h. Play

It’s just TORN CITY. Understand:

Kawhi doesn’t play with the Spurs, is injured while the Spurs try to get him on court, when they’re known to rest their players more than anyone else.

He goes to the Raptors, who trade DeMar, who loses in the first round with the Spurs with bad defense.

The Raptors become champions on outstanding defense, beating a Warriors team FILLED with bad injuries.

Patrick McCaw threepeats three years in a row, with two different teams, beating the first one with the second in the finals. Without playing.

I’m torn and awkwardly happy and sad with all that shit. Everything loops in wild ways.

Lots of lessons for coaches out there.

I want to change the world, but real problems are hard. There are huge opportunities, in transportation, energy, computing, healthcare, manufacturing, but none of them can be solved on the kind of timelines and expectations that the startup community have. So many companies I see have great ideas, but aren’t realistic and serious enough to realize them. I worry that we wont solve these solvable problems, because everyone just want to party like its 2009.

Eskil.

I think people also want the glamour and social desirability from 2009 VC startup stuff. People build or want to build things that will look cool and make them look good.

Yes, things are that shallow these days.

Real problems that hit most people –like housing- are not necessarily hard, but they’re tedious. They require humility (housing is a different problem in every single climate, for instance). They require to take time to understand and listen. VC folks think in brute-force mode: throw money and more money, and at some point it just works.

Silicon Valley sold the idea of a single-solution-rules-them-all concept to far too many young bright minds who end up believing in it. There are other bright minds, thankfully.

Back to problems and huge opportunities and to me, everything is telling me housing is the root.

Transportation: what’s the problem with it? We have superbly efficient vehicles. Maybe people travel too much (work, cheap vacation). Just do that less, then (telecommute, less traveling).

Energy: what’s the problem with it? We know everything about how to minmax this. We could do a million time better with housing and buildings, that’s for sure. That’s a housing problem, then.

Computing: not sure what’s the problem here besides the fact that we have far too much processing power to do nothing online. It’s ridiculous. Moore’s law is done. No one cares about 4K or 8K. We have reliable computers that can run for 20+ years without breaking.

Healthcare: well, if we had better housing we would have a shit ton less healthcare problems. We could retrofit houses and buildings with great insulation. That would reduce humidity which reduces the risks of contracting a pneumonia for instance. From being able to wheel in and out elderlies to providing babies with a clean and safe space to grow, to drastically reduce anxiety and stress for people paying bills/rent/mortgages, housing is 80% health to be honest. It’s easy to be healthy in an enjoyable, stress-free environment.

Manufacturing: I don’t know what’s the opportunity here either. We buy and consume too much. We ship everything from everywhere, using boats that are burning 75.6 tons of fuel per day. We have over 50,000 ships that consume that amount of dirty ass gasoline and they run 365/24/7 to ship us a pair of shoes and a damn phone tomorrow. We’re absolutely insane and disgusting. Manufacturing needs to happen locally, providing for local needs. That’s not a huge opportunity per se. The biggest solution is buying less.

To change the world requires two things as of 2019: less consumption. state-of-the-art housing.

*drops mic*

What people want: technology that doesn’t change constantly.

Incentive: super tired of re-learning how to do something that we already know how to do, for decades on.

What companies want: technology that changes constantly.

Incentive: selling more hardware, keeping and controlling users inside a system, economies of scale, justifying positions and salaries.

Companies’ incentives are strong. Yet they don’t make sense in a way: selling more hardware for what, I see homeless people with three devices. Justifying workforce, well maybe you should save money by laying off expensive executives, I don’t know.

People’s incentive is legit, obvious and hitting everyone of us at some point. But, money.

My mom just emailed me to tell me that she’s tired of update problems on her computer. So no video call today. Technology is exhausting and fucking up our lives now.

It’s really bizarre to follow a basketball player for years, to know that he’s amazing and then being kind of mad that he’s doing so well with another team.

I’m not surprised that Kawhi took those Raptors to their first NBA finals ever. I’m not surprised he’s been looking like an extremely efficient and versatile version of MJ, hand fake, midrange and so on. 17 rebounds.

I saw him get better for years, while everyone was like “whatever”.

Kawhi is so good. I couldn’t wait to see that Leonard/White/Murray/Aldridge/Gay bullshit. We would have a game 7 western conference finals right now.

And I just love his dedication to the game and how he clearly doesn’t care about that stupid ass media circus, giving them the coldest answers lmao. It’s just adorable.

Interesting finals coming up. Will Lowry and Van Vleet be able to clamp Steph? Will Klay clamp Kawhi? Will KD need to show up and go thermo-nuclear? We shall see.

In Evicted, Desmond writes that low-income people looking for housing or work are often assumed to be "more or less ‘rational actors’ who recognize trade-offs and make clear choices." Through his research, however, he saw people wear out from long, fruitless searches for decent apartments or jobs. The people he encountered could better be characterized as "’exhausted settlers,’ who accept poor housing in a disadvantaged neighborhood or a dead-end or illicit job after becoming depleted and disheartened from trying and trying and failing and failing."

Chicago’s eviction problem.

Shelter should be a basic right. You can’t do much without it. It starts there.

The fact that private companies can be landlord and never have to answer anyone about anything, should be completely illegal and never be allowed ever again.

There should be some kind of teaching and self-reliance over services for buildings: I’ll cut the grass around and I’ll teach the teenagers how to do it. Don’t charge me shit. Same with clogged toilets etc. The money saved should be re-invested by the landlord  into heavier work, in partnership with the state, the city (sewer increase so that toilets don’t overflow).

The problem with everything being “solved” with money is that no one gives a single fuck. That leads to the stronger getting away with everything and the weakest losing everything, ending up in the streets.

It frustrates me to no end that we know and have all the solutions in the world and we just let people rot. Goddamn.

I had to laugh thinking how Kelly would have reacted not only to the security headaches but to the exasperating management regulations that never existed in his day. I might be cleared for top secret, but I was also on a government contract and that meant conforming to all sorts of mandatory guidelines and stiff regulations. Kelly had operated in a paradise of innocence, long before EPA, OSHA, EEOC, or affirmative action and minority hiring policies became the laws of our land. I was forced by law to buy two percent of my materials from minority or disadvantaged businesses, but many of them couldn’t meet my security requirements. I also had to address EEOC requirements on equal employment opportunity and comply with other laws that required hiring a certain number of the disabled. Burbank was in a high-Latino community and I was challenged as to why I didn’t employ any Latino engineers. “Because they didn’t go to engineering school” was my only reply. If I didn’t comply, I could lose my contract, its high priority notwithstanding. And it did no good to argue that I needed highly skilled people to do very specialized work, regardless of race, creed, or color. I tried to get a waiver on our stealth production, but it was almost impossible.

Skunk Works book.

So, of course this rubs me the wrong way.

I love how engineers know exactly what compounding effects are and how all of a sudden they forget about it the second it applies to us, humans. We do not live in a vacuum. All the requirements to make a better, more equal world, rose from history. There was/is a precedent –a phenomenal bias towards anyone not a white man- that led to those requirements. The precedent lasted for decades if not centuries if we want to go all the way down to it. So, you can be mad as hell at your ancestors and them only.

Secondly, those stealth vehicles and top secret planes were made despite all that “horrible” administrative overhead. Some waivers might have happened and/or things went without minorities on board. Bottom line is, the work went through and was done, regardless of what the government pushed Lockheed to do on the civil rights side of employment, right? And because it was the right thing to do, I don’t think there’s anything to whine about. Affirmative action’s goal always has been a noble one and always will be. Once again, blame your ancestors/compounding effects.

Thirdly, I read Kelly’s autobiography. This man was about solutions and not about complaining. We need black engineers at Lockheed by law? He would have gone down south, hit every single HBCU, talk to the best local black engineers, make them move to California. Problem solved. It would have been a pain in the ass but he would have learned a lot and probably would have just not been interested in talking shit about that. The government pays for all of that, anyway.

Elitism is a hell of a drug. Elitism drills in people’s heads that some people are better than others. They aren’t. it’s all about access.

Different people accessing things at the same time/rate have the same kind of output.

It’s not plane science.

Sometime during summer 2009, I hit my left leg on a coffee table really hard. It hurt like hell. I hit it again at the same spot a bit later that year and for some reason, my body instinctively stopped moving said leg much.

Things became weird. At first I didn’t really notice. I still could do everything: running, pedaling, basketball, dancing, skateboarding even. But it was as if I was missing a whole 180° of action on the left.

It did weird things. At first I probably lost muscles. And then balance. Just slightly. Then the right side of my body compensated and worked out more.

It’s been a good 18 months that I’m working my way back to recover those 180°. Pivoting more and more on my weak left leg, from heel to toe. Jumping on it. It’s just fear in my mind. Everything works just fine. Everything is connected in our bodies. In a way, I atrophied my lymphatic and/or nervous system by partially shutting down physical movement. That’s my theory.

In the past six months I saw a difference. I breathe better. My ears are less clogged. I can sing back as high as I could before that stupid injury. I feel more “balanced” physically instead of having a weird weight on the right side of my body.

There’s this weird effect where simply moving in a way that I haven’t done much in ten years, triggers memories from before 2009. It’s nuts. Early Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s signs? I don’t know.

Skateboarding helps tremendously. It’s the best exercise to make my legs pivot in every direction and make them stand in said directions. A lot of cracking noises in them ankles but it’s all good. I can’t skate much for now –no insurance- but once I get it? It’s over for you hoes. In the meantime,

go go gadget legs s t r e t ch

The skateboard pull has never stop since I was ten.

I just watched a documentary on Daewon Song, a legendary skateboarder. It sent me back.

Daewon at his peak was incredible. Doing things at a speed and a level of mastery that was so far out that we couldn’t even dream of doing half of that. He was that bad. 3 flip to nose manual on a steep ass, rough bank, like it’s nothing.

I was skating Paris and Daewon was skating LA. Now I’m in LA and I know where Gardena is. I know the triple-digit street LA a bit. But more than that, I understand the paradigm. Parents working constantly. Hot days. Perfect evenings. The brutality of that economic system that pushes you to want to try some stuff like jumping on a board and slide on a handrail because fuck it, let’s try. The urgency. The desperation. The creativity.

Hardcore capitalism created street skateboarding. Car culture –parking lots, ability to go anywhere- fed it.

All I could see from 10,000 miles away was teenagers with freedom to spare while wondering how this was possible.

It seems wrong how Daewon is known across the world in one community and still had to live in his car for a while, not so long ago. Hardcore capitalism is some serious shit.

He’s a kind soul, like most skaters I’ve skated with or skaters I heard in interviews.

This makes me want to drive around, find a parking lot lit with soft orange lights and practice my manuals. Just skating.

Further to this… at this point, Google controls:

– the largest browser people use to view pages (Chrome)

– the largest platform people use to run that browser (Android)

– the largest way people discover content online (Google Search)

– the largest way people advertise online (Google Ads)

– the largest way people share video online (YouTube)

– the largest email provider (Gmail)

This is way too much power over the internet in one corporate entity.

It’s way beyond what MS ever accomplished at their height, and it’s way beyond anything Apple ever accomplished either.

The power Google have over the internet at large and the content people consume at this point frankly terrifies me.

A comment online that stuck with me. And for the rest of our internet lives we go through another company, Facebook (Instagram, Whatsapp) and that’s about it.

Two companies rule 98% of what we do do online.

Change, people. Use alternatives. Get used to inconvenience more.