3 year old Susie Clemens, who may be more recognisable as Ms. Mark Twain Jr., woke up one Christmas morning to find this letter from Santa. Ah, the joys of having a writer for a dad!
Bad news for middle managers [Article]
Scott Adams reckons its the middle managers, not the skilled manual labour, that will be replaced by robots. He observes that that the least skilled employees are promoted to management. You need your most skilled people doing interface design, engineering, and the hard stuff. Management is mostly about optimizing resource allocation, and that is something a robot can learn relatively easily, at least compared to most skilled jobs.
Urban vs Rural [Video]
A video compilation of parallels in urban vs rural areas. Splendid!
7 Down [Article]
I grew up with a (perhaps unhealthy!) fascination for crossword puzzles. I just realized from this article that the job of the cross-word puzzle creator isn’t as well paying as playing with spreadsheets, although the newspaper that runs these crosswords makes a pile!!!
Films for Action [Links]
This holiday season, you may want to watch some movies. Or you can watch Films For Action, for free. The catch is that they really are short videos, & provide you some food for thought. Here’s a sample, called “Pirates & Emperors“, highlighting in verse & in under 4 minutes, how governments maintain control.
Memories in a drawer [Video]
If you find yourself losing your memory because of your age (or Alzheimers), have a look at this 2005 chinese animation called “A drawer of memory” that attempts to make poetic sense of what goes on for an old lady with dementia.
Suicide, Assisted [Essays]
Warning: Approach this topic only if you think you are willing to stress test your belief system about life, death & the role medicine.
Drs. Howard Ball, Philip Nitschke, & Patrick Lee put forth their views, for & against, on a topic that is guaranteed to shake the very foundations of our concepts of ethics, law & policy as it applies to death. In a couple of states in the US, a terminally ill patient can ask for & receive a prescription from his doctor that can end his life. Physician assisted death (PAD) differs from euthanasia – where the doctor administers the lethal amount to his patient (remember Dr. Jack Kevorkian?). Dr. Bell opens the discussion with an overview of the ethics, law & policy conflicts of PAD in America. Dr. Nitschke reacts with his opposition to the decriminalization & medicalization of suicide. Dr. Lee wants PAD to remain illegal, & explains why. The discussion continues with Ball responding to the detractors.
Basket-case architecture
The Basket Building (Ohio, United States): The Longaberger Basket Company building in Newark, Ohio might just be the strangest office building in the world, as the text on this video clip says. The 180,000-square- foot building, a replica of the company’s famous market basket, cost $30 million and took two years to complete. Many experts tried to persuade Dave Longaberger to alter his plans, but he wanted an exact replica of the real thing.
[Picture]
Wow! is all I could muster to describe my feelings about this picture. An immaculate job of photography & photoshopping.
How to avoid work [Article]
Advice from the 1950’s from a career counselor, William J Reilly rings true to this day. As he says in his book, How to Avoid Work, “life really begins when you have discovered that you can do anything you want.” This echoes what Thomas Edison said when asked about his secret to success. ” You do something all day long, don’t you? Everyone does. If you get up at seven o’clock and go to bed at eleven, you have put sixteen good hours, and it is certain that you have been doing something all that time. The only difference is that you do a great many things and I do one. If you took the time in question and applied it in one direction, you would succeed. Success is sure to follows such application. The trouble lies in the fact that people do not have one thing to stick to, letting all else go.”