David Acevedo's Blog

How do you know what restaurant is good? As I was walking through the food kiosks at Luquillo, a beach town in Puerto Rico. I realized that you look for the crowded one, because if the locals frequent it, then it most be at least decent, right? At least that's how the thinking goes. While food-poisoning looks imminent in that lonely restaurant with nobody in it. This is a type of group think. You crowd-source your restaurant decision because you don't have time to check each restaurant for cleanliness and audit their food, you go where others have gone to eat and trust in the wisdom of the crowds. Now sometimes you go off exploring too, and go check out that restaurant you haven't tried or that new place that opened. But when you're in a hurry, in an unfamiliar place, need to eat quick the lonely food kiosk just feels sketchy even if it's totally fine and the crowded one is just good. Why is this important? It isn't but it's a cool way of thinking about ...

This past month has been fun. Univision declared a celebration for Puerto Rico's independence, an event that hasn't happened. And the Huffington Post shared a racist tweet from the adviser to the speaker of the Puertorrican House of Representatives. In other news Canada has the same crime rate as Puerto Rico . No, no, I mean the BBC reports Canada has less number of murders ( 598 ) for a population of around 35 million that Puerto Rico has with just 3.5 million (around 1,000 ). But what's a factor of ten between friends? Yet friends of mine on Facebook still defend Puerto Rico as if it wasn't that bad. It was bad in 1993 when I finished H.S. and we had almost 1 murder per day. Now it's at over twice that. What's going on? From afar you have a different perspective that from inside. But all I'm seeing is the fulfillment of trends that have been a long time going. 1. Brain Drain . This was a problem 15 years ago, but it was pretty much ignored. N...

Kodak has filed for Chapter 11. Not particularly surprising, but kind of sad. Here is a great article on why Kodak failed to which I want to add an anecdote. In early 2001 I visited Australia and on the trip back (I think) I talked to a person moving out of Australia that had been a manager at a Kodak shop. By the 2001, developing of film had changed. It was all about scanning and digitalizing. Having just been in Japan I'd see that Fuji was all over scanning. So I wondered what Kodak was doing about that. And the woman told me nothing. She said that for years they'd been complaining to the central office about how expensive their development process was and that it wasn't even tied to digitalization. Their response was that "it's Kodak so people will pay more." Even then it was clear that developing was changing and Kodak was not being visionary about that. Unsurprisingly Kodak stores closed through out Australia. If they weren't listening to their mana...

I'm starting a Non-Profit in Puerto Rico in 2012 that will revolutionize entrepreneurship on the island through the use of mentors in the broad Puerto Rican diaspora and the Hispanic community. I don't know how to do this, and I'm doing it anyway. There is a Buddhist story about a man that is poor and living on a hut. Underneath the hut is a large cache of gold but the man starves for lack of money; not knowing the wealth he possessed. This is so true, for there is no worse poverty than the poverty of the mind , not seeing the options that could be taken is far worse than having no options . And this is what I want to see impacted directly by my Non-profit. Entrepreneurship is a state of mind . It's how one approaches life, failure and risk. It's not about making money, the same way the human body is not about eating, shitting and sleeping. Money, profits are necessary like food is to the body, but the Olympic marathon runner doesn't run to eat ...

I am marveled at how incredibly blind to the consequences of actions CEOs can be. I know it's impossible to predict certain things (Qwickster's spin off backlash was to be expected but the size surprised me) but some things are really easy to see coming. When Hewlett Packard decided to spin off it's PC business (see post here ) and kill it's webOS tablet, it seems it somehow failed to realized that the PC business is synergistic with it's printer business. This strikes of such obviousness that even Homer Simpson would get it. When people buy a computer from HP they are more likely to buy a printer form HP than say Canon which makes excellent printers but not PCs. Then of course the retailers that sell HP computer are more likely to want to sell HP printers too. So with no HP PCs to sell would they give the same priority to HP printers? Of course not. Now HP realizes this consequence . And are rethinking dropping the PC division. Honestly this feels like amateur ...

This is an interesting time for Silicone Valley CEOs. Yahoo fired their CEO, and now HP after the fall out of the previous CEO's decision to quit Hardware (read my previous post here ) they've hired Meg Whitman as CEO. HP has gone through many CEO's in this fashion: Carly Fiorina, Mark Hurd, and the last one, Apotheker. he total cost of ousting these CEOs has been around $80 million . Man, I wish I'd be getting anywhere near that money to get fired. Wow. Now with Meg Whitman, I have even lower hopes for the company. While Whitman will probably turn the company around back to profitability, she is no visionary. With the amount of money she poured into her campaign, she would've won if she'd had any coherent vision. Every now and then I hear someone say that the purpose of a business is to generate income or to put it bluntly "make money." Otherwise they say "you don't have a business." Well that's like saying that the purpose of ...

Law is one of the most inefficient processes of modern society. Still it's effective, all things considered. The inefficiency lies in the fact that figuring out what is legal or not is a complicated process that involves lawyers. Originally law was supposed to be simple enough to be interpreted by jurors but now you almost have to be a jurist to understand the law. This inefficiency is even used as a bargaining chip in many cases with the threat of "tying this up in court for years." How is that even possible? Law is not supposed to be obtuse, yet it gets that way. The law's complexity has driven the need for a highly sub-specialized class of professionals, that rather than be advocates or expert advisors are more like translators to the arcane practices and language of law. Have you ever read a contract and wondered what it meant? Then had it explained to you and you couldn't figure out why they didn't just said that, in plain language rather than th...

Brain Drain happens when the opportunities in a country or place for educated people favors them leaving permanently the area. I've noticed that Puerto Rico suffers from a Brain Drain since I was in college fifteen years ago, but now finally the unseen consequences of this brain drain are being felt. With the downturn in the economy many professionals have left (many to Texas) and Puerto Rico for the first time lost population in the 2010 census. Brain drain has seen and unseen consequences. For example due to a lack of internships many doctors are leaving the island to complete their training abroad and never return. In my family alone four doctors trained in the University of Puerto Rico Medical School are now abroad and likely will stay that way permanently. While moving outside of Puerto Rico involves becoming a minority in the larger US, that is not as much a concern for English-speaking professionals who are already familiar with American culture since they were kids ....

No clue why this need saying but this statement from House Representative Paul Ryan "if you tax some thing more you get less of it, if you tax something less you get more of it" is wrong. Not opinion. It's wrong factually. What actually happens is that there is a sweet spot . A place where more taxation equals less revenue. If you're above the sweet spot on your taxation then, yes, lowering taxes will bring in more revenue. Otherwise less taxation brings in less revenue. Simple enough, right? The sweet spot is where taxation is so high it's  discouraging whatever it is your taxing. Take cigarette smoking. Let's say you wanted to maximize revenue. Where do you want cigarette taxes? Low to medium so that more people will smoke more cigarettes and you'll have a bigger tax base. Of course that's not what we do with cigarettes, there we tax them heavily to discourage use. Ok now let's say taxes were a dollar a pack. Would reducing the tax to fifty...

I am not a very religious person. By that I mean that I don't display what is a very deep spiritual questioning and seeking I constantly do. Today I'll make an exception. America has become a divided country, not in the Left and the Right, but the rich and the poor. Somehow the rich have escaped scrutiny by the religious right, and have used the religiosity of America to out-maneuver more centrist or reasonable politicians. Not too long ago, Arnold Schwarzenegger was booed at a Republican convention (being held in California where Schwarzenegger at the time was the sitting Republican Governor) for doing nothing other than urging Republicans to go to the center. (I'm looking for the reference for this. Let me know if you know this speech.) So with religious zealots defending the right of the rich to be rich, I'd like to talk in religious terms today. The world Jesus walked on was one like today divided into two groups: the rich and the poor. Jesus...

Today I heard on the radio how the economy has so drastically turned on the former Irish Tiger that people are being pushed into the security industry since that seems to be one of the few growth industries. Ireland copied a version of the development program Puerto Rico followed out of the forties under operation bootstrap . It gave tax breaks to American Corporations that set up in Puerto Rico, similar to the way Dell set up in Ireland. Puerto Rico also made these tax-breaks subject to being located outside of the capital to encourage development in the country-side, which was a brilliant idea. Since Puerto Rico was mostly undeveloped in the rural areas and only the capital of San Juan and surroundings had been developed. This development program was abandoned in Puerto Rico by pro-statehood government because these tax-breaks would result in an obstacle towards statehood. This had an adverse effect on employment, though I think this was small considering the effect of the brain-drai...

One of the benefits of scientific research is that by being empirical or experimentally driven it avoids circular and endless discussions on what works or should work. You can just check it. You test to see what works. Jeff Bezos described in a Stanford lecture how Amazon utilizes this testing in it's site live to verify improvements. The ability to test which option is best increases efficiency as it cuts down not only on inefficient options but also on the time that would have been spent discussing the pros and cons of each approach. At Amazon this approach is called A-B testing. Where one option "A" is tested against option "B" and the results are seen immediately. This data-driven approach is what makes science edge out over other disciplines, and it's one that seems sorely lacking on the social sciences, where argument rather than data still reigns king. It doesn't matter that "trickle down economics" didn't have it's intended effe...

In Puerto Rico there were a few movie theaters: one in each mall, a few independents here and there, and the occasional chains. City theaters which didn't have access to parking died out as they did in most of America, but overall the segment was doing well. Then Plaza decided to build a lot more theaters. I remember when the theater in Plaza was only on the third floor next to the food court close to Sears and on the opposite side from the Gonzales Padín/Borders area. After college in those blighted days that I was unemployed in Puerto Rico with my Princeton degree (It looks so nice on the wall...) and lacked money to gas my car sometimes I begged for car rides from friends. One time a friend of mine, his girlfriend and I went to catch a movie, and I asked him for a ride since he lived near me. I ended up saving his car from getting robbed that night but more on that later. So Plaza las Americas the central mall in San Juan, decides to double the movie theater capacity even though...

If bankers behaved like doctors, how would the world be? If a doctor messes up, a life is endangered, and a lawsuit will likely follow. But if a banker messes up; what then? Lives are endangered is not in the same immediate way but lawsuits? Personal lawsuits? Never. A bailout is more likely.  People sometimes ask me why I chose not to go to Med School. It was a complicated decision, but let me tell you that the pressure a doctor gets not to mess up, because lives are at stake is staggering. A banker? Well nobody dies. They make more money, with less of the responsibility. But I don't blame bankers and wall street guys for feeling superior, after all they get paid more that probably anybody. And society seems to pay by value, right? So aren't they the most valuable... teachers conversely who steward you kids, and the future of this nation, well they are not so valued. Can you blame the bankers? If society can't get it's value structure correct; we can't blame those ...

The Hollywood studios created a small storm in a glass of water with this, but by moving the way they did the storm became huge, and has already swallowed up Blockbuster. The decline in DVD that saw me get laid off from my previous job in the DVD post-production chain is due to many factors but all of the factors were foreseen. None were a surprise and none could have been for-stalled. But in a good example of a communal pool where nobody has the incentive to help everybody, (that sounds rather reminiscent of Green Market's theory of the communal fishing pond) the individual incentives ended up hurting everybody. In Green Market's example a pond's fish stock is failing. It would be advantageous to all the boats in the area to reduce their catch for a few years and let the stock rebound less the fish stock could collapse. But lacking rather enlightened fisherman or regulation you don't get that. What you get is that as the individual's boat's catch reduces they m...