Monday, September 13, 2010
Criminal behavior is a natural result of metrics management. Yesterday’s episode of This American Life is a horrific example of that. It tells the story of how the much lauded introduction of metrics management into the police department in NYC lead ultimately to horrific criminal behavior by the police. But that’s not exceptional. Why this [...]
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
I’m still chewing on the idea of guard labor, so a pile of random thoughts I’ve been having. Businesses adapt the ratio between guard labor v.s. productive labor. That ratio varies across firms within industries, from one industry to another, and inside of firms from on department to another. Presumably there is a great deal [...]
Living as I have for decades right off the information super highway I was already aware of the seedy underworld of pick up artists. Or, if your the kind of geek who likes a mnemonic: PUAs. Some commodities suffer from an imbalance, high demand and low quality of supply. The skill of how to get [...]
Sunday, December 27, 2009
I was skimming this long long post about the demographics and institutional affiliations of the community of climate skeptics, and deep in the body is this fascinating bit. UPDATE (December 19, 2009): Peter Staats, in the comments, suggested that belief in anthropogenic global warming is entrenched among scientists and will disappear as the older generation [...]
I have recently started reading Albert Hirschman’s 1991 book “The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy.” I’m only 20 pages into it so no telling where it’s going. But so far, it has totally blown me away. The book is an outline of three styles of rhetoric that are commonly used by reactionaries, i.e. those [...]
The HR department is administering the loyalty oath. This is annual event. We are requested to testify, via a form, to all our professional affiliations. To a degree I am, of course, joking. This invasion of our personal privacy is motivated by three concerns: concerns about possible conflict of interest (i.e. that the best interests [...]
One of the two books about business to which I return often is Strategy Safari by Mintzberg et. al. It is a delightful tour through the jungle of approaches to strategic management people have suggested over the decades. In spite of it’s cheerful and concise nature I find I can’t casually read this book. I [...]
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
“Tyranny consists of the desire of universal power beyond its scope.” One of the nice things about having a blog is that you can spit out those damn brainstorms before they do too much damage to your equilibrium or worse or are extinguished by your daily life. I’d not noted before that the evolved animal [...]
The Shangri-La diet Shangri-la Diet book is out; it’s eccentric author is doing his book tour; the echos of the PR machine are reverberating thru the media ecosystem; and apparently I’m not immune to their effects. Darn! What caught me was two things. This fun cheerful paper on “Self Experimentation” by the diet’s inventor Seth [...]
I have this old wound which while it handicaps me it has the useful side effect that I can predict the weather. Whenever this wound begins to act up I can sense storms just over the horizon. This article suggests some particularly bad weather ahead. Consistent with current climate trends though.
Fresh Links…