text:
Can a chain ever be good?
- b
- Brian S Jun 4, 2006 05:07 PM
I've always thought that if a place has more than one branch, then it's not very good. Or only one branch is good. A lot of New Yorkers think this. But, here in Tulsa, a lot of people prefer to go to nationwide chains. Are they ever any good? Can they be? If a famous singer trained a whole bunch of people to ape his every movement and vocal nuance, would you want to see one of those clones?
Today's New York Times has an article echoing these sentiments. With the top chef in the kitchen, "they taste constantly, berate even their top staff for not getting the seasoning right, micromanage shamelessly" But the chef can't do that if he is a thousand miles away.
I don't think your analogy is particularly good -- perhaps it's closer to the difference between a recording and a live performance. The recording may be technically better, but it doesn't have the immediacy and vibrancy of a live performance.
"Good" is a relative and semantic question. Is the food good? The whole dining experience good? The whole sociopolitical aspect good? Certainly some nationwide chains offer dishes that are well-prepared and tasty. I'm still not sure that would make them "good."
If you are defining it as places with more than one location, than yes, definitely. I know some restaurants that would qualify as chains under that definition that are good.
I've been in places where a national chain was definitely the best option -- at the very least they have consistent standards, and the menu is tried and true.
re: Ruth Lafler
Saying that chains are always bad is about as silly as believing that independently owned restaurants are always good.
re: Melanie Wong
re: taxchic
So name a good chain. A chain that, were it to open a branch in San Francisco or New York or another big city, you would post about on the local board (if you could), saying, if you don't eat there because you are prejudiced against chains, you are missing some great food. This will help me, since I'm currently in a city with a lot of chains, and the place you name will be the next restaurant I eat at.
re: Brian S
Houston's consistently gets good reviews from posters I trust.
re: Homer J
in n out burger is fairly indisputably delicious
re: california
chipotle isnt bad, if there aren't any other good burrito places around (like in manhattan)
re: california
I had my first in and out burger about 2 months ago. Nothing special..and the fries were awful. My step-son was in town and he drove clear across town the get them. It had to be a nostalgic thing with him...
If I want a chain burger..I stick to the Carls Jr. six dollar burger. Sometimes...that is soooo good.
re: Brian S
Despite another poster saying that Roy's clones are not nearly as good as the original, our Roy's in Chicago turns our some of the best mid-priced seafood in town (I say mid-priced because obviously very high end places like Avenues and Everest are going to have better food, including seafood). Roy's is better and more imaginative than local places like Shaw's. Another of our favorites in the chain restaurant category is Ruth's Chris. We just happen to love the way they do steaks, and they are always great.
We tend not to eat at low-end chains, so can't say about them.
re: Brian S
Macaroni Grill, about 10 steps better than Olive Garden. Il Fornaio is another chain (small) that I would mind going to, so is Piatti.
re: Brian S
It's been a while, but years ago I had a number of very good meals at Legal Seafoods in the Boston area.
I'd also echo another poster's thimbs up on Houston's--for what it is, it's solid.
re: Brian S
I like Popeye's. There are few mom and pops that make fried chicken as consistently good. I also love White Castle hamburgers (an acquired taste, perhaps). And Steak and Shake isn't bad for what it is (at least it wasn't the last time I was in one...probably five years ago). In DC, I liked Five Guys--I think they are expanding. Oh, and Waffle House. Pecan waffles, hash browns scattered, smothered and covered--roadtrip favorite.
re: butterfly
I should qualify this a bit... I'm going mostly on nostalgia with these particular chains, as I haven't lived close to any of them for a long time... But when I go to the US on road trips, these are the places that I gravitate toward if there isn't any promising local place close-by. About Waffle House, the quality seems to vary from place to place. Waffles can be tricky.
re: Brian S
Santouka (currently, my favorite ramen place in the NYC area), just as good in LA and Tokyo.
Din Tai Fung would be a big hit in NYC, as it is in LA and Tokyo, among other cities.
Original Pancake House. Haven't been to the ones in Western NY state, but the ones in LA and San Diego are pretty great.
re: Eric Eto
Eric, is the Santouka in NJ or in NYC? TIA
re: Brian S
"So name a good chain"
Off the top of my head....using the "more than one location" criteria earlier in the thread and emphasizing "good" as opposed to "spectacular", I'd be fine with any of the following if I were traveling in unfamiliar Anytown, USA:
Bonefish Grill
Beard Papa
Smith & Wollensky
Commanders Palace
Ruth's Chris
Kopps Custard
Texas Roadhouse
The Capital Grille
re: Brian S
Carrabba's is exceptionally good, IMHO. Better than Macaroni and Olive Garden combined.
Houston's is great. Has one of the best steaks I've ever had.
In N Out is surreal. Best burger and fries available at a chain.
Krispy Kreme's hot donuts for sheer decadence. I guess Cold Stone could fall under that umbrella too.
re: Brian S
Palomino has consistenly outstanding lamb shanks. Oceanaire has a remarkable variety of fish, always fresh and well-prepared in my experience. I would certainly rate these chain restaurants as "very good." It isn't three-star haute cuisine, but definitely a good dining experience.
re: taxchic
re: Ruth Lafler
RUTH: Good wording. I love your comeback. I still don't know why some people treat chains as a stepchild. In most cases, chains are better then individual restaurants, as they have testing kitchens, time and money to test and sample recipes, months to try them on customers, and sometimes for free, they have expensive gourmet chefs trying to come up with something that no-one else may have, and they always try these new ideas before marketing.
There are a few reliably good chains out there. The problem you state where the clones aren't as good as the original are fairly limited; the ones that are most noteworthy for that are Pizzeria Uno in Chicago, and Roy's in Hawai'i. Both have extended to nationwide operations, and in both cases the original restaurant is leagues better than at its extensions. In this case, it's sort of like the party game Telephone, where the recipes get translated multiple times until they hit the diners' plates. Once it gets there, it has been slightly adjusted by numerous chefs along the way, and the original vision is different from what it once was.
I think the main problem with chains is not so much that the chef isn't there, but that marketing departments exist for bigger chains. It's less of a problem of a cloned singer, as it is the upper management trying to play to as wide of an audience as possible. Think of it as being like American Idol; there are surely some truly great singers who get knocked out early in the competition because they have a very unique voice (someone like Tori Amos comes to mind). While a number people will absolutely LOVE that person's voice, there are other people out there who don't like it as much for whatever reason they have. So, American Idol and a chain restaurant are very similar because they avoid finding that absolutely amazing stuff that not everybody may like, and tread the safe road by creating something as inoffensive (and in turn, banal) as possible.
I remember Z'Tejas Grill before they got really huge (Phoenix had their fourth location, it was their first outside Texas IIRC)- one of their signature dishes, Voo Doo Tuna, was a very assertively flavored dish that I really loved, but could see some people out there not really liking it. I had the same dish years later after they went national, and the flavors that I enjoyed so much before were now muted. What likely happened is that the people who didn't like it mentioned that they didn't like it, and then management tweaked the recipe so that the offending note disappeared. The worst offender on creating bland, inoffensive dishes (in my mind, at least) is The Cheesecake Factory. I still remember the very first time I ate there. I had the Asian Orange Chicken; the first thing I thought when I took a bite was "Gee, this used to be better than it is now". You could just tell that the dish used to have so much vibrance and life to it, and through focus groups the dish turned into a hollow shell of its former self.
PS- as far as national chains go, my favorite is Texas Roadhouse. They have reliably good steak, and their fall-off-the-bone ribs just can't be beat.
re: JK Grence (the Cosmic Jester)
I'm also a Texas Roadhouse fan and have a tendency to forget they're a chain. That could be because the one in my area (Abilene, TX) has perhaps the lowest turnover rate I've EVER seen in anything but a family-run restaurant where you basically have to die to quit. ;-) In the six or seven years we've been going, we've seen two bar-backs rise to management, and were stunned not long ago to have another long-long-term server come over to our table and tell us he couldn't believe how big our kids are now (they're 9, 13 and 14) because he remembers when new servers would cringe when they saw us coming (you know, the kid thing) and the older servers would always tell them they'd be lucky to get our table - we had the best behaved kids they've ever seen. (OK, I digress to brag a little, but you get the point.)
I may've mentioned this here, or at another forum, but during this economic period, I'm more likely to go to that trusted chain than a hit-or-miss local spot. Sacrilege, I know.
(In fact, we may be heading out to dinner soon as I just realized I have three entree certificates thanks to emailing the restaurant not long and suggesting a brand of low-carb margarita mixer.)
Actually, the Salvadoran or Vietnamese guy or gal actually executing the dish may be a better cook than the star chef, just not equipped to run a restaurant show....
Actually there are a number of chains that New Yorkers rely on: Wu Liang Ye, H&H bagels, Le Pain Quotidien, Popeye's, Tasti D Lite, and many others not to mention the supermarkets - Whole Foods, Fairway, etc - clothing stores, and everything else that people in the suburbs use.
The difference is that the food has more variety. Nothing stands in the way of a good chain here. Le Pain Quotidien is an international chain of cafes and it is all over Manhattan.
I think there are differences between local/regional chains and national chains.
There can be inspired items on the menu at chains, but by and large, they are standard to appeal to an American thought process that dynamic is scary and static is good. An acquaintence of mine will always eat at chain restaurants when he travels without exception because he wants no surprises and knows what to expect. Oddly, he would rather go to Red Lobster in Portland, ME or Outback in Kansas City or Chevy's here in Phoenix rather than try a local place.
I am fairly sour on national chains because there is rarely ever anything that is truly inspired or unique. Of course, if they are like Claim Jumper, they aren't worried about anything inspired, but simply are serving large portions for the "wow!" factor.
Unfortunately, those obscenely large portions of mediocre food is still mediocre food.
re: Seth Chadwick
Yes, some very local chains can be good if they allow autonomy. One small fast food chain in Tulsa lets franchise owners add their own recipes in their branch; one local owner prepares the spicy fish sandwiches he used to sell out of a van before buying the franchise. The best local chain I know is Ron's Hamburgers. It started as a single branch. It looked like a cowshed and it would be jammed with people waiting for a seat. Rich lawyers sitting next to construction workers on lunch break. Ron was a genius cook and he put each burger through about ten steps. Meat was pounded flat, seasoned with salt and spices, coated with lard using a paintbrush, cooked on a superhot grill (500 degrees), steamed under a dome. I like my burgers extra rare and this is much harder to do , so Ron took it as a challenge and he gave me the best burgers I have ever tasted. Now this style of burger is flat and very thin (about a third of an inch thick) and as big as an old 45 RPM record. The meat is succulent and juicy and melts in with the cheese. The best chef in New York could not make a better burger. Ron doesnt cook any more but there are now seven branches. Ron developed a unique franchise system. He gave each of his kids a branch, and his wife got the busiest branch, downtown. But none of those branches can compare to the burgers I ate when Ron was behind the grill.
While it is silly to think that every chain is bad and every independent is good, I don't believe that a chain can ever be the best of it's particular genre (cost/style/location). By chain, I'm specifically referring to places that have corporate kitchens that require absolute adherence to market-tested recipes, procedures, sources, etc... This very definition points to the goal of consistently apeasing the masses - that means a nice mediocrity, never hitting the highs and never hitting the lows.
Such chains are safe bets, known quantities - and can't be called really bad. But they're never going to be really good, by chowhound standards (real finds, either for authenticity, cost, or some other property that speaks to being unique - places that we're really happy and proud to report and debate on this site).
Given the economic part of the equation, although not directly a chowhound goal, that such places tend to displace the truly unique places, and that such a trend is counter to the overall desire of chowhounds to find the really unique places, my judgement is to stay the heck away from all chains as much and as often as I can.
I don't know how many folks remember that wonderful film, Demolition Man, starring that wonderful actor Sly Stallone, (cough, cough), but it foretold a completely castrated future, in which all restaurants were Taco Bells, because they had won the "restaurant wars". Every time someone goes to a Cheesecake Factory or PF Chang or McCormick & Schmick's, etc. etc., when much better, independent alternatives are nearby, I fear that this future of the Demolition Man is just around the corner.
as a previous poster noted, there's a difference between local chains and national chains. I personally find local chain to be, on average, slightly more consistent (I used to regularly visit Le Pain Q - not all great, but mostly decent).
I haven't eaten at any of the top-famous places Bittman wrote about, so I can't comment on that. But I've eaten at enough places to feel that if the head chef isn't there, the food can still be good but most often fell short of great. There's just not that perfection.
National chains is another story. The best I've had from them is mediocre, and the worst....I prefer not to remember it. At the volume anyway, one can't really cook, one can only serve and distribute.
So even though I admit there are plenty of awful independent places, I still prefer to go to them because there still can be a possibility of the unexpected, whereas with national chains I already know it's going to be disappointing.
re: zorgclyde
By the by, Le Pain Quotidien isn't an apt example of a "local" chain; it's an *international* chain with many, many shops everywhere from its native Brussels to Dubai.
Hmm. With the singer analogy, you're implying that the person cooking is more important than the food itself. I'd have to disagree, since I think that people other than star chefs can make food of the same quality as a star chef. They may have more limited repertoires or creativity or business acumen, but they can cook. Heck, I'd put my chocolate tart up against Gordon Ramsay's any day.
Speaking of Gordon Ramsay, I guess you'd have to consider him a chain. And Nobu, and Batali's places, and lots of other high-end restaurants generally considered good by foodies. Would you say those can never be good?
re: fara
In as much as the "star" chef can't possibly be at each one simultaneously I'd have to view tham as a chain. Granted they each have different names and themes but you yourself called them "Batali's places" and are already consolidating them in your head.
Whether they can be good or bad is another issue, but they are somewhat analogous to the Lettuce Entertain You group in Chicago. Many restos, one company.
re: Larry
Well you christened them "batali's places" first --
Anyway, I can see your point, but they're not a chain. Each chain restaurant is supposed to be the same or very similar to the others. The great Mario does not pretend that Spotted Pig is anything like Babbo (see the NY times article on his reaction to the Michelin guide.) They each clearly serve their own purpose.
The fact that Mario is not likely to be in the kitchen when you dine at these places is already known, but doesn't seem to diminish the quality unlike some other over-hyped restaurants.. uhumm Le Bernardin -- where we had terrible service by servers that appeared to have just walked in off the street, food that was bland, and we spent 4X as much as we did at Babbo. we were also seated in a large room with plenty of space, but were bumped constantly by the servers b/c there wasn't enough room between our table and the next!!
At Babbo the place is small, we were seated more tightly, but the servers knew what the h-ll they were doing!
Le Bernardin has only one location, was given very high marks by MIchelin and NY Times, and it was the worst dining experience ever.
I don' t think the chef in or out of a restaurant NEEDS to be the deciding factor, they have to hire decent managers and under-chefs is all.
re: Cagey
I agree that the singer analogy is not right-on. A singer has a voice that is a "One-of-a-kind." Cooking is closer to the Blue Man Crew. As for the chain issue. I admit that when I am on the road and need a snack and a Coke IMO McD does a "Fries and Coke" better than most Big$ places. So many places just cannot get the Coke right and have no idea what Fries are. Yet McD can do it at a thousand places and for Low$.
re: Like-Go-Eat?
McD fries are only good when compared to BK's. When compared to real Pommes Frites at a fantastic bistro, they are sad imitations. Same with just about everything that's been mentioned as good at a chain here and any other time we've had this discussion.
Two points:
1) If we're all about telling each other about wonderful, delicious finds, what the heck are we doing discussing McD fries (or any other unbiquitous chain food)? They're neither wonderful and delicious, nor a find.
2) As Brian said in reply to a poster above, and I said before - what if people going to these chains is causing the individually inspired places to either go out of business or simply not be able to get established? Then, aren't people who go to these chains directly responsible for the demise of deliciousness?
What's the good of universal mediocrity? What's the good of discussing universally mediocre places on a site like Chowhound that's supposed to be dedicated to excellence, not mediocrity?
re: applehome
As much as we may hate it, that's the bittersweet truth about life -- you can make every logic-based, political, emotional, philosophical, and economical argument from here to Sunday supporting the superiority of fantastic bistro pommes frites and all one has to say is: "Well...shucks. I just like McD's fries better." The scoreboard of life would still read a one-to-one tie in valid opinions.
I also don't think ubiquity necessarily precludes deliciousness.
re: MSPD
That's your opinion. ;)
Everyone's opinion is presumably valid to themselves. (Why would anyone knowingly hold an invalid opinion?) But where there is a desire to share knowledge and opinion, we judge each other's opinions based on such factors as experience and knowledge. If one has had outstanding bistro pomme frittes and judges McD's to be better, that's one thing. If one feels that McD's isn't as good, but will do in a pinch, that's something else. And if one has never had great bistro fries but still feels that McD's are the best, well - that's just an invalid opinion.
The same issues come up every time we discuss chains here. While ubiquity may not mean a complete lack of deliciousness, it does mean that it's probably not worthy of discussion here. What's the big deal in sharing that McD's fries, Cheesecake Factory or PG Chang's are good (in a mediocre sense)?
If McD's announced that they were going back to tallow instead of their partially hydrogenated vegetable oil - that would be a really worthwhile discussion to have here. I would anticipate lots of reports on which branch is doing it really well!
re: applehome
I attended a lecture by Julia Child a few years back at the Chicago Botanic Garden, when she was still doing the PBS series with Jacques Pepin. She opined that Burger King french fries were very good, and that she liked eating them while on road trips up from Massachusetts to Maine.
Was her opinion "invalid"? Says who? You?
re: peg
Good point Peg. I read an interview with Julia Child and I recall one of her favs was In-N-Out Burgers.
The intended focus of my post was that the singer analogy is not right-on because a singer's voice is a "One-of-a-kind" thing. I made a quick attempt for an analory of Cooking and thought it being closer to the Blue Man Crew performers. Upon more thought I would say a chef is more like a song writer / composer. The work product can be transfered to paper. The issue then becomes whether another cook can read the recipe. I used McD being able to serve fries and a Coke with the correct amount of syrup and fiz as an example that a recipe can be followed no matter who reads it. I stand by that statement. To believe otherwise I would have to consider great chefs as Gods who are the only ones who can create and then re-create the same meal again and agian. No Way. Any Bistro menu can be mulitplied. The problem is when the corperate mind gets it fingers in the pie (dead beats at the top who begin to cut corners to fill their pockets -$).
re: Karl S
I even have a witness! ;o)
re: peg
"The preeminent gourmet admits to a taste for hamburgers and hot dogs. And she has even been known to stop at a certain Burger King in Maine. Says Child defiantly, "I don't care, frankly, what people think. I do what I like." See link below.
Julia Child and In-N-Out Buger
Buttom line -- A chain can be good! Also, when on the road and without a Chowhound book or list of notes from a Chowhound Board a chain may be your safest bet.
re: peg
JC had made many references to McD fries before they started using veg oil, as did Jeffrey Steingarten, as did many others. I had never heard any reference to her saying that BK or In and Out fries were good, and I followed her pretty well, including meeting her on a couple of occasions, but it's certainly possible.
Fries made in veg oil are just not as good as those fried in tallow, I don't care how consistently you can make them. My own experience with McD fries, especially driving across the country many times, says that they're not as consistent as you might want to believe. They can be utterly and inedibly horrible.
And yes, this is my opinion, and yes, I had my tongue firmly in cheek when I wrote the last response. But even in jest, if you read that post carefully, the only opinion I called invalid was the one that was based on ignorance - and no one could call JC ignorant.
re: applehome
I have to say the McD fries generally tend to be among the worst found in the chains nowadays. It's very sad.
Yes, they can be good. If you're not looking for haute cuisine but looking for something that hits the spot then in some instances national chains can be good. The three that come to mind are Marie Callender's for pies, Popeye's chicken and plain ol'pancakes at IHOP. There are some remarkable mom pop shops in my neigborhood but none of them do what Marie's, Popeye's or IHOP does.
re: Tracy L.
"There are some remarkable mom pop shops in my neigborhood but none of them do what Marie's, Popeye's or IHOP does."
Maybe that's because Marie's Popeyes and IHOP put them out of business.
All pies are $6 at Marie's this month throughout much of the Southwest, by the way.
re: Brian S
I wrote "there are some remarkable mom pop shops...", I did not refer to the past tense.
For the record they are all currently in business, they are thriving and they are not endanger of going out of business.
re: Tracy L.
I meant in danger.
re: Tracy L.
What is good about Popeye's chicken? I don't think its even deserving of the classification "food"!
re: calabasas_trafalgar
Too each his or her own. I really enjoy their spicy chicken.
re: free sample addict aka Tracy L
I do too, occasionally.
re: Das Ubergeek
What about the beans and rice? They are always so creamy and freakin' delicious. Oh. My. God.
I think I want to be embalmed with the essence.
re: calabasas_trafalgar
Maybe you've never had it fresh? I remember the first time I ate Popeye's was at a rest stop and it was really dried out. I wouldn't go near the place until someone insisted it was better than KFC. OMG, it is the best fried chicken you're likely to find anywhwere when it is hot.
In my own, quite opinionated opinion, no, a chain of restaurants cannot be good.
Individual members of that chain, however, may be as good as a one-of-a-kind good restaurant.
In my sad experience though, they arent usually. At least, they dont remain consistently good across changes of management and across changes of shift, much less across geography, and consistency in management quality across members of a chain seems to be impossible to achieve.
My 2 cents - don't spend it all in one place.
As far as the high end places, go how about Thomas Keller's restaurants? I guess you could consider Bouchon a chain since there's the Vegas and Napa locations, but what about Per Se and French Laundry? He may not be at the Bouchon restaurants as much as the other two, but he has a Video Teleconference connecting Laundry and Per Se, so he can keep an eye on both restaurants.
I know that chains can have good food, maybe even great food, but I never go to one unless it was not my choice. I think it is terrible that most of the cities in this country have the same restaurants. My own brother was in Vancouver BC and wanted to find a TGIFridays. He called me to find one .my own brother!! I couldnt believe it. Vancouver has some of the most amazing restaurants and he was looking for a TGIFs!! Grrrr. Its too bad people dont take the time to find the local restaurants I think we as a country are lazy. Id rather have average food in a "local one of a kind restaurant" than have good food at a chain. The whole idea of them just annoys me.
re: janedoe67
"Its too bad people dont take the time to find the local restaurants "
That's the thing though, it takes time to actually find local restaurants. A case in point. Last week I was driving from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, taking the scenic non-turnpike route. Stopped in Altoona for a dinner break. After at least 30 minutes of trying to find any kind of local restaurant (that wasn't a bar) I had to give up and go with a chain - Pizzaria Uno in this instance.
Like everyone else here, I would much rather find the local spots that are unique and possess local/regional tastes, but sometimes you have to settle for what you can actually find.
There is a great Belgian chain called Le Pain Quotidien - they have restaurants all over the US and Europe. Also, Pret a Manger a European sandwhich store chain isn't bad - I think they have some outlets in NYC too.
There are exceptions to every situation and here's mine:
Claim Jumper, Carlsbad CA
We hit this place right after a full day at Sea World. It was my introduction to the concept "You'll never Finish this single-portion helping." I still tried.
Macaroni Grill, Milpitas CA
I wouldn't hesitate to hit this chain if there over any local Italian choices. The service has always been quick, the prices good, the food consistent.
Olive Garden, Lubbock TX
The only OG I'll go. Service is always great and they handle some my extended family's eccentricities more easily than other restaurants in the area.
Fern's, Lubbock TX
I can't get enough fried okra when eating at this cafeteria smorgasbord.
In-and-Out, Mountain View CA
I have yet to find a time that they aren't busy but fries come out cooked and the burgers delicious.
Sizzler, Blythe CA
I can't believe no one has added Chick-Fil-A to this long list. Their chicken nuggets are like no other!
re: mattlap_2000
I repeat - Popeye's chicken is not even food!
re: calabasas_trafalgar
Of course it's food. Just because you think it's terrible doesn't make it not food.
I actually like it now and again (meaning a few times a year). It's way better than KFC, Church's or (gaaaack) Mr. Bojangles.
re: Das Ubergeek
I'll never go to a Popeye's again. For fried chicken, I stick with Roscoe's Chicken & Waffles, Shakey's Pizza(no foolin!), or the takeout deli at Whole Foods.
Hmmm - revived post....I'll chime in:
Houston's - really great ribs and chicken caesar and loaded baked potato and french fries
Penang (east coast upscale asian chain) - really good everything
In-n-Out Burger
The thing about the singer's: as someone mentioned each vocal quality is different AND singer's ARE trained by famous singers and end up copying their sound and style and become famous themselves. They are often then known as a So-and-So Singer. But no singer (unless their art is mimicry like in "Little Voice") is capable of absolute exact replication, much like the chains I like cook their food fresh, not out of a corporate 'bag' and while consistent, would be nearly impossible to have an exact replication.
"Buttom line -- A chain can be good! Also, when on the road and without a Chowhound book or list of notes from a Chowhound Board a chain may be your safest bet."
I would say a true chowhounder would not rely on a book or notes. While they certainly can be helpful, it certainly infringes upon the exitement of discovery. This is just the reason i never go to chains when traveling. If i am somehwere on business, i will travel around to find something that looks unique. While i certainly have had some bad food while wandering into places, i have also had some great food. The reward outweighs the risk for me when the alternative is bland chain food. If you are on this site, then you must love to travel for this reason, to eat things you cannot eat at home. If you have the same chain at home, why would you eat it on the road.
One of the things i hate about America is its uniformity, how everywhere has begun to have the exact same stores and restaurants. I cannot contribute to this, so i do not support chains.
re: MVNYC
I think you've presented a good case for the opposing opinion as well. A 'true chowhounder' finds good food wherever it lays, be it upon Limoges in a tony zip code or a greasy bag upon orange naugahyde. A chain restaurant can vary wildly in quality simply because they staffed by human beings rather than robots, all having differing work ethics and management techniques.
To digress: chains suck much of the time. Yeah, I said it. Probably because making ends meet on 7 bucks an hour makes you want to kill everyone. It's the hate that makes the burger taste bad. But I've had as much (or more) bad food from quaint mom-and-pop restaurants as fast food restaurants.
Interesting and amusing thread.
My son, an engineer for Wrigley, was visiting their plant in Taipei, Taiwan a few years ago. His engineer-host announced that as a special treat for the visiting Americans, he was taking them to McDonrals for lunch. My son hoped he had heard wrong, but no....it was a five-story Mickey D with kitchen on the ground floor and an elevator to four stories of tables above. (I couldn't bring myself to call them "dining rooms.") Taipei is pretty densely developed, it seems. The food was, well, McD. He said that at the time he hadn't been in a McD for seven or eight years, and was looking forward to a similar interval before his next visit.
He also mentioned that, when taken to a Chinese restaurant on Taiwan, you should question your Taiwanese host very closely about each dish, or you would find yourself biting something that you never in your wildest dreams would have thought to be edible. Whatever precautions he took, he said the food was, in fact, pretty great. Maybe he could be a Chowhound after all.
I'm suprised that no one in this discussion of chain restaurants has mentioned the restaurant empire of the Pappas family. It started (in either Dallas or Houston) with a couple Greek brothers in a "typical" Greek greasy spoon in - as I think - the late 1920's.
I picked this up some years ago from looking at photos in various Houston-area restaurants, and I'm a little hazy on the details. I hope someone with more precise knowledge of their history can fill this in and correct as necessary. I think it's a fascinating saga.
Today, the company operates what must be at least 100 restaurants in a variety of formats- Pappadoux for Cajun, Pappacito for Mexican, Pappanino (I may have that not quite right) for Italian, Pappas Steak House, Pappas Seafood, Pappas Barbeque, and maybe a couple more.
They are all over Houston and Dallas and I don't know where else, though there are two Pappadoux in the Chicago suburbs. One of them, fortunately, near me. I've eaten in a bunch of them in Houston. Their quality control, for such a far-flung operation, is just astounding. I've never had a bad or disappointing dish.
As far as I know, the renowned Pappas Restaurant in Tarpon Springs, FL is a different bunch of Greeks. ;-)
If you can get to one, order the fried onion rings. They are the best onion rings in the known universe.
re: MikeLM
I've been to two Pappas' places--first to a Pappasita's in Houston about 15 years ago, which was pretty good. More recently, I tried Pappadeaux at the Houston Airport while waiting for a connection. Dang--those were some of the best crabcakes I've had. Almost makes me want to fly Continental again just to connect in Houston.
re: MikeLM
I agree ... the Pappas family really knows how to do chains, though I haven't been to one in awhile. Pappacito's has the best chicken enchiladas I've ever had. You probably recall how they got nailed for conspiracy for moving illegal chefs around their restaurants like chess pieces. I kinda respected them for it--shhhhh, don't tell Immigration I said that ;)
Houstonian here. The Pappas restaurants USED to be uniformly good. Sadly, Pappasito's (Tex-Mex) is on a serious downhill slide due I think to cost-cutting measures more than anything. Their Greek concept, Yia Yia Mary's, is surprisingly awful - worst Greek salad in town. The seafood places - Pappas Seafood and Pappadeaux - are still fairly good though. And Pappas Steakhouse is one of the best in town. I'll still hit a Pappas place every now and then, but they're a lot less consistent than they used to be.
I am generally not a fan of chain restaurants.
That said, while in Honolulu I visited a fusion sushi restaurant called Sansei that my parents had highly recommended. I was surprised at how good it was. There were a few unimpressive dishes out of the things I tried but all in all, it was very good and we had a great time.
I suppose sometimes the success of chains depends strongly upon a: the degree to which the stores are managed by the parent company or original managers, and b: the specific goal of that chain in particular.
I like good food. If its at a "chain" whether local, national or international, so be it. I have found some chains have certain locations that are better than others. And, consistency tends to depend on whether a chain has franchised locations or fully company owned and operated by a single entity. If you want to sample a chains, then I suggest a visit to Dallas, TX--seems like that have chains I never heard of there, everywhere!!
There are a couple chains I wish we had in NYC (e.g. Peet's Tea & Coffee, Chik-Fil-A).
My Favorite Chains:
Cheesecake Factory--Surprised no one mentioned this!!!
Le Pain Quotidien
Don Pablo's
Red Lobster
The Palm Steakhouse
Juice Generation
Cracker Barrel
Smoothie King
Peet's Tea & Coffee
re: Ora
Consumer Reports now surveys consumers to assess which chain restaurants are best; the July 2006 issue features tons of ratings. For the most part, the scores were very close. For example, the 2 points separating Il Fornaio and the Olive Garden are less than the 5 point margin of error, a statistical tie. Poor Chevy's came last in the Mexican category, apparently downrated for the service. (Really? Those festive office birthday lunches never seemed to lack for staff attention. ;-) For the rest of the exciting results, you'll have to check out your local library or subscribe over at consumerreports.org.
Somehow I can't imagine ever seeing a plausible rendition of osso buco at a chain Italian joint. That's a dish that demands a bit of the chef's soul. But I don't have to worry about getting a great version anywhere I go in Bologna. That to me pretty much sums up how I feel about chains.
Gotta love hearing radio commercials for places that use "real balsamic" and "genuine Italian parmesan". If that's all you've got to promote, good luck.
There are so many good choices for Italian everywhere on the Eastern seaboard, that's one category that never made sense to me as a chain concept.
I have been to Olive Garden and to Bucco di Beppo. OG just tries to do too much with each dish. Most dishes should have stopped at maybe four ingredients, but they felt the need to put eight on. BdB doesn't want you to taste the tomato, so they hide it in boatloads of spices. Obviously their "gourmet chefs" and "kitchen experts" must have learned that San Marzanos are "too tomatoey" for American tastes.
IMO, chains are for the "accidental tourist" who prefers to dine in a well-defined comfort zone. But I own an indie coffeehouse, so I support indies whenever I can out of principle because I want people to support me.
I have the advantage of knowing shop owners like myself throughout the country who know what's good in their area - and they'll rarely recommend an indie over someplace that's unique.
Additionally, when I travel I usually want to try whatever represents the regional style of wherever I'm visiting. Chains can't meet that desire.
I can honestly say that I eat perhaps one meal a month at chains where I can get takeout, usually an Outback burger or a meatloaf at Boston Chicken, because it's relatively cheap, relatively decent for the price and still hot by the time I get it home. But that's it - more functional that taste.
I'll note that I do hear an awful lot of positive things about customer service at Panera Bread. Apparently their managers are empowered to do whatever the heck they want to satisfy customers. I don't hear much about the food though. Just the service and the free wireless.
There are chains out there that are "any good", as you phrased it. I'll agree that it's pretty uncommon, though. But for me the chain that delivers consistently is Ruths Cris Steakhouse. I've been to only four locations, but has always been a winning meal.
Cheesecake Factory. They are the best at what they do, period. They're so good in fact that I refuse to set foot in them. I'm just not worthy of such perfection.


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Shop til you drop and experience a myriad of different sights, sounds and souvenirs in bustling bazaars around the world. Soak up the atmosphere in the souks of Marrakech, barter for bargains at the ginormous Grand Bazaar in Istanbul or lose yourself in Beijing's Silk Alley Markets. Visit the old covered market in Damascus or get some great souvenirs in Otavalo the handicraft market in Ecuador.
With over 1500 stalls, the Silk Alley (Xiushui Jie) is Beijing's most famous indoor market. Whilst there is actually very little silk, there is a large selection of shoes and clothing much of which are designer knock offs. Upstairs you'll find the children's clothes and Chinese handicrafts, great for souvenirs and presents!
Istanbul's Grand Bazaar attracts tourists and locals alike selling everything from beautiful Turkish carpets, pottery and brassware, belly dancing costumes, things made from and wool, shisha pipes, and all sorts of other things. Visiting is heaven for shoppers but is also a great way to discover the Turkish hospitality, and you may well find your self offered lots of cups of tasty Turkish tea with no obligation to buy!
Otavalo market has lots of interesting gifts from carpets and rugs with Indian patterns to jewellery, paintings and reed pipes, but is also a great place to go people watching. The handicrafts market is a maze of colourful stalls with Andean pipe music coming from 'Poncho Plaza' the square around which the market is centered.
Markets are a great way to experience life as a local but wherever you go, don't forget to do as they do and haggle! Below is a selection of tours that will take you to these bustling hives of activity.

subset: commoncrawl


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Find out more about this story and the other items discussed in Thursday's meeting in today's Pilot News.


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Other Gift Planning Opportunities (USA & Canada) - Videos
Additional links on this topic:
|Which Is Better? A Will Or A Trust?
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|How Does A Charitable Lead Trust Work - "A Gift That Comes Back"?
|Can An Investment Project Be Planned Giving?
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Safer Surgery: Doppler Probe Expected to Improve Colon Resection Outcomes
URMC's colorectal surgeons are using a new device that they anticipate will hasten recovery, shorten hospital stays, and reduce risk for complication in patients undergoing colon resections. The esophageal Doppler probe assists surgeons by slipping down the esophagus where it can carefully assess blood flow velocity in the aorta – an important metric for determining just how much fluid a patient needs to keep optimally perfused during the course of a procedure.
"Blood loss through bleeding or mere evaporation is a natural part of many surgeries, but losing too many fluids, or the opposite – hyperperfusion or fluid overload, which can lead to inflammation – can be dangerous," said John Monson, M.D.,chief of URMC's Division of Colorectal Surgery. "This device helps ensure that a patient remains in the most physiologically normal state during, and after, the resection."
Monson said the device is commonplace in Europe, especially in the U.K., where studies have demonstrated its ability to whittle length of hospital stay from nine to seven days and reduce post-operative complication rates from 15 to 2 percent. In one cohort, patients monitored with the probe even were able to resume a more normal diet in half the time.
"It's better medicine, and has the potential to improve patient outcomes," said anesthesiologist Stewart Lustik, M.D., who directs Anesthesia Technical Services at URMC. "We're really excited to manage intraoperative fluid administration and tissue perfusion without introducing the associated risks of invasive catheters."
Learn more about URMC's Division of Colorectal Surgery, or e-mail firstname.lastname@example.com.
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The Sandbox Savant
Very opinionated. Always Passionate. Not necessarily right.
Sunday, 21 September 2014
Vacliv Smil | atoms to bits?
Wednesday, 17 September 2014
Sunday, 14 September 2014
Peter Thiel | funding startups insight
Tuesday, 26 August 2014
Sunday, 17 August 2014
Dare to Disagree [Antidotes to Willful Blindness]
It seems "willful blindless" is a human condition, ie, it is not a function of intelligence, upbringing or culture. Specifically, most people are hard wired to be obedient, and we know from bystander theory that the more people who see something going wrong, the less likely someone is to intervene.
In her research, over 85-percent of people surveyed at companies claim they are either afraid to speak up or believe it is futile. So is the job of the leader to create conditions in which the smart employees are willing and able to speak up if they see something wrong? I think so. If we do this, we have lower the chance of making life threatening business decisions.
Some of her suggested antidotes to willful blindness:
- Hire for real diversity, not just political correctness. Bias has a biological basis. Our brains prefer information and people that are familiar. We are confident in people who are like us; they confirm us and our beliefs, but what we really need is people who are different than us with different thinking styles and backgrounds.
- Humility: Leadership that is humble and confident enough to listen those who speak out intelligentally.
- Curiosity: In execution mode, we develop tunnel vision, especially if we are surrounding by people who think like us. We also need curious people – people whose minds wander and whose brains are supple.
- Nurture safe environments to allow people to ask hard questions and enable structured debate around answering those.
Tuesday, 20 May 2014
Insight: leaked NYT Innovation Report
Here are some of the insights I found most interesting:
- "When it takes 20 months to build one thing, your skill set becomes less about innovation and more about navigating bureaucracy."
- The value of the homepage is decreasing. "Only a third of our readers ever visit it. And those who do visit are spending less time: page views and minutes spent per reader dropped by double-digit percentages last year."
- Newsroom needs to get involved in the business side. No longer can journalists not be involved in pushing the product: "at The Times, discovery, promotion and engagement have been pushed to the margins, typically left to our business-side colleagues or handed to small teams... [the] newsroom needs to claim its seat at the table because packaging, promoting and sharing our journalism requires editorial oversight."
- Need to approach the "new media" as software developers; build tools that scale: "We have a tendency to pour resources into big one-time projects and work through the one-time fixes needed to create them and overlook the less glamorous work of creating tools, templates and permanent fixes that cumulatively can have a bigger impact by saving our digital journalists time and elevating the whole report. We greatly undervalue replicability." They point out that competitors like Vox and BuzzFeed view innovating with their platforms as a key function and allow them to create products like BuzzFeed's quizzes — incredibly popular, but also easy to create over and over again.
- Need a stronger "big data" approach: "Without better tagging, we are hamstrung in our ability to allow readers to follow developing stories, discover nearby restaurants that we have reviewed or even have our photos show up on search engines." And, ""Just adding structured data, for example, immediately increased traffic to our recipes from search engines by 52 percent."
- This is just dumb. so easy to fix: "Overall, less than 10 percent of Times traffic comes from social, compared to 60 percent at BuzzFeed."
- Comments sections suck: "Only one percent of readers write comments and only three percent of readers read comments. Our trusted-commenter system, which we hoped would increase engagement, includes just a few hundred readers."
- Live events for media companies can be big, Atlantic's http://www.aspenideas.org/ was cited: "There is no reason that the space filled by TED Talks, with tickets costing $7,500, could not have been created by the Times. 'One of our biggest concerns is that someone like The Times will start a real conference program,' said a TED executive."
- The age old creative and business dont mix: 'Everyone is a little paranoid about being seen as too close to the business side.'
- Innovators Dilemma en route. The people with power and vested interests in the past kill innovation: In the triangle of business side, Reader Experience, and newsroom, the newsroom is often seen as defensive or risk averse. "One reason for our caution is that the newsroom tends to view questions through the lens of worst-case scenarios," the report puts it. "And the newsroom has historically reacted defensively by watering down or blocking changes, prompting a phrase that echoes almost daily around the business side: 'The newsroom would never allow that.'"
- Trying to find the innovators solution... The big question: How can the Times become more digital while still maintaining a print presence, and what has to change? "That means aggressively questioning many of our print-based traditions and their demands on our time, and determining which can be abandoned to free up resources for digital work."
Wednesday, 18 December 2013
9 Contradictory Traits of Creative People
I read this again the other day on the web and lifted it for reference. As a business guy trying to build business models around creativity, I often hit a dead end just as I think I have cracked it. That's because of the deep paradox that exits in great creative output. Mihaly describes 9 contradictory traits that are frequently present in creative people:
1. Most creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but are often quiet and at rest. They can work long hours at great concentration.
2. Most creative people tend to be smart and naive at the same time. "It involves fluency, or the ability to generate a great quantity of ideas; flexibility, or the ability to switch from one perspective to another; and originality in picking unusual associations of ideas. These are the dimensions of thinking that most creativity tests measure, and that most creativity workshops try to enhance."
3. Most creative people combine both playfulness and productivity, which can sometimes mean both responsibility and irresponsibility. "Despite the carefree air that many creative people affect, most of them work late into the night and persist when less driven individuals would not." Usually this perseverance occurs at the expense of other responsibilities, or other people.
4. Most creative people alternate fluently between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality. In both art and science, movement forward involves a leap of imagination, a leap into a world that is different from our present. Interestingly, this visionary imagination works in conjunction with a hyperawareness of reality. Attention to real details allows a creative person to imagine ways to improve them.
5. Most creative people tend to be both introverted and extroverted. Many people tend toward one extreme or the other, but highly creative people are a balance of both simultaneously.
6. Most creative people are genuinely humble and display a strong sense of pride at the same time.
7. Most creative people are both rebellious and conservative. "It is impossible to be creative without having first internalized an area of culture. So it's difficult to see how a person can be creative without being both traditional and conservative and at the same time rebellious and iconoclastic."
8. Most creative people are very passionate about their work, but remain extremely objective about it as well. They are able to admit when something they have made is not very good.
9. Most creative people's openness and sensitivity exposes them to a large amount of suffering and pain, but joy and life in the midst of that suffering. "Perhaps the most important quality, the one that is most consistently present in all creative individuals, is the ability to enjoy the process of creation for its own sake. Without this trait, poets would give up striving for perfection and would write commercial jingles, economists would work for banks where they would earn at least twice as much as they do at universities, and physicists would stop doing basic research and join industrial laboratories where the conditions are better and the expectations more predictable."
Tuesday, 5 November 2013
Think Different
The "Think Different" Campaign (1997), marked the return of Steve Jobs to Apple and is my favourite Ad campaign of all time. (Which, interestingly, only received a Silver at the Clios!?)
Fascinating behind the scenes take on this campaign by Rob Stiltanen, part of Lee Clow's creative team who put together this campaign for Apple while at Chiat/Day: http://onforb.es/1hdRgRW. I love how Jobs initially thought the script was "shit". He is descrived as a mix of "Michelangelo, Mies van der Rohe and Henry Ford—with some John McEnroe and Machiavelli thrown in".
"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules.
Wednesday, 25 September 2013
Strategies vs. Taktika
love this. cant remember where I read it unfortunately:
"You can't have strategy without tactics… if you do it's called dreaming. You can't have tactics without strategy… if you do it's called chaos."
Friday, 16 August 2013
trading analogue dollars for digital pennies
Sunday, 30 June 2013
Ad Peacocking: The Waste can be Good
Sunday, 12 May 2013
How mobile drives conversions | Google + Nielsen
Thursday, 21 March 2013
Longer walks & Elevator mirrors
Sunday, 11 November 2012
Work-Life Balance is Bullshit
I agree with Alain.
The concept of work-life balance is a false dichotomy.
First, it presumes that work is in opposition to life. It is assumes that the problem is binary - it's not. The fact is that work is a fundamental part of life; who we are and what we do both define us, sometimes with good and bad results. Work-life balance is not a state. It is a fluid goal and while the pursuit of it is great, it doesn't really exist. Strive to add other parts to your life to "balance" the work part but don't kill yourself when you don't get this ephemeral balance. I worry that people berate themselves for never having balance, which is another kind of stress, guilt, equally bad as high work stress. so my view: pursue it, but don't fixate on the state.
Second, long hours are not necessarily a problem. Some people get enjoyment working long hours: "work is more fun, than fun", said Noel Coward. It all depends on the person's frame of reference too. do you have kids? 50+ hours is likely dumb. but I for one (with no kids - yet) love working long hours in my current job. it is where I get most of my "Flow" (Csikszentmihalyi). and this makes sense, because achievement is high on the list of what makes most people happy. I find mine in the job that I do. so we need to be careful: long hours are not *necessarily* bad.
And Orson sums it up beautifully here:
"The two things arent separated in my mind... Work is an expression of life"
"The heights by great men reached and kept
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night."
Wednesday, 7 November 2012
CMO Budgets: Classical vs. Digital
Sunday, 4 November 2012
McLuhan vs. Shirky
Saturday, 3 November 2012
Viva Long Copy | IBM's 4 Page Ad
IBM publishes a celebratory 2,592-word four-page ad. The ad was featured for one day in U.S. issues of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post and now is accessible only online.
add in pdf format here: http://bit.ly/SkC0oH
I particularly love the message: long term business thinking counts. I like the stark contrast to teh increasingly loud Schumpeterian Gale - destruction of large companies, highlighted by the IBM ad.
"Nearly all the companies our grandparents admired have disappeared. Of the top 25 industrial corporations in the United States in 1900, only two remained on that list at the start of the 1960s. And of the top 25 companies on the Fortune 500 in 1961, only six remain there today"
Wednesday, 31 October 2012
Hegarty on Advertising
- creativity is not an occupation, it is a preoccupation
- ideas are the most egalitarian thing we do. They can be done by anyone at anytime
- advertising: putting one culture against the other, seeing radical, innovative ideas sublimate convention
- on ideas: the more you process it, like food, the blander it gets
Sunday, 28 October 2012
Too Busy to Meditate
What really seems to have convinced me was this section:
Research shows that an ability to resist urges will improve your relationships, increase your dependability, and raise your performance. If you can resist your urges, you can make better, more thoughtful decisions. You can be more intentional about what you say and how you say it. You can think about the outcome of your actions before following through on them.
Friday, 12 October 2012
Buying Adwords & Crowdsourcing your Book Title
So the idea kicked off when Wal-Mart vetoed his original title: 'Drug Dealing for Fun and Profit' because it was too contentious.
Tim Ferris took 6 prospective titles for his first book, 3 of which were:
- 'Broadband and White Sand',
- 'Millionaire Chameleon'
- 'The 4-Hour Workweek'
He then setup a Google Adwords account, bidding on "keywords" related to the book's content including '401k' and 'language learning': when those keywords formed part of someone's search on Google the prospective title popped up as a headline and the advertisement text would be the subtitle.
Ferriss was interested to see which of the sponsored links would be clicked on most, knowing that he needed his title to compete with over 200k books published in the US each year. Within one week and for less than $200 he knew that "The 4-Hour Workweek" had the best click-through rate by far and he went with that title.
Lastly, Ferris decided to test various covers by printing them on high quality paper and placing them on existing similar sized books in the new non-fiction rack at Borders, Palo Alto. He sat with a coffee and observed, learning which cover really was most appealing.
Monday, 10 September 2012
IP: Intellectual Property or Insider Privilege?
What I think was missed (and where twitter fails), was conveying the nuanced and complex. I am a big Apple fan. I love that aesthetic and beauty has become central to technology and Apple deserves kudos for that. But do they deserve a payout based on ideas? I would argue, no.
The reason I dont like the judgement is twofold:
1. Apple "borrowed" much of their early technologies from other inventors. The mouse and the GUI (graphical user interface) were taken from PARC (Palo Alto Research Centre), owned by Xerox. But this was just the start of lengthy borrowing spree. For the iPod, Apple used the mp3 format to deliver its songs. For its operating system OSX, it uses a unix kernel. I could go on.
2. The fact is, the PC and The Internet boom were built on the back of "open source" ideas - programming languages and networking protocols like UNIX, HTML and TCP/IP. Ideas that could have easily been patented but if they had been, I would argue, would have killed Personal Computing and the world wide web before they even got started.
But the best person to unpack this complex and nuanced debate is Russell Lamberti. A young, formidable and increasingly influential South African economist.
(Bold mine, for the "attention challenged".)
IP: Intellectual Property or Insider Privilege?
By Russell Lamberti
Last week a US court ruled that Samsung Electronics had to pay $1 billion to Apple Inc. for patent infringement. Samsung made a cool $6 billion profit in the 2nd quarter of 2012 on revenue of nearly $50 billion, so $1 billion, in the final analysis, is pretty manageable. But that's not the point. The Apple-Samsung patent war, which – sadly – is probably far from over, raises once again the broader question over the basic efficacy and legitimacy of intellectual property law. Is patent and copyright protection socially beneficial? Is it even legitimate property right? Although this is a divisive issue, most people regard intellectual property rights, specifically patent and copyright, as legitimate property rights. Most people are wrong, and below I'll show why.
Intellectual property rights are a suite of privileges granted by the state to successful applicants trying to secure patent, copyright, trademark or trade secret protection. In the case of patents and copyright, people are essentially granted property rights over ideas or patterns of ideas. Patents for example grant an inventor a limited monopoly on the manufacture, use and sale of his invention or process. Copyright is granted to creators of "original" works and grants exclusive right to the creator to reproduce, sell, and perform those works publicly.
The supposed legitimacy of patents and copyright in IP policy discourse essentially rests on two core pillars:
- that creation is sufficient basis for property rights, and
- that higher levels of investment (time and resources) in innovative and creative processes can be achieved if innovators/creators are granted the opportunity to earn exclusive monopoly profits for a period of time.
It is relatively easy to demonstrate that proposition 1 is logically false. If I break into my neighbour's garage, steal some items belonging to him, and fashion a product from those items, is the product I created my property? Of course not – once caught I would immediately have my creation confiscated and the component parts returned to my neighbor. Creation is clearly therefore not a sufficient condition for property ownership. Moreover, creation is also not anecessary condition for property ownership since property – say, land – can come to be owned by acquisition in voluntary exchange (gift or purchase) or by first possession (original homesteading).
'Property rights' granted exclusively on the basis of creation are therefore illegitimate.
What then is the correct basis for determining property rights? To get to an answer to this we must ask another question: why do any property rights exist at all? Asked in another way, what purpose do property rights serve for mankind? It is clear that property rights exist first and foremost to eliminate conflict over scarce resources. There is no property right over the air we breathe since practically it is non-scarce. In contrast there are property rights in physical resources since these are scarce. If there was no scarcity, i.e. all the finished consumer goods and services humans could possibly desire were infinitely supplied and appropriated for use at zero marginal cost or effort, there would not only be no need for property rights but no 'economic problem' at all.
Therefore, the raison d'etre for any right to property is scarcity.
Without scarcity there is no need for a property right.
Therefore, since the 'creation' of an idea is an inadequate basis solely on which to establish property rights in ideas, proponents of intellectual property rights must somehow show that, at the very least, ideas are economically scarce goods. However, ideas are clearly non-scarce. One person's idea can be adopted by another person without the first person's use of the idea being affected in any way. While my use of certain physical resources necessarily excludes someone else from using those very same resources, ideas or patterns of ideas are not subject to this same constraint.
If creation is neither a necessary nor sufficient basis for property rights, and if ideas are non-scarce, then intellectual property rights, particularly those embodied in patents and copyright, are nothing more than illegitimate monopoly privileges granted arbitrarily by the state.
Sensing this inherent problem, many IP rights advocates revert to the utilitarian argument of core pillar number 2 which essentially states that: "more innovation is better, and IP rights lead to more innovation". Although this is one of the most popular defenses of a regime of intellectual property rights, it fails miserably on a number of levels.
1. The first is empirical: There is scant evidence to show that rates of innovation are higher under IP regimes. In fact, most studies are either inconclusive or show that IP laws actually hinder innovation. See here, here, here, here, here, and here.
2. Cost-Benefit Analysis: There is also very little understanding of the human and financial capital costs of creating, maintaining, administering and enforcing the patent and copyright system. How much money and man hours is spent on litigation, fines, licensing fees, legal experts and filing patents and copyrights with patent and copyright offices? These 'direct costs' are seldom considered by utilitarian IP supporters, let alone measured in a rigorous cost-benefit analysis.
3. Progress in Industries without IP Protection: The utilitarian argument also fails to explain how and why innovation took place prior to the advent of modern IP law and how some industries, most notably the fashion industry, remain highly innovative, dynamic and profitable with almost no meaningful IP protection.
4. Non-Protected Rewards from Innovation: The utilitarian viewpoint also grossly underestimates, if not ignores outright, the ability of innovators to reap handsome rewards from their innovations without IP protection by being first to market, using secret, hard to replicate formulas, innovative branding strategies, and the erection of other legitimate barriers to entry such as signing long term service contracts with clients or creating spin-off products that are exclusively compatible or highly complementary (ironically as Apple Inc. has done). Such rewards can be, and have historically been in certain instances, substantial.
5. Giant Leaps vs. Incremental Innovation: In addition, the utilitarian argument ignores the ability of innovative processes to proceed along an incremental path as opposed to a process that proceeds in large leaps forward every few years. The assumption of pro-IP utilitarians is that inventors need to commit enormous resources and effort into research and development and therefore require the potential to earn protected, exclusive monopoly rewards. But in a non-IP world in which information and ideas are replicable and easily assimilated at much lower cost into existing R&D efforts, it is entirely conceivable, indeed likely, that innovation would proceed on a far more incremental, fluid, and, importantly, lower cost basis, requiring lower rewards in the market place to clear investment return hurdles.
6. Malinvestment or Overinvestment: Finally, this line of thinking assumes falsely that more R&D, invention and creation is necessarily better. Austrian business cycle theory has shown that when certain market prices are artificially distorted for any meaningful period of time, serious 'malinvestments' can occur, leading to widespread entrepreneurial error that must eventually result in a painful bust and reallocation of productive resources to the production of goods and services most desired by consumers. More R&D, if it is the result of price incentives that would not necessarily have arisen in a free market (i.e. arising from state-granted IP rights), and especially once it finds expression in actual physical capital investment, can be economically harmful and set in motion distortive forces within an economy that ultimately reduces or hampers overall subjective welfare.
Even if we were to concede for the sake of argument that there was merit in the utilitarian view, the IP rights advocate would still have to concede that in order to achieve such utilitarian ends a society would need to abandon the fundamental basis of property rights and require the state to enforce and uphold special privileged monopoly rights. It is strange therefore that many libertarians support the enforcing and protection of intellectual property rights, particularly in respect of patents and copyright, which require strong subversion of legitimate principles of property rights and a high degree of state intervention.
But this is not all. The following are even more reasons why we need to ditch intellectual property rights, especially as they are embodied in patents and copyright:
1. Legally arbitrary: Legal purists should shudder at the thought of IP law regimes. The legislation and regulation governing patents and copyrights is entirely arbitrary. Why is copyright protected for 21 years and not 14 years, or 14 months? Who decides and on what sound juridicial basis? What constitutes something original? Isn't everything a remix? Is it the first to file a patent or the first to invent? How do you prove the latter beyond reasonable doubt? What is 'enough' time to be allowed to profit exclusively from an invention? What if someone else independently invents something already patented? The sore truth is that IP advocates cannot answer these questions with any legal rigour. The reason they cannot is that patents and copyright are bogus legal constructs.
2. Diminishes Real Property Rights: It gets worse. By granting illegitimate property rights in non-scarce things (ideas or patterns of ideas), the state grants patent holders, for example, the right to effectively take control over other people's physical, scarce property. How? By allowing a patent holder the right to prevent others from copying his product ideas by using their own physical property, IP rights create a perverse unnatural extension of coercive property rights over the physical property of others. We can safely say therefore, that IP rights are not only illegitimate property rights in and of themselves, but they actually diminish true property rights within society.
3. Creates New Pseudo-Property Rights: The granting of pseudo-rights in the case of most intellectual property law begets yet more pseudo-rights. Patents and copyright for example imply the right to some future commercial value derived from inventions/creations, but since commercial market value is determined by subjective valuations of customers, this right would have to imply control over other people's value judgments which is entirely erroneous. Asserting a right to future commercial value purely on the basis of creation runs into the fallacy of the communist labour theory of value by suggesting that the mere act of work or labour establishes value.
4. Retards Economic Progress by Creating Artificial Scarcity: The very essence of economic progress is the elimination of scarcity through an ever greater division of labour. Since human needs and wants are practically unlimited, the elimination (or near-elimination to be precise) of scarcity in some goods allows us to channel time, effort and resources into meeting new, previously unmet needs, allowing us to live a more pleasurable existence. This process entails bringing to bear non-scarce knowledge onto scarce resources in order to arrange those resources in such a way as to achieve the highest valued ends in the most efficient ways. Without non-scarce knowledge resource use would be highly myopic and inefficient and the division of labour would scarcely be possible. The non-scarcity of ideas is the ONLY reason we are able to achieve any degree of prosperity in our natural, causal world of real resource scarcity. IP rights are therefore nothing more than an attempt to artificially establish scarcity where it does not naturally exist. This can only retard economic progress.
Apple Inc.'s 'victory' over Samsung Electronics last week is really a victory for illegitimate state-granted monopoly privilege over dynamic competitive enterprise. There is neither a sound ethical, legal, economic, or utilitarian basis for upholding a patent and copyright system.
Copying isn't theft.
The world is worse off for the system of intellectual privilege that may directly benefit a privileged few in the short run, but unambiguously harms us all in the long run.
Monday, 20 August 2012
Twitter: Why I might not follow you back
Often I torment over whether I should follow someone when they follow me. Sometimes I will err on giving them a temporary follow but reserve the right to unfollow them later if their twitter stream (what they tweet) is noisy or not interesting to me. One often feels compelled to do the decent thing and reciprocate with a follow. In the early days of twitter it used to be good manners to follow back, especially as we felt kindred being early adopters of this strange service. Now, not so much.
The problem is, twitter is only useful if the content is interesting to you. And I personally get diminishing marginal utility on anything past 250 follows (people I follow). Past this number it becomes too noisy.
So this gets me onto the point of this post: Just because I dont follow you, doesnt mean i dont like you. Hell, I may even love and adore you. in person. on twitter, not so much. So please do not take offense.
So what are the reasons I dont follow people on twitter:
- What you have to say on twitter is not of interest to me. This doesnt mean you dont have valuable things to say. Likely you do, just not to me.
- You dont tweet content, only conversation. I'm not into conversing on twitter. it is the wrong medium for this type of communication in my opinion
- You are only a voyeur, not a participant. That is fine, but clearly there is no point following you
- You tweet too much. This would make my twitter stream too noisy if I were to follow you. Very few people get away with this. Kaya Dlanga is the very rare exception. He has taken on the role of a social commentator and seemingly speaks for an important demographic of South Africa. Be warned, you are unlikely to be successful doing this.
- You self promote. This used to work in the early day of twitter. The humblebrag was par for the course back then. Now, not so much.
Thursday, 28 June 2012
CMO's to spend more on tech than CIO's
This will sound amazing to people outside the digital marketing sector, but for those of us inside, it is obvious. It is what has been pushing revenue growth in the sector for the last 5 years and likely will continue to keep those growth rates double digit for the next 5 years.
- "big data" - as customer interactions increasingly become digitised and accumulate exponentially, companies find themselves sitting on massive, potentially valuable, data mines. the challenge is finding the gold. much easier said than done.
- "cloud computing" (aka ubiquitous computing) - Ostensibly this is about all of our devices (laptops through to TVs) being tethered to a central repository, stored in "The Cloud" (internet), of our information and files. It is really a story about the mobile device, however. The mobile device is radically transforming the way we interact with our customers. the story is far from complete, but for now just think of how many times you interact with your mobile device each day. research varies from almost 40 to over 100 times every day. in marketing, this what is known a "touch point" and in yesteryear it was thought that three touch points lead to sale. now it is likely more with the torrent of information that confronts us but even if it is double that, the potential to reach customers and *engage* them is significantly greater and the potential ROI significantly higher. Certainly much more intimate than the shotgun broadcast messaging of classical advertising. And herein lies the rub of shifting marketing budgets from classical to digital marketing.
- "realtime customer data" - allowing businesses to make revenue and cost decisions today, rather than the traditional quarterly strategic change or monthly operational shifts. interactions now provide deep insights in the digitally savvy organisation. Amazon looks at over 500 customer metrics daily. And Amazon is not alone.
Thursday, 10 May 2012
The Science of Successful Teamwork: Communication
Sunday, 6 May 2012
The Entrepreneurship Elevator Pitch
"Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled."
Howard Stevenson, 1975 - HBS professor
source: Breakthrough Entrepreneurship
Monday, 13 February 2012
History of Marketing
History of Marketing Infographic
Saturday, 7 January 2012
10 lessons for Web Tech Startups
Having been involved in the web tech space for some time now (Vottle.com, IS Labs and recently QuirkLabs), I have been lucky enough to have worked with and around some of South Africa's best entrepreneurs. Here are some lessons I have learnt:
1. The Boot: Almost every business can be bootstrapped to start. And should be. Not even Google (server intensive) needed outside financing for its first couple of years. Superstar entrepreneurs have an uncanny knack of making money go extremely far and this in itself forces creative solutions to problems that almost always spawn new opportunities. I strongly encourage entrepreneurs to seek financing later in the development of their business, ideally post prototype, and as close to product launch as possible. Too much capital makes a small businesses lazy. If you use finance as an excuse to start your business, you should be getting a job, not starting a business.
2. Capital Efficiency: I have never found a reason to pay founders what they are "worth" in the market. If you want to start a business and believe that venture finance should be paying you a professional salary, you should be a getting a job. In fact, I have always believed that founders should use venture finance only for stuff that relates directly to a cost of sale. The easiest thing for founders is to beg, borrow and steal (figuratively) from the 3 F's (friends, family and fools).
3. Cash really is King: "Turnover is Vanity, Profit is Sanity and Cash is Reality". There is nothing more important to a startup than cash-flow. Nothing. I advise all founders to build a real-time cash-flow model that works for them. There is no need to get caught up in GAAP intricacies either. Put simply, it is your total cash in the bank less bills ("burn-rate") plus revenue. Income statements are mostly irrelevant for early startups and balance sheets only become useful if you want to sell your business or borrow money (assets as collateral).
4. Two-Minutes Noodles: If the entrepreneur can eat Two-Minutes noodles and still be evangelical about their business, you know your founder has the right value system. The truth is, successful entrepreneurs never do it for the money, they do it to change the world. This is, of course, less about eating the noodles and more about seeing what type of person you are.
5. Product Paradox: The founders need to get a product out as soon as possible and then iterate through a fast customer feedback loop. At the same time, the founders need to operate meticulously. Product development needs to be thoroughly thought-out and planned. And I don't just mean in the founders heads. I mean detailed planning. Your planning will invariably look far different from actuality, of course, but that is fine. Planning forces you to think of the roadblocks that could derail your business.
6. The Law of Two: Successful startups (measured in terms of longevity) almost always have two co-founders. One is usually more visionary and the stronger communicator, the other, highly technical and strong on the detail. The best startups have founders with all the skills, just in varied strengths. One thing is certain, their skills are invariably complimentary.
7. The Darwin Rule: As Darwin eruditely said: "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change." Having the best product, while extremely powerful, is almost never the deciding factor of success in a startup. Rather it is the business most able to respond to market shifts. Gone are the days when product life cycles lasted decades. People who are unable to adapt quickly and want the next day to resemble the previous should rather get a job.
8. Ideas are like Carbon Monoxide: They are increasingly abundant and of little use. Don't be married to your idea and don't think your idea is worth money - it almost never is. Most ideas are worth nothing without execution. Ensure you spend time unpacking your idea and formulating an action plan to assess viability and value. The devil is always in the details. Most great businesses started off with an idea that was, at best, only loosely-related to what made them successful in the end. Such is the evolutionary nature of business.
9. Evangelical Rule: Entrepreneurs need to believe so strongly in what they are doing, they believe they are saving the world through their product. They believe, like Steve Jobs, that they are "putting a dent in the universe". They have evangelical zeal that on the surface is quite annoying. It is hard to overstate the importance of this frame of mind in your founders. It is the difference between people who do 8 hour and 16 hour days; between two-minute noodles and long lunches; between living your startup and seeing it as a "job".
10. Ham-and-Egging: Coined by Profs Bhide and Stevenson, it is the challenge entrepreneurs have of getting capital from investors to build product based on "imminent sales" and landing customers with the promise of "imminent delivery". Typical chicken and egg scenario. Start-up salespeople (one founder at least) need to be natural ham-and-eggers. They have to make the case that their company is perfectly capable of providing their service without full knowledge of being able to do so. This is often difficult because of the ethical issues, specifically, where do you draw the line on lying. My take is, as long as you honestly believe you will deliver, do it. Many of the successful startups I know of have had to do this in the early stages, so it is clear to me that this is one of the awkward necessities of a startup.
The ideal founder
So, if we take the above lessons and construct the ideal founder, they would look something like this: A zealot with an almost annoying passion for their business and who could talk about their startup up every day, all day, easily. They are good at selling. They believe living frugally is spiritual and necessary. Understanding highly technical ideas as well as the bigger picture is something they are good at. They are not usually analytical. They don't mind that each day is continually different, despite the chaotic nature of such. They know that money matters, but don't spend too much time worrying about their personal bank account – that doesn't help sell the product. Blind faith is often used to describe them. So is naivetéy. They are comfortable with these personifications, even reveling in them and the fact that it makes them an outsider and "strange". They deplore rules, even when the rules make sense. Nothing is ever accepted knowledge until they have put it to the test. They are almost impossible to manage and are often deemed self-centered. The latter is just zeal misunderstood. Consideration is for people with jobs and they, after all, are changing the world for the better, so you need to get out the way.
Wednesday, 26 October 2011
I highly recommend watching this video of her discussing her research - while average video quality, the content is extremely insightful.
May I have your attention please? - Linda Stone - SIME 09 from Ayman van Bregt.
My notes from the video:
1. Attention is our primary currency
2. Attention, expressed collectively defines a society, community and culture
2. She coined "Continuous Partial Attention" a state where we are continuously doing multiple tasks that require cognition. It creates a heightened state of crisis, similar to that of "fight or flight". She argues that we have become "communications centred" rather than highly productive when working. The implication is that the quality of our work likely suffers and with this modus we struggle to solve deep and difficult problems, that require uninterrupted thinking.
3. She talks of "Email Apnea" which is the temporary cessation of breath or shallow breathing when doing anything in front of a screen.
4. While technology has definitely increased our productivity, it has also compromised the quality of life by being "always on". We use technology to "stay on top of things" but it rarely works out that way and it creates a "artificial sense of constant crisis". in large doses this can have significant health implications, such as, cortisal burnout,
5. breathing is the body's master control for attention and cognition. with email apnea you are in "fight or flight" mode which is not optimal for deep problem solving and creative thinking
Wednesday, 3 August 2011
Four tips to choosing your digital partner | memeburn
There is no doubt that digital continues to be a growing part of every marketing budget. Choosing the right partner to assist your digital efforts is a critical decision. As critical, I'd argue, as the choice of agency in any marketing discipline to date. The reason for this lays in the nature of digital itself — uncontrovertibly, digital has technology at its heart.
For a marketer, what does this mean? When I talk technology, I mean hardware and software — always behind the scenes, but as essential as the engine in your car. Like your car's engine, you leave the design of such technology to experts. And similarly, just like you would never buy a car without knowing you could get spare parts and expertise to fit them, so the choice of digital partner must be considered with the support necessary to maintain the software (and hardware) they use and create. This maintenance issue is a difficult one — without the knowledge of a software expert, how can a marketing professional make the right decisions upfront to avoid expensive rewrites later? The first step lays in choosing the right platform for your needs.
Look for solutions that fit your needs
If you are running a guesthouse, boutique store or similar small to medium business, it is very likely that you will be able to use off-the-shelf software. You will most probably have common requirements that are already addressed with little to no modification — for example, your website could be aWordPress or Magento install. Support for most of these platforms is widespread and reasonably priced.
If, however, you are an enterprise, you should be looking at enterprise software. Your requirements are almost certainly going to be specific, your modifications necessary, plentiful and long running. Your choice of partner… critical.
This is custom-made software — while your software developer will use common components and perhaps even a branded platform, the finished product will be unique to the needs of your organisation.
The first thing to look for is an enterprise level programming language — languages like Java and C# can be heavyweight for simple needs but possess an inherent structure that becomes important as the size of a software project grows. These languages provide good support for important enterprise software features like packaging and multithreading, and benefit from excellent developer tool support. In general, avoid PHP unless you are primarily looking for a CMS platform, and beware Ruby on Rails if you need to integrate with legacy systems.
Don't let IT define your choices
At many organisations, the IT departments exert an unusual level of control. Partly because they are in charge of aspects of the organisation that are opaque to other departments, they are frequently given the ability to make decisions that affect the business beyond their remit. Let's look at the company website. The goal of the website must surely be one of marketing, with a sales component ifecommerce is present. Hence, the needs of the marketing department should be paramount.
However, it is frequently IT that makes the software decision — a decision that is often clouded by the needs of IT to serve the company's staff. A good example of this is Microsoft SharePoint – while SharePoint is a great choice for document sharing within an organisation, it is generally a poor choice to power an ecommerce website. If you are measured on sales and marketing, make sure the software choice is aligned with your goals.
Specialist or full service?
Once you have narrowed down your software choices, you will be looking at two types of partners to fulfil your needs. The first, a specialist software development house and the second, a full service agency. The focus of each differs. The software development house is often concerned with the development of so-called "backend" systems – examples include financial processing software and fulfilment software, largely used by specialist trained staff, or with no user interface at all. Software development houses employ mainly software engineers and often have limited design or usability proficiency.
Full service agencies have both of these skills however, and given their marketing background are accustomed in writing software suitable for a wide audience — the company's consumers or entire staff complement. Such software has particular constraints in ease of use, look and feel and performance that (with all due respect) require expertise not core to the capabilities of most software developers. Choose correctly depending on your needs.
In particular, beware the lure of two agencies collaborating, one on the backend programming and one on the design.
The complex nature of software development means that such partnerships are prone to a poor end product or even failure. As any software development methodology will instruct, the best possible environment for developing software exists when the entire project team works in one room. By this I mean the software engineers and developers, designers, copywriters, usability practitioners, project managers, system administrators, conversion experts, SEO practitioners, QA staff, and all the other roles that go into the development of a modern digital marketing product.
Choose for the long term
Finally, the consequence of software maintenance is the need for a long term partner. No matter how well documented, any complex custom-made software will take time to transition from one development team to another. Even if your aim is to take the maintenance in-house, a partner chosen for their experience will develop software that avoids gathering "technical debt" and is written in a way that is easier to maintain and adapt to new needs, particularly as your business scales. Look for a partner who can demonstrate that they have maintained software for many years, and have successfully handed large projects over to other teams.
Ultimately, trust is critical. Your risk in digital is growing with your increasing investment, and so is the need for a partner that understands your strategy and can assist you in making the correct choices now for your future needs.
Saturday, 30 July 2011
Kathryn Schulz: On being wrong
[hat-tip: Andrew Warren]


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Anne Arundel County
Man fatally shot in Laurel Tuesday night
A man was fatally shot in Laurel Tuesday night and Anne Arundel County police are asking for the public's help in locating suspects.
Police seek 2 men who robbed Arundel Pharmacy
Police seek 2 men who robbed Anne Arundel County pharmacy at gunpoint, stole drugs
Advocates want later class times in Anne Arundel
Advocates are urging the Anne Arundel County Board of Education to push back school start times next year to give students more time for sleep.
New Baltimore casino could squeeze revenues at Maryland Live!
Maryland Live! Casino in Anne Arundel County has been Maryland's most successful casino. But a study finds that when a new Casino opens in Baltimore next year, revenues at Maryland Live! could drop.
Member of USNA food service staff dies
Member of Naval Academy food service staff pronounced dead after being found unresponsive
Opponents of Common Core speak up in Maryland
Common Core standards are set to go into effect for Maryland's 2014-2015 school year -- but vocal critics are now calling for a stop.
Md. oyster shell recycling program faces problems
Shell collection delays and confusion over tax incentives have recently caused setbacks in the region's oyster shell recycling campaign.
Md. lottery looking for three weekend winners
The Maryland Lottery is looking for three winners from weekend drawings, including the owner of a $1 million Powerball ticket.
Md. withdraws proposed fertilizer regulations
Maryland withdraws fertilizer regulations, will resubmit proposal next year
Google opens showroom to show off gadgets in Annapolis
Google is trying to take a bigger bite out of Apple and Microsoft's holiday sales in retail stores by opening gadget showrooms in six locations, including in the Washington, D.C area.
Anne Arundel Police release video of robbery suspects
The Anne Arundel County Police Department has released video, pictures and descriptions of a suspect and a suspect vehicle from recent robberies occurring at a Dunkin' Donuts and BP Gas Station/Benfield Service Center located at 8699 Veterans Highway Millersville, Md.
Vatican honors Anne Arundel teen for cancer test
A Maryland teenager has been honored by the Vatican for his work to develop a cost-effective method to detect pancreatic cancer.
Officials fear more were victimized at Fort Meade
US attorney asks parents to query kids after former Fort Meade counselor charged with abuse
Developer cancels Annapolis City Dock deal
A developer says he is canceling a proposed $20 million Annapolis City Dock redevelopment.
Naval Academy expelling student for setting fires
Naval Academy in process of expelling midshipman accused of setting small fires across campus
FBI wants more info on Md. man charged with sexual abuse
Ex-Fort Meade youth worker charged with sexually abusing a minor
Md. man arrested for impersonating a police officer
A Maryland man has been arrested for impersonating a police officer.
Police: Man shot at Linthicum motel
Anne Arundel Co. police: Man shot at motel in Linthicum
Annapolis Council talks of stripping mayor's power
Annapolis City Council to revisit legislation to strip Republican mayor-elect of power
Challenger wins close race for mayor Annapolis
Republican elected Annapolis mayor by 59 votes after unofficial count
Hi: 41 °F | Lo: 28 °F


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Insurer climbs five spots on Computerworld's annual listing of top companies for IT professionals
COLUMBUS, Ga., June 17 /PRNewswire/ -- Aflac today announced that IDG's Computerworld, the voice of IT management, has again selected the company as one of the top workplaces for information technology professionals. This insurer ranked No. 29 on this year's list, up five places from last year, and has appeared on the list 10 times. This honor is part of the weekly publication's 16th annual Best Places to Work in IT survey and is published in the June 15 issue of Computerworld and online at Computerworld.com.
"Aflac is extremely proud to be repeatedly recognized as an employer of choice for IT professionals," said Gerald Shields, Aflac senior vice president and chief information officer. "We thank Computerworld for this honor and are especially grateful to Aflac's team of professionals, who consistently strive for excellence and innovation. They create a winning formula that provides quality service to our customers and support for our sales force."
In ranking Aflac in the upper tier of its coveted list, Computerworld cited the amount of time invested in training and the large number of women and minorities within the company's IT ranks.
Since 1994, Computerworld's annual Best Places to Work in IT feature has ranked the top 100 work environments for technology professionals, based on a comprehensive questionnaire about company offerings in categories such as benefits, diversity, career development, training and retention. In addition, this year Computerworld surveyed more than 27,000 IT workers for the list, and their responses
|SOURCE Aflac
Copyright©2009 PR Newswire.
All rights reserved


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Is the webcast royalty fiasco really about mandatory DRM?
Webcasted radio has been taking it on the chin lately, with a proposal to institute insane royalty rates that would effectively spell the end of many popular broadcasters. Those royalty rates were supposed to go into effect this week, but a temporary reprieve and hopes of a new deal kept internet radio thumping along. Everyone sighed relief, but Ars Technica reports that the picture may not be so rosy after all.
SoundExhange, the royalty clearing house set up by the RIAA, has ferreted in a clause to the new agreement which would require DRM for licensed streaming audio. That means, simply put, that you won't be listening to internet radio on any platform SoundExchange doesn't like, or with any player not equipped with (and there for paying license fees to include) proprietary content protection schemes.
Pardon our language but, that just sounds yuckie.