I didn’t have anything on my mind, and then I saw this posted by a friend:
I’m in favor of government running things where profit maximization should not be the goal – defense, infrastructure, education, and healthcare. To those who disagree, I ask:
Why would you want to put $600 billion into shareholders’ pockets at the expense of improving the nation’s overall health and productivity (which can only help GDP)?
Why don’t you want to move away from a system with 30% overhead (which doesn’t improve health in any way) to one with 3% overhead?
By reducing administrative overhead and eliminating profits for the payers from the equation, we can then pay doctors more for their services than they currently get from Medicare and Medicaid while likely reducing overall costs of healthcare for people and businesses alike. I don’t understand (and would like to know) why someone would disagree with this model (unless of course that person was a financial beneficiary of the current one at the expense of millions of Americans’ well-being).
Generally, I tend to lean toward social liberalism and economic conservatism — basically, the government should provide services where profits should be irrelevant (like defense, infrastructure, healthcare, or education), but should do so appropriately within a balanced budget. I also like the idea of citizens paying a reasonable overall cost (taxes + private fees) for these services and getting some actual value for them.
What does that mean in this political climate? It means that I support what the president has said so far and am waiting for the results of his plans (frankly, it’s too soon to tell). It means that I’m leery of Congress, who can’t seem to get over themselves and their special interests and get something done to benefit their constituents. For instance, the stimulus package and the budget process both irritate me — at what point will they actually change from the quid pro quo style of bill-writing that causes so much of the bloat and deficits in the first place? I know – the president spearheads some of these initiatives and signs off at the end, but the devil’s in the details where Congress does the writing.
What I don’t understand is how intense the hate has become. The Obama administration has been in place for fewer than five months — have they had time to earn the invective already? I didn’t like GWB when he was elected, but what he had done in his first five months wouldn’t have warranted the reaction Obama gets. The Sotomayor nomination alone has brought racism out of the woodwork, while seemingly 0.0000001% of the discussion of her nomination has anything to do with her legal credentials or published judicial history. I understand if someone doesn’t like her decisions or even things she says in public, but why the leap to racist slurs (albeit bafflingly confused slurs)?
National Review - Sotomayor
Ultimately, I don’t think most Americans have this hatred in them without lots of outside nudging and prodding. It makes me wonder what would happen if the haters (not to be necessarily confused with committed) on both sides were silenced for a while and allowed people to debate again. Maybe we’d let the best ideas (not the loudest shouters) win.
At this point, I’m pretty sure that I live in the best city (for me) in the United States – Chicago. It has the right blend of food, music, culture, business, and attitude. Plus, the winter weather doesn’t make me want to run screaming most of the time. But the city I always want to go back to is London. In addition to making dedicated trips, we make a point of stopping there any time we travel to Europe for a day or so just to enjoy and relax.
The last time I was in London was about a month ago, for a night and a day. We found out early that our flight would be delayed leaving London for home, so we had a few more hours to spend there before getting on the Tube for Heathrow. After stopping off in a pub near our Russell Square hotel for some food and something to drink, we headed down Tottenham Court Road (which turns into Charing Cross), down Shaftesbury, and across to Leicester Square to check out the half-price theater options. The square has at least three such ticket brokers as well as two movie theaters and many imprints of the hands of movie stars. We got our tickets, had another quick drink, and headed to the show.
The next morning, we were greeted by the rain. I think part of my enjoyment in London is that although the weather isn’t good, it is better than Chicago’s (especially in winter). After a good breakfast in the hotel, we headed out toward Oxford Street, stopping off in various Caffe Nero locations to get an espresso and warm up for the next leg. The first location we stopped in was next to a Starbucks – the Starbucks was empty, while Nero was going strong for a Sunday morning. We walked down Oxford, doing some window shopping, till we got to Marble Arch. We then wandered across Hyde Park, watching some pick-up soccer as we went, over to Knightsbridge. Lunch at Wagamama (which really should be brought to Chicago) preceded some wandering around, both on the street and in Harrod’s. Finally, we headed back to the hotel, picked up our bags, and went to the airport.
I recognize that nothing I’ve written above is extraordinary or game-changing. London just feels both comfortable and exciting to me, a mix of old and new. Even though we’ve been there many times, there’s still more to check out — for us, the East End is still an unknown. Also, I found a whole street of guitar stores just off Charing Cross in Soho. We’ll have to check them out next time.
Normally, I don’t talk much about work — I like to keep my personal and professional worlds as separate as I reasonably can. This past month or so, though, it’s been all professional all the time. But unlike in recent years, my time has been spent truly building something, not just trying to keep the lights on. This is a chance to take much of what I’ve learned over the past several years — techniques, best practices — and put it into practice for customers across industries and sizes.
George Reese of enStratus (who makes some interesting tools for cloud infrastructure management) posted a somewhat surprising position on auto-scaling resources in the cloud. I have to admit that I’ve generally found the idea of the auto-magically expanding and contracting cloud to be very appealing, especially now that IT budgets are tightening. I hadn’t honestly thought about the possibilities for a DDoS attack and its impact on both the cloud infrastructure and the clients’ costs as the cloud expands beyond any reasonable maximum. Reese’s article brings this concern to light and emphasizes the importance of continuing to pursue capacity planning, even in the cloud.
As I think about it more, I agree that IT should develop a pre-defined configuration and take advantage of the auto-magic within the bounds of that configuration. Such an approach will benefit the business by engendering confidence in IT’s capabilities for capacity management and by ultimately reducing costs for the repetitive tasks that dynamic capacity changes can provide.
I was fortunate to go to Alinea in January 2007; this was before people found out about Grant Achatz’s cancer. He was on this week’s Top Chef and had this to say on the web site:
My health is great. I am one year out of treatment and still in remission. The past year has been an amazing learning experience for me in terms of the way taste works. It has certainly made me a better chef. I now have the most intimate knowledge of flavor, and am able to process it in a more intellectual way than before.
Grant is the most inventive chef in America right now, and (I think) stands with Ferran Adria and Heston Blumenthal on the world stage. The entry fee for the Alinea experience is very high, but worth every penny.
With the election done, the news has turned into a large-scale version of “Inside Edition” when covering the Obama transition, particularly when getting a sandwich makes the news. I’ve been spending more time looking at how the overall economic situation is affecting business decisions around budgets for the next 12-18 months.
The key here is “examining”. SaaS is not a cure-all anymore than other technologies with funny acronyms (SAN, NAS, iSCSI). The questions leaders need to ask include:
What do I really need from this service? If you can’t answer this question, there are larger problems than SaaS vs. in-house. Too much technology is purchased and deployed without a solid understanding of what is really necessary. In these times, people should consider whether the cool and expensive features of any product are really necessary and worth the extra expense.
What are my requirements for data integrity, management, and protection? The discussion really needs to shift in this direction. For instance, many companies are now using Microsoft Outlook/Exchange in a SaaS model (at this point, even Microsoft is offering this as an option for companies that can’t afford the software). But remember, that data (i.e. all those messages, meetings, and contacts) is all outside your datacenter and outside your direct control. Before placing your data with another party, it is imperative that you create a contract that ensures your compliance with any external regulation or internal policies.
What are my requirements for security against malicious attack? All applications and services need to be considered in a context where new vulnerabilities and exploits are identified every day. Regardless of where your service is hosted, you need to know about the security parameters and how your company is being protected.
Does it add value for my company to have my highly-skilled IT team manage this service? To use Outlook/Exchange again, the service is already very expensive to buy and maintain, unless your organization is very large. At the same time, service providers are making it cheaper every day to compete for your business. On the other hand, an application may require hands-on, in-house management because of the complexity or customization of the application to your company’s requirements. As IT teams are challenged to do more with less, it’s important to make sure that their time is spent on activities that (as much as possible) help company profitability.
IT teams will continue to be needed — experienced technologists can lead to true points of differentiation for your business. In fact, IT can be crucial to examining SaaS options alongside more traditional offerings by helping to ask the questions above and advising you on whether the answers are satisfactory to your requirements. The resulting outcome will likely be the most appropriate for the entire organization.
I already posted President-elect Obama’s speech in Chicago, but I also want to point out Senator McCain’s concession speech. For the first time in a long time, the man respected by many across the political spectrum reappeared to be gracious and eloquent. I’ve heard that in stressful times (such as a presidential campaign), people become more themselves. I hope this isn’t true for McCain and that the man who gave this speech is the real thing.
Taking a break from politics (now that the election is finally over after 200 years), the WSJ BizTech blog has an interesting (to me, at least) post on delaying the PC lifecycle:
I’ve been through this a number of times in the last 10 years, and short-term cost cutting always wins. In a way, it makes some sense if the timing is right (for instance, when it’s year-end and delaying the purchase by a month or two can improve the balance sheet). But delaying by a year or more becomes expensive, particularly when those computers are used by non-salaried employees or when deadlines are affected by slow computing resources. Unfortunately, it’s harder to quantify the money lost by workers twiddling their thumbs than the fixed purchase of computers, so cost cutting wins.
Companies are even more likely to not buy computers (and other assets) because of the declining economy. But this is the exact time to buy! Computer vendors are going to be desperate to sell anything, and prices are better than ever. Also, computers are assets and should be depreciated over at least three years, so the hit to the balance sheet is low. The hard part for managers will be to overcome the natural hesitation in a recession to stop doing anything when doing nothing just feeds the downward spiral.
All right, I’m done being a computer (and business) geek for the moment.
