“In a computer, everything is recallable all the time, but life is a succession of events that only happen once.” —
Thomas Bangalter
Cover Story: Daft Punk | Features | Pitchfork
Woman in Blue Reading a Letter
(Johannes Vermeer, 1663-1664)
Stanley Kubrick on the set of Barry Lyndon (1975).
(Source: fuckyeahdirectors, via parislemon)
“Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.” — John Stuart Mill (via nevver)
“The future is extremely hard to see through the lens of the present. It’s very easy to unconsciously dismiss the first versions of something as frivolous or useless. Or as stupid ideas.” — What a stupid idea | Dustin Curtis
“News”
Apple’s new pitch to investors | Felix Salmon -
Felix really sums up the nature of the awkward adolescence that Apple is having. Any company has to eventually transition away from being measured on growth to being measured by different fundamentals. His penultimate paragraph is essential:
“Apple is trading at an astonishingly low valuation, with a p/e ratio in single digits, because it has now become that animal investors like least: a slow-growing tech stock. Either one is fine on its own, and both slow-growing stocks and fast-growing tech stocks can support much higher multiples than Apple is seeing right now. But conservative investors, who like slow-growing stocks with high dividends, are constitutionally uncomfortable with the volatility inherent in the tech world. And technology investors, who are happy taking that kind of risk, want to see substantial growth. Apple, notwithstanding the fact that it’s one of the most valuable companies in the world, is falling through the capital-markets cracks.”
Our economic system is designed to solve various friction points with incremental improvements — but there are limited equivalent mechanisms for stakeholders (rather than customers) to have their needs solved. It’s the purpose of regulation to adjust incentives to limit negative externalities. Perhaps what’s (also) needed is an infrastructure for identifying and solving externalities through non-regulatory means. Like Kickstarter for externalities.
Inspired by Dealing with a real life externality by @yegg
[the best sentence of which is the closing note: ”I wonder how many other small negative externalities are out there waiting to be solved.”]
The future according to Mr Google -
Eric Schmidt, speaking with Alan Rusbridger of The Guardian:
“There’s a lot of discussion in the world about the two billion that are connected,” he says. “We spend all day talking about the issues of e-commerce and start-ups and globalisation and so forth, and we forget that the majority of people are not online and that they will come online, the majority of them in the next five years.
It’s going to happen very fast. It’s going to happen in countries which don’t have the same principles that we in America have from the British legal system – around law and privacy and those sorts of things. All sorts of crazy stuff is going to happen. Human societies can’t change that fast without both good and negative implications.”
“Our ancestors lived in close-knit extended families, imbedded in the spectacular complexity of wild ecosystems, viewing reality itself as full of awareness and intention. Now we grow up in neurotic nuclear families, work in office cubes, our closest engagement with nature is mowing the lawn, and we view consciousness as an accident in a mindless billiard-ball universe.” — Ran Prieur