ALEX CAMPBELL'S TUMBLELOG

Heartbreaking and brilliant. It’s “Nickle and Dimed” for the post-noughties age.

Play Spent - try and make it through the month as a low income American.

reblogged from rickwebb

Retro-fitting a prime minister with an identity is extremely tricky. Kevin Rudd put significant work before the 2007 election into which, cautiously, post-Howard Australia could snuggle with confidence: economic conservatism with a whiff of godliness, spruced up with a modern wife and a Chinese twist for the adventurous; sort of a bilingual crypto-Howard, sans tracksuit. Amidst endless critiques of Labor’s woes, Annabel Crabb’s analysis in The Monthly is the most compelling and incisive yet (sadly subscriber only, but it’s worth buying the print issue just for this article and Don Watson’s)

The other possibility is that the wretchedness of Gillard signifies a more general upheaval in the social and political setting. The cliches, the tortured and oppressive cadences are habits of the language she was raised in. Demotic it may be, but this language carries only the shallowest meaning. The phrases are not to inform or inspire the audiences but merely to echo it to satisfy its narcissism. The spin the public loathes is made expressly for them. ‘The Nation Reviewed’, Don Watson in The Monthly

While passionate conviction and shrewd pragmatism are characteristics of great political leaders, what really distinguishes them is their detachment - not their proximity to the electorate but their distance from it. The natural posture for a politician has always been ‘chief amongst equals’. But modern media does not allow this. Now it is at best ‘equal among equals’ and commonly last or least among them.

Listen to talkback, watch Q&A, tune in to the internet and ask where the power and respect lies. Who lays the strongest claim to the record, the knowledge and the authority, charismatic or otherwise? Not the leaders. Most of what used to be theirs is shared between the host and the audience, for whom pretty well any opinion is as good as another. The politicians scramble for the residue.

‘The Nation Reviewed’, Don Watson in The Monthly

A designer is trying to create order out of chaos, while an art director is trying to disrupt: competing for attention and empathy. John Hegarty, Hegarty on Advertising: Turning intelligence into magic. (via nextness)

reblogged from nextness

I asked him if he would come up with a few options. And he said, ‘No, I will solve your problem for you, and you will pay me. And you don’t have to use the solution — if you want options, go talk to other people. But I’ll solve your problem for you the best way I know how, and you use it or not, that’s up to you — you’re the client — but you pay me.’ Steve Jobs on iconic designer Paul Rand (via curiositycounts, STW Nextness)

reblogged from nextness

via the STW Nextness Tumblr

reblogged from nextness

“Isaac Osei, who owns a taxi fleet in New York City with his wife, is also a Ghanaian chief who wears a crown and oversees five towns.”

- An African Chief in Cabby’s Clothing, The New York Times

Cannes, June 2011

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do. Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush by Ron Suskind for NYT Magazine
October 17, 2004

(Source: sexartandpolitics)

reblogged from underpaidgenius

Further confusion is created by equating strategy with success or with ambition. This was my problem with the Web-services CEO who claimed “Strategy is never quitting until you win.” This sort of mish- mash of pop culture, motivational slogans, and business buzz speak is, unfortunately, increasingly common. It short-circuits real inventiveness and fails to distinguish among different senior-level management tasks and virtues. Strategy cannot be a useful concept if it is a synonym for success. Good strategy, Bad strategy by Richard Rumelt

reblogged from continuum

If you look at the price earnings ratio for technology companies relative to the price earnings ratios for all industrial companies, you take that ratio, PE technology divided by PE industrial, you can plot that ratio over the last 40 years, and it is at the lowest point that it’s ever been. Another priceless quote from this interview with Larry Summers

Look, I think the biggest problem the country has right now is not the budget deficit. The biggest problem the country has right now is the jobs deficit. Yes, there’s a risk that we will misplay things and make the mistakes of the 1970’s, and have inflation and have excessive borrowing.

But far and away the larger risk is that we will make the mistakes of 1937, and that we will not have a recovery that is sustained, that we will make the mistakes that Japan made, and that we will have a decade or two of stagnation. The right question to be focused on is how to stimulate demand.

Look out there, guys. The Treasury bond rate, Treasury note rate for ten years is 2.85 percent. Nobody is failing to invest because 2.85 percent is too much. They are failing to invest because there are no customers in their store. They are failing to invest because their factories are sitting empty. They are failing to innovate because they’re not sure how large the market for the product will be.

That is the problem that we need to address. By the way, an extra percent a year on the growth rate for the next five years will do more for the budget than any amount of the entitlement-cutting that’s under discussion.

From this fascinating interview with Larry Summers. Yes, the same interview in which he calls the Winklevoss twins assholes.