The Melanzana Micro Grid fleece is a casual and warm midlayer. As someone not wearing it for any serious hiking or physical activity, it’s appeal is being a cozy fleece for chilly SF mornings.

The sweet spot for the Melanzana as an outer layer is very narrow—temperatures in the low to mid-60’s when walking around the city. Anything colder and the lack of wind resistance makes it too chilly. Anything warmer and it’s easy to overheat after 10 minutes of walking uphill.

Unless I’m wearing it around the house, I much prefer using it as a mid-layer underneath an unzipped jacket in cooler temperatures (50’s). That way it’s comfortable, doesn’t overheat, and looks nice.

At 10-12oz it’s easy to throw it in a bag or pack it when traveling. It would also make a decent airplane hoodie.

A Voluntary Disclosure Agreement is a process in which a company comes clean about not collecting or paying taxes when they should have (usually sales tax and corporate income tax). This helps to minimize penalties and the look-back period for paying back taxes. Without it, the tax agency will come after the company for the full amount and penalties. In fact, many States will not accept a VDA if they notify you first (e.g. sending a tax questionnaire).

See also:

• The National Nexus Program standardizes Voluntary Disclosure Agreements in multiple states to make it easier.

Each State has a process administrating a Voluntary Disclosure Agreement to pay back taxes. The Multistate Tax Commission runs a program to standardize the VDAs and make it easier for companies to meet their tax obligations and pay back taxes.

Member States:

See also:

• Startups oscillate between operating ignorance and normalization

Current consensus is that Mark Zuckerberg is an evil billionaire. A contrarian view would be this: Zuckerberg is an anti-hero who, in an unprecedented position of power, advances technological progress and well-being.

Take the metaverse—a bundle of interesting ideas that are, more or less, already happening (VR, AR, crypto, NFTs, and so on). It’s easy to mock, but what if we’re wrong that it’s a dumb idea? What if it’s a useful abstraction that fosters a new kind of digital economy that creates opportunity for more people?

In What Is a Tech Company on Stratechery, a tech company is defined by the following characteristics.

Software has zero marginal costs Providing the product to subsequent customers costs nothing (or near nothing) once it’s created.

Software improves over time Updates to the product happen continuously which increases the value to the user after they buy it.

Software offers infinite leverage Software creates efficiency that opens up new levels of scale and markets (e.g. the whole world can be your customers).

Software creates ecosystems The software creates and ecosystem that wasn’t available before like connecting buyers and sellers or third-party software vendors on a platform.

Software enables zero transaction costs Self-serve software reduces or eliminates the need to be hands-on with customers making each additional transaction cost nothing.

Not every technology business will meet all of them, but it is highly skeptical if a company purports to be a tech company and doesn’t exhibit most of these characteristics (like WeWork).

More people in the US have quit their job in 2021 then ever before (since it started being tracked). COVID-19 made people re-evaluate whether or not their jobs were worth it—many have decided to change jobs are quit altogether, especially in retail and food services.

See also:

• The number of quits keeps climbing, 4.3 million people quit their job in August 2021
• Two-thirds of remote workers want to continue to work remotely

• Depreciate: unless you are building accounting software, you probably mean deprecate.
• Receive: it’s inevitable you will track down bugs due to a misspelled variable name recieve.
• Referrer: if the inventors of the HTTP_REFERER header can’t spell it correctly, neither will you.

A confounding aspect of conservative politics is how they view the rule of law. Conservatives tend to see laws as being designed for certain kinds of people. In their mind, a terrorist is already a terrorist and if the same law is used to define one of their tribe as a terrorist it’s the left being fascist.

Liberals tend to see the rule of law justified with morality—the law defines people and is justified through morality. Acts of terrorism are defined by the law. An American can be held to the same standard (domestic terrorism) because terrorism is morally wrong.

Read the Reddit thread

See also:

• This is also in-group favoritism, a conservative doing bad things is still part of the tribe because of morality (not legality)

In an experiment testing the causes of zoom fatigue, researchers found that having the camera on during virtual meetings resulted in fatigue (likely due to self-presentation), not time spent or frequency of meetings.

They also found gender and organizational tenure moderate the relationship between camera on and fatigue—women and new employees are more fatigued.

Read The Fatiguing Effects of Camera Use in Virtual Meetings: A Within-Person Field Experiment.

Exporting org-mode documents using ox is very slow when there are many org-id links in the contents.

After some profiling I found the following code is called during export in a loop over each org-id link which returns the link’s file location.

(car (org-id-find id))

Unfortunately, org-id-find will load the file and all of it’s associated modes. This is very slow when all it needs is the file location.

Replacing it with the following makes the code roughly 10x faster.

(org-id-find-id-file id)

As a temporary workaround, you can overwrite org-export--collect-tree-properties:

(eval-after-load "ox"
  ;; Org export is very slow when processing org-id links. Override it
  ;; to skip opening the file and loading all modes.
  (defun org-export--collect-tree-properties (data info)
    "Extract tree properties from parse tree.

    DATA is the parse tree from which information is retrieved.  INFO
    is a list holding export options.

    Following tree properties are set or updated:

    `:headline-offset' Offset between true level of headlines and
                       local level.  An offset of -1 means a headline
                       of level 2 should be considered as a level
                       1 headline in the context.

    `:headline-numbering' Alist of all headlines as key and the
                          associated numbering as value.

    `:id-alist' Alist of all ID references as key and associated file
                as value.

    Return updated plist."
    ;; Install the parse tree in the communication channel.
    (setq info (plist-put info :parse-tree data))
    ;; Compute `:headline-offset' in order to be able to use
    ;; `org-export-get-relative-level'.
    (setq info
          (plist-put info
                     :headline-offset
                     (- 1 (org-export--get-min-level data info))))
    ;; From now on, properties order doesn't matter: get the rest of the
    ;; tree properties.
    (org-combine-plists
     info
     (list :headline-numbering (org-export--collect-headline-numbering data info)
           :id-alist
           (org-element-map data 'link
             (lambda (l)
               (and (string= (org-element-property :type l) "id")
                    (let* ((id (org-element-property :path l))
                           (file (org-id-find-id-file id)))
                      (and file (cons id (file-relative-name file))))))))))

See also:

• Another downside of using ID links in org-roam

A paper published in Nature looked at brain autopsies of people that died from COVID-19. Brain endothelial cells were found to be infected and there was an increase in string vessels (lost capillaries).

This helps to explain how brain damage happens and relates it to the 76% of patients who may have impairment and a range of psychiatric symptoms.

See also:

• Animals they researched showed the damage repaired over time giving hope for recovery of long COVID
• A different study found COVID-19 infection reduces grey matter thickness in parts of the brain
• Half of COVID-19 survivors had lingering symptoms after 1 year

The reason the metaverse concept is so appealing to corporations is that it’s a vision for the ultimate company town. Everything is controlled by the corporation, what you buy, where you live, even the space in which you exist (virtually for now) is up for grabs.

It would be good to be skeptical of any metaverse vision that is tightly controlled by a for-profit institution. Especially one like Facebook.

Read The Metaverse is Bad in the Atlantic.

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The Narcissist’s Prayer by an unknown author, perfectly describes their progression. You can use this to spot a narcissist and avoid them.

That didn’t happen. And if it did, it wasn’t that bad. And if it was, that’s not a big deal. And if it is, that’s not my fault. And if it was, I didn’t mean it. And if I did… You deserved it.

See also:

• Trump paradox

Repeated information is perceived to be more truthful than new information. Prior knowledge does not reduce the significance of the effect. Basically the more someone repeats something the more it will be believed.

See also:

• Trump paradox is even more interesting because he tells the truth about things he shouldn’t and lies awfully about things he should.

Faster is more productive because it is a multiplier on tasks you spend a lot of time doing (thinking, writing, typing, debugging).

Being faster takes practice and most people don’t try to improve.

The way to be efficient in many problems is to be smarter. Counter-intuitively, being faster helps you learn faster and have better thoughts.

Read Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity From Dan Luu.

See also:

• Speed is undervalued explains how product value changes with speed (time really).
• You can invert everything Dan says with inefficiency—slowness begets more slowness by becoming a habit.
• Surprise plus memory equals learning and being surprised more often (iterating quickly on different solutions) helps you learn more.
• Learning fringe programming languages makes you faster because you see more ways to solve a problem which are often transferable.

It’s common in product and engineering circles to constantly ask people “what problem are you solving?” While this can be useful for focusing work on the right things, it also leads to solutions disguised as problem statements and self-referential arguments. Instead, ask “what’s the situation?”. This gives space between facts and the interpretation of those facts which makes it easier to understand and spot errors.

See also:

• This is worse with an engineering as delivery organization where problem definition is outsourced to a separate part of the org
• Taste might help to spot problems calibrated to what’s important based on the company culture
• A cathedral for creation a bazaar for growth

The org-roam-ui is a visualization and exploration companion to org-roam. The force-directed graph of notes (nodes) and links (edges) shows how concepts fit together and relate. I thought it was primarily eye candy, it’s useful for 1) spotting connections you haven’t already made and 2) identifying orphaned notes that could be linked to other notes.

By looking at a subgraph and increasing the number of neighbor nodes rendered you can see Nth degree connections to a note. This is handy for linking related notes together or simply to think about the through-line that brings seemingly disparate ideas together.

By looking at the edges of the overall graph, it’s easy to spot orphaned notes that don’t connect to anything. These are worth revisiting and linking them or maybe deleting.

See also:

• Most tools for networked thought have this kind of graph visualization, but none that integrate with emacs and org-mode.
• Browsing the graph feels a lot like walking around a garden.

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The list of ways wealth is created is remarkably short.

You can

1. Move things from place to place (e.g. shipping, exporting goods)
2. Store things (e.g. winter coats are more valuable in winter)
3. Transform things (e.g. manufacturing)
4. Farm (e.g. … farming)
5. Build buildings (e.g. real estate development)
6. Extract natural resources (e.g. mining)
7. Cure disease (e.g. pharmaceuticals)
8. Find new ways of doing 1 through 7 more efficiently (e.g. 3D printing, fertilizer, mining an asteroid)
9. Provide useful information (most of 21st century corporations) a. Match supply and demand (e.g. Google search ads, Uber) b. Figure out the rules (e.g. lawyers, consultants) c. Information to be informed (e.g. journalism, blogging)

Read A catalog of wealth-creation mechanisms from Rondam Ramblings.

See also:

• Methods of product ideation could benefit from knowing what kind of business you are in and who you should learn from
• Naval Ravikant has a “How to get rich” series that talks about personal ways of going about wealth creation
• Recent technological advancement is in simulation
• How people get rich and income inequality

An analysis by Ladders found that the percentage of high-paying job listings ($80,000+) in the US and Canada that were remote increased from 3.69% in Q4 2019 to 14.67% in Q3 2021.

See also:

• 45% of jobs can be done remotely
• Half of Millennials and Gen Z would consider quitting if employers don’t allow remote work
• Executives are likely included in “high-paying jobs” which would lend support to remote work overall. Organizational support of remote work correlates with reported productivity

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The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that 4.3 MM Americans quit their jobs in August 2021, up from 4MM in July. The quit rate is highest it’s been since the statistic became available in 2000.

Most of the workers quitting worked in the food services industry and hospitality (892,000), retail (721,000), professional business services (706,000) and health care and social assistance (534,000).

See also:

• One interpretation is that workers are fed up with poor working conditions related to COVID-19.
• Quit rate can serve as a measure of workers willingness or ability to leave jobs. 45% of jobs can be done remotely.
• Half of Millennials and Gen Z would consider quitting if employers don’t allow remote work.
• COVID-19 is a vehicle of fantasmic projection, I’m sure each side will be able to use these statistics to support their agenda.