Entrepreneurship

Foreign Export

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(There have been a lot of posts here lately concerning some serious subjects, such as the pending US election or the Russian invasion of Georgia. I thought we could use some lighter fare.)

It must have been twenty years since I first heard about it. A wife would wonder if her husband was cheating on her, but hiring a detective agency to follow him around can cost a great deal of money. What happens if he is in between affairs? It could be years before he strays again.

So a few detective agencies here in the United States employed attractive young women who would carefully strike up a seemingly chance friendship with the suspected husband. The idea was to never actually suggest anything illicit, but to see if the subject of the investigation would pursue this particular honey pot. If he mentioned right off that he was married and wanted to talk about his family in a positive way, then the investigation would end. If he suggested a weekend getaway with his attractive new buddy, then that would also mean the end of the caper.

The idea here is to see if the husband was wise in the ways of philandery. If he knew what he was doing and moved in for the kill, then at least the wife would know that he was unhappy with the marriage enough to stray when opportunity came a’knockin’.

Is this still something that happens now, or was it a minor fad that ran its course decades ago? I have no idea, but I am having trouble finding any mention of this sort of thing online. Even if there are still detective agencies that offer this service, it must be a very narrow niche market that isn’t very well known.

Our fellow Chicago Boy Steven has written a post concerning a similar service that is available in Japan. They have certainly put their own cultural stamp on things. For one thing, the female lure seems to be willing to allow things to get physical in order to get the goods on the target. For another, the agencies also offer similar services, this time employing a male lure, for husbands that want to dig up some dirt on their wives. They even offer to conduct some rather elaborate operations to manipulate lost loves into giving a client a second chance.


Go ahead and read the newspaper article which discusses the practice. Seems like an awful lot of money is being spent in Japan by people who need help in ordering their love lives.

I can see why this sort of thing isn’t very popular over here in the States. It rarely makes a difference during a divorce if one of the spouses is sleeping around, so there isn’t a financial reason to find out for sure. A divorce can also be sought by either party without the other granting consent, while in Japan it seems that infidelity is grounds for an annulment whether or not everyone agrees.

The sting operations described in the article are pretty elaborate, real James Bond kind of stuff. There really isn’t any financial motive to seek out services like that here in the US, but I can see why it would be worth the expense to someone who lives in a culture that will take such evidence into account when the family assets are carved up by the divorce judge. The article makes it clear that there are a variety of detective agencies that offer these services, and some of them are flush enough to maintain fleets of expensive cars to be used in the sting operations. That doesn’t happen unless a lot of people are willing to spend a lot of money for your services.

It also seems to me that the rigid social structure in Japan creates an almost unique environment for companies that offer these services. People make a big deal about how individuals will go to great lengths to try and avoid shame in that country, but they rarely mention that it also effects the bottom line. In Western societies, it is generally accepted that having trouble in your personal life usually doesn’t have anything to do with your performance or fitness in business. It seems to me that this doesn’t apply in Japan, where even the appearance of impropriety can damage your career prospects.

Stories like these, where people can be manipulated so easily if they are born into a shame based culture, makes me appreciate my own even more. Sure there are problems with a society that is individual-centric, but I think that it is still better than the alternative.

(Hat tip to The Volokh Conspiracy, who first brought the article to Steven’s attention.)

The Return of Commercial Sail?

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In a post on Ships and the Global Economy, I mentioned a sail-assist technology which has been develope by a German company. Operating something like a kite, the SkySails system is said to be capable of lowering vessel fuel costs by 10-35%.

Comes now Compagnie de Transport Maritime à la Voile which has entered the cargo transportation business with a pure-sail approach. The 106-year-old Kathleen & May will be running wine from Bordeaux to Dublin. CMTV has chartered several additional sailing ships and will be using them to ship products such as coffee and jam. The company also intends to have new vessels built to its specifications.

Here’s CMTV’s website. Note that shippers get a “logo sticker” that they can attach to their products, certifying that “goods are transferred to consumers in a clean and socially responsible way that contributes to sustainable development, without neglecting the requirement to exchange necessary goods between people.”

I doubt if pure sail will ever recapture a significant portion of the world ocean transportation industry, but it may well thrive in some niche markets, serving people who want to buy products which are defined as “green” or “sustainable” and who may also enjoy the association with the romance of sail.

Sail-assist technologies for powered vessels, on the other hand, may have a significant role to play, particularly if oil prices continue to climb and if environmental restrictions mandate the replacement of bunker fuel with the more-expensive distillates.

Here’s a report on the test on the SkySails system on the multipurpose cargo ship Michael A. Note the interesting comparison of the tractive force from the sail with the thrust from an Airbus A318 turbine engine.

CMTV item via Checks with Chart.

The right to a job

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There has been a certain amount of fuss recently over the case of the sued hairdresser. The story is readily available in the MSM so I shall sum it up very quickly indeed. Ms Sarah Desrosiers runs a hairdressing salon in King’s Cross, North London, which specializes, as she puts it, in “funky urban hairstyles”. I am not sure I know what it means but whatever it is the business has been successful. As it happens I know two young women whose hair is always beautifully cut, who had followed Ms Desrosiers when she left the big salon she had worked for and set up her own business.

In other words, we are talking about a talented, hard-working, entrepreneurial young woman of the kind this country needs many more of. Whether we are going to have them after this particular episode remains questionable.

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Quote of the Day

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Americans have had it so good, for so long, that they seem to have forgotten what government’s heavy hand does to living standards and economic growth. But the same technological innovation that is causing all this dislocation and anxiety has also created an information network that is as near to real-time as the world has ever experienced.
 
For example, President Bush put steel tariffs in place in March 2002. Less than two years later, in December 2003, he rescinded them. This is something most politicians don’t do. But because the tariffs caused such a sharp rise in the price of steel, small and mid-size businesses complained loudly. The unintended consequences became visible to most Americans very quickly.
 
Decades ago the feedback mechanism was slow. The unintended consequences of the New Deal took too long to show up in the economy. As a result, by the time the pain was publicized, the connection to misguided government policy could not be made. Today, in the midst of Internet Time, this is no longer a problem. So, despite protestations from staff at the White House, most people understand that food riots in foreign lands and higher prices at U.S. grocery stores are linked to ethanol subsidies in the U.S., which have sent shock waves through the global system.
 
This is the good news. Policy mistakes will be ferreted out very quickly. As a result, any politician who attempts to change things will be blamed for the unintended consequences right away.
 
Both Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama view the world from a legislative perspective. Like the populists before them, they seem to believe that government can fix problems in the economy. They seem to believe that what the world needs is a change in the way government attacks problems and fixes the anxiety of voters. This command-and-control approach, however, forces a misallocation of resources. And in Internet Time this will become visible in almost real-time, creating real political pain for the new president.
 
In contrast to what some people seem to believe, having the government take over the health-care system is not change. It’s just a culmination of previous moves by government. And the areas with the worst problems today are areas that have the most government interference education, health care and energy.
 
The best course of action is to allow a free-market economy to reallocate resources to the place of highest returns. In the midst of all the natural change, the last thing the U.S. economy needs is more government involvement, whether it’s called change or not.

–Brian Wesbury

Random Thought

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Why is it that software developers, in the GUIs of common software, particularly blogging tools, put rarely used and dangerous functions (“Delete this [post/database/blog]”) immediately next to frequently used functions (“Save this [post/database/whatever]”)? This is stupid, yet one sees it not infrequently, and not only in version 1.0.

Not-so early versions of Movable Type actually had a “delete this blog” button. What was the purpose of such a function? Was it to let you destroy the evidence if the blog police were at your door? I don’t get it. It’s easy enough to delete your blog inadvertently using an FTP program; the developers shouldn’t do anything to make inadvertent deletion even easier. I always edited the MT scripts to remove that stupid button and the function it triggered.

WordPress, supposedly the latest and greatest, has a “Delete post” link next to the “Save” and “Publish” buttons. Why couldn’t they put the delete button somewhere else — say, at the bottom of the page? For every post that I’ve deleted intentionally I have come close to deleting several more posts accidentally, merely because the delete link is in a dumb place. For all of its brilliance, WordPress has the feel of a vanity project managed by a few clever developers who ignore the marketing guy who suggests that maybe it’s not such a great idea to put the delete button next to the save button.

But of course there is no marketing guy, because WordPress is an open-source project managed by a few clever developers. Maybe that’s the problem. If WP were being sold for real money, the developers might have no choice but to put more care into GUI design. And they might be able to afford to hire specialists to do it. But since it’s open-source, and users are members of a “community” rather than paying customers, what’s the incentive to spiff up the GUI? OTOH, given the competition from other (free) blogging packages, it might not be possible to sell WP.

It’s interesting that some basic GUI issues are not given much weight in the race to add software features. I don’t know if there’s a remedy for this situation.