Random Articles

• You Expect What You Pay For Recently - a collegue recounted his experience selling a fully-capable product with a price less than half its competitors. “After the presentation, the customer turned to the sales representative and asked, ‘What’s wrong with it?’” This, more than 78 years after J. Walter Thompson’s research for Pond’s Cold Cream proved that price and quality are directly correlated
• Only Do “We are not good at knowing, we are not good at planning, we are not good at forecasting, we are only good at doing.” - Nassim Taleb, author The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
• Is Closed a Cultural Benefit? This weekend, I caught up with a college friend in central Wisconsin. Starbucks recently opened their first storefront in Wausau. Given Starbucks’ consistency and my lack of knowledge of other options, I suggested we meet there. “How about something local, like Jeannie’s Cafe?”, Tom asked. I’m always up for tasting the local flavor and we planned to
• Real Wages Up, Not Down - Economists Fight A biased New York Times article on wages being down gets a fisking: “What keeps my wages high (and yours) is our alternatives…What sets workers wages are the wages of those alternatives…Workers are better educated than ever. That is why I believe that compensation, properly measured, is higher than it was five or ten or twenty
• The Economics of Podcasting First off, this post defines podcasting is an effective way to deliver highly niche audio to a very enthusiastic audience (the World English Bible translated into Klingon or Tips for Triathletes in the Southwestern US for example). Secondly, the numbers used here are rough and make for easy math. Let’s say you’re making one show a week