Shafik Yaghmour

INTERLUDE • Electric Meters in Dutch Houses Near Amsterdam, there is a suburb of single-family houses all built at the same time, all alike. Well, nearly alike. For unknown reasons it happened that some of the houses were built with the electric meter down in the base-ment. In other houses, the electric meter was installed in the front hall. These were the sort of electric meters that have a glass bubble with a small horizontal metal wheel inside. As the household uses more electricity, the wheel turns faster and a dial adds up the accumulated kilowatt-hours. During the oil embargo and energy crisis of the early 1970s, the Dutch began to pay close attention to their energy use. It was discovered that some of the houses in this subdivision used one-third less electricity than the other houses. No one could explain this. All houses were charged the same price for electricity, all contained similar families. • The difference, it turned out, was in the position of the electric meter. The families with high electricity use were the ones with the meter in the basement, where people rarely saw it. The ones with low use had the meter in the front hall where people passed, the little wheel turning around, adding up the monthly electricity bill many times a day. 13

There always will be limits to growth. They can be self-imposed. If they aren't, they will be system-imposed. No physical entity can grow forever. If company managers, city governments, the human population do not choose and enforce their own limits to keep growth within the capacity of the supporting environment, then the environment will choose and enforce limits.

It's a great art to remember that boundaries are of our own making, and that they can and should be reconsidered for each new discussion, problem, or purpose. It's a challenge to stay creative enough to drop the boundaries that worked for the last problem and to find the most appropriate set of boundaries for the next question. It's also a necessity, if problems are to be solved well.

“The lesson of boundaries is hard even for systems thinkers to get. There is no single, legitimate boundary to draw around a system. We have to invent boundaries for clarity and sanity; and boundaries can produce problems when we forget that we've artificially created them.”

Resist and Unsubscribe

If you want to see some change in the world you should consider "Resist and Unsubscribe":

www.resistandunsubscribe.com

You don't have to unsubscribe everything even just a few multiplied by many makes an impact.

The Opt Out Guide for Everyone This is a user-friendly guide to retrieving your digital life from the Tech Giants. In a post per day over three weeks, I'll walk you through a process for changing your digital habits and services to set you up for success in 2025 and beyond. For those looking to get a headstart over the New Year, I'll lead you through from January 1-January 21, 2025. If you follow along, by January 21, 2025 you'll experience a new, fresh, digital you. Of course, you can start (or return to) this series at any time. Doing this in three weeks is intense, to be sure, but I'll try to keep the activities under an hour a day, some longer and some shorter. Rome wasn't built in a day: similarly, if you built up a digital trail over decades online, it will take some time to deconstruct. And sure, you could just take the nuclear option and blow all your accounts away. But that doesn't ensure that the data is removed from the platforms. Some of this you have to be systematic about and remove step by step. Plus, in many cases, you actually want to keep things handy. Emails. Contacts. Photos from that vacation fifteen years ago.That's okay. We'll find a way to retrieve it so that it is yours. Remember, "the cloud" is just someone else's computer. Let's bring your data back home.

There is this really great series of posts "The Cyber-Cleanse: Take Back Your Digital Footprint": www.optoutproject.net/the-cyber-cl...

I did not go through the whole thing but what I have looked at is a gold mine of privacy informations and alternative services to the big players.

"Bill of the Month": kffhealthnews.org/news/tag/bil...

For those who don't get how completely bonkers the US healthcare system is.

How do you cut the ocean in half?

Use a sea saw

🥁

Did you hear the joke about the high wall?

It was awesome, I am still trying to get over it

🥁

Picture showing various goods and their inflation rates electricity since 2020 +41% Car insurance +56% Restaurants +35% Hospital Services +29% Daycare +39% Colleges +22% Beef and Veal +59% Home Prices +46%

This is a great piece about what regular Americans are feeling price wise: www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

We talk about inflation and yes, we want to stop the bleeding but prices won't go down after that.

Anyone speaking to cost of living has to think about how you can help people today.

“When a systems thinker encounters a problem, the first thing he or she does is look for data, time graphs, the history of the system. That's because long-term behavior provides clues to the underlying system struc-ture. And structure is the key to understanding not just what is happening, but why.”

Systems fool us by presenting themselves or we fool ourselves by seing the world-as a series of events. The daily news tells of elections, battles, political agreements, disasters, stock market booms or busts. Much of our ordinary conversation is about specific happenings at specific times and places. A team wins. A river floods. The Dow Jones Industrial Average hits 10,000. Oil is discovered. A forest is cut. Events are the outputs, moment by moment, from the black box of the system.

Right now, I’m glued to my phone. Like most people in the US, I get my news from various apps – social posts, podcasts, newsletters – and when things are blowing up (literally) I can’t look away. People in Minneapolis are posting video updates from protests; experts are publishing essays about international law and the US attack on Venezuela. I have to consume them all! The weirdest part, though, is that the more I watch and read what other people are saying, the lonelier I feel. This is hardly a new or unique experience. Sociologists have been talking about it for nearly 80 years. In 1950, scholars David Riesman, Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney published a book called The Lonely Crowd, in which they argued that the rise of consumerism and mass media had led to a new kind of personality type that is deeply sensitive to loneliness. They called this personality “other-directed”, and their descriptions feel startlingly prescient in our era of social media and AI chatbots. Other-directed people are constantly attuned to what everyone around them is doing, using the preferences of their peer groups to decide what to buy, wear and think. Because their values come from peers, rather than elders or ancestors, they tend to be present-oriented and unconcerned with history. Riesman and his colleagues warned that other-directed people are obsessed with conforming, anxious to be “part of a crowd” and “having fun”. What other-directed people fear more than anything is being alone.

Riesman and his co-authors suggested two solutions to this other-directed problem. First, we need to take back our leisure hours from the hyper-consumerist sphere of media. All that effort we put into paying attention to our peers is too much like work, they argued, and we need more free play. Which brings me to their second suggestion, which is that people – and especially kids – should test out new identities and experiences. Figure out what you enjoy when nobody is telling you what “fun” is supposed to be. Do something you have never done before. Wear something dramatic or silly. Strike up a conversation with a neighbour you have never met. Surprise yourself. And see how it feels to just… experiment. You won’t figure out who you are from a “for you” feed or a chatbot. So get off your phone, do something unexpected and be yourself for a while.

"The Lonely Internet Crowd": www.newscientist.com/article/mg26...

If you read one piece today, this should be it.

“Self-organization produces heterogeneity and unpredictability. It is likely to come up with whole new structures, whole new ways of doing things. It requires freedom and experimentation, and a certain amount of disor-der. These conditions that encourage self-organization often can be scary for individuals and threatening to power structures. As a consequence, education systems may restrict the creative powers of children instead of stimulating those powers. Economic policies may lean toward supporting established, powerful enterprises rather than upstart, new ones. And many governments prefer their people not to be too self-organizing.”

This capacity of a system to make its own structure more complex is called self-organization. You see self-organization in a small, mechanistic way whenever you see a snowflake, or ice feathers on a poorly insulated window, or a supersaturated solution suddenly forming a garden of crys-tals. You see self-organization in a more profound way whenever a seed sprouts, or a baby learns to speak, or a neighborhood decides to come together to oppose a toxic waste dump.

Did you hear the one about the Agnostic, Dyslexic, Insomniac

He stayed up all night wondering if there was a dog

🥁

And now for my favorite dark programming j/k

What is the difference between a light bulb and a programmer?

The light bulb stops working when it burns out.

🥁

And, conversely, systems that are constant over time can be unresilient. This distinction between static stability and resilience is important. Static stability is something you can see; i's measured by variation in the condition of a system week by week or year by year. Resilience is something that may be very hard to see, unless you exceed its limits, overwhelm and damage the balancing loops, and the system structure breaks down. Because resilience may not be obvious without a whole-system view, people often sacrifice resilience for stability, or for productivity, or for some other more immediately recognizable system property.

Resilience arises from a rich structure of many feedback loops that can work in different ways to restore a system even after a large perturbation. A single balancing loop brings a system stock back to its desired state. Resilience is provided by several such loops, operating through different mechanisms, at different time scales, and with redundancy-one kicking in if another one fails.

“The real choice in the management of a nonrenewable resource is whether to get rich very fast or to get less rich but stay that way longer.”

Indeed, it is obvious but put this way it hits different.

In fact, just about any long-term model of a real economy should link together the two structures of population and capital to show how they affect each other. The central question of economic development is how to keep the reinforcing loop of capital accumulation from growing more slowly than the reinforcing loop of population growth—so that people are getting richer instead of poorer.*

“The human mind seems to focus more easily on stocks (levels of a good) than on flows. On top of that, when we do focus on flows, we tend to focus on inflows more easily than on outflows” “Everyone understands that you can prolong the life of an oil. based economy by discovering new oil deposits. It seems to be harder to understand that the same result can be achieved by burning less oil.”

“All models, whether mental models or mathematical models are simplifications of the real world”

“sub purposes could come in conflict with the overall purpose”

“Keeping sub purpose and the overall purposes in harmony is an essential function of a successful system”

Reading “Thinking in Systems”

“Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals”

We often get stuck on what is said and forget to look at results. If the results never match what is said then you need to realize maybe what is said is meant to mislead.

"the last decade five decades. But let me make an interesting historical point and this is maybe due to my age. Uh there's been generation after generation of AI scientists since the 1950s claiming that the technique that they just discovered was going to be the ticket for human level intelligence. You you see declarations of Marvin Minsky, Newan Simon, um you know, Frank Rosenblad who invented the perceptron, the first learning machine in 1950 saying like within 10 years we'll have machines that are as smart as humans. They were all wrong. This generation with LLMs is also wrong. I've seen three of those generation in my lifetime. Okay. Um so, you know, it's it it's just another example of being fooled"

"AI Fails at 96% of Jobs (New Study)": www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3ka...

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Studies estimate that in states with single-use plastic bag bans, Plastic bag use has decreased by around three hundred bags per person annually.!' In just two states, New Jersey and Vermont, and three cities-Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Portland, Oregon; and Santa Barbara, California-the number of single-use plastic bag saved each year could wrap around the planet forty-two times.18 The numbers don't lie: Reducing unnecessary disposable plastic reduces plastic pollution. Take Baltimore's Inner Harbor as an example-it was like a messy kitchen sink that finally got a deep clean. For years, the harbor, like many American waterways, was plagued by plastic pollution, much of it from foam takeout contain-ers. An estimated 10 million pieces of plastic debris were entering the water every year. However, after Maryland implemented a polystyrene ban in 2020, the number of containers clogging the harbor dropped by 80 percent. 19

Plastic bans have large impacts