Category: Me Myself&I

> Although we built Fleets to address some of the anxieties that hold people back from Tweeting, Fleets are mostly used by people who are already Tweeting to amplify their own Tweets

this is exactly my problem with Twitter. It’s an even bigger echo chamber than FB. As much as I try, I can’t seem to escape the oversaturated bubble of a handful of extremely loud mouthed tweeters and their ardent followers. Mix in the toxic conversations, and it’s definitely not a place I feel comfortable discussing anything.

Twitter the Service was designed to allow you to spit a few words out there, that’s it. It was never, ever meant to be a conversation tool.

And yet Twitter the Company has been force-feeding the idea that tweets are conversational. They are not: actual conversations go nowhere or straight to DM/email. Because good conversations are mostly private, digital world or not. Replies and quote tweets are like comments on blogs, they’re not a conversation, they’re a comment. And that’s fine! But that’s not a conversation, which means it’s optional, which means Twitter the Company can’t make money off of that.

Twitter’s value is in its real-time commentary core, and the only way to monetize this is with a subscription model but that virtually kills the ad model too. I wouldn’t mind that at all but subscriptions are probably way less lucrative. Oh well.

It’s funny how a “free massages for women” from a woman conveys a sense of safety but “free massages for men” from a man probably 100% means I will get harassed in there.

The hardest part is seeing how little sense we make, over and over and over.

Having folks not understand the basic concept of “the more layers of protection the better” through a pandemic that killed 600,000+ in a year in this country alone, is hard to grasp. It’s hard not to react to that.

It’s isolation and/or being nuked with nonsense and egoistical behavior. Weird and exhausting.

The smartphone is the most amazing piece of hardware proving how much the human world is one and only. I mean,

Lithium for batteries probably comes from Australia or Chile. Cobalt for batteries as well, probably from Congo.

LCD screens from Japan and Korea. Hardware engineering from China. Software Quality Assurance from India.

Some WiFi patents and chip from Finland. An obscure file converter necessary for your device and part of FOSS coming from Germany, Russia and Italy.

The camera needs lenses from Switzerland and plastic molding from Taiwan.

Design from the US west coast and marketing from the east.

And yet, those smartphones make us believe and emphasize that it’s us against everything and everyone.

The very thing made with the help of the entire planet, women men and children, all countries and communities, all minerals and clever processes combined, is polarizing us to extremes for the profit of a few individuals, through algorithmic addiction.

I suggest we use phones less rather than doing “strikes” on apps. John Lewis’ good trouble, get back on the open web you cowards, etc.

They make you believe that having trouble in your life is your fault rather than the ever expanding and greedy systems ruling our worlds. The conclusion is then that you can do it all by yourself. Except that, no.

Self-help book: here’s how to manage debt!

Me, really loud and distorted with the megaphone: DUDE CANCEL THE STUDENT LOANS RIGHT NOW YO

Nature. What can I say. Thank you? 5 stars? I love you boo.

That’s a good article about the issues with building today.

He has a one-liner:

The combination of consumer tastes, low dollar value per volume building components, and the complexity of buildings inhibit efforts to scale.

The solution screams 3D printing. Consumer tastes and building complexity? You can print whatever shape you want AKA we can print your weirdest ideas, no problem. The issue here is local code and zoning (even in the 1940s FLW had issues with cities to build flat roofs because it was simply disliked; it hasn’t gotten much better since).

Low dollar value per volume building components? Sure, but in the case of a prefab, this is all combined. If a 3D printing factory scales up, it will incorporate those tiny savings and they will show up in a few % off the total price. It is an enormous issue otherwise, true.

Any complex attempt at prefab or modular, including by Toyota itself, has failed to reach any significant market share.

That’s mostly because it’s been very badly marketed out there. If you told people “buy a prefab house that fits your lifestyle, costs you $80-$100 a year to cool and heat, doesn’t need any specific maintenance ever and where you can go on your green roof to chill; you can move in in a month”, trust me, that shit would fly off the shelves. Put my broke ass on the waiting list, bro.

If prefab is used to build the usual classic, super not efficient house, then prefab is obviously useless. (for those who don’t know, the two massive advantages of prefab: almost no waste compared to a classic construction site; you can make an air-tight house, which allows extremely low needs in heating/cooling, which is crucial to sustain good housing)

The article is about single-family homes. I don’t think building cheap multi-family triplexes is great, as it calls for murders between folks and their thin “low-cost” walls. I do think that considering how societies are moving, we need the ability to build smaller houses for singles and couples without kids.

We need a way more modular way of building housing because we are way more modular in life too.

This store clerk this morning was coming down the aisle while I was grabbing a bag of cheese and as I was looking in his direction, he slapped a pack of water bottles like he was in the club.

Slapped, lowkey grabbed and had a little grin on his face. The Stripper Special.

I know man. It’s a lot of juicy packs of water around.

So, if this book tells the truth about how empathy is biologically mostly wired in us,

And that today we have almost 3,000 billionaires who can’t possibly spend the money they have in their entire lives, and are exploiting hundreds of millions of us to hoard said money, excuse me but,