Category Archives: Current Affairs

Hard Times? Yeah, Pretty Much…

Current Affairs

First off, no, I’m not about to deliver one of those annoying "what’s the problem, we’re all fine" arguments you get from incumbent politicians. Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, AIG, plunging dollar, huge federal spending deficits … these are very definitely hard times.

Secondly, this post, remembering the hard times of the 1980s, comes complete with a musical background, a song called "Hard Times" recorded during those hard times, by Lacy J. Dalton. (Warning: it sounds a lot like country music, so if that bothers you, or you’re allergic, please don’t click the link).

http://timsstuff.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/Lacy%20J%20Dalton%20-%20Hard%20Times.mp3 

So, having cleared that up, back to my point: There’s a very timely post today titled Remembering the 1980s on Small Business Labs. Steve King puts up this simple eloquent business chart first:

And adds some relevant memories of those times, 25 or so years ago, which were pretty tough:

The unemployment rate peaked in 1982 at 10.8%, which was nowhere near depression levels but substantially above where we are today.

Inflation and interest rates were also high compared to today.  At the beginning of the 1980s inflation was over 10% and mortgage interest rates were over 16%.   GDP growth was negative in 1982 (-1.9%) versus positive growth so far this year (+2.1%).

He has a good point. Things look really bad right now, macroeconomic things like the financial industry failures, the mortgage problems, the dollar plunging, the trade deficit, the federal spending deficit, and so on. But then I remember, as well, how hard it was to find a job in 1981, and to buy a house in 1982. We had a fixed-rate mortgage at 18%. And yes, that was the U.S., not Mexico.

And then he adds this other eloquent chart…

… along with a reminder that (among other things) the stock market crashed — lost over 20% of its value in one day — in 1987.

Good to remember. It’s not all that bad. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

Accessing Outcomes, Unedited

Current Affairs

I’m sorry. Tuesday’s post here, about accessing outcomes, left out the video. I’m embarrassed. It’s like that feeling you get when you press send before you add the attachment. I referred to Thomas Barnett’s TED talk, but between me and the blog platform, we left out something very important. And, by the way, in case you still don’t see a video here (browsers and connections differ, here’s the link to the talk on TED.com.

What I wrote yesterday was "This, by the way, is a greatly disturbing talk, beautifully illustrated, beautifully delivered, and very disturbing because it seems, well, like a true story."   

http://static.videoegg.com/ted/flash/loader.swf

A Sudden Dose of Reality. Accessing Outcomes

Current Affairs

Sometimes when things come together, assemble themselves into what seems like order, I worry that it is, in fact, order.

Specifically, this weekend, I watched Charlie Wilson’s War, the movie, Saturday night; and the concluding episode of Generation Kill, the HBO miniseries, Sunday night.

Charlie Wilson’s War is about the CIA sponsorship of Afghan rebels in the late 1980s. The rebels defeated the Soviets. How Wilson and CIA maverick Gust Avrakotos teamed up to make this happen is a great story. It ends with clips of guerrilla warriors shooting down Russian helicopters. The Soviets gave up.

In the final scene, in the wake of the $1 billion triumph, Avrakotos is turned down asking for $1 million to build schools. “It always happens,” he says, “we win the big war and screw up the end game.”

Then the next night, in the conclusion of Generation Kill, the Americans have taken over Baghdad in a matter of weeks. But they’re completely lost, overwhelmed, with what to do next. It’s the same story again. Screwing up the end game.

Both of these are good entertainment. They’re stories, not documentaries, not history, but as stories they feel like truth. And it’s disturbing. The word synchronicity comes to mind. Deja vu.

Then I remembered that I saw this laid out extremely well in a 20-minute talk on the TED talks site: Thomas Barnett. He talked about fourth generation warfare. We win the first half, then screw up the rest. On Iraq, he says:

There’s no trouble accessing battle spaces, what we have trouble accessing is the transition space that must naturally follow, and creating the peace space that allows us to move on.

He goes on …

We have an unparalleled capacity to wage war. We don’t do the everything else so well.

This, by the way, is a greatly disturbing talk, beautifully illustrated, beautifully delivered, and very disturbing because it seems, well, like a true story.

Announcing the Energy Climate Era: Hot, Flat, Crowded

Current Affairs, Green Business, Technology

The buzz is growing very fast on what might have been the keynote speech at the Aspen Ideas Festival last week. I picked it up at Huffington Post, in a post titled Thomas Friedman Calls for Green Revolution. Here’s the lead: 

At the Aspen Ideas Festival Thursday, New York Times columnist and The World Is Flat author Thomas Friedman gave a preview of his new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution — and How It Can Renew America, which comes out in September. The book’s main argument is that the convergence of global warming, global flattening (the rise of middle classes all over the world), and global crowding (the population boom) is driving five key trends that will define the 21st century.

Friedman argues that those five trends — energy and resource supply and demand, petro-dictatorship, biodiversity loss, climate change, and energy poverty — have all been driven past a tipping point such that they have created a new era of history: the energy climate era.

I heard second hand, from someone who was there, that all the buzz was about that speech. The summary on Huffington today includes three short videos you’ll want to see. Here’s the link again: Tom Friedman Calls For Green Revolution.

Google, Zen Master of the Market

Business Stories, Current Affairs

In today’s New York Times, Steve Lohr writes:

"Google’s market power, it seems, is the economic equivalent of what in foreign affairs is called ‘soft power,’ a term coined by the political scientist Joseph S. Nye Jr. This is the power to co-opt rather than coerce."

That’s in an analysis titled Google, Zen Master of the Market. Comparing Google’s market success to Microsoft’s, and then looking at possible antitrust implications, the piece starts with Microsoft and how Microsoft rode to power:

Microsoft was a master practitioner of “network effects,” the straightforward precept in economics that the value of a product or service often goes up as more people use it. There is nothing new about the concept. It was true of railways, telephones and fax machines, for example.

Microsoft, however, applied the power of network effects more lucratively than any company had done before it.

In context, he’s talking about how in computers and software, you build the platform that everybody uses, and the world follows the bandwagon. DOS and Windows, then third-party software development, and then the whole world.

Google, in taking over the Internet like Microsoft took over the PC, is working in new ways in a new world, but also building on network effects.

Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sees the difference in terms of what he calls “direct network effects” and “indirect network effects.” The direct effects, he says, include software document formats and technology standards that are owned by one company and that are incompatible with a rival’s technology. The indirect effects, he adds, include large numbers of users, the ability to learn from those users, the power of a well-known brand and user inertia.

“For Google,” Mr. Cusumano said, “the indirect network effects are very powerful.”

Google, however, has learned from Microsoft, and is managing the potential antitrust implications skillfully. U.S. law generally looks at antitrust as having 70 percent of a market. Google has more than 60 percent of the search market and about 70 percent of the search ad market.

Still, dominance alone is not an antitrust problem. The issue is the powerful company’s behavior, says Andrew I. Gavil, a professor at the Howard University School of Law. “You have to be big and bad, not just big,” he said.

That’s Google, Zen Master of the Market. It’s a good read.

George Carlin’s Last Interview

Current Affairs, Writing

I always liked George Carlin, even if not every routine he ever had. I liked his off-kilter anti-establishment viewpoint. I think the world, and especially our world in the United States, needs dissenters. And it needs good writers. So I’m very sorry to see him go.

Brian Clark at Copyblogger posted George Carlin on Writing, with a couple of good quotes from the much longer post George Carlin’s Last Interview on Psychology Today Blogs. Here’s one of the three Brian included:

“One of the voguish terms, which is so repellant to me, ‘thinking outside the box.’ To settle for that kind of language is embarrassing. But that’s a very useful picture. I try to come in through the side door, the side window, to come in from a direction they’re not expecting, to see something in a different way.”

Here’s the link to the interview on Psychology Today.

The World as We Know It

Current Affairs

To me it’s creepy when doom and gloom predictions of a generation ago are obviously coming true today. This TED talk (if you don’t see the video below, you can click here for the source site) by Alicia Miller is an articulate and very visual reminder of how badly our U.S. news reflects the rest of the world. When I was in grad school for Journalism 37 years ago, experts were talking about how, if trends continued, news coverage would grow steadily thinner and more provincial.

And here we are today, with this TED talk showing us how news coverage is very thin and very provincial.