Last week’s post The risks of someone calling you smart and how to avoid them, got reposted on another site and generated some discussion. The site, Hacker News, is a community with many entrepreneurs, geeks, and science and technology types. Here’s a link to the discussion. Check it out. I like that community and its discussions.
Leadership and politics overlap. I generally try not to take political positions on this blog to make it accessible to more people, but the push to increase surveillance and erode protections like habeas corpus seem enough like ineffective leadership that I feel compelled to cover them. In response to this article stating that Congress granted the president the authority to arrest and hold individuals accused of terrorism without due process[…] Keep reading →
I’m following the story of the government spying more closely than most issues and writing about it here because I see it as a failure of leadership in many ways, most importantly that the system seems to be out of control with the person in charge — the President of the United States — exercising little accountability if not outright lying. Yesterday an opinion piece in the New York Times[…] Keep reading →
I wrote the following in response to this New York Times article, “Eating for Health, Not Weight” in a discussion on Hacker News. With an Ivy League PhD in physics, I’m a big fan of science. I have not observed a scientific approach to diet effective in promoting health. In my albeit limited observation, I observe no correlation between knowing a lot about food, digestion, etc and fitness or healthiness.[…] Keep reading →
The U.S. has “a dysfunctional patent system.” Those aren’t my words. They aren’t the words of an ignorant person either. They are the words of U.S. Circuit Judge Richard Posner, one of the nation’s most esteemed judges and faculty at University of Chicago. A patent dispute between Apple and Motorola prompted that description. Here’s an article from a couple weeks ago — Famous judge spikes Apple-Google case, calls patent system “dysfunctionalâ€[…] Keep reading →
I just read this article, “If Money Doesn’t Make You Happy, Consider Time.” Before commenting on it, I’ll note that I saw it linked to from a tech site, Hacker News. That community tends not to value MBA values and view people with MBAs as not adding the value engineers do. Having been a tech-founder (before my MBA) and a non-tech-founder (after my MBA) of different ventures I understand that[…] Keep reading →
I just read a post, “Google is FUBAR,” (for non-geeks, fubar means “f‘ed up beyond all recognition) suggesting the company is on a slippery slope leading not to its demise but to move its practices from what people like to what will lock them in and to risk more forays into anti-trust and privacy territories. Why is Google FUBAR, then? … It must irreparably alter its fleet of successful web[…] Keep reading →