How do you understand the lease-vehicles line in the balance sheet? From $4.1bn down to $2.3bn. I understand there's some accounting change, but I don't see where the other side of that missing $1.8bn shows up.
"Cole’s lecture was different. He did not speak a single word. He simply went to the board, and began to calculate. On one side of the board, he calculated 267 – 1 = 147,573,952,589,676,412,927 by hand. Then he went to the other side of the board and worked out the product of 193,707,721 and 761,838,257,287, the factors of 147,573,952,589,676,412,927. After spending the silent hour working out the calculations, Cole simply turned around and went back to his seat, completely silent! The audience erupted into a standing ovation."
"But new research shows that it may not be the sound itself that distracts us…it may be who is making it."
For me, the absolute perfect background noise is people talking in a language I don't understand. If you're in a big city, there are almost certainly cafes with customers mainly from some linguistic minority -- I've found them to be great places to work.
[on roughly the same principle, I sometimes listen to foreign-language pop music while working, so the vocal aspect becomes just another instrument rather than a source of distraction]
I do the exact same - listen to foreign music. I can't listen to truly interesting instrumental music because it's distracting, and music with too much emotion grabs too much of my attention. I'll add: I do well with progressive electronic music that doesn't have much going on in it, and some sci-fi movie soundtracks. Additionally, Deuter is great, and his entire catalog is on Spotify.
I seem to increasingly get unsubscribed from mailing lists because of not opening them, which is very frustrating.
Sometimes it's because I'm reading but not triggering their tracking mechanisms. Other times it's because I'm subscribed to lists that I only occasionally read, but want to have available for reference.
Either way: if I've actively subscribed to a list, I have some reason for doing so. I don't want to be unsubscribed!
I'd be happy to add my email address to some whitelist of 'assume I'm reading anything I'm subscribed to', if only it were possible.
Otherwise, maybe I need to forward mails to some service that will open them all in a browser, and trigger all the tracking pixels.
FWIW Gmail does that: it triggers trackbacks from a pool of Google-owned IP addresses that don’t map to any specific users, and then serves themselves the images to the clients. This is why they now load images by default: there’s no more privacy issue.
Not quite the Crimea, but you might like the novelist Amin Maalouf. He primarily writes historical novels set in the medieval Islamic world -- with protagonists who travel a lot, so you see some of the (more-or-less accurate) interactions of different places and people.
'Samarkand' is my favourite of his novels, or 'Leo the African' is probably his most well-known.
Something I would love to see is an open-source attitude entering into the furniture manufacture ecosystem.
What Ikea sells you is, essentially:
a) a set of instructions for making furniture out of basic components
b) those components, produced and distributed through a highly-efficient supply chain
So break those two apart! Let hobbyists and carpenters share or sell their furniture designs. Just specify the components in a standard way, so suppliers can compete to supply the components for each design.
So you turn a monolithic business into one where smaller groups can compete on each part of the system. One company can cheaply supply cut wood in Seattle, another just sells its funky shelving designs without worrying about the infrastructure.
Most bits of this ecosystem already exist -- the furniture-making hobbyists, the DIY stores, the suppliers of nails and screws. They just need a bit of systemisation (and marketing) to pull them together into a system that can compete with a monolithic supply chain.
I agree! You can check out http://www.aalo.co/. Disclosure: this is a startup I founded, with the same intention of what you just mentionted above. Shameless plug :).
General public (especially the millennials) have better knowledge and insights about good design and it has become much more democratic. The problem is that millennials just don't have as much money to spend on furniture, let alone a space to put them in. Ikea's Delaktig line is definitely a step in the right direction, but it still can't provide the level of freedom that "Ikea Hack" does.
I believe the answer lies in a system that provides the basic structure, which lets the individuals design and build on top of it. This way, you can achieve designs that are more unique, multi-functional, and affordable.
My first impression was that it's basically cast iron pipe designs, implemented with your custom components. Not a bad idea, especially as the pieces are more streamlined (slip in elbows) but doesn't really hit me as a real "system".
On your "about us" or product page you should do a small write-up about that actual materials and components. Basically, how is this different or better than cast iron pipe or Klee clamps?
I'd really like to know if your system can support significant weight because most of the designs (except for the garment rack) are small structures that you would expect to hold only 10-20 lbs. I would guess from the weight and dimensions of the garment rack you are using 1-1/4 OD x .065 wall aluminum round tube.
Our goal in terms of functionality, is to make it easier for people to enjoy the versatility of pipe fittings (Kee Clamps, FitzKitz) and slotted extrusions (80/20, Minitec) while providing a seamless design better suited for living spaces.
As you suggested, it'll definitely help us to have a better explanation of our materials and structural integrity. I'll work on updating the information :)
Right now our components are designed to widthstand similar loads as a 1"x1" T-slotted aluminum framing system, and it's been a fun but difficult challenge to make it more cost efficient and user friendly.
You seem like you have very good knowledge of building materials and furniture making in general! Would love to have you on our beta creator group so you can give us even more feedback as we develop the product. Thanks!
This is part of what https://www.opendesk.cc/ is :). They've obviously focussed on the office furniture segment early on, but there's some bedside tables and other things appearing. You can download their designs, tweak them in a CAD program of your choosing and then get them lasercut.
Easier than avoiding triggers -- and almost as effective -- is just to delay the response. Let yourself check your phone, but only 10 minutes after you feel the urge to do so.
This is much easier than complete abstinence, but breaks down the habit-forming link between trigger and instant gratification.
And just as you say, it's something I started doing after reading about training [1] and inverting the priciples
Looks pretty serious to me