The Power of Slack, Tech Meets Healthcare, and Boring News

Hello folks,?

Welcome to Last Week I Learned.?As always, let me know which articles stick out! If you found any media (books, TV shows, etc) of your own, please send them my way.?

Links

• ‘People Like Me’: We Need to Talk About China’s Invisible Blue-Collar Workers ?? | Following the Yuan - I found this article as disturbing as my deep dive on the food system in America. In reading this, I was reminded of the different type of dystopian work conditions featured in Bullshit Jobs and Office Space.

And when the mainstream media highlights the stories of blue-collar workers, it’s often through a positive lens — the hardworking delivery worker making over 1 million yuan in three months and runs on three hours of sleep every day, and the livestreaming farmers using social platforms to turn their family businesses around. Their struggles rarely pierce the information bubble. On rare occasions when they do so through social media platforms, they get taken down without any reason.

• ★ How It Went - One of my favorite stories of the year, hands down. Hats off to John Gruber. I would put this up there with A Gentleman in Moscow as writing I read slower so as to make it last. If I ever write anything like this, I'll die happy.

At some point when I was a little kid, my dad told me he had never once removed his ring since my mom put it on his finger at their wedding, the year before I was born. My mom, I knew, took hers on and off all the time. In fact she often wore other rings in place of her actual wedding band, because she found them more comfortable, and she placed little sentimental value on the ring from her actual ceremony. I asked my dad that day about his, and he told me he simply had never taken it off. I found that to be amazing. From my childhood perspective, he’d worn that ring nonstop for a lifetime.

• ?? “Take it behind the barn and shoot it” - I love a story that digs into the details behind a business. I am forever looking for patterns and articles like this are a puzzle for the mind. For more like it, follow Drunk Business Advice here.

So she moved the party over to a nearby horse farm, and invited the public to join the fun. Meghan began hosting community events, charging people $10 to give their dogs a chance to play on her machine.Her events soon outgrew the horse farm. The space wasn’t large enough to contain the swathes of people and pets that her little invention attracted.Holy shit. Meghan had accidentally created a business.

• ?? Here’s the DDIL - While I do not like or support war, it is a part of life. I read this newsletter to stay up to date on the technology and tactics used by militaries across the world. Maybe it's morbid, but being knowledgeable helps ratchet down my fear a bit in these uncertain times.

Happy 249th B-Day to the US Navy, which started with a 13 October 1775 resolution for “a swift sailing vessel, to carry ten carriage guns, and a proportionable number of swivels, with eighty men, be fitted, with all possible despatch, for a cruise of three months….” After the War of Independence, the new Constitution empowered Congress “to provide and maintain a navy,” which they finally did in 1798.

• Slack - I am learning the power of Slack through painful mistakes every year. I called Slack waste for the longest time. Only now am I seeing the Slack pay off. Going to bed a little early, packing less into each day, and pausing between tasks. Contrary to most advice, those little spaces add up and give you space. Space is the key to good decisions and effective actions.

Slack prevents desperation. You can avoid bad trades and wait for better spots. You can be efficient.

Deep Dive

• Big Tech Takes Your Vitals - The appetite of Big Data is endless. Feeding it results in a strange mix of utopia and dystopia. See a peak of the mixed future in this newsletter about the patents Big Tech is filing in the health tracking space.

Microsoft filed a patent application for a “context-aware” backpack, equipped with sensors and a microphone, which can tell you things about your surroundings;

• When McKinsey Comes to Your Hospital - Business and tech today are all about "separation of concerns". This idea is Henry Ford's assembly line applied to everything. Not everything is a manufacturing plant, least of all the human body. Disaster strikes when you try to apply systems thinking to an ecosystem like the human body. Instead of isolating and optimizing steps in a process, I would love to see McKinsey applying Permaculture Principles to our health systems.

McKinsey’s history with hospital systems from the Bronx to California is littered with the same sort of stuff: Lay off workers, wrench more money out of the hands of patients who can’t afford it, close community-based facilities and make patients range farther for care, and ultimately, merge smaller systems into larger health care behemoths of the sort that UPMC has become.

• The Truth About Egg Freezing - So far, I've been hard on tech and health. Yet there are some incredible health improvements made possible by business and technology as well. Egg freezing is one of these modern miracles and I love this video for how well it lays out the emotional experience as well as the technology. For another great blend of the two, check out the podcast series Race to 35.

Product of the Week

• Introducing Boring News - A fascinating combination of 2 technologies: Generative AI and Prediciton Markets. I am so curious to see how this goes. I imagine more and more products like this becoming available, ever more personalized. I guess I'm describing Facebook on steroids there and now I'm more than a little concerned.

Cause of the Week

• Mom's Against Media Addiction - I am the generation that just missed growing up with technology. I still remember Gameboy Colors and blowing on cartridges to keep them alive. I do no envy the current generation which must contend with a barrage of content and a dearth of tools to navigate it all. I love the work Mama is doing to help. To hear from the founder, check out the end of this Pivot episode.