This video made me smile.
It also made me think about how archaic the act of sticking out our hands to summon a vehicle is.
“Grandpa, what’s a taxi cab?”
“Oh they were these yellow automobiles, driven by humans, that would take you where ever you wanted to go in New York and you would get them to pick you up by standing in the road and sticking out your arm to hail one.”
“They didn’t drive themselves and you couldn’t use your neural chip to give it commands?”
“Nope.”
In Back to the Future Part II they led us to believe we’d have flying cars, hoverboards and auto-lacing sneakers by 2015.
Wrong on all counts.
We have people running around looking for imaginary Pokémon. They’re also accomplishing all sorts of other things like the woman who found a dead body behind a Holocaust Memorial in New Hampshire, the 2 California men who fell off the edge of an ocean bluff while playing, or the wonderful criminals that are using the game to rob people.
Welcome to the future.
Seth Godin says you should read more blogs.
I agree.
If you use Feedly — like I’ve been doing since Google Reader went away – you can find Daily Exhaust there.
The mass killing in Orlando this weekend fits a grim pattern: Every lethal terrorist attack in the United States in the past decade and a half has been carried out by American citizens or legal permanent residents, operating either as lone wolves or in pairs, who have no formal connections or training from terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda or ISIS.
Because 9/11 was carried out by 19 Arab foreign-born terrorists, many Americans may think that terrorist attacks in the United States are carried out by foreigners, rather than by U.S. citizens.
But Omar Mateen, who on Sunday carried out the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11, is an American citizen who was born in New York to parents who immigrated to the United States from Afghanistan.
—Peter Bergen, CNN
Last week Basecamp CEO Jason Fried published a great piece on all the ways group chat applications like Slack are bad.
The whole piece is a must-read, but here’s one nugget:
Many chat platforms put a little green dot next to people telling you they are online/available. That’s called presence, and it’s worse than you might expect. It’s professional pressure to stay logged into chat. It’s saying “if you aren’t green, you aren’t at work”. Quitting chat suggests you aren’t part of the group. And that pressure forces you to keep a chat room open all day. Which forces you to absorb the blows of all-day distractions while you’re trying to actually get the work done you’re supposed to be doing. It’s just a modern version of the outdated butts in seats. Sure you can say do not disturb, but the true version of do not disturb is quitting the app.
In the world of technology, I believe there are very view examples of ‘the good old days’. Computers were always slower and monitors were always lower resolution than they are now. Always. I should know because I’ve been on computers since 1981.
There’s one example that bucks this trend: instant messaging. I miss the days of AIM, aka AOL Instant Messenger. What I miss about AIM is explicitly signing on and signing off. In fact, that was an explicit declaration I used to make with my friends and coworkers when were were mid-chat and ready to sign off, “OK, Mark. I’m out. Late.”
This world doesn’t exist anymore. We’re always online and always available. Apple’s Messages app even gives you the ability to send read confirmations on iMessages you’ve received and opened. I turned this option off years ago.
It’s important for a company to have a strong culture defined so employees clearly understand the rules around instant messaging and the environment such rules aim to establish.
Shit, do I have to spell it out for these people?
Yes. Yes you do.
The fact that Jason Fried wrote the piece mentioned above and he’s the CEO of his company makes a world of difference than if he were just a designer or project manager. Company culture is established at the top, and communicated to the rest of the company. It never happens the other way around.
Over at Re/Code, Ina Fried searched for the most TED thing at TED:
I thought I had found the TED-iest of them all: A helicopter trip to the top of a mountain to play ice hockey on a frozen lake while being instructed by former pros.
But there were a couple problems. First off, the hockey experience sold out in minutes despite the $3,000-plus price tag. That meant no room on the helicopter for poor scribes hoping to glom on.
Undeterred, I arrived Wednesday hoping that someone was out partying too late with Al Gore and was too hung-over to turn up for their helicopter-and-hockey tour. But it turned out there was an even bigger problem, one Gore has been warning about — global warming. The lake in question wasn’t frozen, so the whole thing got canceled.
Seems TED has crawled up its own ass, not unlike what you see in the real Silicon Valley and the (barely) parodied version on HBO.
On a related note, check out this interview with Eddie Huang on The Joe Rogan Experience where he describes the cult-like rules when you’re a TED fellow.
Low-Income Americans Face Internet Access That Is Slow, at Risk of Disruption:
The good news is that the vast majority of Americans, even low-income ones, now have some access to the Internet. The bad news is that many are “under-connected,” with mobile-only access that is subject to data caps or interruption due to payment issues.
A new study of lower-income parents found that 94 percent had some kind of Internet connection, but more than half said their connections were slow and almost a quarter rely solely on a mobile device. One in five said their Internet was cut off some time in the last year due to inability to pay. The study, conducted by Sesame Workshop’s Joan Ganz Cooney Center and Rutgers University, also found disparities based on ethnicities.
Remember when the Internet was talked about as being “the great democratizer”? Good times.
Compared with other countries, Americans still pay the most for the slowest service.
On top of this knowledge, a liberal education should make certain habits of rationality second nature. Educated people should be able to express complex ideas in clear writing and speech. They should appreciate that objective knowledge is a precious commodity, and know how to distinguish vetted fact from superstition, rumor, and unexamined conventional wisdom. They should know how to reason logically and statistically, avoiding the fallacies and biases to which the untutored human mind is vulnerable. They should think causally rather than magically, and know what it takes to distinguish causation from correlation and coincidence. They should be acutely aware of human fallibility, most notably their own, and appreciate that people who disagree with them are not stupid or evil. Accordingly, they should appreciate the value of trying to change minds by persuasion rather than intimidation or demagoguery.
I believe (and believe I can persuade you) that the more deeply a society cultivates this knowledge and mindset, the more it will flourish.
—Steven Pinker
via Twitter
Shkreli fraud arrest incites schadenfreude fest:
December is a festive month for most cultures around the globe, but yesterday was an especially jolly day on Twitter. People were mirthful and friendly and humorous, and all it took for them to bond together into such a united whole was the arrest of a despised pharmaceutical CEO by the name of Martin Shkreli.
I sometimes wish we could write headlines as caustic as this tweet. It gets right to the point: Shkreli is disliked because, firstly, his company cranked up the price of an HIV-treating drug by 5,500 percent (“price gouging”), and secondly, he’s remained completely unrepentant about it (“fuck-tard”). As to attention whoring, Shkreli has a habit of posting multi-hour live streams of himself doing not much at all, plus he splashed out $2 million to buy the only copy of Wu-Tang’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin album.
You see that? No, you don’t, but I’m doing a little dance over here.
Now Bill Murray, go get that Wu Tang album back.
Let’s see how things go for Microsoft with Windows 10, but right now, Windows Phone is still a fucking mess:
While the app gap has always been a problem, Windows Phone is now five years old and it’s still facing new challenges. Over the past year developers haven’t flocked to Microsoft’s platform to improve its app situation. Instead, more and more high-profile apps have actually disappeared. Mint’s removal this week is the latest, angering Windows Phone fans, but it’s not the first, nor will it be the last.
American Airlines, Chase Bank, Bank of America, NBC, Pinterest, and Kabam have all discontinued their Windows Phone apps in the past year. These huge apps have simply disappeared or will no longer be updated. Some companies have cited a lack of Windows Phone users, and others have remained silent, but each removal has put Microsoft another step behind in the mobile race.
And on Microsoft’s constant rebooting of the OS:
It’s easy to blame the lack of apps on developers, but they’ve been saddled with a platform that is constantly rebooting. Windows Phone 7 launched as a Windows Mobile reboot back in October 2010. Windows Phone 8 then launched two years later in October 2012 and existing handsets couldn’t upgrade, and apps needed to be heavily updated. Windows Phone 8.1 arrived last year, finally bringing many features lacking from Microsoft’s platform. Now, Microsoft is on the verge of rebooting once again with Windows 10 Mobile.
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I think what Microsoft presented at their Windows 10 Devices Event looks great, but who’s to say they don’t just reboot Windows 10 like Windows 7 & 8?
Microsoft had a very short window to respond to the iPhone six years ago, but Google beat them to it with Android. Since then, they’ve simultaneously been revising their strategy AND competing with Google and Apple (hence the schizophrenic behavior).
Nick Fulton on people with phones out at concerts:
Sadly, memory-making as visual bootlegging is now wholly a part of the live music experience and it has been since the advent of smartphones. Watching people not watch, or watch through their screens, or simply hit record and clumsily loft the phone above them—what’s the purpose? To remember for all time? To share the experience? What friend is going to be impressed or even have the patience to watch a barely focused video shot from hundreds of feet away, the audio blown out, the shouted-along chorus of the superfan in seat 78JJ muting the band itself?
It’s time we stopped being so tolerant of these serial snappists.
Sometimes I take my phone out at concerts, but I try to be as quick about it as possible. In general, though, I try to keep my shit in my pocket.
If performers want people to not use phones, they need to tell them because people are idiots and need to be told what to do.
I’m getting very close to launching my next Kickstarter project and signing up for my new newsletter is a great way to stay informed:
Gabriel Metcalf on San Francisco’s serious lack of affordability:
But for cities like San Francisco that now have 35 years of growth behind them, the urban problems of today are utterly different from what they were a generation or two ago. Instead of disinvestment, blight and stagnation, we are dealing with the problems of rapid change and the stresses of growth: congestion and, most especially, high housing costs.
When more people want to live in a city, it drives up the cost of housing—unless a commensurate amount of places to live are added. By the early 1990s it was clear that San Francisco had a fateful choice to make: Reverse course on its development attitudes, or watch America’s rekindled desire for city life overwhelm the openness and diversity that had made the city so special.
When San Francisco should have been building at least 5,000 new housing units a year to deal with the growing demand to live here, it instead averaged only about 1,500 a year over the course of several decades. In a world where we have the ability to control the supply of housing locally, but people still have the freedom to move where they want, all of this has played out in predictable ways.
Things have to change. San Francisco is a port city. Prime real estate. Barring an earthquake that swallows the city (actually likely) people are not moving out.
