Curt Doolittle

Theme: Productivity

  • Have Any Corporations Embraced Equitable Or Just Compensation Models?

    Um.. This is one of those problems that’s really nonsense. 

    All employees should be compensated at market rates. Otherwise if you are lower, they won’t stay, if they are over, your competition will eat you.

    Compensation is not equitable WITHIN A COMPANY. It is equitable across ALL COMPANIES.

    Do not fall into the trap of confusing the ‘fiarness’ of a family, with the alliance of people that work together in a company.

    https://www.quora.com/Have-any-corporations-embraced-equitable-or-just-compensation-models

  • How Is An Economic Stimulus Package Supposed To Work?

    There are a series of possible stimuli available from the short term to the long term.
    1) Spending – Fiscal Policy: the government borrows money, then spends it on any number of projects.  This puts money in the hands of consumers, consumers spend on things not related to the projects, and businesses respond in order to serve demand. Their employees spend too, and the cycle expands.  Problem? It takes a long time for money to move into the economy.
    2) Monetary Policy: the government borrows money and then auctions it off at low rates.  Bankers buy this ‘cheap’ money and sell it as lower cost loans to business and the public.  Problem? Sometimes (now) no matter how low you make the cost of credit (effectively zero) people will not borrow it.
    3) Trade Policy. Sometimes you can tax or reduce taxes on goods and services to make them cheaper or more expensive. So, for example, if you want to create jobs in say, clothing manufacture, you highly tax clothing imports.  Problem: this just makes goods and services more expensive for consumers, so it has to be paired with monetary policy.
    4) Industrial policy: what we did with the auto companies. You find a way to create or expand industries that create jobs or create demand.
    5) Education policy: train or retrain your population to produce goods and services that are desired, when the goods and services they produce are no longer as desirable.

    Most of the time, governments quickly adjust monetary policy then they try spending policy.  The argument today is that we should spend more. The problem is that people don’t trust their government to spend it wisely, and they therefore prefer to suffer a slower economy than fund bad behavior in government.

    https://www.quora.com/How-is-an-economic-stimulus-package-supposed-to-work

  • 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

  • THE TOP THEORETICAL TAX RATE REALY 70% OR IS IT REALLY 50%? This article discuss

    http://www.nationalreview.com/agenda/300373/guest-post-arpit-gupta-saez-and-diamond-taxes-arpit-guptaIS THE TOP THEORETICAL TAX RATE REALY 70% OR IS IT REALLY 50%?

    This article discusses top tax rates in tolerably accessible terms.

    I’ll buy that it’s 48%, depending upon where it’s graduated. But as I’ve stated repeatedly, it has to be constructed on a rolling average of income, not that of a single year, which penalizes the middle class for rare events that pay for their retirements. Otherwise there is no 1% (or the more accurate .017%) because something close to 30% of people end up in that high tax bracket at some time in their lives, and that’s too big a block to alienate through aggressive taxation that threatens their retirement savings that come from almost entirely from rare events.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-05-19 17:47:00 UTC

  • THE BEST PLACE YOU EVER WORKED? I was reminded buy someone today that some peopl

    THE BEST PLACE YOU EVER WORKED?

    I was reminded buy someone today that some people remember the best place they ever worked. And I made one of those places. It was an experiment. An attempt to create something very special. I did it carefully and artfully. Inclusively. And I could do it again, with ease. Even in this economy. It’s a craft and a skill. Sure. It’s psychological but it’s not mechanical, it’s spiritual.

    If my health keeps up, I might do it again, just to show that I can draw the perfect circle.

    But I also learned something else: a) if you’re being undermined from the inside kill it quickly. b) heroism is overrated. Heroes die.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-05-11 17:48:00 UTC

  • THE POOR “The absolutely poor constitute about 12% of the US population — the m

    THE POOR

    “The absolutely poor constitute about 12% of the US population — the majority of which is caused either by being a recent immigrant, or by the choice or necessity of domestic independence: living alone, or being a single parent with child while unable to support that domestic independence. And statistically speaking about 4% of that population will always be poor due to problematic genetics. And the inefficiency of the US system of redistribution via services rather than direct monetary contribution is more problematic than the number of poor. So, the financial cost of helping the poor in this country is not a problem. The envious middle class are the problem. And our focus on inefficiently serving the poor through costly government intervention rather than building an educated populace and an economy that satisfies the envies of the middle class is the causal problem. The question is whether we will fix it or cease to be a viable political system because we fail to.”

    Source date (UTC): 2012-05-05 10:30:00 UTC

  • ACTUAL COST OF AN IPHONE 4s (Of course the argument being made is that we should

    http://www.businesspundit.com/iphone-costs/THE ACTUAL COST OF AN IPHONE 4s

    (Of course the argument being made is that we should make them in the states rather than in china. And that’s not going to happen.)

    Source date (UTC): 2012-04-30 10:17:00 UTC

  • 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

  • NOT A CHANGE IN WOMEN, IT’S THE ECONOMY STUPID We need to get these men working.

    http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/young-women-are-more-career-driven-than-men-now/IT’S NOT A CHANGE IN WOMEN, IT’S THE ECONOMY STUPID

    We need to get these men working. That’s what the numbers say.

    The survey results are an aggregate numerical effect, not one that belies any change in male preferences or behavior.

    Factors:

    a) wider distribution of male abilities than female abilities means the lower part of society is male, plus males are disproportionately affected by the ongoing ‘Man-recession’.

    b) fewer men going to college

    c) lower male workforce participation rate

    d) ongoing effect of the recession

    e) the tendency of men to state what is possible as a preference.

    f) the fact that males mentally mature more slowly due to how we enforce education today.

    Basically:

    1) the lower quintiles of males affect the aggregates.

    2) The abandonment of the workforce by increasing numbers of men below 30 and above 52.

    3) The remaining mailes can’t compensate for the other two groups.

    We are not going to have the wonderful world everyone imagined post 1950. The lower classes are abandoning the institutions that made us a ‘society’. Marriage, and the nuclear family will be signals of wealth. And wealth is uncommon. Males will do here, what they have done in the rest of the world when they are no longer bound by marriage.

    That’s what they’re doing. That’s what we’re seeing. It’s just data.

    Does it matter?

    Unemployed disenfranchised women don’t really matter to a polity. Unemployed disenfranchised men create an infinite number of problems. Not the least of which is that they’re a precondition for revolution.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-04-20 07:37:00 UTC

  • Four Levers Of Policy Create An Opportunity For Exchange

    http://modeledbehavior.com/2012/04/17/phelps-on-keynesianism

    It is clear why you could not get economic growth without innovation but the vast majority of business activity over the course of human history have been in economies that were not growing. Indeed, the vast majority of business activity that occurs from now until the end time will almost certainly be in economies that are not growing. Sustained per capita growth is an odd thing that just started recently and will likely end in fairly short span of time.

    That’s false. It’s not ‘clear’ at all. The argument is not settled. We INTUIT that spending may in some ways create innovation. But we can’t prove it. There isn’t much evidence of it. And there is so much noise created by the boom bust cycle that it’s pretty hard to make out anything at all. We know that spending and loose money creates demand, decreases employment AND misallocates capital. Capital follows the easiest opportunity. It exacerbates booms and busts. You just choose to write off the damage done whenever you’re questioned about it. I don’t think you understand the tragedy of the commons behavior this process creates — exploit what you can before it falls apart. It’s not like this nonsense takes place entirely in the market. It moves from the market into politics, and further polarizes the entire process. We SUSPECT that periods of ‘contraction’ do the opposite, which is to expand innovation of all types, everywhere. It certainly looks to be the case. It makes logical sense that opportunity constraint makes people seek opportunity in ‘harder’ places. But the jury is out. The argument is not settled. Other than perhaps the confirmation provided by the Germans, who pursue this strategy on cultural and moral grounds rather than rational grounds, and they have less coalition building to do in their party system, so it’s not necessary to express the problem in rational terms. We can’t achieve the same thing here in the states because of ideological factions, most of which are antagonized by your hero. You “SPENDERS” don’t look at all four policy levers as a set that must be moved IN CONCERT so that misallocation of capital does not occur. The side-effect of moving all four levers in concert is that everyone across the political spectrum also buys into the solution: a) spending (liberals and progressives) b) credit (moderates) c) industrial policy (classical liberals and conservatives) d) human capital (austrians and conservatives) Why do they ‘buy in’? Because a four-lever ‘transaction’ is an inter-temporal exchange from which everyone in every class benefits, not an inter-temporal redistribution which benefits some at the cost of others. Even if none of the participants can articulate their idea in such clear language. This is why the progressive alliance fails. It fails because it seeks redistribution rather than exchange. This is why you and Krugman are frustrated. You because you beliefe “Sh__t happens”. Krugman because he’s a racist and an ideologue. He’s well aware of what he’s doing. He’s just the Limbaugh of the Left. Limbaugh works with the economy of norms, Krugman with the monetary economy. But they’re identical in practice. You on the other hand simply err: “Sh__” doesn’t “happen”. It’s caused. It’s caused by distortion of the inter-temporal information system that allows us to coordinate our activities in such a way that we ensure we are following productive ends. Politics is either voluntary exchange or involuntary theft. Exchanges are self-justifying. Thefts are unjustifiable. Period. Politics is coalition forming, or it’s just dictatorship. And however you choose to justify your preference for dictatorship, it’s dictatorship and nothing more. And the moment you justify your preference with dictatorship, you put back on the table the opposition’s right to press for dictatorship. And in this case, the other side is more capable of putting it into place and maintaining it. They have a more accurate view of human nature. They’re just less willing and interested in doing so. So let’s all stay with seeking exchanges, OK? There are at least four specialties in political economy if we don’t count the MMT group. Together those four groups force an inter-temporal exchange that limites the distortionary effects of credit and spending by matching them with future increases in production. Statesmen lead their states. Ideologues lead their ideology. Hacks are just hacks.