There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.
Perfect Failure
Topic: Philosophy
7:59 am EDT, Jun 22, 2009
Paul Tudor Jones:
Today, I want to talk to you about the dirtiest word that any of you 9th graders know. It’s the “F” word.
FAILURE.
Failure that is so mortifying and so devastating that it makes you try to become invisible. It makes you want to hide your face, your soul, your being from everyone else because of the shame. Trust me, boys—if you haven’t already tasted that, you will.
One problem with failure: it can stay with you for a very long time.
Now, there are two types of failure you will experience in life. The first type comes from things you can control. That is the worst kind. But there is another form of failure that will be equally devastating to you, and that is the kind beyond your control.
Some things happen to you that at the time will make you feel like the world is coming to an end, but in actuality, there is a very good reason for it. You just can’t see it and don’t know it. When one door closes, another will open, but standing in that hallway can be hell. You just have to persevere.
Some of your greatest successes are going to be the children of failure.
Ira Glass:
If you're not failing all the time, you're not creating a situation where you can get super-lucky.
Only losers say they don’t have time to read blogs.
The reality is that you have time to read everything.
Stop talking about time like you need to save it. You just need to use it better.
From the archive:
The reality is that, despite fears that our children are "pumped full of chemicals" everything is made of chemicals, down to the proteins, hormones and genetic materials in our cells.
Stefan Klein:
We are not stressed because we have no time, but rather, we have no time because we are stressed.
"We're all flabbergasted," one European diplomat said.
Fred Wilson:
I thought today might be a good opportunity to talk about ... building successful long term relationships in business. In my business, the most important relationships are those between my partners and me, and the relationships with the entrepreneurs we back and their teams. It's absolutely critical to get those relationships right and sustain them for the long haul.
Tolerance is critical to a successful long term relationship. You need to be able to tune out certain stuff that gets old and let it pass you by without getting annoyed or upset.
Even more important are shared values and vision.
Pico Iyer:
It seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn't pursued.
For a lot of people, their job and their position are not the relevant part of how they see themselves. They have an internal view of themselves, their career aspirations, the direction they want to go. The really important motivational stuff is more in their secret identity.
Usually people always have some passion that really drives them. And this to me is one of the important points of working collaboratively with other people — trying to get a sense of what is the one thing that makes their eyes light up, they get excited about and they won’t stop talking about. And if you can get a sense of what that is from somebody, and you can harness that, that’s going to have more impact on how they perform their job, how they relate to you, how you can convey a vision to them in a way that they get excited about it.
Benjamin Wallace-Wells on Rita Katz:
The best way to fight terrorists is to go at it not like G-men, with two-year assignments and query letters to the staff attorneys, but the way the terrorists do, with fury and the conviction that history will turn on the decisions you make -- as an obsession and as a life style.
Fred Wilson on Paul Graham:
I don't mean this in a negative way, but Y Combinator is more like a cult than a venture capital fund. And Paul is the cult leader.
Johan de Kleer:
One passionate person is worth a thousand people who are just plodding along ...
Pico Iyer on the Joy of Less:
It seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn’t pursued.
Who better to reinvent the vampire genre than Guillermo Del Toro, the genius behind Pan's Labyrinth, and Chuck Hogan, master of character-driven thrillers like Prince of Thieves? The first of a trilogy, The Strain is everything you want from a horror novel -- dark, bloody, and packed full of mayhem and mythology. But, be forewarned, these are not like any vampires you've met before -- they're not sexy or star-crossed or "vegetarians" -- they are hungry, they are connected, and they are multiplying. The vampire virus marches its way across New York, and all that stands between us and a grotesque end are a couple of scientists, an old man with a decades-old vendetta, and a young boy. This first installment moves fast and sets up the major players, counting down to the beginning of the end. Great summer reading.
About Pan's Labyrinth, Anthony Lane concluded:
It is, I suspect, a film to return to, like a country waiting to be explored: a maze of dead ends and new life.
Have you returned yet?
See also, by Mark Z. Danielewski:
Had The Blair Witch Project been a book instead of a film, and had it been written by, say, Nabokov at his most playful, revised by Stephen King at his most cerebral, and typeset by the futurist editors of Blast at their most avant-garde, the result might have been something like House of Leaves.
Extent of E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress
Topic: Surveillance
11:31 pm EDT, Jun 16, 2009
James Risen:
The National Security Agency is facing renewed scrutiny over the extent of its domestic surveillance program, with critics in Congress saying its recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged, current and former officials said.
Thomas Powers, in May 2005:
Is more what we really need?
In my opinion not.
But running spies is not the NSA's job. Listening is, and more listening is what the NSA knows how to organize, more is what Congress is ready to support and fund, more is what the President wants, and more is what we are going to get.
George Bush, in February 2008:
First of all, we have said that whatever we do ... will be legal.
We're having a debate in America on whether or not we ought to be listening to terrorists making phone calls in the United States. And the answer is darn right we ought to be.
Decius, in February 2007:
It is our failure to avoid embracing fear and sensationalism that will be our undoing. We're still our own greatest threat.
Decius, in February 2009:
The ship has already sailed on the question of whether or not it's reasonable for the government to collect evidence about everyone all the time so that it can be used against them in court if someone accuses them of a crime or civil tort.
Noam Cohen's friend, in February 2009:
Privacy is serious. It is serious the moment the data gets collected, not the moment it is released.
Decius, in March 2009:
We are very close to the point where the 4th amendment will be an anachronism - a technicality that has very little impact on everyday life - and a radical reconsideration will be necessary in order to re-establish it.
Decius, in August 2008:
Don't worry about privacy ... privacy is dead ... there's no privacy ... just more databases ... No consequences, no whammies, money. Money for me ... Money for me, databases for you.
Jello, in June 2009:
The cloud and big data analytics. That is where the boom will come from.
The signatories of this letter are researchers and academics in the fields of computer science, information security and privacy law. We write to you today to express our concern that many users of Google's cloud-based services are needlessly exposed to an array of privacy and security risks. We ask you to increase users' security and privacy protection by enabling by default transport-level encryption (HTTPS) for Google Mail, Docs and Calendar, a technology already enabled by default for Google Voice, Health, AdWords and AdSense.
As a market leader in providing cloud services, Google has an opportunity to engage in genuine privacy and security leadership, and to set a standard for the industry.
There is simply no way, officials say, to effectively conduct computer operations without entering networks inside the United States.
The process could ultimately be accepted as the digital equivalent of customs inspections, in which passengers arriving from overseas consent to have their luggage opened for security, tax and health reasons.
Administration officials have begun to discuss whether laws or regulations must be changed to allow law enforcement, the military or intelligence agencies greater access to networks or Internet providers when significant evidence of a national security threat was found.
The complications are not limited to privacy concerns.
Frida Berrigan:
There is no front line anymore.
Decius on CBP:
Their basic point remains the same – customs has checked people’s items at the border for 200 years, so they can check your laptop.
From a CAP petition:
This is an affront to our progressive values of privacy and protection from unwarranted search and seizure.
