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The devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina was horrible. It was actually caused by a worthy adversary… a real storm. I have seen some of real devastation of Hurricane Rita, and I am in no way belittling the real, physical losses sustained in East Texas and Western Lousianna. BUT, a large percentage of the monetary loss and loss of life is a direct result of the unnecessary evacuations.

The ‘mandatory’ evacuations of cities and counties in all up and down the Texas Gulf Coast four days before landfall or even a halfway accurate projected landfall location has caused millions of dollars in lost business revenues, wages, wasted fuel costs and state and local infrastructure expenditures. The unwarranted mass evactuations from as far away as Corpus Christi, wasted hotel rooms that should have been available those that really might have been affected. For the sick and elderly who succumbed after fifteen hours of being stuck in a school bus with no a/c in the midday Texas heat, there is no excuse. What is that saying “Primum non nocere”, “First, do no harm”?

Too many people feel that we cried wolf on this one. If the next one happens anywhere near recent memory, NOBODY is listening.

***Note to Houston mayor
Before you decide to mandatorily evacuate two million people that aren’t in a flood plain, give the people that actually are in the storm surge warning more than an hour to get out of your way.

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Via AlterNet: Hold the Applause for Amazon.com

The “revolutionary” company lost billions of dollars — an average of $376 million annually during its first eight years — yet it kept enticing speculators to pump more money into the company’s stock. Amazon’s speculation-fueled growth contributed to the net loss of more than 2,000 independent book and music sellers during its first decade.

Unlike its independent competitors, Amazon operated in the casino economy of the stock market, not the world of market competition. Amazon accounts for only about seven percent of overall U.S. book sales, but in combination with the proliferation of book chains and mass discounters, its growth hurt independents substantially.

Investors traded paper profits with the real life profits of all the independants. Hey, I owned Amazon stock back in the day too.

The American Booksellers Association (ABA), the major trade group of independent bookstores, saw its membership sliced nearly in half during Amazon’s first decade (independents’ market share for new books has now stabilized, at about 10 percent). While Amazon operated a legitimized Ponzi scheme for years, it was and still is subsidized by federal law.

OK, that may be more than a little left leaning, but its an intersting thought, ‘legitimized Ponzi scheme’. I used to do those chain letter schemes when I was a kid (until I got a cease and desist from the Postmaster at age 13).

We should keep all this in mind when choosing where to purchase books — there’s a hidden cost to those discounts from Amazon. But we should be engaging as citizens, not just consumers, to maintain a rich diversity of choices and ensure our children have the opportunity to be entrepreneurs, not just wage workers for Corporate America.

Grain of salt true, but we could support our local booksellers more.

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How do you build inertia in marketing? The more people you can get behind an idea (positively if possible) the more the idea builds upon itself until it reaches a critical mass. Take BitTorrent from Bram Cohen. Started as a pet project he now lives off the donations from users. Not selling the software, DONATIONS.

The perceived value BitTorrent’s users have in the software is worth more than setting a price that a traditional software company would value their software at. Many won’t donate at all, many will donate what they feel is the minimum and still others will donate more than what a company would charge because of the ‘warm fuzzies’ (to use my high school coach’s favorite saying) they get from the software and the good will trust the author has placed in his user’s hands.

What’s one of the easiest ways to kill inertia? Fine Print. If you are trying to do something good for the consumer (ie. provide them with a quailty product and top-notch buying experience) why inundate them with pages of fine print? It kind of kills the ‘warm fuzzies’ doesn’t it?

Seth Godin posts in Tiny cuts some examples of how fine print and poor customer service can kill any marketing effort.

Fine print is everywhere I look. Fine print means that a lawyer has made sure that you probably won’t win a lawsuit, but is the lawsuit really the point?

When did marketers fall in love with the idea of overselling and then hiding, instead of doing precisely the opposite?

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What are ‘family values’? How can quality of life be accurately measured? Having just returned from a semi-extended trip, these thoughts run through me. I love America. Love doesn’t mean you don’t find faults and try to improve. Finding faults doesn’t mean you want a divorce either.

French Family Values - New York Times

For example, I’ve found that many people refuse to believe that Europe has anything to teach us about health care policy. After all, they say, how can Europeans be good at health care when their economies are such failures?

Now, there’s no reason a country can’t have both an excellent health care system and a troubled economy (or vice versa). But are European economies really doing that badly?

First things first: given all the bad-mouthing the French receive, you may be surprised that I describe their society as “productive.” Yet according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, productivity in France - G.D.P. per hour worked - is actually a bit higher than in the United States.

Crystal, my traveling companion was on her first major trip outside of the confines and relative security of the USA. More than one fight (of more than a couple total ) was started by my comments on life outside the US versus life here. For me, life outside the US tends to focus more on interpersonal relationships, family and pleasure for its own sake (good and bad). Life here (again, in my opinion) leans more towards career, money and success (in a myriad of forms). Here I feel the need to suceed. Everyday. While I’m away I can relax and leave some goals for tomorrow and just enjoy being. Not trying to be anything, just be-ing.

Some of those feelings may be predicated on the fact that abroad, most times, it is a vacation for me. Given my history of extended (lengthwise… 1 month, 6 months etc.) travels I believe I do have a clear perspective that its not all vacation. At some point even extended trips turn into everyday life. Gotta eat, pay the rent, take a bath, get a haircut. Email starts piling up, funds get low, I have my computer, I can always find a job to do locally or back here. Its good for sanity’s sake too, a little bit of normalcy when the exotic becomes mundane. [Its hard to remember you’re an average looking guy when you hear ’sexy man’ catcalls on the street in Bangkok a hundred times a day for weeks on end. A client screaming for the final build of a project has a way of bringing reality crashing in.] I have a unique job that I can work from anywhere at any time, I just need a box and a job to do. Seeing the world while I do it is my biggest reward.

Democracy is a blessing on the world.

A free market economy fuels productivity.

Balance is key.

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Found on AlterNet:
A World Without Bosses?

A handful of Northern California collectives take cues from an innovative Basque cooperative in Northern Spain.

Between the $17+/hr wages these owner/employees and their per-hour profit-sharing bonus’ these guys are making $30/hr for working in a pizza shop (that’s $60K/yr). Everyone makes the dough, everyone works the counter and everyone has a vote in business decisions.

From a comment below the piece:

For far too long have we enabled the elite class by providing our labor in return for far too little control and minisicule economic return. A prime example of this is pay ratios: in hierarchical corporation pay ratios can get as high as 200 to 1 (executives and owners get 200 times as much pay as the people near the bottom of their hierarchy) ; whereas worker cooperatives consciously limit their pay range to usually a maximum range of 6 to 1, and more typically 1 to 1 or 2 to 1.

Do we really want to work 60 hours a week to fatten someone else’s wallet so much more than our own?

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Interesting article on AlterNet:

An Idler’s Life

Life is too short to be only about working. Thousands of years of progress and the number of hours worked per month is starting to increase again. What did we do before the instant communication of email and mobile phones robbed us of our nights and weekends?

The article lists a book by Tom Hodgkinson, ‘How to Be Idle’. Its on order.

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