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Articles to Read.
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck
In my life, I have given a fuck about many people and many things. I have also not given a fuck about many people and many things. And those fucks I have not given have made all the difference.
People often say the key to confidence and success in life is to simply “not give a fuck.” Indeed, we often refer to the strongest, most admirable people we know in terms of their lack of fucks given.
Chances are you know somebody in your life who, at one time or another, did not give a fuck and went on to accomplish amazing feats. Perhaps there was a time in your life where you simply did not give a fuck and excelled to some extraordinary heights. I know for myself, quitting my day job in finance after only six weeks and telling my boss that I was going to start selling dating advice online ranks pretty high up there in my own “didn’t give a fuck” hall of fame. Same with deciding to sell most of my possessions and move to South America. Fucks given? None. Just went and did it.
Now, while not giving a fuck may seem simple on the surface, it’s a whole new bag of burritos under the hood. I don’t even know what that sentence means, but I don’t give a fuck. A bag of burritos sounds awesome, so let’s just go with it.
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“I spent over 25 hours building a cut-down version of Sapiens. The goal? Future-me should be happy to read this once future-me forgets how we evolved. It’s massive for a blog post, just under 30 minutes, but that’s the best I could do, condensing 9 hours worth of material.”
Today religion is often considered a source of discrimination, disagreement and disunion. Yet, in fact, religion has been the third great unifier of humankind, alongside money and empires.
Since all social orders and hierarchies are imagined, they are all fragile, and the larger the society, the more fragile it is. The crucial historical role of religion has been to give superhuman legitimacy to these fragile structures. Religions assert that our laws are not the result of human caprice, but are ordained by an absolute and supreme authority. This helps place at least some fundamental laws beyond challenge, thereby ensuring social stability.
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Shopify and the Power of Platforms
At first glance, Shopify isn’t an Amazon competitor at all: after all, there is nothing to buy on Shopify.com. And yet, there were 218 million people that bought products from Shopify without even knowing the company existed.
The difference is that Shopify is a platform: instead of interfacing with customers directly, 820,000 3rd-party merchants sit on top of Shopify and are responsible for acquiring all of those customers on their own.
This means they have to stand out not in a search result on Amazon.com, or simply offer the lowest price, but rather earn customers’ attention through differentiated product, social media advertising, etc. Many, to be sure, will fail at this: Shopify does not break out merchant churn specifically, but it is almost certainly extremely high.
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In Cairo, the Garbage Collector Knows Everything
The process for garbage removal was even more mysterious. The landlady instructed me to deposit all of our refuse outside the kitchen, where a small door led to a metal fire escape. There was no pickup schedule and no preferred container; I could use bags or boxes, or I could simply toss loose trash outside. Its removal was handled by a man named Sayyid, who was employed neither by the government nor by any private company. When I asked the landlady about the monthly fee, she said that I needed to work it out on my own with Sayyid.
At first, I never saw him. Every day or two, I put a bag of trash on the fire escape, and then it would quickly vanish. After nearly a month of this invisible service, a knock sounded in the kitchen.
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I was wrong about spreadsheets
I’ve done some regrettable things in my life, and most of them have come back around to punish me, in one way or another. That’s how I know, when I spend a few hours each day elbow deep in spreadsheets, that it’s all my fault. I could have avoided this. I could have stayed a programmer forever, never having to memorize Google Drive keyboard shortcuts or have opinions about Pages vs PowerPoint. I did this to myself…by talking shit about spreadsheets.
I ridiculed the spreadsheet jockey. I dismissed their power. I was an asshole about spreadsheets. I just didn’t get it. I asked why people didn’t “learn to program,” and all the while, I was using tools which were clearly less sophisticated than Excel.
Spreadsheets are amazing, they solve specific problems in an optimal way, and they are as useful as a currency as we could hope for in information exchange.
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In Medical Nihilism, published by Oxford University Press, Stegenga presents a devastating critique of medicine. Most treatments, he argues, do not work very well, and many do more harm than good. Therefore we should “have little confidence in medical interventions” and resort to them much more sparingly.
There is no place I would rather be after a serious accident than in an intensive care unit. For a headache, aspirin; for many infections, antibiotics; for some diabetics, insulin—there are a handful of truly amazing medical intervention, many discovered between seventy and ninety years ago. However, by most measures of medical consumption—number of patients, number of dollars, number of prescriptions—the most commonly employed interventions, especially those introduced in recent decades, provide compelling warrant for medical nihilism.
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Why soil is disappearing from farms
The dirt beneath our feet is getting poorer and on many farms worldwide, there is less and less of it.
At the most extreme end, 12 million hectares of land – an area that could produce the equivalent of 20 tonnes of grain annually – are lost to desertification every year. Meanwhile, the spread of our towns, cities and road networks are sealing soils out of reach beneath layers of asphalt and concrete.
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More to Check Out:
- Homelessness in the San Francisco Bay Area: The crisis and a path forward
- How is the Universe bigger than its age?
- Kanye West tried to sell SF investors on 'Star Wars'-inspired housing for homeless
- Taboola, Outbrain and the Chum Supply Chain
- Costa Rica has just run on 100 percent renewable energy for 300 days
My Update.
Cannot believe we are already half way through July. It feels like just yesterday I graduated school…
Do you work at a Seed or Series A startup? Let me know!
Check out Project Wren — a friend’s project that enables you to calculate and offset your carbon emissions.
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