His Magical Thinking: “Steve Jobs”

by obront

So read this book.

If you’re a teenager who “thinks different” and wants to understand how Jobs took that same quality and turned it from a liability to a world-changing asset; if you’re a geek who wants to understand how Jobs identified break-through technologies and made them commercial; if you’re an investor who wants to understand how a company learns less from great success than from failure; if you’re a board member who wants to understand how destructive a creative genius can be, and how to harness that genius without destroying a company; if you’re a CEO who wants to discover what makes a product a flop like Microsoft’s Zune instead of a hit like the iPod; if you’re a design student who doesn’t care about business but wants to understand why the iPad feels so comfortable to pick up (hint: rounded,not square, edges); if you’re an advertiser who wants to understand how two frames can be the difference between a “great” TV commercial and a “shit” commercial; if you don’t care about any of that but just want to understand how all these products came to be…read this book.

It’s great.

Maybe even insanely great.

via Jeff Matthews Is Not Making This Up: His Magical Thinking: “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson.

Krugman again proves himself to be an idiot and deceitful

by obront

Krugman is a big believer in the idea “debt does not matter”. He made the mistake of using Italy as the prime example. Oops! Guess what? Debt matters. Now Krugman is attempting to pass off a foolish statement by blaming Original Sin for the Euro Crisis.

One question that keeps coming up is, how can I reconcile my scorn for warnings about bond vigilantes with what is happening to Italy? This seems especially pointed because I have in the past used Italy’s ability to carry debt exceeding its GDP as an illustration that debt concerns were overblown.

The answer lies in the concept of original sin. Not the Pope’s kind, but the economics kind — the long-standing notion that developing countries were especially vulnerable to financial crises because they borrowed in foreign currency.

The key point is that by joining the euro, Italy took a bite of the apple — it converted its advanced-country status, as a nation issuing debt in its own currency, into original sin, with debts in someone else’s currency (Europe’s in principle, Germany’s in practice). That is the root of its new vulnerability.

Krugman finishes with “More on all this later, I hope.” I hope so too, starting with my questions