Geek Philosophy

Since I’m not feeling particularly inspired to write about any specific topic today, I’m going to go with the daily writing prompt from the NaBloPoMo website and link to a few blog posts / articles that I’ve liked this month.

• Ze Frank’s Guide to Quantitative Easing

I’m an armchair economist at times, and I love a good Jon Stewart-style political mocking. In this video (a take-off of the iPhone 4 v. Evo 4g video that was popular a while back), we are introduced to the concepts behind quantitative easing. It’s pretty funny and worth a watch if you know anything about the banking system.

• Breaking The Web’s Cooking Jar (Coding Horror)

Jeff Atwood is a bright guy, and I love a programmer who knows how to convey technical topics (both simple and complex) to non-technical users. In this post, he discusses Firesheep, a Firefox plugin that has trivialized session stealing. He describes what’s going on, why it’s not a lot different than what’s been possible for 15 years, and what you can do about it.

• Deadly Terrorism Happened Before 9/11 (Salon)

This Salon article does a good job comparing the terrorism events of the past (and the reaction to them) to the knee-jerk, over-reactions of today. An interesting read if you’re the type that grumbles about not being able to bring a 200mL bottle onto a plane (while being allowed to bring ten 100mL bottles), or if you think that security should have less of a theatrical component.

The article isn’t thick with details, but it looks like Starbucks is trying to apply practices (if not principles) from Lean manufacturing to their front-line staff. Unfortunately, it looks like they’re taking a top-down, command and control approach, pushing out rules that make no sense to the employees. They seem to be missing the key principle of empowering the workers.

It’d be interesting to see if they tried this out in a few stores and found substantially improved results. Hopefully they didn’t miss the “Check” and “Act” sections of PDCA.