Astronomer Royal Martin Rees gave a Long Now SALT talk last night around the topics in his new book, On The Future, which covers long term threats and opportunities for humanity. One of the approaches I found particularly interesting was being explicit about the discount rates applied when considering different kinds of preventative measures. 

As the job market changes, one way people can maintain or grow their incomes is by pivoting to more in-demands fields. For all the automation and expansion, relatively few people are unemployed (joblessness is a somewhat different boat), and most industries are unable to hire all the people they would like due to lack of appropriate candidates.

From an introduction to consumption:

From Lever of Riches, talking about the impact of the state and state structures on diffusion of innovations:

A great conversation over the new year got me thinking about the types of consumption that we have, as individuals. There is a kind of spending and investment of time that is really about improving our productivity and career outcomes: training, reading in certain areas, buying tools, and spending on enabling technologies like cars or personal task trackers. 

I can’t really do any justice to Jenny Odell’s great piece in the New York Times about a bizarre network of ventures, so if you (like me) didn’t see it when it came out, please go read. 

Part of the larger social contract forged over the 20th century was a set of a benefits: unemployment insurance, healthcare, workers compensation, and paid time off for vacation or for illness.

The Kirkpatrick Learning model helps with evaluating the effectiveness of training. It proposes evaluating at four levels: 

There are quite a few organizational maturity levels, but I’ve generally found them either too specific to a certain domain, or too speculative to apply properly. I recently read a Miller Heiman Group publication that included the one they have developed for sales enablement processes. It seemed to strike the right mix between practicality and useful, and I’ve found it helpful in getting an orientation on a few process-related questions.

Churn is, generally, seen as a bad thing within an organization - teams wants stability and predictability. These help make the organization more legible, and they are part of generating the feelings of psychological safety and mutual trust that are needed for groups to be effective. Churn also produces work which does not feel productive: recruiting, staffing, training and so on.