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  Thursday, July 31, 2003


Poindexter to Resign Following Terrorist Futures Debacle. The Pentagon official who oversaw a plan for a terrorist futures-trading market is resigning under pressure, a senior defense official said today. By Eric Schmitt. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]

My question is, why wasn't he fired?


8:00:36 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

For Snopes.com, Debunking The Bambi Hoax Was All In A Day's Work.  [Techdirt]

Here's the key line from the summary: "if they want to believe something, they ignore all the signs that it's a hoax." That's it in a nutshell, the reason Internet rumors and hoaxes and stories keep recurring: people want to believe that Nieman-Marcus would charge $200 for a cookie recipe, that the British business-card kid still needs that brain tumor removed, or that grown men would pay $10,000 to chase down naked women with paintballs. And if someone wants to believe it that badly, it's true to them. No sense wasting time convincing them otherwise, all the facts in the world won't disabuse them of their belief. I know, I used to be married to someone like that.


7:58:14 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

Outsourcing of high-tech jobs to other countries--"offshoring" in the jargon--has been much in the news lately. Which probably means it's too late to stop it. Silicon Valley's lost something like 200,000 jobs since the height of dot-com mania, and many of those jobs are never coming back--they're going to India and Taiwan and Singapore and other countries where wages are low and an educated population is ready to work. It's strictly a cost-cutting move by decision-makers at the C-level. But what's to be done?

A group of writers, managers, and interested parties from the National Writers Union (NWU) and STC met last week in Silicon Valley to discuss the situation and our options. See organizer Andreas Ramos' page and summary for some thoughts and links to several of the recent articles.

From where I stand (or sit), it appears that the jobs in greatest jeopardy are the commodity writing jobs, the font-fondling copy-paste jobs. The jobs with the greatest chance of staying here and earning decent money will be the information designing/information architecting/strategically contributing jobs. Between educating STC members to move into the higher value jobs and educating C-level execs of the value we can bring to their products, we have our work cut out for us. Stand by for more on this topic.


7:41:11 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

Beth links me linking BoingBoing about the economics of free Wi-Fi vs. charging for it. Which reminds me of Mark Hurst's rant about the Palace Hotel's pricing of phone calls. It's a great example of the accountants overriding customer service and user experience. I understand charging something, lest customers clog the phone lines all day and night, but sheesh, business customers need to make phone calls. And they'll speak better of your hotel to their friends and customers. Same with Wi-Fi--give it away, you'll get more customers.


7:22:13 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

"Never fight an inanimate object.

 P. J. O'Rourke. " [Quotes of the Day]

So, um, are computers inanimate objects? Some seem pretty "animate" to me. Like the server that's undergoing "unplanned maintenance" at STC Silicon Valley's ISP today. There's nothing I can do, so I won't fight it. Yet.


11:12:28 AM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []


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