L'avantage du terrain

Je ne pensais pas que la foule pouvait avoir un grand rôle au baseball, jusqu'à ce que je prenne connaissance de ce qui se passe au Texas.

Litang va changer d'ici 2030

C'était en 2005, il y a déjà plus de 10 ans.  J'imagine que les choses ont changé depuis là-bas.  Et ça va définitivement changer d'ici 2030.

Je ne me tanne pas

La meilleure visualisation de données

Rabbit vs duck.

L'endettement pour la croissance

Entrevue avec un des protagonistes du livre/film The Big Short.

Where do we stand now, economically?
Well, we are right back at it: trying to stimulate growth through easy money. It hasn’t worked, but it’s the only tool the Fed’s got. Meanwhile, the Fed’s policies widen the wealth gap, which feeds political extremism, forcing gridlock in Washington. It seems the world is headed toward negative real interest rates on a global scale. This is toxic. Interest rates are used to price risk, and so in the current environment, the risk-pricing mechanism is broken. That is not healthy for an economy. We are building up terrific stresses in the system, and any fault lines there will certainly harm the outlook.

What makes you most nervous about the future?
Debt. The idea that growth will remedy our debts is so addictive for politicians, but the citizens end up paying the price. The public sector has really stepped up as a consumer of debt. The Federal Reserve’s balance sheet is leveraged 77:1. Like I said, the absurdity, it just befuddles me.

Petit tour en Iran

Une destination potentiellement intéressante.

If you make your travel decisions based on what your friends and family say, you’ll probably never make it to Iran. This is a country whose politics are impossible to escape. For most travellers that will mean little more than some pre-departure questions about their sanity, but it can make getting a visa a challenge. Except for Americans, who must be accompanied, once in Iran independent travel is easy and, through the people you meet, rewarding and sometimes sobering. However you chose to plan your travel, a journey in Iran will change the way you see this part of the world. (Lonely Planet)

La complexité

 “I believe that we have to avoid being simplistic. I think we have to build resilience and make sure that our political debates are grounded in reality. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the value of theater in political communications; it’s that the habits we—the media, politicians—have gotten into, and how we talk about these issues, are so detached so often from what we need to be doing that for me to satisfy the cable news hype-fest would lead to us making worse and worse decisions over time.”

Longue réflexion d'Obama sur la politique internationale (via The Atlantic).

L'esprit d'équipe

Les pour et les contre du travail en équipe (via The Economist).

Companies are abandoning functional silos and organising employees into cross-disciplinary teams that focus on particular products, problems or customers.

[...]teams are hampered by problems of co-ordination and motivation that chip away at the benefits of collaboration. High-flyers forced to work in teams may be undervalued and free-riders empowered. Groupthink may be unavoidable.

The least that can be concluded from this research is that companies need to think harder about managing teams. They need to rid their minds of sentimental egalitarianism: the most successful teams have leaders who set an overall direction and clamp down on dithering and waffle. They need to keep teams small and focused: giving in to pressure to be more “inclusive” is a guarantee of dysfunction. 

Des rendements pas fameux

Les prédictions pour le rendement sur les placements ne s'améliorent pas (via The Economist).

Obama, la vision et le sport

I’m able to stay focused even when there’s a lot of stuff going on around me. [...] [Like Aaron] Rodgers in the pocket, in the sense of you can’t be distracted by what’s around you, you’ve got to be looking downfield. And I think that’s a quality that I have—not getting flustered in what’s around me. So there was never a point, even early on—even in the first six months, where we weren’t sure whether we were going to dip into another Great Depression, we weren’t sure whether the steps we were taking on rescuing the auto industry or stabilizing the financial system were going to work—there weren’t moments where I thought, “Sheesh, feels like we’re in over our head.”

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One thing you learn as president is you’re not always going to perform flawlessly and you have to be able to put that out of your mind and then look at the next problem coming down the pipe. If I’m working out in the gym, sometimes I’ll go to NBA Classics and watch some of these old classic games— The lack of HD really hurts — you can barely see anybody.  It’s true—and the graphics at the bottom are terrible. But a thing that you’re reminded of, watching those old Bulls games, is Jordan had some stinker games in the playoffs. But he would get that out of his mind, and then the next moment comes and he’s right there. He could have a terrible game for the first three quarters and then suddenly go crazy the fourth. Or he might miss a free throw, and then the next play is he’s stealing the ball and hitting the game-winning shot. Part of what I try to do—not at the level that Jordan did on the basketball court, but part of what you aspire to as president or any of these positions of leadership—is to try to figure out how to be in the moment, make the best decision you can, know that you’re going to get a bunch of them right, but a bunch of times you’re also not going to get it exactly the way you want it.

(From GQ Magazine)