While management consulting has pioneered many advances in business management, the industry is responsible for perpetuating many, of what I consider to be, horrific business sins. One of the most egregious and widespread of management consulting offenses is the practice of slide-umentation, a term I first heard while conversing with Eric, which refers to the [...]
Signaling is a concept from economics which makes the vast majority of higher schooling seem irrelevant. Why else do financial services firms oftentimes seek physics and math students (often with negligible background in business or finance)? Why else are pre-medical students required to endure class after class of essentially zero relevance to their profession of [...]
If you had told me four years ago that I would be working in consulting, I would have responded with a question: “What’s consulting? And, why am I doing it?” As recent as a year ago, I was positive that I would be pursuing a PhD in Systems Biology (or, as it is sometimes referred to, Computational Biology or [...]
Marvel has recently been hit by a deluge of criticisms regarding two of its — well you’ll see: Exhibit 1: the cover to Heroes for Hire #13 … so, Marvel is taking scantily clad women with 6 inch wastes and 90 inch chests in costumes that can’t possibly work except with enormous amounts of superglue [...]
Something I found the other day while browsing in my archives for Google Reader, but its a graphical history of the rise and spread of today’s major modern religions Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Its pretty astonishing how different things looked just a few hundred years ago — as late as the 1400s and [...]
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/04/11/enlisting_iraqis_to_rebuild_their_country/ Enlisting Iraqis to rebuild their countryBy Laurence J. Kotlikoff | April 11, 2007 FOUR YEARS, more than 26,600 American casualties, more than 100,00 Iraqi casualties, 2 million refugees, and $410 billion later, large parts of Iraq and a vast majority of Iraqis are stuck in an unmitigated hell, with no end in sight. The [...]
From the New York Sun: The letter “X” soon may be banned in Saudi Arabia because it resembles the mother of all banned religious symbols in the oil kingdom: the cross. Those hard-asses. Who’s leading the fight against Saudi stupidity? Of course, a businessman who’s company has the letter “X” in its name: Well, never [...]
In the midst of choosing classes, pondering my impending “adulthood”, and fretting the lack of data that I can actually write up for my thesis, a strange thought came to mind. Why don’t they call it Harvard Justice School, instead of Harvard Law School? Sure, it sounds corny — or, to the comic nerd in [...]
For Lisa: A Ec10 (Intro Ec) student asks Greg Mankiw, “Does Econ Make People More Conservative?” The student asks: My school offers two main elective history courses for seniors: Government and Economics. Due to scheduling limitations, not many kids are able to take both. I’ve noticed something interesting as the year has progressed. The students [...]
Let’s say you’re responsible for building a fence across the US-Mexico border. Why do you do it? Well, there are the (what I consider) legitimate reasons of maintaining national security and demanding that all people within the borders obey the law. There are also the (what I consider) less legitimate reasons of maintaining “cultural purity”, [...]