I stumbled on an ad for a restaurant survey. Tell Zagat what you think of local restaurants (or some such) and get a chance to win a tablet blah blah. Well, the odds I’d win the tablet we’re pretty low but I like sharing what I know and think, and I’ve got friends and family who are restaurant people. But, when I hit the survey, the short list of restaurants didn’t even include the three that immediately came to mind.
Zagat is a name I’ve heard before. I already know about the national chains and have an opinion but I want a way to find the unique local stuff. My impression was that Zagat is a place you’d go, say when you’re traveling, to find great local places.
So I thought “no problem,” I’ll just find the suggest link. Nope. No such thing to be found. I’ve spent some time around publishing and marketing and realized that Zagat probably sells (one way or another) appearances on their list. Want to get seen and reviewed? You probably have to pay. Which immediately drops their value in my eyes to close to zero.
A survey implies something very different: they’re actually looking to harness the knowledge that’s out there. And that’s a wise approach. It’s called the wisdom of the crowd and it’s been shown to be as smart or smarter than the experts. Wikipedia, according to studies, is just as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica, for instance. To make that work, you have to listen. If someone else (even a crowd) knows more than you, be ready for them to go in a direction you don’t expect and know things you don’t. If you’re asking people what things (like restaurants) are great, you should expect they’ll know about things (including restaurants) that you don’t. The crowd has a lot of knowledge and the crowd likes to show it off. Give them a way to do that.
And those restaurants that came immediately to mind? Well, when you’re in Colorado Springs, check out moZaic, The Margarita at Pine Creek and Jack Quinn’s Irish Pub. Some days, you won’t even get a table at moZaic. Other days, Jack Quinn’s is overflowing (they’re a favorite of local running and bicycling groups and nationally known). And Margarita… they’re a quiet little local secret. Even if Zagat thinks none of them exists. And a hint, any of them are better in their own than all but maybe one place on Zagat’s list for Colorado Springs.
Monthly Archives: May 2012
Is putting “0 to 60 in 2.3 seconds for a grand” in a title pandering?
I wrote this for my other blog and then realized it made at least as much sense over here. So I steal from myself.
Some weekend reads. And, yes “0 to 60…” is in here. Like a good pandering news show, that bit is all the way at the end.
Science vs. PR: “How a piece of journeyman work is turned into patently junk science… One of the major reasons that science is held in low repute among portions of the citizenry is that it has too often allowed itself to become entangled with public relations.” http://www.american.com/archive/2012/may/science-vs-pr
Web Design Manifesto 2012: “THANK YOU for the screen shot. I was actually already aware that the type on my site is big. I designed it that way…” http://www.zeldman.com/2012/05/18/web-design-manifesto-2012/
Enough: Or, why we should all be laughing hysterically in the magazine aisle: “…I remember an author saying once that he raised his children to be wary of consumerism by teaching them to laugh at commercials. Like, the whole family would sit around the TV together and bust out laughing when someone from LG asked, “Is it a washer? Or something better?” (It’s just a washer.) I’ve decided I like this idea, particularly as a woman, who most advertisers seem to take for a complete idiot.” http://rachelheldevans.com/enough
Old & New Project: Great, provocative images (just read the text before you assume). http://oldandnewproject.com/portfolio/balaams-donkey/ and http://oldandnewproject.com/study/domesticating-christs-cry/
Everyone’s A Curator, Everyone’s A Content Creator: “It used to be that we were all just consumers — or most of us were, anyway. We’d watch TV or read a book or listen to the music on the radio that was selected by others for us. But lately, there’s been an interesting shift in behavior…” http://paidcontent.org/2012/03/13/419-everyones-a-curator-everyones-a-content-creator/
2012 Audi Racing with Hybrids: Half of Audi’s stable for the this year’s FIA World Endurance Championship (including the storied 24 Hours of Le Mans) will be hybrids. http://www.motorauthority.com/news/1073543_2012-audi-r18-e-tron-quattro-hybrid-le-mans-prototype-debuts.
Electric BMW M3 entered In Pikes Peak Hillclimb… and more: I stumbled onto this laundry list of electric racing news. If you think electric car means a golf car or the slightly stodgy Chevy Volt, this is an eye opener. If you’ve got a thing for fast cars, the “Electric Sports Car that does 0-60 in 2.3 seconds” piece at the end has an absolutely trippy video: http://www.greencarreports.com/news/racing
Two weeks in the Netherlands: Pictures
I’ve create a flickr stream of images from our trip. Enjoy: http://www.flickr.com//photos/79815305@N07/sets/72157629717047826/show/
Policy: Military Spending
The political debate in this country is, essentially, one where neither side listens to the other. Which is very strange. The challenges are still the same and two heads are usually better than one in solving a problem. At it’s core, that’s why I started the blog PolicyThunk. Instead of approaching what we need to do from our standard partisan answers, what if we actually took a policy approach and started by understanding what’s so and then said what’s possible. And, if oh by the way, we can throw in the gravy of “here’s why it makes sense for the two extremes of debate” that’s great.
One of my yardsticks of whether I have something to say policy-wise is whether I can see how to see common ground with someone on the other end of the spectrum. One example: military spending. My Dad and I find ourselves in strange agreement: military spending can and should be cut. Funny thing is, the majority of Americans think that it should be cut by at least 83B dollars. That’s according to a new survey (and true both generally and within every standard category: Democrats, Republicans, each age group, etc., etc.)
We’ve agreed that the answer is to subtract a lot of money. But, like mice finding out the meaning of life is 42, now we need the question. In this case, what does the military need to look like for it to cost $85 Billion less?
In some sense, we already know what it needs to be doing. We can pull many of the scenarios out of a careful read of what the U.S. Military is currently dealing with.
Libya is a very different way to fight a war. Pragmatically, it’s not hard to like a war (nope, Mr. Johnson/Bush/Obama, it’s not a conflict or police action, it’s a war) like that. The United States did not have to lead, did not have to send in foot soldiers and did not have to make a long term commitment. In military terms, it was a tightly-focused mission that was clearly defined and achievable. In terms of cost, it was a drop in the bucket.
Part of the success was that the cost of the effort was not primarily ours. It was widely spread internationally. Even other middle eastern countries committed military forces. Perhaps in our increasingly multi-polar world, military force will be more one of focused and smart than stupid and expensive.
But, once you arrive there, you have to start asking what does that new, smaller military look like?
On one level, it looks in a small amount like Donald Romsfeld’s vision. In an era of drones and minimal boots on the ground, do we really need so many aircraft carriers or mainline (read going head-to-head with the Soviets in Europe) battle tanks?
Another recent example is the Somalia pirate situation. There the challenge isn’t the weaponry of the opponents: they’re using speed boats and AK-47s. Movie extras with tranquilizer guns can handle them. The challenge is the battlefield is hundreds of miles across. How do you even find the enemy? And how do you get to them before they capture their target? Do you go with more and smaller ships so somebody is always a short distance away? Wouldn’t you pair that with expanded use of drones?
I could go on from there –the use of computers as a weapon did not begin or end with the computer virus attack on the Iranian nuclear program– but just as the cold war ended (and militaries had to change), another era has ended and the military needs to change again.
But, at this level, military Policy starts with seeing what you’re actually doing and what you expect to be doing. The types of weapons needed are smaller, cheaper, less expensive to operate.
And the skills are radically different. Some positions are going to be de-skilled. The US military is quite conscious of the power of video games. They’re literally adopting video game controllers for control of military equipment like drones. Piloting a drone is a much lower skill position that piloting a fighter jet. At the other extreme, the era of cyber warfare does herald the rise of one new high expertise area in the military.
Another area that will change is what various support services look like. For instance, when far fewer soliders ever spend time in a combat zone (as opposed to jockeying a drone and fighting a cyber ware), the number of combat injuries are going to drop radically. On the other hand, we have no idea what weird conditions are going to develop with people who live in the suburbs, commute to work and then remotely kill people through what feels like a video game. It’s the first time that a significant number of people are warriors, killing people, while being separated and divorced from the results of their actions. Insert your favorite pop psychology and screen play for Rambo as an ex-drone jockey let behind when he snaps.
Clearly there are going to be big losers. Your congressional district is very likely to loose jobs at companies big and small. Your district may or may not get new jobs. But, if we’re honest about what we’ll be doing and how we need to do it, we can save that $83+ Billion dollars and have military that makes policy sense.
Mergers and Acqusitions
PolicyThunk.com and 4til7.com have merged. Here, you’ll (now) find poetry, fiction, art and thinking across a wide range of subjects. Many of the parts of the site outside of the Blog haven’t been updated in a while but new material is coming soon.
Two weeks in the Netherlands
We Americans live in something of an isolated country. For most of us, the next country over (usually Mexico or Canada) is days away by car. What we know of the Netherlands (or Holland) and the people who live there is, shall we say, limited to wooden shoes, windmills and tulips. I didn’t even know what those windmills were used for. I think I had some idea they had something to do with draining dikes and maybe some of them did. Most of the old ones are gone.
We did visit a windmill. It was actually used to grind wheat into flour. Well, still is. It’s not too far from where we stayed in Brielle and operated by volunteers. It was originally built around the 15th century but it’s been burned down and been rebuilt a number of times. Now the flour is sold in small bags to tourists. Ingrid is bringing back a couple of small packages of bread mix she bought there. And, interestingly, there’s one big difference between it and the picture we have of windmills: it’s a variety that’s mounted on a post. A very fat post. They can rotate the windmill so it faces into the wind. On other Dutch windmills, they only rotated the top of the windmill.
Then there are wooden shoes. Do they actually wear those funny shoes? Supposedly, yes, but I have yet to see a pair on someone’s feet. Although, a few days ago my daughter bought a pair of fuzzy pink faux wooden shoe slippers. It’s my understanding that in German, you don’t add all those extra words (e.g. fuzzy pink faux etc) to describe something. Instead, you combine the bits into one giant word. Ingrid got a little crosseyed when I suggested figuring out how to turn ‘fuzzy pink faux wooden shoe slippers’ into a German word.
Tulips actually tell you more about the Dutch than either wooden shoes or windmills. Tulips were a fixation in Holland many centuries ago. So much so that the price kept increasing. People thought, that’s a lot of money but I’ll be able to sell it for more later in the year. So they kept buying and the price kept increasing until the price passed ridiculous. And then the price kept increasing. I suspect the Dutch (or perhaps those in Paris in a foreshadowing of their need to ridicule us Americans) invented several new variants of ‘ridiculous’ to indicate just how ridiculous the latest ridiculous price was. Finally, the price became such that even a nation of completely obsessed tulip lovers decided they didn’t need those tulips quite so much. And, the tulip market collapsed. The Dutch had invented the bubble. And like the recent bubble in the United States, those still holding the tulips had no way to sell them and no way to pay back the money they had borrowed. Ye olde grande recession!
Ingrid’s Father perhaps doesn’t think of the tulip bubble when he says it, but he does say that the Dutch like to be first. It’s the world’s first Republic (yep… we got there later even in our government form does have its own unique firsts). To make it even stranger, the Dutch monarchy was added later. While the House of Orange was instrumental in the creation of the Netherlands in the 16th century, they didn’t become the ruling monarchy until centuries later.
Earlier in the week, they celebrated the Queen’s birthday. Although, it was technically the Queen’s mother’s birthday. The weather is much better this time of year than on her actual birthday (in the middle of winter when, I’m told, the canals actually do freeze and people take time off from work to skate). Although there were celebrations, it bears a strong resemblance to certain holidays in the U.S. with people more interested in being off from work, hanging out (beer or wine?) and shopping. But, there’s one key difference (besides orange being everywhere instead of the American red, white and blue): the shopping focus is garage sales. It’s the only day of the year where you can hold a garage sale without a permit. Well, and garages are almost non-existent so people spread blankets with their old and not so old items. Where we were it translated as the old cobble stone streets in the center of Brielle being covered with blanket. You don’t really drive through most of the center of Brielle under normal conditions. On the Queen’s birthday, it overflowed out of the core up to the neighboring docks. We ended up parking our bikes a quarter of mile down a dock from the bridge over the canal/dock and walking into town.
Another difference that was interesting is the way the Dutch have adapted to having so many people. The large cities of Rotterdam and Amsterdam were dense but not like New York City. The skylines are not dominated by skyscrapers And the public transportation works. We rode bikes around Brielle, took buses in and out of Rotterdam and subways (and our feet) while we were there. Which sounds like some mix of Colorado Springs and either New York or San Francisco. The real difference is how mixed things are. Ingrid’s parents live in a three story apartment. Across the street is a working farm. Around the corner are green houses and businesses (a car repair shop, a this, a that) with more farms mixed in. Much of the country is that way. In the States, there was talk of taking a similar approach with businesses mixed with homes and so on and so forth. To us Americans, it would seem strange to walk a block and see sheep (and smell cows) or bike two minutes to eat at a very good Pizzeria (think something much closer to a very nice Italian restaurant than a Pizza Hut) but it’s amazingly livable.