Ticket Chaos in Beijing for Olympics

I have a close friend who lives and works in Beijing. He wrote me an email about his experience getting tickets for the Olympics today, and he said it would be okay to share this with the rest of you- I thought you would find the contracts between his report and the AP interesting.
The [...]

Social Connection

This is a follow up to my recent post on the Social Contract.
Humans have a basic need for social connection.  The experiments done by Harlow and others in the 50’s show that primates need touch and nurturing to do well.  In fact, many of the cases of failure to thrive in infants may be due [...]

What’s happened to the Social Contract?

There’s a great blog post over at IT Toolbox, on the Original Thinking blog by Dennis Stevenson on The Myth of Job Security- Employer Version, with a promise for a follow up giving the employee’s point of view. I was going to comment, but because my comment was so long, I thought a separate [...]

Law of Supply and Demand

In this world, much of it works by the economic theory of supply and demand.  This means that typically, when supply is tight, the price will be higher than when a commodity is in abundance, in which case the “equilibrium” price will be lower.  (see the graph below.)
Take, for example, tickets to a rock concert. [...]

Your Failure to Plan Ahead Is Not My Emergency

As many of you know, I have been involved in the planning and execution of a number of Podcamps to date, and I’ve also been involved in providing onsite services to people with disabilities at the Super Bowl in the past. Being part of these large events, inevitably there are last minute fires requiring [...]

Being Smart With Money

One of the things I think we do REALLY poorly in this country is teaching our kids how money works. I didn’t get a course in economics until college, but most of the best lessons I learned about money were through various jobs. One was working as a customer service rep for Citibank [...]

Helping Others Out

How do we decide when and how to help other people?
We’re all asked to donate to different causes daily.  Over the past month alone, I have been asked to give to Habitat for Humanity, The Nature Conservancy, Doctors Without Borders, The Smile Train, the local food pantry, the fraternal order of police, various alumni groups, [...]