Quickie link to an awesome article about Daniel Suelo, a man who:
There’s a book about him. The Man Who Quit Money
Check out this hydrogen-related Q&A with Peter Hoffman, a hydrogen advocate. It covers a number of basics regarding hydrogen. And it’s inspired me to list a few of the most common questions I’m getting from friends who want to know more about the hydrogen-powered car that I have recently started driving. So, here’s are the questions my friends and coworkers are most frequently asking me about the car:
Q: What kind of car did you get, exactly?
A: I’ve leased a 2011 Mercedes-Benz B-Class F-CELL. It’s a five-door (four doors plus a hatch) vehicle on the smaller side that’s powered by hydrogen. The hydrogen is converted via chemical reaction to electrical power that’s stored in batteries that drive a motor. Here are some reviews: 1, 2, 3. At least one of those reviews has pricing, in answer to another commonly asked question.
Q: Given the cost and relative inconvenience, why not just get a Prius or Volt?
A: Three reasons. I enjoy an occasional jaunt into early adopter land. This is one version of the future of the car and I was really pleased when Mercedes finally got back to me months after I submitted an “application” expressing interest in the vehicle. (Here’s the official site where you too can apply for the pilot program.) There are only about 30 of these vehicles on the road right now. It’s got geek-snob appeal, to me. Second, if I must drive, I wanted to see if I could do my crazy, 120-mile round-trip commute in a much, much greener way. The length of this trip means that a Prius or Volt would essentially just be conventional gas vehicles, anyway. Third, it’s all about the HOV access. The F-CELL is eligible for a coveted white sticker, allowing me to use the high-occupancy-vehicle lane even when I’m the only person in the car.
Q: What’s the range like?
A: Marketing materials claim the vehicle can achieve a “range of up to 240 miles,” but in my experience, the effective range is closer to 150-170 miles. I’m not driving with a lead foot — in fact, for most of my trip, I’m setting cruise control for 70-75mph. In heavy traffic, where I’m going 15-30 MPH, the fuel efficiency is much greater. I probably could squeeze out 240 miles at 40 MPH, but dare not go 25 miles under the limit on any California freeway for fear of having my face shot off.
Q: Can I get a ride?
A: The terms of the lease cap me at 30k miles over two years, a number I may reach long before my lease term is up. Miles are precious and side-trips are basically out of budget. If, however, you want to tag along on one of my Laguna Beach to Santa Monica commutes (and spend the day in Santa Monica), that would work. If you’re connected to me on Facebook or LinkedIn, you know how to reach me.
Q: What will you drive when your two-year lease is up?
A: Depends on my commute and how well the fuel cell market develops, but I’d love to stay hydrogen from this point forward, all else equal. I don’t know what my options will look like in January 2014.
In Friday’s NYT, Neal Gabler delves into the educational differences of the 1%:
Even though I grew up in the bottom 10% (economically) and spent the last two years of high school on food stamps and other welfare programs, I somehow managed to grab myself one of these 1% educations. Pluck, luck, what the fuck? I still don’t know how. I graduated from Yale (BA in English) and from UPenn’s Wharton’s MBA program. I landed a great internship or three. But what I think Gabler misses is the fact that every population of contestants, no matter how rarified, still stratifies as people look for advantage over each other. At Yale, getting in was no longer an achievement that mattered because everyone there got in. Instead, the student body moved on to new contests.
Some of these contests were generations in the making. A classmate was George Bush’s godson. There were third- and fourth-generation Yalies in my class. These people tended to prove the suggestion philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s point “that it takes several generations to make a career. Interests, habits and lore accrue in families and shape those born into them” (from a relevant-to-this-discussion David Brooks article praising Romney). There were of course scads of Andover/Exeter grads (who formed new cliques), sons and daughters of very rich people, and so on. Those contests were won before any of us even got to Yale. And then once we were all there, new opportunities for differentiation abounded. Singing/performing/writing competitions, sports competitions (several of my fellow crew team members rowed in the Olympics), academic competitions (Rhodes, etc.), secret societies, and so on.
Even certain academic experiences contained competitive hurdles. There’s an intensive program for first-year students that’s been built for students from very solid academic backgrounds (while I struggled to address gaps in my education, the private school kids were reading and discussing Virgil, Homer and Plato for like the third time). When it came time to declare majors, private-school kids overindexed in majors like Economics, Politics and Ethics. The official website for EP&E states that it’s “an honors major, to which application and formal acceptance is required.” Public-school schmucks like me generally didn’t apply.
Wharton was no different. My wife (who also graduated from Wharton) fiercely competed for a spot at Bain & C0. But even among Wharton students going to Bain, students competed for location. San Francisco was thought to be the most difficult office to get an offer from, so Bain SF people looked upon Bain Bumblefuck (Dallas, Atlanta, etc.) folks with a mix of camaraderie and superiority.
In short, the sub-stratification never ends. Once you establish a pecking order and tell certain people they’re the top 10%, those winners look around and start jockeying for ways to arrange themselves into a new hierarchy. It’s a fundamental human tendency.
So back to the NYT article … Gabler goes on to enumerate the ways in which this endless competition is problematic, including this one: ”1 percent education may make students risk-averse. Though educators are fond of saying you learn from failure, with today’s stakes, the best students know you cannot really afford to fail. You can’t even afford minor missteps. That is one of the lessons of 1 percent education: 1 percenters must always succeed.”
I’d agree with this point. It seems too many of my Yale classmates made conservative career choices, choosing the sure monetary rewards of medicine, law, and Fortune 500 business over entrepreneurship, arts, or social work. Miriam Naficy’s The Fast Track was their bible. If they weren’t pre-med, and they weren’t able to land the internship at Skadden or score above 170 on the LSAT, they wanted to work in banking or consulting.
I’m as guilty of risk aversity as the rest of my classmates. If I’d had any guts at all, I’d have followed my passion and started my own game company after Wharton rather than seek the safety of working on the games business for one of the largest companies in the world (Microsoft).
The times article concludes (big quote, because so much of it is great):
“In the end, 1 percent education is as much a vision of life as it is a standard of academic achievement — a recrudescence of social Darwinism disguised as meritocracy. Where the gap at the country’s best schools was once about money — who could afford to attend? — now there is the pretense that it is mostly about intelligence and skill. Many 99 percenters are awed by the accomplishments of 1 percenters, especially as the gap between rich and poor in SAT scores and college completion widens. Whatever this does to education, it also undermines the underpinnings of the social contract. The danger isn’t just that people who are born on third base wind up thinking they hit a triple; the danger is that everyone else thinks those folks hit triples. One percent education perpetuates a psychology of social imbalance that is the very antitheses of John Dewey’s dream.”
I’m pretty sure I hit the triple, starting from extreme poverty and landing in the 1% (there, that’s a bit of autobiographical detail that maybe someone wiser would have left out). But the charges of narcissism and social Darwinism ring true, and I’m not sure what to do about it. As a new parent I want to instill the right sorts of values and avoid raising the sort of narcissistic, privileged boy that fails to develop any larger mission or ambition for his life. My son’s been napping here on my lap as I wrote the last few paragraphs of this post. At just two weeks old, he’s all potential. How do we avoid Tiger-momming and Helicoptering this little human into a financially-rewarding but ultimately unfulfilling life?
I’ve struggled to figure out the best way to use this site. I’ve self-censored numerous updates that I’d have liked to make because it’s a bit scary to think that this can be read by anybody with an internet connection, many of whom might lack the context to figure out the meaning of some comment or snippet of text that I write here.
But living in fear that someone is going to lift snippets of text from this site and use them out of context isn’t very fun. That fear kept me from writing. And writing (for me) is release and a way to think out loud. It’s a way to work out my thoughts on certain subjects. And oftentimes, it’s the debate that occurs around what I write that helps me refine my positions (or find new and better positions entirely). That’s why my time at Joystiq was so educational. It’s not just that I was able to write about and edit writing about games full-time for two years, it’s that I got instant feedback from Joystiq’s sizable and passionate readership. Whether my mistake was as small as a simple typo or as large as a bad assumption, comments generally showed up within seconds of hitting the “publish” button.
I guess I also fear inviting that sort of (often pointed, sometimes rude) commentary on autobiographical updates. It’s a kind of academic fear, though. It’s not like I have a readership to worry about. Meanwhile, folks like Heather (of Dooce.com) bravely blog it all, even heavy marital woes. I doubt I’m capable of being quite that open, but I’ll give increased openness a couple shots over the next year.
“You are what you learn. If all you know is how to be a gang member, that’s what you’ll be, at least until you learn something else. If you go to law school, you’ll see the world as a competition. If you study engineering, you’ll start to see the world as a complicated machine that needs tweaking. A person changes at a fundamental level as he or she merges with a particular field of knowledge. If you don’t like who you are, you have the option of learning until you become someone else. There’s almost nothing you can’t learn your way out of. Life is like a jail with an unlocked, heavy door. You’re free the minute you realize the door will open if you simply lean into it.” –Scott Adams
“There’s a certain energy that a start-up has that’s like lightning in a bottle, but companies lose it over time as they get mired in their own systems.” — Primo Orpilla, of Studio O + A, an architecture and interior design firm that’s done offices for companies including PayPal, AOL, Trulia, StubHub, Square, Quid, DreamHost, Yelp, and Microsoft, as quoted in Metropolis, November 2011.
And so Studio O + A clients tend to be large companies (like AOL, PayPal, and Microsoft) who are trying to rekindle the energy of their early start-up culture or genuine startups that have completed a strong round of financing and are ready to splash out as part of their bid to attract talent and attention.
I heard this song this morning when I was stuck in the sort of ridiculous rush-hour traffic that proves there’s no such thing as intelligent design at work in our universe. Malevolent design, more like it. Anyways, Zee Avi’s Concrete Wall soothed me from the first Boom sha-clack-clack to the last. Thank you, Jason Bentley.
Stayed up way past bedtime to finish The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind last night. I cried multiple times, and I’m not the particularly weepy sort. It’s just an incredible tale of entrepreneurial spirit and it gave me new respect for all my friends and family who have gone into service (be it Peace Corps or Foreign Service or Gates Foundation or Path)… A really incredible story. If you (are a person I know and) buy the book and don’t love it, I’ll personally buy your copy off of you (it’s a personal money-back guarantee!). It’d make a great gift to entrepreneurs, service-oriented folks, and nephews and nieces who need some help understanding the value of education.
Neat interview with Cathy Davidson, Duke University professor and author of Now You See It (a book about how the science of attention will transform the how we live, work, and learn). I like this quote in particular, because it describes why I’ve chosen to work on games:
“Games are integral in human society, from ancient times to the present. Games are based on strategy and on challenge. If you do well at a game, your reward isn’t “recess” or a “time out”; it’s a greater challenge. When you beat a tough opponent, you seek out a tougher one. That is learning. Being able to harness the energy of games is one of our best learning tools, as any good parent knows, from patty-cake to Simon Says to musical chairs to chess or go. You can advance physical, mental, linguistic, and intellectual progress through games where the testing isn’t after the fact but is intrinsic to and embedded in the very structure of play.
In the 1980s and 1990s virtually all the research on early video games was positive, about the benefits to everything from attention to memory. Games are still used to train pilots, the military, architects, surgeons (robotic and traditional), musicians, engineers, and are also used for rehab and to help or enhance elderly cognitive functions.”
The rest of the article is great, too.
Catching up on my WSJ backlog — I’ve reduced the three-foot-high stack to a mere week’s worth — I came across this WSJ article (”New Wii Is Investor Fizzle”, July 10) and was enraged just enough to make a post. The offending material appears in the fifth and sixth paragraphs:
“The stock market’s pessimistic reaction [to the Wii U console announcement] contrasted with the frenzy Tuesday at the Electronic Entertainment Expoin Los Angeles, when Nintendo showed a prototype of the Wii U…. The line to play with the new console snaked around the exterior of Nintendo’s spacious booth at E3 … with some attendees waiting three hours.”
Why do the Wall Street Journal’s normally fastidious reporters fall for lowly booth bottleneck tricks? It’s easy enough to create a line-up at your booth if you reduce the number of stations (there were just 9 Wii U demo stations on the general floor — verify for yourself via this photo gallery) and give attendees ample time to sample the goods at each station (about five minutes per attendee was allowed when I stopped by the booth, but this was likely variable).
So here’s a little math that I learned back in OPIM 631: at five minutes per attendee across 9 stations, about 108 general attendees were able to get hands-on time with the Wii U per hour. In the first day of E3 (the above-mentioned Tuesday in the WSJ article), the exhibition floor was open just six hours. So let’s be generous and grant that maybe 700 general attendees (press, media, and VIPs excluded) were able to play with the console on Tuesday. An estimated 46,800 attendees went to E3, so approximately 1.5% of total attendees played with the Wii U on the opening day of E3. Unimpressive.
Plus, given the professional nature of most attendees, hands-on time with the new console is a matter of professional due diligence because it’d sound like you misprioritized your time at E3 if you didn’t bother to get hands on time with the one new console that was announced this year.
What’s more, anytime the line threatened to dwindle to a non-buzzyworthy length, it’d be trivial for the marketers to instruct the girls manning the stations to allow attendees another minute or two.
In other words, this setup guaranteed long lines (plus, Nintendo’s got a long history of carefully managing supply of games, consoles and E3 lines to create perception of constraint and/or popularity) so I’m disappointed in the reporters who used the mere existence of lines as evidence of the console’s success at E3.
I’m not saying anything about the quality of Nintendo’s new console or their strategy. Hell, their marketers appear to be pretty savvy in that they’re able to turn an operations constraint into product “buzz.” Rather than a comment on Nintendo’s strategy, this is more a comment on the media that keep falling for the same old tricks. Unfortunately, it’s not just the mainstream media who fail to do a little operations analysis … Joystiq fell for it too. (Many other blogs covered the “lines” for the Wii U without scratching below the surface, but I’m particularly disappointed in Joystiq, since I spent two years there.)
I ran across this little story in a longer NYT piece about Disneyworld … and I thought to myself that it’s too bad that Lucho wasn’t supported by his teacher here, because (depending on how young he was) he showed a form of genius that might have been stifled for life on this day. A fun anecdote. But scary to think about how kids’ brushes with their true talent — their purpose in life — might be stymied by adults who are just doing their jobs.
“When I taught for a year at a school in Lima, Peru, there was no greater hero among the students than the kid who had just returned from Orlando. They didn’t want to hear about California or New York. I had one student, called Lucho. He came back from his trip with a thick stack of photos, in one of those paper wallets. He wanted to pass them around. And kill 30 minutes of class? Ah, you twisted my arm, Lucho. Unfortunately the pictures were entirely of women’s bottoms. It wasn’t “nice” or shapely bottoms that Lucho had been after, but gigantically obese ones. They’ve never seen people who look like us, most places in the world. I confiscated the pictures and stood red-faced, flip-booking through them in front of the class. Shot after zoomed shot of enormous, complexly dimpled bottoms shrink-wrapped into the most outrageously tight and revealing spandex. Young Lucho had found enough of these to fire through an entire roll. It was hard to come down on a student who showed such thoroughness of observation. I thought about him every time I saw one of these Americans go pounding by.” (source)
CrunchGear’s Matt Burns leaps to an interesting conclusion in his coverage of the news that HP has decided to kill their tablet project that would have run Android: “the best option won and HP is going with the webOS over Windows 7 or Android.”
What’s more likely: after HP paid $1.2B for the acquisition of Palm, the only politically possible decision HP executives could make is to make damned sure that investment is put to work in the fullest possible way. Would shareholders have accepted any other decision?
Out of the many factors that HP considered in its decision (from technical to consumer trends to licensing considerations), it’s hard to see how the webOS price wasn’t the most heavily weighted factor in the decision.
Richard Florida’s Who’s Your City was a key read in my quest to become comfortable with the idea of moving to Southern California. If not for that book, I might have never made the move, and I’d certainly still harbor a lot more venom for the goddamned sprawl (and attendant traffic and pollution) that defines this region. However, Richard Florida helped me understand that all that stuff is nothing compared to the huge advantages that come to a region that becomes a world magnet for creative talent (as LA has). Because knowledge workers of all types tend to mass together, LA is to the creative world what NYC and London are to finance, San Francisco is to technology, and Washington DC is to stupidity.
So, it’s with some glee that I saw LA top his Bohemian Index. If that were a worldwide index, it would pretty accurately describe the only cities I’d want to live in.
If you work in or otherwise care about the future of digital media, this Netflix presentation is required reading.
The Obama healthcare package is already working its black magic. The first common cold I caught after the passage of the healthcare reform bill wasn’t at all common. Sure, this cold had all the usual symptoms, but it also had some suspiciously socialist leanings. Evidence:
) and a strangely consonant book I’d just picked up, The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy
. The issue of Adbusters and the book were perfectly paired… Once I’d finished all that nasty commie porn, I rifled through the shelves of the home — and found deckled-edged socialist tome Eating Animals
(which, in all seriousness, is amazing). Could this plethora of propaganda be mere coincidence? I think not. Clearly, Obama’s communist supergerms made this happen.In short, I find myself infected with feverish dreams of building a post-capitalist lifestyle for myself right in the heart of Orange County. This was one of those weekends that helped crystallize an alternate vision for what I might like the rest of my life to look like.
So… thanks to the aforementioned socialist supergerms, I was afforded the time and space to think, and the outcome was kind of radical.
Everyone’s yammering about the amazing scoop that Gizmodo scored when it supposedly purchased an unreleased, next-gen iPhone from whoever “found” it in a bar. Most of the discussion is about the phone’s stats, industrial design, those “seams” and other technical bullshit.
What nobody seems to be covering is how Gizmodo was able to obtain the phone. This to me is a great example of the type of editorial flexibility that Gawker’s indie stance has bought it.
Here’s what I’m guessing the discussions sounded like at Engadget and Gawker.
The discussion at AOL (Engadget’s corporate parent): “Can we buy a potentially stolen phone from a shady dude who says he found it in a bar?”
AOL Lawyers, middle managers, corporate FUDders, etc.: “No. Well maybe. Fill out this form in triplicate and run it by legal and procurement and let’s talk about it next Monday when the group VP is back from volcano exile.”
Gizmodo editor: “Hi Nick. Blam here. Looks like Apple’s next phone is available… We want this scoop. What’s my max bid? And can you let the lawyers know?”
Nick: “I’ll get on it. Try to keep it in the low five digits. Keep me updated.” (Denton admitted here to “checkbook journalism.”)
Result: Gizmodo picks up the scoop of the year (so far) for a rumored $10k and is killing it in pageviews as a result. I’m sure the Engadget guys would have liked to buy the phone, but by the time they’d filled out a P.O. in triplicate for AOL higher-ups, Gawker had already obtained the phone.
Why did I break my long vow of laziness to post this? Well, this story really gets me going because I was stymied by AOL’s lack of budget support for our editorial efforts at Joystiq (back in 2005-2007 when I was involved). We repeatedly tried to secure top writing talent and great features, but AOL repeatedly failed to provide a meaningful budget for it. Maybe this iPhone thing will be a wake-up call. Or maybe (if the phone turns out to be stolen) it’ll simply put another arrow in the AOL legal team’s quiver. Even so, I like Gawker’s chutzpah.
Excellent story in the Weekend WSJ about wine ratings. Of course you can’t do a “blind” test of a game, but I’m seeing some interesting criticisms in this of the metacritic system of game rankings.
Recently (since my last post, anyways) finished the following. I’d recommend the ones with stars:
NYT notes that one of reading’s last refuges is subway commuters. Certainly true in my case. Since I started commuting from downtown LA to Irvine via rail (60 minutes each way) I’m getting a lot more reading done. I’m loving it.
No time to add extensive text, but do need to write these down somewhere, as I’m about to wipe my blackberry (where I keep the list) and need to remember that I’ve recently read:
Also, on the list to read soon:
Picked up the pace a bit in May, but still only 10 books down versus a goal of 21 (one per week is the target pace).
I finished:
#7: The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy
#8: The Numerati
#9: Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior
#10: Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart
Next up:
Just read, in quick succession a few more books. It felt good to knock out #6 in a single day. And yet I’m still 20+ books behind my goal pace of one per week, though.
#4: There’s No Elevator to the Top: A Leading Headhunter Shares the Advancement Strategies of the World’s Most Successful Executives 
#5: Prisoner of X: 20 Years in the Hole at Hustler Magazine
#6: Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
Nearest the top in my daunting stack of unfinished books:
The subject lines of two emails in my junk mail folder right now remind me of one of my favorite books, Jude the Obscure:
In a critical moment early on in the book, Jude is walking along a public road and thinking about his progress towards his goal of becoming a great scholar, pondering the great authors he’ll read –Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Epictetus, Seneca, Antoninus — when he’s hit in the ear with a chopped-off pig penis thrown at him by low-class girls who are washing pig offal in a stream and who call him “Hoity-toity.” One of these girls (the thrower of the pig parts) becomes his wife and completely derails his dreams of scholarship.
These two spam emails pretty much sum up Jude’s losing battle between pursuit of animal gratificatin and pursuit of high-minded scholarship. It’s fun (and maybe a bit sad) to note that not a lot has changed since Hardy published Jude the Obscure back in 1896. I’m wondering whether some cultural critic a hundred years from now will take a serious look at spam mail over time and come to the same conclusion.
Signed up for a 14-day free trial of Zune Pass but won’t renew. Here’s why:
I could go on, but these are the most egregious issues that prevented me from renewing my Zunepass subscription. It’s too bad. I want to see something like this succeed.
This is a great business lesson *and* a great restaurant story all wrapped into one post.
First, I’m not usually the type to want to take a beef public. I believe that one should praise in public, criticize in private. However, Wild Ginger (a relatively expensive restaurant located in downtown Seattle) makes it impossible to send anything more than a few words at a time to them. Their “contact us” form rejects submission of comments that are too long and (even worse) gives the user no indication of why the form failed to submit.
So, because Wild Ginger’s comment form is broken, I must make the comment in public and LINK to it in their comment form. Isn’t that brilliant? I bet that that’s exactly the side-effect they didn’t have in mind when they told their web designer to limit comments to 150 characters (or whatever the limit is).
Here’s the text of the complaint I tried to submit:
I was having lunch with business associates at Wild Ginger (downtown Seattle) today and noticed that the crab cakes that we ordered as appetizers smelled strongly of ammonia. At first, I misidentified the source of the odor as the dipping sauce that came with the crab cakes (because the sauce did indeed smell of ammonia), so the server took away one of the two dipping sauces at our table and returned 20 minutes later to inform me that they had determined that the sauce wasn’t spoiled. By the time the server returned, I had rediagnosed the source of the odor as coming from the crab cakes themselves. I pointed this out to the server, and he took away one of the three crab cakes on the table (not the two remaining dishes of crab cakes, mind you, which would have been the appropriate response, even if the customer was just imagining the whole issue).
The server returned 5 to 10 minutes later to say that the crab cakes were indeed “off” and that he’d be removing the crab cakes from our bill. I expected Wild Ginger to make a better response than “We’ll take those off your bill.” Wild Ginger was serving spoiled crab! The restaurant should have assured me that they’d be taking the rotten crab cakes OFF THE MENU.
Subsequent to the meal, I did some research online and learned that ammonia in crab is a common symptom of spoiled crab meat. There is ample documentation of this issue online, but here are a couple of particularly enlightening links:
http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/346785
http://www.ari1.com/id41.htm
Serving spoiled crab is not something I would have expected of Wild Ginger. I have been to the restaurant at this point a dozen times since I came to Seattle in 2006 and have always considered it a safe place for a business lunch. Now that I’ve been served spoiled seafood at Wild Ginger, and now that I’ve experienced an underwhelming response to the issue, I am questioning whether it is safe to order *anything* from the menu. Perhaps refrigeration standards are not up to par. Perhaps other hygiene issues exist. I know I may be overreacting because one bad experience in a dozen doesn’t necessarily mak a restaurant bad (especially after so many positive experiences), but I was particularly concerned that the waiter didn’t react more appropriately to the issue. At the very least, the waiter should have removed all of the spoiled food from the table immediately. He took away one single crab cake, not the whole lot. Second, I would have expected escalation to a shift manager who could apologize for the issue. Finally, I’d also expect not to see the crab continue to be served on other diners’ tables.
PS: Please fix your web comment form.
I am still on some press lists … and am usually pretty well behaved about obeying embargos, but this one I’m going to break because (a) it’s from my former employer and (b) it’s awesome news and I want to be the first to out it!
The Economist to Launch London Theme Park
Media brand branches into experiential space
London, UK– As part of a strategy designed to broaden the revenue base, leverage content over new platforms and promote The Economist brand to a young and dynamic audience, The Economist Group is delighted to announce the development of a public-entertainment facility that combines the magic of a theme park with the excitement of macroeconomics.
After six months of negotiations with the British government, The Economist Group can confirm that Econoland will be built on a former industrial estate in East London, close to the beating heart of the City and thus to a large potential market of financial-sector employees.
Thanks to issues relating to its previous use, the site has been acquired at an advantageous price. Most of the toxic wastes have been cleared and levels of carcinogens appear to have returned to normal. High unemployment in the area will only increase the facility’s attractions, as former City workers seek to recapture some of the excitement they enjoyed in their professional life. Heavy investment in security and a landscaped moat and electric fence will neutralise any potential threat from the growing anarchist presence.
Among the thrilling experiences Econoland will offer are:
The currency high-roller: Float like a butterfly with the euro and drop like a stone with the pound!
Chamber of horrors: Tremble at the wailing of distressed debt!
Fiscal fantasyland: Watch the economy shrivel before your very eyes as you struggle to stop growth falling!
Bankrupt Britain: Pit your wits against the government as you try to sink sterling and bring the country to its knees!
The severe contest: Try your strength against a bear market!
Econoland will appeal to the kid in everyone, although children themselves will not be admitted. The park will open on April 1st.
More information, including exclusive images of the park, are available at Economist.com by clicking here.
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Tomorrow’s my last day at Microsoft. I never thought I’d be leaving Microsoft after just two years here (many people know what a huge advocate of the company I’ve been). It took a special opportunity to tear me away from all of the great people and awesome Xbox and PC games projects that I’ve had an opportunity to work on as a member of the interactive entertainment business development team.
After a week off, I’ll be joining NCsoft West (developer & publisher of massively multiplayer online games including Aion, Guild Wars, City of Heroes, Lineage) in their new HQ located in downtown Seattle (4th and Pike — less than a mile from my home at 11th and Pike!). I’ll be leading a team responsible for research and analytics — together we’ll be generating actionable market, consumer, and competitive insights.
NCsoft’s got years of experience developing, publishing and operating next-generation online games and is very well positioned to leverage* its assets to compete effectively in the service-oriented future that’s rapidly becoming a reality within the games business. Very exciting! I’m also thrilled to be working on MMOs as a genre. The thousands of hours I spent playing Everquest (2000-2003) led to the epiphany that resulted in my pursuit of a career in games. I’m doing what I love … and getting paid for it. It’s not quite “playing games for a living” (as friends outside the industry are wont to refer to it), but it’s still somewhat unbelievable!
For locals: I’ll be at Smith Bar (Capitol Hill, Seattle) tomorrow from 7pm until late.
* Whoa! I can use words like “leverage” in writing again! Crush! Kill! Compete! Yay. I’ve regained some vocabulary. (’softie joke)
Finished Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us
This article in the WSJ that spoke to me. Summary quotes:
“The deepening recession is exacting punishment for a psychological vice that masquerades as virtue for many working people: the unmitigated identification of self with occupation, accomplishment and professional status. This tendency can induce outright panic as more and more people fear loss of employment.”
“Like a drug, professional success can induce a feeling of ecstasy that quickly feels essential. Recapturing that feeling can require greater and greater feats, a phenomenon that — more than simple greed — explains the drive for ever-larger bonuses and conquests.”
Pretty good summary of typical careerist neuroticism. Not so sure that it’s a vice to be stamped out, though.
I’d love to average about a book a week this year, but so far, with January drawing to a close, I’ve only finished two. I had better pick up the pace if I’m going to stay on track…
(2/5): waste of time. I picked up some neat anecdotes and a better understanding of i-mode’s inception, but I’d have learned more just reviewing the Wikipedia entry. McKinsey consultants are portrayed quite unfavorably here, but I found myself more frustrated at the author’s lack of business acumen and found her frustration with the consultants naive.
(4/5): It took all sorts of willpower to stay mentally engaged and to actively visualize the scenes in this manic roadie romp, but the effort really paid off. I’m still experiencing flashbacks, days after finishing it.(Please pardon my experimentation with an Amazon Associates account I set up years ago but never used, until now.)
While a student in Wharton’s MBA program, I simultaneously served as EIC for the AOL-owned Joystiq properties, the largest video game blog network on the web. This was basically a full-time job on top of my MBA curriculum. For the most part, it was difficult to balance the two roles, but sometimes it lead to insights that wouldn’t have occurred had I not been deeply steeped in new journalism and MBA studies.
One idea that I built out for a class (including business model and all that MBA jazz) was the idea of going head-to-head against the likes of the Financial Times, WSJ, and NYT with an online-only business news publication. The company would not be saddled with expensive print and distribution operations, and would also allow its writers to live wherever they liked, so long as they were near one of the world’s major airport hubs and population centers.
The reason for this unorthodox structure was to keep fixed overhead costs very, very low so that (a) all salaries could be covered through even mediocre advertising, special publishing and syndication revenues; (b) the extra margins (to the extent that any existed) could be focused on talent acquisition, talent retention and brand building. Unshackled by the dead weight of physical operations, the business would be agile, fast, and ultimately deadly for the lumbering giants — even the Grey Lady.
Alas, I never went any further with the idea, but every new report on the collapse has me kicking myself for not building this out and trying to make it happen. It’s too late now. The timing would have been perfect two or three years ago. The physical news media are already reaching advanced stages of collapse which has some of them earnestly working to reinvent themselves (the LA Times, for instance, announced that digital revenues now cover newsroom payroll!). The survivors will be much, much stronger and will have their pick of talent.
It’s fun to watch from the sidelines, but I wonder how long I’ll have to wait to feel this sure about an opportunity to found a startup so clearly in my domain of expertise and passion. The collapse and rebirth of multi-billion dollar, multi-century industries doesn’t happen often (thankfully). I hope I’ve got the guts to pursue the next one.
It’s sometimes nice to spend a whole afternoon with Creativity Magazine and follow all the links and suggestions. Here’s the best of what I found in the December issue of the magazine.
I’m certain: the most incredible thing ever published on the subject of coffee addiction is right here.
Here’s how I make my coffee.
Every Saturday morning, in a very large glass french press, I cold-brew heaps and heaps of high-quality coffee. On Sunday evening, after about 36 hours, I push the filter down on the cold grounds and bottle the elixir in empty wine bottles which then go into the fridge.
To prepare: I pour a serving of this iced coffee into a cup, microwave it, then put in a teaspoonfull of condensed, sweetened milk. I stir and stir, then drink it down pretty fast, since I’m paranoid about letting coffee sit on my teeth too long.
Since everyone’s asking, here’s the verdict on the places we visited:
My top pizza list is therefore largely unchanged by this tour:
1. Pepe’s (New Haven)
2. Grandaisy Bakery (NYC)
3. Di Fara’s (Brooklyn)
4. Joe’s (NYC)
5. Lombardi’s (NYC) — (but only off-hours, when the tourons are not mobbing it)
6. Una Pizza Napoletana (NYC)
7. Franny’s (Brooklyn)
8. Patsy’s (NYC)
9. Rose & Joe’s (Astoria)
10. Grimaldi’s (Brooklyn)
On my next visit, I’m going to have to visit Artichoke, Denino’s (Staten Island — UGH) and all the New Haven establishments again.
As of update 6, my pizza tour itinerary is near final. This post will be edited and updated with any changes.
ASTORIA
BROOKLYN
MANHATTAN
NOT MAKING THE CUT
Thanks to Slice NY in particular for the wonderful research resource. Thanks also to everyone who chimed in with recommendations.
Will Wright (game designer) on car care. I love it. I may emulate him (if I ever manage to obtain an M3):
“He drives: A BMW M3. It’s a two-door sedan. It’s astoundingly fast for how boring it looks, which is what I like about it. I always get ablack car and never wash it. It becomes bland looking, like urban camouflage.” (source: NYT)
Well doncha know the liberal gotcha media are at it again, unfairly smearing Sarah Palin’s decision to parade around in a mere $150,000-worth of designer threads. Listen, you lame liberals, Sarah Palin DESERVES to look good. Here, for the benefit of my conservative readership, are a few STUPID LIBERALS who get it all wrong, courtesy of DNC mouthpiece NY Magazine:
• Marc Ambinder says that “Democrats are going to have a lot more fun with this than is prudent, but the heat for this story will come from Republicans who cannot understand how their party would do something this stupid … during the collapse of the financial system and the probable beginning of a recession.” The wardrobe price tag is “without precedent,” and one can tell by the campaign’s “weakly defensive response” that they’re “deeply embarrassed.” [Atlantic]
• Steve Benen thinks the “political implications are more than a little humiliating” considering “all the McCain campaign messages a story like this steps on — ‘elitist,’ ’small-town values,’ ‘big spender,’ ‘relating to “real” America,’ etc.” [Political Animal/Washington Monthly]
• Christopher Orr concurs that many “Joe the Plumbers, Tito the Builders, Phil the Bricklayers, etc. … may be less than thrilled to hear that the RNC has apparently spent $150,000 clothing and accessorizing La Palin.” Though on the bright side, “John McCain’s $520 Ferragamos now sound like the shoes of a pauper.” [Plank/New Republic]
• Matthew Yglesias says John Edwards’s $400 haircut, over which there was such a huge kerfuffle, looks “like a rounding error compared to Palin’s September hair and makeup expenses.” It’s also surprising that this type of expenditure is legal, though apparently it is. [Think Progress]
• Chuck Todd and friends believe the story “could further add to the perception that Palin isn’t a serious candidate.” And Andrea Mitchell wonders whether Palin is “permitted to accept these kinds of gifts under Alaska ethics laws.” [First Read/MSNBC]
• Jake Tapper wonders whether Palin realizes that even if she donates the clothes to charity, as her campaign claims, she still has to pay taxes on “those fancy new duds just as if someone had written her a check for $150,000.” [Political Punch/ABC News]
• Amanda Carpenter understands that “Palin needs to look good and probably didn’t have a closet full of prime time suits in stock before she got picked,” but thinks this is “extravagant.” She also wonders how much Hillary Clinton spent in comparison. [Town Hall]
• Ezra Klein writes that being a governor, Palin presumably had clothing that “was appropriate for giving political speeches and attending campaign meetings.” Even assuming she needed some new things, “$150,000 of other people’s money” is too much. [American Prospect]
• Michael Tomasky calls the expenditures “both ghastly and hilarious,” and says it’s “way beyond my comprehension” how a woman “running for public office and giving speeches about how she’s just a regular Joe/Joan who understands what regular families go through” can accept “$3,500 jackets.” The tangible effect is that this will “demoralize Republicans.” [Guardian UK]
• Sam Stein writes that the timing is awful: As the “Republican ticket is trying to highlight its connection to the working class,” it’s revealed that Palin “received more valuable clothes in one month than the average American household spends on clothes in 80 years.” [HuffPo]
• Alex Koppelman says “the optics of this aren’t great for the McCain campaign or for Palin, especially given the country’s economic woes and the work the campaign has done to portray Palin and her family as salt-of-the-earth middle-class types.” [War Room/Salon]
• Emily Bazelon contends that, “In a sense, this is unfair,” because any wealthy candidate would already have the nice clothes that Palin needed to buy. Plus, “Isn’t her image a legitimate campaign expense?” However, “the price tag is just much [too] high, too many teacher and nurse and firefighter salaries,” and it also “points out exactly how much Palin is trading on her sexuality, her winks, her look.” [XX Factor/Slate]
Loving this:
“According to Mr. Janzen, he came to the realization that “I don’t want this life — the life of someone who’s working too hard to pay a large mortgage to live in this house.” The catalyst, he said, was watching the value of his home plummet with the rest of the real estate market, while the time and money required to maintain the property only increased. “The energy cost is enormous,” he said, “and the bigger your property gets, the more there is to do.”
Which is why Mr. Janzen has become interested in the small house movement, whose adherents believe in minimizing one’s footprint — structural as well as carbon — by living in spaces that are smaller than 1,000 square feet and, in some cases, smaller than 100. Tiny houses have been a fringe curiosity for a decade or more, but devotees believe the concept’s time has finally arrived.”
I love it and am hopeful that this “movement” can gain steam (more often than not, newspapers invent trends where there are none, but I think this one taps deep into the zeitgeist).
Short update: After a weekend spent frantically driving between Ikea, Nob Hill, Costco, and various other purveyors of nesting goods, we are now officially a two-city family. I’m in Seattle working for Microsoft, while Fiona’s an hour-and-a-half to the south (as the plane flies) working for Bain as a consultant. Looking forward to reconnecting with all my friends in San Francisco on my trips down there. These lyrics ring particularly true for me, now:
I left my heart in San Francisco
High on a hill, it calls to me.
To be where little cable cars
Climb halfway to the stars!
The morning fog may chill the air
I don’t care!
My love waits there in San Francisco
Above the blue and windy sea …
-v
