griseus:

When a new shell washes up on shore, these hermit crabs measure each other and then line up from biggest to smallest until a crab that’s the right size for the new shell comes along. Then the crabs pass their old shells down the line and grab a new, slightly larger one. That way, each hermit crab in the line finds its new home with little hassle.

• More: BBC Life Story
• from IO9

How efficient!

“The symptoms of ADHD can be very subtle. People with prominently inattentive symptoms may simply just seem too much of a pushover or eager to please. Someone with ADHD might be doing just fine at their job, but never get round to passing a certification test for a promotion. A key thing to look at is, is someone performing significantly worse than they should for no reason? For instance, has an adult with an IQ of 143 been stuck for several years at an entry level position? (Or does a student with great smarts and desire to do well get C’s and D’s in college?)”

- Gurevich, David (2010-05-24). Adult ADHD: What You Need to Know (p. 28).  . Kindle Edition.  (via adhdisme)

swanjolras:

gosh but like we spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars and wondering “is there anybody out there” and hoping and guessing and imagining

because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe

and we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for us— we got scared that we were going to blow each other up, we got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, we’d never get to meet them

and then

we built robots?

and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image

and maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more, maybe yeah the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we’re people, too! you’re not alone any more!, maybe we’ll be gone

but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?

the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.

and they told us to tell you hello.

I seriously just teared up reading this.

A Pentagon study of the US nuclear weapons infrastructure revealed “systemic problems across the nuclear enterprise,” reports the New York Times.

Read the rest

Gotham, the Batman prequel on Fox, seems to me to be finding its legs. The early episodes featured a bit too much of what many series offer early on — heavy doses of exposition and unsubtly explicit attempts to Establish Characters. The tone has also been inconsistent, giving one the sense that this is an 8 o’clock network show that partly wishes it were on at 10 pm on FX.

The fan service bits have been fun — hey, look, it’s a young Poison Ivy! — but the show is going to need more than that to keep us interested. It’s also been fun, all along, watching some terrific pros at work. Donal Logue is perfect as the pragmatically corrupt Det. Harvey Bullock. Jada Pinkett Smith is having contagiously campy fun with her role as the gangster Fish Mooney. And Sean Pertwee is making me care about Alfred Pennyworth’s role in this story (while also reminding me, in a good way, of his Doctor dad).

But the core of the show is Det. Jim Gordon, and it’s here, with Ben McKenzie, that Gotham has really started to hook me in. Playing an unfailingly good and honest man is a tricky thing. It can flatten a character out into little more than a cipher or a variable. But McKenzie keeps Gordon alive and interesting by playing him as a man who repeatedly chooses to be good and honest — often because he doesn’t seem to know what else to do.

That’s especially true in his scenes with the terrific Robin Lord Taylor, who seems to be waddling off with the show. Gotham was never supposed to be “Young Batman,” but thanks to Taylor it’s not just “Young Jim Gordon” either. Increasingly, it’s “Young Penguin,” and that turns out to be far more interesting than I would have expected.

There was a scene in the fifth episode that, for me, captured what’s potentially most interesting in this series. Gordon has been dragged before the mobster Maroni to tell the story in which he refused to kill Oswald Cobblepot (the Penguin). Cobblepot is sitting there at the table and if their stories don’t match, Maroni will kill them both.

“Jim, just tell the truth,” Penguin hisses to Gordon, and both actors show us the steps involved in their thinking. Gordon knows that Cobblepot is an untrustworthy liar who might have said anything, but he also knows that the Penguin is smart enough to guess that Gordon will tell the truth, as he usually does. Cobblepot is probably counting on Gordon to be trustworthy and honest, so the safest answer would be to tell the truth. But Gordon can also see that Cobblepot is betting on him being an honest man — not just to stop Maroni from killing them, but for some larger role in some bigger game. Gordon seems aware that telling the truth means, in some way, playing into the Penguin’s larger plans.

So here are two men. One has calculated that he’s not smart enough to outsmart all the dangerous people around him, and so he might as well stick with the truth. The other has calculated that he is so smart that an incorruptibly trustworthy honest man might be more of an ace in the hole than a threat to his dishonest schemes.

That ups the ante on the story I thought we’d be getting from Gotham. I thought this was going to be the story of the lone hero bravely battling against the forces of corruption in the city. Instead, it’s the story of how this lone hero comes to see that the forces of corruption have already figured out how to account for him. He’s realizing that his incorruptibility might serve their ends just as well as if he were a willing accomplice in their corruption. Knowing that, what should he do then?

And there you go. The story has me asking “What then?” And as long as a story keeps me asking that, I’ll go along for the ride.

 

In my grad seminar this semester at the CUNY Graduate Center, “The Political Theory of Capitalism,” we’ve been exploring how some of the classics of modern political economy translate, traduce, transmit, efface, revise, and/or sublimate traditional categories of and concepts in Western political theory: consent, obedience, rule, law, and so forth.

Through economic thinkers like Smith, Ricardo, Keynes, Schumpeter, Jevons, and the like, we try and read political economy as the distinctively modern idiom of political theory. In the same way that religion provided a distinctive language and vocabulary for political thought after Rome and before the Renaissance, might not economics provide modern political theory with its own distinctive idiom and form? In other words, our interest in the political moment of economic discourse is not when the state intervenes or intrudes on the market; it’s when economic discourse seems to be most innocent of politics. That’s when we find the most resonant and pregnant political possibilities.

I’ll give you an example.

For the last several weeks we’ve been reading and talking about Ricardo’s On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, which I have to admit, damn near killed me. Turns out it’s really hard to teach a text you don’t understand.

But one of the more interesting—and, at least to me, semi-intelligible—arguments in Ricardo is his account of rent. (I don’t think the problem is Ricardo; it’s me.) For it’s there, in his chapter on rent, that he introduces the idea of the margin. I could be wrong, but I don’t see anything like a notion of the margin in other parts of the book. It’s all in his chapter on rent. (Ricardo experts or intellectual historians: is that right? Are there other places in Ricardo’s texts where he talks about the margin? Were there other theorists prior to Ricardo who talked about it?)

Now that in and of itself is interesting: Is there something to be gleaned from or learned about the idea of the margin from the fact that it arose, for Ricardo, in the context of a discourse on rent?

Anyway, here are three places in his chapter on rent where he talks about the idea of the margin:

The reason then, why raw produce rises in comparative value, is because more labour is employed in the production of the last portion obtained, and not because a rent is paid to the landlord.

…

Raw material enters into the composition of most commodities, but the value of that raw material, as well as corn, is regulated by the productiveness of the portion of capital last employed on the land, and paying no rent; and therefore rent is not a component part of the price of commodities.

…

It follows from the same principles, that any circumstances in the society which should make it unnecessary to employ the same amount of capital on the land, and which should therefore make the portion last employed more productive, would lower rent.

Ricardo’s basic idea of rent is that it arises from the differential in the quality of two tracts of land. So we start with land that is lush and fertile and easily farmed. At some point the population will require more food and more land will have to be put into play. So we move to the next piece of land, which is slightly less fertile and lush. At that point, the first piece of land generates a rent: the farmer and/or capitalist who use it will be willing to pay slightly extra in order not to have to use the slightly less fertile lend. And then we move to the third piece of land. And so on.

Ricardo’s basic intuition is that rent arises from difference:

If all land had the same properties, if it were unlimited in quantity, and uniform in quality, no charge could be made for its use, unless where it possessed peculiar advantages of situation. It is only, then, because land is not unlimited in quantity and uniform in quality, and because in the progress of population, land of an inferior quality, or less advantageously situated, is called into cultivation, that rent is ever paid for the use of it. When in the progress of society, land of the second degree of fertility is taken into cultivation, rent immediately commences on that of the first quality, and the amount of that rent will depend on the difference in the quality of these two portions of land.

At some point, we reach a final piece of land, beyond which it simply does not pay to work it at all. That final piece of land generates no rent; all it can afford is a wage to the laborer and a profit to labor’s employer. The tract of land just before that one generates a very little bit of rent. The one before that a little bit more. And so on back to the best land.

That last piece of really crappy land—with its concomitant last exertion of labor or last expenditure of capital—sets the value for the class of commodities that are produced on all the lands. For it is there, on that worst land, that the most labor will have to be expended in order to generate the commodity (the amount of labor required to produce the commodity determines the value of the commodity).

The exchangeable value of all commodities, whether they be manufactured, or the produce of the mines, or the produce of land, is always regulated, not by the less quantity of labour that will suffice for their production under circumstances highly favorable, and exclusively enjoyed by those who have peculiar facilities of production; but by the greater quantity of labour necessarily bestowed on their production by those who have no such facilities; by those who continue to produce them under the most unfavorable circumstances; meaning—by the most unfavorable circumstances, the most unfavorable under which the quantity of produce required, renders it necessary to carry on the production.

And while that last bit of land generates no rent—for all the value of the commodities sold is devoted to the wages of labor and the profit of the capitalist—every infinitesimal differential above that last bit of land will generate a rent. And though that last bit of land doesn’t generate a rent, the value of the rents on the better lands will be set by the value of the commodities produced on that last bit of land. The value of the commodities on that last bit will be high—”with every worse quality [of land] employed, the value of the commodities in the manufacture of which they were used, would rise, because equal quantities of labour would be less productive”—so the more productive labor working the better land will produce more commodities, so that better land will fetch a high rent.

Anyway, that’s the little bit of economics I could figure out (and I probably didn’t even get that right.)

But here’s the interesting part for me, as a political theorist.

In political theory, the great political moment, the highest mode of political action, is the founding of a new polity. Read Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, Nietzsche, Arendt: the founding moment is when all the basic laws, institutions, customs and mores of the polity are set out. It’s a moment of great drama and great art (that’s why Aeschylus mined it to such tremendous effect in the last play of the trilogy The Oresteia).

For political theorists of this vein, the further away you move from the founding moment—the further in time and place—the more loss, decay, corruption you will see. There is simply a fact of entropy that sets in, once the fervor and fever of that founding moment is lost. Machiavelli’s great obsession with Rome has much to do with the distance in time and space that the republic/empire travels from its founding as a small city.

The art of politics, then, is to steal back from time (and space) what it takes from the polity as it was founded, to deprive age of its ravages, to find a way to repeat the intensity, the engagement, the connection and commitment, of that founding moment. Whether through education, laws, festivals, rites, wars, what have you.

It struck me in reading Ricardo just how much the marginal theory of rent turns that idea of a founding moment on its head. Where the western theoretical tradition begins with a moment in time and place, and sees a threat in any movement away from that time and place, Ricardo’s theory of the margin begins at the opposite end of that process, with the last tract of land, which is furthest removed from the original tract in both time and space. And where the founding tradition of political theory sees the founding as the source of value from which all politics and morals emanate and decay—the founding is the pacesetter of values—the marginal theory of rent sees the outer limits of decay and decadence as the source of value: of the labor on that outer tract of land that is required for the production of the commodity, of the value of the commodity itself, and of the rent that commodity will generate on the inner tracts of land.

Ricardo himself seems to have had some intuition of how strange this all is. Not from a political theory perspective (though his comments are quite generative on that score) but from a more general cultural and sociological perspective:

Nothing is more common than to hear of the advantages which the land possesses over every other source of useful produce, on account of the surplus which it yields in the form of rent. Yet when land is most abundant, when most productive, and most fertile, it yields no rent; and it is only when its powers decay, and less is yielded in return for labour, that a share of the original produce of the more fertile portions is set apart for rent. It is singular that this quality in the land, which should have been noticed as an imperfection, compared with the natural agents by which manufacturers are assisted, should have been pointed out as constituting its peculiar pre-eminence.

Rent arises from decay, from the distance traveled from that founding tract of land.

And here’s where the fact that the marginal theory arises in the context of an account of rent, of money paid to a semi-aristocratic landlord, might matter. For in classical political theory of the kind we’ve been examining here, the supreme political actor is often assumed to be some sort of propertied worthy, a member of the landed gentry (that was part of the Country tradition of Bolingbroke’s circle in 18th century England) or such. His landed independence frees from him the imperatives of fear and favor, makes him a creature of civic virtue. It is a precondition of his agency.

But in Ricardo’s hands, the landlord is completely without agency. He’s more than a parasite; he’s utterly passive. Not only do his rents derive from the activities of others, but they go up in response to the imperatives of population growth that compel the harvesting of new and less fertile lands. He doesn’t act at all; he merely presides over and profits from the expansions and exertions of others.

And where the landed gentry of the political tradition are expected to attend to the maintenance and the upkeep of the polity, the preservation of its founding fervor, the landlords of Ricardo have a vested interest in the decay and demise of the lands and labors surrounding them. For that decay and demise provide the raw ingredients of difference that serve as the source of their rents.

Without multiplying instances, I hope enough has been said to show, that whatever diminishes the inequality in the produce obtained from successive portions of capital employed on the same or on new land, tends to lower rent; and that whatever increases that inequality, necessarily produces an opposite effect, and tends to raise it.

…it is obvious that the landlord is doubly benefited by difficulty of production. First, he obtains a greater share, and secondly the commodity in which he is paid is of greater value.

If what I’m saying about Ricardo’s theory of rent (and the significance of the margin for that theory) is true, the question becomes: to what extent can we read the entire tradition of marginal economics, which comes later and moves significantly beyond the category of rent, in a similar light, as standing the basic categories and concepts of political foundings on their head?

Astute reader Brandon Z pointed out that the Klingon exchange program covered in Sins of the Father showed the “Riker on a Klingon ship” half of the exchange in this episode. As Brandon puts it:

“You’ll get some Klingon fashion, a guide to Klingon cuisine, and Riker and Picard at a phaser firing range - other than that it’s uniforms.  And Riker indeed gets punched in the face, though it is the Klingon ladies that hit on him.”

GET IT, KLINGON LADIES.

So the episode starts with this quintessential Riker/Wesley shot:

Riker: YOU WANNA GO? HUH? BRO? Wesley: what if I had a mauve sweater 

There are a few exchange program crew members arriving, including one who belongs to an alien race that, according to Wesley, all look alike:

It’s a trap?

This is NOT Wesley’s friend, but he thinks it is. EMBARRASSING. And racist. Get it together, Crusher.

Then, Picard and Riker are enjoying a nice time in the phaser shooting range:

Phaser range provided by IKEA

The thing about this phaser range is that it is INCREDIBLY BORING. If I’m practicing my phasers, I want to be practicing on something fun, but they literally just have a black abyss with lights they’re supposed to shoot at:

BOOORRRRRINNGGGGGGGG

You guys. You can shoot at WHATEVER YOU WANT. Look:

WHATEVER YOUUUU WAAAAANT

But they don’t. They shoot at nothing:

But they look damn good doing it

It’s during this phaser practice that Picard suggests Riker go on board a Klingon ship, and Riker is like “okay” and immediately starts eating ALL THE KLINGON FOOD:

TENTACLES AND APPLE CIDER

LEMONADE IN A CHAMPAGNE FLUTE

GAGH, AKA GUMMI WORMS OF BLOOD

RIKER DON’T GIVE A FUUUUUUUUUCK

Seriously, broheim is CHOWING DOWN like Henry the fucking Eighth. Pulaski and Picard are like, “you okay man?” and he’s like “MORE PLEASE.”

I CAN’T GET ENOUGH

He is at least very generous with his replicator Klingon feast:

Seriously, bro. Bro. You gotta (burps), you gotta try this

Thank you, Number one. I shall take it under advisement.

SQUASH SOUP WITH GIANT THORNS AND A SIDE OF CLAMATO

TENTACLE STEW

My reaction is similar to Picard’s: 

Eeeeeeeeeehhhhh

He’s so polite. So diplomatic. AND RIKER STILL DON’T GIVE A FUUUUUCK

*GUITAR RIFF*

"You have fun, Number One."

Anyway, eventually Riker kicks it over to the Klingon ship, and we get some classic Klingon fashions:

Catcher’s vest? Check. Metal shit? Check. Sense of honor? DOUBLE CHECK.

The plot here is basically: the Klingons don’t super trust Riker, but he’s honorable, so everything turns out fine. It’s good that Rikes did all that food training, because:

Tentacle stew for daysssss

And just as Brandon said, we have some very flirty Klingon gals on this ship:

Hungry eyes / One pile of gagh and I can’t disguise

She is going to chew him up and spit him out, and not in a good way

We don’t see much of the ladies’ outfits, but what I do like here is that they are wearing basically what their male counterparts are. There’s a time for a boob window and a time for a catcher’s vest, and this is the latter. They’re warriors! They wear warrior clothes!

Riker befriends (as much as you can with a Klingon) this other crewman, who has a bottle opener on his vest like a brooch:

I might need to open some bloodwine later, you never know

He’s working sort of a slim fit Klingon look, a little less bulky, a little more streamlined. The Bonobos kind of Klingon.

This scene also has an enjoyable line that Brandon pointed out, which is: "If Klingon food is too strong for you, perhaps we can get one of the females to breast-feed you.” The Klingons neglected to add, “WITTLE BABY WIKER.” Everyone had a good laugh, though:

OH HOW WE LAUGHED ABOARD THAT WARBIRD

Meanwhile, there are shenanigans afoot and Riker basically takes over the ship by transporting the captain to the Enterprise:

My cargo vest is not zoned for Federation starships

Nothing new here, but I will reiterate my love of the pockets on Klingon vests. WHAT DO THEY KEEP IN THERE.

Eventually, Riker comes back (after getting punched in the face, of course) and looks at Picard like this:

I’M BACK, CAPTAIN

Yes, I see that, Number One, but stop looking at me in that lecherous manner. I don’t like it.

OH, DON’T YOU

That’s no way to look at any officer, Number One, much less your commander. Stand down.

SOMEDAY, JEAN-LUC, SOMEDAY

Sorry I accidentally wandered into slashfic land there, but WE’RE ALL THINKING IT. 

And one more for good measure:

I HATE YOU TRISTAN

Fossil fuel subsidies continue to rise:

In 2009, G20 leaders agreed to phase out fossil fuel subsidies by 2020. But it’s clear that most countries are going in the opposite direction, especially the U.S. The government provided $2.6 billion in subsidies for exploration in 2009, which nearly doubled to $5.1 billion by 2013, thanks to a boom in domestic oil and gas production. That means American drilling and investment tax breaks outrank subsidies in Australia, Russia, and China—countries not generally known for their aggressiveness on climate change. And yet, President Barack Obama has adopted climate change as a part of his agenda and hopes to convince the rest of the world to do the same.

In fact, according to the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook, released today, governments worldwide spend a mind-boggling $550 billion on fossil fuel subsidies each year. As Chris Mooney notes, that’s four times the amount of subsidies directed toward renewables:

[That] partly explains why despite an overall greening of world energy patterns in the next 25 years, the IEA says we are going to miss climate goals and end up with quite a lot of warming (barring a very significant course correction). The agency cites “the failure to transform the energy system quickly enough to stem the rise in energy-related CO2 emissions (which grow by one-fifth to 2040) and put the world on a path consistent with a long-term global temperature increase of 2°C.” (It was not immediately clear how much the just announced U.S.-China deal to jointly reduce greenhouse gas emissions changes this picture.)

We have some 1000 gigatonnes of carbon left to emit to the atmosphere before locking in a dangerous amount of warming above 2 degrees, and on the current course we’ll use it all up by 2040, says the IEA. In order to stop that, we’ll need four times the current investment in renewable energy — an increase up to $ 1.5 trillion annually around the world

David Roberts shakes his head:

It’s a little crazy. As the Carbon Tracker Initiative has shown in some detail, if the world is to have a chance of limiting temperature rise to 2C, 60 to 80 percent of current fossil fuel reserves have to stay in the ground. That means companies and countries with fossil fuel assets face an enormous potential devaluation, a “carbon bubble.” Exploration for new fossil fuels at this point is just stockpiling stranded assets, at great cost, with money that could far more profitably be spent accelerating the energy transition. Or maybe, as this kind of insane-but-routine set of facts demonstrates, the world won’t get serious about climate change. Then stranded assets could be the least of our problems.

A lot of people ask me whether they need a niche for their business.

“Choose a niche” is popular advice these days, and easy advice to dispense. Unfortunately, it’s not very helpful for those of us who have multiple passions and can’t see ourselves focusing solely on one area.

It’s true that there are some multipotentialites who enjoy building and running multiple niche businesses. But many others struggle with the challenge of splitting up our time and focus.

So if you’re interested in starting a business, what do you do? Do you build a narrow business because that’s supposedly what works, and then shut it down or re-brand when you become interested in something new? Sounds unsustainable to me…

This problem is what prompted me to create the Renaissance Business guide a few years back. It’s also what’s prompting me to now create something new…

Introducing The Overarching Theme Kit

The Overarching Theme Kit is a short PDF that will give you a quick boost to help you get closer to finding your overarching theme. It includes exercises that I do with my coaching students and that I’ve never written about on the blog before.

I’ve just seen so many people struggling with this issue, and I wanted to put something out there that will provide you with some guidance as you do the hard work of combining your passions. It’s obviously not as comprehensive as Renaissance Business, but think of it as a comprehensive cheat sheet.

What is an overarching theme anyway?

An overarching theme is the core philosophy or concept that brings the various subjects in your business together. It’s what makes your business feel cohesive so that it makes sense to potential customers.

Without an overarching theme, your business will likely seem scattered and confusing. Here are some examples to give you an idea of what I mean. I put what I believe their overarching themes to be in parenthesize:

• Brain Pickings (how to live a good life)
• The Art of Non-Conformity (unconventional living)
• Nerd Fitness (a smoosh of fitness and nerd culture)
• Freakonomics (the hidden side of everything)
• Pikaland (possibility)

All of these overarching themes make it possible for the owner/writer to discuss a multitude of different topics.

In The Overarching Theme Kit you will learn:

• Why traditional business models don’t work for some multipotentialites
• What alternatives exist to the niche business
• The pitfall of Renaissance Businesses and how to avoid it
• 3 approaches to finding your overarching theme
• Specific exercises to help you generate ideas for your overarching theme
• Lots of case studies and examples

Download the Kit

If you’re already on the Puttylike email list, you should have received an email from me yesterday with the link to download the kit. If you are new (hi!), enter your name and email address in the green box below. Once you’ve confirmed, you’ll receive an email right away with the PDF attached. You’ll also receive personal weekly emails from me once a week.

Enjoy the kit, put the information to good use (i.e. take action), and have fun smooshing!

Hi there,

I don’t think you’ve covered my particular issue – how to stop difficult people disrupting meetings when you’re notionally in charge of those meetings – so here goes.

Six months ago I took over as chairperson of a local voluntary group. My problem is with the behaviour of a group member – let’s call her “Ethel”. It’s a real struggle trying to keep the meetings on track because she derails discussions and interrupts people.

The previous chairperson was much more tolerant of Ethel, and, as a result, meetings frequently overran and went off-topic because of her rambling. This stressed me out, and I suspect it put other people off attending the meetings, but I figured it wasn’t my job to do anything, so I just put up with it. Now, of course, it is my job.

Ethel used to be only peripherally involved with the group, but now she comes so that her husband “Robert” can attend. He’s a longstanding member of the group who used to be very active. But he is now a wheelchair user who can’t get around on his own, so he can’t attend meetings without Ethel, who’s his carer as well as his wife.

So far I’ve tried to deal with it by formalising the way we run meetings (planning and sending round an agenda in advance, coming up with a rough idea of how much time we should spend on each agenda item before the meeting starts, and so on). I also find that a sense of urgency works well – “We’ve got a lot to discuss tonight, so we all need to work really hard to stay on track.” But I can’t pull the “urgency” card at every meeting.

So far I’ve just been shutting her down as politely as I can: “Thanks, Ethel, but can we discuss that when we get to it on the agenda?” “Thanks, but we really need to make a decision on XYZ now.” “OK, I’m sorry, we really need to move on.” But I end up having to do this perhaps five or six times a meeting (and that’s on a good day). It’s exhausting and I’m tired of feeling like the bad guy for repeatedly telling someone who’s half a century older than me to shut up. And we still barely finish on time!

I’m wary of taking steps to boot her out, because Robert can’t be there without her. But I dread every meeting because I know it’s going to be a battle and I’m going to leave feeling exhausted and horrible. Any advice would be gratefully received.

Thank you,

Not-So-Rambling-Rose

Dear Not So Rambling:

As the person who runs the meeting, staying on task and reining in people who interrupt is your job. It feels weird for you, because you are a focused, non-interrupty sort of person who doesn’t need others to manage your time or attention, so when dealing with Ethel you are like “but why doesn’t she know” or “why won’t she learn” and “how can she not see?” It also feels weird because she is older than you. But it’s not actually that weird for any group of people to wander off topic, and the meeting-runner’s task is to bring the lost conversational lambs back to the fold. Most people do not mind one bit when a moderator moves things along. Remember back to when you weren’t in charge. Didn’t you wish/silently beg the meeting runner to do exactly what you are doing now?

So, let go of the idea of what you think Ethel “should” know or how you think she “should” behave. For whatever reason (and it could be a cross section of “that’s how her personality is” and “that’s how her brain works”) she doesn’t know/see/do. Ethel may never, of her own accord, stick to the agenda or get into the flow of turn-based discussion, even if you became the perfect meeting runner, and it’s not your job to try to fix her in any way. So it may always take some effort on your part to moderate these meetings. I realize it’s exhausting you, but maybe it will be freeing to let go of the idea that this is changeable by you. You are already doing what you can to change the culture of these meetings, by sticking to the agenda and redirecting people (surely Ethel is not the only one) who go off topic. The meetings are better, and are going to keep being better because of you. You’re going to wear the mantle of your authority better as time goes on, too.

Being a college instructor is a daily exercise in figuring out exactly these kinds of situations in a way that is constructive and kind. When you’ve got a room that contains:

• The person that just really, really wants to ask questions about their personal, outside-of-class project (treating a classroom full of 16 people like one-on-one office hours)
• The person that just really, really wants to ask detailed questions about their specific amazingly fancy camera that is not in the room with us.
• The person who is super-interested in all the material and their mind is being blown, and they are also an out-loud processor & thinker, like Matt Smith’s Doctor.
• The person who blurts out questions as they occur to them, interrupting others (or me) mid-sentence with a question that has to do with something we covered an hour ago or something that we are about to cover if they would only let me get to the end of my sentence.
• A bunch of really quiet people who would never interrupt anyone, quietly doodling in their notebooks who I want to draw out into discussion.
• Limited time.
• A shitload of information to get through.

–it’s a juggling act. Especially since as a student/meeting attender, I was/am either a discussion dominator OR a distracted doodler. At the beginning of the semester, when all these trends are emerging but I don’t know anyone well, the days truly can be exhausting, because I don’t have my flow and we as a class don’t have our flow yet, and if I keep getting interrupted it feels like I will never get that flow. But we do, eventually, flow together. I am in a teaching role relative to the students that you are not in relative to Ethyl, but I think I can give you some tricks from classroom management that apply to meeting management.

1. Keep doing what you are doing, but with fewer questions and less apologizing. Turn “Thanks, Ethel, but can we discuss that when we get to it on the agenda?” into “Thanks Ethel! We’ll get to that in a moment. But right now, Sue, what were you saying about (current agenda topic?)” You’re not asking permission, don’t end your sentence with a question mark and give her room to make that a debatable thing.

2. Straight up interrupt her sometimes. Interrupting someone who just interrupted you or interrupted someone else is sometimes necessary. “Ethel, great point, but Kima was speaking. Kima, can you finish that thought for us?” This will feel impossibly rude to you, and if you interrupted somebody who behaved and thought like you it would be rude, but if you interrupted an enthusiastic talky person like me when I am in full talk mode I would not only not think it was rude, I would be grateful for the direct cue. I’m not saying that everyone who reads this should just start wildly interrupting everyone everywhere, but there are some instances where “It sounds like you have a lot of questions and ideas about this. For the sake of the meeting (or class), we have to move on, but can you put your thoughts in an email to me/the rest of the group, or write them down now in your notebook so we can discuss them later?” is a kindness. To everyone. In that room.

3. Channel the energy and enthusiasm and include her more, not less. Students 1-4, in the bullet points, above? All could be translated as “an ambitious and enthusiastic person who wants recognition.” Could you try to view Ethel like that? You say that she is a peripheral member of the group right now, but comes for the sake of Robert. Can you figure out the topics that she really cares about and ask her for her input sometimes? While the behavior right now is disruptive to the meetings, what you may be seeing is a person who passionately wants to contribute to the organization but who has been sidelined by other responsibilities (or aging). If your only interactions with her are interrupting her or shutting her down, of course it will be draining for you, and it will reinforce the “nobody really listens to me” cycle that’s happening for her.

Find out what she’s good at and what she wants to be doing and channel her energy. Even in a small way, like, if you have to cut her off because she’s jumping ahead on the agenda, when you get to that agenda item, invite her to speak. “Ethel, you mentioned some ideas about this earlier, why don’t we start with you?”

4.Be an active moderator and actively include/call on people to contribute in a way that helps the meeting flow. If Ethel speaks first it gives you an opening to invite someone else to comment (“Wonderful, thanks Ethel! Dave, did you also have a plan for how we could do that part of the work?”) and to even interrupt if you need to for time reasons. “Ethel, thanks, I can see some other people are itching to speak, let’s hear from Gomer and Sue also.” Asking someone to wrap up for the sake of time vs. interrupting someone to make sure that other people are heard seems like splitting hairs, but the second way goes down easier. Time is abstract. Gomer and Sue are here. Moderating like this, while it takes some work, makes everything less tense – Ethel’s not waiting to pounce the second someone takes a breath, you’re not dreading that moment, you have more control, you’re bringing other people into the discussion in an organic and active way, and you’re not the bad guy shutting her down, you’re the moderator managing a discussion.

5. When you ask if there are any questions (or open a topic up for discussion), some questions will be “answer/discuss right now while everyone is together” questions, some questions will be “big picture, let’s all think about that for next time/THE FUTURE” questions, some will be “one person, go research this one thing and tell us about it” questions. Get good at sorting out which kind of question is which and creating a structure for triaging them, which is another way to channel the energies of the people who care about the stuff into getting the stuff actually done.

People who keep going on and on or back and forth in the meeting about one issue are basically volunteering to go figure out a solution to that thing together. “Keith, Mildred, it sounds like you both have the seeds of a plan, want to discuss it more between you and come back to this next time?”, “Amara, you’re right, we do need exact numbers, is that something you can put together for next time?”, etc. This can be used to divide up work organically even when no one is a problem, but it’s especially useful when you need to channel a problem team member.

The greatest meeting runner I’ve ever know, a former boss, had a philosophy that how much you get to talk in meetings is directly proportionate to the quality and output of your actual work. This often meant flipping the script from rooms where only the old white dudes fill the room with their voices while the young women silently take notes (and then quietly do all the work later), and this person was especially a badass at dealing with The Guy Who Will Poke Holes In Everyone’s Plan But Has None Of His Own by saying “Guy, you’ve explained that wonderfully! So what do you recommend we do next?” When “Guy” had no immediate recommendation, Boss would say “Well, you’re right, it is a big issue. Why don’t you come back next week with a few proposals for solving that, and we’ll discuss those first thing.” Boss would back this up in the interim by praising Guy’s initiative and putting Guy’s name on the agenda next to that thing. “We’ll talk budget first, and then Guy will take the lead.” I’m telling you, it was masterful.

If Guy did some work and solved the problem, great! By far the most desired outcome! If Guy didn’t, he would generally STFU for a while, and let the rest of us get on with it.

6. Maybe this isn’t for this particular person or this situation right now, but a good practice if you had to cut someone off for the sake of time (or they are bringing up off-topic things or big picture questions to a small getting stuff done sort of meeting, or they had more to say than you had time to hear) is to follow up with them in a positive way if you possibly can. For me & class, it’s as simple as an email, “Student, you asked some great questions in class today, want to set up a meeting/here are some links that might interest you/seek out this film, I think it does what you want to do very well” etc. If you don’t want Emails From Ethel™ in addition to the time you spend with her in meetings, I totally get it (this is a time when my role as a teacher is very distinct from yours as a volunteer meeting runner). But it can be a way to connect with people and let them know they and their ideas are important to you if you feel like you’ve had to be a bit brusquer than you’d like. I would recommend this, for instance, to managers who want to mentor their employees a little or to people who couldn’t talk as long as they liked to someone at a social gathering.

Well, turns out I had A LOT of thoughts on this, who knew? I’m sure readers do as well, so I’ll put the questions out there:

1. Who is the best meeting-runner you know?

2. What do they do that’s great?

3. How do they deal with derailers and time management?

Gender Diaries: Excerpts

Day 103:

Yesterday I hesitantly talked to my partners and friends about my inability to recognize myself within a gender binary. Confused by the unconditional support and empathy I received, I have retreated into my burrow and will remain here until my feelings go away.

Day 120:

Today I find myself riddled with guilt after realizing that I have non consensually gendered my cats, even prescribing gender norms to them in the form of my daily greeting of ‘Hey big boy, hey little lady, who wants some dinner?”.

I ask Oskar if I should maybe be using different terms to refer to him; his response is a single, enigmatic tail twitch.

Day 142:

I dress today, snarling ‘You want a gender performance? I’ll give you a fucking performance”, layering skirts and pants, skirts and pants. I scrawl ‘NOPE’ in a sharpie across my chest.

I call into work sick. It is the responsible thing to do.

Day 167:

Stymied at work today  – while filling out some employee information forms I stumbled across the binary ‘Gender’ checkbox field. Caught between my need to self identify accurately and my concerns about coming out in the workspace, I found myself instead making a high-pitched keening noise while my pen hovered uncertainly over the form.

The human resources manager, clearly perturbed, left my office after 20 minutes. When I returned the form to her later, a shaky and cowardly checkmark safely nestled into one of those boxes, neither of us spoke of the incident.

Day 180: 

This morning I spent 2 hours staring at myself naked in the bedroom mirror, screaming ‘WHAT ARE YOU’ while smearing a tube of lipstick over my body.

The lipstick made me feel pretty, but ultimately didn’t answer my question.

Day 199:

I dream of cartesian planes… or are they nightmares?

Day 234:

Today I tried to identify as a man. Even after reading Fight Club three times and writing a disaffected manifesto on our meaningless lives of nihilist consumerism after getting drunk on bourbon, I feel like I did not succeed.

Day 241:

I lay my head in my partner’s lap, and she pats me gently. ‘Maybe I’m a houseplant’, I think. ‘That sounds so peaceful’. But this is nonsense. Houseplants do not get patted.

Day 259: 

Chuck Palahniuk finally responded to my repeated correspondences, writing back ‘I don’t know who you are. Please stop writing me”. This resonates; I don’t know who I am, either.

Day 401:

Today I broke through the gender barrier, though they said it could never be done. Reality is different here, social constructions of identity no longer apply, nor do the laws of physics. I see genders in colours I have never seen before and in impossible, inconceivable shapes, an infinity of genders that my simple brain cannot comprehend and my words cannot describe.

Still, somehow, I identify with none of them.

Day 762:

I stare into the gendervoid. It stares back.

Hillary Clinton:

While the finance industry does genuinely hate Warren, the big bankers love Clinton, and by and large they badly want her to be president. Many of the rich and powerful in the financial industry—among them, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman, Tom Nides, a powerful vice chairman at Morgan Stanley, and the heads of JPMorganChase and Bank of America—consider Clinton a pragmatic problem-solver not prone to populist rhetoric. To them, she’s someone who gets the idea that we all benefit if Wall Street and American business thrive. What about her forays into fiery rhetoric? They dismiss it quickly as political maneuvers. None of them think she really means her populism.

Although Hillary Clinton has made no formal announcement of her candidacy, the consensus on Wall Street is that she is running—and running hard—and that her national organization is quickly falling into place behind the scenes. That all makes her attractive. Wall Street, above all, loves a winner, especially one who is not likely to tamper too radically with its vast money pot.

Noah Millman asks, “how would a serious challenge to Clinton, even if it failed, affect the Republican contest?”

It seems to me that a Clinton coronation makes life much easier for those who don’t want to think too hard about what the GOP stands for. The GOP would really like to run a largely negative campaign against the Clinton-Obama record without having to declare itself too clearly on any issue. A Clinton coronation would make that easier, because it would take away the need for Clinton to define herself in any specific way.

Take foreign policy.

Clinton is at the extreme hawkish end of the Democratic Party. She pushed hard for the intervention in Libya, favored a more forceful and earlier intervention in Syria, a tougher line on Iran, and so forth. If she faced a serious primary challenge from, say, Jim Webb, she’d either have to defend that record forcefully, or moderate her stance. Now, if she did the first, then what happens on the Republican side at the same time? First, Rand Paul says he agrees more with Jim Webb. Second, the other GOP contenders have to decide whether they want to echo Clinton, echo Paul, or come up with an alternative way of explaining their views while remaining hawkish. Whatever they do, they have to provide more clarity.

Larison expects a “debate over Libya on the Democratic side could have some very interesting and desirable effects on the intra-Republican debate and on Clinton’s ability to use her time as Secretary of State to her advantage”:

Clinton “owns” the Libyan war in a way that she isn’t similarly responsible for other policy decisions, and that war was a terrible mistake that she urged the president to make.

Webb could attack her consistent support for recklessly hawkish policies without having to recall a debate from a decade earlier, and Paul could use the intervention to highlight an episode where he demonstrated better judgment than the then-Secretary of State. The more that Clinton is forced to defend her record on the Libyan war itself, rather than endlessly relitigating the 2012 attack in Benghazi, the worse it will be for her. The record shows that she was one of the architects of a major policy blunder that is still having destructive effects on the country that “benefited” from the intervention.

Michael Brendan Dougherty advises Democrats to “derail Hillary Clinton.” He calls her “a mortal threat to the next generation of social democratic reform”:

Obama beat Hillary by pointing out that he had been right on the most consequential foreign policy issue since the Vietnam War, and she had been wrong. Amazingly, he appointed her secretary of State, where she pushed hard for military engagement in Libya, which quickly turned into a stateless region dominated by terrorist gangs — a dumpster fire along the Mediterranean.

Hillary Clinton was molded by the Cold War liberal’s fear of looking soft on foreign policy, and she has become the John McCain of the Democratic Party. Already smarting from Obama’s failure to close Guantanamo Bay, his eager embrace of drone warfare, and his expansion of the surveillance state, do liberals really want to lock all that in under Madame Smart Power?

Screenplay Chris Shafer, Paul Vicknair

Unrequited love motivates a guy to write about his experiences.

IMDB

Eric, a manager at a Chick-fil-A restaurant, made a list of words that he forbade his staff from uttering while at work. When someone crossed out "bae" he added it back on the list and wrote, "scratch it our & you lose your employee meals!"

maximumbuttitude:

lhs3020b:

Here are a couple of the less well-known pieces of astrophotography.

These two images were originally sent back to Earth from the Soviet Venera program probes (I believe these specific two came from Venera 13, though I don’t have the citation to hand).

That’s right - that barren rocky wasteland is Venus.

These images are particularly notable because Venus has a surface temperature of over 460 Celsius and a pressure of around 90 bars. That atmosphere is also pure poison. The clouds you can see aren’t water vapour; they’re composed of droplets of sulphuric acid. The ‘air’ itself is 94% carbon dioxide, with most of the rest being nitrogen and a lot of weird nasties.

None of the Venera landers remained operational for more than a couple of hours once on Venus’s surface. But frankly, given how unbelievably hostile the surface conditions are there, it’s a miracle they were able to function at all.

Sky Made of Death Piss Welcome to Orb

liberal: communism failed
liberal: therefore a system where greed is a virtue, the useless money trading class controls virtually all wealth and resources through shadow economics, hyper rich people buy entire goverments and disenfranchise the poor and workers on virtually every level is somehow better
liberal: oh but corporations are bad we should make rules to make them nicer or something. With those politicians they own. Yeah

Derek Thompson flags a new study (pdf):

Jumping between jobs in your 20s, which strikes many people as wayward and noncommittal, improves the chance that you’ll find more satisfying—and higher paying—work in your 30s and 40s. “People who switch jobs more frequently early in their careers tend to have higher wages and incomes in their prime-working years,” said [Henry] Siu, a professor at the Vancouver School of Economics. “Job-hopping is actually correlated with higher incomes, because people have found better matches—their true calling.”

“True calling” is a messy term, since (a) job mastery, (b) job satisfaction, and (c) compensation don’t always line up. There are talented yet miserable investment bankers (a and c, not b), talented and fulfilled public-school teachers (a and b, not c), and several shan’t-be-named general managers of professional sports teams (b and c, not a). But overall, Siu said, adults who switch jobs multiple times are more likely to find a position in their prime-work years where they earn a higher wage and have a lower chance of quitting. (As always, causality is difficult to prove: Perhaps pro-active behavior leads to both higher wages and a greater likelihood of quitting.)

Like I said, the immigration executive order is why they impeach the President over. Now they're saying it.

I was recently chatting with a friend and he was talking about all the things he wanted to learn. I was exhausted just hearing the list and realized that I am either getting old or I am getting tired; I’m not sure which.

There is a constant pressure to learn new things and keep up with all the latest ideas: new frameworks, new platforms, new ideas of how to write code, they just keep coming out. In addition, the ebb and flow of what is desired from a front-end developer keeps changing. It used to be that knowing CSS and HTML was enough, then jQuery came along, then responsive techniques, then Node.js and then Angular, Ember, etc., etc., etc. That list, right there, it tires me out.

So lately I’ve had to do some evaluating. What do I want to focus on, what do I love about the web? What do I actually want to learn, versus what I think I should learn. And to be honest, what I really like about the web, it isn’t always whatever is the sexy new hotness—it’s the bread and butter that makes sites easier for everyone to access and use. I love responsive design, I care about accessibility, and lately I’ve gotten really interested in performance as it pertains to CSS styles and load times.

There is a lot of pressure out there: to learn new things, to spend all your time coding, to be the super developer. I now believe that to be impossible and unhealthy. It means you aren’t living a balanced life and it also means that you’re living under constant stress and pressure.

So I’ve started devoting the time I have for learning new things to learning the things that I like, that matter to me, and hopefully that will show in my work and in my writing. It may not be sexy and it may not be the hottest thing on the web right now, but it’s still relevant and important to making a great site or application. So instead of feeling overwhelmed by code, maybe take a step back, evaluate what you actually enjoy learning, and focus on that.

This December, Freckle Time Tracking turns 6 years old. OMG! And 30×500 turns 5 years old… after a fashion.

You see, the original 30×500 is dead. And the one before that. And the one before that. And the one before that, too.

We killed them. Slowly. And we’re still killing them, even as I write this. The 30×500 that just wrapped up for 30 students is just about expired.

This winter, we’re launching the culmination of 5 years of teaching designers & developers to make their very first product dollar. We’re making the very first go-at-your-own-pace 30×500 ever.

So it seems like a grand old time to talk about why the product development cycle that “feels right” is so very very wrong… and why you need to be more like one of nature’s strangest parasites.

First, the Before picture:

The “Elementary School” Style of Product Development

You learned your personal appproach to product development before you were even old enough to drive.

When you were a kid, it went something like this:

1. You work on a class project
2. …the bell rings…
3. You work on the next discrete project

So now that you’re wearing the Adult Pants, and building products, the natural inclination is to:

1. Build Product A!
2. …time passes…
3. Put Product A aside, build totally different Product B

Like a hungry bee buzzing from flower to flower.

But when you’re a bootstrapper, you can’t let your business lie fallow, waiting, while you build the next thing. You can’t throw away the natural advantages of what you’ve already done. You can’t switch gears every 45 minutes (or every year).

You can’t afford to be so wasteful

Every thing you work on has to feed your next thing. Every step you take has to move you forward (and your customers too).

And each step also has to work on its own, independently, cuz you aren’t living off the largesse of a venture capital fund.

You can’t be a bee

Individual bees don’t build product empires, my friends. Individual bees are the tool of the empire builders. You need to be the director — the queen bee.

Or the wasp.

So let me tell you a story about Nature, red in tooth and claw.

The Wasp and the Caterpillar

“Imagine being eaten alive — from the inside out!”
— PBS and also smart product designers

When you need to come up with novel ways to survive and grow, look to the master: Evolution, and its product, the natural world. And for second, third and fourth products? Look to the parasitoid wasp.

The parasitoid wasp lays its eggs in a live caterpillar.

The eggs hatch into pupae who eat the caterpillar alive… from the inside out. After the wasplettes have eaten their fill, they bite their way out. The (dinner party) host caterpillar expires, naturally.

But what a waste!

That wasteful pupae discards effort — and nutrition — and transportation all in one go. It’s the flitting bee all over again.

(The metaphor is pretty clear, right? Good.)

And in case that’s not creepy enough, just wait — it gets creepier!

Not all parasitoid wasp species are so profligate. The Glyptapanteles wasp knows better than to waste a natural advantage. Its pupae are picky eaters. They don’t gnosh on the vital organs. And so, when the wasplettes blow the joint, the caterpillar is left alive.

Alive to do their bidding.

The caterpillar (what’s left of it) is biochemically hoodwinked into spending its dying breath to guard the baby wasp. And so G-wasps that have caterpillar bodyguards have a much higher survival rate. Their former meal becomes their insurance policy.

Glyptapanteles wasps are nature’s bootstrappers.

The true Bootstrapper’s Multi-Product Development Cycle

So, what can we learn from ol’ Glyppie? Instead of switching focus every time the bell dings — or a product has run its course — plan ahead, shield, and be thrifty:

1. Use what you’ve already got
2. Use it creatively — for both sustenance and protection
3. Build while you grow
4. Grow from the inside out

Thankfully, since we’re talking ebooks and software and workshops here, we are both the wasp and the caterpillar. And there are no caterpillar guts to contend with.

How we’ve made parasitic product dev work for us

It was in December 2010 that the 30×500 product roadmap began.

It started with a phone call.

I hosted a lil 3-hour teleconference call about business. I told structured bootstrapping stories to a mere 8 attendees, who paid $80 a head.

You’d think that, to me, such a pitiful attendance would be a sign to give up while I was ahead. But you’d be wrong.

The bit of feedback I heard most from our tiny group was “MOAR PLEASE!”

So we set out to deliver moar. I mean, more.

Five years later, we’ve helped hundreds of students gross, in total, around $3 million. (It’s harder to get exact numbers than you might imagine, but we do keep a tally every time a dollar amount is mentioned.)

So… $3 million in student results.

And about $1.5 mil for us… not too shabby.

We made it happen with by constantly supplanting our own work.

Each new version of the class was began by burrowing into the weakness of the previous one.

Eating it from the the inside out. Absorbing it. Becoming stronger, faster, better — more helpful to our students.

Then exploiting the powerful reputation of all the classes that came before — no matter how different — to carry us forward.

Glyppie would be proud!

Here’s what we didn’t do

We didn’t:

• start fresh
• change audiences
• create a cluster of disparate products
• change names (* except the very first time)
• change the problem arena
• change the mission, or the direction, or the purpose
• change the fundamental product type (it’s still a class/educational product, even if the format changed)

Now, I have made a few of these mistakes in the past…

…and watched our students make them (usually against our advice, but hey, nobody listens all the time). So, I am speaking from experience when I tell you…

Those things in the list above? Those are the Elementary School approach, the flitting bee approach. Those are momentum-killers. Those are the opposite of growing-inside-and-eating-your-way-out.

Those leave you with no protection.

So that’s not what we did with 30×500 over 5 years. No. We did the opposite. We stayed the course.

We evolved; we didn’t “disrupt.”

We moved from a group coaching call -> structured but long-winded and highly personal multi-month email course -> live, limited length bootcamp experience, with less personal engagement -> 100% turn-key product (coming right up!).

At each step 30×500 became less work for us, and way more effective for our students.

Here’s how we did it.

We’ve never before put out such a detailed roadmap of 30×500. Here it is. Use it to inspire yourself to supplant your product from the inside out.

Dec 2010: The teleconf call. I told 3 hours of bootstrapping stories (designed to create insight, but still… stories); not much in the way of actionability. Just 8 attendees/$640 total.

Jan 2010: Year of Hustle. After the teleconf attendees crying “MOAR,” Alex and I put our heads together to figure out how to give it to them. The result was a detailed outline of 12 weeks of lessons and homework. We pre-sold and rolled it out, live, working to our outlines. (Note: I don’t recommend this. It hurt.) 50 attendees at $450/$22,500.

Sounds like a lot but we split it and each spent hundreds of hours. On paper, a loss. But to a clever Glyppie? A major boon. A fat, juicy caterpillar to poke with our product ovipositor.

Fall 2010: 30×500, the first. Alex dropped out due to overcommitment, so I was left to wrap up the previous class. There were many places where the class was imperfect and students got stuck. I coached them, but I also took note of where, why, and how. When it came time for the next class, I literally flipped the order of lessons on their head. (I cut a few out/added a couple, too.) Sales Safari was born. The research focus had always been there, but now I made it paramount. Much better class, better marketing, testimonials, new name — 50 students at $650 a head. $32,500.

I ran another class, just like that one… except I could never leave it alone. I don’t remember what changes I made for the next couple classes or when, exactly, from here.

But the constant creative destruction went in this order:

30×500, Later improvements:

• More exercises.
• A 3-hour onboarding bootcamp, to get people on the same page, to give them an overview of the system, to get them excited.
• Alex rejoined me. Now we could double down.
• An application process — and we truly denied 20%+ of applications.
• Turned early lessons into free marketing material, to create better students before class.
• A 4-week pre-class on habits, to help students learn to stick to it.
• Expanded the 3-hour onboarding to two half-days (8 hours total).

Then, at the height of 75 students @ $2450/ea — we rested, for a little bit.

Everything we did helped our students execute more, faster, better.

The restructuring, the onboarding, the application, the educational marketing, the habits class — those helped a lot.

But by the end of 2012, there were no more incremental improvements to make to the basic format: onboarding, email lessons, workbooks, exercises, weekly chat.

So we stopped the old class. Fin.

2013: It was time to bite our way out…

To get bigger — to get better — we had to question the most basic assumptions. And it turned out we needed to destroy them. To, in Glyppie parlance, eat them aaaaaall up (and shit out what wasn’t useful any more).

Thus the 30×500 Bootcamp was born:

A live 2-day workshop, with short, tight video lessons broken up by tons of live exercises and hot seats. Atomic exercises, broken into little component parts, for true skill building.

Many of the systems were there, the ones that we’d developed over 3 years of teaching. Many of the lecture-y lessons fell away. We stopped teaching everything that wasn’t directly helping our students to execute their first product. The systems that stood the test of time? They got even more systematic. Do this. Then do this. Here’s how you can tell if you did it right.

Alex and I killed the old 30×500. But we kept the name: 30×500 Bootcamp.

We got the corpse to protect us.

Then it became just… 30×500.

And now we’re about to do it again.

2014: Time to metamorphose

The 30×500 Bootcamp was only ever meant to be a stepping stone. Yes, we spent 1.5 years on a stepping stone — a stepping stone that helped more students produce more awesome products and more sales than ever before. That’s how Alex and I roll.

Our ultimate goal, though, has always been to create a 30×500 product. One that you can just buy, then use to go at your own pace.

We could have tried to create in a vacuum.

But believe me — it’s horrible. Really terrible. And unlikely to work for the student. This, the working in a vacuum, is the source of the worst writer’s block and the shittiest products. (It’s no coincidence that the core of 30×500’s lessons are designed to teach you how to work with data, not guesswork.)

So, we skipped that shit-show and did it the right way.

We created a space where we could get paid to observe people interacting with our future product: The bootcamp.

We’ve learned a shitton. We’ve learned what works & what doesn’t; we’ve gotten to the point where no student question surprises us, because we’ve seen it before. We’ve helped our students ship more, faster. They got live feedback, and we did too.

Now we’re ready to take it asynchronous.

So, the 30×500 Bootcamp was created by baby product larvae eating the old 30×500 from the inside out.

But the 30×500 Bootcamp, too, had the egg of a future product inside it: 30×500 The Product.

And it’s about to break out. Again.

And inside this new 30×500, there’s a whole clutch of baby product eggs — regular books, task-specific products and workshops.

Freaky deaky, weird, and gross…

…but that’s nature for you. That’s the way to grow, survive, and thrive, in a challenging environment. That’s how to fit into the ecosystem that exists. That’s a law of nature.

It takes time, but it eliminates risk.

Wasp on, my friend. Wasp on.

You want more.

I know you do. More lessons on how to do this bootstrapping thing — the counterintuitive, sometimes messy and ugly truths that separate the success stories from the failures?

A chance to get 30×500 The Product at the early adopter discount?

Get our free 7-part (plus bonus) guide, and you’ll be first in line.

Well, you could see this coming. Twitter announced last Thursday that it was teaming up with a left-feminist activist group to investigate gender-based harassment on the social networking site:

A group called Women, Action, and the Media, which advocates for better representation of women, is testing a new reporting process for gender-based harassment. The group developed a tool for reporting harassment and will forward confirmed reports to Twitter. “If it checks out, we’ll escalate it to Twitter right away (24 hours max, hopefully much less than that) and work to get you a speedy resolution,” says the group, which abbreviates itself as WAM. “But please note: we’re not Twitter, and we can’t make decisions for them.”

I wondered what exactly this small non-profit believes in. You can check them out here or check their agenda from the statements in the video above. Their core objective is what they call “gender justice in media.” That means that they are interested in far more than curbing online harassment. They want gender quotas for all media businesses, equal representation for women in, say, video-games, gender parity in employment in journalism and in the stories themselves. They are outraged by the following:

Less than 1 in 100 of classical pieces performed in concert in 2009-2010 were written by a female composer (and 1 in 15 was written by Beethoven!). Women make up 2% of the standard repertoire of pieces (Repertoire Report 2009-2010).

Less Beethoven – more, er, women! The crudeness of their identity politics is of a piece with their analysis. Instead of seeing the web as opening up vast vistas for all sorts of voices to be heard, they seem to believe it is rigged against female voices, or that women are not strong or capable enough of forging their own brands, voices, websites and fighting back against ideas they abhor with wit and energy and passion and freedom. Instead, WAM’s goal is to police and punish others for their alleged sexism – along the well-worn lines of contemporary and controlling left-feminism. Here’s the mindset behind the project:

“I see this as a free speech issue,” Friedman said. She said she knew some would see the work WAM does as “censorship,” but that a completely open and unmoderated platform imposes its own form of censorship. It effectively prevents women, especially queer women and women of color, from getting to speak on the service.

How exactly? Does Twitter prevent women of color from using the service? Or is it simply that WAM believes that women cannot possibly handle the rough-and-tumble of uninhibited online speech? And WAM’s intent with Twitter is not merely to highlight physical threats, abuse or stalking. They are quite upfront about casting a much wider net against those insufficiently committed to “gender justice in media”:

“We’ll be escalating [harassment reports] even if they don’t fit Twitter’s exact abuse guidelines,” Friedman said. WAM intends to “cast a wider net” and see what Twitter’s moderators address.

I can find no reason to oppose a stronger effort by Twitter to prevent individual users from stalking or harassing others – but if merely saying nasty things about someone can be seen as harassment, then where on earth does this well-intentioned censorship end? Is it designed to censor only misogyny and not racism? What about blasphemy? Are the only suspects in this brave new Twitterverse the “straight, white males” disparaged as a group in the video above? And yet, among those liberals who might worry about policing free speech in this way – let alone handing over the censorship tools to a radical activist group bent on social transformation – it’s hard to find anyone anywhere who has any qualms. Jesse Singal wonders if it’s enough to keep the trolls at bay:

There are two ways to look at this.

One is that it’s good that Twitter, in the wake of what the Verge calls “high-profile threats against game critic Anita Sarkeesian and other women” working in the gaming world, is working with an outside organization to potentially beef up its very ineffective harassment-reporting tools. The other, more cynical response is that this could be a useful way for Twitter to make it look like it’s doing something about online harassment without actually doing very much at all. After all, given Twitter’s massive resources, why should it need to outsource this job to someone else?

Marcotte is hopeful that this will help stem the tide of troll bile:

There’s reason to think that WAM!’s involvement will do some good. As anyone who has reported abuse on Twitter can tell you, pretty much anything is better than the current system. And a woman’s group might also be much better at sussing out what is and isn’t sexist harassment than the mostly-male staff at Twitter. But WAM! also has experience in this sort of thing. Last summer, the group decided to run a campaign shaming Facebook over the proliferation of pro-rape and other anti-woman hate groups that escaped censure by declaring themselves “humor” pages. Facebook responded by cracking down on this kind of content. Twitter has wisely chosen to work with WAM! directly rather than go through that sort of public shaming, and hopefully this collaboration will be mutually beneficial.

Mutually beneficial? Does she mean that WAM can get to advance their broader ideas about policing the speech of white straight males by this legitimizing alliance with Twitter?

Somehow, I suspect the culture wars online just got a little more frayed. Because Twitter has empowered leftist feminists to have a censorship field day.

When a party suffers a major setback, everyone comes forward with their diagnosis of the problem. And in most cases their diagnosis of the problem tells us that the solution is what the diagnoser wanted to do more of in the first place. This is just human nature. We see the evidence before us as confirmation of what we already thought. When I'm asked these kinds of questions, what I always say is that we should be highly skeptical of anything that suggests the answer is obvious or simple to execute. Because for all the groupthink and folly and insular thinking of political professionals, they're generally fairly bright and they have huge personal and professional incentives to win. If it were really that obvious, someone would have tried it already.

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Khadak (2006)

A Mongolian post-apocalyptic sci fi/fantasy film about a plague that threatens to eradicate nomadism with a disabled protagonist? Get on my to-watch list!

You can view the trailer here.

You should go read Jed A. Rakoff’s essay in The New York Review of Books, in which the senior federal district judge tries to explain why innocent people so often plead guilty.

But even if you have better things to do this weekend than digest Rakoff’s thorough, convincing, 4,400-word essay, it’s still worth considering why at least 20,000 people have pled guilty to and gone to jail for felonies they did not commit — if you very conservatively take criminologists’ lowest estimates, and cut them in half.

Rakoff identifies three ways the criminal justice system obstructs its own “truth seeking mechanism,” a trial by jury, which Rakoff calls a “shield against tyranny” and which Thomas Jefferson famously called “the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.”

1. By embracing the increasingly-popular plea bargain. Some 97 percent of federal trials were resolved last year through plea bargain, the offer of a lesser charge and a reduced sentence if the defendant forgoes a trial. But the practice, which has never really taken hold in other countries, is, to Rakoff, “the devil’s pact.” Plea bargains happen behind closed doors, without judicial oversight, and are weighted largely in favor of the prosecutor, who has access to police reports, witness interviews, and forensic test reports. Prosecutors also have the discretion to shape the charges brought at trial, and until last year federal attorneys routinely used that power to bully people into plea bargains; any defendant who sought a trial would face the most severe charges with the lengthiest prison sentences as a matter of policy.

In contrast, defense attorneys typically only meet with defendants after they have been arrested and can only interview them through “arduous restrictions imposed by most jails,” as Rakoff puts it. The notion that a plea bargain is a contractual mediation between two relatively equal parties, Rakoff argues, “is a total myth”.

2. Through mandatory minimum sentences. These rules effectively took sentencing power away from judges and transferred it to prosecutors, who can ensure uncooperative defendants spend a long time in prison by bringing charges with the longest minimum sentences. In 2012, the average sentence for defendants brought up on drugs charges who took a plea deal equaled five years and four months, while the average sentence for those who went to trial was sixteen years. The combination of mandatory sentences and prosecutorial discretion forces the defendant into a grim cost-benefit analysis: run the risk of losing the case and serve the maximum sentence or take a reduced charge, at a reduced sentence, even when innocent.

3. Via the unfettered rise of prosecutorial power. Prosecutors have far more power to exert their will than any other party involved in the criminal justice system. The one mechanism that could check their power is the jury trial, which is becoming “virtually extinct” in federal court, Rakoff writes.

One possible solution to all these problems — aside from repealing mandatory minimum sentences and generally reducing the severity of sentences — is greater judicial oversight after indictment. Rakoff’s proposal is for a magistrate to meet with a prosecutor and defendant independently, ask them to provide evidence, and make their own propositions on whether the case is strong enough to go to trial. The magistrate could also interview witnesses and even the defendant.

“I am under no illusions that this suggested involvement of judges in the plea-bargaining process is a panacea,” Rakoff concludes. “But would not any program that helps to reduce the shame of sending innocent people to prison be worth trying?

Photo: Mark Humphrey/AP

The post Three Ways Courts Screw the Innocent Into Pleading Guilty appeared first on The Intercept.

You can't assess the Supreme Court's surprise jump today into the Obamacare subsidies pseudo-controversy without appreciating that there was a big organized effort in the conservative legal community to create the political and legal space for the Supreme Court to intervene. Part of that effort involved working to delegitimize in advance the pending en banc decision of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals as purely political and without legal foundation. Here's the full rundown on what was being done on the outside to push the Supreme Court toward the decision it made today.

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scratchingpad:

Kittens post naptime

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