Curated News (Page 3)

“I am of the strong opinion that a newer brand will emerge victorious — a brand whose business is core to the vision of the quantified self, and not a bolted-on business pursued out of evolutionary necessity.”

via Consolidate this: Quantified self edition

“So are there any other choices? Many legal experts think there is another option: One way or another, the president could simply choose to defy Congress and ignore the debt ceiling.

Wouldn’t this be breaking the law? Maybe, maybe not — opinions differ. But not making good on federal obligations is also breaking the law. And if House Republicans are pushing the president into a situation where he must break the law no matter what he does, why not choose the version that hurts America least?”

via Dealing With Default

“Failure by the world’s largest borrower to pay its debt — unprecedented in modern history — will devastate stock markets from Brazil to Zurich, halt a $5 trillion lending mechanism for investors who rely on Treasuries, blow up borrowing costs for billions of people and companies, ravage the dollar and throw the U.S. and world economies into a recession that probably would become a depression. Among the dozens of money managers, economists, bankers, traders and former government officials interviewed for this story, few view a U.S. default as anything but a financial apocalypse.”

via A U.S. Default Seen as Catastrophe Dwarfing Lehman’s Fall

“Today things are very different. Almost everyone carries a tracking device (their mobile phone) at all times, which reports their location to a handful of telecoms, which are required by law to provide that information to the government. Tracking everyone is no longer inconceivable, and is in fact happening all the time. We know that Sprint alone responded to eight million pings for real time customer location just in 2008. They got so many requests that they built an automated system to handle them.”

via Why ‘I Have Nothing to Hide’ Is the Wrong Way to Think About Surveillance | Wired Opinion | Wired.com

“Over the past decade, the N.S.A. has invested billions of dollars in a clandestine campaign to preserve its ability to eavesdrop. The agency has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world, according to documents provided by Mr. Snowden.”

via Qaeda Plot Leak Has Undermined U.S. Intelligence

“The N.S.A. documents show that one of the main tools used for chaining phone numbers and e-mail addresses has the code name Mainway. It is a repository into which vast amounts of data flow daily from the agency’s fiber-optic cables, corporate partners and foreign computer networks that have been hacked.”

via N.S.A. Gathers Data on Social Connections of U.S. Citizens

“The trick to creativity, if there is a single useful thing to say about it, is to identify your own peculiar talent and then to settle down to work with it for a good long time.”

via Uncommon Genius: Stephen Jay Gould On Why Connections Are The Key to Creativity | Brain Pickings

“What man actually needs is not some tension-less state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.”

via How to Find Fulfilling Work | Brain Pickings

“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.”

via How to Find Fulfilling Work | Brain Pickings

“Aristotle, who is attributed with saying, ‘Where the needs of the world and your talents cross, there lies your vocation.’”

via How to Find Fulfilling Work | Brain Pickings