Brian Gongol
Radio show notes - Brian Gongol Show on WHO Radio - August 3, 2014
Five ways to tell if you're in an organization that's prepared for the future
The White House needs more delegation on national-security tasks
They're trying too hard to centralize decision-making, and that's causing big decisions to go un-made
Omaha is getting 1-gigabit Internet service city-wide
Iowa's Regents universities are paying as much as $450 an hour for work under an "efficiency review"
A whale of a consulting gig if you can get it
"What we've seen is a five- to sevenfold increase in injury rates in youth sports"
A surgeon who has made a career of repairing professional athletes wants parents to bring it down a notch on their kids -- most aren't ever going pro, anyway
Two hurricanes are headed for Hawaii
They might not be at hurricane strength by the time they arrive
No more Fox chase for Time Warner
Rupert Murdoch is calling off the pursuit. Meanwhile, Gannett is spinning off its print-publishing assets.
Planned merger of Sprint and T-Mobile falls through
Babies should not sleep in beds with adults
Maybe we would still care about the missing Nigerian girls...if we focused on just one missing Nigerian girl
It's too easy to retweet a picture or use a hashtag and then forget about an issue. It's time for some of what we know about practical psychology to be brought to bear upon the issue of sustaining public attention on important issues long enough to achieve actual results.
EU class-action lawsuit against Facebook
It's over privacy concerns; what else is new?
What might save the new Gannett is that it'll be debt-free
Isolating all of the print-publishing assets of the company in a new spinoff isn't really a great way to ensure the health of that spinoff, but at least they aren't going to burden it with a debt load. Newspapers can do well enough -- even in times of declining advertising revenues -- as long as they aren't saddled with a big debt burden.
Who owns the copyright when a monkey takes a selfie with your camera?
Keep them! You can keep them!
Vintage (1976) newspaper ad from the Chicago Tribune: "You get Nick and Warren Lattof with every car at Lattof Chevrolet!" Worth the click to see why buyers of the time should have caveat emptor.
The computer you could have gotten for $600 in 1978
4k of RAM and a cassette-tape recorder for data storage. In 2014, you could get two Asus Transformer tablets each with 1 Gb of RAM for that much, store 16 Gb, and still have $100 left over. Or you could get a Samsung Galaxy S5 smartphone with 2 Gb of RAM and 16 Gb of storage. Put another way: The smartphone, for the same price, offers 500,000 times as much RAM.
Interesting questions on the matter of military professionalism
We hope to recruit an officer corps full of bright, motivated people. Do we then want to hear what they think about political issues?
On getting older
Reality checks for Generation X
Netflix teases another season of "Arrested Development" in the indeterminate future
Please, please, please
Most people really are naturally good
(Video) Witness the effort by a group of people to rescue a man trapped by a train car
A third of US households are "just getting by" or "struggling" in their own self-characterization
There will always, always, always be work to do to make people better off. The most valuable thing we can do as a nation is make sure that we're setting the right systems and conditions in place to make sure that we're using market forces to make most people's lives better most of the time. One especially scary takeaway from the latest Federal Reserve research on the subject: "Almost half of adults were not actively thinking about financial planning for retirement." And by whom are they expecting to be taken care?
You don't have to be a gun advocate to appreciate that there are places where someone should be armed
And that may reasonably include hospitals, if certain kinds of people are likely to show up there. The recent experience of a totally justified self-defense shooting at a Pennsylvania hospital is a good illustration.
US labor productivity rose by 2.5% (annualized) in the second quarter
At least, that's the initial projection, though the government's figures have been subject to a lot of revision lately. Ultimately, labor productivity has to grow faster than the population if we are to experience real improvements in quality of life.
Drunk woman attempts to steal a car -- with two cops inside
Miami radio host takes a parting shot at LeBron James
And got suspended for ordering the snarky billboards in Ohio
Water is literally being used as a weapon of war in Iraq
Iraq's largest dam has been captured by ISIS, and the United States is promising only very limited intervention via airstrikes. Memo to the State Department and the White House: Do not discount the possibility that this becomes a semi-permanent state of affairs, with ISIS/ISIL establishing the functions of a state. And if that takes root, then on our hands we have an enormous problem indeed. Hamas provided social services to help cement its standing with the people of the Palestinian Territories. As ISIS/ISIL starts doing the same kinds of things, then it may not matter at all how much we reject them politicially as a terrorist group -- they may end up as de facto a state as many others. And that's a grave risk. Put another way, it doesn't matter that we hate the thought that the soft-power trappings of a legitimate government are being performed by a terrorist group; if they are being performed and accepted/tolerated/endured by the people, then we are witnessing the creation of a de facto state. What's happening is an invasion and occupation, even if we don't recognize the invaders as a sovereign nation. That should set off alarms all over the place.