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November 29, 2005
That will take the stuffing out of them...
My good friend Tony Diromualdo is frothing at the mouth over The Wall Street Journal's article "An MBA Thanksgiving."
I had the good fortune of being at Tony's house for dinner the day after the article was printed, and got to listen to his opinions on it directly - less polished but with the added benefit of audio and calistenics. Since he and his lovely Nancy also prepared 7 dishes with matching vines, I certainly wasn't complaining.
I suggest the WSJ, next time an analysis of a business event that involves most of America's populace is imminent, consult Tony and a number of other serious foodies for their implementation suggestions. How about "Eat yourself happy through your tax preparation" or "Bonfire of the Budget Preparation Brunches?"
With wine suggestions, of course.
Posted by Espen at 12:22 AM | TrackBack
November 26, 2005
YABHTU
Eric Mack is writing about how the term he coined, YABHTU (Yet Another Blissfully Happy Tablet User) becoming a term (a YANTUTAO - Yet Another Nerdy Term Unknown To Any Others - I suppose.) His commenters, and the general market direction, despite the Scobleizer's hard work, seems to not have taken Tablets to their heart, though.
I for one am a not infrequent Tablet user (not sure if the blissfully happy label would stick, though.) I use my Toshiba tablet both for making quick pen drawings when verbal description doesn't work and where doing a proper vector drawing just isn't worth the bother. I use it for presentations, to draw ink circles and lines on Powerpoint slides and to make drawings in lieu of a proper whiteboard. And I use it to take notes in situations when typing wouldn't be appropriate (as when I was listening to a talk by Elie Wiesel last week). The Tablet feature is a very useful tool, but not something I use every day. It adds a very much appreciated layer of functionality.
For a while I was irritated that tableting didn't integrate well into many programs, but since I don't use the text recognition program anyway and I write much slower long-hand than I touch-type, the tablet is the thing. I think Tablet functionality is destined to become a niche functionality, offered on high-end PCs. It might disappear altogether, though, in which case I would have to get a Wacom tablet board, since direct on-screen drawing is hard to retrofit on a laptop.
I do hope Microsoft and the laptop vendors have some staying power on this one. I like this feature, and it would be sad to see such an enabler of effortless expression disappear.
Posted by Espen at 03:34 PM | TrackBack
November 24, 2005
The flat and the unflattened
Friedman, T. L. (2005). The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York, Farrar, Strauss Giroux.
I have long used chapters from Tom Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree in my classes to explain the impact of information technology and globalized capital markets on the world economy. Friedman's ability to find entertaining and highly relevant examples, and his gift for creative labels (in that book he coined two: The electronic herd to denote the legions of day-traders and other small traders who represent the volatile private capital countries now must attract, rather than the much more stable large bank loans of yore; and the golden straight-jacket, how politicians are forced to refrain from cronyism, populism and personal enrichment in order to attract and maintain the good will of the electronic herd. In Lexus, Friedman showed how politicians are becoming CEOs of their countries, managing them to compete in a global economy that cares less about color and location than education and infrastructure. I was eagerly looking forward to his next book on globalization, and, to judge from the response, so has many others.
That being said, my feelings are mixed on this one. Don't misunderstand me - everyone, from politicians to business leaders to students - should read this book, but perhaps less for the first 10 chapters, where Friedman describes how the world is going "flat" (that is, small and interconnected) than for the latter part of the book, starting with chapter 11, "The Unflat World", where he dives into the difficulties of globalization and the dangers of holding it up. While the first 10 chapters are interesting because Friedman writes extremely lively and documents relevant, if well known cases with clarity and wit, it is in the latter part of the book, where Friedman shows why he is the New York Times leading foreign affairs journalist and not their technology or business writer. In that part, the book starts to shine and really deserve the accolades heaped on it.
His key message is very similar to the closing passages of Landes' The Wealth and Powerty of Nations, (indeed, the whole book can be taken as a popularization of Landes with more imminent examples, with a an seasoning of Theodore Dalrymple and Ernst Luttwak, but writen up more in the style of BusinessWeek than The Economist. If that is what it takes to get people to read about and understand globalization, I'm all for it.
That being said, the weakest chapter of the book is the one about business - aside from the brilliant example of Aramex, a Jordanian rapid delivery company, most of the advice there is trite to business researchers and, I suspect, not exactly news to the common reader. Friedman's saving grace is that he can and does travel, has an incredibly knack not only for picking the relevant examples (most of the companies mentioned, such as UPS, eBay, Wal-Mart, are overused in many other contexts but appear fresh here) but for writing them up in a style that makes them interesting. The best example by far is Dell Computer, where he simply traces (or, rather, gets Dell to trace for him) in minute but fascinating detail how the computer he wrote most of the book on came to be - showing that if China and Taiwan cannot agree politically, they are pretty good at supplying parts and know-how to each other and to the world.
Friedman has a great gift for the poignant expression (On the need to not shut the world out for fear of terrorism: "Leave the cave-dwelling to Osama.") but sometimes veers over towards the saccarine (On the India-Pakistan sabre rattling in 2002 and how big companies lobbied to get India to stand down: "The [India-Pakistani 2000] cease-fire was brought to us not by General Powell but by General Electric. We bring good things to life.")
His suggestion that the United States embark on a "man on the moon" project aimed at making the country energy-independent in ten years is nothing short of brilliant - it addresses a serious problem, is doable, would further research towards a great goal, and help the American and the world economy no end. And it would lessen the world's dependence on oil and thereby reduce the danger of future fallouts over access to energy. Go for it. It's a no-brainer.
Friedman also answers his critics, cheerfully admitting that he is a technological determinist - "guilty as charged" - but not a historical one. And his analysis of how the anti-globalization movement - which he thinks is extremely important - has been shanghaied by anti-Americanism and geriatric leftist ideology is both cooly rational but also heartfelt: Friedman is honest and world-wise enough to know that globalization, to be a beneficial evolution, needs a fact-based and rational opposition - focused on how we globalize rather than whether we are. Too many critics of globalization see it in terms of conspiracy theories - it is an evolution enabled by freedom of information, capital and to a certain extent people, and attempts to put the djinnie back in the bottle are not likely to be successful, to put it mildly. (Incidentally, Jared Diamond's Collapse, which I am halfway through at the moment, provides a much better foundation for this opposition than Naomi Klein's populistic but theoretically incoherent No Logo.) As Friedman says it: "What the world doesn't need is the anti-globalization movement to go away. We just need it to grow up. [...] You don't help the world's poor by dressing up in a turtle outfit and throwing a stone through a McDonald's window. You help them by getting them the tools and instutions to help themselves. [...] Just ask any Indian villager."
His best writing - and underlying anger - comes out when writing about the people for whom globalization is not as much a negative influence as a distant mirage. They constitute half the world's population, they will get restless unless as soon as they see what they can get, and if that isn't good enough reason to start thinking about how to use globalization beneficially rather than try to stop it from happening, I don't know what is.
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Possible error: On page 268, Friedman refers to a study of "leading universities" creating 4000 companies with 1.1m jobs and $232b in revenues, refers to the "Task Force on the future of American Innovation" On page 244, however, the same figures are repeated, but instead of "leading universities" it is MIT, and the reference is to a study by BankBoston.
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Notes after the jump, taken as I read through the book, offered here, caveat emptor, typos and all:
How the world became flat
One: While I was sleeping
- Tom was sidetracked by 9/11 and writing about the middle East and al-Qaeda and didn't see how everything has speeded up
Two: The ten forces that flattened the world
Flattener #1: 11/9/89 (the Berlin wall coming down, allowing people to think global, freeing up free trade, especially in India and China)
Flattener #2: 8/9/95 (Netscape going public, the rise of the web)
Flattener #3: Work flow software (interoperability standards - and how PayPal got to be eBay's standard because the users wanted it, not eBay's Billpoint. Essentially an explanation of network effects and the power of a customer community)
Flattener #4: Open-Sourcing (tells the story of the Apache web server and how it came to be. Eventually IBM signed up and was told to contribute their best engineers. Other examples are blogs, and the Wikipedia.)
Flattener #5: Outsourcing (Primarily India - enabled by cheap fiber (as a result of overinvesting), excellent technical education (no corruption in the Indian Institute of Technology) and strong demand driven first by Y2K and eCommerce, then demand for cheap engineers following the .com bust, eventually evolving to business process outsourcing)
Flattener #6: Offshoring: Essentially a description of China and offshoring of manufacturing - China has 160 cities with more than 1m inhabitants, for instance, and graduates 350K engineers annually. "90% of the output from US-owned offshore factories is sold to foreign consumers" p123. WTO membership in 2001 has made a large difference. But it has created competition within China as well - and probably would not have passed had it been put to a popular vote.
Flattener #7: Supply-Chaining: Using Wal-Mart as an example of lean supply chains. Enormous numbers, effective supply chains, vendors dealing direcly with Bentonville, ramshackle headquarters. "but make no mistake about one thing: Wal-Mart also became number one because this little hick company from northwest Arkansas was smarter and faster about adopting new technology than any of its competitors. And it still is. When started in the 60s, it decided to bypass wholesalers and to go straight to producers, but had to build a centralized distribution center for that to get good prices. Once this was established, the focus was on 1) working with manufacturers to get them to lower costs, 2) optimizing the supply chain from the manufacturer, and 3) constantly improving own IT. Bought $260b worth of goods in 2004, 108 distribution centers, 3000 stores in USA, 1000 more abroad. HP sells 400K computers through Wal-Mart in one day at Christmastime. RetailLink hugely important, partnering with producers. Moving to RFID. Subchapter: TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING: Wal-mart's insularity has caused it to misread public opinion many times."Wal-Mart is the China of companies. It has so much leverage that it can grind down any supplier to the last halfpenny. And it is not at all hesitant about using its ability to play its foreign and domestic suppliers off against each other." (p.137). CEO insists it is better for Wal-Mart that things are produced in the States, but the problem is the suppliers themsevles, who do not want to have responsibility for production and employees (especially health care).
Flattener #8: Insourcing (example of Fedex and UPS. UPS has 271 aircraft, 11th largest fleet in world. Repairs computers for Toshiba in Louisville and does logistics for Papa John's pizza. Friedman version of insourcing is when UPS engineers come in and design your logistics processes, then operate them. CEO Mike Eskew says the majority of customers are small companies who cannot build up a logistics chain themselves. Shows the connections between eBay sellers, UPS, PayPal, and eBay buyers. Also does credit risk, acting as trusted third party. Also works for large companies - UPS redesigned Ford's distribution network.
Flattener #9: In-forming (example of search engines. Google as the ultimate flattener. Sergej Brin (p.155): "people underestimated the importance of finding information , as opposed to other things you would do online. If you are searching for like a health issue, , you really want to know: in some cases it is a life-and-death matter. We have people who search Google for heart-attack symptoms and then dial nine-one-one." Yahoo Groups another example. Flip side: privacy, your reputation will follow you no matter what.
Flattener #10: The steroids: Digital, Mobile, Personal and Virtual. (Friedman call these "steroids" because they amplify the other flatteners.). Standard examples: Moore's law, growth in storage, Skype making voice calls free, wireless (exemplified by applications developed by NTT DoCoMo.)
Three: The triple convergence
Convergence I: Technical platform making it easy to store, process and transmit information - people flying Southwest Airlines now print out their own tickets (meaning that Tom, who got to the airport early, found the best seats taken already).
Convergence II: Organizational reconfiguring based on the technology - essentially, process organization.
Convergence III: More players - visa no longer needed.
Example from India, China and Russia: Dhruva, an Indian gaming software development company, doing everything from India. So you get Zippies - young upward mobile Indians. 3m books sold in China on how to prepare your child for Harvard. Boeing using Russian aerospace engineers to develop their next generation airplanes.
Great comment from Bill Gates: "As a result of China's drive to succeed, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates argued to me, the 'ovarian lottery' has changed - as has the whole relationship between geography and talent. Thirty years ago, he said, if you had a choice between being born a genius on the outskirts of Bombay or Shanghai or being born and average person in Poughkeepsie, you would take Poughkeepsie, because your chances of thriving and living a decent life there, even with average talent, were much greater. But as the world has gone flat, Gates said, and so many people can now plug and play from anywhere, natural talent has started to trump geography. 'Now', he said, 'I would rather be a genius born in China than an average guy born in Poughkeepsie.'
Smokescreen: The dot-com bust, 9/11, and Enron has obscured this development for many people, definitely for American politicians.Also, business leaders aren't talking - "they don't want to tell the kids."
Four: The great sorting out
"The most common disease of the flat world is going to be multiple identities disorder, which is why, if nothing else, political scientists are going to have a field day with the flat world. Political science may turn out to be the biggest growth industry of all in this new era." p.201.
Michael Sandel, political theoretician from Harvard: "What [Friedman] is arguing is that developments in information technology are enabling companies to squeeze out all the inefficiencies and friction from their markets and business operations. That is what your notion of 'flattening' really means. [....] Some obstacles to a frictionless global market are truly sources of waste and lost opportuniteis. But some of these inefficiencies are institutions, habits, cultures and traditions that people cherish precisely because they reflect nonmarket values like social cohesion, religious faith, and national pride. [...] That is why why the debate about captialism has been, from the very beginning, about which frictions, barrriers, and boundaries are mere sources of waste and inefficiency, and which are sources of identity and belonging that we should try to protect."
Example: Indian consulting firm wins the contract to upgrade the unemployment system for the state of Indiana. Would have saved $8m, was set up by pro-labor Democrats and politically torn up by free-trade Republicans. Sort that out. (p.207.) The left wants to protect workers but also help developing countries. The right wants to lower public spending and shrink government....
Multinationals becoming global also in their workforce. Lenovo bought IBMs PC division. Rolls-Royce's British chairman asked to come with Gerhard Schroeder to Moscow to drum up business for German companies....
From command and control to collaborate and connect: General Powell doing his own research on Google faster than asking an aide, email with other foreign ministers, SMSing with Jack Straw.
Multiple identity disorder: Wal-Mart pressuring workers, customers and shareholders benefit. Deregulation speeded up drug approval process but may have created problems, such as Vioxx.
Death of the Salesman: Everything is price now, negotiations via email.
Political realignment - the leftist free-market liberals with the business conservatives, the conservative Christians with the labor unions.
America and the flat world
Five: America and the free trade: Is Ricardo still right?
- jobs are lost in bulk, and recreated one by one or five by ten - which never makes the papers
- wages will increase for knowledge workers in India and China, it will take time
- markets open up
- Paul Romer: Idea-based products can be sold to the whole world at once, manual labor can only be bought by one factory or farm or whatever
- there is no limit on the number of idea-generated jobs in the world (once Google is there, you need it)
- the Indians and Chinese are not racing us to the bottom, they are racing us to the top - and that is a good thing (p.233)
Six: The Untouchables (Defined as people whose job cannot be outsourced)
Message: You have to upgrade your skills. All the time.
To his girls: Not "finish your dinner because people in India are starving. It is "finish your homework because people in India and China are starving for your jobs."
Four kinds of untouchables:
- those who are special (such as Michael Jordan). Only one of them.
- those who are specialized, such as specialized lawyers, brain surgeons, and other work that cannot be automated.
- those who are anchored, such as barbers and waitresses, health personnel and plumbers - location-specific.
- those who are adaptable - and those are the ones that will survive, because the other categories will see parts of their work being outsourced
Important to march forward with innovation, be adaptable. America has many advantages: Innovation and education, capital flow, openness, intellectual capital protection, flexible labor laws, a large domestic market, and political stability. Study by BankBoston: MIT students have created 4000 companies, started at least 1.1 million jobs world wide and generated sales of $232b. US has a relatively clean capital market.
But America will have to work at it, because the others are catching up. Are we working at it? No.
Seven: The Quiet Crisis
The USA like a third-generation rich family, squandering it. And it is a quiet crisis. A "perfect storm" is brewing.
Dirty little secret #1: The numbers. Not enough youngsters are choosing science, many engineers and science teachers are retiring. Cut in spending on basic research.
Great quote from Tracy Koon, Intel's director of corporate affairs: "Science and math are the universal language of technology. They drive technology and our standard of living. Unless our kids grow up knowing that universal language, they will not be able to compete. We are not in the business of manufacturing somehere else. This is a company that was founded here, but we have two raw materials - sand, which we have a ready supply of, and talent, which we don't."
Eight: This is not a test
The crisis is a little bit like the shock of the Sputnik in the fifties, and the USA needs a moon program. However, this is not a war, and people don't mobilize as readily. USA is a little bit like IBM before Lou Gerstner. Bush should start his own moon program: Make America energy-independent in 10 years.
Other suggestions:
- portable benefits
- portable health care
- wage insurance (cushion for people between jobs)
- "if you want to live like a Republican, vote like a Democrat" (to stave off social unrest)
Corporate social activism: Set standards for environment and labor, because otherwise you get a backlash.
- should not at cannot take the place of government regulation
Developing countries and the flat world
Nine: The virgin of Guadelope
- the chapter title refers to how statues of Mexico's national symbol are now being imported to Mexico from China
- discusses why China is overtaking Mexico as USAs biggest trade partner, puts it down to
-- education: Where are all the crash programs in learning English
-- attitude: there are islands of prosperity, such as Monterrey, but it doesn't spread
-- government: Signs that things are changing, but initial steps in globalization (privatization, changes in labor law) are hard to do in the face of politicians' graft and rampant populism
- after globalization (which is "wholesale") comes "retail globalization" or "glocalization" - how easy is it to do business? This is much harder because it cannot be done from the top, much harder to bypass the entrenched bureaucracies
- culture matters a lot, especially culture of tolerance. Islam has a problem here (ref. Dalrymple) because no questoning or reinterpretation of the Koran is allowed
- how about democracy? p. 353: "It would be easy to conclude from just looking at Mexico and China that democracy may be a hindrance to reform retail. I think it is premature to conclude that. I think the real issue is leadership."
-- democracries: Thatcher vs. German chancellors
-- autocracies: China is focused and has a meritocracy, Zimbabwe has leaders "so illegitimate that they are afraid of inflicting any pain."
- From McKinsey report: "Rather than fixating on jobs lost to China, [Mexico and other latin-American countries] should remember a fact of economic life: no place can remain the world's low-cost producer forever - even China will lose that title one day. Instead of trying to defend low-wage assembly jobs, Mexico and other middle-income counties should focus on creating jobs that add higher value. Only if more productive companies with higher-value-added activities replace less productive ones can middle income economies continue down the development path."
- self-confidence important: Luis Rubio`: "A lack of self-confidence leads a country to keep chewing on the past."
Companies and the flat world
Ten: How companies cope
(He says that he is not a business writer, and he is not. But the cases are fantastic.)
Rules for how to cope:
Rule #1: Don't build walls.
- example: The experiences of a small photographer, where the photography business, all aspects of it except the ability to take really clever pictures, are being commoditized
Rule #2: And the small shall act big.
- example: (great case) Aramex, Jordanian package company that was able to maintain a coalition of small companies and build their own software when their large partner Airborne was bought by FedEx.
Rule #3: And the big shall act small.
- Starbucks offering customization (19000 versions of coffee), many of the innovations (such as soy milk) coming from customer requests
Rule #4: The best companies are the best collaborators, because the world is becoming so complex you can't do it alone.
- example: Rolls Royce, doesn't make cars, from national to international, partnering as core competence, demand for skills in managing virtual, international teams.
Rule #5: In a flat world, the best companies stay healthy by getting regular chest X-rays and then selling the results to their clients.
- IBM business consulting analyzing companies systemically, breaking them down into components
- HP selling its internal capacities, such as taking an outsourcing contract for an Indian bank
Rule #6: The best companies outsource to win, not to shrink.
- and so on....
Geopolitics and the flat world
Eleven: The unflat world
Friedman is a technological determinist - technology that enables use will be used. But he is not a historical determinist - he does not know what the long-term result will be.
Half the world is outside the benefits of globalization, this is because they are
- too sick:
-- HIV/AIDS, malaria, TB and polio
-- examples of the medical research the Gates Foundation is supporting, such as development of vaccines that do not need refrigeration
- too disempowered:
-- people living in the twilight zone between unflat (abject powerty) and globalized. They can see it, but they can't get there
-- India is one example, for them the globalization cannot happen fast enough
-- antiglobalization movement doesn't help.
"Let's pause for a moment here and trace how the antiglobalization movement lost touch with the true aspirations of the world's poor. [...] It was driven by five disparate forces. One was upper-midlde-class American liberal guilt at the incredible wealth and power that America had amassed in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dot-com boom. At the peak of the stock market boom, lots of pampered American college kids, wearing their branded clothing, began to get interested in sweatshops as a way to expiate their guilt. The second force drving it was a rear-guard push by the Old Left - socialists, anarchists, and Trotskyites - in alliance with protectionist trade unions. [...] They claimed to speak in the name of the Third World poor, but the bankrupt economic policies they advocated made them, in my view, the Coalition to Keep Poor People Poor. The third force was a more amorphous group. It was made up of many people who gave passive support [...] because they [recognized] some kind of protest against the speed at which the old world was disappearing and becoming flat. The fourth force [...] particularly strong in Europe and in the Islamic world, was anti-Americanism." 9/11 transformed America from economic power to visible military power, strenghtening this anti-Americanism. "Finally, the fifth force [...] was a coalition of very serious, well-meaning, and constructive groups - from environmentalists to trade activitst to NGOs concerned with governance - who became part of the populist antiglobalization movement in the 1990s in the hopes that they could catalyze a global discussion about how we globalize. I had a lot of respect for this latter group. But in the end they got drowned out by the whether-we-globalize crowd [...]." The serious discussion about how to make globalization human disappeared, leaving a political vacuum. Best place to start: Rural India, which need better governance to build basic infrastructure so people can start to globalize.
"What the world doesn't need is the anti-globalization movement to go away. We just need it to grow up." --- "You don't help the world's poor by dressing up in a turtle outfit and throwing a stone through a McDonald's window. You help them by getting them the tools and instutions to help themselves. [...] Just ask any Indian villager."
-- example of HP selling photo-printing equipment to villagers, who set up businesses making photos for ID, but also family photos
- too frustrated:
-- Arab young men are frustrated because their religion tells them that they are superior, but others are living better. So they set out to destroy the others.
-- their religion is Islamo-Leninism, seeing themselves as a vanguard
-- quotes Dalrymple's essay on his interactions with young Muslims in British prison
-- Islam as utopian ideology, finding recruits in the many young Muslims who are living close to the flat world but not in it
-- humiliation is the key - Arab countries have about same GDP as Spain, but not the productivity.
-- this is why many Muslims secretly liked 9/11, because it gave rich and successful USA a bloody nose
-- the movement disregards the scientific achievements, such as algebra, that came from Baghdad and Alexandria
"Unfortunately, there is huge resistance to such modernization from the authoritarian and religiously obscurantist forces within the Arab-Muslim world." The political leaders in the Arab world are illegitimate, so they have to either quell opposition or buy it off. That does not stop the frustration.
- too many Toyotas
-- China (and India) is growing and needs oil, 1000 new cars in Beijing every day, need to find another Saudi Arabia by 2012.
-- developing countries will not agree to reduce their consumption, they want the same evolution as Europe and America.
-- China has only two parts of its foreign policy: Find oil, and no independence for Taiwan.
-- the only thing America can do is to set an example by reducing their own energy consumption
"I would love to see a grand China-United States Manhattan Project, a crash program to jointly develop clean alternative energies, bringing together China's best scientists and it spolitical ability to implement pilot proejcts, with America's best brains, technology and money."
Twelve: The Dell theory of conflict prevention
- traces out the entire production process of his laptop
- no two countries that are part of the same global supply chain will go to war (note: this is offered a tad tounge-in-cheek, but still)
- has worked already: Large US corporations pressuring India to slow down its quarrel with Pakistan in 2002
- Jiang Zemin's son is a partner in a wafer fabrication project in Shanghai with a Taiwanese company
"The [India-Pakistani 2000] cease-fire was brought to us not by General Powell but by General Electric."
Infosys vs. al-Qaeda: The freedom and inexpensive coordination that the Internet offers is available to and used by al-Qaeda as well.
Too personally insecure: al-Qaeda did not use nuclear weapons because it was beyond their capacity. Therefore, we must lock down the nuclear weapons.
Conclusion: Imagination
Thirteen: 11/9 vs. 9/11 (the downfall of the Berlin Wall vs. the fall of the World Trade Center)
- compare the startup of JetBlue to the startup of the al-Qaeda "airline"
- Americans cannot retreat from the world, need to stimulate hope and positive imagination (ref. to earlier: Where you have hope, you have a middle class.)
- "Leave the cave-dwelling to Osama."
- examples of such hope:
-- eBay serving as a platform for entrepreneurs (boy with MS starts business on eBay): Not market, but a self-sustaining community
-- India: Second largest Muslim population in the world, non-violent and tolerant. When Islam is embedded in democratic societies, it tends not to grow anger, but acceptance - see India, Turkey. "While a Muslim woman sits on India's Supreme Court, no Muslim woman is allowed even to drive a car in Saudi Arabia."
The curse of oil: "Nothing has contributed more to retarding the emergence of a democratic context in places like Venezuela, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran than the curse of oil. As long as the monarchs and dictators who run these oil states can get rich by drilling their natural resources - as opposed drilling the natural talents and energy of their people - they can stay in office forever. [..] The rules don't really have to pay attention to the people or explain how they are spending their money - because they have not raised that money through taxes." The most creativeness in the Arab-Muslim world today is in places that have no oil, such as Bahrain or Jordan. Iran spends its oil money on wasteful subsidies rather than building the future.
Trade increases exposure to the world, broadens imagination and increases tolerance and trust.
Need examples, such as Aramex: Successful Arab company, no oil involved.
Need to go from untouchables in the Indian sense, to untouchables in Friedman's sense: Example of school in India proving that untouchables has as much potential as any other, given education.
"The two greatest dangers we Americans face are an excess of protectionism - excessive fears of another 9/11 that prompt us to wall ourselves in, in search of personal security - and excessive fears of competing in a world of 11/9 that prompt us to wall ourselves off, in search of economic security."
Posted by Espen at 06:30 PM | TrackBack
November 23, 2005
ADD history of technology and capital markets
Kessler, A. (2005). How we got here: A slightly irreverent history of technology and markets. New York, HarperCollins.
The title is accurate - this is a short history of how technology and capital markets evolved to where we are today (and, given the evolution of the Internet, the two will merge). Kessler connects many events in a very short format, sprinkling the text with a bit too many one-liner jokes. He does better on technolology history than financial markets, but I still enjoyed it. Quickly written and quickly read, with some good little tidbits here and there (such as the account of B.F. Skinner, psychologist and pigeon trainer, creating a bomb guidance system with pigeons inside the bomb nose cone trained to peck at outlines of Japanese war ships.
Not sure if I would recommend this - too quickie unless you already know the history (but then it is fun.) The definitive book on these topics is yet to be written. Notes:
Part I: The industrial revolutionCannons to steam
- Newcomen and his steam engine for pumping out water from mines
- Boulton & Watt and their reciprocating steam engines (no longer relying on condensation to pull the piston back in), decreasing costs and more horsepower
Textiles
- power looms and other production equipment demanding power to run
- cheap cotton clothing that was also better, because it stretched the cotton and didn't itch
Positively electric
- research into electricity (Franklin, Volta, Galvani)
- Jacquard and the punch card loom for patterns
- Babbage and the difference, later analytical engine
- Boole and logic by mathematics (reducing the necessary complexity of calculating engines)
Transportation Elasticity, Sea and Rail
- railroads, the railroad bubble, enabled by a nascent stock market
- explains this in terms of cost reduction: steam ships, the screw and later propeller
- the Suez canal in 1869 lowered transport costs from East to West with a factor of 3 or more
Part 2: Early Capital Markets
Funding British trade
- King (and sometimes Queen) needed money to fund Navy and colonialization
- introduced joint stock company
- King wanted to sell off monopolies, Parliament limited them to 20 years ->birth of the patent system
Capital Markets and Bubbles
- stock market and securities first took modern form in England, but they had learned it from Holland
- Bank of England introduced modern currency
- South Sea company in 1720, at the same time France had the Mississippi company (worth more than all the gold in France). Eventually killed mercantilism
- the Dutch had the tulip craze in 1630
(- in 1999, Priceline.com, which sold discount tickets for airlines, was worth more than the airlines....)
- after the bubble, Brits risk-averse, created consols (long-term lending)
Fool's gold
- mid-1800, England got its trade surplus in gold
- factory owners and workers underrepresented in Parliament, suffered from Corn laws which meant workers couldn't pay for food
- government borrowing against their gold reserves
- Newton fixed the price of gold in pounds in 1717, lasted until 1931
- the Gold standard held money supply constant and wages flexible, which turned out to be the wrong way around
Part 3: Components needed for computing
Communications
- the short history of the telegraph and the telephone
- the problem of amplification - power needed
Power Generation
- battle between Edison and Westinghouse on DC and AC
- Tesla invented AC, works better over long distances because the electrons don't have to move so far
- Edison invented a computer switch - but didn't realize what he had done
Part 4: Digital computers
Ballistics, Codes and Bombs
- Tesla invented radio by experimenting with sending electricity through air
- Marconi got it to work first
- Tesla also invented the AND gate, in 1903
- AT&T developed automated switches, then George Stibitz developed an adder since he needed to do calculations
- air force needed precision - if they had had it, atom bomb may not have been necessary
- (BF Skinner created a precision device with trained pigeons, who were rewarded with hemp seeds for pecking on Japanese war ship silhouettes)
- early computing history, Turing, Echert-Mauchly, von Neumann , etc
Transistors and Integrated Circuits provide scale
- the whole transistor story, up to Intel
Software and Networks
- basically the story of the Internet, via AlohaNet, Ethernet, etc.
- cisco (from Francisco) , made their money when the browser came, and the LAN traffic rule (80% internal, 20% external) flipped
GPS
- history of GPS
Part 5: Modern capital markets
Modern Gold
- from gold standard through Bretton Woods to Nixon ending convertibility in 1971
- necessitates a stock market to capture value
The Business of Wall Street
- stock market is good for three things:
-- provide expansion capital for businesses
-- agree on a price for a business
-- transfer shares from owners to others who may have a completely different risk profile or time horizon
- interplay with communications technology and the stock market
- increases in communications speed set off bubbles and panics, but the market survives
- increasing demand for information, not just prices
"Wall Street has a love affair with technology, to obtain valueable information faster than others, to handle crippling volumes of transactions, and then to invent profitable products."
Insurance
- fire insurance and life insurance privatize risk, but do little to reduce the risk by themselves
- health insurance set up to ensure that doctors got paid more than to make sure people had money to pay
The Modern Stock Market
- essentially a story of the impact of computers on Wall Street, but sloppily written
- NYSE was quick to do electronic trading but very slow on the back office, so stock certificates were piling up at the end of the 60s
- NASDAQ formed 1961, operational 1971
- Intel was a complicated company, required explanations - hence, the road show
- DTC (electronic certificates) implemented 1973
- fixed commissions disappeard in 1975 with the Securities Exchange Act
- Jeff Citron with Datek and programmer Josh Levine invented day trading when he found that he could trade on the small exchance system, which the bigger traders wouldn't - he could then trade within the spread
- as the regular traders moved off NASDAQ, Levine set up ECN, his own electronic matching service, which now has more than 50% of trades on NASDAQ
- increased liquidity enabled hedge funds, which rely on their ability to get in and out fast to keep profits stable
- argues that the NYCE is outdated, that trading in listed stocks is too expensive, and that everything will move to electronic trading, which will provide more risk capital but also more volatility
Appendix; ENIAC Press Release - because it was extremely ahead of its time
Posted by Espen at 04:05 AM | TrackBack
November 19, 2005
WiFi at HBS
From a comment at a Slashdot discussion on the use of WiFi in classrooms:
How they handle it at Harvard Business School (jwachter) on Saturday November 19, @01:53PM :Case teaching at HBS is a pretty intense experience, but this access system surprises me. - I have always held that if you cannot get the students to concentrate in class because they are surfing, then you don't have a technical problem. This means students cannot google for updated information while in class, which I see as useful, not disturbing. Anyway, another person further down nails it:
I'm a student at Harvard Business School, where they have a fairly interesting solution for handling this problem. While every campus building has wireless access, all the access points in the classroom buildings require a web based log-in that checks your student ID versus your class schedule. If you're scheduled to be in class at that moment, you are denied wireless access to the internet (in any classroom building).
Draconian, perhaps, but very effective at keeping us focused in class.
[Georgia] Tech has a good solution to this problem too: they let you do whatever you want, but if you don't understand the material they fail you and kick you out. It's effective at keeping us focused (enough) in class, and also isn't draconian. (mrchaotica)
Posted by Espen at 08:41 PM | TrackBack
That net porn thing
Nick Carr has an interesting post about porn on the web, and the slow change of what we consider normal. Since I have
- recently read Theodore Dalrymple on our sliding standards and what it does for us (or, at least, for some segments of the population), and
- this morning cleared out the junk trackbacks (Spamlookup let 8 through and caught 341 in a week, bravo) which all point to the same kind of sites he is talking about, and
- three daughters who all have net access and use it all the time (they are 11, 16 and 19, and very smart kids, so it is not that I am very worried, but, as Edward Oakes says, "[...] a neoconservative is a liberal with a teenage daughter.")
...I am tentatively beginning to wonder where the end point in this evolution is. The right-wing crazies and naivist doogooders want to shut down the net and/or impose controls, which, of course, is an unworkable solution that is much worse than the problem. But the sort of "this is not a problem and even discussing it is the thin end of the wedge" answer isn't helping much, either.
Aaahhh, the vagaries of the human existence...
Update: Interesting discussion between Matt Asay and Tim O'Reilly over at Infoworld Open Resource. I agree with the Matt in one thing: It is not the existence, but the intrusion, that is the problem.
Posted by Espen at 04:22 PM | TrackBack
November 18, 2005
Thinking meat
To all my students who have a problem with the notion of future computers as intelligent - here is a twisted tale that just might cause you to reconsider: They're made of meat.
Reminds me of a remark made some years ago by Ian Pearson, BT Futurist, in an MBA class teleconference (from memory): "In some years, computers will have evolved until they exceed human intelligence - but you won't be able to have conversations with them. They wouldn't want to talk to you. After all, you wouldn't go out and have a conversation with a garden snail, would you?"
For the record: I maintain my right not to have a view. And to have fun not having it.
(Via Vampus).
Posted by Espen at 06:02 PM | TrackBack
The Penge Bungalow Murders
As a big fan of Horace Rumpole (John Mortimer's seedy but noble barrister-of-the-Bailey) I enjoyed Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders, though the office intrigues and the intricacies of the plot were somewhat simplified - dare I say mellowed - compared to the usual fare. Obligatory reading for anyone with an affinity for "she who must be obeyed" and "Chateau Thames Embankment", though.Posted by Espen at 03:38 PM | TrackBack
November 17, 2005
Sony's sinking DRM
Bruce Schneier sums up the Sony DRM saga in his Wired column, stressing the somewhat complacent role the virus protection companies have played.
Now, the next twist in the saga makes the whole thing even more bizarre: It seems that Sony got some of their code for the rootkit from open source, in particular from Jon Johansen ("DVD-Jon"). If this holds true, and Sony's use is a violation of the open source license, then we can have the deeply ironic situation that DVD-Jon can sue a music company for intellectual property violation.
Talk about turning the tables...
Posted by Espen at 08:56 PM | TrackBack
Display keyboard from Optimus
Just when I thought I had cracked the keyboard thing by getting a keyboard with blank keys, along comes the Optimus keyboard, which has a changeable display on every key. Certainly a brilliant concept - the problem with programmable keyboards, of course, is always remembering which key you mapt that brilliant macro to.
This offers a genuine innovation. As far as I can see, this is a proof of concept. The challenge will be in the implementation - to what extent will grit and dirt and fiddly software decide whether this will turn out a workable solution or just a cool gadget for keyboard junkies?
(Via Feld Thoughts, which also links to a great article on Tim O'Reilly)
Posted by Espen at 06:20 PM | TrackBack
Strong dollar, not offshoring and imports, behind US job losses
Interesting report on the causes of US job losses by Martin Neil Baily and Robert Z. Lawrence for McKinsey Quarterly (free registration required): Strong dollar and weak domestic demand is behind the disappearing US jobs, not primarily offshoring and imports from China. The remedies lie in weakening the dollar against, primarily, the Chinese Yuan, and in reducing the budget deficit. (These goals would appear to me to be somewhat in conflict, given that China is propping up the dollar by buying US treasury bonds).
The analysis of the IT job market is especially interesting and gives some reason for reflection:
Adding software and business-process jobs together, about 274,000 jobs,6 at most, moved to India from 2000 to 2003—equivalent to an annual average change of about 91,500 positions. Although the costs were substantial for the displaced employees, a job shift of this size is small compared with the 2.1 million service jobs created every year during the 1990s and minor compared even with the net annual job increase of about 327,000 from 2000 to 2003.
Employment in IT and IT-enabled occupations has actually been surprisingly strong in the past few years. A look at employment patterns in the IT occupations that offshoring might have affected (Exhibit 3) reveals that total employment in computer-related service occupations dropped only modestly from 1999 to 2003.7 Moreover, the job decline after 2000 followed a huge technology boom in the late 1990s, culminating in the surge of employment and investment needed to resolve the Y2K problem. The employment levels reached in 2000 were unsustainable regardless of what happened to US trade in services with India (My emphasis)
[....] While the overall change was small, important shifts did take place in the mix of employment within computer occupations. The biggest losers were computer programmers and computer support personnel. For the latter group, employment surged from 1999 to 2000, strongly suggesting a Y2K effect; employment in 2003 was still above the 1999 level.
For computer programmers, however, the decline of 99,090 jobs probably was the result of offshoring to India. We estimate that as many as 134,000 software-related jobs were created in India to serve the United States—roughly equivalent to the number of US software sector jobs lost. As trade in services with India became cheaper and easier, the computer-programming sector followed the laws of comparative advantage, with basic programming jobs moving to low-wage countries. At the higher end of the spectrum, though, jobs continued to proliferate in the United States. From 2000 to 2003, the number of US computer software engineers and computer and network systems analysts, who work on higher-end applications and systems, actually increased, thereby offsetting the loss of computer-programming and computer support jobs over the same period..What this tells me is that the new jobs are at a "higher level" not in the sense of level of technical sophistication, but in that they are closer to the customer, facilitating the use and development of the technology rather than doing it. Competitiveness in applied IT is less a question of how to make things than what to do: Once you have figured out a new process or a new way to satisfy a customer, the technical implementation can be outsourced. Which is what I think is happening.
In a sense (and, of course, with considerable exaggeration) the US (or Western) IT industry is becoming like an old-time stockbroker, schmoozing the customer and taking the order, which is then effected by lower-paid minions in the back office. That model was disrupted, at least for the mass market, by the Schwabs and the Etrades of the world, giving the customers direct access to a simple-to-use DYI financial infrastructure. At some point, this is bound to happen with IT services - rather than dealing with local intermediaries, more and more of the higher-end, less structured services will be done directly on a global basis.
Skype is located in Estland, for instance. Welcome to the neighborhood. For US IT people: Shine your shoes and get yourself a better suit.
Posted by Espen at 04:21 PM | TrackBack
November 16, 2005
How to write a business plan
To all my students, past and current, who want to know how to write a business plan: Brad Feld is about to tell you.
Smarten up. Pay attention. For some of you, there might be a test later.
Posted by Espen at 05:48 PM | TrackBack
November 14, 2005
Email subscriptions available....
For those of you who haven't moved to RSS, I have added an email subscription form in the left column - enter your email address, and after confirmation by email, you get updates to this site right to your mailbox. Just what the doctor ordered, more mail....
(This is untested as of yet, but supposedly this service only send out one mail message per day, no matte how many entries I make here.)
Posted by Espen at 10:12 PM | TrackBack
November 13, 2005
Barbarians of times past
Just finished Barbarians at the gate: The fall of RJR Nabisco, which could be described as "the mother of all case studies." (For those who didn't hang around in the late 80s, it is about the first mega-LBO.) I did take a course with Michael Jensen, who provided much of the theoretical underpinning for the LBO craze, in 1991 - and I couldn't quite get what all the fuss was about.
Anyway, the book is a fascinating story of monumental egos: How RJR management (in a company that produced cigarrettes and cookies) had 6 jet airplanes, called the RJR air force. There are scenes of investment banks Salomon and Drexel nearly tanking the whole deal because they couldn't agree on who should be on the left side of the tombstone. Another LBO company, Forstmann and Little, dickering for a day over whether their press release should say that they had been "invited" or "welcomed" to bid for the company. The final chapters when deadlines are extended in 60 and 15 minute increments (with KKR being paid $45m to wait for one hour at one point) are priceless.
The book reads like a thriller, though it is a bit hard to remember who all the characters are. Anyway, it was fun to then open New York Times and read about how the LBO industry now is flush with cash, but is running out of companies to buy - and, not least, buyers for the pieces they want to shed once they have acquired them.
Posted by Espen at 07:25 PM | TrackBack
November 12, 2005
A Ray of Singularity
I had an hour to spend last night, and used it to leaf through Ray Kurzweil's new book, The Singularity is Near, in which he argues that by (roughly) 2045, computer intelligence (or, at least, processing capacity) will be bigger than all human brains combined. This will lead to a merger of technological and human intelligence, and, in time, to the "awakening of the universe" - which I understood to be a sort of mobilization of every molecule in the universe in the service of creating intelligence.
Ray Kurzweil uses many exponential graphs to make his argument, which he sums up as the world going through six epochs (see figure) - physics, biology, brains, technology, merger of technology and humans, and, lastly, the awakening.
I don't know. Kurzweil has a great track record on predictions with his previous books, and certainly knows how to provoke. Whenever I want to irritate my students, I give them Alan Turings Computing Machinery and Intelligence and a couple of chapters from Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines. The following discussion is always interesting, especially when students have to come to terms with what "intelligent" means.
But I can't help feeling that there is some sort of Achilles and the tortoise about the singularity argument - I cannot bring myself to understand what happens as all these trends converge and their growth approaches infinity - nor that they necessarily do. I have always argued that processing and communication should be thought of as free resources, but, of course, within overviewable limits.
The upshot, of course, is that there is not need to panic - I'll be 84 in 2045, and even if I don't make it there (though, if Kurzweil is right, we all stand a pretty good chance of getting there and much longer) I will adopt a real options strategy, which is, I will wait and see, and not worry too much about it. We will know soon enough.
(Incidentally, a lot of stuff is available on the singularity.com website, including chapters 1 (the six epochs) and chapter 9 (response to various criticisms).
Posted by Espen at 07:39 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Peter Drucker is dead
Peter Drucker is dead at 95. Known as the "consultants' consultant", he was a management author and speaker who, despite the lack of easy frameworks, models or quickie theories was one of the most read and influential thinkers on leadership and organizations. He was prolific: His first book was published in 1939 and first management book in 1942. He gained fame with The Practice of Mangement in 1954, and his autobiography Adventures of a bystander is a gem. For some reason, my favorite is his 1994 Harvard Business Review article "The Theory of the Business", where the main message is that "Businesses don't fail because of sloppiness, lethargy or mammoth bureaucracies, but because they fail to understand that their assumptions about their environment--their theory of the business--no longer applies."
I met him only once, at a 1995 internal seminar for CSC Index employees in Cambridge, MA. He told the following story (as I remember it):
At the Mt. Washington hotel in Bretton Woods there is a rule that no guest can go to his or her room without being escorted by a staff person. This is for historical reasons. When the hotel was first built, it had six rooms in a row. Then six more rooms where built on top of them., and six more in the back. Then the bottom rooms where merged, two and two, because they wanted to have ensuite bathrooms. Then the hotel got further expanded, in bits and pieces.Drucker was a writer - he didn't do oversimplified analysis or quick silver bullet solutions, but shared this thoughts and his wisdom, arrived at by reflective observation and precise language. A life well spent.
The rooms are numbered chronologically, and the system is so confusing and the hotel so large that it takes a staff person to navigate.
Most companies are organized in the same fashion.
Update: The Economist, as usual, gets it right with their conscise and insightful obituary.
Posted by Espen at 06:59 PM | TrackBack
November 11, 2005
Ultra-thin client computing for the masses
The ultra-thin client from Newnham Research and Ndiyo! is a really good idea, the solution to classroom computing everywhere. With WiFi and a couple of USB ports, this could allow you to set up workstations everywhere. A stable setup with what technological complexity there is confined to the server.
Best of all: No annoying fan or noisy harddisk.
(via Nicholas Carr.)
Posted by Espen at 02:47 PM | TrackBack
November 09, 2005
Dalrymple on Paris
I am currently reading Theodory Dalrymple's Our Culture, What's Left of IT, as fine a collection of essays as you will find anywhere. Dalrymple is a conservative moralist, but contrary to the standard definition of that kind of person in the US, he is literate, balanced, thoughtful and erudite. There is much to like in the book, including a moving portrait of one of my favorite authors, Stefan Zweig, as well as a merciless comparison of the lives of Marx and Turgenjev, where the latter comes out as the human and the former as the monster.
In light of the recent riots in France, one of his essays is particularly prescient. It is called City The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris, is available on the web, and clearly shows that these riots are the product of a long evolutionary process that France has no reason to be proud of. Says Dalrymple:
[....] France has handled the resultant situation in the worst possible way. Unless it assimilates these millions successfully, its future will be grim. But it has separated and isolated immigrants and their descendants geographically into dehumanizing ghettos; it has pursued economic policies to promote unemployment and create dependence among them, with all the inevitable psychological consequences; it has flattered the repellent and worthless culture that they have developed; and it has withdrawn the protection of the law from them, allowing them to create their own lawless order.
Prescient, indeed. It was written in 2002.
Posted by Espen at 09:09 PM | TrackBack
Trolling
Cory Doctorow posted a link to a discussion on trolling (deliberately provocative discussion forum posting.) This reminded me of an old entry I read on BIX back in the bronze age of the Internet: Trolling for taillights.
Enough. Back to work.
Posted by Espen at 02:26 PM | TrackBack
PRX - public radio exchange
Just back from a "networking event" at Harvard Startups with the rather ambitious title "Entrepreneurship, Disruptive Technologies and the Future of Public Media: How Participatory Digital Culture is Driving New Business Models and Changing Media As We Know It." I had expected a serious presentation, and it turned out to be a stand-up-and-shout in a hallway.
But the speaker, Jake Shapiro, turned out to be interesting. He is Executive Director of the Public Radio Exchange, an exchange for public radio programming. Public Radio is, according to Bill Bryson, the most underfunded enterprise in the USA - but it is what I listen to whenever I can. PRX is essentially a storage house for radio programs that are created by independent producers (often local radio stations) and is made available for other radio stations to access and broadcast. PRX handles licensing and provides an infrastructure for storage and distribution.
Jake turned out to have a background as a musician with an Internet bent - with the band Two Ton Shoe. He told of how he personally had experienced the Long Tail, when a record producer called them and wanted to license their music for sale - in Korea. They went there and were rock stars for a week, with sold-out concerts and radio performances.
Public broadcasting has an interesting role in the "dot-org" bubble, as Jake referred to the current enthusiasm for distibuted content creation and distribution. Freed from commercials and thin on money, it both needs to and can innovate with new models for distribution.
I'll see, eventually - the network in the office I am writing this from apparently does not like RealAudio streams, so I wasn't able to check out the radio programs. But it just may happen that I decide to produce a little broadcast myself one day, and this could be a great place to post it. Eventually.
Posted by Espen at 04:11 AM | TrackBack
November 08, 2005
Getting GTD done
There are many books on personal productivity, and mostly I don't touch them - they tend to flog some sort of software or life philosophy which is hokey at best and dysfunctional at worst. David Allen's Getting thing done (despite its rather tired subtitle The Art of Stress-free Productivity) is an exception. The reason I think that is partly that I found myself recognizing his central premise (that getting organized is essentially about not having to think about things, and having to think about many things makes us frustrated and interrupt-driven), partly that many people in my line of work praise this approach and swear by it. I also liked his practical approach to software versus paper - use whatever you are comfortable with, as well as his observation that many ideas come about playing with new technology or, for that matter, office equipment. And his system is actually rather wiki-like, with its emphasis on frequent reviews and restructuring.
Now, I intend to put his system to the test. As soon as I am back in my office in Norway. In the meantime, there are quite a few web sites with tools and techniques that want to improve on an already good little book. Plus, I can check out OPML as a productivity tool and think about getting my very own Brother labeler....
Posted by Espen at 10:03 PM | TrackBack
November 04, 2005
Brevity is the digital way
Michelle Cameron of Interactive Media Associates has a nice little article about how to improve legibility of online material at Ubiquity.Posted by Espen at 03:57 AM | TrackBack
November 02, 2005
Doc Searls' 4th law hits again
Doc Searls 4th law states that "No matter what car you want to rent, what you'll get is a Chevy Cavalier."
Ain't that the truth.
I read recently that Toyota is about to become the world's largest car manufacturer, surpassing General Motors. Judging from the design and quality of the Chevy Cavalier that is to be my constant companion for the next six weeks, I can only wonder what took them so long.
A few issues after just two days: The front seat armrest, when down, blocks the parking brake. Snow on the rear window falls into the boot if you open it. The boot (or luggage compartment, can never remember what is UK and what is US English) is of decent size, but the door is so small that I had a hard time getting my one large suitcase in. You can't open the luggage compartment from the inside (well, maybe you can, but I can't find the button - you can use the remote key, however). My head touches the ceiling since the front seat cannot be lowered - and I am 6' 3'', which is nothing out of the ordinary. The engine is noisy. The car understeers. Everything is cheap and plasticky. The brake pedal squeaks and the paint flakes off the door armrest, and this on a car with less than 9k miles on it.
At the same time, the people I am staying with are driving a 1988 Toyota Camry that they would like to renew. However, that is hard to do, since the the old clunker just keeps running and what little rust there is is purely cosmetic, according to their mechanic.
I wonder if you can say the same about any 1988 Cavaliers....
UPDATE I: Took another look at the car. It is not a Cavalier, but a Cobalt. Not that anything else has changed.....
UPDATE II: Have now driven this clunker for 5 weeks. Add a gas gauge that will alternately tell you "low on fuel" and "1/4 tank left", increasing engine noise (especially in cold weather) and the most anemic heater I have encountered since driving a VW Beetle many years back. (The Beetle was said to have only to heater settings: Cold and Ice Cold.)
...and an add-on: Interesting discussion over at Marginal Revolution on why most rental cars are US brands. Best hypothesis so far: Volume discounting because of inability to reduce production capacity.
Posted by Espen at 12:00 PM | Comments (6)
November 01, 2005
Getting it right
One of the chief pleasures of being back in the US is reading good newspapers. The ability of (many) journalists to find le mot juste is astounding. In the New York Times Book Review today, for instance, I found the following paragraph (from Fareed Zakaria's review of George Packer's The Assassins' Gate):Packer describes in microcosm something that has infected conservatism in recent years. Conservatives live in fear of being betrayed ideologically. They particularly distrust non-partisan technocrats - experts - who they suspect will be seduced by the "liberal establishment." The result, in government, journalism and think tanks alike, is a profusion of second-raters whose chief virtue is that they are undeniably "sound."I guess that is the problem with all ideology, whatever political banner it comes under. When the map does not agree with the terrain, the terrain is right. No matter what the press releases say.