astukari Newsletter #75 - The Most Ambitious Diary in History
Hi friends,
Happy 75th issue, everybody! I guess that means we’re roughly a year away from number 100. I’d like to do something special for it, like compile all the links and goodies from previous episodes, but lord knows I’ll forget in time for the actual issue. In the meantime, let’s enjoy what we have.
🔨What I’ve Been Making
Income Generators 101 - A long-promised primer on the idea of “income generators”, single-person businesses which serve to fulfill an individual’s income goals.
Strategies for David, versus Goliath - What do you do when a much more powerful opponent tries to gun you down? It can be a scary experience, yet one we’re likely to have at least once in our lifetimes. This blog post serves as a collection of general tips as to what to do in that situation.
📚What I’ve Been Reading
The Most Ambitious Diary in History - Here is my mandatory “You probably won’t learn anything important from this, but read it anyway” article share. On one hand a great primer to the autofiction genre, on the other an intensely fascinating story.
The Global Chessboard - I find it fascinating how much nation-building, cultures, historical events, etc. are based almost exclusively on the natural environment. This post is a good overview of some of the more interesting geographical connections to socio-political states.
Why Asperger’s is the secret to building a great tech company - I’ve heard this take before and I’m not sure that I buy it, but it is certainly interesting enough to share. The tl;dr on this theory is that those with limited social skills from out of the gate are able to drive innovation better because they simply don’t care about the social status quo. Why chase trends if people won’t like you for it anyway? Might as well build something completely different. Of course, this doesn’t explain how most of the culture creators in history have actually been fantastic at communication, and rather just learned to ignore the status quo over time. But both theories do align to the culture creator definition of innovation.
The Devious Fossil Fuel Propaganda We All Use - Here’s an interesting thought experiment: say that you’re a company that uses the environment to make your products (i.e. oil & gas, lumber, etc.) but people happen to be very, very pro-environment. How do you solve this problem while keeping your profits? Well, it’s quite easy really — you make pro-environmental marketing that shifts the blame to some other part of industry. This article’s theory is exactly that.
Theory of the Leisure Class - This is more on the status game theory of social interaction, which I’ve shared plenty of before. We’ve talked about status being made from a good job, or a nice car, but this article adds a new status object: belief. What beliefs are in, and what beliefs are out?