Will Caffeinated Beverages One Day Be Judged Like Cigarettes?

How was it not obvious to generations of people that taking part in an activity that fills one's lungs with something other than air (smoke) might not be healthy? Actually, it was obvious to some, but the majority chose to live in ignorant bliss and not think through the issue. The public chose to be so ignorant that the tobacco industry had the gall to create corporate sponsored health studies showing the safety of cigarettes.

Never mind that there were obvious signs of smoking's unhealthiness that didn't need a study (or cancer) to become apparent. Didn't people have friends who were smokers who's voice changed? Who's exercise capacity diminished? Who coughed nastily?

Americans are now waking up to the dangers of refined sugar. It's not a secret that sugar is responsible for most of the current public health crises in America. Eat a lot of sugar, and you may very well get a chronic disease. Stop eating sugar and that disease may go away.

What do refined sugar, caffeine and tobacco all have in common? They all became widespread in Western society after the age of exploration (in other words their widespread use in the West is fairly recent, occurring over the past five hundred years and becoming pervasive in the past two hundred). They were all once trade commodities that wars were fought over. They are all addictive. And they all have had centuries of profit seeking corporations pushing them on the public.

Is caffeine as severe a drug as nicotine? Probably not. It may even have some health benefits (actually nicotine has some health benefits too). What it certainly does do to most people is raise their heart rates. That's obvious. Everyone knows that. It also, when taken in excess, makes a lot of people jittery. It probably doesn't give people cancer, but is it a good idea for people to drink several cups of caffeinated beverages a day and perpetually keep their heart rates unnaturally high and possibly affect their nervous systems?

Is a cup of coffee as bad as a cigarette? Almost certainly not. Doing either once in a while probably isn't a big deal. Will it one day be discovered that drinking a lot of caffeine, which has obvious side effects that everyone knows about, is connected with the development of a chronic disease. Maybe. This is not health advice, but for the record, I don't drink caffeine and I encourage all of my family not to either, although they don't listen.

A Time When Having No Business Model is a Business Model

The New York Times has a fascinating account of Google's purchase of Waze.  Waze does not make a significant profit.  The purchase by Google is clearly a strategic acquisition.  It seems increasingly common for large American technology companies to purchase small startups for incredibly high prices  for one of two reasons:

Niche
The startup provides an important technology missing from the company's portfolio.  This technology may serve a distinct, but important, set of customers (including developers); or the technology provides an important service for all customers.  An example of this would be Apple's acquisition of Siri in 2010, or Facebook's recent purchase of Parse.

Mindshare
Despite not having a business model (or at least a profit model) the startup has managed to attract a large base of followers.  This was the case with Facebook's purchase of Instagram in 2012, and Yahoo's purchase of Tumblr in 2013.  It was not as if Instagram held the keys to some incredible patented algorithm that Facebook's engineers could not figure out.  It simply had amassed a large amount of users in a space that Facebook was already interested in.  It remains to be seen in Four Square's case, if attracting a significant amount of loyal/influential users is as meaningful as the raw total number accumulated.

Anecdotally, it seems mindshare trumps niche when evaluating the size of these purchases.  The latter mentioned examples are an order of magnitude larger in dollars than the former.  Waze may check both the niche and mindshare boxes.

Of course, companies always made strategic acquisitions of unprofitable colleagues.  What is new is the incredible evaluations used when relatively tiny (but attractive) tech startups find their way onto the acquisition block.  This creates a whole new landscape for successful entrepreneurs to traverse.  One where acquiring users (or technologies) maybe ultimately as valuable as acquiring dollars.  So, perhaps it is not that these startups have no business model - it is just that they have no profit model.

Being Perennially Late Is Perennially Disrespectful

The old schoolchild maxim goes:

If you're early, you're on time.
If you're on time, you're late.

It's basically saying that if you respect other peoples' time (and time is the most precious resource of all, isn't it?) then you don't cut it close when showing up for an appointment. Unpunctual friends and business associates generally fall into three categories:

• Disrespectful without care
• Aloof to the disrespectfulness
• Aware of the disrespectfulness but claim to be trying their best

Yes, the second category really does exist. There are people of such privilege, and other people with such a laid back 'hippyish' attitude towards life, that they really don't understand how frustrating it is to be waited on. This is because they hardly ever have to wait on other people, or live such an unstructured life that they have few precisely timed appointments. These people must be forgiven and gently educated.

It is the third category of offenders that deserves the most scorn, because the first category is a lost cause. If a friend is continually late, and doesn't put enough of an effort not to be, even if he apologizes, he is implicitly saying, "My time is more valuable than yours." Such arrogance is very ugly, even when it's true. A polite person, however important he may be, would never expose such an ugly side of himself. These individuals need firm reinforcement if one is ever going to feel like he is in a mutually respectful relationship with them.

Tell a perennially late and apologetic individual that you were on time and that you have been waiting. Say it nicely, but let him feel guilty, even if he apologized.