On Attitude

”A healthy attitude is contagious but don’t wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.”

Tom Stoppard

It’s Great Working For Trump!

“From Joe Balash, assistant secretary for land and minerals management, speaking to oil exploration companies last month:

One of the things that I have found absolutely thrilling in working for this administration is the president has a knack for keeping the attention of the media and the public focused somewhere else while we do all the work that needs to be done on behalf of the American people.”

Kevin Drum

The Full Story

My Thoughts

The most important trick in the magicians arsenal is misdirection - which is the one single consistent thing Trump has achieved in the past two years.

Manafort has had it good so far, even without the new New York charges …

… let’s see if they can actually sentence him the way they do others ….

I’ve read a lot recently about why Manafort sentences were so lenient at least when compared to the recommendations. His defence tells is that he lead an otherwise blameless life and that should be taken into consideration.

BALDERDASH

He has essentially been a criminal throughout his career, he just wasn’t caught and that proof didn’t come up this time.

If you want to meet some people where that rule did not apply, let me know, I can introduce you. People incarcerated for outrageous lengths of time for something as trivial as ‘possession’ … because they needed to be made an example of. Because the authorities ‘knew’ that they had ‘history’.

Where are those people now?

Don’t Blame Robots for Low Wages

Too many great quotes in this article, so apologies in advance …. my bold, spot the theme!

”Technological change is an old story. What’s new is the failure of workers to share in the fruits of that technological change.”

“There is a growing though incomplete consensus among economists that a key factor in wage stagnation has been workers’ declining bargaining power — a decline whose roots are ultimately political.”

“Most obviously, the federal minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, has fallen by a third over the past half century, even as worker productivity has risen 150 percent. That divergence was politics, pure and simple.”

” What made America exceptional was a political environment deeply hostile to labor organizing and friendly toward union-busting employers.”

“American workers can and should be getting a much better deal than they are. And to the extent that they aren’t, the fault lies not in our robots, but in our political leaders.”

Paul Krugman

The Full Story

My Thoughts

Not just the US. Another example of the UK adopting the US position … thankyou Margaret Thatcher.

The Incredible Story Of The Incredibles

“Concerned about resting on their laurels, the studio’s founders, Steve Jobs and Ed Catmull, hired the company’s first outside director, Brad Bird, to shake things up. Mr. Bird’s most recent film, “Iron Giant,” had flopped financially, and when he pitched his idea for a new movie to Pixar, he was told it would never work: It would take 10 years and cost $500 million to animate.

But Mr. Bird persisted. He recruited a band of disgruntled people inside Pixar — misfits whose ideas had been ignored — to work with him. The resulting movie, “The Incredibles,” won two Oscars and grossed $631 million worldwide, outdoing all of Pixar’s previous successes. (And, for the record, it ended up costing less than $100 million to make.)”

Adam Grant

The Full Story

The Great Realignment of Britain

“Since that law was relaxed, visitors to England—especially England outside central London—have noticed a proliferation of flags. But not the red-white-and-blue Union flag. The flag you most often see on private homes and cars is the red-and-white flag of England.”

David Frum

The Full Story

My Thoughts

I have long argued that part of England’s problem is that its identity has been subsumed by Great Britain and/or The United Kingdom. Seen as almost interchangeable. The Scots, Irish and Welsh are not only proud of their respective countries, but are recognized as independent nations with their own customs, languages, flags, patron saints … even their own parliaments.
The English … well, as Frum writes, you rarely see The George Cross flying. If a flag in England is flying it is more than likely the UnionJack. People might know who the patron saint of England is (St.George), but I bet if they know when St. George’s day is (April 23rd), they are not likely to celebrate it. (Yet they’ll turn out in droves for the patron saint of Ireland!). And as for a government for England, for the English … it doesn’t exist.
Sadly, the flag is has become associated with jingoism and national identity politics, skin heads … and that happened because nobody was looking after.
Maybe that is changing. Maybe it is time to change.

How Beto O’Rourke Could Win The 2020 Democratic Primary

“If there’s an elevator pitch for O’Rourke’s presidential candidacy, that’s more or less it: “I came this close to turning Texas blue. Imagine what I could do nationally.”

Clare Malone

The Full Story

My Thoughts

True, but once again if the dems were playing strategically, they would wake up and realize that the Presidency is not everything. One of the biggest tasks to hand that few are talking about in mainstream is to win back the Senate.

”Beto O’Rourke lost the Texas Senate race in November. Four months later he’s running for president — and early polling shows there’s a not insignificant percentage of people who seem to be on board — or at the very least know who he is.”

Vox

Personally, much as I like him, he isn’t going to win the Democratic nomination … much less the Presidential race. Which means that we are wasting an excellent member of The Senate. Imagine instead of

”I lost to Ted Cruz - but only just, so I can win the Presidency.”

he said

”I lost to Ted Cruz - but only just, so I can win the Senate race in 2020 against John Cornyn.”

… and then imagine how that contributes to a Senate take over in 2020. Imagine if a Dem wins the Presidency - but McConnell and the Rethuglicans hang on to the Senate? Remember how that worked out for Obama?

The Present Of Work

The present of work is not just about ‘when’. Look through a different lens and suddenly we realize that it is exactly that. A gift.

We are conditioned to view work as a transaction. People provide their time, their skills, their intellect, their brains, their labour and in return, through the ‘largess’ of business, we are rewarded with tokens that allow us to live.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

It didn’t used to be this way.

Imagine if our passions and dreams and ideas of what could be were rewarded with value, not tokens. Imagine then what the world could be.

Side Note - I think this is where David Nordfors is heading with The People Centered Economy …. it certainly is where I am trying to get to.

Work - There Has To Be A Better Way.

In their recent Core Intuition podcast, I think @manton and @danielpunkass were touching on - though (IMHO) not getting to two things.

1) Pricing for ‘labor delivered’ against ‘value pricing’.

Bottom line, I really want all companies / corporations / businesses / enterprises to stop employing people based on time … and start paying them on value delivered.

The problem is that to do that, the ‘buyer’ needs to understand what that value is and how it is measured. The old ‘all you did was hit the red button - 20K seems a bit steep’ story pops up in my mind.

I am always thinking this through. Not there yet. But it is one of the People First anchors.

2) Making money while you sleep.

Write a book, code, make an album … and then sell it … allows you to make money while you sleep.

Do a stage play … and you are essentially paid ‘by the hour’ … once the production is completed each day … the seats sold are the seats sold - no more - no less. And out of the income that day, the actors, director, stage hands, back room people, front room people … get paid. (Yes - I know it is more complicated - but that is what it breaks down to.)

BUT. Have those same people make a movie / TV show and residuals, licences, syndication all kick in … money is suddenly made while you sleep.

Working for someone else - you get paid - and when you stop - you don’t.

Working for yourself allows you to build a model to earn money when you aren’t working. As Manton points out, eventually that can dry up, so therein lies the challenge. But not insurmountable.

This connects to their discussion of working for ‘the man’ versus ‘yourself’. Again a People First anchor. If people are no longer working for the largest corporations as they did 50 years ago (and they aren’t), it means they are increasingly working for smaller companies if not themselves and so everything is falling to them to do.

So, if you are no longer the ‘tech spec writer’ for Corporation Y but rather are ‘out on your own’, you are also the Sales department, the Marketing department, the Admin department, the ….. and every minute you spend on doing something that is not generating income is lost opportunity.

It’s a challenge. The population at large is not ready for it. Nobody is trained for it. And so there is a lot of collateral damage … in the past - and it will continue into the future.

People First is working towards highlighting these kinds of issues that are not being discussed in the mainstream and trying to provide solutions to the problems. It’s not easy.

The Vision

On Google

“Google does not understand customers whose IQs are sub-200.”

Robert Cringely