Creative minds. How to transform a stairway to a thing of joy.
Recently in Human value Category
The Internet has given us the power to express ourself. And boy, are we using it in creative ways. Just look at this video about the health care system debate in the USA.
(Listen to the last line.." I want my country back").
xkcd.com once more has a funny one: a tech-cheat sheet that shows how we usually help our (grand)parents, neighbours, co-workers and other 'non-computer people'. I find it to be very accurate!
via boingboing.net
A very, very untraditional entry of friends, groom and bride. Turn op the volume and enjoy !
(This one is for Marjolein and David)
"The Public Domain" by James Boyle is undoubtedly one of the best introductions to the origins, concepts and dangers of copyright law you can find. Not only available in print but also online.
One of the gems in his book is what great minds in the past have said and written about copyright, such as Thomas Jefferson. (see this page).
"Considering the exclusive right to invention as given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society, I know well the difficulty of drawing a line between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not."
The Jefferson Warning boils down to 5 cautions.
• First, the stuff we cover with intellectual property rights has certain vital differences from the stuff we cover with tangible property rights. Partly because of those differences, Jefferson, like most of his successors in the United States, does not see intellectual property as a claim of natural right based on expended labor. Instead it is a temporary state-created monopoly given to encourage further innovation.
• Second, there is no "entitlement" to have an intellectual property right. Such rights may or may not be given as a matter of social "will and convenience" without "claim or complaint from any body."
• Third, intellectual property rights are not and should not be permanent; in fact they should be tightly limited in time and should not last a day longer than necessary to encourage the innovation in the first place.
• Fourth, a linked point, they have considerable monopolistic dangers--they may well produce more "embarrassment than advantage." In fact, since intellectual property rights potentially restrain the benevolent tendency of "ideas . . . [to] freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man," they may in some cases actually hinder rather than encourage innovation.
• Fifth, deciding whether to have an intellectual property system is only the first choice in a long series.13 Even if one believes that intellectual property is a good idea, which I firmly do, one will still have the hard job of saying which types of innovation or information are "worth to the public the embarrassment" of an exclusive right, and of drawing the limits of that right.
"It is good that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good."
But what is the right interpretation? The source of the crisis is quite extraordinary so looking for precedents may not be the right approach , logic and observation are better tools.
Everything started with a lack of cash and credit, combined with a sharp fall of the stockprices. The crisis was dominating the news, experts (or people who were paraded as experts) predicted catastrophies. If you have a business and credit is tight you start optimizing your cashflow: sell your stock, reduce inventories of raw materials, cut cash-out (reduce the flexible workforce, delay investments). As a family you do more or less the same if the future is uncertain: improve your cash at hand, delay expenditures which are "nice-too-have". The new furniture: it can wait. A new car: todays cars are excellent if you keep on maintaining them. The combination leads to a quick and sharp reduction in activity in some sectors but not in all: food is doing fine.
At some point in time you have to start buying raw materials, stock up again. At some point you need the extra staff again (fill up vacancies, balance workforce). At some point people have saved enough and start to spend again on capital goods (slowly and carefully).
And these signs are there.
One of my friends has a recruitment agency and he reports an increase in demand for temporary staff and interim staff, longer projects.
My mother has an apartment on the banks of the river the Maas. She saw a sharp decline in shipping activity after the summer of 2008. In early 2009 the bulk transport ships came back and now the containerships are reappearing.
My bet is that we have bottomed out.
The NY Times, but especially its commenters tell us a story about Norway and why it's doing so well, even in these times of financial crisis. Major lessons are that of course the oil wealth helps, but that also smart use of the money, low inequality of wages and good education are key. The oil we cannot copy, but a lot of the other aspects we can.
An interesting slideshow by the NY Times gives an insight into Google's multicultural workforce. Dit you know half of the engineers working in Silicon Valley were born overseas. Google clearly is a great example that diversity works and may even be necessary to compete in the business world of the future.
The first time I have seen him: no arms, no legs, no worries. Being disabled is a mental state...
Economists usually focus on factories to measure productivity. Evolving Excellence points out that one might want to look at other costs too.
The papers submitted by Chrysler for its bankruptcy filing show an astonishing waste in its sales channel: the amount of people needed to sell and service a car is ridiculous.
So if Chrysler has 40,800 people and only 22,000 of them actually make cars, while the rest are involved in mostly non-value adding other things, that is a problem. But the really startling number in the filing is that Chrysler has 3,200 dealers which employee 140,000 people. 140,000 people working at dealerships and 22,000 people making cars??? It takes more than 6 people to sell and service a Chrysler for every 1 needed to build a Chrysler. How bad is a Chrysler if it takes that many people to convince people to buy one, then to keep it running?
