ice cream is good for you, right?
making healthy choices
I hope this trend not only sticks around but spreads far and wide! It includes an amazing quote:
I’m not a health nut, but my acupuncturist says people aren’t eating during the day because of intermittent fasting.
In other news, it’s almost the crest of summer tomato season 🥳.
Here are some of the things I’ve read recently:
just helpful hints for better luck when searching (and this one for fun screenshots of the internet 10 years ago)
I’m sweating and my heart is pounding just reading this ahhhhhh
I didn’t know this was going on in Keene, New Hampshire, but I’m not surprised it’s going on in Keene, New Hampshire
the always-wonderful Money Stuff linked to this bizarro-world interview with a leading(?) Ransomware-as-a-Service platform and it is 1000% more straightforward than most tech journalism (which is often just PR). Honestly you could learn a lot about GTM strategy from this… product-and-design-led startup? critical infrastructure provider? dark web channel partner?
have you ever navigated buying health insurance for yourself? I’ve done it on two different states’ exchanges now; every time, I get angry at how challenging it is, for me, a person who makes technology professionally* and usually has the time and resources to spend figuring out how to navigate these “systems”. I’m enraged thinking about anyone trying to do this with limited time, funds, patience… anyway this is a more eloquent exploration of that frustration:
…we work as our own health-care administrators. Our own tax professionals. Our own social workers. Our own disability-law experts. Our own child-support advocates, long-term-care reps, and public-housing officials… the time tax is…a regressive filter undercutting every progressive policy we have… little attention is being paid to making things work, rather than making them exist.
I want to quote and underline the whole thing.
this is linked in the above and even touches on my own [disappointing, disturbing] past as a public-sector-focused management consultant, further hollowing the state:
the fact that so much of our welfare state is jointly administered — either inter-governmentally or through contracting with private agents — makes it hard for Americans to attribute responsibility when things go wrong, thus leading to blame being spread over the government in general, rather than targeted precisely where it could do some good
as I always nervously joke, though: I wasn’t, like, a cool management consultant.
Tech Support is always a good read but lately discussing ~the arc of our careers~ with a lot of folks, this experience of “I don’t recommend it but I’m glad I experienced it” comes up a lot:
That final humiliation was crushing… but I’m oddly grateful for it now. Feeling shattered by the place I’d given so much of myself to was, while not an experience I’d recommend, a profound and instructive life event: it shook the company shill out of me, so to speak.
rereading it for the 12th time, it’s also kind of a “~*Don’t cry because it’s over; smile because it happened*~ <3” AIM away message vibe. (which, obviously, I love. are our careers simply manifestations of what got stuck in our brains in middle and early high school? tune in next week where I’ll share the Dashboard lyrics I’ve collected, corroborating this.)
brief note on burnout from a newly-liberated Choire (and I always recommend Very Recent History)
nothing snarky, just very good to know what actual drowning looks and sounds like (basically: it looks nothing like flailing onscreen drownings)
I always feel like I need to loudly say “so… I *love* driving, and I *love* cars, …BUT…” (I do! sorry to the environment!) anytime I’m about to launch into how terrible cars are for living in a Great City**. Well, the cars themselves might be sort of OK aside from you know, pollution; really it’s parking them that’s the problem.
in case you’re writing a dystopian, post-pandemic (ha, sure, good one) novel or series, this perfect accessory just launched
this explains so much… mostly why there’s never any movie you actually want to watch on any streaming service. Related: how am I reading this wild ride, rather than half-watching it, lying down, on a rainy Sunday afternoon? This would be a totally watchable airplane movie!
* Further narrowing the band of people for whom this process makes any sense whatsoever: I work in tech, so I have general familiarity with the many moving parts involved in building a piece of technology. But also… as a completely random twist of fate, I’ve worked on actual health insurance claiming systems, among other medical technologies! Never heard of ICD-10 codes? Yeah… most people haven’t! You shouldn’t have to in order to have healthcare!
** I agree that having a car makes living in a Great City better, for an individual (because you can get out of that city), but overall, it’s not great for the city to be full of parked cars.