Recent Bookmarks and Annotations
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Work Less, Get More Done: Analytics For Maximizing Productivity: MicroISV on a Shoestring on 2009-10-04
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Working harder is a particularly bad idea for startups because you are likely competing with people with resources which, relative to yours, are infinite. I compete with several educational publishers who employ tens of thousands. Paras competes with Google. Our competitors have more man-hours in a week than we’ll have in the next decade. Engaging them on those terms is madness.
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It is also set so that it gets cached for 24 hours, so that the monkey-brain WoW playing scrolling-numbers-are-dopamine-cast-into-integers side of me can’t get fascinated into sitting on the page and hitting refresh all day.
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You probably have something which could stand elimination in your business. If you’re using Lean Startup-style processes, you should find out which of your development efforts are being 100% wasted because your customers don’t want what you’re making. The solution to this is simple: stop that development.
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Worker Smarter, Not Harder. Then Go Home.
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“Working harder” is a poor strategy which your competitors can trivially replicate. Instead, spend some time measuring what tasks add value to your business and at what imputed wages. Outsource those tasks which are below your desired imputed wage, automate any task where appropriate, and simply don’t do things which don’t add value.
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We should work to live, not live to work, and maximizing what the economists call “leisure” and what I’d rather rebrand as “stuff of lasting importance” should be a major goal for our careers and businesses.
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Scientists may soon be able to erase fear and trauma from your mind - Telegraph on 2008-10-24
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The researchers think that the new technique could help war veterans get over the horrors of conflict
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t r u t h o u t | Can Obama See the Grand Canyon? on 2008-10-23
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Out in the stucco deserts of Limbaughland, moreover, fear is already being
distilled into a good ol' boy version of the "stab in the back" myth
that rallied the ruined German petite bourgeoisie to the swastika
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Although I've been studying Marxist crisis theory for decades, I
never believed I'd actually live to see financial capitalism commit suicide.
Or hear the International Monetary Fund warn of imminent "systemic meltdown."
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But the real culprits, of course, are not being trundled off to the guillotine;
they're gently floating to earth in golden parachutes. The rest of us may be
trapped on the burning plane without a pilot, but the despicable Richard Fuld,
who used Lehman Brothers to loot pension funds and retirement accounts, merely
sulks on his yacht.
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with the American way of life in sudden freefall, the
specter of star-spangled fascism doesn't seem quite so far-fetched.
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The Right
may lose the election, but it already possesses a sinister, historically-proven
blueprint for rapid recovery.
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In addition, both Obama and his vice presidential partner Joe Biden, in their
support for Secretary of the Treasury Paulson's plan, avoid any discussion of
the inevitable result of cataclysmic restructuring and government bailouts:
not "socialism," but ultra-capitalism -- one that is likely to concentrate
control of credit in a few leviathan banks, controlled in large part by sovereign
wealth funds but subsidized by generations of public debt and domestic austerity.
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If we are especially concerned about the fate of the poor or unemployed, we
are left to read between the lines, with no help from his talking points that
espouse clean coal technology, nuclear power, and a bigger military, but elide
the urgency of a renewed war on poverty as championed by John Edwards in his
tragically self-destructed primary campaign. But perhaps inside the cautious
candidate is a man whose humane passions transcend his own nearsighted centrist
campaign. As a close friend, exasperated by my chronic pessimism, chided me
the other day, "don't be so unfair. FDR didn't have a nuts and bolts program
either in 1933. Nobody did."
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In 1930, the factories may have been shuttered but
the machinery was still intact; it hadn't been auctioned off at five cents on
the dollar to China.
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Casino capitalism has proven its mettle by transmitting the deadly
virus of Wall Street at unprecedented velocity to every financial center on
the planet. What took three years at the beginning of the 1930s -- that is,
the full globalization of the crisis -- has taken only three weeks this time
around.
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More importantly, the
New Deal did not arise spontaneously from the goodwill or imagination of the
White House. On the contrary, the social contract for the post-1935 Second New
Deal was a complex, adaptive response to the greatest working-class movement
in our history, in a period when powerful third parties still roamed the political
landscape and Marxism exercised extraordinary influence on American intellectual
life.
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Even in the new military (largely a hereditary caste
of poor whites, blacks, and Latinos) demoralization is reaching the stage of
active discontent and opening up new spaces for alternative ideas.
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an intensified war in Afghanistan, that will enlarge the military-industrial
complex, none of this will replenish the supply of decent jobs nor prime a broken
national pump.
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However, in the midst of a deep slump, what a huge military budget
can do is obliterate the modest but essential reforms that make up Obama's plans
for healthcare, alternative energy, and education.
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It's worth asking, for instance, what in the actual substance of his foreign
policy agenda differentiates the Democratic candidate from the radioactive legacy
of the Bush Doctrine? Yes, he would close Guantanamo, talk to the Iranians,
and thrill hearts in Europe. He also promises to renew the Global War on Terror
(in much the same way that Bush senior and Clinton sustained the core policies
of Reaganism, albeit with a "more human face").
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the Democratic
candidate has chained himself, come hell or high water, to a global strategy
in which "victory" in the Middle East (and Central Asia) remains the
chief premise of foreign policy, with the Iraqi-style nation-building hubris
of Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz repackaged as a "realist" faith
in global "stabilization."
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Under huge pressure from Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats alike to cut the
budget and reduce the exponential increase in the national debt, what choices
would President Obama be forced to make early in his administration? More than
likely comprehensive health-care will be whittled down to a barebones plan,
"alternative energy" will simply mean the fraud of "clean coal,"
and anything that remains in the Treasury, after Wall Street's finished its
looting spree, will buy bombs to pulverize more Pashtun villages, ensuring yet
more generations of embittered mujahideen and jihadis.
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Am I unduly cynical? Perhaps, but I lived through the Lyndon Johnson years
and watched the War on Poverty, the last true New Deal program, destroyed to
pay for slaughter in Vietnam.
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It is bitterly ironic, but, I suppose, historically predictable that a presidential
campaign millions of voters have supported for its promise to end the war in
Iraq has now mortgaged itself to a "tougher than McCain" escalation
of a hopeless conflict in Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal frontier. In
the best of outcomes, the Democrats will merely trade one brutal, losing war
for another. In the worst case, their failed policies may set the stage for
the return of Cheney and Rove, or their even more sinister avatars.
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Op-Ed Columnist - Fire the Campaign - NYTimes.com on 2008-10-13
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It’s time for John McCain to fire his campaign.
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Its combination of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence has become toxic. If the race continues over the next three weeks to be a conventional one, McCain is doomed.
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Its combination of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence has become toxic. If the race continues over the next three weeks to be a conventional one, McCain is doomed.
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And let McCain go back to what he’s been good at in the past — running as a cheerful, open and accessible candidate.
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There are still enough doubts about Obama to allow McCain to win. But McCain needs to make his case, and do so as a serious but cheerful candidate for times that need a serious but upbeat leader.
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McCain can make the substantive case for his broadly centrist conservatism.
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our enemies won’t take a vacation because the markets are down
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At Wednesday night’s debate at Hofstra, McCain might want to volunteer a mild mea culpa about the extent to which the presidential race has degenerated into a shouting match. And then he can pledge to the voters that the last three weeks will feature a contest worthy of this moment in our history.
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The scariest thing about Sarah Palin isn't how unqualified she is - it's what her candidacy says about America | The Smirking Chimp on 2008-10-03
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So the only thing left is to stand mute against the fit-for-a-cheap-dog-kennel crowd-control fencing you see everywhere at these idiotic conventions and gnaw on weird new feelings of shock and anarchist rage as one would a rawhide chew toy.
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Only 21st-century Americans can pass through a metal detector six times in an hour and still think they're at a party.
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"She totally reminds me of my cousin!" the delegate screeched. "She's a real woman! The real thing!"
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Not because it makes sense, or because it has a chance of improving his life or anyone else's, but simply because it appeals to the low-humming narcissism that substitutes for his personality, because the image on TV reminds him of the mean, brainless slob he sees in the mirror every morning.
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Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she's a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove. But more than that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask for in return for the total surrender of our political power.
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Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she's the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV -and this country is going to eat her up, cheering her every step of the way.
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Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation.
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he had acted impulsively and out of utter desperation in choosing a cross-eyed political neophyte just two years removed from running a town smaller than the bleacher section at Fenway Park.
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by picking the most obviously unqualified, doomed-to-fail joke of a Bible-thumping buffoon
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As in: You want me to rally the base? Fine, I'll rally the base. Here, I'll choose this rifle-toting, serially pregnant moose killer who thinks God lobbies for oil pipelines. Happy now?
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The candidate sauntered to the lectern with the assurance of a sleepwalker
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present herself as just a humble gal with a beefcake husband and a brood of healthy, combat-ready spawn who just happened to be the innocent targets of a communist and probably also homosexual media conspiracy. It was a virtuoso performance.
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It was like watching Gidget address the Reichstag.
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the small-town girl with just enough looks and a defiantly incurious mind who thinks the PTA minutes are Holy Writ, and injustice means the woman next door owning a slightly nicer set of drapes or flatware.
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But it was hard not to recognize the genius of wedding that faltering brand of institutionalized greed to the image of the suburban American supermom.
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Palin herself burned this political symbiosis into the pages of history with her seminal crack about the "difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull: lipstick," blurring once and for all the lines between meanness on the grand political scale as understood by the Roves and Bushes of the world, and meanness of the small-town variety as understood by pretty much anyone who has ever sat around in his ranch-house den dreaming of a fourth plasma-screen TV or an extra set of KC HiLites for his truck, while some ghetto family a few miles away shares a husk of government cheese.
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But Sarah Palin is something new. She's all caricature.
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Palin wasn't the most qualified candidate, that the party "went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about narratives."
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The great insight of the Palin VP choice is that huge chunks of American voters no longer even demand that their candidates actually have policy positions; they simply consume them as media entertainment, rooting for or against them according to the reflexive prejudices of their demographic, as they would for reality-show contestants or sitcom characters.
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Not only did her party just preside over the largest government expansion since LBJ, but Palin herself has been a typical Bush-era Republican, borrowing and spending beyond her means.
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That means all us taxpaying non-Alaskans spend $8,500 a year on each and every resident of Palin's paradise of rugged self-sufficiency.
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Palin's crack about a mayor being "like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities" testified to the Republicans' apparent belief that they can win elections till the end of time running against the Sixties. (They're probably right.)
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tens of millions of patriotic flag-waving Americans whose first instinct when things get rough is to whine like bitches and blame other people -reporters, the French, those ungrateful blacks soaking up tax money eating big prison meals, whomever -for their failures.
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After eight years of unprecedented corruption, incompetence, waste and greed, the party of Karl Rove understood that 50 million Americans would not demand solutions to any of these problems so long as they were given a new, new thing to beat their meat over.
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Of course, if the daughter of a black candidate like Barack Obama showed up at his convention with a five-month bump and some sideways-capwearing, junior-grade Curtis Jackson holding her hand, the defenders of Traditional Morality would be up in arms.
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Then there's the God stuff: Palin belongs to a church whose pastor, Ed Kalnins, believes that all criticisms of George Bush "come from hell," and wondered aloud if people who voted for John Kerry could be saved. Kalnins, looming as the answer to Obama's Jeremiah Wright, claims that Alaska is going to be a "refuge state" for Christians in the last days, last days which he sometimes speaks of in the present tense. Palin herself has been captured on video mouthing the inevitable born-again idiocies, such as the idea that a recent oilpipeline deal was "God's will." She also described the Iraq War as a "task that is from God" and part of a heavenly "plan." She supports teaching creationism and "abstinence only" in public schools, opposes abortion even for victims of rape, denies the science behind global warming and attends a church that seeks to convert Jews and cure homosexuals.
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She's a puffed-up dimwit with primitive religious beliefs who had to be educated as to the fact that the Constitution did not exactly envision government executives firing librarians.
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But Americans like politicians who hate books and see the face of Jesus in every tree stump. They like them stupid and mean and ignorant of the rules.
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As governor of Alaska, Palin presides over a state whose entire population is barely the size of Memphis. This kind of thing might matter in a country that actually worried about whether its leader was prepared for his job -but not in America.
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As politicians, both men are more narrative than substance, with McCain rising to prominence on the back of his bio as a suffering war hero and Obama mostly playing the part of the long-lost, futureembracing liberal dreamboat not seen on the national stage since Bobby Kennedy died.
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So, sure, Barack Obama might be every bit as much a slick piece of imageering as Sarah Palin. The difference is in what the image represents. The Obama image represents tolerance, intelligence, education, patience with the notion of compromise and negotiation, and a willingness to stare ugly facts right in the face, all qualities we're actually going to need in government if we're going to get out of this huge mess we're in.
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Here's what Sarah Palin represents: being a fat fucking pig who pins "Country First" buttons on his man titties and chants "U-S-A! U-S-A!" at the top of his lungs while his kids live off credit cards and Saudis buy up all the mortgages in Kansas.
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The truly disgusting thing about Sarah Palin isn't that she's totally unqualified, or a religious zealot, or married to a secessionist, or unable to educate her own daughter about sex, or a fake conservative who raised taxes and horked up earmark millions every chance she got. No, the most disgusting thing about her is what she says about us: that you can ram us in the ass for eight solid years, and we'll not only thank you for your trouble, we'll sign you up for eight more years, if only you promise to stroke us in the right spot for a few hours around election time.
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Democracy doesn't require a whole lot of work of its citizens, but it requires some: It requires taking a good look outside once in a while, and considering the bad news and what it might mean, and making the occasional tough choice, and soberly taking stock of what your real interests are.
This is a very different thing from shopping, which involves passively letting sitcoms melt your brain all day long and then jumping straight into the TV screen to buy a Southern-Style Chicken Sandwich because the slob singing "I'm Lovin' It!" during the commercial break looks just like you. The joy of being a consumer is that it doesn't require thought, responsibility, self-awareness or shame: All you have to do is obey the first urge that gurgles up from your stomach. And then obey the next. And the next. And the next.
And when it comes time to vote, all you have to do is put your Country First -- just like that lady on TV who reminds you of your cousin. U-S-A, baby. U-S-A! U-S-A!
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Speak correctly, or build a big bunker -- chicagotribune.com on 2008-10-02
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Allow me to introduce myself. I am a traitor and an idiot. Also, my mother should have aborted me and left me in a Dumpster, but since she didn't, I should "off" myself.
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Anyone who dares express an opinion that runs counter to the party line will be silenced. That doesn't sound American to me, but Stalin would approve.
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But when we decide that a person is a traitor and should die for having an opinion different than one's own, then we cross into territory that puts all freedoms at risk. (I hear you, Dixie Chicks.)
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Steven Guess: Wall Street bail-out represents the end of the Reagan Revolution | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk on 2008-09-29
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As Paul Krugman recently remarked: "Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no libertarians in a financial crisis."
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We are blaming consumers for trying to get easy credit, and financial institutions for trying to make lots of money. Is that not how the system was supposed to work? How can we second-guess willing sellers and willing buyers who purchased mortgage-backed securities at their market rate? Their risk, their reward – but apparently not their loss. The invisible hand seems all too obviously elitist. The rich are in trouble, so we act. The poor have been in trouble since the beginning of time, but that's just background noise on our walk to work.
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Fiscal conservatives tried and failed to make the central component of the bailout a combination of deregulation and tax cuts.
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While no one can yet suggest America is on the verge of a second New Deal, paradigm shifts are often not obviously apparent at the time they occur.
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Corporate executives should not have the right to risk the entire American economy – indeed the global economy – as part of their portfolio management, regardless of Ayn Rand's philosophical musings.
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While Republicans struggle to explain how the irresponsible decisions of executives and consumers are to blame, but their own policies which afforded them this opportunity are not, one wonders about the legacy of Reagan's economic policies. It seems that in a time of serious economic crisis, Americans will turn to Roosevelt rather than Reagan. Doing nothing simply isn't an option, and tax cuts and deregulation in a time of corporate excess makes little sense. It is only natural to wonder if this is more than a temporary shift in political discourse.
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Is Google Making Us Stupid? on 2008-07-01
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When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
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When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration
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the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.”
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In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.
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About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the approval of Midvale’s owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.
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More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher.
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“For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.”
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Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”
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And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.”
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“filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.”
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He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would
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expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).
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Coding Horror: Don't Go Dark on 2008-06-18
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Dropping code-bombs on communities is rarely good for the project: the team is either forced to reject it outright, or accept it and deal with a giant opaque blob that is hard to understand, change, or maintain. It moves the project decidedly in one direction without much discussion or consensus.
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programmers do not want to write code out in the open
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I don't think it's hubris so much as fear of embarrassment. Rather than think of programming as an inherently social activity, most coders seem to treat it as an arena for personal heroics, and will do anything to protect that myth. They're fine with sharing code, as long as they present themselves as infallible, it seems. Maybe it's just human nature.
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When somebody surfaces and the deliverable isn't done, we know right away. We know that this week we slipped one day. That's worth knowing, much better than getting to the end of the project and observing, "Oh, we slipped six months!" At that point it's too late to even bother counting up how much you've slipped.
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This is easier to deal with in the workplace, because you typically have some kind of (theoretically) rational project management in place, and everyone works under the same umbrella. It's effectively impossible to go dark if you're practicing any form of agile software development.
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Tasks are always sliced up so they fit into a single iteration, and you never let them spill over into multiple iterations. You'll always have something to show at the end of each iteration. You can't go dark without quitting the project or, perhaps, your job.
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'Dead man' wakes up as doctors prepare to remove his organs - 11 Jun 2008 - NZ Herald: World / International News on 2008-06-11
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The case of a man whose heart stopped beating for 1½ hours only to revive just as doctors were preparing to remove his organs for transplants
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It was at that point that the astonished surgeons noticed the man was beginning to breathe unaided again, his pupils were active, he was giving signs that he could feel pain - and finally, his heart started beating again.
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the man can walk and talk.
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"During the meeting, other reanimators ... spoke of situations in which a person whom everyone was sure had died in fact survived after reanimation efforts that went on much longer than usual," the minutes of the committee meeting say.
"Participants conceded that these were completely exceptional cases, but ones that were nevertheless seen in the course of a career."
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