Nathaniel Ward

Americans are self-organizing into mutual-aid societies to overcome the challenges posed by the pandemic. This is an encouraging development: Civil society organizations have unique local knowledge that enables them to help those in need far better than top-down approaches.

Jonah Goldberg:

The culture war has become more important than the issues the culture is supposed to be about.

Ward Carroll:

Not since 2008 have we seen as sharp a contrast in the digital media presence between presumptive nominees. But this time the difference is almost entirely about tone.

This is a neat subscription page. The “pay less” rate seems like a steal given the perceived value.

Customer-facing payment gizmos often prompt for gratuities–even in places where tips weren’t common before. What’s the etiquette in these cases? The NYT has some ideas, and the WSJ ran a similar piece last year.

The New York Times reports on the Charles Koch Foundation’s push into foreign policy:

When it comes to foreign policy, though, the agenda of the foundation — which supports education and research and constitutes a relatively small part of the Koch network — does not line up quite so neatly with partisan politics. In keeping with Charles Koch’s libertarian shrink-the-state imperative, the foundation has set out to bring an end to America’s age of endless wars and to reduce the nation’s military footprint around the world — a vision shared by many progressives, some of whom count themselves among the Koch grantees.

The current moment requires more events like Apple’s, not fewer. They’re celebrations of free enterprise and what it can achieve when unleashed.

Good news for hockey fans.

It’s one thing to point out that gig economy triumphalism was overblown, that gig work isn’t for everyone. It’s another to compel workers who do prefer the flexibility of part-time gig work into an outdated employment model.

This is a great essay from George Packer about the pathologies of modern education. Since each family has its own preferences about what education ought to consist of, wouldn’t it be best if decisions about education were left up to families rather than politicians or school-assignment algorithms?

Jonathan Mayer and Arvind Narayanan deconstruct Google’s disingenuous arguments on tracking protection. Fortunately, there are excellent alternatives to Chrome.

Brian Krebs tells an astonishing story about a payroll firm that “abruptly ceased operations this past week after stiffing employees at thousands of companies.” Trust matters.

The premise behind this article—that with just a bit more central planning we can have our cake and eat it too—is far too common among urbanists. The hubris is extraordinary.

“The world’s richest regions, such as North America and Europe, are not only increasing their forest area,” Alexander Hammond writes. “They have more forests than they did prior to industrialization.”

The best security posture is to assume you’ve been compromised. Because you probably have.

Too many firms measure their employees not by what they accomplish but by how long they spend accomplishing it. “Hours become a proxy for devotion and attachment to mission,” Ty Fujimura says on the Rework podcast.

“Peak performance and constant performance are very different,” Fujimura writes on Medium. “Choose to be at your best by choosing to rest, and if you manage others, let them do the same.”

Salim Furth explains that zoning laws have become “too inflexible and too political,” and too easily coopted by special interests. He suggests a more flexible approach:

In the current housing market, zoning is to blame for high housing costs in coastal cities. But taking a century-long and nationwide view, different problems crop up in different markets. The specifics of each city’s regulations ought to change with the market, but the broader system—as defined by a state zoning enabling act—should be flexible enough to accommodate industry or commerce, overcrowding or vacancies, trolleys or self-driving hovercraft. And it ought to serve the public interest broadly.

Self-driving hovercraft are a thing?

The most hostile words in email marketing:

Please do not reply to this email. The sending email account is not monitored and nobody will see your reply.

Treat your customers like human beings and let them reply to the messages you send them.

Motorcyclists spent decades winning legal victories and respect, Mike Riggs writes in Reason, yet interest in riding has declined:

It might also be the case that bikers are victims of their own success. They worked hard for decades to raise the social standing of motorcyclists, and now any and every kind of person can commute to work on a motorcycle or cruise on the weekends. Young people might see boomer enthusiasm as a turnoff—the biker lifestyle can read as dated, like steakhouses and big Cadillacs. Maybe, to love a chromed hog and ape-hanger handlebars and the sound of a V-Twin hitting its sweet spot, you had to be alive and young when riding that kind of motorcycle was synonymous with opting out of polite society or bucking the generation that preceded you. Young people today have safer ways to opt out; meanwhile, their parents have matching helmets.

“A politician … is a man who thinks of the next election; while the statesman thinks of the next generation. The politician thinks of the success of his party, the statesman of the good of his country.”

—James Freeman Clarke

Online tracking technologies continue to evolve. Anti-tracking technologies will need to evolve to keep up.

DHH suggests abandoning subscription walls like ebook offers in favor of actually persuading people to sign up your emails.

If you have a mailing list that’s worth signing up for, you don’t need to trick, cajole, or bribe people in other to get them on board. You only need to do that when you know that most people wouldn’t voluntarily join. That’s a pretty weirdly coercive play.

There’s a real opportunity here for ethical firms to differentiate themselves.

I made some updates to the code behind NathanielWard.net:

• Switched to common system fonts over Google Web Fonts, vastly speeding the site’s load time.
• Ripped out Google Analytics, both to speed up site loading and because I really don’t need to creep on my readers.
• Added support for dark mode via a CSS media query: @media(prefers-color-scheme: dark) {}