Monthly Archives: July 2010

Thoughtbasket Goes Green

Posted on July 27, 2010 | 1 comment

Your humble correspondent has recently started writing for Ecopreneurist, a publication focused on clean and green businesses. You can read my first post here.

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Posted in Business, Pop culture, Trends

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More on Taxes & Government Services

Posted on July 20, 2010 | 1 comment

In a timely follow up to my piece this week on the inherent relationship between taxes and government services provided, Anne Applebaum wrote a great article in Slate about the general hypocrisy of Americans who demand smaller government while castigating their government for not preventing or solving problems like the underwear bomber or the financial meltdown or the BP oil disaster. Ms. Applebaum doesn’t put it this way, but I will: if you want your government to do things, you can’t continually agitate for, and only fund, a small government. Doing things requires resources.

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Posted in Business, Philosophy, Politics

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Being Successful Doesn’t Make You Right

Posted on July 20, 2010 | 2 comments

No, this isn’t some sort of epistemological exploration of what “right” really means, or whether such a thing can exist at all in a post-modern world. Quite the opposite: it is a blog entry on corporate culture and how that culture works, or doesn’t work, at successful companies, in this case Google and Microsoft.

Peter Sims wrote a piece about why he thinks Google is potentially past its prime, on the way to becoming the next Microsoft. I don’t know if he’s right about that; I suspect he is, but I hope not, since I have friends who work at Google. But in the course of his article, he talks about Google’s corporate culture and how it might be hindering current success:

“Product manager candidates, for example, are told they must have computer science degrees from top universities. But while Google’s core algorithm was a brilliant feat of engineering innovation, a growing chorus of voices question whether it can be sustained. That cookie-cutter approach to people misses important opportunities for diversity and creates glass ceilings for non-engineers, both of which stifle innovation. Cultural hubris, another pattern Jim Collins in particular raises, is of foremost concern. It is often said that at Google the engineers lead engineering, product, and even marketing decisions. But when the company has failed, such as with Google Wave or Google Radio , critics have questioned whether the company really understands people.”

Google has been incredibly successful, and folks at Google will say “our culture must be right; look how successful we’ve been.” But maybe Google wasn’t successful because of its engineering-led culture. They launched with a great search solution right at the time the market was ripe for contextual advertising. So maybe their success was due to luck. Or maybe the engineering culture was important early, but not now. After all, it’s not like Google has been spewing out successful new products (hello Orkut). In fact, Google still makes the vast majority of its revenue from the same search business it’s been running since launch.

In the same way, people at Microsoft used to say about their culture: “It must be right; look how successful we’ve been.” But Microsoft was successful mostly because it had a monopoly on operating systems, which it brilliantly leveraged into applications success. Perhaps it was successful despite its culture, not because of it. In fact, I would argue that Microsoft’s historic corporate culture of aggression was in fact counter-productive, leading directly to the antitrust actions that have hampered the company ever since.

The point is that companies, and the employees therein, should recognize that there may not be a causative relationship between the corporate culture and success, or if there was once such a causative relationship, it may have been severed as the strategic landscape changed. Companies would thus do well to avoid resting on their laurels and to instead constantly examine practices and cultures and see if they need revision based on current conditions.

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Posted in Business, Technology

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No Taxes = No Government Services

Posted on July 19, 2010 | Leave a comment

There was a great article in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday about cash-strapped counties letting their rural roads decay from pavement to gravel, since gravel is much cheaper to maintain. It seems telling and appropriate that we are going back to 1940’s road conditions, since we’ve spent the six decades since then overspending, undersaving and generally acting like idiots.

Several of the counties mentioned in the article have put the gravel decision up for a vote, with ballot measures that give citizens the opportunity to choose higher taxes and pavement or lower taxes and gravel. I dig that: let the people decide. But of course, this being America, some people want it both ways.

“Judy Graves of Ypsilanti, N.D., voted against the measure to raise taxes for roads. But she says she and others nonetheless wrote to Gov. John Hoeven and asked him to stop Old 10 from being ground up because it still carries traffic to a Cargill Inc. malting plant.”

So Judy doesn’t want to pay taxes to cover the cost of the road, but she wants the road paved anyway. OK people, let me explain some basic math to you. If you don’t pay taxes, you don’t get services. It’s that simple. If you don’t pay the cashier at Safeway, you don’t get to take your groceries. If you don’t pay at Home Depot, you’re not able to walk out with paint and brushes. Why should government be any different? If you don’t pay for it, you’re not going to get it.

Serious libertarians know this. Their approach is that government shouldn’t provide most services. Cool. I don’t agree, but I get it. Unfortunately, the common approach in our society is more Judy Graves and less libertarian, calling for lower taxes but more services. Less money in, more money out. This is unsustainable, and it’s why Judy and her Ypsilanti neighbors are going to be driving on gravel instead of asphalt.

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Palestinians Try Nonviolence; Will They Stick With It?

Posted on July 16, 2010 | 1 comment

Two articles recently, one in the Wall Street Journal and one in the NY Times (by Thoughtbasket plagiarist Nicholas Kristof), both discussed nascent efforts by Palestinian activists to use non-violence as a tactic against Israel, departing from the usual Hamas trope of violence against Israeli civilians and military targets.

As the WSJ article notes, violence clearly hasn’t worked for the Palestinians. “‘When we use violence, we help Israel win international support,’ said Aziz Dweik, a leading Hamas lawmaker in the West Bank.” Well, duh. The amazing thing is that Hamas is still using the same violent tactics that have clearly proven ineffective. It’s as if they’ve never bothered to examine their own history. Or, frankly, any other history. Because generally speaking, violent separatist movements don’t work very well. Why doesn’t Hamas go talk to the folks from the Tamil Tigers, or the Shining Path, or FARC, or the IRA? Those guys tried violence for decades, and it mostly got them killed or jailed. None of those movements achieved their aims.

Or, the Palestinians could look at political movements that did work, in India or Poland or South Africa or the American south. These movements were all built on non-violence. Moreover, they were all led by paragons of non-violence: Gandhi, Lech Walesa, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, respectively. Who do the Palestinians have? Yasser Arafat. You can see their problem. Had the Palestinians spent the past 15 years sitting peacefully in front of Israeli bulldozers instead of throwing rocks and shooting rockets, they would probably have their own state now. Instead, Hamas is the worst enemy the Palestinians have.

And yes, I know all these situations are more nuanced than I make them out to be. The ANC did use violence, and the IRA now has seats in Parliament. And the greatest independence movement of all, the American secession from England, was indeed violent. Of course, nothing is black and white. But the general trend is clear. For the past century, non-violent movements have been more successful than violent ones. If they Palestinians really want a state, rather than just wanting power, or wanting to kill Jews, they should follow Gandhi’s lead, not Arafat’s.

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Posted in Politics, Trends

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Soccer Is Too Random for America

Posted on July 6, 2010 | Leave a comment

Like many Americans, I have been watching a lot of soccer during the World Cup. Also like many Americans, I won’t watch soccer again until the next World Cup in four years. Despite the popularity of youth soccer across the US, the game has just never really caught on as a spectator sport here.

A number of theories exists as to why soccer isn’t more popular in America — no timeouts for commercial breaks, not enough scoring, ridiculous faking of injuries, generally boring*, too European, etc. — all of which are probably true (I am drinking my own explanation Kool-Aid here). And there are, I’m sure, plenty of other good reasons, including my personal uber-theory of sports, which I will save for a later post, after I have trademarked its awesome parts.

But watching this World Cup I came up with a new idea. Relative to the big American sports, soccer is way more random; players don’t have as much control as they do in our sports. The players thus lack agency, which I use here in the philosophical sense: “human agency is the capacity for human beings to make choices and to impose those choices on the world.” Americans like sports with heroes, and heroes require agency. All the great American sports narratives are abut players who took control (Babe Ruth calling his homer, Michael Jordan in the clutch) of their game. Randomness gets in the way of this control.

When I say that soccer players are not in control, I don’t mean this as a criticism. The guys in the World Cup are the best at what they do. But using your feet to move a ball is simply less precise than using your hands, as you do in football, basketball and baseball. Shots and passes regularly go awry in soccer; this is the randomness of which I speak.

For example, in Sunday’s game between England and Germany, at around 59 minutes a German player was breaking away. Although English defenders were closing in fast, the German had an open shot at the goal. He took the shot from not far outside the penalty area (ie. from 54 feet…pretty close) and yet he missed the goal by three feet. Why? Because kicking is not hugely accurate. Compare that to an NFL quarterback, who, even with giant players rushing in to clobber him, will rarely miss a 19 yard pass by three feet. Why? Because throwing is accurate. Note: I am watching the Uruguay vs. Netherlands game as I post this, and the same thing just happened.

True soccer fans probably like this randomness. And over time, the randomness will be evened out: even if players only make a fraction of their shots, the better team will likely take more shots, and thus score more by the end of the game. But Americans are far more Newtonian. We want action, then result. We prefer a narrative of consistent forward progress, not random fits and starts. We want our action heroes not to follow the flow of Brownian motion but to seize the day and execute, whether they are Peyton Manning or John McLane.

* I tried to find the brilliant bit from the Simpsons where the ball just gets kicked back and forth for about two minutes, fully encapsulating the American view of soccer, but the internet failed me.

THIS JUST IN: Check out this set of Get Fuzzy comics for a classic take on the American view of soccer as boring.

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Posted in Pop culture

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