There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.
Bill Moyers on LBJ and civil rights
Topic: Politics and Law
12:27 pm EST, Jan 20, 2008
This video is a really beautiful and educational bit by Bill Moyers on what Lyndon Johnson did for black people with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
It’s exactly the kind of perspective we need more of.
People forget what good LBJ did for black people, which is why it’s so easy for tempers to flare over a line like Hillary Clinton’s (which is included in the Moyers video). Moyers doesn’t downplay either the struggles of black Americans, or the importance of LBJ’s legislation; his is a perfectly balanced voice of calm.
The question becomes not how best to understand the social network, but how best to understand what new memes the society is ready to accept. It's really about market timing.
Consider:
"The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself." -- Peter Drucker
Philip Kotler: The most important tasks in marketing have to do with studying the market, segmenting it, targeting the groups you want to service, positioning yourself in the market, and creating a service that meets needs out there. Advertising and selling are afterthoughts. I don't want to minimize their importance. But you put it so well years ago when you shocked a number of people by saying that the aim of marketing is to make selling unnecessary.
What could marketing be if it isn't selling? The shortest definition I've heard is that it is finding needs and filling them. I would add that it produces positive value for both parties. The contrast between marketing and selling is whether you start with customers, or consumers, or groups you want to serve well -- that's marketing. If you start with a set of products you have, and want to push them out into any market you can find, that's selling.
(Update: I was amused to notice -- only after making this post -- that in the print edition of Fast Company, the advertisement which is located adjacent to the conclusion of this article features a quotation by Peter Drucker.)
A delicate condition - Fears of both recession and inflation
Topic: Business
9:44 pm EST, Jan 17, 2008
The world economy is increasingly powered by countries, such as China and India, whose growth is far more energy- and commodity-intensive than that of rich countries. This shift means that the usual relationship between America’s business cycle and commodity prices may change. Past American recessions have sent the price of oil and other resources down. That may no longer be so.
The rich world could easily face a prolonged period of weaker growth and persistent price pressure.
How much to worry depends on whether this combination affects people’s expectations of future inflation. Because central banks have earned a reputation as inflation fighters and people expect long-term inflation to remain low, price shocks -- even on the scale of the recent commodity-price surge -- need not translate into persistently higher inflation. Were workers and firms to expect higher inflation, and set wages and prices accordingly, central bankers would face a big problem.
An excerpt from the 1958 "Disneyland" TV Show episode entitled "Magic Highway USA". In this last part of the show, an exploration into possible future Transportation technologies is made. It's hard to believe how little we've accomplished on this front since 1958, and how limited the scope for imagining such future technologies has become. Witness an artifact from a time where the future was greeted with optimism. Note the striking animation style here, achieved with fairly limited animation and spectacular layouts.
I like how suburban sprawl is anticipated with such glee!
From a technology standpoint, it spans a wide range; some ideas are pure vision, with no sense of reality (cantilevered, fully air-conditioned sky-ways through beautifully desolate mountain ranges?), while others are quaintly myopic (punch cards as storage media for your navigational unit?). Still, a lot of fun.
Powerful signals point to a long period of sub-par growth. The huge backlog of unsold homes suggests house prices have further to fall -- by around 20% going by housing futures. Lower house prices will force Americans to spend less and save more -- a process that has hardly started. They will also spread the mortgage mess well beyond subprime borrowers, which would lead to greater financial losses.
A new study finds that, on measures from capital inflows to asset-price rises, the build-up to America's mortgage crisis looks eerily like earlier financial crises in rich countries. The parallels are not perfect, but their message is that whether or not the economy falls into an official recession, it will probably stay weak for longer than many now expect.
The company that turned DVDs into a subscription service for millions of consumers said Monday that it no longer will put a cap on the number of hours its customers can view movies and TV shows over the Internet.
With all of these recent developments looking so promising, someone is going to have to break the news to Sony that all of this fuss over Blu-ray isn't going to matter in a year or two.
"Unlimited has always been a very powerful selling point with our subscribers and a large part of what set us apart in the marketplace," said Leslie Kilgore, the company's chief marketing officer. "In talking with members about our streaming feature during the past year, it became clear that, as with DVDs, the idea of streaming unlimited movies and TV episodes on a PC resonated quite strongly. And we're now in a good position to offer that."
Last month I made my picks, and tonight's the night. Let's see how I did. Correct picks are in bold.
Picture, Drama: "Atonement." Actress, Drama: Julie Christie, "Away From Her." Actor, Drama: Daniel Day-Lewis, "There Will Be Blood." Picture, Musical or Comedy: "Sweeney Todd." Actress, Musical or Comedy: Marion Cotillard, "La Vie En Rose." Actor, Musical or Comedy: Johnny Depp, "Sweeney Todd." Supporting Actress: Cate Blanchett, "I'm Not There." Supporting Actor: Javier Bardem, "No Country for Old Men." Director: Julian Schnabel, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly." Screenplay: Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, "No Country for Old Men." Foreign Language: "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," France and U.S. Animated Film: "Ratatouille." Original Score: Dario Marianelli, "Atonement." Original Song: "Guaranteed" from "Into the Wild."
So, 7 out of 14, though I hedged a bit on Director and Screenplay. If I had seen "There Will Be Blood" when I made my picks, I definitely would have chosen Daniel Day-Lewis over George Clooney in "Michael Clayton." And if I'd seen "La Vie En Rose" before last week, I would have picked Marion Cotillard, too.
david foster wallace: untitled excerpt from something longer that isn’t even close to halfway finished yet
Topic: Fiction
1:19 pm EST, Jan 12, 2008
My audit group’s Group Manager and his wife have an infant I can describe only as fierce. ... Its features seemed suggestions only. It had roughly as much face as a whale does. I did not like it at all.
The Next Bubble, by Eric Janszen | Harper's, February 2008
Topic: Economics
7:33 pm EST, Jan 9, 2008
I recommended this article on Monday, but I would like to draw your attention again to one passage in particular:
Because all asset hyperinflations revert to the mean, we can expect housing prices to decline roughly 38 percent from their peak as they return to something closer to the historical rate of monetary inflation. If the rate of decline stabilizes at between 6 and 7 percent each year, the correction has about six years to go before things stabilize, leaving the FIRE economy in need of $12 trillion. Where will that money come from?
Janszen concludes that the next bubble is alternative energy.
