officemonkey

I Beresheet the bed.

Chicago was extremely fortunate to also have Dick Buckley, who had great pipes and an encyclopedic knowledge of traditional jazz.

The likes of these men will never be seen again.

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The US had been destroying chemical weapons for decades, due to treaty obligations. Thinking is not knowing.

Disrupting the business model means sucking the juice out of everything.

I got a package delivered by Amazon. It was "left in a secure location" according to the Amazon delivery driver. Turns out it was delivered at 9 pm, left outside my condo building in a February winter storm.

I can't complain about it (short of the item review) and Amazon doesn't learn that their driver sucks.

But hey, it's better for Amazon's bottom line, and divorce attorneys aren't free, ya know.

"We would need to essentially rebuild our entire network in Louisville to provide the great service that Google Fiber is known for, and that's just not the right business decision for us."

In other words, "we fucked up and so we bailed." Google is like the bad first husband you should have never married in the first place.

The RPG game "Traveller" [sic] has a method for creating fictional worlds using a variety of dice rolls. The original game was created in the early 80s, but the multiple editions since have created system of remarkable depth. One supplement even was able to generate biomes mapped to a dodecahedral sphere.

Size, Atmosphere, Hydrosphere, Population, Government, Law level, Technology, all would dictate the kind of goods available, the political structures, the economics.

It was so easy to generate systems that the game came up with an Atlas of the Imperium which featured thousands of stars. I can confirm that a sufficiently motivated nerd could rustle up a RPG subsector (with 20-40 planetary systems) in an hour.

Let's generalize:

I do feel that companies should have a social and moral responsibility to their users.

Sadly, companies only have a social and moral responsibility to their shareholders. It's one of the reasons why corporations are not people, they're more often immortal sociopaths.

If Facebook knowingly refused to refund improper transactions, THEY are the ones committing fraud. Plain, old, "screw you, Facebook user" fraud.

I would argue that an ereader that simply displays ebooks is less of a "screen" than a smartphone.

But I read 90 books a year on an ereader, so perhaps I'm biased.

I honestly think it has a lot to do with mass media and advertising. There are some people who just can't handle near-constant and well-crafted messages to consume and buy.

One anecdote was a woman I know who (when someone cleaned out her nearly condemned) house became enraged that he was "getting rid of all her memories." The thing has supplanted the good feeling of having the thing.

"Nostalgia marketing" does this. How many versions of Monopoly do you need?? Well, here's one with the ORIGINAL TOKENS and WOODEN HOUSES!! And here's one with SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS!! and OHIO STATE FOOTBALL!!!! You need them ALL or your life is incomplete.

It sounds like more people should be interested in regulatory reform. I'm a huge fan of refactoring regulations once the problems they've been made to fix have been solved.

The problem is most "bodies of laws" are so complex and have so many competing stakeholders that it's a lot like a method that everyone's afraid to touch so they just comment "#DO NOT TOUCH!!"

The other problem is the "policy people" who create regulations are rarely the subject matter experts. They are good at managing the process to the successful conclusion: a new published regulation. They are not good at deciding what a good regulation is.

On the other hand, hotels are innovating on improving the customer experience too.

The Hilton App is easier to use than their actual website. I am able to check-in and check-out without talking to anyone. I can use a digital key on my phone. They send me receipts automagically.

And thanks to consistent corporate standards, I know what to expect in a Hampton Inn vs. Homewood Suites vs. Conrad.

Getting a hotel has become less of a hassle, has less friction, and is more convenient. Oh, and the technology helps the chain as well.

If you disrupt an industry, you better hope your moat is big enough to ward off the entrenched business. Ridesharing might indeed kill the taxi, but there's no way AirBnb is going to defeat the hotel industry.

I was appalled that the the existing taxi system (essentially a protected monopoly) wouldn't immediately create an Uber/Lyft app when ride-sharing first appeared. Then I realized that building such a thing would only benefit drivers and customers, and those are the two constituents that the existing taxi system doesn't care about.

They have to follow the commander's legal orders. Whether they agreed or not should be immaterial.

Work stoppage followed by collective bargaining. They were literally the only three persons who could do the work. Ground control had to negotiate.

OTOH, it could have been the commander's sole decision, which means it wasn't a strike. He may have decided that as the commander he needed a fit crew and this was the only way to attain that.

You may find happiness living in a less dense environment. I live in a residential neighborhood among adults who seldom subwoof at any time, much less at midnight.

Many people who have jobs in urban areas have to deal with long commutes on top of a standard work week.

I'm one of those rare people who will happily go to bed at 9 pm every night. My favorite job was when I teleworked from 6 AM - Noon. 30 hours a week, with no commute, and my choice of hours? It was heaven.

In the original "Traveller" RPG (we called them the "little black books") you could get killed during character generation!

The game also had a fairly deadly combat system; often the only way to "win" was not to fight. (If you died, you could always introduce a replacement character at the next spaceport.)

It probably cost them some popularity long term, but it also made for an entire galaxy of world building.

(Younger kids will probably not realize that Traveller was likely an inspiration for the "Firefly" show. When I first saw the show, I said "That's Traveller.")

If you're going to gamble this way, you better be right, because if you're wrong, you're fired.

Forgiveness will always be given for a "great success."

Or the reviews.

If somebody is reviewing books I have zero interest in (eg: super partisan politics, superhero comic books) then I'm likely to unfriend them on Goodreads.

One of my middle-aged male friends was really into Young Adult romances. Like two books a week. I had to let him go.

I think I would do this for my friends, even without Facebook. The problem is when I have to spend emotional labor tending to people I haven't seen since high school.

My favorite social network is the one I have on Goodreads. I love to see what my friends (who are readers) are reading. I also have found a bunch of people whose book tastes are similar to mine. Everyone is interested in the same goal: finding and reading good books.

When someone overshares, or gets soapboxy, or just spammy, I just unfriend. I did this with my sister! That's something I'd never do on Facebook.

I know people hate on unions, but unions are supposed to negotiate two things: wages and working conditions.

Negotiating working conditions with a union-enforced contract gets rid of mickey mouse management, and establishes a process for workers to review working condition changes. I honestly believe that's the best feature of unions.

(The worst feature of unions is their tendency to protect the worst employees -- the "interently lazy" types. As long as "protecting the worst employees" is a key concept, unions won't make it back.)

It all depends on the metro area. That seems a little high for Chicago.

Wow, it's only been 18 years since Blue Mountain Arts being sold to Excite@Home for $780M.

If you recall, Blue Mountain Arts made 3/4 of a billion dollars in 1999 for it's "ecard" business, a business that literally anyone with a webserver can replicate in an afternoon.

It's too bad too, because Excite was my favorite "webportal/homepage" back then. And the dotcom bubble burst killed it.

The author, Dorothy Thompson, was a key journalist and personality who encouraged the U.S. entry into WW2. The book "Those Angry Days" by Lynne Olson describes the struggle between the interventionists and the isolationists.

There was also a rapidly-maturing Reddit waiting in the wings.

If you have a moat, you can weather the storm after a design snafu. If you don't? @Jack, you dead.

Technology isn't the issue. Technology gave me an ereader that lasts for a week on a single charge and lets me carry around a couple hundred books. It's a large part of the reason why I'm reading 80 books a year.

How creators and consumers of applications, websites, and content USE technology is the problem.

Many consumers spend zero time thinking about the outcome of their technology use. Too many creators spend all their time thinking about only ONE outcome of their technology use.

When someone identifies a problem, it's easy to blame "technology" and not the market and social pressures that created it. If people have "forgotten to read" it's their fault, not Instagram's.

Habits are formed over time.

I began reading "books" again in 2010, after a 10 year lapse of mostly not reading books.

At first, the best I could do was 15 books a year. It took me three years before I "leveled up" to "80 books a year."

Technology isn't the enemy here. Attention span is.