Monday, October 30, 2017

What can you buy with Bitcoin or Crypto tokens?

Well, I just bought a Ring wi-fi doorbell on Overstock.com and paid for it with District0x tokens.

Never heard of District0x? No worries.

They take Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum and 30+ others....





Thursday, October 26, 2017

On America's role in the world

In the past few years, I have the fortunate opportunity to travel to many foreign countries including Israel, Switzerland, France, UK, Denmark, Hungary, Estonia, Brazil, and Japan.

When I chat with people (as you know I do), and they ask me about American politics. I express my sadness at the amount of discord we currently have. 

I'm pretty patriotic, believe in the ideals of America, and think that the Constitution is one of the greatest documents of all time.

While Europeans, in particular, like to poke fun at Americans, deep down, I think they admire what America represents.

They may make comments about how much we spend on defense, but in their moments of intellectual honesty, they will admit, "when things get nasty, we're pretty glad you do it."

They also recognize that, if America totally opened its borders, there would be 1 billion people who would try and immigrate the next day.

They understand that, despite all of our flaws, we have a product that is in ridiculously high demand worldwide.

They want us to lead.

We're not doing it.

And I'm not going down the anti-Trump or anti-GOP route. I think the Democrats are just as bad. Trump may be failing us now, but Obama failed us in Iran and N. Korea...and probably China.

I'm not sure where/why we became this way, but I think it's a symptom of a disease internal to the US which I don't fully understand.

I'm not saying the US is better in all respects than every other country and there are plenty of reasons why someone (rationally) would choose to live there.  All I am saying is that, at this stage in world history, I believe America has a unique role to play and we're not playing it.

Republicans and Democrats share the blame and I wish (I know, naively) that they could see what I see when I talk to people.

Thursday, October 19, 2017

Now you don't even have to go to the coffee shop

I work from home and I make my own coffee.

Thanks to Coffitivity, I can now drink my own coffee, save the money, avoid the trip to the store AND still get the benefits of feeling like I am sitting in one.

It plays the ambient noises you hear at a coffee shop which, according to some studies, actually help you focus.

Monday, October 16, 2017

Some of My Life Hacks Edition

I saw Warren Buffet on Charlie Rose a few weeks ago where he said something like:

"I'm rich. I can buy anything I want. But you know what I can't buy?  I can't buy time. I have the same amount as everyone else."

Though some would argue that you can "buy time" by getting a Roomba (just got one), it got me thinking about some of the "life hacks" that I employ so I can use the time I have the way I want.

  • get up btw 4-5am each morning to have focus time (per WSJ)
  • schedule conference calls back to back and then take them while walking through the park (work+exercise)
  • on video calls, I do curls (keeps my hands off the keyboard so I stay focused on the conversation and builds muscle)
  • listen to audible books at 1.7 speed and watch youtube at 1.5x speed
  • take cold showers (it has the affect of getting me out of the shower faster), but I do it because of what I learned in The Secrets of People Who Never Get Sick: What They Know, Why It Works, and How It Can Work for You
  • my admin, Mary...huge.  She does all kinds of things for me. Most recently, she dealt with the local water company and power company to resolve some issues. Saved me a lot of time from waiting on hold.
  • batch processing...put similar tasks together which is why Watch Later on YouTube and Pocket are so valuable
  • keep my head shaved. No prep time. No shampoo time.
  • Right Inbox...so I can write emails now and schedule them to be sent later, i.e. when someone says "hey, remind me of this next week."  I just write the email at that moment and schedule it to be sent in a week.


There are some of mine. What about yours?
What are yours?






Tuesday, October 10, 2017

The Sabbath is a Competitive Advantage in the Smartphone Era

There are many reasons to observe the Jewish Sabbath.  Ranging from "I believe God commanded it" to "it's a great time for family and community."

I'm going to add one more.

In the always-on digital, smartphone age, it actually is a competitive advantage.

Far from FOMO, what the voluntary 24 hour break from all forms of technology and media does is not just force you to have in-person conversations, it gives you the time to do deep reading, intense reflection, and rumination (the new 3 R's).

I will often print out some of the most intellectually demanding articles about crypto/blockchain/Bitcoin to read over Shabbat and, since there are no distractions or any kind, I can focus.

Then, I can internalize it without being rushed.

More than 10 years ago when Nicholas Carr first published his ideas in an article and subsequent book, "The Shallows," many people laughed at him.

His thesis was flawed as we all believed that always-on access to information would make us smarter.

Kudos to him, he hasn't given up on his thesis and now, he is back with reams of data after 10 years of study, supporting his case.

And it's convincing (pasted below for those who can't access the link from WSJ).

I use a device called Circle by Disney to manage and limit time for my kids during the week, but I know that the battle against screens is a challenging one.

However, on Shabbat, everyone knows...no screens. Not negotiable, not debatable, and not even an issue. Plus, we don't have to go to or pay for a Digital Detox Retreat (over 250k listings) and we have a built-in operating system for how to enjoy the day.

Carr's closing makes the case for me.

When we constrict our capacity for reasoning and recall or transfer those skills to a gadget, we sacrifice our ability to turn information into knowledge. We get the data but lose the meaning. Upgrading our gadgets won’t solve the problem. We need to give our minds more room to think. 

And that means putting some distance between ourselves and our phones.

That is exactly what the Sabbath is designed to do, a physical separation between you and the world of work. 

Turns out, it's even more beneficial that originally thought.


Full Article

So you bought that new iPhone. If you are like the typical owner, you’ll be pulling your phone out and using it some 80 times a day, according to data Apple collects. That means you’ll be consulting the glossy little rectangle nearly 30,000 times over the coming year. Your new phone, like your old one, will become your constant companion and trusty factotum—your teacher, secretary, confessor, guru. The two of you will be inseparable.
The smartphone is unique in the annals of personal technology. We keep the gadget within reach more or less around the clock, and we use it in countless ways, consulting its apps and checking its messages and heeding its alerts scores of times a day. The smartphone has become a repository of the self, recording and dispensing the words, sounds and images that define what we think, what we experience and who we are. In a 2015 Gallup survey, more than half of iPhone owners said that they couldn’t imagine life without the device.
We love our phones for good reasons. It’s hard to imagine another product that has provided so many useful functions in such a handy form. But while our phones offer convenience and diversion, they also breed anxiety. Their extraordinary usefulness gives them an unprecedented hold on our attention and vast influence over our thinking and behavior. So what happens to our minds when we allow a single tool such dominion over our perception and cognition?
Scientists have begun exploring that question—and what they’re discovering is both fascinating and troubling. Not only do our phones shape our thoughts in deep and complicated ways, but the effects persist even when we aren’t using the devices. As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens.
The division of attention impedes reasoning and performance.
Adrian Ward, a cognitive psychologist and marketing professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has been studying the way smartphones and the internet affect our thoughts and judgments for a decade. In his own work, as well as that of others, he has seen mounting evidence that using a smartphone, or even hearing one ring or vibrate, produces a welter of distractions that makes it harder to concentrate on a difficult problem or job. The division of attention impedes reasoning and performance.
A 2015 Journal of Experimental Psychology study, involving 166 subjects, found that when people’s phones beep or buzz while they’re in the middle of a challenging task, their focus wavers, and their work gets sloppier—whether they check the phone or not. Another 2015 study, which involved 41 iPhone users and appeared in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, showed that when people hear their phone ring but are unable to answer it, their blood pressure spikes, their pulse quickens, and their problem-solving skills decline.
ILLUSTRATION: SERGE BLOCH
The earlier research didn’t explain whether and how smartphones differ from the many other sources of distraction that crowd our lives. Dr. Ward suspected that our attachment to our phones has grown so intense that their mere presence might diminish our intelligence. Two years ago, he and three colleagues— Kristen Duke and Ayelet Gneezy from the University of California, San Diego, and Disney Research behavioral scientist Maarten Bos —began an ingenious experiment to test his hunch.
The researchers recruited 520 undergraduate students at UCSD and gave them two standard tests of intellectual acuity. One test gauged “available cognitive capacity,” a measure of how fully a person’s mind can focus on a particular task. The second assessed “fluid intelligence,” a person’s ability to interpret and solve an unfamiliar problem. The only variable in the experiment was the location of the subjects’ smartphones. Some of the students were asked to place their phones in front of them on their desks; others were told to stow their phones in their pockets or handbags; still others were required to leave their phones in a different room.
As the phone’s proximity increased, brainpower decreased.
The results were striking. In both tests, the subjects whose phones were in view posted the worst scores, while those who left their phones in a different room did the best. The students who kept their phones in their pockets or bags came out in the middle. As the phone’s proximity increased, brainpower decreased.
In subsequent interviews, nearly all the participants said that their phones hadn’t been a distraction—that they hadn’t even thought about the devices during the experiment. They remained oblivious even as the phones disrupted their focus and thinking.
A second experiment conducted by the researchers produced similar results, while also revealing that the more heavily students relied on their phones in their everyday lives, the greater the cognitive penalty they suffered.
In an April article in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, Dr. Ward and his colleagues wrote that the “integration of smartphones into daily life” appears to cause a “brain drain” that can diminish such vital mental skills as “learning, logical reasoning, abstract thought, problem solving, and creativity.” Smartphones have become so entangled with our existence that, even when we’re not peering or pawing at them, they tug at our attention, diverting precious cognitive resources. Just suppressing the desire to check our phone, which we do routinely and subconsciously throughout the day, can debilitate our thinking. The fact that most of us now habitually keep our phones “nearby and in sight,” the researchers noted, only magnifies the mental toll.
Dr. Ward’s findings are consistent with other recently published research. In a similar but smaller 2014 study (involving 47 subjects) in the journal Social Psychology, psychologists at the University of Southern Maine found that people who had their phones in view, albeit turned off, during two demanding tests of attention and cognition made significantly more errors than did a control group whose phones remained out of sight. (The two groups performed about the same on a set of easier tests.)
In another study, published in Applied Cognitive Psychology in April, researchers examined how smartphones affected learning in a lecture class with 160 students at the University of Arkansas at Monticello. They found that students who didn’t bring their phones to the classroom scored a full letter-grade higher on a test of the material presented than those who brought their phones. It didn’t matter whether the students who had their phones used them or not: All of them scored equally poorly. A study of 91 secondary schools in the U.K., published last year in the journal Labour Economics, found that when schools ban smartphones, students’ examination scores go up substantially, with the weakest students benefiting the most.
It isn’t just our reasoning that takes a hit when phones are around. Social skills and relationships seem to suffer as well. Because smartphones serve as constant reminders of all the friends we could be chatting with electronically, they pull at our minds when we’re talking with people in person, leaving our conversations shallower and less satisfying.
ILLUSTRATION: SERGE BLOCH
In a study conducted at the University of Essex in the U.K., 142 participants were divided into pairs and asked to converse in private for 10 minutes. Half talked with a phone in the room, while half had no phone present. The subjects were then given tests of affinity, trust and empathy. “The mere presence of mobile phones,” the researchers reported in 2013 in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, “inhibited the development of interpersonal closeness and trust” and diminished “the extent to which individuals felt empathy and understanding from their partners.” The downsides were strongest when “a personally meaningful topic” was being discussed. The experiment’s results were validated in a subsequent study by Virginia Tech researchers, published in 2016 in the journal Environment and Behavior.
The evidence that our phones can get inside our heads so forcefully is unsettling. It suggests that our thoughts and feelings, far from being sequestered in our skulls, can be skewed by external forces we’re not even aware of.
Scientists have long known that the brain is a monitoring system as well as a thinking system. Its attention is drawn toward any object that is new, intriguing or otherwise striking—that has, in the psychological jargon, “salience.” Media and communications devices, from telephones to TV sets, have always tapped into this instinct. Whether turned on or switched off, they promise an unending supply of information and experiences. By design, they grab and hold our attention in ways natural objects never could.
But even in the history of captivating media, the smartphone stands out. It is an attention magnet unlike any our minds have had to grapple with before. Because the phone is packed with so many forms of information and so many useful and entertaining functions, it acts as what Dr. Ward calls a “supernormal stimulus,” one that can “hijack” attention whenever it is part of our surroundings—which it always is. Imagine combining a mailbox, a newspaper, a TV, a radio, a photo album, a public library and a boisterous party attended by everyone you know, and then compressing them all into a single, small, radiant object. That is what a smartphone represents to us. No wonder we can’t take our minds off it.
The irony of the smartphone is that the qualities we find most appealing—its constant connection to the net, its multiplicity of apps, its responsiveness, its portability—are the very ones that give it such sway over our minds. Phone makers like Apple and Samsungand app writers like Facebook and Google design their products to consume as much of our attention as possible during every one of our waking hours, and we thank them by buying millions of the gadgets and downloading billions of the apps every year.
A quarter-century ago, when we first started going online, we took it on faith that the web would make us smarter: More information would breed sharper thinking. We now know it isn’t that simple. The way a media device is designed and used exerts at least as much influence over our minds as does the information that the device unlocks.
People’s knowledge may dwindle as gadgets grant them easier access to online data.
As strange as it might seem, people’s knowledge and understanding may actually dwindle as gadgets grant them easier access to online data stores. In a seminal 2011 studypublished in Science, a team of researchers—led by the Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow and including the late Harvard memory expert Daniel Wegner —had a group of volunteers read 40 brief, factual statements (such as “The space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry over Texas in Feb. 2003”) and then type the statements into a computer. Half the people were told that the machine would save what they typed; half were told that the statements would be immediately erased.
Afterward, the researchers asked the subjects to write down as many of the statements as they could remember. Those who believed that the facts had been recorded in the computer demonstrated much weaker recall than those who assumed the facts wouldn’t be stored. Anticipating that information would be readily available in digital form seemed to reduce the mental effort that people made to remember it. The researchers dubbed this phenomenon the “Google effect” and noted its broad implications: “Because search engines are continually available to us, we may often be in a state of not feeling we need to encode the information internally. When we need it, we will look it up.”
Now that our phones have made it so easy to gather information online, our brains are likely offloading even more of the work of remembering to technology. If the only thing at stake were memories of trivial facts, that might not matter. But, as the pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James said in an 1892 lecture, “the art of remembering is the art of thinking.” Only by encoding information in our biological memory can we weave the rich intellectual associations that form the essence of personal knowledge and give rise to critical and conceptual thinking. No matter how much information swirls around us, the less well-stocked our memory, the less we have to think with.
We aren’t very good at distinguishing the knowledge we keep in our heads from the information we find on our phones.
This story has a twist. It turns out that we aren’t very good at distinguishing the knowledge we keep in our heads from the information we find on our phones or computers. As Dr. Wegner and Dr. Ward explained in a 2013 Scientific American article, when people call up information through their devices, they often end up suffering from delusions of intelligence. They feel as though “their own mental capacities” had generated the information, not their devices. “The advent of the ‘information age’ seems to have created a generation of people who feel they know more than ever before,” the scholars concluded, even though “they may know ever less about the world around them.”
That insight sheds light on our society’s current gullibility crisis, in which people are all too quick to credit lies and half-truths spread through social media by Russian agents and other bad actors. If your phone has sapped your powers of discernment, you’ll believe anything it tells you.
Data, the novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick once wrote, is “memory without history.” Her observation points to the problem with allowing smartphones to commandeer our brains. When we constrict our capacity for reasoning and recall or transfer those skills to a gadget, we sacrifice our ability to turn information into knowledge. We get the data but lose the meaning. Upgrading our gadgets won’t solve the problem. We need to give our minds more room to think. And that means putting some distance between ourselves and our phones.
Mr. Carr is the author of “The Shallows” and “Utopia Is Creepy,” among other books.


Appeared in the October 7, 2017, print edition as 'How Smart- phones Hijack Our Minds.'


Sunday, October 08, 2017

800 Million Rich Jews and the big joke of the Middle East

I was on a plane the other day and engaged in a fascinating conversation with a college-educated, African-American woman who works in real estate.

After a long conversation about Section 8 housing and discrimination, I shared that I felt Jews and African-Americans were natural allies in fighting oppression, since "when it comes to street cred in having been an oppressed or persecuted group, I would argue that Jews are at or near the top of the list."

She agreed and then remarked something along the lines of "but now there are so many of you and you control all the money."

"How many Jews do you think there are exactly?" I asked.

"Maybe 25%."

"Of the world population?"

"Yes."

"So, there are 7 billion people in the world...."

"Ok, maybe 1/8th."

"That's about 800 million people."

"Yes."

"Uh, well, ok. I would say that, on a good day if you are really stretching who you count, we're probably in the 14 million range."

"Really?"

"Yes. Now, as for the money part, I suppose it is probably true that, on average, Jews have more money than many other ethnic groups, but you know why I think that is?"

"Why?"

"I think it's a Darwinian survival response.

If there is one thing we have learned over millennia it's that we really can't count on other people to take care of us. When we do that, we are pretty damn vulnerable. 

So, since we can't go man-to-man in defending ourselves against our enemies, we have to figure out a way way to preserve ourselves.  That comes down to money and technology.

We don't have to earn extra money only because we want to-- sure, we like nice things and experiences like everyone else- we do it because we have to.

If we don't have the money, we can't pay for the things we need to defend ourselves and we can't give the money to the non-Jewish friends who actually do want to help us. There are plenty of those, but there are plenty of the non-Jewish enemies as well. The good guys need financing to help us, so we have to pay them.

And when it comes to technology, it's the same story.

Israel wouldn't be the technological powerhouse it is today were it not for the fact that they are outnumbered 1000 to 1. They have had no choice but to figure out a more effective way to defend themselves. Or they die. Talk about "necessity is the mother of invention."

You see, For Israel, a lost life is really expensive proportionally. For its enemies, it's really cheap.

The ironic thing is as my friend Anat says, 'if the Arabs just left us alone, we would probably just kill each other and do the job for them.'

So, you see, what Jews have learned the hard way is that, in order for us to increase our odds of survival, we have to be as smart as we can so we can effectively earn money to pay for our defense and invest in tools and technologies so we can compete with an disproportionate quantity of enemies. 

At a global level and I wouldn't say that it's something we discuss as a group, rather something that has become intuitively understood. It's why, I think, that Jews care so much about education and work ethic. Those are two pillars of financial success which is critical to our survival.

There is a saying in the Israeli Army "Ein Breirah" which means 'no choice.'  As in, 'we have to defend this territory because we really don't have an alternative.'

You see, we really don't have an alternative. If we can't have some degree of agency over our own defense and future, we're extremely vulnerable, something we know from a long history of being vulnerable and powerless.

The by product of this may be disproportionate wealth, power, and/or influence, but try to remember something. This isn't because we necessarily set out for this goal. It's because we really don't have a choice if we want to go on living as a people with a commitment to a set of values and beliefs."

"I've never heard that explanation before. Thank you for sharing it with me."