Your enemies might be right about you

https://sahar.substack.com/p/your-enemies-might-be-right-about

If your enemies are attacking you and winning, there’s a good chance it’s because you have a real weakness.

It’s not that they’ll be nice enough to attack your weakness with compassion: they’ll twist truth and be as unscrupulous as they can get away with. It’s not that they’ll only attack you for things you’re actually wrong about: maybe you are weak because you’re correct but unpopular. But it still is a real weakness. Either way — you have a problem.

Even if it’s all horribly unfair — understanding where people don’t trust you, where they don’t like you, where you’re misunderstood, where people are liable to scandalous lies about you — that’s information. Useful information.

When we’re fully enmeshed in a social scene, we keep track of who is important, and who is an annoying barely tolerated crank. We forget that others looking in have neither the context nor desire to make that distinction. The worst members of your team often become its public face: the edgelords, the conspiracists, the assholes, the scolds, the predators, and worse. You know who will make sure to show you when that happens? Even when it hurts your feelings — especially if it hurts your feelings? Enemies. God bless them. 

The Deadliness of Good Intentions

https://www.1517.org/articles/the-deadliness-of-good-intentions

Therapists spend hours, if not years, trying to explain to people that intent does not equal impact. For example, you may not have intended to hurt your kids, but the fact of the matter is, you hurt your kids. You can’t tell your kids “stop acting hurt because I intended to do good—it just went wrong.” Therapists try to bring patients from the reality of “it went wrong” to “it needs to be made right.”

We try to justify ourselves through the means of the ever-virtuous “intent.” Intent is the mind’s way of searching for some redemption, or some justification. Intent is often a liar. It covers the sins of pride and entitlement. 

When we take a harder look at intent, we’ll find the “lesser sins” that we find tolerable, if not necessary sometimes to get the desired outcome that we’d prefer. For example, we had to lie, because otherwise they wouldn’t do what we needed them to do for a good thing to happen. Or, we were only making a prayer request, not gossiping. Any time we bend the law to fit our need for a “good thing,” we are attempting to do, we’ll find calculated manipulation, or the thoughtful way we hide what our actions so as to not upset anyone.

I Watched Stand-Up in Saudi Arabia

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/10/fear-laughing-riyadh-comedy-louis-ck/684527/?gift=SKtFP-7gCBnFn1bNJdqPMi_7j1-Q3xFUfh3oXFEbWpw

As I ate dinner one night at the Ritz-Carlton, in a Chinese restaurant overlooking the indoor swimming pool, I reflected that the promise of a five-star hotel is insulation, a cocoon against the outside world. A rich person—a successful comedian, say—could glide from the business-class lounge to the front of the aircraft to an air-conditioned limo to a luxury hotel where your dinner is interrupted by five different people asking if everything is okay. Live enough days like this, and the whole world becomes your bellhop. No wonder these guys like Saudi Arabia. The way that daily life bends around rich people is that little bit more obvious here.

The Agentic State Vision Paper

https://agenticstate.org/paper.html

AI technologies have matured sufficiently to handle real-world government complexity whilst costs have decreased enough to enable widespread deployment. Citizens increasingly expect digital service experiences comparable to those they receive from leading private sector organisations, creating public demand for agentic government services. Perhaps most importantly, governments that act now can actively shape the development trajectory of agentic AI to serve public purposes rather than merely adapting to systems designed by others according to commercial priorities.

Seven Charts That Explain the Past 25 Years of the NBA

https://www.theringer.com/2025/10/10/nba/seven-charts-that-explain-the-21st-century-nba

It’s hard to overstate just how much pro basketball has mutated since Y2K. The 2000s NBA was an analog league full of hulking centers, midrange jumpers, and pixelated national TV games framed in 4:3. But the game has since changed in every imaginable way: stylistically, financially, globally, and culturally. We’ve witnessed the rise of the 3-pointer, the death of the post-up, the internationalization of the MVP race, and the billionaire-ification of the NBA’s ownership class and even of some players. 

As part of its weeklong reflection on the NBA quarter century, The Ringer asked me to come up with a set of charts that explain the past 25 years of the best basketball league in the world. Let’s start with shooting.

Algorithms are breaking how we think

US gov't admits F-35 is a failure

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/f-35-failure/

Nearly a quarter century after the Pentagon awarded Lockheed Martin the contract to develop the Joint Strike Fighter Program into the F-35, the government finally admitted the jet will never live up to Lockheed’s ambitious promises — used to sell the $2 trillion boondoggle to nearly 20 countries around the world.

The Government Accountability Office released a report last month detailing the ongoing challenges the program faces. The first paragraph of the highlights page includes this sentence:

“The program plans to reduce the scope of Block 4 to deliver capabilities to the warfighter at a more predictable pace than in the past.”

The casual reader will be forgiven for possibly glossing over the passage because of its anodyne wording. But the statement is a profound admission that the F-35 will never meet the capability goals set for the program. “Reduce the scope of Block 4” means that program officials are forgoing planned combat capabilities for the jets.

Block 4 is the term to describe ongoing design work for the program. It began in 2019 and was termed as the program’s “modernization” phase. In reality, Block 4 is just a continuation of the program’s initial development process. Officials were unable to complete the F-35’s basic design within the program’s initial budget and schedule. Rather than making that embarrassing admission and requesting more time and money from Congress, Pentagon officials claimed the initial development process was complete (it was not) and they were moving on to “modernization.” What they really did was simply reclassify initial development work with a fancy rebrand.

So, when program officials say they plan to “reduce the scope of Block 4,” they are saying the F-35 will not have all the combat capabilities that were supposed to be a part of the original design.

This is a remarkable development

The dawn of the post-literate society

https://jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-dawn-of-the-post-literate-society-aa1

As you have probably noticed, the world of the screen is going to be much a choppier place than the world of print: more emotional, more angry, more chaotic.

Walter Ong emphasised that writing cools and rationalises thought. If you want to make your case in person or in a TikTok video you have innumerable means for bypassing logical argument. You can shout and weep and charm your audience into submission. You can play emotive music or show harrowing images. Such appeals are not rational but human beings are not perfectly rational animals and are inclined to be persuaded by them.

A book can’t yell at you (thank God!) and it can’t cry. Without the array of logic-defeating appeals available to podcasters and YouTubers, authors are much more reliant on reason alone, condemned to painfully piece their arguments together sentence by sentence (I feel that agony now). Books are far from perfect but they are much more closely bound to the imperatives of logical argument than any other means of human communication ever devised.

Power, Money, and Booze - A Leaders Perspective on Preventing Sexual Assault

https://mkloepper2025.substack.com/p/power-money-and-booze-a-leaders-perspective

As you can imagine, the regional AAFES manager was not super happy about our request that he reduce shelf space dedicated to hard alcohol. Afterall, AAFES operates for profit. It’s a unique organization that provides service members with good retail services and circulates a portion of their proceeds into various morale programs. And, they operate for profit. And, booze makes money (as does tobacco and junk food). 

 In any event, despite his misgivings, when presented with our data, our regional AAFES manager had little choice…he reduced the linear shelf space of hard alcohol and limited container sizes to .75 liters. (Math is interesting…in one meeting the manager revealed his quarterly profits from hard alcohol. It was a lot. We did some quick napkin math and showed him the profit value to AAFES for each sexual assault in my Brigade. It was sickening, and inarguable).

I Printed a Microchip That Runs on Air — A Nervous System for Squishy Robots!