The next M-Pesa? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa
3,628 karma · joined January 21, 2009
As the article observes, the liberty of expression offered by social media may itself compromise our individuality and authenticity by pressuring us to stage-manage an image of ourselves compatible with societal norms: an image that we aspire to but can never fully realise.
I see now there are other novel ways of supporting preemption for emergency vehicles, although I’m still unconvinced that’s what our city uses as the lights often preempt several minutes in advance and from over a kilometre away.
https://www.afr.com/markets/market-data/uk-stocks-wipe-out-i...
Tangential, but the author’s description of Kuhn’s paradigms as describing things incommensurably differently (“claims that were true in the old way of talking might be false in the new way, and vice versa”) reminds me of the way Hofstadter summarises Gödel’s incompleteness thereoms in GEB. That is that no set of axioms can be both mathematically complete and consistent, so we may need multiple theories (paradigms?) to reason effectively and discover all truths.
Morris seems to claim (based on the author’s summary) that necessary a posteriori truths (ala Kripke) provide some sort of anchor across these paradigms that proves newer paradigms are better than older ones because (and I’m a little unsure on his argument) newer theories are still describing the same thing in different detail and we can therefore see that a newer paradigm is objectively richer and more truthful.
However, I wonder as Kuhn did whether this argument is strong enough to handle all scenarios. As Kuhn argued, a concept of Heat is substantially different across paradigms. I would add to the list those qualitative problems like consciousness and qualia that seem, at least at this stage, to require non-scientific paradigms (ala Lyotard) to reason meaningfully about, but in taking on these paradigms we lose the ability, as Kuhn argued, to talk meaningfully about things we could previously.
Our definition of time seems therefore to be two things: first, a snapshot of physical state (in which we imagine points in time a bit like Back to the Future), and secondly (as other comments have noted) a measure of periodicity.
The latter is that which we seem to be measuring experimentally (e.g. with differences in atomic clocks within gravitational fields). However what we are literally measuring seems to be something like “how many times can a given particle move/irradiate relative to another given particle before we bring them back to each other”. Reducing to a pendulum for example, we could imagine that the space was “more dense” so it took longer to travel the same apparent distance, a bit like how light takes longer to travel through particular materials. Another way to see this would be a kind of universal framerate.
So based on this possibly weak conceptual understanding, I can certainly imagine a fourth property of any given spacetime location that reflects how frequently events can occur in that space (a kind of EM-field view of time), but to consider this as a geometric “position” or coordinate is something I conceptually struggle to imagine.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salomon_v_A_Salomon_%26_Co_L...
It works as a central government register with a threat and imposition of large penalties for companies who disregard it.
As far as recruiters, I can't recall a week here without at least one contact, but it sounds like it's even busier in NYC!
On the other hand, if you want career advancement there's something pretty cool to the US idea of "have managed 15 people after 2 years experience" which just doesn't happen here in Aus.
However I acknowledge the opportunities of equity returns are far higher in the states.
Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth are all in the top 10 cities to live in the world.
Taking Adelaide for example (1.2 million people), we can live within 10-15 minutes of the CBD in a roomy townhouse for highly-affordable rent, get paid pretty well, be 20 minutes from the beach, 20-60 minutes from four different world-class wine regions, have a great festival culture, delicious local food and wine, and a highly safe and welcoming culture.
If you want a larger city you have Melbourne (3.9 million) with a fantastic bar and food culture and endless high-paying work.
As a company, and this is somewhat anecdotal, you have high availability of highly-educated workers who are used to working collaboratively and doing whatever's needed to get things done to cover the work of N other people (low population after all).
UberEats drivers who accept delivery of multiple orders, so you wait for everyone else's orders to be cooked and delivered before your cold burger and fries arrive. This problem is exaggerated by either these orders being on opposite sides of the city or the delivery driver being on a bike (why either of these are permitted I have no idea). Have even had my order delivered to someone else and vice versa this way before.
In general, slow deliveries and the usual process of having to walk up the street to find lost/lazy drivers. The ETA always being wildly wrong (I get cooking delays, but delivery ETA from pickup should be spot on, and is usually off by 100%). Then add in general restaurant problems with mixing up orders, missing items, or selling food that doesn't transport.
Would happily pay $10 (maybe even $15) per delivery rather than the $5 they charge now if all of these problems went away (e.g. guaranteed prompt and direct delivery).
As a consequence we now, apparently, lay claim to the longest period of uninterrupted growth in modern history.
However, we've had uncharacteristicaly flat growth since, narrowly avoided recession a couple of times, and are battling low wage growth which, in combination with rising energy and property costs, is beginning to undermine consumer demand.
This has been unhelped by the end of a mining boom, related decrease in Chinese growth and demand for commodities, structural taxation challenges (income taxes were reduced during the boom, and we struggle to tax multinational companies), and a huge speculative property bubble (fuelled by lower interest rates, favourable taxation schemes, currency flight from foreign investors, and ultimately the self-reinforcing returns). I'm sure demographics are playing a role too.
Considering most of our pension schemes ("superannuation") are invested in either property, mining, or banking (itself dependent on property), there's huge uncertainty ahead.
As an example of how some viewed these challenges, the Trilateral Commission's 'Crisis of Democracy' paper[5] - though heavily criticised from both sides of politics[6] - offers some interesting insight into the perspectives held by a number of highly influential people of the period.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagflation#Explaining_the_197...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilateral_Commission
[5] http://trilateral.org/download/doc/crisis_of_democracy.pdf
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilateral_Commission#Criticis...
Yes I miss a few calls, but there's rarely anything that can't be followed up with (I put my phone on vibrate if I'm expecting an important call), and the peace of mind it brings (and reduced flow interruption) has been fantastic.
Priority Inbox highlights anything that actually comes from a human.
Multiple emails are more effective (for me) for automated and marketing emails, e.g. "right, I should remember to buy some more shirts from that company that keeps sending me offers", or "that domain is expiring soon, I noted that it was 30 days out last email but now it's getting closer".
Given the importance/actionability of these kinds of emails roughly approximates status updates on Facebook's News Feed, my approach has been similar (browse, trust that my eye will catch anything important, don't waste effort trying to read through every single piece of information).
You're right that I could make an effort to read through each email I receive immediately and decide whether its actionable, but this approach works well for me with very little effort.
Would be interested to see how he's going 4+ years later.
At least for personal mailboxes I've found 'inbox zero' a thankless task and have settled for "inbox as a feed" in which I trust that anything important will catch my attention (e.g. via Priority Inbox or multiple emails) and everything else will fade away. For what it's worth, this means I currently have 12k+ emails that I'll never open.
Isn't this kind of learning really a discovery process inherent to analysis and development?
To take an old anecdote of the engineer who charges $1 for making a chalk mark and $9999 for knowing where to make the mark - if you're going "off the clock" while you work out where to make the mark (i.e. debugging a library), are you then charging higher rates when you "know where to make the mark"?