8. Take the long view
If your culture is dependent on this quarter’s earnings or this month’s sales targets, then it is handicapped by short-term thinking. Passion capitalists take the long view. We tend to overestimate what we can do in a year, but underestimate what we can do in five years. The culture needs to look ahead, not just in months but in years and even decades.
The writer Arthur Koestler said that a writer’s ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years’ time and for one reader in a hundred years’ time. Lasting influence is better than a burst of fame. Keep an eye on the long view.
via 8 Rules For Creating A Passionate Work Culture | Fast Company.
rePost::How Religions Demand for Obedience Keeps Us in the Dark Ages | Daylight Atheism | Big Think
That most of the Kashrut laws are divine ordinances without reason given is 100 per cent the point. It is very easy not to murder people. Very easy. It is a little bit harder not to steal because one is tempted occasionally. So that is no great proof that I believe in God or am fulfilling His will. But, if He tells me not to have a cup of coffee with milk in it with my mincemeat and peas at lunchtime, that is a test. The only reason I am doing that is because I have been told to so do. It is something difficult.In other words, the kosher laws have no reason or justification, and thats a good thing, because they teach people the habit of unquestioning obedience, which should be encouraged. This uncannily resembles a piece of parenting advice from Stephen Colbert, who satirically wrote that “Arbitrary rules teach kids discipline: If every rule made sense, they wouldnt be learning respect for authority, theyd be learning logic”. Religious authorities like this rabbi are making the exact same argument in all seriousness! And then, of course, theres Islam, whose very name is Arabic for “submission”.
via How Religions Demand for Obedience Keeps Us in the Dark Ages | Daylight Atheism | Big Think.
Holiday 1938
For posterity’s sake. Just finished watching Holiday 1938 starring Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant. I soo love this film.
‘Buti nga’ | Inquirer Opinion
What this situation reminds me of is that of the movie Snake Eyes. The prosecution better be sure they don’t have secret bank accounts because they are also on the public eye and definitely under the cross hairs of people against corruption.
Naman naman.
Ewan ko sayo at mga katribo mo, pero sa ganang amin—kaming tinutukoy sa mga surveys na namamangha kung bakit nand’yan ka pa, palakasan lang talaga ng apog—sukang-suka na kami sa katiwalian, kawalanghiyaan, kalokohan. Ngayon pang nagkaroon sa wakas ng pagkakataon na puksain ang mga ito, di na kami bibitaw. Muling nagkaroon ng sigla ang mga katagang binigkas namin kay Marcos at Arroyo noon: Tama na, sobra na, palitan na. Panahon na para magkaroon tayo ng mas disenteng pamumuhay. Panahon na para magkaroon tayo ng panibagong buhay.
Lalabas ka sa wakas sa impeachment court?
Buti nga, nang magkabistuhan na.
via ‘Buti nga’ | Inquirer Opinion.
Hobbs, NM, picked as site of scientific ghost town – Boston.com
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—A scientific ghost town in the heart of southeastern New Mexico oil and gas country will hum with the latest next-generation technology — but no people.
A $1 billion city without residents will be developed in Lea County near Hobbs, officials said Tuesday, to help researchers test everything from intelligent traffic systems and next-generation wireless networks to automated washing machines and self-flushing toilets.
Hobbs Mayor Sam Cobb said the unique research facility that looks like an empty city will be a key for diversifying the economy of the nearby community, which after the oil bust of the 1980s saw bumper stickers asking the last person to leave to turn out the lights.
“It brings so many great opportunities and puts us on a world stage,” Cobb told The Associated Press before the announcement.
Pegasus Holdings and its New Mexico subsidiary, CITE Development, said Hobbs and Lea County beat out Las Cruces, for the Center for Innovation, Technology and Testing.
The CITE project is being billed as a first-of-its kind smart city, or ghost town of sorts, that will be developed on about 15 square miles west of Hobbs.
via Hobbs, NM, picked as site of scientific ghost town – Boston.com.
Badass of the Week: Anthony Omari
But Anthony Omari didn’t go down immediately. Bleeding intensely from the face, his vision obscured by blood and rapidly becoming dimmer and more blurry by the minute, Omari swing wildly, connecting with his assailant, driving the cowardly asshole back once again. Stumbling, his strength failing him, Omari ran to the front door of the home, closed it, and locked it. Only after the orphans were safe did he allow himself to pass out.
It took 11 stitches, and it’s going to leave the kind of badass scar that action movie characters can only dream about (the closest thing that comes to mind is Kurt Russell in Soldier) but after only two days in the hospital Omari was back at the Faraja Children’s Home, taking care of his beloved orphans once again.
In the end, Anthony Omari saved the orphans not only with his hammer, but with his incredible story of personal bravery in the face of incomprehensible danger. When word of his battle reached Ben Hardwick, a 21 year-old Penn State student working as an intern at a facility nearby, Ben came to talk to him. Impressed by the story, and further concerned for the safety of both Omari and the children, Hardwick put the dude’s story up on Reddit, asking for $2,000 in donations so Omari could build a bigger fence to keep those assholes out.
He received $65,000 in the first twenty-four hours. At last count, the total was up to $83k in donations from Blues Brothers in 46 countries, or roughly 40 times the amount requested – more than enough to build the 8-foot stone fence Omari needed, plus new beds for the kids (some of whom were just sleeping on mattresses on the floor), two full-time night security guards, and extra padlocks for the doors, while still having enough left over to purchase dogs that shoot bees out of their mouths and automated robotic anti-douchebag defense turrets. For a tiny, cash-strapped orphanage in a remote part of Kenya that has spent the last decade struggling just to provide food for their children, eighty grand can go a long way.
via Badass of the Week: Anthony Omari.
The Day Programmer vs. The Night Programmer « notgartner
Now – day programmers are the most prevalent in this industry, and you find them mostly in organisations which have historically tolerated a certain amount of inefficiency. Day programmers have the following characteristics:
1. They are mostly led and seldom lead.
2. The have trouble coping with complexity.
3. They cannot visualise a solution.
4. They don’t load their development tools at home.
5. Typically don’t participate in the development community.
6. See programming as “just a job”.
via The Day Programmer vs. The Night Programmer « notgartner.
Warren Buffett Is A Punk | TechCrunch
I don’t think Buffett is a bad guy. I don’t know him. I have no personal opinion of him. But he’s not your grandfather. Like any hard-core investor, he’d slit your throat in a dark alley before letting you make a dime of profit off of him.My main point is: always look at agendas. Try to understand the real reasons behind someone’s “good reasons”. And yes, I know there will be comments like “blah blah Buffett is 1000x the investor and man you are.” He probably is. I’m probably a worse punk thank he is. But I admit it. Also, before anyone brings it up: why is this on TechCrunch? Buffett has long commented that “tech is too complicated for me to invest in” and yet now he is one of the largest tech investors on the planet with his investments in IBM, INTC, and DTV. When someone who is so good at crafting agendas turns his eye towards you, you better keep your hands on your wallet.
via Warren Buffett Is A Punk | TechCrunch.
Bus Ride To Work 2012 05 09
3 Thoughts while going to work riding one of those yellow Metrolink Ayala/LRT buses.
- I remember the free market as characterized by a skating rink, nobody directs it but nobody bumps into each other most of the time. I’d rather characterize it as the QC Circle during after or about rush hour. The Big Buses are the Big Corporation. The motorcyle commuter are the individuals, the cars are the small enterprise, the small delivery trucks are the medium enterprise. The Big 10 Wheelers are the too big too fail. I’ll expound on this in a later post.
- I was surprised that a cursory look at a person begging for help for a brother who died while working as a tricycle driver had seven twenty peso bills and more than 20 pesos in coins. Either people are more generous now or this bus is an outlier. Your belief in this actually shows more about you than in my my observation.
- I wrap my tickets with the money I get for change and stupidly I gave twenty pesos to the person asking for help (See number one). A ticket inspector started checking tickets. I asked to be bypassed because I have yet to realize my mistake. When I finally realized it I called the conductor and paid again. He was dumb founded and asked, Haven’t I given you a ticket already(In tagalog)? I told him I lost it but I’m paying so I won’t have to explain to the inspector. He gave me change and a ticket for the minimum fair. I was surprised because he gave me a discount without me asking for it.
Erik Naggum's XML rant
| And how would you improve on it?
A brief summary, then: Remove the syntactic mess that is attributes.
(You will then find that you do not need them at all.) Enclose the
/element/ in matching delimiters, not the tag. These simple things
makes people think differently about how they use the language.
Contrary to the foolish notion that syntax is immaterial, people
optimize the way they express themselves, and so express themselves
differently with different syntaxes. Next, introduce macros that
look exactly like elements, but that are expanded in place between
the reader and the “object model”. Then, remove the obnoxious
character entities and escape special characters with a single
character, like \, and name other entities with letters following
the same character. If you need a rich set of publishing symbols,
discover Unicode. Finally, introduce a language for micro-parsers
than can take more convenient syntaxes for commonly used elements
with complex structure and make them /return/ element structures
more suitable for processing on the receiving end, and which would
also make validation something useful. The overly simple regular
expression look-alike was a good idea when processing was expensive
and made all decisions at the start-tag, but with a DOM and less
stream-like processing, a much better language should be specified
that could also do serious computation before validating a document
— so that once again processing could become cheaper because of the
“markup”, not more expensive because of it.
But the one thing I would change the most from a markup language
suitable for marking up the incidental instruction to a type-setter
to the data representation language suitable for the “market” that
XML wants, is to go for a binary representation. The reasons for
/not/ going binary when SGML competed with ODA have been reversed:
When information should survive changes in the software, it was an
important decision to make the data format verbose enough that it
was easy to implement a processor for it and that processors could
liberally accept what other processors conservatively produced, but
now that the data formats that employ XML are so easily changed
that the software can no longer keep up with it, we need to slam on
the breaks and tell the redefiners to curb their enthusiasm, get it
right before they share their experiments with the world, and show
some respect for their users. One way to do that is to increase the
cost of changes to implementations without sacrificing readability
and without making the data format more “brittle”, by going binary.
Our information infrastructure has become so much better that the
nature of optimization for survivability has changed qualitatively.
The question of what we humans need to read and write no longer has
any bearing on what the computers need to work with. One of the
most heinous crimes against computing machinery is therefore to
force them to parse XML when all they want is the binary data. As
an example, think of the Internet Protocol and Transmission Control
Protocol in XML terms. Implementors of SNMP regularly complained
that parsing the ASN.1 encodings took a disproportionate amount of
processing time, but they also acknowledged that properly done, it
mapped directly to the values they needed to exchange. Now, think
of what would have happened had it not been a Simple, but instead
some moronic excuse for an eXtensible Network Management Protocol.
Another thing is that we have long had amazingly rich standards for
such “display attributes” as many now use HTML and the like. The
choice to use SGML for web publication was not entirely braindead,
but it should have been obvious from the outset that page display
would become important, if not immediately, then after watching what
people were trying to do with HTML. The Web provided me with a much
needed realization that information cannot be /fully/ separated from
its presentation, and showed me something I knew without verbalizing
explicitly, that the presentation form we choose communicates real
information. Encoding all of it via markup would require a very
fine level of detail, not to mention /awareness/ of issues so widely
dispersed in the population that only a handful of people per
million grasp them. Therefore, to be successful, there must be an
upper limit to the complexity of the language defined with SGML, and
one must go on to solve the next problem, not sit idle with a set of
great tools and think “I ought to use these tools for something”.
Stultifying as the language of content models may be, it amazes me
that people do not grasp that they need to use something else when
it becomes too painful to express with SGML, but I am in the highly
privileged position of knowing a lot more than SGML when I pronounce
my judgment on XML. For one thing, I knew Lisp before I saw SGML,
so I know what brilliant minds can do under optimal conditions and
when they ensure that the problem is still bigger than the solution.
—
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway
Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder.
Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.
via Erik Naggum’s XML rant.