Speaking of good camerawork:
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There’s a thread over on Hacker News today which caught my interest.
I have been the CTO of a company that is growing like crazy […] Recently I have been doubting every move that I make and have lost all faith in myself as a developer. […] The thing is, I know I’m a decent developer but I find myself doubting every single decision that I make.
and what particularly caught my attention was the comment below:
Reminds me of this excerpt from an Obama interview:
When problems reached him in the White House, he said, it was because they were unsolvable. He generally was being asked to choose between two bad options. “By definition, if it was an easily solvable problem, or even a modestly difficult but solvable problem, it would not reach me, because, by definition, somebody else would have solved it,” he said. “So the only decisions that came were the ones that were horrible and that didn’t have a good solution."
I don’t even totally quite know what I think of that yet, but it does raise an interesting point about leadership.
Someone else then commented:
This should probably be a must read for any wanna be presidents and leaders who are only after the power and glory.
I’ve just never thought of it from that particular aspect. But it makes sense. If you have decent people under you, they are going to take care of everything that isn’t a lose-lose messy situation. So is that kind of inherent - if you get to a leadership position you just get stuck with the worst stuff where no matter what you do it’s wrong and you can’t ever actually do good things, but just have to choose the least-bad option?
(Edit: The link to full discussion over there: Ask HN: I've lost faith in myself as a developer, how do I get it back? | Hacker News)
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Makes sense - why else would FDR have a Brain Trust?
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So many things wrong with this.
Sure there are good solutions, just not ones that
- won’t piss off the rich and powerful, and/or
- won’t drastically change things thus scaring the pants off the cowardly conservatives, and/or
- won’t make the religious right go bananas, and/or
- won’t hurt the feelings of racist white people, and/or
- won’t cost a bazillion dollars that needs to be taken out of the pockets of the rich and powerful
- goto 1
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I had no idea about this story. Just like so many of Jimmy Carter’s accomplishments, here he worked as part of a team. Housing, elections, guinea worm, all things where a charismatic figurehead doesn’t do anything, it has to be a distributed effort. I think that’s what made him a great and effective human being. Some portion of us view that as inherently inferior and worthy of ridicule, and it has made the everything incredibly worse.
I wonder how it’s going on the alternate timeline where President Carter was re-elected and they never had a President Reagan.
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It’s called “humility” and it’s been absent from the men who’ve occupied the Oval Office for far too fucking long, it not being a characteristic the masses seem to want in their leaders.
And even though I’m still working through my disappointment w/HST for his pleading poor when he wasn’t (I bet it was a way of him compensating his guilt for being well-off after being poorer than his peers for so long, he was that type of person), I admire him yet.
Addendum: Thanks for posting this!
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Another parallel:
I think service in WWI was a college education of its own (HST was the last POTUS who didn’t have a college degree).
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A little more than one-hundred years old, and more relevant than ever:
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Today is 30 days since I officially moved into the new house. I happened to re-open the Zillow listing tab today, and, based on their estimate, it’s gone up in value a little over $1,000 per day since we moved in. 
Real estate is weird.
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Zestimate? I wonder if they exhort their employees to be zestful in their jobs?
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+13.5% in 30 days??? Wow.
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Only the sixth one ever spotted, first in 22 years.
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slow mo footage of old school vector graphics arcade games
(obviously, it’s flicker city)
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Of particular interest to people who make or use software, and how we might be bringing about the collapse of civilization:
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Here’s a rabbit hole for you:
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Goth Judy Garland:
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Yep, I got one. It’s what I use to make jet fuel.