This is crazy. All this art was made using Excel. Excel, seriously?
Category: Technology
-
The Big Squeeze
Another good post by Seth Godin:
There are more truck drivers in the US than just about any other occupation.
For a long time, unionized truck drivers benefited from work rules, healthcare, vacations, etc. It wasn’t an easy job to get, but it was a career.
Companies started to realize that if they offloaded the work to freelance truckers, people with their own rigs, they could take advantage of a free market. As a result, more and more of the work ended up with independent operators, who got to be their own boss, paying for their own equipment, finding their own work.
The problem, exacerbated by the speed and power of the internet, is that there’s always someone cheaper and hungrier than you are. That if you do undifferentiated work, the market will squeeze you to do it cheaper.
We get (slightly) cheaper trucking. The millions of drivers get exhausted while living right on the edge. They work too many hours, carry too much weight, burn themselves out.
And the same thing is true for anyone who signs up to be a cog in a digital marketplace. Uber drivers, freelance bottom-fishers, hard-working people cranking things out by the pound…
Any market that seems to offer an easy in to the undifferentiated will eventually squeeze them.
-
Data Plans Without Net Neutrality
Now that the US doesn’t have Net Neutrality someone forwarded a post on data plan options in Portugal, which doesn’t have Net Neutrality (not clear how that could be in the EU, post says there are loopholes).
Really into messaging? Then pay €4.99 ($5.86 or £4.43) a month and get more data for apps like WhatsApp, Skype, and FaceTime. Prefer social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Messenger, and so on? That’ll be another €4.99 a month.
Video apps like Netflix and YouTube are available as another add-on, while music (Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Play Music, etc.) is another, as is email and cloud (Gmail, Yahoo Mail, iCloud, etc.).
ISPs just like cable companies. Yeah, that’s an improvement…
-
Facebook is Creepy
If that wasn’t obvious already, this article drives the point home.
Behind the Facebook profile you’ve built for yourself is another one, a shadow profile, built from the inboxes and smartphones of other Facebook users.
-
Kiss the Good Times Goodbye
The author of this very good article on autonomous vehicles is a former head of Product Development at General Motors, hence the title. I might have renamed the article, “Kiss senseless road deaths goodbye”.
Key paragraph for me:
The tipping point will come when 20 to 30 percent of vehicles are fully autonomous. Countries will look at the accident statistics and figure out that human drivers are causing 99.9 percent of the accidents.
Of course, there will be a transition period. Everyone will have five years to get their car off the road or sell it for scrap or trade it on a module.
h/t to Om Malik’s new link blog.
-
It Just Works
Typed on my awesome Dell XPS…
-
Fidget This
In zero gravity, courtesy of NASA…
-
Holy Crap. This Never Gets Old
SpaceX landed another rocket. Phil Plait, of Bad Astronomy fame, enjoyed it:
-
Apple Charging
Why are Apple products so hard to charge? I’ve had a variety of Android phones and tablets. I’ve used any number of charging cords and bricks. They always work. Why wouldn’t they, it’s not that complicated.
Everyone else in the family has iPhones. We have two iPads. My daughters have the charging quirks down. “Don’t use that cable for the iPad, it only works for my iTouch”. “No, not that one either, that only works for Danny’s phone”. And the devices all recognize that a charger has been plugged in, because you get the ever so helpful “Not Charging” status. We’ve returned multiple iPhones because they wouldn’t charge. Googling “iPhone won’t charge” returns over 13 million hits.
Serious question, can anyone explain this? Charging isn’t hard…
Steve Fischer's Random Blog 