This is a marketing piece that can’t be taken seriously without that context, or maybe one that can’t be taken seriously at all. And yet I can’t help thinking we’re missing the forest for the trees. We don’t need to decide where future productivity gains should accrue if we acknowledge and live in reality: we don’t need any more productivity! We have more than enough to go around.
Of course it would be great to make use of AI to solve cancer or fix other intractable problems, but we all know this isn’t the way things are going to go. The cancer is in our minds, our societies, and our norms that push us deeper and deeper into a grow-at-any-cost reality where the need for productivity is neither questioned nor considered in any real way. They say: we must grow! They say: we must be more productive! And we sit around thinking about who is going to control the productivity instead of acknowledging the real issues at hand.
I can only imagine a solution where we can all collectively agree that enough is enough. I’m not hopeful it’s possible and I think it’s probably the only way.
I understand the following isn’t the point of this piece and yet I still can’t help wondering: How much better off we would all be if “senior management” stopped playing these games to get things done and instead spent most of that time really considering the things getting done and whether they are ultimately good for individuals and society at large. We don’t need another product from the “fruit company” and we certainly don’t need most of what our collective work is making today.
Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love and crave the experience of working with other people to make things. And I cannot for the life of me understand why seemingly intelligent and talented people like Rands would fritter away their lives and those of others in such trivial pursuits in many cases, and downright evil doings in others.
Here I am, worrying about how I am going to afford housing after a divorce, and I’m reading insightful leadership advice from an author who has seemingly spent their career building this leadership expertise at one company that makes the most insanely technologically advanced gambling distraction devices imaginable, another company that makes war and mass surveillance products seemingly out of a corporate strategy to profit from human suffering, and the least objectionable company that only made the most distracting communication-platform-cum-torture-device when it convinced us all email wasn’t fast enough to get things done™ and that now embodies an actual AI hallucination as a company strategy. Why can we not have good leaders in making a society where divorce doesn’t threaten basic human needs? Or maybe one where healthcare is a given? Food being widely available?
Instead we band together and create more than $5 trillion worth of “value” in three companies that make absolutely nothing of worth to real human needs. And then we read about the games played inside those companies by humans who could be using their skills for anything else useful and we come here to argue about the merits of middle management.
What are we doing? How did we get here? Can any leadership help us work together to dismantle the horrors we’ve created to make room for making things that address real needs?
First off, I appreciate the thorough explanation and review of the ZSA Moonlander. That said, I’m here to discuss the “visual ergonomics” of this post.
Why is justified text so bad on the web? And why do people still use it, despite how terrible it looks? When I was in journalism school I learned how to properly justify text with line breaks, tracking, and other techniques to make sure we didn’t have “rivers” of blank space through the text or other hard-to-read layouts. Is there no way to achieve the same readable outcome today with CSS, or otherwise?
If not, I beg of you: Please don’t use justified text on the web!
Oh I’m sad (and totally unsurprised) to hear that.
I wonder if there will ever be an exodus from Austin similar in scope to the influx of the past decade. If I could time travel I would definitely visit Austin through the years to see how it was and how it ends up.
>I love biking/walking around the Oracle campus area because they made a bike path and the area is safer than it was before.
That general area of the Town Lake trail was always my starting point for runs. My favorite “section” was definitely the trail on either side of the dam. I would park in the lot across the lake from the now Oracle campus and start most of my runs there. I ran thousands of miles with that as my starting point (I was training for ultramarathons) and never felt unsafe. That started in 2010 so I can’t speak to safety before then.
I liked the character of those neighborhoods and everything they had to offer. The JuiceLand on Cesar Chavez always brought out the most interesting characters in various states of mind on Saturday and Sunday mornings. There was always a pickup basketball game going at the Metz Neighborhood Park, and sometimes I would take a break there to refuel and watch for a few baskets. The Oracle campus is on the other side of the lake from there but I think it still had an influence on the neighborhood even that far removed. I won’t say it was a completely negative influence, but it definitely made things less interesting to me. The east side in general was trending in that direction though, so I’m sure it wasn’t all at the feet of Oracle.
I don’t live in Austin now. It was nice to reminisce about long runs on Town Lake so thanks for that!
Of course it would be great to make use of AI to solve cancer or fix other intractable problems, but we all know this isn’t the way things are going to go. The cancer is in our minds, our societies, and our norms that push us deeper and deeper into a grow-at-any-cost reality where the need for productivity is neither questioned nor considered in any real way. They say: we must grow! They say: we must be more productive! And we sit around thinking about who is going to control the productivity instead of acknowledging the real issues at hand.
I can only imagine a solution where we can all collectively agree that enough is enough. I’m not hopeful it’s possible and I think it’s probably the only way.