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[ Drop the Degree and Go With the Cert | wsj.com ]

I think Apple could put out enough iPhones to maintain stock in Apple and AT&T stores, but they’re choosing not to. They’re pulling a Wii.

I think a big part of the allure of the Wii was the fact that you couldn’t find one for months. It’s a simple matter of wanting things we can’t have. And it’s happening now with the iPhone 3G as well.

Do you know when you’re getting some in?

No way to know…we had a shipment yesterday but they sold out in 11 minutes. And we got a couple in today, but they were special ordered and have already been picked up…

This builds desire, and it’s a tactic that melds perfectly with Apple’s elitist, “I’m special” marketing strategy.:

http://iqcomparisonsite.com/

It frustrates me that our major institutions, e.g. public education, the common business environment, etc. do not embrace proven methods of improving performance.

I wonder, for example, how much overall efficiency could be gained by experimenting with two simple programs:

1. Allowing workers to take a 20-30 minute nap in the afternoon
2. Doing a program to increase to improve fluid memory (and therefore I.Q.)

Does it seem extremely odd to anyone else that these things — especially the I.Q. raise — require very little time and the ability to improve worker performance in almost every area, yet nobody is even taking notice?

I.Q. points are platinum. Intelligent people (assuming they have good methodologies) are better problem solvers. Having one or two smart guys on an engineering team is possibly better than having ten average ones — even if they’re experienced.

So how can any manager dismiss the possibility of instantly upgrading their team in a way that no training class, degree, or certification could ever hope to do?

It seems the business world would rather just keep grinding along at their own mediocre pace than take a risk of losing valuable “grind time” doing some crazy progressive crap. Hell, I might as well be talking about taking time off to meditate, or to sacrifice a flower to the God of photosynthesis (It doesn’t work, by the way).

So, I for one am going to actually evaluate this memory/I.Q.-improvement program. And if I like it, i.e. it seems to actually work, I’m going to propose to my manager that we give it a shot. It supposedly only takes like 20-30 minutes a day to do, and results in a major study showed that it significantly boosted the I.Q.s of those who used it.

Am I loopy here, or does this not make sense?

As for the napping, I’m just doing that on my own as part of my lunch break. That’s an even harder sell.:

ROWE is a simple concept: let people do what they want at work — as long as they’re getting work done. Evidently Best Buy has put the system into place and has increased productivity by 41%

This, like democracy, is another example of a great system that works for the best among us, but fails to deliver for the average. I think this would be great to apply to the stars at a company, i.e. most talent and most self-discipline, but for most in America’s work force it would equate to almost certain failure.

It’s clearly a better system for those who are mature enough for it; I’d love to see it implemented in more places so we can see additional metrics on it.

Anyone who just blindly takes random new drugs because they’re approved by the FDA and recommended by their doctor is ignorant, and he or she is likely to suffer for it.

How about the news about Singulair? It’s a Merck product that’s supposed to cure asthma, but it makes people want to kill themselves.

Eh, minor point, right? We make fun of the side effects on those commercials, but people still buy that shit and put it in their bodies. Here’s the list of side-effects:

• tremor
• anxiousness
• depression
• suicidal thoughts

Thankfully they sell other drugs to fix all of those…

So why do you think these asshats are still able to sell this poison? Maybe because Singulair made Merck 4 billion fucking dollars last year, which can pay for a hell of a lobby group.

Seriously people — don’t take new drugs put out by the pharmaceutical companies. They’re very likely to be dangerous. Remember, track the incentives.:

Paul Graham just put out another excellent piece. This one is on how creativity is effected by various work environments — especially startups vs. corporations and small vs. large companies. I particularly like this bit:

An obstacle downstream propagates upstream. If you’re not allowed to implement new ideas, you stop having them. And vice versa: when you can do whatever you want, you have more ideas about what to do. So working for yourself makes your brain more powerful in the same way a low-restriction exhaust system makes an engine more powerful.

Definitely check out the whole thing.

You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss | paulgraham.com

Net Neutrality is one of the most important challenges facing civilization as a whole right now, yet most people don’t even know - let alone care - about it. Here’s my simple summary of the issue, and please be sure to watch (and pass along) the video that comes after it.

Radio and newspaper, when they were first introduced, were user-generated media sources. This means that people could, for relatively little money, produce their own content and then get it out to very large groups of people through these media. But once corporations realized how lucrative the mediums were they, along with government help in many cases, created an environment where only very few could create the content, while the masses could only consume it.

This translates directly to the Internet. For these first 10 years or so that the web has been in its current form the people have had the ability to create and instantly publish their content to millions of people. This, just as with radio and print, has been an invaluable tool for propagating all types of individual expression. Art, movies, music, poetry, novels, political opinion, philosophical discourse - all these constituents of healthy democratic society are spread instantly through the Internet, even more so than with the previous media types.

But just as with radio and print, the corporations have now realized the power of this medium, and they’re moving to seize control of it. Quite simply, they plan to limit access to content, making it far more difficult (if not impossible) for regular people to create content and then distribute it to the world. Their intention is to place controls on who can and cannot create and distribute content by, you guessed it, charging for this “privilege”. What this will do is effectively do to the Internet what they did to radio and print, i.e. make it a one-way highway that goes from corporations to the people, but not from the people to the people.

So this is not a minor technological debate; it’s quite simply one of the most important issues facing our generation. The Net Neutrality debate literally discusses the ease with which people gain access to information. Please take the time to follow the issue and educate others whenever possible.:

So, CompTIA, a company that specializes in computer certifications, finds in their own study that certain IT skills aren’t where they need to be.

Hmm…I guess they’re going to need training to start out, and probably some sort of way of ensuring that their level of knowledge has reached a certain recognized standard.

I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.

I’d say that’s a pretty solid way of approaching entrepreneurship in today’s tech world.

Does anyone else think it’s (shameful | criminal | wrong | outrageous) for Exxon to be making record profits (10.7 billion last year) while the economy and the dollar are heading into the toilet?

That’s $1,700 a second, by the way — in profit, not earnings.

This is while the country faces an energy crisis caused by our dependence on oil and everyone with a brain understands that we need to be moving towards renewable energy. I understand free markets and all that good stuff, but this is where I differ with people like Ron Paul.

I have a feeling his answer would be “market regulation”, or something like, “If people don’t like what a company is doing they have the choice to not do business with them.” Lame.

At some point there needs to be incentive for a company to do the right thing, or at least to stop doing the wrong thing, and it may be the case that only a government can offer those incentives (negative or positive) in certain cases when the people have lost the ability to do so.

The FDA comes to mind.

I’m not sure about that position, but it certainly makes sense to me at the moment.