Monthly Archive for May, 2008

Did Moores Law wreck the US Economy ?

Published
by
nick
on May 9, 2008
in General Blog
. 0 Comments

Interesting article here. Seems to say that Moore’s Law caused a fundamental miscalculation of the US economy productivity growth throughout the 1990s.

Did Moore’s Law hide the fundamental weakness of the US economy? Are the dotcom boom/bust and housing boom/bust a result of this monetary mis-management ?

Quote:
“There has been no productivity growth acceleration in the 99% of the economy located outside the sector which manufactures computer hardware… Indeed, far from exhibiting a productivity acceleration, the productivity slowdown in manufacturing has gotten worse: when computers are stripped out of the durable manufacturing sector, there has been a further productivity slowdown in durable manufacturing in 1995-99 as compared to 1972-95, and no acceleration at all in nondurable manufacturing.”

Anyone know the answers … ?

The Un-Interview

Published
by
nick
on May 1, 2008
in General Blog
. 1 Comment

Well, I have seen it all at work now.
Following many months of redundancy process, there were two people competing for voluntary redundancy with one candidate to replace one of them.
So, how to decide which is to go ?

The answer …. hold a couple of “un-interviews”.

I kid you not, one of my colleagues was called in, and his boss made him explain why he should get the VR and not the other person. So he ran through all his worst traits. E.g. why he had failed to fill in his timesheet every week for the last year, apart from once when he tried to fill out the whole year’s timesheets in advance. He pointed to his latest “performance” review. He quoted the bosses boss as saying “xxxx maybe you are in the wrong job”.

Anyway, he got the un-job !