[I]f the data were good for the company, they would have made them public.
– Tom Slee’s The Sound of Silence Rule with applications to Uber and Airbnb
Verisign, the registry responsible for .NET, is raising its costs by $0.61.
I feel a great disturbance in the Internet, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
Kids will think it’s funny that their ancestors used to stare at glowing rectangles hoping to suspend disbelief.
– Chris Dixon on Virtual Reality
AT&T: Give us $10 per month to access your existing family plan data bucket.
Me: Okay and how much more data do I get in my bucket per month?
AT&T: None, but you have to lock your SIM card to our network.
Me: Um… brb.
T-Mobile: please accept our offer of 200mb/mo of free LTE data.
Me: Thanks, I will!
[several months pass]
T-Mobile: Hey, you’ve used over 80% of your 200mb allotment this month. Toss us $10 and we’ll give you 5gb.
Me: Ha! What’s the catch?
T-Mobile [sheepishly]: You have 150 days to use the 5gb, BUT we promise not to dip into this bucket until you exhaust your free 200mb.
Me: Wait, that’s not a catch?
T-Mobile: I love you!
Me: I know.
Fin.
If you are going out to eat with a small group, I recommend two stops. No, don’t eat any more food than usual, but distribute your meal across two restaurants. Have a few appetizers in one, and then leave and move on to another.... This approach will improve the conversation at your table, if only by breaking up the original seating plan. It also makes you more aware and more appreciative of what you are eating.
If you are going out to a movie, see two. There is a fixed cost of attending, whether in terms of the traffic, the babysitter, or simply the will to spend time away from Facebook.
– Tyler Cowen suggests Playing Two
I came of age in San Francisco working at a software startup during the dot com boom. The cyberpunks and the geeks were my friends. We worked together, we lived together, we raved together. Yes, a lot of what motivated us was the golden handcuffs (i.e. a salary of stock options only good in a future IPO) but I remember being motivated by the idea of technology changing the world for the better. Sometimes it felt like we were revolutionaries. Unfortunately a lot of those ideals, if they still exist, have become…corrupted is too strong a word… subsumed. The revolution has been corporatized.
–Zoë Keating on being pressured into a business deal with YouTube
Time was when you could beat a man to death with a Western Electric handset, and then wipe off the blood and use it for another twenty years.
– Dr. Drang, discussing office designs
The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) ★★★★☆
I hate the word “Obamacare” and will not use it. It’s a derisive term that has been embraced for some reason by ACA/Obama supporters. It needlessly politicizes an already over-politicized issue.
Nona Willis Aronowitz for The Atlantic’s CityLab on Why These Midwest Millennials Are Choosing Milwaukee Over Chicago:
Milwaukee, a city of almost 600,000, has a lot to offer twentysomethings: relatively affordable housing, unique restaurants and bars, a rich cultural scene, and a famous art museum, not to mention a gorgeous Great Lake. It’s also a mere one-and-a-half hour car ride from Chicago, one of the biggest and most vibrant cities in the country. Milwaukee isn’t a commuter town, but it’s not a figurative island, either. Many young people I spoke with described it as a sort of “mini-Chicago,” or perhaps what Chicago used to be a few decades ago—a city that has retained its blue-collar roots while still offering certain amenities for ambitious Millennials.
I came for a job, but I’ve stayed becuase it’s a pretty nice place to live and much cheaper than most other places I ever imagine moving to (which helps make it an even nicer place to live of course).