Transit systems, not people, cause traffic jams

Posted on December 3, 2008
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Stating the obvious about SF and the proposed congestion pricing plan for downtown traffic. This plan is less about public transportation and more about generating revenue from a new tax on drivers coming into SF that then can be applied for general fund pet projects. Even when the money is committed to transportation it somehow ends up as general fund money through inter-agency loans.

Congestive pricing is classic San Francisco problem solving. Given the choice between a bold, sweeping, and innovative new idea that will make headlines across the country, and a basic, nuts-and-bolts solution that isn’t sexy, we go for the big splash every time. C’mon, it isn’t that people don’t want to use public transit - this is one of the greenest cities in the country. It is that the public transit we have isn’t a good alternative.

[From Transit systems, not people, cause traffic jams]

BTW, I love taking BART into SF but only if my meetings are after 11am because once the predominately empty carpool parking spaces at the BART station free up after 10am I can get a parking spot. If I show up at the BART station in Daly City at 9am, fugghetaboutit. I’ve never understood the logic of having a 200 empty carpool parking spaces in a parking lot that is regularly filled to capacity first thing in the morning.

The Hope of False Optimism

Posted on December 3, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized |

Larry asks what happened to the bah humbug economy. The answer is really quite simple, consumers were bombarded with report after report featuring absurd discounts on every product imaginable and they consumed. However, anyone taking comfort in these numbers needs to go take a stiff drink and wait for the final seasonal retail numbers to come in before loading up their portfolio on Best Buy and Amazon stock.

Maybe there’s some hope for the holiday season after all. Spending on Cyber Monday - the Black Friday of online shopping - jumped 15 percent from the year before, with online shoppers dropping a cool $846 million in a single day, according to comScore. In fact, spending was up throughout the entire Thanksgiving holiday weekend, starting [...]

[From Cyber Monday spending jumps 15 percent. What happened to bah humbug economy?]

Consumers exercising their diminished Christmas budgets in one weekend won’t result in a boost for holiday sales, and retailers offering 50-70% discounts are simply choosing to lose less money. There are no indicators that suggest consumers will spend anything like they have in recent years and with credit card debt already topping the charts and credit card companies proactively trimming credit limits, well the picture becomes quite predictable.

Writin Dem iPhone Apps is Hard

Posted on December 3, 2008
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Interested in a unique insight on why writing iPhone apps isn’t for the faint of heart or the novice? Brent Simmons is one of the most respected developers in this space for good reason, he knows his stuff and continually one ups what others are doing.

I’ve been working heavily and steadily on iPhone code lately, and it occurs to me that writing iPhone apps is like writing poetry while writing desktop apps is like writing prose.

I’m sure it’s been said before, but the point is still good: in an iPhone app, everything counts so much — every design choice, every line of code, everything left in and everything left out.

[From Polish polish polish!]

Twollow: Automatically Follow People on Twitter Based on Keywords

Posted on December 3, 2008
Filed Under Marketing |

Applying analytics to twitter remains a challenge. I had breakfast with a senior executive from a fortune 50 (actually, a Dow 30) company today and this topic came up. There are a lot of point solutions that help you discover interesting things about what is happening on twitter, but none of these tools provides you with capabilities to measure anything but raw data. The bane of analytics solutions is when they operate as reporting tools… telling you what something is instead of what it means. This will remain an emergent area for companies pushing tools like Twollow but they will have little penetration into the corporate executive suite because they fail to function in an integrated fashion or integrate with other dashboard measurement systems that are already in use.

Twollow is new simple tool that automatically follows people based on keywords or phrases that those people mention. Think of it like Google Alerts but for twitter. It’s an interesting idea but sometimes people will mention keywords or topics that aren’t really representative of their industry. For example you can be in the technology industry and then one day you casually mention “cookies” in one of your tweets. It also doesn’t look like the system keeps track of who the new followers are.

[From Twollow: Automatically Follow People on Twitter Based on Keywords]

Lack of Foreign Resources Plagued U.S. Mumbai Coverage

Posted on December 3, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized |

Thanks to blogs, twitter, and online news sites I got all the Mumbai coverage I needed and probably with insight and accuracy that would escape any American TV or cable news operation.

As terrorists descended on Mumbai last week, the staffs at American TV news organizations scrambled to mobilize resources and personnel, underscoring the effects of deep cuts in foreign news operations. [From ANALYSIS: Lack of Foreign Resources Plagued U.S. Mumbai Coverage]

Help Me Fill My Red Kettle

Posted on December 1, 2008
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I started a Salvation Army Red Kettle campaign with a modest goal of raising $125 for the Salvation Army this Christmas season. Please pitch in a few dollars to help me reach this goal. You can start your own campaign by going to Online Red Kettle.

Personal fundraising widget for 2008 Red Kettle campaign

The Mayflower’s Beneficiaries

Posted on November 28, 2008
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Last year we went to visit my wife’s grandmother and extended family outside of Boston. We took a day to do something I have always wanted to do, visit Plymouth Massachusetts, and in our case it took on special significance because my wife’s family descends directly from the Mayflower, the Ashley and Whitman families.

I was terribly excited to visit Plymouth and while not disappointed I do remember feeling let down that the sign on Plymouth Rock goes to great lengths to remind you that it isn’t the actual rock but an approximation picked out some time later. Furthermore, you are reminded that the Mayflower was actually heading further south to the mouth of the Hudson River, it’s almost like a “hey they actually didn’t want to stay here but got stuck” account of the history. I could not understand why a town that sits on the most consequential rock in American history would want to downplay it.

I was very disappointed that little of the Mayflower Compact was enshrined in the accounts of the history on the monuments or on the tour of the Mayflower II. This is really quite an extraordinary piece of history, because the Mayflower Compact represents the first government “by the people, for the people” in the New World. This document established a governing body without specific authorization from Britain. Indeed the Compact was superseded by the 1621 Peirce Patent a mere year later, which established a government based on the explicit authority of the King of England.

John Quincy Adams later referred to the Mayflower Compact as the foundation for the U.S. Constitution, most likely a symbolic foundation as the Compact itself probably didn’t even exist in written form by the late 18th century. The Compact established a government of equal and fair laws, written by the very people who would be governed by them. It also established that covenants between man and God could not be infringed upon, which is interesting to think about because 156 years later the Declaration of Independence take the notion of inalienable rights that all men are born with, not granted by government to a whole new level and gives birth to a idea that later becomes a nation.

EDIT: actually, after reading this last sentence I decided that I need to restate it because the Declaration did not result in a nation, what the Declaration did was to firmly assert the Mayflower Covenant principle of unalienable rights which when later included in the Constitution became a nation. It’s important to recognize that American history is wrapped by two revolutionary ideas, the first being what the Mayflower Compact started, that truths exist between man and God and are irrevocable by government, and the second being that government exists to serve the people.

The Mayflower pilgrims in 1620 were not the first settlers in North America, but they were the most successful because they recognized the importance of forming a government and having a sense of “covenants between men” as the basis for laws. We all benefit from the Mayflower, even if the Rock is just a rock.

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Airports almost empty day before Thanksgiving

Posted on November 26, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized |

Aside from the economy being a central issue, airlines and airports have done everything humanly possible to ensure that you simply don’t want to fly unless unavoidable. Overbooked flights, bag fees, no food, dirty airplanes, and surly employees all add up to “hey let’s drive, gas is $1.94 a gallon!”.

Bay Area airports were eerily empty for much of what traditionally has been among the busiest travel days of the year.

[From Airports almost empty day before Thanksgiving]

Case in point, we are talking about taking a family vacation to San Diego early next year (look out Kedrosky!) and decided that renting a minivan and driving down would be cheaper than flying and less hassle to boot. It’s a lot of time behind the wheel but no worse than trudging through an airport pissed off about having to pay $150 to check bags.

The Perversity of Government Mandates

Posted on November 26, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized |

Anyone who thinks that the government should be using tax policy and legislative mandates to change consumer behaviors would be wise to consider the example of ethanol. Over a year and a half ago the Heritage Foundation urged Congress to not expand the mandate for corn based ethanol imposed by the 2005 Energy Plan, suggesting that aside from doing little to decrease dependence on foreign oil, the reality is that it was artificially inflating food prices.

The new ethanol mandate is perhaps the most dis­appointing program in the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Since taking effect in 2006, this measure has increased energy and food prices while doing little to reduce oil imports or improve the environment.

[From The Ethanol Mandate Should Not Be Expanded]

Not only has this happened but the law of unintended consequences kicked in with disastrous results, and now that oil is relatively cheap there is a wholesale collapse in the ethanol market as new investment dried up and expansion with it, and companies like Verasun, who were essentially living off the teet provided by the government, collapsed under the weight of existing debt maintenance, inability to access credit markets to roll over their debt, and the economic reality that ethanol is uncompetitive with cheap oil.

As we sit here in November of 2008 amid a shattered global financial market, it is increasingly evident that a sharp rise in CPI for food and energy represented a tipping point for U.S. consumers who pulled back to accommodate price increases in two core product categories. Business investment decisions were also distorted by energy inflation, no doubt contributing to the economic shock that precipitated the financial markets collapse.

It was precisely the segment of the market most vulnerable to food and energy price spikes that triggered the mortgage meltdown, subprime borrowers. In the future it would be wise for Congress to recognize the catastrophic consequences of distorting markets through legislative mandates.

Think About all the Pet Related Jobs

Posted on November 26, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized |

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