flâneur

Cheng Lin

11 followers · 5 following · 628 views

on the atlas — 14

highlights — 12

  • They continue to be collected despite a climate crisis that is caused almost entirely by the copious fossil fuels that those same powerful creditor nations burned to industrialize and achieve their own wealth, the very wealth that undergirds the I.M.F. Caribbean nations are being asked, in a sense, to pay not only their own debts but the rest of the world’s debts, too, for all the progress it made while leaving the Caribbean behind.
    The Barbados Rebellion: An Island Nation’s Fight for Climate Justice - The New York Times
  • So the distinction between "objective" and "subjective" is not binary, but a matter of degree, depending on how much the subjects have in common.
    Is There Such a Thing as Good Taste?
  • What can you say in this language that would be impossibly inconvenient to say in others? In the process of learning how to say things you couldn't previously say, you'll probably be learning how to think things you couldn't previously think.
    Weird Languages
  • Milton Friedman once said the great public sector mistake is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.
    IT'S TIME TO BUILD | Future
  • A new monetary asset can only emerge if it better fulfills the core functions of money, and it can overcome the adoption hurdle of a new money.
    Matt Huang | Bitcoin for the Open-Minded Skeptic
  • That quality of a new interface paradigm that is commonly titled "intuitive" may well turn out to be one of the worst qualities it can have.
    Jef Raskin on "Intuitive Interfaces"
  • The client wants something that is significantly superior to the competition. But if superior, it cannot be the same, so it must be different (typically the greater the improvement, the greater the difference). Therefore it cannot be intuitive, that is, familiar.
    Jef Raskin on "Intuitive Interfaces"
  • Yet by mandating public participation and outsourcing it to consultants, governments run the risk of transforming community relationship-building into a checklist of codified practices. “The community” invited to participate has reason to be skeptical, especially when the invitation comes from a commercial developer with money to gain and data to harvest.
    Post-It Note City
  • I think the mistake we make is not understanding that taking more risk, when the benefits are asymmetric, often creates more optionality.
    Take Asymmetric Bets
  • 81% percent of those who responded said their research programs would become more ambitious if they had such flexible funding
    What We Learned Doing Fast Grants - Future
  • To us, this suggests that there are probably too few smart administrators in mainstream institutions trusted with flexible budgets that can be rapidly allocated without triggering significant red tape or committee-driven consensus.
    What We Learned Doing Fast Grants - Future
  • The licensed therapists in the study didn’t accurately predict a single deterioration. Only three clients were predicted to get worse, despite therapists being informed by the researchers that the clinic-wide deterioration rate hovered around 8 percent—and despite the fact that 40 clients, or about 7 percent of those in the study, ultimately did deteriorate.
    What Your Therapist Doesn’t Know - The Atlantic