John Cox

Blogs · @wyome

Tagged history · everything

The New Yorker

The Mission to Get Osama Bin Laden : The New Yorker

This New Yorker account details the May 1, 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden, tracing the operation from its planning stages through execution, focusing on the Navy SEAL Team Six assault on his Abbottabad compound despite significant obstacles. The narrative reveals how a Black Hawk helicopter crashed during insertion due to aerodynamic complications, forcing the SEALs to adapt on the ground, and reconstructs the precise moments when bin Laden was located and killed on the third floor, along with several family members and associates who posed threats. The piece also examines the broader intelligence, political, and military context—including President Obama's decision to authorize the raid over cautious advisers' objections and the operational precedent it set for future unilateral U.S. military actions inside Pakistani territory.

Permalink historypoliticsnewsmilitary

Readability

Black, Brown, and Beige — www.newyorker.com — Readability

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the Guardian

The Atlantic

The Management Myth - Magazine - The Atlantic

The author, a philosophy PhD who became a management consultant and founding partner of a consulting firm, argues that management theory is fundamentally unscientific and philosophically hollow—rooted in Frederick Taylor's dubious "scientific management" of the 1890s, which masked subjective judgments as objective data, and perpetuated through later theorists like Elton Mayo who merely recycled humanistic platitudes as revolutionary breakthroughs. Business schools provide little genuine education beyond credential-signaling and networking, and management theory itself is essentially a moralizing discipline disguised as technical expertise, one that corporate executives manipulate to justify control over workers while remaining insulated from accountability for their failures.

Permalink historyeducationbusiness

TechCrunch

How We All Missed Web 2.0′s “Netscape Moment”

DST's 2009 investment in Facebook at a $10 billion valuation marked a pivotal shift in startup economics comparable to Netscape's 1995 IPO, not because it was itself a liquidity event, but because it enabled a new model where high-growth companies could avoid going public indefinitely while still accessing capital through secondary markets and providing investor returns. Just as Netscape's IPO proved that unprofitable startups could access public markets, Facebook demonstrated the inverse—that companies didn't need to go public at all to achieve growth, liquidity, and strategic flexibility—a change driven by structural shifts in public market regulations and sentiment that made IPOs increasingly unattractive for tech founders. The secondary market explosion that followed has already rippled through the Valley's investment strategies and employee incentives, though the risk of degradation and excess looms if the industry fails to exercise restraint.

Permalink technologyhistorybusiness

Flickr

Flickr: The Commons

The Flickr Commons is a collaborative platform launched in 2008 by Flickr and the Library of Congress that allows over 100 cultural institutions to publicly share photographs from their archives. The program aims to increase public access to photography collections, enable crowdsourced metadata improvements, and facilitate knowledge contribution from users while ensuring the long-term preservation of these digitized materials. Cultural institutions with photography collections can register to participate and contribute their holdings to the growing commons.

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www.youtube.com

taoyue.com

taoyue.com: Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men

The author argues that he avoids hiring purportedly "brilliant" men because they are typically fast-talking con artists who start projects enthusiastically but lack the discipline to finish them—the real problem being not intelligence itself but the combination of overconfidence and inability to handle repetitive work. Drawing on personal experience with charismatic failures like his former partner Carroll, he illustrates how such men generate excitement around grand schemes, then lose interest when faced with practical details and modest execution. Instead, he advocates for hiring ordinary, steady workers who possess five simple qualities: good health, thriftiness, clear communication, attention to detail, and courage—arguing that business success comes from extracting consistent effort from reliable people rather than depending on the erratic brilliance of talented misfits.

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This American Life

This American Life

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Kraft Heinz

Damn Interesting

Damn Interesting » Blog Archive » The Phantom Time Hypothesis

German scholars have proposed that roughly 297 years were fictitiously inserted into our calendar during the early Middle Ages—meaning it's actually 1708, not 2005—based on inconsistencies like the Gregorian calendar's correction being smaller than it should be and mysterious gaps in historical construction records. While the proponents point to evidence of medieval document forgeries and historical discontinuities, their conclusions rest on circumstantial evidence at best, and their proposed motives for such a vast conspiracy (like Otto III wanting his reign to include the year 1000) strain credulity. The hypothesis, though intellectually intriguing for raising legitimate questions about historical dating, ultimately reflects an unscientific leap from ambiguous data to an extraordinary claim.

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