Software, Digital Content, Geopolitics, Economics & More from of a Libertarian Serial Expat and Entrepreneur
In: living worldwide
18 Mar 2003Jason quotes (apparently approvingly) a site that pontificates over French school menus and how they’re so superior to what’s served to children in America. Well, those menus sure sound impressive, but if you knew Montigny le Bretonneux for the drab suburb it is (though neighbor city Trappes is quite worse), you wouldn’t base too much [...]
In: living worldwide
28 Nov 2002Glenn Fleishman: "So what I’ve been told is that it’s considered incredibly bourgeois to offer good service. It’s a lessening of oneself to be subservient in that fashion. This may be an interaction of culture problem, as the best service I receive in the States is service of equals: it’s a salesperson or server who [...]
Newsweek: "As long as the government is more interested in shuffling the jobless between useless projects and playing with the numbers instead of tackling real labor market reform, it will be a long time before Germany is working again. Absurd laws such as those passed last week only feed the vicious cycle, in which ever [...]
In: best & worst practices|building online products|living worldwide
8 Nov 2002Compare Canon’s web site about digital cameras in the USA and in Europe. We Europeans have to suffer through this long page that makes it almost impossible to tell apart products from each other, while the US site gives a good overview of their two consumer ranges, plus a small upselling option to the SLR [...]
"[D]ialect maps, displaying what terms and pronunciations are used, and where they are used." Fascinating for a foreigner like me. Turns out that you can call sneakers "tennis shoes" (like in French) if you don’t live in the Bay area or in the northwest. Interestingly, some concepts I might have trouble translating are referred to [...]
CTV.ca: "The government says the law, which stems from European Union directives, aims to encourage online commerce by making the Internet a safer place to do business. It wants companies operating on the Internet to be subject to the same tax and commerce laws as traditional firms. But opponents say Spain has gone far beyond [...]
In: living worldwide
13 Oct 2002It’s fun to see Fox News is not distributed on the French cable and satellite TV bundles. I guess TV execs here still believe CNN is the only US news channel.
In: living worldwide
10 Oct 2002Wharton: "Welcome to the world of global back-office operations, or as it is often called, cross-border business-process outsourcing. While companies have long outsourced manufacturing operations and other tasks such as IT maintenance or software development, the trend has now expanded to include other kinds of business processes such as customer contact, bill processing and medical [...]
In: living worldwide
5 Aug 2002Rick Bruner: "I mean, am I living with cultural blinders on, nationalistic to the point of myopia, or is it not true that the United States did in fact have disproportionate influence on the way the rest of the world has lived in the past 100 years or so? For example, starting with "The Arts" [...]
In: living worldwide
15 Jul 2002Considering the poor recent economic track record, and bad fiscal condition, of continental Europe’s biggest countries, the fact that the Euro hit parity with the U.S. dollar talks at length about the gloom brought by corporate America.
I'm CEO of an online trade publishing firm in the marketing and defense verticals. We try to make news and data digestible and useful in an environment that is more noisy each day. This personal blog mixes my thoughts and interests on politics, business, software, and more, based on my business and personal experiences. Over the years I have posted items that turned out spectacularly wrong, and a few posts that stood the test of times better. Personal views only.