HN user
It would better for people such as Christensen to call themselves "business historians." They make ex post facto analyses of what made a business successful. There's value to that, and it often makes for very interesting reading especially if you can incorporate all the personal drama.
To purport that you've come up a theory of business success with predictive power is another thing entirely.
True, but consider this from the shitphone piece...
"Things had gradually become slower. They rarely came to a full stop, but they got close. Complicated websites in particular were hard for shitphone. I found myself blaming the websites."
Maybe you would just stop going to horribly designed mobile websites, and you wouldn't be much worse off.
This article reminds me of the "shitphone" story that got posted here a while back. Long but definitely worthwhile IMHO.
https://medium.com/matter/shitphone-a-love-story-a44e6643480...
Basically an exploration of value. An iPhone can cost 3x times as much as some of these other phones, and is certainly a more pleasant device to use, but does it really offer 3x as much functionality?
The basic (world-changing) functions of the smartphone (location services with GPS, decent point and shoot camera with you at all times, web access on the go, etc.) are present in both devices.
If you put something like this in space, and pointed it down, would it be a useful espionage tool (more useful than the spy satellites the US and its allies already have)?
Nah, that's what I'm talking about. Makes things too complicated and expensive. How about this...
If you have the capital, you can build whatever you want as long as you don't physically endanger other people (building meets earthquake and fire codes, etc.)
I would point the finger at NIMBYism and the fact that new developments in places like San Francisco, London, and New York have to hop through many many hoops to get built (and pass muster with a surprising number of "stakeholders").
Here is just one example...
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/real-estate/201...
The TL;DR of this article is that a large new apartment block in SF is being held up by a construction union because the developer is refusing to hire union labor for every contractor role in the project.
Maybe we should reduce the red tape around building new structures and see how far that gets us before plowing more money into public housing and other government interventions.
"Grindhouse Wetware"
...that company name
Not exactly my point, and I won't go there. I don't know enough about drugs to comment.
Smart, creative people are, by and large, allergic to authoritarianism. Draconian rules around possession of soft drugs like cannabis are useful proxies for measuring a state's authoritarianism.
mandate out for people to be more "creative"
A tough sell in a place where the possession of even a tiny amount of marijuana is punishable by caning and long imprisonment.
Met a couple of these guys in my career in tech. Two were DevOps engineers who had no college but made themselves indispensable. One was a guy who had only a smattering of Java but became a really useful Salesforce platform developer. Our VP of Sales had him on speed dial and he had a LOT of consulting clients on the side. All of these people were men, and I'm pretty sure they all earned over six figures.
I've met a larger number of people who have masters degrees, sometimes PhDs, and numerous certificates in project management, etc. Their jobs in education, healthcare administration, government, and utilities require these credentials for advancement or even for entry-level posts. Most of them have pay that is quite low. Some of them (the educators) are even at the poverty line in the Bay Area, where I live. Most of them are women.
I often read that men are "ending" because of their failure to attain college and postgraduate degrees in our new economy at the same rate that women do. At the same time, I read that our universities are failing to provide real skills valued in industry.
To what extent are these trends linked?
To me it makes sense that the FBI needs a fleet of surveillance planes for investigations. It also makes sense that these aircraft carry civilian livery to be low-profile (same idea as an unmarked pursuit car).
What seems f-ked up are the shell companies. Why not come out and say "we have surveillance planes; we need them for investigations; here's how much money we've allocated in our budget to operate them."
The FBI shouldn't need to hide this.
I'll concede the point on the R&R paper. Didn't know there was so much controversy about it, and the accusations that some of their findings were due to a technology glitch are pretty damning.
But still, the median age of the US population in 1950 was 30 years old. Today it's over 37 and climbing. And (not to beat a dead horse) the savings rate is half what it was then.
To me that indicates that a far larger percentage of our population is going to be living on (paltry) fixed incomes than at any other time. Inflation would be crushing to our aging population.
I just don't think you can compare our situation to the 1950's.
Here's an interesting meta-study about the effects of a high debt to gdp ratio.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w16827
I admire the candor of your second point ("we just inflated it away.") I think this is ultimately what will happen here in the USA.
I think that most people would choose austerity now over higher inflation down the road, but maybe I'm delusional. Our consumer savings rates continue to trend down so maybe people just wouldn't care much.
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/personal-savin...
Krugman presents this as a dilemma between two choices.
1. Institute austerity now. 2. Institute stimulus now, pay down debt responsibly once the good times roll.
This is a sham dilemma. The real options appear to be.
1. Institute austerity now. 2. Institute stimulus now, but half-ass the debt paydown in the future, condemning future generations to a high debt to GDP ratio.
Given this real dilemma, which is worse? I don't pretend to know the answer. I know austerity sucks. I also know that governments lack the self discipline to pay down debt significantly in the future.
Which option is actually worse?