respect for construction over destruction
Good olive oil gets bitter when it’s broken by blades.
[Cook all your veggies together once a week and keep them ready to incorporate during the week. Crispers are useless. Maximize your oven or re-use your boiling water.]
[While the oven is pre-heating, prep your veggies from longest to shortest cooking time.]
[When roasting different vegetables, pair the ones thay grow most similarly: keep together roots, stems, tubers. Beets are their own thing.]
[Phase 1: shake the tree, ask everyone; prioritize money and invoices; support yourself mentally as it might not ‘appear’ succesful to others or even to you; keep operations simple to start quickly.]
[Phase 2: the real transition starts here; notice what gets the strongest reaction from clients; shape the work closer to your deeper interests and passions; share with others; increase visibility, maybe by writing blogs; find peers or start your own community; don’t partner or build an agency; don’t lock into a niche.]
[Phase 3: raise rates; find more senior and expensive work; zoom in where the market wants what you enjoy delivering; publish consistently; formalize business apparatus and legal entities; don’t hire, outsource, or operationalize; avoid getting complacent now that the money’s good; don’t burn out; stay visible; don’t lock into a niche.]
[Phase 4: say no to the work from previous phases unless money’s tight; find support from other senior indies to charge 10x your phase 1; keep learning and publishing; avoid offering ‘packages’ that trap you in phase 3 work.]
[Phase 5: are you presenting yourself to C-suite stakeholders?; can you take equity in your clients?; what do you want to spend your freedom on? and what is needed to sustain that for 15–20 years?; embed your real self in any book or conference you feel tempted to create; can you say no to phase 4 work?; what does phase 5 work look like?]
[To poach an egg: boil and simmer four inches of water; add a bit of vinegar; crack the egg onto a cup and pour into the water; after a minute and a half, lift with a slotted spoon and prod a bit to check; drain and store in ice water; reheat in simmering water before serving.]
I usually have at least one nicely cold soft-boiled egg on hand to lure my thoughts away from eating lunch out.
[Cooking seems like something to juggle amongst life’s many complications rather than a clear path through them.]
[Fast-and-easy recipe books try to sell us akin to ‘breathing air more rapidly’ while pasta is already ‘boil then toss’ and omelettes are already a minute away.]
[Cooking is transformation, and transformation is human.]
[Absurd to think that nature starts from scratch at dawn: cooking as well is continuity, picking up where something else left off.]
Stale slices of bread should be ground into breadcrumbs, which make a delicious topping for pasta, and add crunch to a salad. Or they must be toasted and broken apart for croutons or brittle crackers, which ask to be smeared with olive paste.
This continuity is the heart and soul of cooking. If we decide our meals will be good, remanded kale stems, quickly pickled or cooked in olive oil and garlic, will be taken advantage of to garnish eggs, or tossed with pasta. Beet and turnip greens, so often discarded, will be washed well and sautéed in olive oil and filled into an omelet, or served on warm, garlicky crostini. The omelets or little toasts will have cost no more than eggs and stale bread, and both will have been more gratifying to eater and cook.
If our meal will be ongoing, then our only task is to begin.
if there is anything that you can learn from what is happening, learn it.
[Adding salt is more than just about boiling: it’s a way to cook one good-tasting thing inside another.]
[You already know how everything is supposed to taste: it should be ‘good’. And that’s as true for water as any other ingredient.]
[Add ingredients together warm, as they’re already transforming and open to change.]
[Push re-use of water by moving from less starchy to more starchy ingredients.]
[Taste the broth often and cook until delicious.]
We’re not saying what we’re saying, we’re saying what we’re not saying.
Kevin Komisaruk, American-Canadian Keyboard Musician
messaging that bombards us daily: fear and compliance are the new virtues to signal and will ensure our survival.
I also wonder how they process the contradiction of seeing our society celebrate those who disrupted history with peace and compassion, while persecuting those trying to do the same today.
Imagine luring each ant into a small individual-ant-sized box with honey, then scattering the boxes. This “maximizes the revealed preferences” of each individual ant, but it kills the ant colony as surely as boric acid.
our legal system is fundamentally oriented around individual rights, not group rights. No group has the property right to any individual. (No group, that is, other than the state).
YouTube Commentator Beau of the Fifth Column on Fact, Opinion, and the Democracy In Between
[Democracy needs people to slow down the overly progressive and drag along the overly status quo: high polarization where people can’t talk to one another limits the discussion that fuels a functioning ecosystem.]
[No matter how many times they try to distract, instead of disagreeing you can simply repeat “I understand that you disagree with me” or “I accept that you disagree with me”.]
3-2-1: Punchiness, Pain Points, Press “B” – Harry Dry’s Newsletter
[Make a fact hit harder by converting units into everyday objects: from “One large tree removes 2.2M BTU from the Earth’s atmosphere” to “One large tree is equivalent to 10 air conditioning units”; “0.1 square miles of the Amazon are destroyed every minute” to “50 soccer fields worth of the Amazon are destroyed every minute”; “Carbon savings of 800,000 tonnes per year” to “Carbon savings equal to 450,000 fewer cars on the road per year”.]
[A given name like ‘honour killings’ portrays that violence as somehow different than in the occidental nations: more barbaric and primitive. Is ours any better?]
[1. What is the difference between hearing and endorsing a dangerous idea? 2. Should we hear them or not, and why? 3. Is it possible to discuss them productively?]
[Strengthening an argument doesn’t make it more threatening.]
[Appreciate disagreements; notice and address anxiety.]
[Systemic issues stick when their disagreements are stuck in unproductive states or off limits of discussion.]
Reading is more about picking out ideas than passing over each word.
what triggers you, teaches you.
[Get comfortable asking “what does that say about me?” to learn about why you have buttons people can push in the first place.]
Great hacks to know to start to New Year Clean!
[Put half a lemon in a Ziploc plastic bag and fill with vinegar, then tie to let your shower head soak inside for about an hour to descale and remove dirt inside.]
I changed the game from “online debate” to “potluck at my house.” I changed the goal from “let’s debate ideas” to “let’s enjoy each other’s company while having a stimulating conversation.” I changed the conversational medium from “type into a comment text box” to “discuss over food and drink.” And I changed the question from “What do you believe?” to the biggest unanswered question in my own head: “What’s the endgame for the gun-control debate?”
[By realizing that we knew less, we felt somehow wiser.]
A traditional essay makes a single case and puts all its weight behind it. A problem brief collects the best proposals [and criticisms] that attempt to answer the open question. That means it might have two or five or a hundred different proposals, each with supporting evidence and proposed actions, each a result of a collaboration between supporters and opponents.
[Focus on end-games instead of arguing specific points.]
the low doorway is meant to remind guests to enter with respect.
Be Kind, Everyone is Fighting a Social Atrophy You Know Nothing About
And so we struggle to reach out, and to respond with our fragile hurting brains. We want connection, and we also find the possibility potentially very difficult when we’re not doing so well. After all, if you invite someone over, they will see your messy house, and maybe judge you. And everyone’s “house” is a mess right now in one way or another.
love the hack to reach out right before ‘correspondence bankruptcy’ to reduce pressure on the recipient 👍🏽 i also try to generally cultivate a norm of ’no response necessary’ with anything i send; if it’s urgent i’ll call or say so.
this made me reflect on my frequent desire for solitude, often by saying or feeling that ‘my social cup is full’. i never thought that it might cost me some ‘social muscles’ but i can see that as a possibility if it goes on for too long. nevertheless, i’d like to think that i know when i want to have company and when not, that i have good judgement in balancing this within myself.
in what seems to now be a previous life, where i felt an overwhelming lack of social interaction, friendship, or companionship, i practiced what i called ‘shake the tree’ once or twice a year: dm everyone with warm wishes and my current city. many were happy i sent this, many reacted with a simple emoji, many didn’t respond, but it generally felt worthwhile for me.
Israel’s Genocide Betrays the Holocaust
A new world is being born. It is a world where the old rules, more often honored in the breach than the observance, no longer matter. It is a world where vast bureaucratic structures and technologically advanced systems carry out in public view vast killing projects. The industrialized nations, weakened, fearful of global chaos, are sending an ominous message to the Global South and anyone who might think of revolt — we will kill you without restraint.
Evil is protean. It mutates. It finds new forms and new expressions. Germany orchestrated the murder of six million Jews, as well as over six million Gypsies, Poles, homosexuals, communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Freemasons, artists, journalists, Soviet prisoners of war, people with physical and intellectual disabilities and political opponents. It immediately set out after the war to expiate itself for its crimes. It deftly transferred its racism and demonization to Muslims, with racial supremacy remaining firmly rooted in the German psyche.
Germany today is Israel’s second largest arms supplier following the U.S.
Does broadcasting happen because others make copies of the post? Does something exist online forever because someone made a copy?
[To any disagreement, you can ask: What’s really at stake here? If true, what happens? What truth would cause you to change your mind? If this were no longer a problem, how would we get there?]
[‘Nutpicking’ is to select the most extreme viewpoint so that it’s easy to tear apart; an empty victory that invites another cycle.]
[Consider helping the opposition build their strongest arguments and enlist them to build up yours. Iron sharpens iron, and each of you is best suited to find flaws in the others’ approach.]
[We’re easily blind to the loopholes in our own desires.]
[Even if one side wins through power, do they really expect the other side to simply shut up about it forever?]