Michael Seufert

My Jan. 28, 2012 Sun column;Toe-to-toe with GreenpeaceComments reveal why group prefers stunts to debateGreenpeace is pretty good at stunts — it’s their trademark.Sometimes it’s jokes, sometimes it’s criminal breaking and entering. Like when they bro…

Fados lisboetas. Por João Pereira Coutinho.
O governo prepara-se para acabar com o 1º de Dezembro e o 5 de Outubro e o edil António Costa já avisou: Lisboa continuará a festejar a implantação da República. Não se esperava outra atitude. Se vir…

Lizzy Grant lançou um álbum em 2010 que não levantou ondas. Hoje Lana Del Rey, a autora comprou os direitos de autor do seu primeiro álbum e vai relançá-lo daqui a dois dias. A estratégia com a nova editora passou por uma renovação total da im…

O Tribunal de Contas chumbou um contrato de 1,1 milhões de euros que foi celebrado, em Janeiro de 2011, pela empresa pública Parque Escolar com a construtora Mota-Engil.

Uma lontra apareceu hoje, por volta das 12h30, numa praia da Foz, no Porto, deslocou-se até uma esplanada próxima e regressou pouco depois ao seu meio natural.

Shared by Michael Seufert

Três palavras: pa ler mice.
The bill criminalizes the denial of officially recognized genocides, including the Armenian genocide begun in 1915 — an event whose public affirmation in Turkey is treated as a crime.

Shared by Michael Seufert

Hehe.

Create Value, Not Jobs:

Public discourse on matters of the economy is and has always been dominated by the idea that the road to prosperity is to create jobs. In a moment of high unemployment, the “create jobs” rhetoric becomes that much more prevalent. We get a “Jobs Bill“; opponents of Obama’s reform call it “job destroying“; after a brief period of discussing deficits and debt national news outlets turned right back to talking about jobs.

The point is, our goal should never be to “create jobs”. Our goal should be to enable people to contribute something valued by other people. The value is the point, not the work. If someone finds a way to provide value to hundreds of millions of people and it requires no more effort from them than batting their eyelashes, that would be a win.

This is not a matter of semantics. If you think the problem is a lack of jobs, all sorts of dangerous “solutions” may come to mind. Anything from having the government hiring en masse to do make-work, valueless jobs, to setting high tariffs and immigration restrictions so that domestic companies and labor do not have any foreign competition.

.. Yes, there would be more “work” to do if we cut off trade and immigration, but it would also impoverish just about everyone as the cost of getting anything would skyrocket. Getting a job is not an end unto itself; the whole point is to trade our labor for other things that we want. Getting a job at the cost of not being able to afford anything is an absurd proposition.

But we need to get our priorities straight; what we want to do is help people create value. Unless giving someone a job will enable them to create more value than it costs, the existence of that job is counterproductive.

How well can you communicate over email? (or blog posts? how about in person?):

Without the benefit of paralinguistic cues such as gesture, emphasis, and intonation, it can be difficult to convey emotion and tone over electronic mail (e-mail). Five experiments suggest that this limitation is often underappreciated, such that people tend to believe that they can communicate over e-mail more effectively than they actually can. Studies 4 and 5 further suggest that this overconfidence is born of egocentrism, the inherent difficulty of detaching oneself from one’s own perspective when evaluating the perspective of someone else. Because e-mail communicators “hear” a statement differently depending on whether they intend to be, say, sarcastic or funny, it can be difficult to appreciate that their electronic audience may not.

Submitted by: axel_valentine
Posted at: 2012-01-18 03:33:18
See full post and comment: http://9gag.com/gag/1919738