Works sucks. I know it, you know it, we all know it. But what if didn't have to be quite so bad.


Dream job? Sorry, I don't dream of labor.
--r/antiwork meme

A Job to Love is an introspection guide, full of prompts about how to examine activities you really enjoy, not just say you enjoy because you've been doing them for a while, or they're prestigious, or your parents expect you to. I've been lucky, in that all my jobs have been pretty easy and tolerable, with the exceptions of bad bosses and bureaucratic nonsense which is probably the same everywhere.

I really should go back and do the introspective bits in full now that I've read the entire book, but it just seemed like too much at the time.

Ghost Spin didn't quite stick the landing for me, which is a damn shame. The story starts promisingly enough with Cohen, the centuries old AI from the previous books, in the frontline navy planet of Crucible. His mission has been blown, and as the hunters come through the door, he puts a gun to his human host's head, and *bang*. Turns out even machines can die.

His fragments are everywhere in the datasphere, and if Catherine Li is smart enough and brave enough, she might be able to put them together and get her husband back, and finish Cohen's mission. The stakes are nothing less than the future of post-humanity.

Because the loss of Bose-Einstein condensates from Compton's World means that the UN's FTL system is falling apart, and humanity will die as outposts go dark all the way back into Sol. The best hope is the Drift, a strange region of space where FTL travel is still possible (or maybe it's parallel universe hopping-the math is clear, the implications impossible). Either way, the Drift is where everything matters, and UN ships of the line are duking it out with pirates with both human and Syndicate allegiances.

Llewellyn is a pirate captain, ex-Navy, former co of the USN Ada, Countess Lovelace. Piloting and fighting in the Drift requires the best AI available, and Llewellyn gets an upgrade that puts a ghost of Cohen inside his head. Llewellyn is being hunted by Astrid Avery, his former first officer and lover who betrayed him and now captains the Ada, along with the creepy people who killed Cohen in the opening.

There's a lot of intrigue and double-dealing, made even more confusing by the fact that there are two Li's after she scattercasts to Crucible. But the plot plays out mostly in Cohen's interrogation of Llewellyn's memory, a retrospective that offers few surprises since we already know where it winds up. The moment to moment writing is still solid, but the big picture stuff, especially what does it mean to survive as a human person in this universe doesn't quite hit.

The Machine That Changed the World is a landmark study of Japanese automobile manufacturing that has not aged well, and if it is what passes for groundbreaking research in management, is even more evidence that the MBA is a massive scam.

The automobile the most complex consumer good around, requiring complex and highly capitalized entities to build. In the early 1980s, Japanese automakers began comprehensively beating the US based Big Three. A group of scholars centered around the MIT Sloan business school conducted a comprehensive global review of auto manufacturing, which revealed a phenomena they called Lean Manufacturing, an extension of Taiichi Ohno's Toyota Production System.


TPS reports from Office Space.
Look what MBAs demand our respect for. They have played us for absolute fools.

Mass production is defined by efficiency through scale. By making millions of the same thing, you drive costs per unit. Human skill is removed as much as possible to keep labor costs low. The downside of mass production is an alienated labor force that doesn't care about their jobs or the final product, adversarial relationships with customers and suppliers, immense overhead in inventory, quality assurance and rework, immense capital tied up in inventory of parts and final product, and an overall system that turns like an oil tanker, taking decades to bring a product to market.

By comparison, lean production focuses on reducing waste, variability, and overhead. Frontline workers are empowered to find solutions and encouraged to stop the line rather than let a mistake persist. The whole apparatus is configured for flexibility, with die changes (switching out the expensive metal press forms) taking minutes rather than days and inventory of parts kept to an absolute minimum. A pace which maximizes long term output is found by mixing runs of more-and-less complex cars, rather than stocking massive inventories of unwanted models. Part suppliers are brought into the design and production process to find continual improvements, rather than kept in the dark via least-cost bids and components to spec diagrams. And finally, product development teams are considered a priority, with a single leader organizing the design of a new car from start to finish, with true authority over his technical specialists, rather the GM model of a weak project coordinator trying to form consensus among an ever shifting group of people who regard their true home as whatever department they were drawn from.

It all makes sense. Get good people and trust them to do their jobs. Eliminate errors, friction, and waste. Invest in producers and not overhead. Stay close to your customers and innovate frequently. And if you need a multiyear global study to figure this out, I am legitimately concerned about your brain function. Is management some kind of debilitating brain fungus?

While lean manufacturing is all well and good, there are some obvious vulnerabilities. It requires a trusted and capable workforce, not one metrified into paralysis. There has to be a distinction between discipline worthy human errors and patchable system errors. And lean benefits from short, local, and distributed supply chains. It is supremely vulnerable to single sources of origin and long supply chains, as we all found during the Pandemic. Modern logistics systems are so potent that letting an item bounce halfway around the world for months is cheaper than just doing it locally. And as someone who's been the only developer on a project with a manager, two project managers, a systems architect, a QA tester, and partial involvement of numerous other people, corporations are addicted to useless overhead.

In a further bit of hilarity, this book was written at the peak of Japanese prosperity, and while it isn't quite Yellow Peril, it is very optimistic when in reality Japan almost immediately entered a Lost Decade that has stretched into a Lost 30 Years. Toyota engineer Taiichi Ohno is a primary protagonist, yet the authors fumbled elementary elements of his biography, though he was alive and presumably available for interviews when the book was written.

I lucked into an Imperial Terra collection, starting with this story, and I'm suitably impressed. Flandry is a pilot in the Terran Navy, serving a tired and decadent empire which has been drawn into a slowly escalating proxy war between two alien species on a distant plant with a medieval level of technology. After being shot down, Flandry is rescued, becomes a trusted advisor to the human aliens, and gets roped into an interstellar escapade to the capital of a rising interstellar power, where he is implicated in a scheme by the local chief of intelligence, Max Abrams, against the diplomat Hauksberg, that has him on the run and then the hero, heading off a plot that could have crippled the Terran fleet.

As always, Anderson has deft touch with pacing, handling in 180 pages what might take a lesser author (cough David Weber cough) 600 or more. I'm excited for the rest.

I'll admit that I'm skeptical of design thinking. I think Lee Vinsel's acerbic and brutally sourced essay Design Thinking is Kind of Like Syphilis — It’s Contagious and Rots Your Brains is basically spot on. The flaws that Vinsel identifies are primarily that design thinking is that's an outsider's perspective that attempts to solve complex sociotechnical problems with one weird trick, thereby obscuring actual solutions grounded in history, local capacity building, and true insight and effort.

But design thinking may offer actual insight on a problem that you yourself have, like a job that you hate. After all, no one knows you better than you know yourself, and as Burnett and Evans explain, we often get stuck on an idea of a 'career' that we chose with little real knowledge, a linear process pushed by our parents, college major, and then the need to keep bringing home a paycheck.

As an antidote, they advise a process of true self-discovery and rapid prototyping, starting with examining your values, the kinds of things in your life that make you feel energized or drained, and then rapid prototyping of ideas and informational interviews to skip the brutal and inefficient online application process and find work that values you as a person, and not just a cog in a machine. Chapters are short, readable, and have fantastically useful advice at the end.

Unmasking Autism is an interesting contemporary rethinking of neurodiversity and disability. Price is an professor of social psychology at Loyola in Chicago. He is himself trans and autistic. The basic thesis of this book is an extension of the social model of disability, in essence that the perceived severity of autism is based on how much annoyance it causes to caregivers, and the constant psychological effort required by autistic people to exist in allistic (non-autistic) spaces and pretend to be normal, is in fact what is disabling. The way to handle autism is not to crack down with behavioral therapy and internal discipline, but to admit to it, to accommodate stimulation and personal stamina, and find a better way to live.

Mental illnesses are socially and historically determined. My own PhD is on that subject, though with ADHD rather than autism. Unlike an organic or infectious disease, mental illnesses manifesto in changes in behavior and belief, meditated through the understanding of researchers. And autism has a particularly strange and ugly history, with key work by Hans Asperger, who was involved in a eugenic Nazi project to separate his beloved 'hyper-male' mathematical savants from the "feebleminded". Autism diagnosis have spiked in recent years, up to 1 in 44 children. White boys from middle class and above families are more likely to receive a diagnosis, but gender and racial diversity is increasing.

While we know that autism is linked in families, and has to have a neurological component, the specific mechanisms are still fairly opaque. Price suggests that beyond the "Rain Man" stereotypes of hyper-rational, unemotional, male nerds, autism is part of broad spectrum of emotional and sensory regulatory disorders which may manifest as ADHD, borderline personality disorder, and seems to have a link to being trans. It's weird and complex and beyond the reach of social psychology.

But what is within the reach is how we react to autism, a lot of which is a legacy of abuse. Autism Speaks and Applied Behavioral Analysis are methods for caretakers, which involve hammering an autistic person into a normalized box. The social environment of school punishes deviance from the norm, leading to self-censorship and masking. And finally, many workplaces are needlessly loud and chaotic. Very small and reasonable accommodations, in terms of accepting stimming behavior, encouraging exploration of niche obsessions, and allowing time and space to calm down and prevent meltdowns, can all let autistic people lead fulfilling lives.

Price is against high and low functioning as a categorizing, preferring to discuss support needs. And this book is great for people with minimal support needs. It has much less to help those with critical support needs, autistic people with profound communication impairments or sensitivity to sensations. Still, a fascinating and very readable piece of applied disabilities scholarship.

Kotkin is a leading Russian historian and author of a well-received book about everyday life under Stalin, so his biography of the man himself can be expected to be deeply researched, comprehensive, and groundbreaking. And all of those expectations are well-met.

More than a biography of Stalin, this is a book about the fall of the Tsars and the rise of Communism, a sprawling journey across two continents and decades. A biography of a figure like Stalin is innately challenging; how do you balance the man, the leader, and the mass murderer? Kotkin avoids a straightjacket theoretical paradigm, showing Stalin as a canny tactician and theorist, who turned the chaos of the Russian revolution into a personal dictatorship, using the Communist Party as an instrument to extend his power down to the lowest levels.

Vol. 1 of the three volume series covers Stalin's childhood, rise to power, and the decision to 'de-Kulakize' farming in 1928, forced collectivization which sent millions into the nightmare of the gulag system, and killed millions more through famine. Kotkin argues that the collectivization was a distinctly Stalinist move, based on his understanding of the nature of class warfare, and the availability of secret police power against 'internal enemies'. A second major innovation in scholarship is Kotkin's evaluation of Lenin's Testament. This short document, produced at the end of 1922 when Lenin was crippled by strokes, provided negative evaluation of top communists, including Stalin. Kotkin argues the document was written by personal secretaries around Lenin, not the man itself, but it was treated as credible by the Communist Party, and hung like a sword of Damocles over Stalin's power.

So this book is deeply researched, and as good as scholarship gets. It's also a slog, 740 pages of text and another 200 or so of footnotes. And while individual anecdotes sparkle, there's a layer of distance from the times and the man himself.

I guess I'm up for the next two books, but I'm not exactly looking forward to it.

Operation Underworld is dadly historical narrative non-fiction about one of the weirder alliances in a war full of weird alliances. In early 1942, as the United States entered the war and Nazi U-boats sank ships by the scores up and down the coast, security of the ports was a major concern. A naval reserve intelligence officer, Commander Charles Radcliffe Haffenden, with a unclear remit, limited resources, and immense personal daring, decided to do whatever it took to develop sources along the New York waterfront, and that meant the Mafia.

An immense amount of war material moved through the port of New York, and sabotage was the first major concern. The waterfront was intensely mobbed up, a network of territories and bosses all ruled by the iron code of silence the Mafia called omerta. Collaborating with the authorities was forbidden. Haffenden managed to convince a capo working out of a fish market, a beefy man by the name of "Socko" Lanza that it was his patriotic duty to help the Navy, and Lanza agreed, and also said that real cooperation required the approval of Charles 'Lucky' Luciano, the currently imprisoned head of the five families.

Haffenden sent word to Luciano, Luciano said yes out of a combination of patriotism and self-interest, and the partnership started up. It's military effects are mixed at best. Sabotage appears to be a largely overblown threat, with Nazi special agents bumbling their way into the hands of the FBI, and local radicals equally incompetent. Mafia-connected individuals provided intelligence for the landings in Sicily, as well as some on-the-ground help. Most key, supplies kept flowing through the ports without strikes or stoppages.

Neither of the participants got what they wanted out of the deal. Haffenden wound up thrown under the bus by the Navy, since he had greatly exceeded his authority and blemished their reputation. Luciano used Operation Underworld meetings as a cover for setting up his gambling syndicate, and while his sentence was commuted, he was deported to Italy and never returned to New York.

In one of those weird historical twists, Operation Underworld would likely have been completely buried, except Luciano was obsessed with the idea that New York Governor Thomas Dewey (of "Dewey Defeats Truman" fame) owed him favors, and Dewey commissioned an extensive report to clear his name, which didn't really do much, but set down thousands of pages of primary sources. These sources have been declassified since the late 1970s, and there are other books, but Black has added a novelistic flair, which adds interest to what is otherwise a rather vague and bureaucratic story that happens to involve the Mafia, but also isn't quite history.

I will be decrepit and in my deathbed with almost everything lost, the faces of my family, my favorite songs, but one thing will remain.


Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.

Wetware is a popular introduction to microbiology, framed by Bray's contention that even the simplest cell is an information processing system. And as even basic observation shows, this must be true. E. coli moves towards nutrients and away from poisons. Amoebas are microscale apex predators, stretching towards lesser protozoans with psuedopods. And higher organisms are delicately orchestrated complexes of organs and tissues, grown from a single zygote that contains every necessary instruction encoded in the four base pairs of DNA.

Information processing is the central metaphor of our era, much as clockwork was that of Newton's. However, as a popular book, Wetware is often frustratingly vague about the details. Methylation turns proteins and genes on and off. The addition or removal of phosphorus groups from proteins provides necessary energy to combat entropy and also serves to time processes. But information as we use it is all symbolic processing, which as the Church-Turing thesis argues is the same thing, no matter the hardware. Binary digital logic is just the easiest to engineer. Wetware processing is something profoundly different, an analog process of protein interaction occurring at the speed of molecular diffusion. A physics simulation of a single cell would be a massive computational endeavor, yet it's unclear of a statistical abstraction would preserve whatever vital processes makes the whole thing work.

Fascinating, especially for someone who last took a bio course in 9th grade, but I wanted something deeper and bolder.

Heavy gaming is my primary hobby. I love intricate strategy games, boardgames with lots of little pieces, and improvised joy of a good RPG session. And while I was never primarily a games studies scholar, much of what I read (click the 'games' tag on this post) didn't land, missing what I found worthwhile in gaming.

Games: Agency As Art is the book which represent maturity of philosophy of games. Nguyen is an avid gamer, and he links gaming to the tradition of philosophy on aesthetics. Games are first and foremost activities of fun, and he identifies the specific form of fun as striving. Winning and the psychology of flow states are an adjunct to the primary pleasure of trying one's best. And certainly, while I enjoy winning, a well-played loss is more fun than a trivial victory. As an aesthetic object, games are inscriptions of agency, specific rules that tell you how to act and what to think about. You don't have to follow the rules, but if you don't you're playing a different game.

Having precisely identified the pleasure of games, and what makes for proper gaming, Nguyen turns his attention to the use of games. Other scholars have gotten caught up in the moral power of games, their ability to make us attuned to injustice in the world, which is a use of games, but saying that is like saying that the point of Cubism is to make us attentive to the horror of aerial bombing. It misses the forest for a single tree. Rather, the limited and narrow universe of the game serves as training ground for a specific type of agency, a set of values and skills, which we practice by playing. In real life, being able to shuffle among agencies is a useful skill: to decide whether to approach a problem as one of logistic optimization, geometric organization, or personal diplomacy. Rather than reducing the world down to a single limited set of ends, games help us pick appropriate ends.

My only caveat is that this is a work of analytical philosophy. Nguyen is in fact quite clear and readable for a philosopher, but that is faint praise, and getting through this book requires a level of comfort with arcane distinctions.