“Tiredness of life manifests itself as melancholy in weak-natured individuals. In strong-natured ones as indifference.”
Ferdinand Borderwijk (in his book ‘Character’)
Category Archives: This is how I see it
Quote of the day #118
“The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
David Graeber
Quote of the day #117
“For the first time in history, more people die today from eating too much than from eating too little.”
Yuval Noah Harari
(in Homo Deus)
Quote of the day #116
“The strength of a movement lies in her ability to articulate a positive cause. Agreeing on what you are opposed to is the easy part.”
Alain Badiou
Quote of the day #115
“Only when the last tree has died, the last river has been poisoned, and the last fish has been caught will we finally realize we cannot eat money.”
Cree Proverb
How badly targeted “personalized” ads can be
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Picture by geralt on Pixabay
One of the main reasons – and quite possibly thé main reason – why the big platform players, such as Facebook, Google and Amazon are collecting data by the bucket load on everyone (obviously including you, dear reader) using their platforms, product and services is the belief that this enables them to serve “better” a.k.a. “more personalized” ads, and thereby deliver you a better user experience.
An important element during this data collection effort is keeping track of all the websites you have visited, the underlying logic being “if you have visited that website, it is very likely that you Continue reading
Quote of the day #114
“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”
Roy Amara
Quote of the day #113
“Life is too short to be normal. Stay weird.”
Unknown
Quote of the day #112
“When the best leader’s work is done the people say, ‘We did it ourselves!’ “
Lao Tzu
Just asking… #9 – Billionaires
Picture by pasja1000 on Pixabay
Why on earth would one person ever need a billion euro (or dollar, if that is your currency of choice)? In which sense could that person experience a genuinely higher quality of life compared to someone having ‘only’ 100 million? I’m not claiming that all the wealth in the world should be redistributed to the extent that everyone would have exactly the same – some people undeniably work harder than others or have far more responsibilities (e.g. over matters that can decide over life and death of others) and it is perfectly legitimate for that to result in receiving, say a 10 times bigger amount of money. But not 10.000 times more.
In the years leading up to the financial crisis of 2008, a handful of hedge funds managers collected more than 1 billion per person per year. If you can think of a single argument to not qualify that statement as utterly obscene, do let me know. I can’t think of any.
So: why does the world need to have billionaires? Just asking…
THE SECOND HALF 