What bothers me about the U.S. broadband situation isn’t how bad it is, but that many people seem to think the reason is a mystery.

Other advanced nations are providing tens, hundreds, and even gigabits of bandwidth to their citizens, while we wallow in the relative modem-ages.

People enjoy saying it’s the size of the country that matters, i.e. that it’s easier for those smaller nations to upgrade their infrastructure while it takes us much longer.

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I’ve just put up a short business writing primer in my /study section. The goal is to help those who struggle with being able to correspond well in a business setting.

• A Business Writing Primer:
  http://www.danielmiessler.com/study/business_writing/

Definitely check it out, and be sure to comment over at my sparkling new comment system if you have any input. I’m looking for more points I can add to the list.

Airbnb has also spawned its own ecosystem — ordinary people who will now come clean your home, coordinate key exchanges, cook dinner for you and your guests, photograph rooms for rent, and through the ride-sharing business Lyft, turn their cars into taxis to drive you around. “It used to be that corporations and brands had all the trust,” added Chesky, but now a total stranger, “can be trusted like a company and provide the services of a company. And once you unlock that idea, it is so much bigger than homes. … There is a whole generation of people that don’t want everything mass produced. They want things that are unique and personal.”

via Welcome to the ‘Sharing Economy’ – NYTimes.com.

I find this model fascinating. People have lots of different things–clothes, accessories, cars, apartments, houses, boats, friends. The Airnb concept will eventually reach to all of these.

An American judge known for his harsh and autocratic courtroom manner was jailed for 28 years for conspiring with private prisons to hand young offenders maximum sentences in return for kickbacks amounting to millions of dollars.

Mark Ciavarella Jnr was ordered to pay $1.2m (£770,000) in restitution after he was found to be a “figurehead” in the conspiracy that saw thousands of children unjustly punished in the name of profit in the case that became known as “kids for cash”.

via US judge receives 28-year jail term for his role in kids-for-cash kickbacks – Americas – World – The Independent.

Privatization is always the answer, right? It’ll find the most efficient way to do things, right?

Sure, but only if that “thing” is make money.

Privatization of healthcare works great as well–at making people at the top of the healthcare business into millionaires. The people working in the prisons? Not so much. The people in the prisons? Definitely not.

But the executives and shareholders who are benefitting from it–absolutely. They’re doing just fine.

The right has it right: privatization is good at accomplishing its goals. The part they’re wrong about (or maybe they aren’t) is understanding what those goals are.

When the goal is money then any other goal is a guideline, not a rule. And guidelines are the first to go when pressure is applied. And there’s always pressure being applied because there is an ever-present possibility of making more money then you’re currently making.

Privatization. Capitalism. Markets. Assuming we make it long enough these will all come to be considered as extraordinarily dangerous words. They will come to be known as lethal tools only to be wielded by the very best among us, and only under supervision by the rest, lest they turn the pursuit of a noble goal into a profit-worshipping cult of “us and them”.

The pursuit of profit is like a nuclear detonation. When controlled perfectly it can be a beautiful thing–an intense power that enables positivity and growth. But, usually, it just murders motherfuckers.

In general, you can use this approach unilaterally but you are going to have to teach the other side how to give in the context of negotiation.

Think about what you would want if you were on the other side and ask them to think about the same thing.

Write down the most you are willing to give a perfect counterparty and the least you would accept.

Ask them to do the same.

Say something like, “If later you decide to improve your offer, then I will not work with you because you lied on the first go-around, and I do not work with liars. Likewise you should hold me to the same standard of honesty.” Of course, you can find less harsh words than these.

Reveal what you wrote to each other simultaneously.

If you each offer more than the other would accept, and you honestly admit your imperfections, then you will come to an agreement.

via The secret to a higher salary is to ask for nothing at all – Quartz.

My friend Steven Harms is a lead developer at ShopItToMe here in SF. They just launched their site so I wanted to give a heads-up to anyone interested in fashion.

The concept for is pretty simple: you create preferences for clothing items you’re interested in and the site goes and harvests all of the best content that matches those parameters for you into a daily feed.

If you’re into wardrobe at all, do have a look.

I’m changing my home office phone setup from a cloud-hosted VOIP provider to…well, something else. I was having far too many dropped calls for the $40/month I was paying. Besides, I just felt like it was time to modernize.

Here are my requirements:

1. Stable connection during calls (no drops)
2. Extremely high voice quality
3. Wireless capability (need to be able to walk in the house with it)
4. Easy dialing (preferably Apple Contacts integration)

I have a few thoughts:

1. Use Skype with a high quality bluetooth headset (which one?)
2. Use a soft-client VOIP service and a high quality bluetooth headset (which one?)

What are you guys using? What headset would you recommend?

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