Final Boss Form

May 15

Did Parking Meters Just Get Too Smart? - The Atlantic Cities -

Through the use of parking space sensors, Santa Monica’s meters now know when a car leaves a spot and can automatically reset itself to require whoever parks there next to pay the full price of parking. It’s part of the intelligent parking system that the city has been rolling out, which includes the ability to accept coins and credit cards, send text messages when metered time is running out, and compile information to help the city better price its parking to correspond with demand.

These smart parking spots even know when you’ve outstayed your time-sensitive welcome, disallowing you from putting more time in the meter if you’ve been there too long. Two-hour parking, all of a sudden, really does mean two-hour parking.

These are technological improvements that can have large-scale impacts on the ways cities relate to their parking enforcement efforts. By making parking spaces less of a birthright and more of a product, cities like Santa Monica hope they can get drivers to pay a reasonable, market-determined price for the space they’d like to use – or to let that price discourage them from using that space. Or from driving at all.

“

What banking most needs is to become boring, the way the business was before bankers became addicted to trading profits. Safer banking means lower profits, which means smaller compensation packages. That is precisely what JPMorgan’s London traders were trying to avoid.

Happily, the recent behavior of JPMorgan’s London traders could well cause regulators to put in place a Volcker Rule so tough that it would make banking boring again. One can only hope.

” — Make Banking Boring - Joe Nocera

May 14

I’m reposting @elspethjane’s pic with @mollymeme and I #reinstagram (Taken with Instagram at Internet Week NY HQ)

“intersection” by Kai Ziehl

The Pitch: Ring the Bell -

rickwebb:

Against my better judgement, I watched another episode of The Pitch tonight.

By the first five minutes of this episode, I realized that were I still in the biz, and this was actually how things went down (which it wasn’t, I’m sure - this is reality TV), I would have declined the assignment:

1)…

Wow — do joint briefs actually happen? That seemed so contrived.

I watched an episode of The Pitch a few days ago and was surprised at how rough the production was.

One “conflict” seemed to be made by cutting a scene out of sequence. Another scene used the same reaction shot three times in a row. Considering how much AMC is promoting ‘The Pitch’, I expected a much tighter show. Perhaps production of the other episodes aren’t so bad.

An exoskeleton and dramatic lighting can make any industrial building look pretty! #architecture (Taken with Instagram at John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK))

May 13

“

Every meme, like folklore, shares two common characteristics: It must show reproduction (the ability to be copied) and variation (the ability to mutate).

These days, memes spread faster and wider than ever, with social networks acting as the fuel for mass distribution. But it’s possible we may see less mutation and remixing in the near future. As internet usage shifts from desktops and laptops to mobile devices and tablets, the ability to mutate memes in a meaningful way becomes harder.

” — Andy Baio. Feels Bad Man: How Mobile Is Stopping the Lulz

The most important piece about last weekend’s ROFLcon was written by Andy.

I agree that the rise of 9gag probably has a lot to do with it’s availability on mobile. Instead of iterating, users end up pushing existing instances of an image macro out further. I also have a suspicion that the success of KONY2012 could be partially explained by a generation of users who speak mostly in reblogs/shares/retweets.

But I also think that the Internet is like water — it always seeks the lowest ground and routes around whatever obstacles are thrown at it. I think we’ll soon see new forms of iterative creation that we haven’t seen before. I just hope they’ll have the same creative impact the folks at MemeFactory are calling Internet Memes’ golden era (2004-2008).