December 2010
32 posts
Happy New Year!
New Year’s Eve dinner - Chili crab at Jumbo Seafood, East Coast, Singapore.
Downgraded
I blogged enthusiastically about Vietnam and its potential yesterday. Today I am downgrading my enthusiasm a notch or two.
My social network responded almost immediately to yesterday’s post, even though it was Christmas Day - Stock_Bitch hit me back on Twitter and noted that Standard & Poor’s recently cut Vietnam’s foreign currency sovereign credit rating. It’s now BB-...
Young and hungry
One of the first things I noticed when I arrived here is how young everyone is. It looks as though the entire population is under the age of 30! How did I not notice this when I lived here?
Well, the last time I was in Vietnam, I was in my 20s, and I guess you don’t notice how young everyone is when you’re young, too. Twelve years later, things are a bit different: last night,...
Boomtown
I haven’t been to Vietnam since we left in 1998. We lived in Hanoi and only visited Ho Chi Minh City a few times, and I mostly remember it being a dusty, traffic-clogged construction site. But it was clear that Vietnam was on the way up, and HCMC was leading the charge (OK, I’m going to give up now, and call it Saigon. Everyone here does, anyway).
I’d heard a lot about the...
“It Works, Bitches
When we battle slings and arrows
And the path before us...”
– The Digital Cuttlefish
WatchWould you like to write about pork belly prices for a trade magazine based in Topeka Kansas?
“For us, who owe these taxes, to think that we don’t want to pay our fair share...”
– John Bogle, CEO of the Vanguard Group.
http://www.westerncitizen.com/1563/super-rich-kvetch-over-taxes/
Bonds, yields, and Hershey bars
A Whiteboard watcher wrote in this week, saying she watched the WB on the Fed buying bonds, but still wasn’t quite clear on the relationship between demand for bonds and bond yields.
This is a great question, because it goes to the heart of how bonds work and why they trade, and often trips people up.
Here are three things you need to know about bonds, before you even start thinking about...
Why I want to meet Bob Sutton
‘Cause he wrote The No Asshole Rule and Good Boss, Bad Boss, and because his d.school bio says this:
Bob has strong opinions, even if they aren’t especially consistent. The thing that he believes most strongly - and most consistently - is that life is too short to spend time with pompous jerks. Bob strives to work and hang out in places where...
Negotiation - by a negotiator
Anyone looking for some tips on negotiation could do worse than check out someone I’ve been “following” on Tumblr and Twitter for a while now (ugh, that sounds creepy: new verb, please).
I’ve no idea what BankrChick’s real name is. For that matter, I have no idea whether she’s a she. Or even a banker. But she’s so brazen and outrageous that I’m...
Enlightenment, anyone?
I love the way good ideas sometimes seem to just float around, waiting to be pulled down and prototyped. I pitched my “explainer archive” to the Knight Fellowship last year, which means the folks at Propublica and NYU’s Studio 20 were probably thinking about the same thing at the same time.
Last week, Propublica and Studio 20 launched explainer.net. The idea behind the site...
Here's who Madhu's mixing with this week...
From the Ink Conference website. Madhu had better be on form!
Adora Svitak Child prodigy, author Thirteen-year-old Adora Svitak has been called a ‘tiny literary giant’ by Diane Sawyer, and with good reason; a prolific author, she’s written over 400 short stories and published two books, Flying Fingers (a short story collection) and Dancing Fingers. She is the world’s...
How the JCrew deal almost didn't get done →
Last in, first out
We had our last class in our course on The Art of Public Speaking last night. The class took the form of a dinner, at which everyone gave a speech of tribute for roughly four minutes.
The subject matter really varied: some talked about teachers, friends, relatives, or people they admired, while others praised inanimate things, like the southern accent, cars, and even ice cream! It was great fun,...
Deliverables
Every time I tell anyone about this Fellowship, I’m always asked about deliverables. It’s usually the last thing they ask about, right after, What exactly are you studying? (Whatever I like); “How many classes do you have to take?” (As many as I choose). How many credits do you have to earn?” (None); “What qualification do you get ?” (None).
Once...