The Chinese stole the design secrets to all — repeat, all — U.S. nuclear weapons, enabling them to leapfrog generations of technology development and put our nuclear arsenal, the country’s last line of defense, at risk. To this day, we don’t know quite when or how they did it, but we do know that Chinese intelligence operatives are still at work, systematically targeting not only America’s defense secrets but our industries’ valuable proprietary information.
We have a phrase at Acme tool company that I suppose they have at many companies: “It’s all about the customer.”
Since anyone can say “customer focused,” we better ought to have a look at what it really means. Imagine then that you are a potential customer of my company. As such, you might first hear Click Here to continue reading.
I don’t engage in extravagant dental care. I floss and brush daily and avoid eating too many sweets–this is the extent of the thought I typically give to my dental hygiene. I have read that you are supposed to replace your toothbrush with some regularity–every six months or year, if I remember right. But I […]
You know the guy has got to be good when he can do something that you know is hard and make it look easy. Not too many people have the skills to make a consistent product by hand the way this guy does. Most people would have to have depth guides and such.
The US index for new orders is at a sixty year low. Korea’s manufacturing output is shrinking faster than in the Asian crisis. China, Japan and Europe are all looking at manufacturing contractions too.
Over at Seeking Alpha, Edward Hugh has a collection of graphs showing the declining in manufacturing all over the world.
This can’t keep up for too long without serious problems.
G . . . F . . . E . . . D . . . C . . . E . . . A . . . G. The notes slide down the scale, clear and sharp, except where I flub it.
I’m learning the guitar. If you had asked me four, or maybe even […]
Elsewhere, I wrote about the three hundred and thirty-five year war(1). To fill in the opposite end of the spectrum, I now present to you the “Forty Minute War” otherwise known as the Anglo-Zanzibar War(2). It began something like this:
The Anglo-Zanzibar War was fought between the United Kingdom and Zanzibar on 27 August 1896. The […]
China has been in the news a lot recently for its poor health record. It is a sad fact that they are not the only country with this problem, and that this is not a new problem. Let me take you back to Bhopal, India in December 1984. According to the Wikipedia article(1):
The Bhopal disaster […]
Thirteen miles away (source)
A bit of grim history for you.
The world’s largest conventional explosion (that status a bit disputed) occurred on Thursday, December 6, 1917, when the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, was devastated by the huge detonation of a French cargo ship, fully loaded with wartime explosives, which accidentally collided with a Norwegian […]
In short, swoopo is about as close to pure, distilled evil in a business plan as I’ve ever seen. They get paid for everything up front, and as they drop ship everything there’s no inventory or overhead to worry about. It is almost brilliantly evil, in a sort of evil genius way. You can’t stop people from endowment effect fueled bidding when they have the individual chance, however small it may be, to win a $2,000 television for $80 — while collectively sending the house $10,000 or more.
Read the whole post to get the details of what Swoopo does. I have to say that I don’t understand what this guy is getting on his high horse for. Does he call casinos evil and get all outrage by them?
I would not call these people honorable businessman out to provide a needed service. But there are a lot of companies out there there who rip people off in worse ways. At least these people are up front about how everything works.
Still, I share his sneaking admiration for their brazen upfront manipulation of human psychology for their own profit. But I don’t think they will make money for long. If they don’t get shut down under some obscure hypocritical law (How can any state that has a lottery prosecute these guys with a straight face?) they are going to face a whole bunch of competition from other people looking to do the same thing. That will drive down profit margins in a big way. Why pay 75 cents for a bid when some other site will let you do it for a nickel or less?
I also think that greed got the better of them when they started offering cash auctions. That is just asking to be shut down. They would have been better off sticking solely with auctions that gave you an actual product. At least then they would a have a little bit of a fig leaf to hide behind when they got accused of being a gambling site by some regulator.