I agree in theory, but it's difficult to align values with someone whose strategy is to shift blame to clients and subordinates due to lack of planning and communication skills. These people create a toxic, reactive working environment and their damage needs to be managed. I don't believe that they bring good things to the table.
I realize that this sounds exceptionally bitter so I am open to the possibility that I have become cynical and am unable to see from outside the lense of my own vision.
The people who believe in these types of predictions don't put much stock in science anyway. Someone who doesn't believe in carbon dating isn't going to listen to an argument regarding the Earth's age based on carbon dating.
If you really want to provide a counter in these types of discussions it is more helpful to speak in their language. My favorite example of this was when last year astronomers announced that the zodiac signs were incorrect due to a shift in the planet's position relative to the sun since the time that the zodiac was created. This produced more reverberations in the astrological community than any number of studies showing the falsehood of their predictions.
In this case, it may be helpful to point out that the December 21 is simply the date at which the next cycle in the Mayan calendar begins, as occurs every 400 years or so, and that the Mayans themselves made no predictions about cataclysmic events occurring on these dates.
My main complaint from the book is that Isaacson injects his own opinion too strongly and too often. He writes it like a novel, with him guiding us to the conclusions he has prepared for us. Instead I would have preferred it be written like a well-written wikipedia entry, with numerous sources presented and the reader being granted the freedom to come to his own conclusions. This bothered me much more than any technical inaccuracies.
I think this touches on a larger social issue. I believe that the younger generation is more sensitive to being manipulated about what to think and feel. Before the internet, we relied on experts to present us with the facts and the conclusions; there is now greater awareness that there are always multiple sides to any story, and we prefer hearing all of them before making up our minds.
As an example, I recently watched an investigative journaling television show with my parents about the dangers of laser eye correction. I was struck by how unaware they were of the different methods that were being used in the show to guide their opinions (music, poor-quality hidden cameras, etc). To me, I wasn't given nearly enough objective facts to come to any sort of conclusion, but to my parents, the conclusions presented by the experts were enough.
Isaacson writes like an expert, but we don't want an expert, we want a fact-gatherer.
An even bigger problem than password reuse, in my opinion, is secret question formulas to reset your password. My banking site requires a strong password, which of course means that I often forget it, which means that resetting my password has become a regular part of the login process. The site allows me to reset my password directly from the site after answering my secret questions correctly. It does not send an email link to reset.
If a password can be reset by answering a series of secret questions, then the password itself is moot and the account is only as secure as its secret questions. Which in many cases aren't very secure to anyone who might know the person (What is the color of your first car? What is your first pet's name?).
Given the choice between being allowed a "weak" password that I might actually remember, and a "strong" password that I either have to write down or reset every time I log in via answering a series of questions that are even less secure than a weak password, I would take the weak password.
Why do you think that? Jealousy is a human emotion and has no limits, and no level of success or achievement is a guarantee to be free of desire for more.
I admit I've been curious about exactly it would look like and what would happen if the entire underground oil field were to somehow spill into the ocean at once.
I think the real metrics regarding the effects of these privacy issues are going to be much harder to measure. I don't think there will be a lot of people outright shutting down their Facebook account, but instead people will begin to self-censor more and more what they say on the site. I notice myself using the site much less frequently the last several months, and many of my friends report the same. It's actually hard to say for sure whether this is due to privacy concerns, or if people are just starting to get bored of it and realizing that having real contact with their real friends really does matter.
I realize that this sounds exceptionally bitter so I am open to the possibility that I have become cynical and am unable to see from outside the lense of my own vision.