Slippage, Breakage, Float, and Bong

It's a couple years old, but I just found this great Motley Fool article covering some important, but never-talked-about, business terms.

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Chinese Dr. Strangelove

From today's FT, FT.com / World / Asia-Pacific - Top Chinese general warns US over attack.

China is prepared to use nuclear weapons against the US if it is attacked by Washington during a confrontation over Taiwan, a Chinese general said on Thursday

Great...

“We . . . will prepare ourselves for the destruction of all of the cities east of Xian. Of course the Americans will have to be prepared that hundreds . . . of cities will be destroyed by the Chinese.”

I'm sure all the people in the cities east of Xian (which is like, almost all Chinese people), are delighted about this prospect.

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Gizmo vs. Skype

The Gizmo features page looks really promising. Sounds like they really have thought about how to differentiate against Skype with real innovative ideas. Some of these feature really sounded interesting, so I download the client....and absolutely can't get it to work. It won't let me register, won't let me login, just freezes for a while then gives up. I fully believe in "release early and often", but what's the point if it doesn't even work on the first go. So there I've just uninstalled this POS, and am somewhat annoyed at having lost 15 minutes of my time with buggy software that didn't work at all, let alone as advertised. Back to skype, it is!

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Interesting website: 43 Places

43 Places is an interesting example of a Web 2.0 site that has bits of social networking, tagging, RSS, AJAX UI, and, just to cover all the right buzzwords, long tail!

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Company to watch: Jobster

Mixes social networking with jobhunting. Helps companies find good people who aren't active jobseekers. Just acquired www.workzoo.com, a jobs search engine/aggregator Link: Jobster - Connecting Employers with Working Professionals.

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VoIP backlash in Germany? | Tech News on ZDNet

Previous post-rant aside, Phil did refer to something very worrying. Vodafone really shouldn't be doing this. I hope they don't get away with it... Link: VoIP backlash in Germany? | Tech News on ZDNet.

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Sorry Phil, don't mean to pick on you, but it's become a pet-peeve since I see this mistake in so many places: The company is called VodaFone, with an "F" Repeat, It's VODAFONE not Vodaphone. It's only the largest operator in the world by market cap, and second largest by subscribers, so it's not an insignificant mistake. People making any kind of commentary about telecoms lose all their credibility when they can't even spell the name of the largest company in the field, don't you agree? Ok, rant over... Link: Skype award for most disruption per employee.

Skype Employees: 300

Vodaphone Employees: 60,000

Scaring Vodaphone Germany into filing an anti-Skype tarriff: Priceless.

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Watching America is a very interesting new website that translates into English articles from newspapers around the world. The idea is to allow Americans to "Discover what the world thinks about U.S.". Quite a good idea, although I would say that in the interest of a true conversation, it would be good for multiple translations to be taking place- wouldn't it be interesting to have Chinese, Russian, Urdu, Arabic, etc. versions of the main western press as well?

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Wow:

"says Linda McBain, boss of City-based-private client bank Investec. 'There has been a dramatic increase in the number of women holding senior management positions and statistics show that there are now more women millionaires than men under the age of 44.'"

Interesting development, I think. Some questions:

Am I simplifying things to say that traditionally men were responsible for generating household income and women responsible for managing/spending it?

Does this mean we're headed to a situation where the "typical" household sees the male partner totally disintermediated from the economic cycle, that is where the woman is responsible for the substantial earning, and entire spending of household income?

Are there historical/cultural examples of a household structure like this?

What are the implications for other roles?

How do both men and women adapt to this sort of change?

Is adaptation really necessary?

Will these changes stabilise or continue to move around?

Will these changes spread, or just occupy niches, leading to a situation where there is no "typical" household, and each couple will just have to negotiate individually whatever arrangement/roles/adaptation that makes them comfortable?

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