From Jim Wat­ch­man com­ment in this Marketwatch’s story: This plus they had to prove in court that there was no dis­tin­guis­ha­ble dif­fe­rence from their pro­ducts to Sam­sungs pro­ducts during the lawsuit.…that hurt. Con­su­mers now know by Apples tes­ti­mony there is no advan­tage in paying 4x more for their pro­duct. Pure genius if true.

Anot­her TED Con­ver­sa­tions reply: Oh, I’m not arguing that there’s a large num­ber (albeit MBTI sur­veys put the num­ber of intro­verts at a few points over 50%), but that for the achie­vers that are, their intro­ver­sion is por­trai­ted posi­ti­vely after it led them to suc­cess in tasks that require a lot of reflec­tion. My ques­tion is if that qua­lity (or at least, the pos­si­bi­lity of having a kind of intro­ver­sion that leads to achie­ve­ments) is recog­ni­zed and valued in peo­ple, at least in an equal level with extro­ver­sion, when they are still every­wo­men and every­men. Gates’ suc­cess was esta­blis­hed early […]

En retros­pec­tiva creo que habría pre­fe­rido plan­tearlo de otro modo; he aquí el debate: Intro­ver­sion: is it regar­ded as nor­mal in your country/culture? His­tory offers a rat­her posi­tive view of intro­verts: the lone explo­rers, the poets, the genius scien­tists, the artists, the phi­lo­sop­hers, are often por­trai­ted as powe­red by the par­ti­cu­lar qua­li­ties of intros­pec­tion. But the day to day social reality wit­hin their local tribe may be rat­her dif­fe­rent. Intro­verts may be admi­red from afar, but depen­ding on the cul­ture, not so much in their neigh­bor­hood. This is not a big deal except when new gene­ra­tions are rai­sed with only […]

My reply to this ques­tion. Honest ques­tion: When we replace more and more jobs with those of robots, what hap­pens to all the peo­ple who are now unem­plo­yed? Do we just keep making more jobs for them? Theo­re­ti­ca­lly menial jobs that currently are une­co­no­mi­cal and that are still hard to robo­tize will increase their rela­tive value. Maybe nobody would give you more than 2 cents for giving a hug, but when machi­nes make food ridicu­lously cheap, you pro­ba­bly will be able to buy a kilo of oran­ges for 2 cents. The pro­blem is, current eco­no­mic poli­cies and finan­cial inter­ests don’t allow for […]

An extract from an IRC con­ver­sa­tion (I’m The­Ve­ne­tian­Mask):   bok­bok­bok forrest gump has an incre­di­bly inter­es­ting life because he’s a sym­bol, right, so that part of the movie is obvious fic­tion bok­bok­bok the parts where he’s on the bench are reality, his story is always fic­tion, “a dream about ame­ri­can reality“ bok­bok­bok so offe­ring the woman a cho­co­late, com­men­ting on the woman’s shoes. ame­rica is very boring but it has big dreams bok­bok­bok that’s the mes­sage i see in that movie bok­bok­bok why is ame­rica boring? peo­ple don’t talk to each other well. even at a bus stop, you are […]

My Cana­dian friend Alex asked me about them, so I wrote this reply:   Alex: Out of curio­sity, what are your thoughts on the riots/protests in Spain? Do you iden­tify with them? Have you ever been a part of any demons­tra­tions (at any point, not just recently)? Fran: I’ve been to seve­ral, 15M the last one. I remem­ber still the huge demos­tra­tions against joi­ning the Iraq war and after the Madrid bom­bings. Pro­tests are actua­lly fre­quent, but often very poli­ti­zed or very union-centric. Valen­cia is a con­ser­va­tive city which is often seen as very cola­bo­ra­tive and sub­ser­vient of the cen­tral goverment, […]