• As I See It: The Power Of Pizza

  September 11, 2017 Victor Rozek

  When you become the richest man in the world, if only for a few hours by virtue of stock market fluctuations, you nonetheless acquire an additional layer of gravitas. Suddenly, everything you say or do has added significance. Small actions are credited with great meaning. The trivial becomes transcendent.

  Which is probably why, the day after the New York Times announced that Jeff Bezos had toppled Bill Gates from his golden throne as the world’s richest man, the usually sober Business Insider gushed about his managerial prowess. The article appeared under the preposterous headline: “The ‘two pizza rule’ is a …

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• As I See It: So You’re Thinking About Retirement

  August 28, 2017 Victor Rozek

  If your IT career spanned the AS/400 years, you may be of an age when you are considering retirement. Certainly, if both your health and your bank account are reasonably robust, retirement can be as sweetly anticipated as a tax refund. The prospect of leisure and travel, or just putting a halt to the daily grind, exerts a strong gravitational pull. But reality is like the spellchecker of the imagination: it corrects misconceptions.

  We are, in fact, absurdly encouraged to view decline as the Golden Years. Retirement has long been romanticized by everyone from the AARP, to financial planners, to …

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• As I See It: Those Accursed Millennials

  July 24, 2017 Victor Rozek

  Kids!

  I don’t know what’s wrong with these kids today!

  Kids!

  Who can understand anything they say?

  Kids!

  They are disobedient, disrespectful oafs!

  Noisy, crazy, dirty, lazy, loafers!

  While we’re on the subject:

  Kids!

  You can talk and talk till your face is blue!

  Kids!

  But they still just do what they want to do!

  Why can’t they be like we were,

  Perfect in every way?

  What’s the matter with kids today?

  That little ditty was sung by the wonderfully snarky Paul Lynde from the 1960s musical Bye Bye Birdie, still performed in high schools around the country. Beyond …

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• As I See It: Wake Up Call

  May 22, 2017 Victor Rozek

  Maybe she just didn’t want to carry a purse. Or maybe she liked to wear tight jeans and having anything in the pockets spoiled the look. Or maybe she wanted to keep it handy, or thought it was trendy or “dope.” But whatever the reason she, like a growing number of women, carried her cell phone tucked into her bra.

  She was 39 at the time of diagnosis, a Chinese woman, non-meat eater, with no genetic or lifestyle predispositions to cancer. Under the circumstances, what her doctor found was highly unusual: multiple primary tumors in her right breast. It was …

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• As I See It: In the Land Of Lost Listeners

  April 24, 2017 Victor Rozek

  “I should sell my tongue and buy a thousand ears.” – Rumi

  Rumi would not do well on social media. Not much listening going on there. We are a culture of speakers. From the advent of email through the current suite of thumb-enabled apps, all are designed to amplify the mouth. From sea to shining sea, we have become one long declarative sentence fragment.

  Let’s face it: Most of us speak because we want to be heard. Only a priest in a confessional begins a conversation in anticipation of listening to someone blather on about their dysfunctions. But that’s the …

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• As I See It: The Politics of Self-Disclosure

  March 27, 2017 Victor Rozek

  It is quite possible that two of the most unexpected and consequential events of recent times had their origins with a student in Warsaw. Perhaps if he hadn’t been accepted to Cambridge University, the fates of two nations would not now be spinning off in unforeseen directions. But he was, and in Cambridge, the ripples of his fascination with psychometrics grew into an unintended tsunami. His name is Michal Kosinski, and there are a lot of people angry with him.

  Psychometrics is the reality-based branch of psychology, at least in so far as it is data-driven. It is rooted in …

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