fundamental tenet
84 karma · joined May 24, 2010
UPDATE: I found it!
http://www.rogerebert.com/answer-man/
But I don't see any easy way to search for really old Answer Man stuff in the archives.
If they don't use weapons, how do they have guns to throw away?
UK Criminals do use weapons, including knives, to hurt people, which is why you guys have started running anti-knife campaigns, as detailed here:
It's not about customers being less intelligent than you; that's an arrogant stance to take in these kinds of situations. Lots of people are intelligent enough to understand how batteries work -- or how computer programs work -- if they should choose to spend the time and effort it would take to do so.
But they're not choosing to do so. They're not your R&D team. They're your customers, and they're paying you big money for something that will make their lives easier.
In this case, they're paying for a car that's going to get them from point A to point B with no hassles, so they can focus their intelligence on problems of their choosing, not on problems with your product.
So it's hardly greedy of the guy to want to be able to at least pay back his wife's student loans before Obama hits him up even harder to help finance a new era of government expansion. There's a difference between revenue and profits, after all.
As for saying he shouldn't have bought a million-dollar house, that's hardly an unreasonable price for a couple with a combined annual income of roughly half that amount. As a multiple of their income, it's comparable to a couple who makes $125,000 a year buying a house worth $250,000. That doesn't sound so crazy, does it?
And that UNC Chapel Hill thing is just disgusting. Not sure someone who would do something like that is a good representative of the attitudes of white people in general.
His choosing an airline ticket took a long time precisely because he WASN'T satisfied with "less". If he really wanted less information or fewer options and choices, he could have just used Orbitz without checking JetBlue and the United site, Or he could have just picked a single carrier and taken whatever flight they had available. But he wanted more -- he wanted to know about every possible detail and every available carrier. If he wants to know who to blame for the long time it took him to pick his ticket, he need only look in the mirror.
Coincidentally, I used Orbitz for the first time just two days ago after an unpleasant experience with a human travel agent who I felt was trying to push me into options and prices I did not want. By comparison, Orbitz was much more efficient and offered a good balance between complexity and simplicity IMHO.
# Are we burning out on Facebook?
# Web abuzz on talk of Google Facebook killer
# Book about Facebook's beginnings may dim spotlight on privacy
# Facebook CTO: Don't forget Facebook is for sharing
# Facebook dev move won't stop rogue apps, say researchers
# Facebook 'likejacking' attacks continue with flesh appeal
# Is there a replacement for Facebook?
# Facebook CEO says mistakes made, privacy changes coming
# More than half of Facebook users may quit site, poll finds
# Social networks may be sharing your info with advertisers
So instead of comparing June 2010 to May 2010, you compare May 2010 vs. May 2009 to June 2010 vs. June 2009. So you could say something like, "Facebook registrations were up 30% YoY in May 2010, but were up only 2% YoY in June 2010. Actually, at this point, YoY growth rates might even be negative (i.e., Facebook may have signed up more users in June 2009 than it did in June 2010).
Month-on-month (MoM) comparisons can be interesting, but you need to put them in context to determine if seasonality is affecting the results.
At any rate, the number of new registrations, by definition, says absolutely nothing about whether users are getting burned out on Facebook. You'd need a metric like average time spent on the site per user per month to say something about that.
This one seemed mainly like Jeff congratulating himself on the neat things he's done, with very few actionable take-aways for the audience. The ending in particular, with its repetitive "Will you A, or will you B" device, smacked of laziness, as if it were hastily dashed off the night before.
That is my point.
First, it totally failed to address the question of wealth received through means other than entrepreneurship: What about athletes, movie stars, heirs and heiresses, etc?
Second, it posits that owner-CEO's will always grow the value of their companies, ignoring that many CEO's with significant shareholdings in their companies have nevertheless plundered their companies for their own benefit.
Third, it claims that the rich got that way by doing work other people don't want to do, by which logic the average garbage man should be rich since he is doing work no one wants to do either.
Fourth, it lumps short sellers in with various other parasites trying to feast on the wealthy. But if good entrepreneurs will always (always!) grow the value of their companies, why should they fear short sellers? If the company goes up in value, the shorts will get taken to the cleaners. It sounds like the author resents the fact that short sellers perform a valuable function in exposing the overvaluation of companies that aren't doing as good a job as other people might think.
Simply put, this is a poorly-reasoned essay with little to add to the debate about taxing the rich.
So I guess what I'm saying is, don't think you can just work a lot when you're younger and do whatever you want when you're older. Nature may limit your options. Make sure you do the things you like to do when your body is strong and healthy enough to handle them.
On that note, take good care of your back. You can heal a broken arm or leg, but you can't heal a herniated disc. You only get one back. Bend from the knees, sit up straight, use ergonomic furniture, and don't walk around with 200-pound backpacks.
Which is actually a good reason to make taxes lower and less burdensome, so the most productive members of our society (as measured by income) will spend their time producing, instead of defending the fruits of their labor from the tax man.
The examples Rowe used to back up this idea were unlikely mavericks who managed to turn undesirable or unremarkable jobs into fantastically successful businesses. Those people are just as rare, if not more so, as those who find success by "following their dreams".
Ordinary workers aren't millionaire entrepreneurs; they're janitors, or sewer workers, or Foxconn assembly line drones. Yet that's what "real work" looks like. And I notice Rowe isn't quitting his job as a TV show personality in favor of joining the road crews who "whistle while they work."
The best thing I can say about Rowe is that he ranks up there with Malcolm Gladwell in his ability to throw around a bunch of unrelated contentions and anecdotes and pretend to tie them all together with a facile and unsubstantiated thesis.
I also hate the verbal tic he demonstrates, which is becoming depressingly common, of saying "right" after every few sentences in a story. For example: "I was working on a crab boat, right? And this big wave comes over the side, right?" Etc. It's a lazy way of trying to psychologically condition the audience into agreeing with you without actually doing the hard rhetorical work of convincing them. Drives me nuts.
Um... no, the biggest message you have heard recently is that people don't want you destroying the terms of service they agreed to with unilateral, opt-out changes, you greedy tool.