Ads don’t work by creating a Pavlovian response through association (emotional inception), they work through changing the cultural landscape around us (cultural imprinting). Ads create the impression that everyone else has made the association between a product and a context. Therefore, we make rational decisions by fitting into how other people may perceive what we buy. This largely explains why common consumer goods (highly visible purchases by others) are more effectively advertised at large scale (like the Super Bowl watched by 100MM people).

This only works for products that other people can see broadly. For example, bed sheets can not be advertised in this way because other people don’t have access to seeing your bed sheets so there is no shared cultural context on which to sway your decisions.

Read the essay.

See also:

• Operant conditioning seems related in that we may have been socially ‘punished’ before by receiving judgment about an item we possessed that didn’t adhere to a shared cultural context.
• How Cellino & Barnes, personal injury law firm, works

When using a virtual physical address like Earth Class Mail for business purposes, you need to fill out USPS Form 1583 and have it notarized which requires two forms of government ID.

See the form

See also:

• Back office

A Gallup poll with data from September indicate that two-thirds of remote workers want to keep working remotely. An article from 2016 estimated the number of knowledge workers in the US to be 30MM people and adding roughly 1MM per year. Since most remote jobs are knowledge work jobs, we can estimate 20MM people in the US want to work remotely permanently.

See also:

• The number of remote native companies are likely to increase as a result
• This will increase the back office administrative burden needed to support remote workers

In software development, a simple framework to keep in mind that clarifies how to write certain code is that libraries provide and applications consume. Libraries should useful and reusable in most contexts, therefore it should play nicely with other code and be more or less agnostic. Applications on the other hand are intended for end users and make different trade offs—the code is written for a user not for other code or contexts.

A simple example to highlight the difference is error handling. A library should encapsulate and provide all errors that can be thrown by code in the library so that it’s easily discoverable and can be handled by downstream callers. Applications on the other hand need to catch errors so they can provide feedback to users or log them appropriately—they consume errors produced by the code in their application.

See also:

• This is easily apparent in Rust error handling libraries: thiserror for libraries and anyhow for applications

The number of companies raising a seed round of funding declined from 2019 to 2020 by 27%. Early-stage funding (Series A,B) was down 11% since 2019. This fits with the global trend of number of new startups declining.

A visualization of sustainability represented by concentric rings (hence the doughnut). At the center are twelve factors necessary to support life that array outward. The first ring closest to the center is the minimum required for society to function, but as it extends outward it reaches the ‘ecological ceiling’ such as climate change, pollution, etc.

The purpose of the model is to use it as a framework for making economic decisions. For example, an economic policy could encourage more oil drilling, but that would cause an overshoot of the energy needs of society causing harmful effects (e.g. greenhouse gases, pollution, and land conversion). Using this framework, one could better make decisions that are grounded in sustainability.

See the visualization

See also:

• Civilization is composed of fast layers and slow layers to absorb shocks which draws a similar conclusion about change.
• People are bad at long-term thinking, this model might help make the long term more immediate
• This is similar to the concept of deep time in that it helps show effects that occur over many years.
• Pareto optimal would be the space between the social foundation and ecological ceiling.

Connecting key lines in a document is important to answer the key question and provide clear reasoning. To do that, structure the document using inductive arguments rather than deductive arguments. That’s because a deductive structure could introduce a large distance (number of paragraphs) between the problem and answer which the reader would be required to hold in their head and build their own connections which can be confusing and difficult to read.

As a rule of thumb, deductive arguments are good choice for structuring supporting sentences of a key line in the same paragraph and inductive arguments are a good choice for structuring key lines across a section or document.

See also:

• The Minto Pyramid Principle
• Ideas to support a key line should be inductive or deductive

Completing a tasks, documenting the problem and what you did to solve it serves as a kind of automation for the future. Anyone can read it and pattern match to the situation before carrying out the sames set of tasks to fix it again. This also ends up becoming research or a spec for how to automate the task programmatically (a higher order form of automation).

Read ‘Manual work is a bug’

See also:

• Automation of even low-level tasks is an example of compounding interest
• Humans are the great interop layer

If the universe is infinite and there are an infinite number of stars then every point in the sky should be a star. However, we observe the night sky as being dark not bright.

This has been attempted to be explained a few ways, that the universe is finite (not generally accepted) or the Big Bang means a finite amount of stars are observable because the universe is expanding (microwave background radiation, invisible to the human eye, seems to prove that).

Salaries rise in response to other salaries rising in jobs that experience productivity gains. For example, the ticket prices in the classical arts rise not because they can put on a concert with half the orchestra, but because the salaries of their patrons have grown. Similarly, the salary of managers grew not because their productivity increased, but because the salaries of engineers the manage grew exponentially.

See also:

• Peter Principle, traditionally management is a promotion and therefore needs to be paid more, amplifying Baumol’s cost disease

Occurs when one party’s position can not be improved without loss to the other party. For example, in negotiations, that would the point where the terms are optimized for both parties such that it can not be improved further without loss to either side. A Pareto improvement is when something can be improved without loss and Pareto dominated is when there is a possible Pareto improvement.

See also:

• Homeostasis is a similar concept in biology
• Novice software engineers being too dogmatic about duplication can be explained as a lack of understanding of Pareto optimal in engineering

Categories are not a useful way of demarcating sections in a document because they don’t support the structure of answering the key question of the document. For example ‘Background’ doesn’t say anything and the reader is forced to read through the section to connect the ideas rather than providing it to them. Section titles should answer the next question reader has from the preceding section to make it easier to understand your argument.

See also:

• The Minto Pyramid Principle
• Reading is the transformation of a linked list of ideas into a tree, without providing clear edges and nodes (like sections) the reader is left on their own to piece together the connections

When forming a horizontal relationship between ideas (e.g. supporting sentences of a summary statement), they should form an inductive or deductive argument. This makes the connection of ideas more clear to the reader and improves overall reader understanding.

An inductive argument is a collection of ideas that can be described with a plural noun e.g. reasons, steps, problems.

A deductive argument is a statement about the situation and the second idea comments on the subject and predicate of the first. The third idea states the implications. For example, dogs are great, Noodle is a dog, therefore Noodle is great.

See also:

• The Minto Pyramid Principle
• SCQA introduces a document and states the overall situation that all relationships should ladder up to in a tree structure
• Always give the summarizing idea first in this case pertains to inductive arguments

ISBN-13: 978-0273710516

We can only read one sentence at a time, but the resulting information received is tree-shaped. This presents a challenge to the writer to ensure the transformation matches the intended tree structure otherwise the reader may misinterpret the ideas shared. That’s why organizing ideas is important and explaining the connections between ideas so the reader doesn’t have to.

See also:

• The Minto Pyramid Principle
• Always give the summarizing idea first is a way of enforcing a hierarchy of information which makes writing more clear

To have clear writing, always give the summarizing idea first, before the individual ideas that are being summarized. This helps with clarity because you are providing the connection between the ideas upfront so the reader doesn’t need to make their own association which leads to confusion.

See also:

• The Minto Pyramid Principle

As mentioned in The Mythical Man Month, good system design (user friendly) requires a small (ideally singular) team of architects, separated from implementation, that decide what goes into the system and what stays out. This avoids rogue ideas making it in that muddy the overall product.

In No Silver Bullets, Fred Brooks adds that conceptual integrity is difficult to achieve because of the inherent complexity of software systems—complexities can not be ignored as one would a simplified model in mathematics or physics because the complexities are the essence.

See also:

• Software architectural pattern
• Talk then code

Personal income was higher, lost wages were offset by unemployment benefits and stimulus programs. Consumers spent less on services (hotels, air travel), more on durable goods (e.g. better home office equipment), and saved 173% more money than last year. More people are buying homes, in part due to low interest rates and the pandemic. Low interest rates also investors into higher risk asset classes (they can no longer get the same returns from bonds for example) which pushes more capital into the stock market (lowering the federal funds rate causes all asset classes increase in value).

The stock market surge is fueled by people that escaped the economic damage from the pandemic—those in higher paying jobs that can operate during the shutdown. In fact, some businesses are booming and the rise in wages from say a bonus due to strong company performance can offset the lost wages of low paid front-line workers.

Read the article from the NY Times.

When writing essays, starting from an outline of Zettelkasten notes makes it much easier and faster to write. This method separates the structure from the narrative. For example, finding notes and related ones keeps your thinking at a higher level of abstraction (atomic ideas or concepts) instead of getting bogged down in how you will word it. Once you have the outline, you are filling in the narrative that connects the ideas. This leads to faster progress compared to doing both at the same time.

Example: the essay What I learned - 2020 was written from the outline § What I learned 2020.

Personal

• COVID-19
  • Deaths per day in the US due to COVID-19 is more than twice that of WWII
  • COVID-19 is a vehicle of fantasmic projection
  • american values are incompatible with managing the epidemic
• structural racism
• substituted economics for racisom
• stress and anxiety are cumulative
• zoom fatigue
• My morning practice
• Personal note taking practice
• Reflections on writing 500 notes
• https://www.alexkehayias.com/essays/zettelkasten-setup/
• Building Noteland
• actions should be dictated by values not emotions
• emotional thermometer
• Identity is a powerful motivation for behaviors
• VO2 max
• mindfulness
• self-compassion

Projects

• Noteland
  • Initial stack for the Noteland web app
  • values and principles for developing Noteland
• Tunnelcast
• Personal note site
• Episodic narative generator
• Air quality monitor in Rust

Professional

• Moving on from Stripe Atlas
• Product
  • Product work is hard because it necessitates change
  • Product work is a pursuit of facts about the user, market, and their problems
  • https://www.alexkehayias.com/essays/problem-solving/
• Organization
  • Self-servicification
  • Building Remote Teams (2019)
  • Activities we relied on for relief from every day stress and anxiety are no longer available to us

The buying behavior of consumers versus enterprises can be characterized by the difference between products and platforms. A product is a specific solution to a problem or problem area whereas platforms are frameworks for implementing present and future workflows. This explains why, as businesses grow larger they start to buy from Oracle, Workday, etc. they’ve outgrown what a single product can do.

Read the original tweet.

See also:

• This is an example of workflows are more useful than solutions

When employees move around they generate trailing tax liabilities for the time spent in a particular jurisdiction. This includes employment taxes and reporting as well as personal tax issues (for example, shares vested while in California will need to pay taxes once a gain is realized).

See also:

• Back office
• Employers of remote workers are unsure they are remitting taxes correctly

When you are feeling overwhelmed by something you are working on, measure the progress you are making rather than the final outcome. This helps to break down the larger work into actions you can do and control rather than fixating on the size of the endeavor. For example, rather than focus on having the perfect startup idea measure your progress by the number of things you learned, users you interviewed, and notes you’ve written.

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