I actually thought this was going to make the point that just because you are poor, doesn't mean that you have the skills to fix things on your own. It's great that the author is able to work on their own cars (but doesn't have the money). I think probably more common is that you don't have the money AND you don't have the skills.
And I don't think that's the fault of the individual. The world is more complicated than ever. Even cars that may have been possible to work on yourself 20 years ago, it's becoming less easy to do this.
What a bizarre article… performance ended up being worse, how can that be considered a resounding success? Doesn’t seem like it’s a slam dunk case for using neon
I just got this on my kindle since it seems to have pretty good reviews. Your comment doesn't really outright say that the book helped you become more focused and disciplined - would you say that it did or didn't?
I wonder if we really are the first generation to have this type of problem, though. It seems reasonable to me that people would be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of books published over the decades preceding the widespread adoption of the internet. There's just tons of material out there. Even in the academic world, the amount of papers published every year - even before the internet - would probably overwhelm anyone if they tried to keep on top of it.
I'd love to see some pre-internet articles complaining about the pace of publishing and strategies for coping with the onslaught of information at that time. It seems reasonable that it would exist, and I'm sure we'd all find it rather quaint :)
Interestingly, another candidate (George Smitherman) who ran against Ford for the 2010 municipal election in Toronto admitted to being addicted to "an illegal drug" before running for political office.
I wasn't living in Toronto when the election was going on so I didn't really pay attention to the media re: the election, but I wonder how they portrayed him at the time
I think breaking down those strategies is actually really useful. It's interesting to think of these strategies from a product development perspective as well; how will products react to new consumer strategies?
1) Default - most products will (I think) continue to collect as much data as they can
2) Withdraw - I doubt most companies will withdraw from the data collection frenzy that is the current marketplace
3) Expose - There's definitely room out there for more services that expose patterns in public data, or more mechanisms for publicizing private data (the New Yorker Strongbox, for example)
4) Disrupt - One example in this space that I love are location spoofers like MediaHint, that allow users to access content that is designed to be location-locked.
And I don't think that's the fault of the individual. The world is more complicated than ever. Even cars that may have been possible to work on yourself 20 years ago, it's becoming less easy to do this.