Awesome .....

'Finding Superheroes' .. the latest in my weekly series at Biz Catalyst is trending. That's two weeks in a row .... FYI - this was last weeks.

Musical Exploration - the link is at the bottom of JP's post.

Can’t wait to read mainstream media’s take on the Verizon Strike … here is one non mainstream media’s view …

‘The company could have done this two months ago,’ said network tech Pat Fahy of IBEW Local 827 in New Jersey. ‘They could have done it [when the contract expired] in August and we would have taken it.'
Instead, he said, ‘they forced us to work without a contract for eight months and to be on strike for almost two months. Many of us have resentment two miles long.'

and if this

Though this strike was the fourth or fifth for many Verizon workers' nearly all have been with the company for over 15 years' it was the first time since 1989 that the company cut strikers' health insurance.

doesn’t make you wonder about the craziness of US healthcare … then what does? In short - if you go on strike - we will cut your health insurance. Where else in the world can that even happen - much less does happen ?

I talked about my passion for maps in a recent 'Pour Vous' post on my web site. Remember when you were in meetings - and the 'winner' was the one who had the marker ? Turns out there is another race - who owns 'the map'.

Fascinating comparison of Google Maps versus Apple Maps.

Seperately of course - there is the whole other issue around how global maps need to reflect the truth [PDF] - not the perspective of the cartographer. An obvious example is that of Kashmir, which is but one of hundreds of border debates raging around the world.

Another post from my partners in crime over at This Is Enchant.

If you don’t like Mark snooping around in your stuff they point out ...

Too personal? Switch off!
Finally, coming back around the microphone and Facebook’s listening capabilities, if you are not happy about Facebook’s tactics and want to stop Facebook accessing to your microphone, you can switch it off. See the following steps:

Good advice - but have you ever noticed that depite switching it off, the settings 'don't stick'? Well they do actually - it is just that Facebook keeps messing around with privacy settign as at the backend - and when they do - guess what? The defaults are restored and Facebook's defaults are 'reset to snoop'.

Glad I am not there.

“WeWork, the fast-growing shared workspace startup, is cutting about 7 percent of its staff and plans to temporarily pause hiring, according to a Bloomberg article citing internal emails. The cutbacks come three months after New York-based WeWork raised a $430 million funding round amid plans for aggressive expansion, including new workspaces in Asia and the U.S. launch of a private bedroom rental business called WeLive.

... Bloomberg via Crunchbase

This is EXACTLY why I think that the UK/London authorities are being paid off ....

Machine Head ? Wish Your Were Here? 

I thought I was in a time machine for a minute!

Wait - I think we are!

You can either read through Mary Meeker's 213 page Powerpoint ( where every known rule of Powerpoint is broken. )

Or you can watch her present it here ( where every known rule of 'Good Presentation' is broken. )

... seriously - why do we hang on this ? Oh wait - yes - because of the possibility of this ..

According to this ... could be !

The whole article is worth a read …

Democracy is not about I or us vs. them. Democracy, as Obama often says, is about the word we. It is big, messy, and noisy. It is inclusive, welcoming, and tolerant. It's about a willingness to compromise and assume good faith in others. It's about a belief that America is not the project of any one person, party, race, or religion and that we all have a responsibility to find a way forward, together, even if we don't get everything we want, even if we don't always win the argument, even if sometimes we take two steps back.

UPDATED COMMENT : June 14th, 2018

This article was written by Jon Favreau just 2 years and 2 weeks ago. The whole direction and conclusion he came to turn out to be so wrong - you wonder how it might have ever got written.

The again - pretty much everything he wrote about Trump was spot on. We knew so much including this;

In this campaign, Trump has been called “utterly amoral,” a “con artist,” a “fraud,” a “pathological liar,” a “serial philanderer,” a “narcissistic egomaniac,” a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot,” the “Kim Kardashian of politics,” “ISIL Man of the Year,” a “cancer on conservatism,” and an “orange-faced windbag” who shouldn’t have access to the nuclear codes. And those are just the views of his fellow Republicans.

… and nothing and everything has changed.

November 2018 is really just around the corner, are we ready?

The 4Cs are growing

He's old - but that is no reason why he shouldn't get it.

"I would have to pay to make a record. There's no royalties so I can't see that ever happening. There's no record business. How do you get the money to make the records? I don't know.

Roger Daltrey, never the sharpest knife in the block, on how the death of the music industry is the death of music.

I have a different position. (This written in 2011 - but my opinion has not changed.)

Startups can't explain what they do because they're addicted to meaningless jargon, which I would argue is because most people really don't understand the art of communication.

Bottom line it is a TWO-way process - and in that process you need to understand who is listening - and ensure that what you are saying is being heard, understood and reacted to.

Anything else - you are in Broadcast mode.

Just last week I posted this - scroll down to 'Fraud' - where I pointed out that Philip Green has realy just taken us all for a bunch of idiots.

This just in today. 11,000 jobs gone, 20,000 affected my the pension scam - and one man to blame. You know who I am talking about 'Sir' Philip.

I was just in a conversation with Melinda Fouts on this very topic. Well not quite, we were more talking about what qualifies somebody to be a life coach, whereas this article is about the broader issues of what I call self invention - I have written before about how that is rampant in the world of social media ... it seems it is everywhere. 

The Complex eventually becomes a full fledged self-sufficient ecosystem when people in group 4 are reviewing books by people in group 3 who are only tweeting people in group 2 who are appearing on the podcasts started by people in group 3.

Read all about it .... and watch the video ... it isn't Bullshit!

Fascinating thoughts from our man Elon ....

If many sufficiently advanced civilizations exist, and if they're likely to create simulations of the universe (or a slice of it), then we are almost certainly living in a simulation. 

and to put it into perspective, Elon points out ....

"Forty years ago, you had Pong, like, two rectangles and a dot. That was what games were. Now, 40 years later, we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously, and it's getting better every year (...) If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality."

Read all about it ....

... not as bad as you might think.

The marriage of reason was not, in hindsight, reasonable at all; it was often expedient, narrow-minded, snobbish and exploitative. That is why what has replaced it — the marriage of feeling — has largely been spared the need to account for itself.

Alain de Botton (@alaindebotton) is the author of the novel “The Course of Love.”