Margaret Thatcher on a visit to Canada

On A Visit To Canada
Trudeau’s government was extremely unpopular in 1983. Trudeau argued that the Korean Airliner incident with the USSR demonstrated the dangers when politicians were not in command. He felt that the responsibility was on local military commanders not the leadership. Thatcher responded that there was endemic incompetence on USSR’s communist system of governance. Thatcher met with Progressive Conservative leader Brian Mulroney but found that there was too of the adjective and not enough of the noun in his policy and actions. With Reagan’s visit Thatcher reiterated the sentiment that – in reality – the Soviets had nothing to fear from them since Liberal Democracies are peace loving.

On Lebanon and Grenada
242 American and 58 French troops were killed in a terrorist attack in Beirut. Two Shia Muslim groups took credit. In Grenada, US intervened in a USSR coup attempt. International opinions were negative towards with US. Lebanon led to Grenada.

Z World Detroit

This is a crazy Zombie Apocalypse idea from an entrepreneur in Detroit. It actually isn’t that bad. They need to prove that they have a winning team that it committed to making the business work. Hopefully they have someone who has managed DisneyWorld or a theme park on their board. It’s more comparable to a paintball facility than a traditional theme park, so you will have to look at paintball clubs and they scaling problem. The experience has to be fool proof (ie. no accidentally falling to their death while evading a horde of zombies).

That might be tough to pull off without a risk of law suits, and they will have to strike a balance between authenticity and safety. Also, Detroit is very cold in January so it’s likely that demand will drop during the harsh winters months, and so this is a season-based theme park which further cuts into revenue. If people from across the world come to experience the park, then how will Z World manage the volume of guests versus number of zombies? The cost of one zombie employee versus the fee for a guest would also be a concern.

It will be hard to scale when the entertainment is the zombie employees themselves. You have to assume that a guest who has become a zombie will relish the chance to act like a zombie as well. It’s possible that in the process of creating a Zombie theme park, you will have a giant hide-and-go seek game instead since some guests will not want to act like a zombie, as zombies are usually slow and not too sharp. Like a paintball tournament, I guess everyone will want to be the one survivor of Z World. Will the guests actually enjoy trying to survive this over 24 hours? It’s an ambitious project, I hope that it is a success.

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? Part IX

(IV) The Zero Sum Game within the Economy Is A Lie.

New wealth can be created by reinventing a business model. Godin believes that the pie (economy) is not limited, and does not delinate how large the pie could be. The example is Kim Berry of the Programmers Guild, a non-profit lobby in Congress to ban Visas for talent programmers from outside the US. For him, it’s a win/lose, not a win/win to have diversity and foreign competition within the US programming community. This is completely absurd since programmers can be anywhere, and still program via telecommuting. Also, great talent can create innovation and more productivity, this then leads to more demand, the programmers guild could grow tenfold by enlarging the pie.  The scarcity of resources might make it clear that wealth is derived from 1st resource acquisition, 2nd the specialists within finance, et cetere, 3rd the service technology and industries but Godin believes the pie can be enlarged, while Berry believes that there is a limited size to the macro-economic pie.

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