Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
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Scanning And Sorting How the banking industry, with an assist from tech, turned an incredibly frustrating, manual process—sorting checks—into an excellent example of automation. Today in Tedium: The physical check, for most general purposes, is a sheer relic—basically used mostly for specific big-ticket purchases like rent, it certainly doesn’t have the sex appeal of, say,…
There is a reason we live in a golden age of dystopian science fiction: Increasingly, it feels like it is coming true. From “The Hunger Games” to “Elysium,” stories depict a world in which the trend of growing wealth and income inequality continues to its logical conclusion. This narrative seems inevitable because it has occurred…
Silicon Valley’s push into the physical world “is going to be a much longer, slower process, especially in the next couple of chapters,” said Andrew McAfee, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who studies technology’s impact on society. That timeline isn’t typical for Google. Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched the search engine—then called BackRub—in…
The Washington Post reports that Amazon is launching technical teams whose workers will only clock in for 30 hours a week. While plenty of employees at Amazon are part-time, the novelty here is that the teams are entirely made up of workers on a reduced schedule, including managers. The teams’ members will receive the same…