City Paper has an eye-opening inside look at how much you make being an Uber driver in Philly.

So many choice nuggets, here are just a few:

So it’s no wonder the taxi industry is having so much trouble competing with Uber — taxi companies have to pay to maintain, acquire and insure all the cars in a taxi fleet. Uber’s drivers shoulder that burden themselves, with expenses eating around 20 percent of total gross fares. And Uber’s gross fares, according to a Business Insider tipster, are expected to hit $10 billion in 2015.

And:

Driving for UberX isn’t the worst-paying job I’ve ever had. I made less scooping ice cream as a 15-year-old, if you don’t adjust for inflation. If I worked 10 hours a day, six days a week with one week off, I’d net almost $30,000 a year before taxes.

Uber, you know, a company “valued” at 50 billion dollars.

What did Chris Rock say? Behind every great fortune, is a great crime?

via Daring Fireball

Fresh site from Work & Co.

In a sea of cookie-cutter, trend-following portfolio/agency sites, this shows there’s nothing stopping companies from making great ones.

This was the remote control car I had in middle school:

Blast from the past thanks to Coudal!

image via sci-fi-o-rama

Remember Leeroy Jenkins from 10 years ago?

Director Finn O’Hara made it into an epic, 3-minute short film.

via Rands in Repose

IN 1890, the American psychologist William James famously likened our conscious experience to the flow of a stream. “A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described,” he wrote. “In talking of it hereafter, let’s call it the stream of thought, consciousness, or subjective life.”

While there is no disputing the aptness of this metaphor in capturing our subjective experience of the world, recent research has shown that the “stream” of consciousness is, in fact, an illusion. We actually perceive the world in rhythmic pulses rather than as a continuous flow.

—Gregory Hickok shedding new light on how the brain works

—Jason Kottke

That Cribs episode with Redman back in 2001?

It was real:

It’s rare, but sometimes less is more in hip-hop. That’s always been the case for Redman, who appears literally covered in dirt on his second and third album covers, and who has spun a career out of rhymes about “grimy shit” and dressing “bummy for low profile.”

All of which made him the least likely subject imaginable when Cribs premiered on MTV in 2000. Next to the shameless bourgeois excess of his rap contemporaries like Jermaine Dupri and Master P, both of whom made appearances on the show, Red’s duplex in the farthest reaches of Staten Island — “De La Casa,” as he calls it — was a momentous outlier. Though the clip first aired in 2001, it remains burned into the collective pop culture consciousness, along with its images of his gold plaques covered in soiled laundry.

Yet there’s been speculation over the years that the whole thing was faked. So we decided to settle matters once and for all, and called everyone involved. The verdict: it was real. And as the show’s creators, and Red himself, and his cousin, explain below, it took hip-hop’s proudest “stankin’ ass” to show everybody that a sense of humor trumps a platinum bidet any day, and that even in the land of gilded ballers, there’s still room for a funny dude who keeps his cash inside a shoebox to be king.

Amidst all the other episodes of douchebaggery and opulence, this episode was refreshing and now it’s a classic.

If you haven’t see the clip, shame on you.

Lindsey Green has a theory:

Here’s the theory: In Green’s post, “Where Don Draper Ends, D.B. Cooper Begins,” she supposes that Don Draper is about to pull his most daring identity theft yet—he’s going to turn into a real, historical figure.

“D.B. Cooper” is the pseudonym of a man who permanently skipped town in November of 1971 by skyjacking a Boeing 727 in the most Don Draperian way a man could skyjack an airplane. Clad in a suit and tie, Cooper handed a note to a flight attendant. She presumed it was his phone number until he whispered over to her, “Miss, you’d better look at that note. I have a bomb.”

Very intriguing.

All I know is there are a ton of open-ended subplots and there’s no way they’ll all be tied up in last two episodes.

Knowing what what I know about Matthew Weiner, I can only assume this is all by design.

via parislemon

Image taken from Slate (via kottke)

R.L. Stine on cell phones “ruining” movies (via parislemon):

You know, cell phones have ruined everything. They’ve ruined every plot, seriously. You used to have this plot where the girl is getting these frightening phone calls and she’s trying to figure out who’s calling her. You can’t do that story anymore [because the name is] right there on the phone.

This is bullshit.

The Departed is a great example where the entire plot exists because of cellphones.

Talk about tension.

In case you forgot, the second Death Star was built by contractors.

I’ve been working on a new book since last July. Back in October I wrote, “I’ve been told that becoming a parent lights a fire under your ass like nothing else, so we’ll see what happens.” Ha.

I made a promise to Owen before he was born that I would not use him as an excuse to fail at The Thing I needed to do.

Oh sure, I would use him as an excuse for plenty of other things I didn’t want to do, like answer emails or attend various social functions, but I would not use him as an excuse to give up on The Thing.

Writers are constantly looking for excuses not to write, but there’s nothing more pathetic than a man who blames his family for not being able to write.

—Austin Kleon, On writing post-fatherhood

I’ve also made a promise to myself that if and when I have a child I won’t use him/her for an excuse not to design, or screen print or make whatever is I’m making. It’s a cop out.

If you really want something, you find a way to get it.

At least I do.

Art schools are at the forefront of the sustained attack on humanities that Marina Warner has written so brilliantly about. One of the slogans of those occupying Central Saint Martins is simply this: “We’re an art school not a business.” Languages, humanities, social sciences and particularly arts are subject to huge losses in funding and are expected to do just this: become businesses. This is the only model that our politicians understand. Hence we keep being told that the creative industries do employ lots of people. Every film made here requires carpenters and electricians and so on. The argument that art or culture is valuable only when it is monetised is a dangerous one. A false dichotomy between science and art has been set up – first by Labour with the Browne review, and now amplified by the Tories. So Stem subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) are seen to be financially viable. Which of our ministers has a degree in maths or science I wonder?

—Suzanne Moore, The Guardian