A more apt comparison would be Antarctica. But even in Antarctica you can go outside and feel the sunshine on your face in the summer. You can't really do that on a space station or on a Mars base.
I would personally probably miss the smells and the seasons the most.
It always troubles me when people talk about the future and futurism optimistically and without understanding the historical context and why it might be a bad idea.
For you that don't know, futurism had its roots in 20th century Italy and was a broad art and cultural movement that ultimately gave rise to fascism. It also inspired both Lenin and Hitler and merged with the ideals of industrialism to create communism (Leninism) and national socialism.
The difference is, back in those days futurism was considered avantgarde. Today it seems to be modus operandi.
And on a side note: Why would any sane person want to live in space? Going there to do some important science for a while, sure. But living in a tin-can in an insanely hostile environment for the rest of my life? Not gonna happen.
I don't think he is talking about "high priority" in the project management sense, rather in the visual or cognitive sense that the presentation of a feature to the user is highly prioritized. His argument is basically that it is more important or relevant to make the feature "obvious" (easy to understand) rather than "high priority" (attention grabbing).
Yes, but the only feedback provided was that my argument was a straw-man. I.e. they disagreed with the point I was trying to make. And as far as I understand, the social contract on Hacker News implies that you don't down vote if you disagree, only if the comment is spam or trolling, etc.
Although I suppose I'm on the verge of becoming somewhat of a troll right now.
I didn't claim that a sustainable businesses can't do good work. I simply claimed that sustainability is at odds with producing good things. Which is a fairly different claim. Though I can see how the distinction was not perfectly clear in my comment.
But to be honest I thought I was being very careful in my wording about something that should be self evident, e.g.
"...will most likely not be as inherently good as it could be."
Running a business implies a trade-off. The trade-off is that if you want to be successful (i.e. sustainable) you need to focus on the business and not the product. Which is exactly what the article is stating.
Maybe a better example to support my claim is Apple. They make great products. But the way they do that is by focusing on the process of creating great products. Jonathan Ive specifically talks about this in the Objectified documentary. He says that most of their time is spent on designing the manufacturing process and the tools needed to mass-produce the products, only a very small part of the time is spent on the actual design of the phone or computer and that design is almost always a direct implication of the manufacturing process rather than something they magically dream up in some creative haze.
Why am I being down voted for this? It is not spam and not intended as flame bait. It is not off topic and it is not pointless humor. It is a serious comment that needs to be debated and not hidden away at the bottom of the page.
I am not stating anything extremely controversial, simply the same thing the article is stating, but with a slightly different wording.
Don't down vote me because you disagree with me or because you think I am bashing capitalism (I am not, I love capitalism). If you think my argument is weak or lacking, please tell me so in a comment instead.
That something is enjoyable does not make it inherently good (unless you ascribe to Utilitarianism). There are of course other factors beyond pure enjoyment that contribute to the inherent goodness of a thing. You don't need to enjoy a medical device in order for it to be able to do its job well, for example.
Rather, the distinction I was aiming at was between "process" and "product". But I suppose that wasn't very clear. My intention was not to start a flame war on capitalism.
In my opinion a process can be sustainable (and thus very likely profitable), but a product can not. In this case a business model is a process and the thing you put in your mouth (the hamburger) is the product. For the hamburger to be perfect we would need an ever escalating process. Constantly adding more complexity or work to refine the product we can create thus creating an unsustainable process.
If you want to create a hamburger in a sustainable and profitable way. The McDonalds process is most likely one of the best ways to do that. But it will NEVER create a perfect hamburger. The same is of course true with the opposite. A tiny connoisseur coffee shop can conceivably create a perfect cup of coffee and push the boundaries of the state of the art. But it will NEVER be a sustainable process. You need to make compromises in order to achieve that.
The point I was trying to make with the McDonalds example was simply that a scalable and successful business model necessarily implies that they are unable to create the "perfect" hamburger. They have practical limitations inherent to their process that makes it impossible. If they instead were running a two star luxury restaurant they might have a chance at making a perfect product. But that wouldn't be a scalable and sustainable business, and most like not very profitable either. Most luxury restaurants have extremely low margins and in many cases operates with considerable losses.
And just to make it clear, I am not trying to criticizes capitalism per se. I'm only basically stating the same thing the article is stating; that there is an inherent paradox in capitalism that makes it more complex to deal with than is directly apparent. Everyone that goes into business or deals with business indirectly through policy-making should be as aware as possible of this paradox, simply because it will prevent us from collectively ending up in a world with great processes but awful products or with great products but awful processes. Neither of which are very tempting scenarios.
This is the paradox of capitalism. Focus on creating something inherently good and it will not be sustainable. Focus on creating something sustainable and profitable and it will most likely not be as inherently good as it could be.
Example: McDonalds. Brilliant business model. Awful product.
I was talking about Facebook the tool, i.e. how it is actually being used by people. Not Facebook the business model, which I agree with you is exactly as you describe, but is something completely different and separate from how it is perceived and used by ordinary people.
But you are profoundly fooling yourself if you believe that that is what Facebook is. If all you want to do is CC a list of people some photos, there are way better tools out there.
I think it's pretty obvious that Facebook has been, from the start, something very different. It is so ingrained in every little design decision and how they promote and talk about the service that it is a tool for managing your public persona. Not a simple communication tool, or replacement for email. Though they obviously offer that kind of functionality as well through Messages and Chat.
Facebook wants to enhance or maybe even change the way you interact socially. It's not a political agenda, but it is definitly a very conscious mission to change a large part of western culture.
There seems to be a lot of confusion about this. So let me state it again to make it clear:
FACEBOOK IS A TOOL FOR MANAGING YOUR PUBLIC PERSONA.
The macro difference in philosophy between Facebook and Google+ is that Google+ encourages social silos and obscurity (typical characteristics of geek/hacker culture, inherited from American liberalism and Californian utopism), while Facebook on the other hand encourages emphasis on context and sharing (in the two way interactive sense, not the one way broadcasting sense that for example Twitter promotes).
But that is exactly what is counterproductive about it. Because it forces you to make assumptions about the people you interact with. Have you asked all of your friends wether or not they might find your family photos interesting or not? Do you think there is no value in being exposed to things that is beyond your comfort zone? I might be a 25 year old party animal that doesn't care shit about family life. But seeing the odd family photo or two in my feed now and then might perhaps be good for me? And I might even enjoy it, even if I don't want to readily admit it to my self. There is also the dimension of making the social realm more "democratic". In the sense that it is a good thing if people are not intentionally excluded from social contexts. It helps create a more tolerant society and more robust and flexible social networks if the interaction in the networks are less clustered (something a hacker, with knowledge about how the internet works should be able to appreciate).
The somewhat technical explanation is that what Google is doing is implementing something very similar to "Social role theory" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role_Theory), which emphasizes social roles as the defining characteristic used to understand social interaction. While Facebook rather is implementing something more akin to "Symbolic interaction theory" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_interaction).
Facebook Places is the feature I've been using the most on Facebook since it was introduced. And I can probably say the same thing about the rest of my circle of friends. It is very sad if they are intentionally going to limit such an awesome and well designed feature (way, way better than anything Foursquare, Gowalla or Twitter offers). Especially if they are going to require you to attach a status message or photo to every check in. Most check ins I do is simply to passively tell my friends where I am to coordinate social gatherings in an informal way without having to attach any greater meaning or social significance to the fact. I'm sharing my location. I might not necessarily be interested in sharing anything more than that.
It's a bit like saying: "Oh, by the way. I might be hanging out down at the bar tonight. Swing by if you feel like it". Without actually having to say it out loud.
edit: The more I think about this, the more angry I get. It feels like the Google+ nerd mafia is slowly destroying Facebook through bad influence. They simply don't understand how and why Facebook works and is popular. The whole privacy and circles stuff for example, which is just stupid. No normal person cares about that. Facebook is a tool for sharing and connecting and to limit that in the name of privacy is insanely counterproductive. It only adds a wet blanket of politics on something that is better understood through social psychology and sociology. Facebook used to understand that, but now it seems they've started to become distracted. Sad really.
The Twitter geo feature sucks big time compared to Facebook Places. Maybe they should do something about the user experience instead of the scalability masturbation they seem so obsessed with at Twitter.
The problem with this model is obviously going to be producing the content and I'm surprised Gruber doesn't mention that.
Distributing books this way will add a lot of complexity and cost to an already expensive workflow. If this format succeeds I imagine it will have more in common with "games" than it has with traditional "books". The model for funding and producing these "books" would therefor probably be more similar to how games are produced.
(always avoid double negations)