Category Archives: News

An Evening of Historic Proportions

Last night was a historic night. It was the first time in the history of social media that I was “locked out” of Twitter. Okay, probably not the historic event you thought I was going to cite, but it did happen.

While I was busy tweeting and retweeting last night, I didn’t even consider that I would hit the “daily update limit” — but I did. The irony is that just before I sat down at my computer to begin watching the coverage (on TV and online), I saw a tweet from someone who was speaking for @TheStalwart — who had just hit the daily limit and thusly wouldn’t be participating in the “Election Party” on Twitter last night. It was a bit strange last night — to — in a way — be excluded from the excitement on Twitter, especially just after the networks were calling the election.

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All kidding aside, last night was a historic evening. Since the United States is such a major player on the world’s stage, there is certainly interest around the world in the person who holds the office of the President of the United States. As you can see from the graphic on the right, some may say that the rest of the world was happy with the result of last night’s election.

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There’s just one more thing I want to share in this post and it does have to do with history. After Pres. Obama was declared the winner by most of the networks, his Twitter account tweeted a photo that has been retweeted more than any other tweet in the history of twitter — and it’s still going! It surpassed the record (somewhere in the 200,000’s or the 300,000’s last night), but in looking at the tweet a few minutes ago, it’s almost up to 750,000 retweets. That’s a lot of retweets! In case you haven’t seen it yet, I’ve included it below:

 

 

Environmental Serendipity: A Chance to Rebuild “Green”

With all due respect and condolences, the storm that hit the East Coast of the US is a tragedy, especially for those having to go through it first hand. The things I’m about to say in this post are in no way meant to detract from what is clearly a trying time for a number of citizens.

That being said, I can’t help but think of the ‘environmental serendipity.’ Let me explain: with DEstruction comes the opportunity for CONstruction. That is, after everything is all cleaned up, there will be an opportunity for these areas to rebuild their homes and communities. Given this, there is also the opportunity to rebuild from a more environmentally friendly perspective.

What I find noteworthy here is that if a storm like this hadn’t come through, would any of these areas considered knocking down their homes and rebuilding in a much “greener” way? Probably not. That’s why I see this storm as almost an environmental serendipity in that it gives these communities a chance to be much more mindful of the environment, with respect to its build.

There’s also the perspective that has been taken by some (like Newsweek), in that it brings climate change front and center to the national (USA) discourse. Given that it wasn’t mentioned at all during any of the US presidential debates, this is another “happy” consequence. Storms like these seem to be happening with much greater frequency. As this reality sets in, it will be (hopefully!) harder and harder to deny that our climate is changing… and we should be doing something about it!

Some Men Just Want to Watch the World Burn: Lessons from Hurricane Sandy

[Editor’s note: BuzzFeed just posted a note explaining that they have outed the Twitter user responsible for spreading this misinformation.]

Just before Hurricane Irene last year, I remember writing a post about how that kind of event could have a profound effect on people’s priorities. This year, the day after “Hurricane” Sandy, I can’t help but think of the misinformation.

Most of the day yesterday, I followed the coverage of Sandy on Twitter, diligently retweeting what I thought was pertinent information. While my Twitter following is currently less than 200, it still feels important that the information I share be correct (especially when it comes to events like yesterday). I like to think that the content of my tweets would be the same if I had 200,000 followers, but there’s no way to know that (without actually have 200,000 followers). Some people don’t share this sentiment.

Last night, there was (at least one) Twitter user who decided to spread false rumors. I don’t actually follow this Twitter user, but I did see a number of the reports that were *apparently* started by him. What possesses someone to spread misinformation during a crisis? I don’t know. One might try to develop some sophisticated argument tying the misinformation to a political gain, but I think that the threads of that argument are much too thin. The only other thing I could think of was the line from The Dark Knight: “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

Some folks might put the onus on journalists who didn’t vet the tweets, which eventually led to CNN reporting that the floor of the NYSE was flooded. It kind of reminds me a bit of CNN’s misstep this summer with the report that “Obamacare” was deemed unconstitutional.

While there are these instances of misinformation spreading, there are also many positives to an instantly connected world (by way of the internet). For instance, when certain images were going viral, they were quickly shown to be fakes. In fact, both The Atlantic and BuzzFeed have posts showing examples of these from yesterday.

It looks like the internet makes quick work of fake images, but might still have a little while to go before it no longer falls prey to digital deception. In fact, Prof. Drezner argues that the internet does well with fast-moving memes (pictures, stock market flooding, etc.), but has a harder time with slow-moving memes (Pres. Obama was born in Kenya). It’s worth reading.

Waking Up with Songs Stuck in your Head

When I woke up this morning, I was surprised to hear a song stuck in my head. I was less surprised that there was a song stuck in my head and more surprised about which song: “A Whole New World.” Remember that song? Remember Aladdin? My goodness — I haven’t seen that movie in ages, so I have no idea why that song would have been stuck in my head. Maybe it has something to do with what I was dreaming about – who knows.

The other odd part was that this wasn’t the only song stuck in my head. I also heard “Frosty the Snowman.” It was almost like the two songs were spliced and I’d hear a verse of Aladdin and then a verse from Snowman.

I don’t have anything profound to share about this experience, but I thought I would post the videos of the songs and give you a flashback to times when you were younger and saw the movie Aladdin or watched those Christmas specials on TV.

Update on Jeremiah Stanghini’s Blog: Corrected Deep Links and a New Category

So, when I moved all of these blog posts from Genuine Thriving to this site, I said that I wasn’t going to go and update all of the deep links on the site. Translation: I wasn’t planning on going through all of my old posts simply to update the links that I had used within the website. Meaning, if you clicked on a link in one of my posts that was to something I had written earlier, before about 15 minutes ago, it would have taken you to that version of the post over on Genuine Thriving. After watching some of the traffic for this site, I decided to go through and update most of the old links.

For just about every post on this blog, I’ve updated the deep links. The only ones that I haven’t: the series of “What’s on my iPod” and “Who I’m Following on Twitter.” That’s not to say that I won’t in the future, but for the time being, these are the only posts where there’s a link to a blog post on Genuine Thriving. On that note, if you happen to find a link to a blog post on Genuine Thriving, please leave me a comment, so I can update it.

In the meantime, why don’t you check out some of the other articles/series I’ve written. Here’s a smattering:

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I also wanted to let you all know that I’ve gone ahead and changed the category of (Genuine Thriving) to Wisdom. There were some posts that were “tagged” Wisdom, so I’ve shifted them into the category of Wisdom and now we’re up over 40 posts in the Wisdom category. Some of these may shift, but for now, I’ll leave it like this.

Extra! Extra! Read All About It: Newness Abounds

Well this is an awfully new setup, isn’t it? My previous blog fell ill to some kind of malware. It was a bit upsetting because I spent two months setting up that website from scratch. Now, that website has not totally gone away nor will it. However, I have decided to move my blog from that site to this site because I presume that the content will be safe on this server.

In the transition from the old site to the new site, I lost a few of the blog posts (about 6), but just about everything made the transition. So, you’ll see all the same categories (including Genuine Thriving), along with all the same tags. I’ll continue to write under these same categories (but maybe not Genuine Thriving). As you can see from the menu bar, I’ve added a few other links: to Twitter, LinkedIn, and… my new Facebook page!

I wanted to change the way I interacted with the Internet, so I’ve changed my Facebook profile into a Facebook page. I hope that you’ll continue to interact with me on Facebook in this new way. I’ve also integrated Facebook and Twitter such that updates should cross-post.

In the coming weeks, look for a new header image to appear on this site. For now, “Jeremiah Stanghini” in text will have to do.

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On a side note: I will not go back and update all the deep linking and from all the posts I’ve written in the past. Unfortunately, that would just take too much time. Though, if you take the “title” of the link and search this site, there’s a high probability that you’ll be able to find the post.

How The Heck Does The Economy Work, Anyway?

A few months ago, I wrote a post about an online video series I’ve been following by John Green on world history. A few days ago, I learned that two economics professors at George Mason University were starting an online course in the same vein as Stanford. As they’re economics professors, naturally, you’d expect that the course is on economics (it is). In fact, the two professors (Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen) describe the course as:

This course covers theory and empirics and history for the economic growth of developing nations.

I have to say, I’m really excited for this course and I think you should be, too. Similar to my comment about our need to understand the implications of history and the past, I believe we also should have an understanding some of the basic underlying theory of the economy.

There are a few differences between John Green’s crash course and the course being offered by Prof. Tabarrok and Prof. Cowen. First, as I referred to earlier, the economics course is more in the same vein of MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). Second, there aren’t any fun animations from the Thought Bubble (at least I haven’t seen any, yet). Third, there are multiple videos per lesson. With John Green’s course, there was only one video per week on a given topic. With this course from Marginal Revolution University, there are usually multiple videos for a given lesson. For instance, for the lesson on People (as in, leading thinkers on the economy), there are over 30 videos. Finally, there are practice questions. Practice questions? Yes, practice questions. Meaning, the professors have included practice questions along with the videos to help the viewer interact with the material.

I’ve included the introduction video below.

Has the Automobile Peaked: The Economist Thinks So…

This morning I was thumbing through my copy of The Economist to find an intriguing headline: “Seeing the back of the car.” The “briefing” at the top of the page said, “The future of driving.”

After reading through the article, it’s seems to me that the author makes a convincing point (with data!) that the automobile has reached its peak.. It’s pretty hard to argue with some of the evidence, too. I’ve included one of the more enlightening graphs below. In it, you can see that the percentage of people getting their license (as compared across years) is definitely declining. While we can’t necessarily say that this means the end of the car. It would certainly be a contributing factor, though, if this were to occur. The Economist isn’t the only place where this argument’s being made either.

Much has been made of the generations transitioning into the work world and their lack of affinity for buying houses and cars. There are some reasonable explanations for this, too. If we think about the era that they’ve grown up, owning cars and houses weren’t the “be-all, end-all” like it was for previous generations. There’s a strong preference for spending money on other things.

One of my more popular posts here at Genuine Thriving was something I wrote near the beginning of my time writing here called, “Advancing America’s Public Transportation System: High-Speed Rail in the USA.” In my weekly glance at the posts that get the most hits, it’s often near the top. There are a number of possible explanations, but I think it has to do with a greater affinity for public transportation (than there used to be). As someone who has spent time in a number of different cities and countries with varying qualities of public transportation, it seems to me that a successful public transit is one of the cornerstones to a thriving local economy.

Note: If you’d like more evidence that public transit is vital to a city’s economy, check out Richard Florida’s work, who’s a Professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

Could “General Managers” Have Stopped JP Morgan’s Loss?

Jamie Dimon (CEO of ) has been in the news for the last couple of weeks and I’m sure he’d much rather not have been (at least not in the news for the reasons he and his firm are in the news). The :

JPMorgan Chase says losses from a massive trading blunder in the bank’s London have reached $5.8 billion and could go as high as $7 billion.

That’s a . I think that this occurrence (and probably the kerfuffle with ) is tied to something I read in the Harvard Business Review last week. It was an article by in that talked about the :

At one time general managers were at the center of the action. Two decades ago, organizations were designed around stand-alone business units, so all managers had to understand finance, technology, manufacturing, sales, marketing, strategy, human resources, and more. . . However starting in the 1980’s, many companies evolved to “functional” structures to cut costs and reduce duplication. The transition consolidated those support functions which were common among the BU’s [business units]. GE, for example, went from hundreds of discrete BU’s to a dozen large businesses with each one having strong, centralized finance, HR, engineering, marketing, and manufacturing units. . . In fact, for many chief executives I’ve recently worked with, the first real GM job that they had was CEO!

While I can see how this trend has helped to save companies lots of money, I find it a tad worrisome. I’ve about having an eye towards the bigger picture and I wonder if by consolidating these business units that this eye towards the bigger picture has been shielded. That is, not having a general manager there to act as “oversight” may have made it easier to shirk long-term goals and focus on short-term profits.

Tying this back into the JP Morgan Chase loss: I wonder if the firm had a number of general managers (at more levels than the ) would this have happened? Would a general manager responsible for the trader in question have allowed this kind of trade to happen? The same question could be asked about Barclay’s and LIBOR. Would a general manager have created an environment where it was okay to behave so unethically? It’s nearly impossible to answer these questions either way. Nonetheless, it is worth considering the trend of the organizational structure of firms. Is it really in the best interest of the firm to eliminate all general managers? Are the short-term gains worth sacrificing the long-term sustainability?

Today is the Third “Friday the 13th” in 2012

Since today is Friday the 13th, I thought I’d pull up an old post from the . A little more than a year ago, I . Here’s a brief excerpt:

Given the , I thought it would be a good time to do a post on the ‘silliness’ of Friday the 13th. The absurdity of Friday the 13th has always puzzled me. It really is just a day and the only reason that it garners “power” over anything is because  of Friday the 13th by perpetuating the myth. The title of this post includes the phobia: friggatriskaidekaphobia. One can ‘learn’ from Wikipedia that this is a compound of , the name of the Norse goddess who gave us the name “Friday,” and , fear of the number 13. I happen to like words, but a word like friggatriskaidekaphobia — when, outside of days like today, would you use that? Maybe more importantly, who would use that word? Maybe psychiatrists or psychologists?

If you have 3 minutes and 3 seconds (estimated reading time), click-through and read the article: .