Repurposing Big Box stores (oh, didn’t you hear? They’re going away).
This is an old website, but I predict many more to follow:
And a design college! Delightful:
Where Productivity Goes
Lots of talk about how we’ve progressed since 1949. Here’s one graph. (and more and more).
I like thinking of it like this (using this dataset to see that we are about 2.75x the 1949 median income level)
As pointed out in the original Atlantic piece and in this awesome Tyler Cowen piece, our relative consumption is shifting away from super competitive ‘making things’ sectors and towards protected domestic service-oriented industries.
We’re spending similar amounts of money on food and apparel, etc. We’re spending much of the gains made since (and that’s a LOT of gains) on services and housing.
And housing’s a funny one because it’s simply rent paid to an owner of capital. Shouldn’t we be bidding for opportunities in productive industry rather than stocks of housing?
On Advertising
Two links on ads.
1. Which ad is more effective? HN discussion here.
2. This signals desperation to me for some reason:
Learn Something Today
Read Tyler Cowen.
Big Fails
The economist has a list of ways to birth a megaflop, by which they appear to mean a strategically important investment that loses a company money, face and time. The basics:
- Don’t break something that works (“slaughter a sacred cow”)
- Don’t do something you’re not good at just because you can. (“mix oil and water”)
- Don’t produce a genuinely awful product.
I’m fascinated by organizational dysfunction. Not only from train wreck voyeurism, mind you, but because the only way to learn is through failure and I’d rather learn through others’ failure if I can. (btw, the only book I’ve seen in this vein, and it isn’t that great, is this one.)
Anyway, the most interesting kinds of failure happen when companies that get a lot right screw up. In that light, that list above isn’t too bad. But I’d add one:
4. Forgetting what the product is.
The Economist opens their article with a discussion about the recent film flop John Carter, which I wanted to see but skipped after checking reviews. I think Hollywood blockbusters are a better example of my point than any of theirs.
The problem is that ‘Hollywood’ is actually not in the content creation business, believe it or not. They’re in the distribution business, a business run by advertisers, marketers and salespeople. There are two really important challenges to overcome in sales driven businesses:
First, to quote Gordon Moore: “Every the salesmen thinks he’s management material”.
Second, salesfolk are quick to criticize products that they think might be a difficult sell.
Sales is tough. And when it doesn’t work it’s not always obvious where something went wrong.
Salespeople have two extremely powerful advantages that quickly turn into a disadvantage in tough times: they have outstanding communication skills (which they use to trick themselves and everyone else into thinking they know more than they do, see Gordon Moore above) and they’re the ones who are experts in sales. Shouldn’t they know what’s best?
Hollywood flops all the time. I think this happens when the sales department makes too many decisions on what they want to sell: the package becomes the product.
It’s easy to say “don’t give marketing too much control!” but remember that marketing is often a bigger part of the blockbuster budget than the film itself. They control the money!
I didn’t quite know where to link to it, but this is an awesome post on sales.
Technology Doesn’t Die
I’ve been slowly reading What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly after listening to the Econtalk interview some time ago. There’s all kinds of neat insight in it, one of which is this idea that technology does not die:
“I say there is no species of technology that have ever gone globally extinct on this planet.”
…That means, he said, “I can’t find any [invention, tool, technology] that has disappeared completely from Earth.”
Can’t be, I told him. Tools do hang around, but some must go extinct.
If only because of the hubris — the absolute nature of the claim — I told him it would take me a half hour to find a tool, an invention that is no longer being made anywhere by anybody.
Go ahead, he said. Try.
If you listen to our Morning Edition debate, I tried carbon paper (still being made), steam powered car engine parts (still being made), Paleolithic hammers (still being made), 6 pages of agricultural tools from an 1895 Montgomery Ward & Co. Catalogue (every one of them still being made), and to my utter astonishment, I couldn’t find a provable example of an technology that has disappeared completely.
Well today I read about IBM’s old operating system, which I vaguely remember, called O/S 2. Dead, right?
Try though it might, IBM couldn’t force an unwilling world to use OS/2 as its primary operating system. But it also couldn’t extinguish demand for the operating system simply by declaring that it wasn’t going to sell and support it anymore, an announcement it made in 2005…
In New York City’s subway system, for instance, the travelers who gain entrance by swiping their Metrocard fare cards over five million times each weekday do so with the assistance of IBM’s theoretically defunct software. “While OS/2 is not running any visible part of the system, it does serve an essential purpose and there are hundreds of OS/2 computers in service,”…
…A company called Serenity Systems International sells an operating system called eComStation that’s a licensed, updated version of OS/2, giving users the option of buying a piece of software that’s still extant and still supported.
Waldhauer says that the checkout systems at Safeway supermarkets still run OS/2. So do certain Automated Teller Machines still in service, although big banks have largely moved on to Windows.
And perhaps more in keeping with the spirit of Kelly’s prediction:
And so do some holdouts who stick with OS/2 simply because they like it. For years, an organization called Warpstock has held OS/2 conferences in the U.S. and Europe.
How They Started
Fun little discussion on how people got into programming.
I started by writing simple VBA macros to automate Excel at work. A buddy that sat nearby studied engineering in school and showed me some of the basics. From then on it was hitting the ‘record’ button and googling what popped up!
My programming has always been focused on data management and analysis. I learned SQL in the Stanford DB course and Matlab/Octave in the Stanford ML class. I took up Python to build a simple weather webapp which I’ve never finished then bolted on scipy and numpy after reading some Kaggle winners’ submissions. Now I use Python all the time. The webapp project also introduced me to django (which I rejected – too painful to learn), some ftp syncing automation, sqlite, and a bunch of rudimentary php and javascript/jquery.
I’m messing around with C, now, but I can’t see a great reason for ditching Python yet. I still don’t really know what an Object is (wtf is __init__?) though I’d love to learn about it eventually.
Through Google Maps Quest Mode’s Nostaglic Haze
I spent a fair amount of my youth as a basement-dwelling video game addict. Much of that time was spent playing the dorkiest of genres: Role Playing Games (RPGs). They’re a kind of video game version of choose your own adventure, except without any choice.
I know, it impressed the hell out of the girls, too.
Anyway, today Google maps today brought me back to those days:
Progress
This story about hazing at US fraternities is pretty shocking:
“I was a member of a fraternity that asked pledges, in order to become a brother, to: swim in a kiddie pool of vomit, urine, fecal matter, semen and rotten food products; eat omelets made of vomit; chug cups of vinegar, which in one case caused a pledge to vomit blood; drink beer poured down fellow pledges’ ass cracks… among other abuses,”
I went to a school that outlawed its fraternities almost a hundred years ago and had a common orientation week that sought (with some success) to accomplish some of the same things that more dramatic hazing does:
Hazing supposedly serves a deliberate purpose, of building solidarity. Psychologist Robert Cialdini uses the framework of consistency and commitment to explain the phenomenon of hazing, and the vigor and zeal to which practitioners of hazing persist in and defend these activities even when they are made illegal.[20] Cialdini cites a 1959 study in which the researchers observed that “persons who go through a great deal of trouble or pain to attain something tend to value it more highly than persons who attain the same thing with a minimum of effort.”
There is a trend in our society of becoming less tolerant towards deliberate infliction of pain. I’d argue that building solidarity is a good thing to a point, but that benefit is almost comically overshadowed by the costs of this kind of hazing.
In case your immediate reaction is to scoff at this liberal claptrap, think of this trend in the context of Gladiatorial games and crucifixion. Blunting our impulse for violence has made the world a better place.
“Yeah, but only up to a point!” you might respond. Sure, but that point is decided by generations to come. Who can predict how our grandchildren will react to stories of hazing?
At my alma mater, they tried to get by this by promoting some interfaculty rivalry. It’s silly to think back on this but defining my identity as a Commerce student necessarily put me in opposition to the Engineers. And for a time a part of me really bought into it. Not because it made sense but because I wanted to buy into it.
The search for solidarity as an unpleasant impulse in a pluralistic society, even when it isn’t pursued with violence. Think of this quote from Tyler Cowen:
Brink Lindsey said… that [voters] choose on the basis of the people they sympathize with. To which Tyler Cowen replied, “People vote on the basis of who they sympathize against.”
In the politics of affiliation, you can vehemently denounce 49% of the population if it stirs a feeling of solidarity among the other 51%.
Revolution’s Achilles Heel
Pete Warden didn’t ask us to square this circle, but he should have. Both quotes from his blog.
Our tech community chooses its high-flyers from people who have enough money and confidence to spend significant amounts of time on unpaid work. Isn’t this likely to exclude a lot of people too?
…I look around at careers that require similar skills, like actuaries, and they include a lot more women and minorities. I desperately need more good people on my team, and the statistics tell me that as a community we’re failing to attract or keep a lot of the potential candidates.
Appreciate the shoutout to actuaries and all, but isn’t the simple solution to encourage more education in this field?
Quote 2 comes from the comments to his first post:
I’m a female who majored in computer science but then did not use my degree after graduating (I do editing work now). While I was great with things like red-black trees and k-maps, I would have trouble sometimes with implementations because it was assumed going into the field that you already had a background in it. I did not, beyond a general knowledge of computers.
I was uncomfortable asking about unix commands (just use “man”! – but how do I interpret it?) or admitting I wasn’t sure how to get my compiler running. If you hadn’t been coding since middle school, you were behind. I picked up enough to graduate with honors, but still never felt like I knew “enough” to be qualified to work as a “true” programmer.
How is this possible? Even the people with degrees in field can’t code? And this isn’t the first time I’ve come across a story of Comp Sci graduates that couldn’t program.
Actuaries aren’t the best comparison because so much of Actuarial Science builds on pre-existing math knowledge and adds insurance and finance training. Coding is more fundamental. I’d say an actuary is to a .NET (or whatever) programmer what a generalized ‘math geek’ is to a ‘programmer’.
There’s only one way to learn to code, and it’s not the easy way. Like math, or any other language for that matter, you’ve got to sit down and crank away, learning from your mistakes; few could call themselves mathematicians three years after picking up their first calculators.
Of course, you don’t need to master the coding equivalent of calculus to be useful any more than you need to take integrals to do your taxes. But right now the whole programming ecosystem is starved of talent. Pete needs ninjas and everyone else needs front end web devs.
That means every kid should in the world should figure out whether they like programming or not in a middle school classroom.
Not Unreasonable 