Alexander Chalkidis

Blog

  • Who gives a sh*t management advice

    Who gives a sh*t management advice

    It is now almost a week without power, thankfully water is back on.  As usual on TV and social media everyone is playing the blame game.  And you know you can’t win.  As different types of information flies around, the complexity is overwhelming and usually nothing changes.  In any organization, family or simple task where a group of homo sapiens must collaborate and share the workload , things get complicated.

    WHO GIVES A SH*T?  I often get the urge to shout it in business meetings.  Now let me take my example here in the cold while I watch my freezer contents melt to try and dissect how nobody gave a SH*T and we ended up like this.  In fact I think this will become a huge management guru type moment, if we survive please invite me as a motivational speaker to come and explain how it will solve all your organization’s problems.

    Ι live in a rich suburb of Athens, a European capital, the year 2021.  It is in fact probabl;y in the top 10 richest areas in Greece, a beautiful residential area full of trees.  Pine trees.  Why pine trees?

    1. NOBODY GAVE A SH*T as our environment was degraded from beautiful indigenous species, to pine trees.  They act like cockroaches, incredibly sturdy and adaptable.  After every forest fire that wiped out biodiversity pine trees appeared first.  Most people were just happy to see anything green grow.  Unfortunately pine trees are not well adapted to snow fall.  So they break easily.  And when they fall, they take with them the power lines.

    Now it gets complicated.  An American would say “buy yourself a chainsaw and clear that damn tree yourself!”  If we lived in frontierland and were all physically able and strong enough, maybe it would be an option.  As a kid I remember many a Saturday with my siblings and father clearing trees either for the fireplace or for safety.  Taller trees were a bit tricky, thankfully we had no major accidents.  Then the local authorities decided that they should tackle trees near power lines.  It made sense.  Then they stopped doing it.  We called and reported danger spots, they said they had done all they could.

    1. NOBODY GAVE A SH*T as these requests piled up.  The local authorities made their own interpretation of a recent legal change to power distribution and decided it wasn’t their job.  They acted as if they had no right to interfere while they clearly had both a right and an obligation to deal with those danger spots.

    So it snowed and the trees broke and power supply was disrupted. Elderly people in my area were left with no heating, no telephone, no power, stuck in roads with no access, buried under heavy snowfall and blocked by fallen trees.  How did all the guilty parties react?  The local authority applied to put us in a state of emergency.  Great, that takes the responsibility out of their hands.  Pass the hot potato, why not?  So they announce that the Army, Fire Dept and every other special unit is coming to save us.   Government acted like they have solved the problem.  And…nothing.  Six days into the problem and nobody has knocked on doors to check if the people in the houses are alive.  Single parents with kids huddled around fireplaces burning furniture, desperate but unable to brave the cold or leave the kids alone while they go for help.

    1. NOBODY GAVE A SH*T.  You imagine the control center of a special unit in a tent and some commander shouting out orders.  You imagined wrong.  That “can do” attitude, you know when the boss says “I don’t care HOW you do it, just GET IT DONE!”  That is the “who gives a sh*t” moment when boss shows he gives a sh*t.  That is what makes a boss.

    I could continue breaking down the thousands of people that didn’t give a damn, a hoot or a sh*t but my netbook battery won’t last forever.  Please.  Be part of the solution.  It is a lovely sunny day here in Dionysos, Greece, but around 5pm it starts getting cold and by 7pm it is freezing with no power.

    Be a leader.  Be a doer.  

    Give a sh*t.

  • Big Tech saves lives – 911 calls need to change

    Big Tech saves lives – 911 calls need to change

    If and when you are psychologically up to it, listen to some 911 calls. It is not just good indirect experience in case you are ever in a desperate situation but also heart warming to know that so many ordinary people can turn into super heroes when the need arises.

    It is also absolutely infuriating.

    As a person that always looks for the optimal solution to problems, I often find myself wanting to scream at either the caller or the operator. 911 (or 112 if you are in Europe, or other numbers in other countries) is an amazing feat of collaboration and government actually managing to do something useful which generally works well. The history of getting different carriers to maintain an emergency service is fascinating.

    But it is far from enough.

    In the recent pandemic we initially all discussed contact tracing. Apple and Google silently yet amazingly, produced a way to use our smart phones. They got little credit for it mainly because they are so afraid of the privacy backlash. But maybe emergency calls is a way for us all to reap the benefits of this work in the long term.

    Have you ever dialed in an emergency? Here’s what happens. Regardless of whether or not you have paid your bill, or even if you are near a cell tower of the company you buy service from, your route gets patched through to a central service. (In the U.S. it is a bit more complicated due to different State laws and histories with telcos.) Your phone sends your location to the person picking up your call to save everyone time.

    So why just location? Your phone battery levels might be useful for emergency services to know. But what would be really great would be access to your cameras. Oh, you are worried they might abuse it? Well listen to the lady that drowned in her car because 911 didn’t believe it was filling up with water. In fact why stop at your cameras, based on location in case of emergency, 911 should be able to ask bystanders’ smartphone cameras to switch on. You get an emergency notification and accept if you want. It would help in a lot of situations. All available data from smart phone sensors of the person calling 911 as well as people nearby could save a lot of lives and energy.

    One of the biggest problems with 911 calls is pranksters. Again, there are tech solutions. Because if the call also send a log of recent activity, emergency services could much more quickly and reliably assess if you are serious or a ten year old playing a bad joke. It could be with your approval, a message on your phone saying “we need to access your internet history and app usage to make sure your emergency call is valid”. If my kid was in danger or my car is half fallen down a cliff I am pretty sure I won’t mind them seeing whatever else I did today to prove I am serious.

    In the early days of the internet, I had suggested public use of banners on websites for announcements that are important to society. It would a kind of online ad tax to help find missing children or spread awareness for important topics which don’t get enough funding for communication. Maybe 911 calls can start something which brings back the concept of public dogoodery in a new way again.

  • No serious user (let alone a company) should trust Apple silicon, here’s why

    No serious user (let alone a company) should trust Apple silicon, here’s why

    Let me explain how the tech world works for Intel.  It isn’t that they made “a wrong decision” or “were late embracing new materials” or whatever journalists wrote recently under the influence of the Apple marketing machine.  Sure, we all would have loved a David and Goliath story, or something truly exciting and revolutionary in the processor world.

    But it doesn’t work like that.

    The tech world has suffered too much from “move fast and break things”.  Apple’s M1 chip is a typical example of just that.  They botched a way to make it sort of work well enough on some applications.  Including Intel memory ordering or dedicating cache to Javascript however won’t cut it when you are making a serious buying decision.  It hardly makes it for a private user if you think about it.  I outlaid some of my objections here in a way that anyone that has seen Apple operate before should understand and believe.

    There is a reason the planet does not run on Apple machines.  And it was never about price.  Apple simply hasn’t got the people, resources or will power to collaborate on the global scale that Intel does.  Most people don’t even see this work.  While Apple toys with its users by changing power adaptors or connectors, Intel has people on committees making sure that the new USB will work on 90 percent of the planet’s computers.  Not work “sometimes”, not “work pretty well”, it has to work exactly as expected every time.  Apple can shoot off variations of Bluetooth of its own.  Their iPhone users will put up with it.  Intel can’t and won’t.  From space exploration to bank infrastructure, our planet relies on technological solutions that  have been developed through long term collaboration.  And that is never, ever from Apple.

    Serious tech companies work with other serious tech companies to ensure that everything works.  I remember putting my ten year old IBM laptop next to a fully loaded Mac G4, both had been bought around the same time.  My PC ran everything perfectly, even MS DOS software written decades ago.  The Mac was practically useless.  Microsoft and Intel are boring.  Yeah, sure.  If you consider reliably working boring.  They don’t just announce that 64bit is the future and throw a switch.  They find ways to communicate with tens of thousands of other companies.  Through trade shows, committees, working groups and a million other ways.  There are many candidate technologies.  Most fail.  Somehow we need  to make sure that the ones that really fit best are the ones that are supported.  Yes of course, that delays implementation.  And so it should.

    Sure, if you have a very small investment recoup window and a very specific task in hand that justifies an M1 laptop, go ahead.  If only you depend on the acquisition, play with it all you like.  But if you need to bet your life, company or future on the silicon you are about to buy, Apple is definitely not the company to trust.

    Apple was, is and will remain a fringe player.  Don’t be fooled by the hype.  They may make loads of money but it is from their lifestyle products, not their RnD.   We all know the ARM moves were through acquisition, nothing internal. Apple doesn’t innovate technologically but in marketing.  They bought a chip company and used them for this gimmick now like they have done with many other companies over the years.  Look again at the numbers.  Whether it is iOS or personal computing, they never get a big piece of the pie.  They don’t want to.  They can’t handle it.  The company recently paid a fine for batterygate and laughed at the amount it came to in total.  But that is only because their user base is so small.  90percent of the planet doesn’t care, we don’t use Apple devices and never will.

  • What nobody is telling you about the new Macs

    What nobody is telling you about the new Macs

    The entire industry has gone crazy about the “phenomenal” performance of the new Apple computers. As I predicted, under Tim Cook Apple is indeed changing. But not nearly enough. And don’t be fooled like all those tech “experts” who make money from click baiting you with the impressive titles about “PC killing performance”. When Cook first took over I famously wrote that I might buy an iPhone in a couple of future iterations. I stand corrected. Tim Cook disappointed me, he didn’t turn it into the best version of IBM. This is a company with no mission statement that simply doesn’t have any technological innovation of its own. Apple is not about technology, it is more of an American stock market game that moves the i-Goalposts as much as is needed to fool enough of the people.

    So before you rush out to buy one of these new laptops everyone is raving about, let me tell you why you will regret it. Let’s look at a two year scenario. What could go wrong with this lovely new Apple laptop in the next two years?

    1. If anything isn’t working, well, you’re on your own. Apple users have been crying over faulty keyboards forever and the company didn’t even acknowledge them, let alone fix it for them. The “you are holding it wrong” mentality is still strong at Apple.
    2. Accessories – they have you by the balls! Even when Apple pretends to follow a standard, they twist it into something proprietary. Whether it is power, Bluetooth, storage, or even simple cables, they always find a way to make you pay more and restrict your choices. Apple can make even buying a webcam a difficult task while the rest of the planet simply plugs and plays.
    3. We know that the gimmicks might disappear. They put that bar on the top of the keyboard, made you pay extra for it, you showed it off to your friends the first day, and then what? Other companies will at least make an effort to support it a few years into the future, Apple takes pride in not giving a damn about you and how much you loved or hated something on their machines.
    4. We burn Pentiums to the ground. We have seen this exact scenario before. Apple had moved to IBM made processors. For a very short period they had a bit of an edge in performance. It wasn’t like for like if you also considered price, but it was close. Almost immediately however Pentiums took over. As the benchmark test showed Apple falling much behind even on Photoshop and other staples of the designer world Apple simply disregarded them. After years of pretending they finally switched to Intel. 95% of the planet works on PCS. That is where science develops everything, that is where serious businesses invest. It is simply a matter of time for the serious users to overtake any minor party trick Apple comes up with.
    5. It has got a bit easier to go IN their walled garden but remains almost impossible to get OUT of the Apple ecosystem. They are making money from services now, trying to reduce their dependency on iPhones. So YOU are the product. Buy those much cheaper Apple speakers, wow, they are a third of the original price, why? Because much like Amazon they just want to get you into their world of services. (I can export everything from twenty years of living with Google with one click and take them to any other IT system as they are openly accessible formats.)
    6. Apple has no friends. I watched the company enter the video business. They never innovated, simply bought other companies, used them to gain market share. They made a big fuss about entering the broadcast business, then suddenly gave up and left everyone high and dry with no support. Even Final Cut Pro languished unloved and unsupported. They don’t share with partners, they don’t invest in retail channels. That is how Apple rolls. It never includes your best interests.

    Indeed Apple has written the book on “how to do something that really screws your customers and get away with it”. They stop supporting something you love all of a sudden with no explanation. It might be that they make no new drivers for your printer, it might be that they stop working completely with a peripheral company you had already bought everything from. When they switched to 64bit machines, yes, we all knew that sooner or later the industry was heading that way. But only a selfish idiot would force that on us. Even now millions of people rely on 32bit solutions thanks to the incredible backwards compatibility of Windows. When Steve Jobs announced he was killing Flash he was no prophet; he was a disgustingly selfish businessman trying to bully the planet through marketing gloss. I hate Flash as much as anyone, probably more, but it is still around for good reason and it outlasted Jobs. Acting selfishly is part of their charm according to their fans.

    Well, if you like that sort of thing and have plenty time and money to waste, run along and buy a new MacBook. I warned you.

  • Enemy at the gates: content marketing vs natural language (vs litigation)

    Enemy at the gates: content marketing vs natural language (vs litigation)

    I couldn’t help it. The English in the post was so bad I had to state the case. Sure, it only had one “like” and probably almost nobody had seen it, but all the same, it cried out “auto-translate”. The sentence structure was not blatantly incorrect, just…off. Sure, there were several actual mistakes, but they were the sort of thing that you would find in a Google search.

    But in a different context.

    This particular post was promoting a content marketing seminar or something like that. Some self-professed expert selling expertise. It was full of hashtags and the actual words were possibly spurted out by some paid service of other experts. The Facebook page had several thousand “likes” but the actual post just one which is fairly typical of this level of wannabees. But it is indicative of a larger problem.

    While we discuss politics and how, when, if and what the platforms should censor or not in public dialogue, this is what is happening in the background. If they make their algorithms so they favor tags, well, tags is what users will give them. Even Apple has started using tags on their YouTube channel. They won’t get high in search ranking without them. Plain and simple.

    So the post with terrible English attracted the attention of the owner of the page. He initially said it was correct, then said it might have been a typo. He then set his lawyer on me with threats to delete it. In a way this behaviour is entirely consistent with all the other things he has copied and pasted in order to present himself as an expert. That is how it works. A pecking order of ignorance. In the fast-changing world of social media, you can be an expert as long as you find customers with less knowledge or desire to keep up with the latest trends. Threatening to sue is standard operating procedure and we are all the poorer for it.

    For what is the value of social media if I can’t freely post on my wall and discuss with my friends without fear of litigation? Should we all end up using it simply as content marketing, ever promoting something and seeing it simply as yet another channel? Social networks should actively protect our right to write freely and without fear or the content will simply become pointless. Even public figures should have the right to discuss freely on social media with their friends.

    As well as all other problems, the actual language will end up being computer code compatible with whatever indexing mechanisms they use. Humans like to communicate. Stop policing it and enjoy.

    Oh well, at least he corrected his post the next day. ; )

    FOR THE RECORD: Ι flagged the comment where I was threatened with litigation to Linkedin but have not received an answer.

  • The Queen’s Gambit isn’t just bad. It is proof that Netflix has made us stupid.

    The Queen’s Gambit isn’t just bad. It is proof that Netflix has made us stupid.

    You will be extremely hard-pressed to find a negative review of “The Queen’s Gambit”, a Netflix series about a chess prodigy. So let me do my best.

    We are living in a cinema-free pandemic period with limited choices. Important major international releases are frozen, production of new ones restricted seriously. Netflix can sit at a table with the producers of the new 007 and ask for it at a ridiculously low price because it is going stale and they don’t have many options. So let me start another way around. How did I hear about the Queen’s Gambit?

    It was on Netflix’s reccomendations. We all know that it is a bad reccomendation engine but what other options do we have? Check it out on IMDB? That is getting worse every day as Amazon hasn’t spent time improving it in ages. First reviews? Always gloating for any old crap. So we take the bait, the Netflix promo on Netflix makes it look better than others, you see the first episode and then, well, the rest, because you are on the binge machine that is Netflix. Worse still, friends and family are also stuck in the same rut so we are not even cross checking. The Emperor has no clothes but, meh, let’s wait till the parade is over before saying it. And when you have invested eight hours on the parade of the mini series you are highly unlikely to admit it was wasted on mediocrity.

    I will go further than that. The Queen’s Gambit is downright insulting and dangerous. Take for example the topic of substance abuse. The way it is presented we are left with the impression that it is a) easy to control b) useful for chess playing and c) with no long term consequences. Or maybe let’s see how the series portrays a woman entering a male-dominated realm: a) everything is polite b) nothing particularly nasty happens to her and c) grandmasters lose to her and immediately offer to help train her for her next challenge. This level of lying is insulting to millions of women of that era and even today. Women’s rights organizations should be an uproar.

    In fact all the topics touched by this series are done in such a superficial way that it is problematic. Take the scene where she visits a hippy house to enjoy marijuana for example. It is the cleanest and least messy den ever shown on television to represent a hippy household. My daughter didn’t even understand the point of the scene as our heroine hoovered and tidied the place after a one night stand , also confusingly presented. This isn’t political correctness, it isn’t the opposite. It is just terrible movie-making that fails to really touch the audience in any meaningful way.

    The Queen’s Gambit is an insult to so many great chess movies, so many true chess stories, to the heroes that battled hate in the Cold War. It isn’t just bad TV, it has a negative impact. People won’t start playing chess because of it, they will start pretending to play chess for a while maybe.

    So my movie review would be like this: “If you are really bored with the pandemic in lockdown and have no access to anything else other than Netflix, if you want to mindlessly waste 8 hours of your life without learning anything of consequence, don’t miss it!”

    The serious social and technological problem remains: how will we fix recommendation engines? If we introduce a social aspect to them, can we as a society, ensure we hold ourselves up to any level of intelligent critique? Or do we just want to have fun? Well the Queen’s Gambit is not even fun.

  • Messages and Music: Google doesn’t care

    Messages and Music: Google doesn’t care

    Tech pundits have often bashed at Google’s ever-changing messaging solutions array. Let me assure you: Google simply doesn’t care. There is little useful data in your silly little chats. It will not help the algorithms improve, it will not help them serve better ads.

    I know, I know, this is just a theory. Nobody knows how Google decides things, not even most of the people working there. But I know because I just spent some time trying to reorganize the way I handle music. Google decided to end Play Music, a service many of you don’t even know existed other than the shortcut on your phone if it was an Android. But I loved it. I could upload endless mp3 files (50,000 actually was the limit) and have them available on all my devices. I could also just click on an album name or folder full of lectures I want to hear while running. That is the same thing as what Spotify charges you 10 bucks a month to do. Only free. It integrated stuff online with offline life almost perfectly. Much like the very excellent and underrated Google Play Books service which is – as far as anyone can tell – also without limit in terms of number of books you can have on it for free.

    There was actually a good working model in all these. One service for everything. You want a book? Add it to Play Books. You want it on your device? Just click “download”. You want to see it from any other device? No problem. It is actually the model most users want. All in one. Limitless. And free.

    Google gives you infinite space on Google photos. Infinite Google Docs. Infinite books to upload and enjoy. Common denominator? You are helping them get more data. The sort of data they like and can use to improve their all-knowing God-like algorithms. Messaging is obviously not useful or they would have introduced a killer app ages ago. They have the users, they have the tech, they have the power. But now we know that music is also useless in that respect. So don’t bother with YouTube music folks. It will fold and fail like so many other Google experiments before it.

    If you’re not part of the solution, you probably don’t even know what the problem was.

  • Facebook Horoscopes: the killer app

    Facebook Horoscopes: the killer app

    I have gone on record as stating that I would sacrifice a finger (possibly even a whole hand) for access to raw Google data.  It is the closest to an omniscient, all-knowing creature there has ever been on the planet.  Its data can pretty much predict all sorts of business and other developments.   Facebook on the other hand has earned no such honor in terms of self-mutilation.  It is a badly run platform with management closer to a hacker mentality than a global force for anything.  However, as a social scientist, I would love to experiment with users like they do.

    Whether or not horoscopes have the slightest truth to them is scientifically pretty clear.  They do not.  End of story.  Except for the haggling little detail of the fact that most people on the planet, even scientists, actually believe the opposite.  Some secretly read their charts, others try and explain it away, many openly follow them as “innocent fun” but probably well over half the global population in fact gives value to astrology.

    Not that many scientists have bothered to discredit astrology simply because it is so obviously irrelevant.  A few studies into the time of year of birth don’t really bear much relevance.  NASA tried to point out that it could be 13 and not 12-star signs and of course they shouldn’t be neatly spaced out if we want to have any sort of astrological founding to this particular myth.  All to no avail.  So I call on Facebook to solve this once and for all!

    Oh great schemer, hacker at heart, and lost unethical teenager, Mark Zuckerberg, this is your time to shine.  Use that vast trove of data you so freely sell to everyone to help us understand.  Most users have given you their actual birth date.  And you can cross-reference with a zillion indicators of personality.  Do Virgo’s post more often?  Do Pisces upload more creative things?  Are Scorpios really sex crazy in their online behavior?  You have the data even for shy zodiac signs.  Are all people born in August less likely to post stuff about themselves?  Especially with lockdown and increased reliance on social media, it would be extremely easy to prove or disprove that certain birth dates correlate with certain online traits.

    Except you won’t, will you Mark?  Because all you care about is money and power.  If you find any such data you will use it for a dating app or whatever else you can think of which will generate money and power for you.  Congress doesn’t need to break apart technology companies.  Just the selfish ones like Facebook.

  • The ring , the next President and the finest manager you have ever seen

    The ring , the next President and the finest manager you have ever seen

    It was just a Facebook ad for a ring. Contrary to doom and gloom tech naysayers, their algorithm is pretty bad. I very rarely even pay attention to Facebook ads. But this fitness monitoring ring had the endorsement of the NBA. That little familiar logo in combination with the indicator that it had hundreds of comments caught my eye. It was mainly Republicans expressing their hatred of the athletes that took a position against racism. I made the mistake of commenting and instantly received a lot of hate and ridicule. As a seasoned social media professional, for the good of my mental health, I just left it there and forgot about it.

    This morning I woke at 4am. I had gone to bed early, I don’t need much sleep anymore. And…LeBron James. Normally I would roll over and sleep some more but I started to watch the game. A lot of people find the first half of a basketball match boring since any result can be overturned at the end. They don’t know LBJ. He was probing the court like Curiosity, the Mars rover from NASA. The man is the Marco Polo of exploration, he tries every opponent, every combination of moves with his team mates. He has a mind map of every individual’s playing styles, strengths, weaknesses, mental states and a plan about how to help them develop in the direction he needs them to. At half time I didn’t even care about the score. Almost everyone had played well. And they didn’t even know that LeBron was the one pulling the strings.

    Most people are focused on short term results. Multinational behemoths suffer from this, quarter to quarter, keeping investors happy can ruin a company. It is pretty similar with elite athletes, millions of haters ready to demolish you at every turn. This is a sport which pioneered detailed data gathering, it was way ahead of the curve in terms of using all available information to improve. And LeBron is the Google of it all. He processes it and he uses it for good. Google may have dropped the slogan “do no evil” but LBJ lives by it. The Nuggets started increasing the pressure, chipping at the Lakers’ lead. LBJ continued to trust his teammates even though they were – as always – wasting many of his great assist passes, or not understanding how they need to move.

    And then comes the dreaded finale. Jamal Murray is possibly the all time greatest if you look at his stats during the playoff fourth quarters. The man turns into a monster scoring machine with a phenomenal percentage of his shots going in from anywhere he chooses. He kicked into gear and for those in the know it was obvious that the Nuggets would win.

    Except that LBJ was on the court.

    It was the gentle, almost loving way that he did it. If only political rivalries were so sweet and tender. He made a slight hand signal to Rajon Rondo to indicate that he would defend against Murray. And that was the end of that. The next 3-4 times the rising star attempted to score he was met with the defensive genius of LBJ. He missed them all. All those basketball experts who had previously understood that the Nuggets would win, instantly knew that they would now lose. One man turned the match around yet most people wouldn’t even notice. Because in an equally gentle way, he then stepped away.

    Especially in politics or business we are always asking our leaders to be forceful. We don’t like it when they are uncertain even when – as with the COVID pandemic – the simple fact is that nobody had conclusive evidence on which to act. In basketball it is easy to see how LeBron could just keep making a fool of Jamal Murray. That is what Michael Jordan would do. He would keep at it to make an impressive story for people to tell. About him. To become a legend simply by the fact that he personally did something extreme and impressive.

    Not LBJ. He left Caruzo to defend even if it cost them a couple of buckets. He continued to pass to others even though they missed a lot. He quietly sneaked off court before the end even to not make a big fuss about the win, to not make it about him, to go and talk to Anthony Davis who had struggled on many fronts. They started to walk towards the locker room completely and obviously exhausted but a journalist chased them. It is the rule that the top scorer of the winning team has to speak on camera right after the game. Davis couldn’t handle it, LeBron dragged himself out and put his after match towel around his neck.

    It is usually four questions. The last one is sometimes not about the game. Tonight it was about Breonna. That question is something that LeBron has earnt. He is the unofficial spokesperson for millions of Americans because he has matched athletic skill with political bravery. Michael Jordan may or may not have said that “Republicans buy sneakers too” to justify his lack of political action, but LeBron forcefully accepts the opposite role. If all those haters in the fitness ring cost him not getting as many championship rings as Jordan so be it. More so even than the great Mohamed Ali he is a symbol of an athlete using his position to change the world.

    And I cried.

    It was past 6am in Greece, I only had a short nap to take before waking the kids and all that, but here I was crying for what a tall black bearded and slightly balding man said about Breonna Taylor. In a highly polarized country getting ready to vote, what could he possibly say to millions of people like me around the world? After all hundreds of communication specialists are dissecting the same topics for presidential candidates and covering every possible angle, every slogan, every way to look at the problem and influence people, he had me, the interviewer and people around the world feeling his pain.

    It is not the championship ring that LeBron James is lacking. He is President material. If you are in any way involved in leading teams you would do well to study him on and off the court. While everyone talks the talk about uniting the country, leading their companies, or teaching this and that, he shows us how.

  • The best thing on my holiday you can do at home

    The best thing on my holiday you can do at home

    Instagram dictates modern tourism, learn how to use it

    It was our last day in Reykjavik and we headed past the scenic old port.  To a simulator.  That’s right.  After two weeks in Iceland and a whole lot of very impressive experiences, we went to a helicopter fly-over machine.  We had been on glaciers, inside volcanos, seen more waterfalls than you can imagine exist but here we were strapping ourselves in to a typical such ride.  It moves, it sprinkles you, blows air on you and you get a completely unique new view on the sights you have already seen as well as many you will never be able to.  It also features good weather which helps explain why it took so long to film it.  At the end they offer the typical cheesy fake photos of you in front of the Northern Lights or other options for anyone with too much cash.

    If you only have fifteen minutes to experience Iceland I can think of no better way.  And you could have the same film anywhere in the world.  But the cheesy photos kill it.

    One of the reasons Iceland is so popular lately is because it is Instagramable.  You just point at any of their attractions, take a photo and can be sure of a stream of likes and comments.  That simple.  You will look good.  It is unusual.  You seem interesting and adventurous.  It stands out in their social media.  I first experienced this effect last year in Norway.

    It is much safer than it looks. To the left of my friend Shorty in this pic I took is a ledge from which you can climb onto the rock.

    This is just a rock. I can think of a thousand equally impressive views in Greece where we could add a rock like this for Instagram.  And even though thousands of people probably post the exact same photo, mine still got hundreds of likes and comments.  So why don’t we go about putting rocks for photos in more places?  Make it as safe as you want, just make sure it looks impressive.  And make it easy for the photographer to get to the right angle.  It is more important these days than the actual experience.  People don’t care how you got there, if you cheated or took a ride, nobody will check.  “Pics or it didn’t happen” only refers to the finish line, the final result.  No matter if you posed for ten minutes or waited two hours for the clouds to lift, the sun to be at the right place or whatever else you needed to do.

    I think someone has actually died falling off this rock, but it still rare considering how many thousands of people go there and pull silly stunts like me there

    In fact if I had one criticism of Iceland and the way they have set up their national parks it is that they don’t have enough photo opportunities.  Too many of those great waterfalls have fenced off the ideal semi-dangerous-looking spot or the ideal photo angle position.  Nobody has (yet) fallen off that rock in the picture.  This other one (with me jumping) I think one person did; too many think it is cool to dangle their feet off the ledge.  Why? Because someone posted it on Instagram! In a way it may actually be the Norwegian Tourist Board’s fault that person fell off.  If only they had set up the angle for photography better.  He wouldn’t have to go so close to the ledge for an impressive photo.

    Me in front of a waterfall. Not even a famous waterfall, no filters, just a good angle.

    The currency is “likes”.  No point complaining, that is how it goes.Work with it.  It is the most natural viral promotion there is.  People take the photo, others are envious and want to go get their own ultra likeable photo.  No need to chase so called “influencers”.  Instagrammable locations work like a pyramid, sucking in more and more people.  Even the ones that didn’t like or comment are opening a Google search about travelling to that destination in another tab.  Come on, admit it, you probably started back at half way through this article when you saw my picture of my friend on that rock…

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    (If anyone in tourism needs my help making their location more Instagrammable, feel free to contact me.)