203 / Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullshit.

The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.

– James Baldwin

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Featured artist: Edgaras

Dense Discovery
Dense Discovery
 

Welcome to Issue 203!

View/share online

It’s tax time in Australia – our financial year finishes on June 30th – and so I’ve been emailing a lot with my accountant recently to finalise last year’s tax return. As if to make me feel better about it, Anne Helen Petersen’s post Paying for civilization incidentally came up in my reading list this week.

We hardly ever think about why taxes have such a bad rap. It’s just become standard practice to show a certain amount of contempt for the government whenever taxes enter the conversation. Maybe it’s because our pay slip regularly reminds us of just how much the government takes away from our hard-earned money, leaving us wondering where the heck all of that money goes?

I can’t help but think of the parable in David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech in which an old fish asks two young fish, ‘How’s the water?’, to which they reply, ‘What the hell is water?’ His speech is about living a life in consciousness of the all-important essentials that hide in plain sight, everywhere, all the time.

If I may hijack this parable: maybe our version of the water is a pretty decent society – a civilisation that, despite its many flaws and shortcomings, still seems to provide a base level of comfort and safety for the vast majority of it. Who of us really think about taxes when we turn on the lights or cross the road? Like the fish, we’re swimming in the benefits of taxpayer-funded essentials, blissfully ignoring the amazingness of their existence all around us.

My biggest gripe with taxes is not having to pay them, it’s about how inequitably our shared obligation is distributed: thanks to creative accounting and other loopholes, those who are in the best position to pay more, often pay the least. So instead of protesting about having to pay too much, we should be more vocal about some getting away with paying too little.

Allow me to, once again, finish with the words of Rutger Bregman: “We can talk about these stupid philanthropy schemes; we can invite Bono once more; but come on! We got to be talking about taxes. That’s it. Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullshit.”Kai

 

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Through thoughtful engineering practices, we help align people and processes with the goals and values of your company. Whether it’s through team scaling, leadership coaching or developing career progression rubrics, we guide you and your team through change and growth. Let’s talk!

 

Apps & Sites

Switchboard →

Cross-app collaboration space

Switchboard provides a collaboration space in which all of your existing web apps – from Notion to Figma and Gmail to Trello – can be made visible and interactive to other team members, removing the need for constant, awkward tab switching.

Clearer Thinking →

Thinking & decision tools

This website offers a variety of tools, surveys and mini-courses meant to help you “change your habits, make better decisions, and achieve your goals”. It’s all built around increasing rationality in human behaviour, although I’m not entirely convinced rational decision-making works in our favour as much as we’d like to believe it does.

Mumu X →

Smart emoji picker

Mumu X (for macOS) lets you find emojis by entering not just descriptive text but symbols and characters that are somewhat related to the icon. The tool uses the GPT-3 language model to learn associations between emojis and whatever people enter to find them. Pretty smart, but also pretty expensive.

Notable People →

Mapping local notability

If you have a few minutes to spare, this map of note-worthy people is a fun way to spend it: “The map is showing birthplaces of the most ‘notable people’ around the world.” Zoom into your childhood hometown to see if you recognise the local ‘celebrity’.

 

Worthy Five: Leo Mascaro

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Five recommendations by photographer and music curator Leo Mascaro

A video worth watching:

Sample Breakdown shows how Daft Punk creates their music through chopping samples. It left me speechless.

A book worth reading:

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey is a peek into how famous people used to spend their time creating the work they are now known for.

A recipe worth trying:

Pão de Queijo (cheese bread) is a food staple in Brazil that is perfect (and delicious) for any time of the day!

An activity worth doing:

I’ve been trying to spend more time listening to some favourite albums instead of rushing to listen to all the new releases as soon as they come out. I think these days we should all be revisiting the things that we love.

A newsletter worth subscribing to:

Fog Chaser shares a new and beautiful original instrumental song every month. Perfect for moments of calm on a busy day.

 

Books & Accessories

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Whistling Vivaldi →

How stereotypes affect us

A book offering insights into how we form our sense of identity and how we can mitigate the negative effects of the ‘stereotype threat’. The author Claude M. Steele runs through plenty of experiments and studies that “show, again and again, that exposing subjects to stereotypes – merely reminding a group of female math majors about to take a math test, for example, that women are considered naturally inferior to men at math – impairs their performance in the area affected by the stereotype.”

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Where the Leaves Fall →

Humankind’s connection with nature

I love that there is a wave of new independent magazines untangling our complicated relationship with the rest of the natural world. WtLF is one of those, compiled by two editors – one from the global north and one from the global south. Expect stories at the intersection of social justice and the environment, art, science, culture, philosophy and food. “We are a part of nature, existing in reciprocity with the Earth, but as many of us are born into an environment that is mainly brick and concrete, it only becomes harder to reconnect with the sense of awe and wonder that the natural world presents to us.” Friends of DD enjoy a 15% discount. Become a Friend to access specials like this.

 

Overheard on Twitter

Can’t seem to sleep. Let’s see if the bright light of my phone containing all the information in the entire world held inches away from my face for the next 15 minutes manages to lull me into a peaceful slumber.

@townsendyesmate

 

Food for Thought

Paying for civilization →

Read

The idea of viewing taxes in a positive light seems pretty radical or stupid – depending on who you ask – but, as Anne Helen Petersen argues here, somebody’s gotta pay for the essentials that hold a society together. “When I told [my financial advisor] I was down with paying taxes, it was difficult to tell if he was just surprised or just thought I was stupid – which presupposes the idea that smart people pay less taxes. I’m not dumb, and I take deductions like everyone else. But I’ve also made a conscious decision to think of paying taxes not as a burden to get out of, but as a willingly performed obligation, a way of being a citizen in my community.”

This is the waste of one operation, my operation →

Watch

In this 90-seconds-long clip, Maria Koijck shows how much waste was produced by just a single medical procedure – her surgical breast reconstruction. It’s staggering to think of the waste produced daily by the millions of hospitals around the world. Maria raises awareness of this and asks: ‘Is there a better way?’

It’s Time to Stop Living the American Scam →

Read

This piece is on the ranty side and I’m not convinced that all millennials are this despondent, but Tim Kreider touches on a general sense of distress about the future that many of us feel. “People aren’t trying to sell busyness as a virtue anymore, not even to themselves. A new generation has grown to adulthood that’s never known capitalism as a functioning economic system. My generation, X, was the first postwar cohort to be downwardly mobile, but millennials were the first to know it going in. Our country’s oligarchs forgot to maintain the crucial Horatio Alger fiction that anyone can get ahead with hard work – or maybe they just dropped it, figuring we no longer had any choice.” (Possible soft paywall)

 

Aesthetically Pleasing

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Ronny Tertnes’ H2O Sculpture Droplets series is a collection of close-up photos of droplets hitting a body of water.

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The elemental use of brick and timber connects Garden House beautifully to the outdoors. What a warm place, full of texture and patina!

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Goodness me, the intricacy of Yulia Brodskaya’s art is astounding. What you see here is composed of thousands of layers of meticulously folded paper. (via)

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The beautiful Kokoro is a high contrast display serif with a pinch of quirkiness. It comes in six styles and three different weights with carefully treated italic sets.

 

Notable Numbers

101,353

Since August 2021, the non-profit The Ocean Cleanup has collected 101,353 kg of plastic over 45 extractions, sweeping an area of ocean of over 3000 square kilometres – comparable to the size of Luxembourg or Rhode Island.

16

Data from Global Forest Watch suggests that across the globe, the amount of tree cover being burned has nearly doubled in the past 20 years. In 2021, around 16 football pitches of trees per minute were lost to forest fires.

1,825

According to this research professor of urban planning, drivers looking for on-street parking in American cities account for roughly 1,825 miles travelled, for each curb space, every year. That’s two-thirds the length of the country.

 

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The Week in a GIF

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Reply or tweet at DD with your favourite GIF and it might get featured here in a future issue.

 
 

Older messages

202 / How the Shifting Baseline Syndrome makes us see temples not ruins

Monday, August 22, 2022

To refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to give it up. Do not be misled into passivity either by false security (they don't mean me) or by despair (there's nothing we can do).

201 / The true cost of owning a car is just astounding

Monday, August 15, 2022

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. – Simone Weil Featured artist: Stephan Schmitz Dense Discovery Dense Discovery Welcome to Issue 201! View/share online → In The Insane Cost of

200 / Four years of DD! 🎉

Monday, August 8, 2022

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. –

199 / Housing for people, not profit

Monday, August 1, 2022

Perseverance – a lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves an inglorious success. – Ambrose Bierce Alexandra Dzhiganskaya Dense Discovery Dense Discovery Welcome to Issue 199! View/share online → This

198 / War-life balance in Kyiv

Monday, July 25, 2022

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite. – Bertrand Russell Featured artist: Irina Kostyshina Dense Discovery Dense Discovery Welcome to Issue

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