Your Citizenship Provider

Denis Bider reflects upon the founding of the United States 200 years ago as an "experimentation with systems of government".

He blogs about the dilemma of the founding fathers:

You know that there must be some good system of government, but you don't know what it is. So what do you do?

And answers:

You do the reasonable thing: create competiton. Instead of creating one country and enshrining a certain system into law, you create dozens of separate states; you say little about the organization of their internal governments; but you pit them to compete against each other to attract citizens.

That was 200 hundred years ago. Perhaps, it is time for another experiment?

Citizenship brings certain privileges and government provided services to people in defined geographic area.

But people are now beginning to relocate outside their country of birth for extended periods, if not permanently. Also restrictions on foreign nationals acquiring property are reducing the world over.

Then why should citizenship (or nationality) be closely based on a geographical territory?

Rather it should be more like membership to a club, that comes at a price and provides services to its members.

The Citizenship Provider would negotiate with large territory owners (nations, which may themselves be citizenship providers through their state) for residency rights for its members.

In time a market for citizenship, much like for insurance or credit cards should develop.

And the territory owners would have interest in developing their property in the hope of attracting more residents and charging appropriate rents.

Would it be too difficult to make this market work? If not, we have an alternative to expensive elections and the consequences of living with other people's choices.

 

Technorati tags: citizenship, governance, government, nationality, markets, democary, property

When the spouse is hotter

It's rare, but by no means uncommon for a piece in mainstream media to be the stuff that makes a classy blog.

For instance, in the July 9 issue of Time, Belinda Luscombe writes a delightful essay on the perils of marrying outside your looks or "cute-category".

As in so many other areas of discrimination, women face double jeopardy. Guys who marry a few rungs up the looks ladder are rock stars or rich or have, I don't know, beautiful penmanship. Women who marry up, well, they're deluded. Their husbands must be gay or have really bad bacne to even look at them.

When Your Spouse is Hotter than You - TIME

Picture from: http://www.padmalakshmi.com/

Technorati tags: Belinda Luscombe, Time, essay, blog

A Little Girl Speaking on Environment

Here's video clip of an eloquent speech delivered by a 12 year old girl from Canada at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development held in Brazil some years ago

The most eloquent speech on environment is, of course, the one that Chief Seattle made. I wish there was YouTube video of it, but here is a text link:

Chief Seattle's speech on environment

Technorati tags: Chief Seattle, environment

There's no customer loyalty in net shopping

I had been a regular customer at rediff.com, mostly buying books from them.

One evening about four years ago, I couldn't log into the site. But I wanted a book, so I logged onto Fabmall.com (now indiaplaza.in) and bought it there.

In years that followed, I never went back to rediff, because Fabmall was equally easy to use. I joined the Fabmall book club (nice discounts) and did all my shopping there.

That was till last Sunday, when at 6 pm I tried Indiaplaza, and their server was down. I typed rediff.com in the address bar, loss of discount not withstanding.

This time Rediff didn't ask if I was registered with them, only for an email ID. They accepted the payment by credit card, without fuss and sent a mail, creating an account in the process.

My book was delivered yesterday.

I should have been happy with the whole experience, except that I also received a mail shortly before the book was delivered:

You should receive your order between 29 Jun, 2007 and 03 Jul, 2007.

The mail provided a tracking number and a link, but this number was declared invalid at the Courier's site!

Hmm. This makes me want to declare the rules of business for net merchants who expect me to shop with them:

1. Ensure no glitch. 99% uptime is not good enough.
   
   Know what the best in the business can achieve and go for it. If there's a break down, say so on the main page, give an estimate of when you would be back and ask the customer to leave their email address, so you can get back.
   
   
2. Eight days in advance isn't customer delight.
   
   It shows that your information is unreliable. That the tracking number fails even as the package is being delivered only reinforces this impression.
   
   
3. Promising eight days later is wrong.
   
   Your business has an expected response time that your competitor sets and your customer knows. Promising less, even if you can meet this expectation isn't the best strategy.

 

Technorati tags: service level, internet shopping

Google must be doing something right

Of course, or GOOG won't be where it is today!

Apparently, everyone has discovered by now that there's money in the Long Tail. How much better is Google compared to its competitors in exploiting this opportunity?

I looked at the traffic to this blog (which sits firmly at the far, thin end of the tail) to determine Google's performance in this area.

Here's the breakup by source of visitors that reached Making Sense via search engines in last 30 days: 

Google Search	74.2%
Google Image Search	21.5%
Google BlogSearch	1.4%
Microsoft Live Search	1.4%
AOL Search	1.0%
Technorati	0.5%

Startling, isn't it?

 

Technorati tags: Long Tail, search, Google, search engines