TechCrunch conversation with Amazon CTO Werner Vogels: ““Where, in the past — five, ten years ago, you would have to beg for people to come. Now people knock on the door,” he said. “The problem that these companies have is how to manage them. They don’t actually have the people. An organization like Mercy Corps, for example, they only have two people that are in tech, right? Because that money goes to the area [where] they can actually have impact. They don’t go on the tech side. … Now they have an engineer for two weeks. They have all these great ideas that they want to do, and even companies that are coming to them saying: ‘Oh, you can have our products for free.’ But they do not have the people to work on this.” Vogels believes — and I think a lot of people would back him up — that the next generation of workers will also bring this mindset to the companies they work for and that these companies will have to adapt to them. “That means as employers, if you’re interested in actually hiring the absolute best engineers, you better make sure that you change your company culture to actually be able to attract these people. It’s no longer: Do I get the best laptop? Do I get the best screen? Do I get two screens, right? But does my work matter? And that’s a really big shift, because it’s no longer about what’s the salary I’m getting? Because I’m willing to give up some of it if the work I’m doing means something right. And that means that, as an employer, you need to change that as well.””
WaPo: “In “Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know,” [Mark Lilla] argues that “we are creatures who want to know and not to know.” The repudiation of knowledge is every bit as central to human flourishing as its pursuit…Lilla draws on the work of Freud to show that we are at odds with ourselves — that we are nothing but an uneasy détente between jostling desires. But the fiction of an integrated self is nonetheless a precondition of moral agency. “Ethical action,” Lilla writes, “requires a sense of self-mastery, a false belief that I am fully and solely the author of my actions.” Ignorance of the true, multifarious nature of the self is therefore a necessity.”
NYTimes: “Besides the president himself, the future of Trumpism is still most likely to be shaped and stamped by two men, JD Vance and Elon Musk. Not just because of their talent and achievements, and not just because Vance is the political heir apparent and Musk would be one of the world’s most influential men even if he didn’t have the ear of the president-elect. It’s also because they represent, more clearly than any other appointee, two potent visions for a 21st century right, and their interaction is likely to shape conservatism for the next four years and beyond. Musk is the dynamist, the believer in growth and innovation and exploration as the lodestars of American civilization…As Musk has moved right, he has adopted a more libertarian pose, insisting on the profound wastefulness of government spending and the tyranny of the administrative state. Vance meanwhile is the populist, committed to protect and uplift those parts of America neglected or left behind in an age of globalization. Along with his support for the Trumpian causes of tariffs and immigration restriction, this worldview has made him more sympathetic than the average Republican senator to certain forms of government investment.”
WSJ: “The Management Top 250 ranking compares companies using the late management guru Peter Drucker’s principles to identify the most effectively managed businesses. This year, 842 companies were graded in five categories (customer satisfaction, innovation, social responsibility, employee engagement and development, and financial strength) based on 35 indicators supplied by third-party data providers. The statistical model that produces the ranking was created by researchers at Claremont Graduate University’s Drucker Institute. Bendable Labs, a private firm, works with Drucker to perform the calculations and interpret them.” Apple came out tops in the 2024 rankings.
Wired: ““There’s no other market of the size which still has about 50 percent penetration, about half a billion people without a smartphone. So there’s a lot of room for growth,” says Navkendar Singh, IDC India’s associate vice president of devices research. In one important sense, though, India is quite different from key Western markets, because the phone isn’t just a complement to other devices like a home PC or laptop. It’s often the only device a person uses day to day. “India is not a multi-device market,” Singh adds. “People don’t buy a laptop, a tablet, and a phone. A phone remains, for 700 million people, the first and the only device with which they access the internet, compared to about 220 million PC users in India, including corporate PCs.””
