This is the current building being built that I talk about. Notice (1) the two layers of paint, and (2) bolts being used instead of welds compared to the steel structure photos in the essay
I went down memory lane. In 2020, I dropped out of Dartmouth, flew back to Nepal on the second flight after borders reopened, and spent a year doing things I never expected.
One of them: building one of the first three-story I-beam steel structures in Far West Nepal. No local expertise. No supply chain. A crew that had never done it before. We figured it out anyway.
a catalog for all deliverables ever made by consultants so that they can search semantically among slides from differnt projects and more effectively reuse their previous slides in new projects
It has an ingestion layer where we break apart a project, it's deck and it's slides into relationships like frameworks/visual archetypes, and then save that in a graph database plus a vector database. The user can then query "find me work we've done on geology research that might be relevant to industrial mining"
At our apartment in the South End in Boston (2023-2024), we had a nice backyard where me and my roommate would host a lot of parties. Some were more successful than others. In particular, one event (dubbed 727 for being on 7-27) was particularly unsuccessful. My good friend and DJ came to visit and we did a B2B backyard sesh. The music was amazing, vibes immaculate but we lacked the crowd. Looking back, our biggest mistakes were:
1. asking people to come at 2 PM on a weekend and saying party will go till 7 PM. There is a limit to expectations, as I have learned
2. not using Partiful or Luma (Apple Invites wasn't a thing back then) so we could never really remind people or confirm people. Plus, many flaked (~40%) or arrived very late (~70%)
3. not making the party interesting enough for 22-24 year olds - many flaked :(
4. not following rules 8 and 9 as mentioned here (whom to or not to invite given a group)
Some tips that worked for us in other parties:
1) Be very generous with drinks, make good ones and buy good beer/wine, avoid temptation to venmo request afterwards (please don't). atithi devo bhava
2) Have something to do. For us it was Dartmouth pong in our backyard lol
3) Have a good vibe
One major pro tip not mentioned: if inviting a girl you want to impress, learn to mix drinks and songs ;)
A good shake goes a long way...
It is not a question of what, but a question of why.
Why do autocrats rise to power? Why are far-right parties rising in power in Germany, France, Spain and Portugal?
I've come to see this as a fundamental human nature one can't go against. Some people are, just evil. Humans will always love self more than others. This love of self can turn into a hatred of others, or easily be turned into a hatred of others.
Acceptance that evil forces and opportunitists and populists will always be around us is the first step in asnwering what is to be done
If the closest you can get to understanding populists is “some humans are just evil and selfish”, a large part of humanity will remain mysterious and unreachable to you.
I think everyone understands tribalism to some extent. You would probably expend more effort to protect your child than you would a stranger. Populism just turns up the knob on this instinct.
Calling people who hold beliefs you find wrong "evil" is, IMO, counter-productive and will lead not only to conflict but to worse outcomes for yourself (even if your side "wins"). The root of cultural differences (both within and between societies and sub-cultures) are differing beliefs of what is right and wrong; what is morally good and morally bad.
What you view as hateful, others will view as loving. And what you view as loving, others can view as hateful. Painting the opposition in simplistic terms like "evil" and refusing to even try to see why they feel they way they feel solves nothing and empowers extremists. And when groups led by such people "win", the majority still lose.
IMO, any side of any belief, be it individualism vs collectivism, atheism vs religion, sexual openness vs sexual restraint, free speech vs censorship, capitalism vs socialism, etc, etc. can easily morph into something harmful. You may have discovered "evil", but after many decades, I've come to see that most people's hearts are in the right place. But there are always a significant fraction on any side of any issue that, for whatever reason, cannot regulate their emotions and seem to need to strive for the extremes.
Compromise can happen if you reject extremists. Solutions can be found if you understand that the extremists on your own side are as much the opposition as the other side of an issue. Purity of belief always seems attractive on the surface. But moderation is not a cop out, it's pragmatism. Moderation is the practical philosophy through which solutions can be found. Fundamentalism, extremism, dogmatism, are approaches that lead to worse outcomes. Moderation leads to better outcomes. History has shown this again and again.
> I think when people, particularly in America, think "protest", they think of people walking around with placards and other such relatively low effort involvement.
Growing up in Nepal and witnessing some large non-violent and violent protests, I was frankly, baffled to see people standing on the sides of the streets and holding sign boards as protests
Where's the rallies? Where is the mass involvement needed for a successful protest? where are the street blocks? non-voilent doesn't mean just standing there.
The first time I actually saw something worth being called a protest was during the Black Lives Matter movement. I think it exposed the American police system for what it was, and the system's inability to control protesters peacefully
I've seen a lot of protests around NYC on various topics
Recently more with Palestine
> You could have tens of millions of students and otherwise unemployed individuals walking around with placards, and nobody's going to care.
I think you're wrong here
Do it for one day nobody cares
Do it for a week, people notice
Do it for a month, you've got regime change
Far below. Occupy Wall Street was perhaps thousands of people. 3.5% of the US would be over 12 million people. 3.5% of New York City would be 350,000 people. In the street outside Wall Street. Yeah, that would have occupied Wall Street, to the point that workers would have had trouble getting in the door. Occupy Wall Street was nothing like that.
The USA has an astonishly effective machine at stomping out protests for anything more than holding up a sign. BLM in Minneapolis was allowed to go on because the politician agreed with it. (Tim Walz's wife famously noted how much she enjoyed the smell of the burning tires.) []
When I was young and still under the illusion protests did anything, I recall going to a protest during the 'occupy' days. Obama was coming into town and we wanted him to be able to hear us chanting or see our signs.
My memory is pretty bad at this point on the context, but roughly how I remember it going was he was going to some sort of convention center. We started walking there, and about halfway there this mysterious but incredibly confident and authoritative person with a megaphone showed up and told us we had succeeded and the protest was over. About 90% of people actually believed that and left. The 10% of us that were like "who the hell is this lady and why would anyone listen to her" kept going. Then the police surrounded us and beat the shit out of anyone they could get to. We never got anywhere close to Obama's route.
This sequence of events (even though expected!) reminds me a lot of the Monty Python and the Holy Grail speech:
> Listen, lad. I built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. Other kings said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp, but the fourth one... stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad: the strongest castle in these islands.
(although I suppose this ship fell over, then burned down, and then sank into the ocean)
