Thang Nguyen 555
Cultures on Collision Course
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Author: Thang Nguyen 555
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subtitle: the Machine that agrees with you. You log on, and when you no longer want to continue, you can log off. You search for sites and sound that fit you. Machine = matchmaker. You purchased this title, perhaps you would like to order that title as well. How about connecting with this professional, or…
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In Freedom, Franzen reminds me of Updike ‘s laboring over a character with winding but irresistible narrative. The theme: too much personal freedom i.e. one’s own apps and features weigh heavier than a loosely connected modern Jewish family. Fiction helps us forget our pain-filled reality. And Freedom did just that for me. With a garden variety of themes: from eco-politic to petropolitic,…
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BlackBerry was blamed for London Summer unrest while tech proponents gave it credits for Arab Spring. Tech is just out there, with its incremental and osmotic effect. What society chooses to do with it is entirely different. There will come a time when we do need to switch to energy-efficient light bulbs, paint our roofs white and…
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50 years ago, you would have been chased out of the pub had you painted these scenarios: the US can’t wait to open off-shored manufacturing centers, Gaga as a mermaid on wheelchair, and 90% of the population will shop at Wal-Mart, stocked with 99% Made-in-China merchandise. Dude, in the 60’s, we were living the American…
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For young people, it’s a time for recreation, renewal and reviewing school materials. For politicians, it’s time to pay the bills from Cold Wars, Star Wars, and Gulf Wars …. For us, consumers, it’s a time to conserve fuel and energy, or just to stay cool. One quote sticks, uttered by a friend of those…
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That’s what we need. Late 70’s, we also got gas price hike. We got “a crisis of confidence”. And we got Middle East hostage situation that drove Nightline ratings over the top. But we also got disco. It helped. Distraction did not solve any problem. It just got our minds off the situation at hand. For however…
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The news of Premier Nguyen Cao Ky passed away brought back a long time passing. In my youth, the sound of hovering helicopters was as common as street vendors’ chants. On the war’s last day, ambassador, flag, ground-keepers, pilots and anything that moved, tried to get out to International Waters . Buses, barges and yes, choppers. Lone…
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“We are ‘creatures of information’”, “in the library of Babel, seeking information past and future”, says James Gleick in the Information. We might look in hardback and paperback, print books and e-books, newspaper and news broadcast, but we are still after the information. It reminds me of a line by St Paul “though now we see…
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Albertson is your store. No wonder you just walked in, took the items, and walked out (after paying the machines). http://www.spokesman.com/blogs/officehours/2011/jul/12/albertsons-will-take-self-checkout-lanes-out-stores-doesnt-affect-area-albertsons-stores/ I still remember having lunch at Woolworth, or stopping at full-serve stations back East. “coffee refill?” ” oil check?” We are heading toward a self-serve nation (or as in a recent feature in the WSJ,…
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The paper announced “a A student committed suicide for not passing Vietnam‘s first IBM-graded SAT“. So, my classmates showed up at my house the next morning for condolences. True story. Not having seen the column the day before, I was completely taken aback. Hence, my first exposure to bad journalism, and Vietnam’s first trial run…
Thang Nguyen 555 