Thursday, July 12, 2012

The Daily Cannibal

The Daily Cannibal

Wisdom From The Kid

Posted: 12 Jul 2012 03:38 AM PDT

We used to try to edit Hatto.  Now we just give him to you in the same way you get water from a faucet.  Take it as it is:

The Unwritten Evolution of Tech

There is nothing "new" about technology except its perceived value.
When the masses embrace new technology incendiary language soon
follows. The push pin may seem commonplace today, but in 1900 Mr.
Edwin Moore single handedly re-invented the way communication
travelled through message boards. Imagine trying to place a want ad on
a board without a push pin? The brilliant, revolutionary, and
disruptive invention was so widely embraced that Edwin Moore sold
$1,000 worth of push pins to the Eastman Kodak Company the same year –
that's almost $30,000 in today's value.
Most would not consider Mr. Moore a technologist but then what is a
technologist? What perceived value must be achieved before this due
title is bestowed? If technology is about facilitating the flow of
complex information, communication, data, or even physical goods
across great masses of people or distances – the concept of the push
pin truly is revolutionary. Let's not forget that computers merely
translate complex series of 1's and 0's – originally conceived by the
Egyptians.
Here are a few other companies that go unrecognized in the realm of technology.

 

McDonalds
Quite possibly the most well-known restaurant in the world is at the
forefront of innovation. Beyond diabetes and obese inspired recipes,
McDonalds mastered how to flash fry a whole cow in a matter of
minutes, transform a potato into a salted cardiac arrest in seconds,
and serve over 30g of syrupy soda in an instant. Even these
evolutionary culinary processes did not cure their biggest hiccup. The
people serving the quarter pounders with cheese could not count.
No matter how successful a business, if the employees collecting the
money are under collecting you don't have a business – ahem Greece.
So McDonalds invented the app. To overcome this obstacle McDonalds
built simple terminals, customized software, with gigantic screens and
big colorful buttons. These machines may act like cash registers, but
they are much more. They are the first customized application to
ensure that users don't have to compute numbers, not even type 1.99
into a machine, but rather just press a large image of Big Mac to tell
a complex network of back room chefs and back office statisticians
that is what the customer wants. Why, so that everyone knows that
everyone is getting what they want and at the right price. Trying to
re-teach someone math is far more difficult than teaching someone to
press a button once for one and twice for two.

FedEx
Beyond getting police officers drunk to ensure his planes took off,
Fred Smith had a much larger problem with FedEx, namely paper. With a
large distributed network of employees around the globe, Federal
Express's business was truly mobile.  Anytime a package was
dropped-offed, picked-up, delivered, returned, or lost a piece of
paper was required. After along it was difficult to know what to keep
track of first the paperwork or the packages themselves.
No matter how mobile the business, paperwork always holds you back.
Just ask anyone at your local police department.
So FedEx invented mobile computing or dare we say the tablet. Federal
Express had already mastered the tracking number but the management of
the client signatures was the problem. With a large human presence
FedEx created the handheld signature scanner. Processing mass amounts
of data and providing clients with a device to sign instead of a piece
of paper helped coordinate, organize, and maintain all package
information in one place. Now the focus of the business shifted from
paper management to delivering packages on-time. Technology helped
this shift.

American Express
Never leave home without it is possibly one of the great tag-lines of
the 1980's, but only in so much that Amex had a customer problem and
hoped that marketing would help solve it. Turned out that customers
where more fickle and less convinced. It's difficult to imagine today,
but the early days of credit cards was the equivalent presenting a
Filo-Fax as a CRM solution today. Credit was viewed as a social faux
pas. To use credit was to socially pronounce that you could not afford
what you were consuming or that you were light on cash.
So no matter how brilliant the idea, preconceived social convention
will triumph, think Marie Antoinette.
So American Express invented the loyalty points system or in my view
gamification. How does a company overcome social stigmatism? Give
users a distraction or "other" reason.  American Express's Rewards
program is as celebrated as it is used. What better way to get
business users to flash Amex over Mastercard then to bribe reward free
air miles and travel awards and send the bill to the employer. This is
truly an innovative master stroke. From gaining rapid market share in
the world of business, users where able to justify paying for meals
with American Express because "they want the miles" or "If I reach
100,000 points I get to go to Mexico" when the truth was they didn't
have the cash and their company was paying the bill.

So what's the point here? Today people talk about innovative
technology companies yet never do they mention some of America's
largest blue chips. We can't say that craigslist would not have
existed if it wasn't for the push tack, but I'm willing to bet that
Steve Jobs once ordered a large fries from McDonalds, received a
package from FedEx, and had a Black American Express card in his
pocket and he thought: "Wow these boys are smart, but I can do it
better" and then he went on to create the App Store, iPad, and iTunes.

 

In Afghanistan, U.S. Military Can’t Contain Itself

Posted: 11 Jul 2012 10:18 PM PDT

What use, I wonder, could we possibly make of the news that the pullout from Afghanistan is going to cost “billions of dollars?” Did anyone expect a free pass out of there?

In a recent post I talked about how unusual it is to hear about dollar amounts in the trillions. Maybe I should have included a caveat excluding war. A Reuters report put the cost of the Afghanistan conflict at $3.7 trillion and counting – and that report was from a year ago. Also around that time, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated that the Bush tax cuts and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined “will account for $7 trillion in deficits in 2009 through 2019, including the associated debt-service costs.” So. Trillions, schmillions.

How trivial, then, to spend just a few billion to get all our people and stuff out of Afghanistan! The news that seems significant in the new report actually has to do with mere millions – specifically, $610 million the military has spent on boxes in which to carry in all the stuff they now have to carry out. And that’s not the price for renting those shipping containers; no, that $610 million is the cost in late fees for not returning them on time.

You might think that, knowing what a long and difficult haul it is moving things into and out of that country, the military might have negotiated better deals with the shipping companies, but I guess that’s all water under the blown-up bridges. Nonetheless, the Christian Science Monitor has jumped on the story and calculated that the military would actually have saved money buying the containers outright.

But hey, how often have you seen the words “military” and “saved money” in the same sentence without a “would have” or “could have” connecting them? Do a web search on the phrase “military saved money” and you will find the pickings awfully slim. Unless you count an investigation into doctors overturning soldiers’ post-traumatic stress disorder diagnoses so the government wouldn’t have to pay for their PTSD treatment, it’s hard to find much at all.

Come to think of it, all this suggests that our true-believer politicians on the right have it backwards. Instead of giving the federal government responsibility for the “national defense” and privatizing just about everything else, shouldn’t they want to privatize the military instead? Right-wing doctrine says you have to run the government like a business, after all. And if you run a business, do you tolerate late fees in the nine figures?

The Return of Chauncy Gardner

Posted: 11 Jul 2012 09:46 PM PDT

 

 

Government no more spends our money than a garden spends water or a body spends blood.

This is but one of dozens like it.  Regard it.  Admire it.  Stand in awe of its majesty.   But you say, a garden does spend water?  Tut.  Nitpicking, nitpicking.  A body does spend blood?  Besides the point.

And what, exactly, is the point?  Well, we don’t understand our economy because we think it’s a machine.  And it’s not.  It’s a (wait for it) … garden.  Or so say Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer, authors of The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy and the Role of Government, and authors of an op-ed essay in today’s New York Times, “The Machine and the Garden.”

Your patience will not allow as thorough an examination of this essay as I would like to provide; hence, a brief precis:

Obviously, we all think the economy is like a machine because we use metaphors like “jump start” and “grease the wheels” and “tune up” and stuff like that.  QED, right?  And that’s where we went wrong:

What we require now is a new framework for thinking and talking about the economy, grounded in modern understandings of how things actually work. Economies, as social scientists now understand, aren't simple, linear and predictable, but complex, nonlinear and ecosystemic. An economy isn't a machine; it's a garden. It can be fruitful if well tended, but will be overrun by noxious weeds if not.

Never mind that only pencilheads like Krugman think the economy is linear and predictable.  Let’s take a look at this “garden” metaphor.

First of all, a garden is by definition an artificial representation of nonlinear nature.  You choose what you plant and where you plant it.  Selection is not natural, but imposed from outside.  There is no creativity in that there can be no mutation, no random element, and no room for experimentation.  Okay, enough of that — an economy is about as much like a garden as a supernova is like a butane lighter.  but:

In this new framework, which we call Gardenbrain, markets are not perfectly efficient but can be effective if well managed. Where Machinebrain posits that it's every man for himself, Gardenbrain recognizes that we're all better off when we're all better off. Where Machinebrain treats radical inequality as purely the predictable result of unequally distributed talent and work ethic, Gardenbrain reveals it as equally the self-reinforcing and compounding result of unequally distributed opportunity.

Is “gardenbrain” a synonym for “dirthead?”  I have read this gibberish several times now, and still cannot get all the way to the end without abdominal spasms from guffaws so profound that my ribs threaten to crack under the strain.  “We’re all better off when we’re all better off.”  And that last sentence — what freshman essay at what community college did the authors lift that from?

The authors also have an interesting habit of making statements that are so patently wrong they should make the reader start barking in protest, but the calm assurance of these assertions somehow tends to soothe one into at least an initial acceptance, until the mind recovers from the opium and suddenly croaks “What?! What?!”

Humans, it is said, originated in a garden. Perhaps that is why we understand so intuitively what it takes to be great gardeners.

Frankly, I think ether are very few people working at the New York Times that think for one second that “humans originated in a garden.”  And I would bet serious money that not one person in a hundred alive in the US today would agree outright that they “understand so intuitively what it takes to be great gardeners.”  If they do say so, they lie.

The authors see the government in this metaphor as an all-knowing, benevolent dictator that weeds out undesirable growth and nourishes admirable and desirable shoots for the benefit of all.  One thing here we might agree with is the image of government spewing fertilizer in all directions, as we have actually been witness to this phenomenon for nigh on 65 years now.

Enough.  I can’t go on.  Let me tell you boys something:  an economy is not a machine, nor is it a garden, or a Ferris wheel, or a curious piece of green putty you found in your armpit on a warm afternoon (Douglas Adams).   If you want to make a botanical comparison, however, there is one more apt:  it’s a jungle.  We can clear it, defend ourselves from it, try to bend it to our own benefit, and we can to some extent contain it.   But we don’t want to reduce it to some sterile plot of completely designed and rigidly managed state of equilbrium, because we need its feral nature to provide the innovation, creativity, laboratory and incubator that will guarantee our continued progress towards a better future — for everybody.

Finally, we find it hilarious that the authors of this puerile nonsense and all its contradictory imagery seem to be unaware of the use of this metaphor back in 1971 in Jerzy Kosinky’s masterpiece, Being There, where the sweet but simpleminded groundskeeper of a recently-deceased plutocrat is mistaken by the plutocrat’s associates for a profound sage, and therefore elevated to great prominence, because, whenever asked a question, he would respond by saying “It’s like a garden….”

Or, in the words of the authors:

Find the right ground and cast the seed. Fertilize, water and weed. Know the difference between blight and bounty. Adapt to changing weather and seasons. Turn the soil. This is how a fruitful economy grows.

Great ideas never die.  They just come back as unintentional self-parodies.  Gardenbrain indeed.
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