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Five Little Piigs

The financial community has been giving us this bullshit about the Five Little Piigs countries for years. However, they have never attempted, to my knowledge, an analysis of what these five countries supposedly have in common. Precious little, imho. Let’s take a closer look.

Portugal
Portugal is well-known for having been for a long time running the European country with the highest number of PhDs in government. It ranks decently in terms of corruption and very well in terms of freedom of the press — higher than France and the UK, and just behind Germany. Portugal is not a very rich country, but they never tried to make things up. They had some luck in the ’90s with companies relocating there, only to be undercut by places in Eastern Europe like Slovakia. I hope they will be able to cash in on Brazil’s new status as an economic powerhouse. I wish them well, and hate those who scorn them.

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Ads. What else?

Ads. What else? Build a large enough mousetrap, and then splatter ads all over it. Whatever the mousetrap, ads are the only way to monetize. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram. And very soon SoundCloud as well.

Do you ever wonder what this tells us about our culture and our societies?

Professionalism

I hate “professionalism”. I know, it’s a requirement for many jobs. But I’d feel uneasy and unwelcome in such jobs and companies, so I might as well say: Just fuck it.

Professionalism is about average people posing as if they were smart. Professionalism is to the corporate world what political correctness is to politics. That is to say, bullshit.

The idea of “best practices” is no better. If everybody is doing something, how can it be the “best” thing to do? Average at best. More probably, mediocre, dumb and boring.

Rich and poor countries

A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars.
It’s where the rich use public transportation.”

— Enrique Peñalosa, Ex-Mayor of Bogotá

Rich and poor countries. A quick check: which large European cities have seen more downloads of their official public transport app on the iPhone than on Android? Only Berlin, Amsterdam and Vienna. Whatever the reason – it is possible, of course, that the iPhone app was launched much later than the Android app – many other cities don’t fare too well: in Milan we have almost twice as many downloads on Android; in Barcelona, twice as many; in Paris and Rome almost 7 times as many; in Dublin, 25 times as many.