45: Notes To Self

Yo, it’s Luke!

Just moved into a 12 month lease with my two good friends, Aidan and Jaylen. The fellas are hyped. If you’re in SF, come stop by!

That said, here is your weekly dose of 5 noteworthy ideas & things I learned about last week. Click on each link to dive further on that topic.

1. Gov’t Thought Experiment

Here’s a conversation starter for your weekend: if you could snap your fingers and put a law into place right now, what would it be?

Personally, mine would be changing our election system to ranked choice voting.

Right now, most states and the federal gov’t do first past-the-post voting. Whoever gets the most #1 votes wins. So someone could be the favorite candidate for 30% of voters and least favorite for the other 70% and still win. So silly!

With RCV, you rank your top 10. As a result, most people are satisfied. Which means it’s harder for idiots to stay in office and easier for reasonable people to get put in office. Thus, politicians are more incentived to actually serve their citizens.

Listen to our lord and savior Andrew Yang, talk about it here.

2. My Favorite New Tool (Julius AI)

If you use spreadsheets or data analysis in your job, you gotta try Julius AI (chatGPT but for spreadsheets).

It has saved me ridiculous amounts of time in spreadsheet / data manipulation.

3. More Gov’t Thoughts Because Why Not

Another convo starter: what are the biggest problems that only the government can solve, but no one talks about?

I’ll start:

• Processed food and a reactive healthcare system. 50% of America will be obese by 2030! More here.

• Making it easy for smart, well educated foreigners to get US citzenship.

• Even though everyone talks about it, it seems like the gov’t isn’t very focused on the massive implications AI has on work, meaning-making, and society at large.

Also, when will we figure it out and go balls to the walls on investing in nuclear??

4. The Daily Primer (Anu Atluru)

5. What Season Are You In?

I recently felt a bunch of internal conflict. Far more anxiety and stress than normal.

Now that I’ve finished school and moved to SF, it felt like I had to sacrifice one side of me (intellectual explorations and fun adventures) to get where I wanted to go (successful start to my career with properly planted roots in SF).

Naturally, I was scared that I would no longer feel like I was flourishing.

But I’ve come to realize that what makes you flourish at one time will not work all of the time.

To flourish, you need to know what season you’re in. Right now, I feel a strong calling to a more “focused” season of life.

After committing to that season, my mind is at ease. I’ll re-evaluate after 3 months.

It helped to know that worry time is scheduled for later.

Do you know what season are you in?

Thanks for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday! If you liked this edition, send it over to a friend who would like it too 🤝 

Cheers,

Luke

PS: you can find more rabbit holes here & my writing here.