Looking back all the time

Both, the economics and Financial Management professors have remarked, as have dozens of op-ed columnists, that most financial/economic solutions target the last crisis, and lay the seeds for the next one.

I was wondering, aren't most MBAs also looking back, when the career-changers pick their new careers? Most would simply choose whatever is currently 'sexy'.

Anyone looking for jobs in Private Equity or Hedge Funds today ought to know that the crazy days are just about over. Not exactly mundane and normal, but not wild either. Sure, the average hedgie would still make a pile of money, but one would need to be a lot smarter to make as much money as in the heyday. Ditto for PE. Ditto for consulting. Ditto for whatever the fad !!

Picking your next job with an eye on the past isn't a really smart idea. Nonetheless, that is precisely what many of us will do.

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Music maketh the mood, or is it the other way around?

Today, there I was, in an Irish pub, a pint of bitter in hand, watching Man. Utd. a goal ahead against Fulham.
Neither of the two entirely unexpected, neither me in an Irish pub, nor Man. Utd. a goal ahead of Fulham. Everything ho-hum.

Suddenly, Fulham equalized. The game came to life, as did I, and as did the music. Now, either the faceless, nameless DJ at the classic rock radio station that was playing was a Fulham fan, or it was just me, a little mellower after a second mug, because all of a sudden, Led Zep, Kiss, Live, AC/DC (and Bon Jovi too) all played, back to back. Uptempo !!

The second equalizer, in the 89'th minute, and the unmistakable 'Whiskey in the Jar' comes on at the same time. Surely not just a coincidence, eh?
Four minutes of extra time later, the Man. Utd. players walked out a little unhappy, already trailing Chelsea. I walked out a content man !!
A long run later in the evening, a perfect ending to the August break...

PS: I don't hate Man. Utd. anymore. Not since a certain showboating Portuguese left Manchester for Madrid. But I still love to see the fan-boys pissed off !!

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Age: just a state of mind, or something like it...

Last term, one of the more interesting exercises the class did was in O.B. We were on the eye-roll inducing, but easy, stuff, like 'what do you want out of life', 'long term goals' and how these things evolve with time. The professor then asked us to chart out the amount of time, as a percentage, we'd like to spend on 4-5 aspects (the usual suspects, personal, professional, family, social etc.), and do this in chunks of 5 or 10 years, from now, till the time we'd like to live.

Then we were to compare it with the people around us.

The class was quite for about 5 minutes, and then it became a fish-market. On a side note, methinks the only reason I enjoyed O.B. was that every second OB class was bound to end up in a fish-market !!

The most interesting thing was the huge difference in our thinking. Not in our allocation of time. No, if you knew the other person, you could make a fair guess of his/her allocation. What really stood out was how long we wanted to live !!

I was ready to call it a day at 60, another at 65, but most Europeans went on till 80 or 85 !! We weren't asked to influence each other's points of view, just understand them. Oh boy, did this take some understanding, ha ha.

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Net Neutrality Neutered ?

In all this hullabaloo over the Google-Verizon proposal,there are a lot of grey areas...
One good point stands out. No company can pay an ISP to prioritize it's traffic at the expense of a rival.
That, I think, pretty much retains the core idea of Net Neutrality.

Then why is there a reluctance on one's part to say it's cool?
Why is there a nagging suspicion that this proposal will do us no good?
Why is there so much skepticism around the deal?
There are reasons good enough to justify this ...

For one, the bargaining power rests with the ISPs when it comes to dealing with the smaller content providers. No good can come of it.
These smaller content providers will be able to cut deals with some ISPs, not with all.
Now, imagine one ISP has a deal with one of the bandwidth-hogs, and you get high-speed access to it at home. Now you travel to another place, and the ISP there doesn't allow high-speed access to this service, since it doesn't have a deal with the content provider. So you can access a website at full service levels with one ISP in one place, but not with another ISP in another place. What total rot!! The very essence of today's evolution is that the internet is the same wherever you go.

You can kiss the idea of a 'cloud' goodbye if this happens.

Tech. enthusiasts aside, the marketing departments won't be too happy with this development. They're targeting their customers and spending money on advertising on the right website, with all the segmentation, profiling etc. Now, some ISP comes along and blocks access to the website. A good proportion of the advertising expense would just go down the drain. Not good !!

Even if an ISP doesn't block access altogether to these bandwidth-hogs, if they just provide access to the content but at much lower (public) speeds, that's just not good enough. It'll still be a retrograde step.

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