The Many Sides of Jack Dorsey
wired.com
wired.com
I wonder how the dishwashers feel about super rich people paying a ton of money to pretend they have a life as full as dishwashers.
And your life can be more authentic too, if you just wear clothing of such carefully crafted impermanence and imperfection!
This is kind of Zen. I saw this as an example of motivated and deliberate learning. I find that taking notes instead of winging it can lower the chance of making the same mistake twice. You miss and forget more than you realize. To put it another way, you forget what you remember and don't even remember you forgot.
Or a Moleskine.
You know ... Zen. The kind of brands the Dalai Lama would consume if he were a rich SF hipster. Zen.
The other two cases are not as open and shut.
Basho, who brought haiku into its modern form, was not a monk, but did practice Zen meditation as a layman, and lived as a pilgrim and hermit, teaching a circle of disciples, like an abbot. Issa, the second most influential haiku poet after Basho, was an honest-to-goodness Jodo Shinshu Buddhist (though not Zen!) priest. Furthermore, the haiku aesthetic embodies Zen's fierce focus on the ephemeral beauty of the current moment. I think that saying that the practice of haiku is "influenced by the same principles" is such an understatement as to be absurd.
Right now I am not going to dig into the history of raku.
Zen is a school of buddhism which focuses on enlightenment, with different sub schools that focus on different methods for attaining enlightenment (well actually it's not, but it helps seeing Zen practitioners goal as gaining enlightment). Zen is not rock gardens, wabi sabi or haikus. Christianity is not building gothic cathedrals.
Glad I have no clue about Zen, or I would need to slap you on your head with a stick.
Of course Zen does not consist of composing haiku, building rock gardens, or reading koans.
... dropping the trivial words makes the tagline weird. It's "Zen Judaism: For You, A Little Enlightenment".
Now the question is of course, who has had some experience with it? Is this confined to SF, other american cities? Does it work as elegantly as it looks? Paying with a credit card at a restaurant always seems to take forever, I'd like to be able to spare some hassle.
I don't think Square is confined geographically, at least within the US, but I have my doubts will help with the "processing at restaurants takes forever" problem. Most restaurants who plan to take cards already have merchant accounts; Square is most helpful if your problem is "I'm a person or small vendor and want to accept credit cards from other people, perhaps even on-the-go."
(Or, if this Quora question is any guide:
http://www.quora.com/Square-Inc-1/Is-Square-an-unpleasant-pl...
if your problem is that you haven't been able to find a workplace environment that's sufficiently uncircumspect about its place in employee's lives and the world.)
I guess Square could be used creatively to solve the processing time problem: a restaurant could hand out mobile devices to all servers and just process customer payments at the table. There might even be incentives to do that: moving people faster means you can server a higher volume of customers. Whether that'd be enough to overcome Good Enough+Inertia is the question.
Using Square is faster and more convenient than cell-based (Nurit, Verifone) processing: enter total, swipe, sign screen with a stylus or finger, and, only for customers who have never paid with Square on that card before: receipt via SMS or email (or none)? and enter phone number or email address. Customers often got the receipt by SMS before leaving the shop.
Using a Nurit meant total, swipe, wait for connection & authorization, print paper receipts for merchant & customer, get customer to sign and return merchant receipt, make sure merchant & customer end up with the right bits of paper, credit card, and pen.
It may sound like a trivial difference in reading the steps, but when dealing with a flurry of customers the ability to spend more attention engaging with customers while still handling payments correctly is an important difference.
We are on our 4th credit card processing technology in 8 years (paper imprinter, pay by cell & numeric entry, Nurit, Square), and Square is the best so far at making payments a trivial part of the sales process instead of a minor hassle.
Pretty much every even slightly classy restaurant in Canada has mobile POSes the server brings to your table and you use to punch in your credit card PIN (or it prints the receipt for you to sign, if you have an ancient or American card).
It still takes too long and I wish the limit for RFID-authorized transactions was higher so I could tap rather than PIN, but at least the card remains in my sight at all times.