of his stories and make short lessons of them.

Just selling my CD

In which

Sivers tells the story of how CD Baby came to be. At this point in his life, he had achieved some success as a musician including having saved enough to buy a house.

He was selling his CD in local record stores but wanted to sell online as well. So he called the online record stores to see if they could sell his CD they all told him that you needed to go through a major distributor.

That wasn't going to work. So he went to his bank and got a credit card merchant account and put his CD on his own website with a "buy now" button. And then then friends asked him to sell their CDs on his site, to which he agreed. And this happened many times over.

What I notice

This may not be mind blowing to you, but it is to me. He called the online record stores!!

You mean, I can just pick up the phone and call people?? Perhaps I can make an exercise of this.

Also, he was scratching his own itch, as Tim Ferriss likes to put it. And he belonged to a demographic which had the same need. One by one, they asked him for help to do the same. The growth was slow and organic, requiring no promotion on his part.

Finally, his credit card merchant account was, at the time, a difficult to acquire resource that he shared. Sivers refers to his conception of business as "the Co-op model of business" where he simply splits the cost of an expensive but shareable resource by acquiring it and then making it available to others.

Make a dream come true

In Which

Sivers goes from realizing that he had accidentally created a business to applying a utopian dream-come-true stance to prevent the business from growing too much.

He lists 4 points that are a dream come true for an indie musician (unsigned to a major record label) trying to sell his/her own music:

  1. Pay me every week
  2. Give me the name and address of everyone who bought by CD
  3. Never kick me out for not selling enough.
  4. Never allow paid placement.

Sivers closes saying he wasn't trying to make a business. "I was just daydreaming about how one thing would look in a perfect world.

What I notice

Sivers claims he hadn't intended to create a business but he created a business anyway. Perhaps "the reluctant businessman" is the right kind of business man to avoid the soul-crushing corporatization that seems pervasive in America.

We are much too good at creating soul-less businesses. That's why it's amazing when a company like Apple becomes a big deal. I suspect even Apple has long been in the process of becoming soul-less and most of us haven't admitted it.

Apple have become the establishment in certain spheres. I understand their original purpose to be to disrupt the establishment and to empower individuals. And I think this will be much more difficult if they are trying to protect their hegemony over certain domains.

Back to Sivers. I don't know if he's right in a categorical sense. What he says feels good to me. Stay small, and stay true to your utopian purpose. There is a part of me that wants to believe that this kind of good is possible in our universe. But examples are rare.

Next Time

That's it for this time. Thanks for reading along and see you next time!

On Presidency, and Brushfires, and Stewardship

Avoiding the Temptation

This morning I am tempted to reflect on work first thing but since that's where my mind seems to want to go, and another part of my mind is feeling willful, I guess we're going to have to write instead about...

I Voted for Donald Trump

Yes, folks. The news based on in yesterday's Primary, is that he is motoring ahead. And a large number of people that I know actually got out to vote.

Many of them are also appalled.

I saw a couple of instances of wondering-in-public by people I know whether they know any people that voted for Trump. I saw one specific request by someone, whom I expect to be a liberal (as most of my friends and acquaintances are) to contact her if you voted for Trump. From what I know of her, she strikes me as capable of genuine curiosity so I can take the request as an earnest desire to understand.

I voted for Donald Trump.

Really, I voted for everybody. That's the same as voting for nobody but they don't give you a sticker for this. (That's fine. I don't need social standing on this. I prefer stickers bearing the names of startups on the cover of my Mac.)

You might ask why I didn't vote. Don't I care enough to vote against someone? Even Trump?

Virginia is an open primary state, which means that you don't need to register with a major party to vote in a primary. But you can only participate in one in any given year.

Here's my reason. You can't vote for anyone without holding your nose. And we don't have a vote-against system. We have a vote-for system. The last time I voted against someone, we got Obama-care and 8 long years of increasing racial tension in the United States.

(Though I voted for him in the Primary I didn't want Obama, who seemed at the time like the Prototype of a socialist-leaning Democrat, in office.)

Here's a grand irony: fans of Ayn Rand, the people whom I have connected with who call themselves "Objectivist", (which I still resemble... but I no longer accept as a label for myself).... They are in accord with the liberals on opposing Trump.

I can' t help but notice how easy it is to agree when you state what you stand against, and how difficult it is to agree when you say what it is you wish to move toward.

Maybe it's easier to see something bad when you can point right at it.

Much easier than trying to predict the future if we implement policy X or Y or Z (or all of them).

Life Under Donald Trump, Executive

I didn't vote because you have to hold your nose to vote for anyone. I couldn't convince myself that Trump had to be opposed because he was worse than Ted Cruz, whose election would be a step further down the road to American Theocracy.

No one on the ballot really wants to reduce the size and scope of government, and some wish to increase it.

Maybe this would be especially true of Donald Trump. If you'll pardon my ranting a bit... He might be able to slap that name on more doomed projects. At his age, with so many failed ventures, he is as close as we can come in our nation to *an expert at *spending other people's money. He'll fit right in in Washington!

There is a valid fear that the man has no boundaries or principles. That he would strain the constitution. Well... good.

Maybe the congress and the judicial branch will grow more mature in their stewardship of this country by getting some practice at performing checks and balances rather than aligning with their party and opposing the other guys.

Maybe after a disastrous and gridlocked Trump presidency, we will come to understand the error of our ways. We will respect the Office of the President more... And demand someone of appropriate stature to occupy that seat.

This is analogous to how the human body responds to threats.

We make the human body stronger by introducing stresses which do not kill us.

Weakened virus cells. Physical workouts involving lots of weight.

The body responds to this stress with immune response or hypertrophy to grow and overcompensate in order to handle the next instance of a similar challenge.

Organizations tend to respond in this way as well.

With this in mind... Maybe Trump will be the brushfire that prevents the wildfire. If he is the wildcard everyone expects him to be, maybe that will adjust the American psyche to reject unprincipled pandering in the future.

On Respecting the Office

What can you say about the last few that have sat there? "Leaders eat last" say thought leaders in the discipline of leadership, but I think most of the people on the ballot do not think of any person or mission before their own personal gain: power, prestige, money, hubris. And you can probably say the same about Bush and Clinton.

Yes, even Obama.
(I don't support his agenda or his programs, I guess that makes me a bigot)

Vice is so deeply associated with political office that the best among us would not even consider running for it.

Now I don't imagine myself to be the best anything. But my self-conception includes integrity. And I can't imagine a situation where a person with integrity can take the mantle of a position that seems to be ultimate power, therefore ultimate corruption.

I couldn't imagine a man like Jocko Willink wanting to run for President. Or Sam Harris. Or Tim Ferriss. They have better things to do and would probably disqualify themselves.

Does it take a lack of self-awareness to be delusional enough to think that being president seems like "the right thing to do"?

I want to respect the office because the men who occupy that seat are the most honorable sort. I want to be able to look back on the last 5 presidents and ask what they had in common, and the answers that I come up with are: they were stewards who were dedicated to liberty... and they refused fame and fortune after their time.

I will probably only find that in Brandon Sanderson's writings.

For Purpose Running

The First Race: GW Parkway Classic 10mI

The first race of 2016 for me. It's coming!

I am back on track with my training for the GW Parkway Classic 10 Mile Race. I got in about ~6.5 miles of running with some walking this weekend.

I plan my running to take me to the Lake Anne Recreation Center so that I can stop for a drink of water at around ~3 miles. I don't like to carry water or anything that unbalances me left/right wise. It's nice to know the Rec center is there and I make sure to thank the people behind the desk for being my oasis.

Calculating for the Race

I will need 60-90 minutes a day 3-5 times a week to get the level of training I need to finish my 10 mile race. My run during the weekend was really hard work and left my muscles sore, but that will be less of a problem next week if I get in all of my other scheduled runs.

There are 6 weekends left until the race... 7 if you count the race itself. If I increase by 0.5 miles each weekend, I can get to 10 miles on race day.

That leaves me with a question of how to add social elements of motivation to my own practices of #discipline and #will...

Adding Purpose to Running

I am tempted to attach fundraising goals to my running goals.

My main goal with running races is that it provides an anchor event for the connection I enjoy with my family and friends. We support one another to keep "getting after it", keeping fit, and making ourselves better physically and mentally.

Adding fundraising would be congruent with my current explorations of non-remunerative activity. What would I do whether or not I got paid for doing it?

People won't be funding me. They will be funding the efforts of others to make a difference, or to get by, or to do things differently than before in a way "the market" hasn't chosen to pull and push.

Here's what I envision:

  • Four races this year.
  • Four different charities.
  • Four different sizes of race.
  • A crowdrise campaign for each.

I will be the first donor to each, to get things started and put my money where my mouth is, and publicize these efforts.

It will connect people to me and to one another! We will all be generous! And it will force me out of my shell to go find people to fund my campaigns.

For The Family of Officer Ashley Guindon

Maybe I can even do something in response to the senseless tragedy in Lake Ridge this weekend.

It looks like the PWCPA has set up a fund for Officer Guindon:

The Prince William County Police Association has created the fund for the family of Officer Ashley Guindon. The association will collect all donations and send them directly to Guindon's mother.

If possible, checks should be made out to "PWCPA in memory of OFC Ashley Guindon," authorities said.

Anyone who wishes to donate can leave their donation at any county police station or mail it directly to the police association at: Prince William County Police Association, Officer Guindon Memorial Fund, P. O. Box 1845, Manassas, VA 20108.

Police are warning people not to donate to GoFundMe pages that purport to be raising money for Guindon's family. Police determined that at least one fraudulent page was set up in the officer's name.

So I can definitely do this and I can definitely ignore the last paragraph because I only intend to hit up people that I know personally and they know I'm not a crook!

Instigation Initiative

It is 6am. Early...

I try not to do things when I am awake at odd hours. But maybe this is just the sort of thing I ought to embrace and act right now.

By an hours time, I expect to have this post up and have my crowd rise page going.

Just watch me! :)

Status Update

Okay... well I've hit a snag. I can't seem to designate the PWCPA fund on crowdrise just yet but I have e-mailed their support and we will see where that goes. But I am proud to have taken immediate action on this.

On Absolutes

Extremism is rarely the thing we need.

Absolutes let us off the hook, because they demand not to be negotiated. But absolutes usually bump into special cases that are truly hard to ignore…

-Seth Godin, At the edges, it all falls apart

I generally consider myself an absolutist with a set of fundamental priciples that are not to be violated. But this claim is subject to verification.

I certainly think the list of absolutes we hold should be short and subject to modification based on the incorporation of new data.

Whatever we believe, we have to admit that there are times when absolutes serve us well, and there are times when we are blindsided by unexpected implications. They always seem to face the special case challenges that Godin talks about above.

Maybe they are contextually helpful but not categorically so.

An absolute right to life?

You end up with the abortion debate. You end up with debate on the morality of the death penalty. Do animals have rights?

If rights are derived, as Ayn Rand suggests, from the requirement to exercise one’s reason in order to determine how to act to sustain one's existence… does a mentally crippled human being have exactly the same right to life in the same context?

Do two people battling over water rights where one is dumping waste and the other is drawing water to drink have an obvious solution answered by an absolute right? First come first served?

There are more questions than answers. And more pragmatic answers than principled ones. And in some contexts, the pragmatic answers may be measurably more just or generous.

An absolute right to free speech?

Consider Edward Snowden. Consider the caricature of yelling “fire” in a crowded room with tiny exits guarded by Nazis with submachineguns.

An absolute right to privacy?

An innocent person is suspected to have information pertaining to a missing-person-slash-murder investigation. Do the police have a right to the data on his/her electronic devices?

What I Notice That Absolutes Actually Do

What I notice about absolutes is that they help us to notice a situation where grave injustice may occur. The desire to impose an absolute indicates an area of grave importance.

Absolutes reduce cognitive load. A person thinking in principles can keep fewer "things" in mind at a time when trying to make a decision.

We use absolutes to communicate and express what is important with a lot of poetic license. The tendency is to hear what is said and to suspend disbelief. This occurs in any echo-chamber.

 
 

We also use absolutes to avoid communicating in the raw detail of a topic. Moral grandstanding is good example of this. Think about how impossible it is to have an honest conversation that doesn't get dragged fully into the weeds on any of these topics: Racism, Sexism, Islamism, pay inequality, affordable medical care, immigration, or Abortion.

In light of this, I suspect that we might do well to rewire ourselves so that when we find that the thing we most want to say is an absolute principle therefore a change in policy that we remember that great care is needed… the best and clearest thinking you can muster will be needed in order to be able to engage in honest conversation and/or decision-making.

Absolutes and Policy

In my observation, most human beings do a pretty poor job of thinking through the long-term implications of applying broad principles. Some of us can do this well in certain contexts but with small contextual changes, we start showing gaps in our logic.

Human beings get bogged down when multiple principles interact in a dynamic system.

And human beings are especially bad at predicting behavior in such a system while they are driven by their own panic in response to what seems like a crisis.

Conclusion: We are wise to avoid making broad changes in policy while in a panicked response. Let’s just wait until we are calm to review the situation and decide how to respond.

…The good middles, the difficult compromises that matter, that’s where we can build things that have long lasting impact.

We need a compass and a place to go. But the road to that place is rarely straight and never absolute.

-Seth Godin, At the edges, it all falls apart