How does a culture that prizes equality of opportunity explain, or indeedaccommodate, its persistently marginalized people?

Lest the reader misconstrue the book’s purpose, I want to make the pointunambiguously: by reevaluating the American historical experience in classterms, I expose what is too often ignored about American identity. But I’mnot just pointing out what we’ve gotten wrong about the past; I also want tomake it possible to better appreciate the gnawing contradictions still presentin modern American society.

It starts withthe rich and potent meaning that came with the different names given theAmerican underclass. Long before they were today’s “trailer trash” and“rednecks,” they were called “lubbers” and “rubbish” and “clay-eaters” and“crackers”—and that’s just scratching the surface.

Britishcolonists promoted a dual agenda: one involved reducing poverty back inEngland, and the other called for transporting the idle and unproductive tothe New World.

The hallowed American dream is thegold standard by which politicians and voters alike are meant to measurequality of life as each generation pursues its own definition of happinessunfettered by the restraints of birth (who your parents are) or station (theposition you start out from in the class system).

economic stratification createdby wealth and privilege.

eugenics

American exceptionalism, 7, 69, 190, 310, 318

Words like quality and excellence are misapplied sorelentlessly that they border on meaningless.

while efficiency was a goal, quality was the goal.

Mistakes are part of creativity.

A subversion takes place in whichstreamlining the process or increasing production supplants the ultimate goal, with eachperson or group thinking they’re doing the right thing—when, in fact, they have strayed offcourse. When efficiency or consistency of workflow are not balanced by other equally strongcountervailing forces, the result is that new ideas—our ugly babies—aren’t afforded theattention and protection they need to shine and mature.

Katherine Sarafian,a producer who’s been at Pixar since Toy Story, tells me she prefers to envision triggering theprocess over trusting it—observing it to see where it’s faltering, then slapping it around a bitto make sure it’s awake. Again, the individual plays the active role, not the process itself. Or,to put it another way, it is up to the individual to remember that it’s okay to use the handle,just as long as you don’t forget the suitcase.

As Brad Bird, who joined Pixar as a director in 2000, likes to say, “The process eithermakes you or unmakes you.” I like Brad’s way of looking at it because while it gives theprocess power, it implies that we have an active role to play in it as well.

Once you’re aware of the suitcase/handle problem, you’ll see it everywhere. People glomonto words and stories that are often just stand-ins for real action and meaning. Advertiserslook for words that imply a product’s value and use that as a substitute for value itself.Companies constantly tell us about their commitment to excellence, implying that this meansthey will make only top-shelf products. Words like quality and excellence are misapplied sorelentlessly that they border on meaningless.

Imagine an old, heavy suitcase whose well-worn handles are hanging by a few threads. Thehandle is “Trust the Process” or “Story Is King”—a pithy statement that seems, on the face ofit, to stand for so much more. The suitcase represents all that has gone into the formation ofthe phrase: the experience, the deep wisdom, the truths that emerge from struggle. Too often,we grab the handle and—without realizing it—walk off without the suitcase. What’s more, wedon’t even think about what we’ve left behind. After all, the handle is so much easier to carryaround than the suitcase.

Likewise, we “trusted the process,” but the process didn’t save Toy Story 2 either. “Trust theProcess” had morphed into “Assume that the Process Will Fix Things for Us.” It gave ussolace, which we felt we needed. But it also coaxed us into letting down our guard and, in theend, made us passive. Even worse, it made us sloppy.

Likewise, we “trusted the process,” but the process didn’t save Toy Story 2 either. “Trust theProcess” had morphed into “Assume that the Process Will Fix Things for Us.” It gave ussolace, which we felt we needed. But it also coaxed us into letting down our guard and, in theend, made us passive. Even worse, it made us sloppy.

“Story Is King” differentiated us, we thought, not just because we said it but also becausewe believed it and acted accordingly. As I talked to more people in the industry and learnedmore about other studios, however, I found that everyone repeated some version of thismantra—it didn’t matter whether they were making a genuine work of art or complete dreck,they all said that story is the most important thing. This was a reminder of something thatsounds obvious but isn’t: Merely repeating ideas means nothing. You must act—and think—accordingly. Parroting the phrase “Story Is King” at Pixar didn’t help the inexperienceddirectors on Toy Story 2 one bit. What I’m saying is that this guiding principle, while simplystated and easily repeated, didn’t protect us from things going wrong. In fact, it gave us falseassurance that things would be okay.

Likewise, we “trusted the process,” but the process didn’t save Toy Story 2 either. “Trust theProcess” had morphed into “Assume that the Process Will Fix Things for Us.” It gave ussolace, which we felt we needed. But it also coaxed us into letting down our guard and, in theend, made us passive. Even worse, it made us sloppy.

I read many such books as I set about trying to become a better, more effective manager.Most, I found, trafficked in a kind of simplicity that seemed harmful in that it offered falsereassurance. These books were stocked with catchy phrases like “Dare to fail!” or “Followpeople and people will follow you!” or “Focus, focus, focus!” (This last one was a particularfavorite piece of nonadvice. When people hear it, they nod their heads in agreement as if agreat truth has been presented, not realizing that they’ve been diverted from addressing thefar harder problem: deciding what it is that they should be focusing on. There is nothing inthis advice that gives you any idea how to figure out where the focus should be, or how toapply your energy to it. It ends up being advice that doesn’t mean anything.) These sloganswere offered as conclusions—as wisdom—and they may have been, I suppose. But none ofthem gave me any clue as to what to do or what I should focus on.

Not knowingwhere else to turn, I remember buying a copy of Dick Levin’s Buy Low, Sell High, Collect Early,and Pay Late: The Manager’s Guide to Financial Survival, a popular business title at the time,and devouring it in one sitting.

You need to understand and learn the basic ideas, from scratch.ZK is a lifetime job.

in literature notes, do you write all of the stuff from a single article/book/whatever in one note, or do you split them all into individual notes of their own, one little piece on each card/note?

typewriters are ultimately instruments of human creation, not destruction.

The typewriter division of Wanderer Werke continued unencumbered, manufacturing precision typing machines such as this one, emblazoned with its striking “WW” crest (which bears a striking similarity to the Wonder Woman logo from the 1980s).

The typewriter was made in Siegmar-Schönau—a suburb of Chemnitz—by Wanderer, an early German pioneer in manufacturing bicycles, motorcycles, cars, and later military trucks and tanks for the Wehrmacht, the armed forces in the Nazi era. In the 1930s, Wanderer’s automotive division was one of four car companies consolidated into the Auto Union AG, which later became Audi. Indeed, one of the four interconnected rings on the Audi brand logo represents Wanderer.

They collect artifacts, I collect histories.

a typewriter with the “special key” is no more or less odious than one without; it is just a matter of the meanings we humans impart upon it.

some argue that the typewriter is just an inanimate object; a tool crafted for a specific purpose, which assumes neither the responsibility of the user nor his blame.

More frequent were machines built with the double-lightning-bolt SS Siegrune, usually above the No. 3 or 5 key. With sieg meaning “victory,” the runes became ubiquitous in Nazi Germany as a shorthand rallying cry for “victory, victory!” In their more sinister application, the SS runes became the logo for the Schutzstaffel—the notorious paramilitary units most responsible for the wanton slaughter of 6 million Jews across Europe.

In very rare circumstances, a German typewriter would be made with a dedicated swastika key, like this one at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The largest online typewriter community currently boasts some 29,000 members, with no signs of slowing down.

Larry McMurtry thanked his trusty Hermes 3000 typewriter while accepting his Golden Globe for Brokeback Mountain.

At the conclusion of the war, local Czech authorities, armed militias, and regular military units ethnically cleansed nearly 3 million Bohemian Germans from Czechoslovakia. From the high-altitude perspective of postwar geopolitics, President Edvard Beneš dubbed it Czechoslovakia’s “final solution of the German question.”

As strange as it sounds today, German klein (“small” or portable) typewriters were among the most sought-after souvenirs for soldiers fighting in World War II. Think of it: Adjusted for inflation, top-of-the-line portable typewriters cost roughly the same as your MacBook Pro today, and their usable lives were measured not in months or years, but decades and generations. Consequently, thousands of Uranias, Gromas, Erikas, Rheinmetalls, Continentals, Olympias, and other high-quality, precision-made German machines were looted from Nazi military and government offices, businesses, and even from civilian homes, whether their owners were dead or alive. “War trophy” is of course a pleasant euphemism: It denotes a reward for heroism, bravery, and sacrifice, while simultaneously acknowledging that even the good guys steal, pillage, and destroy amid the haze of total war.

In the 1740s, Thomas Harrison invented a wooden filing cabinet in which the file cards could be hooked on little tin plates. On each of these plates was written the name of the entry (i.e., the re-spective subject heading), and the plates were arranged in strictly alphabeti-cal order.22

Samuel Hartlib was well aware of this improvement. While extolling the clever invention of Harrison, Hartlib noted that combinations and links con-stituted the ‘argumentative part’ of the card index.60

Instead of jotting down every note, thought, observation, excerpt, andreading on a single slip of paper and leaving them there, Placcius recom-mends grouping them, by dint of appropriate libros excerptorum (see figure2.5),39 excerpt books that follow the pattern that had guided the design ofregisters and bound library catalogs since Konrad Gessner; Placcius citesthe entire section “ De Indicibus Librorum ” from the Pandectae .40 Perhapshis strong vote for the bound form of this storage technology and againstJungius’s method is a way of warning against lifelong knowledge accumula-tions that merely gather treasures without being recombined and pub-lished as new books. Jungius, keen on including new resources, delays hisown publications time and again, leaving them unfinished or simply asraw paper slip potential in storage, on call. 4

How to start a commonplace book .t3_1bfu16h._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #edeeef; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #6f7071; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #6f7071; }

“Do you know, Watson,” said he, “that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.”

By eleven o’clock the next day we were well upon our way to the old English capital. Holmes had been buried in the morning papers all the way down, but after we had passed the Hampshire border he threw them down and began to admire the scenery. It was an ideal spring day, a light blue sky, flecked with little fleecy white clouds drifting across from west to east. The sun was shining very brightly, and yet there was an exhilarating nip in the air, which set an edge to a man’s energy. All over the countryside, away to the rolling hills around Aldershot, the little red and grey roofs of the farm-steadings peeped out from amid the light green of the new foliage. “Are they not fresh and beautiful?” I cried with all the enthusiasm of a man fresh from the fogs of Baker Street. But Holmes shook his head gravely. “Do you know, Watson,” said he, “that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.” “Good heavens!” I cried. “Who would associate crime with these dear old homesteads?” “They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.” “You horrify me!” “But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.

Is the Zettelkasten just for organised people?

Circularising

Office Organisation, of which the work here discussed forms part, 2has been considerably modified within recent years, and Avhatis called the " card system " has now come very much into vogue.

People marveled at new invention after new invention and there was a tendency to see mechanical and especially electrical advances as somehow endowed with life. The phonograph, for example, was held to be alive and print adverts even claimed it had a soul.

By having a longer historical view, it actually tends to extend our time horizons in both directions. So, by thinking more about the past, it sets us up to think more about a long-term future and to challenge ourselves to think more expansively and ambitiously about what might come by having the sense of a wider aperture to think about rather than just thinking about the here and now or what’s coming out in the next cycle.

Institute For The Future at Palo Alto that likes this technique. It’s called “Look Back to Look Forward.”

if you’ve ever heard of the futures cone, it’s this idea of you know, this kind of widening aperture; the further out you look, the less predictable things are.

The whole industry is built on this concept of planned obsolescence. That’s the term that I think IBM famously came up with in the sixties, where basically you’re intentionally trying to constantly sell people on the new new thing. And that’s what drives the stock price up. And that’s what drives the press cycle. And that’s what gets people to buy new products and things. And so, the whole industry is predicated around this idea of there’s always a new thing around the horizon.

I worked as an academic librarian, for about six years.

quote from Schopenhauer’s essay, ‘How to think for oneself’, §268:“the most beautiful thought, if not written down, is in danger of being irretrievably forgotten.”It’s from the passage where he observes that Lichtenberg thought for himself in both senses of the phrase, unlike Herder.The original essay, “Selbstdenken” was part of Schopenhauer’s book Parerga und Paralipomena II. Last authorised edition, Erstausgabe Berlin, A. W. Hayn 1851, online textLooks like Povarnin was a Schopenhauer fan!

'картотек' (card index), to find the relevant section (it's section 51. The fascination with index cards, p.68). This is pretty much the only part of the booklet that discusses index cards, though.

S. I. Povarnin, How To Read BOOKS (1924)

I also recommend a book called "An alphabet of the intellectual labour" (азбука интеллектуального труда). It had at least ten editions, I've read the 10th edition from year 1928.

“Six big devils from Japan quickly forgot how to waltz”

Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs

Many GTDers have fallen for The Toolbox Fallacy.

there’s something really magical about the information density of visuals and graphics, which I would argue is based on the fact that humans are deeply embodied in visual creatures before we were linguistic textural creatures. And so it’s kind of pulling on a much richer, kind of higher bandwidth information channel for us.

when I finish reading an article, I'm excited to go to Tinderbox and play with what I've just learned. And that is just rare. Normally that sort of work is is tedium and it doesn't feel that way.

persuasive technology, BJ Fog's contribution to the problem that we're all faced with today, which is that were addicted to our devices. So how does that work? Well, basically his theory has three parts where you have motivation, you have ability, and there's a trigger. And if you're above a certain threshold, you have the right motivation and the right ability, that trigger will trigger a behavior. If you don't have enough motivation, or if you don't have enough skill set, then that trigger won't work. Or if you have the motivation in the skill set, and the trigger doesn't happen, then you'll never trip into the behavior.

This episode's transcript was produced by an AI. If you notice any errors, please get in touch.

Paul Otlet, another great information visionary, to create a worldwide database for allsubjects.

http://userpages.umbc.edu/~burke

This volume traces the Fields and science information systems to the beginningsof the Cold War.

Concilium Bibliographicum

NovelsSense and Sensibility (1811) Pride and Prejudice (1813) Mansfield Park (1814) Emma (1816) Northanger Abbey (1818, posthumous) Persuasion (1818, posthumous) Lady Susan (1871, posthumous)Unfinished fictionThe Watsons (1804) Sanditon (1817)Other worksSir Charles Grandison (adapted play) (1793, 1800)[p] Plan of a Novel (1815) Poems (1796–1817) Prayers (1796–1817) Letters (1796–1817)

Facebook marketplace, set location in various regions. (Ymmv)Ebay (flooded with junk, diamonds in the rough are either overpriced or seller wants high shipping)Auctionninja.com (like shopgoodwill, but higher quality items on average and higher final bids on interesting items)Hibid.com (I've gotten a thing or two here)Estatesales.net (I've gotten good deals here)Estatesales.org (usually redirects to respective company sites to bid there)Shopgoodwill.com (hard to win bids on interesting items)Goodwillfinds.com (the higher end/rarer items they receive go here, so higher prices)Craigslist (usually baren of typewriters)Kijiji (I don't find much that's both interesting and feasible to ship)Etsy (meh, overpriced)

The platen was quite hard to begin with, around 100 on the Shore A hardness scale, though it would feed two sheets reliably. The platen was cleaned and treated with methyl salicylate, which brought the hardness down to about 92, and has remained at that hardness for several months.

Smith-Corona Galaxie 12 XII Blue

Smith-Corona Silent

Olympia