On using social media to choose your news/noise platform:
This profusion of informational choice lets me to customize the news and information I consume. There are many ways to do that but the most common way is through social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Facebook and Twitter entertain us, let us keep in touch with friends, learn things we couldn’t have imagined and by friending and following the right people, they let us discover an unending stream of content, a stream we curate for ourselves.I don’t listen to one news channel. Or even three. Or one newspaper. Or a few magazines. With Twitter and Facebook, I create my own newspaper, my own news channel. I can get the highlights of every network. Every newspaper. Every pundit. Every talking head. Any reporter who does interesting work. This information revolution is an extraordinary achievement.
https://medium.com/@russroberts/i-cant-hear-you-e7a218831f07
What is a bureaucracy?...and it's uses:
A bureaucracy is an automated system of people created to accomplish a goal. It’s a mech suit composed of people. The owner of a bureaucracy, if an owner exists, is the person who can effectively shape the bureaucracy. Bureaucrats are people who are part of a bureaucracy (excluding the owner).
Not all organizations are bureaucracies. Most organizations are mixed — they have both bureaucratic and non-bureaucratic elements.
The Purpose of Bureaucracies
The purpose of a bureaucracy is to save the time of a competent person. Put another way: to save time, some competent people will create a system that is meant to do exactly what they want — nothing more and nothing less. In particular, it’s necessary to create a bureaucracy when you are both (a) trying to do something that you do not have the capacity to do on your own, and (b) unable to find a competent, aligned person to handle the project for you. Bureaucracies ameliorate the problem of talent and alignment scarcity.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/brQwWwZSQbWBFRNvh/how-to-use-bureaucracies
When do TV shows peak:
There are some slight genre-dependent differences: Comedies and dramedies tend to peak 45 percent of the way through their runs, while dramas peak 25 percent of the way through their runs. The average comedy remains within .02 points of its peak for 30 percent of its run, while dramas and dramedies stay in that sweet spot for 20 percent and 10 percent of their runs, respectively. In general, dramas are the most resistant to steep declines, maybe because the sheer need to know what happens next keeps audiences placated even if the plotting and writing aren’t quite as adept as they once were.
https://www.theringer.com/tv/2018/7/31/17628494/when-do-tv-shows-peak
A bureaucracy is an automated system of people created to accomplish a goal. It’s a mech suit composed of people. The owner of a bureaucracy, if an owner exists, is the person who can effectively shape the bureaucracy. Bureaucrats are people who are part of a bureaucracy (excluding the owner).
Not all organizations are bureaucracies. Most organizations are mixed — they have both bureaucratic and non-bureaucratic elements.
The Purpose of Bureaucracies
The purpose of a bureaucracy is to save the time of a competent person. Put another way: to save time, some competent people will create a system that is meant to do exactly what they want — nothing more and nothing less. In particular, it’s necessary to create a bureaucracy when you are both (a) trying to do something that you do not have the capacity to do on your own, and (b) unable to find a competent, aligned person to handle the project for you. Bureaucracies ameliorate the problem of talent and alignment scarcity.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/brQwWwZSQbWBFRNvh/how-to-use-bureaucracies
When do TV shows peak:
There are some slight genre-dependent differences: Comedies and dramedies tend to peak 45 percent of the way through their runs, while dramas peak 25 percent of the way through their runs. The average comedy remains within .02 points of its peak for 30 percent of its run, while dramas and dramedies stay in that sweet spot for 20 percent and 10 percent of their runs, respectively. In general, dramas are the most resistant to steep declines, maybe because the sheer need to know what happens next keeps audiences placated even if the plotting and writing aren’t quite as adept as they once were.
https://www.theringer.com/tv/2018/7/31/17628494/when-do-tv-shows-peak
Some interesting memories about summer jobs:
For a city kid with no use for a driver’s license and no experience farming, spending a summer on a tractor harvesting apples was a surprising delight. Who knew I appreciated nature? Not me. Waking up before dawn to drink coffee with the crew, the sweet smell of fruit and dew in the cool morning air which would soon be scorching, gorging on apples, mastering the stick shift, perfecting my reverse, the feeling of camaraderie among workers, it was magical.
In fact, I was tempted to become an agriculture major in college or skip school altogether and just spend forever in the orchards. That didn’t happen—my parents were pretty insistent that farming wasn’t my forte—but the experience taught me that I didn’t yet know myself. I wasn’t just bookish and could be interested in anything, it turns out.
Financial Twitter — like much of Twitter in general — is rife with anonymous voices spewing foul, even hateful language. It can be a dangerous place for many people — and not just women, though #metoo moments regularly happen there.
At a time when even the president of the United States’ tweets contain vicious and false statements, it should not be surprising that the same is true for Financial Twitter — also known as FinTwit — which has its share of blowhards, bullies, and bots.
https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b19b6swblfjyvh/Inside-the-Always-Nasty-Frequently-Sexist-and-Often-Litigious-World-of-Financial-Twitter
On next gen batteries:
Carbon-based energy storage has another major advantage over existing technologies. It can actually be used as part of the external structure of the phone. Instead of designing batteries to fit into current phone designs, Voller is preparing for a future of flexible screens and foldable devices, where all our data is pulled from the cloud over 5G, and battery life becomes even more important.
Voller waves his smartphone in the air, bemoaning the shortcomings of lithium-ion that have driven him, and hundreds of others, to join the high-stakes race to reinvent the brilliant but flawed battery. “We’ve all had to evolve strategies to deal with it, whether it’s clip on batteries, or carrying two phones,” he says. “It’s crazy. It shouldn’t be like that.”
On being a mailman:
Delivering the mail gives you a granular insight into America’s growing cultural, political, and wealth divide. North of town, there’s a senior-living mobile home community sitting in the shadow of newly-built eco-friendly condos that sell for half a million dollars. Residents at the condos subscribe to The Atlantic and New Yorker residents in the trailer park a few hundred feet away get People and National EnquirerClerks, whose duties include working the front desk helping customers and sorting mail and packages (sometimes overnight), were brutally overworked, often clocking 60- to 70-hour weeks. Many of my coworkers felt trapped: Sure, the job sucked sometimes, but where else can you find a secure job that pays as well?
https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/07/man-of-letters/565979/
