Thoughts from under a rock

This is old news, but it had escaped my attention until now.  It is sad, but not surprising that micro lending, a concept that has the potential to do so much good, can also ruin peoples lives.  If you do not have much, going into a small amount of debt can be deviating.  

I was aware that micro lending is a big business.  But, the numbers in the article surprised me.  The industry is huge. In India alone, it is worth over $5 billion.

The movement has attracted big investors. Investors who are interested in large returns. With this much money looking for profit, problems are bound to occur.  Consider the predatory lending that contributed to the 2008 US real estate collapse. If it can happen to such an extent here in the US, imagine how susceptible to exploitation the average target of the micro lending industry is.  

I am a firm supporter of freedom of expression and freedom of religion.  As an affirmed atheist, I value the ability to openly express my believes. Or, lack their of.  I also support the rights of religious believers to do the same.  Having said this, the decision by the Supreme Court to protect religious institutions from anti-discrimination law is troublesome.  

The court read the issue as being a simple case of defending a churches right to select its own ministers. By viewing the case through this narrow lens, the court is putting the rights of the church over the rights of individuals. 

According to the news coverage, the church does not dispute that the woman was fired because of her disability.  Meaning she would still have the job if she had not been diagnosed with narcolepsy. 

Of course a church has the right to chose its ministers. Once having chosen an individual, churches should not be able to freely dismiss them for purely discriminatory reasons. 

I read this recent review of Richard Branson's new book with a skeptical eye.  Many things stood out to me, the first of which was the observation that the book read "like a series of loosely related case studies and anecdotes".  That description speaks volumes. 

Anecdotes are useful in some contexts, but as a way to provide a path to success, care must be taken.  

As for being able to make money while doing good, it is certainly possible, but as the old trope goes, you can not make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. Branson's success did not flow solely from wanting to do good.  With his success come a outsized capacity to do good, but he did not get where he is without stomping on some toes.

As for using the London Marathon's runners-for-charity as an example of how to do good while doing well, the fee reduction for transactions may not be all that it seemed.  For a good description of the limits of this type of promotional charity, see this criticism of the American Express Red card.

I do strongly agree with the quote about the problem with nonprofits.  The grant driven model of responding to RFP's and promising only what you have to to get the money is not sustainable.  

I have somehow accidentally developed an entrepreneurial streak. I did not plan on this, and until earlier today I did not even know that I had. This changed when I came across this article on Inc's website.  According to Howard Stevenson of Harvard Business School "Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled."

This definition resonates due to its focus on process over outcome. It calls attention to how entrepreneurs go about things, not on the specifics of what they do. It is about actions.  Challenges can be approached with an entrepreneurial spirit, or not. For individuals, it is not an either/or situation. People can chose to approach ideas and challenges entrepreneurially, or not.

It is instructive to recognize the generalized language. The word resources is used rather than money.  Money is important to the success of many business ventures, but for some ideas, success depends as much on time, attention and human capitol as it does on early access to money.

The poor economy has limited many traditional opportunities to earn a living. This, combined with the disruptive nature of computer technology and the internet has made it possible for many people with relatively limited means to pursue ideas. More and more products and services are being brought to the world faster and with less upfront investment than ever before.

One of my children just went through one of those periods all kids go through where they get hysterical over the the realization that everyone dies.  I remember going through a phase like this myself.  I have a clear image of  standing in the living room of the house I lived in until I was 8 screaming that I did not want to die.  

It is understandable that death scares kids.  In fact, the thought of dying is so a sobering, it is a wonder that we aren't all completely paralyzed by this fear.  Paralyzed to the point of never getting out of bed.

Sure we all think about death from time to time.  No healthy, well adjusted person wants to die, but we all manage to put up enough of a barrier to keep us from constantly stressing out about it.

I am a big fan of the experimental approach to entrepreneurship, espoused by the likes of Peter Sims, Seth Godin and Eric Ries. All of these authors argue for the value of accepting a significant level of failure as the price for ultimate success in business and other endeavors.  

Central to each of their messages is that trying things, taking positions and being willing to learn when things don't work as expected is an effective way to progress towards goals, especially in the face of uncertainty. 

But, I don't think any of them are arguing that one should seek out opportunities to make mistakes.  The idea is more nuanced.  It is more like: don't avoid doing things out of the fear of making mistakes. When mistakes happen (and they will), be sure to learn from them.  This is why a recent essay by Paul Schoemaker on Inc. magazines website did not resonate with me. 

This essay at HBR Blog provides a bunch of good reasons to up the Facebook* habit.  The negative influences described are not limited to Facebook, but this does not detract from their relevance.  Many people would benefit from reducing the time and attention spend with the personas projected by the members of their Facebook community.  I say persona, because, people share information selectively. You only see what people want you to see. 

As the essay points out, there is a bias towards only posting positive information. This combined with the fact that comparing oneself to others correlated with reduction in happiness, is poignant.  Anyone out there who has the habit of comparing their real lives to the experiences their friends share on Facebook would probably be much happier if they spent less time in Facebook and more time reading books and going for walks.

I am a major user of Apple products.  I have an iMac, a 13" macBook pro, an iPhone and an iPad.  When my father was having trouble with his Vista PC a few years ago, I even convinced him to convert to mac.

I have not always been loyal.  I was a mac user back in the 1980's, but in the mid 90's switched to a PC. The switch was driven by the relative price of mac's vs PC's , the fact that the company I worked for at the time used PC's and by my experience with Apple's clunky, crash prone, pre OS X operating system.

With the adoption of a linux base operating system in OS X, Apple won me back over with the new, stable, safe and extendable operating system.  They then exploded in tot he mobile market.  First with the iPhone, then the iPad.  My loyalty in the mobile world stems from early adoption. I owned my first iPhone before there was an android to compete with it.  Same thing with the iPad.  

My continued attachment to the iOS devices is mostly due to inertia.

If I were starting over today, I might not go the same route.  Open source, linux based os's like Ubuntu have come a long way over the past decade. The two non-mac computers in my house both run Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). I could easily do 99% of my computer work on those machines.  I have never used an android device, but I am sure the same is true for my mobile activities. The apps I use the most (Evernote, Pulse, Kindle Reader, Simplenote, Dropbox, weather, calculator, timers and web browers) all have versions, or analogous programs for the android platform.

This lead me to the title of this post.  Why Apple is not likely to remain on the top: lack of openness. 

Maintaining the app store and iOS as a closed system is great in the near term given Apples market advantage.  In the long run, it will stifle innovation. Sometime in the future, creative innovators in a more open ecosystems such as the one being developed by Google with Andriod, will identify opportunities and change faster than Apple can respond.

Seth Godin makes a compelling case for being more aggressive in getting things done and experimenting without the fear of failure. Among the things he advocates for is the need to start more things, finish what you start / ship, over deliver, learn how to say no, don't fear failure, but avoid risk.  

His words can be inspirational but can also send a mixed message.  The real challenge is to figure out when to do what.  The reason most people do not have the success that Godin has with initiating many things and seeing what works and what does not is that there is an art to figuring out what to pursue.  We are inundated with opportunity.  More so if financial rewards are not our primary motivation. In the face of the overwhelming number of opportunities we are all surrounded by, there is a real cost to picking one thing over another.  

There are a myriad of things we can do, both big an small, to reduce the impact of climate change. Even the small actions have value, but only one thing will really make a difference. We must reduce the amount of greenhouse gases we release into the atmosphere. Nothing else will change the trajectory we are on.  

This point is made quite clearly in a recent paper in the Journal of Climate discussed at Fast Company.  Among the actions the paper looked at was the value of painting roofs white.  Based on their data, it turns out that there is no net benefit to making roofs lighter.  One reason given for the lack of benefit is that the cooling savings realized in the summer are offset by increased heating costs in cooler months. Does this mean that the warmer the climate, the greater the potential savings?  I have not looked at the original article.  I wonder if they discussed the relative merits of white roofs in low versus high latitudes.  Maybe dark roofs are best in regions where heating consumes more energy than cooling and white roofs can be encouraged where more cooling is needed?

This article about what it takes to succeed in business caught my eye a few weeks ago. Especially because the author Aaron Levie is the founder of Box a file sharing serves similar to Dropbox.  

It is interesting to see a long essay about attention to detail from the CEO of a company who's offering I have checked out and found lacking. 

This is a appropriate consequence of a recent Facebook security flaw.  For a brief time it was possible for curious individuals to get access to private photos.  Including Mark Zuckerberg's.  Until the bug was identified, Facebook could be tricked into giving access to a limited number of private photo's by reporting the person as having posted inappropriate content to their page. 

We live in a world where it is best to assume that anything you post, save or email has the potential to be seen, stolen and widely distributed. Given this, this security flaw at Facebook is just the latest in the ongoing erosion of privacy on the web.

The question is, how to adapt to this situation. Given the rate that things are changing and the many benefits that flow from easy storage and retrieval of information, part of the answer has to be acceptance. With mass digitization of information, increased connectivity and an overabundance of affordable storage, information is out there and will be found.

Another article in the New York Times about running that came out around the same time as the article on stretching I wrote about a few weeks ago discussed running technique.  It is an interesting read for a number of reasons. Including, its willingness to challenge the popular idea that there is one right way to run.  

In times past, we as a species and a society were limited in our ability to acquire the knowledge and resources needed to live comfortably.  Resource limitation meant that people had to spend a substantial portion of their time working to meet basic needs (  farming, cooking from scratch, sewing and mending clothing etc).  Knowledge limitations meant that sickness, death and poor health was rampant. Medical knowledge we now take for granted was not available.  

There are still needy people in the world.  Many go to bed hungry everyday, but there is an astonishingly large group of people that have access to resources that far exceed what they need to survive.  

I have no doubt that being attractive is a beneficial characteristic in our extremely materialistic society.  However, this article at fast company describing an experiment where an attractive woman changed her appearance to see how her looks affected her treatment by strangers, does not really make the point well. The problem, it is hard to tease looks apart from all of the other social cues we are constantly bathed in.  Note that while experiment was presented as an exploration of how appearance ( i.e. looks) affect social interactions, the experiment was described as one where the woman changed here appearance by

dressing down, changing her posture, and adopting a surly, scowling demeanor. 

Of course, this means much more than simply looks was being tested.  Behavior and attitude where also changed during this experiment.  

I suspect that self confidence ( which may covary with looks) is also important for getting ahead in this world.  

Over the past few years I have been slowly progressing down the path of becoming more and more serious about programming.  My collection of books and links to  tutorials has grown and to include material on Pearl , Python, Ruby, HTML5, PHP and JavaScript. My most recent project relies heavily on JavaScript for functionality and this is where I am spending most of my writing and learning efforts these days. During this journey, I have tried out a number of different text editors and IDE's without ever settling on a favorite. Although, Aptana Studio 3 has become my goto editor for the past few weeks. 

Over the past few years, I have  tried more than onces to get my head around the power and functionality of the emacs.  Emacs is an old, extremely popular editor that prides itself in providing a rich, efficient editing experience that is completely keyboard driven.  With proper use of emacs, there is never an need to waste time reaching for the mouse.  This is very appealing to me. I work this way as much as I can in my non coding computer time.  Relying on things like Quicksilver to perform a whole suite of tasks that most people use the mouse for.  

This leads me to the point of this essay.  This recent essay touting the superiority of emacs over the plethora of newer, GUI driven editors available today.  The essay is one of the more robust descriptions of the value of emacs (and vims) over other options and has gotten me thinking again about giving it a try.  Although, I know there will to be a steep learning curve before I become at all proficient with the system. 

This learning curve is the reason I have tried and failed to get a handle on emacs in the past.  Not only is the documentation poor, the interface and terminology used in the system is very different from what we have all grown use to in the current GUI driven world.  Buttons, mouse clicks and pull down menus have become so common that even the most popular linux distributions such as Ubuntu are almost completely menu and mouse click driven.  Sure you can open the terminal if you want, but there is really no need to if you don't want to

The problem this raises for learning emacs is that the usual exploring of menus and clicking on buttons to discover the functionality of a program does not work.  For anyone not already very comfortable working on the command line, learning emacs requires starting at zero and relearning how to interact with the computer.