“They should draw an equation: What level of fame do you need to achieve to keep doing what you want? Because you don’t want any more than that.” (Tina Fey) […] Paul Allen, the Microsoft cofounder, has a yacht that is 416 feet long. It cost something like a quarter of a billion dollars. It carries two helicopters. It’s so large it cannot dock anywhere on the French Riviera. (That’s why it needs those helicopters. They are the only way to get to port.) The “Octopus” seems to be a perfect example of way-too-much. Possessions of this kind act like barnacles that slow movement and limit freedom. “Going for a sail” must seem to Allen like something that requires him to mobilize a third-world country, an event so wearying that it must seem better, most of the time, just to leave the thing be.”—Just-enough, a new trend in the works (or, why Paul Allen’s Octopus is really an Albatross) :: Grant McCracken
“for people living in a shantytown like Nima — and by extension in similar places across Africa and beyond — the possibilities afforded by a proliferation of cellphones are potentially revolutionary. Today, there are more than 3.3 billion mobile-phone subscriptions worldwide, which means that there are at least three billion people who don’t own cellphones, the bulk of them to be found in Africa and Asia. Even the smallest improvements in efficiency, amplified across those additional three billion people, could reshape the global economy in ways that we are just beginning to understand.”—Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty? (via Savage Minds)
