I found an interesting blogging idea today to simply write down 5 of the things I’ve been thinking about lately. Like Nadia, my ambitions for my blogging far exceed my capacity. However, as with most skills, increasing capacity comes through excercising such capacity as already exists.  So I’m going to try to at least once a week, write down a list of the 5 things that have been on my mind during that past week.

1. Robots vs Sweatshops: I’ve been hearing a lot about the automation being a driver of the current depression in good job creation and the ails of the middle class. However, it occurs to me that a lot of our consumption is made by hand, just in parts of the world where labor is cheap. Maybe that growth of emerging middle classes is having a downward pull on middle class wages in places that were previously more competitive markets for manufacturing?
2. Rest vs Decay: I’ve noticed that when I’m not ‘working’ (whether on projects or errands or my employment), I fall into one of two stats: rest or decay. In my rest state, I emerge, rejuvenated and energized, whereas in my decay state I emerge - well actually I don’t emerge, I just continue to be in a low energy, lethargic state. I still haven’t fully explored the difference between the two.
3. Process and Scale - There is a sense that small teams and individuals have an advantage over large organizations because they are more agile and have less process and formality. I wonder though if that might be backwards. Because they are small they can actually have much more process and ensure a much higher degree of devotion to tight and agile development cycles. Maybe the real problem at scale for organizations is not lack of process but the difficulties in actually doing it correctly.
4. Improvement and measurement: Not much to say here other than the observation that you can’t improve what you can’t measure.
5. Philosophies of blogging: what exactly am I trying to achieve with my writing? Am I trying to make factually based claims that I require research to do? I think thats not usually the case. More often I’m trying to structure my thoughts and create paradigms and frameworks for more effectively thinking about problems I and others face given imperfect information.