Tag Archives: Society

MBTI is dead? Long live Socionics!

I accidentally stumbled on an article about the death of MBTI yesterday. Strangely, it never occurred to me that there would be a wide audience interest in things like typologies in general and MBTI in particular. I always thought these were fairly specialized subjects only interesting for a minority of people. Since you seem to be interested, I present to you Socionics.

It all originated some time in the previous century with the works of Karl Gustav Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist. His work was later built upon to create MBTI and later corrected and extended by people like Aušra Augustinavičiūtė, Gregory Reinin and Igor Kalinauskas to become Socionics. Nowadays Socionics is a young but fairly popular in narrow circles direction of social psychology. Actually, there are still raging debates on the subject of “where it all belongs”.

Socionics works with dichotomies of information processing functions and therefore describes how the given person filters and processes the information coming from outside, bases the decisions and outputs the information into the outside world. So Socionics is really a study in information metabolism of the psyche.

Given that, we can roughly say that a human being has some basic instincts at the base of its decision making, then there is the distinction between male and female, on top of that sits the information metabolism and that is all wrapped into a personality. The type of information metabolism determines those deep motivations inside the psyche that cause us to take many of our decisions. One has to note, of course, that different motives deep inside may cause nearly the same actions in different individuals. Different personalities may cause differentiation in actions based on the same motives.

Determining the type of information metabolism, or the socionic type, of a person is a task of uncovering those deep seated motivations that demonstrate how the given person processes the information. Tests for MBTI fail here because they try to correlate the behavior directly to the type but we see that the behavior is controlled by the personality. The type of information metabolism can be seen clearly when the practitioner concentrates on the motivations underlying the behavior. Unfortunately, the development of tests in this direction is far from mature yet and best results are based on the expert opinion… -->

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On Minimalism

Reading about minimalism and especially minimalist homes makes me think about typical Japanese traditional homes, Buddhist temples and such. I think what I learned from being in Japan about traditional culture is directly applicable to minimalism. So I know and like most of it, actually. This is a funny feeling of something new being actually quite old and well-known.… -->

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Nokia for free. You wanna fries with that?

It turns out that Nokia is being sold for about 5 billion Euro. And Nokia also passes its Qualcomm license worth more than 1 billion Euro to Microsoft. So the total price is, in fact, in the ballpark of 3,5 billion. And that is for a company that brings 15 billion in sales every year. Criminal. Uncle Sam, you wanna fries with that?… -->

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Nokia. End of story.

Nokia is gone for good. Microsoft has got what it wanted so badly for so many years. Could you imagine in your wildest dreams five years ago that Microsoft would buy Nokia, the undisputed market leader? I don’t like Microsoft but I have to admit they take their long-term business planning seriously, as opposed to so many other companies. Unfortunately, them being good means we are out of mobile phone manufacturing companies. And even though Microsoft got it now, I seriously doubt they will be able to run it properly to deliver the same brilliant products Nokia had.

But Nokia? How could you be so stupid not to see what’s coming? It was so painfully obvious. Although, come to think of it, nobody except the Nokia mobile phone customers was interested. The management got paid large sums of money to go along with the plan. The shareholders that matter probably know what they are doing in terms of their own win. So, who cares? Some people got reach on it and why would it matter that there will be no next brilliant Nokia E52 for the rest of us? We get what we deserve – a world where it does not matter anymore how good or bad the products are, how good or bad people feel about something initially. Everything can be manipulated, sold and bought, even the unthinkable happens if you have money to pay for it. Technical brilliance and the quality of the thing that does something perfectly do not matter anymore.

And just come to think of it, they paid such peanuts, 5 billion, for Nokia! That’s like getting it for free, basically. Can you imagine? Market leader is sold for 5 billion? That’s nuts! This is simply criminal and if I had shares of Nokia I would definitely sue. Making a market leader lose between 5% and 10% of the market a year – that is an attention grabbing achievement. Again, I would certainly prefer if a court looked into it very, very carefully. And if I was the government of Finland, this purchase would not go through, ever. Even in the face of threats of military strikes in the name of democracy.

Damn, after all these years, where am I going to get my next mobile phone?

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Global survillance economic results

An article in The Morning Call talks about economic impact of the NSA surveillance, but limits the discussion to its area of interest – the US companies, while making me think about the rest of the world:

Worldwide spending on the cloud is expected to double over the next three years to more than $200 billion. U.S. firms have been leaders in developing the technology. According to a new report from the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, however, global worries about NSA surveillance are likely to reduce U.S. market share.

The report’s admittedly loose estimate is that U.S. cloud-computing firms will lose $21 billion to $35 billion in revenue between now and 2016. According to the report, some 10 percent of non-U.S. members of the Cloud Security Alliance said they’ve canceled a project with a U.S. company since the disclosure of the NSA’s surveillance. In addition, 56 percent indicated “that they would be less likely to use a U.S.-based cloud computing service.”

Interestingly, this does not only apply to the US economy. There are companies everywhere that would rather prefer not to be monitored. That would rather prefer to go about their business without this stranger looking over their shoulder day and night. What will happen?

I think we may be facing a new arms race soon. The businesses with money were not all that interested in keeping things private until now. Now they will likely invest in tools for privacy and the tools will get better. And so off we go, there will be demand for privacy from the, ahem, private sector and the demand for surveillance from the government sector. Big money to be made.

Just wondering… will the common citizen become “collateral damage” in this war?… -->

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Jack Barnaby … died? or made die?

Jack Barnaby was a hacker specializing in ATMs and medical equipment. He was working on the medical implant and hospital equipment security. He was scheduled to give a talk titled “Implantable medical devices: hacking humans” at the BlackHat USA 2013 tomorrow. The talk would focus on the security of wireless implantable medical devices, of which there are millions in the world. Jack planned to reveal software that uses a common transmitter to scan for and “interrogate” individual medical implants and discuss how they may be abused. And he is dead.

“The San Francisco Medical Examiner’s Office said Jack died in the city on Thursday. It gave no details. He was believed to be in his mid-30s.”

Interesting. We are 4 days after now and still there is no information whatsoever. Some reporters say he was 35, some – 36. Nobody has any details on why he has died, of what causes. Not even a statement like “from natural causes”. Simply no information. Weird accidents happen. But being in security we are entitled to an unhealthy bit of paranoia.

At the time when medical equipment is riddled with viruses and malware, disclosing more problems with the medical equipment, demonstrating how people could die from a remote network attack on their implants, all that is a serious crime against good business. I would not be surprised if his death was “nothing personal, just good business.”… -->

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Airport lounges

I have been through the Vienna airport recently. They built a very modern new terminal there. Respect goes for handling the airport security efficiently and having a sufficient number of screening posts to handle the current traffic (although I am not sure it will be enough if the number of flights increases). What kept me wondering for good five minutes is the lounge though.

See, ten years ago lounges were all over the place. You could not walk down any corridor at any airport without bumping into one or another airline’s lounge. Now, fast forward to this modern construction and… I spent literally five minutes looking for the lounge, then got my directions from the staff, and spent another five minutes looking for it again. The lounge is literally hidden away!

Why would they do it? Are we afraid to hurt the feelings of the economy class people? Are we interested in minimizing the number of visitors to the lounge? What is it? Why on Earth would you want to make the most profitable class of passengers – business traveler – despair in their search for the lounge?

And it is a tendency I notice in a lot of places. Many airports rebuild the lounges, decreasing their numbers and hiding them away. Airlines limit what the travelers can do with respect to a lounge. You know, one used to be able to simply walk into a lounge by flashing the card. Now you have to fulfill a myriad conditions before you get admitted.

I understand cost saving strategies. What I do not understand are the most profitable customer segment alienation strategies.… -->

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Water – an artificially global problem

You must have heard that the amount of potable water is limited in the world. You must have heard that we all have to save water in the whole world because water is precious. Nearly all of that is nonsense. At least the “global” part of it definitely is.

Yes, water is important, in some parts precious. However, drinkable water is not a global problem. It cannot be. It is a local problem, local to the particular geographic location. Saving water in a place where there is abundance of it does not do anything for other locations where water may be scarce. Problems with water must be solved locally.

This problem was artificially converted into a global problem. It allows increasing prices for water anywhere, requesting that people save water where they cannot be made to pay for it – it is an economically profitable wave of uncertainty created to rip off people.

This is a shameless ripoff because we are made to pay for an abundant resource as if it is scarce. Water is an artificially global scarcity problem.… -->

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