kochikame

Not really a good analogy.

The brain does far, far more than marshal resources and distribute the where they are needed, which in essence is what the financial sector does for the economy.

You're right. Even on a warm Friday night, the city center couldn't be said to be crowded. You can get a seat at a bar or a table pretty much anywhere you want, in my experience.

Your comment made me think of the Bournville model village that Cadbury's built for their workers in Victorian times

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bournville

Downtown San Jose is a curious place. There are almost no stores and only a few big companies (like Adobe) clustered together. It seems like bars and restaurants are the only things really thriving there.

If you compare the experience of walking around downtown San Francisco or any other larger US city during a weekday or on a weekend, San Jose seems very, very quiet and lacking that "bustle" that big cities have the world over.

This Google development has the potential to give the downtown area some much needed balance and revitalization.

Everyone is reading this in Archer's voice

I wonder if a similar change would occur in the brains of native English speakers who learn Chinese or Japanese as adults? After all, it's a whole new way set of very different characters to learn and decode.

It may be that once the big shift has occurred when you learned to read your native language, it will never happen again, as you now have the "firmware" to read anything.

You've inspired me to try it.

Next time I'm waiting for a train, I'm just going to stand there and see what happens.

Good points. In my comment, I was focused on the difficulties around getting the information you need and being aware of what is happening in other parts of the company, but there is also the huge factor around punishing risk-takers too.

For example, I can build a chatbot in a day that will take some load of a bunch of people in my department. Will it be deployed? No way. Will it be seen as a possible threat to people's patronage networks by cutting their teams and budgets? You bet. Will I possibly be chastised for doing something that is not in my JD? Possibly. Will I bother making it in this case? Nope.

No one knows anything in big companies

Lots of smart, talented and energetic people are expending most of their power just figuring out who to talk to about what or what the hell that out-of-the-blue email from corporate finance means for them.

Just figuring out how to get a thing done can be exhausting.

Sapiens was a great read, very thought-provoking, but the weakest part of it by far were the final chapters on technology and the near future. He kind of just dropped a few buzzwords, asked a lot of big questions and put a bow on it. Very disappointing after the eye-opening insights and wide-ranging arguments of the rest of the book.

While there are many things I want to hear about from Mr Harari, the future is not one of them.

Good managers always connect people, by breaking through silo walls and barriers

Try living in a country like Japan for a while and you may have the experience of having your idea shit on or ignored because of your race.

It's just a majority/minority thing.

As a caveat, it is still a pretty privileged position to be a white person, even in Japan. I think non-white foreigners have a much harder time there.

Yeah, default subs and the unfiltered reddit front page is awful. Just subscribe to things you really want to hear/talk about, block users who harsh your mellow and you should be fine.

"Invasion"? No. Managing an "occupation", maybe.

But look what the US left behind when it withdrew from those nations. Independent, stable, wealthy, democratic, growing, peaceful countries which now rank high on most development indices.

Nation-building is the best term in these two cases, regardless of the circumstances of "entry"

I hate these kinds of articles and titles. I mean, the science is interesting, but it's not like "survival of the fittest" is now discredited or anything.

Fit doesn't mean physically fit, it means fit as in "fit for purpose" or "suitable". It's easy to see how a slow metabolic rate could make organisms "fitter" in terms of lower energy requirements or longer lives, for example.

These rules can always be broken, however.

Money can always be found with the right person inside saying "I want this person on the team ASAP"

Dexterity is their secret weapon!

With this kind of dexterity, I would say Las Vegas croupiers should be getting a little worried and thinking about re-skilling.

David Copperfield should be OK a while longer though

With the huge exception of Spotlight on Mac OS