Calvinisim's role in the financial crisis

Since I tweeted about this a couple of people have asked for elaboration, so I'm posting it to my rarely used blog. Cheers!

Recently I read "People of God" which is a Catholic perspective on the history of Christianity and the Protestant Reformation. There was some discussion of John Calvin versus Augustine and it mentioned that one of the lines of thought that became prevalent among believers in John Calvin's doctrine was that worldly blessings were a sign of divine election to salvation. In a sense - the origin of the protestant work ethic - work hard, achieve success and well, looks like I'm elected based on how much God has given me! The premise mentioned in "People of God" is that the lack of ability to know one's election in pure Calvinism drove many to strive to at least appear to be elected by material acquisition and accomplishment. In the absence of any other way to know one's state of salvation, perhaps the attainment of worldly success isn't a bad indicator (although this seems to clash directly with Ecclesiastes, Job, and Jesus' teaching about the tower of Siloam, etc).

So my theory is, this byproduct of Calvinism is a component of our modern American culture of overconsumption and posturing over our neighbors and peers to appear successful and blessed. The culture of debt and indebtedness is so pervasive that, as Dave Ramsey points out, many worship at the altar of FICO. The desire to appear blessed that birthed the "Protestant Ethic" may also have aided in the creation of the American materialistic debt culture. It seems Americans feel our value is so closely tied to our possessions that we need to accrue highly irresponsible credit card debt to the tune of $8,329 per household at the end of 2008. (Source: Nilson Report, April 2009) I'm not saying that many Calvinistic Christians consciously follow this line of thought today, but rather that it could be a component of the cultural soup that drives many Americans to ruin our lives (and our country) through unsustainable and ruinous borrowing practices.

Also, I am not aware of this physical blessing indication of election being a legitimate teaching of Calvin - but rather a somewhat subconscious outgrowth of the protestant culture created by the doctrine.

Bing vs Google

So where was I when I heard about Michael Jackson's death? At a client site, working late... the fellow that mentioned it to me said "How am I going to keep track of how old my Mom is now... she's the same age." MJ was 50, I'm getting old.

So, saw an ad for bing.com on tv tonight, pretty clever. I had heard of bing, but had not yet tried it... well I was trying to remember an obscure auditing concept tonight and given that I couldn't remember the mathematician that it's named after it was an obtuse search. Google failed to return relevant results on the first page. I decided to give bing a whirl and low and behold - I got the answer, using the same search string, on the first page of results - Benford's Law. So, if we threw away everything else from searching over the last 10 years of my life, right now it'd be bing 1 - google 0.

The 3 Categories of Road Warriors

Well I heard today from a 10 year veteran of the consulting gig that there are three categories of road warriors.

1. Those with a chip on their shoulder that entered consulting because they felt unfairly treated.
2. Individuals that are running from something. Could be personal, could be professional.
3. People that were essentially forced into it.

This particular consultant stated he was initially number 1 but that after enough time away from home it became 1 and 2. Not good. We agreed I'm number 3. Thing is, I'm willfully here so I'm not sure I fit any of these categories; probably just as well, none sound very appealing.

Week of firsts

So here's another in a week of firsts - my first blog post from a netbook. I got this HP mini a few weeks ago for a graduation gift (hooray, got my MBA). It's awesome the niche this tool fills in my life, highly portable yet highly usable web access. It will be hard to replace this medium until the ultra-portable projection screen becomes a reality. Anyway, the other significant first of the week was listening to Pandora in my car via my blackberry. Tuesday I updated the system software on my 8830, kudos to RIM for making some nice improvements to the browser, email display and calendar function. As it turns out, I can now run Pandora on my blackberry, which is totally sweet. I hooked the phone up to my aux port in the car and presto, instant streaming custom radio. Satellite radio will be toast when they lose their exclusive contracts with the NFL, etc. It's really somewhat a shame that the land based (lower tech) network is continuing to dominate satellite cellular and data communication. Satellite mobile phones seemed like such a better solution than blanketed cellphone towers everywhere.

3rd best thing I've seen this month

3rd best: Hitler ranting about his nightly build failing -  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Azl4nqLn4-Y

2nd best: Google Latitude

Best: Google Sync for iPod Touch and iPhone

Manage your reputation or else

Wow, so we're all aware that there's a lot of info about us out there on the Internet - but just how much and how personal is that info? I mean sure, some stalker-hacker-maniac could probably find a picture of you on google-earth if they looked long enough or hack google-latitude and find where you are. Sure, that's a little creepy. However, I had not seen an in depth EASY to use resource that searched across so many mediums to compile a virtual dossier until I found pipl.com today.

I've been interested in managing my reputation online for a while, granted done little with it. Recently I've become concerned with managing my wife's google results, which is what prompted today's discovery of pipl when I googled myself and looked down towards page 6 in the results. This thing pulls it all together in one place and even tries to guess potential user names for someone - they may be fishing for a lawsuit with that sort of functionality. Nonetheless, I found a lot of info about myself there, compiled from a lot of different places - some accurate, some not. I checked out a couple other people, those with less unique names are less identifiable, but if your name is unique it's another story. I was surprised to discover that my wife's recommended favorites and recently browsed items from her Amazon.com account were available when I searched for her. Honestly I felt a bit uncomfortable even just searching for other people as some information that could be available - I don't want to know! Do we want to know when our friends and coworkers are searching for books on dealing with marriage difficulties, or finding a new job, etc. etc.? I don't! I suspect in another few days I'll be over the initial shock of the amount of info available and accept it as the norm - perhaps akin to perceptions of modesty over time, so too will perceptions of privacy change. Still though, are we crossing a line here that isn't healthy?

When I saw my wife's recent Amazon searches online it surprised me - that's not something I expected to be publicly available. Thankfully, it appears she has been searching for mundane stuff - medical texts and Malcolm Gladwell books... There's an old cliche for American Patriotism - Freedom isn't Free. The intended application of this refers to the sacrifice made by soldiers and others to provide the freedoms we have today. Loss of privacy ultimately reduces freedom. Most of our personal data out there on the web for perusal is coming from "free" websites - perhaps the cliche applies to the Internet as well - freedom (read privacy) isn't free.

Pipl is not the only player here by any means, there were at least a dozen others I came across in my brief foray, many free, some for pay. It's been nearly 10 years since I first came across the birthday listing online that has millions of U.S. citizens search able by name with their birth dates. That was a shock back then, but still - how private is a birthday really? Many post the full thing on their facebook profile. Some of the other information now out there, search able with a few key strokes, is much more personal to me than a birth date.

The bottom line - the concept of privacy existing online has always been a falsehood, over the next 5 years I expect most people will finally come to realize this. What then? Start actively managing your online identity, the sooner the better. If you don't do it, something else will, and you may not want your first result for a prospective employer to be your most recently browsed Amazon.com titles...

....in the meantime, if anyone ever wonders how our marriage is or if we have any rare diseases, be sure and checkout pipl.com for more recent info on our formerly-private lives.

Managing communication during change

What does communication have to do with software development?  Well, a lot.  What does communication have to do with running a successful company?  Everything.  So what do you do when major changes are being put in place at a company and you have a critical communication to send to clients?  This is a challenging situation, especially when those doing the communicating may be new to their roles.  When a communication is sent to clients of a sensitive nature, man it's important to get the message right, if this doesn't happen, irrevocable damage may be done or at the least, significant extra hassle created.

I've recently seen a situation where significant extra hassle was created :)  Big shock right?  Well, my conclusion from all this is, make sure EVERYONE that needs to be consulted on a given communication is, especially when people are in new roles and may not fully understand the products they're responsible for.