thoughts http://vhata.net/taxonomy/term/15/atom/feed 2007-04-03T21:13:15+02:00 Five thoughts from five people http://vhata.net/blog/2008/11/26/five-thoughts-from-five-people 2008-11-26T16:50:07+02:00 2008-12-08T11:44:15+02:00 Jonathan Hitchcock Over the last year, I have encountered five people who have said (or written) things that really stuck in my head, and made me think, or think differently, or simply struck me as an excellent way of seeing things. I've tried to put them together into one narrative, and I presented it at the November GeekDinner.

Innovation

Robynn Burls Robynn Burls was one of the people asked to give an Elevator pitch for her business at a party hosted by Vinny Lingham (my boss, who reappears below). Robynn and her partner, Scott, run Encyclomedia, which provides "targeted and verified media contact lists to companies wanting to gain publicity". In other words, it lets people easily find journalists who actually want to know or hear news about their products, and who can actually write about them, based on the scope of their jobs. In addition, all the details are verified, so they're up-to-date and accurate.

Robynn began her elevator pitch by describing how one often encounters things that are being done in the same old way they've been done for decades, with little or no true innovation. Nobody has thought to update the methods, or re-think how things ought to be done, so they just carry on using the same ancient methods - this leaves a huge space for somebody to come in and create a totally new system based on new ideas and new ways of looking at the problems that are being solved.

This is what Robynn and Scott did with Encyclomedia. The "old way" was to subscribe, for a fee, to a provider, who would post you a book containing a list of journalists and media personnel. This list wasn't "targeted" in any way, it was just... media people. There was no way of knowing if anybody on that list was actually interested in your area or product, so you ran the risk of spamming half of the journalist population of your town. Robynn and Scott saw that there was an excellent opportunity to step into this gap, and created an online, searchable database, to which one can subscribe, which allows you to get exactly the information you need, verified and up-to-date.

This idea is not new, but people rarely seem to use it. To hear Robynn state it outright like that made me realise that it is a perspective that we need to have, but rarely do. Henry Ford famously said:

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

I'm not using this to imply that true innovation will be divorced from the customers, or that users don't know what they really want, but rather to point out that a really new way of doing things is not just "more of the same" (harder, better, faster, stronger!), but a complete re-think of the problem, a process which begins with re-asking the questions, not just trying to find new answers.

It's interesting to find examples of people that have applied this concept: PushPlay redefined what "renting a DVD" was, for example - you give them a list of what you want to watch, and they post a couple of your top choices to you at home every time you return the old ones.

So, for everything I've said before about ideas, this is how you can get them if you're stuck - if you can identify an area where people are trudging along an old path without realising it, cut them a shortcut through the undergrowth, and they'll come stampeding.


Thinking Globally

Vinny Lingham Vinny Lingham started SynthaSite - the company for which I now work - a year and a half ago (or more, depending on how you measure), with the mantra "Free Websites For Everyone". It was a small startup based in Cape Town, with only about three employees at first, but it raised $5million in venture capital funding last year, and has opened offices in San Francisco, and there are now over thirty employees.

In one of his many pep-talks to us as his employees, he talked about his strategy for the company, from the beginning, and one thing that really stuck with me was what he said about "going global". Basically, he said, whatever your product, whatever your idea, don't constrain yourself to a local market. You may start small, and you may only serve a small market at first, but keep your eyes on the horizon - there is a huge global market waiting to be tapped, and with internet access rapidly spreading, it is now possible to reach out to it.

Vinny was not saying that you should try and throw yourself into competition on an international scale, but you should bear in mind that you will get there eventually. It is, in fact, wise to start small(ish) and consolidate on your home ground before moving out, but don't allow yourself to get trapped in a local-only mindset. There are a number of ways that this might manifest: an unwillingness to branch out too far from your safe area, or even some assumptions underlying your project that you don't even realise are symptoms of a local-only mindset.

An example of this latter problem can be found in one of my favourite websites. I used it as an example of a good idea well executed previously, but there is a problem with DoStuffCT: there is nothing Cape Town-specific about the concept or the implementation of the site, but the idea that it is "for Cape Town" is embedded throughout the site. Apart from the obvious "CT" in the domain, the description of the site agrees:

Do Things in Cape Town is all about finding and sharing stuff to do in Cape Town [...] I realised that a site where users can easily contribute to a collection of activities in Cape Town would be perfect. A Wikipedia of things to do in Cape Town.

The site is well implemented, easy to use, and contains a bunch of great content, and there really isn't anything stopping somebody from Joburg (or Bahrain) from adding an activity to the site for their area - the interface is flexible enough to allow this - but there is always this core assumption showing up: "This site is for Cape Town". I spoke to Al, and he realises this, and actually did it intentionally: it suits his purposes, and was never meant to be a global phenomenon. However, it is a good example of how your original aims or premises may affect your implementation in ways which may not be desirable if you're planning to expand or diversify later.


Attracting Users

Seth Godin Seth Godin should not need any introduction - he is something of an icon among marketers, but his novel idea was that you should get permission from people before marketing your product to them. I wish more marketers actually used his idea. Anyway, he has an excellent blog, on which he writes about a post a day, each one making an interesting point, or discussing a different way of looking at things.

In one of these posts, Seth talks about Firefox's knee-jerk reaction to the idea that it might lose traction to Google Chrome: they quickly added new features to improve their users' browsing experience. While making your product better than any other one is a good way to attract and keep users, it's not the best one. Marketers talk about the Golden Grail of "going viral" - that state where your users start spreading your product for you, and usage rises exponentially, because each user brings in five of his friends. This phenomenon is virtually impossible to control, but Seth talks about how you can at least make it more likely to happen.

If you make your product better for a user, he might recommend it to his friends (if they ask). But if you make your product better for a user if lots of other people use it, they will do their damnedest to make sure that lots of other people use it, simply to improve their own experience. Consider Facebook as an obvious example: if none of your friends use it, you can sign up and look at your own pictures, and read your own status updates, but it's frankly useless. Facebook's usefulness increases every time one of your friends starts to use it, and so, naturally, you try and get all your friends to use it, so that you can communicate with them, and send them party invitations (and add apps that throw sheep at them). This is the most obvious form of "going viral": an application that is only useful if you get all your friends to use it.

Since that example only really works in the realm of social networks, consider another example. Google Reader has a "share" button unobtrusively placed at the bottom of each post you read. If you like something, or think it's interesting, you click the button and carry on reading. All of your Google contacts who use Google Reader will see the post you found interesting showing up under your name in the "Shared Items" folder. It's an excellent replacement for the usual "hey have you seen this cool article?" messages one often sends, and I have found it a very useful source of reading material (and a way to discover new feeds to read). Since I want to know about interesting stuff my friends find, I encourage them to use it. This encouragement may not be as strong as "going viral" requires, but it is stronger than it would be if I were suggesting Google Reader simply because it's a good product.

I've only used websites (and web software) in my examples, but the principle holds firm in other areas. You can see a vestigial attempt at this sort of thing when a service offers you a discount if you refer five other people to them, but I think that misunderstands the spirit of the concept. There is a lot more to be said about this Network Effect, but I think I've made my point:

The amount of money people spend on marketing and public-relations seems like such a waste when you realise that with a few slight tweaks, you can actually get your user-base to start marketing for you - just make it nicer for them if there is widespread adoption.


Testing your assumptions

Phil Barrett Phil Barrett is a director of Flow Interactive - a user-experience consultancy based in the UK, and he presented a talk at a 27Dinner last year that I thought was quite insightful. He was talking about the order in which people generally perform the steps involved in creating a new product. After having the idea for their product, they design and implement the features they need, then they fix any bugs they can find, and then they do some testing to see how the product fares in the wild. Phil's primary interest is, of course, user experience, so he was specifically referring to user experience testing: giving the product to a bunch of people and seeing how they interact with it, and where the weak points are.

The problem with this, he said, was that one often finds that the users can't handle a certain part of the interface, or that there are big problems with the way people are forced to interact with the product. What are you going to do when this happens? The product release is scheduled soon, and you need to fix this problem as quick as you can, so you patch over it and hack some sort of solution into the interface, which is just not ideal. Phil's point was that you need to move user testing back in the product cycle: start as soon as you can, and test constantly so that you will see when users start to struggle straight away, and you can work on the problem properly, during your development cycle.

To illustrate this, imagine an app that allows users to find entries in a directory of some sort. It's a brilliant idea, captures a niche, and the directory is populated with lots of good information, so the product should be a hit. The developers create a very detailed search interface that lets users specify pretty much exactly what they are looking for, with all sorts of details and choices available, which means that the results will always be relevant to the users, and the product will be useful.

So, this app gets designed, implemented, bug-tested, and everything, and then they give it to some users. And it turns out that users don't have the faintest idea how to handle this amazing search interface: there's just too much. It scares them, and they don't know what to do. So the developers quickly hack on a simple text-box which people can type a phrase into (a la Google), so that at least they can use the product. But now, of course, the search results are less relevant - you're coming up with nineteen results, only two of which are vaguely what you were looking for, because the app is trying to work out what you wanted from a few words in a textbox, instead of a nice fine-tuned search interface. The app is going to flop.

Phil obviously talks from a user-interface point of view: the search form should have been presented for user testing in the early stages, so that something could have been done about it. But the essential principle applies to any assumption you make when developing an app, designing a service, or even starting a company. In this case, the developers assumed that their users would be able to work out how to use the search form, but people make all sorts of other assumptions which often turn out to be false. An obvious one would be the assumption that people want your product (not everybody is as obsessed about Japanese Bear Cartoons as you - maybe there isn't a market?), or that your database schema is going to scale when your product goes mainstream.

It's such a simple idea, but one that I think people should constantly remind themselves about - take a good look at what you're about to do, work out what unquestioned assumptions you are making, and question them. It's difficult to do, because they are, by definition, the things you thought were obviously true, but it may turn out to be what saves your product.


Finding your niche

Chris Anderson Chris Anderson is editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, and is probably most well-known for popularizing the idea of the Long Tail. I have been familiar with the idea for a long time, but it is only this year that I began to see how the idea can be used effectively to inform how one chooses a userbase to target.

The idea of the Long Tail, as summarised in Tim O'Reilly's seminal article "What is Web 2.0?", is as follows:

Small sites make up the bulk of the internet's content; narrow niches make up the bulk of internet's the possible applications. *Therefore: Leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head.

The example I often use of how important the Long Tail is, number-wise, is that of facebook apps: you have a few excellent apps that everybody uses (photos, or maybe ScrabulousLexulous, because who doesn't like a good game of Scrabble?), and then you have an enormous amount of ridiculous apps ("You have been bitten by a werewolf/vampire/rabid sheep", "Your friend has thrown an apple at you") which get three or four saps to add them, and that's it. However, if 5000 people use Lexulous, and four people each use the 2000 other apps, that's still an exposure of 3000 more people for the small ones. This is not the best example to use as a business model, but it does give a good indication of how "niche markets" (in this case, small groups of people turned on by utterly inane apps) collectively outweigh the "mainstream market".

Amazon are the seminal example of a company who used the Long Tail to push themselves forward - they sell very small quantities of a very large number of things, thus easily making up large sales totals by appealing to diverse tastes. In the Olden Days, it was difficult to distribute your product, or to find the esoteric tastes on the edge of the market, so you had to make a product which would appeal immediately to the tastes of the easily-accessible masses, and sell lots to them. With the Internet, it is no longer hard to find a bunch of people who are interested in your unicorn-Star Trek-crossover-fiction, and this market is a lot easier to appeal to (you know what they want).

The Long Tail has a lot more to it, of course, but this core idea is important when you are a business or product that uses the internet to reach its consumers. I wrote about this before, in the context of Android apps appealing to a long tail of users that the centralised Apple appstore couldn't reach, and I think that anybody who is trying to sell anything, or appeal to a set of people, should investigate this and apply the principles.


Conclusion

None of these five ideas are that new, and I know that (for example) Vinny was not the first person to say "think global". As Stefano said, this is stuff that everybody should know. It is just surprising that a lot of people don't, and often waste their effort or money as a result. Having internalised these ideas has made me look at a lot of projects and services differently, and I think it's a useful exercise to rehash them every so often.

]]> Over the last year, I have encountered five people who have said (or written) things that really stuck in my head, and made me think, or think differently, or simply struck me as an excellent way of seeing things. I've tried to put them together into one narrative, and I presented it at the November GeekDinner.

Innovation

Robynn Burls Robynn Burls was one of the people asked to give an Elevator pitch for her business at a party hosted by Vinny Lingham (my boss, who reappears below). Robynn and her partner, Scott, run Encyclomedia, which provides "targeted and verified media contact lists to companies wanting to gain publicity". In other words, it lets people easily find journalists who actually want to know or hear news about their products, and who can actually write about them, based on the scope of their jobs. In addition, all the details are verified, so they're up-to-date and accurate.

Robynn began her elevator pitch by describing how one often encounters things that are being done in the same old way they've been done for decades, with little or no true innovation. Nobody has thought to update the methods, or re-think how things ought to be done, so they just carry on using the same ancient methods - this leaves a huge space for somebody to come in and create a totally new system based on new ideas and new ways of looking at the problems that are being solved.

This is what Robynn and Scott did with Encyclomedia. The "old way" was to subscribe, for a fee, to a provider, who would post you a book containing a list of journalists and media personnel. This list wasn't "targeted" in any way, it was just... media people. There was no way of knowing if anybody on that list was actually interested in your area or product, so you ran the risk of spamming half of the journalist population of your town. Robynn and Scott saw that there was an excellent opportunity to step into this gap, and created an online, searchable database, to which one can subscribe, which allows you to get exactly the information you need, verified and up-to-date.

This idea is not new, but people rarely seem to use it. To hear Robynn state it outright like that made me realise that it is a perspective that we need to have, but rarely do. Henry Ford famously said:

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

I'm not using this to imply that true innovation will be divorced from the customers, or that users don't know what they really want, but rather to point out that a really new way of doing things is not just "more of the same" (harder, better, faster, stronger!), but a complete re-think of the problem, a process which begins with re-asking the questions, not just trying to find new answers.

It's interesting to find examples of people that have applied this concept: PushPlay redefined what "renting a DVD" was, for example - you give them a list of what you want to watch, and they post a couple of your top choices to you at home every time you return the old ones.

So, for everything I've said before about ideas, this is how you can get them if you're stuck - if you can identify an area where people are trudging along an old path without realising it, cut them a shortcut through the undergrowth, and they'll come stampeding.


Thinking Globally

Vinny Lingham Vinny Lingham started SynthaSite - the company for which I now work - a year and a half ago (or more, depending on how you measure), with the mantra "Free Websites For Everyone". It was a small startup based in Cape Town, with only about three employees at first, but it raised $5million in venture capital funding last year, and has opened offices in San Francisco, and there are now over thirty employees.

In one of his many pep-talks to us as his employees, he talked about his strategy for the company, from the beginning, and one thing that really stuck with me was what he said about "going global". Basically, he said, whatever your product, whatever your idea, don't constrain yourself to a local market. You may start small, and you may only serve a small market at first, but keep your eyes on the horizon - there is a huge global market waiting to be tapped, and with internet access rapidly spreading, it is now possible to reach out to it.

Vinny was not saying that you should try and throw yourself into competition on an international scale, but you should bear in mind that you will get there eventually. It is, in fact, wise to start small(ish) and consolidate on your home ground before moving out, but don't allow yourself to get trapped in a local-only mindset. There are a number of ways that this might manifest: an unwillingness to branch out too far from your safe area, or even some assumptions underlying your project that you don't even realise are symptoms of a local-only mindset.

An example of this latter problem can be found in one of my favourite websites. I used it as an example of a good idea well executed previously, but there is a problem with DoStuffCT: there is nothing Cape Town-specific about the concept or the implementation of the site, but the idea that it is "for Cape Town" is embedded throughout the site. Apart from the obvious "CT" in the domain, the description of the site agrees:

Do Things in Cape Town is all about finding and sharing stuff to do in Cape Town [...] I realised that a site where users can easily contribute to a collection of activities in Cape Town would be perfect. A Wikipedia of things to do in Cape Town.

The site is well implemented, easy to use, and contains a bunch of great content, and there really isn't anything stopping somebody from Joburg (or Bahrain) from adding an activity to the site for their area - the interface is flexible enough to allow this - but there is always this core assumption showing up: "This site is for Cape Town". I spoke to Al, and he realises this, and actually did it intentionally: it suits his purposes, and was never meant to be a global phenomenon. However, it is a good example of how your original aims or premises may affect your implementation in ways which may not be desirable if you're planning to expand or diversify later.


Attracting Users

Seth Godin Seth Godin should not need any introduction - he is something of an icon among marketers, but his novel idea was that you should get permission from people before marketing your product to them. I wish more marketers actually used his idea. Anyway, he has an excellent blog, on which he writes about a post a day, each one making an interesting point, or discussing a different way of looking at things.

In one of these posts, Seth talks about Firefox's knee-jerk reaction to the idea that it might lose traction to Google Chrome: they quickly added new features to improve their users' browsing experience. While making your product better than any other one is a good way to attract and keep users, it's not the best one. Marketers talk about the Golden Grail of "going viral" - that state where your users start spreading your product for you, and usage rises exponentially, because each user brings in five of his friends. This phenomenon is virtually impossible to control, but Seth talks about how you can at least make it more likely to happen.

If you make your product better for a user, he might recommend it to his friends (if they ask). But if you make your product better for a user if lots of other people use it, they will do their damnedest to make sure that lots of other people use it, simply to improve their own experience. Consider Facebook as an obvious example: if none of your friends use it, you can sign up and look at your own pictures, and read your own status updates, but it's frankly useless. Facebook's usefulness increases every time one of your friends starts to use it, and so, naturally, you try and get all your friends to use it, so that you can communicate with them, and send them party invitations (and add apps that throw sheep at them). This is the most obvious form of "going viral": an application that is only useful if you get all your friends to use it.

Since that example only really works in the realm of social networks, consider another example. Google Reader has a "share" button unobtrusively placed at the bottom of each post you read. If you like something, or think it's interesting, you click the button and carry on reading. All of your Google contacts who use Google Reader will see the post you found interesting showing up under your name in the "Shared Items" folder. It's an excellent replacement for the usual "hey have you seen this cool article?" messages one often sends, and I have found it a very useful source of reading material (and a way to discover new feeds to read). Since I want to know about interesting stuff my friends find, I encourage them to use it. This encouragement may not be as strong as "going viral" requires, but it is stronger than it would be if I were suggesting Google Reader simply because it's a good product.

I've only used websites (and web software) in my examples, but the principle holds firm in other areas. You can see a vestigial attempt at this sort of thing when a service offers you a discount if you refer five other people to them, but I think that misunderstands the spirit of the concept. There is a lot more to be said about this Network Effect, but I think I've made my point:

The amount of money people spend on marketing and public-relations seems like such a waste when you realise that with a few slight tweaks, you can actually get your user-base to start marketing for you - just make it nicer for them if there is widespread adoption.


Testing your assumptions

Phil Barrett Phil Barrett is a director of Flow Interactive - a user-experience consultancy based in the UK, and he presented a talk at a 27Dinner last year that I thought was quite insightful. He was talking about the order in which people generally perform the steps involved in creating a new product. After having the idea for their product, they design and implement the features they need, then they fix any bugs they can find, and then they do some testing to see how the product fares in the wild. Phil's primary interest is, of course, user experience, so he was specifically referring to user experience testing: giving the product to a bunch of people and seeing how they interact with it, and where the weak points are.

The problem with this, he said, was that one often finds that the users can't handle a certain part of the interface, or that there are big problems with the way people are forced to interact with the product. What are you going to do when this happens? The product release is scheduled soon, and you need to fix this problem as quick as you can, so you patch over it and hack some sort of solution into the interface, which is just not ideal. Phil's point was that you need to move user testing back in the product cycle: start as soon as you can, and test constantly so that you will see when users start to struggle straight away, and you can work on the problem properly, during your development cycle.

To illustrate this, imagine an app that allows users to find entries in a directory of some sort. It's a brilliant idea, captures a niche, and the directory is populated with lots of good information, so the product should be a hit. The developers create a very detailed search interface that lets users specify pretty much exactly what they are looking for, with all sorts of details and choices available, which means that the results will always be relevant to the users, and the product will be useful.

So, this app gets designed, implemented, bug-tested, and everything, and then they give it to some users. And it turns out that users don't have the faintest idea how to handle this amazing search interface: there's just too much. It scares them, and they don't know what to do. So the developers quickly hack on a simple text-box which people can type a phrase into (a la Google), so that at least they can use the product. But now, of course, the search results are less relevant - you're coming up with nineteen results, only two of which are vaguely what you were looking for, because the app is trying to work out what you wanted from a few words in a textbox, instead of a nice fine-tuned search interface. The app is going to flop.

Phil obviously talks from a user-interface point of view: the search form should have been presented for user testing in the early stages, so that something could have been done about it. But the essential principle applies to any assumption you make when developing an app, designing a service, or even starting a company. In this case, the developers assumed that their users would be able to work out how to use the search form, but people make all sorts of other assumptions which often turn out to be false. An obvious one would be the assumption that people want your product (not everybody is as obsessed about Japanese Bear Cartoons as you - maybe there isn't a market?), or that your database schema is going to scale when your product goes mainstream.

It's such a simple idea, but one that I think people should constantly remind themselves about - take a good look at what you're about to do, work out what unquestioned assumptions you are making, and question them. It's difficult to do, because they are, by definition, the things you thought were obviously true, but it may turn out to be what saves your product.


Finding your niche

Chris Anderson Chris Anderson is editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, and is probably most well-known for popularizing the idea of the Long Tail. I have been familiar with the idea for a long time, but it is only this year that I began to see how the idea can be used effectively to inform how one chooses a userbase to target.

The idea of the Long Tail, as summarised in Tim O'Reilly's seminal article "What is Web 2.0?", is as follows:

Small sites make up the bulk of the internet's content; narrow niches make up the bulk of internet's the possible applications. *Therefore: Leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head.

The example I often use of how important the Long Tail is, number-wise, is that of facebook apps: you have a few excellent apps that everybody uses (photos, or maybe ScrabulousLexulous, because who doesn't like a good game of Scrabble?), and then you have an enormous amount of ridiculous apps ("You have been bitten by a werewolf/vampire/rabid sheep", "Your friend has thrown an apple at you") which get three or four saps to add them, and that's it. However, if 5000 people use Lexulous, and four people each use the 2000 other apps, that's still an exposure of 3000 more people for the small ones. This is not the best example to use as a business model, but it does give a good indication of how "niche markets" (in this case, small groups of people turned on by utterly inane apps) collectively outweigh the "mainstream market".

Amazon are the seminal example of a company who used the Long Tail to push themselves forward - they sell very small quantities of a very large number of things, thus easily making up large sales totals by appealing to diverse tastes. In the Olden Days, it was difficult to distribute your product, or to find the esoteric tastes on the edge of the market, so you had to make a product which would appeal immediately to the tastes of the easily-accessible masses, and sell lots to them. With the Internet, it is no longer hard to find a bunch of people who are interested in your unicorn-Star Trek-crossover-fiction, and this market is a lot easier to appeal to (you know what they want).

The Long Tail has a lot more to it, of course, but this core idea is important when you are a business or product that uses the internet to reach its consumers. I wrote about this before, in the context of Android apps appealing to a long tail of users that the centralised Apple appstore couldn't reach, and I think that anybody who is trying to sell anything, or appeal to a set of people, should investigate this and apply the principles.


Conclusion

None of these five ideas are that new, and I know that (for example) Vinny was not the first person to say "think global". As Stefano said, this is stuff that everybody should know. It is just surprising that a lot of people don't, and often waste their effort or money as a result. Having internalised these ideas has made me look at a lot of projects and services differently, and I think it's a useful exercise to rehash them every so often.

]]> Thoughts From America 3: National Identity http://vhata.net/blog/2008/11/03/thoughts-from-america-3-national-identity 2008-11-03T17:47:14+02:00 2008-11-04T10:19:54+02:00 Jonathan Hitchcock This is the third post in a series, discussing ideas and thoughts that arose from my recent trip to California. The first two are here and here.

National Identity

Over three years ago, I wrote this entry, which contained a piece by Martin Amis about America, and how she was going insane, and yesterday I wrote about how the American Dream has led to a culture that celebrates mediocrity. However, I don't think that America is a nation that has gone mad, or bad. I think that she is a deeply conflicted nation that no longer knows where she is, and what she is supposed to be doing in the world.

One look at the electoral map makes it perfectly clear that America fights a constant internal battle between two distinct personalities, but recently, she seems to have become even more confused and unsure where the line that separates them lies.

If you'll pardon a quick switch in the gender of the anthropomorphized nation, these Sinfest comics excellently illustrate the problems the nation (Uncle Sam, with his sweetheart Lady Liberty) is having:

Remember When

Uncle Sam Not Depressed

Drunk Uncle Sam

Identity Crisis

This internal conflict is manifesting itself in the strangest of ways. We have Rednecks for Obama, Gays for McCain, and Feminists for Obama, and even white supremacists supporting Obama. The electorate just doesn't seem to know how to identify itself or which side to fall on. The campaigns are behaving even more strangely. Arnold Schwarzenegger broke the political mould by using the brave "he has scrawny arms" attack on Obama. There's been recent news claiming that Obama has been using hypnosis and mind-control to get people to vote for him. Senator Elizabeth Dole brands her opponent as godless (what is "godless money"?).

Watching how the actual candidates handle this is interesting - specifically John McCain. Watching him mock himself on Saturday Night Live really reminds you that he is a decent man - one who has had a very noble career, and has repeatedly taken stands against the Republican Party when he believes in something (immigration reform, free trade, and climate change are all things he has taken unpopular positions on). But this campaign has forced him to do and say things that I think he really dislikes, and sometimes you can actually see a look on his face that just says "what have we become?". I think the most notable instance of this was in Denver, when he was booed by his own supporters, when he took a stand against the racist bile that they were shouting about Obama. He had to quieten them and say "he is a decent family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that is what this campaign is about". The look on his face when he takes the microphone away from a woman who has just called Obama an "arab" is almost piteous as he corrects her.

While that incident does show that McCain is fundamentally a decent person, it also highlights the schizophrenia of the American people, who find themselves booing John McCain, because he is defending Barack Obama, whom they hate (hate!?) because he is running against... John McCain.

Tonight is the eve of the elections in America (which is, of course, why I am writing this entry). As I've said above, I think John McCain is a great man who would not make a bad president all in all. However, and this will come as no surprise to anybody who has spoken to me recently, I think that Barack Obama is an amazing man, with excellent policies, and a firm moral grounding that will, if all goes well, drive him through to an excellent term in office. For two really excellent comparisons of the two candidates, and the way they diverge from each other, I recommend this newsweek article, and The Economist's endorsement of Barack Obama.

Update: I forgot to add that the world seems to agree with me, according to this page, and the Economists global electoral college.

One unbelievably sad piece of news that has just come in is that Obama's grandmother has passed away, on the eve of what could be the greatest victory of her grandson's life. I present that without comment, but with great regret.

So, as her citizens go to the polls tomorrow, I'm holding thumbs that America will let her rational, sensible, unbigoted personality shine through. They have a lot of hope for themselves, and I've said before that I have a lot of hope for them. I'll leave you with some quotes from a few of them:

A really moving tweet by the delightful nictate (who was just as moved when I thanked her for saying it):

We owe it to the world to vote Obama. It's a gift, an apology and a promise in one gesture.

The always amusing J. Adam Moore tweeted a confirmation of the internal battle America is fighting:

Is it just me, or does this election feel like a pass/fail national IQ test?

And finally, something that has been doing the rounds quite a bit:

"Rosa sat so Martin could walk. Martin walked so Obama could run. Obama is running so our children can fly"

Watch the results and the commentary!

]]> This is the third post in a series, discussing ideas and thoughts that arose from my recent trip to California. The first two are here and here.

National Identity

Over three years ago, I wrote this entry, which contained a piece by Martin Amis about America, and how she was going insane, and yesterday I wrote about how the American Dream has led to a culture that celebrates mediocrity. However, I don't think that America is a nation that has gone mad, or bad. I think that she is a deeply conflicted nation that no longer knows where she is, and what she is supposed to be doing in the world.

One look at the electoral map makes it perfectly clear that America fights a constant internal battle between two distinct personalities, but recently, she seems to have become even more confused and unsure where the line that separates them lies.

If you'll pardon a quick switch in the gender of the anthropomorphized nation, these Sinfest comics excellently illustrate the problems the nation (Uncle Sam, with his sweetheart Lady Liberty) is having:

Remember When

Uncle Sam Not Depressed

Drunk Uncle Sam

Identity Crisis

This internal conflict is manifesting itself in the strangest of ways. We have Rednecks for Obama, Gays for McCain, and Feminists for Obama, and even white supremacists supporting Obama. The electorate just doesn't seem to know how to identify itself or which side to fall on. The campaigns are behaving even more strangely. Arnold Schwarzenegger broke the political mould by using the brave "he has scrawny arms" attack on Obama. There's been recent news claiming that Obama has been using hypnosis and mind-control to get people to vote for him. Senator Elizabeth Dole brands her opponent as godless (what is "godless money"?).

Watching how the actual candidates handle this is interesting - specifically John McCain. Watching him mock himself on Saturday Night Live really reminds you that he is a decent man - one who has had a very noble career, and has repeatedly taken stands against the Republican Party when he believes in something (immigration reform, free trade, and climate change are all things he has taken unpopular positions on). But this campaign has forced him to do and say things that I think he really dislikes, and sometimes you can actually see a look on his face that just says "what have we become?". I think the most notable instance of this was in Denver, when he was booed by his own supporters, when he took a stand against the racist bile that they were shouting about Obama. He had to quieten them and say "he is a decent family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that is what this campaign is about". The look on his face when he takes the microphone away from a woman who has just called Obama an "arab" is almost piteous as he corrects her.

While that incident does show that McCain is fundamentally a decent person, it also highlights the schizophrenia of the American people, who find themselves booing John McCain, because he is defending Barack Obama, whom they hate (hate!?) because he is running against... John McCain.

Tonight is the eve of the elections in America (which is, of course, why I am writing this entry). As I've said above, I think John McCain is a great man who would not make a bad president all in all. However, and this will come as no surprise to anybody who has spoken to me recently, I think that Barack Obama is an amazing man, with excellent policies, and a firm moral grounding that will, if all goes well, drive him through to an excellent term in office. For two really excellent comparisons of the two candidates, and the way they diverge from each other, I recommend this newsweek article, and The Economist's endorsement of Barack Obama.

Update: I forgot to add that the world seems to agree with me, according to this page, and the Economists global electoral college.

One unbelievably sad piece of news that has just come in is that Obama's grandmother has passed away, on the eve of what could be the greatest victory of her grandson's life. I present that without comment, but with great regret.

So, as her citizens go to the polls tomorrow, I'm holding thumbs that America will let her rational, sensible, unbigoted personality shine through. They have a lot of hope for themselves, and I've said before that I have a lot of hope for them. I'll leave you with some quotes from a few of them:

A really moving tweet by the delightful nictate (who was just as moved when I thanked her for saying it):

We owe it to the world to vote Obama. It's a gift, an apology and a promise in one gesture.

The always amusing J. Adam Moore tweeted a confirmation of the internal battle America is fighting:

Is it just me, or does this election feel like a pass/fail national IQ test?

And finally, something that has been doing the rounds quite a bit:

"Rosa sat so Martin could walk. Martin walked so Obama could run. Obama is running so our children can fly"

Watch the results and the commentary!

]]> Thoughts From America 2: The American Dream http://vhata.net/blog/2008/11/02/thoughts-from-america-2-the-american-dream 2008-11-02T14:34:22+02:00 2008-11-04T00:10:52+02:00 Jonathan Hitchcock This is the second post in a series of musings I had during, or on my return from, my recent trip to America. The first one is here and the third one is here.

The American Dream

The American Dream has always been held up as a kind of generic golden ideal of hope for the common man: "Whatever your mind can conceive and believe it will achieve". However, what the American Dream actually is seems to be somewhat ambiguous, and has changed somewhat over the history of the nation. The original concept comes from the actual Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness

In other words, where you were born, what race you are, and what your immediate circumstances are, should not affect the opportunities you have to strive for greater things. Everybody should have the same freedoms to pursue their goals without prejudice or bigotry. This is a noble ideal, and one that I think any rational human should agree with.

Devolution of the dream

However, the American Dream seems to have evolved somewhat, recently. The form it now takes in a large part of the national consciousness seems to be more along the lines of "there is the possibility for anybody to become rich and powerful, regardless of their circumstances", with a definite emphasis on material wealth. This, again, is not a bad thing, if you retain the implication (taken from the declaration of independence) that your success should rely on your innate abilities, hard work and determination, instead of on your class, race or gender. However, I think that this implication is increasingly disappearing from the Dream that pervades the subconscious of the American people. Now, there is a simple belief that anybody can become rich and powerful, if... What? They deserve it? They believe it hard enough? They try hard enough? I don't think that there is even a condition attached any more.

Celebration of Mediocrity

This has become especially apparent in the recent presidential campaigns: Obama has been accused of "elitism", and Sarah Palin has been joyfully accepted by "Joe Sixpack" as "one of us". In many of the adverts I saw on TV while I was there, there was a constant undertone that whatever product was being sold was one that suited the common man, the everyday person on the street, the masses. It seems that being intelligent or qualified or educated is starting to become socially frowned upon, because it is "elitist" and "snobbish".

It is my opinion that the reason for this celebration of mediocrity is this latest evolution of the American Dream. Or rather, the reason being excellent is unfashionable is because it goes against this latest evolution of the American Dream. Being intelligent, or otherwise well qualified for something, is not something that just anybody can achieve, no matter how much they want to, or believe they can: seeing somebody who is actually really great is an uncomfortable reminder that you can't be good at some things, no matter how much you want to be. I don't think that this is an explicit thought in people's heads, but the reason they prefer a pathetically mediocre candidate like Sarah Palin, because they "can relate to her", and "are comfortable with her", is that she doesn't scare them or break the comfortable notion that they can achieve anything.

As this newsweek article puts it:

Do we want leaders who are everyday folks, or do we want leaders who understand everyday folks?

Individualism

Another aspect of this is a phrase that has also always been associated with America: "rugged individualism":

The USA is usually thought of as being at the individualistic (its detractors would say "atomistic") end of the spectrum (the term "Rugged Individualism" is a cultural imprint of being the essence of Americanism), whereas European societies are more inclined to believe in "public-spiritedness"

This "I got mine" attitude also dominates the American sub-conscious. "I worked to get where I am, and I deserve it, and I will fight you if you try to take it away from me". Obama has been vilified as a "socialist" because his tax program will slightly increase taxes on the richest 5% of America, so that he can give tax cuts to the other 95%. In his now famous talk with Joe the Plumber, he used the unfortunate phrase "spread the wealth around" - meaning that everybody would be a bit more prosperous if we just slightly penalised the richest 5% of America. That phrase, to your American Rugged Individualist, means that he is going to take what you worked hard for, and give it to somebody else who clearly didn't work nearly as hard, because they are not as rich as you.

Get what is yours

The whole time I was in California, there were adverts offering people a way to get hold of the money that was "locked up in pension plans". "This money is yours, you have the right to do whatever you want with it!" they crowed - as if saving it for your old age wasn't fulfilling one's potential. Then there were the lawsuits: "Have you been in an accident recently? You deserve to be compensated! Phone us and we will sue for you!" One advert I saw actually spoke about personal income in terms of "pension plans, trust funds, or lawsuit payments" - as if being litigious was a valid career option.

The whole atmosphere was one of "it's yours by rights, and nobody else's, and you must have it now". I was frankly flabbergasted that I was seeing adverts offering pension cash-ins and easy loans in a country that had recently been crippled by an economic crises brought about by bad lending, but it fits with the idea that an Individual can do What He Wants, and if he tries hard enough, he will achieve Great Things.

A bad dream

Like I said at the beginning, the American Dream is a noble ideal when applied right, but to remove the rationale behind it (that one should not be unfairly prejudiced by irrelevant things like race and gender), and add to it an individualistic attitude that makes you fight for what is yours, even if it's to the detriment of others, seems to me to have had a very bad effect on American society.

South-Africans, Awake

What about us, here in South Africa?

We have our own version of this problem, you know:

Thabo vs Zuma

If you haven't read Thabo's excellent letter to Jacob Zuma, do so now. In it, he warns strongly about people developing a cult of the personality, based around just this "common-man appeal". I've always liked Thabo Mbeki, the pipe-smoking, Yeats-reading, eloquent intellectual, who failed to survive against the sharks of politics, but who went out with a quiet dignity that I really admire. Yet the same accusations of "elitism" have started to be thrown about on the South African political scene. Suddenly, being intelligent and speaking in a certain way, reading certain books, using certain words, and so on, qualifies you to be labelled "elitist".

When it gets hard to tell whether this article is satire or not, the warning bells should start ringing. South Africa has a high enough education rate that we should be able to see past populist rhetoric and party lines and start choosing based on the actual issues. Democracy is meaningless if the vote that we all so proudly have gets given to the guy who can toyitoyi the fastest.

Now, don't get me wrong: I'm not saying you should always pick the intellectual. Don't forget that in Zimbabwe, Mugabe is the intellectual with seven university degrees and fourteen honorary degrees, and Morgan Tsvangirai is the populist union leader who struggles with public speaking. Being biased against somebody because they never had the chance to get an education is almost as bad as being biased against somebody because they did.

I think there's a good chance for this country, as a relatively young democracy which is still very much finding its feet and struggling with working out how it should be doing things, to define its own national consciousness and make its own South African Dream, rewarding those who deserve it, but not punishing those who didn't manage to achieve their goals.

Remember, we have our own founding fathers, and they also had a vision. I leave you with the words of Nelson Mandela:

We have triumphed in the effort to implant hope in the breasts of the millions of our people. We enter into a covenant that we shall build the society in which all South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity - a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.

Update: Bizarrely, Ze Frank posted a blog entry about the American Dream at almost the exact same time as I did.

]]> This is the second post in a series of musings I had during, or on my return from, my recent trip to America. The first one is here and the third one is here.

The American Dream

The American Dream has always been held up as a kind of generic golden ideal of hope for the common man: "Whatever your mind can conceive and believe it will achieve". However, what the American Dream actually is seems to be somewhat ambiguous, and has changed somewhat over the history of the nation. The original concept comes from the actual Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness

In other words, where you were born, what race you are, and what your immediate circumstances are, should not affect the opportunities you have to strive for greater things. Everybody should have the same freedoms to pursue their goals without prejudice or bigotry. This is a noble ideal, and one that I think any rational human should agree with.

Devolution of the dream

However, the American Dream seems to have evolved somewhat, recently. The form it now takes in a large part of the national consciousness seems to be more along the lines of "there is the possibility for anybody to become rich and powerful, regardless of their circumstances", with a definite emphasis on material wealth. This, again, is not a bad thing, if you retain the implication (taken from the declaration of independence) that your success should rely on your innate abilities, hard work and determination, instead of on your class, race or gender. However, I think that this implication is increasingly disappearing from the Dream that pervades the subconscious of the American people. Now, there is a simple belief that anybody can become rich and powerful, if... What? They deserve it? They believe it hard enough? They try hard enough? I don't think that there is even a condition attached any more.

Celebration of Mediocrity

This has become especially apparent in the recent presidential campaigns: Obama has been accused of "elitism", and Sarah Palin has been joyfully accepted by "Joe Sixpack" as "one of us". In many of the adverts I saw on TV while I was there, there was a constant undertone that whatever product was being sold was one that suited the common man, the everyday person on the street, the masses. It seems that being intelligent or qualified or educated is starting to become socially frowned upon, because it is "elitist" and "snobbish".

It is my opinion that the reason for this celebration of mediocrity is this latest evolution of the American Dream. Or rather, the reason being excellent is unfashionable is because it goes against this latest evolution of the American Dream. Being intelligent, or otherwise well qualified for something, is not something that just anybody can achieve, no matter how much they want to, or believe they can: seeing somebody who is actually really great is an uncomfortable reminder that you can't be good at some things, no matter how much you want to be. I don't think that this is an explicit thought in people's heads, but the reason they prefer a pathetically mediocre candidate like Sarah Palin, because they "can relate to her", and "are comfortable with her", is that she doesn't scare them or break the comfortable notion that they can achieve anything.

As this newsweek article puts it:

Do we want leaders who are everyday folks, or do we want leaders who understand everyday folks?

Individualism

Another aspect of this is a phrase that has also always been associated with America: "rugged individualism":

The USA is usually thought of as being at the individualistic (its detractors would say "atomistic") end of the spectrum (the term "Rugged Individualism" is a cultural imprint of being the essence of Americanism), whereas European societies are more inclined to believe in "public-spiritedness"

This "I got mine" attitude also dominates the American sub-conscious. "I worked to get where I am, and I deserve it, and I will fight you if you try to take it away from me". Obama has been vilified as a "socialist" because his tax program will slightly increase taxes on the richest 5% of America, so that he can give tax cuts to the other 95%. In his now famous talk with Joe the Plumber, he used the unfortunate phrase "spread the wealth around" - meaning that everybody would be a bit more prosperous if we just slightly penalised the richest 5% of America. That phrase, to your American Rugged Individualist, means that he is going to take what you worked hard for, and give it to somebody else who clearly didn't work nearly as hard, because they are not as rich as you.

Get what is yours

The whole time I was in California, there were adverts offering people a way to get hold of the money that was "locked up in pension plans". "This money is yours, you have the right to do whatever you want with it!" they crowed - as if saving it for your old age wasn't fulfilling one's potential. Then there were the lawsuits: "Have you been in an accident recently? You deserve to be compensated! Phone us and we will sue for you!" One advert I saw actually spoke about personal income in terms of "pension plans, trust funds, or lawsuit payments" - as if being litigious was a valid career option.

The whole atmosphere was one of "it's yours by rights, and nobody else's, and you must have it now". I was frankly flabbergasted that I was seeing adverts offering pension cash-ins and easy loans in a country that had recently been crippled by an economic crises brought about by bad lending, but it fits with the idea that an Individual can do What He Wants, and if he tries hard enough, he will achieve Great Things.

A bad dream

Like I said at the beginning, the American Dream is a noble ideal when applied right, but to remove the rationale behind it (that one should not be unfairly prejudiced by irrelevant things like race and gender), and add to it an individualistic attitude that makes you fight for what is yours, even if it's to the detriment of others, seems to me to have had a very bad effect on American society.

South-Africans, Awake

What about us, here in South Africa?

We have our own version of this problem, you know:

Thabo vs Zuma

If you haven't read Thabo's excellent letter to Jacob Zuma, do so now. In it, he warns strongly about people developing a cult of the personality, based around just this "common-man appeal". I've always liked Thabo Mbeki, the pipe-smoking, Yeats-reading, eloquent intellectual, who failed to survive against the sharks of politics, but who went out with a quiet dignity that I really admire. Yet the same accusations of "elitism" have started to be thrown about on the South African political scene. Suddenly, being intelligent and speaking in a certain way, reading certain books, using certain words, and so on, qualifies you to be labelled "elitist".

When it gets hard to tell whether this article is satire or not, the warning bells should start ringing. South Africa has a high enough education rate that we should be able to see past populist rhetoric and party lines and start choosing based on the actual issues. Democracy is meaningless if the vote that we all so proudly have gets given to the guy who can toyitoyi the fastest.

Now, don't get me wrong: I'm not saying you should always pick the intellectual. Don't forget that in Zimbabwe, Mugabe is the intellectual with seven university degrees and fourteen honorary degrees, and Morgan Tsvangirai is the populist union leader who struggles with public speaking. Being biased against somebody because they never had the chance to get an education is almost as bad as being biased against somebody because they did.

I think there's a good chance for this country, as a relatively young democracy which is still very much finding its feet and struggling with working out how it should be doing things, to define its own national consciousness and make its own South African Dream, rewarding those who deserve it, but not punishing those who didn't manage to achieve their goals.

Remember, we have our own founding fathers, and they also had a vision. I leave you with the words of Nelson Mandela:

We have triumphed in the effort to implant hope in the breasts of the millions of our people. We enter into a covenant that we shall build the society in which all South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity - a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.

Update: Bizarrely, Ze Frank posted a blog entry about the American Dream at almost the exact same time as I did.

]]> Thoughts From America 1: Necessity and Invention http://vhata.net/blog/2008/10/30/thoughts-from-america-1-necessity-and-invention 2008-10-30T21:18:31+02:00 2008-11-04T00:11:14+02:00 Jonathan Hitchcock Apart from a broken rib and an iPod touch, I brought a few other things back from my visit to California. This is the first post in a series of thoughts and ideas I had during my trip to San Francisco.

Update: (The second one is here, the third is here.)

Old Ma Necessity

We've all heard the old chestnut about necessity being the mother of invention. It really hit home when I got to San Francisco, and one of the first emails I received from the office manager included Google Maps directions to the office. I know, we've all seen these before, and academically, I knew they worked, but it was still a surprise to see Google give real life directions that were actually useful to me. In South Africa, we become accustomed to things not even being meant to work for us - they're for the posh people in the first world, you know? (Although, now I think about it, most of the times I've ever encountered these maps it was because people were going "LOL GOOGLE SAYS DRIVE INTO THE SEA" and so on, so even then I didn't have much of a good impression of them.) The Google Maps for Cape Town barely have the highways fully drawn in.

Having underlined our necessity, where's our invention? Look again at the above-linked Google map of Cape Town, and then compare it with the OpenStreetMap equivalent.

Now, I know a lot of the drive behind OpenStreetMap is a desire to have open/free maps, rather than the necessity to fill the gap left by the inadequate Google Maps, but the two do go hand in hand. When you're in America, and everything works, you don't even realise that there's a niche in which to innovate. If you'd like another example, consider bandwidth. I won't lie to you, American bandwidth is FAST. I watched the presidential debates streaming live off the internet, in fairly high definition. When you've got that bandwidth, you don't even try to save it. But here in South Africa, the need to save bandwidth has led to some very clever solutions.

I attended BarCamp Africa at Google HQ in Mountain View, and one of the overriding themes was that Things Are Different In Africa, and that there is some amazing innovation happening here, simply because there's no other way the problems we encounter in our unique situation will ever be solved. One of the discussions underlined this for me: we were discussing Android and the iPhone, and I realised that there will be an enormous market for phone applications that are so specific that they're useful for only like thirty people in a tiny village in Kenya. Like I've said, things are different in Africa. There are places in Africa that desperately need a solution for a problem that no other place can even understand. There is a lot of necessity. And as a result, there is a lot of potential for a lot of invention. Of course, to return to phones (although phone apps obviously, aren't exactly the solution to many of Africa's problems, they suffice as an example), Apple just doesn't have the resources to create (or approve) apps to touch a fraction of this necessity, and that's where Android can swoop in and fill the void. An African entrepreneur can take advantage of the Long Tail to produce a large number of apps that are only used by a few people, but whose total uptake is enormous.

A final example before I leave the subject, just to illustrate how different Africa is. In Ghana, apparently, you just don't get street addresses. If you want to know where somebody lives, you'll get told "Akua lives two compounds behind Kwabena". Addresses are relative, and that's the way it's always worked. If you read this article, you'll see somebody trying to pull Ghana into a western ("modern" !?) way of thinking, but what they should really be doing is coming up with a Ghanaian solution to this Ghanaian problem.

The western world's maps (and things) already work, and so they don't even realise that we face these problems in Africa. This is where we can step in and start providing African solutions to our uniquely African problems.

]]> Apart from a broken rib and an iPod touch, I brought a few other things back from my visit to California. This is the first post in a series of thoughts and ideas I had during my trip to San Francisco.

Update: (The second one is here, the third is here.)

Old Ma Necessity

We've all heard the old chestnut about necessity being the mother of invention. It really hit home when I got to San Francisco, and one of the first emails I received from the office manager included Google Maps directions to the office. I know, we've all seen these before, and academically, I knew they worked, but it was still a surprise to see Google give real life directions that were actually useful to me. In South Africa, we become accustomed to things not even being meant to work for us - they're for the posh people in the first world, you know? (Although, now I think about it, most of the times I've ever encountered these maps it was because people were going "LOL GOOGLE SAYS DRIVE INTO THE SEA" and so on, so even then I didn't have much of a good impression of them.) The Google Maps for Cape Town barely have the highways fully drawn in.

Having underlined our necessity, where's our invention? Look again at the above-linked Google map of Cape Town, and then compare it with the OpenStreetMap equivalent.

Now, I know a lot of the drive behind OpenStreetMap is a desire to have open/free maps, rather than the necessity to fill the gap left by the inadequate Google Maps, but the two do go hand in hand. When you're in America, and everything works, you don't even realise that there's a niche in which to innovate. If you'd like another example, consider bandwidth. I won't lie to you, American bandwidth is FAST. I watched the presidential debates streaming live off the internet, in fairly high definition. When you've got that bandwidth, you don't even try to save it. But here in South Africa, the need to save bandwidth has led to some very clever solutions.

I attended BarCamp Africa at Google HQ in Mountain View, and one of the overriding themes was that Things Are Different In Africa, and that there is some amazing innovation happening here, simply because there's no other way the problems we encounter in our unique situation will ever be solved. One of the discussions underlined this for me: we were discussing Android and the iPhone, and I realised that there will be an enormous market for phone applications that are so specific that they're useful for only like thirty people in a tiny village in Kenya. Like I've said, things are different in Africa. There are places in Africa that desperately need a solution for a problem that no other place can even understand. There is a lot of necessity. And as a result, there is a lot of potential for a lot of invention. Of course, to return to phones (although phone apps obviously, aren't exactly the solution to many of Africa's problems, they suffice as an example), Apple just doesn't have the resources to create (or approve) apps to touch a fraction of this necessity, and that's where Android can swoop in and fill the void. An African entrepreneur can take advantage of the Long Tail to produce a large number of apps that are only used by a few people, but whose total uptake is enormous.

A final example before I leave the subject, just to illustrate how different Africa is. In Ghana, apparently, you just don't get street addresses. If you want to know where somebody lives, you'll get told "Akua lives two compounds behind Kwabena". Addresses are relative, and that's the way it's always worked. If you read this article, you'll see somebody trying to pull Ghana into a western ("modern" !?) way of thinking, but what they should really be doing is coming up with a Ghanaian solution to this Ghanaian problem.

The western world's maps (and things) already work, and so they don't even realise that we face these problems in Africa. This is where we can step in and start providing African solutions to our uniquely African problems.

]]> Ideas http://vhata.net/blog/2008/09/29/ideas 2008-09-29T14:23:02+02:00 2008-10-03T12:04:50+02:00 Jonathan Hitchcock Brain Crack

About a month ago, the excellent Avery Edison linked to an episode of the show by Ze Frank, which had quite a large impact on me:

I have transcribed the relevant bit below for your reading pleasure:

I run out of ideas every day. Each day I live in mortal fear that I've used up the last idea that'll ever come to me. If you don't want to run out of ideas, the best thing to do is not to execute them. You can tell yourself that you don’t have the time or resources to do 'em right. Then they stay around in your head like brain crack. No matter how bad things get, at least you have those good ideas - that you'll get to later. Some people get addicted to that brain crack, and the longer they wait, the more they convince themselves of how perfectly that idea should be executed, and they imagine it on a beautiful platter with glitter and rose petals, and everyone's clapping - for them! But the bummer is, most ideas kinda suck when you do 'em, and no matter how much you plan, you still have to do something for the first time, and you're almost guaranteed the first time you do something, it'll blow. But somebody who does something bad three times still has three times the experience of that other person, who's still dreaming of all the applause. When I get an idea, even a bad one, I try to get it out into the world as fast as possible, because I certainly don't want to be addicted to brain crack.

Dividing people up

The thing is, there are two factors involved - knowing how to do stuff, and doing stuff - and there are four combinations of these two factors. We can all agree that people that neither know how to do anything, nor actually do anything, are not especially useful. Additionally, we can agree that people that have both the knowledge/skill to do stuff, and actually go out and do it, are especially useful. However, the contention comes in when you look at the other two categories of people: people who have the knowledge/skill but don't use it, and people who aren't especially talented or clued up, but still try and do things (badly or not as the case may be).

I think that most people, whether they realise it or not, would consider the talented/intelligent individuals to be "better" (or "more useful"?) than the people that try (possibly unsuccessfully) to do things without having the actual talent to back it up - even though the talented ones don't actually really use their talent for anything "extra", other than getting a job and that sort of thing. I'm finding it difficult to explain this without sounding insulting or condescending, but it's fairly common to hear some very snide remarks about a website that somebody has tried to put together amateurishly, or an implementation of some service which just doesn't work too well. There seems to be a natural bias towards the talented, without regard to what is actually getting done.

Well, I disagree.

It seems like an obvious thing to say, but I don't think people have internalised the full implications: doing something, whether you're good at it, or successful at it, or not, is better than knowing how to do it and never bothering.

Using ideas

Perhaps geeks tend not to implement their ideas because once they work out how to solve a problem, it's not interesting any more. This is understandable, if regrettable. Whether or not this is the case, though, I think that a much more common reason for never implementing an idea is that you think it won't work, or won't work properly, or isn't worth trying. This sort of thing has been said so often that it's almost a cliche, but people still don't seem to believe it: just do something, and it may work.

A lovely example of a good idea that you'd never believe would work is the zipper machine:

zipper machine

As the article says:

I have to imagine the person that first proposed creating this device was thought to be crazy. I suppose they had to fight their way through nay-sayers in their company until someone believed them. However, now that the machine exists it just seems like a natural thing to do.
Every time I see this machine I think it makes a great analogy for IT projects. The more audacious an IT project is, the more crazy it looks. After it is complete and people are benefitting from it everyone thinks it is obvious.

What about closer to home? As Alastair Pott says in the about page of DoStuffCT:

While hiking on Table Mountain I found myself wishing that I knew more of the many available hikes. I realised that a site where users can easily contribute to a collection of activities in Cape Town would be perfect. A Wikipedia of things to do in Cape Town.
I hacked together a quick prototype and the whole idea has developed into something of a hobby for me. I knew that I was onto something useful when I found myself using the site from my mobile phone to get restaurant details. It is my hope that others will discover the site, and that together we can create a useful and complete resource for those looking to enjoy our wonderful city.

This is exactly what I am talking about. Al thought "hmm, that could be cool", and he did it, and now it's one of my favourite sites. A slightly less successful example is Jonathan Endersby's new site, HalfPriceTuesdays. It died in its first incarnation, but he revived it, and it's in private alpha now, so hopefully we'll see it taking off like DoStuffCT.

The ideas behind these two sites are not unique. There are tons of ideas out there, and I bet that you had one just the other day. Just in the course of discussing what I'm saying in this post with some friends, two new ideas got brought up simply as examples to back up the discussion:

  • Find-A-Maid.com - you're in Vredehoek, you need a maid who can work on Friday mornings and is good with children. It's a known problem, and it can be solved. The implementation may need tweaking to be a viable solution (problem: maids don't have broadband, madams do), but it's there.
  • HoldMeAccountable.com - When I say I'm going to do something (implement an idea, write a blog post, fix my car), you can put it on this site, I'll confirm it, and if I don't do it by the deadline, I'm named and shamed. I'd use this.

They may not be great ideas, they may not work, but they are ideas.

And here's the nub:

The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.
--Linus Pauling

Ratios of success

My boss, Vinny Lingham is involved in the venture capital landscape, and he recently gave a talk on investing in startups (which are essentially "people implementing ideas"). As confirmed by the maths here, Vinny said that in order to be successful, a venture capitalist needs about a third of his ventures to succeed, and a third to break even (i.e. make their money back). That's not impossible, but it's a risk that a VC has to take.

However, I am not talking about VCs. I'm talking about you. You don't have that one-third burden on your ideas. Because, no matter how many ideas you implement, you only need one to succeed. If you try six things, and one becomes a success, you've won. If you try twenty things, and only one becomes a success, you've still won. And, of course, the more things you try, the more likely it is that some, or any, of them will succeed. There's, like, no excuse not to!

While you were sleeping

Another thing Vinny went over in his talk was his big idea of "making money while you sleep". This brings us back to the distinction I made earlier between the knowers and the doers. If you're very knowledgeable or skillful, you can make a lot of money by selling your knowledge or skill. You can freelance, or contract yourself out, or even get a permanent position, and the harder you work, the more money you'll get, because you've got the skill and the knowledge to make it happen. But to be really successful, you've got to work really hard. There's a direct correlation between the time you spend and the amount you get back. And that's all well and good, but there's only so much time you have. It's much more efficient (and pleasant) to make money while you sleep. If you implement an idea, and it works, and becomes successful, then you can sit back and let it work for you, and bring in the money for you. Or, better, you can start on another idea, and hope that that one works, too. If, instead of just "being good", you actually produce something that is out there and tangible, separate from yourself, the correlation between your time/energy and the amount you get back no longer exists.

My friend Dom makes an important point about this: if you are only making money from your job, you start to rely on your job. You get tied down, and start accepting more downsides and problems, because you worry that if you don't, you'll lose your job, and have no income. You need to be earning things on the side in order to be free enough to put your foot down when your job becomes intolerable. You may be lucky enough or skilled enough to walk straight into another job, but... you know... you may not.

And now, to my final point.

Cape Town

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor's research findings over the past five years show that the percentage of people between the ages of 18 and 64 in Cape Town who pursue new business are 190% above the national average.
In Johannesburg, it is only 60% above the national average.
But only 5% of new entrepreneurs in Cape Town and only 6% in Johannesburg make use of the latest technology in their businesses.
Only 15% of new entrepreneurs in Cape Town expect to have more than ten employees in five years' time.

We are in the most entrepreneurial city in the country. It has been referred to as the next Silicon Valley. Not only that, but we, as geeks, are also capable of making use of "the latest technology". We're perfectly positioned to take our ideas and make them work (if we have the confidence to "expect to have more than ten employees in five years' time"). I know that a lot of the people reading this have already been nagged by me: this post has been burning a hole in my brain for a month (I'm only publishing it now because I'm presenting this exact material at the GeekDinner tonight). But even if I have already said it to you, it's time to actually do something about it.

Conclusion

So, from now on, some rules:

  • Don't say "I will [ later ]"
  • Don't say you don't have enough time: you're lying
  • Don't expect it to be perfect (or even to work) at first
  • Don't over design

I know I'm the worst of the lot, and let this blog post hold me accountable if I haven't started doing things in six months.

]]> Brain Crack

About a month ago, the excellent Avery Edison linked to an episode of the show by Ze Frank, which had quite a large impact on me:

I have transcribed the relevant bit below for your reading pleasure:

I run out of ideas every day. Each day I live in mortal fear that I've used up the last idea that'll ever come to me. If you don't want to run out of ideas, the best thing to do is not to execute them. You can tell yourself that you don’t have the time or resources to do 'em right. Then they stay around in your head like brain crack. No matter how bad things get, at least you have those good ideas - that you'll get to later. Some people get addicted to that brain crack, and the longer they wait, the more they convince themselves of how perfectly that idea should be executed, and they imagine it on a beautiful platter with glitter and rose petals, and everyone's clapping - for them! But the bummer is, most ideas kinda suck when you do 'em, and no matter how much you plan, you still have to do something for the first time, and you're almost guaranteed the first time you do something, it'll blow. But somebody who does something bad three times still has three times the experience of that other person, who's still dreaming of all the applause. When I get an idea, even a bad one, I try to get it out into the world as fast as possible, because I certainly don't want to be addicted to brain crack.

Dividing people up

The thing is, there are two factors involved - knowing how to do stuff, and doing stuff - and there are four combinations of these two factors. We can all agree that people that neither know how to do anything, nor actually do anything, are not especially useful. Additionally, we can agree that people that have both the knowledge/skill to do stuff, and actually go out and do it, are especially useful. However, the contention comes in when you look at the other two categories of people: people who have the knowledge/skill but don't use it, and people who aren't especially talented or clued up, but still try and do things (badly or not as the case may be).

I think that most people, whether they realise it or not, would consider the talented/intelligent individuals to be "better" (or "more useful"?) than the people that try (possibly unsuccessfully) to do things without having the actual talent to back it up - even though the talented ones don't actually really use their talent for anything "extra", other than getting a job and that sort of thing. I'm finding it difficult to explain this without sounding insulting or condescending, but it's fairly common to hear some very snide remarks about a website that somebody has tried to put together amateurishly, or an implementation of some service which just doesn't work too well. There seems to be a natural bias towards the talented, without regard to what is actually getting done.

Well, I disagree.

It seems like an obvious thing to say, but I don't think people have internalised the full implications: doing something, whether you're good at it, or successful at it, or not, is better than knowing how to do it and never bothering.

Using ideas

Perhaps geeks tend not to implement their ideas because once they work out how to solve a problem, it's not interesting any more. This is understandable, if regrettable. Whether or not this is the case, though, I think that a much more common reason for never implementing an idea is that you think it won't work, or won't work properly, or isn't worth trying. This sort of thing has been said so often that it's almost a cliche, but people still don't seem to believe it: just do something, and it may work.

A lovely example of a good idea that you'd never believe would work is the zipper machine:

zipper machine

As the article says:

I have to imagine the person that first proposed creating this device was thought to be crazy. I suppose they had to fight their way through nay-sayers in their company until someone believed them. However, now that the machine exists it just seems like a natural thing to do.
Every time I see this machine I think it makes a great analogy for IT projects. The more audacious an IT project is, the more crazy it looks. After it is complete and people are benefitting from it everyone thinks it is obvious.

What about closer to home? As Alastair Pott says in the about page of DoStuffCT:

While hiking on Table Mountain I found myself wishing that I knew more of the many available hikes. I realised that a site where users can easily contribute to a collection of activities in Cape Town would be perfect. A Wikipedia of things to do in Cape Town.
I hacked together a quick prototype and the whole idea has developed into something of a hobby for me. I knew that I was onto something useful when I found myself using the site from my mobile phone to get restaurant details. It is my hope that others will discover the site, and that together we can create a useful and complete resource for those looking to enjoy our wonderful city.

This is exactly what I am talking about. Al thought "hmm, that could be cool", and he did it, and now it's one of my favourite sites. A slightly less successful example is Jonathan Endersby's new site, HalfPriceTuesdays. It died in its first incarnation, but he revived it, and it's in private alpha now, so hopefully we'll see it taking off like DoStuffCT.

The ideas behind these two sites are not unique. There are tons of ideas out there, and I bet that you had one just the other day. Just in the course of discussing what I'm saying in this post with some friends, two new ideas got brought up simply as examples to back up the discussion:

  • Find-A-Maid.com - you're in Vredehoek, you need a maid who can work on Friday mornings and is good with children. It's a known problem, and it can be solved. The implementation may need tweaking to be a viable solution (problem: maids don't have broadband, madams do), but it's there.
  • HoldMeAccountable.com - When I say I'm going to do something (implement an idea, write a blog post, fix my car), you can put it on this site, I'll confirm it, and if I don't do it by the deadline, I'm named and shamed. I'd use this.

They may not be great ideas, they may not work, but they are ideas.

And here's the nub:

The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.
--Linus Pauling

Ratios of success

My boss, Vinny Lingham is involved in the venture capital landscape, and he recently gave a talk on investing in startups (which are essentially "people implementing ideas"). As confirmed by the maths here, Vinny said that in order to be successful, a venture capitalist needs about a third of his ventures to succeed, and a third to break even (i.e. make their money back). That's not impossible, but it's a risk that a VC has to take.

However, I am not talking about VCs. I'm talking about you. You don't have that one-third burden on your ideas. Because, no matter how many ideas you implement, you only need one to succeed. If you try six things, and one becomes a success, you've won. If you try twenty things, and only one becomes a success, you've still won. And, of course, the more things you try, the more likely it is that some, or any, of them will succeed. There's, like, no excuse not to!

While you were sleeping

Another thing Vinny went over in his talk was his big idea of "making money while you sleep". This brings us back to the distinction I made earlier between the knowers and the doers. If you're very knowledgeable or skillful, you can make a lot of money by selling your knowledge or skill. You can freelance, or contract yourself out, or even get a permanent position, and the harder you work, the more money you'll get, because you've got the skill and the knowledge to make it happen. But to be really successful, you've got to work really hard. There's a direct correlation between the time you spend and the amount you get back. And that's all well and good, but there's only so much time you have. It's much more efficient (and pleasant) to make money while you sleep. If you implement an idea, and it works, and becomes successful, then you can sit back and let it work for you, and bring in the money for you. Or, better, you can start on another idea, and hope that that one works, too. If, instead of just "being good", you actually produce something that is out there and tangible, separate from yourself, the correlation between your time/energy and the amount you get back no longer exists.

My friend Dom makes an important point about this: if you are only making money from your job, you start to rely on your job. You get tied down, and start accepting more downsides and problems, because you worry that if you don't, you'll lose your job, and have no income. You need to be earning things on the side in order to be free enough to put your foot down when your job becomes intolerable. You may be lucky enough or skilled enough to walk straight into another job, but... you know... you may not.

And now, to my final point.

Cape Town

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor's research findings over the past five years show that the percentage of people between the ages of 18 and 64 in Cape Town who pursue new business are 190% above the national average.
In Johannesburg, it is only 60% above the national average.
But only 5% of new entrepreneurs in Cape Town and only 6% in Johannesburg make use of the latest technology in their businesses.
Only 15% of new entrepreneurs in Cape Town expect to have more than ten employees in five years' time.

We are in the most entrepreneurial city in the country. It has been referred to as the next Silicon Valley. Not only that, but we, as geeks, are also capable of making use of "the latest technology". We're perfectly positioned to take our ideas and make them work (if we have the confidence to "expect to have more than ten employees in five years' time"). I know that a lot of the people reading this have already been nagged by me: this post has been burning a hole in my brain for a month (I'm only publishing it now because I'm presenting this exact material at the GeekDinner tonight). But even if I have already said it to you, it's time to actually do something about it.

Conclusion

So, from now on, some rules:

  • Don't say "I will [ later ]"
  • Don't say you don't have enough time: you're lying
  • Don't expect it to be perfect (or even to work) at first
  • Don't over design

I know I'm the worst of the lot, and let this blog post hold me accountable if I haven't started doing things in six months.

]]> The Political Compass http://vhata.net/blog/2008/09/26/the-political-compass 2008-09-26T01:40:57+02:00 2008-09-26T18:28:29+02:00 Jonathan Hitchcock The political discussions of the last century or so have mostly been dominated by the terms "right wing" and "left wing", both of which have all sorts of connotations attached to them. These terms, however, are rather limited. For example, both Stalin and Ghandi were "left wing", but their politics were worlds apart. There is clearly another dimension to their ideals that needs to be taken into account.

The political compass is a way of orienting somebody's political views that looks beyond the simple left-or-right of their economics, also grading the social aspect of their opinions, ranging from authoritarian (at the "top") to libertarian (at the "bottom"). To give you an idea of how this works, have a look at where some major historical figures stood:

political compass of major historical figures

There is an online test that gives you 62 statements on various issues, and requires you to agree or disagree, strongly or weakly, with each one, using your answers to position you on the compass, and show you where you stand in relation to others. Recently, a bunch of my (mostly CLUG) friends took the test, and Michael hacked together a nifty script that automatically generated a graph which plotted our positions against each other:

political compass for CLUGgers

As you can see, we all kinda cluster in the lower left corner, with the exception of a few fascists and capitalist pigs. This is probably to be expected from a bunch of freedom-loving open-source geeks, but the wide spread of our opinions got me thinking. We're all rational, intelligent people (well, almost all), and I've always had the (possibly rather naive) opinion that if people could just talk about stuff, and see each other's points of view, they'd agree. Or, disagree less. Bearing that in mind, and bearing my current campaign (which will become increasingly obvious) to raise the signal-to-noise ratio of our local internets, I balked at the simple "this is my score" posts that some of us were doing. Accordingly, I asked my friends to actually write up their test results, instead of just giving their scores - that is, to go through the test question by question, and actually explain their reasoning, so that we could see why our scores were different. So far, my call has been heeded by Stefano and Jeremy, bless their pasty white skins.

You will notice from the above graph that Jeremy (labelled as jerith) falls on the bourgeois-money-grubbing-lapdog-of-the-imperialist (that is to say "right") side of the economic spectrum, while I am fairly far left (vhata at about -5,-5), and I used this to perform an experiment when drawing up my analysis. First, I did the test as normal, and wrote down my answers. Then, I read through Jeremy's rationalisations (or "reasoning", if you must), and re-did the test, but bearing his thoughts in mind the second time. While nothing he said actually changed my mind (except for one question which I had misunderstood, and which was clarified by his answer), it did have some effect in strengthening or weakening my convictions.

This is exactly what I had hoped would happen (and I promise I didn't do it on purpose): getting an insight into the mind of another person whom I respect made me empathise with his opinions more, and drew me slightly towards his world-view. It turns out that my results after redoing the test pushed me just over two full points to the right, towards Jeremy's position. It also strengthens my belief that if we could just engage in proper dialogue, instead of always falling back on over-defensive rationalisation and emotional attacks, there would be a lot less conflict in the world.

Before I give the analysis of my answers, I want to quickly discuss the political compass of a few other people. The people at politicalcompass.org have put together charts for all of the European Union countries, and for all of the people running in the US presidential elections. They give some nice discussion, especially of the elections, so I won't duplicate that here. What I will say is that it is no surprise that almost all of the nodes are in the top-right corner: being below the x-axis means you don't like the government meddling with you, and it's not surprising that governments and politicians aren't in favour of that. What is pleasing is (a) how close to the centre point a lot of Europe is, and (b) where Barack Obama stands. Walton Pantland at Red Star Coven puts it really well, so once again, I won't re-say it here.

On to my analysis!

Propositions concerning the country and the world

  • If economic globalisation is inevitable, it should primarily serve humanity rather than the interests of trans-national corporations.
    Strongly Agree - trans-national corporations are an economic/political construct. To suggest that something should serve their interests instead of the interests of the human race which created them is simply frightening.

  • I'd always support my country, whether it was right or wrong.
    Strongly Disagree - again, to suggest that you would support something that you know is wrong, simply because it's "your" country is terrifying.

  • No one chooses his or her country of birth, so it's foolish to be proud of it.
    Disagree - you can be proud of the fine achievements of the country you were born into, just as you can be proud of your own natural talents (which you were born with, and did not earn). It's when you take that pride to levels of nationalism, and attack others because they're not your people that it gets bad.

  • Our race has many superior qualities, compared with other races.
    Disagree - I firmly believe that all humans are created equal: no race is inherently superior to another race. The reason this isn't a strong disagreement is that there are quantifiable physiological advantages that some races have in certain areas (Kenyans can run, French people can pronounce things nobody else can, Polynesian pearl divers can hold their breath for ages), but this is no reason to claim "superiority".

  • The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
    Disagree - the relationship is not black-and-white: both being against one thing does not mean we are both for the same things. Any teenager at highschool should know this.

  • Military action that defies international law is sometimes justified.
    Agree - very, very rarely, a military force might conceivably have to breach international law to achieve some greater good.

  • There is now a worrying fusion of information and entertainment.
    Disagree - I didn't understand this question until Jeremy pointed out that this fusion meant that we could no longer tell the difference between fact/reality, and fiction/entertainment, and this made me realise that this fusion can lead to wars and governments being treated like viewer-run reality shows. I changed my opinion to Agree after that.

The Economy

  • People are ultimately divided more by class than by nationality.
    Agree - In this era of globalisation, I don't feel that cross-border differences are anywhere near as important to our world-views as the differences of income and class.

  • Controlling inflation is more important than controlling unemployment.
    Disagree - if everybody has jobs, they will have money to spend and circulate, and inflation will decrease. I don't think the reverse will happen as readily.

  • Because corporations cannot be trusted to voluntarily protect the environment, they require regulation.
    Agree - They cannot be trusted, being primary money-creating machines, and the environment does need protection, so some form of regulation is required. It's not a strong agreement because I think my views that they can be (self?) regulated by consumer opinion and pressure to be ethical doesn't fall under the spirit of the question.

  • "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is a fundamentally good idea.
    Strongly Agree - it may not be implementable in our current situation, but it makes perfect sense that everybody does what they can, and gets what they need - it's just plain old efficient.

  • It's a sad reflection on our society that something as basic as drinking water is now a bottled, branded consumer product.
    Agree - I don't judge people for wanting luxuries of this sort, but I do think it's unfortunate that society makes people seek happiness in this form.

  • Land shouldn't be a commodity to be bought and sold.
    Disagree - land should be treated like other means of production. This isn't a strong disagreement because I acknowledge that it is still a more important means of production than most others, and maybe still deserves some slight special-casing.

  • It is regrettable that many personal fortunes are made by people who simply manipulate money and contribute nothing to their society.
    Agree - big-ups to them, but I would much prefer a world where you had to actually give back to society in order to be successful.

  • Protectionism is sometimes necessary in trade.
    Agree - occasionally, factors are such that greater harm will come from allowing a big corporation (or similar) to manipulate the market forces to destroy a small local economy (for example), than would come from putting restrictions on the free market.

  • The only social responsibility of a company should be to deliver a profit to its shareholders.
    Strongly Disagree - this leads directly to destroying the environment and having trade union leaders murdered in order to stop costs and wages going up. Companies should have a strong social responsibility to improve the community, etc. (Whether they ever will or not is not the subject of this question.)

  • The rich are too highly taxed.
    Strongly Disagree - They're not going to get any sympathy from me by whining that their huge salaries aren't