Just did this, and I was shocked at how many apps and services had access to my Gmail. Facebook, Twitter, etc. One fairly simple hack would crush my entire online presence. Oy.
Thanks, guys.
See? You should do this right now.
Remember when Facebook changed all of our default email accounts to their own, unused system, without informing any of us? That was fun! But it looks like the problem could be much wider and more damaging than it first seemed. Big update:
This guy is 69 years old, but half of his face looks much, much older than that. He was a trucker and, for 28 years, his face received much more sunlight on the left side, resulting on premature aging. We all knew that being exposed to the sun makes you age prematurely, but seeing the dramatic…
Skechers: Skechers Will Refund Your Money Since It Tricked You into Buying Ugly Shoes(via @Gawker) »
All your friends laughed at you when you bought magic sneakers you thought would transform you into Kate Upton while you sat around and watched TV, but who’s laughing now that Skechers has agreed to pay out $40 million in refunds to those poor saps like yourself who bought the shoes and their…
So excited! We’re getting closer to the big day!
Our wedding registry can be found at the link below:
Every single iMessage to and from this man’s iPhone—his friends call him Wiz—has been sent to us by accident. We know about his job, sex life, and address.
The real reason that we should be concerned about private equity’s expanding power lies in the way these firms have become increasingly adept at using financial gimmicks to line their pockets, deriving enormous wealth not from management or investing skills but, rather, from the way the U.S. tax system works. Indeed, for an industry that’s often held up as an exemplar of free-market capitalism, private equity is surprisingly dependent on government subsidies for its profits. Financial engineering has always been central to leveraged buyouts. In a typical deal, a private-equity firm buys a company, using some of its own money and some borrowed money. It then tries to improve the performance of the acquired company, with an eye toward cashing out by selling it or taking it public. The key to this strategy is debt: the model encourages firms to borrow as much as possible, since, just as with a mortgage, the less money you put down, the bigger your potential return on investment. The rewards can be extraordinary: when Romney was at Bain, it supposedly earned eighty-eight per cent a year for its investors. But piles of debt also increase the risk that companies will go bust.
- In this week’s issue, James Surowiecki writes about how private equity firms like Bain Capital earn profits: http://nyr.kr/ArHyoL
RIM’s co-CEOs, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie—aka the keyboard-loving odd couple—are finally realizing they’re running BlackBerry into the ground and jumping ship before it’s too late.
I just switched the default search engine in my browser from Google to Bing. And if you care about working efficiently, or getting the right results when you search, then maybe you should too.
A Papa John’s employee is out of a job this morning after entering a customer’s name (who also happened to be community manager at Pro Publica) as “lady chinky eyes.” The company’s Twitter account is in full-on damage control mode this morning, tweeting everyone who mentions the story: “Please know we have issued a formal apology, are reaching out to customer & franchise employee is being terminated.”
YouTube was created by three former employees of PayPal, in a Silicon Valley garage, in early 2005. According to two of the founders, Chad Hurley and Steven Chen, a graphic designer and a software engineer, respectively, the idea grew out of a dinner party at Chen’s home in San Francisco, in the winter of 2004-05. Guests had made videos of one another, but they couldn’t share them easily. The founders envisioned a video version of Flickr, a popular photo-sharing site. All the content on the site would be user-generated: “Real personal clips that are taken by everyday people,” as Hurley described his vision.
Brain Pickings is the brain child of Maria Popova, a cultural curator and curious mind at large, who also writes for Wired UK, The Atlantic and Design Observer, among others. She gets occasional help from a handful of talented contributors.
Brain Pickings is a human-powered discovery engine for interestingness, culling and curating cross-disciplinary curiosity-quenchers, and separating the signal from the noise to bring you things you didn’t know you were interested in until you are.
Because creativity, after all, is a combinatorial force. It’s our ability to tap into the mental pool of resources — ideas, insights, knowledge, inspiration — that we’ve accumulated over the years just by being present and alive and awake to the world, and to combine them in extraordinary new ways. In order for us to truly create and contribute to the world, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these ideas and build new ideas — like LEGOs. The more of these building blocks we have, and the more diverse their shapes and colors, the more interesting our creations will become.
Brain Pickings is your LEGO treasure chest, full of pieces across art, design, science, technology, philosophy, history, politics, psychology, sociology, ecology, anthropology, you-name-itology. Pieces that enrich your mental pool of resources and empower you to combine them into original concepts that are stronger, smarter, richer, deeper and more impactful — a modest, curiosity-driven exercise in vision- and mind-expansion. Please enjoy.
