When someone tells you, “I’m an engineer”, instead of filing this as a fact in your mental Rolodex, you immediately want to know the story. How did they end up an engineer? Is this the end of a long journey, the beginning of a new story, or the middle? Curiosity drives you to ask good questions, good questions make connections, and connections lead to opportunities.
Category: Blogs
The official Everything-Voluntary.com blog.
Every Man His Own Dominion
All humans need freedom and responsibility in their lives. Together, those map pretty well to the ancient Judeo-Christian idea of the “dominion” of all humans with regards to the creation around them.
Defund, Dismantle, and Disavow
Isn’t it odd how an idea which has been around less than 200 years is now imagined by so many people to be essential for civilization. Especially when that institution is utterly antithetical to civilization and society. This societal cancer (or is it a virus?) is said to have begun in London, England in 1829 and spread from there. It should have been smothered in its crib.
The Murder of George Floyd
George Floyd may have had some drugs in his system at the time he was attacked by the Blue Line Gang. He may have resisted arrest. So? To those who think this matters, how do they feel if a woman who had a glass of wine is killed while fighting off a kidnapper? It’s the same thing.
Today May Be the New September 3, 1929
On the monetary front, we have a 12-year-old mega-bubble of fiat credit, stock buybacks, bloated balance sheets, and “infinite liquidity”. On the “real” front, we have a global economy with record forced unemployment, decimated supply chains, and whole industries on the verge of bankruptcy.
Keeping Focus Without Retreatism
I wrote yesterday about the information war. We’re bombarded with so much information if we are tuned in it’s impossible to think. But I don’t think the long-term solution is total retreat from the world at large, or what Venkatesh Rao calls Waldenponding.
On Police Brutality IV
George Floyd did not find himself with a knee on his neck for almost 9 minutes because Derek Chauvin is a racist. No, he found himself being killed because Derek Chauvin, and his many cohorts, are authoritarians.
Information as Artillery
You can’t read, or write, or talk calmly, or think deeply, or experience silence. Even in gaps between the salvos, you’re too shell-shocked to be of much use. Every sensation sets you off. That is the environment in which we live. The trenches are anything connected to the internet or television or news of any kind. Information is the artillery. The good news is, you can leave.
Censorship is a Loser Move
Censorship is running rampant, but I’ve seen people argue that it’s not censorship unless government is doing it. That’s not correct. Censorship doesn’t only refer to government action.
On Parenting
An insight I had recently is on who we are raising as parents. We are not raising children, rather, we are raising adults. Childhood is a very small part of life for us. It only constitutes the first 15 years, or so. The importance of this insight, that we are raising adults, is a reminder that how we engage with our children and the behavior we model will determine the type of adults that they will become.