“If you wish to persuade me, you must think my thoughts, feel my feelings, and speak my words.”
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Category Archives: This is how I see it
Don’t call us, we won’t either
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Picture by Karlis Kadegis
“Hello Mr. Van Haver, how are you today?”. As the opening line of a telephone call from a bloke I’ve never been in touch with before. Am I really the only one to spot from a zillion miles away that the sole intention of such call is to sell me something? Why on earth should that line be the opening line of every single one of those calls? As far as I recall, I did not include on my LinkedIn profile “stupid enough to make any amount of smalltalk cause increased inclination to buy anything”. Not alone are those callers interfering with whatever I was considering a proper use of my time, but they are clearly stupid enough to believe that politely (the use of the word polite obviously referring to the faked intent of the sender of the message, not to the actual effect caused in the recipient) checking how I am doing today – and thereby taking up even more of the time I was not willing to give them – is going to help them reach their goal in even the slightest way.
Aaahhhh. How I enjoy a good rant every now and then.
Quote of the day #62
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
Upton Sinclair
Quote of the day #61
“Economists don’t predict because they know, but because they are asked”
John Kenneth Galbraight
Refugees: How much is too much?
In 1956, over 200.000 Hungarians fled to Austria as refugees in a relatively short timespan, after the Soviets had ended the Hungarian Revolution manu militari. Unlike what you might expect from looking at the political climate in Austria today, a mere 60 years later, those refugees were treated so well that one of them openly stated: “If I am ever required to be a refugee, I hope to make it to Austria.” (source: The Bridge At Andau, a book published in 1957 by James A. Michener, based on interviews with some of those Hungarian refugees). Continue reading
Quote of the day #60
“Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.“
Arthur Schopenhauer
Quote of the day #59
“Anybody who knows the past isn’t allowed to turn refugees away. Anybody who sees the present can’t turn them away. Anybody who thinks about the future will not turn them away.”
Mercedes-Benz boss Dieter Zetsche
Quote of the day #58
“The trouble with revolution is that it usually replaces one form of imbalance with another.”
Henry Mintzberg in Rebalancing Society
(Professor of management studies at McGill University in Montreal)
Top 7 Podcasts
Audio content has one major advantage over video or written content: you can fully consume it while being engaged in another activity. Of course you can, say, also read a magazine while watching something on TV, but in that case it will be impossible to grasp the full details of both sources of content. Another example where watching video or reading is clearly not possible is in the car – if you are in the driver seat in this unfortunately still pre-Google-self-driving-car-for-commercial-use era. Listening to audio on the other hand is perfectly possible when you are behind the steering wheel.
Picture by Patrick Breitenbach
That is probably why cars are usually equipped with some sort of audio device and why there are no regulations against consuming audio whilst driving. For a very long time Continue reading
Quote of the day #57
“Talent is ubiquitous, opportunity is not”
Valerie Jarrett
(Senior Advisor to US President Barack Obama)
THE SECOND HALF 