http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/opinion/26brooks.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
Over the past few years, many investment bankers behaved like idiots, but so did average Americans, racking up unprecedented levels of personal debt. With the populist narrative, you can accuse the former and absolve the latter.
One of the better ways to reduce the ‘corporate’ or ’special interest’ money in government is to avoid the number of things the government spends money on. I realize sometimes easier said than done but it cuts the lobbying influx off at its knees.
http://www.freepress.net/files/nn_fact_v_fiction_final.pdf
Here’s a pro “net neutrality” piece. I’m really annoyed by this debate and the lack of intelligence on both sides. On the telco side, you have idiots like Ted Stevens and Ed Whitacre (former CEO of AT&T) saying we deserve to get paid for our pipes. Those are the pipes that us consumers and the web sites we visit already pay for.
On the other side, you have people ignoring the rational concept of prioritizing traffic based on the stuff that needs to get there. Has anyone heard a voice of reason here?
I think what a lot of this is really about is the lack of competition in the telco space. It’s a capital intensive business and thus it’s hard to offer a lot of options to people. If it were so easy and cheap to lay cable everywhere, we’d have 5 pairs of cable outside our houses with companies lobbying us to go with them. Nonetheless, whenever there are fewer options, consumers feel they don’t have the ability to punish their telco/internet provider for doing crazy stuff. This is a legitimate fear and it happens. People wouldn’t have such legitimate fears about the idiots @ AT&T/Verizon/etc. regulating traffic if they could punish them for that behavior in the marketplace, but a lot of them can’t.
Thoughts?
I was thinking the other day that it’s important for a business to be open about when it’s exiting a line of business. There is nothing automatically wrong with a company abandoning its commitment to a market. As long as the communication with the employees is open and honest and the company makes an explicit decision, this can be OK. This seems to fit nicely with Jack Welch’s “fix, sell, or close” strategy.
From Tim Harford’s Logic of Life
Schelling’s strategy was right from the negotiator’s textbook: make a specific and (apparently) unambiguous commitment. That was what President Kennedy had done when facing Khrushchev over Berlin. Rather than saying something vague such as ‘we will take the steps necessary to defend our interests’, he made an unambiguous statement. Four days after reading Schelling’s analysis of the problem, he announced on television, ‘We have given our word that an attack upon that city will be regarded as an attack upon as all.’ That public commitment made it hard for Kennedy to ignore any attack, and thus dissuaded Khrushchev from making one.
I recently rediscovered this quote:
A customer is the most important visitor on our premises, he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.
George Will writes on Ted Kennedy here. I hope one day I have a “positive balance.”
Throughout my travels in Europe, I’ve always taken notice of toilet brands (Don’t ask me why I notice things like that). It’s occurred to me that almost every country uses their national toilet company. I’ve never really seen international toilet usage in any of my travels.
Perhaps toilets are not a fungible commodity?
