Purgatory at 37 degrees
At the heart of the current U. S. mortgage crisis are a variety of players that include circa 2006 home buyers with houses they couldn’t really afford, mortgage brokers who sold mortgages to people they knew couldn’t afford them, banks who turned those mortgages into securities that were bound to (in some cases designed to) fail, all held together with bureaucratic glue made almost entirely of testosterone and bullshit, and decorated with robo-signers and lost documents by the millions. Old news, right? But who would have thought we’d see many of the same behaviors emerge around one crappy refrigerator from Home Depot?
My friend Ralph owns that crappy fridge, an LG model based on a Whirlpool […]
Like a lot of you, this week I received several messages telling me my e-mail address had been stolen from a company called Epsilon that provides mass e-mail services to many giant corporations. At the end of this post you’ll find what I believe is the latest list of companies affected. I have heard from four of these companies so far — Best Buy, Chase, Hilton, and Ritz-Carlton, which is interesting because I don’t recall having even stayed at a Ritz-Carlton. From a look at the master list below I’m surprised I haven’t yet heard from Verizon, where I am also a customer. The point of this post isn’t just to print a list of […]
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is out with his autobiography and 
I have been doing business in Japan for 20 years, consulting for big and small companies, speaking at conferences, writing for Japanese publications, and helping both American and Japanese companies do business with each other. For years I flew to Tokyo once a month, generally in my role as giver of bad news, which I could get away with as an American. Throughout those 20 years I have been astounded by the energy and discipline of Japanese industry, and by its turgid impenetrability. For a country known for advanced technology, Japan is astoundingly resistant to outside ideas, as the current earthquake and nuclear crisis show yet again.