PicoBusiness

From
here
. These appear to be from Cosmo, and thus, mostly targetted towards women, but they are still interesting, even if you’re on the receiving end.

1. To seem like a team player at work …
Put up a picture of your dog (or even a friend’s pup) in your workspace

2. To appear more powerful in the office hierarchy …
Wear a chic all-black outfit to work, and don’t smile as often as you’re inclined

3. To bond with the boss …
Offer to get her a hot cup of coffee — even if you’re not her assistant

4. To have “the talk” without making your partner flip out …
Take him to a restaurant that has soft feminine colors and furniture with few angular lines.

5. To make your crush fall for you on a dinner date …
Subtly touch the back of his hand as you’re reaching across the table for bread.

6. To seem more alluring when you meet a guy …
Talk about a beach vacation you took using sensual terms (e.g., “The sun felt so fabulously warm against my skin”)

7. To impress a guy’s parents the first time you meet them …
Casually praise someone whom you’re certain his mom or dad holds in high esteem,

8. To make a friend out of an acquaintance …
Start mirroring her behavioral tics, like touching your hair when she touches hers.

9. Your slob roomie to clean up after herself more often …
Spray a bit of liquid all-purpose cleaner in the air right before she enters the skanky spot in question

Hmmm.

When businesses are truly made of people, rather than impersonal monoliths, these conversations will be a lot more real and a lot more likely to result in positive outcomes for all concerned.

I agree! We must replace the obelisks, statues and dolmens that run our businesses, and replace them with living, breathing human beings who can feel emotion, make plans and love children.

(Hat tip: Gaping Void)

Note: Yes, I read the whole thing. He seems to believe that human beings lose their souls when they go to work for corporations, which I find to be an unfortunately all-too-typical bigotry of the academic elite. And what’s more, it’s not like governments don’t have their share of soul-crushing systems-over-people, institutions-over-ethics mindsets. And they have all the high-end military hardware to boot!

An amusing article from the Register. A British economist says that economic growth and CO2 emissions are inextricably linked, and in order to reduce CO2 emissions, the economy will have to shrink.

Money Quotes:

Asked if this wasn’t, in the end, going to mean a fairly hair-shirt lifestyle for us Brits - no cars, no tumble dryers, fewer showers and iPods and so on - Bond said that “economic wealth isn’t the same as happiness or directly linked to quality of life … It’s about a quantity lifestyle - more and more stuff - versus quality”.

And

“The idea of a technological fix is one we should be cautious about,” he said. “So often there are unintended consequences or trade-offs. Look at the ‘paperless office’ - there’s now more paper, not less. Look at biofuels. I’d be wary of believing that a technology solution will arrive in time.

Yes, unintended consequences of technological change…. As if gutting the economy has no unintended consequences at all.

From data discussed at Future Pundit, I created this chart of miles driven per person in the US.

Based on population data from April 2008 and Miles Driven from May 2008, we can come up with some interesting observations.

1. The miles driven per person estimate for May 2008 is slightly below 2002 levels:

2001: 9689.38

2002: 9806.25

2008: 9758.76 (Estimate)

2. Another interesting measurement - %-age change in miles driven vs. the previous year:

And what you’re seeing here is a steady and ongoing decrease in the “rate of growth” of driving over time. In other words, since 1990, our driving miles/year has been leveling off, despite a significant increase in population.

3. Which suggests the graph - changes in population vs. changes in driving year-over-year:

Which shows that the population growth has been a steady 1% per year. In the go-go 80s, we increased our mileage more than the population growth, and for the 90s through 2005 we roughly aligned our driving to the population, and since 2005 we’ve been driving less relative to population.

Source Data:

Population

1980 – 1990 http://www.census.gov/popest/archives/1990s/nat-total.txt

1990 – 2000 http://www.census.gov/popest/archives/EST90INTERCENSAL/US-EST90INT-07/US-EST90INT-07.csv

2000 – 2007 http://www.census.gov/popest/states/NST-ann-est.html

2008 http://www.census.gov/popest/national/NA-EST2007-01.html

Driving

1983-2008 http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/tvtw/tvtpage.htm

China quake caused by colliding land masses.

This is a little bit like saying:

• Lava is made of molten rock
• Water is made of Hydrogen and Oxygen
• Space lacks breathable air.

I finally got around to listening to this podcast on jobs and captalism and poor people.

The basic concepts that Russ discusses:

• Does Capitalism require poor people to do the menial work?
• Do rich countries require poor ones to exploit in order to do the manual labor work?
• Is Capitalism “rigged” to ensure that only the top 1% get all of the benefit of economic growth?

In general, Dr. Roberts knocks it out of the park - discussing in clear and data-leavened terms about why he believes that the system is not “rigged”, and why rich countries do not require poor ones.

It is on the topic of Capitalism requiring poor people that I find myself disagreeing with him. Here’s the general claim:

Rich people don’t want to mow their own lawns or paint their own houses. Without poor people to do that work, the whole system would collapse

Dr. Roberts points out, quite correctly, that this is absurd. 100 years ago, there were a lot of dirt-poor people who made a living (barely) threshing wheat in fields. Now we have combines and tractors and other devices to do this work for us. The poor in the US have multiple color televisions, cars, refrigerators and all sorts of other amenities in their lives that those wheat-field workers would have never had, or been able to afford, if they were still doing that work today.

But where I don’t think Dr. Roberts fully explained things is that this definition of poor is always changing - no one thinks about wheat-fields anymore when they think poor - they think “garbagemen” and “cashiers”. If, through the miracle of science we automated those jobs, people would move the goalposts - mechanics and security guards would be “poor”. And if, again, through science those jobs were eliminated, a new set of jobs would be the “demeaning jobs that no one wants to do.”

Essentially, there are always jobs that are the “least pleasant”, and people will always think “How horrid that I should have to do this unpleasant job.” Thus, they will perpetually see these people as exploited rubes whose sweat grease the wheels of the market.

Perspective is in order here, but perspective usually gets in the way of a good sound-bite.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/04/prevention-cost.html

The claim: Because prevention techniques have to be widespread to be effective, the cost of making them widespread dwarfs the benefit of reduction in the disease. In other words an ounce of prevention costs more than a pound of cure.

Political Observations

1. The vast majority of pundits, when faced with a crisis, will claim that the crisis would have been averted if only we had done what they told us to do.
2. Alternatively, they will say that the crisis happened because of the actions/policies of their rivals. Hah hah! They say. This is why you should never listen to _______
3. Pundits will generally ignore the complexities of issues in order to make their point clear. That is what makes them dangerous, and what makes it foolish to listen to them without a truckload of salt. There are no simple issues.
4. You can point out that an issue is complex to a pundit, and they will ignore you, or mock you. Because admitting that the world is complex and that their philosophy isn’t perfect hurts their pocketbook.
5. I’ve noticed a surprising tendency amongst progressives - they believe that corporations can brainwash people into buying their products like slaves, and they believe that journalists can brainwash people into caring about certain topics. Didn’t Air America disabuse them of this notion? Note: At least they’re consistent on this (fairly silly) belief.

Business observations

• I listened (on the radio) to the owner of a landscaping company say that without lower-wage illegal immigrants on his payroll, his costs would be too high, and he would go out of business. Really? No one will want landscaping at all if it costs a bit more? All of his competitors are well-prepared for this contingency? I’m not particularly indignant about immigration, but this argument is lame.
• Right now the business world is essentially all-doom, all-the-time. Historically, this is usually the time when it turns around.

Glenn Reynolds (of whom I am an avid reader) asks, with regard to the use of ethanol as a fuel “WILL ETHANOL LEAD TO FOOD SHORTAGES“?

I was originally going to say “Of course not.” But then, I realized the one scenario where it would happen, and that is if corn is heavily subsidized by the government (ie. the taxpayers, i.e. you and me), but only for use as Ethanol. If it happened quickly enough, every farmer would immediately sell their corn for use as Ethanol, because they’d get money whether it was used or not.

But in general, if the government doesn’t do something stupid like massive, quickly applied subsidies (a tall order, I admit) then there should be no food shortages. Food would get more expensive, especially meat, but all in all, I expect that people can cut back on fuel more than they can cut back on food, and that would cause more farmers to sell their corn to food production instead of Ethanol production. End result - just like any other situation where multiple markets require a particular raw material, we’ll end up with a market equilibrium that will sort everything out.

Neat set of articles this morning:  Timothy King talks about businesses failing, and whether that’s a good thing.  In the process, he cites an interesting article about the myths of entrepreneurship.

In my life experience, there’s a wonderful synchronicity between agile software development and entrepreneurship.  Failing Fast is a key concept in Agile development.  It works because failing isn’t the end of the world - the volume of resources spent to discover the failure is not high.   Entrepreneurship, especially Internet-based entrepreneurship is also an area where you can limit your financial risk, and still learn a lot about the business, what you do well, what you don’t do well, etc.

Failure in business is not an ethical lapse.  It is not a moral stain on your character.  It is a learning experience.

I’ve modified my stance on Net Neutrality some since I first wrote about it, although I still think that the people will win.    But there’s an interesting debate between Tom Evslin and Richard Bennett on the topic.

After reading both of them, I am more convinced than ever that Tom is right, and Richard is wrong.  Richard’s examples and thoughts on the topic seem to perpetually work on a “bait and switch” approach - we’ll get the customer to pay for their connectivity to the Internet, then we’ll shaft them by making their favorite websites pay too. To his mind, this is ok, because they can use this money to pay for more fiber in the ground.  But I don’t find that argument compelling.
As I mention in my lengthy comment on Tom’s post, the cable and telco monopolies given them each a huge infrastructure advantage over everyone else.  An advantage that was given to them in the public interest.  If this was truly a free market, I would have no problem - I’d say “If you don’t like dial-up with Mindspring, switch to AOL”.  But the monopoly license gives us much less choice in our broadband network provider.  Why? Because we (us and our ancestors) gave them exclusive access to the soil.  They would have to be much, much more service agnostic before I would accept any such deviation from complete neutrality.

This is definitely different than how I used to feel.  But over time I’ve learned what a fundamental (and market-distorting) advantage this monopoly franchise has been to the telcos and cable cos, and I’m disinclined to give them even more advantage now.  I will reiterate - dial-up service is easily switchable, and I have no problems with dialup providers attempting to shaft their customers, because the customers have many other options available to them.   But broadband access was deliberately distorted by government force, creating a duopoly for a huge chunk of the people in this country.  While I believe that eventually innovators will obsolete the cable and telco monopolies, I am disinclined to give them even more power in the short term.

After watching this on Comedy Central, I read a blog post that pointed to the real origin of the term “Dismal Science.” I never realized that Economics is considered the dismal science because it argued that all races were equal. If arguing for equality is dismal, I don’t want to be happy!

Greg Mankiw discusses whether Economics is a science or not, in response to this post from Don Luskin.

Don has two points. The first is that Economics is not a science because there is no ability to repeat experiments (which is common to many disciplines: astronomy, geology, archaeology, evolutionary biology, meteorology and paleontology (and all the branches therein)).

However, Don’s second issue:

Where is the utterly essential ingredient of repeatable experimental verification of falsifiable hypotheses?

Is quite simply wrong. Indeed, all of the discplines I mention above have a rich history of making predictive hypotheses based on observations, and determining if the predictions came true. That is why we expect tornadoes in the midwest, hurricanes in the summer and fall. That is why we expect prices to increase if supply diminishes, given fixed demand, and why we do not expect prices to increase with increased supply and fixed demand. That is why we can predict that there was a common fossil ancestor to both ants and wasps, and then, lo and behold! discover that this fossil ant exists.

The key metric of what is science and what isn’t is the ability to predict what is likely to happen given past results - which is the core of a falsifiable hypothesis. Relicable experiments are just one of the ways that these predictions can be analyzed. Certainly a falsifiable experiment that can be replicated many times is easier to prove or disprove than a prediction about the origin of the Universe. But Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein made all sorts of predictions about the makeup of Universe, without the ability to create a replicable experiment. (At least, I’ve never heard of them creating any black holes in their laboratories). Those predictions have led to significant benefits for humanity, using rigorous analysis and producing testable hypotheses.

in What Would Google Do, Derek Powazek makes some interesting claims:

• Google succeeded despite the sparseness of their interface, not because of it.
• It worked because Google’s service was easy to understand, and sparseness was different, and cool
• Being sparse now is, in general, no longer chic because everyone does it
• If your service is harder to understand than search, you are not well served by sparseness

I disagree with the first point - I think that people were overwhelmed with the barrage of information on Yahoo and MSN, and Google’s clean, simple interface was simply less intimidating. It may have been sparse, but at least you didn’t have to try to comprehend 7500 screen objects.

However, I generally agree with the other points - sparseness is no longer cool, because it’s played out. And, Derek is right - if your service is hard to understand, sparseness is not your friend.