Your team will likely have a combination of idealists and realists. Harness the vision of the idealists to see where the team should move towards, but use the realists to help create the steps needed to get to that destination. A pragmatic balance of idealism and realism creates an actionable plan that moves in the right direction over time.

A balancing act We need optimism without credulity, skepticism without pessimism, and a balance of idealism and realism. Where do you naturally sit in the matrix? What about the individuals in your team? What about the team as a whole? Is the group dynamic different to the sum of the individuals? Why do you think that is? Are you able to change your position to counter-balance extreme opinions within the team, even if that mindset is not the natural one in which you reside? Also, are you able to notice when your own default position can cause biases in your own judgement?

That’s because in general, specifications are written so that behaviours are overtly specified; in other words, everything that is not explicitly disallowed is allowed. Therefore, reading too much into specifications can unintentionally cause harm, since you’ll be introducing new behaviours that others will have to work around.

The need for trust, the cost of it, and the dependence on middlemen to provide it is one reason why behemoths such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon turn economies of scale and network-effect advantages into de facto monopolies. These giants are, in effect, centralized ledger keepers, building vast records of “transactions” in what is, arguably, the most important “currency” in the world: our digital data. In controlling those records, they control us.

The crypto bubble, like the dot-com bubble, is creating the infrastructure that will enable the technologies of the future to be built. But there’s also a key difference. This time, the money being raised isn’t underwriting physical infrastructure but social infrastructure. It’s creating incentives to form global networks of collaborating developers, hive minds whose supply of interacting, iterative ideas is codified into lines of open-source software. That freely accessible code will enable the execution of countless as-yet-unimagined ideas. It is the foundation upon which the decentralized economy of the future will be built.

My web design philosophy is no razzle-dazzle. My job is to help my clients identify and express the one or two uniquely true things about their project or company, then enhance it through a memorable design with a light touch. If complexity comes along, we focus in on it, look for patterns, and change the blueprint for what we’re building. We don’t necessarily go looking for better tools or fancier processes. In the past, I’ve called this following the grain of the web, which is to use design choices that swing with what HTML, CSS, and screens make easy, flexible, and resilient. It seems there are fewer and fewer notable websites built with this approach each year. So, I thought it would be useful remind everyone that the easiest and cheapest strategy for dealing with complexity is not to invent something to manage it, but to avoid the complexity altogether with a more clever plan.

As someone who has decades of experience on the web, I hate to compare myself to the tortoise, but hey, if it fits, it fits. Let’s be more like that tortoise: diligent, direct, and purposeful. The web needs pockets of slowness and thoughtfulness as its reach and power continues to increase. What we depend upon must be properly built and intelligently formed. We need to create space for complexity’s important sibling: nuance. Spaces without nuance tend to gravitate towards stupidity. And as an American, I can tell you, there are no limits to the amount of damage that can be inflicted by that dangerous cocktail of fast-moving-stupid.

While news organizations were dancing to Facebook’s tune they neglected their biggest treasure: their own sites, and most importantly, what remained of their own social networks. Their readers. More and more advertising was crammed into busier and busier Desktop-Websites that fewer and fewer would visit. Their headlines and leads fed Facebook. Headlines and leads are what most people read, so Facebook was happy. Readers were happy too because they didn’t have to type URLs anymore to scan a couple of headlines.

He went as far as claiming that posts on Facebook were “99% authentic”… which may leave those who have spent some time on social networks asking: Does he ever use his own product? Is Zuckerberg real?

Taking a step back from news is good for PR and good for China: facebook’s decision to downgrade publishers in their newsfeed seems like a knee jerk reaction to the negative reputation the company has since Trump’s election and the scrutiny it has come under for its role in Brexit or the Catalonia crisis. And then there are reports about declining user engagement and there is the overall shift towards ‚private social‘ i.e. chat apps. But there is more to it. […] Wrapping too much journalism around your brand is a mistake for any platform hoping to still make it into China, which is one of Mark Zuckerberg’s great ambitions.

Everything that Facebook does in the near future has to be interpreted in the stark neon light of fighting antitrust laws. Zuckerberg is ready for big sacrifices to avoid the governmental beatdown. Cutting news organizations out of the main feed already cost him 3.3 Billion. He knew that beforehand. He also knew that news organizations would not love him for his big change of mind. But compared to having the government step in and break up the Facebook Kingdom, 3.3 Billion and a couple of angry journalists is a very small price.

Hitler's dictatorship differed in one fundamental point from all its predecessors in history. His was the first dictatorship that made the complete use of all technical means for domination of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and loudspeaker, 80 million people were deprived of independent thought.

In less than four decades, radio had completed the journey from fledgeling technology, to nerdy hobby, to big business, to potent political weapon.

This trajectory must have come as a shock to its pioneers. At its birth, it seemed like radio would only be a force for good. How could something that connects people together be anything but beneficial? Radio brought music into hospitals and nursing homes, it eased the profound isolation of rural life, it let people hear directly from their elected representatives. It brought laugher and entertainment into every parlor, saved lives at sea, gave people weather forecasts for the first time. But radio waves are just oscillating electromagnetic fields. They really don't care how we use them. All they want is to go places at the speed of light. It is hard to accept that good people, working on technology that benefits so many, with nothing but good intentions, could end up building a powerful tool for the wicked. But we can't afford to re-learn this lesson every time.

That is what makes the seemingly empirical accounting format used in most economic analysis an expression of creditor-oriented pro-rentier ideology. Households do not receive incomes from the houses they live in. The value of the “services” their homes provide does not increase simply because house prices rise, as the national accounts fiction has it. The financial sector does not produce goods or even “real” wealth. And to the extent that it produces services, much of this serves to redirect revenues to rentiers, not to generate wages and profits.

It is now recognized that U.S. living standards since the 1970s have become debt-fueled, not income-supported. This went largely unnoticed until the bubble burst, since the underlying distinction in credit flows has been excluded from the economics curriculum.

Consumer credit is not used to generate the income that will pay off the loan, as with business finance.

if every real estate asset bought on credit skims off the income of the owner-borrower, then the rise in home ownership since the 1970s has sharply increased rent extraction and turned it into a flow of interest to mortgage lenders. […] As in a Ponzi scheme, the larger the flows of income the mortgage market commands, the longer the scheme can continue.

This debt requires the real sector to pay debt service — […] what fraction of the economy’s total returns … is absorbed up front by the financial industry.”

finance is not the economy. Rent is not income, and asset values do not represent wealth, but rather a claim on the economy’s wealth.

Faced with a choice between saving the “real” economy by writing down its debt burden or reimbursing the banks for losses and defaults on loans gone bad, the policy response […] was to save the banks and bondholders (who incidentally are the largest class of political campaign contributors). This policy choice preserved the remarkable gains that the “One Percent” had made, while keeping the debts in place for the “99 Percent.” This accelerated the polarization that already was gaining momentum between creditors and debtors. The political consequence was to subsidize the emerging financial oligarchy.