Labor and Leisure

nickcrocker: I live here.

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 21:56:42 -0400

nickcrocker:

I live here.

Run pitstop for the freedom tower. (Taken with Instagram)

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 18:03:55 -0400

Run pitstop for the freedom tower. (Taken with Instagram)

Taken with instagram

Sat, 05 May 2012 05:48:34 -0400

Taken with instagram

mediahascookies: Once upon a time, New York contemplated...

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 22:16:29 -0500

mediahascookies:

Once upon a time, New York contemplated draining the entire Hudson River so that it could be connected to New Jersey.

"Political scientists John Sides of George Washington University and Jack Citrin of the University of..."

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 13:53:38 -0500

“Political scientists John Sides of George Washington University and Jack Citrin of the University of California, Berkeley, hypothesized in a working paper that supplying Americans, who typically overestimate the number of immigrants and illegal immigrants among them, with correct numbers would reduce the perceived threat of immigration and change their views.”

- Americans Stumble on Math of Big Issues - WSJ.com

Which only goes to prove how out-of-touch political scientists can be. Not only are people naturally innumerate, but more generally you can’t argue people out of positions that they weren’t argued into.

(via felixsalmon)

Trinity church (Taken with instagram)

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 12:02:37 -0500

Trinity church (Taken with instagram)

Harvard graduate school of design (Taken with instagram)

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 13:41:07 -0500

Harvard graduate school of design (Taken with instagram)

Taken with instagram

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 13:06:01 -0500

Taken with instagram

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 12:06:35 -0500

Taken with instagram

"Brooklyn’s story, then, doesn’t lend itself to a simple happy ending. Instead, the borough is a..."

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 22:03:13 -0500

“Brooklyn’s story, then, doesn’t lend itself to a simple happy ending. Instead, the borough is a microcosm of the nation’s “hourglass economy.” At the top, the college-educated are doing interesting, motivating work during the day and bicycling home to enjoy gourmet beer and grass-fed beef after hours. At the bottom, matters are very different. Almost a quarter of Brooklyn’s 2.5 million residents live below the poverty line—in the housing projects of East New York, in the tenements of Brownsville, or in “transitional” parts of Bushwick and Bed-Stuy, all places where single-mother poverty has become an intergenerational way of life. Between 2000 and 2010, the percentage of the area’s population on welfare did decline markedly, but the number of Medicaid recipients almost tripled, to nearly 750,000. About 40 percent of Brooklyn’s total population receives some kind of public assistance today, up from 23 percent a decade ago.”

- the city journal on growth in brooklyn (via cacioppo)

"It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system,..."

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 15:07:48 -0500

“It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”

- Henry Ford (via azspot)

To bemoan the loss of manufacturing jobs is to bemoan economic progress. Not asked enough of those...

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 22:11:50 -0500

To bemoan the loss of manufacturing jobs is to bemoan economic progress. Not asked enough of those with rose-colored visions of a not so glamorous manufacturing past is what advanced economic society anywhere in the world has gotten that way by way of clinging to days gone by. In the U.S. we can point to Michigan as a state stuck in the past, and the result is massive unemployment in concert with the outflow of the state’s best and brightest citizens.

…

In The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton warned his readers about falling for the “deceitful dream of a golden age.” Manufacturing is just that. Once the employer of many at high wages, those days are long past, so to dream of a manufacturing future for the United States is to pine for excruciating poverty.

John Tamy at RealClearMarkets.

"Point five is the most ambitious of all. We need a cultural shift in parts of business. Capitalism..."

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 17:15:08 -0500

“Point five is the most ambitious of all. We need a cultural shift in parts of business. Capitalism can’t just be about trying to make money – that’s the ethics of a used car salesman or a drug dealer. Capitalism has to involve a sense of creativity, boldness and pride in a job well done. The most successful companies have usually had this and many still do – from Apple to Brompton to Zipcar – but many financial companies seem to have long ago abandoned them.”

- Time Hartford via Financial Times and TimHartford.com.

His five point plan (Hartford is from the UK, but it’s generally written and applies across continents) :

Meaningful freedom of opportunity that both left and right compromise on.

Tax environmentally damaging activities. Think I remember learning about these negative externalities in Econ 50.

Overcome the banking lobby and reform the financial system.

Review and improve the processes that influence innovation.

Make capitalism not just about money.

Shokan, NY (Taken with instagram)

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 11:59:19 -0500

Shokan, NY (Taken with instagram)

Video

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 21:53:49 -0400

designcloud: Ubdub Hanging Gardens’Infinite Pools

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 21:16:31 -0400

designcloud:

Ubdub Hanging Gardens’Infinite Pools

lostsplendor: St. Pauls, c. 1919. Click for Source.

Sat, 29 Oct 2011 10:41:27 -0400

lostsplendor:

St. Pauls, c. 1919. Click for Source.

Video

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 22:36:35 -0400

The Lean Startup as a Model, not a Theory

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 14:40:35 -0400

Wrote this for work, figured I’d repost here.

Monday night, to close out Columbus Day, I saw Erick Schonfeld, Editor at Techcrunch, interview Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup. Tech@NYU hosted the event, a huge success with a few hundred in attendance. Over the past couple years, but especially the last two months, Ries’ and his lean startup model have been ubiquitous in the tech and startup communities (this article offers some background and overview). Entrepreneurs now launch “minimum valuable products,” build feedback loops for rapid and automated user reactions, and iterate with the gospel of Scrum. Noodle is no exception, we use scrum, we have MVP goals, and we want to user test quickly and often.

However, Ries’ ideas and arguments conclude with a model, the Lean Startup. The advice he prescribes depends on the presence of certain symptoms; it is not a theory and should not be treated as the definitive answer for businesses that want to innovate. Emmanuel Derman, in a piece on the abuse of quantitative financial models but I think it applies here, wrote, “Theories tell you what something is. Models tell you merely what something is partially like.”

Ries has provided a phenomenal framework for guiding execution and strategy at startups. Unfortunately, the startup community, within its own environment of early adoption, has flocked to the Lean Startup – seemingly assuming Ries has given us a plugin for success. I have come across very little critical analysis of Ries’ book or the lean startup model. There is certainly a lot of wisdom in the book, especially when it comes to web-based consumer facing startups, but there are also some flaws in both his arguments and the way entrepreneurs and techies have absorbed them.

The “Lean Startup” Mindset:

Lean manufacturing is great when you have a team of four 25 year olds building a web application, but not every company can acquire the right talent and team pedigree without offering 401ks and healthcare. Certain businesses, with great visions, are capital intensive and need time to develop before success. Ries is definitely aware of this, he says lean startup is not bootstrapping and often relative to the industry, but it was clear at the talk that as his book is diluted and passed around the tech community, its complexity is narrowed and entrepreneurs are assuming all companies thrive with the same set of inputs that a Dropbox did.
Over-application of incrementalism can be bad. Our head of product, James Rohrbach, sent this post by Andrew Chen around last week. Read the whole post, but in short, Chen warns companies of continually pushing off “product design debt” when iterating. This leads to a website that look like Las Vegas: a cluttered amalgamation of shiny features not connected by any over arching design vision. Implementing new features, in order to get quick feedback, can override a once visionary idea or design philospohy. On Monday, Schonfeld brought up Apple as an example of company that is not “lean.” I didn’t think Ries had a good answer for him. The vision of Apple, its software, and the design of its products were never sacrificed in favor of quicker implementation for feedback.

The Lean Startup Economy:

Ries talked about how he learned that most business leaders feel their industry is speeding up – the future is going to be about even faster implementation and innovation. He offers a prescription for taking advantage of this environment, but I think he should have also spoken on the potential implications of an economy based on these models. “Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon collectively employ just 113,000 people, a third of GM’s payroll in 1980,” wrote The Economist. Apple, Google, and Facebook are some of the “heavier” tech companies, what happens when the space, and a list of America’s top companies, is dominated by individual or conglomerates of “lean” startups rather than manufacturers? Lean may be good for the entrepreneur, but when applied in bulk, what does it mean for America?

Ries’ big emphasis is, in fact, on lean manufacturing (his favorite example is Toyota), rather than just web based startups. He explained, on Monday, he’s hoping for the next stage of lean business – the leaders that are able to translate his model for startups into manufacturing ideas or cutting edge research and development groups that build the next generation of cars and discover the cure for cancer. But, in many ways, the way the tech community has absorbed his ideas, any endeavor of that magnitude, with such a vision, comes off as doomed to fail.

His work is a big step forward in the move to define processes for new businesses to think about, but there are some bigger questions to be asked, especially when it comes to the way his audience has interpreted his model and work. The approach works for those entrepreneurs, especially in their early years of operation – focusing resources on the vital metrics and strategy. However, it is not the foolproof theory that so many in the tech, management, and startup communities treat it as.

“The red line, here, is median real household income, as...

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 23:05:00 -0400

“The red line, here, is median real household income, as gleaned from the CPS, indexed to January 2000=100. It’s now at 89.4, which means that real incomes are more than 10% lower today than they were over a decade ago.

More striking still is the huge erosion in incomes over the course of the supposed “recovery” — the most recent two years, since the Great Recession ended. From January 2000 through the end of the recession, household incomes fluctuated, but basically stayed in a band within 2 percentage points either side of the 98 level. Once it had fallen to 96 when the recession ended, it would have been reasonable to assume some mean reversion at that point — that with the recovery it would fight its way back up towards 98 or even 100.

Instead, it fell off a cliff, and is now below 90.

In dollar terms, median household income is now $49,909, down $3,609 — or 6.7% — in the two years since the recession ended. It was as high as $55,309 in December 2007, when the recession began.”

-Felix Salmon

Not only do we have a high unemployment rate, but the wages of those that can get jobs are a catastrophe.