Business
Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic has written a piece that uses the latest Apple iPhone problems as a jumping off point to examine the “religious experience” of being an Apple “fanboy.” In short, there are 4 myths surrounding the Apple “mystique”, according to Texas A&M’s Heidi Campbell: 1. a creation myth highlighting the counter-cultural origin…
I don’t usually directly plug a blog, but Seth Godin’s Blog is a pithy record of his thoughts, mostly applicable to business, but broadly applicable to life. Godin looks at things from different angles and, though some of his solutions may boil down to re-wordings of the familiar, his explanation and method is engaging. For…
John Derbyshire posted a viral email from Wall Street circles that amounts to an egotist’s cri de coeur: Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you’re only going to hurt yourselves. What’s going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We’re going to take yours. We get…
A quick note on conservatives’ view of businesses appears to be in order. In general, we do not believe businesses are inherently pure, moral actors. We do not look at the housing bubble and the derivatives market and defend them on the grounds that they were legal, so nyaa, nyaa, the CEOs got away with…
I came across an interesting Associated Press story (via ABC News) involving Taco, a local manufacturing company. Taco is using a strategy calls that the article calls “work-sharing” to avoid layoffs during the current economic downturn. The piece that makes the article really interesting is the AP reporters’ unrealistically stark explanation of Taco’s management’s reasoning…
As a follow-up to this morning’s post on Rhode Island’s need to get out of the way of its economy, Tabetha recently offered a comment in our discussion of the economy and higher education to which I’d like to return: If RI wants to keep college grads, the number 1 need is pretty simple: have…
Whereas I focused on the likelihood that international governments’ participation would ultimately exacerbate the problem of “too big to fail” and risk taking among large banks, Matthew Lynn argues that the big banks will leverage salary caps to hinder the one thing that could truly restrain their pay and risk taking — namely, competition: They…
Gotta say that I’m inclined to suggest a rule of thumb dictating that executive bonuses are simply not permitted while their companies are in bankruptcy, mainly for the reason expressed by U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Arthur Votolato with reference to such a request from Twin River: “I’m concerned with how the management team gets credit…
First things first, Grafton Willey deserves a round of applause for speaking truth: “This is a deep recession which we worked hard in Rhode Island to get into. We have to take a long-term recovery view,” said Willey, who is also a managing director of CBIZ Tofias, a CPA firm with offices in Providence and…
As with much else in Rhode Island, it could be that some of the decisive ambivalence about the continued permissibility of prostitution in the state would dissipate if people took a moment to understand what it actually means. The blog of a new Web site that URI Professor Donna Hughes and associate Melanie Shapiro have…