The problem is that click-bait is the only way to keep the lights on for most of these sites. They just don't make that much money.

Consider how this translates to employee pay and, in turn, the incentive for these employees to pursue virtuous journalistic careers and invest the time required to keep things on the straight and narrow.

As a result, we don't get journalism - we get op-ed and clickbait. We get toxicity.

This is part of a vicious cycle. Toxicity and clickbait are more profitable.

It is in human nature for us to have our interest piqued by negative headlines and bad news. Our brains work by recognizing patterns and relationships between facts and situations. We've evolved to be more interested in the facts that jut out and are potentially more threatening to our survival.

So, bad news and negativity gets clicks. Weird-ass headlines gets clicks. Misinformation drives clicks. Toxicity drives traffic. Clickbait drives traffic.

Go look at the headlines and "hot" articles on top gaming blogs. You'll see tons of negative articles or headlines that stir toxicity.

• The more people get upset, feel that they're getting taken advantage of, or feel threatened, the more likely they are to click.
  
  
• The more inflammatory the article, the more likely people are to comment.
  
  
• The more likely they are to comment, the more likely they are to return to the article.
  
  
• The more likely people are to return to an article, the more page views the blog gets.
  
  
• The more page views the blog gets, the more they make.
  
  So, if you're the editor for a gaming blog site, what do you do? Even if you're not intending to run toxic content, you might unconsciously start becoming conditioned to run toxic content through the positive feedback you get through page stats.
  
  In systems like Forbes where anyone can submit and the most popular articles get featured, it's easy to see how the most divisive and potentially toxic content gets featured.
  
  Consider this. Here's a fictional made-up quote we can use for the sake of argument.
  
  > "In the new game, the brothers go to Africa. It's a fascinating place," said Jim Drawerson, artist on Super Plumber Brothers 2. "It was hard to capture all of the culture and ethnic diversity, but I think we did a good job."
  
  Which of these three headlines do you think will get the most clicks and comments?
  
  > 1. Super Plumber Brothers 2 artist interview
  
  > 2. Super Plumber Brothers 2 artist talk about setting game in Africa
  
  > 3. Super Plumber Brothers 2 artist slammed for racist comments
  
  For the third headline, all you have to do is find a few people on Twitter who were offended (someone is always offended about something), screenshot their comments, and paste them into your article.
  
  The third headline will drive clicks, even if it's not accurate. But who's going to hold the gaming bloggers accountable?
  
  Gaming blogs are largely not accountable to anyone except the stats that keep the doors open. I'm not going to name names or sites, but I can tell you that, having worked in the industry, there are a handful of very popular sites that do not fact check and do not run corrections. It should come as no surprise that these sites also make most of their revenue on click bait.
  
  So what can we do?
  
  
• Do not click on clickbait. Look at the headline of an article and ask yourself - Is this going to help me understand or know more about gaming?
  
  
• Do not comment on inflammatory articles. This only gives toxic clickbait more views.
  
  
• Question sources. What are the facts that the author is asserting? Where did they get these facts? Did they talk to the developer/publisher?
  
  
• Question credentials. Who wrote this article? What is their qualification? What kind of articles do they typically write? Have they contacted the publisher/developer to get the facts?
  
  
• Question authority. Who is writing this? Do they have special knowledge? Do they have special access?
  
  
• Tell authors and editors when you see clickbait and you don't like it. Do this through Twitter - not through the site. Do not contribute to toxic comments sections.
  
  
• If you find a factual error in an article, tell the author. Do this for Twitter. They will probably censor you in the comments section.
  
  
• Comment on articles that are well-written and contain facts and thank the author.
  
  It's a huge effort, but a lot of the toxicity in the gaming community comes from ignorance. And that ignorance is driven, willfully or not, by clickbait.
  
  
  At the end of the day, there's just not that much gaming news. So someone has to stir up drama to fill columns and drive clicks.
  
  EDIT -- This is a great book that covers some of this subject matter. Very quick read.
  
  http://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/1591846285
  
  To be clear, I am not affiliated with this book and am not using Amazon affiliate to make money on clicks/purchases of this book. I think it's a great resource for people who would like to know more about this topic.

I remember reading a story in "Trust Me, I'm Lying; Confessions of a Media Manipulator" where the agent of an author wasn't getting any good marketing coverage for his client's new book, so the agent starting pulling the "angry consumer" shtick, calling/writing into different media outlets (bloggers, radio, etc..), pretending to be pissed off about the book. No one had heard of it, but eventually some of them started writing about how insulting & disgusting it was, just based on the agent's complaint.

It worked. No publicity is bad publicity.

---
edit: Since people are seeing this, you should read this book. The guy (former American Apparel advertising exec) did this tell-all book because he saw the media's standards dropping and his industry's tricks starting to be used in things like politics. It will destroy your confidence in ever believing anything you read on the internet, reddit definitely included. Good for honing your bullshit detector.

edit 2: I am not affiliated in any way with this book. You are not being manipulated 😜

I can't defend the last decade, but the first regime had no chance after what the Panthers and Jags did with their new franchises. That immediate success caused the Texans and Browns to get completely shafted in the expansion process.

I'm not going to go into all the details since they are well documented all over the internet and in Terry Pluto's* book. Many Browns fans hate they guy because he is perceived as eternally pessimistic, but he has been dead on for the most part (most recently Manziel from the start), and deserves some level of respect regarding his editorial opinion.

If you aren't interested in the book, here is a decent recap of the whole expansion. Credit to /u/Brokewood.

/* I was 10 beers deep when I wrote this. I still think Grossi is a solid reporter.

The part you quoted is actually copy/pasted from my book, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, which is where this YouTuber got his information. This paraphrasing is also a bit misleading, because Hennig's team was playing with a lot of ideas, some of which might not have made it into the final game.

If you want the full story of Uncharted 4's development (plus the stories behind nine other games), you should check it out! https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Sweat-Pixels-Triumphant-Turbulent/dp/0062651234/

From across the pond, welcome to pretty much the best sport ever! We're glad you're here :) I'm gonna try to keep it general, cuz I think once you've got the basics down you can just watch some games and refine it from there. Also, I learned a lot of stuff about the game by playing video games like The Show, so if you can get a copy of that and wanna get more in-depth that's actually not a bad way to come at it from a different angle.

Let's start with the overall structure of the game. One of the things that's different from most sports is how many games there are in a season, and to accommodate that two teams will play several games in a row against each other. That's only really important if you don't want to look silly when talking to another baseball fan. As far as actual game structure, there are nine innings a game. Each inning has a "top" and a "bottom;" in Major League Baseball the away team gets to hit in the top of an inning and the home team defends ("fields").

Arguably the main competition happening within a game is between the pitcher and the batter. Whenever a batter steps up to take his swings, that's called an at bat or AB for short. During an AB, the batter will try to swing at pitches in what's called the strike zone. The strike zone (and correct me if I'm wrong on this guys cuz it has changed some) is the width of home plate and the height is between a batter's belt and his knees. It's important to understand the strike zone because then you can understand balls and strikes. A ball is whenever a pitcher throws outside the strike zone and the batter doesn't swing at it. However, if a batter does swing and either misses the ball or fouls it off, it counts as a strike. A foul is when the batter puts the bat on the ball but it goes out of bounds. This can be into the seats, behind the batter's box, outside the foul lines (those little white lines that go straight out from home plate, cross third and first base, and extend all the way to the edge of the outfield), etc.

The total number of balls and strikes in an AB is called the count. The count's important because once a batter gets 4 balls, he takes first base on a walk, which is also called a "base on balls" in ye olde lingoe and why the stat is abbreviated BB. But if the pitcher throws him 3 strikes, he's out! That's called a strikeout. However, a foul ball never counts as a third strike, it's only a strike out if the batter doesn't make contact (either swinging and missing or not swinging at a pitch in the strike zone).

There are other ways to record an out too; strikeouts are by far the least common. First let's talk fly outs. That's when a batter gets the ball in the air but it's caught by one of the fielders. There are two "special" fly outs, one being a pop fly. That's just a fly ball that doesn't leave the infield (i.e. usually it's caught by the pitcher or a baseman rather than an outfielder). There are also foul outs. Like I said before, fouls are balls that aren't in the normal playing field. But pretty much all stadiums have what's called "foul territory," which is space between the foul lines and the seats. If a fielder catches a fly ball that stays out of the seats, that's a foul out! Second, though, there are ground outs. A ball is considered "live" as soon as it touches fair ground. All that really means is that the batter-cum-runner isn't out yet. Anyway, if the batter hits the ball on the ground, one of the fielders can pick it up and throw it to first base. If the ball gets to the base before the runner does, he's out!

Obviously if every batter got out all the time the game wouldn't really have a point, so there are also hits! There are really only four flavors of hits: Singles, doubles, triples, and home runs. As the names imply, it's just what base the runner can manage to get to safely. If there's a runner on second or third base, we say he's in scoring position, which means that any hit has a pretty good chance of getting him home. Incidentally, that's how points or runs are scored: having a runner cross home plate.

A batter is credited with a run batted in (RBI for short) when he gets a hit and a runner makes it home. There are other ways to get an RBI, too: If there's a runner in scoring position (usually third base but sometimes second if the guy is REALLY fast) and the batter hits a fly ball far enough into the outfield, the runner can still score if he tags up and runs home. Since the ball hasn't hit the ground, it's not live yet. Once it hits the fielder's glove, though, we're off to the races! The runner first has to tag the bag he's on, then when the ball comes alive he can score. If he does, then the batter is out but he still gets an RBI. However, the fielders have a chance to throw the ball home and try to tag the runner out before he touches the base.

There are other sacrifice plays besides the sac fly. Batters can also hit sacrifice ground balls, but these aren't always to score runs like the sac fly is. Explaining this part requires a lot of strategy talk so I'll steer clear of a lot of it since I'm just trying to go through the basics, but a lot of the time it's just to move a runner into scoring position.

I'll finish out by just talking about a couple of the stats you'll hear a lot about. Ima start with hitting stats! The most common one you'll hear is batting average or just "average." This stat is just what percent of the time a batter will get a hit. Also, even though a lot of these stats are shown as decimals, they're really percentages. So like if a batter has a .250 average, chances are he'll get a hit every fourth AB. If he's got a .333 average, it'll be a third of the time. So on and so forth. If a player is batting over .300 that's generally considered really good. Jose Reyes right now has a .350 average and that's the highest in all of MLB, so that's really good. As an historical note, batting .400 is kind of a mythical achievement that not too many guys have managed.

I've already explained RBIs, but just FYI that's the other big stat that most media outlets highlight as the most important one. Home runs are usually the third stat that rounds out what they show you on TV when a guy steps up to bat. It's becoming more common, though, that a player's on base percentage or OBP is displayed. That's the average number of times a guy gets on base either by hits, walks, or being hit by a pitch (if a pitcher hits a batter with the ball the batter automatically gets to take first base no matter what the count is). Some people consider OBP to be the most important stat, but that's something you can read more about if you want.

And now here are some pitching stats! Probably the two biggest stats commentators highlight are earned run average or ERA and wins. The ERA is the average number of runs that pitcher would allow in nine innings. Say, for example, his ERA is 3.00. That means, were he to throw all nine innings of a game, he'd give up 3 runs on average. Anything lower than that is usually considered pretty elite. Wins are becoming more widely regarded as kind of a meaningless stat but, nonetheless, can be a big impressive number we like to ooo and ahhh at. The stat itself is just if one pitcher gave up fewer runs than the other. That's kind of a gross oversimplification, but I'm not sure I can really articulate the nuances much better than that. The pitching equivalent of OBP is the WHIP, or walks plus hits per inning pitched. I say "equivalent" because both are stats that are really important but only just starting to be talked about during an average broadcast. WHIP is a really crucial stat because it reflects how many baserunners the pitcher allows during an inning. A WHIP of less than 1.00 is suuuuper good, but becoming more common in the post-steroid era.

And with that, I think you should more or less have the tools you need to start watching and loving baseball! Welcome again!

EDIT: Wow thank you guys so much for the great feedback!!! This is my last day at my tearing-my-hair-out internship so I'll come back and change the things I got wrong later tonight. If you know of somewhere else where people might find this helpful, feel free to repost it wherever (though I'd really appreciate it if you tack my name on it)!

It's not just gaming journalism, it's all modern journalism.

Ryan Holiday - Read his books.

https://www.amazon.com/Growth-Hacker-Marketing-Primer-Advertising/dp/1591847389?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc

https://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/1591846285?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc

So a few off the top of my head:

1. The Professional Chef. Geared towards professional chefs but a great resource.
   
   
2. On Food and Cooking. A classic. Not really a 'cookbook' per se but rather a book that discusses history and food science.
   
   
3. The now out-of-print Williams and Sonoma Mastering Series. Specifically, their book on sauces - the others are solid but not quite as good. Those books were how I personally learned to cook. (still can find used)
   
   
4. The Flavor Bible. Obligatory. Eventually you grow out of it a bit, but it's still a great resource to have around.
   
   
5. Flour Water Salt Yeast. I just got this book recently this last Christmas, and I've been enjoying it quite a bit.

This is a great read as well. Highly recommend. A good insight into devops.

https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262509/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

I imagine you're already aware of it given your interest, but in case you (or others) aren't Jason Schreier's book Blood, Sweat and Pixels has a whole chapter on Destiny's pre- and post-launch troubles. Schreier's the guy who broke the story on Anthem's awkward development just this week.

As much as I wanna say this guy is a douchebag/idiot and karma will come back around... that’s not how the internet works. We’re all giving him free press right now.

https://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/1591846285

When you consider that they were forced by their publisher to make DA2 in only 16 freaking months. It is amazing to me that DA2 was even a playable video game, let alone anything resembling a good video game.

Then on top of that, DA:I was created in just 3 years, and Bioware was forced to use Frostbite, even though it had none of the tooling required to make an RPG. Sure if DA:I were going to be an FPS Frostbite would have been cool, but for the entire first year of development Frostbite was basically an unusable mess to everybody but the environment artists and level designers, and even then their work was just an educated guess because the level designers couldn't even playtest their levels, they jsut had to make levels that would probably work given knowlege about the broad strokes about how the game was supposed to wind up.

On top of all that, they were forced to scrap a ton of stuff in DA:I because it was mandeated that the game come out on PS3 and XB360, even though those platforms only wound up consisting of 10% of DA:I's sales.

They didn't even have Iron Bull implemented in the game until 8 months before ship. All of the play testing up until that point was without a fufll party, because the party system had to be developed in Frostbite specifically for that game.

"The biggest differentiator between a studio that creates a really high-quality game and a studio that doesn't isn't the quality of the team" said one person who worked on Destiny. "It's their dev tools. If you can take fifty shots on goal, and you're a pretty shitty hocky player, and I can take only three shots on goal and I'm Wayne Fucking Gretzky, You're probable going to do better. That's what tools are. It's how fast you can iterate, how stable are they, how robust are they, how easy it is as a nontechnical artist to move a thing."

Once again, it is incredible that DA:I resembles anything close to a decent game given the tools and timeline they were made to work with.

Reading Blood, Sweat and Pixels made me want to rip EA's eyes out.

If you want to know the ins and outs of how luxury goods are made today, I highly recommend "Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Luster" by Dana Thomas. Great examination of the industry, cuts through the mystique of modern "luxury."

More people have died over the cultivation and export of Bananas than oil.

The phrase "Banana Republic" comes from the bloody history of Central America and the Caribbean where, for the majority of the 19th and 20th century (with remnants well in to the 21st) major multinational fruit companies like "United Fruit" and "Dole" mercilessly controlled the governments of whole countries in order to set up favorable conditions for the growth, harvesting, and export of bananas.

Most of the strife that Central America experienced in the last 50-60 years is related to the Banana trade in one way or another, and the fact the Caribbean Islands are inhabited by predominantly dark-skinned people with African roots is due to the HUGE influx of slave labor imported to grow and harvest Bananas.

NUMEROUS coups have been held, backed by the US CIA, to overthrow democratically elected governments that threatened the Banana industry (not conspiracy theory - verified fact: see Guatemala 1954).

See Bananas: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World for a very readable history of the Banana

If you's havent heard about it, i recommend picking up the book by Kotaku journalist /u/jasonschreier - 'BLOOD, SWEAT AND PIXELS', its available online and has a section all about the origins of Stardew Valley and lots of interesting insight (Such as how Barone learned to fake lighting in his video game due to his lack of knowledge around it)

The shit that gamers throw at devs on social media is unwarranted, transparency or none. Developers make games, and sometimes those games are good, sometimes they are bad, and sometimes it is or isn't their fault. Regardless, they still deserve to be treated like human beings.

Transparency is great; I love how Blizzard handles OW (that netcode video with the paper cups was awesome), and I think writing like Jason Schreier's Blood, Sweat, and Pixels are really cool and can help people understand the pressure and challenge of making any game, let alone a good one, but really, a lot of gamers need to grow the fuck up.

Yeah... but it's done by the writer of Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made. Each time he posts it's something worth reading, IMHO.

You should read Trust Me I'm Lying if you want to know exactly how easily online media can be deceived.

It's ridiculous and I've used some of the tips in it to get stuff I've made into some fairly prominent magazines.

TL;DR in case you don't want to read the book:
They don't give a shit if it's not reliable, they get the page views (and hence advert hits) regardless of if it is legit. The edit isn't retroactively sent to everyone who previously read it. Plus they can even get a double dip of hits when they write the article about how they were tricked.

https://www.amazon.com/False-Start-Browns-Were-Fail/dp/1886228884

This was a great book on how the NFL screwed the expansion Browns and goes up to the 2004 season I think

For his point on energy, the USA's huge oil production capacity for the last 100 years has given us a real competitive advantage against other countries. One could argue that our country's ascendance to sole world power was completely due to the our access to cheap energy. For instance, look at the role access to fuel played in the second world war.

We have always been one of the largest oil producers in the world. Even today US companies basically control the world oil market as middle men (I highly recommend Daniel Yergin's book for a long but informative read on this subject.). However, the fear is that we will soon lose our cheap energy advantage and become dependent on foreign oil... it maybe true that right now the US consumes a lot of domestically produced oil, but the writing on the wall says that will not be the case forever.

It's may be partly because depression is over-diagnosed.

This book argues that we're now diagnosing normal self-limiting periods of grief or stress as mental illness.

For example, if your spouse dies and you experience symptoms of major depression for several months, do you have a physiological illness called depression, or are you going through a completely natural grieving process?

The book also suggests antidepressant use may be perpetuating depression, rather than treating it successfully in the longterm. People may experience symptoms of depression or anxiety during the withdrawal process, think that's their normal state, and go back on the drug to stop the symptoms.

That's not to discount people who legitimately suffer longterm symptoms of severe, unexplained depression and suicidal tendencies.

Not a proper ELI5 response, but I read this book in college that went in on a lot of stuff about how luxury brands started targeting different audiences and how that affected quality; might be interesting for you as background reading material:

https://www.amazon.com/Deluxe-How-Luxury-Lost-Luster/dp/0143113704

(1) Read, bruh. I can't vouch for it personally, but I've heard the book Watching Baseball Smarter recommended with high regard. And it's almost literally the exact thing you asked for. Here are some other good book recommendations:

• Moneyball by Michael Lewis. Hard to believe that the book is sort of old hat at this point, but it still serves as a very readable introduction to advanced statistics.
  
  
• The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract by Bill James (mostly). This book is good toilet reading, if you have a massive toilet on which to perch it, and your bowel movements are glacially paced. James ranks the best players at each position, and goes on a witty, decade-by-decade jog through the history of the game.
  
  
• The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball by Tom Tango. Are you a "math person"? Read this book, you'll like it. It's an introduction to sabermetrics that explains the important first principles of statistical analysis, builds an important statistic (wOBA) from the ground up, and then applies all of that knowledge to answer specific questions about baseball strategies and to debunk, verify, or qualify some of baseball's hoary "conventional wisdom."
  
  
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. This book is not about baseball, but it's still great and you should read it.
  
  (2) You'll want to start watching the game more, if you can. Find a method (like MLB.tv or, you know, your television) to do so. Massive exposure does help you learn, and it's a fun, if inefficient, method. Osmosis. That's just science.
  
  (2b) Depending on the broadcast crew, it's sometimes addition-by-subtraction to mute the television.
  
  (2c) If you have MLB.tv Premium and intend to follow your favorite team, I recommend watching the other team's broadcast. You know enough about [TEAM X] already. Learn something new about [TEAM Y], instead. Unless, of course, (2b) applies, in which case maybe your best bet is MLB.tv's option to overlay the radio broadcast on the TV video. Barring that, the liberal application of the DOWN VOLUME button is always an option, and then, like, listen to Chopin's Preludes. Don't be That Guy and lean too heavily on No. 15, though. There are 23 others. Expand your horizons.
  
  (3) When you go to games, keep score. Sure, there's a guy a few seats over in a striped button-down and pre-faded jeans (Chad or something) who will mock you mercilessly for it. Sad for you, you've lost Chad's respect. But, oh, the things you'll gain. A free souvenir. A better grasp on the flow of the game. The priceless power to answer the "what did I miss" and "what the fuck just happened" questions that litter the air at ballgames, tragically disregarded and forgotten like the syllabi from Chad's last semester at Bromaha State. You can learn how to score ballgames here. Fuck Chad.
  
  (3b) Go to games alone now and then. Did I mention that, in some company, it's rightly considered rude to score a ballgame like a trainspotting anorak? Not in all company, mind you. But I like going to some games alone to avoid the messy politics of divided attention altogether.
  
  (4) Bookmark a few websites. Quick stat references include FanGraphs, Baseball-Reference, and Brooks Baseball. Grantland, Baseball Prospectus, Baseball America, and the Hardball Times are all good. FanGraphs and Baseball-Reference both have subscription options that allow you to access enhanced content for a small fee, which is worth it if only to support the yeoman's work that they do compiling and sorting our beloved numbers.
  
  (5) German chess great Emanuel Lasker is believed (incorrectly) to have said that "if you see a good move, look for a better one." Good advice. Too much of the history of baseball analysis is the history of people getting stuck in comfortable places and refusing to interrogate their own ideas about the game. Sabermetricians have made careers out of just pointing this out, and even some of them do it from time to time. Also, on the level of pure self-interest, baseball ignorance and bad teeth have this much in common: Keeping your mouth shut hides them both. If you have a good opinion about a baseball topic, look for a better one.
  
  (6) Watch a some decent movies about baseball. Sugar is excellent and disturbing. Baseball: A Film by Ken Burns is available on Netflix and worth watching. You drink his nostalgic Flavor-Aid at your own peril: At times, Baseball is about as edifying as having a good, 19-hour stare at a Norman Rockwell painting. It's still in a class all its own as a baseball documentary. You should also watch Ed, starring Matt LeBlanc, because it'll teach you not to take strangers on the internet seriously when they give you advice.
  
  (7) When you go to games, wear whatever the hell you want. This has nothing to do with understanding baseball, but it annoys me when people make a big deal out of policing the clothing that others wear to sporting events. Sitting front-row at a Yankees-Tigers game in your best Steelers jersey and a pink Houston Astros BP cap? Whatever. You be you. You be you. I once watched as a perfectly innocent college student was denied a free t-shirt from a Nats Park employee because he (the student) was wearing a Red Sox shirt with his Washington cap. That was pretty fucked.
  
  (8) Take the EdX Sabermetrics course. Others have recommended this, with good reason. It's a wonderful introduction to advanced analytics, and you get a taste of programming in R and MySQL as well. You don't need a CompSci background. I sure didn't.
  
  Hope this helped.
  
  Footnote: Chad-hating is actually too easy. Truth is, I've never really been mocked for scoring games. Once, I even bonded with a Chad-esque guy sitting next to me at a Braves-Nats game here in Washington. He was pretty drunk, but we talked Braves baseball while he drank and I drank and I scored the game and he drank more. He seemed utterly engaged by the scoring process in that guileless, doe-eyed way that only the drunk have mastered. That's the Chad I loved.

Grab the Phoenix book: https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592

You should read Trust me I’m Lying by Ryan Holiday. It brilliantly digs into the media ecosystem and explains exactly why you are right.

https://www.amazon.ca/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/1591846285/ref=asc_df_1591846285_nodl/?tag=googlemobshop-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=292905515425&hvpos=1o2&hvnetw=g&hvrand=2803731859655008491&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9061024&hvtargid=pla-406163954633&psc=1

Spoiler: media went through this in the early 1900s when newspapers were sold individually. Subscriptions to papers is what Bred modern journalism as a virtuous pursuit like we understand it.

This book has been suggested a few times so I finally got around to reading it. I think it has some good information in it. I'm only about halfway through it, but I like it so far.

Time Management for System Administrators

Other books would be any of the social books like "How to influence people", "7 healthy habits..." Etc.

I haven't read this one yet, but It has been suggested to me if you plan to go more into management/leadership Start with Why

Other books that have I have ear marked due to being mentioned:

• The Devops Handbook
  
• The Practice of System and Network Administration
  
• The Practice of Cloud System Administration
  
• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy - This one might have been a joke, but as someone who has dealt with depression and burnout on the job. I think this could be beneficial.
  
• How to win friends and influence people
  
• How to win friends and influence people in the Digital Age
  
  Also, do a search for "Books for IT Professionals" to find a lot of other suggestions.

Let's go ahead and jump down the rabbit hole here.

1 - Reddit is a business. It's a subsidiary of Advance Publications. Technically any content or comments you post here are unpaid contributions to someone's bottom line. Controversy and lies are amoral in this context, meaning that if something gets hits and views it's gold. Doesn't matter if it's bullshit feminism, a post about some cool archaeological dig in Siberia, or a post hating on mods and admins. Even this box I'm typing is gifted content.

2 - The internet itself is a fucking business. And it's about as cultish as you can get. Memes, viral videos, comment circlejerks, flaming, are all part of a "cult"ure we've built around the rights and wrongs of interacting with each other through electronic means. Anything desirable but "other" is quickly categorized and integrated. Anything undesirable is simply ignored. That means controversial is actually desirable because it generates back-and-forth. This dynamic is super fucking easy to manipulate, meaning...

3 - It's all marketing now. When companies exhaust their technological or practical advances, they turn into marketing machines. And those machines are as vicious as they are effective. Just try reading more than half of Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator without wanting to throw your computer and phone in the trash and move into the mountains. If you post in an online forum, you're becoming part of 100 problems at once. You can weigh the pros and cons and decide against participating if you like.

4 - People trying to market and make money off of PUA, Red Pill, or anything else are as varied as any other self-help group. Some are completely full of shit. Some are so-so. Some are downright fucking necessary and totally worth your money. Now the ones that are worth the money and time, I want them to have exposure and visibility. I want them to have a voice that effects others because that means eventually I'll hear about their awesome idea, read it, and change my life.

5 - Just because you engage in a few activities in a community does not mean you're in a cult. I've seen real cults hidden off in the backwoods, actual physical groups of people that truly indoctrinate their youth with mantras like "I beat my body and make it my slave." It might be scary to think that people go into those things without any critical thought, that they become automatons for some fake "greater good."

But I'm going to go off the rails here and say: Why not?

Why not drop your ego sometime and join up with a group that demonstrates effective methods of self-development? I remember being invited to a secret meeting of a Christian teen group off in the woods where they had an "Honor Ceremony." Basically these kids had worked their asses off studying and working out in pure isolation. They learned about God and all that stuff - to each their own - but the end result was a group of extremely committed, extremely in-shape young adults.

I mention this ceremony because the message was not what I expected from any Christian sermon anywhere:

(paraphrasing) "The moment you leave this place, everyone is going to want to have sex with you." That was their graduation message, and it wasn't a lie. These kids had been holed up away from civilization and honed into fit little soldiers of Christ and then told the most honest thing ever: the outside world would find them hot and innocent. They would be irresistible.

So maybe some become lifelong Christians. Some get into drugs. Some, like the girl I took back to my dorm (they kicked her out after she spent a weekend with me), just fast-tracked from slut to married life and forgot the place altogether. Basically it all evens out. The cult thrives off of those few who both become successful and maintain their beliefs. Everyone else is just forgotten.

I personally think Red Pill is most effective when it feels like a cult for the first little bit and then once you get past the basics and realize it's about living your own life and thinking for yourself, you realize the entire fucking message is do what you want. If you want to join a cult, sure. If you want to climb a tree and piss on people on the sidewalk, great. As long as it's your decision apart from the "oh man are other people judging me" voices, it's still your life.

Sure I mean there is a whole book written on it. And I should really say it wasn't just the draft, but the entire set of circumstances surrounding their return to the league.

The tl;dr is that the confirmation of Al Lerner's purchase of the team was heavily delayed in an attempt to drive up the price of the franchise. The NFL was hoping more bidders would come in last minute with better offers. That didn't happen and the final paperwork was signed less than a year before the first game of the season. To contrast, the Panthers and Jaguars had about 2 years to build their team. The Texans had over 3 years.

This doesn't just mean players, though that's a big part of it. It means front office. It means coaching. It means facilities. All of that was delayed. It was an impossible task. A lot of coaches saw this and didn't want to come to Cleveland. Before the roster had even been built! They just knew it would be the shit show that it was. So let's just call Chris Palmer's (first new HC) tenure a complete wash. It's not like he left things any better than they were when he get there though. How could he? Butch Davis inherited the same mess, and so on and so forth until present day.

The draft was fucked up because the rules in place for the Browns were far more strict than the rules put in place for the Jags and Panthers. The Browns were allowed to select fewer players from each individual team. Players on IR the year before were not excluded from the players made available to them. The Browns were given the scraps of the scraps to work with and it was compounded by the fact that the team was only started a few months before the fucking expansion draft even took place! Try putting together a competent scouting department and then actually scouting players in that amount of time.

I'm not saying the team hasn't been massively incompetent at the same time. Lots of bad draft picks. Trouble attracting free agents. A poor track record of treating injuries. Lots of things. But there are other incompetent organizations out there and they seem to figure it out every once in a while. I mean after 20 years you think would accidentally do a couple of things right! But the Browns have been trying to flip heads and have come up with tails for almost 20 years now. Like I can barely believe it's possible sometimes. They were certainly done no favors from the onset though.

>I wonder whether online work changed things because there are few occasions for people to have conversations that socialize them into the ethical expectations of the profession.

Journalism didn't have ethical expectations a hundred years ago, because every story was sold on 'hot sheets', cheap 2-page papers sold by newsies. The most sensational headlines made the most money and there was zero accountability.

Then for 50+ years, journalists became dependent on monthly newspaper subscriptions and reputation and audience trust became paramount. Suddenly, ethics were necessary to do the job.

Now, news is all click-driven and we're back to zero accountability. Trust Me, I'm Lying is a great book about our current era of news and how it can be manipulated.

The NFL set up the (new) Browns to fail. They had the bids for the new ownership in for years, but they sat on awarding an ownership group. Part of this was pure greed - they wanted to extort public money for stadiums by threatning other cities that their team would be moved to Cleveland instead of having an expansion team there.

The delay of awarding the ownership group (that they knew they were going to pick years earlier) meant that the team barely had any time to put together a front office, coaching staff, scouting staff, facilities, etc. The NFL helpfully suggested some of the worst FO staff in the history of the game to get them started. They also changed the expansion rules to be much less favorable to the new team than they were for Jacksonville or Carolina, putting the team way behind them in terms of assets.

I think a lot of that was also spite. The city of Cleveland embarassed them by mass protests, all sorts of bad press, dragging them in front of Congressional hearings and getting the word out about how the NFL fucked over a city because their incompetant crony needed one last bribe and cashout from the public coffer. Never has such a well-supported team with a good fanbase left their home.

The Browns fans were passionate enough that they were the first team in sports history to earn the right to retain their name and history after a move, and they forced the NFL's hand to get them back.

So the NFL got us back by fucking us over with expansion rules, waiting until the last possible second to award ownership, and "suggesting" some of the worst FO staff in the history of the game (since ownership didn't really have time to find their own).

Edit: More info http://www.amazon.com/False-Start-Browns-Were-Fail/dp/1886228884/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1463795124

I feel like this story could be a whole sequel to The Phoenix Project.

\> "can't we just install Google Tag Manager" - it's just a block of code in the <head> tag

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Things your dev will probably be thinking of:

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What's the performance like for this? Will this block the page load? Is this important? What kind of info is going to collect? Is this complaint with our privacy policy and how we collect info on our users?

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"Iit's just a block of code in the <head> tag" ... hosted where? From Google? Do we operate in China? Will we ever? Will their CDN work? Can we afford to be reliant on their CDN / resource? Does it work in all the browsers we support?

​

Depending on the scope and reach, this could have a lot of stuff.

​

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\> "can't we install this countdown pixel on one of our servers? it's just a block of php code" link

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Do the servers run PHP? Should they? If not, would we need to install it? Who is going to keep that server patched? If it does, where do we put it? What are you using it for, emails?

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\> "can't we just have read only access to the database? just certain tables? such as a category data, so we can count/sum/group-by categories - what about a staging database - can't we use that?"

​

Maybe a replica. As you've been told, you can't just run random queries since you could hurt performance without proper scheduling and permissions. This takes time. Privacy issues might prevent you from handling it without lawyers involved.

​

Who now has to manage your access? How are the credentials issue? Are you machines secured enough to handle the data or is someone going to click a random link and now get backdoored and now some competitor has access to your info? Oops!

Aside from that...

\> To the marketing team, everything sounds easy "just copy paste this script"

​

Sometimes it is. Often times, it is not. That being said, a lot of stuff can be very simple especially if it's a one off. You should organize time with your teams to get this kind of stuff. Where I work, we do help out with these requests but they are put in queue. However, you have to prove it's really going to help the business. You can't be wasting expensive resources chasing things that not going to return some kind of value for the business.

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If you REALLY want to understand, reach this cliche book: https://www.amazon.ca/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592 Judging by how you are talking, I am sure it will resonate with you.

I would be very cautious before you start this. You need to have a much better understanding of why you’re doing this before you start. I think breaking up ops teams may be an answer to a different question. That question should be: “how do I deliver better business value?”

The first step is to understand what you’re trying to achieve. Gene Kim, Patric Debois et al talk about the “three ways”. It’s essentially three steps towards embracing devops culture.

The first is all about increasing flow through the system - that system being your organisation. The idea is to look at how your organisation goes from a business need to realising business value. For instance, how do we go from wanting to provide another payment option on a website, to customers being able to use it?

One way of analysing and visualising your organisation as system is something called “value stream mapping”. This looks at how a piece of work gets requirements, gets developed and how it gets to customers (even if that’s internal customers). You need to understand the process, where the delays are, where teams hand off from one to another, where things go wrong. Ideally you want to optimise this process. One of the issues that many organisations look at just automation and essentially automate a slow and inherently crap process. This will never give the returns that many people are after. Looking at this level, you should be looking at organisation goals. How do you measure this work in a frame that other people are going to understand who are not IT? Is it how fast you can get a feature to market? Increasing individual spend? Increasing reliability of the service you provide to customers? If you’re not framing this initiative in those terms, then it’s doomed to failure. Be specific and measurable.

Once you understand your process, you can look at opportunities to optimise the feedback loops (the second way). It might be that infrastructure is required by dev teams that gets delivered by ops but isn’t what they need. There is a team hand-off here that needs to be addressed. There are many solutions to this problem, but it might be a start to move where the person provisioning that infrastructure sits. Put them in the dev team. You might still keep them as part of the ops team logically to start out with. The point is, you’re looking at the system, understanding the constraints and trying to optimise pain points.

You can achieve a lot without adding any new automation or technology solutions and this shouldn’t be underestimated, but ultimately, handcrafting systems isn’t repeatable or fast enough. This is where reorganising teams might look sensible, but you should know what outcomes you are string to achieve. That might be difficulties provisioning infrastructure fast or flexibly enough, it might be deployment of code to live being too slow, it might be that testing is too slow. Once you know you need improve, you can look at tooling to better achieve that.

/u/quailtop mentions:

>In my (admittedly limited) experience, you can solve needing faster development velocity (the first problem) through staffing a new team whose job it is to help improve the deploy, test and release process for all developer teams. Their job is necessarily cross-cutting across all dev teams. They would develop internal tooling e.g. a standardised build/release process that all teams can employ. This is a great pattern because it avoids encroaching on existing territory and is a very clear contract between engineering.

This is otherwise known as the DevOps “hub and spoke model” and is what my organisation has implemented. It’s worked very well for us and it’s a clever way to start a reorg.

For certain ops teams, you may want to keep them together. For example, you may have a large and complicated network setup and still need a dedicated networks team. My focus then, would be putting an obligation on those teams to allow others to better consume their services. They may need to add other people to this team to make that happen. For example, if you have a complicated network, with lots of steps, look at both automation of those steps but also to allow other teams to more effectively consume them. Amazon spent a lot of effort building the culture that ever system or service is an API that should be able to be consumed easily internally (have a read here: https://apievangelist.com/2012/01/12/the-secret-to-amazons-success-internal-apis/ . So, for this case, you may add a tech lead and some software engineers to build network APIs rather than splitting the team up. This may include some of your more traditional network admins to look at replacing on prem infrastructure to support this. The goal however, should always be about the organisation level goal. Improving the speed at which you can reliably deploy network changes should be in support of one of those strategic objectives.

The third way then focuses more on continual learning and experimentation. You should have embedded a set of objectives that you’re working on achieving but you’ll have lots of legacy systems, legacy processes and behaviours. Focusing on outcomes and consistent asking of “why?” will start to help. This is also where SRE becomes really relevant for me. IMO SRE isn’t something that is particularly useful to start out with. It’s best when you’re looking at elevating and existing DevOps culture to a new level. This will look more at observability of a systems and understanding where the more difficult optimisations can be done.

Let me be clear. DevOps is a long road for any organisation to change to. To really get mature it will take many, many years to properly bed in. My organisation started around 5 years ago and we still have more progress to make. One of which is to move from project based way of organising work to more long lived product teams. This organisational change is probably the biggest thing holding us back right now, and has nothing to do with automation or technical practices.

I wouldn’t start out by reading about SRE, I would start with a book called The Phoenix Project and then read The DevOps Handbook, at least twice. Start with the strategy before you make any changes. I would also look to see if you have a cloud strategy because many of these practices are much harder to implement purely on premise.

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Edit: Thanks for the silver!

Edit2: One thing that's also worth noting is that for many people, moving from traditional sysadmin to DevOps is a hugely scary change. It means that many of the staff won't have the job security they thought they had and they need crucial skills they don't have. To make this work, understand this point of view and support them. This requires really mature and experienced leadership at all levels. This is a good, short and free ebook to help the more traditional sysadmins understand why they have to change.

A big problem, and it somewhat coincided with Dominic's rise to editorial power at the paper as news editor, is that at some point they decided to eschew being an arts weekly with some news coverage to focus mainly on generating web traffic through flamebait and controversy. And while that works, the problem is that there's a host of other web outlets that do it better and on a larger scale than the Stranger ever could... and of course those outlets probably pay better even if the workload is great. It was only a matter of time before the Dominics and the Lindys would run off and take a better paycheck to go do it for someone else.

Problem is those writers were able to build a rep of credibility in the paper's prior life before they and the paper went that route, and passing the torch isn't possible when no one gives a shit about Ansel Herz trying to be a more obnoxious version of Dominic, and no one really wants to see Paul Constant, Charles Mudede or Brendan Kiley stumble out of their pay grade to try and do hard hitting journalism. They already had Bethany Jean Clement pulling extra duty out of her comfort zone before she left.

I frankly would not be surprised if Savage got bored of the tedium and just decided to shut the paper down in a couple years. He already makes a lot of money from his touring, book, syndication of his column, etc, and doesn't really need the paper anymore.

> My boss is an understanding person and knows that we're stressed, but the larger organization seems uninterested in reorganizing to lessen our burden.

That's all you really need to know. You expressed a concern about the health of the team(s), and the broader org said "no, this is fine". They can live with all the benefits and consequences that come with that decision. All you need to know is whether or not you can live with all the benefits and consequences of that decision.

> Are most jobs like this?

I would say no, but practices that promote burnout aren't exactly uncommon -- toil is one example.

It's not uncommon for organizational practices/structures to foster high levels of burnout, but most orgs who give a shit will tend to fix those problems because turnover tends to be more expensive than simply fixing the problems that cause the turnover. Kinda sorta depends on the business's priorities, though. Showing the value of strategic investment in technical resources is ... difficult at times. I like the approach taken by Accelerate -- numbers and figures are what your manager needs to be focusing on, though it is hard to do when you're drowning already and engagement from leadership is low to non-existent anyway.

Check out Blood, Sweat and Pixels for a bit of in depth info about the creation of The Witcher 3 and the seriously humble beginnings of CD Projekt. It has several other stories of games being made in a crunch period as well, it's a great read.

It's almost as if the rest of the league is not valuing these assets correctly. Oh wait, where have we seen this before?

You rang?

I haven't read the book, but I've heard a couple interviews with the author through my various foodie podcasts. He seems cool, and he made bananas seem downright fascinating the entire time he was speaking.

Edit: I have read and would heartily recommend The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan if you're even a little interested in the genetic, behavioral, and political! manipulation of our food. Corn, in particular, as it's the backbone of the American food industry, but he covers a lot of ground. It's really eye-opening. Do recommend. (And any half-decent American library will have it, so awesome and free.)

If you're serious about it, The Professional Chef, the textbook of the Culinary Institute of America is available. It takes you from the very basics - the first recipe is 700+ pages into the book.

I wouldn't say it's the exact same, but I still lump it in a nice to read category:

The Phoenix Project

There's a whole chapter here about how much trouble DAI went through because of that janky engine.

https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Sweat-Pixels-Triumphant-Turbulent/dp/0062651234

Frostbite is a cancer. I'm hoping Jedi Fallen Order sells like hotcakes so that EA's forced to reckon that (a) single player games are relevant and (b) that non-Frostbite games are easier to develop.

The NFL wants the Browns to be terrible since they came back. After reading this book I actually believe it.

https://www.amazon.com/False-Start-Browns-Were-Fail/dp/1886228884

They’ve done just that in The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations by the same author as The Phoenix Project.

> give a vague impression that they all do the same thing.

Lots of tooling does overlap but each one has one area it excels at - some excel at the same area.

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So, you have done a good job so far, it seems like most of your stuff is automated to a good degree and you have identified where your weaknesses are.

You should tackle one thing at a time, identify your largest bottle neck or problem and work to solve that first. In the same vain, only introduce one new tool at a time. Each takes some time to learn and to implement it correctly. Trying to do too much at once will just cause problems.

You have already identified the weaknesses so focus on solving these, starting with what you think is causing the most issues.

> - One server per environment is obviously not super scalable

Look into HA setups. How you do this and how much work it is depends on your application. Typically there are two parts to applications, work and state. Work (such as processing requests) is easy to scale if it contains no state. Just add another server to the environment and load balance between it. For this you need a loadbalancer (HAProxy or Nginx work well, though there are many others to chose from) and to move any state off the node you want to scale.

There are many forms of state, most will be stored in a database but you should also pay attention to session state which is sometimes stored in memory on the node - if you have anything like this you will need to do work to move it into some sort of storage, like a database or storage solution (such as your existing database or redis or memcached etc).

> - No sense of automatic provisioning, we do that "by hand" and write the IPs to a config file per environment

There are loads of tools to help with this.

Terraform for provisioning infrastructure.

Ansible or Chef or Saltstack or Puppet for provisioning nodes (I recommend starting with ansible, though any of them will work).

There is nothing wrong with using bash scripts to glue things together or even do provisioning while you learn to use these tools. I would not shy away from them, but do recognize the benefits each tool provides over just bash scripts. Take your time to learn them and stick with what you know and what works for you while you do. Introduce them a little bit at a time rather than trying to convert your entire infrastructure to use them in one go.

> - Small amounts of downtime per deploy, even if tests pass

This is easiest if you have a HA setup. You can do it without one but it involves just as much work and basically follows the same steps as creating a HA setup. In short, with multiple nodes you can upgrade them one at a time until everything has been upgraded. There are always some nodes running on either the old or new version so everything will continue to work.

You can either update nodes in place, or create new ones (if you have automated their provisioning) and delete the old ones when the new ones are up and working (see immutable infrastructure for this pattern, also canary deploys and blue/green deploys for different strategies).

> - If tests fail, manual intervention required (no rollback or anything) - though we do usually catch problems somewhere before production

Tests should be run before you deploy. These should run on a build server, or ideally a CI system. Ideally these should not only run before all deployments, but also for all commits to your code base. This way you can spot things failing much sooner and thus fix them when they are cheaper to fix. You also likely want to expand on the number of tests you do and what they cover (though this is always true).

Rollbacks should also be as easy as deploying the old version of the code. They should be no more complex than deploying any other version of your code.

> - Bash scripts to do all this get pretty hairy and stay that way

Nothing wrong with some bash scripts, work to keep them in order and replace them with better tooling as you learn/discover it.

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I have mentioned a few tools here, but there are many more depending on exactly the problems you need to solve. Tackle each problem one at a time and do your research around the areas you have identified. Learn the tools you think will be helpful before you try to put them in production (ie do some small scale trails for them to see if they are fit for purpose). Then slowly roll them out to your infrastructure, using them to control more and more things as you gain confidence in them.

For everything you have said there is no one solution and as long as you incrementally improve things towards the goal you have you will be adding a lot of value to your business.

For now you need to decide on which is the biggest problem you face and focus your efforts on solving that - or at least making it less of a problem for now so you can focus on the next biggest problem. Quite often you will resolve the same problems in different, hopefully better, ways as you learn more and as your overall infrastructure, developmental practices and knowledge improves.

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Also the 12 factor app is worth a read as is googles SRE book and the devops handbook. The Phenoix Project is also a good read.

Though these are more about the philosophy of DevOps, they are worth a read but wont solve your immediate issues. Reading around different topics is always a good idea, especially about what others have done to solve the problems you are facing. It will give you different perspectives and links to good tools you can use to solve the problems you face.

I've been saying this since the last election.

"Sex sells" is dead. We've successful removed any and all shock value on that one.

Now it's "Outrage Sells". And they even write books about how to use it.

https://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/1591846285

All of these psych drugs (stimulants like riddalin or adderall, antidepressants like effexor or prozac, antispycotics like seroquel and risperdol, mood stabilizers like lamictal, and benzos like klonopin or xanax) are addictive, and the body reacts to them exactly like it would any street drug. The brain is capable of recovering in some circumstances, but lingering effects can last for years or be permanent. Psych meds are incredibly powerful substances that in some cases can be more powerful than common "street drugs". These are not medications. Instead, pyscg meds are powerful neuroactive substances that are poorly understood. In US society, these drugs are heavily prescribed to all sectors of the population. Including children and pregnant mothers.

In a social sense, these drugs are convenient "control" mechanisms for prisons, psych wards schools. They are also heavily prescribed for depression, anxiety etc. Most of this occurs in the USA, in other countries (excluding the UK) prescription rates are fairly low. Women account for something 2/3 of all psych med drug use, and women are usually responsible for drugging their children.

Riddalin is a common "entry" drug for children. Adderall, vyvanse and provigil are also quite common now. It rarely ends with these stimulants and often progresses to the more powerful antidepressants, antianxity, and antipsycotic medications. That's when the long term and life altering damage can occur.

There's considerable evidence both in the scientific literature and NUMEROUS anecdotal stories on the internet for people who get severe withdrawal from the antianxiety, antidepressant, and antipsycotic drugs. As such, they are not treatment for a disorder, but cause their own dependency and addiction profiles. Psych meds are powerful substances that severely affect the body just like any drug or toxin. There's studies on the long term side effects, and how difficult it is to stop taking the drugs. Sexual side effects can be permanent. This condition is called post-SSRI sexual dysfunction and primarly affects those who take antidepressants.

Some people recover, others never recover. Children almost certainly get permanent damage as their brains are still in development. Lots of dumb ass women take these drugs during pregnancy, damaging their kids brains before they're even born. Then the dumb cunts take it after they give birth, so they are shit mothers doped out on drugs. These are the same dumb cunts who will quickly go to a doctor and start poisoning their kids once the PTA meeting goes badly. Then they'll bitch and moan like the cunts they are about why the kid isn't getting better. Eventually, the poor kid will probably fail to do well in school because the drugs cause brain damage, and the dumb bitch will make his life even more difficult until he escapes at the age of 16 or 18. With brain damage and a dumb bitch as a mother, his life is going to be very difficult. Life is hard enough, life with withdrawal or brain damage can lead to homelessness, jail, lifetime of addiction, and worse. Homelessness due to psych med withdrawal and long term side effects is extremely common for men.

Women have it easy. Even if a young girl gets brain damage, no one will care - standards are so low, and any guy will fuck a girl if she's wet between the legs (or use lube if she can't get wet). If she's got a pulse, she'll never be homeless. Even a heavily brain damaged girl will get a job and a college degree no matter how badly damaged they seem to the world. IF that doesn't work out, she'll just find some dude to take care of her. These drugs primarily affect men, because society puts so much pressure on them. Even small amounts of brain damage, or withdrawal can fuck their careers and futures up permanently.

Scary shit, good reason to never ever send your child into a public school system if it can be helped. Public schools have gotten worse since I was a child. Pyschiatrists and other such doctors"child psychiatrists" are all greedy cunts who want to poison your kid so that they can make some extra money. Most psychiatrists are too brainwashed to understand how the drugs really work, and believe everything the pharmaceutical company tells them like idiots.

Most parents are blue pilled faggots who will listen to the female's desire to do the "right thing". Doing the "right thing" is brain damage to young children with fragile brains. If your child survives the brain damage, he will be prone to addiction and other emotional issues for a very long time. These drugs affect every single part of the brain and especially affect the emotional and sexual portions of the brain.

Also note: there's no such thing as a child dose for these drugs in the literature. They're designed for adults. It's literally GUESSWORK, and everyone reacts differently to different doses. It's a real fucking mess, but doctors pretend they know what they're doing, and are protected from legal repercussions from any consequences these drugs may have on children.

Very few if any studies have been done on children for more than 6 weeks. This is true for stimulants, antidepressants, antipsycotis, mood stabilizers and benzos. There's not much scientific understanding about how these drugs actually work, and there's even less understanding about their long term effects on adults. For children the knowledge is even less thorough.

There's a handful of studies that have been carried out on these drugs for more than 6 weeks in adults, and I don't believe there's ever been one carried out long term in children. The fact is that almost EVERYONE takes these drugs for more than 6 weeks, so there's very little knowledge about how these drugs actually work long term. There is also plenty of evidence that these drugs are no more effective for treating their make believe "diagnoses" than a placebo pill.

There's literally studies that have been carried out which demonstrate that placebo and antidepressants or ADHD meds are equally effective over the longer term. In some studies, patients actually do BETTER for more than 6 weeks on the placebo and those on the drugs do considerably worse. This also holds true for benzodiazepines, and antipsychotic medications as well.

A pulitzer prize finalist (male author) has published two very informative and scientifically based books on the subject of psychiatry and psychiatric medications. He's not a scientologist, just a concerned journalist.

Here's the links for those who are interested:

https://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Epidemic-Bullets-Psychiatric-Astonishing/dp/0307452425/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1527721857&sr=8-1&keywords=anatomy+of+an+epidemic

https://www.amazon.com/Mad-America-Medicine-Enduring-Mistreatment/dp/0465020143/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1527721886&sr=1-2-fkmr1&keywords=made+in+america+robert+whitaker

TLDR: All pysch meds are poorly understood in adults, and very few if any studies have ever been conducted in children. In adults, psych meds can cause severe withdrawal reactions, nerve damage, and permanent sexual dysfunction in both men and women. There's considerable documentation that placebo pills are more effective than psych meds for treating the "diagnosed condition". Robert Whitaker's two books are excellent, easy to read documents that can explain far more than I can on a reddit post.

Not exactly...

>A banana plant takes about 9 months to grow up and produce a bunch of bananas. Then the mother plant dies. But around the base of it are many suckers, little baby plants.

>At the base of a banana plant, under the ground, is a big rhizome, called the corm.

>The corm has growing points and they turn into new suckers. These suckers can be taken off and transplanted, and one or two can be left in position to replace the mother plant.

See: http://www.tropicalpermaculture.com/growing-bananas.html

Also, this book was fun to read: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0452290082?pldnSite=1
Except for the parts where US fruit companies treated central America like garbage... those parts were pretty poops-mcgee.

https://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/1591846285

link for the lazy

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power

"[...] The Prize, winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, is a comprehensive history of one of the commodities that powers the world--oil. Founded in the 19th century, the oil industry began producing kerosene for lamps and progressed to gasoline. Huge personal fortunes arose from it, and whole nations sprung out of the power politics of the oil wells. Yergin's fascinating account sweeps from early robber barons like John D. Rockefeller, to the oil crisis of the 1970s, through to the Gulf War."

Not OP, but I asked the same question years ago and I compiled this list:

​

1. This is the best book on the subject that I've read. It is as fair to both sides as one can be. In fact, I came away with a better understanding of how and why the Palestinians feel the way that they do after reading the book.
   
   ​
   
   
2. The Arab Spring. This is a great journey through all of the countries affected by The Arab Spring. It helps understand where we are now.
   
   ​
   
   
3. The Prize. Technically, it is the history of the oil industry. As you should expect, it covers a lot of ME history, too.
   
   ​
   
   
4. Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS This book helps you understand how radical ISIS really is compared to AQ.
   
   ​
   
   
5. Michael Oren has two good books: Six Days of War and Power, Faith, and Fantasy. Despite Oren's affiliation with Israel, his books are fair and interesting reads.
   
   ​
   
   A book on the fall of the Ottoman Empire is another good place to start. I have not read this one yet. I've heard that it is a good read.
   
   ​
   
   ​

Guys, if you're interested in the making of Destiny, or stories like this in general, i encourage you to read Blood, Sweat, and Pixels. It is really good.

The claim that mental disorders are caused by imbalances in the brain has been heralded for decades in research paid for by pharmaceutical industries. However, the evidence substantiating those claims is very sketchy. Take a look at Robert Whitaker's Anatomy of an Epidemic for a comprehensive overview of the scientific evidence. It strongly suggests that the claim for mental disorders being cause by faulty brains is not consistent with the best evidence.

"I'm on a 10mg daily dose right now, do I even have anything to worry about?"

Longterm benzo use is going to make your anxiety vastly worse than it was to start with. That's why you're never supposed to take them for more than ten days. Time for you to find a new doctor.

But if you want an answer to your question, yes they cause brain damage, and they're also extremely addicting -- more than heroin. (Whereas heroin withdrawals are over in three or four days, longterm benzo users are often completely unable to sleep or think and function properly for up to a full year.)

If you want a good book on the subject, I'd recommend Anatomy of an Epidemic:

http://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Epidemic-Bullets-Psychiatric-Astonishing/dp/0307452425/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1347671582&sr=1-1&keywords=anatomy+of+an+epidemic

Scorecasting says the Cubs' strategy for years was to offer cheap beer to drive attendance. No need for a winning team when people can go day drinking at Wrigley for a reasonable price.

I wish the Nationals did this :(. $50 for bleacher seats and $10 per beer. As if I needed more reasons to not want to go to a regular season MLB game!

I have an eccentric obsession with the oil/energy industry. Some of these books were mentioned already, but below are my absolute favorites:

• The Prize
  
• The Frackers
  
• Oil 101
  
• The Big Rich
  
• The King of Oil
  
• Fundamentals of Investing in Oil and Gas
  
• The Smartest Guys in the Room
  
• The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels
  
  If you're looking for a history of oil and gas check out The Prize, and The Frackers covers the more recent energy revolution. Oil 101 and Fundamentals of Investing in Oil and Gas deal more with the technical side.

For me:

Freakonomics <- Showed me a different level of problem solving, via thinking about the motivation behind things.

The Icarus Deception & Linchpin <- Helped me realize I hate doing the work of a cog in a machine and that I enjoy my work if I get to express myself via creativity.

Currently reading:

How To Win Friends And Influence People <- It may be old, but it's still a great resource for human relations, even today. I don't know about most people around here, but I don't like only staring at my monitor 24-7. You can kind of think of it as the start to social engineering. You learn the correct inputs so that you may get the outputs you desire.


Bonus: Not sure if this counts, since it could be considered "technical":

The Phoenix Project <- If you ever interact with non-IT folks, you should read this book. If you are a non-IT person and interact with them, you should read this book. It shows you there are more ways then simply supporting a business that IT should be utilized. I read this after I'd been "doing devops" for a couple years already, and it really solidified a number of points. It's also a great talking point if you ever interview with someone who HAS read it. The only feedback I've received has been positive when I mention this book (to someone who has read it).

edit: words

http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/0671027034

http://www.amazon.com/Start-Why-Leaders-Inspire-Everyone/dp/1591846447

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143124986

Buy a copy of the Smuggler's Cove book and go from there.

> You don't see conspiracies growing around the Jags, Browns, or even my Fins and there's a reason for that.

How about the basis of this book?

Basically when the Jags and Panthers joined the NFL and were immediately successful the other NFL owners were annoyed/frustrated that these newly formed teams could just come in and beat their established teams so quickly. When the Browns were re-forming in 99 the NFL owners then postponed the votes on who would be the new owner multiple times pushing the vote back over and over again even though it was almost a given that Lerner was going to be the guy. When the ownership was finally approved, the Browns ended up having the shortest amount of time to prepare a team out of any expansion in the history of the NFL by a pretty wide margin. There was also more about the teams making the expansion draft even harder on the Browns. Terry Pluto makes a pretty damn good case based on interviews and observations from people involved in the process that the '99 Browns were set up to struggle from the start. Everything after that has been the organization's fault of course but those first couple seasons were really hamstrung by the rest of the NFL ownership.

If you really want to get into making tiki drinks, you should buy the Smuggler's Cove book to get a good grip on what you're doing. The book also has recipes for most of the common syrups in the back. It is under $20 on Amazon, so it costs about the same as a decent bottle of rum.

Dude, that's fantastic news. This comment immediately got me subscribed for updates.

Some other source recommendations off the top of my head...

Tiki drinks:

• Just about anything Jeff Berry has put together for tiki drinks. I would argue that Mr. Berry is as responsible for the modern resurgence of tiki cocktails (and their re-elevation to being carefully crafted, quality drinks) as anyone in the industry.
  
• Martin Cate's Smuggler's Cove
  
  General cocktails:
  
  
• Dave Wondrich's Punch and Imbibe - note that you may have to do a bit of reading to arrive at the recipes, as these (and several of the other books I'm about to mention) spend a good bit of time on history and/or technique in addition to "just" containing recipes.
  
• Dale Degroff's Craft of the Cocktail
  
• Jeffrey Morgenthaler's The Bar Book
  
• Gary Regan's The Joy of Mixology
  
• Kevin Liu's Craft Cocktails at Home
  
• The Dead Rabbit Drinks Manual
  
• Dave Arnold's Liquid Intelligence
  
• Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails
  
  
  ...that's... not a bad list to get started. Good luck! I'll be interested to follow along with development.

According to Accelerate https://www.amazon.co.uk/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Technology-Organizations/dp/1942788339

• Lead time, the faster you get a feature out the better. Top companies do this in 1 hour
  
• Deployment frequency, the more you deploy, the faster you can get features out and fix issues. Top companies do this on demand (several times a day)
  
• Mean time to recovery, how fast you recover from downtime. Top companies do this in under an hour
  
• Change rate failure, what feature when delivered is incomplete and requires more work. Top companies have a failure rate of ~10%

>While today you can develop a great game with descent graphics and story, etc for less than $100. Hell mods that can be the size and quality of real published games with entire campaigns, voice acting,multiplayer modes, etchave been produced costing nothing.

Lies. Especially that last thing.

You're making the mistake of assuming Time =/= Money. Time absolutely equals money.

Those "free" mods, with voice acting and all that, absolutely have a cost. Someone spent hundreds to thousands of hours setting it all up. Sometimes teams. Someone spent dozens to hundreds of hours reading out voices, and someone else made executive decisions on which reading to use. That all of the time was volunteered does not mean it cost nothing. Were it done by a business, every single person there would get a paycheck for their time.

Skyblivion was started in 2013. Assuming 30 hours were spent on it per week on average, between 2014 and 2018 you're looking at 6,240 hours. At $10 an hour (an underpaying rate) you're at $62,400 to make what they've made of it.

Comic Books take roughly 6 months from start to publication (if not more, some have their stories finished and ready to print 6 months ahead of the print date) and if there's only one artist and one writer (usually there's also an inker, sometimes two writers), you're looking at $84,000 a year for the pair. If you only get six months of work out of them, that's still $42,000, signifigantly more than your "few thousand" estimation. And that's before we even get in to printing and distribution costs.

The current average feature length budget for a Hollywood Film is between $70-90 million.

This book gives a figure of $10,000 per person per month to develop a game, meaning a 400 person team given 3 years for an AAA game would need $144,000,000 to make a game.

A 50 person team taking 2 years for a more A level game is going to use up $12,000,000.

And 5 people taking a year to make a little indie game need $600,000 to do it.

I.. uh.. don't see how Gaming is in any way falling behind.

This is a book by Joel Salatin and he is absolutely the man.

Excellent film.

As a companion piece for libertarians, I would recommend Everything I Want to Do is Illegal by libertarian/organic farmer Joel Salatin who is featured in the film. (Here is the essay that inspired the book.)

I've got some on my counter right now (waiting for it to separate, so I can use the whey to ferment some veggies). This stuff is not easy to come by. It's ironic that our supposed right to privacy allows abortion but we can't consume milk.

The supposed dangers of milk (and necessity of pasteurization) are largely a result of feeding grain to cattle in crowded conditions instead of allowing them to eat grass on pasture. As a result, the cow's digestive system (naturally pH neutral) become acidified, leading to bacteria that can survive in that environment, such as our digestive systems, making us sick.

For a great read on how deeply government intervenes/interferes in the food system (with all sorts of negative consequences for the environment, animals and human health), read Everything I Want to Do is Illegal. Made a bit of a libertarian out of me.

Daniel Yergin's The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

Historical account of the oil industry, which is particularly relevant in today's markets.

One Google Search Later Holy shit, it's actually a real book. I thought it was photoshopped.

http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Want-To-Do-Illegal/dp/0963810952

You might want to read The Phoenix Project. It's an IT fable of a guy getting thrown into a management position in an absolute cluster... mess, and how he clawed his way out via process improvements.

I'm very much enjoying The Pheonix Project right now. It gives you a good view of DBA's (as well as other IT professionals) in the context of an entire IT department.

Highly recommend you read this book:

https://www.amazon.ca/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592

It details a fictional story around someone in a very similar situation to yours and is kind of a DevOps bible at the same time.

Reminds me of Trust Me, I'm Lying

When Breath Becomes Air - Paul Kalanithi

Being Mortal - Atul Gawande

Better - Atul Gawande

Honestly anything by Atul Gawande

Start With Why- Simon Sinek (Just finished this one today. Phenomenal read. Not medicine related, but a great perspective on what leadership means and how you can inspire those around you)

The White Coat Investor - James Dahle (Financial literacy is always a good thing)

​

I have quite a bit more book suggestions if you're ever curious, but those should keep you busy for a while. Feel free to DM me if you want more!

Photo of the Finished Product

This recipe is from San Francisco's Smuggler's Cove, which is absolutely one of my favorite tiki bars.

The bar's creator released a fantastic book loaded with Smuggler's Cove recipes but also history of tiki, a breakdown of different rum classifications, and even how to decorate for a tiki bar. I highly recommend it.

Recipe:

• 0.75 oz fresh lime juice
  
• 0.25 oz fresh grapefruit juice
  
• 0.25 oz homemade cinnamon syrup
  
• 1 tsp homemade grenadine
  
• 0.5 oz John D. Taylor's Velvet Falernum
  
• 1.5 oz blended aged rum (I used El Dorado 12)
  
• 1.5 oz column still aged rum (I used Zacapa 23)
  
• 1 oz black blended overproof rum (I used Lemon Hart 151)
  
• 2 dashes Herbstura (1:1 mixture of Angostura bitters and Herbsaint)
  
  Combine all the ingredients in a shaker with ice and shake, open pour into Zombie glass or other tall drinkware. Garnish with mint. (The original recipe calls for a flash blend, open pour with gated finish.)
  
  Obviously, this is a very strong drink, so being able to make it at home is nice, even if a little prep-work is required! It packs a punch but it is extremely complex, flavorful, and not cloyingly sweet. If you have the patience, it's a worthwhile, serious tiki drink.

If you want to be super pissed, read False Start by Terry Pluto. It goes through the systematic fuckery that happened to Cleveland between '95 and '99.

We were paying the penance of the Jags and Panthers doing well. So the NFL super overreacted and fucked us. On purpose. That, and they wanted to wring as much blood money out of the new Cleveland owner as possible.

What pained me the most was the optimism that Pluto had looking forward (from the book's publishing date of 2004)... and a decade later, that optimism has yet to be validated. But this year's looking to be the right trend!

oh yes, absolutely. there's a great book on this from several years back. Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster. The data is a few years old, but it's only gotten worse! https://www.amazon.com/Deluxe-How-Luxury-Lost-Luster/dp/0143113704

> Scorecasting

A link for the clicky clicky.

I used to teach cooking classes (don't let my username fool you). My #1 piece of advice for all inexperienced cooks is to learn how to use salt (use kosher salt, not table salt). Taste your food, add some salt, taste again. Pay attention to the changes that you notice. You can learn as many techniques and fancy tricks as you'd like, however if your palette sucks and you can't season food properly then it's all for naught.

Secondly: liberate yourself from the slavery of recipes. (Unless you're baking). Learn TECHNIQUES, not RECIPES. Understand WHY you do everything in cooking and you'll be able to cook with intuition. Having good food intuition is what makes someone a good cook, not just having a memory bank of recipes. I'd suggest picking up the Culinary Institute of America's textbook's The Professional Chef. This is the textbook for one of the best Culinary Schools in the entire world.

Blood, Sweat and Pixels

This is going to be the opposite of what you want to hear. But, you asked for it and I respect that. I think that there's no substitute for going about this old school and traditionally. The good news is that you can mostly do this for yourself, by yourself.

If you're disinclined (due to time or for another reason) to enroll in a culinary program get yourself either The Professional Chef or Martha Stewart's Cooking School

I know what you're thinking, "Martha Stewart? What am I? A housewife from Iowa?" Fuck that. I've been fortunate to have met and worked with Martha Stewart she's smart enough to know what she doesn't know and that particular book was actually written by a CIA alum and very closely follows the first year or so that you'd get in a program like that. It starts with knife work and then moves on to stocks and sauces. This particular book has actually been criticized as being too advance for people who have no idea what they're doing so, despite appearances, it may be perfect for you. If you want to feel more pro and go a little deeper, get the CIA text but know that it's more or less the same info and frankly, the pictures in the MSO book are really great. Plus, it looks like Amazon has them used for $6 bucks.

These resources will show you HOW to do what you want and they follow a specific, traditional track for a reason. Each thing that you learn builds on the next. You learn how to use your knife. Then, you practice your knife work while you make stocks. Then, you start to learn sauces in which to use your stocks. Etc. Etc. Etc. Almost like building flavors... It's all part of the discipline and you'll take that attention to detail into the kitchen with you and THAT'S what makes great food.

Then, get either Culinary Artistry or The Flavor Bible (Both by Page and Dornenburg. Also consider Ruhlman's Ratio (a colleague of mine won "Chopped" because she memorized all the dessert ratios in that book) and Segnit's Flavor Thesaurus. These will give you the "where" on building flavors and help you to start to express yourself creatively as you start to get your mechanics and fundamentals down.

Now, I know you want the fancy science stuff so that you can throw around smarty pants things about pH and phase transitions and heat transfer. So...go get Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking THAT is the bible. When the people who run the Ferran Adria class at Harvard have a question, it's not Myhrvold that they call up, it's Harold McGee. While Modernist Cuisine always has a long, exciting complicated solution to a problem I didn't even know I had, when I really want to know what the fuck is going on, I consult McGee and you will too, once you dig in.

Another one to consider which does a great job is the America's Test Kitchen Science of Good Cooking this will give you the fundamental "why's" or what's happening in practical situations and provides useful examples to see it for yourself.

Honestly, if someone came to me and asked if they should get MC or McGee and The Science of Good Cooking and could only pick one and never have the other, I'd recommend the McGee / ATK combo everyday of the week and twice on Tuesdays.

Good luck, dude. Go tear it up!

What you're talking about is a culinary school textbook. But much of it is demonstrated in the classroom, and some things don't come through so well just verbally, you need a visual.

The problem with food is it is so eclectic. So if you're cooking Italian, your needs are different than if you're cooking Italian-American, and your needs are different if you're cooking American. Even then you're needs are different if you're Southwestern Tex-Mex, Midwestern Casserole, New England Seafood, Or Texas BBQ. Asian styles are not really comparable to European styles/tools/processes, despite cross over ingredients.

Any good chef will tell you, the more you know, the more questions you have. The beauty with food is that it is endless.

Look at the CIA textbook as a starting point: http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Chef-Culinary-Institute-America/dp/0470421355

But stop trying to over simplify things.

We're in the opening stages of buying out a large company. Similar sized (international, thousands of employees, dozens of sites all over the place) to us; but naturally there's months of procedure before the buyout is complete. Gov't approval, shareholders vote, board voting, etc. I'm not allowed to communicate with my counterparts at the incoming company, but have contacts in other industries that do business with both of us. I got word a couple weeks ago that their entire team in a specific IT specialty is quitting. They're all scared that my company is going to fire them all as soon as the ink dries.

First off, nothing could be further from the truth. My company may be an outlier, but we do lots of M&As every year; tempted to say 1-2 a month. Mostly small shops, but every now and then we bag a big one like this. Vulture capitalism is a real thing, but it makes up a very very small amount of buyout and mergers. You're still right to be scared, people are always fearful of change. Buying a new house/car, moving to a new place, taking a new job, etc. Perfectly natural.

I'll take a minute to hit on your core concerns:

> Everything I look after is old

So what? If the old hardware is still meeting its requirements in the production environment, that's fine. It's nice to have newer stuff, but I've never seen management update hardware simply because it was "old". If it was constantly at risk of losing customer data, or had unsolvable security concerns, then upgrading it to newer hardware would make sense.

About 1/3rd of my environment (+1500 servers) is what I would call ancient.... but they're still running. Supporting apps that customers use. Preforming some special process that needs specific hardware/software. In some cases, the team that owned the hardware was divested years ago and nobody told us to turn off their shit when they left. It kinda common. During the merger process, everything will be inventoried and documented, including what the server is actually doing (ie: hosting). This is where the curtain is lifted and suddenly we don't need to keep all these boxes running. The ones that do need to stay will get P2V'ed or V2V'd to better systems, if there's a reason it can't stay in its current environment.

> I get the feeling we're kept here temporarily to keep the old stuff running.

Yes, of course you are. Who else? Your team has the knowledge and experience keeping it all running. You're kinda stuck in a holding pattern though. Until the merger is complete, you can't get a job at the new company, and you can't move up at your current one. If you quit your job, you wont get a place at the new company, even if you fit the bill.

At my place, we do very little external hiring, and even then only for esoteric positions (IE: Lync Engineer, Sharepoint admin, Citrix, etc). M&A's are the primary source of our onboarding. Not just because you have experience with the current systems that the company is inheriting as part of the merger; but because you've played an important role in making your current company attractive to mine, which is what lead to the buyout. If your IT systems were shit, and always crashing/losing data, your company wouldn't have grown to the point where it'd be attractive to buy it out. Also, you're keeping these ancient systems running? Nice... obviously you know what you're doing.

Which brings me to the next part... have you met anyone from the new company's HR team yet? We always send in a team of people (directors, HR, advisors) to meet with the employees of the newly acquired company. Figure out who are the good apples and who are bad. Who knows what they're talking about and who is just faking it for the paycheck. If you haven't met with the other company yet, I'd strongly advise you to not jump ship yet. You could be throwing away an excellent opportunity just because you're scared of the pending change.

> Management is off-site.

This is perfectly normal. My manager is 1000mi away, and I only talk to him over Lync/email. Somehow we take care of all our datacenters, around the world, without having to see each other in person. But hey, this is the 21st century and this is how it works. The best people for the job may not live within 50mi of your office, but are within range of another office. If you need someone sitting in the same building to give you guidance on what needs to be done, then you need to ask yourself why. It shouldn't matter if your orders come over an email, a voicemail, or a sit-down meeting. In my experience, having remote management makes the subordinates much more responsible. They're allowed to get their job done their way, in their time (as long as it meets the metric of success), and then report success over an email/chat/call. Almost everyone I've met loves this kind of system. Much more laid back then say, a micromanaging boss who hovers over your desk and asks for constant updates.

> Pay is low, turnover rate high

This too is normal during your M&A. Accounting doesn't want to introduce extra financial liabilities for the new parent company, because it can throw off their forecasting models. Don't be surprised if you get the bare minimum until about ~6mo after the ink dries on the merger. This applies to new hardware, facilities requests, bonuses, perks, etc. It's not a bad sign... but it can be bad for morale. My suggestion is to just suck it up, because you're not going to win a fight with the accountants.

> Change management is more strict.

Get used to this in larger companies. Can you imagine the chaos of hundreds/thousands of people with their hands in thousands of servers? If a customer app goes down at 9am without CC, how do you figure out who did what where? Was it the app owners doing a code change? Was it the network team upgrading a switch? Was it security rolling out an update to the firewall? Change control saves your ass. I was befuddled by the process too when I started, but they've made a believer out of me.

Why should the company wake up 100 people in the middle of the night, to play Sherlock Holmes in the environment, looking for what has changed, because some developer made an opps?

[Also, if you've never read The Phoenix Project, I strongly recommend it. It'll give you a look at how a company without change control "tries" to get things done, and then you can see how change control, once properly implemented, makes everyone's lives soooooo much easier].

> What to do?

Nothing you've done at this point has been unreasonable. Like I said before, your reaction to the change in your company will naturally cause feelings of fear, anticipation, anxiety; which leads to second-guessing and the sense of flight. Your paycheck is at risk, which puts food on the table, gas in your car, and a roof over your head. Totally normal to be up late at night wondering what the future holds.

I'd suggest you get your CV updated... and also put together a portfolio. If/when the new company comes to visit, they'll want to meet with the team who has kept everything running and see if they can be integrated into the new company. You're not re-interviewing for your current job a la 'Office Space', they want to see if you can provide extra value to the company if given the chance. This is where you impress them with how you saved the day keeping X-system online, or how you automated something that used to take days, into minutes. Things like that.

I would NOT suggest signing a 1yr committal on a new lease with the intention of staying with the company. My advice is from someone who has sat on the other side of the table, and while I'm painting you a rosy picture because you've given me no reason to think less of you.... I will state that someone people will be laid off. Duplicate positions, fakers, incompatible team members, etc. Not everyone makes the cut. If you're a decent worker who can be taught new tricks, odds are on your side of being "asked" to join the new company (where you'll still do your current job, and take on more responsibility for a while, until we can find a way to reduce your criticality to the old entity).


tl;dr - Fear of uncertainty is normal. You don't have the full picture of what's going on behind the scenes. You'll see the writing on the wall IF layoffs are coming. Don't do anything rash.

Oil on the market is what they call 'fungible'. What that means in practice is that all the oil on the export market acts like it all goes into one huge wholesale pool, and from there is divided up by customer. So it really doesn't matter where the oil country A is produced. All the suppliers are getting the market price.^1 And since most of the oil that one nation can import from another nations is exported by an OPEC nation,^2 picking one over another really has no impact on the earnings of any of them. The reason being is that the production capacity of exportable oil isn't that far greater than the import demand. It is larger, which is why OPEC keeps trying to convince its members to restrict output. But it's not so much greater that any of the exporters could be cut out of the system.

So for example the US refuses to buy from Iran. Fine. Iran sells to India and China instead. And the US buys the same amount from Mexico, Canada, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, others. It all just washes out.

The importers lack the threat of simply collectively boycotting imports. For their economies are far too dependent on imported oil to function on a day to day basis. Importers attempt to limit imports by high taxes to discourage use, or by maximizing domestic production, or regulations to discourage use. But those policies only very slowly change energy consumption patterns.

For a history of oil production, see Pulitizer Prize winning book The Prize by Yergin.


^1 Just to keep things from getting confused on this, not all oil is created equal. Some is of a quality which is easier or less costly to refine into usable products. Some comes from locations that are far less costly than others to produce. Some are in locations which makes export much more economically viable due to geography.

^2 Back in the heyday of OPEC, The Soviet Union wasn't the major oil exported that Russia is now. And Canada wasn't exporting like they are today either. And US production was in a relative low spot because the easy stuff had been pumped, and advanced extraction methods like fracking hadn't been invented yet. But Russia's interests more or less align with OPEC's interests. So they aren't really lining up to help the importing nations. And Mexico and Venezuela have long term production problems due to not properly investing to maintain their capacity. So as a whole OPEC's bargaining position is a poor one currently.

I havn't watched this doc yet, but if you're curious to read in depth into this topic, and it's truly fascinating. I can't recommend the book The Prize enough. It's a great read and you'll see how modern power was shaped well into the 20th century.

>Why isn't this a bigger deal for people? GMA just got scammed and no one is making a fuss about.

Well, it happens literally all the time. Ryan Holiday wrote a book about it and how stupidly easy it is back in 2013. "Whenever you see a malicious online rumor costs a company millions, politically motivated fake news driving elections, a product or celebrity zooming from total obscurity to viral sensation, or anonymously sourced articles becoming national conversation, someone is behind it. Often someone like Ryan Holiday." But, nobody cares. Or not enough to matter, anyway.

And even if people did, care... who's going to report on it? The media? You think they're gonna let you know how stupid and easy to manipulate and constantly wrong they are?

Once in a while I get together with a friend (or two) and try some Tiki cocktails that we haven't tried before. Here's links to all the other times we've done this: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Port Light

• 1 oz. egg white
  
• 2 oz. bourbon
  
• 1 oz. fresh lemon juice
  
• 3/4 oz. honey syrup (1:1)
  
• 1/2 oz. Passion fruit syrup
  
  Combine egg white and bourbon in a drink mixer tin and flash without ice for 10 seconds. Then add remaining the ingredients. Fill with 12 ounces of crushed ice and 4 to 6 small "agitator" cubes. Flash blend and open pour with gated finish into a footed pilsner glass and garnish. (from Smuggler's Cove: Exotic Cocktails, Rum, and the Cult of Tiki)
  
  Kona Castaway
  
  
• 3 oz. unsweetened pineapple juice
  
• 1 oz. aged Jamaican rum
  
• 1 oz. light rum
  
• 3/4 oz. coffee syrup
  
• 2 drops Bittermen's Tiki bitters
  
• Lime wedge
  
  Combine all the liquid ingredients in a cocktail shaker with crushed ice. Shake until well-chilled and pour everything into a chilled wine glass or highball. Garnish with a lime wedge. (from Putney Farm)
  
  Coffee syrup:
  Combine a 1 to 1 ratio of coffee (preferably Kona coffee) and sugar. Bring to a boil and then lower the heat and simmer until it reduces by 1/3. Keep in the fridge for up to 2 weeks.
  
  Don's Special Daiquiri
  
  
• 1 oz. Jamaican rum (Smith & Cross)
  
• 3/4 oz. aged white rum
  
• 3/4 oz. lime juice
  
• 1/4 oz. passion fruit syrup
  
• 1/4 oz. honey syrup (1:1)
  
• Garnish: Maraschino cherry
  
  Add all ingredients except cherry to cocktail shaker. Shake with ice until well-chilled. Strain into chilled cocktail coupe and garnish with cherry. (Adapted from Don the Beachcomber original)
  
  Manoa
  
  
• 1 1/2 oz. (45 ml) Bacardi Carta oro rum (we used El Dorado 8)
  
• 1 oz. (30 ml) Arcane cane crush rum (we used Real McCoy white rum)
  
• 3 ml Absinthe
  
• 2 tsp. (10 ml) Pimento dram liqueur
  
• 1/2 oz. (15 ml) Passion fruit syrup
  
• 1/2 oz. (15 ml) Homemade falernum syrup
  
• 3/4 oz. (~20 ml) Grapefruit juice
  
• 3/4 oz. (~20 ml) Lime juice
  
• Mint
  
• Sugar cube
  
• Ground cinnamon
  
  Add the rums, lime juice, pimento dram, both syrups, and grapefruit juice to a blender with 6 oz. crushed ice. Flash blend for 10-15 seconds. Pour into Tiki mug or highball. Garnish with fresh mint. Place spent lime shell (cut side up) onto the ice with an absinthe-soaked sugar cube inside. Light the sugar cube on fire and dust with ground cinnamon. (from A Mountain of Crushed Ice)

And a Bottle of Rum is absolutely the book you're wanting.

Smuggler's Cove has several decent sections on rum, including some history and a lot of subdivisions and classifications.

Potions of the Caribbean is another great book more focused on the influence of cocktails in the Caribbean, but has some good insights on rum as well.

X-posted to r/tiki as well

It's been hot in northeast Georgia, hot and humid!! To me, that means Mai Tais!

I've been drinking quite a few lately, because I'm also putting together a side-by-side overview of four different orange liqueurs to be posted on r/cocktails soon. This is a fantastic way to experiment a bit.

I start with the Mai Tai recipe from Smugglers Cove and tweak just a little...

• 1 oz Doorly's 8-year old Barbados Rum
  
• 2/3 oz Denizen 3-year old Aged White Rum
  
• 1/3 oz Smith & Cross Navy Strength Rum
  
• 3/4 oz Lime Juice
  
• 1/2 oz Clement Creole Shrubb
  
• 1/4 oz homemade Mai Tai syrup
  
• 1/4 oz homemade Orgeat
  
  Combine in a shaker tin with 12oz crushed ice plus a couple large cubes and shake until the tin frosts up. Dump everything into a double Old Fashioned glass and garnish with a spent lime shell and a sprig of spanked mint.
  
  Notes on my Mai Tai:
  The book, Smugglers Cove, is simply brilliant in how it handles rum. I've been a whisky guy for many years, and just in the past 6 months or so have begun exploring rum. The Smugglers Cove book, and the subreddits, r/rum, and r/tiki have all been fantastic resources.
  
  As outlined in Smugglers Cove, the original rum Trader Vic had access to when he created the Mai Tai (J. Wray and Nephew, 17-year old Jamaican) is not available today. Fortunately, the tiki gods are generous and gave us Martin and Rebecca Cate, who go on to describe the history of the Mai Tai in fantastic detail. If you are a fan of rum, or tiki, or just general booze-lore, I cannot recommend the book Smuggler's Cove: Exotic Cocktails, Rum, and the Cult of Tiki highly enough.
  
  With that being said, the book describes mixing various rums to achieve a profile similar to Vic's original. I do not claim to have recreated the original with my mix of Doorly's, Denizen, and Smith & Cross, but based on some trial and error (is it really an error, when the result is still a damn good Mai Tai?!) I did find a flavor combination I absolutely love!
  
  My "tweak" is to use 1/2 oz of Clement Creole Shrubb in place of Pierre Ferrand Dry Curacao. Nothing at all wrong with the Ferrand, it's just that, to me, the extra little bit of spicy funk from the rhum agricole base adds a perfect note to a Mai Tai.
  
  The Mai Tai syrup and Orgeat are both recipes from Smugglers Cove as well. The syrup is a 2:1 Demerara with a bit of vanilla extract and a pinch of salt added. The Orgeat is pretty standard stuff, almonds, water, sugar, orange blossom water and rose water. Both are well worth making and keeping around in the refrigerator.
  
  ~Cheers!

Excellent book for an introduction to what devops is all about. I worked at a devops consultancy for almost 3 years and we made everyone that joined read that book as well as the follow up, The Dev Ops handbook https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002

The devops handbook goes a little deeper into some of the technical ideas.

Actually, you'll have better luck in /r/rum or /r/cocktails

But in the meantime, pick up Martin Cate's amazing new book Smuggler's Cove: Exotic Cocktails, Rum, and the Cult of Tiki. Anyone working in a tiki bar should have read it.

Read 'Continuous Delivery', 'The DevOps handbook', and perhaps 'Accelerate'.

Progression systems, squad controls, over-the-shoulder third person, and expansive environments all needed to be adapted to make Frostbite work with Inquisition and Andromeda.

Check out Jason Schreier's Blood, Sweat, and Pixels for some additional information. He has an entire chapter on what the Inquisiton team had to do to adapt Frostbite for Inquisition.

I agree though, my favorite parts of Inquisition and Andromeda are without a doubt the environmental design and the technical prowess behind any type of magical/biotic/tech explosions. Those games at their best look as good as any game I've ever played.

Analytic Methods in Sports

Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won

Depends how much effort you want to put into it.

For general baseball knowledge and history:

• Watch all of Ken Burns Baseball (its all on Youtube).
  
• Read Moneyball for an understanding of how modern analytics revolutionized the game and upended the status quo. (Some people are still fighting this fight, but among MLB front offices the nerds have already "won" basically).
  
• Read Baseball Between the Numbers for a good primer on modern analysis (though there has been more progress since that book came out of course)
  
  
  For Dodgers specific history:
  
  
• Watch the ESPN 30 for 30 on Valenzuela (Fernando Nation).
  
• Read Jon Weisman's book about the Dodgers for a great overview of team history.
  
• Read Molly Knight's book for a good narrative look at the current team and ownership group. This is great context for understanding how we got to where we are now.
  
  For current news and analysis:
  
  
• Dodgers Digest is a great blog for level-headed, intelligent Dodgers analysis. The writers there know what they are talking about and aren't overly reactionary, as a general rule.
  
• True Blue LA, the Dodgers SB Nation blog, is run by Eric Stephen who is the most diligent Dodgers beat writer today. In the off season for example, he's writing a season review for every player who appeared for the Dodgers in 2015.

The video description has three 1 2 3

i said that he didn't need to have any business knowledge, his fortune was made off of a technology that none of his competitors had, which gave him an absolute edge - it's like being able to buy stock at a 50% discount and then sell it at full value on the open market.

one of the last things i mentioned was that fred koch was a great businessman and chemist - my intention was to insinuate that failure was nearly impossible under that set of circumstances. he was in an almost constant legal battle with the enormous e&p monopolies of the time, he brought his technology to the ussr when he couldn't use it stateside, and he created the platform for an oil services/technology company in probably the best time in early american history to do so. he was booming while the stock market was crashing and his innovations in using lighter napthas to create more gasoline out of the same amount of crude oil made rock island oil into the empire that it is now.

if i'm being candid, i wasn't expecting to be asked for sources since people post complete bullshit here all the time, and my original post is clearly littered with my opinions and isn't intended to be an academic exercise..

i'll give you a list but you might have to go to the library or hit up amazon

sons of wichita - dan schulman (the book's alright but gives insight to the early generations of the koch family rather than brothers)

oil 101 - morgan downey (describes the oil industry from top to bottom in a digestbile and interesting way, totally recommend if you're even sligthly interested in learning about the industry - describes cracking as it relates to refining business)



you can easily google the history of koch industries too, as well as excerpts from the books.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Phoenix-Project-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592

The phoenix project. it was a good book, not so much a reference book, but still has some valuable lessons in it.

As were Bush, Reagan, and numerous other high ranking US officials, both military and civilian. There have long been close links between Riyadh and DC. For good reason.

The House of Saud, while now a convenient boogeyman for those with no sense of even recent history, has provided not just oil for many decades when there were inadequate supplies in North America (and Europe), but more importantly has been a key ally in the gulf, a place where instability is the natural state, and where Wahhabism especially would rapidly fill a power vacuum.

Is Saudi Arabia an ideal ally? No. We have many differences with them. But they are far better than the alternative. Through taking donations from the Saudis, Clinton was shoring up an important relationship while furthering the impact of her family foundation.

So you can criticize Clinton's relationship with the House of Saud, but see how quickly Trump cozies up to them.

I guess in summary, two things. One, these things aren't black and white, as cute as it may be. And second, keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

For more detail you can read the following:

https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Kingdom-Modernists-Terrorists-Struggle/dp/0143118277

https://www.amazon.ca/Prize-Epic-Quest-Money-Power/dp/1439110123

Is this the same one?

http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Chef-Culinary-Institute-America/dp/0470421355

Amazon Link for those interested

I know your joking, but it's actually written by a farmer in the US.

I looked up the book https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Want-Do-Illegal-Stories/dp/0963810952

I sort of am on the fence of recommending these books but have you read?

• Phoenix Project link
  
  
• Art of the Start link
  
  
• The hard Truth link
  
  Learning how businesses work definitely improves your tech skills. It helps build logic based around what is best for the business, not what is best for IT, or what is best for you. Learning how IT becomes a finely tuned oiled machine for your business is even better.
  
  I have read some of the books on start ups and business so I can understand where they come from, what they are trying to accomplish as a business.
  
  The soft skills will come as you work with more and more people. Just always try to walk into a situation as a neutral part, listen, observe, learn and don't be a jerk. The soft skills will develop pretty easily that way

Make sure you checkout What is DevOps? in the welcome section of this subreddit.

If you have some time, get your hands on The Phoenix Project as well. It will give you some perspective.

Cocktail Kingdom is located in NYC.

36 West 25th Street, Fifth Floor, New York, NY 10010

Go check it out, good stuff there.

Honestly, if he has his OWN bartending equipment, a really nice leather bar roll-up would be nice.

http://www.cocktailkingdom.com/all-barware/bags-case

Depends on your budget.

If he wears an apron at work...

http://butcherandbaker.com/

I love their aprons.

Books are always good for inspiration.

https://www.amazon.com/Smugglers-Cove-Exotic-Cocktails-Cult/dp/1607747324

This one came out recently and I couldn't recommend it more. The people who wrote it are probably the foremost tiki and rum experts in the world. It's the best cocktail book since Death and Co.

>I am unconvinced the report at ... really relates to high-quality software.

There are actually two stability metrics in the DevOps report. Mean time to recovery (MTTR) and Release Fail Rate. And while they are not something that people think of "quality" as a developer, I find it hard to believe that software of low internal quality could be released without massive pains. Both of which are lowest for high performers. When you listen to some talks by Jez Humble, who is one of the authors of the DevOps report, he says exactly what this article says. It is actually a core message of most of his talks.

Also, in the full book, they go into more details about actual technical practices and they find trunk-based development, developer-owned tests and refactoring correlates with high IT performance. And all of these practices are what Fowler and Humble associate with software quality. I really recommend reading the book, as the report is mostly condensed stuff for managers and executives to read between meetings.

I disagree that it's any sort of new trend, the people's desire for lies and gossip and hyperbole has always been there. I've lived it long before the last ten years of Huffington Post and Upworthy and Buzzfeed.

Tangentially related, you'd probably love the book Trust Me I'm Lying

From Blood Sweat and Pixels:

"Every time I worked with Joe [Staten], I said, 'Joe, I'm really out in the dark here on where the story's going - I don't understand what's happening with the story, " [Marty] O'Donnel said. "And he would say that he was frustrated too. And at least what he told me was that he was frustrated with the lack of commitment from Jason. Jason would say, 'Yes this is good,' then a month later say, 'No, we shouldn't do this.' So there was a lot of what looked like indecision coming from Jason."

In the summer of 2013, months after Jones and Staten had hyped up the story of Destiny to press and weeks after [the gameplay trailer released at E3], O'Donnell went to the hospital to get sinus surgery. Just a few days after he got home, catastrophe began.

"I got a sort of panicked email from [Bungie's production director] Jonty Barnes saying, 'Oh my gosh, Joe released this supercut thing, and everybody's up in arms and worried about the story,'" O'Donnell said. "And I was lying on the couch, in a drug haze from recovering, and I was just sort of like, 'You've got to be kidding me. This is horrible.'"

Said "supercut thing" - or, as it was more commonly called, the supercut - was a two hour internal video that was meant to convey Destiny's entire story. To most observers, it was a mess. Staten had compiled and edited the supercut almost entirely on his own, peppering it with incomplete dialogue, half-finished voice acting, and rough animation. People at Bungie, many of whom were already nervous about the state of the game's story, found it impossible to understand.

In the supercut's version of Destiny's story, the player's main goal was to hunt down an artificially intelligent war machine named Rasputin, who had been kidnapped by the swarming, undead alien Hive. On the journey, the playuer would head to Earth, Venus, Mars, the Moon, Staturn, and a mystical temple on Mercury, where an Obi-Wan Kenobi-like wizard named Osiris would offer advice and words of wisdom. Along the way, the player would befriend and team up with characters like "The Crow," a suave alien with pale blue skin and slick hair [Note, the Crow's character model was repurposed to be Uldren].

Opinions varied on this story's quality, but almost everyone outside the writer's room agreed that the supercut itself was a disaster. "Joe's vision probably made tons of sense in his own mind," said Marty O'Donnell. "And Joe was just [thinking], 'Come on, everybody, we've all got to go in the same direction. We've got to star now. Here it is. This isn't perfect but we can fix it . . . ' Instead it backfired completely . . . Just about everybody in the studio thought, 'Oh my gosh, this is going to be a train wreck.'"

Perhaps by putting out the supercut, Joe Staten had hoped to force the studio's hand. Maybe he wanted to make Jason Jones and the rest of Bungie's leadership commit to a suingular vision for Destiny's story and stick to it. One former Bungie employee said Jones had actually requested that Staten make a presentation so they could all assess the state of the story. Few people at Bungie anticipated what would happen next.

Shortly after the supercut circulated, Jason Jones gave the studio a new edict: They needed to reboot the story. It was time to start over. Staten's story was too linear, Jones said, and too similar to Halo. Starting now, Jones told the studio, they were going to rewrite Destiny's story from scratch.

Interestingly, the sun protective aspect has not been more challenging - to the naked eye, our fabrics appear to be normal lightweight to midweight knits, and factories have had no trouble accommodating us.

What is challenging about producing in the USA is that costs are higher than they are overseas - much of the money we spend on production funds the salaries of those cutting, sewing, and dyeing our merchandise - and the price of labor in the US is simply higher than it is in Cambodia or Bangladesh (two popular, overseas, low-cost manufacturing markets). We decided to produce in the US because it would allow us to do better quality control, plus we strive to be as sustainable a business as possible. Manufacturing in the US reduces our carbon footprint because we don't have to put our finished goods on an airplane or on a barge, or ship our components around the world.

Beyond just assembling our garments in the US, we also use American-made components; this is another quality control & sustainability effort. It also allows us to turn items more quickly, because lead times are often shorter than ordering from overseas. Some companies buy all of their fabric from markets with less or non-existent testing standards, then cut & sew the item in the US, and call it American made. They aren't violating any rules, but it's just a less supervised and regulated way to produce clothing. This subject itself is worthy of a lengthy discussion; one great resource for more information on this practice is Dana Thomas' Deluxe.

It's not about more or less insight, it's about the lens through which you interpret the information. MarkZ had an interesting short twitter thread about it.

In general, even people who spend all day watching and analyzing players' performances can be biased and have inaccurate perceptions of players' skill. One of the core motifs of Moneyball was precisely that. The old scouts who had played and scouted the game for decades were biased in particular ways that relative newcomers who weren't indigenous to baseball weren't.

Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World

Touches on everything from agricultural science to the entanglement of the fruit industry with the upper echelons of US government. It boggles the mind.

This is quite interesting so I will go ahead and put MAXIMUM EFFORT into it

chapter 1 - ikuto's talent would have gone unnoticed if chiyuki (someone born into the fashion industry) hadn't gone out of her way to hunt him down and then had a moment of self-realization "impossible probably".

chapter 2 - chiyuki's dad (an insider) happens to get a call from a former co-worker and decided to back ikuto who stood up to him for chiyuki's sake.

I have had me mentor pull some strings for me too when I used to work in research and academia...one phone call and I was having lunch with a top government official

chapter 4 - well he is a raw talent born in unfavorable circumstances which isn't unheard of in real life

chapter 5 - not unheard of...people in influential positions use opportunities to further kids all the time

chapter 6 - again, not unheard of...in fact, it is quite common in event management for things to fall in chaos when someone isn't able to come (either travel/overwork/sick)

chapter 7 & 8 - creative work is hard to....predict/control. There are moments when you shut down wondering how you managed to do it before and others where everything falls into it's place like a jigsaw

chapter 9 - not much of a cliffhanger here

chapter 10 - not unheard of...people managing the event and those managing the inventory have an instance of miscommunication. All events are susceptible to failure due to a lot moving parts

chapter 11, 12 - resolutions, no cliffhanger

chapter 13, 14 - MC mentions earlier (chapter 1) that he wanted to give up his dream because of his unfavorable circumstances...we were going to find out the full extend of it sooner or later

chapter 15 - I liked this one a lot...we have to wait a week before we find out the result of ikuto's self-reflection...chiyuki has her moment of self-reflection back in chapter 1.

Up until now, it's been been other people pushing him into it and he is responding to situations. Now he needs to figure out why he wants to be fashion designer. To be one is to design clothes that appeal to the masses, It isn't enough to want to make clothes (for his sisters/mom). He has the talent but it isn't good enough he needs to be obsessed about it to keep at it long enough.

Remember, chiyuki had other agencies willing to take her on or she could have compromised and moved into another profession where she wouldn't denied for being short. She chose her namesake, Mille Neige.

chapter 16 - resolutions, no cliffhanger

chapter 17 - cliffhanger...first one that is not set up well enough but I'd wait for the next chapter to pass judgement on it.

I have no idea about the fashion industry but I have heard people quitting companies in the middle or right before key events in the video game industry for health or creative differences.

>it so often just gets me rolling my eyes and sighing and this little last page dramatic twist cliff-hanger perfectly embodies why

I think you have been quite harsh in your assessment. I found none of the cliffhangers hard to believe/outlandish.

It's not like the MC fell on top of a female while she was in a public bath (every ecchi manga ever) or ran into his girlfriend's (and step-sister) step-sister and saw her underwear.

>At every turn it feels like the author is trying to use every little trick they can find to make things just a little more intense, more dramatic, as dramatic as they possibly can and it just ends up feeling overplayed.

I disagree...I could relate to it esp. working in a high stress environment. I mean sure the manga is structured in a fashion that maximises the impact but all of those things are quite common in industries like fashion, event management, animation, video games, research and academia which subsists on creative work and crunch (over working to meat deadlines that are hard to predict/pin down) is the norm.

If you ever happen to start things from scratch or attempt a startup, you will realize that more often than not find that one little thing or other can lead to near total collapse...it is dramatic by it's nature

An Essential Reading List For Designers

Source: www.tomfaulkner.co.uk

All books have been linked to Amazon for review and possible purchase. Remember to support the authors by purchasing their books. If there are any issues with this listing let me know via comments or pm.

Architecture

• The Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture by Phaidon
  
• The Architecture of the City by Aldo Rossi
  
• Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown & Steven Izenour
  
• Modern Architecture since 1900 by William J R Curtis
  
• Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture by Phaidon
  
  Communication Design
  
  
• Essentials of Visual Communication by Bo Bergström
  
• Visual Language for Designers by Connie Malamed
  
• Visual Communication: From Theory to Practice by Jonathan Baldwin & Lucienne Roberts
  
• This Means This, That Means That: A User's Guide to Semiotics by Sean Hall
  
• Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture by Marita Struken & Lisa Cartwright
  
  Fashion Design
  
  
• Fashion Design Course by Steven Faerm
  
• Fashion Today by Colin McDowell
  
• The Fashion Designer Survival Guide by Mary Gehlhar
  
• Deluxe: How Luxury Lost it Lustre by Dana Thomas
  
• The Fashion Book by Angela Buttolph Editors of Phaidon ?
  
  Furniture Design
  
  
• Furniture Design by Stuart Lawson
  
• Eames by Gloria Koenig
  
• Design of the 20th Century by Charlotte & Peter Fiell
  
• 1000 Chairs by Charlotte & Peter Fiell
  
• The Encyclopedia of Furniture by Joseph Aronson
  
  Game Design
  
  
• The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses by Jess Schell
  
• Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster
  
• [Challenges for Game Designers](Challenges for Game Designers) by Brenda Brathwaite
  
• Level Up!: The Guide to Great Video Game Design by Scott Rogers
  
• Screenplay: The Foundation of Screenwriting by Syd Field
  
  Graphic Design
  
  
• Grid System in Graphic Design by Josef-Muller Brockmann
  
• The Art of Looking Sideways by Alan Fletcher
  
• A Type Primer by John Kane
  
• The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst
  
• The New Typography by Jan Tschichold
  
  Information Design
  
  
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte
  
• Show Me The Numbers:Desiginingg Tables and Graphs to Enlighten by Stephen Few
  
• Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte
  
• Information is Beautiful by David McCandless
  
• Information Graphic by Sandra Rendgen
  
  
  Industrial Design
  
  
• The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
  
• The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda
  
• Manufacturing Processes for Design Professionals by Rob Thompson
  
• Process: 50 Product Design from Concept to Manufacture by Jennifer Hudson
  
• Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell
  
  (cont'd)
  
  

Nope. Nope. Nope.

first things first, the article says they could be extinct "within a decade," and it was written in 2003...so there's that.

now, let me elaborate. The type of banana grown in most of central america is called a "cavendish," it is vulnerable to panama disease race 4, which is not present in central america (but it is pretty much everywhere else). when people say that the cavendish will be going extinct, its because of the inevitability of that strain reaching central america, which it surely will at some point.

now let me discuss that. Bananas are very big business. i believe its somewhere along the lines of 90%+ of American households have bought bananas in the past month. that's huge. Now, do you think that the big fruit companies will allow them to go extinct? that is their cash cow, their core business. they learned a lot from the Big Mikes. For example, in the Philippines, i heard that when panama disease was found on a farm, they burned the whole thing to the ground and didn't use it again for like 30 years. Also, everything that went into the farms and came out of the farms was disinfected...people, vehicles, tools, everything. With the Big Mikes, none of this was done and that why it spread so quickly.

black sigatoka is different, and definitely an issue, but not a huge one and is controllable on farm level to a very effective extent (as far as i know).

To put it in perspective, everyone i know that had anything to do with bananas in central america was never worried about Panama Disease, or sigatoka, or pests. they were more worried about the weather or volcano eruptions or some issue with logistics. believe me, a hurricane will have a much greater impact on a farm than some sigatoka.

Now, if something does happen, and the cavendish is in danger, there are literally thousands of different types of bananas. They would be a little more expensive, as the infrastructure for shipping bananas is based around the cavendish, but i'm sure they would get to you. Also, there is a lab (i forget where or who its owned by) that is dedicated to cultivating new bananas. They have had some success, but i don't believe anything commercially viable...yet.

so relax everyone, your cornflakes will have plenty of bananas for a long time.

source: i work for Chiquita.

TL;DR: Low level Chiquita employee explains why this article isn't entirely accurate.

EDIT: a good read

The Professional Chef. Tons of recipes, no fluff. Definitely more textbook than cookbook though.

Also, an Amazon reviewer of the book said this

>The biggest inconvenience is that the quantities are referenced by weight so it might say 2oz of sugar and I have no idea how much that is. 

Which is just funny to me. The book has measurements in both imperial and metric for each recipe.

For social media you should check out different company blogs. Those are really helpful. I like the Buffer and Hootsuite blogs a lot.

But books are way better than online websites

For marketing you should read Traction by Gabriel Weinberg

Ryan Holiday's Growth Hacker Marketing and Trust Me, I'm Lying are insanely informative and fun to read.

Wow...
https://www.amazon.com/Start-Why-Leaders-Inspire-Everyone/dp/1591846447
Your fundamental problem is that you need to start with what you are trying to do, then work to get the data in the right shape to meet this need.


GOALS:

Show the availability of resources with a given skillset over time. You want to allow for resources to learn new skills.


DIMENSION TABLES

Now that we know what your goal is, let's look at the actors that you have defined to determine what dimensions you need.


"Show the availability of resources with a given skillset over time" The nouns in your goal will give you the dimensions that you need.


Employee- DIM_EMPLOYEE (don't call people resources... they just don't like it :) )
Skillset- DIM_SKILLSET
Time- DIM_DATE (if you are calculating availability down to the hour, then you will also need a DIM_TIME table)
FACT TABLES
"Show the availability of resources with a given skillset over time. You want to allow for resources to learn new skills." The verbs will give you what needs to go into your fact tables.
These fact tables will be a little tricky depending on how complex you want to make them.

Availability- you are looking to capture the availability of a resource and compare it to the demand for a given skill.

​

​

but... unfortunately, I have to go. I will try to add some more to this later. Hopefully, this is enough to help you a little.

Well, there's the old saints:
https://www.amazon.com/Hawaii-Tropical-Drinks-Cuisine-Beachcomber/dp/1566474914
https://www.amazon.com/Trader-Vics-Bartenders-Guide-Revised/dp/B000LY5HJY

And the new testaments:
https://www.amazon.com/Smugglers-Cove-Exotic-Cocktails-Cult/dp/1607747324
https://www.amazon.com/Beachbum-Berrys-Potions-Caribbean-Berry/dp/1603113800

Knowing rum is good. Knowing orgeat and falernum is better.

False Start: How the New Browns Were Set Up to Fail

I’d also mention a great follow up would be the DevOps Handbook: https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002

You're not reading the right books. Very few people need to know about buses and registers. Try reading some books about computers that are written for a general audience by journalists. Some examples:

• The Soul of a New Machine
  
• Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
  
• Dreaming in Code
  
• The Phoenix Project (this one's fiction)
  
  Hopefully they'll keep you engaged and you'll learn things in the process.

It's like Sarah jumped straight out of the book.

Definitely check out The Phoenix Project. I'm about halfway through it now and am really enjoying it!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0988262509/

The Phoenix Project, explains it in a novel format. https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592

hey I read that! Matt Simmons ended up being dead wrong about peak oil, but otherwise I enjoyed the book. But The Prize by Daniel Yergin is the king of oil books - it is brilliant.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Prize-Quest-Money-Power/dp/1439110123/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=04AERX02B4996WQXBJA0****

The Prize by Daniel Yergin is a great history of the O&G industry.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1439110123/ref=redir_mdp_mobile/188-3799228-4803548

Is there any proof though that this has any effect? The only thing in this piece is speculation that it MIGHT do something. But the only thing its been used so far is to enforce to mcconnells supporters the word witchhunt. Not that that's not a reason to do it since they'd do it anyway, but its weird how much, without literally any evidence, we're believing this narrative. Its a dangerous illustration of gullibility when we want to believe and we should learn about this aspect of ourselves so it's not used in a more malicious bit of manipulation. Its actually a great example of the kind of story snowballing that becomes true by repetition described in Trust Me I'm Lying [1]

[1] Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator https://www.amazon.com/dp/1591846285/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_g5buDbC06QP43

I've been really put off by the way they have been marketing Series 8 (I think a lot of the "leaks" (including the leaked scripts/episodes and the rummor about Jenna) have been intentional and part of their marketing strategy). I have questions about just why Matt's contract wasn't renewed and about what happened to Chris to make him leave after one series.

All of that goes to your "I wonder what's happening at BBC right now." comment. I've been wondering too, but about different things.

this is legit. the article is from over a year ago. he wrote a book about it

Et dans ce cas il tourne la réthorique selon comme quoi EM utilise la justice (corrompu) pour entérer la vérité.

Au final quoi qu'il arrive ils consolideront leur base électorale.
Cet article explique assez bien cette stratégie :
http://observer.com/2017/02/i-helped-create-the-milo-trolling-playbook-you-should-stop-playing-right-into-it/

Et y'a même un livre :
https://www.amazon.fr/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/1591846285/?tag=ryanholidayfr-21

This is actually the central premise of the book, Trust Me I'm Lying:

https://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/1591846285

Essentially, now that most media is online, and advertising sales are driven by clicks, clicks become the all important goal of most articles. And this is ushering in a new era of yellow journalism.

What drives clicks are anger / outrage/ fear / hate/ humor / sex - things that produce 'emotional valences.'

So take two headlines examples.

1. "Trumps election due to democrats's failure address the economic concerns of middle america, research shows."
   
2. "10 reasons why debate is pointless, and flyover state conservatards need to be put in re-education camps."
   
   Article 1 could be a wonderfully written, deeply researched article with a nuanced world view and actionable advice for winning in 2020. Yet, its not an exciting headline, and certainly does not spike a readers emotions. It gets 12,000 clicks.
   
   Article 2 could be raging drivel; an emotional , opinion based listicle with 250 words and 10 memes stolen from Reddit. But that headline is pure click gold. Those who are angry/hateful about trumps win will click, while trump supporters angry/afraid about the prospect of being put in political re-education camp will also click. Further, both sides will share this article with their 'sides' of the aisle online. Result, 1.2 million clicks.
   
   While article 1 is much better quality, article 2 is far more profitable for attracting advertising. As such, writers and editors will pursue more 'stories' like article 2.

I highly suggest Trust Me, I'm lying if you have not read it yet.

http://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/1591846285

Will check it out. If you want to get further into the Tiki side of things, I recommend Smuggler's Cove: Exotic Cocktails, Rum, and the Cult of Tiki https://www.amazon.com/dp/1607747324/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_xrV7ybVRKN7FJ

Anything that lasts this long is systemic.

• Browns were screwed in 1999. The Expansion draft was rigged so we didn't get any quality players (Ex: There were a number of retired players on the list of eligible draftees) The Owners didn't give a shit about Cleveland and didn't even want the city to have a team, but had to because the city won a lawsuit against the NFL. We were doomed from the get-go (read False Start: How The Browns Were Setup To Fail for more). Couch was arguably our best QB since '99 and he was ruined when he was drafted. This accounts for the first 4-5 years of shitty QBs.
  
  
• Our first owner Al Lerner, actually gave somewhat of a shit about the team (though he helped Modell move the team so fuck him). After he died in 2002 he left the team to his son Randy Lerner who didn't give a shit about the team. He only cared about his soccer team Aston Villa. However, he promised his father he wouldn't sell the team for 10 years. This promise sunk us into 10 years of bad ownership and therefore bad Front Offices, and thus bad QBs.
  
  
• Finally, he sold the team to Jimmy Haslam who does give a fuck about the Browns. Hopefully this means we'll actually get some competent people in management. This is the true first year of the Jimmy Haslem era as Banner/Chud were not his choices.
  
  TL;DR: Nobody cared enough about the Browns over the last 15 years to see them succeed. Hopefully with new ownership this will change.

I'm going to second that recommendation. DevOps is a really versatile role and you'll want to make sure that you have a solid understanding of the scope involved so that you can confidently set expectations when applying for positions.

It's become a bit of a buzzword in the last year, but for a good reason since it is pretty much essential for agile development and overlaps strongly with architecture / infrastructure development.

There are two books by the same team of authors I strongly recommend reading, including non-referral amazon links below.

• The Phoenix Project - Explains the approach in a narrative form. If you're only going to get one of these and you're new to the concept, I'd go with this.
  
  
• The DevOps Handbook - More abstract, but a really thorough and well organized examination of both DevOps as a discipline and the road to implementing it in an organization.

Okay, so my recommendation is similar to many others here, except that I'd say start with(get an audible subscription),

The Goal Audio Book by Eliyahu M. Goldratt

This is a really good book to start with, reasonably easy to listen to in audio format once you get rolling. It all started with this book! It's perfect start before you seque into

The Phoenix Project

It made for a pretty descent audio book as well. I powered through both of them while commuting. And I found it to be good enough.

DevOps HandBook

This however isn't quite as good as an audio book and you are better off with the book itself unless you are tight on time.

From there, this primer is pretty comprehensive to get you rolling,
[O'Reilly Learning Path: Modern DevOps] (https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/learning-path-modern/9781787280236/) which will cover a little bit of every technology you might be interested in. I haven't gone through this myself but it seems to have descent coverage, from the 3 ways, to git, containers, docker, kubernetes, ci(jenkins), swarm, aws, puppet, salt, testing, agile, compliance, etc etc..

As everyone else has mentioned, 12 Factor is a required reading.

And if you want a pretty deep dive on Docker, Docker Mastery: The Complete Toolset From a Docker Captain

Is well maintained. If you want to know AWS better, there are some descent udemy courses as well that you can pickup for $15. Anything from Ryan Kroonenburg is pretty descent. Side note Azure just started offering a managed kubernetes service that is now in preview its worth checking out.

From there, the only other thing I would say is to look at Terraform and every product by hashicorp and some more in depth content for
kubernetes and possibly Powershell if you are a windows person.

Accelerate - https://www.amazon.com/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Technology-Organizations/dp/1942788339/

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - https://www.amazon.com/Habits-Highly-Effective-People-Powerful/dp/0743269519

Extreme Ownership - https://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Ownership-U-S-Navy-SEALs/dp/1760558206/

It's kind of dumb but there are two different "CD"s.

The first level is CI, which is committing code and having something that builds it automatically and runs all the tests.

The next level is CD (Continuous Delivery), which is a process that takes your successful integration builds and pushes them out to some set of environments (e.g. UAT or staging or whatever). From there you might have some set of additional tests that run, maybe load tests or integration tests with live external systems.

The third level is CD (Continuous Deployment), which is a process that takes your successful delivery builds and automatically pushes them to production.

In a true continuous deployment pipeline there's no gating step where people sign off on UAT (this doesn't mean there's no people involved anywhere, for example code review pre-merge is fine). You write your tests, you merge your changes, and if everything passes the changes just show up in production.

The part of your process that makes it not "true CD" is the human sign off in UAT.

That being said, TRUE AUTOMATED CD IS NOT RIGHT FOR ALL SITUATIONS! There are many business reasons that you might not want to or be able to apply a true continuous deployment model.

IMO the best book on this stuff that's out right now is https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1942788339

You might have a look at some of these:

https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Video-Game-Industry-Developers/dp/0415828287

https://www.amazon.com/Extra-Lives-Video-Games-Matter/dp/0307474313/

https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Sweat-Pixels-Triumphant-Turbulent/dp/0062651234/

https://www.amazon.com/Changing-Game-Transforming-Future-Business-ebook/dp/B001I8QVJC/

https://www.amazon.com/Gamers-Work-Stories-Behind-People/dp/1430233516/

https://www.amazon.com/Innovation-Marketing-Video-Game-Industry-ebook/dp/B01G2BOQGY/

https://www.amazon.com/Total-Engagement-Virtual-Changing-Businesses/dp/142214657X/

Jeebus, that's awful! I'll probably read more about it soon enough, though. I just borrowed the book Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster from the public library.

I guess if I want to buy a Kate Spade bag in the future, I should actually purchase it by walking in a Kate Spade store (and allow both the colors and the price tags blaze into my eyes).

Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Luster is incredible and important in today's market that focuses on aspirations towards high end purchases.

Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Fast Fashion is another good one.

Dang it, now I have to defend my responses! ; )

There are books and books on psychiatry's history as well as it's problems. I know it sounds like a conspiracy theory but there's just so much to it and there are so many levels. It's very complicated...the bio-medical model is great for treating things like polio, bacterial infections, and stomach aches, but in terms of mental illness there are so many more variables going on. You can't say that something like depression is simply a chemical imbalance and therefor you need medication. That's so reductive it hurts. That's like saying a headache is an Advil imbalance. Brain chemistry is important but it is over emphasized. Also think about the side effects of medication.

I think you missed my last point. Drug companies want wider diagnoses and more loose criteria in the DSM so more people can be diagnosed and prescribed and thus the companies can make more money.

The below book completely changed my view. It documents the rise and history of psychiatry as well as its outcomes. Tons of research backing in the book. It's not just some guy rambling but some guy rambling with research and data to back it up.

http://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Epidemic-Bullets-Psychiatric-Astonishing/dp/0307452425

Dr. Raine,

Kudos to you sir, rarely is an IAMA filled with so many thoroughly well-informed students of the OP's area of expertise. You have an erudite fan base.

My question -
Are you familiar with the book Anatomy of an Epidemic? (My guess is yes,.. if only due to the similarity in titles!)

Do you have an opinion on the argument that Mr. Whitaker put forth that the application of psychiatric drug-based interventions with the goal of improving mental health appears to result in (on average) dramatically worse long term results? Perhaps even driving patients further up the scale of mental illness in the interests of relieving short tern symptoms.

Mr. Whitaker puts together a convincing (to me, a layman) foundation of studies and research that seem to show we are "re-wiring brains" and not for the better with drug interventions.

Follow-up question -
I have ordered your book (just now) so perhaps you address this there. In your synopsis you say that your studies may help "identify violent offenders early in life [potentially informing] crime-prevention policies" - are you concerned about the inefficacy of intervention-directed policies in the hands of government bureaucratic oversight?

BTW - I can't speak for Mr. Whitaker or Anatomy of an Epidemic - I hope I have gotten his thesis right in my question.

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safron Foer. Great book, really interesting perspective on factory farmed animals. You won't be disappointed.

Amazon link

I'm mostly a basketball guy so...


You don't need to have ever seen a basketball game to appreciate these first two books.

Breaks of the Game by David Halberstam which it probably the best NBA book. It follows the 1978 Portland Trail Blazers and gets way more access than anyone could get now. Plus Halberstam was a great writer so he gets the most out of excellent material.

The Last Shot by Darcy Frey this is probably my favorite basketball book. It follows high school basketball players and it works as biography as well as an exploration of sports culture, race, class, and youth. The Hoop Dreams of books. Great journalism on a great subject.

Freedarko's The Undisputed Guide to Basketball History Captures the visceral and intellectual thrill of watching basketball better than any other book. Manages to capture big picture and little picture.

Seven Seconds or Less Lifelong basketball writer follows one of the funnest teams in NBA history for a year


Pistol Biography of Pistol Pete and his insanely driven father. Manages the rare feat for a sports biography of not slipping into hagiography.


Baseball

Moneyball How baseball teams were run a decade ago. Really well written and somehow manages to make baseball and business really entertaining. Great for fans and non-fans.

Not quite. The banana in the supermarket is known as the Cavendish banana, a sterile cultivar. It has no seeds, which is much more appetizing than the alternative. The species Musa acuminata is the progenitor of sweet bananas. The edible bananas we know and love are triploid hybrids. The ones with mostly Musa balbisiana genes are plantains, essentially.

As Wikipedia notes, when the two species were introduced into the same range, they started hybridizing, giving us our delicious banana without all the seeds. When people noticed this, they started growing those more and more. It was a happy accident, and humans started growing them, just like any other crop.

Note that this is just a quick summary, and I encourage you to read more about it. The banana has a pretty fascinating history, and Wikipedia's articles are great places to start.

EDIT: Wow, thanks for the gold! For more information about bananas, check out the book Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World by Dan Koeppel. To get an idea of what the book covers, here's a podcast between Steve Mirsky of Scientific American and the author. It will blow your mind.

I’ll recommend three books that have upped my research as a home cook; The Professional Chef by CIA, Techniques by Jacques Pepin, and Ratio by Michael Ruhlman.

Of course there are hundreds of books but I often reference these in particular for education.

Salatin is an unconventional farmer who raises grass-fed beef, pastured poultry, and pastured pork. He is very innovative and has a lot of things to say about the relatively recent pitfalls of American culture. He probably is most recognized for his appearance in Food Inc. and he has done multiple Ted talks. Check him out- this is the the future of farming! He's also authored multiple books

Obligatory referral for reading the Phoenix Project.

https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592

What you want to do is engineer your systems such that "Maintenance Windows" are not a thing. You might want to look into SRE and DevOps techniques.

• The Phoenix Project
  
• The Google SRE books

First, go read The Phoenix Project. A quick read that novelizes process workflow concepts really well.

Personally, I use a Kanban board to make sure projects are moving along. In conjunction with a ticketing system (which is a great log but poor visual representation of how projects or long tasks are going) it works great and is visible enough that my CEO often walks in and takes a look at our "current status." Would be worth looking into as initial investment is low (mine is a whiteboard and some colored post it notes; more elegant and online solutions are plentiful).

Worth pointing out as I haven't seen this book mentioned here so far.
Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator

I have been reading the book and the first edition is a little disjointed but still gets the point across.

If you really want to learn to cook i would suggest getting the text book than many professional chefs use while in school, something like this:
The Professional Chef https://www.amazon.com/dp/0470421355

You dont have to read it cover to cover but you should use it ad a reference to learn the fundamentals and establish a basic set of skills that you can use as you continue to learn and try new things. Like many endeavors you can save a lot of time by learning the tricks of the trade in the beginning.

Also like others said youtube is an awesome way to learn, also check out Americas Test Kitchen on PBS.

Nå folkens, der er snart gået et år siden Skodbil sidst mæskede sig i fødselsdagskage, og det betyder at successen skal gentages. Fødselsdagsgaver er for lang tid siden gået fra at være Lego og våben, til at være sokker og bøger.

Derfor skal der nu nogle gode kogebøger på listen. Jeg er ikke så meget på udkig efter opskriftsbøger, men mere ude i at ville have kogebøger som jeg rent faktisk kan lære noget af. Jeg har allerede følgende på listen, men hvis DU kender en helt vildt god bog jeg bør læse, så sig til.

Sølvskeen

The Food Lab, Kenji Lopez

Chocolate at Home

Paul Bocuse Institut Gastronomique

The Professional Chef

The Flavour Bible

Mastering Cheese

Der er med vilje ingen vinbøger på listen, for det gør jeg mig ikke specielt meget i - endnu.

Read Joel Salatin's Everything I Want to Do is Illegal, and you won't even want to eat "USDA Organic".

I'm a technical PM for two teams, as a well a contributing dev on both teams.

While the skills are definitely different from programming a few things I've found that helps:

• Get to know AGILE really well. Read the manifesto, read about scrum vs kanban . Understand each's strengths and how to do the process correctly for both. I tend to think SCRUM is like fitness, you have to do it right to get the full benefits. If I go the gym and work out then, eat a gallon of ice cream everday, I won't be fit.
  
  
• Understand how to write good user stories, look into different patterns people use . For example the "As a <user> " format is quite popular but really understand how to flush out stories .
  
  
• Avoid strict timelines (I know you mentioned it in the OP) but a PM can't be 100% rigid on timelines and even suggest them . The way that works for our entire company is we base everyone complexity and use the fibonnaci scale to estimate complexity by having multiple people on a team vote. I (as the PM) look at past velocity (how many points we completed) and then project out how long something will take based on the point values estimated by the team. This works FAR better than "oh it will take 2-3 weeks". People are bad at time estimates, complexity estimates are a much better gauge.
  
  
• Practice your networking skills and diplomacy skills. Part of being a good PM is having established relationships with other teams and getting things for your team. A good product owner is a leader, but not a dictator. You don't tell the team what to do, you set the vision, and remove any blockers in their way. As part of this too is being available to answer questions.
  
  A few books you should read:
  
  
• Notes to a Software Team Leaders Even though its focused on being a lead/supervisor, you can get a lot of good insight on how to help guide the vision of a team.
  
• [Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time] (https://www.amazon.com/Scrum-Doing-Twice-Work-Half/dp/038534645X). Really good book on understanding the spirit behind scrum, with real world examples. Not very technical , more about why rather than what scrum is. I've read this several times.
  
• The Phoenix Project. Good book about breaking down barriers between teams and working towards a shared goal. It is devops focused, but I believe product managers would benefit from reading this as it illustrates the importance of shared ownership, automation and avoiding silos.
  
• How to Win Friends and Influence People. Great book on interpersonal relationships and how work with others.
  
• The Clean Coder. A book focused on professionalism for developers (not so much the code, but overall environment/culture). This is a good resource to understand the dev cycle in the real world and what teams should be doing to be professional. This will help you when making decisions on specific things to focus on.
  
  In terms of sprint plannings, just remember it's a negotiation. You're not there to tell people what to do. Rather you have the stuff you would like done, but you negotiate with the team on what's possible and what's not. I've seen too many PM's get pissed cause their teams couldn't do 100% of what they wanted and that's not right. Rather a good PM, imo, brings options and lets the team decide how much they can handle. There have been times when I've gone into sprint plannings and non of items made it on the sprint, and that's ok.
  
  Sorry for the long rant!
  

Change control issues automatically make me think of Phoenix Project.

A great read for anybody in IT.

Queria partilhar depois em tópico próprio para criar alguma discussão. Se calhar o melhor é lançar o desafio de ler, e meter a malta a ler o livro e só depois discutir, né?

É este. Se quiserem alguém quiser ebook envie PM.

EDIT: Tópico próprio

https://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/1591846285

One of the first things he talked about was promoting a shitty book by a guy named Tucker Max who makes up fake stories. And he went out, defaced the billboard for the book, then wrote in an anonymous message with the picture of the defaced billboard. And put up fliers for a protest for the book then sent that in for people.

And he just emailed writers at HuffPo and Breitbart and other such sites, he didn't even post it to Digg (this was before Reddit). Nowadays he could probably just post the stuff on Reddit and people would give it thousands of upvotes without a thought or clue.

Edit: Good fragrance, 60+ upvotes: https://np.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/4v5yke/s_a_u_s_a_g_e/d5vsglq

Bad fragrance, downvoted immediately (-2): https://np.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/4v5yke/s_a_u_s_a_g_e/d5w6999

Someone's monitoring the thread...

Right now I'm reading Trust me, I'm lying. It's pretty much ruined the internet for me, and I couldn't recommend it more if I tried.

The media.

The DNC leaks proved that the Media was acting 100% as a surrogate for Hillary Clinton throughout the primaries and the general election. The problem is, the media lies.

They do not do reporting any more. They do opinion pieces, editorials and propaganda for their special interests. They dabble with identity politics and do hate-baiting outrage click bait pieces for money. They cannot be trusted.

I could write a book about this, but I don't really have to because it's been written already - Trust me, I'm lying

Absolutely should. Many people don't necessarily like seeing how the sausage is made, but Ryan Holiday's book is a great start.

>I feel as though I'm going to be "messing up" alot with clients.

yes. A lot. It's normal

BA in kin would be a waste of time unless you plan on doing physical therapy or want to work in more clinical settings.

I'd suggest reading and messing up with clients; it's the only way you'll learn. Two books that offer fairly different, but great, base beliefs as well as programming are

Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe

New Functional Training for Sports 2nd Edition by Mike Boyle

as well as Start with Why

Book recommendation: https://www.amazon.com/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Technology-Organizations/dp/1942788339

This book is not directly related to agile. But it is rather unique, because it is based on studies and not on authors subjective opinion. It tries to figure out, which mechanics are relevant for modern software development teams.

Most often our rituals are not based on evidence. They are originally based on convenience and afterwards kept up as dogma. Sadly the original introduction was often done by the wrong people.

For example agile was mostly invented by developers, but the widespread adoption of scrum was done by business people (managers as scrum master). As such a dogma was formed that may not be in the best interest of solid software engineering.

You should check out Jason Shreiers "Blood, Sweat, and Pixels." Recommended read for anyone interested in development.

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062651234/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_0m3eAbXMVFBFM

You might also be interested in Jason Schreiers article covering Destiny's messy messy development. http://kotaku.com/the-messy-true-story-behind-the-making-of-destiny-1737556731

And also interesting(maybe?): he's going to publish a book covering all of these stories and more later this year, named blood sweat and pixels. https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Sweat-Pixels-Triumphant-Turbulent/dp/0062651234

>The main problem is that I feel anxious committing to pieces... my style/taste changes sometimes and I end up not loving pieces nice bought even just months ago.

I think this is something that a lot of people feel, which is the exact feeling fast fashion companies are trying to exploit. They thrive on constantly pushing trends out, selling clothes with weird bells and whistles that go out of style quickly rather than quality basics (ever wonder why there are so many cold-shoulder tops and tissue tees with sayings on them??), making consumers go through the churn of buying so quickly that they never get the chance to be thoughtful about what they buy.

In addition to what everyone's suggested (The True Cost & other educational things), I think a suuuper important thing is to get a handle of what your style really is. Please note that you don't have to limit yourself to one siloed style! But it is important to get a sense of overarching themes of stuff you both love and actually wear. Once you have that down, whatever random trend won't look that appealing anymore when it comes around.

There are lots of ways to do this. Personally, I found starting a pinterest board the easiest--it's pretty passive, you just get on every once in a while, pin some stuff and look through their related pins, but I've learned a LOT about what I love through doing this. Another method people here like is the visual wardrobe, or the curated closet/Into Mind.

Also, to add onto the reading material people have suggested, I highly recommend Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Lusture for anyone curious about how fashion has in modern times become the massive, unsustainable and unethical mass it's become.

Here's the thing with the Cubs, there are plenty of reasons for this prolonged title drought.

Chicago was the last team to move over to set up a farm system, ownership never spent a lot of money on payroll until the last decade or so, and they shared a division with one of the most successful teams in baseball; the St. Louis Cardinals.

The Chicago Cubs didn't win a title for over a century because they were doing everything to prevent a championship run for so long. Once they invested in the right people, right players, etc. they won a championship. In fact, stats pointed to the Houston Astros being the most cursed team in Major League Baseball prior to the Cubbies winning it all this year.

Here's a 2011 Chicago Tribune article that goes into greater detail on this. If you want to read further I strongly encourage reading Scorecasting that touches upon this and challenges, investigates other interesting topics in sports.

An interesting book I read tried to figure this out for all major sports. The argument they made was (iirc) the largest impact on home field/ice advantage is how the home team's fans affect the judgement of the referees. And the largest impact is on the calls that are largely subjective (e.g. was that "holding" or not). They also spent considerable time trying to refute other ideas (e.g. travel issues, knowledge of ones own field/rink, fans boosting confidence/energy of players, a few others). Some data the book provides:

• In the NHL, home teams get 20 percent fewer penalties and receive fewer minutes per penalty. "On average, home teams get two and a half more minutes of power play opportunities ... than away teams. That is a huge advantage." If you multiply that by a 20 percent success rate, you get an extra 0.25 goals per game for the home team. Since the average overall differential is only 0.3 goals for the home team, "this alone accounts for more than 80 percent of the home ice advantage in hockey."
  
  
• There is no apparent [home ice advantage] in shootouts, where refereeing makes no difference
  
  I wouldn't go so far as to say the authors figured it all out, but they made some interesting observations.
  
  This website has more info for what the book said about other sports

This is seriously a MUCH bigger and more prevalent concern. Here is a very enlightening book about the issue.

It is amazing how much humans have altered the wild, ancestral versions of plants to reach the staple crop version that we are familiar with. Here is a recently published book that covers the sad history of the banana. It covers not only the biology of this sterile mutant that may go extinct, but also the terrible, sad history of it's cultivation with much blood on the hands of the United States government and commercial parties.

The New Professional Chef

There is a newer version called The Professional Chef that Paul Bocuse calls "The bible for all chefs".

I agree with u/mirepoixmatt, I like the older versions a bit better. You can get an older version of the New Professional Chef for 75 cents

https://www.amazon.com/Professional-Chef-Culinary-Institute-America/dp/0470421355/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1486308362&sr=8-1&keywords=cia+cookbook

It will save you an unreal amount of money. I’ve worked as a chef for going on 15 years now. If you’re interested in learning to cook and have the time you could get yourself a beginner culinary school textbook like On Cooking or The Professional Chef. It’ll teach you a ton and is chock full of beginner recipes with explanations of why everything is done the way it is.

https://www.amazon.com/Cooking-Textbook-Culinary-Fundamentals-5th/dp/013715576X


https://www.amazon.com/Professional-Chef-Culinary-Institute-America/dp/0470421355

Rockstar gets a lot of deserved flack, but according to this book CDPR don't do unpaid overtime like nearly all American studios do.

D1's launch was the result of a combination of multiple factors. Including changing trends in the gaming industry and a rocky development. NOT the source, initial cause or root of the trends you are perceiving.

For more on this:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062651234/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_awdo_jsBOzbXZTSWFV

If you want a good example of Bungie's development problems, read the Destiny portion of Jason Schreier's book, Blood, Sweat, & Pixels.

But yea, they seem to be a poorly managed studio. They take way longer than most studios to patch the game. They take months to do small sandbox updates, while letting some problems just go on forever (OEM, seriously wtf?). They have about 600 employees, according to Luke's interview prior to Shadowkeep. That's 2-3 times more than studios like Santa Monica (God of War) or Naughty Dog (TLOU). Sure, they do a 'live service' game.. but come on.

There's a really interesting book you could read with Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion that goes into this. It's really eye-opening, and gave me a bigger understanding when the media started focusing on factories in India after that horrible collapse. Another one is Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster that ties into the whole modern phenomena of cheap, "affordable" fashion.

I have posted a link here once but don't speak for others in this sub in any way, of course. I am writing off the cuff and won't cite studies, but if anyone needs to corroborate these statements I refer you to Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America by Rober Whitaker for a journalistically sound statement of the argument and some of the relevant studies on the harmful effects of modern psychiatric drugs, as well as a beautiful glimpse at the end of the kind of effective, social treatment that might replace them.

Among other things, I find the zeal with which the psychiatry-marketing complex has defended and continues to tacitly promote the simple neurotransmitter chemical imbalance model of depression and other mental illness fairly disingenuous. This is true especially given its use to justify drugs that are obviously sedatives and tranquilizers, or performance enhancers geared towards reassuring the parents of underachieving students.

The clear and effective purpose of these drugs, in an institutional or community setting, is to make the patient easier to handle, not to cure the disease. By advertising the latter as their intention and promise, drug manufacturers and marketers are opening up a new market of voluntary patients in addition to the existing market seeking sedatives with which to control patients and family members whose symptoms make them hard to handle.

The drugs and their marketers have the effect of converting patients into consumers, not only of drugs for the initial diagnosis or episode but for the drugs used to balance the reaction to those - somehow the option of stopping the first drug in the case of a less than expected response has been virtually replaced by a norm of adding 'complementary' drugs to try and optimize the response.

This flies in the face of common sense trial and error medicine and also creates lifetime multidrug consumers. This pattern is not very flattering for those whose wealth is built on these products.

This process, which thrives on emergency room institutional commitment and justificatory diagnoses, skews the diagnostic methodology as it obscures the quite plausible causal role of the initial drugs in the manifestation of 'symptoms' of a later or conclusive diagnosis. Robert Whitaker conveys the prevalence of this kind of revisionary diagnosis to include symptoms of drug withdrawal or long-term use well in his book and I don't claim to represent it as cogently as is warrented, but I think this aspect reveals some of the nuance in the criticism that distinguishes it from simply believing "that it's all bs".

The suspicion is not that the illness or symptoms do not exist, in the sense that the patient is suffering, but that the worst of them (very frequently not the initiailly displayed symptoms) might be symptoms of poisoning from these other drug treatments or of the combined drug stupor and isolation from community and society. In other words the symptoms might not be the end-all, labeled-and-medicated-for-life huge issue we often treat them as, if the people had adequate social support. We might be creating these lifetime multidrug consumers in direct opposition to their best interests as patients of mental illness.

Unfortunately, these patterns and market forces have inhibited and led to the suppression of those who would carry forth research into the long-term effects of these medications, meaning we cannot yet know how damaging these treatments are in the long term. Abnormal outbursts upon stopping psychiatric medication have been overwhelmingly interpreted as psychotic breaks rather than dangerous somatic reactions to the drug and its withdrawal - again justifying continued medication, often at a higher dose. It appears as though secondary diagnosis has been used to mask what may be long-term damage caused by these drugs, and revelations about the ubiquity and multifunctionality of neurotransmitters in the body make urgent the need to understand the implications of our heavy-handed attempts at 'rebalancing' someone's brain chemistry.

A fictional example: an initial, often childhood diagnosis of AD(H)D for manic symptoms, treated with amphetamines (known to cause distinct crashes), precedes the appearance of depressive periods or lethargic moods, followed sometime later, likely in middle or high school, by a diagnosis of manic-depressive (bipolar) disorder for which antipsychotics or sedatives are added to the mix. Because he began medication as a child, the patient has no regular pattern of talk therapy where he can hash out his moods and feelings with an informed professional, and he is alienated and simultaneously romanticizes his condition and flaunts his medication schedule (or seeks higher dosages and sells a portion of his prescription) as he sees fit, confusing his medical history. Enough hospital-worthy episodes later, with increasing (drug-induced?) delirium, or perhaps when he has an episode that threatens his college graduation or career, and the patient is likely to be deemed schizophrenic and the drug cocktail made stronger and more hallucinatory.

Eventually, when his family supports wither and he is alone, he falls through the cracks and ends up committed. His diagnosis justifies his lifetime institutionalization and continued, expanded medication - now with even less input from the patient and far less credibility given to his personal narrative, which by this point has been strung out on multiple drugs for years. His symptoms, or possibly the consequences of a childhood and adolescence spent on multiple psychotropic drugs, have impeded the development of healthy living habits and social literacy, which further justifies his need for 'assisted living' and forced medication in a locked ward, at the expense of family members or insurers once the patient's own estate has been expended.

This illustration sounds extreme in a few paragraphs but it is not so far from how these things play out all too often in the US right now. And the age of initial diagnosis is creeping younger and younger at an unsettling rate. Part of why I follow this sub is to keep abreast of changes in diagnostic criteria like the introduction of childhood flavors of adult mental illness.

In response to your first question, although I am not any authority in this sub at all, I think it's important to realize the difference between 'anti-psychiatry' and 'anti-psychology' - I, for one, believe that talk therapy, proceeding from potentially multiple psychological traditions, can be very effective treatment and possibly sufficient for most, except for the very real expense involved in providing the time and attention that would be effective and the pursuant difficulty in reaching the most vulnerable populations. Every one of us, and especially those who have been cut off from normative communication with society by mental illness, need the loving attention of the people in their lives in order to flourish and function healthily in the group, and in an ideal world I think we would do well to provide psychologists where family supports are lacking or inadequate.

On the other hand mass psychiatry, the medicalizing of societally unfit personality presentations and subsequent drug treatment, feels like a dangerous road for us to travel, a shortcut to a numb consumer populace and a profit venture masquerading as individualized mental healthcare.

TL;DR: Critical of motivations and methodology as well as the existing diagnostic criteria born of those.

It's pretty well established that home teams and teams that are trailing receive the benefit of the doubt when it comes to foul calls. What I'm saying is it doesn't surprise me that there was a massive disparity based on Nova being the home team and the fact that they were trailing (along with each team's FTR tendencies on off and defense) . That doesn't mean I don't think Nova probably should have been called for some more fouls if the refs were being objective.

If games were always called evenly then HCA would basically not exist However, we know that homecourt advantage does exist based on historical point differentials for home/away teams. The vast majority of HCA can be explained by officials giving more foul calls in favor of the home team according to the book Scorecasting. So stop complaining about a phenomenon that has existed in sports forever.

You should read "Scorecasting." It's a really cool book that is comparable to Freakonomics from a sports standpoint.

Here's a blurb about home field advantage.

Basically, the authors think that Home Field Advantage seems to come from referee bias and not that the crowd makes the players play better. That said, I don't know what happened to the Jets that weekend, but I see it as more of an anomaly and would be comfortable starting Asiata, McKinnon to a lesser degree.

You are correct. Unless its an obvious generational talent (even those don't go in the top 3 - see Randy Moss), the players who end up being the best picks in the draft are usually the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th picks at their position. There is an excellent book called Scorecasting that delves into this subject. http://www.amazon.com/Scorecasting-Hidden-Influences-Behind-Sports/dp/0307591808

Nice, thanks for doing the math.

I've seen at least one study (I think in Scorecasting) that showed that there wasn't any identifiable performance hit to individual players' FT% on the road, at least in the NBA.

There is a difference in what fouls are called, though. So I'm wondering now if that ties in with /u/JonShoes' point that who got fouled matters -- maybe the borderline calls that Virginia would be expected to get away with more frequently at home are more likely to come against guards, and the clear-cut fouls are against bigs.

I love your last point BopCatan! It's awesome to see the confused looks and stutters from the ignorant people when they see a strong fit person tell them they're vegan.

As for my motivations I'd say I'm a bit of a mix of both. I was inspired to look into it because someone I have a lot of respect for decided to become vegan. In short, what I found was that a lot of the animal products we ingest are far from the simple collection of healthy nutrients and proteins that they were sold to me as. I had already mostly phased out red meat based on previous health risks I had researched, but my initial response was to switch to eating only locally produced meat where I could be confident in knowing where and how it was produced. Over time I kind of just stopped eating that all together too as I noticed how much better my body was feeling after vegan meals. I used to get stomach aches quite regularly or feel tired and sluggish after eating and those problems vanished almost instantly. Plus my girlfriend was a vegan before me anyways so I was learning to cook some awesome vegan meals to impress her anyways!

My ethical motivations sort of developed alongside my already growing veganism. A big part for me came from focusing on the damage mass production of animal products does to our planet. There's so many aspects to this and I don't want to write a short story on here but I'd say my introduction to these thoughts began with factory farming. I had a discussion with someone where they explained how these methods are often so stressful to the animals being slaughtered for consumption that huge amounts of meat and milk was being spoiled by the animal’s own stress hormones and that products that were still being pumped out of these factories were causing disease and poor health significantly more then ever before. This was a big deal to me, but the kicker was later reading an article about how researchers for some company were attempting to genetically modify the cows so they wouldn't have a stress hormone to release in the first place. This just seemed like such a ludicrous response to me. Rather then recognizing that hey, maybe what we're doing is pretty bad after all, we decide to mess with the genetic composition of our food even more? Really? And that says nothing for the ethics of putting animals in a situation where they feel so much terror that they are destroying their own bodies from the inside out.
(I can't remember the exact articles I read but just did a 5 second Google and here is one that talks about the stress response of animals).

There are many more environmental factors to my ethical “motivations”. Another big one for me is the massive amounts of C02 created from all the production and shipping we do. But ya, there are people way better qualified then me to talk about this stuff.

If you’re looking for a good articulation of ideas and facts I’m currently reading a really cool book called Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer (the guy who wrote Everything is Illuminated) discussing his research into food production preceding the birth of his first child. I dunno if it’s the best book ever, and I haven’t even finished it, but I figure maybe it’s something people haven’t heard of rather then suggesting people go read Michael Polan or watch Earthlings etc. (not saying those aren’t worthwhile!).

Here are a few books that I really enjoyed. The first couple are stats-oriented, while the third is more narrative-driven.

Moneyball by Michael Lewis

The Only Rule Is It Has to Work by Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller

Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life in the Minor Leagues of Baseball by John Feinstein

1.)We have the History. We have 9 World Series titles, which is a lot, (3rd all time) but not to a point where we are spoiled.

2.)We are one of the two teams in the AL that hasn't changed our names.

3.)We are on the West Coast, and for 10 years had a minor league team in Vancouver

4.)We are invented, and are Moneyball

5.)Nerdpower

6.)We have a great young bunch of players coming up that thanks to brilliant people, will continue for years to come.

7.)You can't beat us, everyone loves the underdog, and our uniforms are some of the best.

8.) We won 3 straight WS in the 1970's with one of the craziest teams of all time. The only other team to win 3 straight WS titles? The Yankees. Trust me, you don't want to root for the Yankees.

I hope now you have enough info to make a decision!

Edit-Spacing

For reference, go to Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything, or this book. For flavours, I'll usually go with the Flavour Bible or the Flavour Thesaurus.

An excellent book for you at this point would be Jacques Pépin's Complete Techniques. From the description:

"Jacques Pepin's Complete Techniques features everything the home cook needs to perfect: poach an egg, whisk a perfect hollandaise, knead a crispy baguette, or bake an exquisite meringue with the perfection and efficiency of a professional chef. Featured throughout the book, Pepin's classic recipes offer budding masters the opportunity to put lessons into practice with extraordinary results."

It also covers things like knife technique and other fundamentals, which you mentioned.

As far as French cooking goes, although they've been around awhile, two books that are still definitive on the subject are Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, Volume One and Volume Two. All three of these books (Pepin plus these two) are foundational to learning about cooking. There are others, but these will give you a very good start, and will increase your cooking skills and knowledge exponentially.

If those aren't enough, you can also check out The Professional Chef, which is a fantastic book of recipes and techniques put out by the Culinary Institute of America. It's a bit spendy, but worth it if you want to learn. The Amazon links are provided for reference; if money is an issue you can quite easily find all these books used.

Well, on the extreme side, "The Professional Chef" textbook I believe is the one used by the culinary institute of America. I picked one up off Amazon for $36 just for the hell of it. It's really interesting and reads more like an academic text than a cook book. It can be quite intense though.

A much more popular choice and a much easier read would be "The Food Lab" by Kenji Lopez-Alt who is a writer for serious eats. The book has plenty of recipes but does an unbelievably amazing job explaining the science and reasoning behind the choices that are made as well as various "experiments" that kenji does to answer cooking questions. It definitely teaches technique and really helps put you in the right "mindset" for cooking without a recipe.

Here are links to both.

https://www.amazon.com/Professional-Chef-Culinary-Institute-America/dp/0470421355

https://www.amazon.com/Food-Lab-Cooking-Through-Science/dp/0393081087

I wanted to cook but was unable to take time off to attend a school. I'd been enraged with a crap meal in an expensive countryside resto at a dinner for someone, so the next day I went up the High Street and found THIS.

I wasn't smart on cooking but I realized as I think you do that learning technique rather than reciting recipes is the way to a happier kitchen future.

After that, I eventually got an edition of THIS. It helped expand on, but not replace, the lessons from Cordon Bleu.

I went through those before this day of Internet videos and information sharing occurred; you are a beneficiary of more modern times being able to search for a solution to your problems.

I wanted to ask a question about your relationship, but hesitate. I mean, (blushing) how much stock do you put into your ability to please your husband with cooking? I only offer that as a point of consideration as a long-time married man. Restaurant-quality food at home won't make or break a marriage (although horrendous food at home can contribute to a break-up); other aspects of a marriage more than compensate for the quality of home-cooked food. Take it from a long-time married person. An offer of a PM stands, and best wishes in your journey to moving your already-good home cooking to a higher standard.

Würde "The Professional Chef" empfehlen.

Steht unheimlich viel Hintergrundwissen drin. Und auch echte gute Grundrezepte (Fonds, Saucengrundlagen etc.).

Rezepte sind auch drin, die sind, und das ist der einzige Haken, etwas schwer zu lesen, weil sie aufeinander aufbauend geschrieben sind.

Jetzt als aus dem Kopf konstruiertes Beispiel:

Braten mit Sauce: Rezept für braune Sauce benutzen.

Rezept für braune Sauce:

• Rezept für Mirepoix benutzen
  
• Rezept für Rinderfond benutzen
  
• Das ganze Mischen.
  
  Aber insgesamt wahnsinnig viel Hintergrundinfos und Kochen wirklich von grundauf und auf anspruchsvollem Niveau.
  
  Wer wirklich Lust hat in der Küche auch anspruchsvoll zu kochen, dem kann ich das Buch voll empfehlen.
  
  Ansonsten noch "Aroma - Die Kunst des Würzens". Ist von Stiftung Warentest und geht in Teilen fast in Richtung Lebensmittelchemie (aber wirklich nur grundlegend).
  Das Buch erklärt, wie Aromen entstehen, auf welcher chemischen Basis, und wie sich Geschmack zusammensetzt bzw. wie unser Körper überhaupt Geschmack wahrnimmt.
  
  Dann gibt es ein großes Kompendium aller möglichen Aromen, chemisch analysiert, so dass man dann genau weiß, welche Aromen man miteinander kombinieren kann. Gibt nochmal ein sehr gutes Hintergrundwissen, wie Geschmack funktioniert.
  
  Außerdem lernt man wirklich interessante und neue Aromakombinationen.
  
  ~edit~ Deutsche Version von TPC kostet 200 irgendwas Euro. Ich weiß nicht mehr wo ich es gekauft habe (ggf. Amazon.com bestellt und mir schicken lassen), aber das ist natürlich zu viel. 50 Euro wird man aber schon dafür ausgeben können.

Buy this book! This is the exact book they use in schools. Very in depth and super easy to understand. http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Chef-Culinary-Institute-America/dp/0470421355

Just a some that likes cooking alot here. Maybe pick one of these bad boys up and start playing.

http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Chef-Culinary-Institute-America/dp/0470421355

http://www.amazon.com/Ad-Hoc-Home-Thomas-Keller/dp/1579653774/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373677797&sr=1-1&keywords=thomas+keller+cookbooks

http://www.amazon.com/Bouchon-Bakery-Thomas-Keller/dp/1579654355/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373677797&sr=1-2&keywords=thomas+keller+cookbooks

http://www.amazon.com/French-Laundry-Cookbook-Thomas-Keller/dp/1579651267/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373677797&sr=1-3&keywords=thomas+keller+cookbooks

http://www.amazon.com/Bouchon-Thomas-Keller/dp/1579652395/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373677797&sr=1-4&keywords=thomas+keller+cookbooks

http://www.amazon.com/Under-Pressure-Cooking-Sous-Vide/dp/1579653510/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373677797&sr=1-6&keywords=thomas+keller+cookbooks

http://www.amazon.com/Momofuku-David-Chang/dp/030745195X/ref=sr_1_9?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373677797&sr=1-9&keywords=thomas+keller+cookbooks

http://www.amazon.com/Ratio-Simple-Behind-Everyday-Cooking/dp/1416571728/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1373678139&sr=8-1&keywords=ratio

Cant beat The Culinary Institute of America The Professional Chef unabridged. The CIA does it right.

The Professional Chef. I think we were using the 6th edition while I was there, but they're up to 8th edition now.

I'd recommend learning how to cook, rather than learning how to make specific things.

Try The Professional Chef, which, misleadingly, is not just for professionals.

https://www.amazon.com/Professional-Chef-Culinary-Institute-America/dp/0470421355/

Failing that, find a good Youtube channel which covers the basics, rather than just specific meals.

I should note, recipes and actual meals do become good resources, once you can interpret why they work, etc.

9th Edition Is newer, cheaper, and prime eligible.

Here you go mate, there seems to be a newer edition

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0470421355/ref=redir_mdp_mobile/184-9271667-0334449

Sorry of this shows up weird, I'm on mobile

Anyone who liked this interview should read Joel Salatin's book: "Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories From the Local Food Front"

I highly recommend this book. It will make you want to tear your hair out with concrete examples one after another of the evil banality of the food police.

i would prefer more consumer choice. while food regulations may have started with safety and the public good in mind, now they are used as a way to keep competitors out of the market
for example its easy for Tyson and Perdue to comply with regulations that cost millions, but if someone wanted to get into the meat market those regulations which aren't really scalable to small setups would bar market entry and often they are written by the established companies to do just that.

I think we need to have informed consumers making intelligent decisions and where and who they buy from. If i trust the local farm and want to buy unpasteurized milk from him because i value its health benefits then the FDA shouldn't have the ability to send in a SWAT team to shut him down

Its sad that feedlot meat, Twinkies and Mt Dew are "Safe" and approved but the food from our gardens represents "Public Health Threat" if we were to sell it.

for more on the ugly side of US Food Regulations i refer you to Joel Salatin https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Want-Do-Illegal-Stories/dp/0963810952

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=war7BsnrPLY

They want to quash small, local agriculture. Read "everything I want to do is illegal" by Joel Salatin for a whole lot more of what you just described.

Oil 101 has good reviews.

Oil 101 by Morgan Downey is a good overview of all parts of the industry. I recommend reading that before getting in depth with other resources recommended here.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0982039204/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_2jZWDbFH6N89N

Oil 101 for any of you autists who want to learn more about pricing. the global supply and how it all works.

Both you and your boss should read this "fictional book" so that you are both on the same page.

The Phoenix project is the best description of the problem that devops is trying to solve IMHO.

https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262509/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1484364343&sr=8-1&keywords=phoenix+project

I would need more information from you before I could make some solid recommendations.

by 'adopt agile methodologies' do you mean your company just said 'we want to be agile now. go make it happen.' or have you already made the commitment to hire an agile coach? how big is your dev organization? are we looking at 2 or 3 teams of ~10 people each? or are we looking more at 15 teams with 10 each?


You personally should also try to understand what Agile is and what it isn't. after that, you should try to understand what scrum is and what it isn't. with this information you'll be able to figure out what you need to brush up on and dig into.

---------------

Some general things to know:

the scrum training/certification shows bare minimum exposure to knowledge to begin practicing. IE: you should never assume that anyone that has gone through training knows how to implement Scrum in an organization. This includes yourself. At best, the cert means you have enough knowledge to talk about Scrum, and could practice scrum in an environment where it is already in place. it is not a good measure of your ability to aid a company in an agile transformation.

Aglie/Scrum is not a magic bullet. it takes a lot of hardwork and effort to make it work. It's better than what you're doing. but one of the key things Agile/Scrum does is bring the problems you have to the surface so you can fix them. IE: if it doesn't hurt, you're probably not doing it right. be prepared. you've been doing a lot of work that enables bad process. you're going to see all of it in painful, excruciating detail. Focus on fixing the process and making it the way it should be, even if that means slowing WAY down on getting product out the door. depending on the size of your organization, it may be a full year before you really start to see major benefit. it might take you 6 months to fix all of your broken processes and break even with where you are now. Keep in mind, that fixing some of the broken might include an increase in scope to some people's jobs. Don't take shortcuts. you're not doing yourselves any favors by trying to cut corners and implement faster. the transformation will put strain on the weakest parts of your process. it's supposed to.

No series of courses is going to prepare you to spearhead a transformation. You will need expert help, it's not something you can easily stumble through. it becomes more difficult the bigger your organization is. and keep in mind, that the transformation isn't segregated to development only. it will have repercussions in marketing, sales, etc. There is a reason a company is expected to hire a dedicated person as a scrum master (as opposed to having a dev manager that acts as scrum master).

read these two books:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262509/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1465834584&sr=8-1&keywords=phoenix+project

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lean-Trenches-Managing-Large-Scale-Projects/dp/1934356859/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1465834595&sr=8-1&keywords=lean+from+the+trenches

If you're going to be the main driver of transformation, you're better off reading those two books than undergoing scrum training. they will give you a more complete understanding of what you're trying to do.

Don't know what specific field you are in, but if you have an IT focus at all I STRONGLY recommend the Phoenix Project by Gene Kim and Kevin Behr. It's a non fiction approach to IT management wrapped in a fictional story. Anyone who has worked in any sort of IT related field will relate strongly to the first half of the book.

This is a great (and short) introduction to what the DevOps mentality is. You and your boss should read it before you start hiring "DevOps Engineers".

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0988262509?keywords=devops%20books&qid=1457046991&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1

It's not a "thing" but a philosophy on making sure Developers and Operations (SysAdmins) work together within your organization.

The Phoenix Project and The DevOps Handbook by Gene Kim would be the ones I know of.

https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592

https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002

Not itcher, but also recommend it. https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592

The Phoenix Project sets its main villain as the manager of the security department who can't see the forest for the trees.

Spoiler alert: He shaves his head, achieves enlightenment and all is saved.

I highly recommend starting with The Phoenix Project. Don't pass by this book just because it says "DevOps" in the title. It quite specifically addresses the ideas of change management, why they are important for IT, and more importantly why they are important for the business.

Then once you're sure you're ready for Change Management, The Visible Ops Handbook is a more prescriptive book that will help you on the beginning stages of implementing Change Management.

Read this book

>Fast forward 4 months to the present, and I have had barely any time to work on any aspect of this certification during normal working hours (I mean within the 40 hours per week that is the traditional work limit for employees). I have had a little time to work on the certification in the office, but at least half of my work for this has occurred outside of the 40 hours.

Sounds like your problem isn't ISO certification, but an issue with workload management.

>Since this is a sysadmin job, I have also had to work outside of the 40 hours on other critical tasks (fixing crashed servers, patching servers, installing network devices, etc).

Sounds like your problem is really this. Do you have any sort of patch management systems in place? Do you have automation setup with stuff like puppet, chef, or salt, etc?
Do you have staff in your team that are wasting time, or could take work off you?
Are you just applying bandaid solutions where you really need to fix the underlying issue with faults, etc? What about preventative maintenance, etc.

If you haven't, I suggest reading The Phoenix Project; it is a fantastic read on how a fictional troubled IT department is required to meet a hard deadline, and the process they went through.

Available as an eBook or printed copy here: https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592

I am, of course, saying this without knowing what your work environment is like, or what staffing levels are like, etc, but without doubt, the very first thing I think of when I see people talk about, or tell me that they've got issues keeping up with their workload, is that it's usually because they haven't taken a good look at what they really, genuinely need to do to get business outcomes.

Put another way, do you really need to put a TPS coversheet on every report?

Na verdade, cria-se muito mito em cima de nomenclaturas. O SRE veio da engenharia de software como bem aborda aquele famoso livro do Gene Kin o The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps... . O SRE hoje pela definição de onde se originou (o Google), e atuando dentro do Google propriamente, é o que seria em tese o nome que se dá erroneamente ao (Engenheiro DevOps)...que sabemos ser um nome de mercado...uma vez que na teoria não faz sentido algum.

​

O SRE é o cara que compreende a arquitetura dos projetos, de lógica de programação (podendo atuar nas mais diversas linguagens), apesar de ter maioria em python e GO, mas que resolve todo tipo de problema relacionado principalmente a operações. É uma tentativa de mercado de resgatar o MacGyver , que consegue juntar um chiclete e um clips e produzir uma bomba, mas com a intenção de contratar um Chuck Norris . No fim das contas, na prática, é o profissional pau para toda obra. O foda é quando pagam mal por isto.

​

Outra coisa também que atrapalha é o EGO e VAIDADE das pessoas em se entitularem tais coisas. Mal sabem da cilada que podem estar se envolvendo. A cilada de enganar o empregador que tem espectativa maior do que aquela que você anuncia, ou a cilada de cair uma porção grande de problemas no seu colo que muitas vezes não há maturidade e experiência para resolve-los. Essas coisas eu vejo com certa frequencia e claro, sempre me disponho a ajudar. Mas é bom dar este toque.

​

​

Sr. Director checking in - required reading IMHO:

Turn the ship around

and

Phoenix Project

You guys need to change how Dev works with you, I'll elaborate once I'm at a computer.

Edit:And I'm back

Where are these apps coming from? What's the driving need for them? Do they serve a business purpose? If so, do they drive revenue or productivity? You guys need to have a chat with the development managers or Director to figure out what their roadmap is for all these apps. They have an idea of their purpose but they're not involving Ops which is a major deficiency when we're looking at adopting a DevOps culture.

When looking at Ops being the constraint, what particular aspect is the constraint? A specific person or process? Isolate the constraint then protect it, if it's a person you're pulling off projects you need to figure out why they're getting pulled off them and remedy that.

As for a technology to look at for a solution, start using Docker. Create standard Docker templates and provide Dev with those as their platform, if they're creating apps for production then you need to provide the standards they deploy to/develop for.

Now go read The Phoenix Project, I'm deadly serious about reading that book as you have a major communication breakdown that is resulting in an insane amount of projects being thrown your way.

/u/HostisHumaniGeneris has a pretty exceptional definition.

The only thing I'd add is my own personal experience. DevOps is a philosophy -- not a team name or a position. For example, a developer can be a "DevOps developer" or a company can be a "DevOps company" as if it's a quality of their performance, but not a purpose. Your actual role shouldn't really include the word "DevOps" because at the end of the day you're still doing IT, or Operations, or Systems, or Development.

The reason being is that for DevOps philosophy to be implemented, all levels of the team need to be on board with the philosophy.

Read "the Phoenix Project" -- for example -- to get some ideas about what DevOps is really about.

I'm a software engineer and not in DevOps. However, one of the managers at the company where I work encourages all the developers to read The Phoenix Project, and if/when they finish that she gives them a copy of The DevOps Handbook.

I'm about halfway through the former and haven't started the latter. The Phoenix Project is a novel, but it's kind of like one of those novels with a message, in this case the message is how to be part of a successful IT department at a modern company.

One idea is reading more about soft-skills and process stuff, rather than nitty-gritty tech stuff. Books on Agile for example are great. I also listen to a lot of podcasts in that kinda scenario.

Some books that might be good for you:
- https://www.amazon.com/Clean-Agile-Basics-Robert-Martin/dp/0135781868
- https://pragprog.com/book/tpp20/the-pragmatic-programmer-20th-anniversary-edition
- https://www.amazon.com/Soft-Skills-software-developers-manual/dp/1617292397
- https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592

Read this, https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592

https://www.amazon.com/Prize-Epic-Quest-Money-Power/dp/1439110123

; Or, what happens to oil-dependent communities and countries since 1880

Here, read this to answer your questions related to oil trap
http://www.amazon.com/The-Prize-Quest-Money-Power/dp/1439110123

Nice! I have added both to my reading list! The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power sounds really interesting, I have been looking for an older book on the Oil Industry... those greedy bastards always make for a good read! I have found it hard to find books on Oil (or many renewables for that matter) that don't have a little slant.

[Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity's Unappeasable Appetite For Energy ] (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393931536/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_R02xCbQ1V4B98) looks like a really good in-depth read as well. I think the title of the book sums up an uncomfortable truth about humans in general. I also find that books that take a more general overview of energy have less of that "rah rah" in one direction or the other.

I linked them so others could find them easily!

Archives for the links in comments:

• By finalremix (loc.gov): http://archive.fo/E1qFX
  
• By The-Rotting-Word (amazon.com): http://archive.fo/UkEbV
  
• By hga_another (amazon.com): http://archive.fo/nFfxI
  
  
• By hga_another (amazon.com): http://archive.fo/71ta6
  
  ----
  I am Mnemosyne 2.1, Watch out for moon rocks! ^^^^/r/botsrights ^^^^Contribute ^^^^message ^^^^me ^^^^suggestions ^^^^at ^^^^any ^^^^time ^^^^Opt ^^^^out ^^^^of ^^^^tracking ^^^^by ^^^^messaging ^^^^me ^^^^"Opt ^^^^Out" ^^^^at ^^^^any ^^^^time

Your example with Chernobyl is absurd. It would require that every single news organization follow the same policy, and "sell the news" to you via subscription. That could never happen in the free market. In the free market, some news sites run ads to gain revenue, some will sell subscriptions, some will push agendas for money and so on and so forth.

I still don't see why charging for a monthly subscription is such a "disgusting" business practice. Your argument with Chernobyl was a simple reduction to absurdity. If a site puts out quality content that people deem worthy to pay for, let them. I think that relying on clickbaiting, manipulation and sensationalism is much more disgusting and harmful. That's the real problem with news today, not those few subscription-based sites, who are at least honest with their business practice.

You also pay for your newspaper. In this sense, "selling news," as you put it, is very much standard practice, and it always has been throughout history. You also take issue with that?

By the way, Trust me, I'm lying is an insightful and thought-provoking book on the subject, even more topical today than when it was originally released, I highly recommend it.

It's called Trust Me, I'm Lying. I'm actually reading it for a class I'm taking on Communication Ethics. I'm not super well-versed on the subject so I don't have any other recs for you. This book was a quick read and the info was presented in an interesting way.

It's straight up media manipulation.

WaPo making money off legitimizing Breitbart is wrong.

You are right to criticize this.

Try

You Are Not So Smart:
http://www.amazon.com/You-Are-Not-So-Smart/dp/1592407366

Trust Me, I'm Lying: {the second part of the book}
http://www.amazon.com/Trust-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator-ebook/dp/B0074VTHH0/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1374416648&sr=1-1&keywords=Trust+Me%2C+I%27m+Lying%3A+Confessions+of+a+Media+Manipulator

And this are not books but they will open your eyes {I strongly suggest you dont watch this if you can't stand blood or violence }

Interview with a Cannibal
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BosZxa1bYcE

Karachi
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgIl1vmIchA

Slaves of Dubai
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMh-vlQwrmU

Yeah and I mean no offense, but this seems a bit much:

> He sucks, as does the writing for this season. This is the opinion I hear almost universally in face to face conversation. The only place I see good things said about him is online. That leads me to believe that there is a major covert marketing push being made.

>I no longer trust what I see here as being representative of the community.

I just finished reading Trust Me, I'm Lying, which has plenty of good examples of how easily the author (and others) have leaked bullshit into the news. This very much applies to serious stuff as well.

Highly recommend the book!

You should read Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator which explains the complete absence of fact-checking in online media - and increasingly on the mainstream media which uses it as a source. These days, if its not The Guardian or BBC News, I assume its anywhere from 50% - 100% fake/lies/spin/manipulated/Alt-News

The way PR and marketing works with these bottom-feeding websites which churn out garbage-tier "content" to feed the click-farms, is that they MUST keep it churning. Churning, churning, controversy, clicks, anger. etc.

This is just a taste. Clickety-click.

I have definitely done this with great results. Just make sure you target the right blogs, be VERY personable and SHORT in your email... have one or two lines that makes you better/interesting to try and hook them. These two lines or so should be the only copy/paste you do on every email.

• If they sense any copy/paste format, you will be in their trash.
  
• Be very short, if you can't hook them on your greatest feature/differentiator, a full paragraph/story won't do it or be read.
  
  Seriously consider reading [this book: Trust me, I'm lying to you] (http://www.amazon.com/dp/1591846285).
  
  It will teach you how blog posts go "up the chain" of media broadcasting, what it takes to set that off, how to find which blogs the high traffic sites pull articles from, and overall is an interesting read for marketing. You may be able to find the info for free, he is a blogger/writer... so trying Googling: Ryan Holiday up the chain
  
  Again... seriously get this info. I read it in a few hours or day or so.

Are your customers loyal clients or just one time clients.

Go read / listen to this book. Talks a bit about it.

https://www.amazon.com/Start-Why-Leaders-Inspire-Everyone/dp/1591846447

Only one title of overlap, nice.
Out of your list, where would you start? Have you read any other in our original list?



Built to Sell, John Warrillow

The Automatic Customer, John Warrillow

How to Sell at Margins Higher Than Your Competitors, Lawrence Steinmetz

Start With Why, Simon Sinek

Leaders Eat Last, Simon Sinek

The E-Myth Revisited, Michael Gerber

Selling the Invisible, Harry Beckwith

What Clients Love, Harry Beckwith

Question Based Selling, Tom Freese

I posted this in another thread so sorry its just a copy paste, but very relevant---


I dont recommend bartending school. i haven't been personally, but you dont need to pay for the education if you work at the right bar. I learned everything while getting paid.

Death and Co makes amazing books to teach and inspire how to make great unique cocktails. The modern classics covers the fundamentals of bar tools and all the philosophy, plus theres a bunch of neat recipes. They also have a codex thats super interesting in that they simplify and break down the origins of most cocktails. Everything is a riff on a classic, in one way or another.

Another one I like is from Smugglers Cove in San Fransisco (i think?) This book touches more into tiki and tropical cocktails, but its a lot of fun and there are plenty of great cocktails without super esoteric ingredients.

On the opposite end of the relax tiki book is this book from Grant Achatz, 3 Michelin starred chef of Alinea in Chicago (hence the pricy book). He also owns bars in Chicago and New York, and have some of the most exceptional drinks I've ever had. He's big on molecular gastronomy, wether its juice filled caviar balls, dry ice used to chill your drink tableside (with lots of smoke) or this tableside infusion. A lot of it is super over the top and not necessary, but for presentations sake its incredible. really innovative and inspiring

Sorry for the lengthy post, but I suggest that if you want to get into cocktails and mixology, find a nice restaurant with a cocktail program. If you're near a big city, try bar backing at a nice cocktail spot or restaurant, it'll help you kind of see things from the outside for a bit and will make it all less daunting.

cheers

I would recommend getting a copy of the Sippin’ Safari 10th Anniversary and a copy of Smuggler’s Cove.

That should cover most of what you’re looking for.

Not sure if you can get Cachaca there, but the capirinha is a very 'beginner friendly' cocktail that's clearly international.

Seconding maximswim's recommendation on tiki cocktails, they're basically all strong and generally on the sweet side, plus they can have cool garnishes/mugs. If you're willing to do complicated drinks, Smuggler's Cove is a great resource.

I just ordered it. Here's the amazon link if anyone is interested: http://www.amazon.com/False-Start-Browns-Were-Fail/dp/1886228884 Used copies are available for $4 with shipping.

The NFL made the agreement with the Browns because the city of Cleveland had a lease for the Browns to play in memorial stadium for a few more years. The NFL didn't want to go through the headache of of a team playing in an empty stadium without advertisers and an absolutely hostile market so they gave in and agreed to give Cleveland a new team (either expansion or relocation) upon building of a new stadium.

The NFL then fucked over the expansion Browns as punishment and yeah. There is a book about the process, I've never read, but it's quite detailed called False Start.

https://www.amazon.com/False-Start-Browns-Were-Fail/dp/1886228884

And for some added lemon juice on that paper cut, a local beat reporter wrote a great short book: False Start that shows the utter buttfuckery that was our return.

Edit: had to go the long way round to get a link instead of a screen shot: Here you go

How many of the orgs you're thinking about have Cleveland's history? After the team was stolen by Art (may he rot in Hell) Modell, the sorry excuse for a team that was dropped on us was set up in the very worst ways imaginable: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1886228884 (False Start: How the New Browns Were Set Up to Fail by Terry Pluto -- I highly recommend it).

We're talking about gross mismanagement of this team since the freaking return. How do you turn things around after more than a decade and a half of stupid? This is probably the first time in the history of the NFL that an organization with zero roots, whose set-up was a cautionary tale (and certain aspects of which I believe were deliberately not repeated for the team that followed), that was managed into the dirt for 16 years by some of the biggest headcases in sports, actually gets turned around (if it ever happens).

[Edited for the expansion team reference.]

• Analyzed syslog streams from the SonicWall, planning out further automated reporting.
  
• Patched all servers and workstations to address Patch Tuesday vulnerabilities. Except for the one server we don't ever talk about.
  
• Increased reliability, RPO, and RTO on the Veeam offsite backups, while probably also driving down costs.
  
• Debugged an issue where a wireless Logitech mouse was intermittently controlling two computers randomly, because a staff member was moved to someone who somehow had a wireless Logitech keyboard and a wireless Microsoft mouse and was previously paired to that exact mouse from years earlier.
  
• Began reading The Cuckoo's Egg and The Devops Handbook. For the former, the book was made before I was born, but I find it scary that I still understand everything they're talking about and get nostalgic. On the topic of the latter, I've been really thinking about the whole idea of the System of Record vs. System of Engagement, as that was a bit eye-opening in terms of why doing certain things the proper way is not very enjoyable or streamlined.

https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002

Tell your manager to read this fucking book: https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002

> Should we start learning how to build for Android, iOS, or some cross-platform tool? What are trade offs for each?

For instance https://ionicframework.com/

But honestly, as long as you don't need to develop native, as /u/Xen0_n mentioned, I'd go with a progressive web app. You write it once and it runs in all modern browsers. You also have access to e.g. GPS, can send push notifications, etc. But make sure, a PWA provides all the technical features you need! (Proof of Concept! -> I need to decide on the tech stack by the end of this month)

It's also important to consider your team's abilities. If everyone is a python developer, don't use c#. If everyone knows angular, React is probably the wrong decision. If there's not enough knowledge and experience present in the team - the people of a team can usually give quite good feedback about technologies (complexity, learning curve, if it's fun to work with it)

​

>What are common components of an app's architecture that we will likely have to think about? I know we'll need a front end and a back end with a database, but I'm guessing we'll need to consider things like communications with the server storing the database? -How do apps link these components together/let them talk to each other?

Usually Multitier architecture. E.g. the front end communicates with a REST-api, rest API with a business layer, business layer with a persistency layer. What you use (programming language and back end) will determine how the communication will work. With Java and a relational database it will be most likely be JDBC with the given driver of the DBMS.

But also think about the cloud - this has some impact on the software architecture (aka could readiness).

​

>What are common mistakes when making early design decisions that cost you down the line in efficiency and maintainability?

From my experience:

• In general violating basic object oriented design principles (SOLID, cohesion, coupling,...), e.g. passing around Objects from the OR-Mapper directly to the client, instead of designing API's. Or bi directional dependencies of packages.
  
• not applying good software development and delivery practices (software delivery pipeline, high test coverage, high quality tests, code reviews, release and deploy regularly, decoupled architecture..). You should never be afraid to change your software.
  
  ​
  
  > What should our development process look like? Simultaneous front end and back end development? Back end before front end?
  
  Don't split the team into front end and back end if you can avoid it. Only if the team is getting too large to be effective, a split should be considered - having two teams will usually end up in finger pointing. Better is to code by feature. And split up a feature into smaller tasks (work in small batches), think about MVP: A small batch which already generates value to the customer and also generates feedback. It doesn't need to be feedback from production, but can be from a customer.
  
  How you write and deliver software - from requirements engineering, UX testing, actual coding and whatnot to deployment into production - is a really large subject. And there's no 'one size fits all'-approach - every environment is different. I'm a disciple of agile software development: The Manifesto for Agile Software Development and Continuous Delivery (and: Accelerate).
  
  Important is, that you guys always improve the process (as in continuous improvement). Not only within the team, but also and especially with the customer.
  
  ​
  
  Another thing: Don't forget security. The outcome of a security audit can be painfully expensive.

Oh wow, great question! I've pondered this quite a bit and am currently reading up on two resources to deepen my understanding:

Stripe's Developer Coefficient report: https://stripe.com/files/reports/the-developer-coefficient.pdf

Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: https://www.amazon.com/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Technology-Organizations/dp/1942788339

It's kind of a wordy title for that book, but it's interesting to see what the authors deem to be the really key things for safely accelerating development velocity. We've addressed a lot of the things in the book via intuition over the years but I really would love for us to start being more methodical and process oriented in trying to improve things. I'd be interested to hear what you think!

I'd love to have some metric that represented how "sure" developers feel when they are developing new services/features and estimating timelines as well as how "sure" they are about deploying changes without having unplanned reverts and things of that nature.

That sounds tricky. I think you're starting with the right place: visualizing workflow;

A suggestion is that you focus on building trust by addressing pain points. What pains does the team have with the current process and can you concretely improve those in the short run (as opposed to abstractly saying "if we adopt this whole enchilada that will get better, trust me").

Another thing to focus on is measuring some of the health indicators in Accelerate. Honestly, you might be doing awesome already and the problem to be solved is recognizing and celebrating it. Good luck!

Hey, welcome to the subreddit.

I don't post here much these days because although I'm fairly outraged at the things I see here, I don't have a ton of energy for activism since building positive things in my own life consumes much of my energy. I can tell you that I'm engaged, in a relationship with inverted gender roles, and that my fiancée and I are helped vastly more by what we've learned here (and what we learned in our neuroscience and other courses) than what I learned in my WS studies. I consider myself an egalitarian, and I consider the current egalitarian move to be a backing of the Men's Rights Movement.

In the spirit of giving you a higher order of discourse than you find in SJW circles, as has been my experience here, I can highly recommend a book on this topic that I think you'll find enlightening. Trust Me, I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday. For example, he was the former press guy for American Apparel and planted many, many of the stories you now associate with Dov Charney. The SJW machine came up with more, and now the man's out of a job. Is he probably a sleazeball? Sure. Would I want him to date my daughter? Definitely not. Does he belong on a sex offender registry for the rest of his life? I seriously doubt it.

The book contains more than just his personal stories, as Holiday has done his homework on journalistic history and business and so on. But from what I can tell from his book and my observations elsewhere, the answer to your question appears to be a solid yes.

I heartily recommend you stick around here. There's a lot of anger and pain, sure, but you will learn a fuck ton of useful shit.

Phil, have you read Trust Me I'm Lying? The book is hyper aware of what is wrong with the current state of the news-media-blog system. It might even be funny to see you use the tactics outlined in the book to exploit the system and reveal it's inner machinations.

Someone that starts a business. Thats it. Everything else is someone selling you bullshit.

oh

Look

At

all

These

people

Making

Money

Telling you how to be an entrepreneur

Oh that last one shows you how and why bullshit sells.

These books came quickly to my mind:

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz

Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator by Ryan Holiday Some priceless marketing lessons here.

A ton of post-it notes.

For the agent provocateur, I am just pointing out that we do not know the details. The agent could either be from a law enforcement group or possibly a media outlet who wants a story.

The book www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/1591846285 talks about how he went and slapped sexist posters around town and then took pictures of them to create a story.

> Well done ! Now just keep that in mind (i.e. the far bigger risk caused by right wing groups when it comes to violence) and think again about the death threats from reactionary men. Hint : violence/death threats, right wing/reactionary.

Since the 1970s leftist groups have pretty much stopped violence/death threats etc. They now resort to media stunts and these sorts of things. Meanwhile among the right wing groups the opposite appears to be the case.

Personally I would say the elites have shifted from supporting the right wing to supporting the left wing since they see them as less of a threat.

> For the agent provocateur, I am just pointing out that we do not know the details.The agent could either be from a law enforcement group or possibly a media outlet who wants a story. The book www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/1591846285 talks about how he went and slapped sexist posters around town and then took pictures of them to create a story.

Of course you'll never know the details. That is why you have to use your brain. What were the outcome for those involved ? Where those outcome predictable ? You can then probably assume that the predictable outcomes where the goals of the perpretretors and infer their motives / identity.

Have those threads resulted in a crackdown on videogame misogyny ? Have they helped the target or harmed/destroyed their (professional) life ?

>Personally I would say the elites have shifted from supporting the right wing to supporting the left wing since they see them as less of a threat.

The elite support both right-wing and left wings on social issues (gay marriage), so as to pretend that we have a healty democracy, laughing all the way to the bank.

I'm reading this book right now. Should be required reading for anyone in KiA.

Pretty sure that's already a thing. Currently reading "Trust Me I'm Lying" by Ryan Holiday

https://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/1591846285/

I'm going to leave this book here.

Anyone who thinks that this wasn't planned is deluding themselves.

This is a little bit off-topic but there is Flat Earth News by Nick Davies for general media bias which touches on state censure and propaganda, there's also Trust me I'm lying by Ryan Holiday which is mainly about PR.

Hey there!
UX Designer/Researcher here. I came from a background in Psychology and Neuroscience research before UX Design. Personally I used the UCSD Extension for a certificate in UX Design. I really appreciated the course work and in conjunction with the Coursera Interaction Design felt like I was given plenty of exposure while also having flexibility to work.
From my experience in the industry, I would look into what area you are interested in. UX careers can involve programming and development, but I use absolutely no coding at my current position (at others I have though). The biggest selling point to an employer is showing an understanding of the process: wireframes, flow charts, user studies, iteration (agile/scrum/waterfall), and design understanding. I have worked on multiple billion dollar webpages and can say the process is nearly identical when scaled down.
If you are interested in some resources to start on your own I would recommend Simon Sinek's Start with Why for understanding how to look at design solutions.
Don Norman has many great books, including The Design of Everyday Things.
Some actual books to look at and learn on your own are A Project Guide to UX Design, Lean UX, and The UX Book. I highly recommend the last one I find it very thorough and digestible and for ~60 bucks is a reasonable textbook.
Lastly, once you have a grasp of UX as a concept I would get familiar with the Adobe Suite, Axure or InVision, and any others from career sites that you might not know about (I really like [Sketch]() as a cheap option ~$99).

Best of luck, feel free to ping me with questions

Yes.

1. Small Giants
   
   
2. Start with Why
   
   
3. Influence
   
   
   Start with #2.

Absolutely! Here's a short list of non-magic books that I commonly see recommended to magicians.

Understanding Comics - Scott McCloud

Purple Cow - Seth Godin

Delft Design Guide - multiple authors

An Acrobat of the Heart - Stephen Wangh (shouts out to u/mustardandpancakes for the recommendation)

In Pursuit of Elegance - Guy Kawasaki

The Backstage Handbook - Paul Carter, illustrated by George Chiang

Verbal Judo - George Thompson and Jerry Jenkins

Be Our Guest - Ted Kinni and The Disney Institute

Start With Why - Simon Sinek

Lots of common themes even on such a short list. What would you add to the list? What would you take away?

He also has a book on the subject which might be of help to you: http://www.amazon.com/Start-Why-Leaders-Inspire-Everyone/dp/1591846447

I'm reading it at the moment and so far so good, but the bulk of the idea is covered in the Ted talk.

I'm reading Elon Musk's biography right now and think it might be helpful if you're talking about career success. The dude seems like a jerk but has an incredible work ethic and drive to succeed.

You can say pretty much the same exact thing about Augustus' biography.

Outliers really helped me a lot, because it made me realize talent wasn't nearly important as skill/effort. You put in the time and effort and you will develop your skills.

If you're an introvert like me these books helped me "fake it till I make it" or just want to be more socially capable: Charisma Myth, anything by Leil Lowndes, Make People Like You in 90 Seconds. Not a book but the Ted Talk about body language by Amy Cuddy

A book on leadership I always hear good things about but haven't read yet is Start With Why.

There are already some great ones posted so I'll just go with a couple more... non traditional ones that are surprisingly helpful.

Purple Cow

Start With Why

Cocktail Codex for understanding builds



Death and Co for technique, classics, and variations



Liquid Intelligence for understanding the “why” to the “how”



Smuggler’s Cove because tiki is sort of its own thing in a lot of ways



Imbibe! for historical context




Some honorable mentions include Jim Meehan’s Bartender’s Manual, Regarding Cocktails, and The Dead Rabbit: Mixology and Mayhem.

Ha, not a bunch more. I was looking at books on amazon and this came up in a recommendation or something. It's currently on pre-order.

Here's the link: http://www.amazon.com/Smugglers-Cove-Exotic-Cocktails-Cult/dp/1607747324?ie=UTF8&colid=2RWGZCCTUJPKG&coliid=I3RVGB3429Y92Z&ref_=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl

The recipe from Martin and Rebecca Cate’s book Smuggler's Cove: Exotic Cocktails, Rum, and the Cult of Tiki (The photo I shared is straight from the book)

Here are the only books you need:

1. Smuggler's Cove: Exotic Cocktails, Rum, and the Cult of Tiki
   
   
2. Beachbum Berry's Potions of the Caribbean
   
   
3. Beachbum Berry Remixed
   
   
4. Beachbum Berry's Sippin' Safari
   
   They're all fantastic. But if you only buy one, start with Smuggler's Cove. It's just an incredible wealth of information and it's a lot more current than the others. It's also very useful if you're looking to expand your tiki repertoire since it has a lot of information on bar equipment, rums, syrups, etc. that the other books lack.

False Start: How the New Browns Were Set Up to Fail

That's the Amazon link. You can get it in hard copy or Kindle.

I enjoyed False Start by terry Pluto about the bungling of the new browns.

https://www.amazon.com/False-Start-Browns-Were-Fail/dp/1886228884

Main factor, I guess, is time. There's some fantastic reading material on it, but I think the basis was that the Panthers and Jags had around 640 days to get ready for expansion; the Browns? They got 370. Think about how long this LA thing is taking, if, tomorrow, they just said "YEAH, FUCK IT; NEW TEAM IN LA NEXT YEAR, EXPANSION DRAFT, GET STARTED NOW, NEW OWNER WILL BE WHO THE FUCK CARES, GO GET IT." Like that.

False Start by Terry Pluto goes into it more in depth.

Here's also a great explanation from /u/Brokewood.

The DevOps Handbook, Team Geek and Debugging Teams come to mind.

I don't think there is something specifically for "devops managers" (what is that even?). General leadership books would work for you as a manager I suppose. Just keep the principles of DevOps in mind when you do manage away.

Senior Level Software Engineer Reading List

Read This First

1. Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment
   
   

   Fundamentals
   

   
   

2. Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
   
3. Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions
   
4. Enterprise Patterns and MDA: Building Better Software with Archetype Patterns and UML
   
5. Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail
   
6. Rework
   
7. Writing Secure Code
   
8. Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries
   
   

   Development Theory
   

   
   

9. Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests
   
10. Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications
    
11. Introduction to Functional Programming
    
12. Design Concepts in Programming Languages
    
13. Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective
    
14. Modern Operating Systems
    
15. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change
    
16. The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles
    
17. Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
    
    

    Philosophy of Programming
    

    
    

18. Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It
    
19. Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think
    
20. The Elements of Programming Style
    
21. A Discipline of Programming
    
22. The Practice of Programming
    
23. Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective
    
24. Object Thinking
    
25. How to Solve It by Computer
    
26. 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts
    
    

    Mentality
    

    
    

27. Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
    
28. The Intentional Stance
    
29. Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes In The Age Of The Machine
    
30. The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
    
31. The Timeless Way of Building
    
32. The Soul Of A New Machine
    
33. WIZARDRY COMPILED
    
34. YOUTH
    
35. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
    
    

    Software Engineering Skill Sets
    

    
    

36. Software Tools
    
37. UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language
    
38. Applying UML and Patterns: An Introduction to Object-Oriented Analysis and Design and Iterative Development
    
39. Practical Parallel Programming
    
40. Past, Present, Parallel: A Survey of Available Parallel Computer Systems
    
41. Mastering Regular Expressions
    
42. Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools
    
43. Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice in C
    
44. Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book
    
45. The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security
    
46. SOA in Practice: The Art of Distributed System Design
    
47. Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques
    
48. Data Crunching: Solve Everyday Problems Using Java, Python, and more.
    
    

    Design
    

    
    

49. The Psychology Of Everyday Things
    
50. About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design
    
51. Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty
    
52. The Non-Designer's Design Book
    
    

    History
    

    
    

53. Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality
    
54. Death March
    
55. Showstopper! the Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft
    
56. The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth
    
57. The Business of Software: What Every Manager, Programmer, and Entrepreneur Must Know to Thrive and Survive in Good Times and Bad
    
58. In the Beginning...was the Command Line
    
    

    Specialist Skills
    

    
    

59. The Art of UNIX Programming
    
60. Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment
    
61. Programming Windows
    
62. Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X
    
63. Starting Forth: An Introduction to the Forth Language and Operating System for Beginners and Professionals
    
64. lex & yacc
    
65. The TCP/IP Guide: A Comprehensive, Illustrated Internet Protocols Reference
    
66. C Programming Language
    
67. No Bugs!: Delivering Error Free Code in C and C++
    
68. Modern C++ Design: Generic Programming and Design Patterns Applied
    
69. Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#
    
70. Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# with NUnit
    
    

    DevOps Reading List
    

    
    

71. Time Management for System Administrators: Stop Working Late and Start Working Smart
    
72. The Practice of Cloud System Administration: DevOps and SRE Practices for Web Services
    
73. The Practice of System and Network Administration: DevOps and other Best Practices for Enterprise IT
    
74. Effective DevOps: Building a Culture of Collaboration, Affinity, and Tooling at Scale
    
75. DevOps: A Software Architect's Perspective
    
76. The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations
    
77. Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems
    
78. Cloud Native Java: Designing Resilient Systems with Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, and Cloud Foundry
    
79. Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation
    
80. Migrating Large-Scale Services to the Cloud

These look great - I'm buying them asap.

Amazon recommends a third book as well: "Leading the Transformation: Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale".

• https://www.amazon.ca/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262509
  
• https://www.amazon.ca/DevOps-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002
  
• https://www.amazon.ca/Leading-Transformation-Applying-DevOps-Principles/dp/1942788010

Have you tried the DevOps Handbook?
The Devops Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1942788002/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_WMs4ybAXM9TPX

This one.

https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002/ref=pd_sbs_14_img_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=AACV133PGSYZ0D84739R

Here's your homework:

• https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592
  
  
• https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002/
  
  Then start looking into individual technologies. Docker, Drone, Kubernetes can work together on the same stack, for example. Start there, then figure out what's interchangeable.
  
  You'll need to establish awareness of the business needs and full stack context before DevOps will make proper sense.

I highly recommend The DevOps Handbook; I'm in the midst of reading it now, if you appreciated The Phoenix Project then this comes across super practical and to the point.

https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002

https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002

​

Explained best in this book - The DevOps Handbook.

Scuse my ignorance... What does OM mean? 😁 But yes, we're trying to optimise for overall flow of customer value. The other metrics account for "de-risk deployments by doing it a lot", "don't break production" and "if you do fix it quickly". These are not of our own design by the way... Completely plagiarised from https://www.amazon.co.uk/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Technology-Organizations/dp/1942788339

The overhead for measuring feature lead time is minimal thankfully. I put a label such 'value-marker-1' against the first and last stories in a Jira epic. A new valuable thing inside an epic just means I increment the number on the labels I use. Also means you can have measure multiple valuable things in an epic with overlapping timelines. My cronjob gathers this up daily along with a bunch of other metric information. I owe a detailed blog post to https://medium.com/onzo-tech by the end of March.

We're seeing a healthy tension across the route numbers and it looks hard to game one without sacrificing elsewhere. I am measuring deployment leadtime too but haven't set a target there as I can see it leading to bad behaviour. One thing I am currently wary of is the short term temptation to reduce technical quality in return for lower leadtime. It would eventually manifest in higher change failure rate and increasing lead times

Link for the lazy: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0074VTHH0/

This textbook is used by the top culinary school in the United States. It is a steal at this price. The only problem I've had is the recipes our for serving a lot of people, so you have to scale them down. It's a good skill to learn anyways. The Professional Chef https://www.amazon.com/dp/0470421355/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_JB3Lzb3P564CZ

If you like learning from books I would highly recommend buying a used copy of a Professional Cooking book that Culinary colleges use.

New ones cost about $50-75 but older editions with 98% of the same content can get found for $20 and can be used as a culinary bible.

Amazon: The Professional Chef

For those who don't already know what this means, Pro Chef is referring to The Culinary Institute of America's textbook The Professional Chef.

Don't bother! They're too expensive, vs. just getting a job in a restaurant and working your way up. Buy the CIA's textbook, and work your way through that while you have a kitchen job. Make sure that it's for you before you spend the tens of thousands of dollars needed to get a culinary degree.

Wine:

Windows on the World - Kevin Zraly

The Wine Bible - Karen MacNeil

The World Atlas of Wine - Hugh Johnson & Jancis Robinson

Cooking:

The Professional Chef - The Culinary Institute of America

The Culinary Institute of America book page on Amazon

The Flavor Bible - Karen Page

Sounds like you're looking for a cooking school book. Not sure if there is a vegan one already.

The America's Test Kitchen Cooking School Cookbook

The Professional Chef

I would definitely recommend getting Professional Cooking or The Professional Chef, then. Either of them will give you the solid foundation you're looking for.

Most anything coming from the Culinary Institute of America is trustworthy, as is Alton Brown and Julia Child. America's Test Kitchen (and Cook's Illustrated/Cook's Country Magazines) is fantastic... they do a lot of recipe and product testing, which saves you the effort, energy & resources. They give you a recipe, but also go into a bit about WHY it worked.

What makes you think they wouldn't have started selling it without regulations? if there was no need for licensing they could have literally walked into any liquor store or bar and said "Hey im George Clooney can you do a test run of some of my tequila" without ever needing to go through government.

Someone like Clooney is an outlier because he is rich and famous but there are tons of stories of people doing things they love and are good at, but are prevented from monetizing it because of regulations. Like that guy in LA making bread in his kitchen, he was fined thousands of dollars for selling bread because he didn't have a commercial kitchen and correct licenses. This despite the fact that he ran a tight ship and his customers loved him. IIRC he had to pay like $20k+ out of pocket, then a couple years later California legalized selling homemade food.

There is a popular green/sustainable farmer called Joel Salatin who wrote a book about how regulations are killing small farms and food businesses and how they make it too onerous for small operations and local food growers to serve people.

Something something Polyface Farms, something something Joel Salatin.

You should read Joel Salatin's Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal. There are so many bogus laws and codes in place for our "safety" you wouldn't believe.

I can't.

But the point is to re-examine laws after they are passed and see if they are having the intended effects. In the case of the drug laws, it hasn't worked, so it should be time to reconsider them.

Amazon

Sounds like a condensation of The Phoenix Project

http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Ops-Handbook-Implementing-Practical/dp/0975568612 by my boss Kevin Behr and his co-authors. Also http://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262509 by the same trio. In the latter the opposing factors of planned and unplanned work. Planned work, us in development would think of as stories, epics, etc in a card/wall/board centric app. Unplanned work: tickets in a incident/problem management app. You have to attend both of course, and work to minimize unplanned work. ThePhoenixProject is TheGoal but 30 years later and skewed towards IT (while still in a manufacturing company, with it's own bricks and mortar outlets), and contrasting planned and unplanned work, as I said. VisibleDevOps talks of ITIL, which ties in the "Managing IT operations" you were asking about.

I'm still a young C# developper, around 3 years of C# for websites and APis for small and big companies, but it's not because your predecessors built an in-house framework that this is the right way to build a system. C# is a great language but it shine thanks to the core orientation of productivity delivered by the .NET framework and ASP.MVC.


Of course if your needs are so specifics that you want a custom framework, don't forget that it will become a HR problem. Talented people rarely want to jail themselves to a company and build a specific set of skills that can't be transferred.


But as I said, I'm young. I do think that we are living on the shoulders of giants and that not everything need to be rebuilt. Some of the coolest techs we've seen these past years around containers and micro-services were actually already implemented in the 70's.

That said, I didn't read this book, so I will read it and predictably learn a lot of things. If you didn't already, I would recommend the following books. They aren't C# specific but will help you in the environment you are describing:

• [Working Effectively with Legacy Code] (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0131177052/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1)
  A mountain of pattern for common uses cases to improve stability and efficiency of legacy apps.
  
• [The Phoenix Project]
  (https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262509/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1498813798&sr=8-1&keywords=the+phoenix+project)
  An inspiring guide on how to work and migrate from waterfall project toward a more predictable project management methodology.

The team I'm on is somewhat unique in our organization and we have been using a modified and always evolving Kanban method.

Our choice to try Kanban came after having read The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim. We really loved the iterative feedback that a system like Kanban can provide.

We started with yarn and sticky notes on a whiteboard until we felt comfortable with the process and then migrated to Kanbanflow. We do individual task time tracking in Toggl.

We had played with bigger solutions targeted for VAR/MSPs but found that they also wanted to be CRM solutions (and a lot of other cruft that we didn't need). Basically, we were wasting our time trying to learn tools instead of processes.

Will we be using these solutions six months from now? Who knows. We are able to shift pretty easily between tools and like to be able to pick what we need. We tend towards simple, useful SaaS offerings that know what they want to provide and do it really well.

Not a tech book exactly but check out the Phoenix Project. It is a fictional story about a IT manager that becomes the Director of IT in a tanking business. It is fictional but VERY informative when it comes to project management, especially if you plans to manage a team. It talks about how to handle problems in the tech world and how to interact with other departments. Very good story.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0988262509/ref=cm_sw_su_dp

realmente, não há exatamente um consenso sobre o que é devops, mas a meu ver é mais um filosofia do que realmente uma função. é um modelo de trabalho que procura quebrar os silos funcionais dentro de uma empresa e trazer uma maior integração entre elas, trazendo maior agilidade e resultados mais rápidos. Tudo isso permeado com bastante automação e melhoria continua sempre focado nos beneficos que isso vai trazer pro negocio. Sei que falando desse jeito parece um conceito bem vago, mas é algo que envolve coisas como:

• automatizar infra-estrutura, para que o provisionamento seja mais eficiente, padronizado e reproduzivel
  
• ambiente de entrega continua (continous delivery) - onde as aplicações vão "pro ar" de maneira automatiza e continua, e isso inclui uma serie de etapas como automatização de builds, testes e deploy
  
• monitoramento e aprimoramento dos processos de recuperação, basicamente fazendo com que os problemas sejam corrigidos de maneira automatica, aumentando a resiliencia do ambiente.
  
  Esse link aqui pode te dar uma boa introdução no assunto: https://theagileadmin.com/what-is-devops/
  
  Além disso, te recomendo fortemente que leia um livro chamado The Phoenix Project, que conta a historia de uma empresa fabricante de auto-peças que precisava ganhar agilidade para enfrentar a concorrencia ou estariam fadados a fechar as portas.
  
  https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592

I agree with you, in a way.

In my experience an entire IT team may be 50-60% effective but it's because of a single person doing 100% their own capacity. There seem to be alot of people who slack off while their colleagues pick up the slack. This isn't always laziness. It could be that they don't have the proper skill sets, may have apprehension in working with some technologies, or aren't familiar with the entire environment enough to do things themselves. This is sort of like the scenario presented in the phoenix project

Work doesn't get done because of the single person working at capacity and other people "blocked" on that person. This gives the illusion of a very busy IT team and lack of staff but in reality management just needs to address the underlying issues... again, kind of like in "the phoenix project" :)

QBQ. The Question Behind the Question


The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

Rework


Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In


Gemba Kaizen: A Commonsense, Low-Cost Approach to Management

Time Management for System Administrators

By its very nature, DevOps roles are typically not "junior", and you'll have to have earned your mid-level stripes in systems/operations/cloud engineering to graduate on into DevOps.

Read [0] "The Phoenix Project" and [1] "Leading the Transformation" for an introduction to what DevOps theory/philosophy is all about. It's really worth taking the time to study these books, even if what is in them may not be something you're going to apply at your current job.

Get an [2] AWS certification. As a difficult and rare exam, companies looking view those who hold the DevOps Engineer certification in high esteem.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Leading-Transformation-Applying-DevOps-Principles/dp/1942788010

[2] https://cloudacademy.com/learning-paths/devops-engineer-professional-certification-AWS-13/

Doesn't matter the year, The Phoenix Project is a must.

I'm a software developer with about 5 years of experience , and I used to have the same sorts of problems where I would over-commit to getting work done and under-deliver. To summarize, I changed to where I only commit to tasks that will take 1-2 days or less at a time, and I make it very very public what I'm working on in order to manage both my and my team's expectations. Here are the gritty details (ymmv of course):

1. I got my team to start using a ticketing system and explicitly define what we are working on with explicit acceptance criteria for each ticket. That way you know where your finish line is. There other huge benefits to this but its outside of the scope of your personal workflow. This of course takes buy-in from your team, but at the very least start a board on trello with "todo", "in progress", and "done" columns, and try to keep the number of items "in progress" to a minimum, and work on them until their finish. A cardinal sin here is to move something from "in progress" back to "todo". This thing you're setting up is called a kanban board
   
   
2. I break the work I do into 1 or 2 workday 'chunks' on our team board, so I don't lose interest or chase another issue before the work I'm doing gets finished. Keep in mind that some workdays, depending on how heinous your meeting schedule is, a workday may only be 4 (or less :[ ) hours long. An added bonus to this is that its easier to express to your team what you're working on, and after practice chunking up your work, you and they will reasonably be able to expect you to finish 2-3 tasks a week. There are always snags because writing software is hard, but in general smaller tasks will have a smaller amount of variability.
   
   
3. As I'm coding, I practice test-driven development, which has the benefit of chunking up the work into 30 or so minute increments. While I'm making tickets for the work I do, i explicitly define the acceptance criteria on the ticket in the form of tests I'm going to write as I'm coding ( the bdd given-when-then form is useful for this ) , so the flow goes write tests on ticket -> implement (failing) test -> implement code to make test pass -> refactor code (if necessary)
   
   
4. This is a little extreme but I've adopted a practice called 'the pomodoro technique' to keep me focused on performing 30-minute tasks. Basically you set a timer for 30 minutes, work that long, when the time elapses take a 5 minute break. After 5 or so 30-minute intervals, you take a 20-30 minute break. There's more to it, but you can read more here. Again, this is a little extreme and most people don't do things like this. Here is the timer I use at work when its not appropriate to use an actual kitchen timer (the kitchen timer is way more fun though). There's a build for mac and windows, but its open source if you want to build it for something else.
   
   
   Side note: in general I limit my work in progress (WIP limit) to one large task and one small task. If there are production issues or something I break my WIP limit by 1 and take on a third task (it has to be an emergency like the site is down and we are losing money), and I make sure that whatever caused the WIP limit to break gets sufficient attention so that it doesn't happen again (usually in the form of a blameless postmortem ) . If someone asks me to work on something that will break the WIP limit by more than one, then I lead them to negotiate with the person who asked me to break it in the first place, because there is not way one person can work on two emergencies at the same time.
   
   Here's some books I've read that lead me to work like this
   
   

• [Kanban: successful evolutionary change for your technology business] (https://smile.amazon.com/Kanban-David-J-Anderson-ebook/dp/B0057H2M70)
  
  
• The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations
  
• The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
  
• Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation
  
  As you may notice, the latter 3 books are mostly about how to quickly and reliably ship software. Developer workflow is a big part of getting that to happen, and many people have some of the same problems we do.
  
  I could go on like this for hours because I fucking love kanban. Feel free to PM me if you want to chat about your specific problems. There is figuratively nothing that I would rather talk to internet strangers about.
  

As an Enterprise Architect, i believe you would need to have a great understanding of the nature of your business.. Around asset depreciation (in effect does it make sense for you to close down your datacenter?), how outsourcing contracts affect your P&L etc. Also around what the outlook of the business is - is your business looking at net new business models or possible adjacent markets? If no, then a cloud migration/transformation probably doesn't make alot of sense (also, if the answer to that question is no - do you think your organisation will survive in the next 5 years?).

Reason being is a cloud migration/transformation will never be cheaper than running things on-prem/outsourced, not unless your workload was purpose-built for the cloud - from an architectural PoV, this is what the industry calls "cloud-native".

Now, if you're still with me - then that means that you have good reasons for moving to the cloud. I would advise to start small - never, ever do a big-bang. Approach this like you would a scientific experiment. Form a hypothesis, have a controlled group and variable group, then evaluate, learn, and adopt. If you're wrong, pivot, then try something else. If you're right, build on top of that then scale.

You will probably realise that doing things this way sound alot like Agile - and they are similar. You might also feel that existing tooling and your organisational structure doesn't allow for that kind of work - as you will optimize for speed and getting quick feedback from your stakeholders (or customers). This is the fundamental problem of cloud adoption within enterprises - enabling a large organisation to work in this way, while making sure that you're not breaking any laws or regulation. Organisations who fail at this simply move their costs to the public cloud provider, then complain that it's too expensive without achieving real value, then decide to move back on prem (costing millions again).

This will require : a) Organisational change - grouping people not by function, but by the value they deliver towards a company goal or outcome and b) Cultural change - a culture that embraces change, and the failure that comes with it. And not resting on your laurels once you achieve success; and lastly, c) Architectural changes - towards decoupling, independence, and resilience.

There's alot of content out there (including the ones you mentioned) that will help out for C - Architectural changes, but not much for the first two.. It is, arguably the easiest part of the three, unfortunately.

Oh, and one more thing - there's this thing called DevOps as well - not the tools surrounding it, but rather the discipline and culture that comes along with it. I'd recommend you to read https://www.amazon.com.au/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592 before anything else.

​

​

​

DevOps is broad - very board. Some say it's not even a "thing".

Your request is quite broad.

I'll do my best, and feel free to ping back any specific questions as all DevOps requirements are conditional based on your working context.

Considering your background, and your current approach to DevOps, I'd suggest reading up on DevOps culture, generic tooling (in various classes), amongst various other topics (apologies for the ambiguity here, but there is too much without more specific context).

DevOps Tooling Classes:

• Source control: Strive for all your day-to-day activities to be represented as code in some form.
  
• Automation using CI pipelines (Git, Jenkins/Teamcity, etc).
  
• Automation from a configuration management perspective (Ansible, Chef).
  
  (Naming a minuscule fraction of the available tooling.)
  
  Ask yourself these questions to help you with your Google'ing:
  
  
• What is a CI pipeline?
  
• Can I read JSON and YAML?
  
• What is Kanban?
  
  If I had to sum it all up, and give you the best vectors to approach this:
  
  Think of DevOps as being able to deliver a business requirement using reliable and reproducible techniques:
  
  
• "Everything-as-code."
  
• "Community effort."
  
• "Monitoring"
  
• "Simple is key."
  
  As I mentioned before, DevOps is very broad.
  
  Read https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592
  
  Ping back for help! That's what DevOps is all about!

Software engineering is different than many other things. It takes a lot more than just wanting. It also can't be accomplished with just money.

I can't tell you how big of a role that leadership and vision play in the equation.

But it is then the process. That is where Google has really been a leader. Google basically invented the entire SRE/DevOps space.

Wrote the canonical book on the subject. Well the latest one.

To me it is The Goal and then Phoenix Project and then you finish with the Google SRE book.

You read in that order. If a software engineer it will change your perspective if not yet read. Google just read them a lot earlier than others.

Here is a link to the books I am talking about if do not work in the field

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel)

https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592

https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/introduction/

The Phoenix Project (https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592)

Whilst it's not primarily about security, it does play a major role in the story.

It's important as a security professional to see where the industry is headed, and how security can adapt.

I found it a great read from a security perspective.

The Phoenix Project
https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592

Phoenix Project

HIM is the core of all badness in healthcare. I assume you know this but the fact that it's a total disaster in general is responsible for my income. Have you read the Phoenix project?. To me that's a must read for anyone in IT management. It literally changed how I saw things. You can read it in a day. Trello for Kanban, with slack integration can be amazing.

When I interview I talk about the 4 types of work and how they handle flow. I'm a consultant so I need to understand what sort of a disaster I'm getting into. You need that info to especially since you're early in the year and course is somewhat laid in.

For interview questions I'd be prepared to answer MU, HIPAA (Cfr 164), HITECH (13410d). Budgeting, team management and find out if you gel with the CIO. Most of them aren't morons but some are simply incompetent.

I wish you the best!

Ok! Here’re a few:

http://www.gallup.com/press/176069/first-break-rules-world-greatest-managers-differently.aspx

https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Leadership-Steps-Transforming-Performance/dp/0060835915

http://www.jamesshore.com/Agile-Book/

https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592

Your situation is remarkably similar to The Phoenix Project (http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0988262592). I encourage you to check it out.

It sounds like your company doesn't believe its success is dependent upon a well-managed IT infrastructure. Which business goals are jeopardized by this behavior? How can you effectively communicate that 1) without properly planning capacity the IT team might as well be a gulag, and 2) without controlling what work is released to IT, it is destined to be perceived as a cost center instead of contributing to the company's value stream?

...have you ever been able to say no to a business/development proposal that got dumped on your team?

At the very least, the book might provide some consolation that your IT pains are not unique :]

> You mentioned our GDP. 2/3 of our GDP comes from consumer spending.

Consumer spending and the output of the economy is impacted by how much people have to pay for gas, heat, oil, etc ENORMOUSLY(think about how much the average citizen spends on gas throughout a year and then think about them spending that on other things). Like I said you are uneducated in subject matters that are essential to comment on these matters and you are going to go on as if you aren't. All while arguing a position no analyst in the world would(hyperbole).

https://www.amazon.com/Ascent-Money-Financial-History-World/dp/0143116177/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1466453148&sr=8-1&keywords=Ascent+of+money

https://www.amazon.com/Prize-Epic-Quest-Money-Power/dp/1439110123/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1466453203&sr=8-1&keywords=The+prize

Read these two books and you will have a clearer picture of this macro picture I was referring to and you will understand how absurd your position is. The ascent of money was made into a pbs documentary, albeit a 4 hour one. It doesn't do the book justice though.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/ascentofmoney/

The Prize was a Pulitzer Prize, non fiction book that will educate you on oil and why the middle east is important.

https://careers.state.gov/work/foreign-service/suggested-reading
Click on the suggested reading list on that page.

To get the whole macro picture I was referring to, read these books. You may want to start with their recommended International Relations textbook. These are books the State Department recommends you read if you are going to negotiate and do diplomacy on behalf of United States government(pretty hardcore stuff).


Best of luck with your studies/investigations and enjoy the rabbit hole, it really is an eye opener into another world that is not really discussed in the media.

It's a long read, but it's thorough - http://www.amazon.com/The-Prize-Quest-Money-Power/dp/1439110123

I'll never forget reading The Prize by Daniel Yeargin. He simultaneously tries to tell you about how Standard Oil was some unstoppable monopoly...while also telling you about how Branobel was eating away at their monopoly. They got to something like 30% before Stand Oil got trust-busted. So trust-busting only came after Standard's market position was already eroding.

Go read history books instead of copying out-of-context newspaper quotes -
US interest in the mid-east started in ww2 - FDR signed an alliance with Saudi Kind that stands to this day. Israel was not even a country back then.

The US army does not fight wars for Israel - even though Israel does benefit from some of those - and Israeli politicians like to take credit for having influence in the US (does not mean they actually do).

The Israeli army on the other hand did fight a war purely for the US - in which 3000 of its soldiers died (equivalent to US casualties Vietnam in terms of relative population size) and many more injures - it was in October 1973 and it was a war in which the US administration demanded Israel does not strike early even when Egyptian and Syrian forces were massing at its borders. The reason? US wanted the Suez Canal - and Egyptian president promised to give it if US "gives" him a victory over Israel.


TL;DR

Read/Watch The Prize - understand the importance of oil to (American) strategic thinking post ww2. Stop thinking things in the world have reason X or nation Y behind it - it's simplistic wishful thinking. World is complex, though cookie.

As a more personal aside, I think that The Prize is a really interesting book; however, it is not truly focused on engineering but more on the impact of the "most influential industry in history."

Ohh! You should definitely look into The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power by Daniel Yergin.

It depicts the history of the global petroleum industry from the 1850s through 1990.

Its extremely well written and an incredibly powerful part of human history.

Link: http://www.amazon.com/The-Prize-Quest-Money-Power/dp/1439110123

Już nie chciałem wnikać w szczegóły bo kolega padlina by mnie zlinczował , ale ja tak naprawdę to głównie słucham książek. Do tego słucham sporo tzw pop science , ale z ostatnich ciekawych pozycji to mogę polecić :

Trust me, I'm Lying - Ryan Holiday

Never Split the Difference - Chris Voss

Influence - Robert Cialdini

Thinking fast and slow - Daniel Kahneman

Daj znać jeśli coś z tego Cię zainteresuje.

The suggestions here are good. In addition I recommend , 'Trust Me, I'm Lying': https://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/1591846285

This book gives you a good idea about the consequences of Postmodernism - at least, the toxic method of simply deconstructing anything to the point that nobody knows what is 'true' or even that some things might be more 'true' than other things.

If were posting long shit rather then defending our position ourselves heres a book on why you should ignore the news http://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/1591846285

Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator

I am reading it currently. It's so beautiful and eye-opening.

It’s a shame that’s what you think.
I’d recommend you read this book. May help you understand what goes into and how games are made. 80 hour weeks, missed birthdays, no OT pay. It’s a miracle any game gets made.

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062651234/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_OxCHAbH8FWXPM

Jason has connections all over the gaming industry. He even wrote a book about a few game developments: https://www.amazon.com.br/Blood-Sweat-Pixels-Triumphant-Turbulent/dp/0062651234

He keeps posting on troubled development stories on Kotaku too (the Anthem and BO4 articles, for example). He earned my trust in regards for info in the game industry.

>"Italy is very similar to Greece in terms of climate and terrain (with some important differences), and classical Roman architecture took a lot of cues from Greek styles (again, with important differenes). Point being, they could re-use - if not the models - a lot of the same textures from Odyssey, cutting down on the amount of work they would have to do.
>
>It fits within the same era. AC games seem to usually run in series based on time period; you had the Ezio trilogy which hearkened back in Revelations to the first game; you had ACIII and Black Flag in similar eras (Edward was Connor's grandfather), and those plus AC:Unity, AC:Rogue, and AC:Syndicate are all within about a hundred and fifty years of each other (from 1715 at the start of IV to 1868 for Syndicate). Since they've been working in the ancient period with Odyssey and Origins, if they're going to do another game set in that era, it would make sense to do it immediately afterwards - and I don't think they're stupid enough to never make an AC game set in the Roman Empire."

I agree with your points. But at the same time, if we look at their situation right now....they surely will want a game that will be playable on old and new gen next year. So Montreal has 3 years to release it, right?

They surely will not want a brand new era/assets in a game that will have to release in both systems. In that case, they needed something that could use what they have in Origins/Odyssey. Of course, this would give points to Rome, which was something that even I was believing some time ago.

But then, Jason reports puts a wrench into the situation. And when you think about it...Vikings can fit very well (conquests battles, naval system, mercenaries, huge natural landscapes, etc) and also show a more medieval vibe after the 1 year gap, helping to fight series´s fatigue

And yes, I agree that the Roman EMpire would be fantastic. I was believing on AC: Legion a few months ago (at least we got the tittle in another franchise). Is it trully gone? Now that is another question. It would not be impossible to happen after Vikings. We had Odyssey and Black Flag happen right after 3 and Origins, so it would not be that weird for a prequel after a sequel.

The schedule is interesting if they do follow the current formula:

2013 - Black Flag (Montreal)
2015 - SYndicate (Quebec)

2017 - Origins (Montreal) - 4 years of development
2018 - Odyssey (Quebec) - 3 years of development

2020 - Kingdom (Montreal) - 3 years of development
202? - ??? (Quebec) - ? years of development

Will they skip 2021 and then have 4 years for their next gen title? Or only after 2021 will they skip a year and then having their first new era? That is up in the air for now. I think Ubi would give a lot of time for their next gen title and really nail it.

Look at the replies to your post. It really wasn’t funny.

Do some research. Crunch is real, it happens a lot in the industry. I don’t think NetherRealm has denied it either. Here’s a good book that shares a lot of stories about crunch and how damaging it can be:

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062651234/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_5nooDbZGYAZP0

Pretty sure the crybabies in this scenario are the people whining they’re not getting their DLC fast enough.

Check out Jason Schreier's Blood Sweat and Pixels

Blood Sweat and Pixels graver også i crunchkulturen hos en lang række udviklere, nærmest som en sidebemærkning. Men indtrykket er mest af alt at computerspilbranchen bare er en ung, kreativ og passioneret branche med helt sindsyge deadlines, hvor det ikke rigtig bliver godtaget at sige stop. Jeg tror det var en af Naughty Dog udviklerne der sagde at han i en måned ikke så sin familie, boede i sin bil og spiste morgenmad og aftensmad på den samme tankstation. Der var bare en forståelse for, at hvis ting ikke blev leveret til tiden kunne udgiveren dræbe projektet fra dag til dag, og så var alt tabt.

Så troede man at crowdfundingrevolutionen endelig ville gøre en ende på problemet, ved at udviklere kunne tage ting i et lidt roligere tempo uden at være afhængige af "Big Brother" til finansiering. Det var så løgn.

You should read his book, Blood Sweat and Pixels, it deep dives into a lot of games developments just like in this article (including Dragon Age Inquisition). It’s an absolutely fascinating, if sometimes depressing, read.

https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Sweat-Pixels-Triumphant-Turbulent/dp/0062651234

Buying him computer hardware might be nice, but there's a lot of other ways to give something related to games and game design.

There's always a great big pound of dice. It's full of dice of assorted numbers of sides, and a game designer remotely interested in tabletop (which should be all of them) can use a healthy supply of dice for making tabletop games. There's always the fun of just rolling dice giant handfuls of dice. I'm out right now but I'll add the link when I get back home. Here's the link: Pound of dice

I'd also look into games he hasn't tried. BoardGameGeek has a lot of board games listed and reviewed that you could get, and of course there's always steam. For board games I'd recommend:

• Red Dragon Inn, a fun party game for 2-4 that's best with 3+. You play as a bunch of adventurers after big dungeon raid and now they're spending gold at their local tavern and gambling. Can support more players with its sequels.
  
• Monopoly Deal: A card game version of Monopoly, without the bullshit. Unlike it's big board game cousin, it actually plays out fairly quickly while still being focused on building monopolies to win the game. As a game player perspective it's a fun game, but also from a game designer's perspective it's interesting to see how this game re-imagines the original board game while being true to the source material and streamlining many of its game mechanics.
  
• Carcassonne: A well known classic game that works well with 2-5 players where players build up a world of castles, farmland, and roads.
  
• Bang the Dice Game: A game where the sheriff and his deputies face off against the outlaws but nobody knows who to shoot. At the start of the game players are given their roles in the conflict but only the sheriff shows who they are. The rest of the game involves social deduction to try to figure who everyone is supposed to be shooting, and trying to read past bluffs. The game works great for 5-8 players, and can work for 3-8.
  
  There's also a lot of books on game design you can get him. You may have to check to see if he owns some of these already, but I've found them to be great reads that I can recommend to anyone interested in game design.
  
  
• Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: This is a book that tells "The Triumphant, turbulent stories behind how video games are made" and talks about the stories behind 10 different games from across the video game industry and what went on during development. I just bought this one and haven't gotten to chance to read it yet, but I'm excited to start it soon.
  
• The Art of Game Design: This is one of the most well known books on game design that discusses a lot of what makes games work. I recommend it to anyone interested in game design.
  
• Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games: This book talks about everything that goes into how to design a game and some key differences on how some types of games work. It's more on the beginner/intermediate side, so some of it might be familiar to him.
  

Thanks! It's this book.

For a more detailed look at luxury items I highly recommend the book Deluxe.

With the exception of Hermes (which still hand stitches its bags and makes it scarves in France and has a lifetime service on its bags to ensure workmanship) no "luxury" brand is unscathed.

With that said, many brands do adhere to quality craftsmanship--it just may not be from a "fancy" country and many times its workers are not paid appropriately.

LV shoes, for example, are made in Romania with soles attached in Italy so they can carry the "made in Italy" tag. I believe LV sources their bags to France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and the USA. Unsure if they are entirely made in China and sourced elsewhere.

Again, it's not like the bags or shoes are shitty in themselves--it's just false advertising because people like your friends won't buy a "made in China" or "made in Romania" product because it carries a stigma.

With that said, 99% of the "luxury" brand products you see--from perfumes to cheap keychains--are poorly made and just carry the "brand." "Luxury" brands no longer mean "quality."

Brand name != Quality. Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster is a good read on this subject.

> these people were prescribed ADs for a reason, no?

Check out Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker - https://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Epidemic-Bullets-Psychiatric-Astonishing/dp/0307452425

Yes, but probably not the reason you're thinking. The answer is $$$$, control and the belief that a pill will be a panacea for all of life's problems.

The most scathing critiques of psychiatry are from people who have been maimed by it.

This book can change one's view of the benevolence & competence of the enterprise. "Religion" has nothing to do with it.

There's a fantastic book that addresses a lot of these points: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0307452425/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=&sr=

While I wholeheartedly agree psychiatric drugs should not be the go-to for children, talking to a therapist or another mental health professional can be highly beneficial, and drugs don't even need to be in the equation. In fact, Amber said "i want you to talk to a therapist" not, "I want you to see a psychiatrist." Also, Gary doesn't seem to be providing any coping mechanisms, whereas Amber says "There's things we can do to take your mind off it"

http://www.amazon.com/Eating-Animals-Jonathan-Safran-Foer/dp/0316069906

Unbiased, honest, well-written.

PeTA can also help you out:

The Dairy Industry

The Egg Industry

If the goal of Buddhism is to limit suffering in all beings, then it is absurd to argue for an omnivorous diet. Animal agriculture is one of the most destructive forces in our world.

> it is permissible to eat meat on the condition that the animal was not slaughtered specifically for the person who eats it.

That was always the excuse I got from people while living in Thailand. It's just a loophole to allow people to do something they know in their hearts is wrong. Why should it matter to anyone who the animal was slaughtered for? It certainly didn't matter to the animal. How about in the case of factory farming, where animals are killed by the billions in an automated system of blades, grinders and boiling water? Who are those animals being killed for? If not specifically you, it must be ok, right? Also, there is more to consider than the moment of slaughter. A compassionate person must also consider the horrendous conditions the animals are forced to live in for their short, awful lives.

I have a great deal of respect for Buddhist thought, but in regards to the moral and ethical problems one encounters when eating meat, Buddhist texts must surely be inadequate. The Buddha had no way of anticipating the horrors of factory farming. He didn't know anything about the torture chambers that produce the meat we eat-- he didn't know that millions of humans would have to starve while the grain they needed to survive was fed in bulk to genetically mutated livestock, all so a wealthy few could have a more delicious dinner. The Buddha had no way of knowing how much suffering eating meat would cause years later, but the Dalai Lama should know better, and he really should have a bit more to say on the matter.

For a more enlightening take on eating meat, read Eating Animals by Jonathan Safron Foer.

Any fact checks/critiques of this are encouraged! Eating Animals convinced me that over fishing was a problem but I can't speak to the specific facts quoted in the video.

Buy Moneyball.
Non-fiction, about a moment that changed baseball history, by a writer that knows how to tell gripping non-fiction stories (see Flash Boys, The Big Short etc.)

Huge baseball fan..

this looks like a great read!

Calico Joe, and slightly different but an excellent sports book nonetheless, Moneyball.

Your list is great, so I'm just going to tack on some suggestions to what you've already got rather than start my own.

Numbers-y, science-y books
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis

The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First by Jonah Keri

Memoirs
Odd Man Out: A Year on the Mound with a Minor League Misfit by Matt McCarthy

Veeck as in Wreck: The Autobiography of Bill Veeck by Bill Veeck

Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits & How Baseball Got Big

and Vindicated: Big Names, Big Liars, and the Battle to Save Baseball by Jose Canseco

Fiction
The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

Non-fiction

Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball by George F. Will

The Machine: A Hot Team, a Legendary Season, and a Heart-Stopping World Series: The Story of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds

and The Good Stuff: Columns about the Magic of Sports

and The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O'Neil's America by Joe Posnanski

3 Nights in August: Strategy, Heartbreak, and Joy Inside the Mind of a Manager by Buzz Bissinger

The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn

The Pitch That Killed: The Story of Carl Mays, Ray Chapman, and the Pennant Race of 1920 by Mike Sowell

Yes, I understand the irony of Joe Posnanski and Jose Canseco being the only author with multiple books. Just read Canseco's books. They're actually not bad.

There are more I'm forgetting. I must have read 50 books about baseball in my short life. I'll add them if I remember.

> What really fucks me off is the insistence on using a metric shitload of acronyms that are literally meaningless to a new spectator. It took me a fortnight to work out that K means strikeout. Why, for fuck's sake?!

It's actually because of Henry Chadwick, an Englishman who pioneered the statistical analysis of baseball. The "K" represents the last letter in "struck" (as in "struck out"). He used it because "S" was already taken up as a designation for "sacrifice" (as in "sacrifice hit"). It is still popular because baseball fans are creatures of habit, and, as others have mentioned, "K" makes it very easy when scorekeeping to differentiate between a swinging strikeout and a looking strikeout.

To address the broader issue: Baseball statistics have developed haphazardly over the last 150 years. Old statistics with old designations are layered under newer statistics with newer designations - all of them carrying little (or big) bits of information about the play on the field which, at one point or another, somebody thought it would be useful to remember - and the abbreviations and acronyms reflect the evolving requirements of newspaper layout editors, analysts, fans, and scorekeepers. There's really no easy way to learn it all, but I can assure you that just trying to do so will immeasurably increase your appreciation for the game.

I would suggest a two-pronged approach. First, take note of the statistics mentioned by broadcasters. These tend to be "caveman" stats - batting average, RBIs, ERA, pitcher wins, etc. - which are really crude measures of performance but are very popular and therefore are important to know. Second, pick up a book or two about sabermetrics - Moneyball and The Book are both good - and read a little bit about the more advanced approaches to stats and analysis that baseball watchers have taken over the past couple of decades. Also, surf Fangraphs and Baseball Reference. Soon, you'll be able to identify all the statistics that broadcasters throw around, and you'll be able to tell which of them are useful and which are useless.

The big news here is that this particular strain of Panama disease has gotten out of Asia. It's not going to wipe out banana production overnight, but now that it's in Africa it could very well lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths due to starvation. There are a number of countries in Africa where families rely on a banana tree for an enormous amount of their daily caloric intake. While most of those countries don't use the Cavendish cultivar I believe a few of the most popular varietals are susceptible to this fungus. There are some that are resistant. I'm trying to remember which ones. I want to say the Brazilians have one that's tart and almost crunchy like an apple but the big companies don't want to switch to it because it's "too different".

There are also varietals that have a significantly higher quantity of vitamins and are all around more nutritious than the Cavendish, but again the major corporations, Dole and Chiquita, think the consumer is too unwilling to stomach a change in flavor or they themselves are unwilling to adjust their supply chain to accommodate more delicate fruit. My uncle actually grows the old Gros Michel or "Big Mike" that everyone used to eat. It's SIGNIFICANTLY better. It's got a thicker peel so it transports more easily and oh my god it's so creamy. There's actually a line of thought that the banana is the fruit referenced in the garden of Eden description which seems more plausible when you try the better varietals and lines up with where bananas were historically grown and eaten.

The sky-is-falling style rhetoric that accompanies this issue is a result of the frank inevitability of Panama disease shutting down industrial Cavendish operations. There is no way to stop it, currently they use incredibly harsh pesticides to slow it. The banana is uniquely difficult to genetically modify or even cross breed because any of the common edible versions deliver something absurd like 1 seed per 1 million fruit so the researchers are forced to either sift through that many bananas or more commonly they use current wild bananas which have massive seeds and then try to slowly breed the seeds out. It's a huge pain. Anyway the Cavendish is almost guaranteed to die unless there are some major breakthroughs in mycology. At the current rate, they're looking at 10-20 years max assuming no huge advances.

I recently read that book they referenced which gives a lot of fascinating detail about the history behind the banana industry and this particular fungus and where I got most of this detail. It's a fantastic read especially if you want to hear about the United States explicit backing of two major corporations as they effectively cripple central america in order to better control their labor. This book: http://www.amazon.com/Banana-Fate-Fruit-Changed-World/dp/0452290082/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1394076091&sr=1-1&keywords=banana

I've been trying to get through The Fruit Hunters but I keep getting stuck. I think it's partly the frustration of knowing I'll never taste a lot of the fruits he writes about. At least not without spending a lot of money.

Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World

There are some food-related book suggestions on that page, but none seem to be about fruit.

Also, I had no idea that there was a huge, amazing world of fruit out there until I tried raw vegan & then fruitarian (currently omnivore, for the record, but still enjoy all types of good ingredients & recipes!) & started digging into varieties & sources a little bit deeper. I pretty much had stuff like apples, oranges, and bananas growing up. Fruit was good, but nothing to get overly excited about...maybe you got a really delicious orange once in awhile, but that was pretty much it, haha! But thanks to international shipping & market demand & places like Whole Foods & Trader Joe's trying to introduce more options to consumers, we have access to more global foods than ever before!

On a tangent, on a fruitarian diet, avocados & tomatoes are actually both included because they are fruits. They kind of fall into the sub-category of "fruit vegetables", along with zucchini, peppers, eggplants, pumpkins (yup), olives, pickles, and paprika (...berries). We eat a lot of Haas avocados in the United States, but they're not even the best ones - there's Reed, Fuerte, etc. But Haas makes more sense for market purposes (the smaller size fits more to a box, they ship better due to thicker skin, etc.), so that's what we get!

That's not a bad thing, however - it's really nice to have avocados available year-round, and even though they're kind of pricey (upwards of $2 each now, where I live), you can use them for so many things... chocolate pudding, Sinh tố bơ (Vietnamese avocado shakes), homemade ice cream (sounds weird, tastes good! I make it with coconut milk & cocoa powder sometimes). My buddy has an epic guacamole recipe available here:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/SalsaSnobs/comments/a3kjdy/the_only_guacamole_recipe_youll_ever_need/
  
  Also, there's a whole crazy world of crime, wars, and corruption that goes on to support the fruit industry. Check out Season 2, Episode 1 of "Rotten" on Netflix ("The Avocado War", 56 minutes long), for example. There are a bunch of great books on the banana as well, , such as "Banana Wars" & "Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World". But enough tangents for one thread, haha!

Artic Apples. Genetically modified to remove the chemical that makes them spoil after being cut.

or

Market any of the different types of banana that are possible replacements for the currently available Cavendish Banana; Apple Banana (aka Manzano Banana), Lacatan Banana (Red Banana), or Baby Banana. Could also market the old Gros Michel Banana, because so few people remember it.

This book by Dan Koeppel will give you some great background information about how Bananas became the fruit that we know and love. Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World

I also completely agree with /u/buttunz, The Professional Chef is a must have if you're planning on a career in the culinary field. What I like the most about the Cuisine Foundations text book is all the pictures of the knife cuts. It really helped me improve my knife skills.

I was excited by the Culinary Institute of America's The Professional Chef. http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Chef-Culinary-Institute-America/dp/0470421355/ref=zg_bs_4254_20

This looks more creative and scientific. Congrats.

This book is amazing if you really want to learn the this and that of culinary arts. It's the place I learned about various starches for the first time.

http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Chef-Culinary-Institute-America/dp/0470421355/

http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Cooking-Wayne-Gisslen/dp/1118636724/

Here are a handful of books along the lines youre looking for. They hold a wealth of knowledge that should give you some direction on how to proceed.


https://www.amazon.com/Institut-Bocuse-Gastronomique-step-step/dp/0600634175/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1498046182&sr=8-1&keywords=institute+paul+bocuse

https://www.amazon.com/Science-Good-Cooking-Illustrated-Cookbooks/dp/1933615982/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1498046072&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Science+of+Cooking

https://www.amazon.com/Food-Lab-Cooking-Through-Science/dp/0393081087/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1498046072&sr=8-2&keywords=The+Science+of+Cooking

https://www.amazon.com/Science-Cooking-Understanding-Biology-Chemistry/dp/1118674200/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1498046072&sr=8-5&keywords=The+Science+of+Cooking

https://www.amazon.com/Essential-Spices-Herbs-Discover-Understand/dp/1623156289/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1498046139&sr=8-1&keywords=essential+spices+and+herbs

https://www.amazon.com/Professional-Chef-Culinary-Institute-America/dp/0470421355/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1498046163&sr=8-1&keywords=the+professional+chef

Assuming you're from the US and primary deal with US, English and French culinary styles, I think what you're really looking for is an in‐depth guide to the principles of cooking. Sure, it's good to have cookbooks/recipe books as well, but if you want to study theory a book on principles of gastronomy is more what you're looking for. The golden standard in US culinary schools are books by the ACI, such as: https://www.amazon.com/Professional-Chef-Culinary-Institute-America/dp/0470421355/ref=sr_1_1

I highly recommend the book Trust Me, I'm Lying. Does a pretty good job of explaining the hows and whys of media coverage, and why easy stories are often promoted over important stories.

"Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator" is a good read on that topic.

> Here's the thing: whether it's extremist feminism or alt-right morons; whether it's over-the-top political correctness or blatant racism; whether it's SJWs-gone-wild or gamergate red-pill misogynists -- they all represent an element that most people never have to interact with in day-to-day life.

This is exactly what I mean. One of these things is not like the other, and I've bolded the one for you that is bullshit.

When you describe /r/JWs, you'll get a description that the members agree with: A subreddit of Jehovah's Witnesses. When you describe T_D, you'll get a description that the members agree with: A get a subreddit of Trump fans.

This is not the case with KiA, the main subreddit of Gamergate. When you just described GG, you described something entirely different from their nature. I was there at its inception, when GG started criticising the gaming press for doing things like giving positive coverage of friends and relationships without disclaimers. I saw that the gaming press retaliated by painting their critics as misogynists. I saw third parties such as some crowds on Something Awful and the GNAA celebrate as the other press uncritically took that over. All it took was asking people on KiA what they thought. But they didn't do that.

KiA is not the fringe of society. It's circlejerky, yes, but its anti-censorship is not fringe at all, and it's far from what you believe it to be. In fact, if these topics piss you off, that is exactly what you share with them. You get pissed off by university presidents that do not tolerate statements like "it’s okay to be white"? You're now getting lumped in with "red-pill misogynists", yay.

It really reminds me of what happened to the atheism community when Atheism Plus reared its ugly head. This is something you'll eventually encounter too; something you care about will be misrepresented because it works better for the outrage machine. It's media manipulation at its finest.

This is how all news on the internet works. You can also use this to make your product/lie you wish to propagate or whatever "go viral". How you do it is basically tip a smallish blog or two and within the next little while bigger blogs/sites will pick it up without crediting the original source so that your little lie becomes truth. To find out more about this you can read Trust Me I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday.

> it is for people to talk about a place

And yet we have moved all moving/city questions to 'askPortland'.

Antifa and the PB's are TINY FRINGE groups who's activities promote and always end in violence (remember the 'punch a nazi' signs?). This is about 500 people total that show up at these events. Hardly any statistical amount of Portlanders - yet we give them a constant platform to promote their rhetoric and violence.

I say it's time to yank that platform from them or at least stop giving them more screen and news time than their tiny fringe activities deserve. Racism has no place in Portland. Violence has no place in Portland. I stand up to them both. We are a nation of laws. If you got a friggen gripe - then be part of the solution of fixing those systems, changing laws, and creating something great. Not trashing our parks and turning a block or two of our city into thunderdome on a monthly basis.

It's a tactic both the PB's and Antfi are taking full advantage of to make them seem far larger than the few hundred extremists they are. A social media tactic well documented here:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0074VTHH0/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

> The expectation only people who live in the city will post on this sub is laughable.

It is laughable - because you were the only one that brought that idea up.


But perhaps you're right. It does seem like attendance at these clown-fests seems to continually be dropping. Maybe people are becoming smarter.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0074VTHH0?btkr=1

Jacques Pepin's Complete Techniques is worth a look. If you want something more professional (and a lot more expensive), the Culinary Institute of America's book, The Professional Chef is very thorough.

this is what you are looking for

http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Chef-Culinary-Institute-America/dp/0470421355

>Stories and techniques are what I want.

For these reasons, this is the best cookbook I have ever owned

The CIA book is helpful too

http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Chef-Culinary-Institute-America/dp/0470421355/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1421961861&sr=8-1&keywords=the+professional+chef

What about Professional Chef by CIA or On Cooking by Sarah R. Labensky? I've never tried them but I've heard of them and would like to hear confirmation before spending a lot of dough on these expensive textbooks.

In terms of bang for your buck, this is the best one out there. Not only does it have every recipe you could want, it also covers the why and how of every basic step. Published by the Culinary Institute of America (the best culinary school in the world.)
https://www.amazon.com/Professional-Chef-Culinary-Institute-America/dp/0470421355

The Professional Chef (ProChef), you can also get this in ebook/ App form!

I would look at this book:
Paul Bocuse: The Complete Recipes https://www.amazon.com/dp/208020095X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_rkkjybM2R3694
It contains many recipes for traditional French dishes like onion soup, sole meunière, bœuf bourguignon.
As far as techniques go, I found this book to be the best:
The Professional Chef https://www.amazon.com/dp/0470421355/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_vmkjybW84N5YZ
Especially the section on stocks. It also has a lot of French recipes.

what you really want are recipe inspirations with common ingredients, not necessarily techniques. There are tomes out there like the CIA's Professional Chef or Pepin's New Complete Techniques which go into minute details on very classical preparations expected at high-end restaurant kitchens, but for the avg home cook that's overkill.

I think your ultimate goal is to develop a set of protocols to guide you in creating dishes on the fly, which actually is a really difficult thing to do even for skilled cooks. The only advice i can give is to cook broadly, learning preparations for various cuisines, from Italian dishes, to Lebanese/Israeli, to Indian, Chinese and Japanese. Many ethnic/cultural cuisines have a certain flavor profiles, with specific spices and ways of combining proteins & starches. But you need to read & practice so these protocols come instinctively.

My copy is at least 10 years old, but the information is still solid today. The Professional Chef.

I would also contend Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking is an excellent source for understanding basic flavors, mother sauces, etc.

Start here:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0470421355/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1518328836&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=cia+cookbook&dpPl=1&dpID=41rNtxGGDYL&ref=plSrch

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0316118400/ref=sxbs_sxwds-stvp_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1518328931&sr=1&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_p=2972396462&pd_rd_wg=nq5yM&pf_rd_r=YWY3G2TH6PPKJDW69WQG&pf_rd_s=mobile-sx-bottom-slot&pf_rd_t=9701&pd_rd_i=0316118400&pd_rd_w=Ra06B&pf_rd_i=culinary+school+book&pd_rd_r=6d45f769-fe0f-4f25-870c-9833a3a902fb&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1579129110/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1518329071&sr=8-2&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=jacques+pepin&dpPl=1&dpID=51Ob6blpRqL&ref=plSrch

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0778802566/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1518329157&sr=8-2&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=knife+skills+illustrated&dpPl=1&dpID=513Oqyg2uPL&ref=plSrch

A cast-iron skillet. Soon, your awesome searing skills will be no match for your puny kitchen fan. Just make sure you look into how to care properly for the thing.

As for cookbooks, like other people in the thread mentioned, Joy of Cooking and Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything are great tomes of quality recipes. I would also recommend something along the lines of a culinary school textbook. I'm a big fan of The Professional Chef. This cookbook focuses a lot on technique and theory, but it's very thorough and still has plenty of recipes and delicious looking pictures.

Food Inc. contained interviews with (farmer) Joel Salatin. Look up some of his books, and/or search for more footage of his on Youtube.

TL;DR: Don't care about regulations as long as you (and your local farmer) can opt out of them.

Explosions are cool, man. What better justification do you need than that?

PS: happy independence day! Here's some light reading until boomtime. http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Want-To-Do-Illegal/dp/0963810952

Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal

At first I thought you implied that this book is about bestiality.

Then the Amazon page reconfirmed that it's about big-business laws.

I don't ever want to be shocked like that again

You can always buy a copy

>If you believe it's possible to allow wealth to concentrate into the hands of a very small minority

This happens under government. Government props up monopolies and creates barriers to entry into the market, hampering competition.

Corporations love regulations, because it helps them. Small businesses don't have armies of lawyers to sift through the tax code for them.

Here is a good source:

http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Want-To-Do-Illegal/dp/0963810952/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1380744203&sr=8-1&keywords=why+everything+i+want+to+do+is+illegal

I can provide alternatives if you'd like. Name an area and let's see how regulations could effect competition.

I haven't read it yet but Oil 101 was recommended to learn about the Oil industry.

[Oil 101]
(https://www.amazon.com/Oil-101-Morgan-Downey/dp/0982039204)
isn't bad. [Masting the Grain Markets] (https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Grain-Markets-Profits-Really/dp/1477582967) also isn't bad. Neither will teach you everything you need to know, that will only come on the job.

I don't know of any that compare, but, the Napoleon's Buttons is SUPPOSED to be good.

http://www.amazon.com/Napoleons-Buttons-Molecules-Changed-History/dp/1585423319/

Other books, engineering related, that I liked are:

Norm Lieberman's Process Troubleshooting books, the guy cracks me up!

Working Guide to Process Equipment (3rd edition probably cheaper): http://www.amazon.com/Working-Guide-Process-Equipment-Fourth/dp/0071828060/

Process Equipment Malfunctions (not as good as the other one, some overlap, but still worthwhile, and covers more breadth for individual issues): http://www.amazon.com/Process-Equipment-Malfunctions-Techniques-Identify/dp/0071770208/

The Prize (mentioned above): http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1439110123/ref=redir_mdp_mobile/188-3799228-4803548

The Quest (Follow on to The Prize): http://www.amazon.com/Quest-Energy-Security-Remaking-Modern/dp/0143121944/

Oil 101: http://www.amazon.com/Oil-101-Morgan-Downey/dp/0982039204/

The Mythical Man Month (Not engineering directly as it pertains to software, but, projects and project management are huge in engineering, though this book is timeless): http://www.amazon.com/Mythical-Man-Month-Software-Engineering-Anniversary/dp/0201835959/

Piping Systems Manual (You can NEVER know enough about pipe!): http://www.amazon.com/Piping-Systems-Manual-Brian-Silowash/dp/0071592768/

Pumps and Pumping Operations (OMG it is $4, hardcover, go buy now! This book is great... did you know OSU didn't teach their Chem E's about pumps? I was flabbergasted, gave this to our intern and he became not a scrub by learning about pumps!): http://www.amazon.com/Pumping-Operations-Prentice-Pollution-Equipment/dp/0137393199/

Any good engineer needs to understand MONEY too:

The Ascent of Money: http://www.amazon.com/Ascent-Money-Financial-History-World/dp/0143116177/

It's Nial Fergesuon, who has had his own series of dramas and dumb stuff. The Ascent of Money has a SLIGHT libertarian tinge... but it wasn't bad enough that I didn't enjoy it. I consider it a history book, and he attempts to write it like one.

Have fun!

/r/SecurityAnalysis maintain a decent reading list.

The following is taken from it:

History

• A History of Financial Speculation - Edward Chancellor
  
  
• A Short History of Financial Euphoria - Kenneth Galbraith
  
  
• Barbarians at The Gate - Bryan Burruough
  
  
• Irrational Exuberance - Robert Shiller
  
  
• Liar's Poker - Michael Lewis
  
  
• Manias, Panics and Crashes - Charles Kindleberger
  
  
• Money of the Mind - James Grant
  
  
• Oil 101 - Morgan Downey
  
  
• The Box - Marc Levinson
  
  
• The Prize - Daniel Yergin
  
  
• The Big Short - Michael Lewis
  
  
• The Great Crash of 1929 - Kenneth Galbraith
  
  
• The Panic of 1907 - Robert Brunner
  
  
• The Predators Ball - Connie Bruck
  
  
• This Time Is Different - Rogoff & Reinhart
  
  
• Too Big to Fail - Andrew Ross Sorkin
  
  
• US Bank Deregulation in A Historical Perspective - Charles Calomiris
  
  
• When Genius Failed - Roger Lowenstein
  

If you're serious, start here for understanding Energy. Then something much more light weight about Oil

Then you can read light edutainment like The Prize with more gain.

Nice, here are some more.

https://rbnenergy.com/

http://www.amazon.com/Oil-101-Morgan-Downey/dp/0982039204

http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/24870/falling_short.html

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2470

http://www.igu.org/sites/default/files/node-page-field_file/IGU%20-%20World%20LNG%20Report%20-%202014%20Edition.pdf

There is the occasional subreddit food-for-thought, like this

Just got this for xmas, but haven't read it yet... supposed to be good

The answer to the headline question is no, a thousand times no.

Even Citi's vice chairman Robert Rubin was blind to e.g. 'liquidity puts' on massive off-balance sheet liabilities, which drastically changed Citi's economics to put in mildly. If Citi doesn't understand their own balance sheet, what chance have you got?

Even Warren Buffett sometimes gets blindsided. For instance, Amazon's cloud is eating IBM's lunch of running corporate IT departments and data centers, commoditizing what used to be a high-ticket, high-margin service business.

Even Warren Buffett puts a lot of stuff (most stuff?) in the too hard pile. Especially Warren Buffett.

You don't have to understand how to drill an oil well (although it helps, see e.g. http://amzn.to/24hNwlw , http://amzn.to/1sIYV22 ). What you have to understand is whether we're going to keep drilling oil wells, whether the guys who own and drill wells are going to keep needing Halliburton, and whether Halliburton can keep earning, growing and making a good return on capital re-invested.

Read The Phoenix Project its a very well done narrative of the struggle of setting up quality change management. It goes from simple to culture changes, to proper CM practice.

>How did you get started in DevOps?

I watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdOe18KhtT4. I realised this was the future and if you wanted to be in a high performing organisation you need to do what they're doing.

Unless you're in an organisation that is willing to undergo the cultural change of Operations and Development working together you're probably not going to go far. Creating a devops organisation from scratch is HARD unless everyone is on board.

Looking into the technology is the simple part, try reading around the movement. Pheonix Project (http://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262509) is a good start, from there I'd look into Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Continuous-Integration-Improving-Software-Signature/dp/0321336380 & https://www.amazon.co.uk/Continuous-Delivery-Deployment-Automation-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321601912).

If by this point you don't know a programming language you're going to be in serious trouble. Learn something, be it Powershell (and honestly you probably will want to move onto C# if you want to be amazing at what you) or Python/Ruby.

Honestly you should be working towards what Google does with SRE if you want to be at the leading edge. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Site-Reliability-Engineering-Production-Systems/dp/149192912X.

I'm not clear on the pipelines from developers' machines to production deployment, both today and as you'd propose given current restrictions.

Also, you might want to revisit your Vagrant/Ansible thoughts in the context of what your corporate peers are considering. It's not unreasonable that they are considering rearchitecting their current dev-->deployment strategy and you don't want to be seriously out of step with it to avoid a lot of wasted effort.

Of course, what you'd really want is to work collaboratively with your peers to come up with a strategy to iterate to a modern dev-->deployment workflow that everyone could use, targets Rackspace or generic public IaaS provider, and "breaks down some of the legacy silos" as the saying goes.

It's not irrational to think that the current restrictions could be rethought, You'd need to get the infosec, compliance, and bean counters on board. Needs exec sponsorship.

Have you read the Phoenix Project? Often cited as a starting place. Cheesy in spots, but an interesting read on the process. Not the detailed cookbook you were asking for, but those exist, too. Just need the earlier clarifications.

And if you haven't already, read "The Phoenix Project."

I'm a big fan of Gene Kim. one of his books, the first half was a very gripping documentary about a former employer.. (at least I assume!)

Another "lunches" book to read after the first is Powershell Toolmaking in a month of lunches there's another book coming out on the matter of Scripting later this year.

Also, for reference see if you can get Powershell in Action

It was written by the man who architected and designed the bloody thing, so you're in good hands. I've not read it cover to cover, but it's certainly the definitive reference on the subject.

All above books rated 5/5 stars on amazon by a lot of people.

If you're so bogged down, stitched up and scared to even think about automating anything, then I'd absolutely recommend The Phoenix Project this is the paradigm shift IT has gone through over the past decade. Essentially, IT has taken on board efficiency and best practices that have been standard in the manufacturing industry for decades, to incredible success.

Seriously, "Bag of Nails" IT shops are on their way out. If they're that unwilling to take a step back and do things the smart way, they're a shit company to work for. Learn about technical debt and why it's critical to pay it off.

DevOps and Site Reliability are in essence the latest buzzwords in IT service management, but there's a lot of positive change going on in the industry off the back of it. There's a sort of productivity Gold Rush.

If you're bogged down your current job sounds like the perfect place to cut your teeth and leapfrog off the back of it to move into a better organisation who wants to work smart.

Have fun!

Read this if you haven't already:

https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592

That's a great book! I also recommend this book /u/sudz3 → The Phoenix Project

Ok, you can start with some reading in books.

A suggestion: Scrum a Pocket guide - Gunther Verheyen

If you like a good novel (about DevOps): https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592

​

If you going for training, go for PSM 1 first (prefer that your boss is paying :)). This will give you a lot of background theory on Scrum, specially if you participate in a class. If being Product Owner is more suiting late, you have the advantage of having the theoretical background already.

​

Good luck in your journey! :)

Cheers, Johan

You can try channeling that passion into trying to save the organization. Can you utilize or build tools that make managing things easier? I would imagine you are, but if you're not, have you looked at configuration management stuff like puppet, chef ansible or saltstack? Orchestration tools like mcollective, fabric or capistrano?

It sounds like you have a lot of issues with the dev side of things and the whole silo thing is a pretty well understood problem at this point. Can you introduce devops concepts? This book might be a good place to start:
The Pheonix Project

If you're going to go down the savior path, one key thing that you have to remember is that you might fail and they'll continue down the path until they have no choice but to deal with it or go under. And I would say that failure is quite likely too, you're going to be viewed as someone that makes waves. If you don't demonstrate the value of the change and/or don't hold a lot of political capital, you're going to be fighting uphill.

The Pheonix Project is a wonderful read and even has a gripping story. I think it was my first audible book.

DevOps is a pretty large field and it is not only tech.
For beginners I would recommend reading the Phoenix Project, it's a novel about a bunch of ppl and you follow along as they make the journey from traditional IT to the DevOps way. It's a nice introduction, though it does not give you answers for how to do DevOps (https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592).


DevOps is the next step in making Development and Operations work better together with less friction. To achieve this one needs more lean processes and better tooling.
The tooling part is where you would put automation that help lessen the burden of everyone.
DevOps is a bit in the hype, and many understand it as a magical bullet that will make everything so much easier. Though this is not true, it takes a lot of effort to develop and maintain automation.


I'm working mostly with VSTS (Visual Studio Team Services) and Azure. Here I develop Powershell code to make it easier for code to flow through our different environments by leveraging tech to help remove some of the more burdensome processes.

Though if Operations does not already have a good ITSM framework in place, and you have Developers that just want do whatever the hell they fancy. The road to DevOps will be a hard one.

I did not have much DevOps experience when I started, though I had a strong background from Ops where I was well versed in how to merge processes and tech beforehand. So it was just an extension of this. Also my Powershell skills are good enough so I can write the automation I discover is needed as I investigate the existing glue in place between Dev and Ops.

I would say the biggest hindrance for most to do great DevOps is control of WIP (Work in Progress). This is Business Projects, Internal Projects, Operational Change and Unplanned Work. If one can visualize all these types of WIP flowing through Dev and Ops, one have a good foundation to build the rest on top of.

https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592

Read https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592 and share it with your team.

My husband is an IT director and he said https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592

Do what your boss is telling you to do.

Let. it. break.

If the halls runneth over with trouble tickets, just do your 40 hours and go the fuck home.

Patching it along is making the case that "This doesn't need fixing, because it still works."

Go read "The Phoenix Project", and quit being a Brent. You're doing things wrong, and your company is hurting because of it.

> trilogy

The one I read was a single book.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Phoenix-Project-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592

DevOps is a tough field to break in to. A lot of companies will expect you to come in and know what you're doing right away - especially from a security standpoint. Managing infrastructure for your organization is a really big deal, which is why there is so much emphasis on Linux administration and deep understanding of how to secure those resources.

Going from web development to devops is a pretty big change - really they are two separate career paths. Not that you couldn't do it, but it will be a difficult transition for someone that hasn't done that kind of work before.

I think you need to assess what it is in the technology sector that interests you before you make a decision on which path to go down. Doing Devops-style work is super fun and rewarding, but like I said - it is a completely different field than traditional SWE.

If you do look in to the devops path, I would highly suggest reading Google's SRE book (it's free on PDF -https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/toc/index.html). This will give you a really comprehensive breakdown on what aspects of the SRE/DevOps that you will want to focus on to be successful.



e: also - the Phoenix Project (https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592). A must read for any DevOps hopefuls out there.

Haha guess I saw the "tipsy" and checked out after that! My focus is functional programming, so most of my recommendations are around that.

LambdaCast and The REPL are good and worth listening through (full disclosure I was on the REPL).

Other casts that I cherry-pick through:

• Software Engineering Daily
  
• Future of Coding
  
• The Accidental Engineer
  
  Some good books:
  
  
• The Phoenix Project
  
• The DevOps Handbook
  
• Release It
  
  You should also check out hillelogram and his talks/podcasts/writing on TLA+ if you're not familiar.
  
  Do you have any good recommendations?

https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592/

Very good read, also recommend the follow up DevOps Handbook:

https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002/

Learn the fundamentals of devops and how it relates to your company's technology usage and process.

Read the Phoenix Project, it will give you a better insight on how devops fits in with IT in general.

https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592

For technical skills it wouldn't hurt to know improve your scripting/programming skills.

I dunno...sounds nice in theory, but it's going to make you more of a cost-center than they already think you are. Half of your job is going to be demonstrating that you ADD value to the organization, not just be a big money pit. And that's without tying up development resources on things that look a lot like a big money pit in the eyes of upper management. I don't know what your timeline is, but is it long enough for development?

Come to think of it, maybe read this...it's almost like Zen and the Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance but for IT management, or a big long parable (That is, it's a relatively short book, but long as parables tend to go...or is it an allegory...meh). I don't know, I thought it was interesting, and I'm just a tech (that said, only picked it up because it was during a free promo.)

Also, for some reason I keep thinking "Maybe Reading the Phoenix Project might help." It was free on amazon a few months ago so I read it (thanks to the people here for the suggestion) and it was interesting. There are tons of eye roll moments and it can be silly at times but it does help your thinking when it comes to being buried in neck deep in projects. It's probably worth the $10 to read it as a piece of fiction alone.

http://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369923896&sr=1-1&keywords=the+phoenix+project

The Prize by Daniel Yergin

This is the history of oil. I felt like I saw the word in a very different way after learning how oil had been so important to so many crucial moments of modern history. You will come out of the book seeing modern politics in a very different light.

Basically if you are from the EU (or China, or whereever that's not the USA) and you want to by crude you will have to pay in USD as most countries will only sell in USA. Therefore you have to buy USD then buy your oil, this creates demand for the dollar and keeps it's price up.

The ME countries (read as the twats in charge of them) would typically end up with more USD than they knew what to do with in their own country and would start spending elsewhere, typically on US products.

That's the TL:DR of it, though if your interested in the oil industry and it's history i'd really recommend The Prize though there is a youtube series as well here but i haven't watched that.

Have you read the Prize?

Also, check out theses books:

• Trading Natural Gas: Cash, Futures, Options and Swaps
  
• Global Energy Security and American Hegemony

A book on novel writing.

Anything be Jared Diamond.

The Prize.

If he likes Mac, a subscription to MacWorld.

It's like I'm listing off everything my husband likes. :-P

Osama bin Laden was not acting at the direction of the Saudi government. I believe O. B. L. had been disowned by his own family, the Saudi royal family and had had his Saudi citizenship revoked.


The Road to 9/11: A Brief History of Conflict in the Middle East

Meeting Osama Bin Laden

House of Bush, House of Saud

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power

If you really want to know, you should read Prize - The Epic Quest for Money, Oil and Power. It's basically a parallel history book of the last 150 years and helps explain geopolitical motivations and power struggles, almost all of which are either started by or kept up because of access to oil.

Which is to say, security of and access to, oil is as much as a priority to our national interest as having an anti-missile defense system.

"The Prize" by Daniel Yergin is a long but fun place to start. Bit more historical.

Learn about Shale Gas, OPEC, and what recently has been happening to the price of crude oil I'm certain they will ask about that.

This is also a great book
http://www.amazon.com/Prize-Epic-Quest-Money-Power/dp/1439110123/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1420766548&sr=8-5&keywords=oil+and+gas

https://www.amazon.com/Prize-Epic-Quest-Money-Power/dp/1439110123

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power by Daniel Yergin.

This is a non-fiction narrative masterpiece about more than just the oil industry, but about the driving forces that have shaped the world we live in and the world we will live in. If you want to understand how the 20th century was shaped through the prism of those shaping forces then I recommend reading this book.

Here's subsidies for oil, not to mention all the money that goes into diplomatic/military intervention protecting interests of which I'm sure you're already probably aware. Also, fossil fuels power so much of our economy, so that selective government spending/rights protection also applies to power companies, manufacturing companies... hell really any company that uses fossil fuels more than the average person. Or how bout the grants and subsidies for telecom companies... not to mention the massive government infrastructure spending? Are those not entitlements? How about something as simple as a concert venue that uses public security forces more than your average person. That's a "right" that's selectively applied.

The point is, no matter what, your definition of "rights" are always selectively applied. I'm not even arguing that the above examples are bad things. I like having a regulated telecom infrastructure, and I like the fact that having that infrastructure employs lots and lots of people. I like having security. Hell, I don't like the fact that our gov fights wars in the middle east, but I do like burning fossil fuels that keep me warm and power machinery and electricity. However, if you're just going to justify your position on some philosophical platitude about "rights," I'm sorry but there's no way you can be consistent unless you advocate complete and radical overthrow of the system.

Daniel Yergin's The Prize covers this and more. You can find the TV series based on it on YouTube:

• Our Plan
  
• Empires of Oil
  
• Black Giant
  
• War and Oil
  
• Crude Diplomacy
  
• Power to the Producers
  
• The Tinderbox
  
• New Order of Oil
  

The Prize: http://www.amazon.com/The-Prize-Quest-Money-Power/dp/1439110123
All you ever wanted to know about the last century but had no clue it happened

This isn't a short and sweet answer by any means, but if you're interested in understanding what it is about modern-day journalism that makes it so intrinsically difficult for honest journalism to flourish, I highly suggest you read Trust Me, I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday. I jut got done reading it a few weeks ago and found it fascinating.

> but most people do

Actually the guy who literally wrote the book on this type of marketing, Ryan Holiday, certainly says otherwise and that it is exactly as I said

Read "Trust Me, I'm Lying" if you're interested in this kind of thing.

Sounds kinda like some the work of Ryan Holiday, (former?) marketing head for American Apparel.

His book is pretty good: http://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/1591846285

You are asking good questions. I appreciate your openness and I hope I can add something here. I hope we are not divided as it feels sometimes. Also, you might find it comforting that our country has survived division of similar if not greater magnitude before.

" why can’t you adults do the same "- I hope you will find that some of us can. Can you think of a marketing strategy for us? How many clicks/views would this headline get: "Nobody slams anybody- two dudes who disagree have an amicable conversation and agree to keep the dialog open despite disagreement" Are you familiar with the phrase "If it bleeds, it leads" ?

Also, I will note that nuanced argument takes more time and effort than the sort of shit in the two links below:

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Here is an anti-Trump post relying on an emotional appeal. How much of the Republican party do you think this picture accurately represents? Does it matter what the opposition looks like?

https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalHumor/comments/ceca5l/a_gentle_reminder/

Here is an anti-liberal post based on a straw man argument. (IE- they are dunking on an imaginary liberal, they didn't find a person- let alone a majority of people- who espouse this view)

https://www.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/cbiydd/the_thought_process_of_the_left/

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For more on the financial incentives involved in sensational headlines I like this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/1591846285