In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
Month: December 2017
A Cartoonist’s Advice
Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential. As if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth. You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out and I guarantee you’ll hear about them. To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.
Source: A Cartoonist’s Advice
‘The Basic Grossness of Humans’
Source: ‘The Basic Grossness of Humans’
Content moderators review the the dark side of the internet. They don’t escape unscathed. … As you might expect, reviewing violent, sexual, and disturbing content for a living takes a serious psychological toll on the people who do it.
“The questions I have every time I read these statements from big tech companies about hiring people are: Who? And where? And under what conditions?”
Corporate Taxes and the 2017 Republican Tax Reform Plan
Source: Wonky Thoughts: Corporate Taxes and the 2017 Republican Tax Reform Plan, by Doug Robbins
- American corporate taxes are *not* “among the highest in the world”.
- Corporate taxes have fallen as a percent of GDP from before the 1970s to after the 1970s.
- American economic growth has been declining since World War II.
- Wages have declined since World War II, as a share of gross domestic income (or similarly, GDP).
- Corporate profits have soared since the 1980s.
- Lower corporate taxes do not lead to higher economic growth or higher wages. Lower corporate taxes lead to higher corporate after-tax profits.
The Amazon machine
Source: The Amazon machine, by Benedict Evans
Amazon is a machine to make a machine, and the machine it makes is more Amazon.
Google doesn’t tend to be better at cloud platforms than Apple and worse at UIs because there are better or worse people in each team, but because each company is set up to deliver certain kinds of things, and the closer a project is to that machine’s direction the more reliable the result. If the machine is designed to do X, it will struggle at Y no matter how clever the people. A lot of the story of Amazon for the last 20 years is of how many Ys turned out to be Xs – how many categories that people thought could not be sold online and could not be sold as commodities turned out to be both.