Category: Rant

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rePost::Seth's Blog: Hunters and Farmers

This is an interesting perspective. Though I’ve been very wary of Evolutionary Psychology/Neurology/Anything concerning the brain, I am drawn to this idea.  I believe this is another form of the more nuanced view in the book by probably 5th most favorite TED talk speaker sir Ken Robinson (ted Talk here) . I embedded the talk at the end of this post. Hope you can read his book The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything.

Clearly, farming is a very different activity from hunting. Farmers spend time sweating the details, worrying about the weather, making smart choices about seeds and breeding and working hard to avoid a bad crop. Hunters, on the other hand, have long periods of distracted noticing interrupted by brief moments of frenzied panic.
It’s not crazy to imagine that some people are better at one activity than another. There might even be a gulf between people who are good at each of the two skills. Thom Hartmann has written extensively on this. He points out that medicating kids who might be better at hunting so that they can sit quietly in a school designed to teach farming doesn’t make a lot of sense.
A kid who has innate hunting skills is easily distracted, because noticing small movements in the brush is exactly what you’d need to do if you were hunting. Scan and scan and pounce. That same kid is able to drop everything and focus like a laser–for a while–if it’s urgent. The farming kid, on the other hand, is particularly good at tilling the fields of endless homework problems, each a bit like the other. Just don’t ask him to change gears instantly.
Marketers confuse the two groups. Are you selling a product that helps farmers… and hoping that hunters will buy it? How do you expect that people will discover your product, or believe that it will help them? The woman who reads each issue of Vogue, hurrying through the pages then clicking over to Zappos to overnight order the latest styles–she’s hunting. Contrast this to the CTO who spends six months issuing RFPs to buy a PBX that was last updated three years ago… she’s farming.
via Seth’s Blog: Hunters and Farmers.

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rePost:Better Politicians :: Better Press Corp :: Better Celebrities :: Better Philippines :Brian Williams: Why Jon Stewart Is Good For News : NPR

We need something like this in the Philippines. I think this should start with trying to organize all recorded interviews we have of candidates. These interviews we tag with their positions and the context. We could do this for everything a politician/journalist/business people/celebrity  etc. says. Then whenever a new video is entered into our database we can automatically query flip-flopping, bad policy advice etc! This can be done by us the citizens of the Philippines. I hope someone does this.
PS: The cynic in me keeps remembering Miriam Defensor-Santiago’s “I lied!!!”
PS1: Listen to the npr audio in the linked post.
Ps2: One of the things I’d miss from my current job is the US IP address. No more full episodes of The Daily Show. Colbert Report and

For decades, young reporters would ask themselves, “What would Walter think?” Nowadays, it’s not the memory of Walter Cronkite or even Edward R. Murrow that motivates some reporters — it’s more often the fear that the stories they put out today might get picked apart by Jon Stewart tomorrow.
Prominent among the wary: NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, who recently explained in a magazine essay that The Daily Show host “has gone from optional to indispensable” in just a few short years.
And Williams tells NPR’s Guy Raz that on occasion, when he feels his broadcast tap-dancing toward the precipice — tossing around a story idea for “what I call Margaret Mead journalism — where we ‘discover Twitter,’ ” for instance, or entertaining some other unfortunate editorial possibility — “I will, and have, said that, ‘You know, maybe we can just give a heads-up to Jon to set aside some time for that tonight.’
“I should quickly add, we have another set of standards we put our stories through,” Williams cautions. “But Jon’s always in the back of my mind. … When you make The Daily Show, it’s usually not for a laurel, it’s for a dart.”
None of this, the NBC anchor says, is to claim that Stewart and his crew have had some wholesale transformative effect on the news media.
But “a lot of the work that Jon and his staff do is serious,” Williams says. “They hold people to account, for errors and sloppiness. … It’s usually delivered with a smile — sometimes not. It’s not who we do it for, it’s not our only check and balance, but it’s healthy — and it helps us that he’s out there.”
via Brian Williams: Why Jon Stewart Is Good For News : NPR.

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rePost::A Damaged Culture: A New Philippines? – James Fallows

Nationalism is valuable when it gives people a reason not to live in the world of Hobbes–when it allows them to look beyond themselves rather than pursuing their own interests to the ruination of everyone else. I assume that most people in the world have the same mixture of selfish and generous motives; their cultures tell them when to indulge each impulse. Japan is strong in large part because its nationalist-racial ethic teaches each Japanese that all other Japanese deserve decent treatment. Non-Japanese fall into a different category. Individual Filipinos are at least as brave, kind, and noble-spirited as individual Japanese, but their culture draws the boundaries of decent treatment much more narrowly. Filipinos pride themselves on their lifelong loyalty to family, schoolmates, compadres, members of the same tribe, residents of the same barangay. The mutual tenderness among the people of Smoky Mountain is enough to break your heart. But when observing Filipino friendships I thought often of the Mafia families portrayed in The Godfather: total devotion to those within the circle, total war on those outside. Because the boundaries of decedent treatment are limited to the family or tribe, they exclude at least 90 percent of the people in the country. And because of this fragmentation–this lack of nationalism–people treat each other worse in the Philippines than in any other Asian country I have seen.
via A Damaged Culture: A New Philippines? – James Fallows.

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rePost:This Must Stop Now!!!!: Cabral’s crackdown : Manuel L. Quezon III: The Daily Dose

Fast forward to today, when Cabral’s experience in being subjected to public scrutiny and her seeing the public was not about to give her either a free pass or would be intimidated by her being in the Cabinet, has inspired her to use government to get even with the blogger who caused her such grief. Recently, the National Bureau of Investigation filed a libel suit on Cabral’s behalf, against the blogger. This is not a mere case of an outraged party filing a libel case against another citizen; this is a case of a Cabinet secretary using the government to move her own case forward. First, she asked her own department’s legal service to look into whether she should file a libel case against the blogger, basically a request for civil servants to do what she could fully well entrust to a private attorney. Cabral then specifically asked the NBI to do the sleuthing for her case, by finding out, first of all, who exactly the blogger was, and the NBI obliged by asking the hosting company of the blog who the blogger is. The NBI then also made inquiries with the blogger’s publisher. The NBI then summoned the blogger to undergo a polygraph test.
Cabral could have asked the blogger to come forward for a tête-à-tête to clear the air; but then we are talking about an official who belongs to an administration allergic to public debate and which prefers to restrict its fights to the forums in which it enjoys an advantage. Why put yourself on par with an ordinary citizen when you have the NBI and the prosecutorial services of the government at your beck and call, and when you can bog down ordinary people in protracted litigation with the added benefit of potentially imprisoning the offending party? It’s an opportunity too pleasurable to pass.
It is dangerous to my mind to concede in the first place that this is a question of law: of Cabral merely asserting her rights by challenging the blogger’s exercise of her own right to not only express herself, but to challenge officials to explain themselves. To discuss the pros and cons of the case, whether or not malice was involved, sidesteps the objectionable reality that the law itself as far as libel goes is incompatible with our civil liberties because the provisions on libel law are an anachronism. No libel will ever be proved in the case of the blogger—but that isn’t the point. The point is to remind citizens that challenging officialdom carries such a heavy price in terms of time and money, artificially muddling the issues along the way, so that exoneration ends up neither a vindication nor a triumph of the rule of law.
via The Long View: Cabral’s crackdown : Manuel L. Quezon III: The Daily Dose.

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rePost:: Introverts in the Church

But many churches fail to make this distinction. They tacitly set up the following equation for church life:
Spirituality = Sociability
For example, I was once visiting with a church leader at my church who was making a recommendation that, to make our adult classes more “meaningful,” we would need to share more of our lives in these classes. I stated that such a recommendation would drive the introverts crazy. The response was, “God is about relationships and church is about relationships. Thus, if these people aren’t going to be involved in relationships they will just have to change.”
via Experimental Theology: Introverts in the Church.

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rePost::A Rant About Women « Clay Shirky

read the whole thing!!!

Not caring works surprisingly well. Another of my great former students, now a peer and a friend, saw a request from a magazine reporter doing a tech story and looking for examples. My friend, who’d previously been too quiet about her work, decided to write the reporter and say “My work is awesome. You should write about it.”
The reporter looked at her work and wrote back saying “Your work is indeed awesome, and I will write about it. I also have to tell you you are the only woman who suggested her own work. Men do that all the time, but women wait for someone else to recommend them.” My friend stopped waiting, and now her work is getting the attention it deserves.
If you walked into my department at NYU, you wouldn’t say “Oh my, look how much more talented the men are than the women.” The level and variety of creative energy in the place is still breathtaking to me, and it’s not divided by gender. However, you would be justified in saying “I bet that the students who get famous five years from now will include more men than women”, because that’s what happens, year after year. My friend talking to the reporter remains the sad exception.
Part of this sorting out of careers is sexism, but part of it is that men are just better at being arrogant, and less concerned about people thinking we’re stupid (often correctly, it should be noted) for trying things we’re not qualified for.
via A Rant About Women « Clay Shirky.

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rePost::Because X is the new Why » Living in the Friend Zone

Found this post funny, and some…

A prime example is the following transcript of a recovered phone conversation between myself and Marcee Moran, “You Changed my Life in a Moment,” girl version 2.0, circa 2004:
Jaton, internalizing Dr. Phil: Leave him. You’re a beautiful girl, and anyone would be lucky to be with you.
Marcee Moran: Really Jates? Fuck that means a lot coming from a guy like you.
Jaton, in his head, “a guy like me…”: You can forgive a guy like that, but you can’t forgive me for this little thing… running you out of business?
(Note: line lifted from You’ve Got Mail (1998). One of the very rare WWTHD fail.)
Marcee: Jaton? What? Hello?
Jaton: Nothing. Maybe we can talk about this tom? We can see 50 first dates. It could be our first date.
(Note: sadly, I really said this.)
Marcee: Yeah why not! I’ll call Grace and Maggie.
Oh Ducky, you know they’re going to crop you out of that photo right?
For the better part half of the last decade, I kept falling in love with these Marcee Morans who always decided that I had a vagina. And as the friendship with these girls grew stronger, the less of my advice they heard, and the more assholes they saw.
“Aren’t there any good guys out there?” the Marcee Morans said.
I never knew what to answer so I’d just freeze, nod in all the right places, and try to be helpful, even if part of me wanted to answer, “if by sensitive you mean, sexy,” as I telepathically tuck her hair behind her ears.
via Because X is the new Why » Living in the Friend Zone.

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rePost::Google, land of the spoiled brats?

Perhaps the strongest business argument against perk mania is that if you’re going to spend that much money on perks, at least make them performance-based. I can buy that. But why should that principle apply only to the rank and file?
Last September The Street published an interesting article by Eric Jackson [4] about Whitman’s tenure at eBay. He writes that “something happened in Whitman's last four years on the job in which her pay became dramatically disconnected with eBay's stock price and her perks started to go through the roof.” From 2005 to 2008 eBay’s stock declined 59 percent, while at the same time, Jackson alleges, “Whitman’s interest had drifted away from increasing the stock price of eBay to increasing her cash compensation and perks.” According to Jackson, in her last two years, this included nearly $1 million per year in expenses incurred by flying around on the corporate jet for personal business.
Yet in Whitman’s diatribe about frugality, she has the gall to write this about her reign at eBay: “We had Bagel Wednesday, and we had to plead for those.”
via Google, land of the spoiled brats?.

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QOTD::Please Don't Be Cynical…

All I ask of you is one thing: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism — it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard, and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.
—Conan O’Brien

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Rant:News Reports On Stock Movement:2010 01 24

I hate it when news segments say, “The stocks were down because…” or “The stocks were up because”.
Reporters/Editors really need to learn more about what they are reporting on.
Day to day movements of stock tend to be just noise. Ask a good trader. It seems to me that the traders you are asking are the less knowledgeable ones.
Why is this important?  Because this reeks of trying to manipulate public opinion in a blatantly subtle way. This is a disingenuous way of hinting what is good or bad for business.