“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” — Benjamin Franklin
To loosely paraphrase Tolstoy: Perfect things are all perfect in the same way. Every imperfect thing is impefect in its own way.
I think this maxim is applicable to all categories, not just families, but individuals, and even inanimate objects. At an individual level, I believe we are each defined more by our flaws than by our attributes.
According to an article from Valleywag, Mark Zuckerberg had some not-too-pleasant-sounding things to say about Facebook users:
“He said something like ‘the most disruptive companies don’t listen to their customers.’” Another tipster who has seen the email says Zuckerberg implied that companies were “stupid” for “listening to their customers.” The anti-customer diktat has many Facebook employees up in arms, we hear.
It’s difficult to tell what Zuckerberg’s real tone was, since the above is hearsay. If his point is that a company never has to care about or listen to its customers, he is dead wrong. On the other hand, if he believes that innovation rarely bubbles up from one’s user base, then he is correct. It is the balance between the two forces that makes or breaks a company.
I am with what anecdotally seems to be the majority of people, who thought the Daily Show interview of Jim Cramer conducted by Jon Stewart was brilliant, even while painful to watch.
Jim Cramer had the misfortune of representing all of CNBC, indeed all of the financial news networks (which is what now, 3?). On the other hand, Cramer sort of brought this upon himself, with the over-the-top advertising for him that CNBC provided (e.g. the much harped-upon “In Cramer We Trust”), and the media blitz that Cramer himself engaged upon after the initial salvos were fired that, while featuring him, didn’t focus solely on him.
Stewart’s message though, similar to the withering one he delivered to the (2nd generation of) CNN’s Crossfire, is that these media institutions are woefully mis-serving their audiences. Most of what the financial networks provide is not news- it is commentary. What news they do deliver is already known amongst most traders and professionals, and so useless for any short-term financial decisions, on which the networks unfortunately prey.
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