FourGW term? Foreign Policy? wider? or is it really a generic phrase? (more)

Fabius Maximus on the Myth of Grand Strategy. We can describe these as "grand strategies", but to do so has an element of falsity. Such intellectual analysis, based on theory, had no place in the hearts of these peoples. History also suggests than leaders cannot manufacture a "Primal Strategy." You either have it, or you don't (Emergence?)... We can only envy these "primal strategies." The people of a developed western state seldom have a widely agreed goal and the willingness to sacrifice for its achievement. History shows that a mature state often tries to imitate a "primal strategy," a vain attempt to recapture a lost element from its past. Developed states have wealth, income, and security. They have complex societies, whose elements have a wide range of goals and viewpoints (Coalition). Their leaders and people have a large degree of cynicism. All of these make a "primal strategy" difficult to achieve. Europe"s last attempt was burnt out of its culture in the fires of World War I... General Semantics also sees the world in terms of maps. It is a science of applied epistemology invented in 1933 by Alfred Korzybski. The "ABC-s" of General Semantics explain why grand strategies tend to fail, and greater ambition increases the odds of failure. (This is 1st in his 4-part Grand Strategy series.)

A. Jesse Jiryu Davis reviews Naur Programming as Theory Building. In his 1985 article “Programming as Theory Building”, Peter Naur (of Backus-Naur form) says a programmer’s main activity isn’t coding, it’s creating a theory of the problem at hand and its solution. This theory is implicit (tacit) knowledge, which can’t be written down. (more)

Daniel Nettle: It probably is that bad. The discipline of [psychology] is wringing its hands about its failure to make enough substantial and dependable scientific progress (failure of science) over the last fifty years of effort. First, we blamed our methods: hypothesizing after the results were known, researcher degrees of freedom, p-hacking and the rest. Then, we went after the theories: theories in psychology were so arbitrary. (more)

The Food That Helps Battle Depression. Now recent studies show that a healthy diet may not only prevent depression, but could effectively treat it once it’s started. (more)

A user journey is the experiences a person has when interacting with something, typically software. This idea is generally used by those involved with user experience design, web design, user-centered design, or anyone else focusing on how users interact with software experiences. It is often used as a shorthand for the overall user experience and set of actions that one can take in software or other virtual experiences. User journeys describe at a high level of detail exactly what steps different users take to complete a specific task within a system, application, or website. This technique shows the current (as-is) user workflow, and reveals areas of improvement for the to-be workflow. When documented, this is often referred to as a User Journey Map. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_journey

Jeni Miles: Apps to the Future. (more)

In 2012, aspiring to develop a time management app that helps people "use time better" and avoid procrastination, Dan Ariely co-founded Timeful with Yoav Shoham and Jacob Bank.[52][2] The app was acquired by Google in 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely#Professional_ventures_and_affiliations

David Kadavy: I Took a Week Off. Three Years Later, I Sold to Google. Three years prior, I cleared my schedule and declared what I call a “Week of Want.” I gave myself an entire week to work on whatever I wanted. I had no plan at the time — that was the point of my Week of Want. Three years later, here I was getting a surprise paycheck, thanks to that Week of Want. (more)

Scott Alexander: Chronic Psychitis. Some people have asked my opinion on a recent spate of articles like Is Depression Partly Caused By An Allergic Reaction? and Depression May Be Caused By Inflammation. (more)

GRM vs PITIA (more)

Real Estate Investing for Dummies by Eric Tyson (Author), Robert S. Griswold (Author) (more)

A real estate investment trust (REIT, pronounced "reet"[1]) is a company that owns, and in most cases operates, income-producing real estate. REITs own many types of real estate, including office and apartment buildings, studios, warehouses, hospitals, shopping centers, hotels and commercial forests.[2] Some REITs engage in financing real estate. REITs act as a bridge from financial markets and institutional investors to housing and urban development. They are typically categorized into commercial REITs (C-REITs) and residential REITs (R-REITs), with the latter focusing on housing assets, such as apartments and single-family homes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_estate_investment_trust

Mike Morris: The Client-Server Internet is Dead. It's time to declare that Client-Server architected internet "applications" (i.e. applications of the underlying Internet protocols, mainly seen as websites) (SaaS?) are dead. They've been killed by a combination of enclosure of the commons, feudal plantation ownership and everything-harvesting criminal botnets masquerading as "AI" model-building. (more)

Internet Service Provider (more)

A competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC), in the United States and Canada, is a telecommunications provider company (sometimes called a "carrier") competing with other, already established carriers, generally the incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC)... Local exchange carriers (LECs) are divided into incumbent (ILECs) and competitive (CLECs). The ILECs are usually the original, monopoly LEC in a given area, and receive different regulatory treatment from the newer CLECs. A data local exchange carrier (DLEC) is a CLEC specializing in DSL services by leasing lines from the ILEC and reselling them to Internet service providers (ISPs).[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_local_exchange_carrier (more)

Category theory is a general theory of mathematical structures and their relations. It was introduced by Samuel Eilenberg and Saunders Mac Lane in the mid-20th century in their foundational work on algebraic topology.[1] Category theory can be used in most areas of mathematics. In particular, many constructions of new mathematical objects from previous ones that appear similarly in several contexts are conveniently expressed and unified in terms of categories. Examples include quotient spaces, direct products, completion, and duality. Many areas of computer science also rely on category theory, such as functional programming and semantics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_theory (more)

W. Ross Ashby (6 September 1903 in London – 15 November 1972) was an English psychiatrist and a pioneer in cybernetics, the study of the science of communications and automatic control systems in both machines and living things. His first name was not used: he was known as Ross Ashby. His two books, Design for a Brain and An Introduction to Cybernetics, were landmark works. They introduced exact and logical thinking into the brand new discipline of cybernetics and were highly influential. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Ross_Ashby (more)

John le Carre's Son Penning New George Smiley Spy Novel. John le Carré‘s famous spy character George Smiley hasn’t retired quite yet. Nick Harkaway, le Carré’s son, is writing a new Smiley novel that will publish globally in fall 2024 (more)

see Organization Model, organization model