Sustainable mobility / Clever tricks / A good day

Lesson for me and other consultants - keep it simple. If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it. Or you've just gotten lazy and rely on the jargon. Jeff Nichols

Sustainable mobility

Green car congress is working for sustainable mobility. Being car obsesses, they are mostly interested in cars. There are few articles about bicycles (most non-human powered) and railway systems. I wonder how do they plan to run the cars (of whatever type) when oil becomes expensive. And how do they plan to replace the current fleet of cars and their support systems with electric ones? I would claim trying to fix the problem created by excessive mobility and energy expensive city planning by just changing the powertrains of cars is futile
Not that this kind of car-blindness would be unique. Even the respectable Scientific American failed to include public transit in their set of methods of reducing CO2-emissions. SciAm also wrote pages after pages about some hydrogen cars. It seems that cars have blinded even the best journalist and scientist in the world.

Clever tricks

The managers at TeliaSonera in Sweden are clever:

TeliaSonera is planning to end contracts for about 500 consultants in Sweden. The decision follows discussions with the SIF union, which has been critical of TeliaSonera's plans to sack permanent employees while allowing hundreds of consultants to continue working at the company. Newspaper sources suggest that many of the consultants have already been reemployed by TeliaSonera, but in more specialised jobs.

I wonder what the unions will do next. Not that I am very fond of this consultant driven R&D. It is way too expensive and risky. But management is not science, it is just a set of fads. Today is fad tells that variable expenses are good, fixed are not. Thus, it is acceptable to pay a consultant several times the salary of an own employee and in addition to lose all knowledge created during the development work. It is not acceptable to hire and keep enough own employee. Neither of these things make any sense. Or money.

A good day

Today was a good day. S walked me to the office, I had meaningful and moderately successful tasks to do there, I finished reading a book and did not drink any alcohol. And I watched TV only for 30 minutes.
Apple published their new mobile phone. It is fascinating. If Apple can just lower the price a bit and get e.g. Samsung to produce the phones, Nokia must pay attention. Which would be good for everyone.
Another book review: Aikamme sankari by Lermontov.

Alun perin julkaistu kuukausikoosteessa "Blogs January 2007".