“things I've learned”
56 posts under this tag.
There are two ways we can produce automobiles. We can build them in Detroit or we can grow them in Iowa. Everyone knows how we build automobiles. To grow automobiles, we first grow the raw material from which they are made—wheat. We put the wheat on ships and send the ships out into the Pacific. They come back with Hondas on them.
From our standpoint, growing Hondas is just as much a form of production—using American farmworkers instead of American autoworkers—as building them. What happens on the other side of the Pacific is irrelevant; the effect would be just hte same for us if there really where a gigantic machine sitting somewhere between Hawaii and Japan turning wheat into automobiles. Tariffs are indeed a way of protecting American workers —from other American workers.
David D. Friedman, Hidden Order
particularly now that my lil sis studies economics, how funny it is that economists are far and away mostly of use to govt’s. While theirs is a fine and beautiful knowledge, the only people that actually pay economists to work —besides universities, who employ them to train more economists, a nice pyramid scheme— are either bureaucrats or lobbyists warding or manipulating bureaucrats. At first that made me wary, but lately I’ve come to realize that what good economists (as opposed to bribed sycophants or bad economists) actually have to say to the gov’t is fuck off—stay away, you do more harm than good. Dismantling or even just holding off the gov’t beast is a worthy mission, quite possibly one of the most important.
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these the homeless, tempest-tossed to me;
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
(-Verse engraved on the base of the statue of liberty.)
America the closed preserve
That dirty foreigners don’t deserve
But why wasn’t I legally in the States? Because there are no certain legal paths to what I want: free agency. That is, to be able to live and make wealth, however and how long I want (the legal equivalent would be a permanent residence, a citizenship is that plus voting).
Sure, there are work visas, but I’m not particularly interested in being an employee. I want to make wealth myself or with others, in projects we start. And yes, a work visa can (notice the lack of certainty!), given years, be upgraded to a residence permit—I know a couple of tech guys who have done this after some 7 or more years. It takes that long because professional green cards have a shameful 5 year backlog and because why would employers give you the freedom to work for others or for yourself when they can just have you on a renewable per-year indentured servitude?
The problem’s not getting into the States to vacation work where the powers that be want you to work, the problem is being a free agent. And yes, were America the only option, paying the many-year uncertain penance wouldn’t look so bad. But the world’s a big place.
Final part of Stunde Null, following Part 1 and Part 2
As I would better learn the next morning, the detention center was a nice, non-descript government building in the middle of, get this, upper-middle-class Phoenix suburbia. They take, though, such care in camouflaging that I doubt many neighbors know right next door illegal aliens are being held captive.
They searched me again, and again for weapons. They took away my book. Cops where white, some Hispanic, one of them had some arm-covering tattoos, San Francisco style. A bus was being loaded with a throng of short, tiny, Latin Americans of obvious illegality and indigenous roots, people whom you can tell just by looking that they have never eaten meat on a regular basis, faces and bodies eaten away by poverty and disease. They weren’t treated badly, what I saw was the same detached professionalism afforded to me.
There are many useful tips for improving your conversation, from the “take advantage of freely offered details” to the “ask open-ended questions”, but the true secret of it, I think, was offered by Scott Adams in his wonderful little book, God’s Debris:
“What topic interests you more than any other?”
“Myself, I guess,” I confessed.
“Yes, that is the essence of being human. Any person you meet at a party will be interested in his own life above all other topics. Your awkward silences can be solved by asking simple questions about the person’s life.”
“That would be totally phony,” I said. “First of all, it would be like interrogating him. Secondly, I couldn’t possibly pretend to be interested in the answers. If he turns out to be some shoe salesman living with his mother in Albany, my eyes will glaze over.”
“ It would seem phony to you while you asked the questions, but it would not seem that way to the stranger. To him it is an unexpected gift, an opportunity to enjoy one of life’s greatest pleasures: talking about oneself. He would become more animated and he would instantly begin to like you. You would seem to be a brilliant and talented conversationalist, even if your only contribution was asking questions and listening. And you would have solved the stranger’s fear of an awkward silence. For that he will be grateful.”
“That solves the stranger’s problem, but I have to listen to this guy drone on about himself. The cure is worse than the disease.”
“Your questions to the stranger are only the starting points. From there you can steer him toward the thing you care about most—yourself.”
“Wouldn’t he want to talk about himself instead of me?”
“When you find out how others deal with their situations it is automatically relevant to you,” he said. “There will always be parallels in your life. Find out what you and he have in common, then ask how he likes it, how he deals with it, and if he has any clever solutions for it. Perhaps you both have long commutes, or you both have mothers who call too often or you both ski. Find that point of common interest and you will both be talking about yourself to the delight of the other.”
Also valuable is this sideline:
“You think casual conversation is a waste of time.”
“Sure, unless I have something to say. I don’t know how people can blab about nothing.”
“Your problem is that you view conversation as a way to exchange information,” he said.
“That’s what it is,” I said, thinking I was pointing out the obvious.
“Conversation is more than the sum of the words. It is also a way of signaling the importance of another person by showing your willingness to give that person your rarest resource: time. It is a way of conveying respect.
Just that, an emotion. Often sudden, arbitrary, and against our (as opposed to our gene’s) best interest. Not a revelation nor the distillation of reason nor its conclusion—whence this fancy that reason leads somewhere? “Gut feeling” is, you guessed it, nothing but a feeling. Just as we have unique emotions about concrete things—say, lust—, we have unique emotions about abstract ideas and statements—say, certainty. Emotions, concrete or abstract, are enzymes, catalysts: they shortcircuit dillydallying, they trigger action. Ruminating all day without acting makes as little evolutionary sense as ogling all day without fucking. Hence lust, hence certainty.
That, in a nutshell, is On Being Certain’s premise, and though I have but skimmed it in one of my epic B & N skimming marathons, I was certain of its truth the moment I read it.
I’d rather be me, right now, right here —an upper middle class 22-year-old male Mexican in Guadalajara—, than any other human —emperor, king, sultan, noble, philosopher, artist, scientist, genius,...— from any time before, any place. We have been humans for some 15 thousands years and there’s no time past I’d rather be at.
I don’t mean this as some outburst of excitement, it’s just a calm realization that downed on me a while ago, out of the blue—a surprising measure of the reality of progress, the splendor of the present, the promise of the future.
Put the effort. ”An overemphasis on intellect or talent—and the implication that such traits are innate and fixed—leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unmotivated to learn.” That, in a sentence, is Scientific American’s excellent The Secret to Raising Smart Kids. It’s really some of the best life advice you can get (intelligence is just a nice case example).
The result plays out in children like Jonathan, who coast through the early grades under the dangerous notion that no-effort academic achievement defines them as smart or gifted. Such children hold an implicit belief that intelligence is innate and fixed, making striving to learn seem far less important than being (or looking) smart. This belief also makes them see challenges, mistakes and even the need to exert effort as threats to their ego rather than as opportunities to improve. And it causes them to lose confidence and motivation when the work is no longer easy for them.
Praising children’s innate abilities, as Jonathan’s parents did, reinforces this mind-set, which can also prevent young athletes or people in the workforce and even marriages from living up to their potential. On the other hand, our studies show that teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on effort rather than on intelligence or talent, helps make them into high achievers in school and in life.
[The other test group], meanwhile, focused on fixing errors and honing their skills. One [schoolchildren] advised himself: “I should slow down and try to figure this out.” Two schoolchildren were particularly inspiring. One, in the wake of difficulty, pulled up his chair, rubbed his hands together, smacked his lips and said, “I love a challenge!” The other, also confronting the hard problems, looked up at the experimenter and approvingly declared, “I was hoping this would be informative!” Predictably, the students with this attitude outperformed their cohorts in these studies.
In the growth mind-set classes, students read and discussed an article entitled “You Can Grow Your Brain.” They were taught that the brain is like a muscle that gets stronger with use and that learning prompts neurons in the brain to grow new connections. From such instruction, many students began to see themselves as agents of their own brain development. Students who had been disruptive or bored sat still and took note. One particularly unruly boy looked up during the discussion and said, “You mean I don’t have to be dumb?”
It’s a tough call, distinguishing talent from effort. Intimidation and discourage further muddle the waters. But the question is rather whether or not you want to get better. Talented or not, you will not get magically better without effort. Talented or not, you will get better with effort.
So rub your hands together, smack those lips, and join that wonderfully ridiculous schoolboy: “I love me a challenge!”
“The Humean predicament is the human predicament”
What are you absolutely certain of? Of what are you sure without any conceivable doubt? What is true no matter what? What is necessarily true? Just one thing. Whatever. As long as you’re sure.
I’ve been playing the game for a while and I’ve been shocked to be unable to answer the question. Now, of course I’m familiar with Hume’s skepticism (you don’t really know an apple is going to fall, you’ve just seen all similar objects fall before at similar conditions but you don’t know) and I thought I knew how dear truth was but lately, slowly, I’ve started to realize that not even reason or logic are to be trusted.
Let’s start by quickly demolishing every statement about experience, like, say, that you are, well, you, that you broke your knee when you were fifteen, that your mother exists, that other people exist (solipsism). The usual shortcut is just to ask you how do you know it isn’t all a dream, but I prefer Russell’s more imaginative version, the extreme omphalos hypothesis: how do you know that the world wasn’t created five seconds ago, set in motion, and with fake memories? Clever, huh?
OK, that sweeps off a good big swath of possible answers. As for reason/logic, its problem is that it’s either redundant or not binding at all. But don’t 2 + 2 = 4 whatever fucking nightmare the world might turn out to be? How could time or space not exist? My gosh, can you look me in the eye, and tell me that numbers aren’t infinite? How demented do you need to be to doubt Aristotle’s syllogisms, the very rules of thought (if it’s true that humans are mortal and that Socrates is human, Socrates has to be mortal!)?
But it turns out these conceptual statements aren’t certainties either. When you probe them further, carefully, rigorously, you realize that to advance you have to start defining. If you do it conscientiously, defining or making explicit even the dumbest, most-taken-for-granted assumptions you start to realize that 2 + 2 = 4 because you said so, because you assumed your conclusion from the get-go, and your statements are true in the same empty way that a bachelor can’t be married or a car has to be an automobile too. Yes, it’s a kind of truth, but a rather measly one.
The other thing that usually happens when you probe concepts is one of the most wondrous experiences I know of, exhilarating and unnerving at the same time, dizzying. I call it sense of could. It means taking an entrenched concept and realizing it is not necessarily so, discovering your singularity is just an instance of something subtler, deeper, finding out your rose is one among thousands, seeing that what you thought fixed is just another degree of motion.
Like when Cantor found out there are many kinds of infinities, some bigger than others (!). Like when you realize logic isn’t the complete science Kant thought and open the gates to the non-classical logics. Like when you probe the very fabric of the universe by looking for primitives to space and time. More worldly, like when you question your ethics, your religion, your politics, and you find only possibility where you were looking for necessity.
Now, those two options, redundancy and non-necessity, are the ones I’ve always stumbled upon but I don’t really know that happens for every concept. Or neither do I know if you can dismiss all experience in one fell stroke. That is, I’m, of course, not even sure that you can’t be sure of anything. Would you care volunteering an answer? %(p)Or a question?)%
A fairly unique thing about democracy and capitalism is that —as opposed to, say, monarchy or theocracy— both are formal systems for collective decision making, both specify clear rules for obtaining and aggregating the ends of differing individuals.
As such systems, they both necessarily hinge in what we shall refer to as ballots. Usually the paper in which votes are cast, we will here use the word ‘ballot’ to mean ”an external expression of preference.” The key part is ‘external’. Externality has problems all its own but is also our only hope of finding out what others think—telepathy, guessing, and revelation are our other options.
In democracy, votes are the ballots. In capitalism, it’s money. In democracy, a clinic will be built if the majority of voters vote in its favor. It will keep in operation as long as people don’t vote it out of existence. In capitalism, a clinic will be built if enough people pool the money for its construction and it will keep in operation as long as it makes a profit—that is, as long as it ends up receiving more money than it gives away.
Seeing votes and money as instances of the same concept begs an intriguing question: How then do they differ? How is a vote different than a buck? What specific changes do you need to make to a vote ballot to turn it into a money ballot?
For marketing-minded friends.
Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to produce an ordered list of all the reasons you can think for Starbucks’s use of cash cards. (They’ve just been introduced in Mexico, though they’ve been around in the US for some 6 or so years). Something like:
One-line items are enough, we’re aiming for breadth. Keep it simple.
Remember, this is about why Stbx does this, not why customers buy the cards (which is another mystery onto itself).
Submissions will be accepted until Sunday midnight, September 23th and should be sent to ely.parra@gmail.com. I, elzr.com, shall decide the winner based on the following criteria:
40% for originality and number of reasons
40% for how convincing the reasons are (this, sadly, ain’t no humor contest)
20% for the ordering (from most to least important)
Submissions are accepted in English, Spanish, or French. English is of course preferred but the choice of language will have no bearing on the judgement.
The winner will be announced at elzr.com/posts/Marketing-Challenge on Monday, September 24th. All lists shall be published in said post. The prize will be 25 dollars in Starbucks card credit.
You’re encouraged to resend this challenge to anyone who might have interesting thoughts on the subject. Anyone may participate. (Though Stbx card credit will probably not be very valuable for those living in countries where the local Starbucks don’t accept it yet, not to mention countries without Stbx.)
It may prove a fun marketing challenge. Happy listing!
Resolution:
Julio Sangabriel
# For creating Customer Databases for CRM efforts.
# Offers a gigantic opportunity for Conjoint Advertising
# It makes easier for Customer tracking.
# Psicologicaly customer believe it to be easier to buy if they have a shop card… (which is no ttrue… you can still buy In SB the same easy way) and thus they buy in SB.
# It gives one or more channels for contacting directly the customers.
# It Will become customizable (people will start making them as they see fit)
# It Gives the people a sense of belonging and exclusivity.
# It Makes people believe to be VIP for having a club card from the most expensive coffee in the world.
# Creates Fashion.
# World Control… haha
Adolfo Rodriguez Navarro
# Crear lealtad- le permiten al consumidor sentirse mas involucrado con la compañia y de paso aseguran que el dinero que tiene planeado gastar en cafe solo lo use en ella.
# Abrirse a nuevos mercados- Al ser usada como gift card, la gente que la recibe que antes no consumia el producto se ve alentada a hacerlo, asi que los que la regalan terminan funcionando como agentes de starbucks.
# Financiamiento a traves del consumidor – Para que pedir creditos si tus clientes te pagan por servicios no demandados a un pequeño costo para ti?
# Dinero gratis- tarjetas que se pierden, personas que dejan de usarla, gift cards que nunca son usadas, al final ellos se quedan con el dinero sin dar nada a cambio.
So the winner is… Julio Sangabriel! I particularly enjoyed his #1, #2, #3, #5, #6 (it becomes an always-with-you embodiment of the brand). I must confess that the reason I started this challenge was because upon reading this Economist article on algorithms
, I had the epiphany that Julio’s #3, customer tracking, was Stbx’s true reason. It was not an opinion of anyone with whom I bounced the idea (nor did they thought it remotely important once I told them about it) so I can attest to it’s originality. Adolfo’s, I particularly enjoyed #2 and #3—I had thought myself of something like his #4, that is, credit lost-and-found money, thinking of it as finance money is an intriguing possibility.
I rather like this challenge-making thing, it’s like outsourcing thinking! Besides, it’s just nice to give things away.
Thanks a lot to those who participated and the many more who told me they thought this an interesting challenge (I was frankly afraid people would thought it stupid).
‘Till the next challenge! %(p)(But if you come up with more reasons—it is so much easier once you have somewhere to start—, then by all means add them in the comments.)%
|
RSS
email
