Online identity management, then, is something like glamour curation. It is a skill at which millions of teenagers (and adults) are quickly becoming expert. Ironically, though, most of the photos that make it through the curation process are snapshots taken with harsh flash in nighttime social settings. The indexical quality of the photographs—where you were, with whom, wearing what—is more important than their composition.
These people have lost their way. They no longer own their stuff—their stuff owns them. I am convinced that this is more the norm than the exception in this country. At some point, we started to believe that the more we own, the better off we are. In times past an in other cultures, people believe that one of the worst things that can happen is for someone to be possessed., to have a demon exercise power over you. Isn’t that what being inundated with possession is— being possessed?
As you lower yourself to the thermostatically warmed seat, a concealed motor whirs briefly, providing your first clue that you are about to encounter a piece of highly sophisticated technology. The toilet then remains silent and passive until you reach the point where you would normally apply paper. Instead, you hit the spray button. A hidden tube extends itself beneath you, and with the precision of a heat-seeking missile, it directs a spray of warm water […]
My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were “the best and the brightest,” as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright.
There’s talk today about how as a society we’ve become fragmented by ethnicity, income, city versus suburb, red state versus blue. But we also divide ourselves with invisible dotted lines. I’m talking about the property lines that isolate us from the people we are physically closest to: our neighbors.
The oil industry’s techniques would say that those fields together have proven reserves of 2.72 million times four, or 10.88 megabarrels. But for uncorrelated distributions — and I m going to assume that the distributions here are uncorrelated — the variances add. […] The mean is still 16 megabarrels, but the 10th percentile is now 13.44 megabarrels. The chances of getting as low as 10.88 megabarrels are about one half of one percent; […]
I encourage you to not read the comments in most places where this has been posted, because it s basically people just ranting about global warming and saying either “we’ve reached peak oil, anybody who says we haven’t is a poopyhead” or “we haven t reached peak oil, anybody who says we have is a poopyhead”.
Living closer in, in a smaller space, where you don’t have that commute,” he said. “It’s definitely something we talk about. Before it was ‘we spend too much time driving.’ Now, it’s ‘we spend too much time and money driving.’
