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anonymous

Hang The Pirates - But Start With The Movie Moguls And Record Execs - 0 views

blogs.canoe.ca/...-movie-moguls-and-record-execs

shared by anonymous on 30 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 30 Jan 12
     
    The first list is the membership of Edison's MPPC cross-licensing trust group: Biograph, American Vitagraph Company, Selig Polyscope Company, Lubin, American Star Films, American Pathe Pictures, Essanay Studios, and Kalem Company. Those companies ruled the motion picture world 100 years ago. How many of them exist now? How many of their names even ring a bell except in some antique, ghostly corner of our brains? Now here's a list of the "pirate" film companies that were formed by the "outlaws" who fled to California to escape the legal constraints of Thomas Edison back in the eastern U.S.: 20th Century-Fox, Paramount Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Universal Studios (successor company to Laemmle's IMP) and Warner Bros.
anonymous

What Your Culture Really Says - 0 views

blog.prettylittlestatemachine.com/...what-your-culture-really-says

culture politics

shared by anonymous on 21 Mar 13 - Cached
  • The monied, celebrated, nuevo-social, 1% poster children of startup life spread the mythology of their cushy jobs, 20% time, and self-empowerment as a thinly-veiled recruiting tactic in the war for talent against internet giants. The materialistic, viral nature of these campaigns have redefined how we think about culture, replacing meaningful critique with symbols of privilege. The word “culture” has become a signifier of superficial company assets rather than an ongoing practice of examination and self-reflection.
  • Culture is not about the furniture in your office. It is not about how much time you have to spend on feel-good projects. It is not about catered food, expensive social outings, internal chat tools, your ability to travel all over the world, or your never-ending self-congratulation.
  • Culture is about power dynamics, unspoken priorities and beliefs, mythologies, conflicts, enforcement of social norms, creation of in/out groups and distribution of wealth and control inside companies. Culture is usually ugly.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • What your culture might actually be saying is… We have implemented a loosely coordinated social policy to ensure homogeneity in our workforce. We are able to reject qualified, diverse candidates on the grounds that they “aren’t a culture fit” while not having to examine what that means - and it might mean that we’re all white, mostly male, mostly college-educated, mostly young/unmarried, mostly binge drinkers, mostly from a similar work background. We tend to hire within our employees’ friend and social groups. Because everyone we work with is a great culture fit, which is code for “able to fit in without friction,” we are all friends and have an unhealthy blur between social and work life. Because everyone is a “great culture fit,” we don’t have to acknowledge employee alienation and friction between individuals or groups. The desire to continue being a “culture fit” means it is harder for employees to raise meaningful critique and criticism of the culture itself.
  • What your culture might actually be saying is… We have a collective post-traumatic stress reaction to previous workplaces that had hostile, unnecessary, unproductive and authoritarian meetings. We tend to avoid projects and initiatives that require strict coordination across the company. We might have difficulty meeting the expectations of enterprise companies and do better selling to startups organized like us. We are heavily invested in being rebels against traditional corporate culture. Because we communicate largely asynchronously and through chat, it is easy to mentally dehumanize teammates and form silos around functional groups with different communications practices or business functions.
  • What your culture might actually be saying is… Our employees must be treated as spoiled, coddled children that cannot perform their own administrative functions. We have a team of primarily women supporting the eating, drinking, management and social functions of a primarily male workforce whose output is considered more valuable. We struggle to hire women in non-administrative positions and most gender diversity in our company is centralized in social and admin work. Because our office has more amenities than home life, our employees work much longer hours and we are able to extract more value from them for the same paycheck. The environment reinforces the cultural belief that work is a pleasant dream and can help us distract or bribe from deeper issues in the organization.
  • What your culture might actually be saying is… We have enough venture funding to pay people to work on non-core parts of the business. We are not under that much pressure to make money. The normal work of the business is not sufficiently rewarding so we bribe employees with pet projects. We’re not entirely sure what our business objectives and vision are, so we are trying to discover it by letting employee passions take root. We have a really hard time developing work that takes more than a few people to release. We have lots of unfinished but valuable projects that get left behind due to shifts in focus, lack of concentrated effort, and inability to organize sufficient resources to bring projects to completion.
  • What your culture might actually be saying is… Management decisions are siloed at the very top layers of management, kept so close to the chest they appear not to exist at all. The lack of visibility into investor demands, financial affairs, HR issues, etc. provides an abstraction layer between employees and real management, which we pretend doesn’t exist. We don’t have an explicit power structure, which makes it easier for the unspoken power dynamics in the company to play out without investigation or criticism.
  • What your culture might actually be saying is… We fool ourselves into thinking we have a better work/life balance when really people take even less vacation than they would when they had a vacation policy. Social pressure and addiction to work has replaced policy as a regulator of vacation time.
  • What your culture might actually be saying is… Features are the most important function of our business. We lack processes for surfacing and addressing technical debt. We have systemic infrastructure problems but they are not relevant because we are more focused on short-term adoption than long-term reliability. We prioritize fast visible progress, even if it is trivial, over longer and more meaningful projects. Productivity is measured more by lines of code than the value of that code. Pretty things are more important than useful things.
  • Talk to your company about culture. Talk to other companies about culture. Stop mistaking symbology and VC spoils for culture. Be honest with yourself, and with each other. Otherwise, your culture will kill you softly with its song, and you won’t even notice. But hey, you have a beer keg in the office.
  • anonymous on 21 Mar 13
     
    "Toxic lies about culture are afoot in Silicon Valley. They spread too fast as we take our bubble money and designer Powerpoints to drinkups, conferences and meetups all over the world, flying premium economy, ad nauseam. Well-intentioned darlings south of Market wax poetic on distributed teams, office perks, work/life balance, passion, "shipping", "iteration," "freedom". A world of startup privilege hides blithely unexamined underneath an insipid, self-reinforcing banner of meritocracy and funding. An economic and class-based revolt of programmers against traditional power structures within organizations manifests itself as an (ostensively) radical re-imagining of work life. But really, you should meet the new boss. Hint: he's the same as the old boss."
anonymous

A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100 - 1 views

www.ribbonfarm.com/...f-the-corporation-1600-to-2100

economics predictions longnow

shared by anonymous on 23 Jun 11 - Cached
  • In its 400+ year history, the corporation has achieved extraordinary things, cutting around-the-world travel time from years to less than a day, putting a computer on every desk, a toilet in every home (nearly) and a cellphone within reach of every human.  It even put a man on the Moon and kinda-sorta cured AIDS.
  • The Age of Corporations is coming to an end. The traditional corporation won’t vanish, but it will cease to be the center of gravity of economic life in another generation or two.  They will live on as religious institutions do today, as weakened ghosts of more vital institutions from centuries ago.
  • this post is mostly woven around ideas drawn from five books that provide appropriate fuel for this business-first frame. I will be citing, quoting and otherwise indirectly using these books over several future posts
  • ...73 more annotations...
  • For a long time, I was misled by the fact that 90% of the available books frame globalization and the emergence of modernity in terms of the nation-state as the fundamental unit of analysis, with politics as the fundamental area of human activity that shapes things.
  • But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve been pulled towards a business-first perspective on modernity and globalization.
  • The human world, like physics, can be reduced to four fundamental forces: culture, politics, war and business.
  • Culture is the most mysterious, illegible and powerful force.
  • But one quality makes gravity dominate at large space-time scales: gravity affects all masses and is always attractive, never repulsive.  So despite its weakness, it dominates things at sufficiently large scales. I don’t want to stretch the metaphor too far, but something similar holds true of business.
  • On the scale of days or weeks, culture, politics and war matter a lot more in shaping our daily lives.
  • Business though, as an expression of the force of unidirectional technological evolution, has a destabilizing unidirectional effect. It is technology, acting through business and Schumpeterian creative-destruction, that drives monotonic, historicist change, for good or bad. Business is the locus where the non-human force of technological change sneaks into the human sphere.
  • Culture is suspicious of technology. Politics is mostly indifferent to and above it. War-making uses it, but maintains an arms-length separation.
  • Business? It gets into bed with it. It is sort of vaguely plausible that you could switch artists, politicians and generals around with their peers from another age and still expect them to function. But there is no meaningful way for a businessman from (say) 2000 BC to comprehend what Mark Zuckerberg does, let alone take over for him. Too much magical technological water has flowed under the bridge.
  • It is business that creates the world of magic, not technology itself. And the story of business in the last 400 years is the story of the corporate form.
  • There are some who treat corporate forms as yet another technology (in this case a technology of people-management), but despite the trappings of scientific foundations (usually in psychology) and engineering synthesis (we speak of organizational “design”), the corporate form is not a technology.  It is the consequence of a social contract like the one that anchors nationhood. It is a codified bundle of quasi-religious beliefs externalized into an animate form that seeks to preserve itself like any other living creature.
  • What was new was the idea of a publicly traded joint-stock corporation, an entity with rights similar to those of states and individuals, with limited liability and significant autonomy
  • two important points about this evolution of corporations.
  • The first point is that the corporate form was born in the era of Mercantilism, the economic ideology that (zero-sum) control of land is the foundation of all economic power.
  • In politics, Mercantilism led to balance-of-power models.
  • In business, once the Age of Exploration (the 16th century) opened up the world, it led to mercantilist corporations focused on trade
  • The forces of radical technological change — the Industrial Revolution — did not seriously kick until after nearly 200 years of corporate evolution (1600-1800) in a mercantilist mold.
  • Smith was both the prophet of doom for the Mercantilist corporation, and the herald of what came to replace it: the Scumpeterian corporation.
  • The corporate form therefore spent almost 200 years — nearly half of its life to date — being shaped by Mercantilist thinking, a fundamentally zero-sum way of viewing the world.
  • It was not until after the American Civil War and the Gilded Age that businesses fundamentally reorganized around (as we will see) time instead of space, which led, as we will see, to a central role for ideas and therefore the innovation function.
  • The Black Hills Gold Rush of the 1870s, the focus of the Deadwood saga, was in a way the last hurrah of Mercantilist thinking. William Randolph Hearst, the son of gold mining mogul George Hearst who took over Deadwood in the 1870s, made his name with newspapers. The baton had formally been passed from mercantilists to schumpeterians.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 23 Jun 11
       
      So, Mercantilism was about colonizing space. Corporatism is about colonizing time. This is a pretty useful (though arguably too-reductionist) way to latch on to the underpinning of later thoughts.
  • This divide between the two models can be placed at around 1800, the nominal start date of the Industrial Revolution, as the ideas of Renaissance Science met the energy of coal to create a cocktail that would allow corporations to colonize time.
  • The second thing to understand about the evolution of the corporation is that the apogee of power did not coincide with the apogee of reach.
  • for America, corporations employed less than 20% of the population in 1780, and over 80% in 1980, and have been declining since
  • Certainly corporations today seem far more powerful than those of the 1700s, but the point is that the form is much weaker today, even though it has organized more of our lives. This is roughly the same as the distinction between fertility of women and population growth: the peak in fertility (a per-capita number) and peak in population growth rates (an aggregate) behave differently.
  • a useful 3-phase model of the history of the corporation: the Mercantilist/Smithian era from 1600-1800, the Industrial/Schumpeterian era from 1800 – 2000 and finally, the era we are entering, which I will dub the Information/Coasean era
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 23 Jun 11
       
      I think it would be useful to map these eras against the backdrop of my previously established Generational timeline (as well as the StratFor 50-year cycle breakdown) in order to see if there are any self-supporting model elements.
  • By a happy accident, there is a major economist whose ideas help fingerprint the economic contours of our world: Ronald Coase.
  • To a large extent, the history of the first 200 years of corporate evolution is the history of the East India Company. And despite its name and nation of origin, to think of it as a corporation that helped Britain rule India is to entirely misunderstand the nature of the beast.
  • Two images hint at its actual globe-straddling, 10x-Walmart influence: the image of the Boston Tea Partiers dumping crates of tea into the sea during the American struggle for independence, and the image of smoky opium dens in China. One image symbolizes the rise of a new empire. The other marks the decline of an old one.
  • At a broader level, the EIC managed to balance an unbalanced trade equation between Europe and Asia whose solution had eluded even the Roman empire.
  • For this scheme to work, three foreground things and one background thing had to happen: the corporation had to effectively take over Bengal (and eventually all of India), Hong Kong (and eventually, all of China, indirectly) and England.
  • The background development was simpler. England had to take over the oceans and ensure the safe operations of the EIC.
  • eventually, as the threat from the Dutch was tamed, it became clear that the company actually had more firepower at its disposal than most of the nation-states it was dealing with. The realization led to the first big domino falling, in the corporate colonization of India, at the battle of Plassey.
  • The EIC was the original too-big-to-fail corporation. The EIC was the beneficiary of the original Big Bailout. Before there was TARP, there was the Tea Act of 1773 and the Pitt India Act of 1783. The former was a failed attempt to rein in the EIC, which cost Britain the American Colonies.  The latter created the British Raj as Britain doubled down in the east to recover from its losses in the west. An invisible thread connects the histories of India and America at this point. Lord Cornwallis, the loser at the Siege of Yorktown in 1781 during the revolutionary war, became the second Governor General of India in 1786.
  • But these events were set in motion over 30 years earlier, in the 1750s. There was no need for backroom subterfuge.  It was all out in the open because the corporation was such a new beast, nobody really understood the dangers it represented.
  • there was nothing preventing its officers like Clive from simultaneously holding political appointments that legitimized conflicts of interest. If you thought it was bad enough that Dick Cheney used to work for Halliburton before he took office, imagine if he’d worked there while in office, with legitimate authority to use his government power to favor his corporate employer and make as much money on the side as he wanted, and call in the Army and Navy to enforce his will. That picture gives you an idea of the position Robert Clive found himself in, in 1757.
  • The East India bubble was a turning point.
  • Over the next 70 years, political, military and economic power were gradually separated and modern checks and balances against corporate excess came into being.
  • It is not too much of a stretch to say that for at least a century and a half, England’s foreign policy was a dance in Europe in service of the EIC’s needs on the oceans.
  • Mahan’s book is the essential lens you need to understand the peculiar military conditions in the 17th and 18th centuries that made the birth of the corporation possible.)
  • The 16th century makes a vague sort of sense as the “Age of Exploration,” but it really makes a lot more sense as the startup/first-mover/early-adopter phase of the corporate mercantilism. The period was dominated by the daring pioneer spirit of Spain and Portugal, which together served as the Silicon Valley of Mercantilism. But the maritime business operations of Spain and Portugal turned out to be the MySpace and Friendster of Mercantilism: pioneers who could not capitalize on their early lead.
  • Conventionally, it is understood that the British and the Dutch were the ones who truly took over. But in reality, it was two corporations that took over: the EIC and the VOC (the Dutch East India Company,  Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, founded one year after the EIC) the Facebook and LinkedIn of Mercantile economics respectively. Both were fundamentally more independent of the nation states that had given birth to them than any business entities in history. The EIC more so than the VOC.  Both eventually became complex multi-national beasts.
  • arguably, the doings of the EIC and VOC on the water were more important than the pageantry on land.  Today the invisible web of container shipping serves as the bloodstream of the world. Its foundations were laid by the EIC.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 23 Jun 11
       
      There was an excellent episode of the original Connections series that pointed this out, specifically focusing on the Dutch boats and the direct line to container ships and 747 cargo planes.
  • A new idea began to take its place in the early 19th century: the Schumpeterian corporation that controlled, not trade routes, but time. It added the second of the two essential Druckerian functions to the corporation: innovation.
  • I call this the “most misleading table in the world.”
  • corporations and nations may have been running on Mercantilist logic, but the undercurrent of Schumpeterian growth was taking off in Europe as early as 1500 in the less organized sectors like agriculture. It was only formally recognized and tamed in the early 1800s, but the technology genie had escaped.
  • The action shifted to two huge wildcards in world affairs of the 1800s: the newly-born nation of America and the awakening giant in the east, Russia. Per capita productivity is about efficient use of human time. But time, unlike space, is not a collective and objective dimension of human experience. It is a private and subjective one. Two people cannot own the same piece of land, but they can own the same piece of time.  To own space, you control it by force of arms. To own time is to own attention. To own attention, it must first be freed up, one individual stream of consciousness at a time.
  • The Schumpeterian corporation was about colonizing individual minds. Ideas powered by essentially limitless fossil-fuel energy allowed it to actually pull it off.
  • it is probably reaosonably safe to treat the story of Schumpeterian growth as an essentially American story.
  • In many ways the railroads solved a vastly speeded up version of the problem solved by the EIC: complex coordination across a large area.  Unlike the EIC though, the railroads were built around the telegraph, rather than postal mail, as the communication system. The difference was like the difference between the nervous systems of invertebrates and vertebrates.
  • If the ship sailing the Indian Ocean ferrying tea, textiles, opium and spices was the star of the mercantilist era, the steam engine and steamboat opening up America were the stars of the Schumpeterian era.
  • The primary effect of steam was not that it helped colonize a new land, but that it started the colonization of time. First, social time was colonized. The anarchy of time zones across the vast expanse of America was first tamed by the railroads for the narrow purpose of maintaining train schedules, but ultimately, the tools that served to coordinate train schedules: the mechanical clock and time zones, served to colonize human minds.  An exhibit I saw recently at the Union Pacific Railroad Museum in Omaha clearly illustrates this crucial fragment of history:
  • For all its sophistication, the technology of sail was mostly a very-refined craft, not an engineering discipline based on science.
  • Steam power though was a scientific and engineering invention.
  • Scientific principles about gases, heat, thermodynamics and energy applied to practical ends, resulting in new artifacts. The disempowerment of craftsmen would continue through the Schumpeterian age, until Fredrick Taylor found ways to completely strip mine all craft out of the minds of craftsmen, and put it into machines and the minds of managers.
  • It sounds awful when I put it that way, and it was, in human terms, but there is no denying that the process was mostly inevitable and that the result was vastly better products.
  • The Schumpeterian corporation did to business what the doctrine of Blitzkrieg would do to warfare in 1939: move humans at the speed of technology instead of moving technology at the speed of humans.
  • Blitzeconomics allowed the global economy to roar ahead at 8% annual growth rates instead of the theoretical 0% average across the world for Mercantilist zero-sum economics. “Progress” had begun.
  • Two phrases were invented to name the phenomenon: productivity meant shrinking autonomously-owned time. Increased standard of living through time-saving devices became code for the fact that the “freed up” time through “labor saving” devices was actually the de facto property of corporations. It was a Faustian bargain.
  • Many people misunderstood the fundamental nature of Schumpeterian growth as being fueled by ideas rather than time. Ideas fueled by energy can free up time which can then partly be used to create more ideas to free up more time. It is a positive feedback cycle,  but with a limit. The fundamental scarce resource is time. There is only one Earth worth of space to colonize. Only one fossil-fuel store of energy to dig out. Only 24 hours per person per day to turn into capitive attention.
  • Then the Internet happened, and we discovered the ability to mine time as fast as it could be discovered in hidden pockets of attention. And we discovered limits. And suddenly a new peak started to loom: Peak Attention.
  • There is certainly plenty of energy all around (the Sun and the wind, to name two sources), but oil represents a particularly high-value kind. Attention behaves the same way.
  • Take an average housewife, the target of much time mining early in the 20th century. It was clear where her attention was directed. Laundry, cooking, walking to the well for water, cleaning, were all obvious attention sinks. Washing machines, kitchen appliances, plumbing and vacuum cleaners helped free up a lot of that attention, which was then immediately directed (as corporate-captive attention) to magazines and television.
  • The point isn’t that we are running out of attention. We are running out of the equivalent of oil: high-energy-concentration pockets of easily mined fuel.
  • There is a lot more money to be made in replacing hand-washing time with washing-machine plus magazine time, than there is to be found in replacing one hour of TV with a different hour of TV.
  • . To get to Clay Shirky’s hypothetical notion of cognitive surplus, we need Alternative Attention sources. To put it in terms of per-capita productivity gains, we hit a plateau.
  • When Asia hits Peak Attention (America is already past it, I believe), absolute size, rather than big productivity differentials, will again define the game, and the center of gravity of economic activity will shift to Asia.
  • Once again, it is the oceans, rather than land, that will become the theater for the next act of the human drama. While American lifestyle designers are fleeing to Bali, much bigger things are afoot in the region. And when that shift happens, the Schumpeterian corporation, the oil rig of human attention, will start to decline at an accelerating rate. Lifestyle businesses and other oddball contraptions — the solar panels and wind farms of attention economics — will start to take over.
  • It will be the dawn of the age of Coasean growth.
  • Coasean growth is not measured in terms of national GDP growth. That’s a Smithian/Mercantilist measure of growth. It is also not measured in terms of 8% returns on the global stock market.  That is a Schumpeterian growth measure. For that model of growth to continue would be a case of civilizational cancer (“growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell” as Edward Abbey put it).
  • Coasean growth is fundamentally not measured in aggregate terms at all. It is measured in individual terms. An individual’s income and productivity may both actually decline, with net growth in a Coasean sense.
  • How do we measure Coasean growth? I have no idea. I am open to suggestions. All I know is that the metric will need to be hyper-personalized and relative to individuals rather than countries, corporations or the global economy. There will be a meaningful notion of Venkat’s rate of Coasean growth, but no equivalent for larger entities.
  • The fundamental scarce resource that Coasean growth discovers and colonizes is neither space, nor time. It is perspective.
  • anonymous on 23 Jun 11
     
    This is a lay friendly, amateur, mental exploration of the Corporation. It's also utterly absorbing and comes with the usual collection of caveats that we amateurs are accustomed to rattling off when we dunk ourselves into issues much bigger than ourselves. Thanks to BoingBoing, via Futurismic, for the pointer: http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/23/a-brief-history-of-t.html http://futurismic.com/2011/06/22/a-brief-history-of-the-corporation-1600-to-2100/ "The year was 1772, exactly 239 years ago today, the apogee of power for the corporation as a business construct. The company was the British East India company (EIC). The bubble that burst was the East India Bubble. Between the founding of the EIC in 1600 and the post-subprime world of 2011, the idea of the corporation was born, matured, over-extended, reined-in, refined, patched, updated, over-extended again, propped-up and finally widely declared to be obsolete. Between 2011 and 2100, it will decline - hopefully gracefully - into a well-behaved retiree on the economic scene."
anonymous

The Crisis of the Middle Class and American Power - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...iddle-class-and-american-power

shared by anonymous on 07 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • At the same time, I would agree that the United States faces a potentially significant but longer-term geopolitical problem deriving from economic trends.
  • The threat to the United States is the persistent decline in the middle class' standard of living, a problem that is reshaping the social order that has been in place since World War II and that, if it continues, poses a threat to American power.
  • The median household income of Americans in 2011 was $49,103. Adjusted for inflation, the median income is just below what it was in 1989 and is $4,000 less than it was in 2000.
  • ...49 more annotations...
  • It is also vital to consider not the difference between 1990 and 2011, but the difference between the 1950s and 1960s and the 21st century. This is where the difference in the meaning of middle class becomes most apparent.
  • In the 1950s and 1960s, the median income allowed you to live with a single earner -- normally the husband, with the wife typically working as homemaker -- and roughly three children. It permitted the purchase of modest tract housing, one late model car and an older one. It allowed a driving vacation somewhere and, with care, some savings as well. I know this because my family was lower-middle class, and this is how we lived, and I know many others in my generation who had the same background. It was not an easy life and many luxuries were denied us, but it wasn't a bad life at all.
  • Someone earning the median income today might just pull this off, but it wouldn't be easy. Assuming that he did not have college loans to pay off but did have two car loans to pay totaling $700 a month, and that he could buy food, clothing and cover his utilities for $1,200 a month, he would have $1,400 a month for mortgage, real estate taxes and insurance, plus some funds for fixing the air conditioner and dishwasher.
  • At a 5 percent mortgage rate, that would allow him to buy a house in the $200,000 range. He would get a refund back on his taxes from deductions but that would go to pay credit card bills he had from Christmas presents and emergencies. It could be done, but not easily and with great difficulty in major metropolitan areas. And if his employer didn't cover health insurance, that $4,000-5,000 for three or four people would severely limit his expenses. And of course, he would have to have $20,000-40,000 for a down payment and closing costs on his home. There would be little else left over for a week at the seashore with the kids.
  • And this is for the median. Those below him -- half of all households -- would be shut out of what is considered middle-class life, with the house, the car and the other associated amenities.
  • I should pause and mention that this was one of the fundamental causes of the 2007-2008 subprime lending crisis. People below the median took out loans with deferred interest with the expectation that their incomes would continue the rise that was traditional since World War II.
  • The caricature of the borrower as irresponsible misses the point. The expectation of rising real incomes was built into the American culture, and many assumed based on that that the rise would resume in five years. When it didn't they were trapped, but given history, they were not making an irresponsible assumption.
  • American history was always filled with the assumption that upward mobility was possible. The Midwest and West opened land that could be exploited, and the massive industrialization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries opened opportunities. There was a systemic expectation of upward mobility built into American culture and reality.
  • The Great Depression was a shock to the system, and it wasn't solved by the New Deal, nor even by World War II alone. The next drive for upward mobility came from post-war programs for veterans, of whom there were more than 10 million. These programs were instrumental in creating post-industrial America, by creating a class of suburban professionals. There were three programs that were critical:
  • The GI Bill, which allowed veterans to go to college after the war, becoming professionals frequently several notches above their parents.
  • The part of the GI Bill that provided federally guaranteed mortgages to veterans, allowing low and no down payment mortgages and low interest rates to graduates of publicly funded universities.
  • The federally funded Interstate Highway System, which made access to land close to but outside of cities easier, enabling both the dispersal of populations on inexpensive land (which made single-family houses possible) and, later, the dispersal of business to the suburbs.
  • There were undoubtedly many other things that contributed to this, but these three not only reshaped America but also created a new dimension to the upward mobility that was built into American life from the beginning.
  • there was consensus around the moral propriety of the programs.
  • The subprime fiasco was rooted in the failure to understand that the foundations of middle class life were not under temporary pressure but something more fundamental.
  • the rise of the double-income family corresponded with the decline of the middle class.
  • But there was, I think, the crisis of the modern corporation.
  • Over the course of time, the culture of the corporation diverged from the realities, as corporate productivity lagged behind costs and the corporations became more and more dysfunctional and ultimately unsupportable.
  • In addition, the corporations ceased focusing on doing one thing well and instead became conglomerates, with a management frequently unable to keep up with the complexity of multiple lines of business.
  • Everything was being reinvented. Huge amounts of money, managed by people whose specialty was re-engineering companies, were deployed. The choice was between total failure and radical change. From the point of view of the individual worker, this frequently meant the same thing: unemployment.
  • From the view of the economy, it meant the creation of value whether through breaking up companies, closing some of them or sending jobs overseas. It was designed to increase the total efficiency, and it worked for the most part.
  • This is where the disjuncture occurred. From the point of view of the investor, they had saved the corporation from total meltdown by redesigning it. From the point of view of the workers, some retained the jobs that they would have lost, while others lost the jobs they would have lost anyway. But the important thing is not the subjective bitterness of those who lost their jobs, but something more complex.
  • As the permanent corporate jobs declined, more people were starting over. Some of them were starting over every few years as the agile corporation grew more efficient and needed fewer employees. That meant that if they got new jobs it would not be at the munificent corporate pay rate but at near entry-level rates in the small companies that were now the growth engine.
  • As these companies failed, were bought or shifted direction, they would lose their jobs and start over again. Wages didn't rise for them and for long periods they might be unemployed, never to get a job again in their now obsolete fields, and certainly not working at a company for the next 20 years.
  • The restructuring of inefficient companies did create substantial value, but that value did not flow to the now laid-off workers. Some might flow to the remaining workers, but much of it went to the engineers who restructured the companies and the investors they represented.
  • Statistics reveal that, since 1947 (when the data was first compiled), corporate profits as a percentage of gross domestic product are now at their highest level, while wages as a percentage of GDP are now at their lowest level.
  • It was not a question of making the economy more efficient -- it did do that -- it was a question of where the value accumulated. The upper segment of the wage curve and the investors continued to make money. The middle class divided into a segment that entered the upper-middle class, while another faction sank into the lower-middle class.
  • American society on the whole was never egalitarian. It always accepted that there would be substantial differences in wages and wealth. Indeed, progress was in some ways driven by a desire to emulate the wealthy. There was also the expectation that while others received far more, the entire wealth structure would rise in tandem. It was also understood that, because of skill or luck, others would lose.
  • What we are facing now is a structural shift, in which the middle class' center, not because of laziness or stupidity, is shifting downward in terms of standard of living. It is a structural shift that is rooted in social change (the breakdown of the conventional family) and economic change (the decline of traditional corporations and the creation of corporate agility that places individual workers at a massive disadvantage).
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Jan 14
       
      I would revise: "(breakdown of the contentional family) is too unclear. The 'conventional family' that Friedman notes was very much outlier behavior for most Americans. Having enough money for a wife to stay home was an unprecedented situation in American history.
  • The inherent crisis rests in an increasingly efficient economy and a population that can't consume what is produced because it can't afford the products. This has happened numerous times in history, but the United States, excepting the Great Depression, was the counterexample.
  • In political debates, someone must be blamed. In reality, these processes are beyond even the government's ability to control. On one hand, the traditional corporation was beneficial to the workers until it collapsed under the burden of its costs. On the other hand, the efficiencies created threaten to undermine consumption by weakening the effective demand among half of society.
  • The greatest danger is one that will not be faced for decades but that is lurking out there.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Jan 14
       
      One decade, but not two, if you ask me.
  • The United States was built on the assumption that a rising tide lifts all ships. That has not been the case for the past generation, and there is no indication that this socio-economic reality will change any time soon.
  • That means that a core assumption is at risk. The problem is that social stability has been built around this assumption -- not on the assumption that everyone is owed a living, but the assumption that on the whole, all benefit from growing productivity and efficiency.
  • If we move to a system where half of the country is either stagnant or losing ground while the other half is surging, the social fabric of the United States is at risk, and with it the massive global power the United States has accumulated.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Jan 14
       
      Which is why this is an effective tactic for linking 'evil Socialist' programs to national security.
  • Other superpowers such as Britain or Rome did not have the idea of a perpetually improving condition of the middle class as a core value. The United States does. If it loses that, it loses one of the pillars of its geopolitical power.
  • The left would argue that the solution is for laws to transfer wealth from the rich to the middle class. That would increase consumption but, depending on the scope, would threaten the amount of capital available to investment by the transfer itself and by eliminating incentives to invest. You can't invest what you don't have, and you won't accept the risk of investment if the payoff is transferred away from you.
  • The right will argue that allowing the free market to function will fix the problem.
  • The free market doesn't guarantee social outcomes, merely economic ones.
  • In other words, it may give more efficiency on the whole and grow the economy as a whole, but by itself it doesn't guarantee how wealth is distributed.
  • The left cannot be indifferent to the historical consequences of extreme redistribution of wealth. The right cannot be indifferent to the political consequences of a middle-class life undermined, nor can it be indifferent to half the population's inability to buy the products and services that businesses sell.
  • The most significant actions made by governments tend to be unintentional.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Jan 14
       
      Unintended consequences: A thing that always happens but which politicians are allergic to.
  • The GI Bill was designed to limit unemployment among returning serviceman; it inadvertently created a professional class of college graduates.
  • The VA loan was designed to stimulate the construction industry; it created the basis for suburban home ownership.
  • The Interstate Highway System was meant to move troops rapidly in the event of war; it created a new pattern of land use that was suburbia.
  • The United States has been a fortunate country, with solutions frequently emerging in unexpected ways.
  • It would seem to me that unless the United States gets lucky again, its global dominance is in jeopardy. Considering its history, the United States can expect to get lucky again, but it usually gets lucky when it is frightened.
  • And at this point it isn't frightened but angry, believing that if only its own solutions were employed, this problem and all others would go away.
  • I am arguing that the conventional solutions offered by all sides do not yet grasp the magnitude of the problem -- that the foundation of American society is at risk -- and therefore all sides are content to repeat what has been said before.
  • anonymous on 07 Jan 14
     
    "When I wrote about the crisis of unemployment in Europe, I received a great deal of feedback. Europeans agreed that this is the core problem while Americans argued that the United States has the same problem, asserting that U.S. unemployment is twice as high as the government's official unemployment rate. My counterargument is that unemployment in the United States is not a problem in the same sense that it is in Europe because it does not pose a geopolitical threat. The United States does not face political disintegration from unemployment, whatever the number is. Europe might."
anonymous

Oil and Militancy in the Niger Delta - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...oil-and-militancy-niger-delta

geopolitics africa oil

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 13 - Cached
  • anonymous on 27 Mar 13
     
    "With militancy in the Niger Delta on the rise, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan must convince oil investors to keep their money in Nigeria while retaining the services of Niger Delta militants -- one of his most potent political tools. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta grew from popular protest movements that believed energy companies were exploiting their home region. But militancy then became an extortion method by which the region's political elite could gain a stake in the federal government. Leaders and commanders, including imprisoned former leader Henry Okah, were given political and security leeway to attack energy infrastructure on the condition that they minimize foreign casualties and allow for enough crude oil production to leverage in political negotiations. Okah's former commanders remain in the Niger Delta and, under the auspices of oil pipeline and waterway security contracts, prosper from private and public payoffs. Frequently these leaders are in Abuja managing their relationships with government officials. Abuja will use Okah's 24-year sentence, announced by a South African court March 26, to show that it is trying to contain militancy in the Niger Delta. Jonathan's administration does not want international oil companies invested in the Nigerian oil sector to lose confidence in Nigeria's security environment or to relocate to more stable and secure countries. Increased bunkering, kidnapping and piracy operations have validated concerns of even more militancy in the region. In fact, Italian energy company ENI and Royal Dutch/Shell recently shuttered two pipelines, bringing some 200,000 barrels of oil per day offline."
anonymous

The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nary-science-of-junk-food.html

shared by anonymous on 20 Feb 13 - Cached
  • In the months leading up to the C.E.O. meeting, he was engaged in conversation with a group of food-science experts who were painting an increasingly grim picture of the public’s ability to cope with the industry’s formulations — from the body’s fragile controls on overeating to the hidden power of some processed foods to make people feel hungrier still. It was time, he and a handful of others felt, to warn the C.E.O.’s that their companies may have gone too far in creating and marketing products that posed the greatest health concerns.
  • As he spoke, Mudd clicked through a deck of slides — 114 in all — projected on a large screen behind him. The figures were staggering. More than half of American adults were now considered overweight, with nearly one-quarter of the adult population — 40 million people — clinically defined as obese. Among children, the rates had more than doubled since 1980, and the number of kids considered obese had shot past 12 million. (This was still only 1999; the nation’s obesity rates would climb much higher.) Food manufacturers were now being blamed for the problem from all sides — academia, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society. The secretary of agriculture, over whom the industry had long held sway, had recently called obesity a “national epidemic.”
  • Mudd then did the unthinkable. He drew a connection to the last thing in the world the C.E.O.’s wanted linked to their products: cigarettes.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • “If anyone in the food industry ever doubted there was a slippery slope out there,” Mudd said, “I imagine they are beginning to experience a distinct sliding sensation right about now.”
  • his plan would start off with a small but crucial move: the industry should use the expertise of scientists — its own and others — to gain a deeper understanding of what was driving Americans to overeat. Once this was achieved, the effort could unfold on several fronts.
  • Mudd proposed creating a “code to guide the nutritional aspects of food marketing, especially to children.”
  • “We are saying that the industry should make a sincere effort to be part of the solution,” Mudd concluded. “And that by doing so, we can help to defuse the criticism that’s building against us.”
  • What happened next was not written down. But according to three participants, when Mudd stopped talking, the one C.E.O. whose recent exploits in the grocery store had awed the rest of the industry stood up to speak. His name was Stephen Sanger, and he was also the person — as head of General Mills — who had the most to lose when it came to dealing with obesity. Under his leadership, General Mills had overtaken not just the cereal aisle but other sections of the grocery store. The company’s Yoplait brand had transformed traditional unsweetened breakfast yogurt into a veritable dessert. It now had twice as much sugar per serving as General Mills’ marshmallow cereal Lucky Charms. And yet, because of yogurt’s well-tended image as a wholesome snack, sales of Yoplait were soaring, with annual revenue topping $500 million. Emboldened by the success, the company’s development wing pushed even harder, inventing a Yoplait variation that came in a squeezable tube — perfect for kids. They called it Go-Gurt and rolled it out nationally in the weeks before the C.E.O. meeting. (By year’s end, it would hit $100 million in sales.)
  • “What can I say?” James Behnke told me years later. “It didn’t work. These guys weren’t as receptive as we thought they would be.” Behnke chose his words deliberately. He wanted to be fair. “Sanger was trying to say, ‘Look, we’re not going to screw around with the company jewels here and change the formulations because a bunch of guys in white coats are worried about obesity.’ ”
  • The meeting was remarkable, first, for the insider admissions of guilt. But I was also struck by how prescient the organizers of the sit-down had been. Today, one in three adults is considered clinically obese, along with one in five kids, and 24 million Americans are afflicted by type 2 diabetes, often caused by poor diet, with another 79 million people having pre-diabetes. Even gout, a painful form of arthritis once known as “the rich man’s disease” for its associations with gluttony, now afflicts eight million Americans.
  • anonymous on 20 Feb 13
     
    "On the evening of April 8, 1999, a long line of Town Cars and taxis pulled up to the Minneapolis headquarters of Pillsbury and discharged 11 men who controlled America's largest food companies. Nestlé was in attendance, as were Kraft and Nabisco, General Mills and Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and Mars. Rivals any other day, the C.E.O.'s and company presidents had come together for a rare, private meeting. On the agenda was one item: the emerging obesity epidemic and how to deal with it. While the atmosphere was cordial, the men assembled were hardly friends. Their stature was defined by their skill in fighting one another for what they called "stomach share" - the amount of digestive space that any one company's brand can grab from the competition."
anonymous

How the internet is making us poor - Quartz - 2 views

qz.com/...how-the-internet-made-us-poor

technology unemployment computing

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 13 - Cached
  • Sixty percent of the jobs in the US are information-processing jobs, notes Erik Brynjolfsson, co-author of a recent book about this disruption, Race Against the Machine. It’s safe to assume that almost all of these jobs are aided by machines that perform routine tasks. These machines make some workers more productive. They make others less essential.
  • The turn of the new millennium is when the automation of middle-class information processing tasks really got under way, according to an analysis by the Associated Press based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Between 2000 and 2010, the jobs of 1.1 million secretaries were eliminated, replaced by internet services that made everything from maintaining a calendar to planning trips easier than ever.
  • Economist Andrew McAfee, Brynjolfsson’s co-author, has called these displaced people “routine cognitive workers.” Technology, he says, is now smart enough to automate their often repetitive, programmatic tasks. ”We are in a desperate, serious competition with these machines,” concurs Larry Kotlikoff, a professor of economics at Boston University. “It seems like the machines are taking over all possible jobs.”
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • In the early 1800′s, nine out of ten Americans worked in agriculture—now it’s around 2%. At its peak, about a third of the US population was employed in manufacturing—now it’s less than 10%. How many decades until the figures are similar for the information-processing tasks that typify rich countries’ post-industrial economies?
  • To see how the internet has disproportionately affected the jobs of people who process information, check out the gray bars dipping below the 0% line on the chart, below. (I’ve adapted this chart to show just the types of employment that lost jobs in the US during the great recession. Every other category continued to add jobs or was nearly flat.)
  • Here’s another clue about what’s been going on in the past ten years. “Return on capital” measures the return firms get when they spend money on capital goods like robots, factories, software—anything aside from people. (If this were a graph of return on people hired, it would be called “Return on labor”.)
  • Notice: the only industry where the return on capital is as great as manufacturing is “other industries”—a grab bag which includes all the service and information industries, as well as entertainment, health care and education. In short, you don’t have to be a tech company for investing in technology to be worthwhile.
  • For many years, the question of whether or not spending on information technology (IT) made companies more productive was highly controversial. Many studies found that IT spending either had no effect on productivity or was even counter-productive. But now a clear trend is emerging. More recent studies show that IT—and the organizational changes that go with it—are doing firms, especially multinationals (pdf), a great deal of good.
  • Winner-take-all and the power of capital to exacerbate inequality
  • One thing all our machines have accomplished, and especially the internet, is the ability to reproduce and distribute good work in record time. Barring market distortions like monopolies, the best software, media, business processes and, increasingly, hardware, can be copied and sold seemingly everywhere at once. This benefits “superstars”—the most skilled engineers or content creators. And it benefits the consumer, who can expect a higher average quality of goods.
  • But it can also exacerbate income inequality, says Brynjolfsson. This contributes to a phenomenon called “skill-biased technological [or technical] change.” “The idea is that technology in the past 30 years has tended to favor more skilled and educated workers versus less educated workers,” says Brynjolfsson. “It has been a complement for more skilled workers. It makes their labor more valuable. But for less skilled workers, it makes them less necessary—especially those who do routine, repetitive tasks.”
  • “Certainly the labor market has never been better for very highly-educated workers in the United States, and when I say never, I mean never,” MIT labor economist David Autor told American Public Media’s Marketplace.
  • The other winners in this scenario are anyone who owns capital.
  • As Paul Krugman wrote, “This is an old concern in economics; it’s “capital-biased technological change”, which tends to shift the distribution of income away from workers to the owners of capital.”
  • Computers are more disruptive than, say, the looms smashed by the Luddites, because they are “general-purpose technologies” noted Peter Linert, an economist at University of Californa-Davis.
  • “The spread of computers and the Internet will put jobs in two categories,” said Andreessen. “People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.” It’s a glib remark—but increasingly true.
  • In March 2009, Amazon acquired Kiva Systems, a warehouse robotics and automation company. In partnership with a company called Quiet Logistics, Kiva’s combination of mobile shelving and robots has already automated a warehouse in Andover, Massachusetts.
  • This time it’s fasterHistory is littered with technological transitions. Many of them seemed at the time to threaten mass unemployment of one type of worker or another, whether it was buggy whip makers or, more recently, travel agents. But here’s what’s different about information-processing jobs: The takeover by technology is happening much faster.
  • From 2000 to 2007, in the years leading up to the great recession, GDP and productivity in the US grew faster than at any point since the 1960s, but job creation did not keep pace.
  • Brynjolfsson thinks he knows why: More and more people were doing work aided by software. And during the great recession, employment growth didn’t just slow. As we saw above, in both manufacturing and information processing, the economy shed jobs, even as employment in the service sector and professional fields remained flat.
  • Especially in the past ten years, economists have seen a reversal of what they call “the great compression“—that period from the second world war through the 1970s when, in the US at least, more people were crowded into the ranks of the middle class than ever before.
  • There are many reasons why the economy has reversed this “compression,” transforming into an “hourglass economy” with many fewer workers in the middle class and more at either the high or the low end of the income spectrum.
  • The hourglass represents an income distribution that has been more nearly the norm for most of the history of the US. That it’s coming back should worry anyone who believes that a healthy middle class is an inevitable outcome of economic progress, a mainstay of democracy and a healthy society, or a driver of further economic development.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 27 Mar 13
       
      This is the meaty center. It's what I worry about. The "Middle Class" may just be an anomaly.
  • Indeed, some have argued that as technology aids the gutting of the middle class, it destroys the very market required to sustain it—that we’ll see “less of the type of innovation we associate with Steve Jobs, and more of the type you would find at Goldman Sachs.”
  • So how do we deal with this trend? The possible solutions to the problems of disruption by thinking machines are beyond the scope of this piece. As I’ve mentioned in other pieces published at Quartz, there are plenty of optimists ready to declare that the rise of the machines will ultimately enable higher standards of living, or at least forms of unemployment as foreign to us as “big data scientist” would be to a scribe of the 17th century.
  • But that’s only as long as you’re one of the ones telling machines what to do, not being told by them. And that will require self-teaching, creativity, entrepreneurialism and other traits that may or may not be latent in children, as well as retraining adults who aspire to middle class living. For now, sadly, your safest bet is to be a technologist and/or own capital, and use all this automation to grab a bigger-than-ever share of a pie that continues to expand.
  • anonymous on 27 Mar 13
     
    "Everyone knows the story of how robots replaced humans on the factory floor. But in the broader sweep of automation versus labor, a trend with far greater significance for the middle class-in rich countries, at any rate-has been relatively overlooked: the replacement of knowledge workers with software. One reason for the neglect is that this trend is at most thirty years old, and has become apparent in economic data only in perhaps the past ten years. The first all-in-one commercial microprocessor went on sale in 1971, and like all inventions, it took decades for it to become an ecosystem of technologies pervasive and powerful enough to have a measurable impact on the way we work."
anonymous

Social Is Not A Destination - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...social-is-not-a-destination

shared by anonymous on 02 Jun 13 - Cached
  • For Facebook, your social network sits on the Facebook site and most of the experience is consumed through the Facebook application; for Google+, social is about a type of glue that ties its services together across search, maps, photos, and more.
  • Google+ is now behind your email (it’s in Gmail), your chats (it powers Google hangouts), your calendar (in Google Calendar), your documents (it’s in Google Drive), your pictures (stealing a big functional element of Facebook by offering it in an integrated fashion with Android devices) and your videos (youTube channels are now managed via Google+); It’s there when you comment on a blogspot site or review a business or restaurant on Zagat and Google map.
  • Google+ serves as glue instead of destination, which means that any comparison between Google+ and Facebook is similar to comparing people who love New York with the Empire Empire State Building: One is a group of people, who can do different things based on some invisible association (love of New York) while the other is a destination where those people or other people can gather for a brief period of time before they move on to some other place.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Google+’s approach is much more boring but also much more resistant to long-term changes because it focuses on links between people instead of being a destination.
  • links are also more resilient than destinations: once a series of links has been established, it is harder to undo than trying to switch from one destination to another.
  • While companies like Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo (through its more recent acquisitions, including Tumblr) have been busy building destination sites on which they can display advertising, Google has been using destinations as a driver for what advertising to display next.
  • This kind of inference based on previous patterns sits at the core of what Google+ is about and, interestingly, a Google alumni has founded a company that would fit nicely in that vision: Foursquare, with its recent switch to search seems to be the perfect database of location signals for Google to pick up.
  • anonymous on 02 Jun 13
     
    "Google+ serves as glue instead of destination, which means that any comparison between Google+ and Facebook is similar to comparing people who love New York with the Empire State Building: One is a group of people, who can do different things based on some invisible association (love of New York) while the other is a destination where those people or other people can gather for a brief period of time before they move on to some other place."
anonymous

Companies won't even look at résumés of the long-term unemployed - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...es-of-the-long-term-unemployed

generations companies résumés unemployed

shared by anonymous on 15 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Matthew O’Brien reports on a striking new paper by Rand Ghayad and William Dickens of Northeastern University. The researchers sent out 4,800 fake résumés at random for 600 job openings. What they found is that employers would rather call back someone with no relevant experience who’s only been out of work for a few months than someone with lots of relevant experience who’s been out of work for longer than six months.
  • Here’s what this looks like in chart form:
  • the long-term unemployed are struggling to find work no matter how many job openings pop up.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • there’s some ambiguity about whether companies are discriminating irrationally against the unemployed or whether they have good reason for screening out people who have been out of work for six months or more.
  • Dozens of states have been considering legislation that would make it illegal to discriminate against the long-term unemployed. Some proposals would even allow unsuccessful applicants to sue under the same discrimination laws that apply to race or gender bias.
  • These proposals have plenty of critics. But it’s also unclear whether they would have much impact.
  • The Obama administration, for its part, has proposed a few other ideas, including training programs and tax credits for businesses that hire the long-term unemployed. (The latter were even included in the American Jobs Act that Republicans blocked in Congress.)
  • Yet economists have argued that while these programs might help at the margins, they won’t necessarily bring down the overall unemployment rate. For instance, a company might just hire a subsidized worker over someone else.
  • It’s worth noting, as Matt Yglesias points out here, that long-term unemployment was a major structural problem after the Great Depression too. But as this old essay by Richard Jensen suggests, it took World War II to finally solve the problem: “The war, by removing millions of prime men from the labor market, by restructuring the work process, by subsidizing wages, and by massive retraining, finally gave the private sector the methods and the incentives to rehire the hard-core.” That’s not really an option today, but it underscores a bleak fact about the recession. When the labor market stays weak for years on end, the damage becomes long-lasting — and extremely difficult to reverse.
  • anonymous on 15 Apr 13
     
    "Here's one big reason why America's unemployment crisis may be here to stay. Thanks to the lasting effects of the recession, there are currently 4.7 million workers who have been out of work for at least 27 weeks. And new research suggests that employers will almost never consider hiring them."
anonymous

Eight Silly Data Things Marketing People Believe That Get Them Fired. - 1 views

www.kaushik.net/...data-strategy-metrics-mistakes

analytics google analytics marketing

shared by anonymous on 01 May 13 - No Cached
  • It turns out that Marketers, especially Digital Marketers, make really silly mistakes when it comes to data. Big data. Small data. Any data.
  • two common themes
  • 1. Some absolutely did not use data to do their digital jobs.
  • ...74 more annotations...
  • 2. Many used some data, but they unfortunately used silly data strategies/metrics.
  • Silly not in their eyes, silly in my eyes.
  • A silly metric, I better define it :), is one that distracts you for focusing on business investments that lead to bottom-line impact.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 01 May 13
       
      Within the context of my current project, the bottom-line impact would be increased engagement (in the form of donations, clinical study participation, and blood/fluid donation to scientific research).
  • Eight data things that marketing people believe that get them fired…. 1. Real-time data is life changing. 2. All you need to do is fix the bounce rate. 3. Number of Likes represents social awesomeness. 4. # 1 Search Results Ranking = SEO Success. 5. REDUCE MY CPC! REDUCE MY CPC NOW!! 6. Page views. Give me more page views, more and more and more! 7. Impressions. Go, get me some impressions stat! 8. Demographics and psychographics. That is all I need! Don't care for intent!
  • 1. Real-time data is life changing.
  • A lot of people get fired for this. Sadly not right away, because it takes time to realize how spectacular of a waste of money getting to real-time data was.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 01 May 13
       
      This is some REALLY FUNNY SHIT to me. But I'm a nerd.
  • I want you to say: "I don't want real-time data, I want right-time data. Let's understand the speed of decision making in our company. If we make real-time decisions, let's get real time data. If we make decisions over two days, let's go with that data cycle. If it take ten days to make a decision to change bids on our PPC campaigns, let's go with that data cycle." Right-time.
  • Real-time data is very expensive.
  • It is also very expensive from a decision-making perspective
  • even in the best case scenario of the proverbial pigs flying, they'll obsess about tactical things.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 01 May 13
       
      I get this completely. We get hung up on the tactical and lose sight of the strategic.
  • So shoot for right-time data.
  • That is a cheaper systems/platform/data strategy.
  • (And remember even the most idiotic system in the world now gives you data that is a couple hours old with zero extra investment from you. So when you say real time you are really saying "Nope, two hours is not enough for me!").
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 01 May 13
       
      THIS is probably the best argument for our using Google Analytics and Google Search to collect data instead of paying large costs to firms that will offer questionable results.
  • That is also a way to get people to sync the data analysis (not data puking, sorry I meant data reporting) with the speed at which the company actually makes decisions (data > analyst > manager > director > VP > question back to manager > yells at the analyst > back to director> VP = 6 days).
  • The phrase "real-time data analysis" is an oxymoron.
  • 2. All you need to do is fix the bounce rate.
  • The difference between a KPI and a metric is that the former has a direct line of sight to your bottom-line, while the latter is helpful in diagnosing tactical challenges.
  • Bounce rate is really useful for finding things you suck at.
  • Along the way you also learn how not to stink. Bounce rate goes from 70% to a manageable 30%. Takes three months.
  • Stop obsessing about bounce rate.
  • From the time people land on your site it might take another 12 – 25 pages for them to buy or submit a lead. Focus on all that stuff. The tough stuff. Then you'll make money.
  • Focus on the actual game. Focus on incredible behavior metrics like Pages/Visit, focus on the Visitor Flow report, obsess about Checkout Abandonment Rate, make love to Average Order Size.
  • 3. Number of Likes represents social awesomeness.
  • it does not take a very long time for your Senior Management to figure out how lame the Likes metric is and that it drives 1. Zero value on Facebook and 2. Zero squared economic value or cost savings to the business.
  • many spectacular reasons
  • Here's one… We are looking at two consumer product brands, the tiny company Innocent Drinks and the Goliath called Tide Detergent.
  • Even with 10x the number of Likes on Facebook the giant called Tide has 4x fewer people talking about their brand when compared to the David called Innocent.
  • As no less than three comments mention below, Innocent is 90% owned by Coca Cola. Fooled me!
  • In a massively large company they've carved out an identity uniquely their own. They refuse to be corrupted by Coca Cola's own Facebook strategy of constant self-pimping and product ads masquerading as "updates." As a result pound for pound Innocent's fan engagement on its page is multiple time better than Coca Cola's - even if the latter has many more likes.
  • 4. # 1 Search Results Ranking = SEO Success.
  • Not going to happen.
  • as all decent SEOs will tell you, is that search results are no longer standardized. Rather they are personalized. I might even say, hyper-personalized. Regardless of if you are logged in or not.
  • When I search for "avinash" on Google I might rank #1 in the search results because I'm logged into my Google account, the engine has my search history, my computer IP address, it also has searches by others in my vicinity, local stories right now, and so many other signals. But when you search for "avinash" your first search result might be a unicorn. Because the search engine has determined that the perfect search result for you for the keyword avinash is a unicorn.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 01 May 13
       
      This is crucial to understand. I will be sharing this, at length, with my boss. :)
  • Universal search for example means that personalized results will not only look for information from web pages, they also look for YouTube/Vimoe videos, social listings, images of course, and so on and so forth.
  • Then let's not forget that proportionaly there are very few head searches, your long tail searches will be huge.
  • Oh and remember that no one types a word or two, people use long phrases.
  • There are a ton more reasons obsessing about the rank of a handful of words on the search engine results page (SERP) is a very poor decision.
  • So check your keyword ranking if it pleases you.
  • But don't make it your KPI.
  • For purely SEO, you can use Crawl Rate/Depth, Inbound Links (just good ones) and growth (or lack there of) in your target key phrases as decent starting points.
  • You can graduate to looking at search traffic by site content or types of content you have (it's a great signal your SEO is working).
  • Measuring Visits and Conversions in aggregate first and segmented by keywords (or even key word clusters) will get you on the path to showing real impact.
  • That gives you short term acquisition quality, you can then move to long term quality by focusing on metrics like lifetime value.
  • 5. REDUCE MY CPC! REDUCE MY CPC NOW!!
  • You should judge the success of that showing up by measure if you made money! Did you earn any profit?
  • Friends don't let friends use CPC as a KPI. Unless said friends want the friend fired.
  • 6. Page views. Give me more page views, more and more and more!
  • Content consumption is a horrible metric. It incentivises sub optimal behavior in your employees/agencies.
  • If you are a news site, you can get millions of page views
  • And it will probably get you transient traffic.
  • And what about business impact from all these one night stands ?
  • If you are in the content only business (say my beloved New York Times) a better metric to focus on is Visitor Loyalty
  • If your are in the lead generation business and do the "OMG let's publish a infographic on dancing monkey tricks which will get us a billion page views, even though we have nothing to do with dancing or monkeys or tricks" thing, measure success on the number of leads received and not how "viral" the infographic went and how many reshares it got on Twitter.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 01 May 13
       
      In other words, use that odd-one-off to redirect attention to the source of that one-off. I'll have to ponder that given our different KPI needs (nonprofit, we don't sell anything).
  • Don't obsess about page views.
  • Then measure the metric closest to that. Hopefully some ideas above will help get you promoted.
  • 7. Impressions. Go, get me some impressions stat!
  • My hypothesis is that TV/Radio/Magazines have created this bad habit. We can measure so little, almost next to nothing, that we've brought our immensely shaky GRP metric from TV to digital. Here it's called impressions. Don't buy impressions.
  • Buy engagement. Define what it means first of course .
  • If you are willing to go to clicks, do one better and measure Visits. At least they showed up on your mobile/desktop site.
  • Now if you are a newbie, measure bounce rate. If you have a tiny amount of experience measure Visit Duration. If you are a pro, measure Revenue. If you are an Analysis Ninja, measure Profit.
  • Impressions suck. Profit rocks.
  • If the simple A/B (test/control) experiment demonstrates that delivering display banner ad impressions to the test group delivers increased revenue, buy impressions to your heart's content. I'll only recommend that you repeat the experiment once a quarter.
  • You can buy impressions if you can prove via a simple controlled experiment that when we show impressions we got more engagement/sales and when we don't show impressions we did not get more engagement/sales.
  • But if you won't do the experiment and you use the # of impressions as a measure of success
  • 8. Demographics and psychographics. That is all I need! Don't care for intent!
  • This is not a metric, this is more of a what data you'll use to target your advertising issue.
  • Our primary method of buying advertising and marketing is: "I would like to reach 90 year old grandmas that love knitting, what tv channel should I advertise on." Or they might say: "I would like to reach 18 to 24 year olds with college education who supported Barack Obama for president." And example of demographic and psychographic segments.
  • We use that on very thin ice data, we bought advertising. That was our lot in life.
  • Did you know 50% of of TV viewership is on networks that each have <1% share? Per industry.bnet.com. I dare you to imagine how difficult it is to measure who they are, and how to target them to pimp your shampoo, car, cement.
  • Intent beats demographics and psychographics. Always.
  • if you have advertising money to spend, first spend it all on advertising that provides you intent data.
  • Search has a ton of strong intent. It does not matter if you are a grandma or a 18 year old. If you are on Baidu and you search for the HTC One, you are expressing strong intent. Second, content consumption has intent built in. If I'm reading lots of articles about how to get pregnant, you could show me an ad related to that
  • The first intent is strong, the second one is weaker.
  • There is a lot of intent data on the web. That is our key strength.
  • anonymous on 01 May 13
     
    This is a really great read by Avinash Kaushik at Occam's Razor. Volunmuous highlights follow.
anonymous

When the Worst Performers are the Happiest Employees - At Work - WSJ - 0 views

blogs.wsj.com/...ad-at-their-jobs-and-loving-it

shared by anonymous on 04 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • “Low performers often end up with the easiest jobs because managers don’t ask much of them,” he said, so they’re under less stress and they’re more satisfied with their daily work lives.
  • Meanwhile, dedicated and conscientious workers end up staying at the office late, correcting the work of the low performers, and making sure clients or customers are satisfied. This pattern breeds frustration and disengagement in the high performers—and perhaps ultimately drives them to seek work elsewhere. “They feel stressed and undervalued, and it starts to undermine the high performers’ confidence that the organization is a meritocracy,” said Mr. Murphy.
  • To remedy the situation, managers should speak frankly with high and middle performers, ferreting out what frustrations might potentially send them looking for new opportunities. They should also find out what could motivate them to stick around, he added.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Apr 13
       
      Sadly, this is very hard to do in some environments. To me, it's a matter of metrics and truly understanding your teams. For instance: It could be that buying people tablets for work (with the unspoken nod that it'll be fun to play with) will placate some, but doing so is a political nightmare. Same with almost any fringe item. They're hard to justify and even harder to know if it's well spent money since job satisfaction is in this 'nebulous zone' with little data. But, as I've seen happen, someone really valuable will leave and an org will effectively 'lose' way more productivity than buying tons of tablets would have cost.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • In the remaining 58% of organizations surveyed, high performers were the most engaged, or engagement scores were about equal among the employees. In the rarest cases, Murphy said, the middle performers were the most engaged.  That segment of the workforce—the employees who are neither superstars nor slackers—tends to be ignored by managers, he said.
  • Low performers were also more likely than the other two groups to recommend their company as a “great organization to work for.” And in many cases, they didn’t even realize they were low performers. When asked whether the employees at the company “all live up to the same standards,” low performers were far more likely to agree with the statement than their higher-achieving counterparts.
  • anonymous on 04 Apr 13
     
    "A new study finds that, in 42% of companies, low performers actually report being more engaged - more motivated and more likely to enjoy working at their organization, for example - than middle and high performers do." - Thanks, Erik. Although I don't know why I should *thank* you for this data. :)
anonymous

The Expensive, Diminishing Threat of Somali Piracy - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...minishing-threat-somali-piracy

shared by anonymous on 08 Nov 12 - Cached
  • Many factors have contributed to the decrease in pirate hijackings in 2012.
  • One factor is that shipping companies have begun equipping their ships with more countermeasures, namely armed guards.
  • For several years, commercial ships sailing in the Indian Ocean have used other countermeasures, such as fences, water cannons and adjusted tactics like disabling the ship.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  •  But the widespread deployment of armed guards beginning in 2011 (guards had been used sparingly as far back as 2008) has a very close correlation to the recent decrease in hijackings.
  • government officials also attribute the drop-off in attacks and hijackings to better coordination between foreign naval patrols, which have made the waters off the Somali coast a less permissive environment for pirate operations.
  • With several years of practice, sailors from international missions such as the U.S.-backed Combined Task Force 151 and the EU-backed Atalanta mission as well as from the unilateral missions of China, Russia, Iran and others have had time to study pirate activity and become more efficient at stopping attacks.
  • Effectively patrolling such a large area requires intelligence and the development of a counterpiracy doctrine that includes going after the larger pirate vessels, called mother ships, that extend pirates' range and allow them to operate in rougher seas during the monsoon.
  • Three years ago pirates were largely uncontested, but now they face a more coordinated defense.
  • The armed guards and naval patrols have not eliminated piracy, but they have increased the costs of attacking and seizing a commercial ship. Because pirates are motivated more by profit than by any ideology, a decrease in profitability will deter them from engaging in the practice.
  • The new Somali federal government still lacks the capability to control pirate towns such as Hobyo and Haradheere, and its officials do not appear to want a strong Puntland doing it for them. 
  • In essence, the commercial shippers and naval forces have adopted a siege strategy -- they hope to starve the pirates of resources, forcing them to give up. Somali pirates held about 20 ships at any given time in 2010; they currently hold 11. As the pirates hijack fewer ships, and as armed guards make piracy more dangerous, the entire enterprise is looking less lucrative and appealing.
  • The problem with the siege strategy is that as soon as shipping companies or foreign naval forces let up on the pirates, they will go back to hijacking ships.
  • That means that about 13,000-23,000 ships are paying for armed guards to accompany them through the vulnerable areas, a roughly 10-day trip, at a cost of approximately $60,000 each time. Based on those figures, the total annual cost for shipping companies merely to deploy armed guards on their ships through the Gulf of Aden is between about $800 million and $1.4 billion. The total cost of piracy to the world in 2011, according to the One Earth Future Foundation's estimates, was between $6.6 billion and $6.9 billion. This estimate included $160 million for ransom payments; other preventative measures, such as rerouting ships or using more fuel to maintain higher speeds, made up the rest of the costs. In other words, the cost of preventing piracy off the coast of Somalia is substantially higher than the costs piracy inflicts.
  • The key component of the siege strategy is that it weakens the pirates' control over their land-based sanctuaries. Their power is connected to their revenue, so the decrease in revenue will decrease their power. The shipping companies and foreign navies hope that some other, less disruptive enterprises will eventually take root along Somalia's pirate-heavy coast.
  • The only force that has significantly challenged the pirates on land is the Puntland Maritime Police Force. Located in northeast Somalia, Puntland is much more stable than the south and is virtually independent. The Puntland Maritime Police Force had success in capturing pirates, destroying their staging bases along the beach, cutting off their supply routes and even, supposedly, attempting to seize hijacked vessels from the pirates.
  • Although Mogadishu is unable to control much of its territory, the new government doesn't want regional governments accumulating too much strength. In the end, a strong Puntland may be more of a risk to Mogadishu than pirates. 
  • anonymous on 08 Nov 12
     
    "Piracy off the coast of Somalia has dropped off dramatically in 2012. Successful ship hijackings have decreased from 31 in 2011 (and 49 in 2010) to only four so far in 2012. Attacks against ships have also decreased, falling from 199 reported attacks in the first nine months of 2011 to 70 attacks over the same span in 2012 -- a 65 percent drop. However, diminished activity does not necessarily mean a decrease in the cost of sailing around the Horn of Africa. Somali pirates occupy a unique position, which is right along highly strategic global shipping lanes yet outside the reach of any national power. For international actors, it is politically and militarily easier to try to contain the Somali piracy threat than to eliminate it. But containment comes at a high cost."
anonymous

In Gurgaon, India, Dynamism Meets Dysfunction - 5 views

www.nytimes.com/...09gurgaon.html

shared by anonymous on 10 Jun 11 - Cached
  • Gurgaon, located about 15 miles south of the national capital, New Delhi, would seem to have everything, except consider what it does not have: a functioning citywide sewer or drainage system; reliable electricity or water; and public sidewalks, adequate parking, decent roads or any citywide system of public transportation. Garbage is still regularly tossed in empty lots by the side of the road.
  • how can a new city become an international economic engine without basic public services? How can a huge country flirt with double-digit growth despite widespread corruption, inefficiency and governmental dysfunction?
  • India and China are often considered to be the world’s rising economic powers, yet if China’s growth has been led by the state, India’s growth is often impeded by the state.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 10 Jun 11
       
      Libertarians like to picture the state in a very fixed, binary position in relation to the economy. Further peeking, though, and you see that governments can be broadly pro-business, or anti-business, or both, or directed specificially in one or another sector. The Libertarian persistence that Government = Bad Things is hardly descriptive or useful.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • GURGAON, India
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 10 Jun 11
       
      This would appear to be a wet-dream scenario for Libertarian/Anarchists. Let's see how this author portrays the many facets there most certainly are...
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 14 Jun 11
       
      Only certain types of anarchism allow for large, organized corporations. Recall that the workers' rights movement was largely spurred on by anarchists.
  • In Gurgaon, economic growth is often the product of a private sector improvising to overcome the inadequacies of the government. To compensate for electricity blackouts, Gurgaon’s companies and real estate developers operate massive diesel generators capable of powering small towns. No water? Drill private borewells. No public transportation? Companies employ hundreds of private buses and taxis. Worried about crime? Gurgaon has almost four times as many private security guards as police officers.
  • “You are on your own.”
  • It is experiencing a Gilded Age of nouveau billionaires while it is cleaved by inequality and plagued in some states by poverty and malnutrition levels rivaling sub-Saharan Africa.
  • Gurgaon was widely regarded as an economic wasteland. In 1979, the state of Haryana created Gurgaon by dividing a longstanding political district on the outskirts of New Delhi. One half would revolve around the city of Faridabad, which had an active municipal government, direct rail access to the capital, fertile farmland and a strong industrial base. The other half, Gurgaon, had rocky soil, no local government, no railway link and almost no industrial base. As an economic competition, it seemed an unfair fight. And it has been: Gurgaon has won, easily. Faridabad has struggled to catch India’s modernization wave, while Gurgaon’s disadvantages turned out to be advantages, none more important, initially, than the absence of a districtwide government, which meant less red tape capable of choking development. By 1979, Mr. Singh had taken control of his father-in-law’s real estate company, now known as DLF, at a moment when urban development in India was largely overseen by government agencies. In most states, private developers had little space to operate, but Haryana was an exception. Slowly, Mr. Singh began accumulating 3,500 acres in Gurgaon that he divided into plots and began selling to people unable to afford prices in New Delhi.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 10 Jun 11
       
      This smells a bit like the rise of Hong Kong. Filling out one piece of paper to start a business. This is Libertarian stuff that still resonates with me. That's very good. And then, the inevitable: BUT...
  • Mr. Singh had become the company’s India representative after befriending Jack Welch, then the G.E. chairman. When Mr. Welch decided to outsource some business operations to India, he eventually opened a G.E. office inside a corporate park in Gurgaon in 1997. “When G.E. came in,” Mr. Singh said, “others followed.”
  • Ordinarily, such a wild building boom would have had to hew to a local government master plan. But Gurgaon did not yet have such a plan, nor did it yet have a districtwide municipal government. Instead, Gurgaon was mostly under state control. Developers built the infrastructure inside their projects, while a state agency, the Haryana Urban Development Authority, or HUDA, was supposed to build the infrastructure binding together the city.
  • And that is where the problems arose. HUDA and other state agencies could not keep up with the pace of construction. The absence of a local government had helped Gurgaon become a leader of India’s growth boom. But that absence had also created a dysfunctional city. No one was planning at a macro level; every developer pursued his own agenda as more islands sprouted and state agencies struggled to keep pace with growth.
  • From computerized control rooms, Genpact employees manage 350 private drivers, who travel roughly 60,000 miles every day transporting 10,000 employees.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 10 Jun 11
       
      As an MR reader notes, in the absence of street laws, drivers are incentivized to speed and behave recklessly. This is one hell of a *feature* of little-to-no government? Cool.
  • The city’s residential compounds, especially the luxury developments along golf courses, exist as similarly self-contained entities.
  • “We pretty much carry the entire weight of what you would expect many states to do,” said Pramod Bhasin, who this spring stepped down as Genpact’s chief executive. “The problem — a very big problem — is our public services are always lagging a few years behind, but sometimes a decade behind. Our planning processes sometimes exist only on paper.”
  • Not all of the city’s islands are affluent, either. Gurgaon has an estimated 200,000 migrant workers, the so-called floating population, who work on construction sites or as domestic help.
  • Sheikh Hafizuddin, 38, lives in a slum with a few hundred other migrants less than two miles from Cyber City. No more than half the children in the slum attend school, with the rest spending their days playing on the hard-packed dirt of the settlement, where pigs wallow in an open pit of sewage and garbage. Mr. Hafizuddin pays $30 a month for a tiny room. His landlord runs a power line into the slum for electricity and draws water from a borehole on the property. “Sometimes it works,” Mr. Hafizuddin said. “Sometimes it doesn’t work.”
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 14 Jun 11
       
      This is one of the issues I take with anarcho-capitalism. It works great, so long as you only look at those on top.
  • Meanwhile, with Gurgaon’s understaffed police force outmatched by such a rapidly growing population, some law-and-order responsibilities have been delegated to the private sector. Nearly 12,000 private security guards work in Gurgaon, and many are pressed into directing traffic on major streets.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 10 Jun 11
       
      And where the private world of Gurgaon and everywherelse intersect, who's problem is it?
  • Sudhir Rajpal, the wiry, mustachioed commissioner of the new Municipal Corporation of Gurgaon, has a long to-do list: fix the roads, the sewers, the electrical grid, the drainage, the lack of public buses, the lack of water and the lack of planning. The Municipal Corporation was formed in 2008, and Mr. Rajpal, having assumed the city’s top administrative position a few months ago, has been conducting a listening tour to convince people that government can solve their problems. It is not an easy sell.
  • “The drains are broken and accidents are happening,” shouted one man. “Yet no one is answerable! There are problems and problems. Whatever water we get is dirty, but we have nowhere to complain.”
  • “Every day some agitation is taking place,” he said, shouting above the din of traffic. “People are not satisfied.” If people should be satisfied anywhere in India, Gurgaon should be the place. Average incomes rank among the highest in the country. Property values have jumped sharply since the 1990s. Gurgaon’s malls offer many of the country’s best shops and restaurants, while the city’s most exclusive housing enclaves are among the finest in India. Yet the economic power that growth has delivered to Gurgaon has not been matched by political power. The celebrated middle class created by India’s boom has far less clout at the ballot box than the hundreds of millions of rural peasants struggling to live on $2 a day, given the far larger rural vote, and thus are courted far less by Indian politicians.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Jun 11
       
      Years ago, when I moved to Seattle, I worked with a mess of Indian programmers who complained that, coming from middle to middle-upper class households, their families had a difficult time doing the U.S.-style entrepreneur thing precisely because of (you put it:) byzantine laws and payoffs. I also take the nod that deriving broad trends from this isn't exactly wise. But it was worth noting because I have vague, youthful memories of the classic Capitalist-vs-Marxist quandry: Both can claim that there has never been a *true* example of one or the other. Reality is messy like that; it never provides perfect samples. By the way, thanks so much for joining in with my little bookmark-experiment, Erik. I love the idea of marking up a discussion document in order to probe an issue. I really shoulda gone to college. :)
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 14 Jun 11
       
      Hey, thanks for chunking out longer articles so that I can get through them (once I have time to open the Diigo emails in my inbox). I'm always a little upset about the juicy stuff I may be missing by skipping Buzz for a week or two.
  • anonymous on 10 Jun 11
     
    The anarcho-libertarian's wet dream: a city without a government. "In this city that barely existed two decades ago, there are 26 shopping malls, seven golf courses and luxury shops selling Chanel and Louis Vuitton. Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs shimmer in automobile showrooms. Apartment towers are sprouting like concrete weeds, and a futuristic commercial hub called Cyber City houses many of the world's most respected corporations. "
  • Erik Hanson on 14 Jun 11
     
    India's government is especially byzantine and a truly active inhibitor of commerce and growth. I can understand how, especially to outside companies who don't know the system, there's a real appeal in being able to avoid the sort of daily struggles of someone claiming to be an official coming to your reception and demanding a fine for a law you're not sure even exists. But even if this city weren't rotting out from the inside, I don't think it would necessarily be a lesson applicable to all other governments. Not every piece of rope is a Gordian Knot, as not every government is India's.
anonymous

Forget Anonymous: Evidence Suggests GOP Hacked, Stole 2004 Election - 1 views

www.benzinga.com/...gop-hacked-stole-2004-election

partisan politics

shared by anonymous on 28 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • "A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush," according to Bob Fitrakis, columnist at http://www.freepress.org and co-counsel in the litigation and investigation.
  • Ohio was the battleground state that provided George Bush with the electoral votes needed to win re-election. Had Senator John Kerry won Ohio's electoral votes, he would have been elected instead.
  • SmarTech, a private company, had the ability in the 2004 election to add or subtract votes without anyone knowing they did so.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • The filing today shows how, detailing the computer network system's design structure, including a map of how the data moved from one unit to the next. Right smack in the middle of that structure? Inexplicably, it was SmarTech.
  • A "man in the middle" is not just an accidental happenstance of computing. It is a deliberate computer hacking setup, one where the hacker sits, literally, in the middle of the communication stream, intercepting and (when desired, as in this case) altering the data.
  • Until now, the architectural maps and contracts from the Ohio 2004 election were never made public, which may indicate that the entire system was designed for fraud.
  • SmarTech was part of three computer companies brought in to manage the elections process for Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, a Republican. The other two were Triad and GovTech Solutions. All three companies have extensive ties to the Republican party and Republican causes.
  • Connell was outed as the one who stole the 2004 election by Spoonamore, who, despite being a conservative Republican himself, came forward to blow the whistle on the stolen election scandal. Connell gave a deposition on the matter, but stonewalled. After the deposition, and fearing perjury/obstruction charges for withholding information, Connell expressed an interest in testifying further as to the extent of the scandal.
  • Connell was so scared for his security that he asked for protection from the attorney general, then Attorney General Michael Mukasey. Connell told close friends that he was expecting to get thrown under the bus by the Rove team, because Connell had evidence linking the GOP operative to the scandal and the stolen election, including knowledge of where Rove's missing emails disappeared to.
  • Before he could testify, Connell died in a plane crash.
  • "The 2004 election was stolen. There is absolutely no doubt about it. A 6.7% shift in exit polls does not happen by chance. And, you know, so finally, we have irrefutable confirmation that what we were saying was true and that every piece of the puzzle in the Ohio 2004 election was flawed," Wasserman said.
  • There were three phases of chicanery.
  • First, there was a pre-election period, during which the Secretary of State in Ohio, Ken Blackwell, was also co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio, which is in itself mind-boggling, engaged in all sorts of bureaucratic and legal tricks to cut down on the number of people who could register
  • On Election Day, there was clearly a systematic undersupply of working voting machines in Democratic areas, primarily inner city and student towns, you know, college towns. And the Conyers people found that in some of the most undersupplied places, there were scores of perfectly good voting machines held back and kept in warehouses, you know, and there are many similar stories to this.
  • After Election Day, there is explicit evidence that a company called Triad, which manufactures all of the tabulators, the vote-counting tabulators that were used in Ohio in the last election, was systematically going around from county to county in Ohio and subverting the recount, which was court ordered and which never did take place.
  • anonymous on 28 Jul 11
     
    "Three generations from now, when our great-grandchildren are sitting barefoot in their shanties and wondering how in the hell America turned from the high-point of civilization to a third-world banana republic, they will shake their fists and mutter one name: George Effin' Bush." If this is true, it's incredibly depressing...
anonymous

Relax! You'll Be More Productive - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-youll-be-more-productive.html

shared by anonymous on 04 Mar 13 - Cached
  • More and more of us find ourselves unable to juggle overwhelming demands and maintain a seemingly unsustainable pace.
  • Paradoxically, the best way to get more done may be to spend more time doing less. A new and growing body of multidisciplinary research shows that strategic renewal — including daytime workouts, short afternoon naps, longer sleep hours, more time away from the office and longer, more frequent vacations — boosts productivity, job performance and, of course, health.
  • Taking more time off is counterintuitive for most of us. The idea is also at odds with the prevailing work ethic in most companies, where downtime is typically viewed as time wasted. More than one-third of employees, for example, eat lunch at their desks on a regular basis. More than 50 percent assume they’ll work during their vacations.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • In a study of nearly 400 employees, published last year, researchers found that sleeping too little — defined as less than six hours each night — was one of the best predictors of on-the-job burn-out. A recent Harvard study estimated that sleep deprivation costs American companies $63.2 billion a year in lost productivity.
  • Daytime naps have a similar effect on performance. When night shift air traffic controllers were given 40 minutes to nap — and slept an average of 19 minutes — they performed much better on tests that measured vigilance and reaction time.
  • Longer naps have an even more profound impact than shorter ones. Sara C. Mednick, a sleep researcher at the University of California, Riverside, found that a 60- to 90-minute nap improved memory test results as fully as did eight hours of sleep.
  • The importance of restoration is rooted in our physiology. Human beings aren’t designed to expend energy continuously. Rather, we’re meant to pulse between spending and recovering energy.
  • we sleep in cycles of roughly 90 minutes, moving from light to deep sleep and back out again. They named this pattern the Basic-Rest Activity Cycle or BRAC. A decade later, Professor Kleitman discovered that this cycle recapitulates itself during our waking lives.
  • The difference is that during the day we move from a state of alertness progressively into physiological fatigue approximately every 90 minutes.
  • Our bodies regularly tell us to take a break, but we often override these signals and instead stoke ourselves up with caffeine, sugar and our own emergency reserves — the stress hormones adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol.
  • Working in 90-minute intervals turns out to be a prescription for maximizing productivity. Professor K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues at Florida State University have studied elite performers, including musicians, athletes, actors and chess players. In each of these fields, Dr. Ericsson found that the best performers typically practice in uninterrupted sessions that last no more than 90 minutes.
  • Along the way, I learned that it’s not how long, but how well, you renew that matters most in terms of performance. Even renewal requires practice. The more rapidly and deeply I learned to quiet my mind and relax my body, the more restored I felt afterward. For one of the breaks, I ran. This generated mental and emotional renewal, but also turned out to be a time in which some of my best ideas came to me, unbidden. Writing just four and half hours a day, I completed both books in less than six months and spent my afternoons on less demanding work.
  • Our basic idea is that the energy employees bring to their jobs is far more important in terms of the value of their work than is the number of hours they work. By managing energy more skillfully, it’s possible to get more done, in less time, more sustainably. In a decade, no one has ever chosen to leave the company. Our secret is simple — and generally applicable. When we’re renewing, we’re truly renewing, so when we’re working, we can really work.
  • anonymous on 04 Mar 13
     
    "THINK for a moment about your typical workday. Do you wake up tired? Check your e-mail before you get out of bed? Skip breakfast or grab something on the run that's not particularly nutritious? Rarely get away from your desk for lunch? Run from meeting to meeting with no time in between? Find it nearly impossible to keep up with the volume of e-mail you receive? Leave work later than you'd like, and still feel compelled to check e-mail in the evenings?"
anonymous

The Anti-Walmart: The Secret Sauce of Wegmans Is People - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...254994

shared by anonymous on 10 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Wegmans has also clearly benefited from being based in Rochester, a small but historically prosperous area in upstate New York that was the birthplace of Western Union, Kodak, Xerox, Bausch & Lomb and other companies. Wegmans treats its employees well in part to keep them from gravitating to other firms.
  • anonymous on 10 Jan 13
     
    "Executives say the company is also able to invest in its employees and focus on steady, strategic growth because it is not publicly traded. They said cutting jobs or shipping them overseas was, in part, the product of having to relentlessly please the stock market." Hell of a read with Hope inside.
anonymous

T-Mobile, Wireless Carriers, and the Way to Fight Oligopolies - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...gopoly-business-practices.html

shared by anonymous on 16 Apr 13 - Cached
  • T-Mobile recently broke with longstanding industry norms and abandoned termination fees, sneaky overage charges, and other unfriendly practices.
  • Although T-Mobile’s decision is welcome news for consumers, it doesn’t change the fact that the old extortions remained in place for about fifteen years, and that they remain in place for the vast majority of Americans still trapped in contracts with Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint.
  • If a monopolist did what the wireless carriers did as a group, neither the public nor government would stand for it. For our scrutiny and regulation of monopolists is well established—just ask Microsoft or the old AT&T. But when three or four firms pursue identical practices, we say that the market is “competitive” and everything is fine.
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  • To state the obvious, when companies act in parallel, the consumer is in the same position as if he were dealing with just one big firm. There is, in short, a major blind spot in our nation’s oversight of private power, one that affects both consumers and competition.
  • Barry Lynn’s 2011 book, “Cornered,” which carefully detailed the rising concentration and consolidation of nearly every American industry since the nineteen-eighties.
  • The press confuses oligopoly and monopoly with some regularity. The Atlantic ran a recent infographic titled “The Return of the Monopoly,” describing rising concentration in airlines, grocery sales, music, and other industries.
  • With the exception of Intel in computer chips, none of the industries described, however, was actually a monopoly—all were oligopolies.
  • Back in the mid-century, the Justice Department went after oligopolistic cartels in the tobacco industry and Hollywood with the same vigor it chased Standard Oil, the quintessential monopoly trust.
  • In the late nineteen-seventies, another high point of enforcement, oligopolies were investigated by the Federal Trade Commission, and during that era Richard Posner, then a professor at Stanford Law School, went as far as to argue that when firms maintain the same prices, even without a smoke-filled-room agreement, they ought to be considered members of a price-fixing conspiracy.
  • the United States has nowadays nearly abandoned scrutiny of oligopoly behavior, leaving consumers undefended. That’s a problem, because oligopolies do an awful lot that’s troubling.
  • Consider “parallel exclusion,”
  • efforts by an entire industry to keep out would-be newcomers, a pervasive problem.
  • Over the eighties and nineties, despite “deregulation,” the established airlines like American and United managed to keep their upstart competitors out of important business routes by collectively controlling the “slots” at New York, Chicago, and Washington airports.
  • Visa and MasterCard spent the nineties trying to stop American Express from getting into the credit-card industry, by creating parallel policies (“exclusionary rules”) and blacklisting any bank that might dare deal with AmEx. It was only thanks to the happenstance that both put their exclusions in writing that the Justice Department was able to do anything about the problem
  • Here’s a simple proposal: when members of a concentrated industry act in parallel, their conduct should be treated like that of a hypothetical monopoly.
  • Meanwhile, the idea that an industry is nominally “competitive” should not provide excessive protection from regulatory oversight.
  • Consider, again, the wireless carriers. The Federal Communications Commission is supposed to insure that the carriers, who are leaseholders on public spectrum, use that resource to serve “the public interest, convenience, and necessity.”
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 16 Apr 13
       
      I will continue to raise my hand at this: corporations were originally 'envisioned' (for whatever little worth that is) as protectors of public trust. THAT'S WHAT THEY GOT IN EXCHANGE FOR LEVERAGE FAR OUTSIDE WHAT NON-CORPORATE STRUCTURES COULD GET. That was the price - and the point.
  • , to quote T-Mobile, “[t]his is an industry filled with ridiculously confusing contracts, limits on how much data you can use or when you can upgrade, and monthly bills that make little sense.”
  • The F.C.C. could have done something about this years ago; the fact that it took a member of the industry to call out more than a decade’s abuse of consumers amounts to a serious failure on the part of the F.C.C.
  • Exploitation of concentrated private power is not a problem that will ever go away. In the United States, it has been a concern since the framing: the original Tea Party was actually a protest against a state-sponsored tea monopoly.
  • it’s important not to become fixated on form, but to attend to the realities that face consumers and citizens.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 16 Apr 13
       
      Dumbed down: If the problem you have with a bunch of things, it's no different than if that bunch was one thing. The effect is the same.
  • anonymous on 16 Apr 13
     
    "If a monopolist did what the wireless carriers did as a group, neither the public nor government would stand for it. For our scrutiny and regulation of monopolists is well established-just ask Microsoft or the old AT&T. But when three or four firms pursue identical practices, we say that the market is "competitive" and everything is fine. To state the obvious, when companies act in parallel, the consumer is in the same position as if he were dealing with just one big firm. There is, in short, a major blind spot in our nation's oversight of private power, one that affects both consumers and competition."
anonymous

Why Choosing to Make Less Money Is Easier Than Ever - 0 views

theumlaut.com/...less-money-is-easier-than-ever

shared by anonymous on 18 Apr 13 - Cached
  • If innovation has become increasingly marginal, then it’s less costly to choose to be a “threshold earner,” which Tyler Cowen defines as “someone who seeks to earn a certain amount of money and no more.”
  • If wages go up, Cowen says, a threshold earner will choose to work less or, I would add, choose work that’s so personally fulfilling that it’s indistinguishable from leisure.
  • As Andy Warhol said, What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.
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  • The Internet and modern media make this truer than ever. The same music, sports, movies, and HBO miniseries are available to threshold earners that are available to their high-income counterparts. The only difference might be the size of the screen they watch it on.
  • If you choose to accept a lower income than you might otherwise be able to command in order to consume more leisure, then what you are likely going to have to give up is consuming positional goods.
  • For one thing, food trucks are “in,” and so are lots of other low-cost consumption made fashionable by threshold-earning hipsters—from no-brand plastic sunglasses and thrift store clothes, to Pabst Blue Ribbon and communal living.
  • In some ways a conspicuously anti-consumerist lifestyle has become a positional good in itself.
  • Trader Joe’s is the chief example of this trend.
  • It caters not to the average American, but to a more elite set interested in organic, gourmet, and ethnic foods. Nevertheless, it offers low prices through an ingenious mix of limited selection and price discrimination (many Trader-Joe’s-branded items are the same high-end brands you’d get at Whole Foods, just repackaged.)
  • The company seems to be directly targeting educated threshold earners. One retail consultant that studied the chain has said that Trader Joe’s typical customer is a “Volvo-driving professor who could be CEO of a Fortune 100 company if he could get over his capitalist angst.” Indeed, the chain sites stores in university-dense areas brimming with bargain-hunting elites.
  • “The retail strategy for luxury brands is to try to keep as far away from the likes of Zara. Zara’s strategy is to get as close to them as possible.” The threshold earning elite gets the high-end shopping experience and trendy clothes at low prices.
  • anonymous on 18 Apr 13
     
    "The "great stagnation" presents us with a great opportunity. It's easier than ever to opt-out of the income-maximizing rat-race and enjoy more leisure. If innovation has become increasingly marginal, then it's less costly to choose to be a "threshold earner," which Tyler Cowen defines as "someone who seeks to earn a certain amount of money and no more." If wages go up, Cowen says, a threshold earner will choose to work less or, I would add, choose work that's so personally fulfilling that it's indistinguishable from leisure."
anonymous

Highest-Calorie Menu Item at McDonald's? Not a Burger - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...3884104577647400959492314.html

shared by anonymous on 13 Sep 12 - Cached
  • Some chains, such as Panera Bread Co. PNRA +0.40% and Au Bon Pain, already post calories on their menus, but McDonald's is the largest chain and the first fast-food company to do so on a national level.
  • Americans now consume roughly a third of their calories from restaurants, up from less than a quarter in the 1970s, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And people spend about half of their food budgets at restaurants now, compared to a third in the 1970s.
  • "If we see a similar effect from other chains you'd see about a 30-calorie per person per day decrease," said Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "The thing about obesity is it's caused by a slow, steady creep in people's weight over decades. For most of us, we're gaining one to two pounds per year steadily over decades and end up being 30 to 50 pounds overweight. The obesity epidemic is explained by about 100 extra calories per person per day, so if we get a daily 30-calorie decrease from menu labeling, that's huge."
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  • Shortly after Panera Bread posted calorie counts on its menu boards in April 2010, the company noticed that 20% of customers began ordering lower-calorie items.
  • A report published last year in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, which reviewed seven studies on the topic, found that "calorie labeling does not have the intended effect of decreasing calorie purchasing or consumption."
  • New regulations requiring operators of restaurants with 20 or more outlets to post calories on menus are expected to take effect by the end of next year.
  • Glenn Kikuchi, owner of 10 McDonald's franchises in Maryland, said he's already seen signs that the highlighted calorie counts are having an effect. "I see that a lot of the moms are looking at it, but also, curiously enough, the teenagers are looking at it, too," Mr. Kikuchi said.
  • anonymous on 13 Sep 12
     
    "McDonald's Corp. MCD +0.32% customers will have an easier time of it next week, when the burger giant's restaurant and drive-thru menu boards across the country will show that the Big Mac, at 550 calories, is 200 calories leaner than the other burger. But other choices won't be so clear-cut, like the Double Cheeseburger with 440 calories or the Southwest Salad with Crispy Chicken, which weighs in at 450. McDonald's highest-calorie item isn't a burger at all, but the 1,150-calorie Big breakfast with hotcakes and large biscuit. And the healthy-sounding 22-ounce mango pineapple smoothie matches the 350 calories in the grilled chicken sandwich."
anonymous

If Alcohol Were Discovered Today, Would it be Legal? - 0 views

www.alternet.org/overed-today-would-it-be-legal

shared by anonymous on 17 Sep 12 - Cached
  • This false distinction is a large part of the communication problem I encounter whenever I try to emphasise how harmful alcohol is. It has a separate language – you get “high” on drugs, but “drunk” on alcohol, drug addicts need a “fix” but alcoholics need a “drink.”
  • We are currently facing a public-health crisis of immense proportions. The increase in harms caused by alcohol over the last 50 years in the UK is comparable to the Gin Craze in the early 18th century, when the urban poor of London were consuming a pint of gin a day per head on average.
  • It’s certainly true that most societies throughout history have brewed some sort of alcoholic drink, and that this has been part of the human diet for so long that many of us are genetically adapted to consume alcohol.
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  • So, drinking alcohol is “normal,” in a sense – people who possess the high-activity variant of the ALDH2 enzyme, come from a long line of people whose bodies adapted to consuming and breaking down alcohol. Indeed, until the 1850s weak beer was often “healthy”: it was the safest thing to drink, because most water was contaminated with viruses or bacteria. However, in the past most of what was drunk was mostly relatively low strength beer and wine, and its consumption was surrounded by custom and ritual to mitigate its social harms.
  • We’re at a similar point now in the UK: the access people have to cheap, high-strength alcohol is almost unprecedented, and binge drinking of the sort we see today is something our ancestors would rarely have been able to indulge in even if they’d wanted to.
  • The drug does have some positive psychological effects, and it can be calming for some people with anxiety disorders (see Case Study 1 below) although with heavy use the effects of withdrawal will start to make them even more anxious when they’re sober.
  • Physiologically, alcohol’s benefits have never been proven, but the idea that low levels of drinking are protective is a pervasive myth – and a very useful one for the industry.
  • However, this may be because this group has more healthy lifestyles, or because of the “sick teetotaller effect” – where many people give up alcohol because they are ill (perhaps from some other disease); their worse health outcomes may have nothing to do with whether or not they drink, but do make the health statistics of non-drinkers appear worse.
  • There is no such thing as a safe level of alcohol consumption. Alcohol is a toxin that kill cells and organisms, which is why we use it to preserve food and sterilize needles.
  • Alcohol is a depressant (similar to GHB, and benzodiazepines like Valium) which, if taken at high enough doses, will produce amnesia, sedation and eventually death.
  • Alcohol also indirectly stimulates the noradrenaline circuit, producing some stimulating effects. This is what creates the noisy energy we associate with drunkenness, even though the drug is a depressant.
  • Some interesting recent research showed that alcohol interferes with our ability to recognize emotions in facial expressions, which may be part of the reason drunk people are so quick to take offense and start fights.
  • Millions of people, not a tiny minority, suffer harm from their own alcohol consumption, or cause harm to others.
  • These are all perfectly valid choices, yet non-drinkers are often heavily pressured to consume alcohol in order to fit in with others. This message is constantly reinforced in the press, on TV, and in alcohol advertising.
  • Far from being safe, there is no other drug which is so damaging to so many different organ systems in the body. Figure 6.2 illustrates how alcohol can harm almost every part of the body through its toxicity alone.
  • But there is a fundamental conflict of interest: however much the industry wants to pretend otherwise, you can’t reduce harm without reducing the amount people drink, whereas companies looking to maximize profits need to sell as much alcohol as possible.
  • anonymous on 17 Sep 12
     
    "A terrifying new "legal high" has hit our streets. Methyl-carbonol, known by the street name "wiz," is a clear liquid that causes cancers, liver problems, and brain disease, and is more toxic than ecstasy and cocaine. Addiction can occur after just one drink, and addicts will go to any lengths to get their next fix - even letting their kids go hungry or beating up their partners to obtain money. Casual users can go into blind rages when they're high, and police have reported a huge increase in crime where the drug is being used. Worst of all, drinks companies are adding "wiz" to fizzy drinks and advertising them to kids like they're plain Coca-Cola. Two or three teenagers die from it every week overdosing on a binge, and another 10 from having accidents caused by reckless driving. "Wiz" is a public menace - when will the Home Secretary think of the children and make this dangerous substance Class A?"
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