This article omits so many negatives from the "cyclist's paradise" vision of Hidalgo's 2 terms that I don't know where to start. Families are the first casualties: the Paris metro is nowhere near accessible to strollers except if you are willing to go to the chiropractor after each week end, and using your car - hell, even parking your family car - is a no go as soon as there is some kind of hipster sports event or just as soon as you are after 10am on week end mornings. Local parks and generally streets are so dirty that you have to wash your children from head to toe as soon as they have set foot outside. And I'm not even talking about used seringes and broken glass in certain parts of the city. I'm actually so ashamed of my city at this point.
Sorry if that sounds offensive, but you are being a bit shortsighted here. The theory just says that shareholder value serves both as a guide to what a business should do, and as a measure of how good it has done, because that measure encompasses all others. Which is debatable but far from stupid: do you really think Apple would have sold so many i* had they been ugly? Do you really think that angry people demanding taxes, regulations, etc don't affect how businesses decide to actually go and maximize shareholder value? The actual real absent in Friedman's reasoning is "eventually": externalities always come to haunt the shareholder value, the question is when do they become tangible enough that this aligns with society's perception of those externalities.
> And meanwhile the biggest threat to all our security, the climate crisis goes unaddressed.
That the climate crisis is the biggest threat to our security is the biggest fallacy of our times. It's not that climate change is unimportant, just that it needs to be evaluated to its fair potential consequences, compared to e.g. an all-out war.
Probably it's because I'm not a quantum physicist, but the argument boiling down to "the wavefunction is an object of a probability space not of physical space" seems to make the whole article moot. Can the "wavefunction" be anything else than a _representation_ of the particule(/wave)?... but then who could ever think that a representation would actually travel in space?
You see the carrot vanishing... OK. But what about the stick?
The whole point of Trump's policy is 'we forgot the stick, let's use it again'. I see this true for international policy but you could probably extend that to that infamous DOGE: Fed agencies must be 'productive' (whatever that means), or else.
I don't know what makes you say that. Requiring a bit of market research from project proponents does not mean excluding anything lightweight or just new. What you don't want is some company being contracted because it talked to you first by whatever channel rather than as a result of some reasoned assessment.
CFO's perspective: wanna sell me something, anything? you're out.
However well crafted your email is, you're an unacceptable distraction from the priorities that the company has set, the achievement of which is materialized by projects of varying size and scope. Upon starting any project of any size, people do due diligence: they assess what exactly it is they are looking for, and then research the market for it. For macro-projects, consultants may be hired to help with the process, which may lead to a proper tender.
Either way, the company contacts you, not the other way round.
It's the reason why it can only work at small scale: it's all or nothing. It wants to be your only communication channel. But, surprise, as soon as you live in a larger organisation, there will already be communication channels that serve part of the same purpose. Then most of the functionality become clutter.
> why would you tip a barber? because they cut your hair good? what was the base payment for then?
Let me return the question: why would you tip a waiter? because they brought your food to your table? isn't that why they should be paid by the restaurant?
Let me also state that, residing in a European city, I do tip my (cheap) barber every time I go because I feel they do an outstanding job at 20% less the price than most competitors, and that work deserves praise in the form of a tip.
In general, it seems to me that a tip should reflect something outstanding. In addition to my cheap barber, I also usually tip at fancy restaurants where the service has proved very, very high above comparables.
At individual contributor level, such schemes may work -- anyways, people are paid by the hour so anything outside hours is already dubbed 'overtime', and companies are bound to care.
At management level (i.e. top management talking either between them or with the management levels just below), where hours don't get counted (in some countries such as France, it's just 'days'), it really boils down to the top management's culture. Workaholic top management = every manager is expected to be workaholic... and Darwin does the rest: soon enough, only workaholics remain.
The study seems US based only, I wonder if there's a similar trend in Europe -- that would help identifying if some of the potential environmental factors have been regulated out on the other side of the Atlantic.
My understanding was that the main interest of SendGrid, Mailgun et al was precisely that they manage to (more or less) reliably mass send email through the great MS/Google/Proofpoint, where hitting the recipient's mailbox is less than guaranteed if you self-host.
Unfortunately the article mixes the ends with the means.
The key trait that seems to stand out in the most highly regarded people in history is discipline: there is no "10x work" without hard, long term focus, which requires discipline.
"Routines" have the advantage of making that discipline easier.
Does it mean they are sufficient? No, and this is where the article is right.
Does it mean they are useless? No, it's just one way of achieving the level of discipline needed to do the "10x work" that the article focuses on.
A primer on valuation: in many financial contexts, $1 of operating savings may be worth much more than $1 of investment.
That is because an investment is a one-off, so it's actually worth $1, but the savings are recurring, so they are worth the same number of years that a company's profits are valued. Depending on sector and investors' beliefs in the future of companies, this factor is typically in the 5-20x range. That means that $1 of savings is well worth at least $5 of investments.
Preserve AM radio for worst-case scenario emergency, where nothing else ever is available -- that's the million year solar flare or the next nuclear winter -- of course. AM is the best at what it does, which is transmitting efficiently, with low power, including in difficult terrain, all with extremely simple hardware.
But why the heck mandate thay we can receive it in every car?? I mean, cars are important in America, but why would you need the wordt-case scenario emergency thing in every car! Mandate home radio equipment makers to support it, or mandate one receiver in every house à la smoke detectors. Cheap and easy. But every car? Crazy stupid.