The Holy Curiosity of Inquiry
Albert Einstein | Folio | Starbucks Workers United | Factoids | Elsewhere and Elsewhen
Quote of the Moment
It is nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreck and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.
| Albert Einstein
Folio
Apropos of Einstein’s quote, and the holy curiosity of inquiry, I have been deep in the details of developing a course in collaboration with Dave Gray and others at the School of the Possible. Next week, ten course developers (including me) will participate in an Open House, on Wednesday, March 6th, from 9 to 10:30 AM Pacific. Click on the link for more information.
My course was initially focused on a fairly small-bore topic: decision-making. But after hammering out a description and plan of attack for such a thing, I reconsidered.
Instead, I’ve switched my focus to something I have been working on, personally, for decades (yes, decades). So, next week’s event will be the debut of something very different, a course I am developing on what can be called ‘networked notetaking’ with a system I call Folio:
Folio: how Obsidian notetaking becomes knowledge
People have used notetaking for centuries to accumulate insights, ideas, quotes, and drawings with the end goal of capturing a body of knowledge in search of consilience: the aspiration that the cross-pollination of these various perhaps initially unrelated snippets can lead to spontaneous and unforeseen breakthroughs. Breakthroughs in both personal understanding and perhaps in the advancement of ongoing explorations in science, art, and social relations, individually and communally.
The rise of digital notetaking systems has amplified these aspirations, and provide means to push notetaking to new levels of sophistication and greater depth of understanding for users. However, the effective use of a notetaking systems like Obsidian, Notion, Roam Research and others requires more that reading the manual and jumping in.
Folio is a system to accomplish that aspiration in Obsidian. Folio is a consolidation of many aspects of Obsidian's capabilities, starting with the primitives of its form of markdown, as well as more complex and sophisticated capabilities from core and community plugins. Folio is also a set of principles and practices intended to support the development of a deep base of knowledge for whatever domains the user wishes to explore, and to assist the user in generating new insights, personal understanding of these domains, and perhaps the creation of new materials advancing communal understanding as well. This can be considered networked notetaking, meaning notetaking incorporating those aims and capabilities.
See the course description here.
So, if you are interested in networked notetaking or the School of the Possible, join us next Wednesday. Attendance is open and free.
Register and add the event to your calendar.
Starbucks Workers United
Looks like Former CEO Howard Schultz’s vow to never engage with a union has been overturned by events. The new CEO, Laxman Narasimhan, is more accommodating, as reported by More Perfect Union:
On Tuesday, the company and the union said in a joint announcement that they had agreed to begin talks on a “foundational framework” to establish collective bargaining contracts with unionized workers.
This includes an agreement to create a single master contract that applies to all unionized stores, which could be supplemented by contracts touching on specific local issues where necessary, the American Prospect reported.
In addition, as a show of good faith, the company said it will finally award union Starbucks workers with raises and other benefits, including the ability to receive tips from credit card orders, that it has been illegally withholding from unionized stores since 2022.“By agreeing to credit card tipping and new benefits for union workers, PLUS a national framework for a contract, Starbucks is surrendering almost all of its leverage,” wrote Jordan Zakarin, who has covered the Starbucks organizing drive since its inception for More Perfect Union. “It’s as close to a white flag as it gets. Organizing will skyrocket. The end is near. The union is winning.”
Schultz is still a major shareholder, but left the board in September. And the company has been breaking labor laws right and left, so maybe Narasimhan wants to stop wasting so much money on pointless legal games.
Former executives who have spoken with Mr. Narasimhan have said he is less resistant to the union.
The company announced in December that it was seeking to restart contract bargaining, and Mr. Narasimhan sent out a conciliatory message soon after indicating that the company wanted to improve its relationship with employees, whom it calls partners.
“Our goal next year is to further reinvigorate our partner culture,” Mr. Narasimhan wrote, adding that “it is time to restitch the fabric of the green apron for all partners.”
Next: will the union be able to break the scheduling precarity at Starbucks, with retail workers scrambling to establish steady schedules and regular hours? In the next newsletter I will dig into the precarity of retail, in depth.
Factoids
Shrinkflation v Skimpflation
Shrinking itself is captured in official inflation data, but another sneaky force that costs consumers is getting missed in the statistics. Companies sometimes use cheaper materials to save on costs in a practice some call “skimpflation.” That is much harder for the government to measure.
If your paper towel roll costs the same but you’re getting fewer sheets — shrinkflation — that shows up clearly as a unit cost increase that is added to official inflation. If your paper towels are the same size but are suddenly made of worse material — skimpflation — the government does not record that as inflation.
In fact, food and household products broadly are not directly adjusted for quality changes other than size and weight, government statisticians said. So if your microwave dinner brand starts using vegetable instead of olive oil, or if your formerly resealable package loses its zipper, that won’t show up.
| Jeanna Smialek, Shrinkflation 101: The Economics of Smaller Groceries
…
Beefy Rice
[Jinkee] Hong, a professor in Yonsei University’s Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, worked with colleagues to grow beef cells inside of rice grains coated in fish gelatin and familiar food-grade enzymes. The end result: a bowl of rice that has 8 percent more protein than a normal serving and produces the same amount of carbon emissions as the grain crop, a staple food for about half of the world’s population.
Sounds a lot smarter than ‘lab-grown’ meat, which isn’t meat, or ‘grown’. This beefy rice hasn’t scaled up yet, but it sounds more practical than earlier approaches.
…
Almost Human
Researchers at Western Sydney University say they’ll switch on the world’s first human brain-scale supercomputer in 2024. The DeepSouth computer will be capable of 228 trillion synaptic operations per second, around the same as that believed to take place in the human brain. The researchers say DeepSouth will help us understand more about both the brain, and possible routes to AGI [artificial general intelligence].
Defense network computers. New... powerful... hooked into everything, trusted to run it all. They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence. Then it saw all people as a threat, not just the ones on the other side. Decided our fate in a microsecond: extermination.
| Kyle Reese in Terminator.
Ok, I don’t really anticipate that DeepSouth will ‘decide our fate in a microsecond’. However, advances like OpenAI Sora are scaring the hell out of creatives in Hollywood, and new startup Figure raised $675 million from investors including Nvidia, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Jeff Bezos to make humanoid autonomous robots for commercial use. These are clearly intended to replace human workers.
…
The Last Remnants of American Tillage
$16.6 billion — The value of U.S. farmland by the end of 2023, which has more than doubled over the last three years. Investors from the tech industry and beyond have descended upon the last remnants of American tillage, viewing it as a hot commodity that will outperform as the world’s population grows and natural resources dwindle. But lawmakers could put forth policies that would restrict unyielding purchases to prevent price creep.
Investors have scooped up over one million of U.S. farmland, according to Reuters:
Though their acreage is a small slice of the nearly 900 million acres of U.S. farmland, the pace of acquisitions by investment firms like Manulife Investment Management and Nuveen has quickened since the 2008 global financial crisis drove firms to seek new investment vehicles, according to Reuters interviews with fund managers and an analysis of data from the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries (NCREIF).
The number of properties owned by such firms increased 231% between 2008 and the second quarter of 2023, and the value of those holdings rose more than 800% to around $16.2 billion, according to NCREIF's quarterly farmland index, which tracks the holdings of the seven largest firms in farmland investment.
I was motivated to look into this factoid from Frame Media because I thought the $16.8 figure was way, way too low. In fact, that number is really the value of just the farmland in the hands of investment firms. The value of U.S. farmland is 900 times more: something like 13.5 trillion.
Elsewhere and Elsewhen
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