One more time I am angry on a bank. I opened Passport account last year with HSBC UK. It was perfect as the account would automatically close after one year if I will not decide to prolong it. Good opt-in feature. But now HSBC decided to change the contract, so my account will automatically prolong until I decide to close it. They changed their services from opt-in to opt-out and locked me inside.
Now staying in Slovakia I have difficulty to close the account. Not to mention that there is £6 monthly charge.
HSBC sucks. Never open a bank account with this bank. Loyds TSB will give you current account free of charge.
I am looking forward to future encounters with banks cheating on me. This will never stop. I wish you fast death greedy banking institutions. Good luck financial crisis, you are doing good job hitting the right ones.
If you study abroad or work abroad and travel back to your home town regularly you may observe something interesting. People are very different. I do not mean it just culturally, but rather that they have different needs and wants and different perception of life, success and everything.
I study in Brno and travel regularly home to north east slovakia. During my studies I spent a lot of time studying abroad. Always when I came back to Brno I experienced some kind of culture shock. Even now when I go home from my university town, I experience slight culture shock.
By living in the new environment you are alienating yourself from that old one. Than when you come back you suddenly miss the new environment to which you have adapted. People you know lived through different experiences than you did over the year you were abroad.
When I go home to north east slovakia I have to become suddenly used to jealous gossips about neighbors in the village, and reality TV shows which are popular in Slovakia and everybody is talking about while I haven’t seen any episode and I am not even eager to waste time watching it. On the other-side suddenly nobody knows what The Apprentice is. It seems like there is nothing to talk about. Even though you speak the language it is hard to find common language and common topic to speak about.
People tend to search like minded people. I can tell that in the cities people tend to be more open-minded than in the villages. There is also huge difference between different working environments. Universities, international corporations or local companies each have distinct cultural traits.
So this way I start to think about “social clusters”. In today’s mobilised world people can move to locations which will best fulfill their personality and give them opportunities for future development. Such a clusters of certain mindsets can boost productivity. This however creates big cultural differences not just between countries but even between regions in the same country.
Ok enough. Too much thinking. But what I am curious to find out are the answer to few questions. Is it better to adapt yourself to the environment in which you are? Or to move to the environment which best fits your personality? Is it wrong to have a differed mindset than most people in the environment you are currently in?
President of Google’s EMEA operations talks about changes which are happening and their pace. Predictions are hard to make, but important decisions needs to be done now. Broadband access went from a nice to have, to a must have. People use Internet mostly for search, chat and entertainment. Community sites become very popular which rises interesting question: Is the content going to be in the center and communities will form around it, or community will form the center and people will find likewise communities to discuss relevant content? He concludes that the biggest brands in the last ten years were developed on the basis of product performance. People demand quality products. Most of these products were free to a consumer and there was a community side to it. I finish with two questions, which I seek answers to. What is the impact of the internet on traditional (4P) marketing? What are the relevant marketing strategies if the product is free?
Imagine a car which comes with an electric miles energy subscription similar to your mobile subscription from your favorite telecom provider. You pass a pump and just swap depleted battery for a new one. Or charge at home while parking.
Great thing about subscription model is that the more you use it the cheaper it is. You get mobile phone for free and unlimited minutes with certain subscription plans. Imagine taking mobile service subscription model to an automotive industry. Shai Agassi is working on such an exciting project:
Interesting talk about extraction of value from real people and real companies producing goods and services, to rather holdings, financial corporations creating myths around products. Companies which don’t make anything but rather become names on debt.
Douglas Rushkoff raises interesting question about our current economy. As money were created to hold value in the age of scarcity, they don’t work well in present age based on abundance. It is free to distribute stuff across the Internet. That’s why scarcity based lending banking model doesn’t work.
“They were so stupid, they bought shares of their own ponzi schemes”. Douglas Rushkoff talking about banks. If you have so much money created where are you going to put them?
Barry Schwartz talks about how we stopped being wise. People more and more follow rules, which allow them to stop thinking.
He describes few features of wise person who:
knows when and how to make exception to every rule
knows how to improvise
knows how to use moral skills in the pursuit of the right aims
is made, not born
I have just remembered Ritzer and his McDonaldization of society theory. I think that it is very important to think critically and not just blindly follow any given rule. It is just sad that many people do not know how to be human these times. I would like to see honesty and kindness in everybody.
Until now I was just listening to stupid information about recession from the media. Nobody who had clue or give serious proposal came across. Media are just repeating one another, same and same again. Today I came across first realistic view of the recession cause and proposal at the same time. Duncan Bannatyne, Scottish entrepreneur and Dragon’s Den investor has probably more clue than most of others.
He believes that the problem was caused by the banks lending to each other. They borrow from each other and instead of it, they give each other security packages, which are less of the value than what the borrowing was.
He aligned it to supermarkets. If the supermarkets were lending each other fruit and vegetables and one was in trouble, they all would be in trouble at the same time.
The solution would be to stop banks letting each other, instead borrowing money from the central bank. If such self contained bank went bust, the rest could buy pickings. Same way as when a supermarket goes bust.
This woul also decrease money wasting across the system - people that take bonuses from moving same money around the system. Eventually there could be much more money available for the business or individuals in need of credit.
John Maeda is blurring the lines between programming and design. At the end of the talk he mentions one interesting problem as it is not about how to make the world more technological, but how to make it more human again. I very much share his view.
