A Tree Falling in the Forest

Anyone who has spent more than ten minutes with me knows how highly I prize my Malcolm Gladwell Outliers-like developed grasp of the obvious.  But living in my very myopic, self centered, cloistered world it is hard to identify things that are obvious to the entire world and not me from those obvious only to me.   This weekend I installed an auto mated garage door opener and stumbled upon the value of doing things in the physical world.  After spending more hours than it should take and skinning more knuckles than reasonable, I achieved great satisfaction in pushing the remote and watching the door open and close.   In fact, I achieved so much satisfaction, one day later I am still pushing the button to admire the physical manifestation of a day's work. At the top of this post you see a video from Mike Rowe from a talk actually given at the E.G conference, not TED,  highlighting the value of the lost art of

 I read this article about the trade off for privacy and this quote from Ron Conway really stood out "For that value tradeoff, they're willing to provide information." I completely agree with him and not just because his support of his iconic investments is legendary. But his statement is not really relevant to most of what is going on at companies giving rise to the concern. We really do not know and cannot imagine what is being done. The government is not allowed to access the same information without a warrant, but the fiction of "consent through EULA" finds permission buried deep inside what consumers call a "click through agreement" and the drafters call a license grant. Rather than go into a whole new rant, I am just reposting something I wrote about a year and a half ago. Sadly, even though we are becoming more aware from great editorials like this one by Lori Andrews in the New York Times, other than attempts by the powers that be to