As I have had a couple days to reflect since launching my book Beyond Eurasian and Hapa: Bridging a Chinese-Western Identity, I'm stuck ruminating on East vs. West.
But not the East-West axis you're thinking about. Not the East-West or Chinese-Western that I write about.
I've been reflecting on the fact that I may have written my book from more of non-Western perspective than I realized. In other words, I wrote and continue to write from a position not aloof to "systemic racism," but certainly not fixated on "white power structures" in the West, whereby the very prerequisite to my own personal development/empowerment/sense of worth/ability to seek meaning is to upend said power structures. No.
Read MoreAt the poles you use references like “sleeps,” because “nights” don’t make sense to a circadian rhythm of 24 hours (the polar night is 6 months long). The polar lands are in effect “deserts”, void of the sorts of things humans need to live healthy, fulfilling day-to-day existences. In a word "lonely."
So, sure, there is "polar" in that the poles are lonely and sometimes when people don't "get you" it can be lonely too--"polar," I guess makes sense in that vein.
There's "polar" as desert but, also another aspect worth considering. That is polarities, of something, something, something, something, something, which then becomes anti-something, anti-something, ad infinitum, this idea of Arctic and Antarctic as simultaneously opposites and mirror images, twins separated at birth subconsciously competing, one with the other.
Read MoreThis anal perfectionism is what drove people like Steve Jobs at Apple Computer. Jobs was known for a compulsion for making industrial design as obvious and user-friendly as possible. He will be remembered for wanting to make his products as simple as possible; he once said “you have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential[i].”
Read MoreTension is entrusting your startup employees with free time and space where they are not under constant surveillance, nor constant pressure to respond immediately to every jittery email. It is giving them the room and freedom to explore and come up with new ideas, positive in the possibility that it will create opportunities for them to stumble onto new things. As effective founders will always tell you, “The door is there, you are welcome to leave.” They have the courage to corral every emotional resource to focus on the prize. Ineffective founders sequester you, they monitor you, they expect you to be effective whilst on a short leash.
Read MoreEventually, Sernovitz will conclude by saying he doesn't quite agree with all the psycho-babble, that he figures people chase things like "Global Services" (and engage in seriously un-economic behavior like taking year end "mile runs," whereby frequent flyers run up sufficient miles and/or flight segments to guarantee one makes their frequent flyer tier level for next year) because these perks are fitting "consolation prizes" for busy flyers who spend way too many hours hurtling through the air cocooned only by wafer-thin aircraft aluminium.
I dunno though. The "endowment effect" makes sense to me. I reckon, even more basic than that, when I used to fly all the time, there was something about "being Gold." Maybe it wasn't the tonic water and pretzels and the wonderfully un-putrid urinal at the lounge, but the very fact I could go to the lounge. It was the entitlement. And when I wasn't gold status there was something equally gratifying about being not gold, "forget these airlines and their statuses and their nonsense, cattle-herding artificially scarcity-manipulating ways," green is good. Green is rebellious. Green is fine by me.
Read MoreThe industry mythologizes the local. Heritage and tradition, it all reduces to local.
And before you are dazzled by the immaculate finishing, remember that part of enduring appeal of that watch is the association with non-cosmopolitan grittiness. It is the quaint image of the watchmaker toiling away at his workshop, squinting and suffering for his art. It is the hopelessly unscalable nature of the Swiss Alps, bucolic as they are, far from any port, a spaghetti of mountains and valleys.
Read MoreAll it took was one manslaughter case and all hell has broken lose in the "Asian-American community."
What I think is really going on here is Chinese, no matter where, I'm convinced are programmed to think of themselves as rarefied and singular even. To think of yourself as Chinese is to think of yourself as distinct. The "younger, often non-Chinese Asian Americans" as Jenn Fang describes them, seem to imagine a "fellow suffering" with other minorities, namely Blacks and Latinos. The starkest dividing line--the dividing principle, if you will, between these "younger, often non-Chinese Asian Americans" and the more Chinese-identifying American citizens/residents who have come to the defense of Peter Liang can be summed up rather neatly:
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. (MLK Jr.)
This quotation is the DMZ. You are either on-side. Or you are off-side.
Read MoreUtilitarians remember, need endless processing power; they need formulas, tables, and all the predictive powers all the world’s algorithms can muster because, after all, they must compute how all of us should act. Is the management consulting industry quivering yet?
But what if all the subjects' pre-existing relationships trip up the analysis? And snags those relationships are. What if they have a child with a neo-natal condition that needs urgently needs surgery, but the child only has a 5% chance of surviving? But then, strewn across the corridor to the ER, there are 30 people with first-degree burns from an electrical fire, all with a 99% chance of surviving. And they are all writhing in excruciating pain. What if they all need the same doctors and hospital staff and space and equipment? What if you have to choose?
Read MoreIn Silicon Valley a nobody can get coffee with a somebody, given they are persistent. The walls are permeable. One reason the culture of Silicon Valley enables this is fear of Moore’s Law. Since technology, whether it is getting smaller, faster, or cheaper is doubling every eighteen months or so, technologists like those in Silicon Valley know the best time to develop a competing product is tomorrow--not the metaphorical tomorrow, as in when we get to it, nooooo, tomorrow as in 24 hours from now.
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