Kludge Discounts

When a managment decision favours speed to market (and therefore revenue) over superior implementation (and therefore lower long-term costs) are they generally:

1. failing to hear or understand that quicker may be more expensive in the long-run?
2. discounting future costs too heavily?
3. expecting future costs that are too low?
4. discounting their future costs correctly, and costs to others too heavily?
5. getting it right?

The correct discount rate within any company must vary depending on its health and funding, so the rate at which people discount too heavily must also vary. If the discount rate is very high, as it may be for a startup, for instance, then the decision that brings revenue quickly will be the right one.

Are there any other observable patterns in these decisions?

Recent Reading

Yeah, it’s been a while. You get what you pay for, right? And since it’s been so long, these reviews are streamlined.

Wrote To Them

After years of saying how great it and its predecessor are, I finally used WriteToThem yesterday for the first time. I wrote to my local MP, Simon Hughes, asking him to vote against the ridiculous Sound Recordings (Copyright Term Extension) Bill. Wish I’d done it ages ago. Now I might tackle him on his silly support for homeopathic hospitals.

Meme parent: BoingBoing, as usual.

Understanding Code

Every programmer should be able to understand and reason about a line of code in one of his^* working languages. It’s far more useful, though, to be able to understand and reason about blocks of code.

Territory

In the BBC’s report on Serbian protests over Kosovan independence, a girl by the name of Bojana Vuckovic is quoted as saying, “We don’t want to let it go because it’s ours, even if the majority of people there aren’t Serbian.” The ‘we’ of her statement is presumably Serbians. The majority of the people on the march would presumably agree to that statment or something similar.

What’s interesting is what ‘ours’ means in that sentence. I am no expert, but I guess that large parts of Kosovo are privately owned, and that neither the old Serbian nor the new Kosovan government would claim ownership of them. However, those governments would claim that their laws extend over that land. The ownership that Bojana is talking about is being in charge of, rather than having exclusive rights to.

So what I’m left thinking is that Bojana believes that, no matter who buys the land of Kosovo, Serbia must remain in charge. Even when Kosovo is 90% or more ethnic Albanian, Serbia must be in charge. I doubt that it’s cost-effective for Serbia to rule a land that doesn’t want to be ruled. So in the absence of an economic motive, why do some Serbs want so badly to be in charge of Kosovo?

Better Booze

Pretty much all of my male friends of my age like real ale and good wine. Pretty much all of them started out as indiscrimate pissheads. The switch from one to the other has two main steps in it, I think:

1. Having responsibilities – chiefly, having to be awake, sober and somewhere other than bed at nine in the morning.
2. Having more money – so beer with a premium of 30% or more (off the top of my head) doesn’t seem so unreasonable.

What I want to know is, in the absence of those two drivers, how many indiscriminate pissheads would become connoiseurs of wine and ale? Have we convinced ourselves that we like them because we know we can’t get slaughtered every night?

A counterexample would be a British male who had the opportunity to get plastered regularly on cheap booze, but who passed it up for restraint and more expensive drinks. I can think of no-one who falls into this category.

Wine Buffs Not Actually Very Discriminating

Pope a Catholic. Bears defecate in woodlands. People think wine is higher quality when it is simply more expensive.

I’m fairly ignorant when it comes to wine, which is not to say I don’t enjoy it. I’ve known for a while that I’m not really capable of telling good wine from average, although I’d like to think I could spot the bad. I think that I prefer red to white, like Shiraz and dislike Chardonnay, but I also think I’m probably just trying to fool myself.

I’ve a good mind to buy half a dozen bottles and try a double-blind test. Anyone fancy some experimentation, strictly in the name of science?

Resolution Review – One Month

So far so good. The crush at the gym has lasted longer than I thought, so I guess I had underestimated the staying power of some of the new faces. Taken in the original order:

• My weight is down again. The calorie counting, gym trips and swimming are gradually working. The only problems have been when eating out, or snacking after drinking.
• The blogging is ongoing, as you can see here or at my Oracle blog. I’ve remembered now something I had previously forgotten: writing a well-researched, clear article is difficult and time-consuming.
• Getting up early is now pretty much habit. I sometimes have to remind myself to do something other with the time than read Bloglines!
• I’ve cut back on the booze. It’s particularly important when you’re also trying to count calories. Only two exceptions to the six-unit rule so far, despite being tempted a few times.
• The Spanish is going fairly well, but would be going better if I actually made an effort outside of the class.
• Budgeting needs more attention.

If it wasn’t for one epic fail of a weekend, I’d have done almost perfectly on the first four points. Good weekend though! So the only two that need serious work are the last two. Let’s see how I do in February.

Life Quickly Imitates Art, Even Sci-Fi

Charles Stross is now one of my two favourite currently publishing SF authors (the other is Iain M. Banks). I got a copy of his latest, Halting State, from Amazon a couple of days ago. I haven’t finished it yet, but so far it’s about economic sabotage in an MMORPG, set in 2016.

Like another modern Aristotle of SF, Neal Stephenson, Charles Stross seems to understand everything, including economics. More importantly, he understands why it’s important (something I only started to grasp a couple of years ago) and can explain it without killing the story. So Halting State spends some of its time discussing money supply and inflation within virtual worlds. So far ahead of the curve, so Charles Stross, I think.

Last night I picked up this week’s Economist, to find mention in the business headlines of Second Life’s financial crisis. Halting State’s characters refer to Second Life as a metaverse, not a MMORPG, but I still find this amazing. Theoretical GDPs and game-currency-to-hard-currency exchange rates have been published for a while now, but maybe the crossover from amusing sideline to area of serious interest is closer than even Charles Stross thinks.

Sex, Lies, and Money

I’ve never tried placing an advert on Facebook, but I’ve been told that FB offers excellent targetting. Apparently it’s possible to require that your ad only be shown to people who fit very narrow definitions, such as people who went to Imperial College and are under 25, or married women living in Cambridge.

Obviously, no amount of matching values from profiles will tell an advertiser exactly who will buy their stuff, but they will want to play the odds. It’s generally a waste of money to advertise a UK service to someone living in France, or to advertise books to someone who hasn’t filled in the “Favourite Books” field. On the other hand, travel, financial products and cosmetic surgery can be usefully adertised to both sexes, so you wouldn’t want to filter out some of that potential audience.

Now, if advertisers know their desired audience, and have tracked their previous successes and failures, they will have a good idea of which fields in my personal information are important and which are not. They probably have hard evidence to back this up.

The second and subsequent lines of my Facebook profile are:

Sex:	Male
Interested In:	Women
Relationship Status:	Single

These three bits of info are the truth and the whole (relevant) truth. Facebook advertisers seem to be very interested in them, judging by the ads that are normally shown to me – I guess about a third are dating-related.

So I was a little surprised, initially, to see an ad earlier for www.urbanconnections.co.uk, a gay dating/event site. Didn’t they see that I am “Interested In” women, and not men? A couple of seconds later I clicked that they probably don’t care what I put in “Interested In” – they presumably figure that there are enough men out there in the closet that it’s worth advertising to the apparently straight men as well as the openly gay. And they quite possibly have the statistics to back this up.

I wonder what else you could find out about society by examining Facebook advertising patterns, maybe using multiple fake accounts. Other people have been datamining it recently as well, although not using any advertising-related data. My hope with advertisers’ choices is that at least some of them would be gathering real evidence of what worked, rather than just guessing.