Short Term Pain Over Long Term Death

This was prompted by a short, but great post from Tim O’Reilly, which I liked a lot.

Something I’ve been really thinking about is the chronic short-termness I see in America’s dealing with the financial situation. It bothers me. It truly does. It bothers me because I love this country and I can’t stand to watch short sighted human nature take grip over society.

I know that I’m not a lobbyist and I can’t do anything about it, so this is more of me venting my frusteration. I’m frusterated that decision makers are so willing to sacrifice the long term well being of America for the illusion of short term pain reduction.

If you’ve been following me on Twitter or following my shared items on Google Reader, you’ll notice I’ve been paying a lot of attention to the financial situation. And here is what we are doing with all of these bailouts — we are merely moving the problem off to the future. We are printing money. That money has to be re-paid at a later date — that’s when we get higher taxes, inflation, etc.

This is Economics 101. You can’t put a band aid over a gut shot wound. The more we give guys like Bank of America and Citi, the more we put off the problem that they are actually insolvent and would fail without us. It makes no sense. Talk about chasing bad money with good. Classic newbie gambler’s mistake. Let’s keep giving money to the people who messed up this much. I understand that we would suffer massive short term problems. I understand that letting these banks fail would really sharply hurt our economy. But it’s important to realize that the point we have reached came through an illusion. These banks leveraged, borrowed, and built up castles in the sky. We are falling from a point we should have never even been able to reach. So yes, there would be heavy short term pain. But eventually, the system would be cleaned out of all this garbage, new players would step in, and new drivers would grow our economy. Banks have failed before. Let them. I don’t want to pay for it. And you shouldn’t have to either.

I’m not pretending I’m an economist or a financial journalist. Thank god — they’ve all been MASSIVELY WRONG.

But I do want to leave you with a great video from Jim Rogers. Just watch how he lays out this clueless Bloomberg reporter and explains more eloquently than I ever could why we are just flushing our country down the toilet.

My New Living Room Wall

Thought I’d share this. I’ll be adding more to this wall.

 

My New Living Room

Be Back Soon

I’m off in Colorado for a ski trip with some of my close friends to relax a bit before school starts. The scenery is gorgeous, the skiing is top-notch, and the weather is beatufiul. Can’t ask for much more.

Be back soon.

Cultural Trends and Perceptions

I got into an interesting talk with an international friend of mine where we talked about various cultural perceptions across different groups of people. As the world becomes “flatter” and globalization sinks its teeth in, there has to exist some equilibrium between ubiquitous sets of cultural norms across populations in the world and localized sets. This extends to everything: dining habits to fashion to dating to sports to politics. For example, KFC is known as a greasy fast food chain in the US. However, KFC has dominated in China where it serves an entirely localized menu and is positioned as a premium offering.

Niche marketers and people who are interested in creating products for global consumption need to figure out how to either target products individually to local markets or create products so ubiqitious that they are accepted across all cultural norms.

Who is Number 2?

Reading the Rockfeller biography got me thinking about the portrayal of leaders in society. The number 1 person (aka Rockefeller, Gates, Carnegie, etc.) get nearly all of the press coverage, books, and fascination. And they should. But if we attempt to learn from the past success and failures of great leaders, I think it’s wise to look for information about the #2, #3, #4, etc in an organization. These are the people upon whose shoulders the giants stood. They were often behind the scenes, excellent in operations, and diligent in execution. I feel like not enough attention is given to them. And I definitely have questions:

If we look at these titans of industry, what can we learn from their captains who served under them?

Are most of these captains, people who themselves are driven to eventually be the head leaders or are they perfectly happy with being just captains? 

What makes a great #2 as opposed to a #3? Can there be more than one person at #2?

What makes a great #2 as opposed to a great #1?

How does the #1 deal with a #2 who wants to be #1? Is this to be encouraged or gaurded against?