Going to blow the walls of Jericho down with this bad boy.
(Glasses for scale.)
Arrived only two months too late for the High Holidays from Israel.
It smells like an elephant’s armpit too.
Ok, now I really need to watch Season 11 of 'Curb'.
Armed with nothing but a YT vid, I tried blowing this thing inside a small SF apartment at 10pm.
Absolutely nothing....until I managed hit it just right, and suddenly it sounded like God was coming to drop off more tablets.
I heard the neighbors suddenly scurry around.
I want to blow this thing at 8am every morning now. It's so rousing.
Side anecdote: when I lived on my sailboat, it was docked across from a Coast Guard base, and I'd hear reveille (with a trumpet) every morning at 8am, and it was better than coffee.
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@brave For starters, they diagnose 'inefficiency' as one of the problems of digital advertising: the 'wrong' players (GOOG, FB) are winning, and the 'good guys' (NYT, media) are losing.
That's the exact opposite of what happened.
Media becoming *more* efficient--i.e., not being forced to pay NYT's outrageous $10 CPM or whatever--is what killed many media companies. While indeed there's spend lost to middlemen, it's hard to claim inefficiency is what characterizes ad tech vs. the old world of 'rate cards'.
As readers likely know by now, I think the decoupling of information from the movement of matter, bits from atoms, to be the most significant event of the past century.
It's hard to understand now how odd our real-time world really is.
As a historical counter-point, timezones weren't invented until late in the 19th century, and weren't legally required until WWI. Things and information just didn't move fast enough until then that it mattered.
I'm old enough to remember letters, which is how most people communicated over long distances until as recently as the late 90s.
Having our eyes and ears in everyone's pockets (and vice versa) is utterly unprecedented. We're still getting our heads around it.
If only ‘targeted advertising’ worked as well as those who’ve never done it think it does.
I can't believe I'm getting on this tired horse again, but for the obvious rebuttal of 'then why do companies spend money on it?', you have to understand that even now digital advertising, with all the 'targeting' in the world, is an improbable statistical fluke.
A marketing team would be high-fiving if they managed to get their clickthrough rate from .5% to 2% through the use of smart targeting. All else equal, that means a 4x in revenue. Woot! Huge success...we are marketing gods.
As was announced earlier today, I'm joining @JoinLincoln as a fellow.
I know this might seem a bit random given the entirety of my knowledge and experience of DC comes from one season of 'House of Cards', but there's method this madness. thepullrequest.com/p/joining-the-…
@JoinLincoln My goal with both Chaos Monkeys and Pull Request was attempting to bridge the chasm between tech and everything else. It's perhaps one of the necessary delusions of Silicon Valley to ignore the power centers of NYC and DC, but that’s an increasingly unsustainable delusion.
@JoinLincoln To riff on Trotsky: Techies may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in them. We’ve reached a point of almost universal disdain and resentment of technology; it’s perhaps the only bipartisan position left in our national politics.
In the longer view of things, liberalism might actually be one of the most unstable systems of government ever tried.
Consider that the government of the current US constitution, the longest-running experiment in democracy since the ancient Greeks, is about as old as the Chakri dynasty of Thailand, and much younger than many other long-lived regimes.
It's entirely possible liberal democracy only obtains in a very narrow set of short-lived conditions, and naturally tends to devolve into previous political forms the moment those conditions disappear (cf. Fukuyama's final chapter in 'End of History').
It's astonishing how quickly this happened. From the civil rights and women's rights movements of the 60s/70s/80s creating the most equitable and fair society in human history, to backsliding into racial and gender identity as definitive in something like a single generation.
Is it worth racializing everything for the tiny fraction of the audience that will get anything out of this?
This is the issue with the overweening empathy of (post-Christian) wokeness: there's no way to apply the brakes and say 'enough'.