This summer my kids were not going to watch too much YouTube. But, things changed. My eleven-year-old got into Moriah Elizabeth, a YouTuber into decorating and painting. Her channel is good. It’s interesting and entertaining. It, for me, avoids the overreactions and clickbait present on YouTube. She’s super positive and if not teaching kids how to be creative at least she shows them that it’s okay to mess up, laugh it off, and try again.
She wrote a book, Create this Book where each page is a prompt to draw only with polka dots, or draw a structure, or draw something without lifting your pencil from the page. We bought it. It’s fun. We do a page a day and laugh at or admire our drawings after.
This is to say that not all screen time is equal. But it’s easy to count and present equally. Apple offers a Sunday notification that your screen time was higher/lower than last week. That’s not really helpful. It would be like if a refrigerator displayed the calories consumed but not what exactly someone ate.
It also happens, says Betsey Stevenson, at the macro level during each jobs report. There’s the unemployment number and the initial response is that more workers are better. However it kinda depends on the timescale.
“When we see the ‘quits’ numbers really high that seems bad. In the short run we’re going to see fewer jobs. But it’s actually an optimistic time.” – @BetseyStevenson The Ezra Klein Show
People tend to quit their jobs when times are good and the next job is immediate. As people move about in the economy it follows that wherever they land will probably be a better fit, a win-win for everyone. But that’s hard to quantify.
One way to flip this problem is to restructure the counts. Basketball coach Todd Golden will redraw the lines on a basketball court. If a player shoots from inside the arc it’s worth one point. Shots outside the arch are worth four. That’s clever counting. Restructuring the way a player perceives the points is a way to find the ‘good’ numbers.
The Waiter's Pad 