“Every fortune is partially justified yet potentially excessive.”
Thomas Piketty (in Capital in the Twenty-First Century)
Author Archives: Jan Van Haver
Guest post: Open letter to Bill Gates
1 Reply
Dear Bill,
It’s now been 8 years since you sent me the e-mail in which you promised to pay 10 cents for every e-mail I would forward. But as you have so far not responded to any of the e-mails I have sent (and then forwarded MULTIPLE times) on this topic, you leave me no other option than to use a public forum to contact you, such as this guest post on a blog which is hugely popular (or so I am told, and I can assure you: I’m not a person that is easily fooled!).
And please don’t claim that you have never received any of the mails, as I have used several different e-mail addresses: bill.gates@microsoft.com; william.henry.james@microsoft.com; bill_melinda@hotmail.com; Continue reading
Quote of the day #25
“Quality is a science, service is an art.”
no idea who originally came up with it, as I read it
on the back of a truck on the highway some time ago
(and I don’t remember the company it belonged to),
so let’s settle for ‘some undefined copywriter’
Would you eat a jar of yoghurt 4 days too late?
A gigantic amount of perfectly good food is thrown away for all the wrong reasons. I don’t want to start moralizing about starving children in Africa (although that absolutely remains a huge and definitely solvable problem*), but rather point to the fact that this is also costing most of you money quite directly – as that more easily causes people to start paying attention (sad, but true).
One of the main reasons is that most people keep confusing the labels Best before and Use by. The latter of the two is the one that is most likely to cause life-threatening situations if not respected. Continue reading
Song of the day: Mark Ronson & The Business Intl – The Bike Song
It seems that songs about bicycles by default sound quite cheerful – possibly because the person writing the song is also compelled to use the sound of the bell that usually comes with the bike. Take for example Queen’s ‘I want to ride my bicycle’ or this ‘Bike Song’ by Mark Ronson.
Listen to the latter at your own risk: I can’t get it out of my head already for a few days now. Not that I mind. By the way: if you are too impatient to watch intros, the actual song starts at 0:45.
Quote of the day #24
“Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”
usually attributed to either Winston Churchill or Abraham Lincoln,
but there is no conclusive evidence for either case
Song of the day: Puggy – Goes like this
Puggy is a Belgian band – at least that is what they call themselves, in spite of the fact that none of the members is actually Belgian (one’s British, one French and the third one Swedish). But they did meet in Belgium as they were all staying there at the time they met.
I don’t mind at all that they call themselves a Belgian band: anyone making such great songs – Goes like this demonstrates clearly that they do – can claim to be Belgian if I had anything to say about it.
If you’re not paying, you are the product*
It’s often claimed that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, but still – espcially and increasingly in this digital age – we are daily using en masse products and services that we consider to be free. Or at least where we don’t have to part with some of our dearly beloved money in exchange for the right to use those products or services. Some examples from the digital world include social media, like Facebook and Twitter; e-mail services, like Gmail or Hotmail (yes, I know, the consumer version is also called Outlook now, but everyone still refers to it as Hotmail); free antivirus; free search engines, like Bing or of course Google; free return shipments for online orders; free wifi in hotels, bars, etc.
Quote of the day #23
“There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.”
Albert Schweitzer
I now know what women feel
Well, sort of. Here’s the story. A while ago I decided to order a custom designed t-shirt online, just to give it a try in order to see what kind of quality one would get and to which extent the offline product would resemble (or not) the online product. (At this point I hate to have to admit that all this spamming by Vistaprint does yield some result, it seems.)
Obviously the main issue was what kind of design elements to put on the t-shirt. Continue reading
THE SECOND HALF 