When companies make money, we assume they are well-managed. That perception is reinforced by the CEOs of those companies who are happy to tell you all the clever things they did to make it happen. The problem with relying on this source of information is that CEOs are highly skilled in a special form of lying called leadership. Leadership involves convincing employees and investors that the CEO has something called a vision, a type of optimistic hallucination that can come true only in an environment in which the CEO is massively overcompensated and the employees have learned to be less selfish.
Scott Adams, “Betting on the Bad Guys”, Wall Street Journal, 2010-06-07
June 7, 2010
QotD: Investing in well-managed companies
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Tweet of the day: World Cup edition
pheadtony: Erectile dysfunction is on the increase. If you suffer, please put a white flag with a red cross on your car to show your support.
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June 2, 2010
Tweet of the day
IMAO_ (Frank J. Fleming): You can’t watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” these days without thinking how much sense Mr. Potter is making about irresponsible lending.
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June 1, 2010
Less than sporting, I realize
Chris Greaves sent me this link, saying “I found this in what appears to be the sporting section of CNN. Something about BP having to admit that their balls don’t work.”
Favourite comment from the site:
td52
CNN: BP announced today that their next attempt will be to drain the entire Gulf of water thereby allowing cement trucks to be driven to the site of the leak. When asked how this was going to be accomplished they said that they replied ” We are still working out the small details.”
Update: Everyone’s getting in on the cheap yucks. Here’s Colby Cosh: “You know this BP spill in the Gulf is bad — they’re running out of strategies with names borrowed from some Japanese guy’s sexual playbook.”
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May 26, 2010
QotD: Facebook privacy follies
All 1,472 employees of Facebook, Inc. reportedly burst out in uncontrollable laughter Wednesday following Albuquerque resident Jason Herrick’s attempts to protect his personal information from exploitation on the social-networking site. “Look, he’s clicking ‘Friends Only’ for his e-mail address. Like that’s going to make a difference!” howled infrastructure manager Evan Hollingsworth, tears streaming down his face, to several of his doubled-over coworkers. “Oh, sure, by all means, Jason, ‘delete’ that photo. Man, this is so rich.”
“Entire Facebook Staff Laughs As Man Tightens Privacy Settings”, The Onion, 2010-05-26
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May 22, 2010
Copyright suits . . . and profanity
Cory Doctorow finds fulfilling both interests easy in this case:
You know what I’m interested in? Copyright lawsuits.
And profanity.
Lucky for me, Google and Viacom have provided both today, in the form of a series of emails released through the discovery process in Viacom’s billion-dollar lawsuit against YouTube. In these emails, the two companies take turns cussin’ and spittin’ and swearin’ about each other. Hilarity ensues. Ars Technica rounds up some of the highlights.
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May 19, 2010
QotD: Action movie lines
“I know what you’re thinking, punk: Did I fire six bullets or only five. Being this is a Glock with seventeen rounds, it’s a moot point, but I’m doing a cognitive psychology study on people’s ability to count in stressful situation. You’ll get twenty dollars to participate. So, do you feel like helping science? Well, do ya, punk?”
Frank J. Fleming, “Action Movie Lines”, IMAO, 2010-05-18
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May 18, 2010
Someone has to make this campaign video
Frank J. considers what his campaign video would be like if he was running for office:
This makes me think of the ad I might run if I one day campaigned for an office. I think I could improve on his ad, though. Here’s what I would do in my campaign ad:
* Ride into the commercial on a Liger.
* Every scene, I’d be stroking a different gun.
* Vow that if elected, our enemies will be eaten by genetically resurrected dinosaurs.
* In the middle of the ad, pause to shoot a hippy dead.
* Not only call the other politicians “thugs and criminals” but also promise to lock them in a room with a bear.
* Draw a picture of Muhammad while talking.
* Look up at the moon and yell, “You’re going down!”
* End with an awesome guitar solo while my farm explodes behind me.Yeah, I’d be so awesome commissioning agriculture or whatever.
By the last item, I was already seeing it . . . someone’s got to make this video. It doesn’t even matter what he’s running for!
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Brontë Sisters Power Dolls
H/T to Lois McMaster Bujold, who “especially liked the fire extinguisher among the accessories included.”
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May 11, 2010
QotD: Parenting, in a nutshell
That’s parenting: a measure of your success is how you’re needed less and less.
James Lileks, Bleat, 2010-05-11
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May 6, 2010
As if we didn’t have enough to worry about already
New Age terrorists have reportedly developed a new, terrifying weapon — the homeopathic bomb:
Homeopathic bombs are comprised of 99.9% water but contain the merest trace element of explosive. The solution is then repeatedly diluted so as to leave only the memory of the explosive in the water molecules. According to the laws of homeopathy, the more that the water is diluted, the more powerful the bomb becomes.
‘It was only a matter of time before these people got hold of the material that they needed to make these bombs,’ said former UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, ‘The world is a much more dangerous place with the advent of these Weapons of Mass Dilution.’
‘A homeopathic attack could bring entire cities to a standstill,’ said BBC Security Correspondent, Frank Gardner, ‘Large numbers of people could easily become convinced that they have been killed and hospitals would be unable to cope with the massive influx of the ‘walking suggestible’.’
The severity of the situation has already resulted in the New Age terror threat level being raised from ‘lilac’ to the more worrisome ‘purple’ aura. Meanwhile, new security measures at airports require that all water bottles be scanned to ensure that they are not being used to smuggle the memory of an explosion on board a plane.
H/T to Megan McArdle.
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May 4, 2010
The lesson, kids, is don’t ask for colour advice
A colour survey gone very wrong:
Thank you so much for all the help on the color survey. Over five million colors were named across 222,500 user sessions. If you never got around to taking it, it’s too late to contribute any data, but if you want you can see how it worked and take it for fun here.
First, a few basic discoveries:
* If you ask people to name colors long enough, they go totally crazy.
* “Puke” and “vomit” are totally real colors.
* Colorblind people are more likely than non-colorblind people to type “fuck this” (or some variant) and quit in frustration.
* Indigo was totally just added to the rainbow so it would have 7 colors and make that “ROY G. BIV” acronym work, just like you always suspected. It should really be ROY GBP, with maybe a C or T thrown in there between G and B depending on how the spectrum was converted to RGB.
* A couple dozen people embedded SQL ‘drop table’ statements in the color names. Nice try, kids.
* Nobody can spell “fuchsia”.Overall, the results were really cool and a lot of fun to analyze. There are some basic limitations of this survey, which are discussed toward the bottom of this post. But the sheer amount of data here is cool.
And a selection of miscellaneous answers:
April 30, 2010
European map, rationalized
The Economist would like to redraw the map of Europe:
People who find their neighbours tiresome can move to another neighbourhood, whereas countries can’t. But suppose they could. Rejigging the map of Europe would make life more logical and friendlier.
Britain, which after its general election will have to confront its dire public finances, should move closer to the southern-European countries that find themselves in a similar position. It could be towed to a new position near the Azores. (If the journey proves a bumpy one, it might be a good opportunity to make Wales and Scotland into separate islands).
In Britain’s place should come Poland, which has suffered quite enough in its location between Russia and Germany and deserves a chance to enjoy the bracing winds of the North Atlantic and the security of sea water between it and any potential invaders.
April 27, 2010
Further evidence that PowerPoint is the tool of Satan
DarkWater Muse sent me the following link, saying “Finally somebody who sympathizes with my long held views on PowerPoint”:
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.
“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.
[. . .]
“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.
“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.
[. . .]
Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters.
The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”
One of the worst aspects of any PowerPoint presentation is that by the use of graphic tricks and pretty effects, serious flaws in actual content can be “handwaved over”. This is great for the presenter who doesn’t want to impart real information, but terrible for the victims audience. Bulleted lists are a useful device for summarizing key ideas that don’t necessarily have a hard sequence or hierarchy, but they can also be used to imply illogical or inconsistent groupings of concepts or facts, especially when the eye (and the mind) is being entranced by whizzy tricks.
To paraphrase Sir Humphrey Appleby, “a good Civil Servant must be able to use PowerPoint not as a window into the mind but as a curtain to draw across it.”
I’ve sounded the warning call about the evil incarnate that is PowerPoint before. Do have a look at the (yes, I recognize the irony) slideshow here.
Update, 30 April: PowerPoint badges for your BDUs.
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Tech-clueless in Toronto
I received the following rant from a reader who is experiencing some, um, technical challenges in his job. Not technical challenges for himself: boss and co-worker foundering under the foaming, rushing waters of technology:
They are going to drive me absolutely insane.
Did you know … that you can select the program with which to open a file by right-clicking on the file and selecting Open With…?
DID YOU KNOW THAT?!
That is the MOST AMAZING THING EVER, according to the oldsters. These guys could not figure out how to open a text file that has an extension other than .TXT. I showed them the Open With… twiddlebit, and now Head Oldster is busy adding the procedure to our internal style guide.
Gobsmacked with heartbroken outrage, I said “Dude. Anyone who has used Windows for any amount of time will know that. You don’t have to put it into our style guide.”
To which he responded: “I have been doing this for 20 years, and this is the first time I’ve heard of this. So it should be documented.”
I don’t know how much longer I can work here.
And to top if off, BOTH OF THEM are constantly getting calls from headhunters and former employers who want them back as contractors. How is that possible? Head Oldster can generally get through the day, but The New Guy — Judas on a Vespa with Cheese and Peppers. Watching him navigate through FrameMaker is like watching Stephen Hawking type out A Brief History of Time character-by-character with his eyeballs, minus the genius part of it.
The guy struggles to find the SAME FUNCTIONS THAT HE USES EVERY DAY in the menus. How can he possibly beswamped with job offers? IS THE ECONOMY DOING THAT WELL?
Crickey.
I have to admit, reading this rant made me feel better about my own work . . .
