First, Blaine Cook says that ragged right is an abomination. Now Tim Bray jumps on board. Have I been conditioned by reading things on screen for so many years to prefer the old ragged right treatment? Will all of us soon be updating our blogs to hyphenate and justify our text? If I were going to go that route, I’d probably have to switch back to a serif font. I think that sans serif and right justified just look wrong together.
When Google announced their new +1 feature, which enables end users to recommend things, I was mainly struck by the incredible geekiness of it. Everybody understands “Like,” whereas +1 was taken from the Apache open source community and its history probably isn’t known to even 5% of Google’s users. Kellan at Laughing Meme digs into the history and finds what is, perhaps, the first mention of +1 style voting. I love it.
O’Reilly Radar republishes a blog post imagining what Steve Jobs would do if he were President of the United States and needless to say, the writer supposes that Steve Jobs would do lots of cool stuff. What the article really shows is that the writer has no clue how the government actually works. Our government is structured in such a way that it’s incredibly difficult to get a lot done, regardless of who you are, and the sort of silly thinking that this article espouses only makes the problem worse. What the country needs is structural change that makes it possible for our leaders to be more effective, not magical thinking about the persuasive powers of great leaders.
Thinking about what should happen is easy — the hard part is figuring out the mechanisms by which it can happen, whether it’s political reform at the national level or setting up a continuous integration platform for your software development project. After seeing the excitement and hope of the Obama campaign transition into two years of excruciating political trench warfare, I just don’t have any interest in hand waving and big, silly ideas.
The federal government is full of smart, competent, persuasive people working in a system that prevents them from rapidly addressing even the problems with obvious solutions. Let’s see some realistic thought experiments that address that.
Paul Baran, one of the original inventors of the Internet, passed away this weekend at age 84. He’s credited with inventing the packet-switched network. Here’s how he described his contribution to the creation of the Internet:
The process of technological developments is like building a cathedral. Over the course of several hundred years, new people come along and each lays down a block on top of the old foundations, each saying, ‘I built a cathedral.’ Next month another block is placed atop the previous one. Then comes along an historian who asks, ‘Well, who built the cathedral?’ Peter added some stones here, and Paul added a few more. If you are not careful you can con yourself into believing that you did the most important part. But the reality is that each contribution has to follow onto previous work. Everything is tied to everything else.
Sometimes it’s strange to me to think that we’re watching the twilight of the first generation of computer scientists. What a world they created for us to enjoy.
Chris Dixon has this to say about whether we’re in the midst of another tech bubble:
I think it’s a good thing that the speculation on large private tech companies is happening in secondary markets where the risks are being taken by institutions or wealthy individuals. This is in stark contrast to the dot-com bubble of the 90s where many of the people holding the bag when bubble popped were non-rich people who bought stocks through public markets. Obviously this could change if we have a bunch of tech IPOs.
This is a wise point. If investors want to plow $41 million dollars into some kind of Instagram/Flickr/Foursquare/Groupon mashup that nobody understands, what do I care?
This is from a response to a gamer’s complaints about non-straight characters in the game Dragon’s Age 2, from one of the game’s writers, David Gaider:
… the truth is that privilege always lies with the majority. They’re so used to being catered to that they see the lack of catering as an imbalance. They don’t see anything wrong with having things set up to suit them, what’s everyone’s fuss all about? That’s the way it should be, and everyone else should be used to not getting what they want.
He could just as easily be explaining why people watch Fox News.
Libertarian economist Scott Sumner talks about the “marshmallow test” and says that he doesn’t trust Democrats:
What do we do if Social Security needs to be trimmed in order to balance the budget? I hear lots of talk about cutting back on benefits for those who “don’t need it.” That would be people like me. Here’s why I don’t trust the Dems—I see them as the party of one marshmallow eaters. They represent people who have less self-control. I fear they will cut my benefits, but not cut the benefits of people who didn’t save for retirement. I fear they will use “wealth” as the criterion to determine who is needy and who isn’t; not lifetime wage earnings.
In my view there is nothing egalitarian about redistributing income from two marshmallow eaters to one marshmallow eaters. They’ve already had their fun when young, loading up their three car garages with all sorts of fun toys. I’ve never even had a garage.
My take on this is that Scott Sumner is a selfish bastard who’s painfully out of touch. There are plenty of people in America and around the world who were never offered the first marshmallow. The Democrats don’t do much to help them out, but Republicans and libertarians don’t seem to believe the government should help them at all. In fact, their main concern is that people with many, many marshmallows can eat them all themselves, and they justify that stance the same way Scott Sumner does. If you’re poor, it’s because you’re inferior to people like them.
The perfect job description serves two purposes. It attracts the kind of people you would hope to hire, and almost as importantly, it discourages the sorts of people you don’t want to hire. Going through big piles of resumes is not fun. Job ads that extoll the virtues of your workplace without laying out any of the potential drawbacks may attract lots of resumes, but it’s almost certain that 90% of them will be from people you don’t want to screen, much less hire.
This ad for an investigative reporter from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune is a masterpiece of the form. Some number of people are going to be incredibly enthused by the ad, but a lot of people would read it and know instantly that they are not interested in or cut out for the job. I guarantee it saves them a lot of time.
I remember once interviewing someone about whom I had real doubts. I wasn’t sure what questions to ask to confirm my suspicions, so instead I just tried to scare them away by telling them that it was a small company and that people who couldn’t do the job would be exposed. Anyway, I was outvoted, the person was hired, and they didn’t last six months. Maybe we should have written a more honest job description.
A lot of people have said that they wished that the New York Times’ new pricing system was more about offering more value for people who do pay rather than putting barriers in the way of people who don’t pay. Those remarks immediately made me think of Amazon Prime.
Amazon Prime subscribers pay $80 a year in exchange for “free” two day shipping on every Prime-eligible item they purchase from Amazon.com. It is, essentially, a loyalty program that you have to pay to join. I’m certain it exerts a powerful influence on the buying habits of subscribers. If a subscriber buys something from a site other than Amazon.com, they’re likely to pay more for shipping, receive the item later, or both. Plus, they’ve already got the sunk cost of the Prime membership on their mind. When they go to other sites, they probably think, “Shouldn’t I look for this on Amazon.com first to see if I can use my Prime membership?”
I always wonder how many Amazon Prime subscribers buy enough stuff over the course of the year to make the $80 they spend on their Prime membership a good deal. My guess is what they’re really buying is the ability to make impulse purchases without worrying about whether they should have waited to group items for free shipping, which in turn leads them to spend even more money with Amazon.com. Amazon.com further benefits from Prime because it encourages third party sellers who use the site to turn their fulfillment operation over to them as well so that their merchandise can be eligible for Prime shipping.
One of the core values at O’Reilly is to create more value than you capture. The fact that Prime benefits Amazon.com in many ways has nothing to do with why people pay for it — they pay for it because it delivers value to them. What can the New York Times offer that creates more value than it captures?
Clearly the New York Times would argue that their articles and blog posts deliver value well beyond their subscription fee. Unfortunately, they have lowered the perceived value of their product by providing free access to their articles for years, and more importantly, close substitutes for what the New York Times offers remain freely available.
Anyway, my plan was to make this a really awesome post with a suggestion for the New York Times that would save the paper and revolutionize online journalism. Unfortunately, great ideas elude me. I even sat and thought about what service I would gladly pay for from the New York Times, and I couldn’t come up with anything. Maybe I’m just happy I don’t work for a news site.
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Will a library card lead me to read more?
Like many people who spend too much time online, read fewer books than I’d like. It’s not that I don’t read as many words as I once did. I read blog posts in Google Reader, updates on Twitter, message board posts in many places, email, and long articles in Instapaper. And my temptation is often to play a computer game, watch a TV show, or catch up on various online reading when I have leisure time. While I enjoy all that stuff, it’s just not the same as diving into an interesting nonfiction book or a gripping novel.
For years I’ve been trying to figure out how to get my incentives to align with my abstract desires and start reading more books. My new theory is that I’m more likely to read books if I check them out from the library. I am a deadline driven person, and when you check books out of the library they come with a deadline. You have to give them back whether you read them or not. The other difference is that buying a book is a commitment. You spend money on it, and so it’s worth looking into carefully to make sure you’re buying something that’s really good. Books are sacred. On the other hand, if you check out a book from the library and it’s not your cup of tea, you put it down and drop it off on the way home from work the next day. No pressure.
So today I went to the library and got a library card and checked out Rosecrans Baldwin’s novel from last year, You Lost Me There. I knew his name from The Morning News and I have enjoyed his commentary on Layer Tennis matches so I picked up his book on a whim and now I have until April 25 to read it. We’ll see how it turns out — first I have to finish reading this issue of National Geographic from last September.