allison gacad

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on the atlas — 37

highlights — 74

What if truth, to yourself first, is how you participate in accountability, reparations, justice, and transformation?
Slow Study Storytelling Series: Imagination and Dreaming as Technologies of Transformation – Community Foundations of Canada
It's ok to want to impress other people, but choose the right people. The opinion of people you respect is signal.
How to Do Great Work
Don't think of yourself as dependent on some gatekeeper giving you a "big break." Even if this were true, the best way to get it would be to focus on doing good work rather than chasing influential people.
How to Do Great Work
Use the advantages of youth when you have them, and the advantages of age once you have those. The advantages of youth are energy, time, optimism, and freedom. The advantages of age are knowledge, efficiency, money, and power.
How to Do Great Work
Though conservatism is usually associated with the old, it's the young who tend to make this mistake. Inexperience makes them fear risk, but it's when you're young that you can afford the most. Even a project that fails can be valuable. In the process of working on it, you'll have crossed territory few others have seen, and encountered questions few others have asked.
How to Do Great Work
Part of the reason we underrate questions is the way they're used in schools. In schools they tend to exist only briefly before being answered, like unstable particles. But a really good question can be much more than that. A really good question is a partial discovery.
How to Do Great Work
What are people in your field religious about, in the sense of being too attached to some principle that might not be as self-evident as they think? What becomes possible if you discard it?
How to Do Great Work
The reason we're surprised is that we underestimate the cumulative effect of work. Writing a page a day doesn't sound like much, but if you do it every day you'll write a book a year. That's the key: consistency. People who do great things don't get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing.
How to Do Great Work
The way to beat it is to stop occasionally and ask yourself: Am I working on what I most want to work on?"
How to Do Great Work
Per-project procrastination is far the more dangerous. You put off starting that ambitious project from year to year because the time isn't quite right. When you're procrastinating in units of years, you can get a lot not done.
How to Do Great Work
If you're making something for people, make sure it's something they actually want. The best way to do this is to make something you yourself want. Write the story you want to read; build the tool you want to use.
How to Do Great Work
Develop a habit of working on your own projects. Don't let "work" mean something other people tell you to do. If you do manage to do great work one day, it will probably be on a project of your own. It may be within some bigger project, but you'll be driving your part of it.
How to Do Great Work
Then came a call that would change her life again. It was Mitchell Weiss, who’d been chief of staff to former Boston mayor Thomas Menino and was now helping Mayor Wu’s transition team. He’d known of Chu from using Remix as a case study in a class he taught at Harvard Business School. As Weiss later told the Boston Globe, he thought she had the perfect résumé to be Wu’s right hand, with her “real, true passion for cities and especially for Boston, real experience leading teams and rallying them through big challenges, and real expertise at the intersection of mobility, climate, economic opportu…
The startup CEO remaking City Hall – MIT Technology Review
But in the same exchange, the broker offered credits at a price seven times higher than they had originally paid.
How middlemen take a cut from money meant to help offset emissions - Unearthed
She maintains the idealistic delusion of a 19-year-old, never mind that she’s 39 with a fraud conviction, telling me she is still working on health care-related inventions and would continue to do so behind bars.
Elizabeth Holmes Opens Up About Her Theranos Trial and What Comes Next - The New York Times
Americans have never been very good at knowing things like this; we are basically completely ignorant of the politics of Asian countries, and we pretend we understand European politics by applying a standard left/right lens that often proves wholly inadequate to the task. In a sense we’ve never had to be very good at understanding other countries’ politics, because we were bigger by far than any of the other countries in the community of rich democratic nations, and certainly in the English-speaking world.
Here...comes...INDIA!!! - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion
Journalism and venture capital are intelligence trades: despite different outputs, the core objective is discovering ground truth as quickly as possible.
Modern Meditations: Katherine Boyle - by Mario Gabriele
The company said the move is aimed at unlocking more value for shareholders, while also attracting investors who want a clean break from fossil fuels.
Teck versus Glencore: What you need to know about the takeover battle | Financial Post
Democracy is a conversation, conversation relies on language, and when language itself is hacked, the conversation breaks down, and democracy becomes untenable. If we wait for the chaos to ensue, it will be too late to remedy it.
Opinion | Yuval Harari on Threats to Humanity Posed by A.I. - The New York Times
Simply put, we are at a juncture where either less-skilled workers will increasingly be able to take on what is now thought of as knowledge work, or the most talented knowledge workers will radically scale up their existing advantages over everyone else. Which outcome we get depends largely on how employers implement tools like ChatGPT. But the more hopeful option is well within our reach.
How ChatGPT will revolutionize the economy | MIT Technology Review
So many of the people I spoke with used descriptions similar to Khurram’s: a gateway, a lifeline, an opening up of the city, of doors that have long been closed to Scarborough’s people.
Maisonneuve | End Of The Line
But at the same time, I feel like something is lost by this approach. Optimization within known constraints cuts us off from the unknown — the influx of ideas from outside our echo chamber, the life experience that expands our perspective in ways we never could have anticipated, the friendship that opens us to a more universal understanding of humanity. And the failure to mingle with other social classes makes it hard to get involved in local politics and community activity in productive ways.
AI Techies! - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion
essentially impossible for people who eat them to get cancer from them, or for the precancerous or cancerous cells to replicate inside people at all. You’d be better off worrying about the nitrates (linked with cancer) or fecal matter (a source of deadly infections) found in farm-raised meat.
Lab-grown meat has a P.R. problem | Food and Environment Reporting Network
normal meat cells don’t just keep dividing forever. To get the cell cultures to grow at rates big enough to power a business, several companies, including the Big Three, are quietly using what are called immortalized cells, something most people have never eaten intentionally. Immortalized cells are a staple of medical research, but they are, technically speaking, pre-cancerous and can be, in some cases, fully cancerous.
Lab-grown meat has a P.R. problem | Food and Environment Reporting Network
I am perplexed by how some folks must believe in an illusion of dominance, so as to justify their (in)action. And in the same breath, I am moved by how some of us must, without fail, show up again and again in the midst of chaos, pandemics, and war
pleasure as praxis: principles of care | LinkedIn
how often the intellectual minor leagues are about politics: that rare area where there are no real experts, and it's every man for himself. Read some physics, think a bit, and announce you've discovered the Theory of Everything, and people will call you a crank. Read some history, think a bit, and announce you've discovered the secrets of the Lizard Papacy, and people will call you a nut. But read some politics, think a bit, and announce you've figured out how all existing institutions are corrupt and only you know how to run them fairly - and you can end up anywhere from interesting-at-parti…
Epistemic Minor Leagues - by Scott Alexander
The world is one big panopticon, and we don’t fully understand the implications of building a planetary marketplace of attention in which everything we do has an audience. Our work, our opinions, our milestones, and our subtle preferences are routinely submitted for public approval online. Maybe this makes culture more imitative. If you want to produce popular things, and you can easily tell from the internet what’s already popular, you’re simply more likely to produce more of that thing. This mimetic pressure is part of human nature. But perhaps the internet supercharges this trait and, in th…
Fuck your Miracle Year - by Roger’s Bacon - Secretorum
People who spend their time writing essays about how we can fix science and foster innovation are just trying to make themselves feel better about the fact that they are incapable of making any actual contribution to “progress” (and yes I’m talking about myself here).
Fuck your Miracle Year - by Roger’s Bacon - Secretorum
Lithium batteries are one of the core components of EVs. Over 50 per cent of the world’s lithium production comes from Australia, followed by Chile and China. But China and Chile account for 60 per cent and nearly 25 per cent, respectively, of the processing of lithium into batteries. China also leads the processing of critical minerals like copper, nickel, cobalt and rare earths. It accounts for over 85 per cent of rare earth processing, 65 per cent of cobalt and around 40 per cent of copper and nickel.
The Indo Pacific’s green industrial policy race | East Asia Forum
The Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan (OTPP) is an investor of FTX.
WTF is happening in crypto right now? | d3crypto
“All the previous work on regen has been done on brittle farming systems in the likes of South Africa and the dust bowl in the US - on soils and land that had already been degraded to a degree,” Jeff says.
Green Dream Pushes Farmers Into Red | Newsroom
qiang culture emerges from this question of “how do you distribute resources that are so scarce to a population of so many people?” Before Dengism, the solution was some form of hierarchy-enabled egalitarianism, where everyone supposedly received their shares through work units—the danwei gave you canteen access, housing options, and film tickets, and rice packets. The message of neoliberalism in the PRC was that if you worked hard enough, you’d eventually climb up the ladders—getting into a college, buying a house, and visiting parents in the countryside during the Spring Festival. But the pr…
Rewilding #4: Society of the Scalper - Chaoyang Trap
Plugins to cut queues, scrapers to find openings—that’s allowed, even expected. Qiang culture normalises behaviours such as writing code to surveill, DDoS, and grab first-come-first-serve digital listings, or creating ghost accounts to increase chances in online lotteries.
Rewilding #4: Society of the Scalper - Chaoyang Trap
“In medicine, we don’t have that divide based on reason or the divide based on situation. It’s more, the pregnancy needs to end for whatever reason, and we will provide that care because that’s what the person in front of us needs.”
What Does ‘Abortion’ Mean? Even the Word Itself Is Up for Debate. - The New York Times
That was not the case with the direct checks and the child tax credit. People noticed them. But they still have not turned into political selling points at a time of rapid inflation.
Democrats Spent $2 Trillion to Save the Economy. They Don’t Want to Talk About It. - The New York Times
The biggest risk is not taking risks
I want to kiss the wrong guy. - by harpriya
building “six-storeys and a corner store” in every neighborhood of the city.
Suddenly, Vancouver Is Sim City | The Tyee
what’s happening in community town halls, and coffee shops, and the occasional local pub — seriously some of the greatest ideas come out of a pub.”
Suddenly, Vancouver Is Sim City | The Tyee
“lobbyists, activists or whatever’s trending on Twitter,”
Suddenly, Vancouver Is Sim City | The Tyee
I wanted to be on the right side of things, but didn’t know how.
Environmental Consulting and Me. Struggling with my self-worth while the… | by Auston Chhor | Oct, 2022 | Medium
I wanted to be on the right side of things, but didn’t know how.
Environmental Consulting and Me. Struggling with my self-worth while the… | by Auston Chhor | Oct, 2022 | Medium
Our work didn’t help more fish get through the fishway. It wasn’t going to stop the flooding of the uniquely beautiful Peace River Valley, and it certainly wasn’t going to help the people of West Moberly First Nation who were currently battling BC Hydro in court over violations of Treaty 8
Environmental Consulting and Me. Struggling with my self-worth while the… | by Auston Chhor | Oct, 2022 | Medium
“The challenge is to persuade China that it, too, has a need to ensure the long-range sustainability of the ocean’s resources,”
China's Fishing Operations Raise Alarms Worldwide - The New York Times
They've built an incredible marketing engine and raised 100s of millions of dollars convincing you that you should put sugar and vegetable oil into your coffee each morning, while hand-waving away evidence that they’re harming you.
Oatly: The New Coke - Almanack - Every
Oatly: Coke for the 2020s
Oatly: The New Coke - Almanack - Every
It is impossible to understand China’s climate moves abroad without first understanding the global economic system China wants to replace: the American petrodollar.
This Week in Climate: China and the End of Petrocracy | Climatebase
As in: how quickly do I take to someone else’s way of seeing the world? How open am I to new ideas, and how quickly do I adopt those ideas myself?
intellectual malleability - by Isabel - Mind Mine
The obvious but tedious fact is that some of us are conditioned to work much harder than others because some of us have a lot more to prove.
Notes on Work | The New Yorker
I appreciate what Andrew Carnegie suggested: a person should spend the first third of his life getting as much education as he can, the next third making as much money as he can, and then the last third giving it all away.
Notes on Work | The New Yorker
Why, then, do we often get this so wrong? It probably comes back to the ‘natural fallacy’: things that seem more grounded in ‘natural’ properties seem better to us.
Notes on Progress: An environmentalist gets lunch