Built for the Montreal Expo, Habitat 67 is a wonderful grand-vision failure/success of architecture. Intended to be a blueprint for affordable single-family dwellings in a high density environment, it’s ended up as a kind of isolated jewel. Remarkable, somewhat expensive and never replicated.
Beautiful from a distance, up close it is looming and inhuman. Every organic touch feels out of place, the scale dwarfs the visitor and everything is leaking.
This post exemplifies everything that I think is important about political argument. It displays memory (bringing up an issue that is more than a week old), data (actual information upon which to base a judgement) and context (puts the data in relation to other information). Also it overthrows some pretty appalling common wisdom.
Also, also, even if you bought the old “10% of the votes came from blacks and 70% of blacks voted in favour” story: YOU IDIOTS. WHERE DID YOU THINK THE OTHER VOTES THAT KNOCKED IT OVER 50% CAME FROM?
There are people in my business who took to the highest hills to decry the betrayal of black Californians, and to this day, are giddily noting that blacks sunk marriage equality in California, who foist the failure of marriage equality on seven percent of the electorate . I will not speculate on their motives. But let’s see how loudly they address this study. Let’s see how much ink we see spilled revisiting those assumptions. Or will it be on to the next calamity, where the blacks–or the Arabs, or the Latinos–can be trotted out and blamed for the failings of others. For the failings of us all.
Seth Godin argues that when it comes to transient or one-time transactions sometimes it’s better to let things go. It’s a rephrasing of the logic that leads to the tragedy of the commons. There’s another side of this coin. If you treat your jerk customers better than your good customers, eventually some of them are going to work out that they are better off being a jerk.
I used to work at the helpdesk of an ISP and due to some billing error, a group of people that were meant to have a 6 month free trial ended up getting free Internet until the company noticed, 2 years later.
In an effort to recover some of that lost income, we sent out massive back-bills to all of these people. Some of them paid without ever calling. Some of them called. Our instructions were that we should explain to these people why we were hitting them with a massive bill. Then, if they raised any complaint, we should waive it. If they thanked us for the explanation, the charge would stand.
The result was that pushy jerks got their money back and friendly people or people who didn’t bother to call at all (our two favourite kinds of customers in a call-centre) got charged.
Seth’s experience of trying to talk to someone about his broken Kettle has got NOTHING to trying to talk to Rogers.
While surfing, I get a message saying that I am near my bandwidth limit for the month. I don’t know when my billing date is, so I’m not sure how bad this is. Clicking on the “monitor your bandwidth” link brings me to a login page.
I have a Rogers book with my account info, but I can’t work out the username and password for this page.
I read through the book for clues. There is information about logging in to the rogers.yahoo.com site and information about how to check your account once there.
I know that information, so I log in.
I find a billing section but have trouble finding usage info.
Help centre search returns lots of results none of which have to do with my question.
On the billing page, I find a link to monitor my bandwidth.
Clicking on it brings me to a new login page.
I enter the username and password that worked before. It does not work here. They want a different username and password. I still have no idea what this is.
Luckily, they give me a 1 877 number to call for assistance. I call it.
A recording tells me that THE NUMBER I AM CALLING IS GOING TO BE DISCONTINUED. Then it repeats the message in French. Then it transfers me to the right number.
I have to go through the voice recognition menu (pro tip – speak gibberish until it gives up and gives you a human).
The human tells me my billing date, so I’ll know when the usage limit resets.
Why, oh why couldn’t the process have been
While surfing I get a message saying that I am near my bandwidth limit for the month and it will reset on [BILLING DATE GOES HERE]?
Every step of the way was clearly designed by people with institutional needs in mind instead of customer experience.
Why can’t I actually look at my billing through the roger.yahoo.com account info page?
Why do I need to create a new login and password to view my rogers information?
Why didn’t my account book COME with a login and password (at least Bell gets this much right).
Why does their web page send you to a soon-to-be-discontinued phone number?
Why doesn’t the old 1-877 number just silently route you to their new phone system? How much can it possibly cost to maintain more than one points of entry?
I’m sure there are reasonable answers to each of these questions, having to do with how the architecture of the user authentication systems relate to various protocols. I don’t care. All I know is that I spent 20 minutes trying to find a very simple answer to a very simple question.
(I will say that the actual dude I talked to was very helpful and quick with the answers. So top marks for hiring him. But he’s only a part of the service. I hate how long it took me to get to him.)
Surowiecki opens with some interesting ruminations about why newspapers are going down. Then, he goes crazy and lays the blame at the feet of the greedy consumer who wants it all for free! The bastards! Soon we’ll get what we pay for!
Here’s the dirty secret of newspapers: For a very long time, most of the content has been crap. Read your local newspaper lately? Remember why you stopped?
Most papers are a strange mix of not-that-great local reporting and columnists mixed with repackaged wire feeds and syndicated content, paid for by bundled advertising. Most of the news in local papers isn’t. At least, isn’t worth paying for. It’s nice that you won the county fair, but it probably doesn’t need to be in my paper. A newsletter for people who care about fairs would be better.
We’re not losing original reporting, we’re losing the middle men that bundled all the content together. Good riddance.
We don’t need to worry about the future of newspapers, we need to worry about the future of reporters. Will there be business models that allow individual or small teams of quality investigative journalists to earn a decent living while also breaking important stories? Will the class of amateur and semi-pro reporters be able to fill in any gaps?
So many redundancies in reporting and news. Do we need dozens of variations on the sports page? How many film critics do we need? How many reporters does it take to cover a press conference? More than zero, but probably less than we have right now.
Content creators in most other industries are going through the painful process of changing the way that they charge for their content, finding some equilibrium between giving a way their stuff for free to attract fans and charging for specialized, related or premium versions. Here’s my non-bold prediction: News reporters will have to do the same.
Cartoonists can survive the death of paid syndication, surely the important content can as well.
Dan Barber’s story (embedded above) is one of my favourite kinds of stories. He begins with something that seems unethical, tells the story of an unlikely maverick who challenges the status quo and wins (a contest). All the while, it turns out that our maverick’s approach involves some down home ingenuity and hands on sustainability. In the end, it turns out that we get to have our cake and eat it to. There is a method for producing foie gras ethically that’s also sustainable (AND DELICIOUS). (If only we didn’t have those evil unsustainable, unethical factory farms that gave us slightly inferior foie gras (and strawberries and mangoes and whatever) year-round.)
At about 8:15 in, Barber unwittingly raises the first issue that will cause massive problems for this kind of farming. He approvingly mentions that the farmer is taking a loss on feeding these geese figs and olives. “The doubly irony is that on the figs and olives, Eduardo could make more money selling those than he can on the foie gras.”
At which point the economist in me asks, “then why does he bother with the foie gras?”
Eduardo is an artisan farmer, he doesn’t need to be profit maximizing, just profitable. So if he wants to take some extra time and effort, he’s welcome to destroy value in the goods he produces as a kind of hobbyist craftsman. That’s fine for him, but does it work on a world-wide scale?
The reason that Eduardo could make more on the figs and olives than he does on the foie gras is that someone has figured out how to make the delicacy more cheaply. It’s far from ethical – it requires factory farming and force feeding – but when it comes to foie gras, people don’t seem to care.
The pricing of foie gras really doesn’t matter to most people, but the same story plays out over and over again in the world of farming. Factory farms produce food more cheaply, with less labour and at a higher density than most organic farms. They also produce the food people want year-round instead of seasonally. They do it at massive environmental and ethical cost, but until there is a price on these things, it is unlikely that entreating people to only eat what is in season will see a shift in the way food is produced.
There’s two ways this story can get better. Either factory food becomes more expensive or sustainable food becomes cheaper.
Eliminating the massive subsidies paid to factory farmers would be a big step in doing both at once. If oil continues to climb, factory farm prices will tend to rise (a lot of oil goes into the machinery and pesticides used on larger farms) making less oil-dependent farming more viable.
The labour issue is a bigger one, which must be solved either by automating organic farming practices, killing western subsidies which will make farming profitable for developing countries (they have a surplus of labour, but ultra cheap grain and dairy from subsidized OECD farmers often forces them out of business), or convincing more OECD citizens to go back to the land.
The last question, to which I don’t know the answer, is: Will organic farming produce enough food to feed everyone? The technologies that underlie the Green Revolution allowed the human population to triple in less than 70 years with very few major famines. Advocates of alternative farming need to account for whether their methods will sustain the human population (or who should die).
They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.
One of my favourite things about financial reporting has always been the way that any change is bad. The dollar would go up and that would be bad, then it would fall and that would be bad.
I took this on Nov 12th when the crisis was only just getting started. Since then, the price of oil has continued to slide. I have no idea if that is a good or a bad thing.
Sometimes, in our quest for the new, we overpay. Most of the time, moving down the curve will decrease your costs dramatically, without hurting your ability to make smart decisions. Alternatively, when you choose to spend the time (or money), leverage it like crazy.
I bet you are overspending on now. Not everywhere, just in the wrong areas. Worth an audit, probably.
Blackberries and the use and misuse of email is probably the #1 place where a good audit would work at an organizational level. There is no good technical way to distinguish between YOU NEED TO READ THIS NOW emails and READ THIS WHEN YOU HAVE A MOMENT TODAY emails and YOU NEED TO SEE THIS BY THE END OF THE WEEK emails, so the solution has to be social.
The alternative? This buzzing device that constantly interrupts you, most of the time for NO GOOD REASON – very damaging for flow.
Looking around me now, I see five ways that people can interrupt me (phone, cell, txt, email, doorbell) and another half dozen or so ways that they can reach me eventually (comments, Facebook, Twitter etc.). I feel like half of my work is keeping these things under control. Having the discipline to TURN THINGS OFF does wonders, when I am able to do it.
Because there is always this nagging feeling, “What if I am missing something important?”
