You know what you could do on this amazing day? Read Five Things and then become a paid subscriber! Awesome idea, right? ✌🏻 Oh, by the way, if you do not want to subscribe to Five Things, Five Things Tech and Five Things Running, you can select which one of the newsletters you want to read in your account settings. Five Things: Self-Worth, Customized Drinks, Amazon, Election Prediction, HeronJust another Sunday morning? Not quite. Make sure to read this!
Hello and welcome back to Five Things! This last week was really weird for me. As I might have mentioned before, we have four kids. Our oldest daughter (and one my top three daughters) moved out 2 years ago and currently studies in Uppsala, Sweden. So it’s just three kids at home. And last week, our second oldest child and by far my favorite son, went on a school trip to Prague. It’s so weird to just have two kids at home. It felt kind of empty. It’s weird how having four kids changes the perspective. I remember when we spent a long weekend in London when our third child was just a year old and everybody thought we were crazy traveling with a small child in a stroller, while we actually thought it was light traveling with just one kid… Anyhow, our son is back and he even grabbed some Czech beer for his old dad, which of course makes me very happy. If you look at this week’s selection of articles, you’ll notice that politics is notable absent. I’m currently too annoyed by the political discourse in Germany, where too many people are focused on pleasing a very vocal and idiotic minority that seems to think that applied xenophobia is the answer to many of today’s problems. So while immigration into Europe has actually gone down in the last few months, there are discussions about declaring a state of national emergency right now and conservative politicians are trying to axe the German and European asylum laws. Meanwhile, we’ve had yet another so called hundred year flood, which is only supposed to happen every hundred years, but we had too many of those in the last few years. And no, it’s not the immigrants who walked from Afghanistan or Syria or came by boat from Africa to start a new life in Germany who are responsible for this, it’s a political generation that tried to look away as much as possible and were stuck in the neoliberal mindset where spending money to benefit all of society was ruled out as something only evil socialists would do. Germany needs to invest as much as possible in many different areas, from infrastructure to housing to economy to the armed forces. And we need to do it quickly before more bridges like the one in Dresden collapse. The funny thing is: Germany is the third biggest economy in the world and still doesn’t understand that we constantly have to invest into change so that we can keep the status quo. Every time I tell that to people they look at me as if I just came up with a totally weird idea. Actually, it is a really simple idea that has been tried successfully many times before, just look at Bidenomics right now. Anyhow, enjoy these Five Things now and don’t forget to think about the heron! The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age
“We are not giving away our value, as a puritanical grandparent might scold; we are giving away our facility to value. We’ve been cored like apples, a dependency created, hooked on the public internet to tell us the worth. Every notification ping holds the possibility we have merit. When we scroll, what are we looking for?” - let’s start with a dystopian view of our future to kick things off here. The Customized Drink Is Out of Control
I’m totally in favor of living out as much individuality as possible, but I really don’t understand the allure of obscenely overpriced drinks with too much sugar. Do you drink that stuff? Amazon employees furious about the end of remote work
One of the positive developments during the pandemic was the sudden realization that people could actually work together without being in one building. Of course, everyone who has worked with developers before, knew that this is possible, but during the pandemic this practice was expanded too many different roles in the workforce. Amazon now wants everybody back in the office and I assume they just want to get rid of some people to reduce headcount after the hiring frenzy of the last decade. No people, no problem: AI chatbots predict elections better than humans
This is such an interesting idea. Essentially they are relying on the prediction capabilities of GenerativeAI to come up with an innovative way to create polls. And it even works. We live in interesting times, for sure. My Harmony With the Heron
“The heron is exactly what the heron is to you in the moment you choose to give it meaning. It will be that meaning until you decide it means something else. That’s how meaning works. It’s a subjective act of interpretation.” - after you read this article, you will think differently about the heron. That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico You're currently a free subscriber to Five Things. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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