The central problem — our changing culture. The world has changed, but classical music (mostly) hasn’t. Which explains why people — of all ages — have lost interest in it.
We’ve been working ‘outside the box’ for a long time. For once, I’d like to see what’s actually ‘inside’ that box, because it must be a nice place.
— Rosalba Rolon, artistic director of the Pregones Theater in the Bronx, speaking at a conference about the future of NYC Performing Arts
When you see something that’s taking advantage of new technology to give people something they want that they couldn’t have before, you’re probably looking at a winner. And when you see something that’s merely reacting to new technology in an attempt to preserve some existing source of revenue, you’re probably looking at a loser.
The internet is becoming this thing where it’s just people trying to become successful on the internet by showing other people how to become successful on the internet. It’s this unbelievably fractal ponzi scheme. Its very, its very Escher. Boy its a, its a terrible, terrible ghetto of information out there.
That’s because nothing in medicine is without risks. Complications can arise from hospital stays, medications, procedures, and tests, and when these things are of marginal value the harm can be greater than the benefits. In recent years, we doctors have markedly increased the number of operations we do, for instance. In 2006, doctors performed at least sixty million surgical procedures, one for every five Americans. No other country does anything like as many operations on its citizens. Are we better off for it? No one knows for sure, but it seems highly unlikely. After all, some hundred thousand people die each year from complications of surgery—far more than die in car crashes.
There probably aren’t many jobs that can be reduced to rule-following and still be done well. But in many jobs there is an attempt to do just this, and the perversity of it may go unnoticed by those who design the work process.
When I tell people that my iPhone isn’t a very good phone—its reception in my apartment is so terrible that I reach for Skype as an alternative—they look at me as if I’m an idiot. Why pay all that money for a phone that doesn’t phone? But the iPhone’s name is a marketing trick; it’s really a mobile computer that I occasionally use to make crappy phone calls.
controlling the scarcity of something that isn’t scarce can’t work
Undo Send for Gmail is all fine and good, but I want Undo Receive, I want some people to have to take back their stupid messages
We need a Coalition for Culture and we need it urgently.
