The Speed of Trust

I've been reading Stephen M R Covey's book The Speed of Trust recently, and the one thing you need to know from it is that if you operate your business or your life without trust, you're paying a lot more than if you had trust.  Obviously, it's about 300 pages more than that, but that's the really, really small capsule.
When thinking about the astronomical costs in 2 key areas, this becomes plainly obvious.  First and worst is government.  We've heard of the expensive hammers and everything else, but if there's one area where we could really use trust, it's in the government.  Let's face it, every single regulation and law comes back to somebody not trusting somebody else.  We spend trillions of dollars in every area of government because of it, and it's only gotten worse over time.  For example, the B-29 bomber cost $7.3 million per unit in today's dollars ($600K in 1944), whereas the F-22 fighter costs $143 million per aircraft today.  I realize that there's a lot more technology that goes into the F-22 than went into the B-29, but the relative technological innovation in each is not nearly as much.  As a result, you could argue that we could be paying $100 million in trust penalty.  This takes the form of all the regulations that Lockheed had to follow on the project, combined with the constantly changing project requirements, number of aircraft ordered, and so on.  If all of that was stripped away and a) the government trusted Lockheed to deliver a product at a reasonable cost that would do everything they wanted and b) Lockheed trusted the government to not try and change the terms once they started business (and thus pad things up front to ensure they don't lose their shirts), think of what that would do in just that one area.  We're ordering 240 or so F-22s, so that's $2 billion in actual savings there.  If that went across the entire government, I'd guess that the $1 trillion deficit we're facing could be replaced with an actual balanced budget.
Another area where this is obvious is in healthcare.  The entire system is set up without trust - malpractice insurance, extra tests, denial staff, and so on.  Meanwhile, our healthcare costs are exploding and it seems like there's nothing we can do to stop it.  If we started by extending just a little trust that the doctors and medical professionals actually care about how they are doing and aren't just out to get us and our money, perhaps we could start changing the tone.  While cutting off the wrong limb is really, really a bad mistake, I tend to think that the doctor didn't try to do it - not that it makes things any better, and some compensation would be in order, but certainly not something that punishes them so severely that their malpractice insurance skyrockets and runs him out of business or causes everyone else to pay more.

Department of Obvious

I got this bag of peanuts on a recent flight and my wife pointed out the list of ingredients and the allergy notice.  You can see that there are peanuts and salt in this bag, but what I'll bet you couldn't see from the fact that this bag is a bag of peanuts...they are "produced in a facility that processes peanuts..."  Wow, that's incredibly helpful there.

Brush with Greatness

While I wasn't namechecked by Bill Simmons, I got mentioned in yesterday's BS Report with a question on Twitter to Simmons' friend Jack-O.  It was at the 46:52 mark in the podcast about Joba Chamberlain looking like Chien Ming-Wang.  I don't know quite what to think, other than that's the first time I've had a question answered in such a large forum.  On one hand, it's not a big deal because it's kind of like meeting a Senator or something.  Ultimately, Simmons is just a regular guy who is very talented at writing and is, dare I say, this generation's Peter Gammons or Rick Reilly.  Nevertheless, it's kind of cool to have your comment be noticed among the many, many comments that they get.  Take a listen, see what they think, and add your thoughts, if you're so inclined!

The Jazz, Millsap, and You

I've been following the ongoing Utah Jazz salary cap dilemma for a while now, and it's a wild and crazy soap opera.  Here we have Boozer, Memo, Harpring & Korver with expiring contracts, Millsap looking for a boatload of money, and AK with a near-untradeable contract.  What's an owner to do?  First, let's look at the facts:
Fact: Boozer is a better player than Millsap.  That's not to say that he puts as much effort into his game, especially on the defensive end, but the point remains that he is an all star. 
Fact: AK's contract was an act of sheer stupidity that didn't seem like it at the time.  AK seemed to be the future of the franchise, and locking him up made sense.  At the same time, once we signed Boozer and Okur, we should have looked at trading AK.  Now it's impossible because he's not nearly as valuable as he was, but Boozer came in to essentially take AK's position. 
Fact: Millsap wants too much money.  While Anderson Varejao just got way too much tossed at him by Cleveland yesterday, I can't imagine paying that to Millsap.  Yes, he's a hard worker.  Yes, he's a fan favorite.  At the same time, will he ever be a perennial all star?  I don't know that he will.  He's a good piece for a contending team, but he's never going to be the go-to guy a la Karl Malone.
Fact: Harpring's contract is an albatross.  I like Harpring.  He's tough, he's another workmanlike player, but at $6 million this year for the condition he's in, he's not worth it.  His expiring deal might be a valuable chip in a trade though.
Faced with these facts, I think we ought to do a couple of things.  One, if Millsap does head for Portland for the rumored price (5 years/$50 million or so), we let him go.  He's just not worth that amount of money, especially when he'd still be a bench player behind LaMarcus Alldridge in Portland.  If he's got a reasonable salary (around 5 years/$35 million), we match.  Then we work a trade like what Bill Simmons proposed on twitter...a 4-way with Utah, Detroit, LA Clippers, and Dallas where we get Josh Howard for Boozer and parts.  If we could send AK out for an expiring contract, maybe we do that too.  If we could trade Harpring's $6 million into an MLE style player as well, I would love to see that.  I think a little of this, a little of that, and we could end up with a very good team next year.  Again though, the last thing I would do is bring back Millsap as a bench guy.  Ultimately, that's not what he wants, his protestations to the contrary.

Spoilers Gone Wild XX

Zuke at Stolen Droids came across this the other day but wasn't able to get a picture.  He did send me a link to a stock photo of it though, so I'm putting it up.  I think this is the most extraneous and useless spoiler yet.  While the others didn't do much of anything, at least they didn't help to cripple the functionality of your vehicle.  This, on the other hand, helps make your truck bed be at least 50% more annoying to get something in to, if not 50% less useful overall.

Bailout for Construction

If the interpretation that Adam over at Time To Keep Score has of the cap and trade bill is accurate (and to be honest, I can totally see that happening), the market for secondary homes could well dry up.  In order to sell a home, especially older homes, you might have to get it up to a certain level or pay huge fines for being such an eco-unfriendly consumer.  Imagine what a boon this is to the HVAC industry as they would suddenly have a whole host of people trying to trade out their heating and air conditioning for models that are officially "good for the environment."  Add the additional taxes (either via an outright tax or through increased costs of goods to cover companies' costs) we'd certainly have to pay in order to cover the bill that the government would send out for this, and we can expect to have less money a year from this bill's passage than we do now. 
While I think about that, why do we have to buy these credits from the government?  Since when did they take over ownership of our lungs, or the air over the US, or whatever this is supposed to protect?

Why We Should Let Millsap Go

I really like Paul Millsap...I really, really like Millsap.  He's a solid player, he's an incredible worker, and he has a great nose for the ball.  At the same time, with the reports all saying that his agent is looking for David Lee money (approximately $50 million for 5 years), I'm all for saying goodbye to him.  That is a contract that is a mistake on so many levels.  AK-47's contract would look downright livable in comparison (okay, that's inaccurate...his contract is an albatross that I would love to get rid of, even if we ship him and the 2010 #1 from the Knicks to the Cavs for Shaq).  The bottom line is that there was some level of tension once Boozer and Millsap were back and healthy that I think negatively impacted the team over the home stretch.  It shouldn't have, but there was definitely a level of Alpha-dogism that went into our collapse.  You aren't going to pay someone that kind of money to sit on your bench.  I know he's a great worker, but even if he wasn't just sitting on the bench splitting time with Booze, I still couldn't pay that.  I think he's a bargain for mid-level exception money, but when he's looking for superstar level money (especially with half the league looking for any way to save money), he's extremely overpriced.  The Pistons or the Grizzlies might take a chance on him, and they might make a great choice.  At the same time, a lot of people thought the same thing about Andrei Kirelinko a few years ago and now he's one of the most untradable people in the NBA who aren't on the Houston Rockets.

Tales from IT

I can always tell when Microsoft releases a patch that restarts computers because I get a slew of calls about people's computers not working.  This morning, for instance, I got one from someone who said that.  I asked her if her power was on.  She said she didn't know, so I asked her to push the power button on her tower.  She told me that she kept pushing it and it just went from black to orange but wouldn't turn on.  It was at that moment I knew that she wasn't pushing the power button on her tower like she said she was...instead, she was pushing the power button on her monitor.  Suffice it to say, once she pushed the right power button, it turned right on.

While we're at it, a lot of people complained they weren't getting email.  Upon closer examination, it's because the person they weren't getting email from wasn't sending them email.  So that's 15 complaints resolved in one fell swoop.

Here's Your Plate III

Take a look at this license plate and see if you can tell me what it's supposed to be.  If you can't see, it's BMR4KER.  My first thought was "Bum raker?  What's a bum raker?"  It could be "Bimmer for Ker" maybe if the e is given an "a" sound, that might work, as long as the owner is someone like Kerry.

Spoilers Gone Wild XIX

 

Here we have an early-90s Honda Prelude with a wicked double spoiler.  Unfortunately the awesomeness of the spoiler is not commensurate with the awesomeness of the car.

Medicall

I propose that new proposed universal health care that the US is going to try to adopt should be called Medicall because we'll all be getting it.  Besides that random point though is that Medicall doesn't make a whole lot of sense.  "By spending this money, we're going to be saving money!"  I suppose that if you buy a couple of candy bars now, you won't have to buy a cheeseburger in an hour, but that doesn't mean you'll be saving it.  With the unfunded Medicare benefit currently projecting at around $50 trillion, adding a lot of people to the rolls seems like the opposite of what we should be doing.  Dan Henninger had a great article about it in today's WSJ:

Whatever Medicaid's merits, this federal health-care program more than any other factor has put California and New York on the brink of fiscal catastrophe. I'd even call it scary.
Spending on health and welfare, largely under Medicaid, makes up one-third of California's budget of some $100 billion. In New York Gov. David Paterson's budget message, he notes that "New York spends more per capital ($2,283) on Medicaid than any other state in the country."
After 45 years, the health-care reform called Medicaid has crushed state budgets. A study by the National Governors Association said a decade ago that because of "new requirements" imposed by federal law -- meaning Congress -- "Medicaid has evolved into a program whose size, cost and significance are far beyond the original vision of its creators."

That being said, it does look like we're stepping back from it a little bit, but let's face it: this is no solution.  Until we get people to be more responsible for their own health, either through moving everybody's insurance to Geico (i.e. auto-insurance style where you pay higher and do it individually) or through a complete revamp of the whole third-party payer system, we're never going to start saving money on medical expenses.

The Insanity that is Paris Traffic

(move to around 6:30 in the video for the pertinent clip)
So I drove in Paris on my recent trip to Europe, and it's some of the craziest stuff I've ever seen.  What's crazier than anything else though is the traffic circle around the Arc de Triomphe.  Let me give you a little bit of a feel for it.  We came into the city on a road with 4 lanes of traffic going each direction.  Once you pass the Arc, it turns into the Champs Elysses.  This road intersects with 3 other major roads of at least 2 lanes each direction at the Arc, creating an absolute mess.  There are no "lanes" inside the circle, it's just one continuous stretch of asphalt.  As a result of this brilliant city planning, I had driven into a situation the likes of which I may never see again.  It was like the wild west of vehicular travel.  I tried to go around to my street in an orderly fashion, going around the outside of the circle.  While I was doing so, I had to dodge cars that would beeline from their respective roads into somewhere around the center of the circle, make a tight turn around the Arc, then beeline right back out.  There weren't rights of way, there weren't any rules, it was just every man for themselves in a massive free-for-all.  My wife was laughing at the insanity the whole time as I just tried to avoid getting hit.  We made it out alive, and I think there has to be a better way to do it.
For example, in many intersections in Paris there's a through traffic tunnel and local traffic split-offs.  Why not at least put the Champs Elysses right under the Arc?  You can route some traffic onto the circle, but a good part of that traffic is going straight.  Punch it into a tunnel that doesn't have to go through the circle.  You could even make it a standard intersection with the streets that are perpendicular to it.  Have a standard intersection below it and you could probably eliminate 30-40% of the traffic that is overloading the Arc's traffic circle.  Then it might not be such a madhouse. 

The Power of the Influencers

Engadget just reported that AT&T caved in to pressure, either real or perceived, from iPhone customers and has opened the upgrade window for those who are upgrade-eligible to the new iPhone 3G S (including yours truly) to tomorrow.  Now I can sign up for some more Apple-y goodness and AT&T keeps me more than happy.  There has been some whinging that it's just for these Apple fanboys and their patron saint, St. Steve, but I think this is a shrewd move.  People aren't used to having to wait for anything other than the masses to get their Apple products, and there was an undercurrent of "AT&T is awful" at WWDC.  Because of that, for AT&T to offer a mea culpa and give Apple's loyal (and vocal) customers a bone is a big thing for them.  I'm sure it will help when it's time to renew their contract with Apple and keep the exclusivity that is really a no-brainer for both parties until LTE comes out and Verizon moves over (because there's no way Apple will build a niche product like a 1xRTT iPhone when so few cell customers use it).  Maybe it will help people be a little less critical of AT&T (I know that's their hope), and I know that that's the case with me.  They've been about as good as I can expect, and I certainly wouldn't jump ship to Verizon unless they got iPhone exclusivity and I couldn't unlock that bad boy.

Will Someone Please Think About the Vegetables!

I was recently at the Hilton Arc de Triomphe in Paris having a nice leisurely breakfast when i came across this on the buffet line.  That's right, raped carots.  I don't know how they were raped, but I know that it wasn't worth tasting them to find out!

We've Got Power Here

Another IT tale of wont and woe...I had someone come in a few weeks ago and tell me that their computer was just a black screen.  I said we'd had a power outage before they got in, so they'd need to make sure they turn their computer and monitor back on.  They said that they'd done that already.  I was in a meeting but told them I'd be there in a few minutes.  Before I was able to get to it, one of my colleagues did.  This person said they'd pushed the power button and demonstrated it to the person who was helping them.  It turns out that the "power button" they had pushed was the button to eject the CD-ROM drive.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Our Marketer!

Here's a gem from our marketer.  We're considering getting a new logo and the head of marketing just said "it doesn't matter what our logo is because we're not a national company."  Yup, he's our marketer!

Another Revelation

I'm back from a massive Europe trip, so I've been quiet for a time.  I came back and found that Adam Lambert is gay in some great investigative reporting by Rolling Stone.  Wow.  I don't think anybody thought that someone with a Steve Perry-esque voice and the flair of Carol Channing was straight, as Adam himself said.  Another amazing piece of journalism along the lines of my previously posted People revelation:

This Ad Doesn't Work for Black People, or White People

If memory serves me correctly, Holmes was in North Carolina at one point.  Perhaps he can explain why Red House Furniture thought this was a good ad:

The End of the V-8

 

The government has decided to mandate a fuel economy increase of 40% by 2016.  While this is feasible, it's going to rapidly change what we are able to buy.  The revived Camaro, Mustang, and Challenger are going to have to trim down, while we completely reverse the horsepower trend we saw throughout the 90s.  My 298 hp V-6 G-35 will not survive, nor will any of the high performance vehicles from BMW, Mercedes, Lexus, and Infiniti.  Here's what I see happening:

The first thing that carmakers will do is decrease the engine size in cars.  That's a cheap and easy way to increase fuel economy, even though it negatively impacts consumers.  We won't be able to buy a BMW 335i anymore, instead we'll see a return to the BMW 318i, which would almost halve the size of the engine.  Likewise, all of the performance cars will lose some weight and lose a lot of engine.  Because engine size is a very good match to fuel burn, we'll have to see a lot more 4-cylendar engines replacing the V-6s and V-8s that we've been used to.

We could see an uptick in sales as cars are redesigned.  If I want an M3, I'd better buy it immediately, because it's not going to be nearly the car it is now in 5 years.  We'll see a decrease in vehicle size as fewer land yacht-sedans like the Grand Marquis and Cadillac DTS are produced.  We'll also see cars get more expensive as car companies use exotic materials like aluminum, titanium, and carbon fiber to keep their mandated rigidity and safety but lose weight so that their engines don't have to work as hard to move the car forward.  We'll also see gas prices stay relatively low because gas demand will decrease.  That's not to say that we won't see spikes here and there, but we won't see a super spike that then stays high.  We will also see a lot of modern classics, just like we had at the end of the 70s.  These modern day muscle cars will be loved and revered for generations to come.  We may also see the return of the Citation, which would be just amazing.

E-Mail for Dummies

Something quick that isn't worth exposition, but I just had somebody come in and tell me that they can't send an email to somebody else in the office. Well, first she asked how to set up her address book. By this she meant "how can this happen without me doing anything." I said I didn't know where a group address book was that she could pull, but she could always hand enter it, like I have. She then said she couldn't send someone else the email. I told her that she could just create a new email and type in his address. This was a revelation to her.

Yup, these are my coworkers.