Unexotic Underclass

“This is America in 2013: 40 years ago we put a man on the moon; today a young lady in New York can use anti-problem technology if she wishes  to line up a date this Friday choosing only from men who are taller than 6 feet, graduated from an Ivy, live within 10 blocks of Gramercy, and play tennis left-handed…

…And yet, veterans who’ve returned from Afghanistan and Iraq have to wait roughly 270 days (up to 600 in New York and California) to receive the help — medical, moral, financial – which they urgently need, to which they are honorably entitled, after having fought our battles overseas.

Technology, indeed, is solving the right problems.”

Incredible post on the Unexotic Underclass and anti-problem entrepreneurship.

“In the third century BC, the Library of Alexandria was believed to house the sum of human knowledge. Today, there is enough information in the world to give every person alive 320 times as much of it as historians think was stored in Alexandria’s entire collection — an estimated 1,200 exabytes’ worth. If all this information were placed on CDs and they were stacked up, the CDs would form five separate piles that would all reach to the moon.”

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/139104/kenneth-neil-cukier-and-viktor-mayer-schoenberger/the-rise-of-big-data?cid=soc-tumblr-in-essays-the_rise_of_big_data-042413

Facebook: Redefining Relationships

Over the past few months, Facebook has taken a clear and absolute initiative to focus in on people.  Additions like Graph Search, the new timeline, and Facebook Home all place more value on the people in one’s network, and the content that they care about. 

Yet what Facebook realized with Graph Search and will learn quickly with Facebook Home, the product is only as good as the people that populate it. And as Facebook cares more about people, so do I. The greater emphasis on the 1000+ friends of mine will quickly make me cull out those that provide me with little value; hometown friends that are still drinking on four-wheelers, obscure colleagues from two jobs ago that no longer inspire me, frenemies and exes from lives past.

These new additions to the products don’t make Facebook a better platform, it helps create better content. The more we fine-tune our friends and interests so we find personal value in Facebook, the more value Facebook can provide to advertisers. Engagement will be higher. Fans will mean something. A like will carry the thought and sentiment that they’ve always wanted.

Isn’t it comforting to know that Facebook is redefining human relationships?

“

Most people try to make themselves into productivity robots.

We force quotas, lists and deadlines on ourselves as if we’re some type of Input Fuel, Output Work Machine. We are not machines, and we need to stop acting like it. Machines are steady-state output producers. Humans are ebbing and flowing organic beings.

Relax your expectations of constant, never-ceasing production. Instead, focus your energies on how you want to feel and what you need to operate with greatness.

Maybe that means more self-care, more breaks, or more doing shit you actually care about.

Remember, we come from nature and are born from seasons. This means that we’ll naturally cycle inward and naturally cycle back outward. Sometimes we will feel drawn to reflect, meditate and grow internally with no outward signs of productivity or results. And sometimes we will feel an inescapable urge to create, shine and radiate our gifts uncontrollably to the world.

The key is in learning to identify and honor your natural rhythms. Listen and lean into whatever you’re being pulled to.

”

http://paidtoexist.com/counterintuitive-productivity/

This resonated with me today.

This garbled message, upon order confirmation from Seamless, always irks me, particularly the asterisk. With all the additional text it provides, is it really worth sounding “cool” by saying “cooking up” your food if you need to add a long-winded explanation? Abandoning it altogether would make for a cleaner page.

At this point, users don’t care. They’ve already purchased. This could be leveraged to explicitly encourage future purchases, checking out other restaurants nearby (like great places for dinner, if the user ordered lunch) or promoting useful features of the site.

This garbled message, upon order confirmation from Seamless, always irks me, particularly the asterisk. With all the additional text it provides, is it really worth sounding “cool” by saying “cooking up” your food if you need to add a long-winded explanation? Abandoning it altogether would make for a cleaner page. At this point, users don’t care. They’ve already purchased. This could be leveraged to explicitly encourage future purchases, checking out other restaurants nearby (like great places for dinner, if the user ordered lunch) or promoting useful features of the site. High-res