Apologies to Kahlon for accusing them of not returning my money when it appears they DID credit me for returned memory. I thought I’d checked carefully but apparently not.
Sorry Kahlon
Kahlon was right and I was wrong
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Author Archives: JoeDuck
Goal * * * *
This great sports drama follows Santiago Munez, an illegal Mexican in Los Angeles whose ability and persistence land him in tryouts for professional UK Football (soccer). The film is strong on family drama and does a great job of balancing sports scenes and the storyline. An excellent family movie with only a few implied sexual situations with secondary characters.
Mansquito * * 2/3
This is actually a pretty good “bad” science fiction film that follows the unfortunate adventures of a mosquito scientist who is infected along with a bad guy by mosquito inducing drugs. The film answers the age old question “What do you get when you combine mosquitos, radiation, humans, and blue goop”.
The 80% Rule. Any job worth doing is worth doing 80% right.
With only a few exceptions I maintain that the old adage “Any job worth doing is worth doing right” is very, very wrong. In fact I think that silly mindset is followed by only a handful of people though many would suggest they follow it regularly.
For many jobs the overwhelming benefits of the task are attained after 80% is completed, and there is a huge diminishing return as you approach the “100% completed” part of the job. Exception for medical stuff like “appendectomy”? Heck no, in fact those are the areas where we should work much harder to absorb more risk so we can decrease costs and get better basic medical care to the inner city and underdeveloped countries. In the case of medical care I think we often come close to a 100% standard and it’s absurd. For example using expensive throwaway gowns and other disposal items one time to (slightly) minimize the risks of infection.
This summer I’ve done a lot of painting. House painting. I’ve done a pretty good job of scraping and prep work, but wondered if I was working too hard at it. Obviously you can’t get every little bit of paint off, so the question becomes how far do you go with it? 99.9%, 90%, 80%, 50% 0%?
I’ve been especially intrigued by how the quality of the prep I did ten years ago does not seem to bear much on how well the paint’s held up. Rather, the paint has failed where the weather conditions were very hard on the house -especially where sun and rain hit hard. In fact yesterday I found an area on the back shed, largely protected from sun and rain, where the paint, after TEN YEARS, was still nicely coating a piece of moss. I’d done inferior prep on the outside sheds compared to the house, but the paint on the sheds had held up about as well. So the extra prep on the house was probably a waste of time.
Of course it’s hard to break the mindset, so I think I did about a 95% quality scraping job this time. Hopefully in 2016 or so, when it’s time to paint again, I’ll remember the 80% rule.
Put your hands in the air and drop that bag of Spinach!
The FDA warns that there is a potential for e-coli tainted spinach in many states, and everybody should be tossing the salad spinach before they toss their salad thanks to e-coli poisoning.
What always strikes me about the drama of these warnings is that today in the USA about 100 people will die from Car accidents, and another 50+ from fatal gunshots, and hundreds more from preventable heart disease, smoking, etc, etc. Shouldn’t we have warnings about these far greater dangers to our health?
People often say about, for example, malaria deaths globally or traffic deaths in USA “that’s not news”, but I’ve met no people who can cite the statistics for preventable death in the USA, let alone the world. Doesn’t that make it news to them? Also, the huge numbers of deaths from what many call “not newsworthy” causes dwarf those of the “newsworthy” causes.
I call that fact alone ….. newsworthy.
Bionic Woman
Claudia Mitchell lost her arm in a Motorcycle Accident, but the Rehabilitation institute of Chicago has created a prosthetic arm for Claudia that moves, *controlled by her own thoughts*. This is done by implanting the arm nerve endings in her chest wall where she can control them using her mind. Incredible.
So, what happens when we can start to control a computer cursor with our mind and have web browser enabled eyeglasses? Wow, we’d be …. smart.
Akeelah and the Bee * * * *
This is a rich, wonderful film about meeting, and overcoming, the challenges faced by inner city American youth. You’ll recognize Laurence Fishburne (The Matrix) and Angela Bassett, both are great as the teacher and the parent of Akeelah, a gifted young girl who seeks the national spelling title. Keke Palmer is superb in the title role. This is a fantastic and uplifting movie yet it avoids the common hollywood pitfall of pandering to politically correct or stereotypical charicatures of African American Culture. (note a few language and minor references to drugs and gangs which are totally appropriate in the context of the film).
Google and the little guy
I noted before that Google is mostly ignoring the enterprise market in favor of maintaining their huge share of regular user traffic and targeting small content producers with Adsense and small advertisers with Adwords. In fact I think FAST, rather than Google, is the top contender in enterprise search. As the internet itself becomes the network, I can see Google grinning in meeting rooms as they chart out the competition with Microsoft which is still heavily chained both economically and philosophically to Microsoft Office, big enterprise applications, and big companies in general.
Incredibly, Microsoft seems to ignore (or perhaps they just can’t cope with) forces that Google correctly sees now and on the horizon. These forces include:
* Company sizes will tend to shrink as internet efficiencies allow “mom and pops” to compete globally.
* Small companies, blogs, local companies, and other small “long tail” online entities market share will continue to grow, and may even become the largest share of total online advertising activity. (though I think this could take many years).
* Many USA, and (most?) Indian and Chinese companies often use bootlegged software. No problem for Google who gives it away anyway. MS office at perhaps $479 per lost license? OUCH!
It’s a tough spot for MS because their online revenues are trivial now, so even with the major allocations to the LIVE project it’s not clear that changing course can ever replace the enterprise and office suite revenues for a company built around “old style” computing.
Facebook to open to everybody soon
Hey, just a few days after I took the time to set up a UW Madison Alumni email and forward it to my Google mail and I’m feeling all special and elite because I have a Facebook Account, Forbes reports that Facebook will open up to anybody very soon.
This will be really interesting to watch. Facebook is much, much smaller than Myspace but has a far more “elite” reputation among the college crowd. Will Myspace users move to Facebook? Run multiple accounts? Which service will new users choose?
Facebook turned down huge money recently, wanting a lot more for what they think is the most valuable social network environment. If I had to predict things I’d say they made a mistake turning down that money and opening up to all. They’llsee slower growth than they are expecting, reducing the perceived value of Facebook to less than what was offered.
Make Marketing, not War. Allocate 25% of military spending to a strategic global marketing initiative.
Yesterday I learned that the USA is the top donor to 1) Sudan and 2) Palestinian Territories.
(I already knew we were the top funder of the U.N.) This did not surprise me, but I’m always struck by how generous our Government is in areas where we are despised.
I’m not opposed to generosity – in fact I think we should send more money to poor and war-torn areas even if it means raising my already usurous income taxes, but it pisses me off that we don’t get a lot more credit for it because credit for all this generosity is deserved and, far more importantly, it is a strategic imperative in the fight against those who fight against us. I doubt the Palestinian or North Korean kids eating food provided by the USA are even aware of the source. They should be.
Given that the results of the “wars on terror” all over the globe are yielding dubious results – perhaps even solidifying the resolve of a new generation of “America Haters” – I propose we do what any good business would do at a time like this. We should reallocate our dubious spending toward something more likely to yield positive results.
My proposal is to establish a highly funded global marketing campaign by reallocating military spending to something that works better. The campaign’s goal will be to restore to the USA the type of international respect we had back in the 60’s. Then, Peace Corps folks would go into the hut of an African or Indonesian villager and find a poster of JFK rather than an arms cache. Why? Obviously not a simple equation, but the 1960’s villager saw the USA’s prosperity and and global influence as a blueprint for their own future prosperity and freedom. Now, a generation later, that villager is more likely to see the USA as exploiting him far more than offering hope.
The sad irony is that exploitation of poor countries is largely a mythology concocted by left wing intellectuals to justify their narrow world view that corporations don’t work well to raise the standards for most of the participants in societies that embrace the corporate capitalist model of development. Corporations do raise standards, and excellent examples abound of the contrast between non-corporate and corporate models of development.
The South Korean villager did in fact become very prosperous and lives in a society with a very high standard of living and reasonable freedoms, while his brother in North Korea struggles just to eat. The poverty in Africa is characterized by a *lack* of corporate capitalist participation, not by an excess amount of it as we’d expect with a “USA as exploiter” world view.
Cuba? Isn’t that the same guy in charge who has been there for forty five years? Has Cuba thrived by pulling themselves out of the corporate capitalist game for half a century? Hardly.
This is not to suggest that there is not exploitation by US corporations. There are plenty of examples, and one person’s exploitation may be seen by someone less fortunate as a road to prosperity. However I’d suggest that most forms of “capitalistic exploitation” are the exception not the rule, partly for the entirely selfish reason that the capitalist model seeks higher profits and this requires more consumers living at higher standards. Global prosperity is not a zero sum economic game, and in this fact lies the key to the success of the corporate capitalist model of development and the bankruptcy of most socialist paradigms.
Thanks to forces of “negative marketing” from self-serving and corrupt Governments, combined with many legitimate grievances against the USA’s imperial stance in global politics, the USA’s reputation appears at an all time low. Strategically this is leading to more terror and more terrorists. If we continue to respond militarily we 1) continue to kill innocent people, our own soldiers, and destroy infrastucture and 2) expend resources that could be put to better use.
Better use? Marketing the USA as a friend not an enemy.
Budget: $109,825,000,000 (25% of proposed 2007 military spend of 439.3 billion)
The US Military approach has failed to win the hearts and minds of the globe, and this puts us at increasing strategic risk. We live in the world’s most sophisticated marketing empire and it’s time we acted like it. Let’s just do it.
Joe Duck 