Curt Doolittle

Source: Facebook

  • I’VE BEEN SAYING FOR EIGHT YEARS : MSFT IS DEAD AND TAKING SEATTLE WITH IT. -AN

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2013/01/20/sell-microsoft-now-game-over-ballmer-loses/LIKE I’VE BEEN SAYING FOR EIGHT YEARS : MSFT IS DEAD AND TAKING SEATTLE WITH IT.

    -AN ENTREPRENEURIAL CATHARSIS. A MANAGERIAL CONTRAST. AND THE VALUE OF AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS AND PRAXEOLOGY-

    Microsoft has created an absurd environment in seattle. It has given more of its profits to employees that any company in history.

    Those employees have spent that money in the local market. It has created an affluent and educated community in King County. It’s a beautiful place to live.

    I’ve been working with Microsoft since they intentionally recruited me along with other thought leaders from the Borland camp in 1992.

    I’ve been instrumental or built four companies in the Microsoft space. With the most recent being the largest privately held firm servicing Microsoft customers.

    I”ve tried to save two products for Microsoft from outside the company, and in practice I am pretty sure that I’ve saved one (time will tell), and we know that we significantly improved the life of another.

    I spent half of 2005 working with senior people trying to implement change in how Microsoft marketed itself.

    What I learned, was that the incentives in the company made it impossible to change without a CEO who understood the problem, and would force the change, and a board that would back him.

    But interestingly enough. I had precisely the opposite problem. In our company we earned 40% of our revenues from Microsoft.

    So, I knew. I knew it was exit that dependency on Microsoft or die.

    My investor fought me. My management fought me.

    They fought me on the downturn in the economy that was inevitable.

    They fought me on the collapse of Microsoft spending that was inevitable.

    I lost the arguments. Because I could not produce evidence of a future that they could not sense on their own.

    That’s because there is no evidence of a future that they could sense on their own.

    And I had too little power to enforce such a change.

    I quit in May of 2009. They refused to accept it. And that was my mistake. Loyalty trumped wisdom.

    But nothing changes. The board over-invested in both Microsoft and TMobile, further extending our dependency.

    Microsoft constrained it spending. Then TMobile was ‘sold’. Business rapidly evaporated.

    I argued that the government would never, under any circumstance, allow the merger.

    That we should prepare campaigns for the duration of the dispute, and for the eventual failure.

    It was a tremendous gift. TMobile has great customer service. Customers love them. If you’re merger is rejected you have the best marketing opportunity in the world.

    With some significant gyrations, I saved the company in the fall of 2011 by a maneuver that is worthy of textbook inclusion.

    Then, I resigned again. This time for good.

    Am I happier today? Yes.

    Am I still angry about halving the size of the 100M company I built? Isn’t that obvious? Well, who wouldn’t be. It’s like someone kidnapped your child and sold her into drug slavery.

    Yes. I am happier today. I am also a little vindicated that the people who opposed me are humbled by it.

    Austrian Economics Explains Everything. If you are in business and do not understand Austrian Economics you are operating from a position of ignorance.

    Keynesian macro belongs to politicians and to investors who try to make money out of asymmetry of information in a complex economy.

    Macro policy is the system of creating lies in the economy so that people act as if those lies are truth, thereby reducing unemployment.

    Austrian economics is the system of understanding truths in the economy, despite the fact that the state creates systemic lies in order to reduce unemployment.

    The source of my predictive ability is due almost entirely to my understanding of Austrian Economics.

    Austrian Economics taught me to never be fooled by a trend. To look not at empirical evidence and extrapolate. That numbers describe the past but do not predict the future.

    It taught me to look at the INCENTIVES within any organization. The INCENTIVES that encourage consumers to buy a good or service.

    And the economic and social environment that enables the organization to serve the interests of consumers who REACT to that economic environment by changing their preferences in their signaling and purchasing.

    But with those incentives, do you know what really killed Microsoft?

    The US Government Killed Microsoft. They killed Bill Gates’ influence in the company. They killed his ability to execute in the company. The US Government killed Microsoft.

    They did because the government ignores Austrian Economics. We Austrians know that few if any companies hold more than a decade of dominance. It’s almost impossible to do so.

    We know that the only monopolies are created by government privilege and microsoft had no such privilege. It was vulnerable to the market. Which was precisely why it fought to win the browser war so hard.

    Organizations calcify around an existing market opportunity, the market changes, the organization is indebted so falls into the Innovator’s Dilemma. The staff develops rent seeking behavior and the company loses it’s advantage.

    Microsoft will change only when Ballmer leaves and one of the prior execs who understands the company and has experience working in the company under Bill Gates returns.

    Microsoft would have to acquire Dell just to keep pace with Apple in quality. But I would bet that the government will block it, and therefore put additional bullets into the company.

    But the culture at microsoft is ruined. internally it’s a government bureaucracy. The people are frustrated and disheartened by the bad management.

    A question? What portion of the USA’s increase in productivity from 1980 to 2006, and what percentage of the stock market profits created during that period, were from Microsoft?

    If you knew it would scare you.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-22 12:51:00 UTC

  • I know we men are an incomprehensible challenge to women, and I know t

    <Rant On>

    I know we men are an incomprehensible challenge to women, and I know that for almost half of women who have to ‘settle’ they’re carrying someone who may not carry his fair share. But the fact of the matter is that there are just as many women who are either ‘crazy’ or vampires or elegantly sophisticated prostitutes or all of the above. And I think that’s even worse that some unemployed guy who sits around drinking beer and watching sports on television. I mean, women can get rid of us by walking away. For some reason, we’re supposed to give permanent transfusions to vampires. Argh.

    <Rant Off>

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-22 08:59:00 UTC

  • Prague is fine. My initial reaction is the boat or somewhere sunny, but a) we wa

    Prague is fine. My initial reaction is the boat or somewhere sunny, but a) we want a lot to do, and there is a lot to do in Prague, and b) its easy to get there and not easy to get to plenty of other places that are sunny and c) its cheap.

    I think two nights is fine. This should be our off season. Not our big meet. Some of us can come a day or two early if we want to, or stay a day later.

    Finding a hotel with enough rooms available should be easy. This is how hotels make money. Every hotel has an event manager for these kinds of things.

    My schedule is much more flexible than everyone else’s. I think that if it is too far off that we lose momentum. If it is too near we can’t do a good job. So late march or early april is probably about right.

    We do need to have a conference room where we can do a few presentations. Otherwise we’re just a roving band of alcoholic libertarians. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-22 08:21:00 UTC

  • BANKING: CREDIT UNIONS ARE GOOD. BIG BANKS ARE BAD. AND WHY Banking is a means o

    BANKING: CREDIT UNIONS ARE GOOD. BIG BANKS ARE BAD. AND WHY

    Banking is a means of allowing people with disparate knowledge, means, goals to cooperate by concentrating their capital and cross-insuring each other. Banking is a GOOD BUSINESS for society and society as we understand it is not possible without banking.

    Now, when you get service charges, this is just charging you for the costs you put onto the bank. THis is a GOOD IDEA because otherwise people who do a lot of bank work force people who don’t to pay all oft of costs. That would be an involuntary transfer. That’s bad. It’s stealing.

    The problem occurrs when the state starts putting funny money into banks and creating a ‘hazard’ by doing so. They allow banks to make risky loans. and those risky loans increase consumption at the expense of creating a fragile economy.

    The argument that Keynesians make, is that we get more good out of that fragility than we do bad.

    And that’s not a truth. It’s a matter of preference.

    And the people who would prefer not to have booms and busts that are caused by the government, because they take risks because the cost of money is cheap, and the pricing information that they see around them is distorted. Then the rug is pulled under them by the fragility and it all comes crashing down into a recession and depression.

    Credit unions are good things.

    Use them.

    Big banks are for conducting war. That’s why we have them. thats where they came from. that’s what they do.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-22 07:56:00 UTC

  • IS A LIBERAL? (Seriously) 1) Liberalism: The democratic republican model of poli

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiberalismWHAT IS A LIBERAL?

    (Seriously)

    1) Liberalism: The democratic republican model of political institutions that arose out of the enlightenment – Locke ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism ) Free Markets, Private Property, Enfranchisement of the middle class. This is the pleasant definition. It could also be defined as the ideology that justified the seizure of political power, and political institutions by the middle class, as trade expanded, wealth expanded, and therefore the economic power of the landed, agrarian, aristocracy was dramatically reduced.

    HISTORY

    During the 1800’s In reaction to the industrial revolution, the lower classes became consumers, and sought and were enfranchised because of the labor, communist and socialist movements, and the introduction of women into the voting and work force.

    The ‘Liberal’ movement broke into two branches. a) “Classical Liberal”, which favored limited government, and as such was ‘conservative’ and b) “Social Democrat” which incorporated the ideas of the socialists and communists and favored a mixed economy that combined the state and private property, and as such was ‘progressive’.

    While technically speaking a ‘liberal’ means a ‘classical liberal’, and therefore a ‘conservative’ the left intellectuals intentionally adopted and promoted adoption of the term ‘liberal’ as a self-identifier in order to use a term that was more tolerable than ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ which were not acceptable in the united states. In Europe, where states are smaller and more homogenous, and where there is a history of aristocracy, these terms, especially post-war, are not seen as negatively, and “liberal’ maintains it’s original meaning – the opposite of how its used in the United States. And this is both a source of humor to intellectuals and confusion to average people.

    Today, a “liberal” means a “social democrat”. But what does a “social democrat” mean? To understand that requires we understand Aristocratic Manorialism, Liberalism, communism and socialism.

    MODELS

    1) Aristocratic Manorialism, is the ownership of property by the aristocracy, and this property is then rented out to everyone else to work on, and farm, or build shops.

    2) Liberalism is the individual ownership of property by individual farmers, craftsmen and merchants.

    3) Socialism is the ownership of property by the state, and individuals are directed by central planners to do the work that is planned for them. Of course, this led to black markets, poverty, dictatorship, and the death of 100M people. Socialism was the greatest tragedy ever to befall human beings.

    4) Communism is the theory that after enough socialism, private property will disappear because it will, supposedly, become unnecessary.

    Unfortunately what we found out is that money, prices, and private property are necessary both to make use of dispersed knowledge, to make use of it in real time, and to provide people with the abilty to make plans, and for people to possess the incentives to make plans. The whole world has adopted capitalism (private property, money, and prices) for these reasons.

    5) Social democracy is the ownership of property by the state, which is then lent out to people for use as private property. Then people are allowed to keep some portion of the income themselves, and the rest is captured by the state in the form of taxes for use by the state. This model then maintains the money, prices, incentives of classical liberal private property, and does not fall into the problem of the impossibility of planning and the impossibility of the incentive to work, but it’s still possible to take money from people after they have produced it.

    Social democracy is a solution to the necessity of capitalism in order to get people to produce, while maintaining the ability of the state to sieze and use or redistribute the profits from production. It is the dominant model in the world.

    Today, conservatives (classical liberals) and progressives (liberals) compete to determine the amount of individualism or socialism that we will have.

    But why do we hold these different opinions? That’s pretty interesting.

    WHERE DOES IT COME FROM?

    To put these political movements in perspective: Just as the classical liberal model is the ideology that justifies the seizure of power by the middle class from the aristocracy, communism and socialism are the ideologies that justify the seizure of power by the lower classes from the middle class.

    Social democracy is a means by which the clerical classes (administrative, educational) can compete for status with the entrepreneurial classes. The military class has been all but ostracized from power since the 1960’s – something unique in history. To maintain power, any set of elites, whether clerical, commercial/entrepreneurial, or military, must have widespread support of the common people.

    As we have moved from a civilization of farmers, craftsmen and merchants, all of whom are individual producers and small business people, to a world where most of us work in government bureaucracy or clerical functions in large corporations, or clerical functions in universities, the number of people who actively participate in the commercial economy by taking personal risks with their own capital, has dramatically declined. But in the aggregate, this change in what we do for a living is actually driven more by the introduction of women into the dominance of clerical labor, and the voting pool than any other factor. Women lean and vote progressive and men lean and vote conservative, and single women vote heavily progressive, and single unmarried women vote almost entirely progressively. And what has happened since 1960, is a dramatic increase in single women due to delayed marriage, and single mothers due to the dissolution of the family.

    WHY DO WE VOTE THIS WAY?

    Now, the question arises as to why affluent educated but non-entrepreneurial people appear to adopt Social Democrat values in college, and why some people positively have this progressive bias. And it turns out that there are at least three factors.

    The first appears to be genetic, in that the individual’s moral code is very narrow, and treats care-taking and protection from harm as the highest, and only moral mandate. (See Jonathan Haidt). Whereas conservatives have five or six moral mandates that they adhere to fairly equally.

    The second is signaling (demonstrating your social status), where the educated in the country, whose status comes from education, but who do not gain status as business owners, business leaders or capitalists, signal their ‘high mindedness’ as a means of gaining status.

    The third is an intellectual view of mankind that has extraordinary faith in humans and the technology of human beings, to solve all the world’s problems ‘if we just put our minds to it’. (Conservatives just see this as an illusion that is the product of ‘False Consensus Bias’. And it may be that this is the underlying cause – the female tendency to desire consensus and the male desire to be attractive to women by signaling similar concerns.)

    GENES

    We are not entirely sure which of these is more influential. But what we do know is that the political affiliations are highly dependent upon gender. And that people are highly attracted to political affiliation for both gender and genetic reasons. (See Pew Research’s excellent collection of graphs and data.)

    In simple terms, socialism and individualism reflect the mating and reproductive strategies of the genders. And it certainly appears from the data we’ve collected that people vote for their moral codes and their moral codes reflect their reproductive strategies in any given economy at any given time. And therefore the result of our political debates is driven almost entirely by our reproductive strategies. (Which to those of us in political theory, is pretty funny, or pretty frustrating.)

    It’s all demographics and our shouting is meaningless. Elections are decided by the 10-15% of people who don’t care. The rest of us are committed to our polarized ideologies. WHat whil happen over the next few decades is that protestant european culture will continue to vote conservative, while the immigrant populations, the underclasses, and single women and the educational and political sectors will continue to vote progressive.

    Conservatives breed, and liberals dont, but the less individualistic minorities breed fast enough to keep up with the decline in liberal births.

    Thanks

    Curt Doolittle

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-22 07:52:00 UTC

  • SHOOTERS ARE ALL LIBERALS? (is this true?)

    SHOOTERS ARE ALL LIBERALS?

    (is this true?)

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-22 06:22:00 UTC

  • I NEED A “FIX” OF PFS FRIENDS We really need a purely casual ‘off season’ meetin

    I NEED A “FIX” OF PFS FRIENDS

    We really need a purely casual ‘off season’ meeting somewhere. A year is too long to last between visits.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-21 13:10:00 UTC

  • BANKING: DEATH BY COMPUTER : RESURRECTION BY CREDIT UNION My family has been in

    BANKING: DEATH BY COMPUTER : RESURRECTION BY CREDIT UNION

    My family has been in banking for generations. It is a very good business. For most of history, you could talk to a banker. A banker was like your accountant, lawyer, or priest: he gave you advice and counsel and worked with you. They were reasonably educated people with decision making authority.

    The advent of computers made it possible, and competitive to centralize banking, turn to statistics that measured and compared statistics about what you did WITHOUT the advice and help of a banker to learn about money, interest and credit, instead of PROVIDING you with the advice about what to do with money, interest and credit.

    This created a lot of asymmetry of knowledge in the population. People got more ignorant and became statistical objects rather than members of a portfolio of relationships that banks built.

    Starting in the 1970’s when the USA instituted the petro-dollar, or using the US Dollar as the world currency for buying oil, the USA has been issuing cheap credit both home and abroad.

    The impact on banking has been that the government is essentially insuring increasingly ignorant consumers with cheap credit, who increasingly get unconsciously into debt, and increasingly into default, rather than building knowledgeable consumers of credit and producers of interest.

    community banks, and in particular, credit unions, are more than just a ‘nice thing’ for consumers. They can rebuild our society by removing the asymmetry of knowledge that lets banks prey upon ignorant consumers and sell them into predatory debt.

    Community credit unions are how all consumer credit should be done, even if we have to legislate it. Because big banks are just part of the government. They are part of the century long credit scam that has made us all slaves.

    Why are we slaves? How do you become a US Citizen? You get a driver’s license, a credit card, a loan for a car, and a loan for a house, and now you are controlled by credit, not by moral code, not by cultural norms, not by laws, but by credit. You are a credit slave. And that might not be bad if it works. But for an absurd number of people, they fail at the card, or the car or the house and become indentured servants. SO it is not so much that those of us who succeed do. It’s that we are advocates for a system that creates a permanent and dependent underclass.

    Credit is citizenship and the lack of it makes you a serf.

    And only community banks can provide advice and counsel. We force people into schools so that they don’t become ‘scoundrels’ that we must support through charity. Why is it that we use credit to create a lower class of people ostracized from the system purely out of ignorance? Why is it that we put almost ten percent of our people into prison for minor drug charges, and therefore guarantee they are dependent upon the rest of us to support them, and if not, lead lives of dependence and crime?

    Now I understand that very few ordinary people can tell whether what I’m explaining here is more or less true than any other explanation that they’ve heard. And all I can do is hope that it makes more sense than some conspiracy theory does.

    We may have the best of intentions. But the road to poverty is very often paved with the best intentions. And the road to social fragmentation has been, with certainty, paved with good, but foolish intentions.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-21 12:29:00 UTC

  • QUOTE OF THE DAY “Ugh, the c-word: consensus. Science does not work that way. Wh

    QUOTE OF THE DAY

    “Ugh, the c-word: consensus. Science does not work that way. What is the ‘consensus’ on the necessity of state?” – Paul Vahur

    (Almost fell off my chair 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-21 12:11:00 UTC

  • OBTAINING PRIVATE PROPERTY AT A DISCOUNT Any attempt to obtain the institution o

    OBTAINING PRIVATE PROPERTY AT A DISCOUNT

    Any attempt to obtain the institution of private property by argument rather than by violence is merely an attempt to obtain private property at a discount.

    I would go so far as that it is an act of fraud: an attempt to obtain the right of private property at a discount by means of argument, while requesting an involuntary transfer of communal property rights by depriving others of their communal property rights so that we may possess private property rights on our own.

    At best we buy those rights with a promise of cheaper goods and more pacifist life from those who would begrudgingly surrender their communal property rights in exchange for private property rights.

    And at best, those who favor communal property will fail to breach their contract and restore communal property rights – a claim on our property – as soon as they can find a way to do so.

    The majority of humans prefer the institution of communal property. They demonstrate that they do. They may demonstrate that they prefer the market for goods and services provided by private property. But they do not prefer the responsibilities they must bear in exchange for private property.

    Private property is the product of violence and the willingness to use violence.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-21 11:29:00 UTC