Alexander Chalkidis

Blog

  • Let’s make a website and hide the fact that we are Greek

    It is a great website.  The English is correct.  The vibe is right.  The concept isn’t ground breaking but on the right path.  So why should it hide the fact that it is Greek?  There is no “about us”.  No physical adress.  If you look hard, in the blog section, there is mention of a “name” and a brief, very vague bio.  And based on this information they want me to shell out 3-4 thousand euro?

    It is a very common chorus in Greece these days.  Everyone starts a business conversation with the mantra “forget the Greek market” followed by some idea of  how to sell abroad.  Which is nearly always half baked.  Getting a truly global angle isn’t easy.  I had written some time ago about how the traditional Greek family business should emulate the German model.  Thinking it and doing it are two very different things.  The current crisis in Greece will take at least a generation to get over.  There has to be a generation of people that grow up and decide what to do in the world with no other option than an international market.

    Meanwhile the ministry of tourism and the prime minister debate rebranding Greece as “Hellas”.  As if they can.

    Using the internet to try out a business idea is a valid strategy.  Some are really good.  Nice branding, great website, good vibe,  content that works for Google…  But a real brand has a real home.  Be Greek and be proud.  You’re not going to convince anyone to buy otherwise and it will end up as yet another big Greek Ego exercise.  Which is great if somebody else is paying the bill.

    They are not.

     

    Note: The initial post contained reference to a website which I incorrectly claimed had no Greek address ;   it actually does have Greek information.   I just didn’t see it, must have been the position.  The gist of the article is valid, I just removed the specific reference.

  • Software features the industry forgot

    Everyone in the software industry knows how fickle users can be.  One wants it this way, one the other.  Everyone thinks that the interface or the features they need at this moment are what is most important.  Almost nobody really knows everything that the software can do, yet opinions are all over the place.   Somewhere there is a company guru (if you haven’t fired him) that knows the ins and outs, that has met many users, that has seen crazy applications.  But most of the time, everyone works the software in the “wrong” way.  You are clicking six times when you could automate it down to two.  “If you download the latest version and learn how to use that new menu properly….”

    But of course, users don’t care.  They just want to get their jobs done.  Quickly and easily.  Without having to learn new things.  So even saturated product segments can be shaken up.   Here are two examples:

    Media Player.   Settled matter isn’t it?  Windows Media Player, Quicktime, VLC…what more can we add to this simple software?   Here is one simple feature that would get me installing at the drop of a hat:  instant delete.  I get given loads of MP3 files.  Or I experiment with new types of music.   As I listen to a song I either like it (keeper) or don’t (delete).  I want one button to do it.  No, I don’t want to stick tags, or stars or rate it to delete later.  I want to send it to the Underworld of music not worth listening to ever again.  I listened for 5, 10 or 30 seconds and I don’t want to waste any more time with it.  Sure, the main use is for people downloading illegally.   Or with friends that download illegally.   But if that is how I like to occasionally listen to the Top40 (I usually weed that down to 3-4 songs that are bearable) that is the software I want.

    A similar example would be photo management.  Here more companies seem to see the sense in a new interface paradigm.   I shoot huge files with my digital camera, even if it is not in RAW.  And then I want to do something with them.  So I have to resize them, edit them individually, stick together whichever pics were meant as a panorama, hide the faces of any friends or relatives that don’t want to be on the internet, watermark them… it is a lot of work.  Get some technology to do this automatically in “good enough” way please.  Locally, on my hard disk.  Most of the planet doesn’t enjoy broadband speeds and even if you do, uploading everything at full resolution isn’t usually the way to go.   Sure I could write macro commands….macro what?  We are in the age of simplicity.  Users are twiddling their thumbs at phones and tablets.  Just get it done.  If you wan’t to stick it on the back of Google Instant Upload or Facebook’s latest attempt at convincing me to trust them with all my pictures, fine.

    These features may seem minor to a seasoned software developer.  It is a fad, you are just one user, you can do it in a million different ways already with other software, it isn’t really our main focus….etc.  But even I, the man who keeps his work computer carefully maintained for top speed and as uncluttered as possible, would probably install a new software to get them done.    User interface isn’t the thing anymore.  I am looking for a digital slave.

     

  • Just how bad is Facebook at programming?

    Cute picture of my son today.  Huge smile as he looked through a Holy Crepe.  He had eaten out some of it and looked to the camera; cute as ever.  Gotta have this as my profile picture.  Facebook profile, upload picture, wait….wait….wait some more.  Finally it uploads.    Sometimes it doesn’t of course.  Go to Twitter.   Same objective.  But hey, it magically shows me a preview of the picture instantly.   And wow, I can even crop it to the part most relevant to a profile picture.   Must be rocket science.  The boffs at Facebook haven’t figured it out.   Some ultra secret patented method Twitter is using…  The picture even uploads faster at Twitter!  Must be they have more money for better servers…

    Or Facebook is simply terrible at designing their infrastructure.  And no, it’s not about the scale of the exercise.   Facebook has always been a terrible platform.  Sure, we don’t get as many major hiccups anymore, but does anyone there even bother to test the user experience?   Tech journalists and social media pundits have a field day with every major overhaul.   Facebook cause pages are created demanding we change back.   Plug ins appear to make it “look like the good old Facebook”.   They never work.

    Because Mark Zuckerberg is still carrying the mentality he had when he started.   He is more concerned with the people gaming his system than the experience of the rest of the users.

    Here is a simple example.   Accepting friend requests.   You may never even consider this if you get 1 or 2 per day.  But anyone building up fake profiles and trying to amass a lot of Facebook ‘friends’ might have two or three hundred friend request to accept.  No, there is no “accept all” button.  Because Mark, knows some people will abuse it.   If you really are a popular person, just starting on Facebook and you have 250 friend requests, you have to click them one by one.   And of course the buttons aren’t at the same place.  No, that would be to easy to get an automated script monkey on to.   As you accept one friend request, it morphs into something else so you have to physically scroll to the next right position of  “Accept”.

    There are dozens of examples like this.  Most people with just one genuine personal account, will not even notice them.  What they will notice and what we all experience daily is just a really really bad user interface.   They build little hoops for cheats but penalise everybody else while they are at it.    The fact that it has never been done in this scale and that it has to serve billions of very different customers is no excuse;  many of the niggles I have with Facebook are due to the fact that Zuckerberg is obsessed with people that are as sneaky thinking as him.  And he can’t think of clever algorithmic ways to get over it.   In a sense, Edgerank is this magic ingredient.   And all the recent changes are a move in the right direction.

    Now let’s hope Edgerank gets good enough so that Zuckerberg relaxes the stupid interface hoops some more.  You can now accept hundreds of friend requests from the left button directly which is faster.  When I see an “accept all” button I will know Facebook has finally got a real and stable business model.

  • The screwed up value chain of cyber security

    In “Campaign” Zach Galifianakis makes an amazing comeback on election day with an original approach to politics: he tells the truth.  Despite being 20 points ahead in the polls however he mysteriously loses to his crooked and corrupt opponent.   Nobody wonders why this happens though the movie audience gets treated to a close up of the electronic voting system’s supplier.   It is the same as the lobby sponsoring the winner.

    Electronic voting systems seem to be mainly for …backwards countries.  Wherever access to paper or other basic election materials is scant, they are probably better off with a simple electronic voting machine.  If voters can’t read it possibly makes it easier for them to identify with big bright pictures of candidates.  Does that sound condescending?

    Well most advanced countries have completely scrapped electronic voting.  Even the ones that invested in it!  And this isn’t just about the U.S. which still remembers well the Gore-Bush tragedy.  (In terms of making the political system credible.)  Ireland actually bought machines but then got rid of them.  Belgium is probably the only advanced country in the world still using electronic voting but that is probably because elo touchsystems was based in Belgium and there are few enough people to double check the result easily!  Everywhere else they seem content on using them retrospectively for things like OCR enabled vote counting or checking.  But at the same time, internet voting soars ahead!

    My question however is not “why can’t politician get e-voting right?”  There are numerous technological challenges and all sorts of best practices we are seeing around the world.  Maybe it will happen one day.  No, the real question is “how come we trust electronic transactions for trillion of dollars daily?”

    It’s not just about high speed trading or automated monsters of software that take advantage of the crazy complicated world of the stock markets, futures and derivatives.   Even simple things.   Meanwhile in the US today they are more concerned with possible power outages affecting paperless voting systems than viruses or cheating.  Somebody trusts a machine to transfer a million dollars to another bank account but doesn’t trust a similar machine to count responses in a multiple choice question!  And for voting they introduce safeguards like fingerprints (Venezuela), time delays (India) and all sorts of other hi tech wizardry (Estonia).

    But still I can log into my computer and transfer all my life’s savings to a another account over the internet?

     

    PS  “Campaign” has an all star cast but is a rather mediocre film.  I wonder if Galifianakis passed a bill about e-voting after becoming congressman…

  • A new Facebook feature: The “I told you so!” button

    Facebook is, essentially, a Content Management System.  (CMS)  Only it is a really, really, extraordinarily bad content management system.   Its search function is rudimentary to say the least.  There is little categorization and even less user generated categorization.  It is almost impossible to find something from the past.

    To large degree this is because Facebook’s engineers are obsessed with making the interface impossible to automate.   Any script you might like to have such as “accept all” (friend requests) or “delete all” (messages)  is reverse engineered so as not to work.   It stops people like me from making so many false accounts and conducting experiments to some degree.   Which means the user has to jump through all sorts of unnatural hoops to get anything done.   “Who cares?   Isn’t Facebook just for wasting time and socializing?”  Well, yes, but even when socializing, some of us like to maintain a higher level of discussion.

    Case in point.  Surprise, surprise, Lance Armstrong was doped.   Where are those discussion I had about this topic a couple of years back?   Who was that friend that insisted I was being extreme?   Whether I am simply a pedantic friend, or someone actually looking for an old joke in my status updates, this is a practically impossible task right now.   I would have to scroll down my wall for a very very long time and then use my browser’s “search” capabilities.   Depending on the kind of search this would be either difficult or impossible.  Multifactorial searches out of the question.   I can’t ask Facebook things like “probably a year ago, a female friend of a friend commented on something I wrote about homeopathy.  What was the name of the substance she recommended?”

    It may seem petty or minor to you.   Some psychological deficiency of mine personally maybe that makes me want to make these things clear all the time.   Or a hypersensitivity to long term trends which I am always searching for.   I studied theory of knowledge at university and tend to make an extra effort to calculate long term odds for anything I see.  Cycling is of course “one of those sports” which is more susceptible to doping.   If you don’t see the point of such functionality, you were probably not around when Zuckerberg announced he wants us all to use Facebook as our digital life store.  Well Mark, do you mind if I organize mine a bit better than you?   It does seem that your main concern is making money and mine would be finding my stuff.

     

  • Here is exactly what Tim Cook needs to do with Apple: turn it into IBM!

    The thing about us consultants is that we give advice even when nobody asked for it.    The world’s biggest company surely doesn’t need my help.   Even more so since I have historically and openly criticized it at every corner.   But, like my friends always say, I probably have a secret wish to one day buy an iPhone.   So here is my best shot at how this might come to pass:

    1. I loved IBM laptops.  In this blog I wrote an almost erotic in intensity elegy.  I still check out the odd Lenovo I see somewhere to see if that keyboard has the old IBM magic, the design details.

    2. Tim Cook is essentially an IBM person at heart.  12 pretty important years in his personal development made him so.   IBMers are a breed apart, the corporate ethos was much more intense than Apple those days.

    3. IBM hardware was always top quality and slightly more expensive.   You could usually pay 20-30% more for a machine with similar specs.   Remind you of someone?

    4. IBM always made conservative decisions about specifications, I/O, software and other components.   Which meant that you have a much better chance to still be relying on the machine even a decade later.  Which justifies the price difference retrospectively many times over.

    …and therein is the difference.   I tried to revive an IBM laptop and a top of the range Apple desktop of about the same era.   Started up the IBM, pressed F2, it came back to Windows XP factory settings.  Left it online to update itself and it is ready almost anything.   The Mac impressed my kids more with its massive monitor and fancy hardware.    “We want to play with the one with the Apple!” they chanted as I struggled to prepare it for use at their school.   To no avail.  Getting OS9 to do anything (especially online) requires almost root level hacking skills.   Meanwhile the ΙΒΜ was playing all their latest Flash game favories, YouTube videos, and I could even load up some ancient DOS games I found lying around back from my gaming days twenty years ago.

    Anecdotes aside, here is the point:   there will always be a need for high quality hardware.  Even more so if it is matched with great design.   Even more so if it has a tidy ecosystem to make it easier to use.   This does not however require stone walls and proprietary tricks.   We don’t want Apple to invent a new connector for our monitors, much less so for our mobile phones.   We are willing to pay Apple to produce 20-30% more expensive hardware because they have put more effort in its design and quality.   In its ease of use.   In good marketing, which means getting the right people using the platform; it benefits everyone on the platform after all when this happens.

    Apple is doing none of this right now.   But Tim Cook has a seriοus personal – leadership problem.   He can’t get people to forget the (inevitable) mistakes he makes like Steve Jobs did.   No glossing over.   He talks simply.   No magic involved.   So why doesn’t he take Apple towards the good old hardworking IBM ways he broke his teeth on?   If he doesn’t, Samsung will.   And I will still prove my friends wrong for another decade by not buying an iPhone for another ten years…

  • The legal limits of Facebook privacy and internal checks or balances

    For those outside of Greece, the case yesterday of someone getting arrested for making a Facebook page probably sounds a bit like some Muslim fanatic in Iran.   It is not quite the same in some ways though it is true that Church and State are way too close in our country.  Interestingy no major news agency has covered the case, so your best bet for a summary of the facts is in this article on HuffPo and this one from Greek reporter.

    Our (anyone who cares about free speech) first reaction was of course to start similar parody Facebook pages ourselves.   Not as many as I hoped but about a dozen pages, equally or more funny than the original were started today.   Worryingly a few of them were removed almost instantly by Facebook.   Even more worryingly in one case the person who made the page had her whole Facebook account removed!

    But then my legal mind fired up.   So I started a page which is an exact replica of the page that got the 27year old arrested.   Based on what I could find from the Google cache.   Arrest me now!   All I did was take publically available information from one part of the internet and put it on another part of the internet.   If they want to put me on trial today alongside the original page creator they will have to close down Google servers first!

    Still, from a strictly Facebook point of view, they could close down the page for whatever breach of whichever rule they pick.   Their social network, their rules.   The case does produce some interesting questions such as “how and why did Facebook give the Greek authorities access to the page creator’s IP adress?” but technically and legally they could close down my clone page.  So I deleted it!   Not before it had 124 likes which means that I can’t delete it though.   Because Facebook makes any page delete request wait for 14 days.

    So for the next 14 days, a page identical to the one that got someone arrested is publicly available here and Facebook can’t do anything to me.   Or at least if they do, they will be way way worse in terms of breach of logic than even the Greek police was yesterday.

    It’s called freedom of speech people.  Get used to it.   There was nothing insulting of Christianity in the Facebook page called “old man Pastitsios”.   Making fun of the people gaining from the memory of a possibly gifted man who has died cannot and should not be illegal.

  • The precursor to Facebook groups 450 years ago worked much better

    A ridotto was pretty much like a Facebook group.   It gathered like minded people around a topic.   It was private, like a club.   Any of you who have visited Florence might have seen the plaque commemorating the Camerata, a ridotto which met at the house of Giovanni Bardi di Vernio.   They argued and talked, and gossiped and had flame wars.   I assume pretty much like people do in forums or Facebook groups.   They repeated themselves, they clashed, some member came and some left.   But in the twenty years that this group met at this house, they did something much more important:

    They made the first ever opera.

    Because – unlike most Facebook groups – the ridotto channeled the energies of its members around a theme.   They were concerned with the nature of musical expression.  Vincenzo Galilei (father to the famous Galileo), based on the conversations in this house, made scathing public attacks on the madrigal, the “pointless pop song” of the time.  But they didn’t just post pictures on their common timeline.   They didn’t stop at making fun of the ridiculous repetitiveness of madrigal technique.   They developed and refined specific theories to explain why the artificiality of the madrigal was useless for human expression.   They didn’t just make a facebook fan page for Girolamo Mei, the scholar who was their guru, they developed his ideas further:   one singer, simple accompaniment, clear wording, natural declamation, no dance rhythms on the words, music to express the emotions of the singer.

    The Florentine Camerata staged “Daphne” by  Rinuccini and Peri in 1598.  Other members of the ridotto and Monteverdi soon followed. The world has had opera ever since, the musical genre which has survived without interruption ever since.   That in itself is quite a success in a world which has been shaken by everything from the Renaissance, to the Industrial Revolution since.

    Now get back to your Facebook tab.   Yes, I know you have it open!   Check out the content, especially in pages or groups organised around a particular topic.   Do you think there is ever a chance they will produce anything close to a new musical genre?  If it happens, it won’t be with any help from the technology.  The members argue about the same topic at regular intervals, yet there is no way to organise the arguments like at http://debatepedia.idebate.org .    People nitpick about the exact meaning of specialized terms yet there is no specialised dictionary being built.   Heck, you can’t even easily find an old discussion!   But most of all, you have no sense of actually building on something.   It is unsatisfying, confusing and ultimately a waste of time.

    This is ridiculous given the technology at hand.   Most Facebook groups are built around a cause.   It would be quite easy to almost automatically make some of the content in a good online spat, end up available online for the public.   To intelligently build around a mission statement.   To make members feel they are actually achieving something.   So, since Facebook is so obviously intent on staying in the “timewasting” part of the market, I ask of everyone else to make the plug in technologies to get the job done.   An app to get content out of Facebook and into a blog maybe.   Another to find unusual terms or specialised words and compile them into a dictionary for new members (or the public).   Just scroll down the timeline of a Facebook group you are a member of and loads of other great ideas will come.

    In fact I think I will setup a ridotto for people that want to work on this idea.

    [soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/50690875″ iframe=”true” /]

  • Climbing Mount Improbable with Professor Varoufakis

    Climbing Mount Improbable is one of many books by Richard Dawkins.   The author of “The Selfish Gene” fame.   Because that is what popular science is all about.   Finding a good analogy, or making a new one that catches on.   It’s not about science.   It’s about communication.    I remember raving about one of his books to a zoologist friend who simply noted that “you know, it takes thousands of other works of solid research for him to cherry pick and make those books such good reads for you.”   It is true.  Much as I love reading popular science I realise that it is a bit like enjoying the introductory course for university entry in any topic.

    But Richard Dawkins has turned into the global symbol of the fight to protect evolution as a theory from naysayers around the globe.   Which led him to become the main event at massive atheist gatherings.   It doesn’t really matter if he chose it, or the role chose him.   I am one of many people that think he is great.   As I do of Steven Pinker.   For making such enjoyable introductions to topics I may have never wrangled with otherwise.   Mainly on language though his most recent book comments on the history of violence.   Reminds us of Noam Chomsky, who Wikipedia succintly describes like this:  ” In addition to his work in linguistics, he has written on war, politics, and mass media, and is the author of over 100 books.”  I can personally testify to the fact that the ones on media (my Masters topic) are way too simplistic.   He was out of his league, applying a simple theory to a complex problem.  Even if it is true, it is not useful.

    It is probably anathema to most readers that I even include Yanis Varoufakis in an article after these great thinkers.  But it is the only way I can rationalize his behavior.   Here is a Professor of Economic Theory whose most recent book concludes that  “while economics has scientific pretensions, it is primarily an ideology that supports the interests of the rich and powerful, and in the process, confers prestige, influence, and money on its practitioners.”   Which is a bit like a high priest writing a book which concludes that religion has no claim to any Holy source but is simply a scam for high priests to get money from poor people”!   And I didn’t even need to fish around for that quote.   He has put it on his blog himself!

    That part is fair enough.   If you are looking to sell popular science books, self promotion is of course part of the set up.   Twitter, Blog, articles anywhere and everywhere.   I even read an interview he did about the island of Aigina simply because he spends a lot of time there.   A nice tidy article in Wikipedia which I am guessing he wrote himself is nothing to be ashamed of.  Quite the opposite, all scientists or public figures would be wise to pay attention to theirs.    And taking a public position in the recent elections in terms of being openly for one party and against others is also an admirable trait in my opinion.   As is submitting a “Modest Proposal” about the future of the Euro Zone.

    Mr Varoufakis does a pretty great job at spreading his views.  The BBC (though I am not sure they were happy with his take on their “censorship” of the interview) , BSkyB, Max Keiser and even CNN host his views.   The man is a rarity by Greek standards as he speaks and writes in very good English, and is obviously always available for any media opportunity.   So he can get away with ludicrous generalisations like this one in an article for CNN: “Whereas in the past we were divided between Left and Right, between pro- and anti-Americans, nowadays America is being seen by almost everyone here as a kindred spirit…”

    Really?  And you write this Professor Varoufakis on what authority?   A journalist with a finger on the pulse of Greek society?   A political scientist with some similar claim?   A sociologist with some supporting research data or even simply a supporting theory?   We could of course blame CNN for not being more careful in their choice of contributor.   Or of not editing it out.   If you think like the sort of people who follow him you could even make up a conspiracy theory and assume that he never wrote it.   (The CIA must have added that sentence…knowing wink…)  But this is a small example of a very big problem.

    Lacking any sort of communicational skills on a political and diplomatic level, this is what Greece has been relegated to.   What our pathetic and wimply academia doesn’t have the balls or ability to do as they are too busy saving their own jobs and fighting to stop anyone from actually judging their performance.   We have a part time economist and full time self promoting author “representing” Greece abroad.   I wouldn’t mind if he was not so good at it.   I don’t dislike what Mr Varoufakis does because it is unclear where he stands.   Is he a budding politician?   Mainly an author?   A media persona on any topic?  (Heck, let’s run around the world to the seven dividing lines and do some artsy installations!)  Nor because he is taking advantage of his claim to science on one hand to make more persuasive his pretty weak arguments on the political level.  (A sin not uncommon to people as great as Noam Chosmky at times – especially when he delved into Media analysis.)

    So it is not because Mr Varoufakis is “wrong” that he ruffles my feathers so much.   In this day and age, and especially in Economics “wrong” and “right” are not even part our vocabulary.  Nor is it simply that it seems rather irresponsible to me that he doesn’t take into account the consequences of his attitude.   Spreading fear of an imminent Eurozone collapse most obviously increases the chance of it happening.   Doomsayers have always had this advantage.   Even with their wishy washy vague language, a quick retrospective look at their work usually indicates how little their predictions bear a resemblance to reality.

    No, what really annoys me about Mr Varoufakis is that my country hasn’t got anyone better to represent us on the global media stage.   Rather like pine trees gain a foothold in our mountains and sea gulls or goats are the only animals that survive in a lot of our much troubled natural environments.   A once wondrous complex country, with natural and intellectual complexity second to none is being turned into a one question entity.   And that is the doing of people like Mr Varoufakis.

     

  • Google and the nation state

    I was 17 years old when I first looked North from the peak of Smolikas.   At 2637 meters it is the second highest peak in Greece.   The sun was setting and all I could see was a sea of mountain peaks in the haze.  My head was full of heroic stories from the 2nd WW, but no, you can’t see borders from up there…

    A few years ago I was walking at Prespes lakes, a point where three Balkan countries meet.  We were stopped by the then newly assigned border police with their fancy jeeps, guns and night vision equipment and forced to leave our camp site.   I later learned that the reason was that they take a sizeable percentage from the contraband in the area…

    During my military service I was stationed in Thrace.  Even during a one day leave I would cycle North to the mountains.   I had to go through a police check which was then operational to control (and oppress) the very small Muslim population up there.   Friendly people, we shared a coffee or two and a few times I had crossed the borders with Bulgaria by accident.   There were no clear markings…

    Most Greeks have never actually been to Thrace.   That doesn’t stop them from pronouncing that Turkey somehow wants to take it from us though!  Most Greeks haven’t travelled to Skopje, even though the road from Thesaloniki is very easy and quite beautiful.   That doesn’t stop them from insulting everyone online regarding the name of “Macedonia”.   And most Greeks have been to Bulgaria only for skiing.   Still, some continue to spread a fear that Bulgaria wants to take part of our country for access to the sea…

    This post is in English because I want to apologize.   It isn’t our fault.   Politicians have fanned up the “Macedonian issue” pretty much since Greece was established as a modern country less than two hundred years ago.    Google today dedicated a doodle to the independence of “Macedonia” but luckily there are no street riots like the massive one some years ago.   For those of you that haven’t noticed, we are in the middle of a massive economic crisis.   Not cooperating with other countries, and even more so neighbooring countries is almost suicidal.   It’s not just about tourism (though many Americans reading online disputes will assume that we are a war zone!) but all kinds of collaboration.

    The online fights are endless.   As if history is objective.   As if Alexander the Great was somehow “Greek” in the same way that modern Greek are.   We selectively forget that Athenians hated his guts, that he and his father had to physically and violently fight against the other city states in order to unite the enough to go away against the Persians.   The logical fallacy of the history crazed argument is that it is impossible to draw a direct connection between the pretty short lived empire of Alexander the Great and the modern Greek state.   The fact that his father imported the best tutor of the time (Aristotle) isn’t enough.   Southern cities considered Macedonians  “barbarian”.   You will never get a “definitive” answer regarding the “Greekness” of Alexander the Great.  (And I haven’t even started about his mother!)   It is a great topic for conversation over wine and cheese.   Not politics and not online.

    We are living on a truly globalized planet.   National identity, much like religion is a dwindling part of our self image.  “Self” image.  That means something you keep to yourself.   Nobody can touch it and you don’t go around messing other people’s self identity.  When we get to practical matters and collaboration between people or countries sure, we need rules.   Simple, practical rules, not insults in capital letters and bad English!   You can call a country “Macedonia”, “Macedonia2” or “Macedonia.com” for all I care.   If the Kalash in Pakistan (descendants of Alexander the Great according to some) want to become independent and call themselves “Macedonia”, be my guest!   If Alexandria in Egypt wants autonomy and wants to draw from it’s past for a name, you can be “Macedonia3”!   Heck we can give all countries a number, it would save us time and data space!