“Even a broken clock is right twice a day.”
English proverb (pointing out that a source is not necessarily
reliable about everything, when proven right about one thing)
Category Archives: This is how I see it
Is it wise (and healthy) to buy generic medicine?
2 Replies
As consumers we are being offered, in an increasing number of domains, the choice between ‘big brand’ products and store brands or ‘white labels’. A nice way to save some money, right? Especially since more and more research is showing that the quality is very much comparable (if not completely the same, or at least being manufactured in the same production facilities), why not choose the cheaper alternative for everyday products such as milk or paper tissues?
But if your health is at stake, things might be a bit different Continue reading
Quote of the day #31
“We all need to take some risk or risk being left behind”
Linda Rottenberg stating the reason why she wrote
her book Crazy is a Complement, a plea for everybody
to think and act like an entrepreneur
Are men smarter than women?
Look at Nobel laureates (especially in the scientific domains), inventors, creative geniuses, brilliant scholars, or any other category of people that are considered to be extremely smart. Almost all of them are male. 
There are some females in all of these categrories, of course, but the male/female distribution is nowhere near the 50/50 one might expect when starting from the assumption that men and women have on average equal intellectual capacities.
In the days of extreme feminism one could not even point out that men and women are different in obvious ways Continue reading
Quote of the day #30
“Facts don’t change beliefs.”
Robert Rose
(in the podcast This Old Marketing, on the need to
include emotions if you want to, say, sell something)
Winter coat
Every year there is a day that you decide that it’s time to get out your winter coat. Some essential questions are sure to arise at that point in time:
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When I get there, will I turn out to be the only one already wearing a winter coat? Continue reading
Quote of the day #29
“This is a very important debate for the decades ahead. The public debt (which is much smaller than total private wealth and perhaps not really that difficult to eliminate) is not our major worry. The more urgent need is to increase our educational capital and prevent the degradation of our natural capital. This is a far more serious and difficult challenge, because climate change cannot be eliminated at the stroke of a pen (or with a tax on capital, which comes to the same thing).”
Thomas Piketty in the concluding pages of Capital in the Twenty-First Century
(his 700 page plea for a progressive annual tax on
capital aimed to improve wealth distribution)
Quote of the day #28
“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”
General Eric Shinseki, U.S. Army Chief of Staff
Beware of cars!
If you ask people to sort a number of items in order of ascending danger, with cars and sharks being some of them, then it is very likely that in quite a lot of cases sharks will be ranked considerably higher than cars. But if you take all factors into consideration – such as the chance of encoutering one or the other on a daily basis, or the total yearly number of people getting killed globally by one or the other – it’s quite obvious that it would make much more sense to run away screaming every time you see a car approaching you. (But please don’t do so, as it would also tremendously increase your chance of being run over by the one coming from the other direction.)
Of course in those rare cases where a human does get killed by a shark, this causes big headlines as journalists and editors are vey much aware that this kind of headlines gets more newspapers sold or causes more people to click through.
Until recently I was convinced, however, that those journalists and editors were able to put in all in the correct perspective and only used that approach for commercial and economic reasons. Unfortunately that turns out to be an illusion: most of them have a world view that is far from realistic, as is shown in the TED* talk by Hans and Ola Rosling shown below. Fortunately the talk also contains some great and very practical rules of thumb to make sure you world view is and remains realistic, so certainly check it out – it’s 20 minutes of you life well spent!
*If you’ve never heard of TED talks before, you should definitely check it out (and many other TED talks at http://www.ted.com).
Quote of the day #27
“Talented people need organizations less than organizations need talented people.”
Daniel H. Pink
THE SECOND HALF 