I’m still sick. Sunday marks one month. It’s absurd. The ravaging cough is much better but now my nose runs pretty much non-stop. I think it’s actually been two different illnesses back-to-back.
I did manage to go on short, slow bike rides in the moderate temperatures yesterday and today. They have stirred up the cough but after that dies down I am left with an hour or two of feeling a little bit better…the same as any day I am able to ride but more welcomed given how miserable I’ve been for almost a month.
I fell off the reading and meditation train when I got sick and I’m trying to get back into it. The books I’ve been reading are too dense for my distracted mind but I have tried to catch up on my endless Pocket backlog…
Facebook is still evil but now everyone knows it, most just don’t care…
Mark Zuckerberg Has Never Cared About Your Privacy, and He’s Not Going to Change
…from a numbers standpoint, Zuckerberg (and the board) likely don’t believe there should be a change at the company. While there are clearly some people who are using the platform less, most people apparently don’t care what happens on Facebook. Just look at the numbers to see how evident that is.
This Is How We Radicalized The World
Populist leaders and the legions of influencers riding their wave know they can create filter bubbles inside of platforms like Facebook or YouTube that promise a safer time, one that never existed in the first place, before the protests, the violence, the cascading crises, and endless news cycles. Donald Trump wants to Make American Great Again; Bolsonaro wants to bring back Brazil’s military dictatorship; Shinzo Abe wants to recapture Japan’s imperial past; Germany’s AFD performed the best with older East German voters longing for the days of authoritarianism. All of these leaders promise to close borders, to make things safe. Which will, of course, usually exacerbate the problems they’re promising to disappear.
Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis
Sheryl Sandberg was seething.
…But it wasn’t the looming disaster at Facebook that angered Ms. Sandberg. It was the social network’s security chief, Alex Stamos, who had informed company board members the day before that Facebook had yet to contain the Russian infestation. Mr. Stamos’s briefing had prompted a humiliating boardroom interrogation of Ms. Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, and her billionaire boss. She appeared to regard the admission as a betrayal.
Everyone talks a good game about working smarter not harder…
Putting A Dent In The Universe
Like Obi Wan, Jesus, and Elvis, Steve Jobs has become even more powerful after his death. Now, instead of being a complicated and flawed human being, he is an icon of entrepreneurial drive. Managers are channeling Jobs, demanding impossible acts of will power from their employees. Meanwhile, investors worry about the epidemic of “founderitis,” a disease that causes start-up founders to believe too strongly in their own intuition and ignore input from others.
You don’t have a career. You have a life
Our working selves look away, tolerate injustice, further the interests of the mega-ruthless and undermine both common good and common decency to a degree that would make us ashamed were it not for a single concept. Professionalism.
Happiness studies show repeatedly that nothing exhilarates like working to further your genuinely held beliefs–and nothing demoralises like working to undermine them.
Do we really think things are so separate? How long, if we go on leaving our decency at home, before the world’s toxins come back to poison the home paddock?
We need to shift our focus from competencies to agency
When we think of intelligence, we usually think of extraordinary individuals. We imagine the thought processes of independent geniuses innovating in isolation. Nothing could be further away from the reality. Creativity is an interactive and social process for even the most gifted. Significant creative breakthroughs almost always represent years of sustained collaboration with others.
You’re Not Managing a Team of Software Engineers, You’re Managing a Team of Writers
Your job is to balance the mysterious business of creativity with the hard-edged requirements of business. If you love the mystery, then the surprises, the uncertainties, the impassioned arguments about apparently tiny details — all the passionate business of creating something new in the world — will take you deeper into the work, will align you with your group.
If you are afraid of the mystery, find its unpredictability difficult, then you will be constantly wrong-footed as you try, and continually fail, to have it completely under your thumb. Control will take only you so far — a smallish (maybe ten person) group, a few years of managing. To go further, you need to love the mystery.