Toolleeo's links
Elites are finding more ways to ensure that their children never run out of chances to fail.
If you already don’t want to talk to your kids about sex, then it’s probably a safe bet that you really don’t want to talk to them about pornography. But with how easily accessible porn is on the internet and the prevalence of computers, tablets and smartphones in the hands of our kids (or their friends), they will almost certainly stumble upon it at some point—and probably at a much younger age than you’d expect.
I often advocate people surrounding me to build their own side projects. I believe they can fulfill you in so many ways: for your career, your relationships, or your independence. Buffer, the company I currently work for, was itself a side project.
I’ve built myself multiple side projects. The major ones being PartyInBeijing (inactive), Nodablock (inactive), Citymayor (need to fix), and now TravelHustlers. I believe each of them contributed and lead me to my current situation: being satisfied in my career, financially, and socially.
The best designers employ specific habits, learned practices, and observed principles when they work. Here are a few of them.
- Experts involve the user
- Experts design elegant abstractions
- Experts focus on the essence
- Experts simulate continually
- Experts look around
- Experts reshape the problem space
- Experts see error as opportunity
- Experts think about what they are not designing
(read the article: nice pictures to visualize the different concepts :-))
Stretched for time, some households are starting to operate more like businesses.
The automobile took over because the legal system helped squeeze out the alternatives.
Il sistema Bedaux era un sistema di lavoro creato, durante la prima metà del Novecento, per aumentare al massimo la produzione industriale eliminando i tempi morti. Prende il nome da Charles Eugène Bedaux, ingegnere parigino morto negli Stati Uniti d'America, che caratterizzò con questo metodo la disciplina del cottimo.
Esso consisteva sostanzialmente in una campionatura del lavoro e, precisamente, nel cronometrare il tempo impiegato dall'operaio per ogni singola operazione; in seguito veniva fissata la quantità di lavoro che poteva essere effettuata in quella porzione di tempo e veniva stabilito un tempo standard che determinava la paga base.
Tens of thousands of Hongkongers took to the streets to protest what they saw as creeping tyranny from a powerful threat. But they did it in a very particular way. In Hong Kong, most people use a contactless smart card called an "Octopus card" to pay for everything from transit, to parking, and even retail purchases. It's pretty handy: Just wave your tentacular card over the sensor and make your way to the platform. But no one used their Octopus card to get around Hong Kong during the protests. The risk was that a government could view the central database of Octopus transactions to unmask these democratic ne'er-do-wells. Traveling downtown during the height of the protests? You could get put on a list, even if you just happened to be in the area.
So the savvy subversives turned to cash instead. Normally, the lines for the single-ticket machines that accept cash are populated only by a few confused tourists, while locals whiz through the turnstiles with their fintech wizardry. But on protest days, the queues teemed with young activists clutching old school paper notes. As one protestor told Quartz: "We're afraid of having our data tracked." Using cash to purchase single tickets meant that governments couldn't connect activists' activities with their Octopus accounts. It was instant anonymity. Sure, it was less convenient. And one-off physical tickets cost a little more than the Octopus equivalent. But the trade-off of avoiding persecution and jail time was well worth it.
What could protestors do in a cashless world...? If some of our eggheads had their way, the protestors would have had no choice.
More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.
One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”
Venture capitalist Nick Hanauer points out the obvious: Low wages create and sustain poverty, not lousy schools. Hanauer encapsulates conventional wisdom:
"Once upon a time, America created a public-education system that was the envy of the modern world. No nation produced more or better-educated high-school and college graduates, and thus the great American middle class was built. But then, sometime around the 1970s, America lost its way. We allowed our schools to crumble, and our test scores and graduation rates to fall. School systems that once churned out well-paid factory workers failed to keep pace with the rising educational demands of the new knowledge economy. As America's public-school systems foundered, so did the earning power of the American middle class. And as inequality increased, so did political polarization, cynicism, and anger, threatening to undermine American democracy itself."
For most of my adult life, I’ve railed against “corporate capitalism”, “consumer capitalism” and “crony capitalism”. It took me a long time to see that the problem is not the adjective, but the noun.
While some people have rejected capitalism gladly and swiftly, I’ve done so slowly and reluctantly. Part of the reason was that I could see no clear alternative: unlike some anti-capitalists, I have never been an enthusiast for state communism. I was also inhibited by its religious status. To say “capitalism is failing” in the 21st century is like saying “God is dead” in the 19th. It is secular blasphemy. It requires a degree of self-confidence I did not possess.
But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to recognise two things. First, that it is the system, rather than any variant of the system, which drives us inexorably towards disaster. Second, that you do not have to produce a definitive alternative to say that capitalism is failing. The statement stands in its own right. But it also demands another, and different, effort to develop a new system.
Capitalism’s failures arise from two of its defining elements. The first is perpetual growth. Economic growth is the aggregate effect of the quest to accumulate capital and extract profit. Capitalism collapses without growth, yet perpetual growth on a finite planet leads inexorably to environmental calamity.