Alexander Chalkidis

Month: June 2016

  • Data comparisons show just how far ahead the U.S. is in tech

    It started with a friend’s interesting project.  https://gotelonica.wordpress.com sets forth to draw comparisons between two European cities.  “Everyday stories, vivid images, mutual interests and hopeful efforts”… will have to be good enough though because finding decent comparative data is pretty complicated!

    If you search the internet for “city comparison” or anything like that, you are most likely to find a US site comparing US cities.  Mobility in the United States is a fact of life.  And great websites cater to all sorts of ways to discover if your new job offer is as good as it sounds.  Or if you should buy a house there or anything else you are interested in discovering.   Similar efforts within Europe are almost non existent.   UN Habitat data doesn’t include Sweden’s second largest city.  Interesting online articles with catchy titles such as “these are the world’s dirtiest/most dangerous/best cities” rarely include both Thessaloniki and Goteborg.

    In fact an American website offered the best weather and crime comparison.   Thessaloniki has a lower crime index and higher safety index.  Which doesn’t say much unless they analyse exactly how they get, process and quantify the data.  Being Greek I know for a fact that the stats coming out of that particular civil service are far from perfect.

    You may eventually find some meaningful ways to compare the cities, if you try hard enough.  Gotelonica is an excellent idea because statistics are almost meaningless on their own in such a complex environment.  European cities cannot be set side by side like American ones.  We have no real federal or state system in place.  The European Union is meant to help us work in different places but in fact there is not that much mobility.  And the lack of data is a pretty convincing evidence of this.

    We are decades behind America and it shows.   Much like my objections to Greek Police statistics above, almost any matter (other than the weather) concerning European cities is bound to become political.  Different measurements, different resources allocated to statistics, different infrastructures which make the numbers rather drab tools to paint a true picture.  It makes it even harder to build any sort of technological platforms or apps.  So we just sit around while Google and Facebook speed along by getting users to volunteer information, live with their tools and then use machine learning to offer better judgements than any European tool ever could.  Google traffic data is the best pan European resource for how fast you will get from A to B.  While we argue about how and why our GPS alternative never got off the ground, Maps just keeps getting better.

    So next time you start talking about European tech entrepreneurs, take a moment to consider how hard it is to get decent databases to work with.  Or to attract other Europeans to your city to work for you.   Or even to calculate ahead of time the chances of either of these two happening.

  • Facebook will help us rebuild Greece

    No, Zuckerberg isn’t about to buy Greek debt.  Nor will he set up Research and Development in Crete.     He isn’t even going to call up European leaders and ask them nicely to be kinder on repayment terms.  Facebook is going to help us build consensus.

    Most people currently believe that social media achieves the exact opposite.  It is not mass media.   We hide alone and pretend, end up feeling inadequate…and all that kind of thinking which is prevalent right now in research papers.  “Get off social to get happy!” seems to be the accepted wisdom.

    But let’s talk about really bad politicians.  We all have some.  My Italian friends simply could not believe what Berlusconi got away with for so long.  Americans are currently worried about Trump but forget they had George Bush, an equally dangerous buffoon, calling the shots for two terms.  The British simply laughed at the idiotic stuff Tony Blair came up with regularly and most African countries are almost used to crazy dictators.   All around the world, people vote for leaders so incredibly stupid, we would not trust them to hold our ice cream, let alone decide our kids’ future.   (More on “Trump, trinkets and the triumph of the twats” here.)

    In Greece we have Alexis Tsipras.  I don’t need to run through moronic highlights.  The whole world has had a taste.  Take the worse you have seen or heard about him and just multiply it by a hundred.  He is an absolute idiot.  Uneducated, incapable and brash.  A lethal combination.

    What is interesting about this particular clown however is his rise to power and what we did about it.   Many of us could see it coming.  We got on our soap boxes and cried:  “can’t you see?”  They couldn’t see.  He got elected.   Some of us insisted and from Day1 posted all the terrible things they did.  Still, we were the weirdos.  Yannis Varoufakis upped the ridiculous ante.   We were on Facebook about it.   The “let’s give them some time to see what they can do” attitude started cracking.  Some Facebook friends started expressing doubts.

    Gradually more and more people turned.   If you are professionally on social media like me, you see a lot of different profiles, a lot of different groups of “friends”.  The arty people seeing their hopes of socialist reforms dashed.   The business crowd feeling the enormous damage done to the economy and the image of Greece abroad.  For a communications guy like me, the signs were glaring, obvious and flashing like bright lights: my country has split up into two social media clans.  On the one side are civil servant and all those directly or indirectly making money from Government.  On the other side the private sector.   We are the schmucks paying the bill.

    This is no new divide.  But social media is helping as clear up the situation.   If you are a civil servant you can’t hide it from me in the long term.  A recent Facebook unfriending made this pretty obvious to me.  He is my age, full of energy, similar outdoor interests, also a keen traveller, well read and we agreed on everything.  Even touchy subjects like child rearing approaches.  In politics we had a similar approach, ended up supporting similar parties.   On Facebook it seemed so that is.   And then recently he did it:  he reposted an article that “not all civil servants are evil”.

    Like you do on Facebook, I pushed a bit.  It didn’t take much prodding.  He came out and admitted it:   “I am 47, have a wife and a kid now, I will not give up my job security”.    It was the fastest unfriend I have ever done.   Because it was obvious. Sharing anything with him is simply a waste of time.   I live in a global economy and have my kids ready to go to any country in the world necessary for work at a moment’s notice.   Government handouts are not part of this plan.  Business opportunities are always global.   He talks the talk but, like the bloated Greek public sector, will not walk the walk.

    Though only half Greek, I love this place.  Greek culture can and should have a bright spot on planet Earth.  But it will not achieve anything while sitting on its butt.  Through Facebook we will unfriend all those civil servants.   We will uncover the hypocrites.  Over time they will give themselves away.  Sooner or later they repost something about Merkel being bad to us, or idiotic pseudo economic conspiracy theories borrowed from a failed ex minister in Australia.   We will build a new consensus and a new idea about what it means to be Greek in the modern world.   One post at a time.   It’s not about living in Greece and it sure as hell isn’t about job security and living off loans.  If there is something special about this great civilisation it has nothing to fear of new technologies, new economies or alien invasions, Jews, Germans and whatever other imaginary enemy lazy Greeks imagine are all working against them.

    I hope Argyris quits his job in the civil service and finds something to do in the real world economy some time soon.    (Posting this on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter now, guess he will see it sooner or later.  ; )

     

  • Trump, trinkets and the triumph of the twats

    Next time you meet a dog, try this.  Take a fresh juicy steak and say:  “If you sacrifice this meat, you will earn a special place in Dog Paradise!”  No, a dog will not give a hoot, a steak or half a dry poo for the afterlife or any other such vague idea.  It is a uniquelly human thing to put religion, politics or fantastic creatures of our collective imagination above basic needs.

    Sathya Sai Baba was a charlatan who amongst other ridiculous tricks “magically” produced trinkets for his audience.   That was not what they travelled to see him about though.  It was his ideas.   The trinkets were just part of the morning ritual.  A lucky few got to meet with him and be blessed.   Less lucky few suffered his sexual advances.  Silently.  For an idea.

    It is our capacity to join forces for big ideas and trinkets that makes us humans such an incredible force to be reckoned with.  No matter what you think of Donald Trump, he has won.  The world is split into Trump lovers and Trump haters and both these groups go to pretty impressive extremes for him.  Much like they would a few centuries ago for their king.  In France they traded the idea of a Sun king for that of a Republicby killing their previous way of understanding how the world was ruled at the guillotine.

    What this monumental advance of our species has achieved is to bring idiots like Trump to the forefront.   Twenty thousand years ago, you had to be a good runner, a strong fighter, able at fishing and hunting, fast at fashioning tools and a lot of other things.  Every day.  All the time.  But big ideas in politics and religion brought together more people than ever before, in groups larger than ever before.  And so we could support the twats.

    Those with no obvious gift, strength or ability found niches.  You could make a living producing nothing edible.   One clever weird looking man claimed he heard the voices of his ancestors.  In the old days they would have killed him as a misformed baby.  He surely would never get a woman.  Now he had twenty virgins in the next room waiting for him to be sacrificed.

    The leader of the clan was no longer the strongest or wisest.  It was the useless fool who insisted no matter what.

  • Social media diet inspired by primitive, happy humans

    Heck, they do it all the time with eating habits.  Why not make a social media regime and sell it?   So here are my tips on how to be happier through changes in your social media habits.   All scientifically tested and based on decades of research:

    1. Eat everything.  Hunter gatherers where more gatherers than hunters.  Always on the look out for berries, or roots, or well, anything edible.   Do the same with your social media.  Don’t be picky which platform to use.  They all taste slightly different.  When you stumble on one, use it.
    2. Gorge on opportunities.  When a stone age wanderer found a tree full of fruit they didn’t sit around debating; they ate as much as possible before some other tribe of humans or monkeys came and ransacked everything.  When you find a new niche, milk it.  Getting a lot of likes for Einstein quotes?  Go for it!
    3. There are three ways of walking the earth.  Ancient nomads where mostly alone all day, with a very small troupe of relatives, 10-20 usually somewhere within shouting distance.  That is how they lived for days and months on end.  Occasions for meeting strangers or bigger gatherins where extremely rare. Emulate this in your use of social media.  Pick a platform for those really close and important to you.  Email, Google plus, ello, instagram, whatever.  Live there most of your day with them.
    4. Be vicious.  Our ancient ancestors were brutal.  Some killed newborns at a whim if they didn’t look nice.  Old people were knifed from behind if they couldn’t keep up, or just left up a mountain.  No regrets, just unfriend, block, send them to cyber heaven.
    5. Boldy go wherever there might be greener grass.  Our nomad ancestors never stopped exploring.   What’s that?  Snapchat?  Hell yeah, let’s try it.  No matter if it looks barren, heck they walked across miles of ice to get to America, you some sort of chicken?  Old places have stale opportunities, look for new vistas.
    6. Burn it all down.  When some enterprising bunch of sailors arrived at Australia 45 thousand years ago, they wiped out all but one of the large marsupials that roamed that continent.   They just burned down forests for fun.  Don’t save for tomorrow what you can use today.  That folder full of “good stuff I found to use some time”?   Well, the time is now.  Go for it.

    I could go on with more points but of course I am developing the idea in a book.  And series of seminars, world tour and self-help audio.  Because as my ancient primitive ancestors knew, everything has a price.  Trade wherever you can!