For quite some time, I had been meaning to write about the seemingly new “admitting failure” phenomenon in development policy. That idea, however, had been pushed back by other, more pressing ideas.
Thankfully, Ed Carr, my favorite online sparring partner, wrote the following last week:
(…) I wonder about the utility of these admitting failure efforts that I see coming from groups like Engineers without Borders. I had the good fortune to catch up with Tom Murphy (or, as the twitterati know him, @viewfromthecave) the other day while he was here in DC, and we started talking about learning from failure. In the course of our conversation, we came around to two key problems. First, really admitting failure requires reframing the public image of development as an inherently do-no-harm effort, where just doing something is better than nothing. Second, given this first problem, when we really start talking about what failure means, even in the most constructive of settings, we will call the entire development enterprise into question.
I don’t have much to say about the two points Ed and Tom brought up — that is really their area, and Ed summarizes their discussion nicely. But I can offer my economist’s take on admitting failure.
There has been much discussion of Netflix’s new pricing system. Netflix used to offer both streaming videos and DVDs in the mail for a fixed amount. In July, Netflix changed its pricing scheme. Subscribers interested both in streaming videos and in receiving DVDs in the mail would have to pay twice the former price — once for each service.
This post is not about that, nor is it about Netflix’s multiple fumbles over the two services. Indeed, Netflix first renamed its DVD arm Qwikster so as to separate it from streaming arm Netflix. Earlier this week, Netflix sent subscribers an email that went something like “Dear Marc: Just kidding! LOL – Respectfully, The Netflix team” informing them that there would be no Qwikster after all, and that the DVD service would remain with Netflix.
Rather, this post is about the questionable market segmentation behavior Netflix has seemingly been indulging in toward its existing subscribers.
I flew out to California last Thursday night to work with coauthors over the weekend and give a talk on Monday.
My laptop worked just fine when I went to bed on Thursday night. But when I woke up on Friday morning and wanted to check email, my laptop just wouldn’t start.
This was going to be a long, unproductive weekend.
That is, until I ran a Google search for “lenovo t400 died when not plugged in” on my phone. I didn’t expect to find anything helpful, but the second link had an interesting enough title — “The Secret Thinkpad Power Button Code to Bring Dead Laptops Back to Life” — that I decided to check it out.
Here is what Mike Masnick, who runs the famous Techdirt blog, had posted on his personal blog in 2007:
I knew something was wrong when the “sleep” light wasn’t lit. I started to get worried when I plugged in the laptop and the battery light didn’t light up. Then I noticed that even though the machine had been asleep, it was really really hot. Pushing the power button did nothing. No lights were on and nothing seemed to get them to turn on. I pulled out the battery and put it back in and that did nothing as well.
So I called up IBM support and explained the situation. The guy on the other end then let me in on the secret power button code to revive your dead Thinkpad. After assessing the situation (totally dead laptop) he warned me: “Okay, this is going to sound totally bizarre, but I want you to give this a try…” He then had me unplug the AC adapter and take out the battery. Then, you push the power button 10 times in a row at one second intervals. Next, you push and hold the power button for 30 seconds. Then you put the battery back in and push the power button… and she lives. The computer came back, good as ever.
I asked the guy what the power button pushing incantation did and he said “static discharge” so apparently there was some sort of static that caused a short or something. I tried to get the guy to explain in more detail what happened, but he said “dude, you know as much as I do… but your machine is working.”
Readers from my generation probably remember the Konami code of yore, a cheat code — up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Start — one had to enter on the start screen of some Konami games to get more lives. Who knew there would be such a code to literally get an extra life for my laptop?
“Admitting Failure”: Corporate Social Responsibility By Any Other Name?
For quite some time, I had been meaning to write about the seemingly new “admitting failure” phenomenon in development policy. That idea, however, had been pushed back by other, more pressing ideas.
Thankfully, Ed Carr, my favorite online sparring partner, wrote the following last week:
(…) I wonder about the utility of these admitting failure efforts that I see coming from groups like Engineers without Borders. I had the good fortune to catch up with Tom Murphy (or, as the twitterati know him, @viewfromthecave) the other day while he was here in DC, and we started talking about learning from failure. In the course of our conversation, we came around to two key problems. First, really admitting failure requires reframing the public image of development as an inherently do-no-harm effort, where just doing something is better than nothing. Second, given this first problem, when we really start talking about what failure means, even in the most constructive of settings, we will call the entire development enterprise into question.
I don’t have much to say about the two points Ed and Tom brought up — that is really their area, and Ed summarizes their discussion nicely. But I can offer my economist’s take on admitting failure.