The two things that almost killed Big Bird

First, Big Bird avoided the Challenger disaster. Next, it survived Mitt Romney.

Experience: I am Big Bird

Consensus

"I suspect capital will do well in any variant of the current political order, it'd be nice if money-transfer was easier, cheaper and better automatable, and I'm not expecting banks to vanish anytime soon..."

"Bitcoin throws a whole pile of obnoxious goldbug monetary theory and ponzi scheme incentives into the mix ..."

"...in order to resist sybil attacks... [it] burned a small country worth of oil, and produced a "transaction processing" network with extremely confusing and non-obvious failure modes that can sustain about the same rate of account-updates as, say, a team of human slide-rule operators."

Stellar Consensus Protocol

Out There

An authoritative review of Mad Men

Mad Men’s second overt challenge to its own glamour relies on the audience’s self-flattering sense of historical irony, on our consciousness of our social enlightenment relative to the 1960s. ‘How wonderful they look,’ we’re invited to think, ‘but how racist they are, how sexist, how homophobic, how reckless in their diet; what snobs!’


What if, with or against our will, we aren’t shocked by the darkness beneath the surface, but childishly delighted by the prettiness of the surface shimmering over the darkness? What if the vintage fashion-shoot perfection of the Christmas scene leaves a more powerful impression on us than our awareness of the suffering...

... over a whole series, these temporal markers of the American 1960s crowd the portrayal of chauvinism to create an effect where, rather than being a cause of shame, past racism and homophobia come to seem an organic and inherently temporary aspect of nostalgia, like puberty – as if civil rights for all races and sexual orientations have been won (to the limited extent they have been) not through protest, obstinacy and sacrifice, in the face of vicious opposition and popular derision, but because they were inevitable. It is as if the worst chauvinisms of straight white 1960s America were childish bad behaviour that the adult straight white America of the new millennium would probably rather not repeat, but permits itself to shake its head over with bemused affection for its impetuous younger self...

The shock of the pretty

Thinking out loud on FOSS

Free and Open-source Software has yet to revolutionize ERP systems. It is one of those areas where the value lies mostly in implementation due to the highly customized and proprietary nature of individual businesses.

The bigger problem, I think, is the two track nature of technological progress and organizational competence. There is nowhere to hide if the ERP is not working.