This morning I needed to respond to an email request for action. It was a simple task.
But the email says I did not respond to a recent voice mail. I search my phone and learn I have had no voice mail messages for days. Now I have a mystery to solve. Does my voice mail work?
0 CommentsEvery now and then I like to update my list of personal rules. I find it helpful to have a list so I can later tell an offender “That’s number six on my list of things I don’t do.” It sounds more decisive than simply stating a preference at the moment.
Scott’s Updated Rules
1. Don’t ask me to remind you of something later. All you are doing is transferring your future failure to me. I’m not going to remember your thing.
2. If you don’t have an opinion on where to eat, I’m going to give you two choices. Please pick one. Ideally, that is the end of the conversation, not the starting point.
0 CommentsIf your company firewall is blocking the image, see it here on Twitter.
This comic is an example of what I call an “engineered solution” joke. You construct this type of joke by combining two unrelated things (El Chapo and commuter train service) and then show how one “solves” for the other.
0 CommentsScience is finally catching up to the non-science of hypnosis. See this about why your free will is an illusion.
I learned that free will is an illusion during hypnosis training classes in the 80s. When you see a skilled hypnotist reprogram a human in real time, the Moist Robot hypothesis is hard to ignore.
0 CommentsI might be one of the least-judgmental people on Earth. That’s because I see humanity as a bunch of moist robots bumping around according to the laws of physics. My worldview doesn’t include free will as anything but a necessary illusion to keep people sane. I never believe people “choose” to be evil or socially unacceptable.
0 CommentsIf you live in a dictatorship, personal privacy might be the only thing keeping you out of jail. And you need that privacy to plan your revolution against the dictator.
If you live in a Republic, such as the United States, you still want some privacy because you don’t want the government to have more power over you than it already has. But the issue is not a life-and-death situation in most cases. Citizens keep an eye on the Republic so it can’t get too far out of hand.
0 CommentsIf you haven’t seen this interactive graph on the causes of global warming, you really should, if only because the technology for the animation itself is outstanding.
I’ll probably run “climate change” through the Rationality Engine at some point, but for now I wondered what reasons the doubters are giving for their doubts. If you are a doubter, take a look at the animation and tell us what part it got wrong.
0 CommentsQ: What do Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and Samsung all have in common?
A: Their business models involve interrupting you all day long.
Individually, each company’s interruptions are trivial. You can easily ignore them. But cumulatively, the interruptions from these and other companies can be crippling.
In the economy of the past, companies made money by being useful to customers. Now the biggest tech companies make their money by distracting you with ads and apps and notifications and whatnot. I don’t mean to sound like an alarmist, but I think this is the reason 80% of the adults I know are medicating. People are literally being driven crazy by a combination of complexity (too many choices) and the Interruption Economy.
0 CommentsBusiness Insider has a an interesting article on 22 surprising facts about Americans. Some of those facts sure surprised me.
For example, here are two bits from the same article.
0 CommentsYou’ve probably seen Donald Trump’s recent quote about Mexican immigration. He said, “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, and some I assume are good people."
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