I find PGP very lame because the community has failed to do even the most basic product management.

There are audiences that need to be drawn in.  Who: email users, email client authors, major email users (i.e. commercial entities), even the intermediaries.  Each of these audiences needs guidance, best practices, models.  And usability sucks.

For example there is no guidance for how to signal that I support PGP and or that I would like my correspondents to use PGP if possible.   There should be a norm about how to signal it in a footnote.  There should be a standard header so counter party clients can automate the song and dance.

The state of all this has only slightly improved over the many many years PGP has existed; but the name change around GPG was the worst kind fragmentation of branding.  Pure navel gazing.

It’s all a terrible shame.

An amusing  tax scheme, framed as a Claiming-race, via Underbelly.

The idea is that the owner must declare what he thinks the the property is worth.    The state then get’s to pick one of two options.  A) collect the tax on the declared value, or  B) buy the property.

The term claim-race comes from horse racing.  It’s apparently common.  Horses in a give race can be purchased for a price tied to that race.  Owners accept that as part of the risk they take when they enter the race.

In the horse race it helps to get horses of about equal quality into the race and relieves the race organizer of assessing quality.  In the tax scheme the state is relieved of assessing the value of the property being taxed (unless they want to exercise option B).  In the example underbelly found of the property in question was cargos passing a toll booth.

A recent interview on hiring in the New York Times[1] included these little snippets:

“we did a study to determine whether anyone … is particularly good at hiring. We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship. It’s a complete random mess, except for one guy who was highly predictive because he only interviewed people for a very specialized area, where he happened to be the world’s leading expert.

…

G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation …”

While these are consistent with my experience, it’s a reasonably bleak conclusion.  First off just imagine you’d spent the last few years expediting a huge hiring pipeline, twisting arms to get interviewers, forcing them to fill out score sheets, etc. etc.  And now it all turns out to have been totally useless.

Or what if you want to make the decision to commit to a relationship.  It’s presumably like other shopping exercises: You collect information.  You then distill into “signals.”  Those signals help trigger the decision to commit.   Apparently all that interviewing and dating is useless.

What then?  Seek other signals presumably.  Height?, rosy complexion?, ficco score?  The article does mention: “what works well are structured behavioral interviews.”   I wonder if that has a consensus meaning.

It’s fun to realize that they probably have the data which would allow them to realize some unfortunate hiring patterns.  For example they might discover that candidates interviewed in building 3 just after afternoon tea on a Tuesday early in the month by a senior employee are much more likely to be hired.  Remember that one of the five ways to get rich is to marry well.  Candidates would pay for that information.

Of course it’s, no surprise that the match making (commitment) problem is so hard.  Evolution you know.