Having opinions!! (also government machinery, uncertainty, and modular housing)

Hello! Nice to be back and writing you from a normal setup. (A proper screen and keyboard, a touchpad—so much glorious room to write, compared to the phone screen I was using for the last few weeks.) It feels like more room to think. (Though sometimes constraints on thinking are a good thing!)

But apparently all that room to think hasn’t led to much today. (I was feeling pretty down this morning, and distracted myself with a coding side project, which helped somewhat.) On, then, to the links:

• Karen Rosenkranz put into words some feelings I’ve been struggling with about originality, opinions (taste!), and our torrent of digital consumption. My therapist and I were discussing opinions this week, and I shared that I tend to avoid forming strong ones (for some subjects), preferring instead to fit myself to those around me. In that vein, we talked about trying to form stronger opinions (while trusting that we’re intellectually honest enough to change our mind if need be), and seeing how it goes.
• 1993 was an enormous year for the federal government, the last time we had a whole-of-government machinery change. In the years that followed, a team of researchers (a who’s who of 1990s Canadian public admin scholars) produced studies on specific departments / portfolios. They went unpublished, and remained largely inaccessible, until now: Evert Lindquist and Alasdair Roberts have published the 1995 machinery studies, plus a 2014 retrospective. Absolutely fascinating reads. The 2014 set includes an account by Jim Mitchell, then Assistant Secretary for Machinery of Government, which nicely colours the change.
• Filip Hracek’s “Unsure Calculator”, a clever interface to make it easier to do math when you’re not quite sure about the inputs. (I recently built a “project management simulator” that does basically the same to contribute to some discussion at work. This is delightfully generic, though, and I especially appreciate the straightforward notation.) (via Sean, thanks!)
• As tariffs make exports less competitive, BC’s modular housing industry sounds ready to step up and consume some of the province’s lumber. A major barrier to wider adoption of modular housing? Traditional construction financing doesn’t work well for it, per the article. (gift link)
• For another take on modular housing from elsewhere in BC, interesting to follow the fate of a modular work camp built to house 1,700 workers. A key barrier to finding someone to take the site on is that each dorm takes around 30 trucks to move—and there are 21 dorm buildings. (Plus other buildings!)
• Neat to learn more about CoSocial thanks to Tim Bray’s two-year reflection. A member-owned co-operative that intentionally requires a bit of process and a small fee to join—two barriers that put up just enough friction to filter out the vast majority of bad faith types.
• It’s the start of baseball season, so why not some reading on baseball history?

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas