Welcome back, Shit Givers. It’s a big day!

We’re back from vacation(s), and I’m very excited to announce two exciting updates:

1. We’ve moved our main website to beehiiv. The address remains the same — importantnotimportant.com - and the podcast is linked from there.

2. We’re launching Comments!

And now, some explanation:

We loved our old website. It was beautiful, a real calling card for our work. But it required a LOT of work, and a LOT of duct tape, and beehiiv has some new built-in features we can’t ignore, and can’t use with a third-party site, like growth tools, and as of today, comments.

And there’s much more on the way.

In addition, by unifying our email and web platform, there should be measurably less admin and design work for us, which means we can focus on doing the work (massive thanks to the team at beehiiv for building an amazing platform, and for helping us migrate home).

Anyways, the same thinking goes for the podcast. We LOVED how the pod looked on the old site, but it was a lot of work, and PodPage does most of that work automatically, and still looks sexy as hell.

Today’s big news, though, is Comments.

For the first time, you can provide feedback and build conversations with other Shit Givers right on the site — if you’re reading this on email, you can use the new button below to click right through.

Bits:

• You need to sign-in (with the email you subscribe with) on the site to comment

• All subscribed readers can comment on free posts, but only paid Members can comment on Member posts (labeled “Premium”)

• Comments are retroactive — they’re live for everything we’ve ever posted, like the popular “Welcome to the Unknown Unknowns” and “ESG is Good Business (But Just Don’t Call It ESG)”

MOST IMPORTANT NOTE: Moderating comments is a hell of a lot of work, and time costs money, and if we’re going to do this, we want to provide a home for future-positive feedback and conversations.

So while all subscribed readers can comment for now, comments will soon become a paid Member exclusive, so we can literally afford to keep it going.

Good shit to come: Watch your inbox on Monday for exciting news around Membership.

Let’s get to it.

👩‍💻 You can read and comment on today’s post on the website.

🎧 Or you can listen to it (Apple Podcasts, Spotify)

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TOGETHER WITH THE DAILY UPSIDE

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⚡️ Interested in community solar? Check out Wattbuy’s tools to get some.

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⚡️ Over 60? Put your experience and skills to work and join Third Act to help fight the climate crisis.

This isn’t rocket science (unless it’s actual rocket science).

Sure, yeah, our world is endlessly complex.

We’ve got about eight billion people, eight million-ish species, twelve-ish major religions, one hundred and ninety-two-ish countries, a wide variety of climates and topographies, as well as finite natural resources and seemingly infinite technological innovations that are somehow both unequally distributed and can make or break nations and economies and livelihoods.



So we’re going to have problems. That’s life.



But some of our problems, like the climate crisis, need to be solved ASAP. And solving them can actually bring about something even better.

In devising how to build a radically new world, I like to imagine a specific, measurable outcome, and then, instead of jumping to “How do we fix X to get there?”, pivot instead to “Why the hell is X this way at all?”



And this is where first principles thinking can be helpful.

Before you say it, I’ll say it. 

First principles and other Twitter-thread-mental-models cat-nip are often over-rated bullshit, but if you try to actually demonstrate them in practice, someone somewhere might find them useful.

So. Let’s try that.

The entire point of utilizing first principles thinking is to clarify problems by taking them apart as far as you can go: to separate any and all underlying facts from any assumptions based on them. 

You're essentially looking to discover the basest elements, shit nobody can argue with, and then rebuild a “better” version from there.



Good news for me, there’s one example we can all immediately relate to:



Food, water, and air are the three human necessities. Even Clarence Thomas and Mitch McConnell cannot deny these things. These are ground-level facts we can agree on, because we have to. 



And yet, these items are increasingly difficult to access, and/or if we can access them, they may be expensive, or, I don’t know, poisoned, or both.

Why? It’s stupid, and complicated, but let’s dive in anyways. I want to be clear that what follows is a gross over-simplification, but we’re talking about the elements required to survive, and to me, the whole thing is pretty black and white.

Anyways.

First: this particular problem -- the inaccessibility of clean food, water, and air, does not have to exist.



Then why the hell does it exist? “Because it’s always been this way.”

Why?

“Because resources cost money.”

Why?

“Because you need labor and infrastructure to process them, and only governments and corporations can afford to do so, and they need to be compensated for their costs, and in the case of business, to profit.”

OK, sure, you had me at the first part, and I get the profit part, but do we need to profit off of these particular things, of all the things?

“Successful businesses require growth.”

I’m not a degrowther (it’s politically untenable, let’s move on for now), but growth at all costs is part of what got us here, and, hold on a minute, nobody answered my first question:

Why do businesses need to profit from these resources, specifically? 

They don’t need to, they choose to. Why? Because they are simultaneously scarce, and essential for survival, and thus valuable? Because they are, to a person with little capital, otherwise finite resources? Why? Are we required to charge for them because they are so limited? Why?

If governments make trillions in subsidies available to businesses for the extraction and processing of resources like, say, fossil fuels, could they also (or instead) subsidize and guarantee clean air, food, and water?



Here’s my long-standing assumption based on what we’ve talked about, above:



Rational humans can go back and forth on taxes, on capital punishment, on speed limits, on agricultural subsidies, on public transportation budgets, on international corporate tax havens, on public money for private sports stadiums, on so much more.

But denying fellow humans clean air, water, and food is a human rights crime and should be treated as such, every time, full stop.

Because if we don’t have a human right to clean air, water, and food, what the hell do we have?

There are uncountable ways to profit in a capitalistic society. Choosing to extract profits from these things, when everyone needs them and they are now in such short supply, is both obvious and morally corrupt.



You and I have talked about identifying your personal 3 or 4 North Star values and making sure every choice you make with your time and money lines up with those. The same set of standards can be utilized quite simply for elected officials and business leaders.

You can apply that standard here.

If you don’t employ these sorts of standards, if we all don’t, and if we don’t make these standards inviolable, things will continue to be done the way they’ve always been done and a radically better world will remain light years away, because these are the building blocks for the whole goddamn project, whether we’re talking solar panels or teleporters or whatever.

It’s actually nice to have a few crystal-clear elements in play. “Oh, the human body cannot survive without these three things? And you’re in the business of depriving people of them? Great, I’ll take my money elsewhere.” 



For some reason I get calls from a variety of big-shots trying to understand the mechanisms behind the complex systems that dominate our economies and societies.

Ignoring the inarguable fact that they could have called literally anyone else, I usually tell them to start with the basics and go from there.

Just…pretend you’re a six year old.

Seriously. Stand in your/any child’s tiny velcro shoes for a moment, and ask “Why?” over and over (and over) until you get to the bottom of a system, problem, or injustice.

Clarify your thinking by reducing problems down to the irreducible. They’re not all going to be as easy as air, water, and food, but you can definitely challenge long-held assumptions, built on irreducible problems, especially the assumptions of those in power.

So. Insist on reputable evidence. Highlight the shit out of the consequences of the world we’ve built, and then rearrange the blocks to show in no uncertain terms that some things are non-negotiable — like safe schools and maternal health — and that we can build something better by guaranteeing those.

Our world has come so far and now is teetering on the edge of both fucked and a glorious, abundant future, so an essential perspective is “things absolutely do not have to be this way.”

We actually don’t have to pay women less.

We don’t have to drink milk from cows; we don’t need to eat those cows, or cut down all of our forests for them, either.

We don’t need to use massive trucks powered by pulverized stegosaurus bones, or cars at all.

We don’t need monocrops that mostly go to cows and fuel and waste and poison our water.

We don’t need to continue investing in industries that profit off the backs of historically marginalized citizens; we don’t need gas stoves; Black and Brown people don’t need to breathe dirtier air, drink dirtier water, and live and go to school in the hottest part of every city in America.

STEM degrees don’t have to cost all of the money, and trade schools and nursing programs and teaching programs don’t need to be shit on, especially when the glorious abundant future we want and need requires a bazillion more graduates from those same programs.

As we choose companies to buy from and candidates to support, this very basic and definitely-not-original method of sorting through the bullshit can actually be pretty helpful.

Sometimes it’s just not that complicated.

— Quinn

(If this button doesn’t work, please don’t me mad, it’s our first time and we’re still figuring it out - just hit the “Read Online” button at the top, and scroll to the bottom of the post to comment)

News From My Notebook

Health & medicine

• Here come the mosquitoes (the screened porch is one of mankind’s best inventions)

• Could an mRNA treatment wipe out peanut allergies?

• Inside the online market for overseas abortion pills

• Air pollution is increasingly linked with both dementia and reduced lung function in kids

• Hear me out: could ice cream have health benefits? (Happy Birthday, Dad! I got you a study scientists are very confused about)

Climate

• Germany quit nuclear power, which isn’t helpful

• Puma, a brand I’m nowhear near fashionable enough to rock, opened up their supply chain to Gen Z sustainability nerds

• Why the next EV push is to electrify school buses

• Southeastern US seas are rising triple the global average

• Check out how your state’s clean electricity efforts are going

• The new EV rules are in — here’s 7 big takeaways before you go shopping

Food & water

• Wall Street made a run on the west’s precious groundwater supplies

• Speaking of: All those atmospheric rivers have temporarily reduced drought warnings, which is (truly) great, but flooding’s getting worse, and the Colorado River is still in trouble, so the feds finally stepped in

• Italy’s plan to ban lab-grown meat won’t help their climate issues

Beep Boop

• OpenAI launched a bug bounty program

  • Semi-related: Spain and Italy are investigating whether OpenAI breached GDPR

• Is ChatGPT hallucinating, or bullshitting?

• Millions of Facebook users had their info stolen in a ChatGPT app

  • Semi-related: WhatsApp made it harder for scammers to steal your account info

COVID

• COVID is climbing steadily in India — here’s why

  • Semi-related: Antimicrobial resistance is growing in India — and everywhere — because we’re over-prescribing them

• The jury is still out on how often you and we should get COVID boosters

Got YouTube?

It all started with Emma Pierson’s grandma (it always starts with somebody’s grandma). How is she using her family history (and AI) to answer life’s biggest questions?