My fear at this point is that our adminstration, that seems deeply committed to foolish and self distructive approachs to most of the world’s problems, will blow the opportunity that Saddam’s capture has granted them.
The key thing at this point is to use his capture to boil more people off the Bathe Party cult structures. I’ve outlined that before. It would be all to easy to convert this happy event into a further proof that the demons are the door of that community.
My model of exchange standards has three agents. These three go by many names. For example: buyer, seller, and middleman; boy, girl, matchmaker; application, hardware, operating system; or client, server, protocol. The last of the three, the broker, is the most often ignored and most often the one with the most power. My father used to say that one of the problems the communists ran into was an insistence that the middleman is nothing but a parasite.
In addition to these most situations are populated by numerious agents of these agents. For example both buyer and seller may have a bank and that bank will, by virtue of aggregating a relationship with a large number of small and hence marginally powerful players, become a key player in setting exchange standards about how transactions take place. Sticking to the currency exchange standards, examples of middlemen include the the check clearing houses, the treasury, and the body of practices, rules, and laws that frame how the work gets done and the disputes get resolved.
As much as the middleman is often overlooked in discussions of this stuff the agents are even more likely to remain below the radar. I’d even say that one of the key foolishness with Libertarians is their blindness to the power of the agents.
The setting of the standards, rules, laws, etc. etc. that forms the frame or foundation for the entire enterprise is negotiated by the players. Happenstance, path dependencies, ethics, and the power of the various players and their agents shape how the standards emerge and evolve. The entire tangle of organizational politics comes to bear.
Here’s an interesting example of that. In the 1960s a number of consumer protection laws were passed. These included laws requiring clear labeling on products; i.e. what ingredients were in the food, how much the can of coffee weighted, or the legality of making claims about the health benefits of your product. It maybe hard to imagine by there was a time when a can of coffee didn’t say what it weighted and after the law was passed we discovered that some cans were a pound while others were 12 ounces.
All of these were passed because the buyer’s agents were in the ascendancy (i.e. the Democrats), helped along by some very shocking scandals. These days the seller’s agents (i.e. the Republicans) are more in the ascendancy. So we get this example.
We currently have a Republican governor, he’s claim to fame is having been an early investor in Staples. His attorney general decided sometime ago to stop enforcing the law that requires that items for sale must be clearly marked with their price. Now the state has repealed the law that requires prices to be marked. The law now requires that every 5,000 square feet have a scanner available that consumers can walk to, scan the item and hence determine the price (at that instant).
What triggered this posting was this line in the article in the paper:
“John Simley, a spokesman for Home Depot, who said price stickers are not important to most customers.”
In the seller’s dreams the buyer’s don’t care about prices.
Science continues to do it’s best to explain lifes mysteries. Today we learn that beautiful women make men stupid. Which seems a nice complement to earlier reports regarding how smart flies don’t thrive.
Exuberance is beauty. – Blake
Beauty, like ice, our footing does betray; Who can tread sure on the smooth, slippery way: Pleased with the surface, we glide swiftly on, And see the dangers that we cannot shun. – Dryden
“The world needs more smart editorial these days. The problem is that that has nothing to do with technology.” – Steve Jobs
Wonderful and amusing BBC discussion of complaining as a cultural aspect in a British bank. (Click on the Listen again link.)
One thing I find amusing about this was that the researcher was an American. My impression has always been that the British have raised complaining into a national art form, a sport. This sport is best played with a pint in one hand. It’s name is whinging. American’s tend to be suspicious about all that. While meanwhile others tend to be quite suspicious about the enthusiastic nature of American attitudes.
He mentions, at least two kinds of complaining. Deprication – complains about which nothing is expected to happen. These are good for getting everybody together on the same page and provide something to talk about. Derogation – complains about which something should obviously happen but framed in a manner to assure it’s unlikely. This avoids offending those who might do something.
The tail end of the show has a nice enumeration of what makes people happy in the job. Nothing very surprising; but always good to have another list.
In Britian the blue collar workers are happier than the white collar ones.
Bats – All the photos are delightful.
I’ve described before that one of threat hangs over any standards actvity is the stick-up, i.e. that at some point down the road, after everybody is locked-in, a patent holder shows up at the party and demands that we all fork royality a payment.
Here is a fine example. Microsoft has decided to start charging a toll on many of those little memory cards people stick into cameras. The folks that designed that standard screwed up. There were plenty of open standard proven alternatives. It was obvious that the designs were encumbered by Microsoft IP. Fools.
But, more importantly is a story that people thinking about adopting the WS protocol stack or sticking Window’s CE .Net into their appliances should be very careful to think thru. Do you really want to pay a milli-cent tarrif on ever transaction your organization does a few years down the road?
Comic Subscriptions – Oh dear.
Different proffessions have different rules. You can really screw up an organization by forgetting that.