Ford CX

March 30, 2022

Truck Guy is 85% more handsome than Corolla Guy according to focus groups

Also he’s 76% more resourceful and 100% more likely to have an awesome pet.

January 15, 2022 bad-research

Natural Diamonds are better says Diamond Miner

DeBeersDiamondsChart

January 15, 2022 bad-research

Not enough money to do it right, but plenty of money to do it twice

Adam Savage in VFX Artists React

December 19, 2021

Return to the Office

Every business leader should ask themselves a few questions before demanding that their employees return to the office:

  1. Prior to March 2020, how many days a week were you personally in the office?
  2. How many teams did you directly interface with? What teams did you spend the most time with?
  3. Do you have an office? If you don’t, why not?
  4. What is office culture?
    • What is your specific office’s culture?
  5. Has your business actually suffered because of remote work?
    • If so, how? Be specific.

Ed Zitron in The Atlantic

December 14, 2021

Internet of bad daytime cable tv

In many ways, it feels like the logical endpoint for the current landscape of internet platforms is just a weird home shopping network where the hosts act like they’re friends with you.

— Ryan Broderick in Garbage Day

October 27, 2021

When software eats the world, it’s not software anymore.

Ben Evans

October 15, 2021

300,000 emails and the Bauhaus

Ben Evans:

In 1800, if you’d said that you wanted something made by hand’, that would be meaningless - everything was hand-made. But half a century later, it could be a reaction against the age of the machine - of steam and coal-smoke and dark satanic mills.’ The Arts and Crafts movement proposed slow, hand-made, imperfect craft in reaction to mass-produced perfection’ (and a lot of other things besides). A century later this is one reason I’m fascinated by the new luxury goods platforms LVMH and Kering, or indeed Supreme. How do you mass-manufacture, mass-market and mass-retail things whose entire nature is supposedly that they’re individual, or convince people that a piece of mass-manufactured nylon and plastic is unique?

October 15, 2021

The Time (and Complexity) Tax

Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic:

The issue is not that modern life comes with paperwork hassles. The issue is that American benefit programs are, as a whole, difficult and sometimes impossible for everyday citizens to use.

I’m running in to a related issue at work, not so much in Government but in commercial organisations. Computing has let companies have very complex policies about how they can sell services but they haven’t much considered how to get people through non-standard workflows.

There’s a tipping point after which the goodwill and effort of customer support staff stops being useful — unanticipated workflows become part of the standard workflow and throw out the assumptions baked in to the service design.

October 2, 2021

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