Entries Tagged 'minor rant' ↓

I’m going to go all out here and reveal my ignorance of general economic theory.  Anyone should feel free to bitch slap me back into reality.  But before you do be sure to read to the end to see what my real point on this is (’cause I’m gonna ramble for a minute).

Deflation has been widely cited as something to avoid, a negative.  What is it?

In economic theory, deflation is a general reduction in the level of prices below zero percent annual inflation. Deflation should not be confused with temporarily falling prices; instead, it is a sustained fall in general prices once inflation passed zero percent to the downside.  Since this idles capacity, investment also falls, leading to further reductions in aggregate demand. This is the deflationary spiral. (Wikipedia)

Haven’t we been seeing this is some sectors for years?  For example, the items no longer manufactured in the US — textiles, electronics, etc — those prices have fallen.  It’s idled capacity in the US, changed investment in the US and eliminated aggregate demand for US provided versions of these.

Yeah, I get that I’m contextualizing it, localizing it to a certain impacted area, which may certainly be abusing the concept of “deflation” a bit more than I should, but if we look at deflation and the deflationary spiral from within these localized contexts, can’t we argue that there are entire populations formerly tied to these now outsourced industries that have been in stuck in this for years, ever since off shoring proved useful?

So then here’s my (first) point on this.  If it’s fair to look at these already offshored industries as deflationary spiral microcosms, isn’t it fair then to also ask if some of the pundits flogging this particular demon are looking at it from within their own context?  And if so, isn’t it fair to also then assume we have to be ridiculously careful about how we look at this issue right now?

In other words, we have to be open to the idea that some of the people getting us hyped up over potential deflation are simply working in industries that no longer provide the value they once did.  Think auto industry.  Think financial advisers (and thanks Kate for your earlier insightful comments on the financial industry).

My second and final point on this is that the government — our government — of, by and for the people — should err here on the side of the people employed by these industries and not on the industries themselves.  Businesses will look out for themselves.

The government can spend a lot of (our) money putting industries on life support only to see them fail anyway.  Or, they can spend a lot of money on the people employed by those failing industries and see at least some of them make a healthy transition to whatever is next.  Spend the money on education — help people get degrees, help those with degrees get advanced degrees, help people through the inevitable change.  It will be hard.  Better now than later.

Wide spread, cross context deflation is certainly and issue to be wary of.  At the same time the government and the people need to look at industries that are still growing. We can’t simply raise the specter of “deflation” and start running around like chickens with our heads cut off.  It won’t work.

PS Full disclosure: I’m lucky enough to be in one of those growing areas, an industry radically transforming IT spend, so my perspective may be slightly skewed.  For those who aren’t — I’m sorry.  I know it’s tough out there.

My brother and I talked this AM about politics.  He mentioned a friend of his who leans conservative.  This friend, he’s a pilot for an air cargo company.

So I asked:

Does he make $1 million a year? No.

Does he have some other monetary wealth, a few million dollars worth?  No.

Does he have land, some tangible assets, etc., that amount to a few million dollars in value?  No.

So I asked:

What does he have to conserve?

My brother’s answer: well, not much.

(BTW, this is totally stolen from Peter Harris who expressed it far more eloquently than me.)  (Maybe he also stole it from someone — I don’t know.  Or, really, care.)

I was reading about the Large Hadron Collider and ran across this sentence:

He added: “Our motto is: no short cuts?

And thought — really?  Cause if you look at the whole paragraph:

He added: “Our motto is: no short cuts? exchanging a single component which today is cold, is like bringing it back from the Moon. It takes about three to four weeks to warm it up. Then it takes one or two weeks to exchange. Then it needs three to six weeks to cool down again.

It would seem that short cuts would be out of the question.  Which the question mark suggests is not the case.

Pesky punctuation.

Chicago’s Sales Tax rate is 10.25% as of today.  It’s not great, and I’m not in any way excited about it, but it’s got me to wondering: what is Chicago’s real sales tax rate?  There are a bunch of exceptions and then there’s all of the Amazon, Zappos and other online shopping expenditures that don’t collect sales tax.

So if you take:

Total Sales Tax Collection

and divide it by

Total Potentially Taxable Purchases

Then you get what our real sales tax rate is.

But the problem is that with all these complexities and exceptions and ins and outs, no one has any idea what the true effective rate is.  Which means we can’t really have much of a true conversation about sales tax.

It’s frustrating.

And the extremely cynical part of me wonders if that’s not the idea.

And that’s a real problem.

When you get bored of my rambling skip to the end for a radical idea and some light TMI.

Lately, I’ve been troubled by the sheer quantity of End User License Agreements, Terms & Conditions statements and other contractual notices — contracts of adhesion — I must agree to prior to doing anything. If, for example, I want to order from Pizza Hut using a little AIR app they have, I have to agree to pages of terms and conditions

Really?  To order a pizza?

My concern is that reading each one of these items in any type of thorough way would take a significant amount of time.  So I don’t — I just click agree and move on with it.  And I’ll guarantee I’m not unique.  I don’t know a single person who reads all that stuff on items they download and try for everyday use.  In fact, I’ll bet companies like Pizza Hut don’t even think twice about putting it in because our standard behavior these days is to just agree.

But what are we agreeing to?  And how enforceable are they?  I don’t know.

Some WikiP articles are interesting here: Click Wrap (some of the case detail is interesting) and then there’s the section on EULA enforceability.

I’m generally supportive of copyrights and intellectual property, etc., but I think we need some reform around this issue.  For example, a standard agreement that says — here’s the agreement — something I could read once and then know that I’m comfortable with what it says and how it applies.  Like some of the open source licensing that’s out there.

The other idea I had was some sort of EULA Advisor website.  You cut and paste the contents into it and get a rating on whether or not it’s appropriate for you.  Hey look — EulaAdvisor.com is open.  Someone should go do this.  C’mon.  You know you want to.

The final idea I’d like to see someone run with is that the increasing complexity and quantity of these type of agreements them, as a whole, largely unenforceable and meaningless.  In other words, a forced simplification. Some requirement that the agreement’s complexity be proportional to the transaction.  A $9 pizza ordered via free software would allow something like 100 words.  $250k software used to run a $25m enterprise could have a few thousand words.

Maybe the formula is simple: a word per $1.  $99 iPod?  99 word agreement.  I like.

We need to do something.  It’s just too many agreements, too much fine print.

* Apparently you can order from Pizza Hut by text message as well.  Having delivered for them (I was young and poor) and eaten way too much of their pizza, I’m not interested, but it’s still a neat idea.  (Which was apparently covered earlier this year by everyone else but that’s another story.)

A couple of open items.

* I get really annoyed any time anyone refers to the Microsoft SQL Server product as simply SQL Server. There are a whole bunch of DB servers out there.  “SQL Server” tells me very little. Knock it off.

* All of these people who want to monetize social networks like Twitter: Can’t they just be mildly amusing and leave it at that?  Knock it off.

* Speaking of Twitter: if you are already following 2-3,000, or 10k or 20k, people, please don’t follow me, too.  Why not?  It’s just annoying.  You’re not really interested in anything I have to say.  Knock it off.

Thank you.

On the one hand, I’d really like to drop a couple of pounds.

On the other, I ***really*** like french fries.

Quite the conundrum.

so in their story what job woes mean to you, under the heading “less money in workers pockets”, is this gem:

A recent survey by human resources consulting firm Mercer found that 6% of U.S. employers are already trimming their compensation budgets and another 10% are considering cuts.

really?  6%?  OMG good thing they alerted the media.

is it just me or is it likely that at any given time 6% of businesses could be doing just about anything?

not that i’m mr econ, or that i want to suggest there’s nothing going on.

but 6% is hardly sufficient evidence to back up their claim.  there’s plenty of other interesting info in that section.  open with that.

the critter, for those of you still with me, is snoring in an unbelievably cute way right now.

So the Swiss bank dropped its suit against Wikileaks.  You know the suit, the one they brought because of the documents that were posted that proved the Swiss bank in the Cayman Island was helping customer evade taxes.

WHAT?  GASP!  Gimme a break.

Is it just me, or is the whole point of a Cayman Island based bank of any kind, and of a Swiss bank in particular, tax evasion?  Call it whatever you want–wealth preservation–but that’s what it’s for.

Tax evasion.

That would be like me suing someone for suggesting I was–on occasion–a little sarcastic.

Oh: and here’s one about KBR avoiding taxes.  Where?  Cayman Islands.

37 Signals is a local media/programming darling who pops on (and off) my radar on a semi regular basis.  I attended their Getting Real seminar a couple of years back and overall think they have some interesting things to say.

Note the emphasis on “some”. Note that I am not among the 85,000 bajillion subscribers to their blog.  Enough said

Anyway, so how did I come across them, twice, in two days?

I ran across their Workplace Experiments post (and had it emailed and found it skyrocketing up Reddit).  It’s interesting, more as a reminder of Good Things To Do than Raw Innovation.

And then I ran across Coding Horror’s Douchebaggery, a reaction to something 37signal’s David HH’s wrote about programmers who don’t use macs (short version: they’re idiots).  “Douchebaggery” is way more true than Workplace Experiments.  And funnier.  At 5:45a, I appreciate funny.

Oh, and for the record: I have PCs and Macs.  I sometimes program on one, sometimes on the other.

PS If you bothered to hit their website, you’d see a quote that appeared in Time — “One of the Net’s rising stars”.  Is it just me, or is displaying a quote from fucking Time magazine on your front page pretty fucking lame if you are in fact a rising star?  It is?  I thought so.  Thank you.