It’s conventional wisdom that politicians are self-absorbed windbags. Another piece of evidence to contribute: the longest words in the English and French languages are antidisestablishmentarian and anticonstitutionnellement respectively, both of which pertain to the political realm.
One of my happiest experiences in the Bay Area was the reopening of Crissy Field as a national park. They were handing out free kites. I flew mine for a couple hours of pure, carefree, unalloyed fun, then gave it to three kids who had arrived too late to get one.
Crissy field is one of the windiest places in San Francisco, and ideal for flying kites. I am not sure who thought it would be a good place to build an airfield, though…
I blog at best once or twice a month on my regular low-intensity blog, which runs my home-grown Mylos software, but am surprising myself by blogging on an almost daily schedule with this WordPress-based blog. Mylos is batch-based: you edit a post, run the script to regenerate the static pages, review, edit and iterate. It takes a minute to regenerate the entire site.
This is a similar effect to using an interpreted language like Python or PHP vs. a compiled language like C or Java. Even though I am more comfortable editing in Emacs (used by Mylos) than in a browser window, the short cycle between edit and preview in WordPress makes for a more satisfying experience and encourages me to blog more freely.
I suspect I will end up importing my Mylos weblog into WordPress, once I figure out how to address some niggling differences in functionality, such as the way images or attachments are handled, and how to use nginx as a caching reverse proxy in front of WordPress for performance reasons.
Much virtual ink has been wasted on discussing the Microsoft ad campaign featuring Jerry Seinfeld, and how useless or ineffective it may be.
I wonder what it says about our society that we are discussing ad campaigns instead of the merits of the product they are supposed to be about, just as political news coverage often devolves on discussion of campaign tactics rather than substantive issues, as if they have any relevance to what happens after the election.
I know advertising is a major “industry”, and that without it people in the design field would find it hard to find well-paying jobs. Focusing the discussion on marketing campaigns instead of actual products ia a case of the tail wagging the dog, however.
It’s an open secret that most public corporations exhibit abysmal corporate governance. Insider management is skilled in using corporate by-laws against the shareholders that are nominally their bosses. One good example is HP’s acquisition of Compaq. Whatever the merits of the deal, the company (i.e. Carly Fiorina) spent half a billion dollars of shareholder’s money in PR expenditures opposed by a significant chunk of the said shareholders, lobbying for an outcome that would handsomely profit the same executives with retention bonuses, a flagrant case of self-dealing.
Most shares are owned by large institutional investors that are too lazy to do proper due diligence. In many case, they are pension funds or investment banks that curry management’ favor in the form of contracts. Index funds can’t even vote with their feet. The only way out would be for corporate by-laws to be standardized and made statutory, rather than one-offs rife with potential for abuse.
A simple question: if a board’s job is to hire and fire a company’s CEO, why is the CEO, who is after all a mere employee, allowed to participate in the board at all, let alone preside it? The CEO should be accountable to the board, not a member of it, or privy to the board’s deliberations. This is in part due to gross over-hyping of CEOs’ importance. What they do is neither unique or as rare a skill as is often supposed, and their prima donna demands should be resisted. Of course, most companies’ boards today are already dominated by their management, so the rot is set too deep to expunge easily.
I concluded years ago that most public corporations are run by self-dealing kleptocracies. They loot most of the companies’ profits, and leave some crumbs to the shareholders. The only way to realize the true potential of investing in a profit-making enterprise is to be an active majority shareholder, either by buying a controlling stake (an option available only to those already wealthy) or by starting one yourself. Belgian financier Albert Frère had a saying “The difference between a big minority shareholder and a small minority shareholder is the difference between a big chump and a small chump”.