Category: rePosts

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.

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.

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.

 
 

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.

| 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.

So there you have it. A darn-near perfect explanation of the GSIII design. Sure, it’s butt ugly, but it’s also 100% (well maybe 90%) lawyer approved.  An amorphous, unsymmetrical blob that doesn’t come in black, with a non-permanent dock and non-square icons. There’s no way Apple can add this design to their Samsung lawsuit.

So Samsung, was it worth it? Your product won’t sell as well, but you won’t piss off one of your biggest component customers either. I understand the motivation, but I still feel like you’ve sold your soul.

When Apple started patent trolling, they basically admitted they weren’t going to win in an open market, and they decided to drag Samsung down with them. The crazy thing is, Samsung is letting them. They’ve ceded ownership of the rectangle and other common sense design traits to Apple, and did everything they could to bow down to their largest customer.

The result? A phone designed by lawyers. What a scary precedent.

The Samsung Galaxy S III: The First Smartphone Designed Entirely By Lawyers.

Harvard Business School’s Teresa Amabile and psychologist Steven Kramer have researched what makes people miserable at work, and wrote this for The Washington Post:
Over the past 15 years, we have studied what makes people happy and engaged at work. In discovering the answer, we also learned a lot about misery at work. …
What we discovered is that the key factor you can use to make employees miserable on the job is to simply keep them from making the progress they expect to make in meaningful work.
People want to make a valuable contribution, and feel great when they make progress toward doing so.
Andrew Bynum leads the league in looking exasperated. He is often seen as childish because of it. What’s one lost chance? Nothing, really. The thing that happened to Bynum on that play happens to everybody. Grow up, kid.
But what happened on that play happens to Bynum a lot.
via The exasperation of Andrew Bynum – TrueHoop Blog – ESPN.

 
Stephen King: Tax Me, for F@%&’s Sake!
Apr 30, 2012 4:45 AM EDT
The iconic writer scolds the superrich (including himself—and Mitt Romney) for not giving back, and warns of a Kingsian apocalyptic scenario if inequality is not addressed in America.
 
Chris Christie may be fat , but he ain’t Santa Claus. In fact, he seems unable to decide if he is New Jersey’s governor or its caporegime, and it may be a comment on the coarsening of American discourse that his brash rudeness is often taken for charm. In February, while discussing New Jersey’s newly amended income-tax law, which allows the rich to pay less (proportionally) than the middle class, Christie was asked about Warren Buffett’s observation that he paid less federal income taxes than his personal secretary, and that wasn’t fair. “He should just write a check and shut up ,” Christie responded, with his typical verve. “I’m tired of hearing about it. If he wants to give the government more money, he’s got the ability to write a check—go ahead and write it.”
Heard it all before. At a rally in Florida (to support collective bargaining and to express the socialist view that firing teachers with experience was sort of a bad idea), I pointed out that I was paying taxes of roughly 28 percent on my income. My question was, “How come I’m not paying 50?” The governor of New Jersey did not respond to this radical idea, possibly being too busy at the all-you-can-eat cheese buffet at Applebee’s in Jersey City, but plenty of other people of the Christie persuasion did.
Lobbyist Grover Norquist responds to King and begs to differ, ‘for f@%&’s sake!’
Cut a check and shut up, they said.
If you want to pay more, pay more, they said.
Tired of hearing about it, they said.
Tough shit for you guys, because I’m not tired of talking about it. I’ve known rich people, and why not, since I’m one of them? The majority would rather douse their dicks with lighter fluid, strike a match, and dance around singing “Disco Inferno” than pay one more cent in taxes to Uncle Sugar. It’s true that some rich folks put at least some of their tax savings into charitable contributions. My wife and I give away roughly $4 million a year to libraries, local fire departments that need updated lifesaving equipment (Jaws of Life tools are always a popular request), schools, and a scattering of organizations that underwrite the arts. Warren Buffett does the same; so does Bill Gates; so does Steven Spielberg; so do the Koch brothers; so did the late Steve Jobs. All fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough.
What charitable 1 percenters can’t do is assume responsibility—America’s national responsibilities: the care of its sick and its poor, the education of its young, the repair of its failing infrastructure, the repayment of its staggering war debts. Charity from the rich can’t fix global warming or lower the price of gasoline by one single red penny. That kind of salvation does not come from Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Ballmer saying, “OK, I’ll write a $2 million bonus check to the IRS.” That annoying responsibility stuff comes from three words that are anathema to the Tea Partiers: United American citizenry.
Photos: Rich People for Higher Taxes
 
 
And hey, why don’t we get real about this? Most rich folks paying 28 percent taxes do not give out another 28 percent of their income to charity. Most rich folks like to keep their dough. They don’t strip their bank accounts and investment portfolios. They keep them and then pass them on to their children, their children’s children. And what they do give away is—like the monies my wife and I donate—totally at their own discretion. That’s the rich-guy philosophy in a nutshell: don’t tell us how to use our money; we’ll tell you.
The Koch brothers are right-wing creepazoids, but they’re giving right-wing creepazoids. Here’s an example: 68 million fine American dollars to Deerfield Academy. Which is great for Deerfield Academy. But it won’t do squat for cleaning up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, where food fish are now showing up with black lesions. It won’t pay for stronger regulations to keep BP (or some other bunch of dipshit oil drillers) from doing it again. It won’t repair the levees surrounding New Orleans. It won’t improve education in Mississippi or Alabama. But what the hell—them li’l crackers ain’t never going to go to Deerfield Academy anyway. Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.
Here’s another crock of fresh bullshit delivered by the right wing of the Republican Party (which has become, so far as I can see, the only wing of the Republican Party): the richer rich people get, the more jobs they create. Really? I have a total payroll of about 60 people, most of them working for the two radio stations I own in Bangor, Maine. If I hit the movie jackpot—as I have, from time to time—and own a piece of a film that grosses $200 million, what am I going to do with it? Buy another radio station? I don’t think so, since I’m losing my shirt on the ones I own already. But suppose I did, and hired on an additional dozen folks. Good for them. Whoopee-ding for the rest of the economy.
Tired of hearing about it, they said. Tough shit for you guys, because I’m not tired of talking about it. I’ve known rich people, and why not, since I’m one of them?
At the risk of repeating myself, here’s what rich folks do when they get richer: they invest. A lot of those investments are overseas, thanks to the anti-American business policies of the last four administrations. Don’t think so? Check the tag on that T-shirt or gimme cap you’re wearing. If it says MADE IN AMERICA, I’ll … well, I won’t say I’ll eat your shorts, because some of that stuff is made here, but not much of it. And what does get made here doesn’t get made by America’s small cadre of pluted bloatocrats; it’s made, for the most part, in barely-gittin’-by factories in the Deep South, where the only unions people believe in are those solemnized at the altar of the local church (as long as they’re from different sexes, that is).
The U.S. senators and representatives who refuse even to consider raising taxes on the rich—they squall like scalded babies (usually on Fox News) every time the subject comes up—are not, by and large, superrich themselves, although many are millionaires and all have had the equivalent of Obamacare for years. They simply idolize the rich. Don’t ask me why; I don’t get it either, since most rich people are as boring as old, dead dog shit. The Mitch McConnells and John Boehners and Eric Cantors just can’t seem to help themselves. These guys and their right-wing supporters regard deep pockets like Christy Walton and Sheldon Adelson the way little girls regard Justin Bieber … which is to say, with wide eyes, slack jaws, and the drool of adoration dripping from their chins. I’ve gotten the same reaction myself, even though I’m only “baby rich” compared with some of these guys, who float serenely over the lives of the struggling middle class like blimps made of thousand-dollar bills.
In America, the rich are hallowed. Even Warren Buffett, who has largely been drummed out of the club for his radical ideas about putting his money where his mouth is when it comes to patriotism, made the front pages when he announced that he had stage-1 prostate cancer. Stage 1, for God’s sake! A hundred clinics can fix him up, and he can put the bill on his American Express black card! But the press made it sound like the pope’s balls had just dropped off and shattered! Because it was cancer? No! Because it was Warren Buffett, he of Berkshire-Hathaway!
I guess some of this mad right-wing love comes from the idea that in America, anyone can become a Rich Guy if he just works hard and saves his pennies. Mitt Romney has said , in effect, “I’m rich and I don’t apologize for it.” Nobody wants you to, Mitt. What some of us want—those who aren’t blinded by a lot of bullshit persiflage thrown up to mask the idea that rich folks want to keep their damn money—is for you to acknowledge that you couldn’t have made it in America without America. That you were fortunate enough to be born in a country where upward mobility is possible (a subject upon which Barack Obama can speak with the authority of experience), but where the channels making such upward mobility possible are being increasingly clogged. That it’s not fair to ask the middle class to assume a disproportionate amount of the tax burden. Not fair? It’s un-fucking-American is what it is. I don’t want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share. That our civics classes never taught us that being American means that—sorry, kiddies—you’re on your own. That those who have received much must be obligated to pay—not to give, not to “cut a check and shut up,” in Governor Christie’s words, but to pay—in the same proportion. That’s called stepping up and not whining about it. That’s called patriotism, a word the Tea Partiers love to throw around as long as it doesn’t cost their beloved rich folks any money.
This has to happen if America is to remain strong and true to its ideals. It’s a practical necessity and a moral imperative. Last year during the Occupy movement, the conservatives who oppose tax equality saw the first real ripples of discontent. Their response was either Marie Antoinette (“Let them eat cake”) or Ebenezer Scrooge (“Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?”). Short-sighted, gentlemen. Very short-sighted. If this situation isn’t fairly addressed, last year’s protests will just be the beginning. Scrooge changed his tune after the ghosts visited him. Marie Antoinette, on the other hand, lost her head.
Think about it.

Stephen King: Tax Me, for F@%&’s Sake! – The Daily Beast.
inspired by brad delong. anti link rot for something i loved reading