How do you understand the lease-vehicles line in the balance sheet? From $4.1bn down to $2.3bn. I understand there's some accounting change, but I don't see where the other side of that missing $1.8bn shows up.
"Cole’s lecture was different. He did not speak a single word. He simply went to the board, and began to calculate. On one side of the board, he calculated 267 – 1 = 147,573,952,589,676,412,927 by hand. Then he went to the other side of the board and worked out the product of 193,707,721 and 761,838,257,287, the factors of 147,573,952,589,676,412,927. After spending the silent hour working out the calculations, Cole simply turned around and went back to his seat, completely silent! The audience erupted into a standing ovation."
"But new research shows that it may not be the sound itself that distracts us…it may be who is making it."
For me, the absolute perfect background noise is people talking in a language I don't understand. If you're in a big city, there are almost certainly cafes with customers mainly from some linguistic minority -- I've found them to be great places to work.
[on roughly the same principle, I sometimes listen to foreign-language pop music while working, so the vocal aspect becomes just another instrument rather than a source of distraction]
I seem to increasingly get unsubscribed from mailing lists because of not opening them, which is very frustrating.
Sometimes it's because I'm reading but not triggering their tracking mechanisms. Other times it's because I'm subscribed to lists that I only occasionally read, but want to have available for reference.
Either way: if I've actively subscribed to a list, I have some reason for doing so. I don't want to be unsubscribed!
I'd be happy to add my email address to some whitelist of 'assume I'm reading anything I'm subscribed to', if only it were possible.
Otherwise, maybe I need to forward mails to some service that will open them all in a browser, and trigger all the tracking pixels.
Not quite the Crimea, but you might like the novelist Amin Maalouf. He primarily writes historical novels set in the medieval Islamic world -- with protagonists who travel a lot, so you see some of the (more-or-less accurate) interactions of different places and people.
'Samarkand' is my favourite of his novels, or 'Leo the African' is probably his most well-known.
Something I would love to see is an open-source attitude entering into the furniture manufacture ecosystem.
What Ikea sells you is, essentially:
a) a set of instructions for making furniture out of basic components
b) those components, produced and distributed through a highly-efficient supply chain
So break those two apart! Let hobbyists and carpenters share or sell their furniture designs. Just specify the components in a standard way, so suppliers can compete to supply the components for each design.
So you turn a monolithic business into one where smaller groups can compete on each part of the system. One company can cheaply supply cut wood in Seattle, another just sells its funky shelving designs without worrying about the infrastructure.
Most bits of this ecosystem already exist -- the furniture-making hobbyists, the DIY stores, the suppliers of nails and screws. They just need a bit of systemisation (and marketing) to pull them together into a system that can compete with a monolithic supply chain.
Easier than avoiding triggers -- and almost as effective -- is just to delay the response. Let yourself check your phone, but only 10 minutes after you feel the urge to do so.
This is much easier than complete abstinence, but breaks down the habit-forming link between trigger and instant gratification.
And just as you say, it's something I started doing after reading about training [1] and inverting the priciples
Berlin is pretty dense, even without skyscrapers. Tightly-packed six-storey buildings can get you very high density (look at Paris for a more extreme demonstration). The area of Kreuzberg I'm in now has the same population density as Manhattan (28,000 people per square kilometre), despite not having anything more than 7 storeys high.
Housing everywhere in Berlin -- especially new-build -- is very dense. Importantly that's true throughout the city, not just in the centre.
Keeping Berlin so dense is an impressive achievement, given that it's surrounded by flat, empty countryside. Partly it's because of the cold war division of the city. But mainly it's cultural -- most Berliners are happy with apartments rather than individual houses.
Politicians religiously promise to maintain the 'berliner mix', where zoning encourages housing and commercial use in the same area, and keeping a social mix by having affordable housing everywhere. A new higher-density mixed-use zone category ('urban area') has just been introduced nationally, largely at Berlin's request.
I've occasionally suggested* a dirty bomb as the only way to make London livable again. Just enough radiation to scare away the rich, not enough to actually harm anyone ;)
And in Berlin, I've sometimes seen graffiti along the lines of "cleaner walls == higher rents". So making the city less appealing is already part of the anti-gentrification arsenal.
* for the record, I'm not actually planning to nuke London.
Looks pretty serious to me