hayekd reblogged
The worst thing about “leadership,” the notion that society should be run by highly trained elites, is that it has usurped the place of “citizenship,” the notion that society should be run by everyone together. Not coincidentally, citizenship — the creation of an informed populace for the sake of maintaining a free society, a self-governing society — was long the guiding principle of education in the United States.
William Deresiewicz at Harpers. The Neoliberal Arts How college sold its soul to the market
Via Shrinkrants
(via protoslacker)
Thanks #Crystal 💎
hayekd reblogged
Brain Strain - Your brain takes in 11 million pieces of information every second, but it is only aware of 40.
hayekd reblogged
solizardlike-deactivated2016062
men need to learn that they are programmed to ignore women, and interrupt women ,and speak over women, and undermine and under appreciate them and then they need to spend a lot of time consciously trying to stop
Showgoers is a Google Chrome extension that lets you sync your Netflix player with yourfriends’ so that you can watch the same thing in real-time. Clicking play/pause or jumping to another scene affects the players of all other synced users. Source
Source: didyouknowblog.com
hayekd reblogged
New Blog Post: Betrayed
I depend on my hardware when I travel, I set things up and I expect them to do what they are supposed to. It saves me endless stress and frustration, so long as it works. Which, because I’m an Apple user, it always does. I never have to think about it. Until recently when it’s all I think about because Apple thinks they know what I want my hardware to do better than I do.
Example 1: The kid has an iPad, I loaded it up with videos for him a while ago. Anytime we travel together I know that as soon as the plane takes off I can give him the go and and he can watch any of the videos on his iPad and kill a few hours of travel time. Except last week as soon as we hit the runway one of his videos won’t play, then another, then another and another. I look and find some new setting “show all movies” which is turned on, I turn it off and now it shows “only movies that have been downloaded to this iPad” which is about 5 of the 30 that used to be there. Some unauthorized autoupdate changed this and deleted files that I had on this hardware. I don’t have autoupdates turned on for this so everything about this was against my wishes. Who on earth at Apple thought this was a good idea?
Example 2: Same trip, my iPhone. Same problem. Half my music is gone. I don’t use icloud, I don’t use Apple Music, I don’t use any streaming shit. I have my own MP3 files and I chose which of those files, those songs, I wanted on my phone. Except now half of them are gone because again, some update that I didn’t consent to deleted files from my device.
I used to be able to trust that Apple products would just work. Now I can’t. I feel betrayed.
And that’s on top of the massive piece of shit that iTunes has become.
While I’ve been reassessing my digital interactions I now find myself reassessing what tools I use as well. Suddenly a dumb music player that reads 256GB MicroSD cards sounds like a more appealing travel companion than my iPhone. And that makes me reassess everything else.
I need a new laptop as my trusty 11″ MacBook air that I’ve dragged all over the world for the last 2 years is on it’s last legs. I’d been eyeballing the new MacBooks but that was when I was trusting Apple to be making the right steps forward. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the older MacBook Pro seems much more appealing even though it’s bigger and heavier – if only because it has ports I can trust and depend on. But reconsidering that is making me reconsider anything. I’ve loyally used Mac OS since the early 80’s but suddenly I’m wondering if something else isn’t a better choice.
I don’t want a company deciding how I want to want to use my stuff. I want to make that decision. I don’t know if Apple respects my choices anymore. But what else do I consider?
via seanbonnerdotcom http://ift.tt/1J8GquX
*Stacks
hayekd reblogged
*Underestimated threat scenario
hayekd reblogged
I have this perverse theory that, in about ten years, sections of the internet will have become like the American inner cities of the 1980s. Like a John Carpenter film – where, among the ruins, there are fierce warrior gangs, all with their own complex codes and rules – and all shouting at each other. And everyone else will have fled to the suburbs of the internet, where you can move on and change the world. I think those suburbs are going to be the exciting, dynamic future of the internet. But to build them I think it will be necessary to leave the warrior trolls behind. And to move beyond the tech-utopianism that simply says that passing information around a network is a new form of democracy. That is naive, because it ignores the realities of power.
Happy Saint Swithin’s Day!!!
If you had told me in 2004 that America would have a black president, universal health care, and gay marriage by 2015, I would have laughed.
Laugh your heart out, America.
(via kateoplis)
Selling this coffee table I made a few years back. Click here for details.
hayekd reblogged
It seems to me that with increased measurement of, and attention to, employee happiness, what happens is that the burden of well-being really ends up falling on the individual rather than the company. Because then these places can say, “Hey, we’ve got wellness expert on-staff, but you’re still not happy. So you have to go, and it’s your own fault.”
Absolutely. This is also an American phenomenon. There are these people, these corporate happiness experts like Tony Hsieh, who's the CEO of Zappos [and author of Delivering Happiness] — his recommendations are some of the most brutal. He basically just advocates laying off the least happy 10 percent of your workforce. This is when happiness gets repositioned as a business resource, and it's up to each of us to either invest in it or let it depreciate, and if the latter happens, you become extraneous. That attitude renders happiness into something completely joyless.