The Millennium Marketer

While this isn’t usually a political blog, I felt a strong need to discuss my political view out of frustration as an American and because it’s really feasible that my generation is going to have to shoulder a lot of the world’s problems many, many years from now. Let’s just say that Atlas and many Americans have something in common: A huge, heavy, impossible burden to shoulder, or a multiple trillion dollar debt.

Ironically, that’s why we –those who 18 and over and who skew towards being technographically more active on the Internet–wanted Obama in the White House in the first place.

Everybody can admire Obama’s presidential campaign, which was lauded as one of the best social media campaigns in history. His team was good at two things: raising funds and getting us excited about his campaign promises. He said Change is Possible, and yet his State of the Union speech was a re-run of last year’s spectacle.

We’ve hired Hamlet as president,. He thinks too much, claims action, and is amazing at monologues, and potentially has too many false advisors. Basically, he can’t seem to get a cohesive policy together to cure us of this nagging and dangerous malady that is our government.

We should have hired a MD instead of a JD. Preferably someone who understands Chinese medicine methodology, or in other words, somebody who knows how to treat root causes, not prescribe medications for all the symptoms of a disease.

Case in point: the budget and $50 million is set to “change education policy,” which means

increasing

government spending to push further the already over-used public services lever. The objective is to ensure that we will have a long term effective working class. In theory, it sounds fair, but the proposed method to execute lacks true substance.

It is enough to aggravate an already sore and infected budget wound even further. Government proposes to do this by creating a “carrot and stick” effect to reward schools that do better in the aggregate and pay less to schools that don’t. Great idea, Genius President. For all that flowery rhetoric, I feel like I have to go “from the beautiful pacific coast of California all the way to the end of Political Street in DC” to mentally shake the brain of the White House to do the right thing.

So let me see if I got this right. Are you proposing to reward schools in rich neighborhoods MORE money (where students already do well), and allow schools with less money to suffer? This makes me so angry–because it’s representative of a lot of Obama’s policies so far–they push money into places where it doesn’t belong because government’s aim is to placate and reach political compromise rather than to achieve real, lasting results.

I’m no expert, but at first glance, it looks to me like Obama and his Education Policy team never read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.

They continue to treat effects instead of the root problems. If you want to focus money into education, focus on encouraging schools to invest in their teachers, encourage creativity, and offer avenues for teachers to get more training and be better teachers. People who don’t belong as teachers will get psychologically squeezed as the field becomes professionally competitive and those unqualified people will move into other areas where they may be more suited. As a result jobs will naturally be reallocated people who really deserve it.

If we continue to push forward more standardized testing, two things will happen. One, we will continue to have the same problems in education that we have had for a very long time and many teachers may simply take their wages and do what is easy. Two, we will be teaching kids to think like standardized tests which is not at all good for the economy in the long run. Our edge in America against China is that we have innovation, a value that China is still struggling with under Communist rule.

I’m not claiming to be an expert economist or even prime to run for President, but seriously (srsly?!) ? Come on, Obama, get to the root of the many diseases that we have developed as a nation and stop treating symptoms.

Well, since it is 2010, you could say I am starting out on a “tabula rasa” or “blank slate,” which I think is a very fitting for a new start to my blog this year.

Not to mention that today was the day that HP and Microsoft todaythe HP Tablet at Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The news is abuzz, and some say this is the Year of the Tablet (or possibly the year of 3D technologies) [side note: my company is going to love it when that happens!]

I started to try and remember what year it was last year, and I don’t mean that it’s now 2010 and last year was 2009. I mean that what electronics device was the device that caught everybody’s attention?

Was it the Kindle? Or maybe it was the Netbook. A quick look at Google Trends confirmed it: 2008 was the year of the eBook aka Kindle (or end of 2007) and 2009 was the year of the Netbook. And of course there was the iPhone, which is now so common place that I could not locate The Year of the iPhone.

A Year in Review

So, since January is a time to review the previous year and look forward to the upcoming year, I wanted to say something about consumer hardware device convergence. In the Year of the Netbook, there was a slow progression, and this is just based on my experience of having read the news about it. People were first excited by the low price, excited by ASUS’s strong entry and leadership in the market, then confused by the difference between a Netbook and the regular computer (or at least that was my experience), then Dell and other companies started to worry Netbooks would eat up margin.

All of this chatter just suggested that electronics are really moving towards a convergence of devices where it is all going to merge into one. You may have an ebook reader, a computer and a smartphone, but you might at some point find yourself with just a laptop that is also a eBook reader and a computer. And, if you really wanted to, you could probably Skype on it.

Tech Consumers Drive Convergence…and the Market Taught Them to Ask for It
While this is nothing new, the real gem is that consumer attitudes are being shaped by these new technologies. Slowly, we start to expect certain things in a device as they become more mainstream, i.e. a touch screen, mobility, ability to multitask…not to mention, that all of this is largely driven by brand influence and brand equity. It’s the big players such as Apple, HP, Intel, and possibly Nvidia who are able to help declare the Year of the Tablet.

Will China Lead Market Innovation Instead of Drive It?
On a different front, China is starting to come into its own. Up until now, it’s been the supplier backstage that has helped make innovation happen. And China is starting to figure out what brand equity is supposed to mean, which suggests that there will be a year soon where it will be the Year of Innovation Led By China (or something to that effect).

What does your gut tell you will be telling of 2010? Or 2011?

Recently, my thirteen year old brother asked me about a poem he is reading for his 8th grade class, The Road Not Yet Traveled by Robert Frost.

While the poem is ideal, the reality is not as clear as “two roads diverged in yellow wood.”
On my morning commute today, a walk through San Francisco that is full of reminders of homeless and “giving up”, I reflected on my past experiences and what I have enjoyed, such as a leading a group of seniors searching for the next road on their career paths and my love for simply speaking with authority on a subject, because I learn best by talking through things.

I came across this thought as I walked:

To be a teacher is to be a lifelong learner.

In my life, I’ve been very lucky to have teachers and mentors with whom I still keep in touch with. And because my role models have always been teachers, I’ve decided that a good reason for being is to set an example for others, like my brother, friends, family and other people I come across.

A “teacher” is not necessarily someone who works in a classroom, and with that thought, I’ve set my mind to this goal for the week to do the best I can, as to serve others who I can teach and learn from.

This isn’t really “new” news but it definitely speaks to the fact that we’re still in recession. You can easily invest in a big bag of flour (preferably wheat flour for the vitamins) to make this. I got two big bags of quality flour from CostCo for about $10, and I think I’m set for the year.

We did a test at home on this one to see whether it matters if you do knead the bread and the difference is very minimal.

3 cups of flour
1/4 teaspoon yeast
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups of warm water

With clean hands, just swish the ingredients around in a mixing bowl. Leave overnight for at least 12 hours. The longer, the better.

When you are ready to bake, Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Find a bowl made of pyrex or cast iron (cast iron is probably much better) with a lid and put it in the oven. Wait about 20 minutes or until the inside of the bowl is about 200 degrees F.
At this point you can add anything you like to your bread dough. Ground flax, oat bran or your favorite dried herbs is great, and dressing the outside of the bread with extra virgin olive oil will give it a little extra crunch, but the bread is good with or without these add-ins.

When the bowl is hot enough, take some oven mitts and remove bowl from the oven. Drop the dough in. Bake for 30 minutes with the cover on, and 15 minutes without the cover for that golden, crunchy outside.

I’ll post pictures soon.
Reference: NY Times The Minimalist