3,794 karma · joined March 4, 2009
presently, we've the opposite problem: technology advances so quickly it's difficult / near impossible to accurately predict life in five hundred years. (making time travel VERY COMPELLING!)
Of the many shocking moments, one that stood out to me was the way they went after post-war Japan to convert their "backwards" desires to ones of a more "forward-thinking" diamond friendly impulse:
"J. Walter Thompson began its campaign by suggesting that diamonds were a visible sign of modern Western values. It created a series of color advertisements in Japanese magazines showing beautiful women displaying their diamond rings. All the women had Western facial features and wore European clothes. Moreover, the women in most of the advertisements were involved in some activity -- such as bicycling, camping, yachting, ocean swimming, or mountain climbing -- that defied Japanese traditions. In the background, there usually stood a Japanese man, also attired in fashionable European clothes. In addition, almost all of the automobiles, sporting equipment, and other artifacts in the picture were conspicuous foreign imports. The message was clear: diamonds represent a sharp break with the Oriental past and a sign of entry into modern life."
"The campaign was remarkably successful. Until 1959, the importation of diamonds had not even been permitted by the postwar Japanese government. When the campaign began, in 1967, not quite 5 percent of engaged Japanese women received a diamond engagement ring. By 1972, the proportion had risen to 27 percent. By 1978, half of all Japanese women who were married wore a diamond; by 1981, some 60 percent of Japanese brides wore diamonds. In a mere fourteen years, the 1,500-year Japanese tradition had been radically revised. Diamonds became a staple of the Japanese marriage. Japan became the second largest market, after the United States, for the sale of diamond engagement rings."
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-yo...
I’d recommend reading James Clear’s Atomic Habits to get a high-level view of what your body/mind is doing when you reach for certain apps/impulses.
Personally, I’ve found that installing blockers like Freedom and setting up timed schedules has significantly increase my productivity and cut back on wasted device time. Fwiw, the “fun” parts of the internet turn off at 10pm and don’t go back on until noon the next day.
You can also set a timed block at the router level, set a password for the setting via a password manager, give the password to a friend, and then delete it from your manager.
I find by simply removing the easy option to engage, the impulse to do so significantly diminishes. It’s only after you’ve felt what that diminished impulse is like and see the effects on productivity that you can then take bigger steps to change your habits.
So, I’m a big advocate for technical solutions because they help reduce need for self control / impulse control by removing the option on a schedule you define when you are your “best” or “most optimistic” self. (Yes, they can be circumvented, but you can also make that significantly onerous as to be usefully frictive.)
Some behinds the scenes production stuff on their Twitter feed. [1]
[0]: https://mount.jp/
[1]: https://twitter.com/mount_inc/status/1381805222679379969
> The lack of goal-triggered payments is probably the biggest "downside" to Craigstarter. Technically, I believe you can have charges be authorized on checkout, but only pushed through on "shipping" — allowing one to approximate the Kickstarter experience on Shopify. However, these charge authorizations are short lived, and this would only work (as far as I can tell) for quick campaigns.
> That said, many Kickstarter campaigns are run as promotional tools more than strict fundraising tools, with the intent by creators to ship no matter what. In theory, one could set a minimum goal on Shopify which, if not met, would trigger a manual refunding of all backers (minus the ~2.8% processing fees). Robin Sloan rigged up something similar with his 2020 Sloanstarter campaign.
> In the end, if you have an audience, and you have reasonable baseline goals, then the issue of "raising enough funds" for a project launch is often not an issue.
Often times the answers to many of our problems are obvious (that doesn't mean not-complex; i.e., an alcoholic often knows the best way to improve the quality of their life), and people aren't dumb, but they can't commit to the "solution."
As soon as you break from obsessing over solutions, you begin to break down habits and reasons why you're in the position you're in. Which has the corollary effect of, eventually, "solving" it.
Once I got good at noticing "solution loops" in my own mind I began to notice it in the conversations of friends. It's amazing how many people are stuck in sometimes multi-year loops. And so now, for life problems of a more macro scale: I a) never try to solve anything for anyone, and b) try to gently guide the conversation away from finding an explicit solution to better understanding why they may be in the position they're in.
This sounds simple / reductive, but it's one of the most powerful ideas / tools I've discovered in the last few years.
I've used this method a few times to superb results.
To announce a shift in olympic schedule requires a total behind the scenes replanning. I suspect they're on that now, and will announce a new date once logistics have been finalized.
I took an afternoon and knocked out a widget edition of the site. If I remember correctly, you submitted your widgets to Apple.com and they had a little gallery. Well, I came home a few days later and my server was melting: thousands of hits/second from apple.com. It turned out they decided to make the entire homepage of apple.com a hot-link to my widget. [1] It stayed that way for about 24 hours — June 17 - 18, 2005.
I love this era of the 'net — when apple.com would just link to a dev's or designer's project. I almost fell out of my chair. Printed the screenshot out. I still remember the bar I went to that night, who I had a celebratory drink with in Kagurazaka, Tokyo, sort of marveling at the absurdity of it all.
The exposure didn't have any marked direct effect on my career or work, but it did boost my confidence in that maybe I wasn't working on such useless stuff in isolation on the other side of the world.
[0] http://buzztracker.org — the maps don't work because the SSIs are broken; but we often forget, Google News was one of the first times world-wide news was consolidated into a somewhat homogenous format (most sites weren't using RSS when it launched in 2001/2), certainly not one you could easily scrape and process global news patterns.
[1] https://craigmod.com/images/misc/buzztracker_apple.jpg
edit: grammar
[0] https://www.wireguard.com/ [1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-crea...
But I'd argue the worst position is one of non-stop media bingeing without action. In fact, I'd say the only way to act reliably or with clear intention is to not binge on media, to not stay in the zone of manufactured outrage. But instead to keep sanely abreast of what's happening and engage only when meaningful action can be had.