What I see in different shades of gray, from behind my reading glasses
One of my favourite authors, Robert Fulghum, celebrated his birthday recently & revised his personal ‘declaration’:
Ever since that recent day in June, the man I know has been thinking about the advantages of having been around for quite a while. By now, one knows some things, or should. By now, one has come to some conclusions about the quality of life. And before plunging on into the future, it might be useful to consider what he knows that makes the time to come workable and wonder-full.
After such profound blurring in our personal and professional lives, code-switching is difficult. You’re aware that every moment you spend working is a moment you’re not spending with a child, with a parent who needs care, with your partner. Now a lot of employees are asking, “Does this job work for me? Do I care at all about what I do for a living?” Increasingly, the bar is rising, and people are saying, “My work has to be more than a job. It has to fit in with my life’s purpose.”
via McKinsey Publications
via Wendy M. Grossman, writing about the Fastly.com incident:
it’s more likely that stuff like this will also increase, will be harder to debug, and will cause far more ancillary damage – and that damage will not be limited to the virtual world. A single random human, accidentally or intentionally, is now capable of creating physical-world damage at scale.
Wisdom from the School of Life:
we truly have talents in many more job areas than we will ever have the opportunity to explore. Large parts of our working personalities will have to go to the grave unexplored – and therefore make themselves felt in protest before they do so.
Leo Babauta reflects:
Somehow the world taught me that what I want is not acceptable, that I should only want what seems reasonable, doable, or won’t inconvenience others.
Ali Minai reckons we’ll be slaves of the machines long before they become our masters.
Long before there is a danger of machines becoming gods, they will become essential to our lives. We already see that with non-intelligent machines: It is almost impossible to live in the world today without access to motorized transportation or instant communication. …
We will help our machines get smarter because we will need them more and more as our servants. Long before they become their own masters, we will already be their slaves.
HT: 3QuarksDaily
Research suggests that David Graeber’s Theory of Bullshit Jobs – that many workers experience their jobs as being comprised of meaningless tasks in which they have to appear productive – doesn’t entirely hold true.
Some reporting on this:
Graeber was wrong about the various trends he believed in — the percentage of bullshit jobs and their increase — but he was right about the capacity of bad managers to turn a perfectly good job into bullshit.
John Naughton’s contrasts the implications of Lean/JIT in two industries, cars & computers:
… both had found themselves caught in a perfect storm that one had weathered and the other hadn’t. This storm bought three forces simultaneously to bear on an unprepared world: the fragility of a global supply chain on which both industries critically depended, the exigencies of US-China geopolitics and a pandemic that, more or less overnight, transformed the way large parts of the industrialised world worked.
Philip Napoli’s opinion column in WIRED on the dismal readership & failure of DJT’s blog:
The failure of Donald Trump’s blog is, then, yet another indication of the massive power that the platform giants hold over the content that we consume. But it’s a reminder that we bear responsibility for voluntarily ceding this power to them, and enthusiastically embracing the push model of the web over the pull.