Category Archives: rants

Another Article from the Land of D’oh – Jobs and Traffic Jams are Linked

A recent article over on the NYT blogs pointed out the stubborn link between jobs and traffic jams and noted that when the average national unemployment rate reached its lowest point (of 4.6% in 2006), the hours that commuters spent in traffic were 13% less than when the average national unemployment rate was close to its highest point (of 9.3% in 2009).

Why wouldn’t this make sense? The more people working, the more people trying to get to the same business centres at about the same time. The more cars trying to get through the same choke points in traffic flows, the slower traffic is going to go. As long as the personal vehicle is primary mode of transportation, obviously there’s going to be a big connection between employment rate and traffic jams. You don’t need a study to confirm this. Just some common sense (and, if you want to verify your common sense, a mathematical model).

Reader Education? What Was I Thinking?

I’m so naive! I thought that if I brought value to my readers each and every day, I could make a difference and build a profitable business at the same time. I thought as long as I avoided mastering the art of saying nothing and stayed off the Analyst 2.0 path, things would work out. How wrong was I?!

Forget education! The real key to financial success is stupidity and bad grammar! Cheezburger, the publisher behind LOLcats and FAIL Blog, just raised 30 Million. That’s right! 30 Million to publish pictures of cats who can’t spell and dumb failures. 

I guess SI should have jumped on the Purchasing 0.3 Bandwagon when it had the chance! Whomever succeeds the now defunct Purchasing is obviously poised for fame, glory, and riches. (And the battle is already raging …)

Want Money For Nothing?

Then take a lesson from these faggots* at the CBSC (Canadian Broadcast Standards Council) and censor classic songs from radio airplay because some prick*2 complained about the use of a word which has taken on an additional meaning in modern times.

For those of you who don’t follow global news, I’m referring to the recent decision by the CBSC to censor Dire Straits‘ classic Money for Nothing because one person in the backwoods of Newfoundland (amidst the Rocks and Trees) complained because it used the word “faggot”, which, in England, even today, is still used to refer to a bundle (of twigs, iron, or chopped meat), a junior who performs duties for a senior, and a guy (who may or may not be homosexual) who is just creepy. In the Dire Straits classic, while it is obviously being used in a derogatory manner to describe someone who has reached a station of life that he obviously does not deserve in the eyes of the song’s protagonist, it’s obvious that the contempt from which the comment springs from the song’s protagonist is non-sexual in nature and the definition (of the many that have been applied to the word since its inception almost 800 years ago) is more along the lines of “a guy who is a creep*3“. As such, there is no grounds for complaint and no grounds for censorship.

As far as I’m concerned, this decision is just disgusting. Not only was the song written well before the creation of the CBSC, but it was written before the creation of the CAB (Canadian Association of Broadcasters), which was the precursor organization. In my view, this should make the song ineligible for censorship. And even if it wasn’t, whatever happened to literary license and this thing called free speech?

While we’re at it, should we rewrite Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” which is an American classic that won the Pulitzer Prize in the year of its publication (1960) for its rather realistic portrayal of what life was like in the 1930’s in Alabama small towns? After all, from a modern perspective, the language in that book is much more offensive than Dire Straits’ use of the word “faggot” in Money for Nothing. Consider this line from Chapter 9: “My folks said your daddy was a disgrace an’ that nigger oughta hang from the water-tank!” Said with intent, it might even cross the line into hate speech, but that wasn’t the intent of the author who wanted people to understand what life was like in the 1930s.

In the same light, when Mark Knopfler use the word faggot, he was attempting to describe how hard-working labourers saw music stars at the beginning of the MTV generation. You played a few riffs, sang a few songs, and made a million dollars. They broke their backs and barely paid the bills.

Let’s not forget that a song is a story, and stories are not hate speech. They are artistic forms of communication meant to broaden our understanding of the world around us and the people in it. And if you don’t understand that, then a faggot*4 has more smarts than you do.

Have a nice day.
(And support Halifax’s own Q104 in their protest! F*ck you*5 CBSC. I hope you get one million complaints.)
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* where this blog is using the classic, now obsolete, meaning of the word faggot which was once used to refer to a “man hired into military service simply to fill out the ranks at muster” because I can’t believe they were hired on suitability for the job at this point

*2 where this blog is using the slang definition of the word which means “an obnoxious or contemptible person” because only a truly contemptuous person would complain about the use of a word completely out of context and insist that free speech be censored when no slur was made or intended

*3 note that the slang definition of creep is “an obnoxious person” and not “pervert” as some people seem to think it is these days

*4 in this case, the blog is using the other classic meaning of the word faggot, which is “a bundle of twigs”

*5 and I mean that in the most common utilization of the phrase in modern times

Ariba Redefines What?

I usually don’t make a point of promoting vendor blogs, or posts therefrom, as those posts are usually designed to promote the vendor that owns the blog (and, to be honest, the post I’m about to reference does promote the vendor’s solution to a limited extent), but this post over on Coupa Cabana (the Coupa blog) on how “Ariba Redefines What?” is totally awesome.

If you follow the press-releases (which, I must admit, I try not to as most of them are just steaming piles of marketing and PR BS, regardless of which vendor they come from), you’ll see that Ariba has recently announced that it has redefined enterprise software. (And if your first thought upon reading that isn’t Get Real! How stupid do you think I am?, then you need to read more of Sourcing Innovation’s rants, particularly my recent rant on the cloud. Or, if you don’t have time, just listen to Larry .) Puh-leaze!

If I knew where the Sourcing Maniacs were right now (as they have been missing in action for a year … they said they were going to visit their European Neighbors, and I haven’t heard from them since), I would have asked them to have their way with this announcement as Ariba is just asking for it with this one.

But, fortunately, Noah found it and he did a dissection that would make even Wacko proud. Ariba Redfines What? is a piece that truly put[s] it up to eleven.

Think!

Atlantic Business recently ran an awesome article that got my attention on the first word and reeled me in with the first sentence. Entitled “Think!”, the author starts off by noting that he

worries [that] we seem to have forgotten or dismissed the value of careful and considered thought. Common sense seems to be in very short supply. Examples of this are everywhere. We send an email, one which is important (at least to the sender) and we expect a reply virtually instantly. Indeed, if one is not forthcoming within 15 minutes we begin to wonder if the recipient has died.

But more importantly, you have to:

think about this: assume that the question being asked is important. We must therefore want a careful and considered response, a response which has had the complete attention of the recipient. Is it reasonable to assume this could possibly have occurred within 15 minutes?

I have to agree. There’s no way you can construct a deep and thoughtful response to an important question in 15 minutes. Even if you have been thinking about the question for days, it still won’t be possible to create a well crafted response in a few minutes — especially if something else is on your mind. But yet, if the call isn’t returned promptly, you fear that the caller is unable to focus on anything else.

Similarly, it seems that if a journalist, or blogger, doesn’t cover a “breaking” story the minute it happens, he feels that he’ll miss the boat. It used to be a company would make a big announcement and the next day it would be a headline. Now, the release goes up on the website, and 5 minutes later there are half a dozen stories about the latest funding round, merger, or acquisition followed by additional thoughts a few hours later — all based on the release or some cookie cutter responses from PR people in an advance call.

How much “analysis” can one truly come up with in in a few minutes? What can you possibly say that goes beyond a seat-of-the-pants reaction or a gut feeling? If you’re a true expert in the space, then the chances that your seat-of-the-pants reaction or gut feeling will be accurate will be (much) greater than 50%, but it’s still just a gut feeling. True analysis takes time and thought. And even if it doesn’t change your viewpoint, I know I’d much rather read a viewpoint knowing that deep thought (over a sufficient time period) was put it into rather than an impromptu piece where there’s a chance that the author might change his mind in a day or two. If most of don’t have the time to read a story on the same announcement twice, we definitely don’t have the time to be confused — and that’s what will happen if we read a differing opinion from the same source a few days apart.

And while I really couldn’t put it in a word before, that, in a nutshell, is why SI doesn’t cover “breaking announcements” as they happen. Not only is an average press release packed full of PR BS, and not only does it generally not contain enough information to truly analyze what the announcement means from a product/service perspective (which is what this blog really cares about and why the Editor insists on demos as a goal of SI is to help you in your quest to be a better Supply Management professional), but there’s no way you’re going to get a decent analysis and a reasonable opinion on a press release with insufficient information in a few minutes (or even a few hours).

You can be sure that if something’s important, SI will cover it when we’ve gotten to the heart of the matter. But we’re not going to ask “how fast” just because some PR person decides its time for the media to run with a story. The Editor wants deep thought put into what he takes the time to read, and it would be unfair to expect that you would be satisfied with anything less.

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