Slavoj Žižek Is A Complicated Dude

Earlier this week a friend introduced me to Slavoj Žižek - and specifically, he referenced The Perverts Guide To Cinema. I started watching and suddenly realized that it was over 2 1/2 hours long. I saved to ‘watch later’! Seriously - watch the first 5 to 10 minutes - you can’t just stop and never return … BUT … life does have a limited duration!

I commented on this to my friend … he responded …

I had no idea it was that long! There is not enough alcohol in New Zealand to get you (let alone two of you) through 2.5 hours. This six-minute piece is more than enough to convey Zizek’s characteristic mannerisms (mental and physical). And he neatly endorses the critique of “the fetishism of action” by reversing Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach: “In the 20th-century we tried to change the world too quickly, it’s time to go back to interpreting it.” Big Think

I haven’t watched it yet … still trying to understand my friend’s reply 😂

QE2 Obituaries That Are Different

I am sad for the loss of the Queen, but ….

There cannot be life without death, it is inescapable.

💬 Keisei Tagami

That said, most of what I am reading and seeing leave me cold. Nobody knows the private story of the woman. Nobody.

This is brought home when reading the 4 articles on the click throughs … four different links that tell the story in very different ways and are not the usual fodder.

The Guardian: When we asked the Queen to tea with Paddington, something magic happened.

Gaping Void: 8 Lessons from QE2

David Frum: How she did it

Politico: The short unhappy life of Elizabeth Windsor

Things Aren't Always What They Seem

Harder Than It Looks, Not As Fun as It Seems is a short neat article on this very topic.

Reminds me of what my mum used to say to me …

“If you only judge your friends by their photo album of course it will look like they have a great life.”

💬 My Mum

or as Morgan has it ….

“It’s easiest to convince people that you’re special if they don’t know you well enough to see all the ways you’re not.”

💬 Morgan Housel

That all said I think I disagree on this ….

“no matter what your role in a company is, your ultimate job is to help sales.”

… ‘revenue’ maybe - but not sales. I think there is a difference.

Two Dave Winer Quotes

“There ought to be a law. If I can subscribe without talking to someone, I should be able to cancel that way too. I was interested in subscribing to the NYT crossword, for $20 a year, but their policy for cancelling required me to converse with someone at the NYT. I know why, they want to try to convince me to stay. My time is worth something, though they don’t think so.”

and

“You can fake caring, but you can’t fake showing up.”

Overcast is My Friend

Long Time Castro user - but it was time to explore the alternatives again. (Same exercise as the RSS reader project a few weeks ago). So of course my first stop was back to Apple Podcasts .. because I keep thinking that of all companies Apple should be able to deliver the best experience …. right?

The app managed to annoy me in less than a couple of days. But it did trigger me to look at synching … enter Overcast - my new friend.

Moved over about three weeks ago. Been getting used to it, and so wasn’t ready to say bye-bye to Castro … until today.

I don’t think Overcast is any better or worse than Castro when it comes to managing the play lists - different for sure. But oh boy - synching.

I like the sound from my iPad better than my phone, so is great to listen to at home - but the iPad doesn’t travel around with me when I am walking.

Overcast synching is just GREAT.

I stop listening on my iPad, grab my phone - head out - and it just works1 … picking up where I was in the podcast and continuing on the new device.

  1. Seriously, someone should use that as a marketing phrase! ↩︎

The Flow Of Liquid

The title is not representative of the piece which is actually about ‘Google Maps’ and ‘personal memory’ but is pulled from the quote.

Read More →

Most Jobs Fall Into 3 Major Categories

𝗩𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗺𝗮𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀 - a person takes money, hands you an object; liquor store clerks, cashiers, bank tellers, etc.

𝗗𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗺𝗮𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀 - taxis, aeroplanes, trucks, etc.

𝗕𝗮𝗯𝘆𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀 - people that watch things. But this extends to people that tweak small things (on par with wiping a baby’s arse) like pool repair, HVAC repair, etc. They take the diaper off, they wipe it down, they put the diaper back on; janitors, gardeners, farmers, painters, security guards, testing, stockers, etc.

Every single one of these will be replaced by a robot, and pretty soon.

💬 Reichart 'Ki' Von Wolfsheild

Source

Raindrop and Readwise Integration

Ooohhh …

Now you can seamlessly sync all of your Raindrop.io highlights directly with Readwise.

Readwise makes it easy to revisit and learn from your highlights. When highlights were introduced to Raindrop.io, many users requested an official integration with Readwise.

Connect your Raindrop.io account to get started. Highlights will be synced periodically throughout the day.

Getting Help

“As one lawyer recounted to the Post, Trump’s legal team once urged the then president “against tweeting about the Mueller probe, only to find he’d tweeted about it before they got to the end of the West Wing driveway.” Others said he was “nearly impossible to represent and that it would be unclear if they would ever get paid.”

The Machine Internet

Bad News is Good News.

“I started talking about the Machine Internet nearly 20 years ago, before it was even called “the Internet of Things.” Sensors and motes, tied to an analysis by wireless networks. Anything whose performance can be adjusted can now be monitored and controlled by a central intelligence. You can monitor the condition of parts and schedule maintenance before things break. This matters if the part is your heart, and its breaking could kill you.”

💬 Dana Blankenhorn

I’ll take that claim and raise you by a few years …

A group of us started talking about the topic in the mid 90s.

We had the obligatory startup … Flypaper … with a back end we called ‘The Megaserver’ - and without getting into the details - the system allowed us to render a website - ‘just in time’ - by assembling components out of a database. Our message at the time … the website only exists when somebody is visiting it.

It lead to some interesting developments and conversations.

I can still remember one scenario where we envisaged every car having its own website, assembled from thousands of components that each mapped to specific things and functions in the car … this is mid-90s… people didn’t get it.

And then came the DOT BOMB. And oblivion swooped in.

Still very proud of what ‘we’ built.

Definitely ahead of its time … I mean think about the tools we had in the mid-90s to build this thing!

And The Answer Is ... Nick Clegg!

Zuckerberg’s New No. 2 Faces an Old Dilemma: Distrust of Facebook

Seriously? That’s the problem?

The new ‘number 2’ is Nick Clegg

Wikipedia

During the party’s time in coalition, the Liberal Democrats saw a significant drop in support and the 2015 general election left the party with just 8 seats, which resulted in Clegg’s ousting as Deputy Prime Minister and his resignation as party leader. In 2016, following a referendum in which a majority supported leaving the European Union, Clegg returned to the Liberal Democrat frontbench, concurrently serving as Spokesperson for Exiting the European Union and for International Trade from July 2016 to June 2017. In the 2017 general election, Clegg was defeated in his constituency of Sheffield Hallam by Jared O’Mara. After losing his seat, Clegg moved to the United States after he was appointed by Mark Zuckerberg as Vice-President for Global Affairs and Communications of Facebook, Inc.

‘#Winning

Ageism - It Never Gets Old 🥁🥁🥁

The promo on some podcast this morning (my bold)

While Tim Cook (Mr. Excitement) has been the CEO of Apple for over 10 years, he’s now getting closer to mid-60s and is probably looking past where he’ll be running things. His legacy is pretty firmly set and there’s not much more at this point he could do, so who will be next in line to run Apple? We’ll look at some of the likely candidates in the second section.

So somebody else could do something that Cook can’t?

Speechless - though not surprised.

  • Branson
  • Murdoch
  • QE2
  • McCartney
  • Jagger
  • Buffett
  • De Niro
  • Scorcese

… oh why go on?

They should all just stop - right now - because they are all clearly way past the age that ^^^this^^^ dude believes to be the point where you should just put yourself out to pasture.

Running … Up That Hill

I recently had a good email exchange with Nick Milo (LYT) after a newsletter he wrote that depended a lot on Running Up That Hill.

As a private exchange, I am not going to reveal the conversation, but rather make the observation that Kate Bush’s Running Up The Hill not only gained renewed momentum in the UK/US Music charts …. It also seems to have pushed Kate back into the limelight.

Kate will turn 64 years old later this month … it is never too late.

Beyond that, clearly, something else is going on. Detailed below are just three of many more links that I have read recently. Articles by writers I read regularly that each in their own way have latched on to the phenomena.

Free Content Marketing = Content Free Marketing

“The Content Marketing category is almost $700 billion. Almost every company is working on content and increasing their content marketing investments. And yet, when was the last time you got a piece of content marketing and you said that was legendary? Let’s dig into how the marketing world got duped into content free marketing, aka saying nothing everywhere, and why this is one of the largest opportunities hiding in plain sight.”

💬 Chris Lockhead

He’s not everyone’s cup of tea - but he often makes very good points - AND - he knows how to talk about a topic on his podcast in under 15 minutes rather than three hours (though this podcast at 1 hour is an exception). Still, worth a listen … or just buy his book - since he is essentially doing a Doctorow - reading his own book!

I THINK it was Hubspot that pretty much lead the way on ‘Content Marketing’ (defined the category as Lockhead would have it). It felt wrong then … still does … maybe finally some sanity will prevail?

A boy can hope - can’t he?

Podcast

If 911 Had Been Treated As A Crime ...

“The 9/11 attacks could have been dealt with as a crime. This would have been sane and consistent with precedent. When lawbreaking occurs, we seek the perpetrators, rather than starting wars with unrelated parties. When the IRA set off bombs in London, nobody called for air strikes on West Belfast (or on Boston, where a great deal of IRA funding came from). When the Oklahoma City bombing was found to have been perpetrated by a white supremacist associated with ultra-right militias, there was no call to obliterate Idaho or Montana. Instead, the attacker was searched for, found, apprehended, brought to court, found guilty, and sentenced.”

“This was not the approach taken by the Bush administration. Rather than seek out and punish the guilty—and only the guilty—it swiftly launched a “global war on terror” that led to the deaths of millions.”

💬 Noam Chomsky and Nathan J Robinson

Read What Do We Owe Afghanistan?

Has Apple Forgotten How to Market?

Questions about Apple and its TV+ marketing

“Marketing during the era of peak TV is hard, but as someone who lives dead center in Apple’s ecosystem, I hadn’t even heard about “Black Bird” until last week, when Tim Cook mentioned it on the analyst call and I saw an extended trailer for it on last week’s “Friday Night Baseball.”

💬 Jason Snell

Odd. Any time I switch to 🍎📺 - Blackbird is front and center. I wonder why that is not the case for Jason?

As for

‘It is interesting that Apple, a master of product marketing, is perceived as struggling when it comes to promoting its entertainment shows.”

Are they?

Are they really?

In Case You Aren't Yet Convinced Of The Mess We Are In ...

Two examples - In one email.

 

False Online Reviews

“Bounty, a startup that pays users for posting reviews to select products on TikTok, raised $4.7 million in seed funding from consumer venture capital firm M13.”

💬 Mahira Dayal - The Information

and

In case you need another reason to get off Twitter ….

“Twitter donated $25,000 to the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), which is raising funds for the anti-abortion movement, newsletters Popular Information and Platformer together reported. The association is using its resources to elect attorneys general that will enforce abortion bans in various states.”

💬 Mahira Dayal - The Information

In Sync

No - not the 🎶 pop group - they were 'NSYNC' ... just an acknowledgement of how nice it is to find like minded travelers on the journey.

The quote below found here

“We need to resist the narratives that are frequently served to us by corporations that sell these technologies, that these models of the future are dependent upon the particular technologies that they’re selling, that it’s always some future that is just around the corner that we have to buy into, when in fact the future is already here.”

Featured Photo Credit: Gabriel Gusmao on Unsplash

Good Advice From Manuel Moreale re RSS

But I don’t always take good advice …

 

  • Keep your feed under control. Don’t subscribe to too many feeds and periodically go through the list and remove the ones that don’t provide value to your life.
  • Avoid feeds that are too busy. Don’t subscribe to feeds that push content out on a daily basis. Disable all notifications from your RSS reader. Unread messages counter, email notifications, push notifications—turn everything off.
  • Subscribe to content that is not time-sensitive. Only read and poke around your feeds when you have time to read something and you’re in the right mood.
  • RSS is a bit of a relic of another time, when the internet was slower and things were

Source

For example, that first thought … I use folders to manage the feeds that lets me focus on topics I want when I visit.

Artificial Intelligence For The Creative Professional

There are a group of companies springing up that are doing for the written word what Dall-E, MidJourney and Craiyon are doing for images, which is to say - enter some core text and let an AI generate the output.

My mind explodes when I see the 'image' results.

I think ‘meh’ - so far - when I see the 'written' results.

I am pretty sure that the engines are as sophisticated as each other, so I wonder if my reaction is more to do with my own abilities - as in I have NO artistic ability when it come to creating images, but I can - and do write - so my bar is higher?

For more background, you might enjoy this from The Verge;

🔗How independent writers are turning to AI

Note - all of the words you read on peoplefirst.business are not created - or even suggested - but any AI tool. (Can you tell?). 😂