💬 Quotes & Concepts
- If what you do succeeds, will the world be better?
- Whose money do they have to take to stay in business?
- What do you have to believe to think that they’re going to succeed? In what way does the world have to change or not change?
- Do you have evidence of leaders in the organization making hard choices to do the right thing?
- Does your actual compensation take care of what you need for all of your current goals and needs — from day one?
- Is the role you’re being hired into one where you can credibly advance, and where there’s sufficient resources for success?
💸 This article alleges that the avg. stock pay for an OpenAI employee is $1.5 million. My initial reaction is great enthusiasm for those workers—what a windfall!
At the same time, the growing inequalities are hard to ignore. I wrote this dispatch a few weeks ago in part to understand things better.
💬 From my current read, The Conquest of Bread:
We have all been bent on studying the dramatic side of revolutions so much, and the practical work of revolutions so little, that we are apt to see only the stage effects, so to speak, of these great movements: the fight of the first days; the barricades. But this fight, this first skirmish, is soon ended, and it is only after the breakdown of the old system that the real work of revolution can be said to begin.
“Money ain’t got no owners, only spenders.”
💬 Omar Little, The Wire
As a child, I had an inexplicable love for the movie Secondhand Lions, starring the recently deceased Robert Duvall. It’s strange to see how it touches on so many themes that I still find myself pondering to this day: storytelling, virtue, masculinity, wonder, etc… While it is a very simple film, avoiding flourish both in special effects and in writing, it’s sincerity and wholesomeness is achingly absent in today’s media. Near the end of the film, Robert Duvall’s character gives a speech which left quite an impression on me as a child. I suspect that it will play a lot during the RIPs for Robert, but I felt like sharing it anyways:
Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love… true love never dies. You remember that, boy. You remember that. Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in.
🤖 A friend shared Astral Codex Ten’s overview of Moltbook (the AI-only social platform where AI agents are interacting together) and I highly recommend. Whether or not Moltbook is an augury of the future, I don’t know – but it really tickles me to read about.
💬 In Health is Membership by Wendell Berry:
If an ecosystem loses one of its native species, we now know that we cannot speak of it as itself minus one species. An ecosystem minus one species is a different ecosystem. Just so, each of us is made by—or, one might better say, made as—a set of unique associations with unique persons, places, and things. The world of love does not admit the principle of the interchangeability of parts… In the world of love, things separated by efficiency and specialization strive to come back together.
💬 A quote from Soren Kierkegaard for Valentines week:
“What is youth? A dream. What is love? The dream’s content.”
💬 From Hugh MacLeod:
“The market for something to believe in is infinite.”
🚕 If you use a rideshare app in NYC, the latest NBER study may save you $:
Among consumers who opened either the Uber or the Lyft app on a given day, only 16 percent opened the other. The report found that the average absolute price gap between Uber and Lyft was approximately $3.50, representing roughly 14 percent of the average fare price, with higher gaps for longer rides. Price differences exceeded $1 about 75 percent of the time, and the distribution of price gaps was relatively symmetric, meaning neither platform was consistently cheaper. NYC riders collectively forgo approximately $300 million in potential annual savings by not comparing prices between platforms. Consumers may benefit from comparing prices more regularly. The market could also become more competitive if there were increased access to price aggregators, reducing search frictions.
In sum—check Lyft and Uber before booking a ride.
💬 From The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt:
What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience.
It’s a good day to introduce yourself to neighbors. 🙂
💬 Was reminded of this today, from Rilke in Letters To A Young Poet:
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything.
Long live everything!
💬 Geez— one of the best explanations of the process of writing, from Karl Ove Knausgaard:
For several years I had tried to write about my father, but had gotten nowhere, probably because the subject was too close to my life, and thus not so easy to force into another form, which of course is a prerequisite for literature. That is its sole law: everything has to submit to form. If any of literature’s other elements are stronger than form, such as style, plot, theme, if any of these overtake form, the result suffers. That is why writers with a strong style so often write bad books. That is also why writers with strong themes so often write bad books. Strong themes and styles have to be broken down before literature can come into being. It is this breaking down that is called “writing.”
💼 Anil Dash’s questions for knowing if that job will crush your soul:
Co-signing the entire post.
💬 Quote by Elizabeth Peabody, per Austin Kleon’s newsletter:
The perilous time for the most highly gifted is not youth. The holy sensibilities of genius — for all the sensibilities of genius are holy — keep their possessor essentially unhurt as long as animal spirits and the idea of being young last; but the perilous season is middle age, when a false wisdom tempts them to doubt the divine origin of the dreams of their youth; when the world comes to them, not with the song of the siren, against which all books warn us, but as a wise old man counselling acquiescence in what is below them.
💬 A great quote, brought to my attention by @robertbreen :
Poetry is language against which we have no defenses. — David Whyte
💬 Since I made a New Years post about Auden’s poem Under Which Lyre, I’d be remiss not to mention a different poem of his, New Year Letter, on this day as well. Here is the opening:
Under the familiar weight Of winter, conscience and the State, In loose formations of good cheer, Love, language, loneliness and fear, Towards the habits of next year, Along the streets the people flow, Singing or sighing as they go: Exalte, piano, or in doubt, All our reflections turn about A common meditative norm, Retrenchment, Sacrifice, Reform.
💬 A charming quote from RuPaul, as told to me by a friend:
“We’re all born naked and the rest is drag.”
💬 “Write, for example, ‘The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.'”
💬 Ten pages into Christmas Memory by Truman Capote and absolutely captured by this man’s prose:
Dollar bills, tightly rolled and green as May buds. Somber fifty-cent pieces, heavy enough to weight a dead man’s eyes. Lovely dimes, the loveliest coin, the one that really jingles. Nickels and quarters, worn smooth as creek pebbles. But mostly a hateful heap of bitter-odored pennies. Last summer others in the house contracted to pay us a penny for every twenty-five flies we killed. Oh, the carnage of August: the flies that flew to heaven! Yet it was not work in which we took pride.