Tag: culture
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too abstract
Abstraction is the practice of peeling away the unnecessary, the unimportant, and the unwanted to arrive as some ideal, yet unreal representation of where you started. It happens in any discipline where we try to represent the real world in a fabricated realm of ideas or concepts. In computing, abstraction takes on a guise of…
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Don’t hold bombs for those who call you “enemy”
I’ve squandered my time on this Earth in workplaces awash with acronyms and can say without pause that acronyms in the non-infrastructure civilian world provide negative value. When you don’t say the words they stop having meaning. This is fine when you are in the military and everyone is trained up and kept sharp because…
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minutes watched
Streaming sites evidently measure how much you like something by a metric called “minutes viewed” which really ought to be “cumulative minutes viewed” (if this was advanced stats for sports, it would be called CMV) because it is a measure of all the minutes that any client watched the show. Which is… weird, like, as…
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everything is a side-hustle
In the back half of the 1990s when the dot com bubble was inflating, there was a sense among the watchers that the energy and limitlessness of the times represented a “New Economy” and a “New Way of Working”. Maybe it did. Maybe it didn’t. By 2008 that optimism was gone, and the prevailing ethos…
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the hubris of idiots
Fun fact: both idiot and hubris are from Ancient Greek and they still mean today pretty much what they meant in 500 BC. Idiot had some benign meanings that it has lost, but the idea of someone who is ignorant, uneducated, or not in the know is very much there. Hubris still has the original…
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social myth
Philosophical mythology vs political sociology is the conflict between progress and regress, sophrosyne vs hubris, and thus the world of freedom and liberty vs the world of authority and control. “Do or do not, there is no try” is incompatible with corpo-capitalism because teaching mythological belief in the Force that you can find harmony with,…
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a more accurate political spectrum
As we once again struggle to talk about what is happening in the White House it is important to understand that our customs regarding how we talk about politics, politicians, and political power are taxonomically flawed. The use of a Right = Conservative, Left = Liberal dichotomy doesn’t fit with the use of a Conservative-Moderate-Liberal…
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Dragons
The Internet and the World Wide Web represent what happens when you build a system that structurally subverts the mechanisms of constraint that allow a government to regulate the behavior of community members. Typically, this has been seen as a good thing because it was initially done by benevolent tinkerers and lots of people benefited…
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Rank, Role, Pay
Rank is where you sit in a hierarchy. You get positional authority from it. Role is what your responsibilities and operational authority are. Pay is how you are compensated. Some places try to keep these three tightly coupled — “Only people of this Rank can hold this Role, and Pay is bound to Rank.” Only…
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threats…
The single greatest threat to liberty in an ostensibly free nation-state is that increases in the efficiency of the bureaucratic system for those who execute the system outpace increases in the transparency of the bureaucratic system for those who are subject to the system.