Overheard

“Oh boy! Another great opportunity for personal growth!”

“I’m not bitter about what happened to me as a child, and my mother was instrumental in keeping me from being so. ... She taught me to be grateful for my life regardless of what that entailed, and that’s directly related to the image of Christ on the cross and the example of sacrifice that he gave us. What she taught me is that the deliverance God offers you from pain is not no pain—it’s that the pain is actually a gift. What’s the option? God doesn’t really give you another choice.”

After over a decade of user testing, it is clear that the way we search the web is similar to the way we would search our home for valuables as it was burning to the ground. Frantically.

“We must shift the focus of companies back to the customer and away from shareholder value ... The shift necessitates a fundamental change in our prevailing theory of the firm… The current theory holds that the singular goal of the corporation should be shareholder value maximization. Instead, companies should place customers at the center of the firm and focus on delighting them, while earning an acceptable return for shareholders.”

“We would accomplish many more things if we did not think of them as impossible.”

Comments

Travis:

How many successful terrorist attacks have there been on US soil since Sept 11, 2001?

Posted by Ryan Cousineau
  at 7:24 pm on Sep. 11, 2007

By Al Qaeda? None that I know of.

How about the number of terrorism related charges filed in the U.S.? There have been about 500 or more since 2001.

But my point isn't about if we ARE safer, it's about if we FEEL safer. Do we, looking ahead, see an increased or decreased level of fear about terrorism now than we did, say, 5.5 years ago?

Posted by Travis Smith
  at 7:32 pm on Sep. 11, 2007

"Feel safer"?

That's an awfully odd metric.

My answer to your question ("why don't we feel safer?") would be, mostly, that we're very bad at judging relative risks.

How bad? Very very bad. Levitt and Dubner, in "Freakonomics" use a simple example of just one minor failure of risk perception: a swimming pool in a household poses a far greater risk to the lives of children than a handgun.

Now before I told you that (or before you read Freakonomics), would you have felt that way?

Posted by Ryan Cousineau
  at 7:50 am on Sep. 12, 2007

Well, actually yeah, I had a house with a pool and I realize the danger they pose.

Besides, and this is a tangent, that stat is pretty misleading: It doesn't take into account that houses have one pool but multiple guns, and it's a stat for all guns, not just for handguns.

http://www.freakonomicsbook.com/thebook/ch5.html

But the main point is that, regardless of our improper and poor judgement about risk (like, let's worry about speed limits, not terrorists and save even more lives) -- regardless of that, our relative state of fear, I'd say, is worse today than then. And I don't want to live surrounded by fear. Which is my point.

Posted by Travis Smith
  at 10:02 am on Sep. 12, 2007

I stood on 6th avenue and watched those towers burn - knowing that one of my family members was burning inside one of them. And let me say this: as much as I hate Bush, as much as I feel he has done everything - everything - wrong since that day... there is nobody on earth who could have made me feel safer after what I saw that day.

Posted by Justin
  at 5:07 am on Sep. 14, 2007

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