Every election there are some board positions on my ballot. The local water system board, the school system board, and the community college board are all positions elected by the citizens. So, some time in October I start reading through campaign websites and social media pages to get a sense for what qualifies the people running for these positions. They definitely attract a type of person, but I genuinely don't understand that type.
It's fairly typical for a person running for a board position to highlight that they have multiple children, a job with some authority, and also hold multiple other board positions. This is ignoring other community and church volunteer positions that are typically listed. I want to know why. Why, if you are already being clearly pulled in fifty different directions would you want to add a fifty-first? At some point you trade quality for quantity. I don't necessarily want to elect someone to a board if they are already on four or five other boards that meet regularly.
I do understand wanting to be involved in decision-making when your life is more opened up. If you are a semi-retired educator and want to use the breadth of your experience to help guide your local school district or community college through difficult decisions, this makes sense to me. It also makes sense to me that a parent would want to join a board to have a voice. I just don't understand it being the fifth board you're on, at the expense of time with your children.
Showing posts with label business. Show all posts
Showing posts with label business. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 20, 2020
Sunday, May 03, 2020
working from home
My company decided that my office will be closed for the foreseeable future and I am now a work-at-home employee. The official line is that this is permanent and not going to change at the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, but I know that things can still change in a heartbeat.
I'm torn on this news. Being a severe introvert, this has been a bit of a fantasy for me, and it has worked well for the month-and-a-half that I have been doing this. It has been great having more opportunity to eat with and interact with the family while still being on top of my work. I will miss my co-workers, though. It also introduces some instability to my job. Will my employer continue to consider me or the rest of the people in my office as important when no one physically sees me working, and will this make me more of a layoff target in the future? It can't help.
I am among those who think this is a harbinger of things to come in business in general. It often doesn't make sense to pay to lease and maintain business facilities when employees can be just as productive from home. This pandemic is going to be an excuse for a lot of businesses to drop some facilities expenses from their books.
There are things that are important about an office, but I don't think they're always the things that management says are important about having an office. The rationale that I normally hear is that an office makes it easier for workers to collaborate. That may be somewhat true, but technology has come a long way in this regard. The bigger issues I see are less opportunity to build rapport on a team and more difficulty in training new employees. I don't have a good, non-buzzword solution for these things, but if someone does solve those issues a lot more business will be removed from traditional offices.
I do think this is going to lead to a fundamental change in much of society, and could be the beginning of a nightmare scenario for extroverts. Will this drive extroverted people out of typical office jobs into fields where they can interact more with other people? I know that finance, accounting, and technical fields already have a reputation for being a bit anti-social. Will marketing, HR, legal, and PR follow suit as people in those fields work more from home?
I'm torn on this news. Being a severe introvert, this has been a bit of a fantasy for me, and it has worked well for the month-and-a-half that I have been doing this. It has been great having more opportunity to eat with and interact with the family while still being on top of my work. I will miss my co-workers, though. It also introduces some instability to my job. Will my employer continue to consider me or the rest of the people in my office as important when no one physically sees me working, and will this make me more of a layoff target in the future? It can't help.
I am among those who think this is a harbinger of things to come in business in general. It often doesn't make sense to pay to lease and maintain business facilities when employees can be just as productive from home. This pandemic is going to be an excuse for a lot of businesses to drop some facilities expenses from their books.
There are things that are important about an office, but I don't think they're always the things that management says are important about having an office. The rationale that I normally hear is that an office makes it easier for workers to collaborate. That may be somewhat true, but technology has come a long way in this regard. The bigger issues I see are less opportunity to build rapport on a team and more difficulty in training new employees. I don't have a good, non-buzzword solution for these things, but if someone does solve those issues a lot more business will be removed from traditional offices.
I do think this is going to lead to a fundamental change in much of society, and could be the beginning of a nightmare scenario for extroverts. Will this drive extroverted people out of typical office jobs into fields where they can interact more with other people? I know that finance, accounting, and technical fields already have a reputation for being a bit anti-social. Will marketing, HR, legal, and PR follow suit as people in those fields work more from home?
Monday, February 04, 2019
lessons at the mechanic
When I was at the mechanic a few days ago waiting to have the brake pads battery replaced on my car I noticed that there wasn't really a way to avoid hearing chatter around me. I especially heard the conversations that other people had with the representative from the dealership who were explaining what they found wrong with their cars.
One man was told that he needed to replace his tires with a set that cost $800, but he declined to do so due to the lack of funds. An older lady was told she needed to replace her battery, and was confused that it wasn't covered by her warranty. Another man was informed that he had nails in two different tires, but that the fix was cheap and quick.
As a parent, it occurred to me that these are the sort of situations that I need to be training my kids to handle one day.
In the example of the first man, if you have a car or anything else that is expensive it will cost money to maintain. Failing to budget for those expenses leads to inevitable unpleasant surprises. I never really appreciated that at a younger age, and I certainly didn't maintain my vehicles as well a decade and a half ago as I do now. We have had some unpleasant surprises over the years related to the cars.
In the example of the older woman, my initial reaction was to think that of course the battery is not under the car's warranty. However, that is not necessarily an intuitive fact to know. Why is the alternator something that would be under warranty (which the representative explained to the lady) but the battery isn't? I know it's because the battery is guaranteed to need to be replaced, but an older lady may not understand this. The kids need to understand that the stuff that is covered by warranty is almost always the stuff that is least likely to need to be replaced. Warranties are useful, but they are also frequently written so that you still have to pay to fix the thing under warranty.
In the example of the last man, sometimes what sounds like bad news may actually be good news. Had he not discovered the nails he may have had to replace the tires, but he was able to get them plugged cheaply. Don't always expect bad news, and appreciate the good news when you get it.
The sorts of things you need to understand to manage in life aren't always what you learn in school. It's hard as a parent to remember that there are lessons to learn everywhere.
One man was told that he needed to replace his tires with a set that cost $800, but he declined to do so due to the lack of funds. An older lady was told she needed to replace her battery, and was confused that it wasn't covered by her warranty. Another man was informed that he had nails in two different tires, but that the fix was cheap and quick.
As a parent, it occurred to me that these are the sort of situations that I need to be training my kids to handle one day.
In the example of the first man, if you have a car or anything else that is expensive it will cost money to maintain. Failing to budget for those expenses leads to inevitable unpleasant surprises. I never really appreciated that at a younger age, and I certainly didn't maintain my vehicles as well a decade and a half ago as I do now. We have had some unpleasant surprises over the years related to the cars.
In the example of the older woman, my initial reaction was to think that of course the battery is not under the car's warranty. However, that is not necessarily an intuitive fact to know. Why is the alternator something that would be under warranty (which the representative explained to the lady) but the battery isn't? I know it's because the battery is guaranteed to need to be replaced, but an older lady may not understand this. The kids need to understand that the stuff that is covered by warranty is almost always the stuff that is least likely to need to be replaced. Warranties are useful, but they are also frequently written so that you still have to pay to fix the thing under warranty.
In the example of the last man, sometimes what sounds like bad news may actually be good news. Had he not discovered the nails he may have had to replace the tires, but he was able to get them plugged cheaply. Don't always expect bad news, and appreciate the good news when you get it.
The sorts of things you need to understand to manage in life aren't always what you learn in school. It's hard as a parent to remember that there are lessons to learn everywhere.
Friday, September 22, 2017
capturing value
Years back in Managerial Economics, the very first class that I took as part of my MBA program, the very simple concept of capturing value was presented. The example used to illustrate the idea was something like the following.
With a few notable exceptions, most of the classes I took in that program could be boiled down to, "These are the strategies you take to capture the most value." I even had one instructor who I respected a great deal state that a business person's primary objective is to collect the most margin dollars, which is another phrase for capturing the most value. If you understand the nuances of this, you're more or less an MBA, I guess.
What is noteworthy to me is that this is slightly different than the economic story that I usually hear people tell laypeople. One illustration I heard a radio personality provide was the following.
On the very simplest of levels this works, but there's a reason that this is not the example provided to business students. Business is not the art of creating value, but rather it is the art of capturing value. If I run the business I'm less concerned with who creates the value than I am with whether I get to capture that value.
When I hear someone present an illustration like the above I now figure that they haven't gone through business training, or I assume that they have a vested interest in their audience having an incomplete understanding about how business works.
This distinction is important for a few reasons.
First, the mowing example is typically in line with what parents teach their kids. It's actually a good example to use to explain a minimum wage job. It's probably not a good example to give someone who is looking to establish a career, though. There are many types of jobs where the worker captures less value than the business. All else being equal, it is in a person's best interest to look for fields in which workers are able to capture more of the value that they personally create.
Second, the mowing example implies that there's a yard out there to mow and that I have the skill to mow it. While this has always been the case, automation is changing the economy such that the ratio of unskilled work to skilled work is decreasing. Some people have the means to "learn how to mow" and some do not.
Third, this understanding is key to grasping the value or danger (depending on your perspective) of a union. One of the things a union provides is a guarantee to capture a specific amount of value for the worker, and on the flip side a union causes a business not to be able to capture specific value from its operations. FYI, I have no strong opinions of unions in general.
There are other reasons for understanding the distinction, I'm sure. I'll stop at two for now, though.
Person 1 wants to sell a car and Person 2 wants to buy a car. Person 1 values his or her car at $8000 and person 2 values that car at $10,000. There is therefore $2000 worth of value to be captured. If Person 2 purchases the car for $2000 he or she has captured that amount of value in the transaction. If he or she purchases the car for $9000 both individuals capture $1000 of value.
With a few notable exceptions, most of the classes I took in that program could be boiled down to, "These are the strategies you take to capture the most value." I even had one instructor who I respected a great deal state that a business person's primary objective is to collect the most margin dollars, which is another phrase for capturing the most value. If you understand the nuances of this, you're more or less an MBA, I guess.
What is noteworthy to me is that this is slightly different than the economic story that I usually hear people tell laypeople. One illustration I heard a radio personality provide was the following.
To understand Capitalism imagine I need $20. I then go to my neighbor and agree to exchange one hour of my time to mow his yard and he gives me $20 for that time. Through this arrangement we both get what we need. I get the $20 and he gets a mowed lawn.
On the very simplest of levels this works, but there's a reason that this is not the example provided to business students. Business is not the art of creating value, but rather it is the art of capturing value. If I run the business I'm less concerned with who creates the value than I am with whether I get to capture that value.
When I hear someone present an illustration like the above I now figure that they haven't gone through business training, or I assume that they have a vested interest in their audience having an incomplete understanding about how business works.
This distinction is important for a few reasons.
First, the mowing example is typically in line with what parents teach their kids. It's actually a good example to use to explain a minimum wage job. It's probably not a good example to give someone who is looking to establish a career, though. There are many types of jobs where the worker captures less value than the business. All else being equal, it is in a person's best interest to look for fields in which workers are able to capture more of the value that they personally create.
Second, the mowing example implies that there's a yard out there to mow and that I have the skill to mow it. While this has always been the case, automation is changing the economy such that the ratio of unskilled work to skilled work is decreasing. Some people have the means to "learn how to mow" and some do not.
Third, this understanding is key to grasping the value or danger (depending on your perspective) of a union. One of the things a union provides is a guarantee to capture a specific amount of value for the worker, and on the flip side a union causes a business not to be able to capture specific value from its operations. FYI, I have no strong opinions of unions in general.
There are other reasons for understanding the distinction, I'm sure. I'll stop at two for now, though.
Friday, April 15, 2016
feature i wish netflix had
This is very much a first world problems post, but they happen.
A little under a year ago we cut the cord on cable. Between Netflix, YouTube, and an over-the-air recorder (Tablo), Golden and I get most of what we want to watch.. However, I am sure the kids might prefer to have more ready access to the Disney and Nick channels. One thing that gets on my nerves more now that we rely on it, though, is Netflix's impossible-to-navigate interface.
At first blush, the Netflix interface looks great. It's clean and attractive. It does a decent job of recommending things we'll probably want to see. However, it is a major source of frustration for the way I want to use it.
The way I want to use Netflix is that I want to be able to go out searching for things I might like to see when I have spare time to investigate. Then, I want to tag a movie or a show as "Something only I will like" or "Something to watch with Golden and I" or "Kid's shows" or "Good for watching with the family over the holidays." What Netflix offers me instead is the ability to add the show or movie to a single list. We have decided at times not to try to find something to watch on Netflix because we couldn't easily find something that fell into one of those categories on the spot.
This idea could be expanded upon as well. As a parent it would be great if I could tag shows as "Only play once I enter a code" or take the opposite approach of disallowing everything unless I have tagged it as allowed. It would also be nice to be able to tag movies in this way that are not yet on streaming, but might be some day.
A year ago I looked into whether I could write something like this myself using the public APIs Netflix allows developers to use. I found that this may have been possible in the past, but they recently locked down what is truly accessible through their APIs to block what they viewed as competing services from using their data/system.
I also looked into submitting this request directly to Netflix because I imagine a lot of people would like a system like what I describe, and it honestly would not be very difficult to build. It turns out that Netflix does not have a support email address to send these requests to, and only has an online chat function which is never active when I have time to submit my request.
So, I post my request here. Maybe at some point someone in Netflix Product Management will be doing a Google search for desired features, run across this post, and decide that it isn't such a bad idea. That's my only real hope for getting this incredibly useful feature added to the product that I subscribe to and use with some regularity.
A little under a year ago we cut the cord on cable. Between Netflix, YouTube, and an over-the-air recorder (Tablo), Golden and I get most of what we want to watch.. However, I am sure the kids might prefer to have more ready access to the Disney and Nick channels. One thing that gets on my nerves more now that we rely on it, though, is Netflix's impossible-to-navigate interface.
At first blush, the Netflix interface looks great. It's clean and attractive. It does a decent job of recommending things we'll probably want to see. However, it is a major source of frustration for the way I want to use it.
The way I want to use Netflix is that I want to be able to go out searching for things I might like to see when I have spare time to investigate. Then, I want to tag a movie or a show as "Something only I will like" or "Something to watch with Golden and I" or "Kid's shows" or "Good for watching with the family over the holidays." What Netflix offers me instead is the ability to add the show or movie to a single list. We have decided at times not to try to find something to watch on Netflix because we couldn't easily find something that fell into one of those categories on the spot.
This idea could be expanded upon as well. As a parent it would be great if I could tag shows as "Only play once I enter a code" or take the opposite approach of disallowing everything unless I have tagged it as allowed. It would also be nice to be able to tag movies in this way that are not yet on streaming, but might be some day.
A year ago I looked into whether I could write something like this myself using the public APIs Netflix allows developers to use. I found that this may have been possible in the past, but they recently locked down what is truly accessible through their APIs to block what they viewed as competing services from using their data/system.
I also looked into submitting this request directly to Netflix because I imagine a lot of people would like a system like what I describe, and it honestly would not be very difficult to build. It turns out that Netflix does not have a support email address to send these requests to, and only has an online chat function which is never active when I have time to submit my request.
So, I post my request here. Maybe at some point someone in Netflix Product Management will be doing a Google search for desired features, run across this post, and decide that it isn't such a bad idea. That's my only real hope for getting this incredibly useful feature added to the product that I subscribe to and use with some regularity.
Thursday, January 10, 2013
a-little-too-late ads
I recently purchased some wireless headphones to use with our upstairs television with some Amazon gift cards I received for Christmas. They are working out well for their purpose, so that means that I will not need to look for wireless headphones for a while. Don't tell Amazon that, though, because now I see ads for headphones when I am on Amazon.
This is not the first time I started getting ads for a product specifically after I purchased that product. The same thing happened after I purchased a Roku this summer. For a while after I made the purchase a huge percentage of the ads I saw was for a Roku. I must have done a Google search for Roku or something like that to get those ads.
It always feels like those ads are going to waste. It should not matter to me since it is money that I am not going to spend, and I am not funding the advertising campaign anyway, but I do not like waste.
Have you noticed the same thing with any of the bigger ticket items that things that you purchased recently? Do you see ads for products that you purchased recently, so you will not be in the market for that item for a while?
This is not the first time I started getting ads for a product specifically after I purchased that product. The same thing happened after I purchased a Roku this summer. For a while after I made the purchase a huge percentage of the ads I saw was for a Roku. I must have done a Google search for Roku or something like that to get those ads.
It always feels like those ads are going to waste. It should not matter to me since it is money that I am not going to spend, and I am not funding the advertising campaign anyway, but I do not like waste.
Have you noticed the same thing with any of the bigger ticket items that things that you purchased recently? Do you see ads for products that you purchased recently, so you will not be in the market for that item for a while?
Monday, December 31, 2012
black monday
As a warning, I don't expect most of my readers to
bother with this one. The major themes are football, business, and
statistics, and I am fairly certain that only interests a small
percentage of my readership.
Today is the day after the last day of the football season, and is typically known as a black Monday when teams who had disappointing seasons announce which coaches are getting fired. This year, a lot of coaches with relatively successful careers have gotten the boot. The names wouldn't mean much to people who don't follow the NFL, but they include people like Lovie Smith, Andy Reid, and Norv Turner, all of whom are usually in the playoffs. And that brings me to a point. I think that most of these firings are ridiculous, and they point to a mistake that people make when they look at statistics. there frequently is not enough data available to make the right decision.
One that sticks out a bit to me is the firing of the Chicago Bears coach, Lovie Smith. I have always detested the Bears, but I have long held quite a deal of respect for Smith, both on and off the field. While Detroit struggled through ridiculously bad season after season, Chicago was graced with a defensively-minded coach who kept getting them into the playoffs, and was also someone to look up to personally. Something to envy for sure. This season, he was canned after a winning season that just missed the playoffs. A lot had to do with the poor performance of the team's offense, but turn a couple of the team's losses to wins and Chicago would be falling over themselves to keep Smith. That's the point of my contention.
The win/loss ratio for a sixteen-game football season is not a large enough data set to use to know whether a coach is good or bad. String along several seasons of mediocre performance, and that would probably be enough, but if you have someone in-house who has a record of success, but one or two mediocre seasons, that is reason to keep rather him rather than to get rid of him. I see this in other business environments as well.
In my experience and in discussions in my MBA classes, I have been amazed at how willing businesses are to live and die by quarterly numbers. Most executives and financial decision-makers will have had to have had statistics classes to attain both their bachelors and masters degrees, yet they make decisions (out of necessity or not) that ignore the fact that statistical variance all but dictates that everyone will have periods where their unmanipulated numbers underperform expectations.
Looking to another business source, one of the biggest red flags for the Bernie Madoff scam was that his hedge fund never underperformed. Statistically this was nearly impossible, even if Madoff was the wisest investor around. Everyone misses on some quarters if they're being honest. Rather than his consistent performance being a reason to invest with him it should have been a reason to avoid him like the plague. People simply aren't wired to look for that sort of red flag, though, and they are wired to punish others based on the appearance of underperformance caused by statistical noise.
Today is the day after the last day of the football season, and is typically known as a black Monday when teams who had disappointing seasons announce which coaches are getting fired. This year, a lot of coaches with relatively successful careers have gotten the boot. The names wouldn't mean much to people who don't follow the NFL, but they include people like Lovie Smith, Andy Reid, and Norv Turner, all of whom are usually in the playoffs. And that brings me to a point. I think that most of these firings are ridiculous, and they point to a mistake that people make when they look at statistics. there frequently is not enough data available to make the right decision.
One that sticks out a bit to me is the firing of the Chicago Bears coach, Lovie Smith. I have always detested the Bears, but I have long held quite a deal of respect for Smith, both on and off the field. While Detroit struggled through ridiculously bad season after season, Chicago was graced with a defensively-minded coach who kept getting them into the playoffs, and was also someone to look up to personally. Something to envy for sure. This season, he was canned after a winning season that just missed the playoffs. A lot had to do with the poor performance of the team's offense, but turn a couple of the team's losses to wins and Chicago would be falling over themselves to keep Smith. That's the point of my contention.
The win/loss ratio for a sixteen-game football season is not a large enough data set to use to know whether a coach is good or bad. String along several seasons of mediocre performance, and that would probably be enough, but if you have someone in-house who has a record of success, but one or two mediocre seasons, that is reason to keep rather him rather than to get rid of him. I see this in other business environments as well.
In my experience and in discussions in my MBA classes, I have been amazed at how willing businesses are to live and die by quarterly numbers. Most executives and financial decision-makers will have had to have had statistics classes to attain both their bachelors and masters degrees, yet they make decisions (out of necessity or not) that ignore the fact that statistical variance all but dictates that everyone will have periods where their unmanipulated numbers underperform expectations.
Looking to another business source, one of the biggest red flags for the Bernie Madoff scam was that his hedge fund never underperformed. Statistically this was nearly impossible, even if Madoff was the wisest investor around. Everyone misses on some quarters if they're being honest. Rather than his consistent performance being a reason to invest with him it should have been a reason to avoid him like the plague. People simply aren't wired to look for that sort of red flag, though, and they are wired to punish others based on the appearance of underperformance caused by statistical noise.
Saturday, September 22, 2012
hiring alex smith
I play fantasy football, and as a part of that I am aware of a specific player that in my opinion illustrates a major factor impacting the national employment situation today.
The San Francisco 49ers had the first pick in the 2005 NFL draft, and they used the opportunity to draft Alex Smith. While I don't watch college football, I do know that he had a strong couple of years with the University of Utah and received some votes for the Heisman trophy. The 49ers certainly felt he had something with him to pick him first overall.
In the next five or six years Smith would be considered something of a bust. He almost always played just well enough to stay the starter, but no one would think that his play ever justified a place in the first round or two of the draft, let alone first overall selection. In fantasy, people would chuckle if someone dared to draft him as anything more than a low-level backup for their imaginary team. No one really took him seriously as anything other than a game manager for a team that relied on its defense for wins.
While most people figured the issue was with Smith, part of the problem was that Smith had five or six offensive coordinators and offensive systems in the same number of years. This meant that he had to essentially relearn how to do everything every year, and readjust to a system that may or may not be a good fit for him.
Before the start of the season last year the team hired Jim Harbaugh as the head coach, who just happened to be a former quarterback. I do not know what specifically happened in the coaching process, but the evidence indicates that Harbaugh was able to help develop Smith's potential like other coaches and coordinators were unable to in the past. In that year Smith's play improved dramatically, and his performance showed more intelligent decision-making. This is to the point where Smith started a streak of passes without an interception toward the end of the season that surpassed any similar streak any other quarterbacks on the team have ever had. Those other quarterbacks include Joe Montana and Steve Young. That streak has continued this season, and he has not thrown an interception yet. The team is widely considered one of the likeliest to reach the Super Bowl this year.
I think this points well to something that doesn't get enough attention today. Potential workers need to be developed, and businesses need to bite the bullet and accept that.
The narrative that has taken hold in the last few years in relation to the job market is that jobs are available and there are job shortages in places, but there is a serious mismatch between the jobs that are available and the skillsets of job seekers. This, I have read, is the a major factor for the high unemployment rate. As a fake example that mimics what I have read, a business that makes airplane parts might state that they'd be happy to hire welders, but they just cannot find any who are qualified to weld aluminum parts. I don't completely agree with this assessment, though.
A few months ago I read an article, and I unfortunately cannot find it now, that disputed this narrative. It stated that there is always a bit of a jobs/skills mismatch in the economy, and there is no real statistical evidence that the mismatch is larger now than at more prosperous times. The notion is popular because both liberals and conservatives can use it to push their particular agendas. Those who are more liberal can use this narrative to push for more education funding, and those who are more conservative can use this narrative to shift the responsibility for the jobs situation from business to the incompetence or laziness of the those who are out of work. At the risk of beating up a couple of strawmen I would like to look at these scenarios.
The education argument has a little bit of merit, but most of it falls apart when you really think about what the narrative implies. It essentially states that the education system itself fails to get people into a gainfully employable state. If this is the case, the idea that simply pouring more money into that system will solve anything is naive. A lot more could be said about this education argument, but that's not where I want to focus.
The other argument that the potential employee pool is simply inferior interests me more, though. Businesses have always had to expect new hires to go through some learning curve. Perfect candidates rarely exist, and when they do they typically command top dollar. The expectation that, even in a weak jobs market, you can be picky enough to demand a laundry list of areas of expertise and experiences with different scenarios and technologies so that you don't have to develop the new hire, then offer a low-ball wage is ridiculous.
What a business is really saying when they say there aren't any qualified candidates is that they are not capable of developing the candidates that are available. Either that, or they're simply unwilling. That may be true, but it is also a red flag that those businesses might not acknowledge their role in creating and nurturing star workers, and might be shirking the responsibility to develop them at all.
This is a problem because in the new economy the jobs that require little training are also the ones that will be the easiest to automate, and these jobs will therefore cease to exist. It's possible that the remaining important roles will go unfilled, or there will be a lot of people playing the role of an undeveloped 2005 Alex Smith who can sort of but not really do their job rather than being a 2012 Alex Smith who is a borderline rock star.
I think a lot of businesses have noticed that some employees get training then leave once they have been fully developed, and that is why those businesses are hesitant to hire someone who needs some development. I have seen the same thing happen several times myself where someone worked just long enough to get past the learning curve only to leverage that new knowledge to find a role somewhere else. I do believe, though, that if a business gains a reputation for one that is constantly developing its employees, and also gains a reputation of not downsizing half the company when hard times hit, that this will ultimately lead to retention and recruitment of long-term employees who will give the business a return on those resources spent in development.
In conclusion I believe that workers and businesses share the responsibility that the worker be up to the task of doing their job. If there is a skills mismatch and a business cannot find people who have the requisite skillset, that is not the fault of the pool of workers that they do not have those qualifications. It is a failure of expectations that developed people would be ready and waiting. In that scenario, it is the business' responsibility to find people who can be properly developed to have the needed skillsets. The companies that know how to identify diamonds in the rough and develop them will find that there are a lot of 2012 Alex Smiths available to be discovered. Those companies will outperform the ones who decide not to bother with hiring their own Alex Smiths in the first place.
The San Francisco 49ers had the first pick in the 2005 NFL draft, and they used the opportunity to draft Alex Smith. While I don't watch college football, I do know that he had a strong couple of years with the University of Utah and received some votes for the Heisman trophy. The 49ers certainly felt he had something with him to pick him first overall.
In the next five or six years Smith would be considered something of a bust. He almost always played just well enough to stay the starter, but no one would think that his play ever justified a place in the first round or two of the draft, let alone first overall selection. In fantasy, people would chuckle if someone dared to draft him as anything more than a low-level backup for their imaginary team. No one really took him seriously as anything other than a game manager for a team that relied on its defense for wins.
While most people figured the issue was with Smith, part of the problem was that Smith had five or six offensive coordinators and offensive systems in the same number of years. This meant that he had to essentially relearn how to do everything every year, and readjust to a system that may or may not be a good fit for him.
Before the start of the season last year the team hired Jim Harbaugh as the head coach, who just happened to be a former quarterback. I do not know what specifically happened in the coaching process, but the evidence indicates that Harbaugh was able to help develop Smith's potential like other coaches and coordinators were unable to in the past. In that year Smith's play improved dramatically, and his performance showed more intelligent decision-making. This is to the point where Smith started a streak of passes without an interception toward the end of the season that surpassed any similar streak any other quarterbacks on the team have ever had. Those other quarterbacks include Joe Montana and Steve Young. That streak has continued this season, and he has not thrown an interception yet. The team is widely considered one of the likeliest to reach the Super Bowl this year.
I think this points well to something that doesn't get enough attention today. Potential workers need to be developed, and businesses need to bite the bullet and accept that.
The narrative that has taken hold in the last few years in relation to the job market is that jobs are available and there are job shortages in places, but there is a serious mismatch between the jobs that are available and the skillsets of job seekers. This, I have read, is the a major factor for the high unemployment rate. As a fake example that mimics what I have read, a business that makes airplane parts might state that they'd be happy to hire welders, but they just cannot find any who are qualified to weld aluminum parts. I don't completely agree with this assessment, though.
A few months ago I read an article, and I unfortunately cannot find it now, that disputed this narrative. It stated that there is always a bit of a jobs/skills mismatch in the economy, and there is no real statistical evidence that the mismatch is larger now than at more prosperous times. The notion is popular because both liberals and conservatives can use it to push their particular agendas. Those who are more liberal can use this narrative to push for more education funding, and those who are more conservative can use this narrative to shift the responsibility for the jobs situation from business to the incompetence or laziness of the those who are out of work. At the risk of beating up a couple of strawmen I would like to look at these scenarios.
The education argument has a little bit of merit, but most of it falls apart when you really think about what the narrative implies. It essentially states that the education system itself fails to get people into a gainfully employable state. If this is the case, the idea that simply pouring more money into that system will solve anything is naive. A lot more could be said about this education argument, but that's not where I want to focus.
The other argument that the potential employee pool is simply inferior interests me more, though. Businesses have always had to expect new hires to go through some learning curve. Perfect candidates rarely exist, and when they do they typically command top dollar. The expectation that, even in a weak jobs market, you can be picky enough to demand a laundry list of areas of expertise and experiences with different scenarios and technologies so that you don't have to develop the new hire, then offer a low-ball wage is ridiculous.
What a business is really saying when they say there aren't any qualified candidates is that they are not capable of developing the candidates that are available. Either that, or they're simply unwilling. That may be true, but it is also a red flag that those businesses might not acknowledge their role in creating and nurturing star workers, and might be shirking the responsibility to develop them at all.
This is a problem because in the new economy the jobs that require little training are also the ones that will be the easiest to automate, and these jobs will therefore cease to exist. It's possible that the remaining important roles will go unfilled, or there will be a lot of people playing the role of an undeveloped 2005 Alex Smith who can sort of but not really do their job rather than being a 2012 Alex Smith who is a borderline rock star.
I think a lot of businesses have noticed that some employees get training then leave once they have been fully developed, and that is why those businesses are hesitant to hire someone who needs some development. I have seen the same thing happen several times myself where someone worked just long enough to get past the learning curve only to leverage that new knowledge to find a role somewhere else. I do believe, though, that if a business gains a reputation for one that is constantly developing its employees, and also gains a reputation of not downsizing half the company when hard times hit, that this will ultimately lead to retention and recruitment of long-term employees who will give the business a return on those resources spent in development.
In conclusion I believe that workers and businesses share the responsibility that the worker be up to the task of doing their job. If there is a skills mismatch and a business cannot find people who have the requisite skillset, that is not the fault of the pool of workers that they do not have those qualifications. It is a failure of expectations that developed people would be ready and waiting. In that scenario, it is the business' responsibility to find people who can be properly developed to have the needed skillsets. The companies that know how to identify diamonds in the rough and develop them will find that there are a lot of 2012 Alex Smiths available to be discovered. Those companies will outperform the ones who decide not to bother with hiring their own Alex Smiths in the first place.
Saturday, November 05, 2011
change
A while back I noted that I had worked at a grocery store that installed a CoinStar machine under the guise of serving customers better. Since the machine took a 7% cut of the change total, I always questioned the purpose of it. It wasn't like we turned down customers who opted to pay with coins, and at the least a bank would count and deposit coins free of charge for customers. Since the machine was providing a service that I felt the store should be providing anyway I was always a little bit cynical about that machine being used as a source of revenue. It seemed more a pointless extravagance in that situation, but I just today heard of a story that indicates that the grocery business may have changed since I was a cashier.
Apparently, a mother in Portland, Oregon, needed to buy some food for her kids but only had change. The information I have is that she had quarters, but perhaps there were smaller denomination coins there as well. The first grocery store she went to told her that they had a $5 limit on change-only purchases. The second grocery store tried to send her to their change counting machine (I don't know if it was specifically a CoinStar machine) that took a 10% cut of the money. When she pointed out that she could not afford to pay this fee and another customer offered to give her cash for the coins she had the store backed down.
This brings up a few points. First, the grocery store I worked for employed two types of people: high schoolers and the poor. Were the employees who enforced these rules all from the former category, because otherwise I would have expected them to be sympathetic to the woman's plight.
Second, apparently most chains do not have an official policy regarding how much you can pay in coins, but the stores themselves enforce these non-existent rules anyway. I am going to guess that the individual stores do not know that there is no actual policy on the matter because the chains want customers to feel the need to use their for-cost change counting machine.
Finally, this gives me pause since there has been a push over the last few years to accept the dollar coins. Why should anyone switch to using dollar coins if there is a chance cashiers may decide they are not going to accept them?
Apparently, a mother in Portland, Oregon, needed to buy some food for her kids but only had change. The information I have is that she had quarters, but perhaps there were smaller denomination coins there as well. The first grocery store she went to told her that they had a $5 limit on change-only purchases. The second grocery store tried to send her to their change counting machine (I don't know if it was specifically a CoinStar machine) that took a 10% cut of the money. When she pointed out that she could not afford to pay this fee and another customer offered to give her cash for the coins she had the store backed down.
This brings up a few points. First, the grocery store I worked for employed two types of people: high schoolers and the poor. Were the employees who enforced these rules all from the former category, because otherwise I would have expected them to be sympathetic to the woman's plight.
Second, apparently most chains do not have an official policy regarding how much you can pay in coins, but the stores themselves enforce these non-existent rules anyway. I am going to guess that the individual stores do not know that there is no actual policy on the matter because the chains want customers to feel the need to use their for-cost change counting machine.
Finally, this gives me pause since there has been a push over the last few years to accept the dollar coins. Why should anyone switch to using dollar coins if there is a chance cashiers may decide they are not going to accept them?
Saturday, June 12, 2010
healthcare
Don't feel bad about not reading this post if you don't want to. It's really only for policy wonks who care about minutia of this specific political issue, and there's nothing wrong with not being a wonk.
Over the last year-and-a-half I have been intrigued with the healthcare debate that has taken place in the country. I am about as close to middle-of-the-road as a person can get on the topic, which mostly means that I don't think any of the available options are ideal. Given the reading and rationalization I have done, I think I could blow holes in almost any plan anyone could conceive of (including the one that is currently in place) as not having enough of the desired effect, having horrific unintended results, or simply not being realistically feasible to implement.
I have also wanted to comment on the state of healthcare for a while but because it is an inherently complicated issue I have not known a real way to do it without making one of two mistakes. First, I could speak in ill-informed platitudes. That is what most of the dialogue I have heard regarding healthcare from both sides has involved. Second, and more likely for me, I could go into such detail about certain aspects of the issue that few would be able to make it to the end of the post, and it would take hours to write properly. Given how long this post is you may believe that I took this exhaustive option, but I truly didn't. Rather than taking either of those two approaches, I decided to talk about two things that pretty much every informed person from any side of the issue agrees are causes for the extraordinarily high cost of medical care in the U.S. I also have some closing thoughts.
1. The seller has far more information about the product than the consumer
First, unlike almost any other industry, consumers of this product are almost completely shut out of the price negotiation process and have almost no information on what good cost or quality is. How do you know whether the doctor you go to charges a reasonable price or does not. How do you know whether your doctor is actually right about the tests he or she recommends are the best ones under the circumstances. How do you know what the differences are between the name brand and generic drugs? How do you know which issues should be addressed and which ones are best left alone? Finally, and most important to my point, how do you know what addressing a specific issue should cost and what addressing your issue did cost?
Imagine for a moment that you wanted to buy a car and all of the information you had was recommendations from friends talking about how nice this or that car salesperson was and the fact that any car you bought would cost you the same amount of money. In this scenario you would have a "car purchase" insurance where some third party would have to pick up the tab for the difference between the price you pay and the actual cost of the car. You just have to pay a monthly fee. What I would do in this situation is find the friendliest salesperson (since I have no way of knowing who is the most knowledgeable salesperson) and buy the nicest car he had. The logical end result of this system would be that the car purchase insurance would be ridiculously expensive just like health insurance is today. The only car purchase insurance companies who would survive would be those who either found some way to encourage customers to price shop (very, very difficult) or who found loopholes in the insurance policies that kept them from having to pay on specific purchases (unpalatable, but much easier). A lot of people see insurance companies as evil, but frankly they are a product of the system within which they exist. They have to tell people that the price of a Bentley isn't worth the quality-of-life improvement that they will see. The insurance companies that do not do this die.
There are a few ways get people to make wiser purchasing decisions, but in the current system they almost all have to come from the government or some entrepreneur who can do something no one has been successful at on a large scale yet. The most effective solution is to require high deductibles, but that only works well for upper-middle class and upper class consumers. Lower class consumers would decide that they could not afford to visit the doctor and would just not go, or they would go and would not pay (that touches on my second reason healthcare costs are so high, but I'll get to that in a bit).
Another way to control costs is something that the state of Maryland does. The prices for certain procedures are standardized so that doctors and surgeons cannot charge more or less than a certain price for a given procedure. That sort of government control may be prone to manipulation, though, and goes against the free-market nature of the country as a whole.
Another solution that eventually got added to the healthcare bill in a very watered-down form that McCain first supported then didn't and that Obama first opposed then didn't is taxing healthcare plans from employers. Since the government does not tax employer-provided health plans but does tax income used to purchase insurance on the open market there is a significant incentive to go with whatever the best employer-provided insurance plan is regardless of cost. Then, since you are paying for a good insurance plan, there is an incentive to over-use that insurance. On the flip side, there is an incentive for the self-insured to under-use their insurance. This specific change is not politically popular because it has an immediate negative affect on almost everyone who is employed and the positive effects are mostly in the long-term. As an example, my healthcare plan almost certainly would deteriorate in quality due to extra taxes involved, so I would have to make a higher salary to compensate for that. I know what the benefits of such a tax would be and I still don't like the idea. Imagine the person who does not understand the benefits. He or she would be livid at any politician who supported it. That is why in the final version of the healthcare bill the actual healthcare plan tax was set to only apply to the most extremely expensive plans conceivable and only goes into effect in 2018 when a new president will be coming into office.
The only non-government options are to hope that someone can use technology to help consumers make wise decisions. One argument could be that websites like WebMD.com, MedicineNet.com, and MayoClinic.com answer questions so that people do not have to go to a doctor to get the same answers. I personally think that they cause people to get nervous that they have some condition and make them more likely to visit a doctor. Other possibilities are technologies that collect price and quality information regarding doctors and procedures and use that to make recommendations. Up to this point, that data has been near impossible to accurately collect. Also, this is something that whoever buys their insurance has to be encouraged to use and so far that has not happened on a large scale.
2. Healthcare choices involve tough decisions where involving cost is unpalatable
I am not officially taking a position on any side in these scenarios, but they have to be considered by anyone who wants to be serious about taking a position in the healthcare debate. President Obama had many opportunities to directly address this, but the problem he had was that doing so would have killed the whole legislative process for his bill. He really could only say that many of the decisions are already being made based on quality of health insurance, but that really did not address the issue in whole. His argument was for the devil you don't know rather than the one you do. One specific doctor asked him in an early televised discussion who would make the decisions about what procedures were acceptable to save someone's life, if they were exorbitantly expensive, and unfortunately the president deflected (again, because I think he felt he had to). Reading the scenarios below, hopefully you will see how difficult this is.
For those who unequivocally disapprove of expanding government-sponsored healthcare, I would like to pose a question that I have not been able to address myself. If a person who is too poor to afford health insurance (high-deductible or not) goes to the ER, should they be treated? If so, who should pay? The current system requires that ERs provide service, inefficiently so. You could say that they should only be required to treat someone if their injury is life-threatening, but who gets to decide what is life-threatening. If an uninsured poor someone comes in with a shallow stab wound that doesn't appear likely to bleed out, should the ER just send that person home until he or she develops something that is more life-threatening like and infection or until the bleeding worsens? There is no doubt that the uninsured using ER services they cannot or will not pay for costs the system at large billions and billions of dollars. The government current subsidizes some of these costs, but who really wants that? Most of the rational solutions to this problem result in a system like what we have now with government subsidization of people using the ER for questionable issues, a system where the extremely poor are automatically insured, or a system where people die on the front steps of the ER because the hospital cannot afford to treat everyone who visits the ER and who cannot pay.
The ER is just one problem where discussing cost is unpalatable. A huge percentage of medical spending is done near the end of life. Let's say you are 60 and you have a terminal type of cancer that responds positively to chemotherapy 2% of the time (not an unreal figure from what I've read). Are the thousands of dollars it is going to cost (Let's say $50K or $100K), if insurance is going to cover most of it, even going to enter into the conversation? Would cost enter the conversation if, as a result of choosing chemotherapy, your kids and grandkids had to pay a few extra thousand dollars every year for their insurance? Without thinking about the impact on others, and frankly who is when they've been told their best chance at survival is an unpleasant procedure that has a one in fifty shot at working, money is not going to be a factor at all in the decision. That fact is a major cause of high health insurance costs.
Almost all of the solutions to bring down the cost of end-of-life medical care are unpalatable. You could just allow insurance companies to refuse to pay for the procedure. You could try to encourage the person to decide that a one-in-fifty chance is not worth the fight and live out the rest of their life in hospice, but that introduces many moral (and political) dilemmas. You could require that doctors/hospitals explain the costs to patients, but that would be largely ineffective and very politically unpopular. You could have the government decide what is an acceptable end-of-life procedure for specific situations like the system that exists in the United Kingdom, but that is uncomfortably close to the concept of death panels.
Finally, what is going to drive research that will find cures? People demonize pharmaceutical companies, and sometimes rightly so, but it is fair to allow them some profit if they have spent billions (or at least hundreds of millions) researching a particular drug and getting it through the FDA approval process. If the market is removed or reduced from the process who decides where finite medical research dollars should go? If you have a disease that only occurs in one out of a million people are you out of luck because the process requires that pharmaceuticals sell medicine for a price less than the research would cost? Would dollars be divvied out by what disease happens to be more in the popular eye (would colon cancer dollars go to breast cancer research)?
Final thoughts about tort reform and personal care
Unfortunately, for too long tort reform was the capstone and main substance of the Republican plan. It is fine as a side item, but tort reform alone is not even a partial solution and would eventually be repealed if the end result were too draconian. Most of the proposals seemed to just say, "There is a monetary limit to what you can sue your doctor for and that limit is X." That seems a bit simplistic in my view. Tort reform should happen, but it should be precisely targeted. If it were it could have a beneficial secondary effect. Standard medical processes should be set for specific symptoms and scenarios (I actually think they are, but I can't remember what it is called), and if the lawsuit is filed complaining that the doctor decided to follow those processes rather than what the patient wanted, that lawsuit should be invalidated. This would encourage standard operating procedures such that the recommendations you get at one doctor for treatment would match what you would get at another doctor. This would hopefully also reduce doctors ordering procedures to cover their butts (which is probably more expensive to the system as a whole than the payouts on lawsuits). Regarding lawsuits where a doctor is truly negligent, I am more on the fence regarding how that could or should be reformed.
Beyond tort reform, Republicans needed to focus on streamlining inefficiencies inherent in the system. There were later proposals that did this to an extent, but they did not properly address most of the issues that I have mentioned above. It's hard to say if the Democrat's bill properly addressed any of the issues I have raised, because they left most of the difficult decisions to the Department of Health and Human Services rather than spelling out distasteful details.
Finally, I think we as a nation need to be realistic about what kind of personal care we can receive. There are a lot of things we need to visit an actual doctor for, however there are some things that we should be able to address with less educated and less experienced people. As an example, when H1N1 testing and vaccination was popular a lot of people went to doctor's offices for that. Isn't that something that a nurse, a nurse practitioner, or a pharmacist should be able to handle? If we care about efficiency in the system (and we should if we want to lower health costs) we should consider reserving doctors for the issues that require the education and knowledge that a doctor would have over someone with a lesser medical degree (forgive me being a pharmacist requires the same level degree as being a doctor, for I do not know).
If you have views on this you can share them if you want, but I am not really looking for a healthcare debate. I would request that any posted opinions be deeply thought out. Simply taking the step to consider the unintended consequences of implementing the system you think should be in place (and there are unintended consequences in almost every system) is really all I am asking for.
Over the last year-and-a-half I have been intrigued with the healthcare debate that has taken place in the country. I am about as close to middle-of-the-road as a person can get on the topic, which mostly means that I don't think any of the available options are ideal. Given the reading and rationalization I have done, I think I could blow holes in almost any plan anyone could conceive of (including the one that is currently in place) as not having enough of the desired effect, having horrific unintended results, or simply not being realistically feasible to implement.
I have also wanted to comment on the state of healthcare for a while but because it is an inherently complicated issue I have not known a real way to do it without making one of two mistakes. First, I could speak in ill-informed platitudes. That is what most of the dialogue I have heard regarding healthcare from both sides has involved. Second, and more likely for me, I could go into such detail about certain aspects of the issue that few would be able to make it to the end of the post, and it would take hours to write properly. Given how long this post is you may believe that I took this exhaustive option, but I truly didn't. Rather than taking either of those two approaches, I decided to talk about two things that pretty much every informed person from any side of the issue agrees are causes for the extraordinarily high cost of medical care in the U.S. I also have some closing thoughts.
1. The seller has far more information about the product than the consumer
First, unlike almost any other industry, consumers of this product are almost completely shut out of the price negotiation process and have almost no information on what good cost or quality is. How do you know whether the doctor you go to charges a reasonable price or does not. How do you know whether your doctor is actually right about the tests he or she recommends are the best ones under the circumstances. How do you know what the differences are between the name brand and generic drugs? How do you know which issues should be addressed and which ones are best left alone? Finally, and most important to my point, how do you know what addressing a specific issue should cost and what addressing your issue did cost?
Imagine for a moment that you wanted to buy a car and all of the information you had was recommendations from friends talking about how nice this or that car salesperson was and the fact that any car you bought would cost you the same amount of money. In this scenario you would have a "car purchase" insurance where some third party would have to pick up the tab for the difference between the price you pay and the actual cost of the car. You just have to pay a monthly fee. What I would do in this situation is find the friendliest salesperson (since I have no way of knowing who is the most knowledgeable salesperson) and buy the nicest car he had. The logical end result of this system would be that the car purchase insurance would be ridiculously expensive just like health insurance is today. The only car purchase insurance companies who would survive would be those who either found some way to encourage customers to price shop (very, very difficult) or who found loopholes in the insurance policies that kept them from having to pay on specific purchases (unpalatable, but much easier). A lot of people see insurance companies as evil, but frankly they are a product of the system within which they exist. They have to tell people that the price of a Bentley isn't worth the quality-of-life improvement that they will see. The insurance companies that do not do this die.
There are a few ways get people to make wiser purchasing decisions, but in the current system they almost all have to come from the government or some entrepreneur who can do something no one has been successful at on a large scale yet. The most effective solution is to require high deductibles, but that only works well for upper-middle class and upper class consumers. Lower class consumers would decide that they could not afford to visit the doctor and would just not go, or they would go and would not pay (that touches on my second reason healthcare costs are so high, but I'll get to that in a bit).
Another way to control costs is something that the state of Maryland does. The prices for certain procedures are standardized so that doctors and surgeons cannot charge more or less than a certain price for a given procedure. That sort of government control may be prone to manipulation, though, and goes against the free-market nature of the country as a whole.
Another solution that eventually got added to the healthcare bill in a very watered-down form that McCain first supported then didn't and that Obama first opposed then didn't is taxing healthcare plans from employers. Since the government does not tax employer-provided health plans but does tax income used to purchase insurance on the open market there is a significant incentive to go with whatever the best employer-provided insurance plan is regardless of cost. Then, since you are paying for a good insurance plan, there is an incentive to over-use that insurance. On the flip side, there is an incentive for the self-insured to under-use their insurance. This specific change is not politically popular because it has an immediate negative affect on almost everyone who is employed and the positive effects are mostly in the long-term. As an example, my healthcare plan almost certainly would deteriorate in quality due to extra taxes involved, so I would have to make a higher salary to compensate for that. I know what the benefits of such a tax would be and I still don't like the idea. Imagine the person who does not understand the benefits. He or she would be livid at any politician who supported it. That is why in the final version of the healthcare bill the actual healthcare plan tax was set to only apply to the most extremely expensive plans conceivable and only goes into effect in 2018 when a new president will be coming into office.
The only non-government options are to hope that someone can use technology to help consumers make wise decisions. One argument could be that websites like WebMD.com, MedicineNet.com, and MayoClinic.com answer questions so that people do not have to go to a doctor to get the same answers. I personally think that they cause people to get nervous that they have some condition and make them more likely to visit a doctor. Other possibilities are technologies that collect price and quality information regarding doctors and procedures and use that to make recommendations. Up to this point, that data has been near impossible to accurately collect. Also, this is something that whoever buys their insurance has to be encouraged to use and so far that has not happened on a large scale.
2. Healthcare choices involve tough decisions where involving cost is unpalatable
I am not officially taking a position on any side in these scenarios, but they have to be considered by anyone who wants to be serious about taking a position in the healthcare debate. President Obama had many opportunities to directly address this, but the problem he had was that doing so would have killed the whole legislative process for his bill. He really could only say that many of the decisions are already being made based on quality of health insurance, but that really did not address the issue in whole. His argument was for the devil you don't know rather than the one you do. One specific doctor asked him in an early televised discussion who would make the decisions about what procedures were acceptable to save someone's life, if they were exorbitantly expensive, and unfortunately the president deflected (again, because I think he felt he had to). Reading the scenarios below, hopefully you will see how difficult this is.
For those who unequivocally disapprove of expanding government-sponsored healthcare, I would like to pose a question that I have not been able to address myself. If a person who is too poor to afford health insurance (high-deductible or not) goes to the ER, should they be treated? If so, who should pay? The current system requires that ERs provide service, inefficiently so. You could say that they should only be required to treat someone if their injury is life-threatening, but who gets to decide what is life-threatening. If an uninsured poor someone comes in with a shallow stab wound that doesn't appear likely to bleed out, should the ER just send that person home until he or she develops something that is more life-threatening like and infection or until the bleeding worsens? There is no doubt that the uninsured using ER services they cannot or will not pay for costs the system at large billions and billions of dollars. The government current subsidizes some of these costs, but who really wants that? Most of the rational solutions to this problem result in a system like what we have now with government subsidization of people using the ER for questionable issues, a system where the extremely poor are automatically insured, or a system where people die on the front steps of the ER because the hospital cannot afford to treat everyone who visits the ER and who cannot pay.
The ER is just one problem where discussing cost is unpalatable. A huge percentage of medical spending is done near the end of life. Let's say you are 60 and you have a terminal type of cancer that responds positively to chemotherapy 2% of the time (not an unreal figure from what I've read). Are the thousands of dollars it is going to cost (Let's say $50K or $100K), if insurance is going to cover most of it, even going to enter into the conversation? Would cost enter the conversation if, as a result of choosing chemotherapy, your kids and grandkids had to pay a few extra thousand dollars every year for their insurance? Without thinking about the impact on others, and frankly who is when they've been told their best chance at survival is an unpleasant procedure that has a one in fifty shot at working, money is not going to be a factor at all in the decision. That fact is a major cause of high health insurance costs.
Almost all of the solutions to bring down the cost of end-of-life medical care are unpalatable. You could just allow insurance companies to refuse to pay for the procedure. You could try to encourage the person to decide that a one-in-fifty chance is not worth the fight and live out the rest of their life in hospice, but that introduces many moral (and political) dilemmas. You could require that doctors/hospitals explain the costs to patients, but that would be largely ineffective and very politically unpopular. You could have the government decide what is an acceptable end-of-life procedure for specific situations like the system that exists in the United Kingdom, but that is uncomfortably close to the concept of death panels.
Finally, what is going to drive research that will find cures? People demonize pharmaceutical companies, and sometimes rightly so, but it is fair to allow them some profit if they have spent billions (or at least hundreds of millions) researching a particular drug and getting it through the FDA approval process. If the market is removed or reduced from the process who decides where finite medical research dollars should go? If you have a disease that only occurs in one out of a million people are you out of luck because the process requires that pharmaceuticals sell medicine for a price less than the research would cost? Would dollars be divvied out by what disease happens to be more in the popular eye (would colon cancer dollars go to breast cancer research)?
Final thoughts about tort reform and personal care
Unfortunately, for too long tort reform was the capstone and main substance of the Republican plan. It is fine as a side item, but tort reform alone is not even a partial solution and would eventually be repealed if the end result were too draconian. Most of the proposals seemed to just say, "There is a monetary limit to what you can sue your doctor for and that limit is X." That seems a bit simplistic in my view. Tort reform should happen, but it should be precisely targeted. If it were it could have a beneficial secondary effect. Standard medical processes should be set for specific symptoms and scenarios (I actually think they are, but I can't remember what it is called), and if the lawsuit is filed complaining that the doctor decided to follow those processes rather than what the patient wanted, that lawsuit should be invalidated. This would encourage standard operating procedures such that the recommendations you get at one doctor for treatment would match what you would get at another doctor. This would hopefully also reduce doctors ordering procedures to cover their butts (which is probably more expensive to the system as a whole than the payouts on lawsuits). Regarding lawsuits where a doctor is truly negligent, I am more on the fence regarding how that could or should be reformed.
Beyond tort reform, Republicans needed to focus on streamlining inefficiencies inherent in the system. There were later proposals that did this to an extent, but they did not properly address most of the issues that I have mentioned above. It's hard to say if the Democrat's bill properly addressed any of the issues I have raised, because they left most of the difficult decisions to the Department of Health and Human Services rather than spelling out distasteful details.
Finally, I think we as a nation need to be realistic about what kind of personal care we can receive. There are a lot of things we need to visit an actual doctor for, however there are some things that we should be able to address with less educated and less experienced people. As an example, when H1N1 testing and vaccination was popular a lot of people went to doctor's offices for that. Isn't that something that a nurse, a nurse practitioner, or a pharmacist should be able to handle? If we care about efficiency in the system (and we should if we want to lower health costs) we should consider reserving doctors for the issues that require the education and knowledge that a doctor would have over someone with a lesser medical degree (forgive me being a pharmacist requires the same level degree as being a doctor, for I do not know).
If you have views on this you can share them if you want, but I am not really looking for a healthcare debate. I would request that any posted opinions be deeply thought out. Simply taking the step to consider the unintended consequences of implementing the system you think should be in place (and there are unintended consequences in almost every system) is really all I am asking for.
Tuesday, June 08, 2010
multitasking
I have never claimed to be a good multitasker. In fact, I am a horrible multitasker. I can generally manage two truly simultaneous tasks if I am only weakly committed to one of them, but that is the limit. The more I learn about multitasking, though, the more I determine that there is no such thing as a good multitasker.
I started thinking about this when I came across a Wall Street Journal article that questioned whether the Internet was making humans more shallow thinkers. The premise is that Internet activity is inherently full of distractions and interruptions, and this does not allow for deep, contemplative thinking. The article then goes into an explanation that people who appear in life to multitask are merely people drawn to constant distraction, and that doing this too much damages the brain's ability to focus.
What's strange is that I, even with the discomfort I have regarding multitasking, frequently find myself attempting to do multiple things at the same time. This happens more now than it used to, and it id definitely enabled through technology that was not available to me earlier in life. I actually find myself rationalizing that I am saving time and reducing stress, though I may be doing the opposite. There are some times when multitasking is useful, but if I am honest with myself I will admit that those instances usually occur when one of the tasks I am performing is truly meaningless. So, if I get more accomplished because I types some emails while dialed into a meeting, that is only because my attention was never really needed in the meeting in the first place.
While many people believe that multitasking improves efficiency because you are accomplishing multiple things at once, multiple studies indicate that multitasking has a negative rather than positive effect on work. As an example, researchers at Stanford found that multitaskers were no better at doing things than anyone else, but they were simply more easily distracted than the rest of the population. They may appear to be doing five things at once, but this is just because those are tasks that are started rather than those that are completed. One of the study's authors went so far as to say, "We kept looking for what [multitaskers] are better at, and we didn't find it."
This all is reinforced by what I was taught in a project management class I took last year. The person teaching that class emphasized that one of a project manager's responsibilities is to help structure project workers' responsibilities in a way that reduces multitasking because of the negative effect that multitasking has on work quality and speed. Expecting constant updates on five concurrent tasks typically results in less productivity than structuring the work to be done sequentially to allow the project member time to focus.
Something that was addressed in a class I took on managing people was that people whose personality makes them want to flit from project to project have been shown to perform better when they are forced into a structure that reduces that behavior. In short, forcing multitaskers to not multitask as much makes them accomplish more. This was noteworthy because the person who taught the class and made that assertion admitted to being one of those people who liked to move from task to task to task.
So, if you happen to be wandering by a Starbucks and see someone sipping a coffee, talking on the phone, typing an instant message, reading a book, tapping a foot to some music, and shopping online at the same time, rest assured that he or she is not doing any of it well. If you are that person, you probably haven't gotten this far down in the post to notice anyway.
I started thinking about this when I came across a Wall Street Journal article that questioned whether the Internet was making humans more shallow thinkers. The premise is that Internet activity is inherently full of distractions and interruptions, and this does not allow for deep, contemplative thinking. The article then goes into an explanation that people who appear in life to multitask are merely people drawn to constant distraction, and that doing this too much damages the brain's ability to focus.
What's strange is that I, even with the discomfort I have regarding multitasking, frequently find myself attempting to do multiple things at the same time. This happens more now than it used to, and it id definitely enabled through technology that was not available to me earlier in life. I actually find myself rationalizing that I am saving time and reducing stress, though I may be doing the opposite. There are some times when multitasking is useful, but if I am honest with myself I will admit that those instances usually occur when one of the tasks I am performing is truly meaningless. So, if I get more accomplished because I types some emails while dialed into a meeting, that is only because my attention was never really needed in the meeting in the first place.
While many people believe that multitasking improves efficiency because you are accomplishing multiple things at once, multiple studies indicate that multitasking has a negative rather than positive effect on work. As an example, researchers at Stanford found that multitaskers were no better at doing things than anyone else, but they were simply more easily distracted than the rest of the population. They may appear to be doing five things at once, but this is just because those are tasks that are started rather than those that are completed. One of the study's authors went so far as to say, "We kept looking for what [multitaskers] are better at, and we didn't find it."
This all is reinforced by what I was taught in a project management class I took last year. The person teaching that class emphasized that one of a project manager's responsibilities is to help structure project workers' responsibilities in a way that reduces multitasking because of the negative effect that multitasking has on work quality and speed. Expecting constant updates on five concurrent tasks typically results in less productivity than structuring the work to be done sequentially to allow the project member time to focus.
Something that was addressed in a class I took on managing people was that people whose personality makes them want to flit from project to project have been shown to perform better when they are forced into a structure that reduces that behavior. In short, forcing multitaskers to not multitask as much makes them accomplish more. This was noteworthy because the person who taught the class and made that assertion admitted to being one of those people who liked to move from task to task to task.
So, if you happen to be wandering by a Starbucks and see someone sipping a coffee, talking on the phone, typing an instant message, reading a book, tapping a foot to some music, and shopping online at the same time, rest assured that he or she is not doing any of it well. If you are that person, you probably haven't gotten this far down in the post to notice anyway.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
applosoft or micropple
I am going to take a bit of a chance here. While I do not anticipate applying to work at Microsoft or Apple any time in the near future, who really knows what types of acquisitions could occur to cause me to be employed by one of the companies by default. If either of these companies ever does acquire the company I work for expect this post to be immediately replaced by a glowing description of the company and the executives who run the company in question.
Quite a few years ago I used to have a strong dislike for Microsoft as a company. This largely stemmed from the fact that I felt like I did not have the realistic alternative to Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. While I do not believe today that Microsoft is an altruistic company, I am not nearly as bothered today by it as I was in the past. For one thing, I have learned since that technical markets tend to naturally gravitate toward monopolies more than most other types of markets. Also, while Microsoft owns monopolies in two markets now, it is not doing a good job at the moment of replacing those monopolies with monopolies in different markets. This puts Microsoft in a very bad strategic position five or ten years from now if things do not change.
I now see Apple as the new Microsoft. This does not mean I have particular disdain for Apple. It just puzzles me why so many of the same people who hated Microsoft for its business practices have a love for Apple. Apple's strategy is almost exactly the same as what Microsoft's has been. Gain a monopoly in a market (iTunes, Windows) and use that monopoly to extract high margins from customers who can't reasonably go elsewhere. Again, I am not saying that Apple's strategy is immoral or anything like that, but rather I am saying that almost everything that a person could have hated about Microsoft they could hate about Apple as well.
Quite a few years ago I used to have a strong dislike for Microsoft as a company. This largely stemmed from the fact that I felt like I did not have the realistic alternative to Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. While I do not believe today that Microsoft is an altruistic company, I am not nearly as bothered today by it as I was in the past. For one thing, I have learned since that technical markets tend to naturally gravitate toward monopolies more than most other types of markets. Also, while Microsoft owns monopolies in two markets now, it is not doing a good job at the moment of replacing those monopolies with monopolies in different markets. This puts Microsoft in a very bad strategic position five or ten years from now if things do not change.
I now see Apple as the new Microsoft. This does not mean I have particular disdain for Apple. It just puzzles me why so many of the same people who hated Microsoft for its business practices have a love for Apple. Apple's strategy is almost exactly the same as what Microsoft's has been. Gain a monopoly in a market (iTunes, Windows) and use that monopoly to extract high margins from customers who can't reasonably go elsewhere. Again, I am not saying that Apple's strategy is immoral or anything like that, but rather I am saying that almost everything that a person could have hated about Microsoft they could hate about Apple as well.
Sunday, March 07, 2010
let's talk about us
There are three parts to this post. They could have been standalone blog posts, but they are somewhat related and posting them separately would make it look like I am in a rut.
First Part:
When Golden and I were first married I used to joke a lot about the cliche couple where she wants to talk about "us" and he wants nothing to do with it. I don't know why I found that specific cliche so funny, but I did. In reality, I am the more likely person to want to talk about "us."
I have always felt like my brain didn't really work the same way everyone else's did, so that has made me fascinated with how different people think. Even more so, once I was in a serious relationship then married I was amazed by how we come from completely different angles at things. I grew up my whole life thinking of the female brain as similar to the male brain with just a few preferences wired differently. While Golden and I think alike in a lot of things, our brains are very obviously more foundationally different than a few hardwired preferences.
I feel I have some pretty good reasons for wanting to understand relationships and the differences between men and women. First of all, it only makes sense that I would want to understand Golden and what makes her happy. Second, and almost as important, is the fact that I want to help NJ and CH have healthy relationships when they are old enough, and it has been my observation that the people most unhappy in relationships are among those who least understand the opposite sex.
Because of all of this, I have discovered that one of my recent guilty pleasures has been relationship-oriented books, especially those that discuss the differences between the sexes. The last book I read was actually one that Golden and I did together that I have heard so many other people discuss: The 5 Love Languages. While I found the book fascinating and it did start some very good discussions between Golden and me, I actually felt like I didn't perfectly fit into any of the five love languages discussed. For the purposes of the book I tested as requiring quality time. I did not feel that the description of someone who needs quality time perfectly described me, but I enjoyed going through the book anyway. A guilty pleasure is a guilty pleasure.
I am already figuring out what my next relationship/differences between the sexes book will be after I graduate this May. That's just one of the reasons that I am hopeful for a good summer.
Second Part:
Because I have historically struggled to understand what is romantic I subscribed to the the romantic tip of the week at TheRomantic.com a few months back. I found the website through a book of romance ideas. Since it is a romance mailing list I would expect that mostly men in need of ideas would be on the list. Apparently, I would expect wrong because the mailing a few days ago had an advertisement for a book for women wanting more out of their relationships. The ad intrigued me enough for the reasons that I have already mentioned in this post that I clicked on it and read through the page advertising the book. There is a lot there that I almost posted about, but I decided to limit it to the following slightly reduced paragraph from the website.
Third Part:
I cannot count how many marriages I have seen where I think that those two people are fortunate to have found each other because no one else would have put up with (fill in the blank for him) or (fill in the blank for her). I am wondering if this is a cause or an effect. Are people very prone to find others who can deal with their quirks or am I just noticing the quirks that weren't addressed because they weren't that important to the spouse? Even more weird: Are the things that I think are so undesirable actually the same things that attracted their spouse in the first place?
I think wondering about the obvious quirks is probably a bit unfair, though. If I use myself as an example, I would not be overly modest if I were to say that anyone who thinks that I am a catch is either crazy or the one person who married me. Everyone has issues that make them challenging to live with and mine would probably drive most people batty in ways they can only dream. My very last roommate in college told me as I was moving out, "You're a good friend but a horrible roommate. You probably think the same of me." I did.* One of the best things about a good marriage is that you've found someone who will put up with your stuff if you can just find a way to put up with theirs.
* Since former roommates of mine read this blog on occasion I should note that this conversation did not happen with anyone who knows about this blog. I am quite sure that the person who said this wouldn't mind me posting it, though.
First Part:
When Golden and I were first married I used to joke a lot about the cliche couple where she wants to talk about "us" and he wants nothing to do with it. I don't know why I found that specific cliche so funny, but I did. In reality, I am the more likely person to want to talk about "us."
I have always felt like my brain didn't really work the same way everyone else's did, so that has made me fascinated with how different people think. Even more so, once I was in a serious relationship then married I was amazed by how we come from completely different angles at things. I grew up my whole life thinking of the female brain as similar to the male brain with just a few preferences wired differently. While Golden and I think alike in a lot of things, our brains are very obviously more foundationally different than a few hardwired preferences.
I feel I have some pretty good reasons for wanting to understand relationships and the differences between men and women. First of all, it only makes sense that I would want to understand Golden and what makes her happy. Second, and almost as important, is the fact that I want to help NJ and CH have healthy relationships when they are old enough, and it has been my observation that the people most unhappy in relationships are among those who least understand the opposite sex.
Because of all of this, I have discovered that one of my recent guilty pleasures has been relationship-oriented books, especially those that discuss the differences between the sexes. The last book I read was actually one that Golden and I did together that I have heard so many other people discuss: The 5 Love Languages. While I found the book fascinating and it did start some very good discussions between Golden and me, I actually felt like I didn't perfectly fit into any of the five love languages discussed. For the purposes of the book I tested as requiring quality time. I did not feel that the description of someone who needs quality time perfectly described me, but I enjoyed going through the book anyway. A guilty pleasure is a guilty pleasure.
I am already figuring out what my next relationship/differences between the sexes book will be after I graduate this May. That's just one of the reasons that I am hopeful for a good summer.
Second Part:
Because I have historically struggled to understand what is romantic I subscribed to the the romantic tip of the week at TheRomantic.com a few months back. I found the website through a book of romance ideas. Since it is a romance mailing list I would expect that mostly men in need of ideas would be on the list. Apparently, I would expect wrong because the mailing a few days ago had an advertisement for a book for women wanting more out of their relationships. The ad intrigued me enough for the reasons that I have already mentioned in this post that I clicked on it and read through the page advertising the book. There is a lot there that I almost posted about, but I decided to limit it to the following slightly reduced paragraph from the website.
"If you're like most women, you probably love talking to your girlfriends about your relationship troubles, and -- yikes! -- asking them for relationship advice... unless she herself has a successful relationship with a man (very important!) -- it's unwise to take relationship advice or tips from your girlfriend (or your mother, sister, cousin or aunt, for that matter)."I had to post this because, while it is a pretty obvious hard sell, there is one thing in there that is kind of true. No disrespect meant to single folks, but single friends who are the opposite sex of the person you are interested in are rarely the people to turn to for serious relationship advice. The longer you are in a healthy relationship the more accurate a picture you have of what are proper expectations from the relationship. It's next to impossible to give good relationship advice without a clear understanding of what expectations are realistic. Bad advice could very well lead you down either the path of expecting too much or the path of settling for too little.
Third Part:
I cannot count how many marriages I have seen where I think that those two people are fortunate to have found each other because no one else would have put up with (fill in the blank for him) or (fill in the blank for her). I am wondering if this is a cause or an effect. Are people very prone to find others who can deal with their quirks or am I just noticing the quirks that weren't addressed because they weren't that important to the spouse? Even more weird: Are the things that I think are so undesirable actually the same things that attracted their spouse in the first place?
I think wondering about the obvious quirks is probably a bit unfair, though. If I use myself as an example, I would not be overly modest if I were to say that anyone who thinks that I am a catch is either crazy or the one person who married me. Everyone has issues that make them challenging to live with and mine would probably drive most people batty in ways they can only dream. My very last roommate in college told me as I was moving out, "You're a good friend but a horrible roommate. You probably think the same of me." I did.* One of the best things about a good marriage is that you've found someone who will put up with your stuff if you can just find a way to put up with theirs.
* Since former roommates of mine read this blog on occasion I should note that this conversation did not happen with anyone who knows about this blog. I am quite sure that the person who said this wouldn't mind me posting it, though.
Tuesday, March 02, 2010
cars in the future
I will warn everyone ahead of time that this post is basically my prediction for the future of transportation. I can see that interesting some people and severely boring others. If you are bored by speculation regarding the future of cars, then don't bother reading this post. Don't you wish everything I wrote came with this disclaimer?
Everyone knows that Toyota has been in the news lately for problems with breaking. For people who own a Toyota vehicle this must be a bit nerve-wracking. For some people adamantly against the idea of buying a car assembled in the United States by a non-unionized Japanese company, I think there is a bit of restrained glee (I decided not to use the word "schadenfreude" because the word seems pretentious). While a lot of people have gotten the idea that this proves the reputation of Toyota's manufacturing excellence a farce, I have to disagree.
Since the issues sound like they are due to very quirky behaviors with the software, this has very little to do with Toyota's ability to assemble a quality car. Software development is a whole different world from car development. Because of this, situations like this one with Toyota and future similar incidents are almost inevitable. As long as we rely on large amounts of software to automate functionality in our vehicles, and we will more and more in future years for economic reasons, inevitable defects will appear. Just due to random chance, some will impact important functions such as the car's ability to stop. This is just speculation, but it sounds like automotive software issues are more difficult to diagnose and fix as well because Toyota sounds to me like it is stalling until the software issue is identified and addressed.
As someone who has spent several years devoted to supporting software and interacting with the support staffs of other software companies I feel I have some qualification to compare expected standards for software compared to automotives. Software is typically held to a lower standard. For example, if a defect makes your browser crash and you have to reboot that is irritating, but it is not entirely unexpected. If your car steering fails to function one day while you are on the highway because of a defect that is much more unexpected and serious. While a Windows defect could cause Microsoft customers some pain a defect in a Prius could cost a customer his or her life.
As an example of what I am talking about, part of the reason that the things NASA builds are so expensive is that there is almost no tolerance for defects. It is very difficult to fix something that is millions of miles away, so it has to be nearly perfect. Even with these standards, NASA has had many serious failures over the years with both hardware and software, and I would argue that as stupid as many of the defects were, having them was quite nearly unavoidable. It is likewise unavoidable that some software glitch is going to cause some serious automotive issues that take lives.
I have considered this quite a bit. It only makes sense that the next big advance in automobiles will be self-driving vehicles. Technically, it is close to possible to build a car that can drive itself already. Prototypes have been made, but they are not anywhere near safe enough to use on the road. The technology simply is not mature enough, but most of the remaining research involves details rather than undeveloped technology.
I expect that the technology will start with semi trucks since the drivers can still take over the vehicle from auto-pilot if there are problems. Eventually, though, the technology will become advanced enough that no truck driver will be needed in the vehicle even as an emergency co-pilot. The day that the technology is mature enough to allow for self-driven cars unmonitored by a human will be a good day for consumers because of cheaper shipping, but it will be a very bad day for anyone who makes a living largely based on their having a CDL. On that day school buses will not have drivers, but rather just an adult who keeps order. Domestic airlines will lose a lot of business because it will be easier and cheaper to rent a car equipped with a bed overnight and sleep while the car does the driving than it will be to deal with the hassle of a flight. Hotels that are not destination hotels will be hurt as well for the same reason: That no one will need to stop for a rest midway through their trip. This should also reduce the need to expand roads and lessen our dependence on oil because an automated car uses less gas than a manually driven car does and can drive closer to other vehicles (reducing its road footprint). All of this is almost technically possible now (or at least within five years), but it will probably not happen for the next twenty because of the problems that Toyota is having now.
What I expect will happen is that small bits of automated functionality will be introduced into cars slowly, such as Lexus' automated parallel parking. Even though the current pace of adding automation to cars is relatively slow, it will get even slower because sooner or later another software issue like what Toyota is seeing will appear and another CEO will be called before Congress to get chewed out regarding his inability to fix some issue that no one entirely understands but that is causing random accidents. This will happen a handful of times and each time it does it will slow the deployment of new automated functionality to a standstill.
Eventually, though, the technology will mature and the next generation will tell their kids about the good old days when cars came with steering wheels, gas pedals, and bucket seats. Not only that, we also had to drive barefoot through the snow uphill both ways...
Everyone knows that Toyota has been in the news lately for problems with breaking. For people who own a Toyota vehicle this must be a bit nerve-wracking. For some people adamantly against the idea of buying a car assembled in the United States by a non-unionized Japanese company, I think there is a bit of restrained glee (I decided not to use the word "schadenfreude" because the word seems pretentious). While a lot of people have gotten the idea that this proves the reputation of Toyota's manufacturing excellence a farce, I have to disagree.
Since the issues sound like they are due to very quirky behaviors with the software, this has very little to do with Toyota's ability to assemble a quality car. Software development is a whole different world from car development. Because of this, situations like this one with Toyota and future similar incidents are almost inevitable. As long as we rely on large amounts of software to automate functionality in our vehicles, and we will more and more in future years for economic reasons, inevitable defects will appear. Just due to random chance, some will impact important functions such as the car's ability to stop. This is just speculation, but it sounds like automotive software issues are more difficult to diagnose and fix as well because Toyota sounds to me like it is stalling until the software issue is identified and addressed.
As someone who has spent several years devoted to supporting software and interacting with the support staffs of other software companies I feel I have some qualification to compare expected standards for software compared to automotives. Software is typically held to a lower standard. For example, if a defect makes your browser crash and you have to reboot that is irritating, but it is not entirely unexpected. If your car steering fails to function one day while you are on the highway because of a defect that is much more unexpected and serious. While a Windows defect could cause Microsoft customers some pain a defect in a Prius could cost a customer his or her life.
As an example of what I am talking about, part of the reason that the things NASA builds are so expensive is that there is almost no tolerance for defects. It is very difficult to fix something that is millions of miles away, so it has to be nearly perfect. Even with these standards, NASA has had many serious failures over the years with both hardware and software, and I would argue that as stupid as many of the defects were, having them was quite nearly unavoidable. It is likewise unavoidable that some software glitch is going to cause some serious automotive issues that take lives.
I have considered this quite a bit. It only makes sense that the next big advance in automobiles will be self-driving vehicles. Technically, it is close to possible to build a car that can drive itself already. Prototypes have been made, but they are not anywhere near safe enough to use on the road. The technology simply is not mature enough, but most of the remaining research involves details rather than undeveloped technology.
I expect that the technology will start with semi trucks since the drivers can still take over the vehicle from auto-pilot if there are problems. Eventually, though, the technology will become advanced enough that no truck driver will be needed in the vehicle even as an emergency co-pilot. The day that the technology is mature enough to allow for self-driven cars unmonitored by a human will be a good day for consumers because of cheaper shipping, but it will be a very bad day for anyone who makes a living largely based on their having a CDL. On that day school buses will not have drivers, but rather just an adult who keeps order. Domestic airlines will lose a lot of business because it will be easier and cheaper to rent a car equipped with a bed overnight and sleep while the car does the driving than it will be to deal with the hassle of a flight. Hotels that are not destination hotels will be hurt as well for the same reason: That no one will need to stop for a rest midway through their trip. This should also reduce the need to expand roads and lessen our dependence on oil because an automated car uses less gas than a manually driven car does and can drive closer to other vehicles (reducing its road footprint). All of this is almost technically possible now (or at least within five years), but it will probably not happen for the next twenty because of the problems that Toyota is having now.
What I expect will happen is that small bits of automated functionality will be introduced into cars slowly, such as Lexus' automated parallel parking. Even though the current pace of adding automation to cars is relatively slow, it will get even slower because sooner or later another software issue like what Toyota is seeing will appear and another CEO will be called before Congress to get chewed out regarding his inability to fix some issue that no one entirely understands but that is causing random accidents. This will happen a handful of times and each time it does it will slow the deployment of new automated functionality to a standstill.
Eventually, though, the technology will mature and the next generation will tell their kids about the good old days when cars came with steering wheels, gas pedals, and bucket seats. Not only that, we also had to drive barefoot through the snow uphill both ways...
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
sexism in commercials
I have been considering a post on feminism, reactions to feminism, and it's impacts on men and women in the church world and the culture at large at some point in the future. My thinking is that people's views on gender impact their impressions of just about everything. I think that most contentious issues owe some contentiousness on some level to conflicting gender views, even if the contentious issue does not appear at first glance to be a gender-sensitive issue. That is something that I will probably put together in a few months though, and I only mention that because I was reminded that I had been thinking about it recently when I saw some of the commercials during the Super Bowl.
To this point I have heard more than one observation that some of the commercials during this past Super Bowl were sexist. Interestingly, I heard people complain both directions that the commercials were either slanted against men or women. I thought I would share a few of the commercials and my opinions of them in regard to how they portray the genders.
Also, something that I would like to note is that I am analyzing these things to death. I am not really offended by any of the commercials mentioned below, but I am very interested by the reactions some of them draw, and I get quite a bit of pleasure working through whether I agree with those reactions.
Since it seems to be the most prevalent type of commercial, I have to note the commercials that imply that men only have one thing on their minds. I am in the camp that thinks this type of commercial is mildly sexist as it pushes a specific stereotype on men. Since many men have found ways to benefit from this sexism, I think I am in the minority who are irritated by it. The Megan Fox commercial and the GoDaddy commercials define this category. Instead of posting them below, though, I decided to go with the more subtle and funny Doritos commercial that only implies that one specific man has less than honorable intentions.
Next, there were two commercials that I saw as remarkably similar. They are the Dove and Charger ads below. I actually really appreciated the ads, though I didn't find them overly funny. The dove one is probably the less controversial of the two as it just goes through the things that pressure men through life, but that also establish his manhood in our culture, so that he does not have to feel feminine for using Dove body wash. Of course, an easier strategy for Dove could have been to re-brand the body wash to a more masculine name, but that's just me.
I understand why someone might think that the following ad has a tinge of sexism against women because the commercial implies that the man's role in a relationship is a chore, so that is why he should be able to purchase a Charger for himself. At the worst, this is only mildly sexist, though, and it really is a good strategy to sell a very masculine car that is anything but practical.
The Bridgestone commercial was certainly mildly sexist, but it is also a joke that has been done to death. Seriously, this is basically the equivalent of the, "Take my wife... please," joke that is as cliched a cliche as I have ever seen.
The commercial that always seems to get mentioned in regard to sexism against women is the following one. No doubt, this is a dysfunctional relationship being portrayed. While I am on the fence about how I feel about this, I am leaning toward the position that it is anti-relationship enough to be a problem. I do see how this would appeal to a lot of men and sell a lot of FloTVs, though.
I have saved the best for last. The following E*Trade commercial again shows a dysfunctional relationship and implies that men can't be trusted. It is still rather funny, though.
In short, I understand how some of the commercials can be viewed as having sexist implications, but at the same time most of them are relatively mild. I see more of attacks on relationships in general in these than attacks on one specific gender, though that is not necessarily any better.
So, what do you think? Were the Super Bowl commercials sexist in some way or were they more benign?
To this point I have heard more than one observation that some of the commercials during this past Super Bowl were sexist. Interestingly, I heard people complain both directions that the commercials were either slanted against men or women. I thought I would share a few of the commercials and my opinions of them in regard to how they portray the genders.
Also, something that I would like to note is that I am analyzing these things to death. I am not really offended by any of the commercials mentioned below, but I am very interested by the reactions some of them draw, and I get quite a bit of pleasure working through whether I agree with those reactions.
Since it seems to be the most prevalent type of commercial, I have to note the commercials that imply that men only have one thing on their minds. I am in the camp that thinks this type of commercial is mildly sexist as it pushes a specific stereotype on men. Since many men have found ways to benefit from this sexism, I think I am in the minority who are irritated by it. The Megan Fox commercial and the GoDaddy commercials define this category. Instead of posting them below, though, I decided to go with the more subtle and funny Doritos commercial that only implies that one specific man has less than honorable intentions.
Next, there were two commercials that I saw as remarkably similar. They are the Dove and Charger ads below. I actually really appreciated the ads, though I didn't find them overly funny. The dove one is probably the less controversial of the two as it just goes through the things that pressure men through life, but that also establish his manhood in our culture, so that he does not have to feel feminine for using Dove body wash. Of course, an easier strategy for Dove could have been to re-brand the body wash to a more masculine name, but that's just me.
I understand why someone might think that the following ad has a tinge of sexism against women because the commercial implies that the man's role in a relationship is a chore, so that is why he should be able to purchase a Charger for himself. At the worst, this is only mildly sexist, though, and it really is a good strategy to sell a very masculine car that is anything but practical.
The Bridgestone commercial was certainly mildly sexist, but it is also a joke that has been done to death. Seriously, this is basically the equivalent of the, "Take my wife... please," joke that is as cliched a cliche as I have ever seen.
The commercial that always seems to get mentioned in regard to sexism against women is the following one. No doubt, this is a dysfunctional relationship being portrayed. While I am on the fence about how I feel about this, I am leaning toward the position that it is anti-relationship enough to be a problem. I do see how this would appeal to a lot of men and sell a lot of FloTVs, though.
I have saved the best for last. The following E*Trade commercial again shows a dysfunctional relationship and implies that men can't be trusted. It is still rather funny, though.
In short, I understand how some of the commercials can be viewed as having sexist implications, but at the same time most of them are relatively mild. I see more of attacks on relationships in general in these than attacks on one specific gender, though that is not necessarily any better.
So, what do you think? Were the Super Bowl commercials sexist in some way or were they more benign?
Thursday, January 21, 2010
haiti
The events surrounding the earthquake in Haiti have given me a lot to think about lately. A few of those thoughts are below.
I have heard wildly varying figures on the number of people who have died, but even the most conservative numbers are breath-taking. Even if a low-ball number of 35,000 people is used that is still ten times the number of people who died in 9/11. Given the toll on those who survived as well it is impossible for me to fathom the human toll this earthquake has taken. It is hard to imagine a worse place on dry land that a major earthquake could have struck.
While pretty much everyone is moved by the humanity of the situation in Haiti, I think that most people are trained to value people of their own nationality a bit more than people of other nationalities. I am always reminded of this when some tragedy occurs on foreign soil and one of the first questions people have is how many Americans were impacted. I am sure that this sort of thing is not unique to Americans, but since I live in the U.S. that is what I notice.
One of the most moving stories I heard was of a two-year-old boy who was rescued after two days under the rubble. NJ is currently three and CD is currently one. I cannot imagine having either stuck for any extended time in a situation like that. It must have been pure torture not only for him, but for his parents as well. I don't want to think of all of those two-year-olds for whom the ending wasn't so happy.
A lot of hay has been made about cruise ships docking on Haiti ports after the devastation and continuing to provide use of private beaches. While on the face of it this sounds horrible, if this is something that locals rely on for income to survive, then it would seem like stopping the ships from docking would be more cruel than carrying on as they have been doing. I certainly do not know the whole story, though.
Having watched my share of The 700 Club as a kid, I am not surprised with the comments that Pat Robertson made about Haiti or why he would not have thought them so inflammatory before he spoke them. That does not change how stupid the comments were, though, or excuse the lack of an apology. Unless he had a direct word from God somehow to support what he said, which he is not claiming he did, then he is essentially filling the role of Job's friends in implying that this happened because the people of Haiti got on God's bad side. I really wish that Robertson was not one of the modern voices of Christianity. How does he keep getting an audience? His main role in life right now appears to be to drive people away from God.
Finally, because I don't want to end with a discussion of Pat Robertson, I would like to conclude with the question of how can we have such a destitute country so geographically close to our own country and do so little about it? I know neither Cuba nor Mexico, which are both closer, are rich, but my understanding is that Haiti is in a completely different league from the other poor countries in this region. The U.S. has also arguably had more opportunity to influence Haiti than most of its other neighbors as well. Maybe we are just concerned that we would turn it into a Somalia or something like that if we offered too much aid? Haiti doesn't appear to have the same tribal issues as Somalia, though, so it's a mystery to me.
I have heard wildly varying figures on the number of people who have died, but even the most conservative numbers are breath-taking. Even if a low-ball number of 35,000 people is used that is still ten times the number of people who died in 9/11. Given the toll on those who survived as well it is impossible for me to fathom the human toll this earthquake has taken. It is hard to imagine a worse place on dry land that a major earthquake could have struck.
While pretty much everyone is moved by the humanity of the situation in Haiti, I think that most people are trained to value people of their own nationality a bit more than people of other nationalities. I am always reminded of this when some tragedy occurs on foreign soil and one of the first questions people have is how many Americans were impacted. I am sure that this sort of thing is not unique to Americans, but since I live in the U.S. that is what I notice.
One of the most moving stories I heard was of a two-year-old boy who was rescued after two days under the rubble. NJ is currently three and CD is currently one. I cannot imagine having either stuck for any extended time in a situation like that. It must have been pure torture not only for him, but for his parents as well. I don't want to think of all of those two-year-olds for whom the ending wasn't so happy.
A lot of hay has been made about cruise ships docking on Haiti ports after the devastation and continuing to provide use of private beaches. While on the face of it this sounds horrible, if this is something that locals rely on for income to survive, then it would seem like stopping the ships from docking would be more cruel than carrying on as they have been doing. I certainly do not know the whole story, though.
Having watched my share of The 700 Club as a kid, I am not surprised with the comments that Pat Robertson made about Haiti or why he would not have thought them so inflammatory before he spoke them. That does not change how stupid the comments were, though, or excuse the lack of an apology. Unless he had a direct word from God somehow to support what he said, which he is not claiming he did, then he is essentially filling the role of Job's friends in implying that this happened because the people of Haiti got on God's bad side. I really wish that Robertson was not one of the modern voices of Christianity. How does he keep getting an audience? His main role in life right now appears to be to drive people away from God.
Finally, because I don't want to end with a discussion of Pat Robertson, I would like to conclude with the question of how can we have such a destitute country so geographically close to our own country and do so little about it? I know neither Cuba nor Mexico, which are both closer, are rich, but my understanding is that Haiti is in a completely different league from the other poor countries in this region. The U.S. has also arguably had more opportunity to influence Haiti than most of its other neighbors as well. Maybe we are just concerned that we would turn it into a Somalia or something like that if we offered too much aid? Haiti doesn't appear to have the same tribal issues as Somalia, though, so it's a mystery to me.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
kerr's folly
This is one of those blogs that I intended to type two years ago and started to put together around that time but I never really figured out how I wanted to structure it, so it collected dust for a while. I have got several like that from around the same year. That is beside the point right now, though.
Back when I started typing this I had just learned of a concept called "Kerr's Folly" in school, which describes an issue that has always intrigued me. Steven Kerr, who was or is a professor of management at the University of Michigan, wrote a relatively famous piece in 1995 entitled "On the folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B." The title sums up the concept nicely. All too often societies, businesses, individuals, and other entities believe expect a certain type of behavior but reward a contradictory behavior. As an example, we expect politicians to be representative of the common constituency, but we accept a system that requires someone be either independently wealthy or willing to accept contributions from whomever will give them in order to be elected. So, we are hoping for a representative who understands and responds to the issues of the common folk, but we reward millionaires and sellouts.
The concept was originally written for business and it is very applicable there. Investors demand long-term growth and stability but judge companies on quarterly results without regard to statistical variation. Management expects teamwork but rewards and punishes based on comparative individual accomplishment. Projects are expected to be completed with high level of quality but rewards are based on meeting time and cost goals.
I see the same sorts of things in life outside of business as well. People who feel mistreated lash out, thus guaranteeing that they will continue to be mistreated (or will start to be mistreated if they misunderstood their treatment before). People who desire friendships and deeper relationships become clingy, which encourages others to avoid them rather than befriend them. People expect their kids to have certain standards and viewpoints but they model opposing standards through their personal behavior and are inconsistent in enforcing the standards they preach.
I have always tried to pay attention as to whether I an providing incentives for people to do the opposite of what I want them to do. I don't know that anyone can be objective enough all of the time to really know what behavior he or she is encouraging, though. Do you pay attention to the behavior that you are encouraging in others to behave in your life as well? Do you have a reason not to?
Back when I started typing this I had just learned of a concept called "Kerr's Folly" in school, which describes an issue that has always intrigued me. Steven Kerr, who was or is a professor of management at the University of Michigan, wrote a relatively famous piece in 1995 entitled "On the folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B." The title sums up the concept nicely. All too often societies, businesses, individuals, and other entities believe expect a certain type of behavior but reward a contradictory behavior. As an example, we expect politicians to be representative of the common constituency, but we accept a system that requires someone be either independently wealthy or willing to accept contributions from whomever will give them in order to be elected. So, we are hoping for a representative who understands and responds to the issues of the common folk, but we reward millionaires and sellouts.
The concept was originally written for business and it is very applicable there. Investors demand long-term growth and stability but judge companies on quarterly results without regard to statistical variation. Management expects teamwork but rewards and punishes based on comparative individual accomplishment. Projects are expected to be completed with high level of quality but rewards are based on meeting time and cost goals.
I see the same sorts of things in life outside of business as well. People who feel mistreated lash out, thus guaranteeing that they will continue to be mistreated (or will start to be mistreated if they misunderstood their treatment before). People who desire friendships and deeper relationships become clingy, which encourages others to avoid them rather than befriend them. People expect their kids to have certain standards and viewpoints but they model opposing standards through their personal behavior and are inconsistent in enforcing the standards they preach.
I have always tried to pay attention as to whether I an providing incentives for people to do the opposite of what I want them to do. I don't know that anyone can be objective enough all of the time to really know what behavior he or she is encouraging, though. Do you pay attention to the behavior that you are encouraging in others to behave in your life as well? Do you have a reason not to?
Thursday, October 08, 2009
education
The value of education and the means of improving it has been on my mind quite a bit recently. The two biggest reasons are that NJ is approaching the age where we have to start planning for pre-school and kindergarten and the other is that I have been getting a bit jaded about higher education over the last few years. As is my wont, I am approaching this through a series of disjointed observations and opinions.
Choice
I don't think that there is a right choice for all kids regarding whether they do public schooling, private schooling, homeschooling, or online learning. They all have very distinct advantages and disadvantages, and so that makes the choice a situational thing more than anything else. A lot of people seem to judge others based on the educational choices that they make for their kids. I am not looking forward to that.
Improving Education
Many Republicans want testing in schools and performance-based pay for teachers. Many Democrats want higher wages for teachers and longer school years. Honestly, I think that all of these are red herring options that only make it look like the politicians are fixing something. They all sound great at first blush but every one of the options introduces perverse incentives, solves the wrong problem, or both.
The way I see it none of the traditional steps that politicians take to fix school systems addresses the main problem, which is that people who do not want to learn will not learn. By my observation, the greatest failure of the American educational system is that it drives kids to apathy of the world around them rather than to a love of learning. Going into too much more depth is beyond the scope of this post, but I have identified three causes that drive kids to apathy. The first is that most people do not learn the best in a classroom structure, so forcing kids to sit in a classroom environment every day for hours makes something that is already boring feel futile as well. The second is that kids who have a love of learning are tagged as nerds, so it is actually cooler to not try to learn and to be educationally deficient. The third is that kids who don't feel safe in school are not likely to enjoy being there, so things like social bullying should be taken much more seriously than they generally are.
Another thought regarding improving the educational system is that maybe personal finance should be a required course. I know, it's not like we are going through a horrific recession fueled by excessive debt accrued by people who should not have been approved for the debt in the first place.
Classism and an Inefficient Economy
I really do understand the value of education. I should. I have nearly twenty solid years of education under my belt. That being said, I believe that the focus on education over other forms of learning and knowledge in today's society serves both to re-enforce the class structure and as a drag on the economy. Let me explain.
First, the requirement of a degree to work in, or be taken seriously in, a business environment favors those people who come from families with means. Someone from a below-median wage-earning family who is not awarded many scholarships will probably graduate with significant student loan debt. I can attest from my own experience that few things are more destructive to building a strong financial foundation in a person's twenties, when doing so is the most important, than paying hundreds of dollars every month to Sallie Mae for years on end. The median student loan debt for graduates with BA degrees in 2007-2008 was $17,700. This is significant because the median is not a measure that weights people extremely high levels of student loan debt like the mean would. So, while education itself is not withheld from the poorer masses, the requirement of an education forces those without means into a debt trap that will be destructive to many graduates' net earning power for many years to come. For many, this will also damage their ability to retire since they were paying off debt rather than saving for retirement.
Second, I believe that the focus our culture places on the time spent in education is a drag on the economy as a whole because it leads to inefficient uses of capital that could be better improving the work force. There is a concept called Parkinson's Law which states that work expands to fill the time allowed for completion of that work. Likewise, if those who establish the rules for the educational system decide that four years of schooling is a good time requirement for a bachelor's degree then the degree programs will backfill to meet that arbitrary length of time. Greater thought should be put into making degree programs more efficient and not just require a certain number of classes for the sake of having a certain number of classes. The only reason this system is allowed to exist in this state is that those who make the decisions regarding how the system should be structured also benefit from requiring students to take more classes.
Frankly, I believe that the best way to improve the American work force is, for the types of jobs where this makes sense, focus many more educational resources on apprenticeships and consider restructuring many degree programs to heavily focus on internships/apprenticeships over other elective work. On-the-job training is almost always better than in-the-class training.
Future of Education
The future in nearly every industry is some sort of automation and increased economy of scale. I have said as much already (prediction #10). The same will be true for education as well, though I think it will take a different face. This isn't much of a prediction since it is already starting, but a very serious shift to online schooling at all levels is inevitable. If an online class can cut overhead by allowing thousands of students to attend the same class and assignments automatically graded or graded by lowly-paid TAs, then that school can theoretically offer the same education that a traditional institution does at a lower price. None of this requires technology that does not exist right now, either. Because of this, I actually suspect that the ever-increasing cost of higher education will drop below the level of inflation some time in the near future.
I do not think that traditional elementary and high schools will go the way of the dinosaur and completely disappear. I do believe that they will go the way of the condor, though, and be thinned out. Simply out of necessity one of the main purposes of schools today is to have somewhere for kids to be while parents are working. Most parents are not going to have the choice of keeping the kids at home if they have to work to put food on the table. I think, however, that school districts will learn that teaching kids online is cheaper than teaching them in the classroom and so they will start offering parents incentives keep the kids at home and learn online. This will encourage many of those who have the flexibility to either work from home or quit their jobs and stay at home while the kids do their learning online.
Ultimately, the strongest attacks against online schooling, at least for the elementary through high school level, will be the same that are leveled against home schooling. The argument will be that kids need social time. What will probably happen to keep that from being an issue is that most kids will go through some sort of hybrid program where they learn online certain days of the week and they come into class certain days of the week. Like everything here, though, this is speculation.
Conclusion
Wherever the bright young minds are today is going to be where the innovative adult minds are in a few years. The school system's main goal should be, then, to keep those who have a love of learning from dimming into apathy. This will have to be done in a changing environment where people will learn as much through an Internet connection as they do in a classroom. It's a challenging proposition to say the least, but I am actually optimistic that it will go mostly well.
Choice
I don't think that there is a right choice for all kids regarding whether they do public schooling, private schooling, homeschooling, or online learning. They all have very distinct advantages and disadvantages, and so that makes the choice a situational thing more than anything else. A lot of people seem to judge others based on the educational choices that they make for their kids. I am not looking forward to that.
Improving Education
Many Republicans want testing in schools and performance-based pay for teachers. Many Democrats want higher wages for teachers and longer school years. Honestly, I think that all of these are red herring options that only make it look like the politicians are fixing something. They all sound great at first blush but every one of the options introduces perverse incentives, solves the wrong problem, or both.
The way I see it none of the traditional steps that politicians take to fix school systems addresses the main problem, which is that people who do not want to learn will not learn. By my observation, the greatest failure of the American educational system is that it drives kids to apathy of the world around them rather than to a love of learning. Going into too much more depth is beyond the scope of this post, but I have identified three causes that drive kids to apathy. The first is that most people do not learn the best in a classroom structure, so forcing kids to sit in a classroom environment every day for hours makes something that is already boring feel futile as well. The second is that kids who have a love of learning are tagged as nerds, so it is actually cooler to not try to learn and to be educationally deficient. The third is that kids who don't feel safe in school are not likely to enjoy being there, so things like social bullying should be taken much more seriously than they generally are.
Another thought regarding improving the educational system is that maybe personal finance should be a required course. I know, it's not like we are going through a horrific recession fueled by excessive debt accrued by people who should not have been approved for the debt in the first place.
Classism and an Inefficient Economy
I really do understand the value of education. I should. I have nearly twenty solid years of education under my belt. That being said, I believe that the focus on education over other forms of learning and knowledge in today's society serves both to re-enforce the class structure and as a drag on the economy. Let me explain.
First, the requirement of a degree to work in, or be taken seriously in, a business environment favors those people who come from families with means. Someone from a below-median wage-earning family who is not awarded many scholarships will probably graduate with significant student loan debt. I can attest from my own experience that few things are more destructive to building a strong financial foundation in a person's twenties, when doing so is the most important, than paying hundreds of dollars every month to Sallie Mae for years on end. The median student loan debt for graduates with BA degrees in 2007-2008 was $17,700. This is significant because the median is not a measure that weights people extremely high levels of student loan debt like the mean would. So, while education itself is not withheld from the poorer masses, the requirement of an education forces those without means into a debt trap that will be destructive to many graduates' net earning power for many years to come. For many, this will also damage their ability to retire since they were paying off debt rather than saving for retirement.
Second, I believe that the focus our culture places on the time spent in education is a drag on the economy as a whole because it leads to inefficient uses of capital that could be better improving the work force. There is a concept called Parkinson's Law which states that work expands to fill the time allowed for completion of that work. Likewise, if those who establish the rules for the educational system decide that four years of schooling is a good time requirement for a bachelor's degree then the degree programs will backfill to meet that arbitrary length of time. Greater thought should be put into making degree programs more efficient and not just require a certain number of classes for the sake of having a certain number of classes. The only reason this system is allowed to exist in this state is that those who make the decisions regarding how the system should be structured also benefit from requiring students to take more classes.
Frankly, I believe that the best way to improve the American work force is, for the types of jobs where this makes sense, focus many more educational resources on apprenticeships and consider restructuring many degree programs to heavily focus on internships/apprenticeships over other elective work. On-the-job training is almost always better than in-the-class training.
Future of Education
The future in nearly every industry is some sort of automation and increased economy of scale. I have said as much already (prediction #10). The same will be true for education as well, though I think it will take a different face. This isn't much of a prediction since it is already starting, but a very serious shift to online schooling at all levels is inevitable. If an online class can cut overhead by allowing thousands of students to attend the same class and assignments automatically graded or graded by lowly-paid TAs, then that school can theoretically offer the same education that a traditional institution does at a lower price. None of this requires technology that does not exist right now, either. Because of this, I actually suspect that the ever-increasing cost of higher education will drop below the level of inflation some time in the near future.
I do not think that traditional elementary and high schools will go the way of the dinosaur and completely disappear. I do believe that they will go the way of the condor, though, and be thinned out. Simply out of necessity one of the main purposes of schools today is to have somewhere for kids to be while parents are working. Most parents are not going to have the choice of keeping the kids at home if they have to work to put food on the table. I think, however, that school districts will learn that teaching kids online is cheaper than teaching them in the classroom and so they will start offering parents incentives keep the kids at home and learn online. This will encourage many of those who have the flexibility to either work from home or quit their jobs and stay at home while the kids do their learning online.
Ultimately, the strongest attacks against online schooling, at least for the elementary through high school level, will be the same that are leveled against home schooling. The argument will be that kids need social time. What will probably happen to keep that from being an issue is that most kids will go through some sort of hybrid program where they learn online certain days of the week and they come into class certain days of the week. Like everything here, though, this is speculation.
Conclusion
Wherever the bright young minds are today is going to be where the innovative adult minds are in a few years. The school system's main goal should be, then, to keep those who have a love of learning from dimming into apathy. This will have to be done in a changing environment where people will learn as much through an Internet connection as they do in a classroom. It's a challenging proposition to say the least, but I am actually optimistic that it will go mostly well.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
a mind of violence
Just as a warning, this post is a relatively frank assessment of one specific part of the male mind as I see it. The content, other than possibly being blunt, is merely PG in nature. Also, since my mind is male, I feel that I am far more qualified to write on that than something on the female mind. While I am not explicitly requesting this from anyone, I would love to hear assessments from other people on how they believe the minds of people of their gender work.
A lot is made of the focus of sex in the male brain. Not nearly as much is made of the focus of violence. While it may be true that the male brain is more wired for sex than violence, I am not currently convinced that this is the case. I think the drive for violence is more easily masked and diverted than the drive for sex and that is why many diminish the important of violence in the male mind.
First is the most obvious type of mental violence which makes it the easiest to mask. My experience has been that I imagine out violent scenarios to situations quite frequently, and I believe this is something that is common to most or even all other men. This is something that has always been with me, meaning I did not learn it from watching TV and movies, and I do not believe I am alone in this given the content of most action films and comic books. Given how opposed I am to offensive physical violence, that I continue to experience this should carry some significance. This maskable violent imagery is only the most straightforward element of violence in the male mind, though. Just because I imagine violence doesn't mean that anyone has to know about it, but there are other telltale signs of violence in men's minds.
Diverted violence is generally related to a focus or interest in warfare and the elements of warfare and dystopian survival. My observation has been that even many of the most pacifist men have interests of which the appeal is largely due to the similarity to some element of warfare. This can take the form of sports, video games, and business, among other things. For example, football is just a proxy for the actions on a battlefield. It is less obvious than gladiatorial fights were, but all of the symbolic stuff is there. Violence in video games is almost redundant, but even most games that are not violent involve vanquishing a foe. Games that do not involve this are usually designed as crossover games to appeal to women. Finally, the business world is almost entirely structured to be a battle zone. The strong and those supported by the strong (meaning government-supported entities) survive largely by ripping the competition to shreds (I just got a violent mental visualization about that).
Dystopian survival mentality is sort of related to warfare mentality in that my male mind is wired to accept that every once in a while society will destroy itself through warfare and a group of people will have to survive the wilds after it is gone. This is not without some truth. At any given point in time through history there are regions of the world where this is reality. I am not an outdoor sportsman and I do not even own a gun, but I can say that they have some appeal because they would come with the knowledge that I could hunt and fish to provide for my family and shoot to protect my family if society disintegrated.
Since God made most men this way I do not think there is anything naturally evil or wrong about the violence drive as I have described it in the same way that there is nothing naturally evil about the sex drive. The wrongness occurs when the drive for violence goes unchecked and manifests itself destructively. Where that point is where the drive is unchecked is for God to know. I just have to be sure not to reach that point.
A lot is made of the focus of sex in the male brain. Not nearly as much is made of the focus of violence. While it may be true that the male brain is more wired for sex than violence, I am not currently convinced that this is the case. I think the drive for violence is more easily masked and diverted than the drive for sex and that is why many diminish the important of violence in the male mind.
First is the most obvious type of mental violence which makes it the easiest to mask. My experience has been that I imagine out violent scenarios to situations quite frequently, and I believe this is something that is common to most or even all other men. This is something that has always been with me, meaning I did not learn it from watching TV and movies, and I do not believe I am alone in this given the content of most action films and comic books. Given how opposed I am to offensive physical violence, that I continue to experience this should carry some significance. This maskable violent imagery is only the most straightforward element of violence in the male mind, though. Just because I imagine violence doesn't mean that anyone has to know about it, but there are other telltale signs of violence in men's minds.
Diverted violence is generally related to a focus or interest in warfare and the elements of warfare and dystopian survival. My observation has been that even many of the most pacifist men have interests of which the appeal is largely due to the similarity to some element of warfare. This can take the form of sports, video games, and business, among other things. For example, football is just a proxy for the actions on a battlefield. It is less obvious than gladiatorial fights were, but all of the symbolic stuff is there. Violence in video games is almost redundant, but even most games that are not violent involve vanquishing a foe. Games that do not involve this are usually designed as crossover games to appeal to women. Finally, the business world is almost entirely structured to be a battle zone. The strong and those supported by the strong (meaning government-supported entities) survive largely by ripping the competition to shreds (I just got a violent mental visualization about that).
Dystopian survival mentality is sort of related to warfare mentality in that my male mind is wired to accept that every once in a while society will destroy itself through warfare and a group of people will have to survive the wilds after it is gone. This is not without some truth. At any given point in time through history there are regions of the world where this is reality. I am not an outdoor sportsman and I do not even own a gun, but I can say that they have some appeal because they would come with the knowledge that I could hunt and fish to provide for my family and shoot to protect my family if society disintegrated.
Since God made most men this way I do not think there is anything naturally evil or wrong about the violence drive as I have described it in the same way that there is nothing naturally evil about the sex drive. The wrongness occurs when the drive for violence goes unchecked and manifests itself destructively. Where that point is where the drive is unchecked is for God to know. I just have to be sure not to reach that point.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
what it's worth
A few months ago something that was popular with a lot of my Facebook friends was making a point that they would not use Facebook if they had to pay for the service. That's fine. It's their prerogative. It doesn't make much sense to me, though.
I am intrigued by how people value different products and services they buy and use. I have heard of studies (too lazy to look them up right now) that establish that people really have almost no means of independently valuing things, so most people use cues from the less rational areas of the brain to value them. That is why people can value two identical pieces of clothing very differently because they have different labels and why people really thought that hugely inflated house prices from a few years ago were reasonable. People used social cues to value things because the rational cues are lacking.
Going back to Facebook, I think that I would pay for the service so long as the people with whom I cared about keeping in touch also continued to use the service. My position on this should carry some weight because I definitely can be a bit stingy. Facebook certainly has a value to me, and actually much more than some of the other services that I already pay money for. For example, we still get the Kansas City Star on weekends, but I read Facebook much more than I read the Star (I know, I know, I can get news online for free for now, but that's an issue for another post).
My impression is that there are a lot of people who will spend $200 on a cell phone and $100 a month on a data plan to connect to Facebook, among other websites, but they expect that those sites will provide their services for free with minimal advertising and put up a stink at a mere unsubstantiated hint that things could go that way. For now I do not think that Facebook and most other websites can afford the loss of goodwill to make their services paid. Maybe that can last forever and maybe it cannot. Time will tell.
I am intrigued by how people value different products and services they buy and use. I have heard of studies (too lazy to look them up right now) that establish that people really have almost no means of independently valuing things, so most people use cues from the less rational areas of the brain to value them. That is why people can value two identical pieces of clothing very differently because they have different labels and why people really thought that hugely inflated house prices from a few years ago were reasonable. People used social cues to value things because the rational cues are lacking.
Going back to Facebook, I think that I would pay for the service so long as the people with whom I cared about keeping in touch also continued to use the service. My position on this should carry some weight because I definitely can be a bit stingy. Facebook certainly has a value to me, and actually much more than some of the other services that I already pay money for. For example, we still get the Kansas City Star on weekends, but I read Facebook much more than I read the Star (I know, I know, I can get news online for free for now, but that's an issue for another post).
My impression is that there are a lot of people who will spend $200 on a cell phone and $100 a month on a data plan to connect to Facebook, among other websites, but they expect that those sites will provide their services for free with minimal advertising and put up a stink at a mere unsubstantiated hint that things could go that way. For now I do not think that Facebook and most other websites can afford the loss of goodwill to make their services paid. Maybe that can last forever and maybe it cannot. Time will tell.
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