This post exemplifies everything that I think is important about political argument. It displays memory (bringing up an issue that is more than a week old), data (actual information upon which to base a judgement) and context (puts the data in relation to other information). Also it overthrows some pretty appalling common wisdom.

Also, also, even if you bought the old “10% of the votes came from blacks and 70% of blacks voted in favour” story: YOU IDIOTS. WHERE DID YOU THINK THE OTHER VOTES THAT KNOCKED IT OVER 50% CAME FROM?

There are people in my business who took to the highest hills to decry the betrayal of black Californians, and to this day, are giddily noting that blacks sunk marriage equality in California, who foist the failure of marriage equality on seven percent of the electorate . I will not speculate on their motives. But let’s see how loudly they address this study. Let’s see how much ink we see spilled revisiting those assumptions. Or will it be on to the next calamity, where the blacks–or the Arabs, or the Latinos–can be trotted out and blamed for the failings of others. For the failings of us all.

photo credit: Peter Davis

Seth Godin argues that when it comes to transient or one-time transactions sometimes it’s better to let things go. It’s a rephrasing of the logic that leads to the tragedy of the commons. There’s another side of this coin. If you treat your jerk customers better than your good customers, eventually some of them are going to work out that they are better off being a jerk.

I used to work at the helpdesk of an ISP and due to some billing error, a group of people that were meant to have a 6 month free trial ended up getting free Internet until the company noticed, 2 years later.

In an effort to recover some of that lost income, we sent out massive back-bills to all of these people. Some of them paid without ever calling. Some of them called. Our instructions were that we should explain to these people why we were hitting them with a massive bill. Then, if they raised any complaint, we should waive it. If they thanked us for the explanation, the charge would stand.

The result was that pushy jerks got their money back and friendly people or people who didn’t bother to call at all (our two favourite kinds of customers in a call-centre) got charged.