Hoorn, Terschelling, a walking island and an ugly watch

What was a white beach in my youth – 45 years ago – now seems to become an illustration of a walking island.

I once lost one of the first digital watches here—a Trafalgar with red numerals that lit up only when you pressed a button. My father had gotten it from a colleague, who had gotten it as a business gift but thought the thing was too ugly—something like the one below. Very ugly indeed.

News not worthy

How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve?

Neil Postman

Good taste

Good taste, to me, is liking what you see and knowing why you like it.

Seth Godin writes in The Practice:

… the ability to know what your audience or clients are going to want before they do.
… watch what the market does and learn from that.

To me, that is too much of a market-oriented view of taste. The second statement also disagrees somewhat with the first.

I don’t think you learn about good taste by observing the market. You only learn what is out there and what the people with the most enormous mouths say about what they like.

Good taste is about appreciation for the specific. The market is about appreciation for the average.

Failure narrative

From Seth Godin’s The Practice, this creator’s failure narrative:

  • There is more supply than demand; therefore, most of the feedback is rejection. From the market, from the gatekeepers.
  • The work is created with generally available tools. The group that believes they can do the same job or better is large.
  • The fanbase is transient, and the churn is significant.
  • Negative criticism spreads easier than positive feedback.
  • We work in novelty. There is always more novelty for our customers to turn to.
  • We and our customers chase creative magic. By that standard, almost all of our efforts fail.

Then, successful creators have in their favor the benefit of the doubt and tribal cognitive dissonance.

Yeah, 16.

The transcription feature in Microsoft Teams works perfectly, as my colleague informs me. He has sent me the transcription of the meeting we just concluded.

OK.

OK. OK.

He used the black from the coop. Stick to you Muslim with with our something. OK, for overhead and he is it document.

AFK Girl California phone and doing the blood. Either get it the document over, so yeah, I’ll need the. Is it a lot?

Yeah, 16.

The meeting was in Dutch.

Project 2025, an outlook on US autocracy

Yesterday, I stumbled upon Trump’s Project 2025. This project is an astonishing fascist agenda of the ultra-right wing of the Republican party that seeks to overthrow the government and install an autocratic government in which the president has all the power.

The language on the website is so amazingly hateful. What is behind this hate between left and right in the US that led to this extreme divide between the people in the US?

The 180-day playbook describes a swift transition of the entire government. For example, under the term “personnel is policy,” thousands of political jobs are planned to be re-staffed with “dedicated conservatives.”

Under the term “religious freedom,” which they claimed to correlate with poverty, economic growth, and peace, an orthodox Christian policy is promised to be instituted that bans abortion rights, LGBTQI+ rights, etcetera.

The next conservative Administration must champion the core American value of religious freedom, which correlates significantly with poverty reduction, economic growth, and peace. It should train all USAID staff on the connection between religious freedom and development; integrate it into all of the agency’s programs, including the five-year Country Development and Coordination Strategies due for updates in 2025; strengthen the missions’ relationships with local faith-based leaders, and build on local programs that are serving the poor.

We have enough evidence of what an orthodox Christian society will bring. What any society based on an orthodox religion produces: intolerance, oppression, government violence, racism, discrimination, and other extreme outgrows.

We can only hope that the people in the US, especially those typically supporting the Republican party, will distance themselves from this autocratic threat. The alternative is probably not their ideal either, but it seems approachable and rational.