The Buddha had no kids
Walking back from the Maritime Museum with a friend I asked him, "how are you so happy all the time?" They explained that they just thought about what was rational. Getting upset and angry didn't get good results. You had to think through and sort through the best, or workable options.
Personal rationality - that's the thing I lack. I can't argue, prove out my actions and feelings. I just, I don't know, don't believe the lines or argument. It's similar to how my kids just can't understand that we need to be to their school at 8:30am so it's imperative to put their shoes on right now, not watch TV, play with an iPad, or draw with permeant markers.
Related: back when I was reading a lot of Stoic stuff, I got to comparing it to mindfulness, Buddhism as it were. The two start and end with very similar states of being and life-styles (taking out the mystic, religious part of Buddhism - well, maybe not - that first part of The Meditations, as I recall, had a lot of gods-talk). I don't know what to make of it, but the two are almost the same, one just Western, the other Eastern.
However, I don't think Stoic masters nor the Buddha had kids - and if they did, they probably had a phalanx of nannies or wives who did all the work. Kids - those fucking shoes - give no fucks about rationality or mindfulness. They're immune from it. I often think of those scenes in movies where the dad has left and become a Buddhist, found themselves alone at some retreat in California. They get their weekend visit with kids (after some eye-rolling handoff with their former partner) and revert back to their real-world, stressed out self.
All the self-care and mindfulness stuff disintegrates when you loose control of your context and mind. When you have to get kids to school at 8:30am. You can't just let it flow, ignore your self. You'll be late, your kids will slowly become bad students, you'll get fined... I mean, am I supposed to not care, detach from the desire to give my kids a good life?
And yet, for eons, people have done it: put up with these agents or irrational chaos, kids. Maybe that's what you give up to: it'll probably work out, and, in the meantime, pass by the Bodhi when you can, and just chop wood and carry water in the meantime.
Original programming
We take listener questions in this week's Software Defined Talk:
At the end of the year, we answer listener questions. From middle-names, to athletes, to advice to startups. Also, we talk open source in 2020 predictions, that NYTimes story on Amazon, and Twinkies.
This week's Pivotal Conversations:
In this episode, we talk with Paula Kennedy who heads up our education and platform groups. She talks about the type of education about cloud native development and operations that our customers find useful and also the platform as a product concept and methods. We also go over some predictions for 2020, not all super-nerdy, but mostly.
Apple M&A
(One more footnote on the AirPods Pro is that at $250 a pair and $300 for Apple Watch, throwing in a case puts these attached accessories for an iPhone at roughly the same average selling price for the iPhone of a few years ago.)
From Horace.
Apple feels like a study in very successful M&A. They don't buy much, the story goes, but it seems like most of the things they buy are turned into success business units (Beats) or core, often differentiating features of existing product line (NextOS, TouchId, chips). Furthermore their bets in strategically weird technologies (headphones, watches) often pay off. Their online services are still weird (iCloud seems, just now, competitive with Box and a Dropbox - their email is nothing in the overall market...I think).
I don't know much about their M&A strategy, their method. As with most observation of market leaders, it might be fraught with the Halo Effect. But there is something worth looking into there. I suspect it has a lot to do with a very specific well know, simple strategy. Also their moves are rarely (ever?) defensive.
Or maybe they're really good at integration, the work done after an acquisition to make sure you get value out of that acquired company and don't destroy it.
Books
I'm in a phase where I have too many books started at once. I learned from, I don't know, Taleb a long time ago and then confirmed by others (Tyler Cowen) that it's OK to just read at a lot of books at once: abandon them, even!
- Art as Therapy - I finished this up. It's good, helpful. Oddly, I don't recall any discussion of music. There's architecture, all types of art, but no music. Where's that line get drawn?
- So Nude, So Dead - I'm not sure how I came across this.
- Dead Astronauts - maybe too mystic for me, too weird. I started reading the book before it, Borne much less weird. Maybe it'll all make sense after reading that one.
- Miami - I really like Joan Didion's writing, her non-fiction (I don't know her fiction at all). I mean, of course: everyone does. This is another book length essay on one topic - like Salvador. It makes me realize that part of he style is suffering no fools, but so subtly that you can't tell it's her voice doing it. The tales in this book are also a reminder of how close we are, time-line wise, to bald, open, and dumb discrimination.
Relative to your interests
Nice gif. "As a result, the number of people required to operate the [Rabobank] platform [decreased] from 30 to 10 and the productivity of developers increased from 30 to 75%." Super app: "Like many other financial technology businesses, Grab started out with mobile payments, but it has since branched out to providing services like insurance, loans and potentially wealth management products on its platform." Long term tactics to fix the system that discriminates against women in tech. Facebook rules mobile downloads for ten years. Some books were read: 2019. “Putting babies straight from mother’s milk on to chocolate spread is not a good idea”. “without a crisp understanding of the specific outcomes your transformation needs to achieve, your work will be—at best—unfocused”. "In order for something to qualify as an option, it must be convex. That is, it must have limited downside with large, open-ended upside." "Star Wars, but make it fashion." “Time as material.” Europe Notes.pdf Reporting on Internet art brute.
