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January 16 2009

dragos
10:27
History suggests that, all other things being equal, a society prospers in proportion to its ability to prevent parents from influencing their children's success directly. It's a fine thing for parents to help their children indirectly—for example, by helping them to become smarter or more disciplined, which then makes them more successful. The problem comes when parents use direct methods: when they are able to use their own wealth or power as a substitute for their children's qualities.
After Credentials
dragos
10:20

He continues: "I can’t help but feel that Guitar Hero (much like Twitter) would have been utterly incomprehensible to earlier generations, that it is a symptom of some larger social refusal to embrace difficulty."

What kills me about Twitter is how this perfect consumerist tool, this nifty agent for packaging intimacy as a product, for simplifying self-expression out of existence, can't discover a business model to justify its own existence. Marx must have had something to say about this.

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Complete control
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12:34
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dragos
10:19
Activities of self-realization are subject to increasing marginal utility: They become more enjoyable the more one has already engaged in them. Exactly the opposite is true of consumption. To derive sustained pleasure from consumption, diversity is essential. Diversity, on the other hand, is an obstacle to successful self-realization, as it prevents one from getting into the later and more rewarding stages.
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Complete control
Reposted by02mydafsoup-0102mysoup-aa
dragos
10:19
To me, the radical move that Guitar Hero makes is to turn music into an objectively measurable activity that is more amenable to our Protestant work ethic. It brings the corporation’s focus on quantitative performance indicators to the domain of music, displacing the usual mode of subjective enjoyment.
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Complete control

December 12 2008

dragos
15:23
How can Jimmy come to understand a moral world where it's somehow vital to avoid eating at McDonald's in Manila, virtuous to intentionally bypass the "Mona Lisa" while at the Louvre and noble to sleep in a ditch in Africa?
Salon Wanderlust | Backstage on "The Beach"
dragos
15:14
"The highest point," he writes, "the term of the sightseer's satisfaction, is not the sovereign discovery of the thing before him; it is rather the measuring up of the thing to the criterion of the pre-formed symbolic complex."
Salon Wanderlust | Backstage on "The Beach"
dragos
15:09
In other words, the angst originates not in watching fat, Speedo-wearing German men defile once-pristine beaches -- the angst comes from our own media-driven notions of how those beaches should be in the first place. We cannot hike the Himalayas without drawing comparisons to the IMAX film we saw last summer; we cannot taste wine on the Seine without recalling a funny scene from an old Meg Ryan movie; we cannot get lost in a South American jungle without thinking of the Gabriel García Márquez novel we read in college. It is the expectation itself that robs a bit of authenticity from the destinations we seek out.
Salon Wanderlust | Backstage on "The Beach"
dragos
14:56
I had never ordered a Manhattan before in my life -- but since it cost more than my hotel room, I figured it probably contained lots of alcohol.
Salon Wanderlust | Storming 'The Beach'
dragos
14:52
Do we travel so that we can arrive where we started and know the place for the first time -- or do we travel so that we can arrive where we started having earned the right to take T.S. Eliot out of context?
Salon Wanderlust | Storming 'The Beach'
dragos
14:52
Regardless of one's budget, itinerary and choice of luggage -- the act of travel is still, at its essence, a consumer experience.
Salon Wanderlust | Storming 'The Beach'

December 11 2008

dragos
10:57
In multijoint, h i g h - resistance exercises, the “brakes” become “engines.” It is an elite skill that takes time to finesse.

December 09 2008

dragos
17:43
Be too complex to categorize.
— Tim Ferriss
dragos
14:30
Marketing discovers the gold mine, whereas sales actually digs out the gold. Technology is a support function that helps discover and helps dig.
— Always Be Testing
dragos
14:00
Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won’t work.
— Thomas Edison
dragos
13:51
Few would argue with Claude Hopkins, author of Scientific Advertising (1923), when he wrote, “Almost any question can be answered cheaply, quickly and finally, by a test campaign. And that’s the way to answer them—not by arguments around a table. Go to the court of last resort—buyers of your products.”
— Always Be Testing

December 08 2008

dragos
16:28
via East Fjords on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

We were driving on a gravel road and it was so foggy, unlike this picture. We had no idea where we were, but we started to get out of the fog and saw these huge fjord walls. Such an eerie feeling...
dragos
14:16
There's an esthetic to doing things that are unfamiliar and another esthetic to doing things that are familiar.

I have heard that there are two kinds of welders: production welders, who don't like tricky setups and enjoy doing the same thing over and over again; and maintenance welders, who hate it when they have to do the same job twice. The advice was that if you hire a welder make sure which kind he is, because they're not interchangeable.
— Robert M Pirsig

October 21 2008

dragos
14:19
9637 c662
Thinking of Iceland these days, especially Varmahlid and the North coast
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