Take

I link to things to read all the time. But sometimes a long article is better than a short article, and sometimes a book is better than a long article.

Obliquity: Why our goals are best achieved indirectly
by John Kay

John Kay coins the term obliquity to refer to ways of solving problems that are not direct approaches.

Maybe that sounds nutty, but as an illustration, the richest people in the world are not the people who most desperately want to become rich. (Larry Ellison excluded.) Oftentimes they are not even those of the most desperate who are best at executing their way there.

Contains well-considered critiques and thinking about the sincerity of moral algebra (that of adding up pros and cons) and of intuition.

Careless People
by Sarah Wynn-Williams

Social media gives me a rash, venture capital in the style of cancerous growth ruins both people and technology, and Facebook is worst of all.

Sarah Wynn-Williams sees that Facebook can turn into a tool that changes the world and basically creates the position to work towards this out of whole cloth. It should not have worked, but it somehow did, thanks to her demonstrated prescience.

What transpires is exactly the worst-case scenario. Facebook is a number-go-up cesspool, the wrong decisions are made (or the right ones for the wrong reasons) and we know where we are today. The details are shocking and interesting, as is the brazenness of the people involved.

Apple in China
by Patrick McGee

Patrick McGee makes the case that Apple's willingness to walk on coals to evolve manufacturing processes has largely built Chinese manufacturing, invested amounts of money comparable to the Marshall plan and made it practically impossible for Apple to move manufacturing anywhere else in the short to mid term.

The road there is a series of individuals doing their best to build something from scratch, sometimes in a comedy of errors. Apple's legendary need to control every situation ends up both shaping the manufacturing ecosystem of the world's most populous country (at the time) and leave Apple to form uneasy truces with iPhone scalpers and organized crime.

One thing becomes clear throughout reading: Apple's level of particular standards and precision rests on an assembly machine and downstream supply chain that have to forgo all of the humane values they are told to follow to achieve a result Apple will accept. The core value instilled by the process, top to bottom, from Hon Hai Precision to device assembling migrant worker, is that you are expendable.