rland

39 ms·

331.
by rland 8y ago
Yes, I mean, that's almost my point. I think for a big portion of the people I see in that throng of 100, the experience of going someplace, joining the crowd, getting in line for the photo angle that trends best on Instagram, then pac
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by rland 8y ago
I have been toying with the idea that travel is the ultimate expression of selfishness and narcissism. I have a place that's very dear to me that is similarly being eroded by a crush of visitors. They are loud, cause crazy traffic, car
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by rland 8y ago
That unraveling of goodwill began much earlier, with Vietnam, imo.
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by rland 8y ago
Death is a very personal thing. Would you tell the author of TFA that they are "giving up?"
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by rland 8y ago
This is the problem I have with higher education. It is not about the effectiveness of the education, but the signal of effectiveness. "Social Capital" is a zero sum game. If someone gains social capital, another must lose. Actual
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by rland 8y ago
If college is simply a jobs training program, we ought to simply say so and do away with the bullshit about enlightened citizens and just get down to career skills and workplace training. Right now, we have the worst of both worlds. The req
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by rland 8y ago
I would like for these centralized platforms decentralized re recommendations. I can picture an API that anyone can use, that would enable third parties to design recommendation algorithms for YouTube. Right now, YouTube is in charge, becau
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by rland 8y ago
Topical is The Book of Sand by Jorge Luis Borges. After all, the distinction between a whole library and a single book is rendered meaningless once infinity gets involved!
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by rland 8y ago
I agree, but the US has the wrong cultural mindset for this issue. The example I turn to -- and I'd be interested in the hard data on this -- is the explosion of STEM education in the US after WWII. It seems to me that a massive instit
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by rland 8y ago
For society, by making the distribution of goods/services more efficient. Amazon enriches our lives (compared to no Amazon) every time anyone uses it. The resources we all save, the delta, go partially to Mr. Bezos and owners of Amazon
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by rland 8y ago
On the contrary. Most of that money is the capital that makes up Amazon and its subsidiaries, which has consistently grown faster (created more wealth/benefit) than almost any other entity in our society. That's your neoliberal ta
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by rland 8y ago
Hikkomori is not strictly a Japanese phenomenon. It is becoming increasingly common in the West.
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by rland 8y ago
A big component is the class issue. Since dialogue about class is verboten, it is never discussed. We are building a trolley line in San Diego to alleviate car traffic along a main freeway artery (Downtown -> UTC). There were several law
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by rland 8y ago
Immediately after writing that, I realized that "tech" is kind of a bad label for our Googles and Facebooks. "Attention companies" is perhaps a more suitable term, because attention is the product they're selling.
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by rland 8y ago
So, advertiser dollars in the "attention economy" have been redirected from newspapers to ad-tech. I wonder, who is a better steward of this money, and the control it entails? Tech has been getting a bad rep recently; but there wa
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by rland 8y ago
That would solve the problem -- but now we are back at square one, because a free competitor will emerge to replace Facebook. There are paid social networks out there. Nobody uses them.
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by rland 8y ago
It's a huge problem in non English speaking countries, like Myanmar. Overtly hateful speech remains up because Facebook cannot find enough people fluent in local languages to moderate. Much more controversially, I think it's a pro
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by rland 8y ago
Facebook seems to be taking a lot of heat these days. But I wonder: what would actually "fix" the platform? As far as I can tell, the only "solution" is getting rid of Facebook. Obviously, FB doesn't agree. Short of
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by rland 8y ago
I have heard the exact opposite. That teachers increasingly have to acquiesce to the demands of parents and administrators. That they want to be creative and exercise their "calling," the art of it and care given to individual stu
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by rland 8y ago
I call it Font Disease. Once afflicted, you will start noticing fonts, and for anything written you can control, you desperately want to find the best font possible--the default will not suffice. When you find a good font, it's very sa
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by rland 8y ago
Many tremendously important things are non-quantifiable by think-tanks and economists. How people make friends. How many friends people have. How much people feel they're a part of their community. How much people touch each other in g
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by rland 8y ago
Yeah, that's what I mean. Universities are far more expensive than they need to be.
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by rland 8y ago
We're asking the wrong questions. A full semester at my local community college is under $1000. Extrapolating to four years of undergrad education, that's $8,000 total. WHY do we need this never ending whirlpool of sophisticated f
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by rland 8y ago
Awesome comment, and I legitimately have never heard this point of view before. You're right, the closest it ever gets is "don't you like [sports team]??" I'm far more inclined to change my view on this issue. We (S
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by rland 8y ago
I had a pair of WP frames that were just fine (my first pair of glasses). When they broke, I ordered not one, but two pairs of similar acetate frames for $20 from Zenni. Quality was identical, so much so that I wonder if they came from the
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by rland 8y ago
Things were repairable in the past because they were both mechanically simple and far more expensive up front. If you want, you can live as people did in the 50s and spend $2,000 for an automatic dishwasher, $3,000 for a washer/dryer c
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by rland 8y ago
That's what I'm saying. Historical changes to the climate have occurred, maybe with similar rapidity, maybe slower, and they caused huge extinctions. The best case, I guess, is that the shift is slow AND life is hardier than we ex
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by rland 8y ago
I'm just a layman, not a climate scientist, but I don't think the magnitude of the warming is our big issue. The issue is how quickly it's changing. Previous warming events happened very slowly; even the quickest ones occurre
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by rland 8y ago
The prominence of the peak. Like how Denali is taller than the mountains around it, but Everest is still the tallest. We're quite close to dolphins and killer whales, so the essence of their intelligence is easier for us to understand,
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by rland 8y ago
Octopuses are really incredible creatures. They diverged from humans in the evolutionary tree hundreds of millions of years ago. Our common ancestor would have been a very dumb animal. Their brain structure is so different: 8 semi-autonomou

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