Microposts

🎶 After hearing my son and nephew rehearsing Is What It Is by Chance Peña, I’ve been a bit obsessed with it. They were practicing for an upcoming campfire concert at their summer camp, where there was recently a tragedy. Watching the campers comfort each other through the tragedy seemed resonant with the song’s lyrics

After experimenting with many different apps and approaches, I’m back to integrating everything into Reeder. I like the clean, consistent aesthetic, easy gestures for actions, and ease of integrating diverse sources.

Finished reading: The Casino Shift by Brian Goldman is a rather sobering look at the poor state of emergency medicine in Canada. Seems like a disaster waiting to happen through neglect, partly motivated by ERs’ amazing ability to adapt and get by with less, until they can’t anymore 📚

Arrived to our cottage vacation in a torrential thunderstorm! That’s okay though. Still better than being at work and the storm won’t last

🎵 Song of the week for my daughter — Angeles by Elliott Smith from Either/Or. Although Waltz, No. 2 (XO) is a slightly better song, I think Angeles is a better first listen song.

🎧 As a small gesture of support for independent podcasts, I’ve switched from Apple Podcasts to Overcast (again). Overcast is certainly a better app and I’m happy to support it with another year of subscription revenue

Finished reading: The Notebook by Roland Allen is a comprehensive look at how physical notebooks have affected culture over centuries that was more interesting than I’d expected.

I’ve been using physical notebooks, with varying levels of enthusiasm, for decades. These days, I mostly use a Field Notes notebook as my primary capture. I use a light structure of an underlined date and Patrick Rhone’s Dash/Plus system. Then I have a Shortcut that takes a photo, transcribes the text, and sends it to other apps for further use on my iPhone. Works well for me and I like relying on the physical notebook while still having the benefits of the digital 📚

🔗 The false promise of sovereignty economics - The Hub

The insight generalizes into a first principle that sovereignty economics gets backwards: countries do not become rich chiefly by owning things. They become rich when their people are productive. A Canadian nurse, farmer, or machinist working with the world’s best AI tools is better off than one confined to a domestically owned but inferior alternative. Forty-one million Canadians equipped with frontier technology will generate more prosperity than a handful of protected national champions ever could.