Reckon » Business

Legalization and Regulation

reckon — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 05:16:49 +0000

Marijuana prohibition currently costs American taxpayers almost $42 billion a year. Compare this negative cash flow to the projected tax benefits of legalization – between $2.4 and $6.2 billion annually – and it becomes obvious why Milton Friedman and more than 500 other respected economists publicly support the legalization of marijuana. | via Reality Catcher

It's time to embrace American royalty | Glenn Greenwald
Only a small fraction of funding by investment banks, mortgage companies, brokerages, equity funds, hedge funds, commodities futures speculators, etc., comes from actual investor capital. The rest—up to ninety-seven percent, in the case of commodities futures contracts—is credit self-created by the banks.
Where did the banks get this credit? The answer is that they simply cranked it out through their fractional reserve privileges derived from their government charters. In fact the only way money comes into existence in this day and age is through a loan from a bank which must be repaid with interest. The loan is secured by the borrower’s collateral or promise to pay. But the cumulative interest load on the economy grows exponentially. As a part of the federal budget, for instance, interest on the national debt is around $500 billion a year and growing.
via Global Research: Impacts of the Financial Crisis: The U.S. Is Becoming an Impoverished Nation

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Impacts of the Financial Crisis

reckon — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 21:41:51 +0000

Only a small fraction of funding by investment banks, mortgage companies, brokerages, equity funds, hedge funds, commodities futures speculators, etc., comes from actual investor capital. The rest—up to ninety-seven percent, in the case of commodities futures contracts—is credit self-created by the banks.

Where did the banks get this credit? The answer is that they simply cranked it out through their fractional reserve privileges derived from their government charters. In fact the only way money comes into existence in this day and age is through a loan from a bank which must be repaid with interest. The loan is secured by the borrower’s collateral or promise to pay. But the cumulative interest load on the economy grows exponentially. As a part of the federal budget, for instance, interest on the national debt is around $500 billion a year and growing.

via Global Research: Impacts of the Financial Crisis: The U.S. Is Becoming an Impoverished Nation

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Google and the power of words

reckon — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:43:34 +0000

The dominance of Google is radically changing written language on the internet – through their search engine and advertising programmes such as AdSense they are homogenising the meanings of words. This provides a strong impetus for newspapers to ignore whatever editorial ethics they had left in their desperate rush towards the money from online advertising.

Article continues here.

via (s)word | The LoveHowlMuse Blog

Dennett argues that the 'hard problem' is a red herring - the whole question of how conscious first person experience arises from the biological function of the brain assumes that consciousness is a single thing that needs explaining. He suggests that there isn't a single thing that is consciousness, just a collection of mental components, but the fact we've named it as a single thing fools us. In his article Explaining the "Magic" of Consciousness, he gives a great analogy of how the use of the word 'the' was used in a card trick to make it seem completely mysterious even to fellow professional magicians. Article continues here. via Mind Hackers
The Beauty, Secrets and Utility of Twitter for Business Lots of people laugh at Twitter, call it a waste of time and worse, and, that's just fine with me. While they're laughing, I'm learning, listening, meeting, and enjoying a global view of an endless flow of creative thought - 140 characters at a time...[Continue reading here.] via What's Next | B.L. Ochman The above is from B.L. Ochman's business blog, but I'm posting here with the hope that those who aren't in marketing, tech, or business per se might be moved to sign up and join the conversations, offer their sage advice, and share a little of the priceless mundane with the rest of us. Follow me on Twitter if you'd like. I've taken to calling it Twitter University after my uninformed, inexperienced knee-jerk reaction upon first hearing about the service. Now I consider it an essential learning and communication tool (and then some). Highly recommended.
One of your remarkable discoveries is that water responds to words, whether they are spoken, written, or even thought, as in prayer. Kind, uplifting words tend to produce beautifully shaped water crystals, while angry discordant expressions have produced warped crystals. via HADO | Interview with Dr. Emoto

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Ah, Freedom

reckon — Tue, 20 May 2008 17:16:33 +0000

In all of these cases, U.S. multinationals have offered the same defense: Cooperating with draconian demands to turn in customers and censor material is, unfortunately, the price of doing business in China. Some, like Google, have argued that despite having to limit access to the Internet, they are contributing to an overall increase of freedom in China. It’s a story that glosses over the much larger scandal of what is actually taking place: Western investors stampeding into the country, possibly in violation of the law, with the sole purpose of helping the Communist Party spend billions of dollars building Police State 2.0. This isn’t an unfortunate cost of doing business in China: It’s the goal of doing business in China. “Come help us spy!” the Chinese government has said to the world. And the world’s leading technology companies are eagerly answering the call.

via Rolling Stone

You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss A few days ago I was sitting in a cafe in Palo Alto and a group of programmers came in on some kind of scavenger hunt. It was obviously one of those corporate "team-building" exercises. They looked familiar. I spend nearly all my time working with programmers in their twenties and early thirties. But something seemed wrong about these. There was something missing. And yet the company they worked for is considered a good one, and from what I overheard of their conversation, they seemed smart enough. In fact, they seemed to be from one of the more prestigious groups within the company. So why did it seem there was something odd about them? I have a uniquely warped perspective, because nearly all the programmers I know are startup founders. We've now funded 80 startups with a total of about 200 founders, nearly all of them programmers. I spend a lot of time with them, and not much with other programmers. So my mental image of a young programmer is a startup founder. The guys on the scavenger hunt looked like the programmers I was used to, but they were employees instead of founders. And it was startling how different they seemed. So what, you may say. So I happen to know a subset of programmers who are especially ambitious. Of course less ambitious people will seem different. But the difference between the programmers I saw in the cafe and the ones I was used to wasn't just a difference of degree. Something seemed wrong. I think it's not so much that there's something special about founders as that there's something missing in the lives of employees. I think startup founders, though statistically outliers, are actually living in a way that's more natural for humans. I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that I'd only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They're like different animals. And seeing those guys on their scavenger hunt was like seeing lions in a zoo after spending several years watching them in the wild. Read the rest of the article here. via Paul Graham | hat tip Hugh MacLeod [gapingvoid.com]
The Beauty, Secrets and Utility of Twitter for Business Lots of people laugh at Twitter, call it a waste of time and worse, and, that's just fine with me. While they're laughing, I'm learning, listening, meeting, and enjoying a global view of an endless flow of creative thought - 140 characters at a time...[Continue reading here.] via What's Next | B.L. Ochman The above is from B.L. Ochman's business blog, but I'm posting here with the hope that those who aren't in marketing, tech, or business per se might be moved to sign up and join the conversations, offer their sage advice, and share a little of the priceless mundane with the rest of us. Follow me on Twitter if you'd like. I've taken to calling it Twitter University after my uninformed, inexperienced knee-jerk reaction upon first hearing about the service. Now I consider it an essential learning and communication tool (and then some). Highly recommended.
So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years." via Here Comes Everybody hat tip gaping void

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Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

reckon — Sun, 11 May 2008 18:53:48 +0000

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

via Here Comes Everybody

hat tip gaping void

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Design conversations, not products

reckon — Sat, 10 May 2008 09:19:30 +0000

For designers, the task at hand is to listen to all these crossover conversations and design the conditions for them to take place in hybrid forms and formats, enabling, facilitating, and curating them without creating them.

via Matter/Anti-Matter

Heatherwick Studio's Rolling Bridge is located within a new residential, office and retail quarter set around part of the Grand Union Canal. Rather than a conventional opening bridge mechanism, consisting of a single rigid element that lifts to let boats pass, the Rolling Bridge gets out of the way by curling up until its two ends touch. While in its horizontal position, the bridge is a normal, inconspicuous steel and timber footbridge; fully open, it forms a circle on one bank of the water that bears little resemblance to its former self. Twelve metres long, the bridge is made in eight steel and timber sections, and is made to curl by hydraulic rams set into the handrail between each section. The Rolling Bridge won the 2005 British Structural Steel Award.
The Beauty, Secrets and Utility of Twitter for Business Lots of people laugh at Twitter, call it a waste of time and worse, and, that's just fine with me. While they're laughing, I'm learning, listening, meeting, and enjoying a global view of an endless flow of creative thought - 140 characters at a time...[Continue reading here.] via What's Next | B.L. Ochman The above is from B.L. Ochman's business blog, but I'm posting here with the hope that those who aren't in marketing, tech, or business per se might be moved to sign up and join the conversations, offer their sage advice, and share a little of the priceless mundane with the rest of us. Follow me on Twitter if you'd like. I've taken to calling it Twitter University after my uninformed, inexperienced knee-jerk reaction upon first hearing about the service. Now I consider it an essential learning and communication tool (and then some). Highly recommended.
by Stephen Reed Industrial Design

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Exactly.

reckon — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 04:23:43 +0000

But there is something about messes that lead to great successes. I think it often has to do with teams that focus almost exclusively on the product and the market to the exclusion of everything else. They don’t build the rest of the infrastructure that it takes to be a stable well executing business and they suffer a lot because of it. But in the process they get the one thing right that really matters. And the fact that they get the one thing right that really matters makes matters worse because the product takes off and they don’t have the resources in place to deal with their success. And mess ensues.

Great post via Fred Wilson | A VC

Outside money is plan B The first priority of many startups is acquiring funding from investors. But remember, if you turn to outsiders for funding, you’ll have to answer to them too. Expectations are raised. Investors want their money back – and quickly. The sad fact is cashing in often begins to trump building a quality product.
Constraints force creativity Run on limited resources and you’ll be forced to reckon with constraints earlier and more intensely. And that’s a good thing. Constraints drive innovation.

via Getting Real Digest | Diigo

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Getting Real Digest

reckon — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 03:51:55 +0000

Outside money is plan B

The first priority of many startups is acquiring funding from
investors. But remember, if you turn to outsiders for funding,
you’ll have to answer to them too. Expectations are raised.
Investors want their money back – and quickly. The sad fact is
cashing in often begins to trump building a quality product.

Constraints force creativity
Run on limited resources and you’ll be forced to reckon with
constraints earlier and more intensely. And that’s a good thing.
Constraints drive innovation.

via Getting Real Digest | Diigo

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Flying Off the Shelves by Paul Constant

reckon — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 23:25:02 +0000

There’s an underground economy of boosted books. These values are commonly understood and roundly agreed upon through word of mouth, and the values always seem to be true. Once, a scruffy, large man approached me, holding a folded-up piece of paper. “Do you have any Buck?” He paused and looked at the piece of paper. “Any books by Buckorsick?” I suspected that he meant Bukowski, but I played dumb, and asked to see the piece of paper he was holding. It was written in crisp handwriting that clearly didn’t belong to him, and it read:

1. Charles Bukowski

2. Jim Thompson

3. Philip K. Dick

4. William S. Burroughs

5. Any Graphic Novel

This is pretty much the authoritative top five, the New York Times best-seller list of stolen books. Its origins still mystify me..

I asked the man whether he preferred Bukowski’s Pulp to his Women, as I did, and whether his favorite Thompson book was The Getaway or The Killer Inside Me. First the book chatter made him nervous, but then it made him angry…

Continue reading Flying Off the Shelves by Paul Constant | via The Stranger

Any booksellers reading this? I’m curious about the how the lists might compare from store to store, city to city… Not surprised Buk is at the top of this one, however. But where is Hoffman? Surprising omission.

So why not consider a revolutionary if not long-forgotten information concept: a book; a book whose pages have texture that can be felt; a book whose letters make a slight indentation in the paper yet jump off the page; a book with hand-stitched binding. "I'm trying to get people to see a book as an aesthetic artifact, not as a generic container," says Dave Wofford, who operates the one-man letterpress Horse and Buggy Press. "I like the concept of attention to detail, tactileness, intimacy. To me books can't be beat for those things. via The Durham News Horse and Buggy Press
He pioneered the cult of youth and turned himself into a brand. No wonder Oscar Wilde is still seen as ‘one of us’
From The London Times
by Gyles Brandreth Oscar Wilde and the Ring of Death by Gyles Brandreth will be published by John Murray on May 1
Last Sunday I made a pilgrimage to the Père Lachaise cemetery, in the northeast of Paris, to pay my respects to the shade of Oscar Wilde. I found I was not alone. The great man’s grave was surrounded by quite a crowd, including a party of Japanese students, a family of Germans (the father was wearing lederhosen) and an assortment of young people in their twenties: French, Italian, British and American.
In his own time, he was an outsider and an exotic. Now he’s one of us. We understand his craving for celebrity. We share his obsession with youth. (“Youth is the one thing worth having,” he wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray.)
As I arrived, one of the young women (an English student from St Andrews) was planting a kiss on the huge Jacob Epstein effigy that surmounts the poet’s grave. She was kissing the marble deliberately, to leave the lipstick impression of her mouth on the monument. “Why did you do that?” I asked. “Because I love him,” she replied. “We all do,” added another of the girls. “He’s one of us.” Wilde, it seems, is our contemporary. He died in Paris 108 years ago, a near-friendless exile, impoverished, shunned, disgraced. Today, he is world-famous and universally admired. There are 1,000 lipstick impressions on his tomb. He would not have quarrelled with the attention: he was a pioneer of celebrity culture. “If you wish for reputation and fame in the world,” he advised, “take every opportunity of advertising yourself. Remember the Latin saying, ‘Fame springs from one’s own house.’ ” At theatrical first nights, as a matter of policy, during the 10 minutes before the curtain was due to rise, he would make a series of brief appearances around the auditorium - in the dress circle, in the stalls, in the boxes on either side of the stage. He wore outlandish clothes; he said outrageous things. He set out to get himself noticed. He was. And he is. I am writing a series of Victorian murder mysteries, traditional who-dunnits featuring Wilde as my detective, and, as my publishers cart me about the world, I am discovering that my hero’s fan base extends way beyond Europe and North America. He has a substantial following in South America, the Middle East, India and - wait for it - Korea. Other Victorian writers may be more widely read (Dickens and Conan Doyle, for example), but I reckon that no other individual Victorian, however eminent (no, not Queen Victoria herself), lives on as a personality in quite the way that Wilde does. [Continue reading the Times article here]
In ‘Alice through the Looking Glass’ by Lewis Carroll, Alice falls through a mirror and on the other side of the mirror, she becomes a piece in a game of chess. Inspired by this, the chess pieces have an opaque mirror finish, when they touch the surface of the board they magically turn transparent and reveal the identity of the piece contained inside them. When removed from the board they revert to being opaque, hiding the identity of the piece. This is a comment on how a chess piece has no value unless it is in play on the board. If removed from the board, a pawn and a queen are equal, in that neither have any value.
A Chess Set inspired by the novel 'Alice through the Looking Glass' where the pieces magically turn transparent when they touch the board.
The theme of 'Alice through the Looking Glass' is the difference between the real world and the world behind the mirror. In keeping with this theme there is a contrast between the unlit mirrored piece and the clear glass piece. Each unlit mirrored piece is a smooth and modern shape. Each lit piece is clear glass, with the negative shape of a traditional, delicate Staunton chess piece enclosed within it. In the book the White Knight talks about how he thinks better when he is upside down. In a reference, the White Knights in the set only work when they are placed upside down. This joke is hidden to all but those who know the background of the chess set The Chessboard is made out of LightPoints a material manufactured by Schott, which is glass that has LED's embedded in it; the pieces are coated with Mirona, a Material that turns transparent when light shines through it. When the piece is placed on the board it completes the circuit and lights up the LED under it turning it transparent, like magic. This product was designed by Yasmin Sethi in response to a brief set by Schott UK Ltd. for Final year students of Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. via Yasmin Sethi Design

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The Beauty, Secrets and Utility of Twitter

reckon — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:58:05 +0000

The Beauty, Secrets and Utility of Twitter for Business

Lots of people laugh at Twitter, call it a waste of time and worse, and, that’s just fine with me. While they’re laughing, I’m learning, listening, meeting, and enjoying a global view of an endless flow of creative thought – 140 characters at a time…[Continue reading here.]

via What’s Next | B.L. Ochman

The above is from B.L. Ochman’s business blog, but I’m posting here with the hope that those who aren’t in marketing, tech, or business per se might be moved to sign up and join the conversations, offer their sage advice, and share a little of the priceless mundane with the rest of us.

Follow me on Twitter if you’d like. I’ve taken to calling it Twitter University after my uninformed, inexperienced knee-jerk reaction upon first hearing about the service. Now I consider it an essential learning and communication tool (and then some). Highly recommended.

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You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss

reckon — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 15:06:48 +0000

You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss

A few days ago I was sitting in a cafe in Palo Alto and a group of programmers came in on some kind of scavenger hunt. It was obviously one of those corporate “team-building” exercises.

They looked familiar. I spend nearly all my time working with programmers in their twenties and early thirties. But something seemed wrong about these. There was something missing.

And yet the company they worked for is considered a good one, and from what I overheard of their conversation, they seemed smart enough. In fact, they seemed to be from one of the more prestigious groups within the company.

So why did it seem there was something odd about them?

I have a uniquely warped perspective, because nearly all the programmers I know are startup founders. We’ve now funded 80 startups with a total of about 200 founders, nearly all of them programmers. I spend a lot of time with them, and not much with other programmers. So my mental image of a young programmer is a startup founder.

The guys on the scavenger hunt looked like the programmers I was used to, but they were employees instead of founders. And it was startling how different they seemed.

So what, you may say. So I happen to know a subset of programmers who are especially ambitious. Of course less ambitious people will seem different. But the difference between the programmers I saw in the cafe and the ones I was used to wasn’t just a difference of degree. Something seemed wrong.

I think it’s not so much that there’s something special about founders as that there’s something missing in the lives of employees. I think startup founders, though statistically outliers, are actually living in a way that’s more natural for humans.

I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that I’d only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They’re like different animals. And seeing those guys on their scavenger hunt was like seeing lions in a zoo after spending several years watching them in the wild.

Read the rest of the article here.

via Paul Graham | hat tip Hugh MacLeod [gapingvoid.com]

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Quick vs. Slow (Quality Control in Art and Business)

reckon — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 13:26:09 +0000

Roskilde Univ. Prof says: Quick working = low quality (like fast food), slow working = high quality (fine food).

Interesting analysis. [via steverubel | Twitter University]

Not So Fast

Sending and receiving at breakneck speed can make life queasy; a manifesto for slow communication

By John Freeman
The boundlessness of the Internet always runs into the hard fact of our animal nature, our physical limits, the dimensions of our cognitive present, the overheated capacity of our minds. "My friend has just had his PC wired for broadband," writes the poet Don Paterson. "I meet him in the café; he looks terrible—his face puffy and pale, his eyes bloodshot. . . . He tells me he is now detained, night and day, in downloading every album he ever owned, lost, desired, or was casually intrigued by; he has now stopped even listening to them, and spends his time sleeplessly monitoring a progress bar. . . . He says it's like all my birthdays have come at once, by which I can see he means, precisely, that he feels he is going to die." We will die, that much is certain; and everyone we have ever loved and cared about will die, too, sometimes—heartbreakingly—before us. Being someone else, traveling the world, making new friends gives us a temporary reprieve from this knowledge, which is spared most of the animal kingdom. Busyness—or the simulated busyness of email addiction—numbs the pain of this awareness, but it can never totally submerge it. Given that our days are limited, our hours precious, we have to decide what we want to do, what we want to say, what and who we care about, and how we want to allocate our time to these things within the limits that do not and cannot change. In short, we need to slow down. Our society does not often tell us this. Progress, since the dawn of the Industrial Age, is supposed to be a linear upward progression; graphs with upward slopes are a good sign. Processing speeds are always getting faster; broadband now makes dial-up seem like traveling by horse and buggy. Growth is eternal. But only two things grow indefinitely or have indefinite growth firmly ensconced at the heart of their being: cancer and the corporation. For everything else, especially in nature, the consuming fires eventually come and force a starting over. The ultimate form of progress, however, is learning to decide what is working and what is not; and working at this pace, emailing at this frantic rate, is pleasing very few of us. It is encroaching on parts of our lives that should be separate or sacred, altering our minds and our ability to know our world, encouraging a further distancing from our bodies and our natures and our communities. We can change this; we have to change it. Of course email is good for many things; that has never been in dispute. But we need to learn to use it far more sparingly, with far less dependency, if we are to gain control of our lives. [Article continues here via Wall Street Journal] Photo Credit: Mark Crossfield
The Beauty, Secrets and Utility of Twitter for Business Lots of people laugh at Twitter, call it a waste of time and worse, and, that's just fine with me. While they're laughing, I'm learning, listening, meeting, and enjoying a global view of an endless flow of creative thought - 140 characters at a time...[Continue reading here.] via What's Next | B.L. Ochman The above is from B.L. Ochman's business blog, but I'm posting here with the hope that those who aren't in marketing, tech, or business per se might be moved to sign up and join the conversations, offer their sage advice, and share a little of the priceless mundane with the rest of us. Follow me on Twitter if you'd like. I've taken to calling it Twitter University after my uninformed, inexperienced knee-jerk reaction upon first hearing about the service. Now I consider it an essential learning and communication tool (and then some). Highly recommended.
Outside money is plan B The first priority of many startups is acquiring funding from investors. But remember, if you turn to outsiders for funding, you’ll have to answer to them too. Expectations are raised. Investors want their money back – and quickly. The sad fact is cashing in often begins to trump building a quality product.
Constraints force creativity Run on limited resources and you’ll be forced to reckon with constraints earlier and more intensely. And that’s a good thing. Constraints drive innovation.

via Getting Real Digest | Diigo

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Small vs. Big

reckon — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 13:16:49 +0000

I always wanted the biggest box of crayons. It was always a really cool thing to have. But as I think about it now, someone that would have taught me how to color, to actually do something with 8 crayons, that could have changed my life. I might have moved from being a consumer to an artist.

Big is about consumers. Small is about artists. Big is about changing people to your world. Small is about preparing people to change their world.

Read the article here.

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Reckon » Business

Legalization and Regulation

Impacts of the Financial Crisis

Google and the power of words

Ah, Freedom

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

Design conversations, not products

Exactly.

Getting Real Digest

Flying Off the Shelves by Paul Constant

He pioneered the cult of youth and turned himself into a brand. No wonder Oscar Wilde is still seen as ‘one of us’

The Beauty, Secrets and Utility of Twitter

You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss

Quick vs. Slow (Quality Control in Art and Business)

Not So Fast

Sending and receiving at breakneck speed can make life queasy; a manifesto for slow communication

By John Freeman

Small vs. Big