Gamifying savings

The lottery is the one pathway to wealth where poor people have an equal footing with rich people. Lottery players know the chance of getting rich with a lottery ticket is infinitesimally small. The point is that without one, the chance is zero.

What if saving could be like a lottery?

The idea of rewarding savings with prizes dates from at least 1694, when Britain, desperate to pay off war debt, lured savers with a jackpot. Prize-linked savings exist in some form in at least 18 countries today. Perhaps the experience most relevant for the United States is Britain’s Premium Bonds, established in 1956. The interest on the bonds isn’t repaid to the holders. Instead, it goes into a prize fund. Every pound savers put in (to a maximum of £30,000) gives them a chance to win a monthly £1 million jackpot plus a million different smaller prizes — all tax free. The program was begun as “Savings With a Thrill,” and the winning numbers were announced each month by celebrities.

At the program’s 50th anniversary, there was £32 billion in bonds — providing the government with capital at a cheaper rate than borrowing. Nearly 40 percent of Britain’s population — 23 million people — hold Premium Bonds. They are sometimes, but not always, the best savings deal — there is often a product whose return is better than the odds of what you’d win with Premium Bonds with average luck. But that’s the point: even though they might not be the left-brain choice, they get people to save.

From the NYTimes Fixes Blog, an idea to incentivize more savings. Doesn't sound any worse than most other ideas I've read to drive Americans to save more. In fact, it sounds better.

Snow Day

Artist Tomer Hanuka provides the cover image “Snow Day” for The New Yorker this week.

It's actually an image he released as a print titled “Perfect Storm” many years ago. The morning the print went on sale I forgot to log on and by the time I remembered it had sold out. I still have pangs of regret that I wasn't reserve one. Otherwise I own many of his other prints, all of which are framed and hanging in my apartment.

“Snow is inherently nostalgic. It encourages you to travel back and think about your life. I think it’s something about the way it blankets reality, sort of erasing the present one dead pixel at a time. And that makes room for the past,” says Tomer Hanuka, about his image “Perfect Storm.”

*****

“I moved to New York in my early twenties, after being in the Israeli Army for three years,” Hanuka says. “I have this image of myself in my first rental apartment, sitting on the edge of the bed and staring at the window. You encounter the world as an adult for the first time—I think that’s what the story was about. That’s a powerful thing. Every window you stared through before was your parent’s world, and now, suddenly, you’re in a city. You’re washed with optimism and a sense of freedom—you’ve just been liberated and that’s amazing. And then you realize you can do very little, and it’s terribly disappointing. But the heartache and all that, that comes later.”
 

For more from Hanuka, browse some of his other illustrations online or purchase this book collection of many of his prints.

5 best punctuation marks in literature

Kathryn Schulz offers her list of the greatest punctuation marks in literature, and it is a wonderful one.

3. The ellipses in T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go, and make our visit.

Okay, I concede: The most famous ellipses of all time is not in "Prufrock." It is not in literature at all. It is in the text crawl at the beginning of Star Wars (“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away …”), which I can’t read without hearing that crashing first chord of John Williams’s score, and which I admire even while wishing George Lucas had seen fit to include one more comma. 

But we are here to talk about literature, and, in that domain, Eliot wins the ellipses game. Everything in "Prufrock" is elliptical: those meandering streets, the foglike cat (fog and cats: name me two things more evasive), the hundred revisions, the perfume-inspired digressions — and all this is to say nothing of the five other literal ellipses in the poem: “lonely men in shirt sleeves, leaning out of windows … ”;  “asleep … tired … or it malingers”’ “I grow old … I grow old … ” — aging in those very pauses, it seems. But by far the most yawning chasm in the poem is the first one: What overwhelming question, Eliot? The candidate options, as I see it, are “What is the meaning of life?” and “Hey, so, would you maybe want to have dinner with me sometime?” Existential exposure, romantic embarrassment: Poor Prufrock, no wonder he trails off into that visual stutter.

Beauty

Via Digg, this video makes for a cool running screensaver for your TV the next time you have people over to do LSD. Rino Stefano Tagliafierro took classic oil paintings and put them into motion with what is commonly known as the 2.5D Effect, or the "thing they did in The Kid Stays in the Picture."

A path of sighs through the emotions of life. A tribute to the art and her disarming beauty. CREDITS: Director RINO STEFANO TAGLIAFIERRO Assistant Director LAILA SONSINO 2nd Assistant Director CARLOTTA BALESTRIERI Editing - Compositing - Animation RINO STEFANO TAGLIAFIERRO Sound Design ENRICO ASCOLI Art Direction RINO STEFANO TAGLIAFIERRO Historiographer GIULIANO CORTI Time 09'49" Year 2014 Thanks MA&PA, ANNA, RAFFAELLA, CORRADO, VINICIO BORDIN, PAOLO RANIERI, KARMACHINA, ALBERTO MODIGNANI, AUGUSTA DESIRE GRECCHI, PAOLO BAZZANI, THOMAS MCEVOY Video Website http://www.rinostefanotagliafierro.com/beauty.html

People no longer have to buy computers that overserve

A Mac or PC is a superior experience for traditional computing activities, at least according to traditional measurements like speed or efficiency, but an iPad is simpler and more approachable, and it does other things as well.

(This, of course, is why Macs aren’t going away. In fact, as Phil Schiller noted at the end of this great Macworld piece marking the Mac’s 30-year anniversary, the iPad has freed the Mac to focus even more on power users going forward.)

Ultimately, it is the iPad that is in fact general purpose. It does lots of things in an approachable way, albeit not as well as something that is built specifically for the task at hand. The Mac or PC, on the other hand, is a specialized device, best compared to the grand piano in the living room:2 unrivaled in the hands of a master, and increasingly ignored by everyone else.

So writes Ben Thompson in The General-Purpose iPad and the Specialist Mac. I agree. For a long time, one of the debates was whether an iPad was just a consumption device. While I think it's silly to argue that you can't create on your iPad, I do largely use it for consumption purposes. I'd much rather do many things on my desktop or laptop than my iPad: write, build spreadsheets, wireframe, create presentations, edit video.

But there are plenty of activities which the iPad and iPhone are far better devices for the job because they are portable, light, sensitive to touch, and, not to be underestimated, always on (while I leave my laptop on most of the time, it still takes longer to wake it up and get it going than my iPad or iPhone). Browsing web pages. Reading books. Reading my email, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. Messaging.

For some activities, the interaction method of finger on screen is both more intimate and simpler. For example, dragging my finger across the screen to adjust brightness of photos in Snapseed is more pleasurable than taking my mouse and finding a tiny slider handle with my cursor and then moving it in tiny increments. Double tapping and having mobile Safari zoom a column of content on the web is wonderful, I wish I could do that on my laptop.

It's clear that for many years, my desktop and laptop have been too much computer for many jobs. For many people, all they needed a desktop or laptop for was reading email, surfing the web, listening to music, or watching streaming video. For those tasks, a desktop or laptop computer overserved their needs, but those were the only types of computers we had so we used it as such.

Now that the world has more choices in computing devices for the job, many are choosing a tool that doesn't overserve, and that is more often than not an iPad or smartphone. For the average household, those are much cheaper to purchase than a laptop or desktop.

I still love sitting down in front of a giant monitor hooked up to my old Mac Pro in my office at home, but the sales figures don't lie. That's now the minority.