At least the books whose contents *I* only vaguely remember are more neatly organized.

A desire to spend more time engaging with the vast trove of ideas and information we encounter everyday drove the creation of this site. The intended purpose: to make some of it stick, or extract more value than the momentary intellectual rush of reading things on the internet.

Apparently lots of people experience that gap between input and retention, and not just with articles that pop up in our feeds every day.

Surely some people can read a book or watch a movie once and retain the plot perfectly. But for many, the experience of consuming culture is like filling up a bathtub, soaking in it, and then watching the water run down the drain. It might leave a film in the tub, but the rest is gone.

Wow does that metaphor ring true.

How bad are you at remembering the facts, details, plots, or characters from the media you enjoy?

What tends to stick? What doesn’t?
What makes some things stick and others not?

Guilty of smug wall-leaning, and cliche prison posing, respectively.

So many dangerous things, wrong-but-technically-legal things, democracy-corrupting things, totally-unfair-to-all-but-a-few things, should-have-been-decided-for-good-a-long-time-ago things go on in this world every day. There oughta be a law.

If you were given ultimate global power to make two things illegal what would you choose?

If you prefer, these can apply in certain places, at certain times, for certain people, etc. with good reason.

They can’t compel people to do things that are already illegal. They would override existing rights/laws as applicable.

They’re not wishes, but they are instantly, easily enforced to the point where the illegal things stop right away. The idea isn’t to punish and imprison people, just fix problems.

7-11, terrified, clings to the hope that Amazon Go never sells cigarettes.

This week Amazon launched their first Amazon Go store in Seattle, an automated convenience store that watches what you pick up, and automatically charges you as you leave.

But the technology that is also inside, mostly tucked away out of sight, enables a shopping experience like no other. There are no cashiers or registers anywhere. Shoppers leave the store through those same gates, without pausing to pull out a credit card. Their Amazon account automatically gets charged for what they take out the door.

Later in the article Amazon says that eliminating cashiers frees up humans to do other less-automated tasks, like restocking or performing customer service, which, sure. But for most, this store will be no different than a giant walk-in vending machine.

I think of how rarely today, compared to decades past, that I need to interact with humans for basic tasks. I can buy a tank of gas without interacting with anyone. I haven’t been inside a bank in years. Movie theaters are down to ticket-tearers and pop-corn poppers, who surely won’t be around much longer. I’m totally fine with self-checkout at grocery stores or in Amazon’s new convenience store concept. And I actively tense up at the approach of an employee in the rare instances I browse a physical clothing store vs buying online. Bartenders, though — take away my favorite local bartender and my life would be poorer for it.

What retail scenarios (if any) would you still rather deal with people vs automation?*

(*Automated customer service lines don’t count. Everyone hates those.)

Which ones do you currently dislike most and want replaced fast? Or currently enjoy and hope they don’t automate away?

What unforeseen side effects, beyond job losses, might arise as this trend continues?

Above: list of cities where houses “with good schools, but you know, still near cool restaurants” are about to get annoyingly expensive.

This week, Amazon announced its shortlist of cities being considered for “HQ2”, their second giant corporate facility bringing tens of thousands of supposedly good-paying tech jobs.

Plenty can be argued about the vast tax incentives being given away to one of the richest businesses around, the propriety of a private company making municipalities grovel to be blessed with precious new-economy jobs — and we should have those conversations too!

But today I was struck by a more tangential thought about demographics. Several of these cities are in places that young, educated, progressive people (a.k.a. voters) are leaving in order to move to coastal urban centers that are already filled with other young progressive people like them — because that’s where the good jobs are. That migration is what’s throwing off the traditional balance of urban/rural, (a.k.a. progressive/conservative) in the states whose major cultural centers are on the decline due to industries shrinking or consolidating (particularly, say, Indiana or Ohio). One big company keeping more of those people in-state theoretically breeds other off-shoot companies, and helps keep the urban vs rural percentage in a state with only mid-size cities bluer.

Essentially, where Amazon places its second headquarters could literally swing a state, electorally.

Should progressive people be encouraging big companies to move jobs to red-to-purple states to drive more urbanization in smaller US cities?

Does this give more power to corporations, or politicize economic decisions, in ways we should be wary of? Or is this all power and political will corporations have now, that we the people should exert more influence over?

On the blockchain, everybody can securely verify you’re a dog, without knowing which dog.

In an article I’d highly recommend about the potential of blockchain technology beyond cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, author Steven Johnson is more excited about the further possibilities of decentralization than he is about new ways to send money.

For example, our personal Social Graphs are currently tethered to places like Twitter or Facebook, who own the lists of our follows/friends that define our experience on social media. But what if, for example, those connections were made through an open standard we could port to any service?

Perhaps someday, every single person on the planet might use that standard to map their social connections, just as every single person on the internet uses TCP/IP to share data. But even if this new form of identity became ubiquitous, it wouldn’t present the same opportunities for abuse and manipulation that you find in the closed systems that have become de facto standards. I might allow a Facebook-style service to use my social map to filter news or gossip or music for me, based on the activity of my friends, but if that service annoyed me, I’d be free to sample other alternatives without the switching costs.

In that world, the list of people you know, news outlets you read, celebrities you are interested in, etc., could be your own. Then you could lay any type of software on top of that to interact with all those things how you saw fit. You could build all manner of new social networks using the underlying connection data, from scratch, without having to convince everyone else to switch to the new platform to make it work.

If you were to build a new social network from the ground up, how would it be different from what we use today?

How could these new social networks avoid some of the pitfalls of the ones we have now?