text:
new-article 111605271540159 https://lifestyle.livemint.com story https://lifestyle.livemint.com News /news/opinion/remembering-nehru-the-great-communicator-111605271540159.html https://images.livemint.com/img/2020/11/13/68x68/172703ac-232a-11eb-b096-187b5d063d34_1605271539830_1605271742414.jpg
Home > News> Opinion > Remembering Nehru, the great communicator
Remembering Nehru, the great communicator
On his 131st birth anniversary, we ask how Jawaharlal Nehru would have dealt with covid-19 and the India-China stand-off in 2020
/news/opinion/remembering-nehru-the-great-communicator-111605271540159.html 111605271540159 story
Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi in 1946. (Alamy)
By Rahul Jacob
When Jawaharlal Nehru died in May 1964, the academic Purushottam Agrawal was a boy living in a Gwalior neighbourhood that was a bastion of the Hindu Mahasabha. Yet Agrawal recounts that the mahant of the main temple, ordinarily a staunch critic of Nehru, was grief-stricken. "We will criticise many of his actions but how can I forget his sufferings for the nation. He should have lived longer but for this wretched, perfidious China," the head priest lamented. The priest repeated a then widely told yarn that Nehru had been a great yogi in his previous life: "Such people are not ordinary human beings."
In his autobiography, Nehru confesses that he was so embarrassed by the "flowery" hyperbole of so many speeches about him that he was tempted to stick out his tongue or stand on his head in response. "Only a saint or an inhumane monster", he complained, could survive such adulation. Decades on, the social media myth-manufacturers of the Hindutva project have created fake news about him of an altogether more vicious order. "Nehruvian" has been made lazy shorthand for almost anything wrong with India.
Agrawal's Who Is Bharat Mata?, a compendium of writing by Nehru and about Nehru by luminaries such as Vallabhbhai Patel, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Martin Luther King, published in paperback this summer, is a high-minded rebuttal. He lets these great leaders make the case for Nehru. Patel's speech on Nehru's 60th birthday moved me to tears because such generosity of spirit and nobility in politics is so conspicuously absent today. "It is difficult for people to imagine how much we miss each other when we are apart and unable to take counsel together," Patel said. "(His) noble record and great achievements are an open book, hardly (needing) any commendation from me."
Agrawal's introduction burnishes Nehru's reputation as the maker of modern India. The selections elaborate on Nehru's idea of India as an inclusive, secular nation while underlining his deep love of its culture and history. Agrawal recounts how Nehru's quick temper was exercised by a boisterous crowd at a public meeting in Bihar, and how he silenced them with a spontaneous yet relevant reference to the state's history. In a manner similar to Ramachandra Guha, Nehru's de facto contemporary biographer in countless essays and works such as India After Gandhi, Agrawal credits Nehru with building strong foundations for democracy in a multi-religious and multilingual country that also happened to be pre-industrial.
The title of the book draws on Nehru's response to repeated cries of "Bharat Mata Ki Jai" when he arrived to address large crowds. He would famously ask people what they meant by Bharat Mata. On one occasion, a Jat peasant replied that they meant the land around them. Nehru offers them an alternative definition, a concise political science lesson: "These millions of Indian people" are Bharat Mata. "Victory to Bharat Mata can only mean 'victory to these people'."
Given that Nehru was usually met with loud cheers of "Jawaharlal ki Jai" and lassoes of garlands, these musings are of a passionate democrat, determined to build an egalitarian ethos in one of the world's most unequal countries. In another passage, Nehru explains in a speech in Hindi that a prime minister is more a servant than a raja; if the people were ever displeased, they could take him "by the ear and unseat him". Contrast this with the hate speech in January that characterised the Delhi elections; in India, the past really is a foreign country.
2020, a tumultuous decade conflated, is thus a poignant time to reread Nehru. India is witnessing both a once-in-a-century pandemic and a build-up of tens of thousands of troops at the border with China, almost 60 years after the Indian Army was routed in 1962 when Nehru was prime minister. What progress has been made in health and defence since and how might Nehru have responded?
Nehru had a degree in natural sciences from Cambridge University. He pushed for institutes of fundamental research as well as the Indian Institutes of Technology. He would have applauded the 300 Indian scientists who banded together in April to fight the fake news pandemic about covid-19 and such canards as cow urine being a cure. Nehru, the great communicator, would have explained in copious detail how the virus spreads.
It is not coincidental that the countries with measured policies to combat covid-19 have been led by scientists such as Angela Merkel in Germany (where, despite a recent spike, overall infections have been well below other large European countries) or Chen Chien-jen, an epidemiologist and former vice-president of Taiwan, which has had more than 200 days without a new case.
But India's meagre allocation of resources to public health, about 1.5% of GDP, has handicapped its responses to covid-19. This neglect of public health dates back to Nehru's era. Mao's China relied on legions of barefoot doctors in the late 1960s to substantially raise primary healthcare standards. Guha has argued that Nehru could have drafted former freedom fighters to improve primary education. Economists Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen have critiqued early five-year Plans—but also governments in this century—for not spending nearly enough on both health and education. Then and now, India's is a "socialist" government mostly only in its disdain for business.
Paradoxically, India's ratio of defence spending to GDP has remained low decades after 1962. The defence analyst Ajai Shukla told me that when one factors in that a good proportion of India's armaments in the 1950s were subsidised by countries such as Britain selling, say, aircraft carriers second-hand, India's relative spending on defence has not moved perceptibly.
Nehru was certainly naive in his dealings with the Chinese in the 1950s; his reflexive anti-imperialism made him foolishly believe the two populous Asian nations were compatriots. Nehru and then defence minister Krishna Menon bungled terribly in sending an under-funded and ill-equipped army to war but viewed through a contemporary prism, Nehru's misunderstanding of China seems less unique—and more a repeated pattern of India-Chinese and, indeed, of Sino-US relations. Early this month, chief of defence staff Bipin Rawat warned that India is at risk of a prolonged conflict with China, months after extensive incursions along the Ladakh border. Prime Minister Narendra Modi met President Xi Jinping 18 times in six years, but this summitry from Wuhan to Mammallapuram has yielded little.
China is much more widely covered today than it was in Mao's time; for years now, Xi and China's aggressiveness has been as apparent as the Great Wall, yet, once again, India was taken by surprise. A more compliant media has kept the conflict mostly off the front pages; pseudo-nationalist TV channels have waged a war against marijuana in Bollywood. In 1962, Indian women knitted sweaters and donated gold for soldiers at the front; in the third quarter of 2020, China's Xiaomi, Vivo and others made up five of the six best-selling mobile phones in India.
Unlike in Nehru's era, perceptions of leadership today matter more than the reality, by political leaders' event management and mastery of social media rather than their ethics or abilities. President Donald Trump's strong showing in the US election despite his racism, and presiding over a shambolic response to the pandemic, is one example.
By contrast, Nehru believed "nation-building (demanded) infinite patience; processes and institutions could only endure through cumulative acts of consolidation", as Madhav Khosla eloquently argued in Letters For A Nation. The book is a compilation of wise, wide-ranging letters of statecraft that Nehru wrote every fortnight to chief ministers, the antithesis of today's tweets. He wanted a "united India in the real sense of the word, a psychological integration of our people". This was why supporters who chanted "Bharat Mata ki Jai" needed to understand that they were cheering for their fellow Indians. It explains his tireless repetition in prescient letters to India's chief ministers that they should stand guard against bureaucracy and police displaying a majoritarian bias. As the head priest in Gwalior put it, "Such people are not ordinary human beings."
Rahul Jacob is a former South China correspondent for the Financial Times.


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Q: Blanc vbCritical VBA message when ribbon is customized in Excel 2007 I'm developing an Excel-2007/VBA application in which the ribon is customized and do experience a big problem.
In my Robbpn there are 10 button who have attached to them a getVisible callback and one also has a dynamic label (also using a call back) (= a total of 11 callbacks). These all work fine.
Two problems however do appear:
1 not so important but possible related) When a run my macro program having set a breakpoint in VBA then as soon as that breakpoint is and the VBA editor appears I get 11 time an Alert showing the message: Can't execute code in breakmode.
2 (important error). In my VBA-application i'm doing an sql query using Connection.ODBCConnection.Refresh. This query is slow. After about 10 secondes my window background changes (to light blue) although screenupdating=false. At that moment the first of 11 error alert appears. These alerts do not contain any text only a vbCritical icon an Ok and a Help button. When pressing that OK button (11 times) my program continues completing the refresh and all is fine.
Is there anyway to eliminate these alerts. (by the way an on error does not trap them, nor are the influenced by Application.displayAlerts true or false or screenUpdating true or false).
Anyone has some tips to solve this?
Greating John

A: I found a solution.  Turn off multi-theading calculation in the Advanced Excel Options for formulas.  I found additional documentation indicating the ribbon callbacks are not thread safe.
Item 1 is the intended behavior when using the ribbon. The second item is not intended, and I have not found a resolution as yet.  In my case, my Ribbon checkboxes will lose their state when this occurs.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


A little more than a century ago, one man, John D. Rockefeller, controlled 90 percent of all U.S. oil and was the richest man in the world. Today, the foundations run by his heirs are attacking that same fossil fuel industry. The Rockefeller Family Fund and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund both donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to non-profits that are suiing Exxon, SunCor, and other major energy companies on behalf of the city of Boulder, as well as Boulder County and San Miguel County in Colorado.
"Suncor and Exxon have known about the costly consequences of fossil fuel use for more than 50 years. Yet they continued to promote and sell their products, while recklessly deceiving the public and policymakers about the dangers," wrote EarthRights International (ERI), one of two DC-based nonprofits that filed the suits, in April.
What the group didn't disclose was that Rockefeller donations made their lawsuits possible. Both ERI and the Niskanen Center (the other DC nonprofit working pro bono on the case) have received well-timed donations from Rockefeller family charities. This private money is being used to fund legal work on the lawsuits against Suncor and Exxon, a case intended to force energy companies to cover the costs of damages related to global warming, such as droughts, fires, and floods. Though the cities didn't specify the damages requested, supporters think that a settlement could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, which would make a good payday for the lawyers involved.
Neither the Niskanen Center nor ERI are licensed to practice law in Colorado, so the case was filed by Kevin Hannon and the Hannon Law Firm. Hannon's professional biography explains that he practices in the areas of torts, personal injury law, liability, and insurance bad faith. The terms of the Hannon contract haven't yet been made public, but law firms in similar cases stand to take home 23.5 percent of any damages won, a sum that could easily reach the tens of millions.
That payoff hinges on a big if, though. In the meantime, it looks like the Rockefeller charities are helping to support the legal work needed to launch the suit.
According to the Rockefeller Brother's Fund's online grant database, the Nisken Center received a $200,000 donation "for its climate program" on February 22, 2018. The Boulder lawsuit was filed on April 17th.
Meanwhile, the Rockefeller Family Fund is listed as an "Institutional Funder" for the ERI and Kavita Ramdas, a trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, also sits on the ERI leadership council.
"Not coincidentally at all, 14 local and county governments and the State of Rhode Islandfiled such lawsuits in the last year, trying to make big oil companies pay their fair share for climate adaptations — the fortifications against the consequences, for instance, of rising seas, extreme weather and prolonged droughts. (The Rockefeller Family Fund has funded organizations that support the goals of these lawsuits,)" they wrote.
Rockefeller money also made its way to lawyer Matt Pawa, the man largely responsible for developing the climate lawsuit strategy in the first place. Before San Francisco and Oakland, Cal. filed their public nuisance lawsuits against Exxon and other major energy companies in September, 2017, Pawa worked for years to set up the cases and to find the best jurisdiction. And he did so in part thanks to Rockefeller money.
The Rockefellers supported Pawa's efforts through donations to a group called the Global Warming Legal Action Project (GWLAP), which Pawa formed in 2004 and led for years. Through subsidiary groups, including the Sustainable Markets Fund and the Civil Society Institute, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund donated some $200,000 to Pawa and his associates.
The Rockefeller money adds an odd veneer to what otherwise looks like a more straight-forward tort case. It also adds a touch of cosmic irony: The Rockefeller charities are spending large sums to take down a corporation descended from Standard Oil, the very firm that made them rich.


Brisbane-based trio MTNS release 'Waves'.
The electronic production reflects the title of the track as the bass lines roll over you like waves in the ocean…or much like positive and negative aspects of life hitting you one at a time.
Expect their 'Like A Stone' EP out soon.


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Q: Why show all data from mysql databese if I hit saarch button by keep search field blank and need extra one HTML button for all Entries.? When i keep search field blank and hit on search button, then show all results from  mysql database, Why.... here is my php code....
I want to create it, when i keep search field blank and click search button... have to show error "no search result" and want to create disallowed white spacing search and need extra one HTML button for all Entries. By one click so that i get all entries......
please help me....
 <?php

$con=mysql_connect('localhost', '1093913', 'tanim1996');
$db=mysql_select_db('1093913');

if(isset($_POST['button'])){    //trigger button click

  $search=$_POST['search'];

  $query=mysql_query("select * from iconic19 where student_id like '%{$search}%' || name like '%{$search}%' || phone like '%{$search}%' || blood like '%{$search}%' || district like '%{$search}%' ");

if (mysql_num_rows($query) > 0) {
  while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($query)) {

 echo "
";
               echo "
";
                echo "".$row['student_id']."	";
               echo "".$row['name']."	";
                 echo ""."".$row['phone'].""."	";
                echo "".$row['blood']."	";
                echo ""."".$row['email'].""."	";
                echo "".$row['district']."	";
                echo "
";
echo "
";

  }
}else{
    echo "
No results

";
  }

}else{                          //while not in use of search  returns all the values
  $query=mysql_query("select * from iconic19");

 while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($query)) {

  }

}

mysql_close();
?>

Its Html Code
<form id="nbc-searchblue1" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data" autocomplete="off">

    <input id='wc-searchblueinput1' placeholder="Search Iconic..." name="search" type="search" autofocus>

    <input id='nbc-searchbluesubmit1' value="Search" type="submit" name="button">

 Show all

</form>

Its css Code..
.view-all a {
    background: red;
    padding: 10px;
    border-radius: 4px;
    color: #fff;
    text-decoration: none;
}

A: Just check if $_POST['search'] is blank then display your message else execute your query.

A: <?php

$con=mysql_connect('localhost', '1093913', 'tanim1996');
$db=mysql_select_db('1093913');

if(isset($_POST['button'])){    //trigger button click
    $numRows = 0;
    if(!empty($_POST['search'])) {
        $search = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['search']);
        $query = mysql_query("select * from iconic19 where student_id like '%{$search}%' || name like '%{$search}%' || phone like '%{$search}%' || blood like '%{$search}%' || district like '%{$search}%' ");
        $numRows = (int)mysql_num_rows($query);
    }

    if ($numRows > 0) {
        while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($query)) {

            echo "
";
            echo "
";
            echo "".$row['student_id']."	";
            echo "".$row['name']."	";
            echo ""."".$row['phone'].""."	";
            echo "".$row['blood']."	";
            echo ""."".$row['email'].""."	";
            echo "".$row['district']."	";
            echo "
";
            echo "
";

        }
    } else {
        echo "
No results

";
    }
} else {                          //while not in use of search  returns all the values
    $query = mysql_query("select * from iconic19");

    while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($query)) {

    }
}

mysql_close();

?>

What I have done was creating a new variable $numRows with a default value of 0. If your search is empty there is no query to the database. I escaped your $search variable.
BTW: Please change to mysqli, the mysql extension is no longer supported in newer php versions.


Site Description we provide online registration services for sporting events that allows athletes to search for events, results, photos, and online registration in one convenient place. our online registration service is free for promoters.
Site Description in Open Directory Provides customized, detailed information about sports events in North America.


SEC and CFTC Testimony on Virtual Currencies: Is More Regulation on the Horizon?
On February 6, 2018, Chairman Clayton of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Chairman Giancarlo of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) testified before the Senate Banking Committee (the Committee) on their agencies' oversight role for virtual currencies. Consistent with his prior statements, Clayton took a strong stance on SEC regulation of Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). But, when it came to cryptocurrencies themselves, he and Giancarlo struck a somewhat more circumspect tone. In particular, despite acknowledging that their existing jurisdiction does not extend to spot transactions in cryptocurrencies, the Chairmen did not yet seek additional regulatory authority.
On Friday, January 12th, during an appearance at The Economic Club in Washington, D.C. United States Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced that the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) was forming a virtual currency working group. The announcement follows FSOC's discussion of virtual currency issues, including "price volatility, investor protection and the potential for illicit use", and commitment to continue reviewing these risks at its meeting in December.


text:
Das Haus Freiherr-vom-Stein-Straße 3, 5 ist ein denkmalgeschütztes Gebäude in der Stadt Quedlinburg in Sachsen-Anhalt.

Lage
Das Haus befindet sich nördlich der historischen Quedlinburger Altstadt und ist im Quedlinburger Denkmalverzeichnis als Wohnhaus eingetragen.

Architektur und Geschichte
Das zweigeschossige Gebäude entstand Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts. Das verputzte Doppelhaus verfügt straßenseitig vor jeder Haushälfte über einen Risalit, der jeweils von einem Ziergiebel bekrönt wird. Die südliche Haushälfte ist im Heimatstil, die nördliche im Jugendstil gestaltet.

Literatur
 Landesamt für Denkmalpflege Sachsen-Anhalt (Hrsg.): Denkmalverzeichnis Sachsen-Anhalt. Band 7: Falko Grubitzsch, unter Mitwirkung von Alois Bursy, Mathias Köhler, Winfried Korf, Sabine Oszmer, Peter Seyfried und Mario Titze: Landkreis Quedlinburg. Teilband 1: Stadt Quedlinburg. Fliegenkopf, Halle 1998, ISBN 3-910147-67-4, Seite 114

Kulturdenkmal in Quedlinburg
Wohngebäude in Quedlinburg
Erbaut in den 1900er Jahren
Freiherr-vom-Stein-Straße (Quedlinburg)
Quedlinburg

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Hello! Please if someone can help with instructions how to do it.. Is it stored in ECU or DASH, what eprom, and algo..?
Here is dump from dash. Eprom is Xicor X5083. It is 2473,3 working hours and I need 2220.. If someone can help to recalibrate..
Hi darkoman , i have the same board you are working on , can you tell me which one on the board is the Xicor X5083 ?
i can power-up on bench , but it need a signal from ECU, it reads input from the Display .
Sorry but at the moment I dont have access to Bobcat so cant try it. But thanks anyway for trying to help me.. Will let you know in a few days if there is a chance to get access to Bobcat..
No problem at all, wanted to know how did you take apart the ECU to read the EEPROM ?
the ECU i have here is sealed and have to cut it in pieces to access the EEPROM . maybe a picture ?
What program for rewriting the eeprom X5083 using?


COSKO IS NOT AN UNPAID INTERN !
Capitol Police on October 3 arrested 27-year old congressional staffer Jackson Cosko for posting on Wikipedia the private addresses of three members of the Senate Judiciary Committee—what's known as "doxxing" (a word derived from the shorthand for "document"). Cosko is facing serious charges that include illegally posting private information of public figures, witness tampering, threats, identity theft, and unlawful entry.
How Trump is changing the balance of some of the most powerful courts in the U.S.
David Mamet had a famous saying, essentially: …'in order for democrats, liberals, progressives et al to continue their illogical belief systems they have to pretend not to know a lot of things'… By pretending 'not to know' there is no guilt, no actual connection to conscience. Denial of truth allows easier trespass.
This hate-filled Democrat ideology relies on your willingness to reconcile their presentations and grant benefit within their seeds of doubt. Do not look away.
The new liberal standard turns American due process upside down.
The last-minute accusation of sexual assault against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is an ugly spectacle by any measure. But if there is a silver lining, it is that the episode is providing an education for Americans on the new liberal standard of legal and political due process.
As Ms. Hill and Sen. Hirono aver, the Democratic standard for sexual-assault allegations is that they should be accepted as true merely for having been made. The accuser is assumed to be telling the truth because the accuser is a woman. The burden is on Mr. Kavanaugh to prove his innocence. If he cannot do so, then he is unfit to serve on the Court.
This turns American justice and due process upside down. The core tenet of Anglo-American law is that the burden of proof always rests with the person making the accusation. An accuser can't doom someone's freedom or career merely by making a charge.
The Senate Judiciary committee hasn't even seen the original letter…only a "redacted" version???!!!
His defeat taught interest groups to demonize judicial nominees based solely on their worldview.
by Mark Pulliam Mr. Pulliam, a contributing editor at the Law and Liberty website, blogs at MisruleOfLaw.com. This article is adapted from the Summer issue of City Journal.
When Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement in June, liberal interest groups were apoplectic. Many Senate Democrats, including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, vowed to oppose any nominee and kept their promise when President Trump nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Liberal groups rail against him for transparently political reasons: They don't like the way they think he will vote, as if he were a legislator.
The confirmation process for Supreme Court nominees hasn't always been so contentious and partisan. The Senate used to evaluate nominees based on qualifications and temperament. As recently as 1986, the upper chamber unanimously confirmed Justice Antonin Scalia. But things changed the following year, when a Democratic Senate denied confirmation to perhaps the most qualified candidate ever nominated to the court: Robert Bork.
Despite Bork's unsurpassed credentials, liberals opposed him solely because of his conservative judicial philosophy. They succeeded and in the process coined a new verb, "to bork." The confirmation process for Supreme Court nominees has been corrupted ever since.
The Bork saga has begun to recede from public consciousness, so it's worth recalling those events and the man at the center of them. Bork had an illustrious legal career. After graduating from the University of Chicago, where he obtained both his undergraduate and law degrees, he practiced law with the prestigious firm Kirkland & Ellis, where he became a partner. He joined the faculty of Yale Law School—generally considered the nation's best—in 1962, specializing in antitrust and constitutional law.
Bork left his tenured position at Yale to serve in the Nixon and Ford administrations. From 1973-77, he served as solicitor general, the third-ranking official in the Justice Department, representing the federal government before the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Warren Burger rated Bork the most effective advocate to appear before the court during his tenure.
Following a brief return to Yale, in 1982 Ronald Reagan appointed Bork to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The American Bar Association gave him its highest rating, "exceptionally well qualified," and in February 1982 the Senate unanimously confirmed his nomination.


Waitakere Gymnastics offers excellent classes to suit all ages from pre-school to teens. This fantastic gymnasium has been purpose built to facilitate the development, success and promotion of gymnastics in Central West Auckland. The Club also offers tumbling, trix boys and adult classes, birthday parties, school holiday programs and additional facilities for other sports and activities.
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In the 20th century people were allowed to smoke in the office, the cinema, at restaurants, indoors and outdoors. Once women were able to smoke freely, smoking became a social norm. Adolescents smoked regularly – doctors even recommended it.
Cigarette sales peaked in the 1960s and have drastically declined since then. Tobacco products were once displayed across billboards and magazine covers. Smokers could enjoy the pleasures of lighting up a cigarette just about anywhere. At one point even pregnant women were encouraged to smoke.


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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


I've hemmed and hawed at the idea that Apple would create a TV. For a long time, I was convinced that a 32" panel with Apple TV baked in and the opportunity to purchase an iTunes subscription would be perfect. However, the lack of a music subscription seemed like a non-starter. Also, people kept reminding me that TVs are such a cut-throat business that even Apple wouldn't be able to charge its requisite 50% margin on the product.
If anything, Apple would make a TV of its own with Apple TV baked in. With one or two HDMI inputs, I guess that would make a semi-viable product for today's living room - especially when bundled with an iTunes subscription.
Apple has pre-bought in its supply chain ever since iPod. If this $4B investment is in large format LCD screens, I would definitely believe a real Apple TV is coming.


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The Friends will be building steps out of railway sleepers, to improve access to the meadow areas , also will be constructing some dead hedging around the meadows and along the paths to create a habitat for the birds and insects.
Tools will be supplied. We have a few pairs of gloves, but please bring your own if you have them.


Dr. Indulekha Gopal, MD is an infectious disease specialist in Boca Raton, FL and has been practicing for 23 years. She specializes in infectious disease medicine.
Caring, lovely, expert infectious disease physician who followed up with me even though she was out of the office. There are not enough words to explain how amazing she has been to me. Thank you for the kindness, Dr Gopal.
×Post a ResponseAre you Dr. Indulekha Gopal, MD?
Check the quality of care at hospitals where Dr. Gopal treats patients.


Abstract:Mark Twin was a famous writer and speech-maker. The book Hard Years talked about the hardships of life and the efforts of opus with the Chinese who lived in American and the book has a great influence on Chinese people in the paper. The Chinese become weakness and indecision because of life's environment. However, after reading Hard Years, efforts should be made to change the situation and create their times. Secondly, China has the same time with Mark Twin. That is, the late Qing dynasty. And at that time, it has a poor reputation and people do not have much to depend on for their living. Therefore, they were enlightened after Chinese people reading the book of Mark Twain and combining the situation---as long as the people in china against with unhealthy tendency by means of your wills and spirits, treating earnestly their weakness and correct it the country will get stronger.


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Stew's Letter
Stew 🍲 Fortier
God Is Dead: He Was Killed by These 6 Sam Harris Quotes
Stewart Fortier July 14, 2019
Hedonism didn't kill God, rationality did; and there are few more rational thinkers in this galaxy than the author Sam Harris.
For 20 years, Sam Harris has been launching truth-seeking missiles into the heart of humanity's most cherished traditions.
I first heard Sam Harris on a Tim Ferriss podcast in 2014 and remember thinking, "this is the most rational and articulate person I have ever listened to."
Since then, I've read every one of his books, watched just about every YouTube video he's in, and even hung out with him a couple of times at TED.
But after years of following Harris, I still think some of his best insights are in his first book The End of Faith -- an unrelentingly rational book that fundamentally shaped how I think about religion.
Here are six mind-stretching Sam Harris quotes from The End of Faith that deleted the space previously reserved in my mind for "God":
"The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.
Because each new generation of children is taught that religious propositions need not be justified in the way that all others must, civilization is still being besieged by the armies of the preposterous.
We are, even now, killing ourselves over ancient literature.
Who would have thought something so tragically absurd could be possible?"
- Sam Harris, The End of Faith
"Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it.
Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence what so ever."
"Anyone being flown to a distant city for heart-bypass surgery has conceded, tacitly at least, that we have learned a few things about physics, geography, engineering, and medicine since the time of Moses."
"The doors leading out of scriptural literalism do not open from the inside.
The moderation we see among nonfundamentalists is not some sign that faith itself has evolved; it is, rather, the product of the many hammer blows of modernity that have exposed certain tenets of faith to doubt."
"It is time we admitted, from kings and presidents on down, that there is no evidence that any of our books was authored by the Creator of the universe.
The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology.
To rely on such a document as the basis for our worldview, however heroic the efforts of redactors, is to repudiate two thousand years of civilizing insights that the human mind has only just begun to inscribe upon itself through secular politics and scientific culture.
We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself."
"We live in a world of unimaginable surprises - from the fusion energy that lights the sun to the genetic and evolutionary consequences of this light's dancing for eons upon the earth - and yet paradise conforms to our most superficial concerns with all the fidelity of a Caribbean cruise.
This is wondrously strange.
If one didn't know better, one would think that man, in his fear of losing all that he loves, had created heaven, along with its gatekeeper God, in his own image."
- Sam Harris, The End of Faith
Oh, and here's a bonus quote from Sam Harris' Letter To A Christian Nation:
"The problem with religion, because it's been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation."
- Sam Harris, Letter To A Christian Nation
Question everything, people... especially claims about the universe made before the invention of the telescope.
P.s. — this post is an excerpt from Stew's Letter, a weekly-ish newsletter for curious people. You can check it out here.
Tags Sam Harris Quotes, Best Sam Harris Quotes, Sam Harris
My Friends Trained A Computer To Speak In A Completely Humanlike Voice (Demos Included)
Stewart Fortier July 7, 2019
Would you believe me if I told you that the voiceover in this video was not produced by a human?
Seriously. Go give it a listen. I'll wait….
Did you listen to it yet?
Now, you probably guessed it by now, but, yep… that entire two minute video was narrated using artificial intelligence.
As in…a human did not speak a word in that video. A machine learning program generated the entire narration.
You just heard a demo of one of the most advanced text-to-speech programs in existence today…built by two guys you've never heard of in Seattle.
Their program "reads" sentences off of a script and produces the sounds that it believes a human would make if they were reading the same sentences aloud.
(Okay that's a little vague, but you get the general idea…)
The result is what you just heard: a humanlike voiceover track generated entirely using artificial intelligence.
Their technology rivals the bleeding-edge research being done at companies like Google.
Seriously, here's a side-by-side demo of Google's best-of-market WaveNet voice reading the same paragraph as two of WellSaid's voices: WellSaid vs. Google.
Google is working on better voices (look up "Tacotron 2"), but they're not commercially available yet -- also, when you read the "fine print" in the research papers themselves you'll realize that their technology has far more limitations than meets the…ear.
"So, all of that's cool, but what would people even use this technology for?"
Text-to-speech technology isn't new, but text-to-speech technology that doesn't sound like somebody repeatedly hitting a dumpster with a baseball bat is.
There are tons of exciting use cases for a text-to-speech service that can cross the "uncanny valley" and actually speak like a real person.
My friends are focused on giving video and content producers access to instant, cheap, AI-generated voiceovers.
But that's just one use case… there are tons more exciting things you can do with this stuff.
From "serious" use cases like:
Helping visually-impaired people by reading just about any written content in an enjoyable, humanlike voice
Replacing the crappy Hawking-like voice with a "real" voice for people who have lost their ability to speak
Creating a fully automated call center that can ask questions and have dynamic conversations with customers
Replace all of the automated reminder / alert systems in airports, train stations, etc. with a voice that does not sound like death itself
And there are plenty of fun use cases:
Instantly convert any blog post on the internet into a mini-audiobook narrated by a professional "voice artist"
Add a studio-quality voiceover to your home movies (you could have the movie trailer voice guy narrate your home movie)
Have Morgan Freeman read you any book on your Kindle…or your emails, or your texts
If you're an indie game developer, you could add hundreds of different voiceovers to your game for a fraction of the cost of traditional voice artists
There are tons more use cases, but you get the idea…
"Cool. This is pretty wild. What can I do with this knowledge?"
Errr, well, I mostly just thought this was interesting and that lots of the Stew's Letter readership would find this sort of thing intellectually stimulating.
But, more practically:
If you want to play around and generate some AI voiceovers, their beta is live and you can request access here (click "Join Beta")
If you're a programmer, they are hiring (see "WellSaid Labs" postings)
If you're just curious about the technology, they post lots of demos on their YouTube page
The future is here… and it's far more wonderful and weird than any of us probably imagined.
Tags text to speech, google wavenet, artificial intelligence, machine learning
"I Think I Like a Speckled Ax Best"
Stewart Fortier January 6, 2019
Have you ever done something so moronic that you've found it difficult to believe that any human, much less the human whose conscious experience you happen to occupy, could be so stupid?
For example, I attempted — and failed — to cook four Trader Joe's chicken nuggets yesterday afternoon. The instructions fit into one sentence:
Preheat oven to 425 degrees and place nuggets on center rack for 20 minutes (this is impossible to screw up, you dunce).
Incredibly, I managed to screw it up. I neglected to set a timer, started to work on other things, and about 45 minutes later was notified that lunch was ready as a cloud of smoke and the smell of scorched chicken nugget filled the apartment. Classic.
This sort of thing happens all the time. I am terrible with navigating the minutia of daily life and always have been. I lose keys, burn chicken nuggets, pour myself drinks and forget about them, and email myself reminders only to be surprised that I have a new email after I hit "send." I live inside my own head, caught in whatever idea happens to hold the reigns at that moment, which often diverts my attention from whatever is unfolding right in front of me.
My natural impulse over the years has been to work hard at "fixing" this glaring inadequacy in my character and to become more functional in the elements of life that I consider boring but necessary. But after years of consciously trying to improve this side of myself, I have made essentially zero progress.
"I wished to live without committing any fault at any time"
I felt pretty frustrated until recently reading the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. One of Franklin's many pursuits in life was to obtain a perfect moral character. He set a personal goal for himself to essentially emulate a character like Christ and live without any faults whatsoever at any time.
Franklin created a spreadsheet that tracked thirteen virtues, ranging from "Temperance" to "Humility," which he would review each day and note wherever he fell short or failed. If he drank one mojito too many, for example, he'd write an "x" in that day's Temperance column. The next day, he'd know to keep an eye on his booze consumption.
After doing this exercise for years, he realized that while he became an overall much better person and even obtained near-perfection in certain virtues, he fell terribly short in others. In particular, he never made much progress in the virtue of "Order" which he defined as "let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time."
In his words:
Order…I found extremely difficult to acquire….This article, therefore, cost me so much painful attention, and my faults in it vexed me so much, and I made so little progress in amendment, and have such frequent relapses, that I was almost ready to give up the attempt and content myself with a faulty character in that respect.
Not one to readily admit defeat, he asked himself if it was worth giving his more stubborn flaws extra attention. After all, isn't the whole point of self-improvement to acknowledge and battle our slothful, fixed nature head-on? Shouldn't we exert ourselves twice as hard in fixing those flaws that seem the least likely to change?
Or should we instead get comfortable with the idea that we are flawed in our own particular way and that each of us may have only so much room to improve in certain areas?
Ultimately, Franklin answers with the story of the man who bought an ax from a blacksmith and requested that its surface be made as bright as the edge:
The smith consented to grind it bright for him if he would turn the wheel; he turned, while the smith pressed the broad face of the ax hard and heavily on the stone, which made the turning of it very fatiguing.
The man came every now and then from the wheel to see how the work went on, and at length would take his ax as it was, without farther grinding. "No," said the smith; "turn on, turn on; we shall have it bright by and by; as yet, it is only speckled."
"Yes," says the man, "but I think I like a a speckled ax best."
And I a scorched nugget.
Tags speckled ax, benjamin franklin
Wake Up, Sheeples: Evolution Has Made Us Conformists
Stewart Fortier November 4, 2018
We like to believe that our thoughts and emotions are ours and ours alone. We are independent entities capable of thinking for ourselves and rising above the groupthink and mania all around us.
Had we been in Germany in the 1930's, we tell ourselves that we would have seen the evil of the Nazi party for what it was and refused to get swept away in the madness. Had we been in the South in the 60's, we would have rejected the racist worldview of our peers and marched alongside the civil rights leaders of the day. Had we been at a Pitbull concert last week, we wouldn't have let an energetic crowd trick us into believing the guy actually has talent.
We are not sheep, we like to believe. We are immune to the manic and irrational behavior of groups. We are beacons of rationality and independent thought. It's ridiculous that nobody has made a statue of us yet. We are Athena herself reincarnate.
But, what if that's not even close to being true? What if we're blind to a deep impulse that makes us more dependent on each other than we'd like to admit?
Humans have a deep impulse to mirror the behavior of the group, and it kind of makes sense
Robert Greene dropped a book this week, The Laws of Human Nature, that I'm convinced will be talked about for the next 30 years. For those unfamiliar with Robert, he spends years upon years writing his books, most of which are about human psychology. The Laws of Human Nature is the culmination of more than 20 years of what he's learned about how humans behave and think.
One chapter that was particularly striking described the impulse that humans have to conform and mirror the behaviors of those around them. Being a conformist tends to get a bad rap these days, but Greene gives the behavior a rational basis in our evolution as a species. While it's far from the only reason we tend to behave like others, it's not one that's written about often.
To survive, humans needed to mirror the emotions of others
If you and your homies went hunting in the Savannah 50,000 years ago and somebody in the group saw a scary-ass tiger, teeth out, charging directly at the group, time was not on your side. Whoever saw the tiger didn't have the luxury of calling a team meeting, "hey gang, everybody have a minute? I was hoping to convince each of you that a tiger is rapidly approaching and is about to remove our faces from our bodies."
It was crucial that the group immediately feel the same fear of whoever witnessed the threat. The quicker the fear could spread through the group, the sooner everybody could react and the more likely they all were to survive. Species that could share emotions, rather than letting them remain the experience of a single individual, maintained an evolutionary advantage in certain contexts.
Our emotional lives are deeply intertwined with those of others
This impulse to mirror the emotions of others clearly goes beyond life-or-death situations. If we're in conversation with somebody who's good-spirited and energetic, for example, we'll notice our own mood gradually lift. And when somebody is being a Negative Nancy, we can watch as their toxic attitude gradually infects those around them. Emotions - some strong, some subtle - often ripple through groups rather than staying bottled up in any individual.
What is true of emotions also seems true of opinions and worldviews
Imagine we've been momentarily infected with a negative attitude after an encounter with a walking, talking bummer of a human being. We're exhausted and de-energized and our emotions often spill over into our worldview. Far from just "feeling tired," our understanding of reality is momentarily altered. Our beliefs about the future, for example, are likely to be different if we're feeling exhausted and beaten up than if we're feeling juiced up and thrilled to be alive.
So, emotions influence our worldview and our emotions are often not really "ours," per se. We are temporary hosts for various states of conciousness, and very often their corresponding worldviews, as they ripple through a group.
This propensity to absorb and transmit emotions is deeply embedded in our nature, making us far less of an island than we might imagine.
Today, emotions can ripple through society ludicrously fast and at a ludicrous scale
Over the past few decades, our role as an Emotion Transmission Beacon has been able to play out at an increasingly enormous scale.
Today, somebody can experience some horrific injustice, post a message or video on Twitter, and within hours, righteous outrage will radiate through millions of other people — much in the same way that the fear of the point man in the Savannah radiated through his tribe members.
Our emotional lives are deeply intertwined and we are not quite the independent actors we'd like to imagine.
We are nodes in a deeply interconnected web of emotions that ebb and flow between all human beings.
Fire Quote
Founding Father Life Hack: Shut Up And Try To Understand Other People
Stewart Fortier October 7, 2018
Benjamin Franklin's Long Road To Becoming A People Person
Benjamin Franklin was one of the greatest statesmen in all of human history, navigating some tumultuous times with tact that few of us can imagine. The man had a rare ability to get insanely difficult people to cooperate and get things done.
But it turns out that Franklin wasn't born with this natural tendency to work well with others. He was terrible at reading people in his youth and it got him in a ton of trouble.
Robert Greene, in his incredible book Mastery, shares a few examples of Franklin's early follies in dealing with others. Taken together, they contain tons of practical wisdom for the rest of us:
1. A teenage Benjamin Franklin pisses off his older brother
From a young age, Benjamin Franklin dreamed of becoming a successful writer. Luckily for him, his older brother James was opening a print shop in Boston. He went to work for his brother, aspiring to one day have his own work published. In addition to doing crappy apprentice tasks, Franklin would pitch story ideas to his brother who constantly shot them down, claiming that readers of The Courant would have little taste for Franklin's writing.
So, Franklin began to submit letters to his brother's paper under a pseudonym. He invented a young female widow named Silence Dogood who wrote highly opinionated, sometimes absurd, essays about life in Boston. Her letters quickly became one of the most popular section of the newspaper.
One day, smug with the success of Dogood's letters, Franklin revealed to his brother that Dogood was his creation. Rather than praising Benjamin for his exceptional writing and the attention it had brought to the paper, James was furious. He hated being lied to and needed loyal foot soldiers in the shop, not rebellious, aspiring creatives. Benjamin's relationship with his brother deteriorated to the point of his brother becoming abusive, and Franklin eventually fled from Boston and moved to Philadelphia.
2. Benjamin Franklin gets swindled by a conman governor
Once in Philly, word of Franklin's publishing expertise got around. The governor, William Keith, was not happy with the only two printing houses in Philadelphia and sought out Franklin to help him start a third; he'd even fund the whole thing himself. Keith told Franklin to travel to London, where machines and material would be waiting for him. Amazed by his good fortune, Franklin abruptly quit the job with the printer he had just landed in Philly and shipped off across The Atlantic.
Once in London, a wealthy merchant told Franklin that the governor of Pennsylvania was a notorious talker, obsessed with projecting an image of power, wealth, and success, but in reality his pet projects rarely lasted more than a week and he didn't even have the cash to back them up. It dawned on Franklin that he was stuck in a foreign country where no money, no machinery, and no materials were waiting for him.
3. Franklin pisses off his co-workers
With no means to get home, Franklin picked up a job at a printing house in London. His co-workers loved to drink on the job, routinely taking breaks to throw back a pint. Franklin was expected to contribute to the employee beer fund, but he informed his co-workers that he did not like to drink while he worked and, as a man of principles, would not be contributing to the fund.
Over the next few weeks, his co-workers began to sabotage his work. Typos began to pop up in work that Franklin had already edited and he was continually blamed for a never-ending stream of reckless errors. It eventually dawned on Franklin what was going on and he begrudgingly contributed to the beer fund.
So, there you have it. One of history's greatest statesmen began his life as a clumsy, naive, clueless punk who pissed off or misread tons of the people around him.
"With his brother," Robert Greene writes in Mastery, "[Franklin] wanted to impress him by revealing his authorship of the letters, totally unaware of the envy and malevolence he would unleash; with Keith, he was so wrapped up in his dreams that he paid no attention to obvious signs that the governor was all talk; with the printers, his anger blinded him to the fact that they would obviously resent his attempts at reform."
After these and a few more incidents, it dawned on Franklin that much of his suffering in life stemmed from an utter and complete failure to consider the motivations of others. When he wrote the Silence Dogood letters, he was able to put himself into the mind of another, obsessing over how she perceived the world. Yet, he failed to make even the most basic effort to do this with the people around him.
Franklin pledged that he would no longer be at the whims of his own insecurities and emotions, and would instead try to understand people for how they actually were, not how he lazily assumed or hoped they would be.
A new, less-dumb man is born
Franklin finally found his way back to Philadelphia and was immediately offered his job back by Samuel Keimer, the printer whom he had previously bailed on just before his trip to London. It didn't take long for Franklin to detect that something was up; why was Keimer being so hospitable to a guy who had ditched him a couple of years prior?
It dawned on Franklin that Keimer wanted to extract all of Franklin's publishing expertise, teach it to his employees, and then fire him. Realizing that the clock was ticking, Franklin quietly turned the tables and used his relatively high-ranking role at Keimer's shop to begin networking around town. By the time it became obvious that Franklin was about to be canned, he had already built up a network of backers ready to support him in opening up his own shop, which is exactly what he did, ditching Keimer once again and going on to be a successful newspaper publisher and best-selling writer.
In Greene's words, "In executing this strategy, Franklin noticed how free he was from any feelings of bitterness or anger toward Keimer. It was all maneuvers on a chessboard, and by thinking inside Keimer he was able to play the game to perfection, with a clear and level head."
If Benjamin Franklin had to work hard to understand other people, you and I probably have some work to do
Franklin's naivety as a young man does not represent some childish state that we naturally outgrow as time goes on; it's the default human worldview that persists at all ages. For whatever reason, we are convinced that our own little story is the most interesting one on Earth. We have little interest in understanding the motivations and perspectives of others because the most addictive movie on the planet is playing out in our head at all times. Why change the channel?
This tendency blinds us to the fact that people are revealing their intentions, motivations, and worldview to us all the time. Very often, we totally miss this and instead project our own insecurities, biases, naivety, and emotions onto others, assuming them to be something other than what they are.
If we don't strive to consider the perspectives of those we interact with, we end up on some spectrum where the best case is constantly boring those around us with our self-interested ramblings and the worst case is reliably being taken advantage of because of our blindness to the true motivations of others.
Franklin was onto something when he realized the value in shutting the hell up and listening every once in a while.
In stew's letter 20
The Reason That Writing Is Hard Contains A Deeper Life Lesson, So Listen Up
Stewart Fortier September 30, 2018
Writing is a brutish, torturous exercise. Even the world's greatest authors lamented how much it sucks to sit down and commit ideas to paper.
"When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth."
That's right; a mind who defined a literary generation felt anything but competent as he did it.
"Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."
George Freaking Orwell didn't whistle while he worked.
"A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
I have 47 browser tabs open right now and will keep hurling these at you until you're convinced.
"Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing."
"I write the way women have babies. You don't know it's going to be like that. If you did, there's no way you would go through with it."
That's two childbearing analogies. Case closed; writing is hard. But why?
There are tons of things that make writing hard, but here's one that's not talked about often: writing forces the author to face their own inadequacies in a way that's nearly impossible elsewhere in life.
When you sit down to write, one thing is immediately apparent: anything that sucks is completely your fault.
All of the lazy assumptions, the half-truths, the naivety, the reliance on cliche, the uninspiring and unoriginal ideas, the failure to persist and land on real insight, to miss the bigger point, using language because it's convenient rather than precise, all of it, every failure to produce something worth reading, is the writer's to own. You can blame your mom if you want, but it's not going to put the next word on the page.
This stands in contrast with much of the rest of life, where execution happens against a myriad of factors outside of ourselves; the politics at this place make it impossible to get stuff done, some idiot got into a fender bender and made me late, the wifi at the airport Arby's was crappy so I couldn't finish that research, the sandwich I ate at said Arby's has made me violently ill and I may only have moments to live, and so on. Those are all reasonably clever excuses.
But there's a brutal clarity in the world of the writer; if what she writes sucks and it's only her, the pen, and the paper, it's pretty obvious who's at fault.
The fact that most situations aren't as simple as the writer's doesn't necessarily make what's true in one world any less true in the other. Maybe we do have more agency than we think, but we're blind to it because whenever our identity as competent and capable people is threatened, we turn on Blame Mode™ and scan the rich and complex situations around us for any plausible target other than ourselves to attribute failure. This is like shooting fish in a barrel most of the time, sparing us the discomfort of looking inwards that a simpler set of circumstances would have forced upon us.
So, yeah, writing is hard because you have to accept responsibility for your actions, which says a lot more about human nature than it does about writing.
In stew's letter 19 Tags writing
From Niches To Riches
The Internet's Opportunity Machine
The past couple of Stew's Letters (part one, part two) have made the case that if you can learn how to do something that society is unable to teach, and it just so happens that your "something" is valuable, you may be rewarded handsomely since you'll have little or no competition.
This is more of a mental model more than it some clear game plan, but it stands in contrast to the more traditional approach to career planning where we look at what the world is hiring for today, invest in formal training, and begin to climb the metaphorical ladder in our chosen field, mostly keeping our skillset within the boundaries defined for us by the system we've chosen to be a part of.
The traditional approach makes practical sense and I don't doubt it still works in plenty of contexts today; it's also the only realistic road for a huge number of people. But, the rise of the internet over the past two decades has opened up enormous opportunities for those of us who want carve out our own niche in the universe rather than occupying a toe nail of a somebody else's.
What's so special about the moment in history we've found ourselves?
The internet is an opportunity machine that does one thing particularly well: it creates a playing field where seemingly obscure, niche things have a far higher likelihood of becoming a successful business than ever before.
First, a quick refresher on what the world looked like in the not-too-distant past.
WARNING: MANY OBVIOUS IDEAS FOLLOW
Much of what's in this essay might seem painfully obvious, especially to anybody who thinks much about the internet's impact on society. This essay was almost buried forever in the draft folder because of how "duh" some of it sounds. After working on it a bit more though, I found that articulating these ideas was helpful in revealing how often I fall back into a pre-internet understanding of the world.
So, with that, you've been warned.
What the world used to look like
For the past hundred or so years, the world has looked something like this:
A handful of companies controlled the means of distribution and defined a relatively narrow set of goods and services that represented our choices as consumers. In the U.S., all of us watched some subset of the same TV channels, every grocery store in town stocked identical brands of soap and cereal, and it didn't make a difference whether you went to a movie theater in LA or Des Moines — the same ten movies played at both.
This narrow list of choices we all had as consumers wasn't necessarily part of a conspiracy concocted by a few mustache-twirling capitalists; it was largely the practical result of how expensive it's been for most of human history to produce, market, and distribute products.
Safeway was not going to drop millions of dollars on a new grocery store only to stock its limited shelf space with Larry's Magic Healing Crystals™. Each store needed to be filled with affordable, mass-manufactured items that appealed to a broad audience. There was no space for the obscure, niche stuff that didn't sell well.
The same was true of a retailer like Barnes & Noble who was not going to drop a few million bucks on a new bookstore only to line the shelves with Great Heroes of Frisbee Golf, Volumes Seven through Twelve (1936-1975). There are more Stephen King fans than frisbee golf connoisseurs and B&N ain't running a non-profit.
"Sorry, buddy, but nobody cares about your [book/song/speciality coffee beans/clothing line]"
All of this was bad news for people who had a message or a product that might not hold mass appeal. There may have been plenty of frisbee golf fans around the world who would love the entire Great Heroes of Frisbee Golf series, but very few in each submarket. And without a major distribution deal most frisbee fans were unlikely to even hear of your book, making it even harder to prove demand and convince a big retailer to carry you in the first place.
Chicken, meet egg.
The internet is taking a sledgehammer to the chicken-or-the-egg problem, though, and is leaving nothing but scattered bits of shell — and opportunity — in its wake.
You can't spell "opportunity" without "awareness"
Fun fact: you can't capitalize on an opportunity that you're not aware of. You also can't buy a book you've never heard of. And you definitely can't order a set of Larry's Magic Healing Crystals™ without first knowing they exist.
It follows, then, that the ability for information to move between humans is the lifeblood of opportunity. And for most of human history, it's been a huge pain in the ass to move around information. It's easy to forget that this is was what cutting-edge global communication technology used to look like:
Pictured: the internet, 350 years ago
Today, half of the Earth is hooked up to each other via cheap, accessible computers that serve as opportunity machines, removing an enormous amount of friction in our ability to transmit information and hear about things that might deeply interest us, improve our lives, etc.
Let's reflect on just how far we've come:
So what are the tangible impacts of our newfound ability to move around information quickly and cheaply? More specifically, how does it affect the nature of economic opportunity?
There are at least two big things that the internet has done, and both have direct implications for how we can make money and build a career. They're probably conventional wisdom at this point, but let's do a quick refresher on what they are.
1. The internet has brought the cost of distribution for digital goods down to essentially nothing.
It's pretty wild to remember that Barnes & Noble, a seller of ideas, has historically been stuck playing the same game as Safeway, a seller of tomatoes and beef. Before the widespread adoption of cheap personal computers, ideas had to be captured in a physical form (a book, novel, encyclopedia, etc.) and were thereby subject to the same laws of physics and markets as the stuff you find in the grocery store.
For those reasons, Great Heroes of Frisbee Golf, Volume Seven (1936-1945) would have had a hard time finding an audience at all.
But, the internet has brought the cost of distribution down to essentially zero for products that can be represented in a digital form. Now, an entire frisbee golf book series can obviously just live on Amazon's digital shelves as an ebook incurring negligible cost for the publisher or Amazon. Having a book in the "Long Tail" of book rankings doesn't mean the certain death it may have in the recent past.
2. The internet has made it remarkably easy to find and reach the people who will love your product, song, book, class, whatever.
The geographical boundaries that have long defined tribes are melting away, leaving only ideological ones.
Instead of taking out an ad in a local paper in the hope of finding a few people who might buy whatever you're selling, you can get on Twitter, search for people everywhere on Earth talking about ultra-specific topics, and send them a direct message that will almost certainly land it in front of their eyes — for free or next to nothing. The friction is becoming so incredibly low to locate, qualify, and get a message to the right people.
Taken together, these two forces are driving some enormous changes in the economy.
"The Market" is breaking into niche markets where there were none before
In a nutshell, the internet enables sizable niche markets to exist where they simply couldn't before. For example, imagine if you were a budding (bubbling?) soap entrepreneur twenty years ago. That would would have been pretty brutal.
Generally speaking, if you wanted your soap line to make any real money, you had to go head-to-head against the big boys and try to convince a major distributor to carry you alongside them.
Today, you could circumvent the system altogether by hosting a Shopify store and distributing, marketing, and selling the soap yourself. The challenge shifts from the nearly-impossible task of getting into a major chain store to the difficult, but less existentially-risky task of finding and broadcasting a message directly to the people who will love your product.
In theory, the internet enables a thriving long tail of soap products to exist.*
So, maybe we should be skeptical when we ask "how do I convince a major retailer, publisher, studio to buy into what I'm doing?" Instead, we can opt for "how do I find the end customers who will love what I'm selling so that I can remove the middleman altogether?"
* In practice, I have done absolutely no research on the soap industry.
Many of these "niches" are huge
It's easy to hear the word "niche"and imagine a market that is almost trivially small. Aw, is that your niche over there? So cute.
But the internet keeps revealing just how many enormous, untapped niche markets exist — granted, at some point these things probably become way too big to be considered a "niche" at all.
One place where is blindingly obvious is in the media industry, as demonstrated by people like Logan Paul. For better or worse, he's proven that millions of people are apparently interested in watching a person with a double-digit IQ insult Santa Clause in a self-produced rap music video entitled "SANTA DISS TRACK." That video alone has garnered over 64,500,000 million views, vastly more than most major media companies could ever hope to attain with their best content.
For context, here's how The Oscars did last year:
This phenomenon is showing up all over the place. Take Delighted, a company that pulls in millions of dollars every year by making it easy to embed a "how likely are you to recommend this to a friend" survey into your website. That's a hilariously specific business. Or MVMT, who brought in $70 Million last year selling niche watches on Instagram.
Hell, take Scrivener, the software I'm using to write this. A school teacher in London built the first version in his spare time ten years ago and started selling it for $50 a pop to writers. It's now a real company with a real team and real revenue. To get even more niche, there's also apparently some dude who made half a million bucks teaching people how to use Scrivener. Niche-ception! It's madness, and neither of these businesses could exist without the internet.
The takeaway? An ever-increasing amount of the Long Tail is economically sustainable. It used to make sense to kill a business idea quickly because it was not immediately obvious that there was a big enough market for it. But, today, maybe we should think twice and consider how much easier it is to find the people who will love what we're doing.
Bonus points: we may have more freedom to not water down our work
When the distribution channels in an industry are expensive and tightly-controlled, there's often pressure to water down what goes through it in an attempt to make it more "appealing" to a mass audience. I know my boy Joel Osteen would say even crazier stuff if he didn't have a publisher.
Jenny Han felt this pressure to sell out before finally getting her movie "To All the Boys I've Loved Before" made. Every major studio except Netflix said they'd only cast a white, not an Asian-American, actor as the lead. Yikes.
It's our job as professional niche-hunters go directly to the 100,000 people who will love what we're doing and forget about the million who might kind of like it if we toned it down a bit.
The Age Of The Niche has only just begun
"People don't have any idea yet how impactful the internet is going to be and that this is still day one in such a big way."
- Jeff Bezos
We're still in the early days of the internet, which could mean we're only just beginning to see what the niche economy looks like. And if the future looks anything like the present, then opportunities await those willing to combine their skills in a unique way to conquer some exciting niche.
Happy hunting!
An honorable mention is due to the great, short book "The End Of Jobs" which elaborates on and inspired many of the ideas here.
Genius Can't Be Taught
Stewart Fortier September 2, 2018
The Art Of Unstructured Learning
Last week's Stew's Letter was all about a simple idea: if society can train you to do something, it can train somebody else and replace you. One strategy to escape the proverbial rat race, then, would be mastering a valuable combination of skills that society doesn't yet know how to teach.
If we can combine a handful of skills in a way that the world hasn't quite seen before, and it just so happens that the combination is valuable, we get to reap all the rewards until society catches on and boils what was once our genius into a curriculum and a "career path."
This is in contrast to our more natural tendency to look at what skills the world is hiring for today and reshaping ourselves accordingly. Even a 22-year-old Hunter S. Thompson insisted we resist this urge:
"Let's assume that you think you have a choice of eight paths to follow (all pre-defined paths, of course). And let's assume that you can't see any real purpose in any of the eight. THEN— and here is the essence of all I've said— you MUST FIND A NINTH PATH."
Full disclosure: I don't feel remotely qualified to write about this topic and it seems worth mentioning that Hunter S. Thompson took his own advice to an extreme and lived a life I'm not sure I envy (insane drug use, getting into gun fights with his neighbors). But, alas, I feel compelled to write about this so buckle up.
Our quirks can be strengths
At some point, many of us have probably faced the proverbial - or literal - bully who has mocked or trivialized something that makes us stand out.
In my case, a bully in middle school preyed on the fact that I was overly-friendly and physically incapable of defending myself; I was "soft," as the youths say. He would threaten to beat my ass if I didn't give him my lunch money each day.
Instead of starting to lift weights so that I could be the one smashing faces in, I doubled down on the exact things he hated (my ability to connect with people) and ended the year with an alliance of thugs-turned-friends who defended me and forced this douche canoe to set his sights elsewhere.
"Quirks" are often rare skills in disguise.
We all have potentially valuable quirks
Imagine for a moment that you're a salesperson who can write well. Or a software developer who loves design. Or an operations guy who's a talented DJ. Or a climate scientist who can give a presentation without sending her audience into REM sleep. Those are all rare combinations of skills that could lead to some magical places.
A sales guy who can write well might escape the most crowded sales channel - taking clients out to drinks - and instead close a huge deal in a persuasive email that pierces through the sea of bullshit his peers are trapped in. Maybe the DJ COO could write a song every quarter that'd be entertaining enough to make people care about boring but important stuff. And so on.
Far from being static, the games we find ourselves in can be reshaped depending on the skills, talents, and personalities of those playing them.
All of us have a unique skill salad - a "skill stack" to rip off Scott Adams' terminology - that we can cultivate if we're willing to look inwards, find a few magic ingredients, and stay committed to nurturing and growing what we find even if we're not seeing any job descriptions that fit the bill yet.
Quote From Smart Person That I Probably Could Have Just Shared And Skipped Writing The Previous Section Altogether
"Those qualities that separate us are often ridiculed by others or criticized by teachers. Because of these judgments, we might see our strengths as disabilities and try to work around them in order to fit in. But anything that is peculiar to our makeup is precisely what we must pay the deepest attention to and lean on in our rise to mastery." - Robert Greene
Turning quirks into superpowers
Okay, so assume you have a hunch on what your skill salad looks like. You're pretty good at a few things and have a gut feeling on how they might be combined into something valuable. What do you do next?
Improving each individual skill is straightforward enough. If you want to get better at boxing, just go find a gym, hire a trainer, and spend your spare time watching boxing videos on YouTube. It might take a while, but there's a known path to nailing down the basics.
But, what happens after you've become a decent fighter? You're ready to synthesize some of your other talents and create a unique fighting style. Surely there's some curriculum that can take you from competence to mastery?
Unfortunately, mastery doesn't appear to be an emergent property of building up various hard skills on their own. We have to go a step further and continually experiment with how to best synthesize our seemingly unrelated talents into a cohesive whole.
Tim Urban from Wait But Why didn't just get really good at writing and then get really good at drawing comics and all of a sudden give birth to his incredible blog. Instead, there's a theme of trial-and-error in his work as he's combined the two skills, eventually culminating into the genre he's known for today.
So to become great at something new, we'll need to figure stuff out on our own and leave the comfortable world of structured learning. We must enter the hairy, ambiguous, no-handbook dimension of knowledge formation known as "unstructured learning."
Welcome to hell: unstructured learning
Unstructured learning lacks a clear curriculum. There are no exercises with pass/fail criteria, nor a handbook on how to move from the basics to mastery. It's arguably the hardest kind of learning, but it's likely to pay the greatest dividends. After all, knowledge that can be distilled into a curriculum can be taught to somebody else who's smarter and cheaper.
So how are we supposed to learn something that can't be taught?
Unstructured learning by definition does not have a how-to manual. So rather than pretend I know how to best navigate the murky road towards carving out a valuable niche in the universe, I feel compelled to do two things:
1. Acknowledge that unstructured learning exists.
Unstructured learning is a thing and it's required for doing anything remotely interesting. Maybe everybody already knows that, but there can be value in reminding ourselves of the obvious; in this case, that originality is always preceded by ambiguity.
2. Share a few nuggets of wisdom that seem relevant for those inclined to venture into the unknown.
As I was writing an early draft of this post, one of the smartest human beings I've ever crossed paths with published a short piece on how to learn stuff that no one can teach you. It contains some timeless wisdom for the restless and curious, but for those short on time here are two big ideas about unstructured learning that stuck with me:
Big Idea #1: You Have To Fight For Your Knowledge
You're not going to learn much if you view knowledge as something that schools, bosses, mentors, family members, and the universe owe you. That's lame and false.
Knowledge is more like the last helicopter out of 'Nam. You'd better go find it and fight like hell for your seat.
Unfortunately, most of us don't fight for our seat on the proverbial knowledge-copter. If we don't understand something after our first question, we give up. We figure that maybe we don't deserve to know. It's tragic, of course, because we do.
"Learning is sacred and everyone deserves it. That includes you."
Big Idea #2: Short-Term "Stupidity" Is The Key To Long-Term Mastery
We spend much of our lives in systems that reward the appearance of competence, which makes sense most of the time. Schools probably shouldn't give A's to kids who answer every question with "I have no clue" and companies probably shouldn't promote people who don't know how to do their job.
But, one unintended consequence of constantly keeping up appearances is that we become terrified to look stupid. People who show vulnerability or admit ignorance get stepped on, or so we tell ourselves.
Looking stupid in the short term, though, is the exact thing we most need to do to accelerate our learning. Our job is to eliminate our ignorance as quickly as possible and there are fewer faster routes than asking obvious, "dumb" questions early and often.
Doing this might come with short-term social consequences, but what's worse over the long term: looking dumb or actually being dumb?
"But my skill salad can't make money"
Okay, assume you've gotten this far. You're ready to blaze a new path and show the world your genius. There's just one problem: it's not immediately clear that you can make money from what you're good at.
That's a valid concern, but I implore you to at least consider the following case study:
"Jesus Christ, this is a long Stew's Letter. We gonna wrap this up anytime soon?"
Alright, so there you have it. A whole bunch of repurposed thoughts on why blossoming into a unique butterfly might not be a terrible life strategy and how you might be able to navigate the inevitable ups and downs required to get there.
This is obviously just one of many ideas on how to build a career and life, though, and I won't pretend that it's complete, or right for everybody, or even terribly practical. But if you've made it this far, I hope you'll at least consider looking inwards and figuring out the things that only you can do.
It'd be pretty messed up if you didn't share your genius with the rest of us.
Footnote: Another excellent life strategy is having a rich uncle die and leave you a fortune. That strategy has a 100% success rate and if you can pull it off, you should. I repeat: if somebody wealthy is planning to give you a large sum of money, don't waste your time building up a skill salad; just kick back and don't screw it up.
You're Not Going To Get Rich Doing What Society Can Train You To Do, People
Stewart Fortier August 15, 2018
Part One: I've Got 99 Problems, And Creating A Lucrative Career Niche Is Absolutely One
My name is Stewart and I want to have an amazing career. It's pretty straightforward: I want one of those careers where you work day in and day out on the singular thing the universe has called you to do. One where you make enormous sums of money, never miss your kids' soccer games, and experience a state of flow that doesn't just muddy the definition of the word "work," but makes one pity the poor rubes forced to experience displeasure in any form in exchange for compensation.
There's one problem though: society has failed to produce a handbook on how to obtain a career that offers those things. Hell, I've never seen a job description that includes even one of them. It's ridiculous, I'm pissed, and I guess we're just left to figure this stuff out on our own.
So, let's start.
If You Can Be Trained, You Can Be Replaced
Those of us in careers with a relatively low barrier to entry are subject to an unpleasant reality: if society can train us to do something, it can train somebody else and replace us. Many of us are more replaceable than we want to acknowledge or admit.*
And if society can easily replace us, it's generally going to be harder for us to make fat stacks of cash. There will always be somebody else out there willing and able to do the same job for less.
So, that's not great news for those of us who don't plan on dropping everything, going back to medical school, and entering a field with an insanely high barrier to entry. How the hell are we supposed to end up with an amazing career?
Escaping Competition: Your Unique Skill Salad
One strategy I've been thinking a lot about is creating and mastering a unique combination of skills that society needs but hasn't realized it yet. The skills themselves may be familiar, but the combination is new and valuable.
If society hasn't seen a particular combination of skills before then it definitely hasn't figured out a way to teach it to other people yet. If you figure out a good recipe, it's yours to own until the rest of the world catches up.
The concept of being a full-time inventor, for example, was relatively new in Thomas Edison's day, leaving him little competition. A century later, we've built up a huge infrastructure to support and train people to do research and development for new technologies that might have potential commercial applications.
What seems obvious today - a combination of scientific aptitude and business savvy is valuable - was at some point an entirely new insight.**
"If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's."
Anybody who wants to carve out their own lucrative career niche, by definition, cannot look at somebody else's path and try to mimic it. Instead, maybe they could look at the raw ingredients right in front of them - their skills and interests - and see if there's a valuable combination that the world hasn't witnessed.
The world often nudges us to make the best ham sandwich we can, but maybe we should just get out whatever the hell is in the fridge and see if we can't put together something new and awesome instead.
Quote From Smart Person That Totally Backs This Up
"All successful CEO's are like this. They are almost never the best product visionaries, or the best salespeople, or the best marketing people, or the best finance people, or even the best managers, but they are top 25% in some set of those skills, and then all of a sudden they're qualified to actually run something important."
- Marc Andreessen
Anecdotal Example That Totally Proves My Point
Tristan Harris was essentially a dime-a-dozen software engineer then product manager (not rare, moderately valuable) at some of the large tech companies before he carved out a niche as a product "philosopher" (non-existent role until him) and ethical thinker at a time when society was just starting to grapple with the newfound consequences of what had up until then seemed inherently harmless or even trivial.
Most of his peers are probably competing for the same product manager roles while Harris is now in a league of his own, founding a school of thought in a valuable niche for which he'll be the go-to guy for the foreseeable future.
Okay, so I've finally convinced you. You've decided that you're going to become the world's first self-driving food truck machine learning engineer. Udacity doesn't have a course on that, so what the hell are you going to do?
Stay tuned for Sunday's Stew's Letter, dear reader.
* The barrier to becoming a reasonably competent software engineer in certain domains is just not has high as many of the pre-madonnas in the field would lead you to believe. And I don't have time to elaborate so stay the hell out of my DMs.
** Granted, the world changes and makes the same combination of skills more or less valuable depending on where in history you exist. Being a great singer during the Ice Ages probably didn't pay out in the same way it does today.
Fire Tweet
An Interesting Tidbit From Some Research On Hunter-Gatherer Communities
Strong Opinion That I Am Unlikely To Change
Proof-Of-Work (For Dummies!)
Why virtual reality matters
Join the other awesome people who receive Stew's Letter each week.
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