HUMILITY AND USER INTERFACE DESIGN
I don’t feel humbled very often. Certainly not in business. Mostly, when my daughter tells me she loves me, or when friends and acquaintances demonstrate their love.
But damn. Denis is so freaking good at UI design it’s … humbling. I mean, it’s almost irritating how easy it is for him.
We scored. 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2013-06-27 11:17:00 UTC
GODS EXIST LIKE NUMBERS EXIST
Good video on a topic that I try to popularize. Does math exist? Do numbers exist? If they exist, how? 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2013-06-27 07:40:00 UTC
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2013/06/more-on-one-percent.htmlMORE ON THE ONE PERCENT
There is an ideological war going on over whether the 1% argument will actually hold up to scrutiny.
This really depends on whether you mean the .01% that STAY in the 1%, or the number of people who ROTATE through the 1%.
Krugman and Delong are making arguments that Mankiw is wrong, and that the 1% are rent seekers.
I don’t see much evidence of that, but I look at the problem as one of rotation through the group, and I think the other side politically is addicted to the idea that the 1% is part of the financial sector.
Even then, I”m not sure how many people stay in that position or how many rotate through it.
I”m not in favor of feeding the financial sector (which anyone who follows me knows) but on the other hand, I don’t know if I buy the 1% argument. I’ve been in the 1% a few times, and I”ve spent a lot of time in the 2-3%.
But Allora and I also lived on pasta and butter when we had to. 🙂
Anyway, I”m reserving judgement until I see more data that I can have confidence in.
Source date (UTC): 2013-06-27 07:36:00 UTC
http://habitableworlds.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/visualizing-the-dark-enlightenment-v-1-5/MAP OF THE DARK ENLIGHTENMENT
Nice piece. Pretty accurate. Shows most of the major players organized by interest area.
I should probably be on this list, but since I don’t COMPLAIN, but instead try to solve the PROBLEM of heterogeneous political cooperation post-majority rule, I guess that I don’t qualify. 🙂
But whining doesn’t solve anything. Any lazy oaf can complain. Any romantic can wish for the past. Any fool can fail to see the change that information and industrial prosperity and consumer capitalism have forced into our social economic and political relations. Any idiot can advocate that his preferred political model is the optimum political model for all others – that there is a ‘common good’ where we have common ends, instead of common goods that allow us to cooperate on means despite having conflicting ends.
So yes. I’m jealous. 🙂
(PS: Tongue in cheek: the fact that I’m whining here is an act of self deprecating humor… ok? I’m not that dim. 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2013-06-27 03:56:00 UTC
(Things that go bump in the night.)
You’d think that at my age, scary movies couldn’t give me the creeps. Living alone at my (big) log house in the (very dark) woods (very far from neighbors), I wouldn’t watch them. And in this big apartment in this very old building I shouldn’t either. Suspension of disbelief and all, being what it is. Ack…. 🙂
I feel ridiculous. 🙂 But it’s somehow satisfying. 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2013-06-26 18:27:00 UTC
http://judithcurry.com/2013/06/26/noticeable-climate-change/CLIMATE – WITH GRAPHS – BY A GROWNUP
Source date (UTC): 2013-06-26 11:06:00 UTC
http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130620130134-128811924-note-to-managers-positivity-mattersFUNNY : I’VE ALWAYS BEEN TEASED FOR MY MANAGERIAL ‘OPTIMISM’
(Even though, operationally, and financially, I’m pretty pessimistic really.)
But there are good reasons for broadcasting optimism – in the sense that there are other options at any given piont, not just hollow encouragement. One of my favorite lines is “what is the worst that can happen if we do this?” Which is usually followed by “And what are our choices from there?” I also try to explain to engineers that science doesn’t progress by being right. It progresses by taking risks (and in business, this means competitive risks) Asking this one question repeatedly tends to train people to ask it of themselves, and plan accordingly.
You can never let your people feel self doubt. Give them room. Let them know that if you’re asking them to do risky things, that failure is a possibility, but that there are always additional options. Give them the credit when they win, and be prepared with options so that you can catch them when they fail.
THE SCARCITY OF POSITIVE THINKING
Now on the analytical side, I know a) that thinking is a resource that is scarce. b) that decisions are not clear, or made in isolation, and are easily influenced by external stimuli. So the problem is giving people the right things to think about and eliminating things that they shouldn’t think about.
Self doubt, fear, “is the mind killer’. Primarily because it’s easier to think about bad stuff, than it is to do the hard work of ignoring bad stuff and simply working on collecting ideas. We are as mentally effort-avoiding as we are physical labor-avoiding. So preserve your people’s prescious mental resources by keeping them focused on problem solving rather than fear of failure. (I view fear of failure as a weakness in management, that want to go hide in an office pretending to add value, or working political games rather than assisting the people.)
BEHAVIOR IN THE FACE OF SCARCITY
Over the weekend I read a lot of ancient and medieval law. And, not so much in the ancient world, but certainly in the medieval world, you get the feeling of this incredible WEIGHT of pervasive and oppressive scarcity affecting everything that people think, say and do.
Our world is so absent of scarcity that we generally are trying to motivate people by the reward of fulfillment, more so than money.
THE PROBLEM OF OPTIMISM
The mistake I tend to make, is that I give my staff the confidence in their own thoughts, so much so, that they start to actually believe me, and they discount my ability to influence them, and so I must let them fail to get my influence over them back. I wish I could somehow figure out how to get out of this trap. But I can’t. I love that people develop into independent actors who are confident in their decisions.
PARENTING RATHER THAN DISCIPLINING
But I think this is just good parenting. Which is, a far better way to run a business than is military cum bureaucratic processes, that we inherited from our european, and particularly british ancestors.
The best executive advice I have is the sort of wisdom that I got from the good-to-great data: build people from within, build a family regulated by cultural values, do what you can succeed at doing, plus my own advice: that scale and credit are an extraordinary competitive advantage, but one that calcifies your organization in mediocrity. Drive to excellence not efficiency. Profit will come from competitive survival, not from efficient production. Efficient production too often takes your focus off the customer. And the customer is the hardest asset to obtain.
Source date (UTC): 2013-06-26 09:22:00 UTC
FIVE STRATFOR PREDICTIONS
I follow STRATFOR pretty closely. They rely very heavily on geo-strategy and demographics rather than some absurd idealism, or pure economics to make predictive trends. (Economics are more derivative than causal when compared to geography and demographics.)
1) “Turkey will emerge as Iran weakens”
Well Iran is an economic basket case, so this is better stated as “Turkey is Emerging as Iran Weakens” and Turkey is a country that’s the most sane in the Muslim world. While we probably all want a strong Turkey and a strong Russia, the muslim world needs a credible core state that can hold other states accountable for their actions within the civilization. I just have a hard time seeing turkey become the core state, even though it will emerge as the most important economic power. That culture is still too primitive and mired in familialism to join the first world.
2) “Russia will use economic tools to build influence in Eastern Europe”
Well, what do you mean ‘will’? Russia owns big industry in Ukraine through the extensive use of credit, and Russia controls the flow of energy. So either western and Eastern Ukraine split, or Ukraine will have to act as a client state of Russia in every way possible. Personally I think Ukrainians are a sweet people that could join Europe even if Russian’s couldn’t. But the stage is set for at least eastern Ukraine to act as a Russian client state. (Canada’s client-state relationship to the USA for example.)
3) “Certain developing countries will emerge as economic alternatives to an increasingly uncompetitive China”
Already happening. The china miracle is slowing down. Not much surprise there.
4) Economic instability will force change on China’s political foundations
This one I don’t buy. I think that not enough time has passed, and that they will retain their strategy, as has france, of being a pain in the ass to the rest of the world in order to demonstrate their relevance.
5) “The tension between economic interests and cultural stability will define Europe”
Which is saying nothing. Either Europe evolves into a german empire (which is actually what I prefer) or the catholic and protestant countries have to split. Given that the low friction route is to maintain the german empire, I think this will be the result. If we can get the USA militarily and strategically out of Europe, then Germany might get out of her WW2 guilt and take responsibility for Europe once again. (Please). The is the only way I know of to rescue western civilization – to restore the confidence germanic protestant values and mythology.
Source date (UTC): 2013-06-26 09:07:00 UTC
CODING TO PERFORMANCE: MENTAL TORTURE FOR SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS
I’m messing with the team lately:
“Speed is a design pattern too.”
“So, I don’t care if its easy to program – I just care if its fast.”
“Yes it’s painful. But I pay you once for pain. The user feels pain every time he loads a page. In the pain-economy, you’re pain is just a better investment.”
🙂
A good complier in most languages will compensate for the overhead of writing ‘good clear code’. But we are increasingly using languages that aren’t put through ‘good compilers’, and as such, we can’t afford the high cost of that overhead.
We coded our product for performance. And the price for that lack of overhead is readability. That means that the code is a bit hard to read for a new employee – it’s hard for me at least.
But, in exchange, I’ve been very happy with our performance. One competitor I’m very familiar with generates about 50MB of peak ram on the server. Our same feature generates just over 4MB of peak memory on the server. We only load what we need for any given request. I think we’ll get to 5MB a request before we’re done. Between the various tactics we use (rarely reloading the page, if ever) only loading sections of any page dynamically (like FB does) , and fetching the data from the client side after the page is presented – all of which are pretty standard fare these days – we have an amazingly fast application both statistically and perceptibly. So coding to speed worked for us.
The truth is though, that clear code is easier to debug, and easier to maintain. And it’s harder for bugs or un-executed code to creep into the source. But in exchange, adding devs to the product team is difficult. And programming to performance is in itself, slow for these reasons. And our application isn’t small by any means.
It is, really, much more dense and full of features than the previous generation of ERP/PSA systems that run on desktops. (They look ‘child-like’ to us at this point. Really.) So we have to be very conscious of performance, and conscious of the fact that browsers tend to bleed memory like crazy.
At present we’re testing out switching ORM’s (the software that maps the program to the database so that developers don’t have to write much SQL) to see if we can make the code easier to write without much of a penalty. But we can’t seem to find a script solution for the browser side that is mature enough for our needs, and is as fast as the way we do it today. It’s better than it has been, but it’s not there yet.
Source date (UTC): 2013-06-26 08:42:00 UTC
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/139464/j-bradford-delong/the-second-great-depressionFINALLY THE LEFT CALLS THIS THE SECOND GREAT DEPRESSION.
sigh.
Source date (UTC): 2013-06-25 14:00:00 UTC