Will winner take all work?

The Winner-Take-All Society is a world in which most of the productive surplus of a society is concentrated in the hands of a few winners -- irregardless of whether they win by virtue, luck, malice, talent or some combination thereof. This is our world.

In our world it is not unusual to see a CEO exercise over $30 million in stock options. That money could have gone to shareholders, or to existing employees, or to customers, or to business partners, or to recruit and retain new talent -- but it went to the winner.

This makes sense if one accepts the notion that the CEO is the company, and that success or failure is determined by the CEO. This is a popular notion; it is widely accepted by a vast array of journalists, consultants, senior executives, writers of best selling business books, the Harvard Business Review and, of course, CEOs.

It might be true. I have no great evidence to the contrary -- but I have doubts. In the world of medicine observational studies are notoriously unreliable and misleading; real data comes from genuine experimentation -- experiments that can't be done in the world of billion dollar corporations. If one believes that modern business is as complex in some ways as living organisms, it's likely we don't have any real evidence to support the belief that the CEO is the company.

There's room for a contrarian opinion -- that companies that do well are the product of hundreds, or thousands, of significant contributors -- most of whom are invisible -- and numerous external uncontrolled variables we can call "fortune" and "circumstance". If you buy this story, then there's a problem with winner-take-all.

The problem is that those contributors are human, and they have the human compulsion to "punish cheating". They will, unconsciously or consciously, respond to "winner take all" in a myriad negative ways. in time this will affect the performance of the corporation, though, not, perhaps, the winnner's take.

This is fundamental human biology -- it cannot be readily changed. Winner take all carries the seeds of its own destruction.

Update 9/16: I didn't expect a supporting argument from a sports article.

A Defining Moment for America - washingtonpost.com

From DeLong and Discourse.Net - widespread astonishment that the Washington Post has one surviving person of character. The proof of this mystery person -- this editorial:

A Defining Moment for America - washingtonpost.com

PRESIDENT BUSH rarely visits Congress. So it was a measure of his painfully skewed priorities that Mr. Bush made the unaccustomed trip yesterday to seek legislative permission for the CIA to make people disappear into secret prisons and have information extracted from them by means he dare not describe publicly...

Too bad The Economist continues to fail miserably. My 20 + year subscription ends next month. I'm sure they'll miss me ...

Cringely on Apple's media play: not based on advertising

Cringely is the most interesting commentator in the PC world, and writes for PBS. Bizarre. Anyway, here he has a particularly good column -- he points out something I hadn't noticed and nobody else has commented on. Apple's media play isn't based on advertising ...

PBS | I, Cringely . September 14, 2006 - Swimming With Sharks

.... Contrast this with Google or Yahoo and even with Microsoft in recent years when everything seemed to be moving to being ad-supported. Where is advertising in Apple's strategy? It is nowhere to be found.

By selling outright, Apple doesn't need ad sales to succeed, reducing its risk. It also reduces downloads, I am sure, but that's not all bad. Even if the system were heroically successful right from the start, it might have technical problems. By ramping slowly with retail sales only, Apple can hope to keep ahead of the demand curve.

Just as Apple isn't Microsoft relying on working with the TV networks and cable channels, Apple isn't dependent on advertising, either. PVR (personal video recorder) functionality and advertising can easily be added at a later date if that is justified by market conditions or revenue expectations. Yet for Microsoft or Google going the other way -- from free with ads to paid -- it is that much harder a task.

When Apple needs more revenue from its movie business it can always add commercials. When Apple needs more revenue from its hardware products, it can always sell a PVR upgrade for $99. The ongoing profit potential is immense...

This is dog-that-didn't bark stuff. Absence is harder to notice than presence, but Cringely is right. Fascinating, and complementary to the strategies of Apple's new best (boardroom) friend - Google.

The entire column is worth a careful read.

Bears and Humans: intersection of problem solving capabilities

We are quicker than most animals at solving most problems, but the gap is not as large as we often think ... (yes, this smells like an urban legend, but I liked Schneier's comment on persistence ...)

Crypto-Gram: September 15, 2006:

Human/Bear Security Trade-Off

I like this example from SlashDot: 'Back in the 1980s, Yosemite National Park was having a serious problem with bears: They would wander into campgrounds and break into the garbage bins. This put both bears and people at risk. So the Park Service started installing armored garbage cans that were tricky to open -- you had to swing a latch, align two bits of handle, that sort of thing. But it turns out it's actually quite tricky to get the design of these cans just right. Make it *too* complex and people can't get them open to put away their garbage in the first place. Said one park ranger, 'There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.''

It's a tough balance to strike. People are smart, but they're impatient and unwilling to spend a lot of time solving the problem. Bears are dumb, but they're tenacious and are willing to spend hours solving the problem. Given those two constraints, creating a trash can that can both work for people and not work for bears is not easy.

The lesson, other than humility about human cognitive abilities, is that attackers often have far more persistence and commitment than defenders. Measures that work against persistent attackers (password rules, etc) so annoy defenders they become impractical.

Whatever happened to Amazon's lousy service?

Is this the sign of new trend? At one time Amazon had a reputation for awful customer service; only a wizard could locate their hidden customer service number.

No longer. Their product return service is fully automated and very effective. Most impressive, is their eStara powered online phone service. When a USPS package went misssing recently it took only one or two clicks to get eStrata to call me back. The problem was resolved almost immediately.

Impressive, and expensive. Amazon is making a big bet that customer service counts. Maybe the pendulum is swinging at last. Dell is no doubt taking notes.

Blumenthal's indictment of Bush - the worst ever (Salon)

Salon has reprinted the introduction to Sidney Blumenthal's new book, "How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime. The introduction is a fairly lengthy indictment of GWB beginning with the days he was considered a “moderate” to the conclusion that he’s probably the worst president in the history of the United States.

It’s probably true that Bush was always this bad, but many people who knew him before seem to think he’s really changed. I’ve often wondered about some unusual organic brain disorder or a significant head injury with post-traumatic deficits.

Garrison Keillor on homeland security

It’s not just funny. I think he spent quite a while thinking this through. It’s a good short course in what’s wrong with our security model, though he’s wrong about the profiling. Competent terrorist would use plain looking euros, we’ve just been lucky current crop is no more competent than the Bush administration…

Guns on a plane | Salon.com

... Sept. 13, 2006 | And now you can't bring your cup of coffee on board the airplane. It's the latest new rule laid down by the nation's security wizards…

But we ditch our venti latte in the trash barrel (goodbye, four bucks) and board the flight, and there we read in the paper that aggressive CIA questioning of an al-Qaida bigwig -- stripping him, turning the air conditioner to 40 degrees, blasting him with Red Hot Chili Peppers music -- broke him, so he ratted on Jose Padilla, a terrorist who set out to make a dirty bomb and who believed that by swinging a bucket of uranium in a circle over his head he could separate plutonium. It's like a cartoon.

The way to stop terrorists on planes is to encourage passengers to bring loaded firearms aboard: guys in orange vests sitting in exit rows with deer rifles on their laps…

This way, if some guy in a burnoose sets up a chemistry lab in Row 24 and mixes hydrogen peroxide, sulfuric acid and acetone in a big beaker that is packed in 15 pounds of dry ice to keep it cool, and cooks up some triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, the passengers will be able, in the several hours it will take him to make the deadly explosive, to bring him under control, assuming the fumes haven't knocked Ahmed out. And they could nab the mastermind too, the monocled guy in first class petting the white cat.

It all began with the name Homeland Security. Somebody with a tin ear came up with that, maybe the pest exterminator from Texas, or Adm. Poinduster, because, friends, Americans don't refer to this as our homeland…

"Homeland" was a word you heard shrieked by a cruel man flicking his riding crop against his shiny black boots: "Zie homeland -- ve shall defend it at all costs, achwohl!" Americans live in Our Country, America, the nation of nations, the good old USA.

… God forbid, somebody shows up at an airport somewhere in the world with an explosive tucked up in his lower colon. The Achtung people will come up with some new security procedures that will effectively kill airline travel, and then this enormous bureaucracy can turn its attention to the nation's highways. Pull over at the checkpoint, get out of the car, open the trunk, take off your shoes, put your hands on the top of the car, turn your head to the right, and cough.

They can search each laptop for possible terrorist-type writing and confiscate cellphones, white powder, shoelaces, car keys, pencils, anything sharp or cylindrical or made of glass, and interrogate people randomly, putting them naked into cold rooms with ugly music played at top volume. It's all fine with me. I'm a liberal and we love ridiculous government programs that intrude on personal freedom. But where are the conservatives who used to object to this sort of thing? ...

I think we know where those old conservatives are nowadays …

Tidbits notices: iTunes and families don't go together

Ahh. Someone who has readership finally noticed this. The problem with most tech geeks is they don’t seem to have families, or even longterm relationships. They don’t seem to notice that you can’t merge iPhoto Libraries or that iTunes is fundamentally designed for a single user environment (see also and this). The Tidbits group is older, and so they noticed …

TidBITS - Apple Updates iPods, Introduces Movies, Previews iTV

... As far as we can tell, iTunes 7 in no way improves the situation of a family that wants to have a single music archive that's shared by multiple computers. Built-in sharing works poorly because only one computer can make playlists, rate songs, and so on, and maintaining a shared music folder on a centralized server works acceptably, but each computer must add new music manually. The one new feature here is that iTunes now supports multiple libraries like iPhoto does; hold down the Option key when launching iTunes to create or switch between libraries. The only real utility we can see to this feature, though, is having a relatively small library on a laptop for travelling, but having another library that points at a shared storage folder when you're at home. ...

The technical problem is bigger than it looks. iPods are also designed to hold contacts, photos, etc. Those are all user-specific. So you want sync to be user specific, but also support shared Libraries with personalized and shared playlists. A bit tricky … but there’s a shark in this pool.

You see, we only think we buy music for a family. The copyright holders would say we buy it for ourselves. If your son wants to hear “Yellow Submarine” he should buy his own copy. DRM rights, you see, are personal, not familial. Feel that noose?

So sharing iTunes Libraries is a bit trickier than it looks …

How bad is the new GOP? Old GOP stalwarts yearn for defeat

Shrillblog detects the end-times. Old-time GOP stalwarts seek defeat, and likely lust for Clinton:

Shrillblog: Breaking News: Shrillness Singularity Discovered!

…George H.W. Bush speechwriter Christopher Buckley, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush advisor Bruce Bartlett, former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough, Cato Institute Chairman William A Niskanen, conservative constitutional lawyer and activist Bruce Fein, Ronald Reagan speechwriter and former National Review editor Jeffrey Hart, and ConservativeHQ.com Chairman Richard Viguerie all write in to say...

… They hope the Republicans lose in 2006 ...Well, let’s be diplomatic and say they’d prefer divided government—soon …

I’m sure they weren’t quite so direct as the above paraphrasing implies, but anyone from the old-time respectable GOP must feel the same way.

The Bush/Cheney/Rove/Rumsfeld GOP practices an authoritarian populism familiar to students of history and of South American politics. It’s not the GOP I grew up with. I didn’t like Reagan or Bush I, but that was before I experienced Rove’s GOP. Now even Reagan, demented though he was, shines like a beacon in the harbor. (Were it not for his unforgivable crime of handing a gun to his enemies Clinton’s retrospective radiance would blind unprotected eyes).

It’s difficult, and painful, to remember what competent governance was like. An entire generation of young voters has no experience with government that’s worthy of the name.

Using Google co-op for health information.

Somehow I missed Google Co-op. Here it's being used to define resoures health information. These collaborative bookmarking, path sharing projects are all the rage, though until now I've not found one that worked for me.

The Google Co-op project is intriguing of course, it's getting hard to keep up with all of their inventiveness -- is Google trying to advance The Singularity all by itself?

Needless to say, the memex had this feature. Vannevar Bush's 1945 prototype for the WWW+ involved the sharing of links, connections and paths in a collaborative development effort.

PS. Visiting my all-but-forgotten del.ici.us site I was intrigued to see the vanity feature -- an ancient link to Gordon's Tech under the old name is on a few other people's lists. I'll have to add all of my blogs and key pages there to see how many others have been found ... Clearly, I've not thought enough about these emergent collaboration sites ...

The magic of the blog: critique a product, the CEO responds

In addition to this opinion blog, I write a tech blog that’s mostly a reference for myself and friends, a little read special needs blog, and an announcements blog for a local special needs hockey team. These have miniscule readerships, but the web works in strange ways.

Recently I wrote two posts on products I use quite a bit. One was an affectionate announcement of the long (long) anticipated release of an iPhoto product I love, the other was a comparison: Gordon's Tech: SmugMug + PictureSync vs. Google Picasa Web Albums.

Within 12 hours of the original posts comments appeared from both the CEO of SmugMug and the author of Keyword Assistant.

Is this a sort of ‘long tail’ variant? Something interesting is going on in our world at the level of feedback loops.

Now if only we could fix planetary heating this way …

The insanity of using SSN as a password

When corporations outsource various HR functions, the disparate contractors all need an identify management process. They can get IDs easily enough, but not passwords. So they need to give everyone a password.

Typically they use a password that consists of some combination of one’s name and a portion of the SSN. For the past few years they’ve routinely used the last four digits of the SSN. Of course since everyone in the world uses the last four digits for authentication that information is now widely distributed and cannot be considered even remotely confidential.

So today one of these vendors asked me for the last six digits of my SSN.

I think you can guess where this is going. We have 3 digits to go.

Blithering idiocy.

The Ten Greatest Privacy Disasters

This is a handy list to review. It started on Wired, Schneier then pointed to this comment he liked: Concurring Opinions: The Ten Greatest Privacy Disasters.

I agree with Solove's opinion on the list, the SSN problem was not the identifier, but rather the essentially fraudulent way it was presented to the public and managed ever after. In essence the US implemented a national identifier while constantly denying it had a national identifier. This is a far worse situation than if we had an official identifier with a body of law to protect us from both private and governmental abuse.

I also agree about his comments on omissions. TIA never died, it only mutated, splintered, and went underground where it's harder to monitor and control. A bit like al Qaeda I suppose, which is interesting from a systems analysis perspective.

Anthrax: remember that?

Funny, Bush never talks about the anthrax terrorist. He also never talks about his rather suspiciously timed smallpox immunization campaign, and the injuries that caused.

A few remember - at least about the anthrax. Tara Smith write about Anthrax--where are we, almost 5 years later?. Turns out, we seem to be where we started. Some good links. Nice to see she reads the illustrious Mr. Schneier.

TS links to the excellent wikipedia article. A mystery indeed.

Ramsey County Elections: Primary Tuesday 7am-8pm

Ramsey County Elections kindly includes a sample ballot. I could start by ruling out every elected official who's spammed me, but that would eliminate most of the ballot.

Or I could vote on the Republican slate and support one of the whackos running against Mark (GOP? What's the GOP?) Kennedy for US Senator ...

Alas, I'll try to figure out the DFL ballot. The endorsed candidates are here; the state DFL was once a bit loony, but I think they've calmed down (even as I've become a bit of raving loon myself - Bush does that to some).

Looks like it'll be:

Senate: Klobuchar
District 4: McCollum (ultimate safe seat)
Governor: I dislike Mike Hatch, the DFL endorsee. I may have to vote for Becky Lourey, an amazing person who is not the obvious choice to oppose Pawlenty.
Secretary of State: March Ritchie. Also a big spammer.
Attorney General: Steve Kelley (DFL endorsed) is among the worst of the spammers. Grrrrrrrrrr.
County Commissioner District 5: Rafael Ortega, the incumbent.
Judge 28-2nd District Court: Jay Benanav. The incumbent, Otsby, was a Pawlenty appointee. Given that Pawlenty is a much smarter version of George Bush, Benanav is a much better choice.