It seems to me that comparing something that is intended to create a new category of device against current categories is flawed. My read of this take on the Microsoft Surface Duo is that it is designed for productivity, smartphones are not designed for productivity, but we will compare it to smartphones anyway.
In my opinion, the real problem with the Surface Duo is its price. Anything that requires one to spend >$1,000 demands more discretion. Right now the price is a barrier to entry that is going to prevent Microsoft from selling many units.
Currently reading: Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation 📚
Finished reading: That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation by David Bentley Hart 📚
Finished reading: The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith by Marcus Borg 📚
Finished reading: So You Want To Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo 📚
“As a society, we are in danger of needing larger and larger social wake-up calls and shocks to the system. At a socio-global scale, this translates into more strident demagogues, more desperate and deeply fundamentalist takeovers, massive cultural disruption and human displacement, more vicious, faceless wars, and literally larger openings in the earth to swallow us up.”
— Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation by angel Kyodo Williams, Lama Rod Owens, et al.
Trump was impeached for doing what he is basically trying to do right now by disrupting the USPS. Republicans in the Senate had their chance to live their patriotic claims but failed to have the courage actually do it save for Mitt Romney.
“The tests, which can be produced for less than a dollar, can be performed by consumers each day or every other day. Though not as accurate as current diagnostic tests, they are nonetheless effective at detecting virus when a person is most infectious”
In a blog post today Om Malik asks, What is work? and I think he touches on a root cause of Trumpism. Basically, many people have a hard time seeing a future in which they have a good paying job and nobody seems to have an answer. Democrats are supposed to support labor via union representation, but instead appears to be in bed with corporations and the wealthy as much as Republicans. The traditional Republican Party has no better answers, leaving a vacuum that allows for the scapegoating that Trump promotes.
Except, scapegoating is itself a misdirection no different than anyone else because it puts focus on China and not on the corporations that use Chinese labor. Pick up anything and you will likely find a “made in China” sticker, but is that the fault of China or the “American” company who sell the product? And what if American’s hunt for the bargain that pushes change companies toward low cost labor so they can maintain profit margins?
“Personhood as such, in fact, is not a condition possible for an isolated substance. It is an act, not a thing, and it is achieved only in and through a history of relations with others. We are finite beings in a state of becoming, and in us there is nothing that is not action, dynamism, an emergence into a fuller (or a retreat into a more impoverished) existence.”
— That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation by David Bentley Hart
I am not this clever, but how is my dad vacation shirt? #staycation
Transport #mbaug
Normally we take a trip somewhere to celebrate our wedding anniversary but this year we decided that staying home is the right thing to do. We did take a road trip to our favorite pie store to bring home and we got takeout from a nice restaurant. I did miss the fun that we had last year, but it’s better being together in our house that apart win one of us in a hospital.
“The notion that God is a reality who can be known (and not simply believed in) has become quite foreign in the modern world and in much of modern theology.”
— The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith by Marcus J. Borg a.co/dvx4M3q
Decision Making Matters
Perhaps the most important skill we learn in life is how we make decisions. Too little time is spent reflecting on this skill in ourselves, and evaluating it in leaders. How we see the world influences the decisions we make. If everything that happens is viewed through the lense of how it affects me personally, for example, does this help or hurt my chances for re-election, then most of the decisions I make are for my own self interest. (Note that very, very few people do NOT make any decisions in their self interest. I am talking about degree)
I suggest that over the course of history, those who history says are good leaders put common interest above their own in the moments that matter. For me the decision making process is a core competency of anyone who I consider to recognize as leader and who may gain my vote in an election.
Incumbents have the blessing or curse of having demonstrated how they make decisions, and thus tend to have an easier or sometimes bigger hurdle to overcome.
It’s been a long time since my civics class, but I could have swore I learned that Congress has the power of the purse. If that’s true, how can POTUS disperse money by executive order?
In truth, social democracies are successful precisely because they foment dynamic capitalist economies that just happen to benefit every tier of society. That social democracy will never take hold in the United States may well be true, but, if so, it is a stunning indictment, and just what Oscar Wilde had in mind when he quipped that the United States was the only country to go from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization.
A thought in form of a question. Is it more important to you that America has been great and therefore we must recognize those who made it great, or is it more important to you to make America great for the future?
Many will want to say both, but for this exercise you an only pick one. I think which you choose and why can be very informative.
Flip-flop sales surge as casual and comfortable fashion wins lockdown. I always found flip-flops uncomfortable.