Friday, November 24, 2006

Doublespeak in Action

"If workers are not allowing themselves to decompress while on vacation, the holidays may be a good opportunity for employers to help their staff unwind, as long as the work is still getting done," Buchenroth said.

from E-Week article http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2062442,00.asp

Now here this "expert" is saying people can "de-compress" at work AS LONG AS THE WORK IS BEING DONE. Now I have never heard of a company during a holiday timeframe - or when that person is on vacation - tell a person that the work is going to stop coming in while they are on vacation nor that their performance goals (monthly, quarterly, weekly) is going to be eliminated / ignored while they are gone. If two weeks worth of work comes in they are not going to be judged as failing to reach their assigned goals that at the end of the month when two weeks of work is yet to be done!

And these "experts" are surprised that managers and workers call in to work while on "vacation"!?

The goals companies set for managers and workers are based on a 52 week year of work for a person 2087 hours - not a 40 week year which takes into account holidays / vacation / sick time of a person.

Monday, November 20, 2006

New Coins of the Realm - failure by design (again) with numismatic Awards to follow

Next year in February the US Government will start printing new $1 coins with pictures of past presidents in sequence like what they did for the quarters and the states.

Now these are the SAME people that created the two (FAILED!) $1 coins already - which BOTH won awards for design - but are totally USELESS in real life. The people who judge these things have no concept of functionality at all. The new coin is BIGGER than the quarter - just like the failed last two coins - and also gold in color.

Sorry - these are doomed to failure in real world use and will only be collected like the prior ones.

NO ONE wants to carry around coins that end up weighing a few pounds in their pockets that are BIG.

Large coins of yesterday were large since they were REAL silver - and the GOLD ones were MUCH smaller since gold was worth more - hence they could be smaller. This fact is totally lost on the designers - award winning ones at that !! Talk about inbreeding and having a washington fix in.

The idiots (yes, they really are idiots since they designed it in a backroom with no PUBLIC input at all) have created a new paperweight.

Make them gold, 6 sided, between the size of dime and nickel and it would work. With the current design it will fail in use - but watch how many awards it will garner from people who DO NOT USE IT.

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Advertising is Harder Than Ever in Modern World

Ah, the "Good old days" of advertising are long gone - and this has made advertising a few orders of magnitude harder than it used to be.
How? "Back when" there were three television networks, a few independent TV channels and maybe 10 radio stations in a large city, two major daily's and three to four local weeklies to worry about for a local market. Then there were truly public bulletin boards (in Post Offices!) you could put up flyers and maybe the town hall.
To get the word out was easy. There were a limited number of places people could find out information and so they COULD find information in those limited locations. And press releases were harder to distribute so there were less so yours had a good chance of at least being seen. No PRWeb.com, 24-7PressRelease.com, PRLeap and a slew of others.
In the modern world it is no wonder that Google, Yahoo, TV, Radio stations, all have more ad revenue now - you have to advertise in a few hundred locations to cover the SAME amount of territory as you did 40 years ago!
You cannot post on public cork boards - almost all have been removed due to lawsuits over "free speech." A government cannot stop the posting of flyers that the community does not want to see so the government therefore banned community boards to avoid free speech suits when they disallowed certain posts. Note: PRIVATE firms - including publicly traded companies - can ban such posts - but when they get sued by the banned posting groups the resulting publicity is unwanted so they too have dropped bulletin boards.
When I try and advertise for the Oregon Chapter of the 8th Air Force Historical Society the quarterly meetings I spend around 5 hours to go to various newspaper web sites to post the meeting notice, e-mail notices to newspapers (who never acknowledge that they got it let alone if they are going to put it into the community meeting notice page), drive around putting up flyers in the few places that allow them. I have never gotten the meeting announcement read by a radio station in the public service announcements time slot. The best I have achieved was getting a TV crew to show up at one meeting which co-in sided with the anniversary of the end of WW II in 2005 which co-in sided with a attempt to move the 123rd Fighter Squadron out of Portland -- so the CO was at our meeting - hence the crew.
With people picking and choosing the web feeds that they get - and with so many sites in a local area - you really have to advertise on all of them also. Doing each one individually is really time-consuming hence the Google / Yahoo display ads and their advertising stream increase. Now to do this in order to sell a product is a full time job for multiple people. A small business cannot do this - no time - so they have to really contact out the work to advertising firms. With so many fragmented locations you have to advertise at to even get a reasonable amount of sales to cover the cost and get a profit is more of an art than a science.
To me, the "information revolution" is actually causing a loss of awareness of what is going on since people are now narrowing their information sources to many specific disparate sites, and methods of delivery, results in "getting the word" out to a wide audience is becoming impossible.
There are so many "information filters" built into the modern world people are becoming information islands - they know what exists in their own little area but are ignorant of what is happening elsewhere by the filters they put in place.
Think about it.

Thursday, November 02, 2006

Internet Gambling, Congress, and Casablanca

With much fanfare the United States Congress passed an internet gambling ban. The ban is really against transfer of MONEY by US banks and other financial institutions to any gambling firm - with exceptions for the states that run gambling operations, Indian gaming, and other "legal" gambling locations to allow you to use your credit card, check and other money transfer mechanisms in order to gamble.
 
This reminds me of that scene in "Casablanca" where the Police Chief comes into Rick's Cafe American and shouts out that he is shocked - shocked!- that gambling is going on there - then gets paid his cut from the winnings as he is shutting the place down.
 
This is what Congress effectively did by passing the law - shutting it down everywhere else except in those places it is getting its "cut" from the states and Indian reservations where it occurs.

And then Congress is baffled as to why people are so cynical and fed up with the whole current "democratic" process.