I realized if I made good, informed decisions I could solve problems in both normal and edge cases. Instead of a one-time answer, I could build a framework to answer any question. A mentality. The outcome of finding the answer, solving the problem, sharing the solution—rewards this mindset. A loop. Doing it over and over.
Month: October 2013
There’s an old rule of thumb that if you have something really important you need done, ask for help from the busiest person you know. Here’s an analogous rule: if you want to identify the most senior, knowledgeable people in an audience, look for the people who are taking notes and asking questions.
New face of the war on immigrants?
Thus, to name a few of the major 21st century transnational labour flows, Turkish and Eastern European workers supply labour to Western Europe, Central Africans to South Africa, Nicaraguans to Costa Rica, Sri Lankas and other South Asians to the Middle East oil producing countries, Asians to Australia, Thais to Japan, Indonesians to Malaysia, and so on.
In all of these cases, it is repressive state controls that create “immigrant workers” as a distinct category of labour that becomes central to the whole global capitalist economy. As borders have come down for capital and goods they have been reinforced for human beings. While global capitalism creates immigrant workers, these workers do not enjoy citizenship rights in their host countries. Stripped either de facto or de jure of the political, civic, and labour rights afforded to citizens, immigrant workers are forced into the underground, made vulnerable to employers, whether large private or state employers or affluent families, and subject to hostile cultural and ideological environments.
To make journalism harder, slower, less secure. Great observations from Jay Rosen about the current challenge to journalism from the surveillance state.
A quick scan across the world reveals that where growth and innovation have been most successful, a hybrid public-private, domestic-foreign nexus lies beneath the miracle. These aren’t states; they’re “para-states” — or, in one common parlance, “special economic zones.”
Three Things I Believe (About the Future of Publishing):
In fact we are living in a golden age, an age of constant reading. Sometimes we feel like it’s too much, too distracting, too bewitching. But we should realize that this is a boom time for literacy, and we shouldn’t underestimate that.
Bad Blood: The Life and Death of Alexander Litvinenko. The story of Alexander Litvinenko and his death in 2006 by radioactive assassination.
Can the Guardian take its aggressive investigations global? Good read in the New Yorker about the Guardian and how it operates.
What Clayton Christensen Got Wrong. Fantastic essay from Ben Thompson about Clayton Christensen, Apple, and theories of disruption.
For all the sophistication of a world in which most of our waking hours are spent consuming or interacting with media, we have scarcely advanced in our understanding of what attention means. What are we actually talking about when we base both business and mental models on a ‘resource’ that, to all intents and purposes, is fabricated from scratch every time a new way of measuring it comes along?