Curt Doolittle

Form: Mini Essay

  • Can Scrum/agile Project Management Be Used Effectively In A Digital Agency?

    I agree with Dave, despite being an advocate of Scrum in most circumstances.

    A controversial argument:

    Scrum was developed for:
    1) Small teams of  talented people.
    2) Strong buy in from the client(s) who are effectively members of the team.
    3) To compensate for the evolutionary accumulation of knowledge as development progresses.

    HOWEVER
    1) It is less contractually defensible without extraordinary change control – the causal relationship between goal, budget and what is accomplished is often open to greater risk of litigation or loss.
    2) Clients are often comprised of different factions attempting to undermine each other, and conflicts not resolved in contracts are often impossible to avoid, leaving the agency exposed to failure, caused by the client discord.
    3) There are a lot of people in the industry who lack the discipline to work in this manner, and the addition of contractors often exacerbates the problem.
    4) It used to be more difficult for agencies to attract top technical talent.  This is declining but is still, to some degree, true.

    INFORMED OPINION
    Is that it is better suited to teams who work together all the time, and in particular for product development, and less comforting to use in high risk environments with a significant amount of customer management.

    Given the tendency of the major agencies to have less trusting delivery relationships with their clients I would have to approach any question extremely cautiously less one or two major failures a year remove all perceived benefit from the broader financial and relationship questions.

    https://www.quora.com/Can-scrum-agile-project-management-be-used-effectively-in-a-digital-agency

  • Is Charity “a Capitalist And Conservative Project”?

    There are plenty of treatments of the subject that discuss the decline of the ‘civic society’ and decline of ‘civic participation’ in society, because the state has destroyed the motivation for, and the ability of people to engage in civic behavior.  The ‘corporatization and bureaucratization’ of charity. The reason is ostensibly that conservatism provides charity in exchagne for adherence to established norms, and progressives reject adherence to established norms, and requrie that charity require no action in exchange.

    So in that sense, yes, it is a conservative project to create a CIVIC, menaing, voluntary, society. And a progressive project to create a STATIST, meaning ‘managed’ society.

    https://www.quora.com/Is-charity-a-capitalist-and-conservative-project

  • SMART PEOPLE TALK TO THEMSELVES BUT POLITICS IS THE ART OF THE MUNDANE Talking h

    SMART PEOPLE TALK TO THEMSELVES BUT POLITICS IS THE ART OF THE MUNDANE

    Talking heads and bloggers abound. But we talk mostly to ourselves in order to construct arguments that can be successfully employed by our faction leaders, which can then be articulated by our faction members, in oder to maintain their conviction in support of onslaughts from our competing factions.

    Our political preferences are inherited, and we largely seek to confirm them. And it’s important because only the undecideds determine elections, and we must keep our factions motivated in order to give the undecideds the confidence to vote for our side versus the other.

    But if you attend state and local level political gatherings. And listen to average party discourse, there are one or two important initiatives, but most of the members argue along ideological lines using the tired mantras that we silly scribblers have produced over the past election cycle, if not the past generation, precisely for their use. Human beings can rarely articulate their own feelings and ideas. We give them the tools to do so. And it’s either gratifying or horrifying how procedural the process is, from ideological manufacture of memes, to the tactical employment of them in daily life.

    Average voters are something else altogether different from faction members. They vote ideologically or pragmatically. But they still get their information from near neighbors who have collected and sorted through these memes. And in the end, they seem to vote almost exclusively for who they think will win, or their subjective evaluation of the current state of affairs, versus who’s policy that they agree with.

    And those that we cannot convince with arguments we convince by saturation bombing with advertising in the vague hope to tilt the 15% of people who are not entirely committed to one side or the other. People need a means of choosing from the impossible and incomprehensible and we try to give them one.

    I would much prefer economic democracy, where we used the web to allocate our tax dollars to what we prefer, rather than relied upon politicians and bureaucrats, elected according to ideology, using memes that we produced for the purpose of swaying the 15% of people who simply don’t care one way or another.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-05-16 16:06:00 UTC

  • DO THE LEFT QUANTITATIVE ECONOMISTS IGNORE STRATEGIC CIRCUMSTANCES? – AN Analysi

    http://www.caseyresearch.com/articles/will-iran-kill-petrodollarWHY DO THE LEFT QUANTITATIVE ECONOMISTS IGNORE STRATEGIC CIRCUMSTANCES? – AN Analysis Of What Our Future Might Look Like.

    I always find the Keynesian quants amateurish. They select the policy that suites their ideology. It’s just another example of confirmation bias. The constantly quote data going back only as far as the second world war.

    Monetary policy and spending policy are short term tools for fine adjustment of an economy. Industrial policy and Strategic policy, Education and Cultural policy for the long term construction of an economy. Monetary and spending policy serve statist and redistributionist ends, Industrial, Strategic, Education and Cultural policy serve conservative ends. Conservatives think in terms of accumulating reserves of capital, and leftists in terms of distributing it.

    The United States has benefitted from 1992 onward from cheap labor, and cheap prices, due to the adoption of consumer capitalism in the post-communist world, combined with the petro-dollar which has artificially increased our purchasing power since 1973. From 1945 to the sixties we benefitted from being the only remaining industrial power, and the cheap conversion of farm labor to industrial labor. From 1840 to 1930 we benefitted from having cheap land and the ability to immigrate excess european population, which we could sell at a discount to the expanding european empires. From 1750 to 1850 we benefitted from conquering a continent occupied by a small number of stone age indigenous people.

    The left economists would have us believe that our quality of life is the product of our democracy and our technology. But it is not. They are a luxury good produced by the organized application of violence in order to obtain a strategic economic advantage. Just as the greeks used organized violence to obtain trade access through the Dardanelles, the Muslims then the italians in the Mediterranean, the northern europeans in the new world.

    Our temporary advantages that were born of the western advancement in violence, reason, commerce and technology, have been neutralized by our evangelism of consumer capitalism, over their strenuous objections and often violent resistance, to the rest of the human race.

    We have created an inter-temporal hazard: an economic dependency upon anticipated future profits which are unsustainable in without strategic military advantages, and unsustainable a population that is polarized, and as such unsustainable as an economy and possibly a polity. Much of that polarization is caused by conflict over this very issue. And class, cultural, and race warfare can be masked through redistribution in times of wealth. But it cannot be masked in times of prolonged distress. A prolonged distress caused by the loss of those strategic advantages.

    Our external debt is irrelevant. We can inflate it away with ease. But we must continue to sell debt to pay for our entire discretionary budget: every dollar of the military and every dollar of the entire federal government is paid for with debt. The other two thirds, consisting of social security, medicare and medicaid are paid for by the totality of our taxes. If the USA is unable to sell debt for petro-dollars, there is absolutely no way for us to replace one third of our budget. ie: that 1/3 which comes from debt, is in fact, 100% of the budget which our government exists to spend. Without that 1/3 that coes from debt we have no money AT ALL for our government to spend.

    Now, the cautious reader might say that we will not lose 100% of our ability to sell debt. There may always be a market for american debt, simply because of the size of our economy. But again, this is a circular statement. It may only take a decrease of fifteen or twenty percent of demand for our debt to decrease the size of our economy such that our debt is no longer desirable whatsoever. At that point, people will fly to some other currency: a currency that is backed by oil and gold, and which will most likely come from the BRIC countries.

    The left’s argument is that we simply can create demand by printing, borrowing and spending. Yes. But we cannot calculate a future based upon predictions that are specious. The future is uncertain.

    That is the entire philosophy of conservatism: Save, Produce, Take Joy In Present Goods Over Fantasy Future Perfections, in order to avoid the error of human hubris. The very human hubris wich is the justification for progressive ideology and policy.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-05-13 13:48:00 UTC

  • USING THE LEFT’S TACTICS AGAINST THEM : A PERSONAL EXAMPLE Yesterday the left se

    USING THE LEFT’S TACTICS AGAINST THEM : A PERSONAL EXAMPLE

    Yesterday the left sent a typical representative to harass the small meeting of conservatives. He came with a camera. He was black. He was young. When he was told that we weren’t going to allow filming, he tried to use a hidden microphone to record the meeting.

    So, I went after him using the left’s tactics: I just insulted him as a dishonest scumbag that wasn’t interested in allowing free speech, only speech they and their ilk agreed with. They’re just terrorists bent on disrupting honest debate and the free exchange of ideas. They aren’t there to learn they’re there to intimidate and oppress. That’s what the left does.

    But this process is always started by the left, and society degenerates, and rational discourse is lost because of it.

    Society is built on restraint. It’s destruction is based upon the loss of it.

    Fox News was developed as a reaction to CNN’s left bent. Conservative talking points were a reaction to the left’s use of ‘staying on message’ by repeating mantras rather than asking questions. The conservative think tanks were a reaction to the ownership of the mainstream media by the left. The liberation think tanks, and the Mises institute in particular, were a reaction to the ideological innovations of the communist community organizers.

    It’s offensive to conservatives to use these tactics. Until they use them. but personally I find it liberating.

    I made the guy leave. There is no point having a recording or a video of someone calling you out on your dishonesty. God knows they don’t want that kind of thing spreading on the internet. I mean, you’re welcome to get into a shouting match with me and I’ll win. I learned from Friedman and Rothbard: never give up, never surrender, never stop. THe left depends upon our distaste for ill manners.

    We have to make it good manners to shout down the left and adopt any tactic that they throw at us. There isn’t any other choice.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-05-07 11:20:00 UTC

  • DEBATING AND TEACHING AS THE CRUCIBLES OF THOUGHT You cannot get good at boxing

    DEBATING AND TEACHING AS THE CRUCIBLES OF THOUGHT

    You cannot get good at boxing or fencing without sparring partners. Likewise you cannot get good at a subject without teaching it or debating it. Although — you can amuse yourself with the pretense of untested wisdom, a mind on its own is little more than an echo chamber. Debate affords one greater flexibility in taking risks, and teaching is the test of whether or not you can reduce your ideas to communicable narratives that survive attempts at refutation. Personally I think both are valuable and necessary tools. And unless you master both well enough to test your ideas by both means, it’s hard to prove you know anything at all. There are plenty of teachers without ideas. There are plenty of debaters with ideas who lack rational arguments. But the only test is the successful mastery of both.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-05-03 11:06:00 UTC

  • WILL THE USA ATTACK IRAN? AN ANALYSIS OF THE STRATEGIC INCENTIVES THE USA WILL l

    WILL THE USA ATTACK IRAN? AN ANALYSIS OF THE STRATEGIC INCENTIVES

    THE USA WILL likely intervene because Iran is developing an alternative exchange for oil that is not denominated in dollars. THis exchange will eliminate the ability of the USA to finance it’s debt and to finance its military program by eliminating foreign demand for dollars in order to buy oil that is denominated in dollars.

    The USA is only able to provide the extraordinary level of income to its citizens because of its control over world finance, trade and oil, made possible by the inheritance of the British naval system after the second world war, and the USA’s ongoing military supremacy from the buildup of the cold war.

    More importantly, the USA pays for its military program through an inventive and progressive alternative to taxes: which is to export debt then deflate it. This effectively charges growing economies for the USA’s policing of world trade without the difficulty of extracting tariffs or taxes on individual states — which would be intolerable to politicians and populations alike.

    However, this strategy was most advantageous when most of the world was either economically primitive or embroiled in the luddist, anti-modernity World Communism movement, leaving commodity prices comparatively low for Americans. At this point in time, there is no one for the USA to charge for policing the world, because the entire world has abandoned tribal agrarianism and adopted consumer capitalism as its economic model. In this new world, it is in the interest of everyone else to pay their portion of world defense costs purely out of self interest.

    Therefore the USA must either stop Iran and retain its military complex, or allow the world oil system to fall under the control of a pan-islamic movement led by Iran and funded by oil revenues.

    There are arguments in favor of either direction. Our current president is perfectly happy to see the rise of a well funded militarily expansionist iran as the core state of islam. Libertarians are by their nature comfortable. Conservatives by their very nature are not.

    Israel is aware of this strategy (I know, because I know people so to speak) and is attempting to force the hand of Obama during the election season and force him to go along or lose his election, or have to wait four more years, during which Iran will be able to finish making all the materials without having to actually assemble a bomb. But having the materials is a s good as having the bomb. Further, they will move into production with their exchange and begin to undermine the dollar.

    China had hoped to use the Euro as a competitor to the dollar, but that is not going to happen. Europe cannot stand. So china will support the rise of this currency. So will the rest of the world, in order to contain the americans. The net effect is that the USA will have to withdraw its military and very likely europe will have to remilitarize rather than continue to have the USA and the developing world subsidize their economies.

    I can see a possible future for the world that is built on an iranian currency, not an american, where the US government collapses and sovereignty falls to the regions so that the west returns to its natural form: a collection of small states. My libertarian side likes this view. My conservative side argues that the quality of life of the average american will so significantly be reduced that this alternative is simply intolerable.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-04-30 12:18:00 UTC

  • The Institutional Answer To Bleeding Heart Libertarianism

    From Econlib

    RE: “they insist that social justice ought to be part of libertarianism but are unwilling to tell us what it means.”

    Thats right. They have no program, no argument, no artifice. Only a sentiment. This is why they’ll fail. But libertarianism, or at least propertarian reasoning within libertarianism, provides the solution to ‘social justice’ — if that term has any meaning other than ‘redistribution’. The solution arises from insight is that the ethic of voluntary exchange does not require unanimity of belief in anything. It only requires institutions that provide a means by which we can construct exchanges between groups that are not possible to construct by alternative means due to pervasive ‘cheating’. Cheating which is expressed as competition, is beneficial in a market for consumer goods, but a form of privatization or corruption when applied to infrastructure or services (commons). Institutions are necessary for creating those exchanges free of ‘cheating’– private appropriation of common investments. The problem for us lies in constructing the institutions that allow exchanges between groups. Even assuming representative government is a good, if for no other purpose than to divide the labor of decision making, the classical liberal model of multi-class government should have been expanded and reinforced so that classes could conduct exchanges, most of which are inter-temporal borrowings from one another. Instead we undermined that feature of the classical liberal government with fully democratic solutions disconnected from the material differences in interests in the population. Furthermore, institutions of all forms are under attack by ideological libertarians. Rothbardian Anarchism has stolen the libertarian movement. But, we don’t need to give up on institutions. We need to give up on creating institutions that depend on a unanimity of belief in ends, means and virtues. A requirement that does not pass the most casual scrutiny. Most ‘justice’ is simply accounting for and settlement of differences in production cycles. There is no reason we cannot bring forward to the disadvantaged the benefits of the difference in production cycles between the classes, in the same way we bring forward productivity through borrowing and interest between capitalists and entrepreneurs. There is no reason that is, other than we lack the political institutions to accomplish in politics what we accomplish daily in banking as a matter of course. That’s the answer to bleeding heart libertarianism: institutions. But we have to understand Rotbardianism as all but a prohibition on organization first. Curt

  • Is Facebook Making A Strategic Error, Or Is Their Current Problem Just A Matter Of Timing?

    1) Yes, FB is trying to pump its share price via advertising in anticipation of the IPO. We should expect advertising higher costs as the public awareness of FB’s income limitations increases. 2) Even if FB produces only 1B a quarter in revenue or only $5 per user, the costs of running that company are small in practice, and marketing expenses are controllable. It can be a profitable business. The question for investors is, can it be a GROWTH business? 3) If FB solves mail and search and duplicates the Google advertising tools, it can improve its value to advertisers even if its knowledge of customers is not as thorough as they hope, because customers will prefer less noisy searches to Google’s noisy and dirty searches. This is probably the strategic internal error they are making. They are very likely overvaluing the data about the individual in pursuit of mass advertising dollars instead of accurately valuing the desirability to the user of the interface and the protection from ‘noise’. FB will not become another Google. Google profits from the fact that its results are BAD. Because its results are bad, it can sell advertising to small business. FB however, can profit from the fact that its search results CAN be GOOD by narrowing acceptable results and narrowing advertising and therefore increasing advertising rates over those of Google. The problem Google has is that it CANNOT ATTRACT TOP BRANDS. The virtue of FB is that it CAN if it creates a walled garden. FB can strategically create a flight to quality for good brands just as Google has created a flight to opportunity for small and weak brands. “FB is television, and Google is the yellow pages.” 4) THE QUESTION FOR INVESTORS THEN is whether FB will pursue the short term trend, and continue to overvalue customer information — which looks bad but may not indicate anything other than an issue of timing — or whether FB will pursue the long term opportunity, of creating a less cluttered garden on the internet which converts their perceived weakness into a strength that is both desirable for users, consumers and for brands, and one which can rival google’s revenue, but rival it with UPMARKET revenue. The important point here, is that investors can INFLUENCE THAT STRATEGIC DIRECTION. I have no idea whether this strategy is commonly understood inside the company or without. But as one of the few people who has built a large scale technology and marketing company (Top 25 Digital Agency), and who has worked with other strategic Fortune 100 technology leaders to try to solve this problem, the business opportunity is obvious to me since Google’s challenge at attracting top brands due to its all-encompassing aspirations is legion. Google helps small business. FB can help large brands. And advertising large brands requires a bit of a garden. And FB has it. But the client interface for that business model is not Google’s. It’s more intimate. It has to be. That is what I suspect FB’s strategic error is: they’re looking in the wrong direction. That direction can be fixed however. And investors should invest in the OPPORTUNITY to create that wealth even if FB’s numbers look depressed because of timing. Curt Doolittle

  • INSTITUTIONS CANNOT SURVIVE IF THEY EXIST TO DENY PEOPLES AMBITIONS- THEY MUST A

    INSTITUTIONS CANNOT SURVIVE IF THEY EXIST TO DENY PEOPLES AMBITIONS- THEY MUST ASSIST THEM IN ACCOMPLISHING THEM.

    In Politics, you cannot tell a group that it may not have something. Even stating it such a thing is irrational. You must tell them that if they want something, there is a way to achieve it. But, our political system doesn’t work that way. It says the only way to win is to defeat the opposition. That’s why we have ideological class, race, religious and cultural warfare.

    Our classical liberal institutions could not, and did not survive the addition of the lower classes, women and other cultures into the polity.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-04-26 16:34:00 UTC