I appreciate these concrete strategies! My family has always encouraged us to “just ask, the worst they can say is no” and not feel bound by existing conventions: for rush ordering/shipping, custom orders, venue or property access, flexibility of deadlines, etc. Some examples I’ve had success with:

• getting customizations to costumes or art pieces- if the product is not advertised as customizable but already being custom made, this can be done pretty easily and sometimes without additional labor or parts. (Customization increases time, but I bet the production and shipping tips you provide could work well if some degree of urgency is still in place!)
• Access to private property for birding, including residential and business. People are very flexible, especially if you make it clear what you want to look at! Folks with extensive birdfeeders setup especially love to show off their success at attracting wildlife to random strangers. (You’ll have to generalize this very specific example yourself.) Aaand if they aren’t sure, offering to buy them a beer goes a long ways (Literally going to get them a beer at a bar after, giving them a $20 and saying it’s for beer, or having a beer on hand. I theoretically comprehend why this method is so effective, but dang the stuff is foul.) DISCLAIMER: I live in the North US, and it’s pretty normal here for people to enter each other’s property. If you live in a location where entering a property with permission from one party that isn’t communicated to other parties on the same property will endanger you in any way, please reconsider!!! It is not worth your safety.
• Regarding deadlines, I am a bit unorganized and perpetually cursed, so there are many many forms, requests, and assignments I have submitted late. This isn’t a good strategy to rely on, but in a pinch, if you see a deadline, ask yourself why it is in place! For standardized forms, almost all of them exist so that staff have a reasonable amount of time to complete processing of the forms before (whatever the next step is). Depending on the timeframe, squeezing in one more to process won’t change their workload significantly the way that moving back the official due date would, so they’re often happy to take your late forms even if the online portal or other standard submission method is now closed. (iirc procrastination statistics suggest around 90% of people overestimate their ability to complete a thing on time, resulting in bulk submissions on the last listed official day. This generally agrees with my experience managing anything with a deadline, with the exception of items people are genuinely internally motivated to complete (This is how I got into a habit of making humorous forms, which provide a small amount of additional motivation)).

All this being said, I haven’t had a ton of luck with production, so I’ll consider these strategies. Thanks!!!!!!!

Side note: being able to afford ten sofas at once would be great. I got mine third-hand for free and had to repair the supporting beams from a previous owner’s drunken bodyslam.

Similarly to the general post I just made, is there a significant difference between this definition of hieratic and the general usage of esoteric?

Is sazen significantly different from obfuscating or esoteric ideas? Perhaps out of sheer mental habit, I find myself conflating the concepts.

Speed of intelligence growth is ambiguous

Three months ago, I learned that narcolepsy patients quite literally experience sleep and unconsciousness asynchronously, and synchronization is normally achieved through regulatory cells that produce hypocretin. Hypocretin, like anesthesia, acts on neuron microtubules. This has led me to a greatly increased interest and confidence in theory surrounding neuron microtubules as a processing unit, and I wonder if anyone in the AI community has considered the implications.

If microtubule lattices are storing or calculating information, it implies that the brain is actually calculating at least \emph{three magnitudes larger} bits of info per second than previously thought with a stunning level of parallelization & connectivity. This sets the bar for human-level intelligence significantly higher, and I would be very interested to see how much this affects growth projections that get tossed around & the confidence assigned to said projections.

The extra little existential dread at the end got me. Excellent mood shift to really push “realign/recall goals now” without making any arbitrary time based axioms. Thanks for the article, and also to the team for getting it curated.

I am curious if you still feel this way (and about the Level Above Mine) after 14 years. While I agree all the execs I have met have a high level of competence and energy, what they have competence in tends to vary greatly. ie. some are well rounded; fit, great at managing at all levels, charismatic, and able to discern information and value in ideas, business and people with relative ease. On the other hand, I’ve met execs that are incredibly good at a small selection of skills: ie. having energy, working hard, and able to relentlessly fine tune a budget until not a single penny is wasted and margins are maximized. The latter results in a very different type of business or organization than the former, especially if the person in question doesn’t fill in for their own weak spots with complimentary staff. (If one’s high competence areas are not in identifying strengths of staff, trying to identify a potential staff member that is good at identifying strengths is very difficult, and I really don’t believe gimmicky tools like StrengthsFinder can fix this little conundrum.)

I’ve also met ill-intentioned execs. This is tricky to discern because they usually had polished charisma and even had claims to good intention that they believed at one level or another, even while simultaneously seeing no issue with ie. laying off $1 million of essential staff members and giving themself a $1 million raise. (“As long as new staff are hired next year, no damage had been done to the business, right?”) This type of irrational thinking and behavior is such a damaging flaw that its very easy to see how reviewers may consider the person’s weaknesses to outweigh their strengths enough to summarize their net skillset as bad. A boat with a high-end navigation system and a hole in the hull will not get you as far as a dinghy.

All that being said, I also find it noteworthy that many many people I’ve met have high levels of competence in skills that aren’t conducive to climbing the socioeconomic ladder (and they’re even sparkly!). In this occasion. it is especially understandable to see them make an estimation of their highest competency, their summed competency, or both, and deem someone that doesn’t meet their own level as not praise worthy.