Judging by my 2015 mobile photos on Flickr, taken with the iPhone 5S [flickr.com] or taken with the iPhone 6S [flickr.com], I must have been exhausted from the amount of good mobile phone photos I took in 2014 [confusion.cc]. I counted and there are about 50 photos in 2015 while there were over 70 in 2014. Not as big a difference as I thought but still…
Anyway, most of the year I continued to use the iPhone 5s and I took a couple of shots I would point to as “my best of 215”.
First up is this shot of a dandylion taken in Stockholm at a friends house. Lovely detail for macro shot on the iPhone.
Second, another macro shot of matcha power in a tea cup, waiting for the hot water. The color of the matcha is intense and set off well against the dark ceramic cup. The harsh light from my kitchen lights is a bit much.
At the other end of the spectrum is this telephoto shot of Millenia Tower near my office in Singapore. The monotony of the windows and the shadows are great. Too bad it’s not leveled correctly.
Per the norm, I changed handset to the iPhone 6S [wikipedia.org] when it came out. Skipping one generation. The 6S jumped the rear camera up from 8 megapixel to 12 megapixel. A sizable jump but, seeing as I didn’t get the 6S until late November, I didn’t take many photos with the 6S in 2015. One I will share is not because it’s that good of a photo but because it’s the return of the panorama!
You will remember, of course, that I started this journey into my best mobile photos in 2004. Back then I had a Sony Ericsson K700i. and it had a built in panorama program. You can see a panorama taken on the K700i in both the 2004 [confusion.cc] and 2005 [confusion.cc] entries in this series of posts. Apple introduced it’s panorama functionality originally with the iPhone 6. But I didn’t have an iPhone 6 so, I first got it with the 6S in 2015. I made full use of it in Harbin, China on my winter vacation. Here is the best example:
Click to see it bigger on Flickr
Please ignore the poor people on the right hand side, that a tragic story.
That’s really about it for 2015, but I want to jump back to the 5S and include this shot of some sticker graffiti in Tel Aviv:
I came across an article in The New Yorker this week on the cult of productivity. The basic idea is that a view of increasing productivity that is based on improving processes, typically in manufacturing, has morphed into the idea that we can all, individually, be even more productive. This is a false economy, allowing companies to “do more with less [people]” which, too often, translated to longer hours for most people. This in turn burns people out, maybe you liked your job but at some point if it takes over your whole life you are going to hate it.
In classic productivity, there’s no upper limit to the amount of output you seek to produce: more is always better. When you ask individuals to optimize productivity, this more-is-more reality pits the professional part of their life against the personal. More output is possible if you’re willing to steal hours from other parts of your day—from family dinners, or relaxing bike rides—so the imperative to optimize devolves into a game of internal brinkmanship
Since my kids were born I have rejected the more-is-more drive for work. Not specifically about productivity but in general, I don’t let the company work me 24/7. I log ago blocked by calendar to show out of office between 6:30PM and 8:30AM on weekdays and all weekend. I’m more religious about it but I reserve the right to ignore all work related things during these hours.
I do work late when there is genuine need; if I have committed to something and need extra time to get it done or, more often, when customer provide unreasonable timelines to get things done —we call these RFPs and customers as assholes about the timelines, universally in my experience they expect their potential vendors to work 24/7 during the short period between release and submission of an RFP. I’ve pulled all nighters with colleagues to get things done on time. Famously a 48 hour binge session to close a major RFP and the only sleep was in the cab to home and back to take a shower halfway through. These days few people are around who were there for that, no one remembers so what did I get out of it? In the end I think only the recognition from my boss that I would do what it took to meet my commitments.
After more than a decade in the same company I have a reputation, at least among the people I work with regularly. My bosses PA asks me if I will attend a late call before scheduling it. Every time there are new VPs to work with I have to set expectations again. Because I work for a company where many of my colleagues don’t or can’t turn off. A majority of them attend calls at all hours of the day and night. Just this week I had colleagues on calls at 6AM (their time, we are a global company) and colleagues who were on calls until 3AM. Working —attending Zoom or Teams calls— until 9, 10, 11PM or later and on the weekends is the norm for many of my Australian colleagues. Here is a typical week on my calendar:
I know it’s not just my colleagues or my company, it’s a general trend of many years in IT and I think in many other industries. Anywhere people are paid to get the job done not just by the hour seems to adopted a model of “do more with less” which is actually “do more with less people”. You get paid to do a job, not work 40 hours a week, so the company just redefines your job to include more and more things, if it takes you 60 hours then so be it. If you don’t do it someone else will… it’s a vicious circle.
If it’s up to you alone to get more done, then attempts to moderate your workload can be misinterpreted as laziness.
The COVID pandemic and work from home have made all this harder on people. I used to leave my laptop at work 90% of the time. Once I shut it down I was done for the day. Maybe I would check email on my phone before bed but I broke my crackberry addiction long ago and I refuse to spent too much time typing emails on my phone late at night. They can wait until the morning for the most part. A quick email to help move things along, especially if those working on it are in other time zones so it’s still their workday is ok, but for the most part. It can wait.
My company has been running a campaign for the past year to get more people to take it easy. We have lost many people to burnout. They have been running virtual coffee breaks, encouraging people to take proper lunches —not to just eat sitting in from of the computer— to shut off in the evenings. I’m not sure how many people are taking advantage of this. Work from home seems to have but many people into a worse place with regards to shutting off. There are no more boundaries. I think many people don’t have a proper “work from home” place in their house. Just sitting at the kitchen table is a recipe for disaster, the psychological superstition between home and office, or what was left of it, is completely destroyed. Too many people where taking their computers home and working in the evening before COVID lockdowns. Many people who are burning out are looking for a new job. As if a new employer will fix this. Too much of it is endemic to modern work culture. “Different company, same shit” I expect.
I’ve spent a lot of effort proving I can get my job done and done well in a ‘normal’ work week, 40 hours. Setting expectations about the amount of work I can and will do at the professional level of quality I want to work at and that the company values me for. I expect I drive my boss crazy, pushing back on extra assignments and arguing about what should be priority. He tells me every year in annual evaluations he appreciates the work and the honesty and all that, so I guess I’m doing something right. It’s going to make changing jobs a real challenge if I ever decide to move on. I joke with my colleagues that I don’t work for the company I work for my boss at this point. Changing jobs would mean having to reset all the expectations about work-life balance.
But I was not always like this. I was on the job 24/7 from the early 2000s until the mid 2010s. I was a crackberry addict. You can find some evidence of this history on this blog. I can’t decide if this was youthful energy, or because I worked at a startup and felt we were building something, that I was contributing directly to something, or lack of family.
Whatever the cause, I remember having a conversation with another youngish colleague back in the day about a couple of co-workers who were the 9-5 type. They came in, did their job for 8 hours and when home. There were times when they would work odd hours due to project constraints or what not but they were “desk jockeys” not in it for the passion but in it for the paycheck. At least that’s the conclusion we came to over beers, in a hotel lobby on a business trip.
I’m not so sure now. These people had families and they did good work. I’ve turned into one of them. I’m determined that I can spend time with my kids after work and on the weekends. To help with homework, watch a movie or play games with them while they are young enough to want to spend time with their father. The week-in, week-out business travel and the VP titles can wait till my girls are both teenagers and don’t want to spend time with papa.
The Economist this week has a good article on something that has been bothering me for a while now. I haven’t been able to express it clearly but this article does a good job. I think the title sums it up nicely:
Before I go into the article let’s establish two things:
We are going to discuss the illiberal left, but I agree with the article that the most clear and present danger to America comes from the illiberal right. I just won’t be focused on the threats from the right in this post.
I’m a a left leaning American liberal.
But what doe “left leaning American liberal” mean? To start with I’m firmly on the Democrat side of the political parties in today’s America closer to the center than many of the most vocal democrats around today.
Perhaps not surprisingly, given I’ve been a loyal reader of The Economist for two decades, a newspaper founded in the classical liberalism tradition, that I am a liberal, but liberalism is complicated. The Economist’s definition of classical liberalism as given in the article:
[C]lassical liberalism believes human progress is brought about by debate and reform. The best way to navigate disruptive change in a divided world is through a universal commitment to individual dignity, open markets and limited government.
That definition should cover both the Democratic and Republican parties in the US… The US was founded in the liberal tradition and it’s major parties are both liberal in the broadest sense but they espouse distinct flavors of liberalism. I say I’m on the Democratic side as I have a strong preference for “social liberalism”, per Wikipedia, social liberalism is:
a political philosophy and variety of liberalism that endorses a social market economy within an individualist economy and the expansion of civil and political rights. Under social liberalism, the common good is viewed as harmonious with the freedom of the individual.
Social liberalism is the default when talking about “American liberals” [wikipedia.org], where the term liberalism is usually used without a qualifier to refer to social liberalism.
But I like that The Economist definition uses “individual dignity” not “individual freedom”. I think that in the pursuit of providing dignity to all individual laws which limit the extend of individual freedom can be justified. Something along the lines of “your freedom to throw a punch ends at your targets nose…” You could write books on the minutia of liberalism and it’s varied definition… here’s a short reading list: The Literature of Liberalism [economist.com] from the Economist.
Liberalism, classical or social, is a big tent, it can encompass both the left and right we are familiar with in mainstream politics of the “west”. The modern west is based on the ideas of liberalism as a whole, but there are still two (and sometimes more) sides. Where do I fit left to right? Well, we all gravitate to views we already hold and judging by my personal media choices and where they fall on the AllSides media bias chart [allsides.com], I “lean left”:
My daily news source is the BBC, but obviously, The Economist is important, I read it almost cover-to-cover weekly and The Guardian, The Atlantic and Politico are all contributors to my reading list. But I have to say I lean hard as I find myself reading Vox regularly (and watching their YouTube channel), I’ve read (and linked to) Democracy Now and Alternet in the past (though I drifted away from them, either I became more conservative or they became more liberal?) and I have subscribed, off and on, since the late 90’s to Mother Jones.
OK, so I’ve established that I’m a left leaning social liberal.. so what? Lets look at what the article actually is actually saying? In short it says that the new generation of left wing Americans are becoming illiberal.
[A]n illiberal left… has recently spread from elite university departments. As young graduates have taken jobs in the upmarket media and in politics, business and education, they have brought with them a horror of feeling “unsafe” and an agenda obsessed with a narrow vision of obtaining justice for oppressed identity groups. They have also brought along tactics to enforce ideological purity, by no-platforming their enemies and cancelling allies who have transgressed
We’ve seen this growing for some time, the cancel culture that started with getting speakers or professors silenced and kicked out of universities a decade ago has spread.
The fact that this movement grows out of “elite university departments” gives credence to the conservative right’s critic that they are silenced by leftist universities. And of course as these young graduates have taken jobs in upmarket media the conservatives scream they are being silenced by the “left leaning media”, (though the chart above shows there is a thriving right leaning media and the fact that most people get their news from one side or the other and less often from the center is one big issue, trapping us all in an echo chamber or filter bubble.)
Superficially, the illiberal left and classical liberals like The Economist want many of the same things. Both believe that people should be able to flourish whatever their sexuality or race. They share a suspicion of authority and entrenched interests. They believe in the desirability of change.
the illiberal left put their own power at the centre of things, because they are sure real progress is possible only after they have first seen to it that racial, sexual and other hierarchies are dismantled.
Herein lies the heart of what makes me uncomfortable about the far left in the US… The forced conversion or casting out of those deemed heretical or not sufficiently committed.
I agree that racism is a problem, that it is institutionalized; both intentionally by people who consciously subscribe to a white supremacist point of view and unconsciously by people who don’t think about their actions or are unaware of bias they have for whatever reason.
I agree that sexism is a problem, that is is institutionalized, both intentionally by people who are misogynistic and through long established structures and norms.
I agree that homophobia is a problem, that is it institutionalized.
I agree that Islamophobia is a problem.
I agree that xenophobia is a problem.
And transphobia
And a long list of other phobias and -isms…
I also agree that addressing the wrongs these phobias and -isms have caused and continue to cause is hard. I will take great efforts to change peoples minds and fix the systems. And that even those issues, like racism that have been in the spotlight for a long time have not been addressed enough. The civil rights movement was decades ago, and we have not finished our work there.
What I don’t agree with is cancel culture and the top down imposition of equity through any means possible. This is another form of intolerance and repression. I can’t put it better than The Economist did:
Progressives of the old school remain champions of free speech. But illiberal progressives think that equity requires the field to be tilted against those who are privileged and reactionary. That means restricting their freedom of speech, using a caste system of victimhood in which those on top must defer to those with a greater claim to restorative justice. It also involves making an example of supposed reactionaries, by punishing them when they say something that is taken to make someone who is less privileged feel unsafe. The results are calling-out, cancellation and no-platforming.
This is the same problem, in essence I had with The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins [confusion.cc]. Forcing people to get in line with your solutions to problems does not fix the problems. Even when I agree with the these peoples goals I can’t support their methods. Which runs the risk of getting me canceled I guess.
When I say I agree with their goals, here is what I mean. This week saw the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia. Richmond is an hour from where I grew up, and this follows the removal, in July, of the Stonewall Jackson statue in Charlottesville, my home town, that was the center of a Nazi rally a few years ago. Removing these statues is called “cancel culture” by many conservatives. But I think removing these statues is correct and it’s not canceling people in the same way as stopping a speaker at a college because you don’t agree with them or getting a professor banned because they have published something that offends your or your sense of justice.
The myriad statues of confederate “heroes” around the US South is part of a concerted, revisionist effort to redeem the South – the Lost Cause [wikipedia.org] narrative. To say the war was not about slavery, even to say that slavery was “good” for the slaves, that they were happy. The statues were erected to terrorize the black population of the South. The amazing success of the effort to change the narrative about the South and the Civil War is mind boggling. Even halfway around the world, non-Americans have swallowed The Myth of the Kindly General Lee [theatlantic.com]. Here is a WhatsApp conversation from yesterday:
M█████ N████████: [RE: America is changing for the better…?] This doesn’t make any sense.. from whatever little I know, Gen Lee was a brilliant soldier, an honorable man and a patriot… Irrespective of which side he fought for… There is no reason to disrespect him now.
beggs: “even if one conceded Lee’s military prowess, he would still be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in defense of the South’s authority to own millions of human beings as property because they are black. Lee’s elevation is a key part of a 150-year-old propaganda campaign designed to erase slavery as the cause of the war and whitewash the Confederate cause as a noble one. That ideology is known as the Lost Cause, and as the historian David Blight writes, it provided a “foundation on which Southerners built the Jim Crow system.””
beggs: We don’t have statues to Rommel around Europe because he was a great general… he was a Nazi. We should not be celebrating Lee as a person, he was defending slavery. and the lionization of Lee and other confederate “heroes” is based on a concerted effort to redeem the south as part of the racist defense of the “southern (racist) lifestyle”
C█████ L██████: Exactly… a lot of the southern memorials were not erected for the prowess of or achievements of the confederacy (a government created for the sole purpose of defending slavery) but as a not so subtle message to the black population. They were saying… while the federal government may be forcing certain laws and protections, you are still in the south. For example, the rebel battle flag was added to the Georgia State flag in 1952, as a direct protest to federally forced integration of blacks and whites in schools. These symbols and memorials across the south, where I grew up, are a form of terrorism, against the black population. I didn’t understand this when I was a kid. People from Beggs and I generation were largely feed the lost cause narrative. It took curiosity and a sense for history to learn what all this really meant. I think this memorials have a place in history books… not in our parks and public places. If you want a further sense of some of what has happened from post civil war all the way to 1970s, in the southern US.. take a look at this map of documented lynchings (https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/explore) so yes, taking down these racist, terroristic memorials is fucking great for America… it’s coming to terms with reality to create a safer future for all… including my mixed family, who were in effect illegal up into the late 1960’s in most southern US states.
Social issues are complicated. I say take the statues down because they were put up to mislead people and whitewash the past. To repress an entire class of people.
Anyway, this post is getting way too long. Go and read all the articles linked to. And add these two, also from the September 4th 2021 edition of The Economist, (if you can due to paywall):
Before I go I want to include two more thoughts. The first is that I always liked this saying when I was young. You hear a lot of liberals use it, usually misattributed to Voltaire:
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it
Evelyn Beatrice Hall (not Voltaire)
That sounds great, from a liberal point of view —in order to progress though open dialog and debate you have to defend others rights to speak, even if you disagree with what they say. But if you start to extend that to the full spectrum of opinions, including those that are advocating intolerance or violence… should you still defend their right to say it? At some point you come to the paradox of intolerance…
if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant
And I think the “my way or the highway” approach of the illiberal left is too close to this form of intolerance. They may be intolerant for the right reasons but I don’t think it will end well. The more they force people in line with their view of the solutions the more people will rebel. I still think the illiberal right is a greater threat than the illiberal left —see Texas new attack on abortion [wikipedia.org] the Republicans perennial siren song to the conservative faithful— but both sides sound too authoritarian in their approach to governing.
Finally, I think the illiberal left should remember the golden rule… If they don’t want to be banned and canceled when others who disagree are in power they should not advocate banning and canceling others. You can’t ban people into thinking your way, if you fix the problems you want addressed through intolerance people will resent the changes for how you forced them down their throats. Learning the lessons and society moving in the right direction still requires better ideas to change people not just change the law.
There was no way for the US to “win” in Afghanistan. The military could take, and given the money hold, territory but the US (and it seems the world) was not into Nation Building. Ever since WWII we have been unwilling to put the effort into building a country up after bombing it down. We pick parachute a few people into office and dole out contracts to money grubbers who follow the army around and cross our fingers, not matter how much we have to hold our nose around our new so-called “allies” in this government. This sort of setup has not ever worked… The closest I guess is the odious military dictatorship in South Korea that eventually was booted out by the South Korean people. I understand the argument for containment of communism after WWII and the unwillingness of the American people to commit to nation building, but the way we do it has not worked out. If we are going to be the world cops and topple rotten regimes we need to have a view of what to do after toppling the rotten regime that does not amount to installing another rotten one and proving that our vision of global democracy under Pax Americana is devoid of any concern for the people in these countries. We long ago lost the moral high ground, and it was not for taking out the bad guys but by replacing them with more bad guys.
