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Why College Could Be a Bad Investment-Minyanville
I’ve seen this quote before, but I like how it’s applied here to starting a business.
cool article on entrepreneurship :)
Some excerpts:
according to Bradsher, internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills.
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if consumers really wanted something that was big and heavy and comforting, they ought to buy minivans, since minivans, with their unit-body construction, do much better in accidents than S.U.V.s. (In a thirty-five m.p.h. crash test, for instance, the driver of a Cadillac Escalade—the G.M. counterpart to the Lincoln Navigator—has a sixteen-per-cent chance of a life-threatening head injury, a twenty-per-cent chance of a life-threatening chest injury, and a thirty-five-per-cent chance of a leg injury. The same numbers in a Ford Windstar minivan—a vehicle engineered from the ground up, as opposed to simply being bolted onto a pickup-truck frame—are, respectively, two per cent, four per cent, and one per cent. )
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when S.U.V. buyers thought about safety they were thinking about something that reached into their deepest unconscious. “The No. 1 feeling is that everything surrounding you should be round and soft, and should give,” Rapaille told me. “There should be air bags everywhere. Then there’s this notion that you need to be up high. That’s a contradiction, because the people who buy these S.U.V.s know at the cortex level that if you are high there is more chance of a rollover. But at the reptilian level they think that if I am bigger and taller I’m safer. You feel secure because you are higher and dominate and look down. That you can look down is psychologically a very powerful notion.
During the design of Chrysler’s PT Cruiser, one of the things Rapaille learned was that car buyers felt unsafe when they thought that an outsider could easily see inside their vehicles. So Chrysler made the back window of the PT Cruiser smaller. Of course, making windows smaller—and thereby reducing visibility—makes driving more dangerous, not less so.
Walt Disney Company is now offering refunds for all those “Baby Einstein” videos that did not make children into geniuses.
“We see it as an acknowledgment by the leading baby video company that baby videos are not educational, and we hope other baby media companies will follow suit by offering refunds,” said Susan Linn, director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which has been pushing the issue for years.
I see this as shocking and yet expected in some ways - sort of an amazing story about how the public got duped.
interesting story.
Volker is totally right. Goldman Sachs and others should never have been allowed to own risky securities in the first place. Goldman should have to spin off trading from its other businesses like asset management & brokerage. Brokers for example need to be financial rocks, and to me it’s unreasonable that they should place large bets with their own money that can ultimately endanger their clients. Many of Lehman’s clients lost money because of risks Lehman took on. I grant you they were hedge funds, but retirement plans invest in hedge funds - so this hurts average people. this sort of cavalier approach to risk management is unacceptable. There’s no reason that banks and brokerages should be involved with trading.
On the Internet, Everyone’s a Critic But They’re Not Very Critical - WSJ.com
a little quote on why most reviews on amazon,yelp, etc. are positive….the fact is most people just aren’t that critical on balance…
sensation seekers make poor investors
Wilbur Ross
Also, by him, in an interview:
Interviewer: You wake up dead broke tomorrow—what do you do?
Ross: Look for a job that could evolve into a business.
FYI: Is There a Scientific Way to Measure How Bad a Fart Smells? | Popular Science
You’re in luck. For their senior project, two Cornell University computer-engineering whizzes recently built a machine that does just that. After learning in class how breathalyzers work, Robert Clain and Miguel Salas assembled a fart detector from a sensitive hydrogen sulfide monitor, a thermometer and a microphone and wrote the software that would rate the emission. A “slight perturbance in the air” near the detector sets it to work measuring the three pillars of fart quality: stench, temperature and sound. Temperature, Clain explains, is critical. The hotter a fart, the faster it spreads. “It beeps faster if it’s a high ranker, and a voice rates it on a scale of zero to nine,” he says. “If it ranks a nine, a fan comes on to blow it away. It even records the noise so you can play it back later.” After a few months of construction, they began field tests. “Well, the sample data wasn’t the entire school, but we definitely tested it,” Salas says.
The contraption could even have use outside of fraternity houses, Clain says, as a biosensor for harmful hydrogen-sulfide-producing bacteria in hospitals. Or dentists could use it to measure oral malodor. They’ve also received some interest from doctors with four-legged patients. “You can test the health of livestock through the quality of their farts,” Salas says. “Smell and sound can tell you a lot about their bowel movements.”
When it came time to present the invention in class, though, Clain and Salas had to test their detector by making raspberry sounds and breathing on it—human exhalations contain enough hydrogen sulfide to trigger the sensor. “It’s hard to fart something really smelly on command,” Clain laments. “Besides, it provided a nicer atmosphere for those around us.” Still, their professor saw fit to award the project a well-deserved A.
I hope some smart entrepreneur shrinks this device and transforms this into a novelty gift.
Craving a slice of immortality? A Chinese farmer is taking a leaf out of a Chinese classic about eternal life and growing pears shaped like babies, hoping his unusual idea will get his business blooming. In the classic novel “Journey to the West,” an imaginary fruit in the shape of a baby makes all who eat it live forever. Farmer Hao Xianzhang, who owns an orchard in northern Hebei province, is turning fiction into fact by attaching baby-shaped fiberglass and plastic moulds to young pears for six months. “People called me crazy. They said I was whimsical and it was impossible to grow baby-shaped fruits. They told me to stop wasting my time and money,” said Hao, who has sold nearly all the 18,000 pears he has cultivated for a hefty 50 yuan ($7) a piece. The idea to shape pears first struck Hao some six years ago, when he saw jelly molded into different forms at a supermarket. (via Pear-shaped business plan reaps fruit of success | Reuters
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Great inspirational article about some entrepreneurs who launched a healthy pizza place. It makes me think about other traditional foods that could be remade in a healthy way…
the hospital encourages employees to report mistakes, and also to report issues that might lead to mistakes. A committee of peers reviews serious incidents. If the panel determines that a mistake has occurred, the hospital and doctors apologize. In addition, the University of Michigan compensates the patient or the family. The costs to such a review are high, said Mr. Boothman. They are included in the hospital’s risk-management budget, which has grown to more than $3 million annually, up from $500,000 in 2001. But claims against the hospital have been reduced to 106 in 2008 from 121 in 2001.
Kind of cool that honesty can be good business.
“When shoppers are exposed to music in a store, sales resistance decreases,” he says via e-mail. Our brains have a finite bandwidth for taking in and processing information, and clogging that bandwidth with music is sometimes enough to prevent us from making rational purchasing decisions, or worrying about the time.
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callers who were given information about their place in line reported more positive experiences—and hung up less frequently—than those who were played background music. And as for recorded apologies? They can make the situation worse, said Rafaeli. Given that apologies often interrupt background music without providing any useful information, she suggested it is possible that “you sort of drift into the music, and go with the flow, and forget that you’re really waiting, or wasting your time. But then this apology awakens you to this unpleasant effect that, hey, I’m waiting!”
feeling of progressing toward the front of the line, rather than the perception of a short wait, improved caller reactions the most [more than music
interactive voice response (IVR) systems—the automated phone menus one moves through by pressing buttons—can actually assuage our on-hold rage more effectively than music. Again, the most important thing is the perception of moving toward a goal.
Would it be ethical for a company to lie to you about your position in line if it made you feel better and promoted commerce by exposing you to a sales pitch, say, for cheap appetizers when you call the local pizza-delivery joint? What about charging you a fee to jump to the head of the line (“pay to not wait” schemes)?
via jingc:
