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And I’m afraid you’re going to have to settle for intramural and club teams you can cobble together, because there will be no NCAA varsity sports in this university system. None. Sorry. Despite what most people think, college sports are a money loser for the vast majority of schools. And getting new teams up and running would be even more needlessly expensive. No giant stadiums, no rooting for the old college team. Can’t afford it. Can’t afford it!

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—	L’Hôte: my dream: five federal universities I pray for the day that intercollegiate sports dies. NCAA schools should spin their sports programs off into for-profit entities, give the alums shares and license them the university name. And then be done.

[U]ncapped student loans need to go. The sentiment is noble; the results, terrible. As long as there’s loose money tied to the impulse control of people in their teens and early twenties, people are going to find themselves under mountains of debt. As long as students can borrow, colleges have no direct incentive to compete on price. I know: our message has been the sitcom family fantasy of “you can go anywhere you can get into.” That just doesn’t fly anymore. Yes, it’s nice to go to an expensive university, just like it’s nice to have a luxury car or a nice house. It is not responsible for government to help people go into debt to buy luxury items.

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—	L’Hôte: my dream: five federal universities Yep. Federally encouraged indentured servitude aka student debt is not a good thing.

By the same token, foreign interest in snapping up pieds a terres in New York City ought to be great news. It should create a lot of jobs for architects and construction workers. It should create upstream jobs for the people who cut the timber and make the metal that goes into buildings. It should create jobs in factories as people build the stoves and refrigerators to stock the new houses. And it should create downstream jobs as the construction workers and oven manufacturers take their paychecks to buy a new car or a night on the town. There should be a construction boom in New York and a construction boom in Silicon Valley and it should be providing lots of employment for working class men. But instead we’re having housing shortages in New York and in Silicon Valley. Not because we don’t have the technology to build lots more houses, but because we don’t have the zoning codes. So with only a handful of projects able to squeeze through the eye of the needle, we get projects that address only the very highest end of the market and the simultaneous occurence of joblessless and lack of affordable houses.

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—	Exporting housing services: A huge economic opportunity. Regulatory limits on development is a great example of regulatory capture of entrenched interests - current land/housing owners. More supply is really the only solution to affordable housing.

In writing about the ACA and our health-care problems, I started to think more and more about supply restrictions. In every other industry, costs come down when new suppliers come in and compete. Yet our health-care system is full of restrictions and protections to keep new suppliers out, and competition down. Then we wonder why hospitals won’t tell you how much care will cost, and send you bills with $100 band aids on them.

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—	The Grumpy Economist: Doctor-owned hospitals

rafer:

The WentNative conference team was emailed this earlier in the day, correctly and humorously. We’ve been aggressively inviting non-white and/or non-dudes to speak and have struck out across the board. Please show us up, suggest people, anything you can — however, we have been trying.

[i’ll give the photomontage artist credit if they want, but I didn’t want to unilaterally out the person or wait to post.]

As a co-organizer of WentNative with @Rafer - I’ll double down on what he said - We’ve tried and struck out so far. Nominations welcome!

Also I think it’s important to note that Rey Peralta of Deutsch - speaking on our Content Marketing for Agencies panel - is a person of color himself. So we’re trying. More to be done.

What AltaVista has done in the past few months is to infuse its Web site with bells and whistles like shopping, free Internet access, an image library and breaking news reports. Like all Internet portals, it is trying to give users more reasons to visit than just offering a way to find information elsewhere on the Web.

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SFGate. Monday, March 27th 2000.”AltaVista Switches Web Portal Into High Gear / Revamped site adds new services.”

I looked this up because, on June 29, 1999, myself and my mentor/boss Mark Bockley, did a qualitative brand and category audit for AltaVista that clearly indicated that search was the opportunity. We were brought in by Jerry Blanton of their agency, to inform brand building work.

We did groups with heavy users of the various brands in the category, and discovered something pretty amazing. I believe our words in our presentation were something to the effect of, “Whoever owns search, wins.” It was clear, from the beginning, that the AltaVista wasn’t listening, and didn’t know how to listen, to consumers.

This entire article is an amazing flashback to the peak of the dot-com bubble. Google isn’t mentioned anywhere in this article, and wasn’t even in the Top 20 Internet Properties list at the end of this article and was barely mentioned in our research.

I say that to indicate that this wasn’t a case of users saying Google is awesome, and us reporting that Google is awesome, so you should be like Google.

This was a case of deep, creative, indirect listening into the motivations at work in an emerging category of behavior revealing unserved needs. AltaVista wasn’t listening that day - they had just been bought by CMGI for $2.3b.

I say this also to highlight that strategic insight - through brand listening - is possible (vital!) even when the entire industry is blind:

Here’s Rod Shrock, the CEO of Alta Vista, defending portalization in the same article. This is a year after our presentation:

“You tell me, was CBS three years ahead or behind of NBC?” Schrock asked. “No idea? So in the grand scheme of things, no one will care in 10 years whether we were three years before or after Yahoo.”

Blinded by Yahoo! And this, from an analyst (any qualitative at work?):

Charlene Li, an analyst with Forrester Research, was not so optimistic. She lauded Alta Vista’s focus on Web enthusiasts and e-commerce, but stopped short of predicting that AltaVista would one day become the Internet’s top portal for all users.

“Being a general search engine isn’t enough to catch up to a Yahoo because they are so far ahead,” Li said.

Perhaps it was too late for them to do anything about it, but suffice it to say that deep creative listening with consumers gave them the opportunity to choose - chase the portals and the wisdom of the day, or turn towards the consumer and become helpful. And they chose to follow the pack over the cliff.

To anyone reading this, I ask, have you explored how your consumer experiences your category lately?

(via peterspear)Some

Meanwhile, if we made it easier to open bars and restaurants, then restauranteurs would need to hire more waiters and dishwashers and cooks and bartenders and presumably would end up needing to offer higher pay to do so. If the limiting factor of restaurant expansion in your city is licenses or permits rather than available local labor, in effect what you have is a licensing and permitting scheme that’s holding down wages across the board for people who lack formal educational credentials.

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—	Food service sector should be taken seriously. Good example of regulatory capture. Local licensing schemes are rarely in the public’s interests.

(via Donald R. Hopkins - How to Eradicate Guinea Worm Disease - NYTimes.com)

Caption: Donald R. Hopkins, vice president for health programs at the Carter Center, helped to eradicate smallpox and is trying to do the same to Guinea worm disease.

Sawickipedia comment: This guy is awesome. Instead of nominating President Drone Warrior for the Nobel Peace Prize - real humanitarians like Dr. Hopkins deserve awards like that. What a modern saint.

lickypickystickyme:

goktgo:

life does not get better than this.

A cat dressed like a shark on a roomba chasing a duck.

yes.

The internet NEEDED this today.

As a cat owner… GOTD (Gif of the Day)

Why not just build a phone?

I’ve always been very clear that I don’t think that’s the right strategy. We’re a community of a billion-plus people, and the best-selling phones—apart from the iPhone—can sell 10, 20 million. If we did build a phone, we’d only reach 1 or 2 percent of our users. That doesn’t do anything awesome for us. We wanted to turn as many phones as possible into “Facebook phones.” That’s what Facebook Home is.

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—	Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook Home, Money, and the Future of Communication \| Wired Magazine \| Wired.com Good insight