Entries Tagged 'culture' ↓

“A man, working in a laundromat?” It wasn’t really a question, nor a rhetorical device. She was just floored I’d ask why the help wanted sign on the window explicitly said “Woman wanted for 3 evening shifts per week”.

When I indicated the laundromat on Duluth St. had 2 men working there, she told me that when they hired a man at their previous location, they lost a lot of customers.

See also a blog entry from a year ago: Women can’t lift heavy weights.

What should I do? Report, boycott, ignore or try and cajole?

Paul Hawken, interviewed with Bill McKibben on Blessed Unrest and Deep Economics:

The United States is a confused place, traumatized by war, confused by its media, underserved by its health care system, insecure economically, arrogant in its policies, and unsure of its identity. The country as a whole is internalizing the inner climate of so many, and this gnawing rise of anomie is eating away at the core.

Being familiar with many of the most common cognitive biases is not only useful to lead happier lives; it’s also becoming essential for survival.

Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes. We pursue things that won’t make us happy and perceive the world as more violent than it really is, even as wars have decreased by orders of magnitude. The availability heuristic affects how we (mis-)spend money on security, including in information security.

Jamais Cascio nails it when he says we have trouble envisioning a future that isn’t catastrophic. He appropriately concludes:

Sometimes, being a futurist isn’t about making forecasts or spotting trends.

Sometimes, being a futurist means acting as a civilizational therapist.

All the essays, books and videos linked above can help us do our individual part for this civilizational therapy project. Have fun

Ecume is playing at Théâtre de la Cabane Bleue until September 29th. If you understand French and are in Montreal, you must go see it.

The chemistry between the actors is amazing. There’s a magic in the rapport between Morgane and Émile that you usually only see in couples falling in love. They are so credible you let yourself be transported in this utterly bizarre world, where an undertaker can help a dead mother and her expecting daughter communicate.

Ecume is original and zany. It is thoughtful, moving and occasionally very funny.

Friday nights at Cat’s Corner start with a 1 hour lesson. Dancers rotate, so you get to meet plenty of people. A half hour into this lesson I get paired with a woman that screams with delight: “A man! You’re the first one I’ve had tonight!”.

That very instant, online dating sites start to feel absurd, even quaint. I’ve met half a dozen women in 20 minutes, some of them cool, others flirtatious. 10 guys were missing to even out the gender balance. On dating sites, the balance is horrible, with guys competing for attention and women overwhelmed. Why are guys paying for dating sites, and not going to dance classes?

Alain, one of the instructors, encourages me to take both the swing and Lindy hop classes starting Monday because they are missing leads. I take a few minutes to go to the bank machine to get money for the classes.

On my way back, I see 5 drunk chumps hollering at the sales guy in front of a nude dance bar on St-Catherine. “What’s the cover?” He crosses the street to convince them, gets their attention. He’ll surely rope them in. They’ll exit more intoxicated, more frustrated, but having bonded.

I walk another block, up 3 flights of stairs into a crowded room of dancers having fun. It’s a safe and fun place to meet people, like the social dances I remember going to in France: all ages, everyone dancing with everyone. My parents met over tango and waltzes. Countless aunts and uncles did the same. Maybe rock and roll really did screw things up for everyone?

The very geeky idea of starting an online dating site keeps bubbling up. I know it can make a lot of money. Unfortunately, I keep seeing better ways for people to meet than through computer-mediated communications.

Digg

Here are the photos mentioned in my previous post on the St-Jean Baptiste national holiday.

200,000 revelers, many of them drunk, stoned or high. Most of them happy. A sea of white and blue flags, many worn as capes.

What an insane party. We started the party at Isabelle’s with a BBQ, drinking and some swing and jazz dancing before heading over to the plains. Pictures will follow shortly (update: flickr photos), once I find a way to get pics out the camera and onto the new computer.

There’s a lot of people with a thirst to change the world. Giving them tools they find credible is the only way you move them to action. Signing petitions just won’t cut it.

On top of the amazing depiction of what is taking place, there’s a simple message: raise a fuss, contact your politicians, make them know that you care and that you want them to do something. I am trying to convince myself to believe this could work, although i admit that i’m feeling very disillusioned with our political structure.

That’s a very common reaction for activists to hear. Many try to convince you that your letters and petitions will, in fact, make a difference. The net result is that most people take in the information, feel paralyzed, do nothing and end up even more depressed. Information alone won’t change the mind of a politician, let alone most people. That’s fairy-tale thinking.

danah boyd is incredibly smart, thoughtful, caring and informed. The quote is from her entry on The Devil Came on Horseback, a documentary about the genocide in Darfur. I honestly can’t fault her for being disillusioned with her political system, and I wouldn’t dare try to argue that point with her. If people like her can’t really use the message of the activists, rabble-rousers and documentary filmmakers, there’s a problem with the message.

One blogger wrote that Michael Arrington of Techcrunch said “there’s little value in being “right” with a story if you can’t be “first””.

Arrington is a brilliant marketer and making lots of money. He is also consistently out in left-field when evaluating startups. I’ve unsubscribed from Techcrunch because of all the noise.

Mainstream media are also noisy, so you might as well shut them off. Some people watch an hour of news every day. Even a half hour a day is 180 hours, almost 5 weeks of full-time work. After years of watching all this, what difference does it make? It only made me depressed. To think of all the better things I could have done with that time…

I don’t need to hear about things that don’t affect me, or that I can’t affect. A coup in Thailand? An MP in the UK charged with breaking the law? Yet another softwood lumber accord that’s being disputed, or another cease-fire broken? Noise to me.

I’ll write more about this later, but locus of control and self-efficacy are important issues. The media make people feel less empowered and less able to change the world. They teach helplessness. To value constant data rather than correct information simply adds to that suffering.

Wanting to change the world, or merely being sane requires shutting off most media.

Over at the Instigator Blog, Ben is arguing that startups aren’t necessarily worse than other places for insane hours. I propose we need to start thinking about the part-time startup.

Paul Graham often talks about startup hackers working crazy hours in his essays, as if this was a good thing (See A Students Guide to Startups). Ben’s right that this doesn’t have to be this way, and he’s fighting a battle against a lot of entrenched opinion from some very bright people.

Most VC’s would probably scoff if you said you wanted to work 25 hour weeks. Angels might not want to have anything to do with you. I do have the sneaking suspicion that 5-6 hours of daily and focused work would be far more productive than 80 hours a week.

After an 8 hour day, a hacker working overtime is usually adding more bugs than they are fixing. Startups usually only care about shipping, and ignore the fact that 80% of the cost of software is in maintenance. After binge work, our software not going to be elegant or maintainable. Our code may not even be readable. Smart as we may be, we’re still falling for that near-universal delusion in the Western world that work equals productivity. Busy-ness only masks a lack of efficacy.

Our society is slowly starting to care about overwork. Indeed, 36 hour shifts for medical residents are only now starting to be phased out. Is anyone really surprised that doctors that were put through such a grueling schedule end up unhealthy and making poor decisions? I can’t imagine what my bedside manners would be like after 12 hours of straight work, never mind 36.

Many people join startups hoping for a home-run, wanting to escape the rat-race. I think it could be the exit. Imagine people dropping out of the corporate world after having a child, and joining a startup so they can enjoy more time parenting. That would be my kind of work environment. Hell, that idea might seem sufficiently appealing to a lot of hackers that hiring might become easier.