🖋️ LongForm
Want to reduce the noice and just focus on things with a little more meat - the this category is for you. Like so much on this site we have a ‘WIP’ as i take some out - and put some in - but safe for at least starting in 2026.
Bliar (sic) Prepares To Live Up To His Name
Blair, frustrated by the repeated delays in the production of the report, has been meeting his allies to discuss his response, but is not planning to make any speech or intervention before publication on 6 July.
... how about the truth Tony ?
Data Driven Is A Mugs Game
Too many people are data-driven - if it is all about the data - you will be replaced.
Data-first vs data-second.
Another way to frame this is 'data-driven' vs 'data-informed'. Data-driven investors ask questions about data first, while data-informed or data-second investors look at the data, but it is second to their intuition and common sense. Wikipedia has definitions for data-based (or data-driven) vs data-informed decision making as it applies to education. I believe data-informed to be a much better approach. In doing a bit of research, I stumbled on this gem – a couple years ago, a test showed that combination AI and human 'data-informed' chess players regularly beat the pure data-driven players. Andrew Chen made a nice post about how data-driven decision making can lead to local maximums and weak decision making. I choose to modify the labels to data-first vs data-second because the data acts as either a first or second pass filter.
In the VC world, data-second investors will always beat data-first investors.
Delivered
Santana IV and Bruce Soord's new solo - tucking in now. And most excellent, particularly Bruce's.
They Were Different Times
"He had gained notoriety among the city’s hippie community when he and a biker buddy, Hairy Henry Kot, came across a candlelight march on Haight Street, turned their bikes around, and led the parade. The police stopped the procession, and Kot was arrested for letting a woman from the group stand up on his 'buddy seat."
Two Weeks In A Row
'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.
A Win For People ...
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 ?
Mapping The World
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.
There Are So Many Reasons Not To Be On Facebook
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 cutting 7% of staff
“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.
Living In The Past
Machine Head ? Wish Your Were Here?
I thought I was in a time machine for a minute!
Wait - I think we are!
The Real Mary Meeker
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 ..
History In The Making
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?




