Wrote
- Planning for China trip, February 2019 (2019-01-12)
- Horse-race political journalism is not awesome (2019-01-11)
Read
- Elisabeth Braw, Trucking Is the Security Crisis You Never Noticed, Foreign Policy (2018-09-19). "Transportation is too cheap," Huster said. "In the past, the fee per container going from Asia to Europe was often 2,000 euros [$2,300]. Today, it's 200 euros [$233]. And with freight shipping that cheap, people expect the truck part to be correspondingly cheap." According to a new survey by PwC, Amazon Prime customers value the unlimited free delivery offered by the service most, with 72 percent of them saying it's the main benefit of the service.
- Lowell L. Getz, A Silent Witness To The Growth Of The University of Illinois, Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (2016-08-15). For undetermined reasons (there are several unverified suggestions), this stream was named the Boneyard. As Champaign became larger and university buildings were constructed near its banks, the Boneyard became essentially an open sewer. So foul was the water, in the early days of the University, it was common-place for tug of wars to be conducted over the Boneyard, the losers being dragged into the stinking water.
- Penelope Trunk, To do something big, aim to be irrelevant., blog.peneleopetrunk.com (2018-12-23). I don’t believe specialization is bad. But I do believe it’s scary. You could get hurt, you could miss your big chance, you could be disappointed, you could fail publicly. But if you don’t learn to take risks by specializing early then you won’t be able to be great at anything later in life.
- Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, The Year in Chinese Science—And Science Fiction, The Daily Beast (2013-12-29).
- Kat Rosenfeld, The Millions Will Live on, But the Indie Book Blog Is Dead, Vulture (2019-01-09). But it's also true that the site's sustainability depended on attracting young writers who were willing to work for no or low pay in exchange for the mere possibility of a career boost. Reasonable people can disagree on whether such an arrangement is always detrimental to the literary sphere; certainly, the Millions couldn't have existed in its current form without it, especially in a world where readers still balk at paywalls or subscription models. But what seems undeniable is that unpaid (or unreliably paid) blogging is a young person's game. To a one, the Millions staffers I spoke to described loving their time at the site — but also finding the commitment impractical, and then impossible, as the responsibilities of adulthood, career, and family (particularly children) began to accrue.
Listened
- Huawei And The Tech Cold War, The Sinica Podcast (2019-01-10).
- 641: The Walls, This American Life (2019-01-04).
- 664: The Harsh Reality of Innovative Companies, HBR IdeaCast (2019-01-08). [04:51] You want to celebrate the learning that comes from failure, not celebrating the failure. There's productive failures and there's unproductive failures, and you want to judge failures in terms of how much you learn. So, if you tried something new, and it's risky, and it doesn't work, so it quote-unquote fails, but you've now learned something about the path forward that could be attractive, that's worth celebrating the learning from that. If you just came up with a bad design or did sloppy work and you failed, that's not worth celebrating. The focus has got to be on the learning, not the failure.
Watched
The Upside (2017)
Photo
Snow day in St. Louis
Upcoming
- 2019-01-15: Venture Cafe Night: 39°N, Danforth Plant Science Center
- 2019-01-26/2019-01-29: INCOSE International Workshop, Torrance, California
- 2019-01-31: Leadership Perspectives: 6 executives. 60 ideas. 60 minutes., Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis
There might be additional links that didn't make the cut at notes.kirkkittell.com