After winning rights to host football championships in 2012, it would be just too perfect if we won also Expo 2012 in Wroclaw. The city would simply rocket. It’s quite hot already. If we won, even I would consider going back to work there.

Today I wanted to check when the decision is due.

According to Wroclaw?s expo site, delegates of the Bureau of International Expositions will vote in December. I?m counting on a nice Christmas gift.

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This according to the news from job market in Gazeta Wyborcza. Warsaw, on the other hand, came us unexpected second in salary expectations.

Another article provides some logic for optimism in Krakow. Thousand of jobs apparently wait for the unemployed, who are scarce, because unemployment in Krakow is the lowest in Poland, at merely 5.3%, compared 14.4% for the country.

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Medical staff just went on strike, and teachers are planning to do so in the nearest future.

There was a remark on lecture of economic history (by Wojciech Morawski) that I still remember: people do not strike during recession. On the contrary, they strike in time of economic prosperity.

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At least according Washington Post article by Warren Brown:

Wroclaw, Poland This capital town of Poland’s southwestern province of Lower Silesia is one of the reasons the troubled nine-year relationship between America’s Chrysler Group and Germany’s Daimler-Benz , known as DaimlerChrysler during the years of merger, eventually fell apart.

It seems an improbable claim to make on a sunny spring weekend with crowds ambling through the picturesque Market Square in the old commercial district of Wroclaw.

My home city was chosen as an example of place with cheap labor, where all sensible car manufactures are migrating, causing demise of American companies like Chrysler. Article quotes unemployment figure of 18% in 2006. That might have changed a bit recently, though.

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Poland together with Ukraine has won the right to host European football championships in 2012 (note to myself: apparently third largest sport event in the world. Must input in the supermemo to finally remember these sort of things). The victory is a rather unexpected, to say the least, as expressed in opening by beatroot:

But wait a minute…have UEFA been smoking too many Jamaican cigarettes, or something?

Who cares that there are no stadiums in Poland, it?s EUR 37b of investments, as press puts it. How successful the government will be in managing this and how impressive the final result will be is sort of a question, but now they have a sharp deadline, and they will have at least to be trying. And the press will have a stick to beat officials over any delays and screw-ups.

What optimistic part of me would want to see is for the event to be a tipping point for Ukraina?s orientation, making it look west rather than drift into Russia?s orbit. Maybe it?s naive but I would see the following reasons for it:

• Providing words of support does not hurt, but now, finally, Ukraina is doing some very visible and economically significant project with Poland
• The usage of EU funds in the process might hint Ukrainian politicians as to where to look for developing their country
• Infrastructural investment will hopefully bridge the two countries more closely, in particular through new highways heading east, border passes, air connections, etc.
• Together with easing the foreign labor regulations, it may increase the importance of economic links between Poland and the Ukraine

I didn?t have any chance to see exact investment plans, but I hope this will provide additional push for “right” direction across our Eastern border.

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(it was supposed to be posted as a comment to Krzysztof Rybinski’s blog article, but it seems that his comments mechanism is in even worse shape than my gallery script:), so I just put it here)

The energy topic is fun to follow, but contains two branches that I find of equal interest, not just the one related to energy sources:

1. SUPPLY

..and most importantly human ability to innovate will soon (I define soon as < 20 years) eliminate our dependence on oil.

This is something I would expect as well, so the rest is a matter of details, i.e. whether wind, solar, bio-fuel, fusion, etc. Makes one reconsider engineering career, but it?s all too late:)

2. DEMAND

What?s interesting in demand is increasing amount of energy that we consume in order to fulfill our informational needs.

The energy requirements of the huge infrastructure that Google is building (and others following) are already quite publicized.

Looking a bit more into the future, there is Second Life and other virtual realities. Nick Carr suggested in an article (Avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians) that virtual ids consume roughly comparable amount of energy as the real ones.

The sophistication of VR will only increase. The dependence on it may increase likewise. After all, since a significant (major?) share of value of the products we consume is already informational (design, software etc), their consumption can be successfully migrated to VR. Producers are already announcing that they will release new products first in Second Life.

If having second life becomes popular, the energy consumption will likely boom.

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There are firms, and there is the market. In firms, people are directed by managerial signals (you do what you are told to do). On the market, people are directed by prices (you do what pays out most).

Now, there is a certain amount of business done inside the firms, and the rest is done outside on the free market – but what determines the border line?

While writing my master thesis I got to know Coase’s theory regarding boundaries of firms. These are determined by the transactional costs, which make market transactions more expensive, and provide incentives to embed them within the firms – till the moment when the organizational cost is higher than transactional one (management has its cost, too).

Ok, I wrote all this to introduce one paragraph of Hagel’s article, which is adding some new perspective to the theory:

At the most fundamental level, the rationale for the firm is shifting. As JSB and I have written, the rationale for the firm articulated by Ronald Coase back in the 1930s ? that firms exist to economize on transaction costs – is diminishing in importance as continued innovation in IT systematically drives down transaction costs. In its place, we are seeing a new rationale for the firm emerge ? firms exist to accelerate talent development. This is increasingly the reason why people choose to affiliate with firms. They believe they can get better faster by working with others within the firm, as well as with others across firms, through the privileged relationships built by the firm. If firms can?t find ways to deliver on this promise, talent will exit and Tom Malone?s e-lance economy will flourish.

Firms allow talent to develop faster, thus gain another advantage over the market.

On a first glance I can’t tell if this couldn’t be retained in the transactional costs framework. Take consultants. It’s true that in the company one can learn more than as a free lance consultant (at least in the beginning). That’s because of the experienced people that you have a chance to work with.

But the team could be assembled on the market basis, by contracting and sub-contracting (we sometimes do that to some extent, when we involve external experts). Usually it’s not… because of transactional costs.

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Read in FT at Helsinki airport, “Cut corners and the human spirit” by Harry Eyres, quoting John Ruskin:

It’s unwise to pay too much. But it’s worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money, that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do.

And:

There is hardly anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price alone are that person’s lawful prey.

Just some useful material for afterthoughts on the Chinese shopping experiences.

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It is a matter of fact that the unemployment rate, as reported by the Statistical Office, keeps on declining, or even, if you compress the scale like below, seems to be falling like a stone:

At it doesn’t yet take into account data from July, when the rate is reported to drop further from 16.0% to 15.7%.

What conclusions should follow is a matter of heated discussion and depends on whom you ask. The government will be happy to accept the credit for the positive trend, while the unemployed and casual nay-sayers will point at increasing migration as the main culprit for this statistical miracle.

If you dive into peculiarities of the unemployment rate definition, you might think the latter may have something to it, for the indicator is not exactly intuitive. It is a ratio of number of the unemployed to the total economically active population. Then, the unemployed are defined as non-working people aged 15-74 who are actively looking for job and are in position to accept it within following two weeks, while active population is a sum of employed and unemployed people.

From this you can easily imagine scenario when unemployment rate would fall but little good would come out of it. For example, when unemployed people simply reached retirement age and left the active population pool, lowering unemployment rate but hardly helping the economy anyhow. Same effect, I suspect, could take place in case of migrations, but here the picture is so blurred that the experts do not seem to know any better so I will leave the topic for now.

Nevertheless, to satisfy my curiosity as to the topic question I found it most intuitive to simply take a look at the other side of the picture, that is, the number of people employed. These are the people paying the bills. Also, in contrast to the unemployed and the others, the concept of people employed seems more tangible.

Below the chart on how the number of people working in Poland has been changing: (read more…)

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Is there anything wrong with having all the answers at your fingerprints? You don’t know, you type, and Google tells you, or you go straight to Wikipedia.

I use Google News on a daily basis to lookup my favorite topics. Hundeds of news sources there, but they say the same thing most of the time. For fresh view, I wait for articles by Carr or Andrew Orlowski, who, by the way, wrote the piece in Guardian which inspired this post: A thirst for knowledge.

Britannica’s president Jorge Cauz identifies a homogeneity online he finds unsettling. “Internet discourse has the ability to negate the diversity of voices, and no one can differentiate between truth and myth,” he says.

How to avoid being another mirror in the hall of mirrors? With such amount of information sources at hand, it’s difficult to go back and do thinking on your own:

“It’s a false supposition we can endlessly delay having to interpret and judge things by stacking more and more bits of data in front of us,” he says. “That data is a comfort blanket in a way – we all do this. People are becoming addicted to getting more information all the time.

Accumulating information is now easier, and thinking is difficult. You would expect that critical insight will rise in price, since it became so scarce now. On the other hand, when the free is (seems?) good enough most of the time, few will pay premium for a quality content.

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NYT article by Steve Lohr pictures journalism trying to cope with new search engine driven reality:

This Boring Headline Is Written for Google

Not that it’s only today that the profession is shaped by technology and marketing: headlines were always meant to attract attention, and telegraph invented the pyramid.

But now comes the Google and the rules change again. After the editor and the reader, the spider becomes third stakeholder that needs to be satisfied.

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Jon ‘Neverdie’ Jacobs bought himself a space resort worth $100k in a virtual reality known as Project Entropia.

Reading on, this new purchase may turn out to be a good investment in the end, as the owner..

..will be awarded 1000 apartment deeds to rent out to in-game players, 100 mall shopping boths and market stalls, all hunting and mining taxation rights, and operating control and revenues from event areas.

Project Entropia players are able to exchange virtual money to real currency in both directions.

Real estate supply is after all limited, so maybe virtual estate is the market of the future?

Who will pay real money for virtual stuff? The same people who were conditioned to pay for worthless diamonds..

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