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2014

  • 2 min read

The dark side of low prices

I spent over an frustrating hour on the phone yesterday with Bank Of America and Paypal trying to sort out what a charge that was showing up on my credit card. All of $4,200.00. So nothing small. It turned out that it was correct, but the description was so incorrect that it was impossible for me to figure out just from reading the statement. I know we've all been there.

During this fiasco I spoke to five different people, earned myself a $25 Amazon gift certificate to 'apologize' for the bad service (Is that all my time is worth?), was on infinite hold (15 minutes+) waiting for a 'supervisor' - twice. Anyway I won't go into the blow by blow because it's boring and stressful to recount.

My point. We are getting what we pay for. Whether it is banking or airplanes or health insurance or telephone or cable. We have set up a world where competitors fight to the death to meet the one metric we have or care about, and that's price. The cheapest wins. And so the competitors fight to the death to give us the cheapest service which means the worse service. We don't (or can't reward) vendors for good service and so that goes out the window.

Minimally trained 'screeners', forcing you to explain your problem before being given to a live agent (if at all), being subjected to advertisements while on hold, multiple and inconclusive transfers to another department, confusing bills and all that.

We are getting what we asked for.

  • 2 min read

About intellectual property and other things

I came across a wonderful quote about intellectual property. I am not sure I agree with it myself but wanted to share it. It is from Carsie Blanton's blog post "New Rules for the Music Business" and it goes like this:

"“Intellectual property” is an absurd concept that only a society of clueless, museless marketers could possibly conceive of. It’s an idea that serves markets, cripples muses, and is willfully ignorant of all of human history.

We are stealing from one another constantly and shamelessly, and that’s a blessed and beautiful thing. Every folk song is a mashup of all previous folk songs. Every film stands on the shoulders of all other films. Every sentence, poem and novel exists only for the creative gumption of all previous speakers of language, which is itself a collaborative invention of the entire human race. The whole history of human invention is characterized by a kind of joyful, infinite plagiarism.

Ideas are not commodities. They are made to be shared, not owned.

That said, I do get the point. If somebody covered one of my songs and got it on the radio and made millions and didn’t pay me, I’d sue the bajeezus out of the motherfucker. If you’re going to turn my song into a commodity, I expect to paid as though it’s a commodity (even though deep in my heart, I know it’s not).

BUT, if somebody covered one of my songs and put it on youtube, or wrote a song that was an homage to one of mine, or burned one of my CDs and gave it to a friend, or used a song of mine in their broke-ass indie film, I’d high five them. Why? Because there is a big difference between sharing someone else’s work and profiting off of someone else’s work.

And it’s time for all of us to get real, real comfortable with the former."

-- http://blog.carsieblanton.com

What I like about this is that it straddles both my impulse that ideas are not commodities and that everything I create is built upon the shoulders of those who came before. Or as I like to say "Ideas are cheap". But on the other hand, if you figure out that you can make money from my creations then there is a basis in fairness that I get some of the benefit of it. Schizophrenic, I know, but it captures it nicely.

  • 1 min read

The Revolutionary Technique That Quietly Changed Machine Vision Forever

In the world of machine vision, the equivalent goal is to win the ImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge. This is a competition that has run every year since 2010 to evaluate image recognition algorithms. (It is designed to follow-on from a similar project called PASCAL VOC which ran from 2005 until 2012) Click to read the article.

  • 1 min read

What about that iWatch? It’s about the Software!

I've seen commentary that it's "disappointingly familiar", i.e. it looks just like several other computer watches, like the Pebble or even the iPod Nano attached to a strap. Or that it's Much Ado About Nothing. But I think that commentary misses the point, because it _focuses just on the hardware. _

It's true that the Apple Watch hardware, at first glance, is kind of boring. I am really sorry to have to say that because it does seem like some world class design went into it, especially the amazing collection of straps, one more beautiful than the next. But still, it looks like a little rectangular computer thing on my wrist. That 's the hardware.

The software on the other hand is a breakthrough. I haven't played with it but I sense that it contains one new invention after another and it will set a whole new standard that others will definitely imitate.

So my prediction: the Apple Watch is like the first iPhone. In retrospect a little clunky, maybe a little slow, maybe without the battery life you would like. But it is a foundation on which will set the standard for wearables for a long time.

  • 1 min read

Worth reading: The Trouble With Harvard!

The most-read article in the history of [The New Republic] is not about war, politics, or great works of art. It’s about the admissions policies of a handful of elite universities, most prominently my employer, Harvard, which is figuratively and literally immolated on the cover.

It’s not surprising that William Deresiewicz’s “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League” has touched a nerve. Admission to the Ivies is increasingly seen as the bottleneck to a pipeline that feeds a trickle of young adults into the remaining lucrative sectors of our financialized, winner-take-all economy. And their capricious and opaque criteria have set off an arms race of credential mongering that is immiserating the teenagers and parents (in practice, mostly mothers) of the upper middle class.

Read more of the response here.

  • 1 min read

Worth reading: Journalism is doing just fine, thanks — it’s mass-media business models that are ailing — Tech News and Analysis

This is worth looking at: Is the internet destroying journalism? In a piece at Salon, writer Andrew Leonard argues that it is — primarily because “the economics of news gathering in the Internet age suck,” as he puts it. Link: "http://ift.tt/1qrLoY6"

  • 1 min read

On Being a Female in Venture Capital

Interesting story…

"My summer internship was full of many positive experiences. I won’t forget, though, the burning sensation I felt in my face every time a secretary walked into a room to remind a partner his next meeting had arrived. Or the strange pride I felt when the only woman on our bowling team hit a strike, putting her ahead of some of our male colleagues — even though we were on the same team, mind you! It will take years for the fealing of outsider-ness to fade. And I count this experience as one more step towards educating myself, a part of the millenial generation, that a lot needs to change in our time at the helm."

-- http://mitsloanblog.typepad.com/mba2015/2014/07/venture-capital-women.html

  • 1 min read

Worth reading: Don’t BS the American People About Iraq, Syria, and ISIL

This is worth looking at: The apparent beheading of American journalist James Foley by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) is a stark reminder of the group’s terrible brutality and the seriousness required to counter them.

"“No one has offered a plausible strategy to defeat ISIL that does not include a major U.S. commitment on the ground and the renewal of functional governance on both sides of the Iraqi-Syrian border. And no one will, because none exists. But that has not prevented a slew of hacks and wonks from suggesting grandiose policy goals without paying serious attention to the costs of implementation and the fragility of the U.S. political consensus for achieving those goals. “"

-- War on the rocks: Don't BS the American People about Iraq and Isil