"Would the boy you were, be proud of the man you are?"
- Heard somewhere
PSA: It’s now illegal to unlock your phone
Yes, you read it right and it’s not from the Onion. Kinda like, you buy a car, the dealer locks it and to unlock it you now have to pay the dealer or go to jail. Corporations win, consumers lose. Asinine.
Subsidy model is disconnected from the actual purchase of the phone. Subsidies work better for carriers since they can hide the cost. Bet nobody knows how much they’re paying for the actual subsidy ($650-$199). I can bet it’s more Pawn shop rates rather than Bank rates. Why not charge real price and offer financing (la T-mobile)? But that’s too transparent for most carriers.
Read.
Lapham's Quarterly: We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was “legal”...
We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. But I am sure that if I had lived in Germany during that time, I would have aided and…
Lapham's Quarterly: We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was “legal”...
We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. But I am sure that if I had lived in Germany during that time, I would have aided and…
Why?
Imagine a life where all your time is spent on things you want to do. All your attention is focused on the project you create yourself, instead of working as a cog in a machine that exists to make other people rich.
My goal is to transition to a meaningful life oriented toward something I love to do. Take responsibility of your own future and build something beautiful and long lasting. And make money in the process.
Why now?
The vital career question of our times - what is risky and what is safe - has changed permanently. The old choice was to work at a job or take a big risk going out on your own. The new reality is that working at a job may be far riskier choice. Instead take the safe road and go out on your own.
Businesses have been around since the beginning of commerce. What’s changed is the ability to test, launch and scale your project quickly and on the cheap.
I need to define and decide that “this” is what I’m going to do. And that is that. Decision made and I’ll figure the rest out.
“When these things happen I react not as a president, but as a parent.”
-President Obama
Class act.
Scathing & very funny NYT review of Guy Fieri’s restaurant
GUY FIERI, have you eaten at your new restaurant in Times Square? Have you pulled up one of the 500 seats at Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar and ordered a meal? Did you eat the food? Did it live up to your expectations?
Did panic grip your soul as you stared into the whirling hypno wheel of the menu, where adjectives and nouns spin in a crazy vortex? When you saw the burger described as “Guy’s Pat LaFrieda custom blend, all-natural Creekstone Farm Black Angus beef patty, LTOP (lettuce, tomato, onion + pickle), SMC (super-melty-cheese) and a slathering of Donkey Sauce on garlic-buttered brioche,” did your mind touch the void for a minute?
"
Teaching today is like a stage play. A play can be seen by at most a few hundred people at a single sitting and it takes as much labor to produce the 100th viewing as it does to produce the first. As a result, plays are expensive. Online education makes teaching more like a movie. Movies can be seen by millions and the cost per viewer declines with more viewers. Now consider quality. The average movie actor is a better actor than the average stage actor. If you were making a movie with a potential audience in the millions wouldn’t you hire the best actors? With more viewers it also makes sense to substitute capital for labor, adding special effects, scenery, music and other quality improvements resulting in a movie experience unlike any that can be created on stage. Is there something ineffably great about a live performance? Occasionally, but the greatest stage performances are seen by only a handful of people.
The parallel between movies and plays and online and offline education has further lessons. First, the market for teachers will become more like the market for actors, a winner-take-all market with greater inequality and very big payments at the top. A principal player on Broadway might earn $62,500 a year, perhaps twice what a minor player might earn.[3] One of the biggest stars in the world, Julia Roberts, made $35,000 a week, or $1.62 million in a 50-week year performing in Three Days of Rain. Nevertheless, her stage salary pales in comparison to her typical payment of $10–$20 million per movie for much less work. Bigger markets support larger salaries, so the best teachers will earn much more in an online world.
Second, movies are better in many respects than plays, but no one doubts that a taped play is worse in all respects than a live play. Many of the early online forays into education were simply taped lectures, boring, flat, and worse than the same in-class lecture. To take full advantage of the online format, an online lecture has to be different from an in-class lecture. Different mediums demand different messaging. I turn to some of these differences now.
"- Alex Tabarrok on why online education works. Tabarrok is the author of the TED book Launching The Innovation Renaissance: A New Path to Bring Smart Ideas to Market Fast. (via explore-blog)
(via explore-blog)
On Beauty
I know a girl who just looks at her face in the medicine cabinet mirror and never looks below her shoulders, and she’s four or five hundred pounds but she doesn’t see all that, she just sees a beautiful face and therefore she thinks she’s a beauty. And therefore, I think she’s a beauty, too, because I usually accept people on the basis of their self-images, because their self-images have more to do with the way they think than their objective-images do.
- Andy Warhol
"These distraction-oholics. These focus-ophobics. Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn’t watching. He’s singing and dancing. He’s pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you’re awake. He’s making sure you’re always distracted. He’s making sure you’re fully absorbed. He’s making sure your imagination withers. Until it’s as useful as your appendix. He’s making sure your attention is always filled. And this being fed, it’s worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what’s in your mind. With everyone’s imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world."
- - Chuck Palahniuk (via findingself)
(via chuckpalahniuk)
Great Dane from Michigan is world’s tallest dog
A Great Dane from Michigan is doggone tall.
The Guinness World Records 2013 book published Thursday recognizes Zeus of Otsego, Mich., as the world’s Tallest Dog.
The 3-year-old measures 44 inches from foot to shoulder. Standing on his hind legs, Zeus stretches to 7-foot-4 and towers over his owner, Denise Doorlag.
Zeus weighs 155 pounds and eats a 30-pound bag of food every two weeks.
(Photo: AP/Guinness World Records 2013 book)
Tall, Dawg & Handsome!
