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Joined June 2008
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Your child’s elementary school is designed the way it is because its purpose is to promote institutional dependence. A safe and pleasant walk to school presents dangerous opportunities for autonomy that will undo important institutional conditioning.
If you accept that one of the primary purposes of schooling is to promote institutional dependence, then you understand why children may no longer walk to and from school.
There is simply too much opportunity during the walk for autonomy.
Geoff Graham retweeted
Modernists have to answer this. On the other hand, never in my life have I seen an ugly pre-Modernist building.
I visited Wurster Hall at UC Berkeley today. It was designed by, and currently houses, the architecture faculty.
The UC Berkeley website notes that "Wurster is often voted Berkeley's ugliest building."
I visited because I was curious about whether it would in person seem as unattractive as it does in photos. And, in short: it does. It's gaunt, austere, and filmed in grime. On an elysian campus, it stands out for its bleak hostility. It reminds me of the German submarine base in Bordeaux.
The UC Berkeley page agrees that it was never designed to be attractive, quoting the curator of their design archives: “Wurster and his handpicked architects didn’t want anything romantic, or sentimental — they hated the idea of ‘making pretty buildings. They wanted a serious building.”
I guess we have to concede success relative to their stated goals, but it does make one wonder what it all says about architecture as a discipline.
To accommodate the intensity of its use, the interior has been made a bit too institutional (high handrails, vinyl upholstery, awkward elevator shaft, plastic column capitals within reach of those on the upper balcony, etc).
Jefferson would approve of the regular dinners and constant traffic, but he’d disapprove of the manner in which they’re accommodated. Fortunately, nothing is egregious or irreversible.
Geoff Graham retweeted
went to visit a friend who’s a ceramicist and works in a studio with no phone signal in a tiny yorkshire village. he doesn’t listen to podcasts or music, only occasionally uses the radio, and when I asked him what he thinks about all day he just said “well, pots mostly”
Geoff Graham retweeted
He just described every war of the modern era.
The brightest future for SaaS is a path toward niche platforms designed, built, and operated by closely-held businesses that understand and truly care about the customers they are serving.
This is great for innovation and entrepreneurs, and bad news for institutional investors.
Here's the desktop demo. It's a fully functioning version of the real thing. Plan is to launch in a month, so "setting up shop" puts you on a wait list. But, if you'd want to be early tester, reach out and we will talk.
scribeline.app/demo
Had such polls existed at the time, Lincoln would have censored them because he would have been in the low 20s.
But to his credit, he did have a 100% approval rating among the small subset of industrialist tycoon voters.
Geoff Graham retweeted
For recurring revenue products, churn (as @johnloeber notes) is a lagging indicator of company health.
Some super basic predictors of church/retention:
1) Are most users for within each account regularly logging in? (Unlikely to churn)
2) Does the account have only one active user? (Likely to churn)
Sure, there are more indicators, but just those two numbers will get you 80% of the way there.
It’s easy to build a customer health dashboard, flag each account red/yellow/green based on those metrics, and then track % of accounts that are red/yellow/green.
The barriers to launching something new and running your own small business—payroll, bookkeeping, navigating the regulatory landscape, etc—are falling.
OH “It’s not a car. It’s a robot that’s shaped like a car.”
The reason people are so excited and impressed by Elon’s flying car, despite its impracticability, is that it’s one of the first times in recent memory of a physical innovation. Not another app, not another software, not another chatbot, a real three dimensional thing that changes how we interact with the physical world. I think this is what the irritation with tech has been for many “luddites” of late, it all seems to be pulling us into a screen. Whereas Elon’s invention seems to be finally doing the opposite. If you’re building things in the real world too, even if it’s paintings, cashmere sweaters, books or sculptures, you’ll appreciate this.
Company parties sponsored by investment vehicles are different than company parties sponsored by humans.
Which is to say, I think at least part of why this stuff has fallen by the wayside is the prevalence of financialization. It’s one thing for a human owner to buy everyone a party and quite another for an investment vehicle to do it. One feels like a thank you and a celebration (which it is) and the other feels like a performative attempt at “team building” (which it is).
Who went to college in the 1970s and hated it? Seems rare.
Maher often says he hated his college experience at Cornell. I don't think I've ever met anyone who hated college in the 1970s or 80s. Maybe a couple people in the 1990s. I imagine a lot more in the 00s and recently.
Matt and I discussed this class a good bit in @yeomanpodcast #23:
yeomanpodcast.com/2025/06/27…
"It only adds up if you add it up." - Gary Gulman
Waymo's OpEx seems decent (maybe?), but you gotta look at the CapEx, too. After spreading the CapEx over the useful life of the assets (with depreciation and a proper discount rate), I am wondering if this is any better than people driving other people around. If ZIRP was going to last forever, that sort of investment made theoretical sense, but when one must operate in an environment where gravity (true cost of capital) exists, does it?