Month: May 2006

Problem solving

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Let’s say you’ve been keeping cats for a while, and you’ve been feeding them outside in the yard. Every time the bowl gets low, someone pours in more cat food.

One day you notice that you’ve been going through multiple bags of cat food per day. Then you look outside and notice that there are entirely too many stray cats in the yard. You’ve successfully deduced that the stray cats coming in your yard from all over the neighborhood are eating all of the extra cat food you’ve been buying. Now how do you solve this problem? Do you:

a) Keep putting cat food in the yard. Round up as many stray cats as you can find and drop them off next door. Repeat as necessary.

b) Keep putting cat food in the yard. Build a large wall around your property to keep the stray cats out.

c) Keep putting cat food in the yard. Patrol the perimeter of your property with a gun to keep the stray cats out.

d) Keep putting cat food in the yard. Adopt the stray cats that are currently in your yard, but this is it! After this you aren’t taking in any more, and that’s final. Repeat as necessary.

e) Stop putting cat food in the yard. Feed your cats and only your cats in a place where the strays can’t get access to the food.

Let’s say you go with (e).

Result? There’s fewer cats in the yard, and the ones that do show up aren’t eating any of your cat food. You’re buying significantly less cat food than before. There’s also a distinct shortage of mice on the premises. Life is good.

Of course if this decision is made by committee, especially if that committee features heavy representation from the ones that originally advocated adopting several cats and feeding them outside, this solution might meet with some resistance…

Barone 1 – The Personal

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“In most books, the I, or first person is omitted: in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were any body else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience.” Thoreau, Walden

I’ve been reading Michael Barone’s Hard America, Soft America. His subtitle is “Competition vs Coddling.” But he describes quite theoretical & profound differences in weltanschauung. Of course, most agree in some situations (say raising a child) coddling is in order and in others (say training for combat) it isn’t. Statist economics coddle; free markets compete; closed societies protect their people from ideas, open ones let the bad ones compete.

But Barone is also getting at a larger notion – to live is not merely to succeed but often to fail; what we do is often & actually (even if we pretend it is not) irrevocable; that our time is limited and we can not revise endlessly – not acting can mean a choice is lost. In short, Hard America sees consequences (sometimes unpleasant and sometimes even disproportionately bad) of our choices. This is a world where authority is earned by risking one’s own self, money, time, work, future. This is not the world of the hesitant Prufrock nor of modern social science nor of some tort legislation. It is not therapeutic; it doesn’t blink; it doesn’t give quarter nor expect it; in short, it isn’t soft.

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Good vs. Bad Online Advertising

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I couldn’t resist posting this unintentionally funny screen shot, but I don’t think there’s anything inherently bad about advertising, online or otherwise. Done well, it adds value for advertisers, publishers and readers alike. But it has to be done well if it is not to subtract value for the reader. (If it subtracts value for the advertiser or publisher it never gets published.) A lot of online advertising is still of the intrusive popup type, and pretending that it’s “context sensitive” because it’s linked to unrelated, vaguely related or overly general keywords doesn’t transform it into something valuable for readers. The best context-sensitive ads I’ve seen are in a hobby forum that serves its own ads and makes it easy for advertisers to select keywords that readers will find interesting enough to click on. Those are ads that you want to see if you are interested in the topic of a discussion. By contrast, the typical served-by-third-parties popup, like the one shown above, is nothing more than an irritant unless it happens to deliver a relevant message by chance.