akristofcak

Or, X% to the donor, Y% to a charity, Z% to cover expenses

Thank you! Again, very helpful. Clearly, the message/concept will need to be carefully crafted to encourage good behavior.

One solution that occurred to me: sharing X% of proceeds back with the donor. The idea being that this would encourage people to send more objectively valuable stuff (though as you point out people are terrible at estimating value).

I like really like the idea of donating to specific causes. Did the thrift shop pay the charities a portion of the proceeds in exchange for the boxes?

Beautiful simple life :)

A man can dream :)

Have to check this out - thank you!

one-in-one-out is a good one; we already implemented this in our household. still a lot of unimportant stuff hanging around getting moved from one apartment to the next... ;)

Interesting twist to the idea!

"Gift Truces" is my new expression of the year. Love it.

This is a really good point!

But even if you treat the cause, these symptoms won't disappear...

This is really helpful perspective, thank you! (the author)

Well, something good came out of this silly idea: I had no idea Amazon does this!! Thanks!

Haha, no one said it would be risk-free :))

That's a misunderstanding: I am not saying there's nothing wrong with what is happening (and my personal beliefs are very much to the contrary). My point is rather than much of the criticism of tech seems to be a criticism of capitalism. So if you want to have a debate about inner cities, poverty, etc, by all means, let's have it, but it's not a tech phenomenon.

If you read the Carr article, you might see that these associations are much less tenuous than you suggest.

Thanks for this addendum.

Yes, the premise was built on some generalization. Not "everyone" was courted by Wall Street 10 years ago, just as not "everyone" is trying to get into tech these days (though I would argue that from certain points of view both feel that way).

I am aware that these narratives don't represent the typical American experience and should have made that clearer.

Thanks for reading and responding.

Yep. This wasn't exactly an essay, just some thoughts around a "trend" I picked up on (ie the backlash). I could write a whole separate article about the NSA but I let Carr's article speak for itself. The reason for including it was that the NSA disclosures put a different light on the tech vs society question. But yea, it could have been more developed.

Thanks, fixed it

Absolutely agreed! Some of the language being thrown around many companies can be nauseating.

I didn't write about this possibility in the article, but there's also a universe of apps/tools/companies which do seemingly trivial things that don't transform anything on the face value and eventually end up being rather impactful. Take Twitter: for the first X years, many people dismissed it as that stupid thing where you write about what you had for breakfast.

Now it's basically a media company. Granted, no lives saved, but a major player in the landscape.

Point being: you can end up doing something truly revolutionary in the end by doing something trivial and useful at first. A better way to order pizza could become a better way to do [something that doesn't sound as banal].

(I would also posit that this kind of serendipity doesn't necessarily make you a visionary.)

That's a great response - thanks!

Nice article.

Zack, you say pick a language "Ruby or Python". I started out in PHP (I have no recollection why) and while I'm far from perfect, I know it well enough to build functioning things and more importantly to figure where to find answers when I'm stuck.

Yet whenever I read other people's writing about coding, almost without fail people say "PHP sucks, do Python" or "PHP sucks, learn Ruby".

Without getting into the arguments about which language is better (I am fairly aware of the differences), can people who have experience with all three opine on whether it makes sense to throw out the time and energy I have invested in PHP (not to mention lot of well functioning code) and start from scratch with one of the other two?

At the risk of stating the obvious, big companies overpay for deals all the time especially when there is some perceived intangible benefit to be accrued. Alas.

I'm still waiting for the perfect app to have with my husband so that we can share to-dos and import/export calendar items and get notifications on the phone/desktop. Something that an app like Pair should be a perfect home for but they don't really focus on that.