Today, Try to Be a Little Less Positive, Will You?

Our Nancy Cook talks to Barbara Ehrenreich about how thinking positive has ruined us all:

So, what’s wrong with being happy at work? 
Ehrenreich: Well, it’s wonderful to be happy. Optimism sometimes is justified, but what has happened in the American business culture has been some kind of staggering retreat from reality. I always assumed that corporate culture was rational because of my background in science and in journalism, but what I began to understand in the 1980s, 1990s, and throughout this decade was that the business culture had become unmoored. The idea of being the CEO went from being someone who had mastered the business to being someone who was a charismatic figure. Some business writers started to talk about the corporation more like a cult.

I remember reading one of these crazy books on attraction—about how you can get what you want by wishing it. One of blurbs on the back was written by a guy who worked for the company that held my retirement funds. That scared me. It’s clear that the build-up to the financial meltdown involved real denial and people acting on the idea that it’s bad to have negative people around.

How has this emphasis on positive thinking changed workers’ daily lives?
It means artificial smiling and artificial cheer. It’s a strain on people emotionally; the effort of managing the appearance of one’s emotions is work. It means not asking the hard questions you think about asking. When people have been criticized for being negative at work, very often what that means is that they asked too many questions. I always thought asking questions was a good thing.

Little late to this, but this is, as they say, a coup for the current bun.

The system is designed to track breaking news and trends and identify the best times to write about seasonal events, such as Halloween or Monday Night Football.

The Wall Street Journal, on Aol.’s new complicated new digital newsroom system.

Also: This cracks us up.

If you’re looking for a job right now, your prospects are terrible. There are six times as many Americans seeking work as there are job openings, and the average duration of unemployment — the time the average job-seeker has spent looking for work — is more than six months, the highest level since the 1930s. You might think, then, that doing something about the employment situation would be a top policy priority. But now that total financial collapse has been averted, all the urgency seems to have vanished from policy discussion, replaced by a strange passivity. There’s a pervasive sense in Washington that nothing more can or should be done, that we should just wait for the economic recovery to trickle down to workers. This is wrong and unacceptable.

Paul Krugman (via azspot) (via shorterexcerpts)

The urgency to bailout “too big to fail” banks and the lack of urgency to bailout people who WANT to work is criminal.

(via soupsoup)

Krugman continues to be one of the sharpest writers and critics out there.

soupsoup:

courtenaybird:

Busting Myths About Black Friday And Cyber Monday - The Consumerist

The more you know…

Let’s say Safeway Food stores offers Kellogg’s an exclusive deal to sell Corn Flakes. The cereal will be removed from the shelves at Giant. Now in order to get them I either have to switch to the Safeway across town for my general shopping, or continue to shop at Giant but make a special trip just to buy Cornflakes.

Which of those things am I going to do?

Neither.

Here’s why: When I go to the grocery store and see that the Corn Flakes are missing, I’ll be disappointed. But hey, look, that spot on the shelf where the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes used to be isn’t empty—something else has taken its place: AnotherCompany brand corn flakes. The box looks different, but they are corn flakes, and they’re less expensive. Turns out they’ve been selling them for years, but I never noticed before. What the heck, I’ll try a box. Beats making a special trip across town to Safeway.

And here’s what I’ll discover: AnotherCompany brand corn flakes are pretty much the same as Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. Maybe the flakes themselves are shaped a little differently, and they taste just a little different, but after a few bowls I really can’t remember what that difference is. And these new corn flakes taste great with strawberries too!

The next time I’m at Giant, I buy another box of the new cornflakes. I am happy, and go on with my life. If I’m at a hotel and they serve Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, I have a bowl. Yep, they’re good, but not good enough to rearrange my life for.

See where we’re going with this? News on the web is beyond plentiful, and most of it is similar. Make it less convenient for me to find your Web site, and I’ll switch to one of the many, many others that are just waiting for the opportunity to win my loyalty. It might not be exactly the same as yours, but after a short adjustment period I’m going to be just as happy. The sad truth is, you’re really not that special.

That would seem like a pretty basic lesson in economics that any executive—especially one as astute as Murdoch—would instinctively get. But he doesn’t. And neither do many of his cohorts.

Wes Kosova, on why Murdoch won’t win this

Rupert Murdoch has it backwards. You don’t charge the search engines to send people to articles on your site, you pay them. If you can’t make money from attention, you should do something else for a living. Charging money for attention gets you neither money nor attention.

Seth’s Blog: Rupert Murdoch has it backwards

SPOT ON! Seth Godin, the “nail it in one paragraph” master. What really is needed for many biz sectors in disrpution is the generic activity: Business Model Innovation. Take it from one of the epicentres of processing exactly that. Innovating new business models - http://businessmodelgeneration.com - where you have a workshop format orbiting nine nice central elements of a viable business model.

Now.

(via @jocke)

(via sliceonline) (via ambivalence)

And they Looked Out, Liked Returned Crusoes, on the Manufactured World

PHOTO: Jason Lee/Reuters-Landov

Here’s Begley, on Copenhagen talks:

Seeing the failure of Copenhagen as something short of Armageddon is not contrarianism for contrarianism’s sake. Just to be clear, if the world had agreed on what quantity of greenhouse-gas emissions to cut by when—on “targets and timetables,” in the prevailing argot—it would have launched us down a path that could keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, relative to pre-industrial levels, which many climate scientists see as a point of no return. The meltdown of global climate talks is therefore a setback to efforts to avert the worst consequences of global warming. For instance, scientists foresee a massive rise in sea levels that would inundate coastal megalopolises from Shanghai to New York, more frequent droughts and floods, a loss of glaciers that provide fresh water to tens of millions of people in India and China, lethal heat waves, and climate shifts that are as dangerous to farming as loss of sea ice is to polar bears. Already, yields of wheat in northern India have fallen due to climate change—not a good thing in a country that is currently importing grain to feed itself.

But for months there have been ample warning signs that the Copenhagen meeting was headed for a cliff. The Senate wasn’t going to pass climate legislation in time, so other countries, getting déjà vu all over again, had no reason to believe the U.S. would abide by any emissions cuts the U.S. pledged in Copenhagen. Remember, the U.S. signed but never ratified the Kyoto climate treaty; to the rest of the world, America’s climate promises aren’t credible even with Obama in office.

This is why you’re not innovative: Highlights from our global innovation survey show that, among other things, the Chinese are more bullish on America than Americans are.

When it entered the world in the final days of 2000, almost no one cared a jot about the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. In hindsight, the CFMA turned out to be one of the most momentous pieces of legislation passed during the entire Clinton administration—and one of the darkest spots on the record of Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers. It began with a simple question: who should regulate derivatives, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission or the Securities and Exchange Commission? By answering “none of the above,” the CFMA essentially deregulated the entire derivatives market, including energy derivatives, as abused by Enron, and credit-default swaps, which allowed AIG Financial Products to binge on unlimited amounts of risk. Enron became the largest corporate fraud in history (and any Californian will be able to tell you about the consequences for energy prices in the state, which were pegged to market prices being manipulated by Enron traders), while AIG’s bailout cost U.S. taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars that were desperately needed elsewhere. But the most invidious effect of the CFMA wasn’t so much financial as political. It marked the point at which Washington became completely captured by Wall Street. Those who opposed the act were ousted; those who pushed it through, rewarded. Financial laws still can’t get passed unless and until the banks want them enacted. And we’re all suffering the consequences.

Felix Salmon, on legislation that changed our world.