jmcmichael

“The product-service-system (or PSS) is a new term for an old idea: emphasizing access over ownership, it’s simply about sharing products among people, and recognizing that bright green systems are just as important as products. Since we already take part in them – video rentals, laundromats, libraries, gyms, and taxis being obvious examples – we only really talk about PSS with regard to things that many of us don’t usually share, like cars, appliances, tools, or clothing. Breaking past some of the cultural barriers that equate affluence with ownership may still be the greatest challenge, but what if alternative is cheaper, more sustainable, doesn’t clutter your home, and connects you with your neighbours?”

According to Brookings Institution economist James Hamilton, apparently it can.

“Like i said earlier now with people like me and you becoming even more irate with this new scandal of 74 bonuses, my friends who work directly with AIG have been furiously taking their corporate stock shares and moving them elsewhere, have been updating their resumes, using any type of social out puts to get new leads at a different companies, and have been using up all of their available vacation and sick time.

One of my close buddies actually has been on vacation since the end of January where he has been in Japan looking to land a new lucrative position. Sorry ive been jumping around so much but i too am worried that I also might be out of a job soon enough when AIG does go belly up. And everyone at AIG KNOWS that it WILL file for Bankruptcy in the next 2-3 months after they sell off their subsidiaries. Just last week i had a meeting with a client in the AIG NYC office where people were acting like it was just another normal day. Even though i noticed little things that were different; tvs weren’t tuned to CNN of CNBC rather turned to ESPN watching the upcoming NCAA tournament. Employees are told to act like normal, walk around with big smiles and never show any stress of the real world and media. Its just so sad to see so many hard working people who are just like you and me (other than the SVP and higher ups) just sitting around in their cubicals and offices knowing that soon enough they will be desperately looking for another job just to support their families.”

In 2006 a Columbia Journalism Review editor (a seasoned journalist formerly with Time magazine in Asia, The Wall Street Journal Europe, and The Far Eastern Economic Review) called me to discuss suspicions he was forming about the US financial media. I gave him leads but warned, “Chasing this will take you down a rabbit hole with no bottom.” For months he pursued his story against pressure and threats he once described as, “something out of a Hollywood B movie, but unlike the movies, the evil corporations fighting the journalist are not thugs burying toxic waste, they are Wall Street and the financial media itself.”

His exposé reveals a circle of corruption enclosing venerable Wall Street banks, shady offshore financiers, and suspiciously compliant reporters at The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, CNBC, and The New York Times. If you ever wonder how reporters react when a journalist investigates them (answer: like white-collar crooks they dodge interviews, lie, and hide behind lawyers), or if financial corruption interests you, then this is for you. It makes Grisham read like a book of bedtime stories, and exposes a scandal that may make Enron look like an afternoon tea.

“I would like my insights to be of help during these difficult and confusing times, for altruistic reasons, mostly, although not entirely. This is because when times get really bad, as they did when the Soviet Union collapsed, lots of people just completely lose it. Men, especially. Successful, middle-aged men, breadwinners, bastions of society, turn out to be especially vulnerable. And when they just completely lose it, they become very tedious company. My hope is that some amount of preparation, psychological and otherwise, can make them a lot less fragile, and a bit more useful, and generally less of a burden.

Women seem much more able to cope. Perhaps it is because they have less of their ego invested in the whole dubious enterprise, or perhaps their sense of personal responsibility is tied to those around them and not some nebulous grand enterprise. In any case, the women always seem far more able to just put on their gardening gloves and go do something useful, while the men tend to sit around groaning about the Empire, or the Republic, or whatever it is that they lost.

…

By the mid-1990s I started to see Soviet/American Superpowerdom as a sort of disease that strives for world dominance but in effect eviscerates its host country, eventually leaving behind an empty shell: an impoverished population, an economy in ruins, a legacy of social problems, and a tremendous burden of debt. The symmetries between the two global superpowers were then already too numerous to mention, and they have been growing more obvious ever since.”

via John Robb’s Global Guerillas blog

“Quality,” primarily defined as formal skill, is back in vogue, part and parcel of a conservative, some would say retrogressive, painting and drawing revival. And it has given us a flood of well-schooled pictures, ingenious sculptures, fastidious photographs and carefully staged spectacles, each based on the same basic elements: a single idea, embedded in the work and expounded in an artist’s statement, and a look or style geared to be as catchy as the hook in a rock song.”