Action Figure Daniel

Category: Reading

  • “The 4 Hour Workweek” by Timothy Ferris

    • Having $1m in a bank account is not the dream but how they live
    • Look for ways to relocate to lower expenses
    • Control when you do what and where
    • Do things differently when the status quo is broken
    • Focus on emphasizing your skills instead of improving your weaknesses
      • (Lean into what you do well instead of trying to be perfect)
    • Distress and eustress are opposites
    • “Realistic” goals have more competition than the unrealistic ones
    • Happiness and boredom and opposites
    • More customers is not the goal
    • “Parkinson’s law” says tasks swell in urgency around its perceived effort
    • “Am I being productive or just being active?”
    • “If this is the only thing I do today, will I be satisfied?”
      • Do these things first in the day
    • Be weary of too much information and from the wrong sources
    • “Will I use this information for something immediate and urgent?”
    • “Learn to be difficult when it counts”
    • Have meetings to solve a problem, not define it
    • “Puppy dog close” is when you do a trial run
    • Refine problems before scaling people
    • Try to remove “you” from the equation
    • People can dislike you but should never misunderstand you
    • Don’t appear to be the decision authority
    • “Decide in advance on the rules, stakes, and quitting time”

  • “The Art of Uncertainty” by David Spiegelhalter

    • Uncertainty is about one’s relationship with the outside world
    • “Unknown knowns” is an important category
    • Anxiety should give way to likely outcomes
    • Chance is for random acts
    • “Ignorance” is different from “uncertainty”
    • ‘Hazards’ are damage from risks
    • Hedgehog knows one big thing while the fox knows many things
    • Where possible, use numbers to communicate uncertainty
    • Random values are better thought as being “swamped” rather than “due”
    • “Monte Carlo” was named from “The name comes from the Monte Carlo Casino in Monaco, where the primary developer of the method, mathematician Stanisław Ulam, was inspired by his uncle’s gambling habits.”
    • Avoid picking your birthday in a lottery to reduce the number of people you would share with
    • Never give a probably of 1:1 except to known True things
    • Probability is not a determined attribute of the natural world
    • Having an “none of the above” bucket lets you track unknowns and adjust later
    • “Once in a hundred years” does not mean you have 100 years between incidents
    • Providing baseline-risk is useful (what are your chances of randomly dying tomorrow)
    • Noting a lack of certainty does not tend to directly erode trust
      • Especially if you are clear about what is being done to manage the uncertainty and what the next steps are
    • Seek to inform rather than persuade
    • Include what can and cannot be inferred from the data
    • Don’t strive to be trusted but to be trustworthy

  • “The Goal (30th Anniversary Edition)” by Eliyahu M Goldratt and Jeff Cox

    • “Science” is about ‘common sense’
    • Make sure you are measuring the correct things
    • “Productivity is accomplishing something in relations to a goal”
    • The measurements are
      • Net profile
      • ROI
      • Net cash flow
    • ‘How do we link actual work to this money?’
    • New measurements
      • Throughput is the rate the system generates money through sales
      • Inventory is the money invested in things purchased to sell
      • Operational expense is the money the system spends to convert the inventory to throughput
    • The pursuit of efficiency is often counter to the goal
    • Dependent events limits the maximum fluctuations you can handle
    • Balance flow, not capacity
      • (All cars traveling at the same, slow speed, move fast than if left to their own choices)
    • Bottlenecks are when market demand exceeds capacity
    • Activating a resource is different from using it
    • We seek to optimize the whole system, not for local optimizations
    • Common practices can impede common sense
    • Kanban is a mechanism to signal for a backfill
      • This limits the available quantities, this also limits excess inventory
    • Sophisticated algorithms that track all variables are really difficult to get correct and not particularly useful
    • The effort to capitalize on improved service is markedly different than the effort needed to build the company

  • “Killed by A Traffic Engineer” by Wes Marshall

    • Cars have killed more people in the US than all our wars combined
    • Auto accidents are the leading cause of death until age 50 and older
    • ‘Safety First’ is a lie
    • It is always the drivers’ fault and never the engineers’
    • Most “standards” are actually “guides” that engineers are supposed to override with good judgement
    • The statement was patented 90 years before they were required
    • Standards don’t have safety in mind, they focus on efficieny
    • Focusing on education shifts blame while seeming to be doing something
    • Driver’s Education courses is not very effective and is mostly a money grab
    • We remove crosswalks that are not safe instead of changing the roads around them
      • Federal rules hold cities liable for pedestrian strikes within the crosswalk
      • (This is why Wailuku removed the crosswalk outside the bar)
    • Why do we let cars drive so fast?
      • (Change the road design to make it more difficult!)
    • “Better safety is fine as long as it does not mean fewer cars”
    • “Road safety” is always “comparative” against similar intersections
    • Metrics usually start with “drive time” or “miles traveled” rarely “capacity” and never “trips avoided (through proximity or alternate transit)”
    • We assume accident severities happen in escalations (for so many fender-benders there will be a severe accident, for so many severe accidents there are so many fatalities) so if you reduce fender-benders then you reduce everything worse
    • “Exposure” is important; If no one is walking on the street, there will be no pedestrian fatalities
    • Retro-reflectivity does not notably safety outcomes
      • The goal is to “increase roadway visibility”, not improve safety, so we repaint the lines anyway
    • “If it’s predictable, its preventable.”
    • We tell people it is safe to walk at the same time we tell cars they can turn
    • Active (drivers being dumb) vs latent (the system lets the driver be dumb) errors
    • Technology morphs our potential safety issues: human expect to be able to stop paying attention
    • Hands are faster and more precise than feet… so why are there not hand brakes?
    • 20-year traffic projections attempt to build for the future
    • Hindsight is not foresight
      • (This!)
    • There is a theory that “speed spread” (the differences between different vehicles) matters, not the actual speeds
      • (The good ole’ “driving slower than everyone else is a road hazard”… even if everyone else is going double the speed limit)
    • Speed studies inevitably push speeds up
    • It always comes back to capacity
    • Highways were weaponized to literally help “clear slums”
    • Many politicians use highways to shape their cities
    • GIS is a spatial relationship analysis tool
    • Fear of liability is not a very valid concern
    • The media frames situations without mentioning the driver
      • “A car hit a pedestrian” (no driver mentioned)
      • “Man hits store clerk” (assailant mentioned)
    • Maintaining a certain “level of service” (aka “capacity over time”) becomes the major choke point
    • We accommodate kids instead of planning for them
    • Transit is safer but we always tout it as being more efficient instead
    • Transportation should be about connecting people goods and services efficiently
    • Reducing transportation should be the goal
    • Changing our thinking is more important than throwing more money at the problem

  • “Poverty for Profit” by Anne Kim

    • Most renal services in America are performed by two companies
    • Dialysis is guaranteed under law
    • Earned Income Tax Credit encourages many tax preparers to focus on supporting low-income people because they can charge good money
    • Tax loans with interest are huge!
    • Preparers don’t generally need to have any certifications or courses
    • Maximus (corporation) offers turn-key welfare admin systems
    • Welfare programs today focus on dispelling people from the program rather than actual work training
    • Bail bonds don’t require refunds or cancellations for dismissed or acquitted cases
    • States often charge for correctional stays
    • Private prison labor can lower local economies by pushing down labor costs
    • The government funds the war on poverty but has outsourced much of it to corporations