#citazione

“Nolan Bushnell, founder of gaming trailblazer Atari, noted,
“Everyone who’s ever taken a shower has an idea.” He goes on to specify that “it’s the person who gets out of the shower, dries off, and does something about it who makes a difference.” Indeed, every successful venture requires novel thinking followed by concerted action.”

Ross Dawson, Thriving on Overload

#passato

5 anni fa

Smartphone e mancanza di rispetto. La maleducazione ormai è diventata la regola. Non per tutti, ma per molti. Noioso pure parlarne.

7 anni fa

Celebravo la fine delle lezioni del primo anno di docenza a Milano-Bicocca.

Segnalavo anche un video shock sul trattamento dei maiali in un allevamento del consorzio del prosciutto di Parma. Video poi censurato. Il prosciutto non lo mangiavo prima e non lo mangio adesso.

17 anni fa

Post inutile se non per segnalare che bloggavo assai e che collaboravo con RAI.

#video

The Syllabus è una delle poche newsletter che continuo a ricevere per email. Una delle poche a cui sono abbonato perché i link che propone sono unici: fonti ricercate, video di seminari universitari, articoli da riviste scientifiche e giornalismo d’approfondimento con punti di vista critici del pensiero comune. Seguono alcuni link dall’ultima newsletter.

La scienza dei gatti

Delizierà molti amanti dei gatti, se solo vorranno seguire questa lezione e non scorrere il proprio feed su qualche piattaforma social ammirando gattini.

Gig Capital: Mapping finance and investment in digital platforms

Prof Oscar Javier Maldonado Castañeda presents “Gig Capital: Mapping finance and investment in digital platforms” Different economic analysts have noted that digital platforms are experiencing a financial crisis (Financial Times, 2023). Years of “cheap” credit from venture capital allowed them to grow and expand in different sectors and countries. Last year, this situation drastically changed. Inflation and the central banks’ response to rising interest rates has put on digital platforms an increasing pressure to become profitable and to give returns to their initial investors. This paper explores an often neglected dimension in the geographies of the gig economy, the role of finance and capital in the shaping of digital platforms. Drawing on digital methods (Munk and Venturini, 2022) and ANT (actor-network theory), this paper explores the flows of capital from Global (North) International markets towards Latin American ventures in delivery platforms during the period 2020-2023. This exploration aims to add an additional layer in the analysis of digital platforms showing the convergence of capital and regulatory interest across countries and geographies.

#articoli

No Exit | Markets and the Good | Issues | The Hedgehog Review

Link: https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/markets-and-the-good/articles/no-exit

One of the scandalous revelations of the COVID pandemic was just how many of America’s superrich—our digerati, venture capitalists, corporate monopolists, hedge fund managers—had long been planning to abandon their fellow citizens should a dire national crisis arise. While poorly paid EMTs and other frontline health workers were risking their lives caring for the desperately ill, wealthy Americans who had amassed their fortunes during our tech-driven Gilded Age were fueling their private jets and stocking their remote shelters in unabashed displays of their proudly vaunted libertarian creed.

No Exit

Cita almeno tre libri che mi è venuta voglia di leggere. In più mi ha fatto venire in mente la scena finale del film Leave The World Behind, se lo hai visto.

Meet the Silicon Valley CEOs Who Say Greed Is Good—Even if It Kills Us All – Mother Jones

Link: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/12/effective-accelerationism/

Silicon Valley is a physical place, but it’s also a style of thinking, a state of being, ­and an ethos. Its reach has extended far beyond its origins south of San Francisco, beyond even Austin and Seattle, where it has displaced anyone who dares utter words that aren’t from a VC investment thesis or pitch deck. The trillion-dollar-plus market caps of the biggest tech companies exceed the GDPs of all but the richest countries. The Valley’s companies are ensconced in every single part of our lives—art, culture, commerce, politics, wars, and communications­ all run through their devices and apps. What if, though, the truth is that we haven’t Silicon Valleyed hard enough?

Adherents of “effective accelerationism,” a trendy new phrase passing itself off as an ideology, think that’s the case. It’s a worldview that began with a few anonymous Twitter accounts back in 2022 and has since taken off, culminating in a 5,000-word October manifesto from Valley oligarch and venture capitalist Marc ­Andreessen that generated enough online discourse that New York Times columnist Ezra Klein felt compelled to rebut it in his first column after three months of book leave.

Meet the Silicon Valley CEOs Who Say Greed Is Good—Even if It Kills Us All

Questo articolo si sposa molto bene col precedente.

Ho imparato anche che vuol dire “effective accelerationism“.

There Is No Such Thing as a Good Book: On “The Art of Libromancy” – Public Books

Link: https://www.publicbooks.org/there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-good-book/

Libromancy’s essential problem lies with its preciousness. In another recent book about selling work in an industry (or two industries, or industry in general) that caters to a lot of idealisms, Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex, Sophia Giovannitti writes, “The fantasy that capitalism is inevitable and rational collides with the fear that if it is, then anything—no matter how sacred—can indeed be bought and sold, with little fanfare.” Assuredly, I feel little fanfare when behind the register at the bookstore, even or especially when selling books that I might, on particularly good days, describe as having changed my life. I am glad you bought Precarious Life or Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; next guest please.

Giovannitti describes a man in her book as “a professorial type—condescending, liberal”; and this, I realize, is how I think of Josh Cook’s Art of Libromancy. When I come to its end, I find that—like the liberal professor—The Art of Libromancy is a largely innocuous book. For those who have not worked in a bookstore (or any other retail environment), it might be an interesting thing to read as you consider how those spaces operate, but perhaps not when considering why commercial spaces operate as they do.

There Is No Such Thing as a Good Book: On “The Art of Libromancy”

Divertente che l’autore citi un libro che ho appena finito e apprezzato, Working Girl, per fare un parallelismo tra vendita di libri e vendita di sesso/arte.

#esperienze

Tabata 20 minuti

Due giorni fa ho fatto una nuova sequenza di esercizi che in 20 minuti mi ha steso. Te la segnalo, ma non te la consiglio se non ti senti in forma e pieno di energia. Si tratta di Tabata, sequenza di esercizi a intervalli ad alta intensità, ancora più intensa.

Ho scoperto anche da dove viene l’espressione Tabata.

#parola

Tabata

Tabata is a high-intensity interval training that consists of eight sets of fast-paced exercises each performed for 20 seconds interspersed with a brief rest of 10 seconds.

Tabata training (also called Tabata protocol) is a type of HIIT (high-intensity interval training). It originated in the research of Japanese scientist Dr. Izumi Tabata and his team from the National Institute of Fitness and Sports at Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan, on high-intensity exercise during the early 1990s. Their objective was to find out if short bursts of high-intensity exercise followed by shorter rests might condition the body better than a continuous moderate-intensity exercise.

To determine this, they worked with two test groups—one doing moderately intense exercise and the other high-intense. Moderate-intensity exercising consisted of a one-hour workout, five days a week, for six weeks. The high-intensity exercising consisted of a four-minute workout, four days a week, for six weeks; each workout consisted of eight sets of 20 seconds of exercise at maximum effort each followed by a 10-second rest. To do the math: (8 x 20) + (8 x 10) = 240 seconds (4 minutes).

The results of the study showed that the moderate-intensity workouts improved the aerobic (or cardiovascular) fitness of test subjects but did little anaerobically (that is, in muscle strengthening). The high-intensity workouts, on the other hand, benefited the test subjects more significantly both aerobically and anaerobically, which, evidently, was due to the unbalanced exercise-to-rest ratio. The reasoning behind this is that a shorter period of rest in between longer periods of intense exercise during a workout does not allow the body to fully recover. By the second half of the workout, the body is forced to work at maximum capacity physiologically, causing the heart to pump faster and the rate of metabolism to increase. In the end, the high-intensity routine builds endurance and muscle, and burns lots of calories—and it only takes four minutes of pushing yourself to the absolute limit four or five days a week. Hence, we have the popularity of the Tabata 20-10 workout (20 seconds of exercise, 10 of rest—and repeat).

Merriam-Webster