** 39th book of 2021: Voodoo Hiring ** Hey you, yes you. Who are the most talented people you know? Would they be a good fit for product manager, project manager, maintenance, property management, or general manager roles? If so reply to this thread, I’m hiring.
** 40th book of 2021: History of Flesh and Bone ** Greece may have been the freedom-loving philosophic pillar of western civilization, but it was Rome that built the empire of text and architecture that was able to withstand the dark ages until the renaissance. Like The Life of Greece Durant attempts to tell history as more than * vicissitudes of politics and war, as if life for a thousand years had been nothing but taxation and death. * This was a comparatively easy task for Greece, whose literature, art and philosophy is both abundant and novel. Such an approach becomes harder for Rome, a civilization for whom * war and conquest … left men often coarse and usually hard , prepared to kill without compunction and be killed without complaint. * Throughout the book, Durant offers a wikipedia level summary of the political bones of history in a rush to get to the living tissue of art, science, economics and every day life that Rome created. ...
** 38th book of 2021: A Shot and a Beer* ** They say don’t judge a book by it’s cover, but please, please judge this book by its delicious cover. John Boehner is retired, doesn’t give a fuck, and is ready to share with you his best stories about being ‘mayor of crazytown’ speaker of the house over a round of golf. So grab your favorite Merlot, light up a cigarette if that’s your thing, and let’s dive in. ...
** 37th book of 2021: Chaos is a Ladder ** Set in the declining days of the Mughal empire, the Anarchy follows the rise of the East India Company. In a few decades, it went from a trading company that lost more than 34% of its ships (1) to a state with twice the standing army of Britain. After a long history as arrogant traders with their own security forces, the English learned that superior training, tactics, and economic wherewithal made mercenary work a profitable side-hustle to trading goods. ...
** 36th book of 2021: Body Politic ** Everybody had politics, even if only some people had sex. * Narratives of collective action and dissonance are so often unsatisfying that mainstream culture has abandoned them. This is true in fiction, journalism, and even history. Politics and bureaucracy are dirty words. Individuals serve as the node for every story, and the anonymous and transparent cultural context reinforces a collective fundamental attribution error, hobbling our ability to understand ourselves and the world. Martine focuses on the blank spaces between individuals, and this is where A Desolation Called Peace shines. ...
** 35th book of 2021: Incomplete, Incorrect ** There are many poorly written books on real estate; this is one. The amount of content that relates to motivation and feel good stories is usually inversely related with the usefulness of the book, a ‘chicken soup index’ if you will. Complete guide is about 50/50, and even brings a story direct from Chicken Soup for the Soul. Perhaps more unique however, is that there are few books whose advice I wholeheartedly disagree with. The author shows a clear disdain for buy and hold: * please forgive my frankness, forget the buy and hold strategy. Have a well defined plan going in, execute, and get out. Yes you can make money by buying and holding, but the real money is made by buying and selling. * ...
**34th book of 2021: Dys-trope-ia ** I’m happy that this comic book series exists, a lower budget way to continue a plot that didn’t succeed in the meat grinder of television. I didn’t know I could be nostalgic for the fears of a pre-crash 2008 America, when our biggest collective anxieties were overpowered security contractors and the phantom threat of terrorism. Now I’m in the 2021 dystopia where the 2008 economic crash and 2020 pandemic reveal that we had much more boring villains to worry about. ...
** 33rd book of 2021: Red Ocean Strategy ** “We must face the fact that for 96% of people, their needs are so vulgar,” explained Gao Han, a senior UI designer, and ByteDance employee number twenty-two. He confirmed the app’s reputation was well-earned, “Toutiao is of course trashy. It’s all click-bait, all kinds of messy news.” * In the west tech companies like to think of themselves as innovators, pursuing a ‘blue ocean strategy’ where competition can be ignored and innovation is paramount. The culture created by original tech giants Google and Microsoft has led to an entire industry that pulls its punches and operates with cozy margins. The Chinese alternate reality of tech after the establishment of BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent), is the opposite: a red ocean where oxygen has been depleted and sharks abound. * Business was conducted like a brutal guerilla war in which developers, engineers, and operations staff worked themselves to death under grueling schedules in which speed of execution was everything. * ...
** Exaggerated, but Useful ** Real estate literature is a questionable genre. Many syndicators realize that thought leadership is essential to deal flow, and the shortcut to thought leadership is authorship. Thus the surfeit of low-quality limited-run real estate books and e-books. These tomes were never meant to be well-written, rather they simply exist as a bullet on the resume of the author. So it is with no small amount of trepidation that I approach ‘Best Ever’. Yet to my surprise there was enough information to break through its brotastic tone and justify publication. ...
** 32nd book of 2021: Pivotal Generation ** For most of the world’s and China’s history, generations didn’t matter. Sons and daughters adopted the class and profession of parents, and life meandered through time. But with the modernity encouraged under Deng’s reforms, generation has become destiny. Indeed, circumstances change fast enough that plans cannot even keep up with circumstances. (计划当不上变化 ) Any economist can tell you about the unprecedented growth that China has accomplished over the last 40 years, yet outside observers still seem to miss the yawning chasm rapid economic growth has brought between the young and old. This is where Young China excels: * His country was becoming more like Brave New World than 1984 […] A population numbed by materialistic pursuits, discouraged from individual thought and the drug soma. Money, materialism, lavishness, extravagance, they distracted people from the pursuit of truth and decency. * The name for Chinese melennials is the ‘strawberry generation’ a play on words for their inexperience with hardship (吃苦), which literally translates to ‘eating bitterness’. Like the baby boomers of the American 60’s who ended up deeply alienated from the greatest generation thanks to the unprecedented prosperity of the 40’s and 50’s, Chinese millennials grew up with prosperity as their birthright, and are now looking for more. ...