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0 CommentsGoogle’s 20% Policy
Posted January 14th, 2015 @ 2:19pm in #google #yahoo #marissa meyer
You probably already know that Google famously has a policy encouraging employees to use 20% of their time working on their own ideas for future Google products.
Today there is an article about Marissa Mayer, now CEO of Yahoo, admitting that in her Google days the 20% was never real. It actually meant Google expected you to do 100% of your job plus another 20%.
Do you know who already knew the 20% wasn’t real?
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Corporations versus Countries
Posted January 12th, 2015 @ 10:31am in #General Nonsense
Corporations keep getting bigger. Some have their own fleets of aircraft, ships, and sometimes even submarines.
At the same time, the more problematic countries - in terms of spawning terrorism - are the ones that are shrinking, both in population and GDP. Syria is smaller now. Afghanistan and Iraq are smaller.
At some point I believe it is inevitable that a corporation will go to war with a small, terror-spawning country.
Attention All Smart, Cheap Bastards!
Posted January 8th, 2015 @ 10:50am in #General Nonsense
Starting Note: The other day I mentioned there are some ideas that, by their nature, can’t be communicated. Today’s post will be a good example of an exception that proves the rule. In today’s post I will embrace a risk of embarrassment that folks with a normal sense of shame would avoid. By the end of this post, three-quarters of you will have a new reason to dislike me. But I didn’t know a better way to convey some potentially useful information. Luckily, I lost my sense of shame years ago. So here you go. The embarrassing parts are at the end.
Now to the actual post…
Words versus Reason
Posted January 5th, 2015 @ 8:30am in #General Nonsense
The problem with reason is that we humans use words to construct thoughts. And words come pre-loaded with all sorts of bias. No matter how hard you try to be reasonable, if you use words, sometimes you simply can’t get there from here.
This is part of a larger topic of great interest to me: Ideas that can’t be communicated because of their nature. I have several of them trapped inside me. (I’ll blog on that another day.)
Anyway, take for example a headline I saw this morning at BusinessInsider.com: “1/1000 of the US Now Controls More than 1/5 of The Wealth”
“Controls”?
Flag Hill
Posted January 2nd, 2015 @ 4:32pm in #General Nonsense
You know I don’t like goals and resolutions. Systems are better. I wrote a book on this topic and I blog about it often. I even give speeches about it.
But I have one exception this year: Flag Hill.
My goal is to hike it to the top. I live half an hour away.
It looks like this:
Could Robots Learn Emotions from Emoticons?
Posted December 31st, 2014 @ 8:39am in #General Nonsense
Could robots learn to imitate human emotions - and in so doing appear intelligent - just by reading millions of text messages that include emoticons and searching for patterns?
Humans use emoticons in text messages because words by themselves are often ambiguous. So we tack emoticons to our words to convey the proper emotional state. Those emoticons are like programming code for artificial intelligence. If a computer sees enough text conversations with enough emoticons I think it could start to develop some rules about human emotions based on patterns.
Systems Versus Goals again
Posted December 30th, 2014 @ 12:14am in #General Nonsense
Those of you who were nice enough to read my latest book (How to Fail…) will recognize my writing as the uncredited source material for this video. The credit information probably got separated from the product at some point.
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Do Successful People have Goals?
Posted December 29th, 2014 @ 3:58pm in #General Nonsense
James Altucher has a great summary of his many interviews with successful people (including me). Do successful people talk about their personal goals? Not so much. That has been my observation as well. Great read.
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The Christmas Chair
Posted December 22nd, 2014 @ 8:14am in #General Nonsense
When I was 12-years old, my mother and I worked together to build a chair out of parts from other chairs. It was our little mom-and-son project. We took the top of an old painted chair with legs and attached it to the swivel bottom from a different chair. My mother reupholstered the back and I refinished the wood and added new wheels.
We did not possess any of the skills necessary to make a new chair from old chairs, and the result showed. The caster wheels would often fall out. The chair was wobbly and unstable. To an unfamiliar sitter it was a death trap.
