WBH Weekly Digest 2023-04-28

Today is the official launch of Spengler's Future by John J. Reilly in paperback and ebook. Those of you who want to support The Long View Republishing Project can purchase a copy from Amazon.

I've got a special bonus for subscribers to With Both Hands, who can download a complementary copy of the ebook in PDF or ePub.

A thread by Shepard putting the phrase "don't read anything after 1980" in context of the earlier attempt by the Futurians to eliminate anything from literary history that didn't match their tastes.

Explaining tech’s notion of talent scarcity

TLDR: Most conversations about “top talent” assume Pareto distribution; however, a closer examination suggests that different corporate cultures benefit from different types of talent distribution (normal, Pareto, and a third option – bimodal) according to the problem they’re trying to solve. Bimoda…

Nadia AsparouhovaNadia Asparouhova

A short exploration of different cultures of talent within organizations, and how that interacts with company culture.

The Firm | Philip Jeffery

“Management consulting” entered my vocabulary a few months into my senior year of college. Long . . . .

First ThingsPhilip Jeffery

This expose of management consulting is especially interesting in light of the article above on how different organizations use talent. Management consulting specifically tends toward internal zero-sum competition and a notable lack of positive pro-social benefits.

There is an interaction here with my thesis on the long-term decline in innovation. The financialization of the economy has pushed too much of our top-talent into non-productive sectors of the economy like management consulting and high-frequency trading.

The Long View 2009-02-07

This mention by John J. Reilly of his work for West Publishing Company spurred me to archive John’s CV from his website. It is easy even for me to forget how many things John wrote in the 1990s. There are even a few pieces referenced in that CV that were

With Both HandsBenjamin Espen

One of John J. Reilly's recurring themes was how little changed across the twentieth century. Read this post about the American legislature's habit of not actually passing a budget and see if it seems familiar.

I have a great love of the aesthetics of oil rigs.

April 25th

Never gets old

With Both HandsBenjamin Espen

Don’t talk to me or my son again

Book reviews and literary criticism of adventure stories, along with an archive of John J. Reilly’s The Long View

With Both HandsBenjamin Espen

I've said that one of the biggest challenges in technology today is simply finding the correct information to solve a problem. It is frequently the case that a problem has already been solved, but the person who needs to know has never heard of the solution.

Little Tiffany

Book reviews and literary criticism of adventure stories, along with an archive of John J. Reilly’s The Long View

With Both HandsBenjamin Espen