George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (/ˈɡɜːrdʒiɛf/; Russian: Гео́ргий Ива́нович Гурджи́ев, tr. Geórgy Ivánovich Gurdzhíev, IPA: [ɡʲɪˈorɡʲɪj ɪˈvanəvʲɪd͡ʑ ɡʊrd͡ʐˈʐɨ(j)ɪf]; c. 1866–1877 – 29 October 1949)[2] was a philosopher, mystic, spiritual teacher, and composer of Armenian and Greek descent, born in Gyumri, Armenia (then Alexandropol, Russian Empire).[3] Gurdjieff taught that most humans do not possess a unified consciousness and thus live their lives in a state of hypnotic "waking sleep", but that it is possible to awaken to a higher state of consciousness and achieve full human potential. Gurdjieff described a method attempting to do so, calling the discipline "The Work"[4] (connoting "work on oneself") or "the System".[5] According to his principles and instructions,[6] Gurdjieff's method for awakening one's consciousness unites the methods of the fakir, monk and yogi, and thus his student P. D. Ouspensky referred to it as the "Fourth Way". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gurdjieff (more)

Sufism (Arabic: ٱلصُّوفِيَّة), also known as Tasawwuf[1] (ٱلتَّصَوُّف), is a mystic body of religious practice within Islam characterized by a focus on Islamic spirituality, ritualism, asceticism and esotericism... it is precisely because it is historically proven that "many of the most eminent defenders of Islamic orthodoxy, such as Abdul-Qadir Gilani, Ghazali, and the Sultan Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn (Saladin) were connected with Sufism"[74] that the popular studies of writers like Idries Shah are continuously disregarded by scholars as conveying the fallacious image that "Sufism" is somehow distinct from "Islam." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufism (note "dervish") (more)

The Reagan era or Age of Reagan is a periodization of recent American history used by historians and political observers to emphasize that the conservative "Reagan Revolution" led by President Ronald Reagan in domestic and foreign policy had a lasting impact. It overlaps with what political scientists call the Sixth Party System. Definitions of the Reagan era universally include the 1980s, while more extensive definitions may also include the late 1970s, the 1990s, the 2000s, the 2010s, and even the 2020s. In his 2008 book, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008, historian and journalist Sean Wilentz argues that Reagan dominated this stretch of American history in the same way that Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal legacy dominated the four decades that preceded it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan_era (more)

Barry Morris Goldwater (January 2, 1909[1] – May 29, 1998) was an American politician and United States Air Force major general who was a five-term U.S. Senator from Arizona (1953–1965, 1969–1987) and the Republican Party nominee for president of the United States in 1964. Goldwater is the politician most often credited with having sparked the resurgence of the American conservative political movement in the 1960s. Despite his loss of the 1964 U.S. presidential election in a landslide, many political pundits and historians believe he laid the foundation for the conservative revolution to follow, as the grassroots organization and conservative takeover of the Republican Party began a long-term realignment in American politics, which helped to bring about the "Reagan Revolution" of the 1980s. He also had a substantial impact on the American libertarian movement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Goldwater

You Have No Idea How Much Better You Can Feel. We have to periodically mess with our status quo. To shake up the snow globe. If someone says some new way of living changed their life, just try it. See what happens. (intervention roulette) (more)

How a school board race in the blue state of Illinois became a nationally funded cage match. BARRINGTON, Il — This leafy, affluent village outside Chicago is known for its suburban amenities. (more)

The Loophole That Made Cars in America So Big. Few trends have been worse for the environment than the dramatic growth of the SUV market in recent decades. (more)

Gardening Your Multi-Stakeholder/Single-Dev-Team Product Process - a special case of Gardening Your Product Process. Relevant to me in 2023. Relevant to many start-ups.

John Cutler: The Basics. I’m not a process freak, but I do believe teams should have their house in order. You can get by with very little process overhead. (This reminds me of the "Joel Test" checklist from Joel Spolsky.) (more)

http://www.joelonsoftware.com (more)

Practice of driving a Product Team via the Feedback of a single metric. (more)

Paying Attention (focus) (and investing hard Resources) to the Most Important Thing or BottleNeck. Ideally to get Compounding results. (more)

I have an occasional need/desire for making/viewing a graph in 3D - not fake-3D-chartjunk, but 3 actual dimensions (ideally with the ability to rotate my view). (more)

Benjamin H. Bratton (born 1968) is an American sociologist, architectural and design theorist, known for a mix of philosophical and aesthetic research, organizational planning and strategy, and for his writing on the cultural implications of computing and globalization.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] He is currently Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego and Director of The Center for Design and Geopolitics think-tank at Calit2, The California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_H._Bratton (more)

In political and social theory, accelerationism is the idea that either the prevailing system of Capitalism, or certain technosocial processes that have historically characterised it, should be expanded, repurposed, or accelerated in order to generate radical social change... Accelerationist theory has been divided into mutually contradictory Left-wing and Right-wing variants..."Left-accelerationism" attempts to press "the process of technological evolution" beyond the constrictive horizon of capitalism, for example by repurposing modern technology for socially beneficial and emancipatory ends; "right-accelerationism" supports the indefinite intensification of Capitalism itself, possibly in order to bring about a technological Singularity... Prominent theorists include right-accelerationist Nick Land. The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), an unofficial research unit at the University of Warwick from 1995–2003, of which Land was a member, is considered a key progenitor in both left- and right-accelerationist thought. Prominent contemporary left-accelerationists include Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, authors of the "Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics"... Focusing on how information technology infrastructures undermine modern political geographies, and proposing an open-ended "design brief", Benjamin H. Bratton's book The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty is associated with accelerationism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism (more)

Moxie Marlinspike: My first impressions of web3. Despite considering myself a cryptographer, I have not found myself particularly drawn to “crypto.”... I don’t share the same generational excitement for moving all aspects of life into an instrumented economy.... Even strictly on the technological level, though, I haven’t yet managed to become a believer. So given all of the recent attention into what is now being called web3, I decided to explore some of what has been happening in that space more thoroughly to see what I may be missing. (more)

To-Do List for $47/month? (more)

Karl Fogel has a new edition of Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project. A free software project can be started, and it can be influenced by interested parties. But its assets cannot be made the property of any single owner, and as long as there are people somewhere — anywhere — interested in continuing it, it can never be unilaterally shut down. Everyone has infinite power; everyone has no power. It's an interesting situation. That is why I wanted to write this book in the first place, and, a decade later, wanted to update it. Free software projects have evolved a distinct culture, an ethos in which the liberty to make the software do anything one wants is a central tenet. Yet the result of this liberty is not a scattering of individuals each going their own separate way with the code, but enthusiastic collaboration and frequent compromise. Indeed, competence at cooperation itself is one of the most highly valued skills in free software. To manage these projects is to engage in a kind of hypertrophied cooperation, where one's ability not only to work with others but to come up with new ways of working together can result in tangible benefits to the software and the community that develops it. This book attempts to describe the techniques by which this may be done. It is by no means complete, but it is at least a beginning. (more)

Literacy in its broadest sense describes "particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing"[1] with the purpose of understanding or expressing thoughts or ideas in written form in some specific context of use.[2] In other words, humans in literate societies have sets of practices for producing and consuming writing, and they also have beliefs about these practices. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy (more)

re the mouth. Also re spoken transmission vs writing/literacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_tradition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orality (more)