Friday, September 30, 2011
Sunday, September 25, 2011
VR: Redux
Ok, this is getting somewhat embarrassing already. Turns out I need to go to Kuopio in early November, so naturally I start figuring out what the best way to get there would be. And just to be fair, let's look at VR as an option. I punch in the trip details and I get the offers below. VR's ticket system does indeed seem to be very interesting as I understood that they have tried to imitate the airlines. One tip: if you imitate the airlines, at least do it properly so you'd maximize the profits. Screenshot below.
So, what we can see here is that VR has implemented three types of tickets. The "Perus" ticket, unlike the name might imply, is not only for the Perus Suomalaiset folk, but is the old 2nd class ticket, i.e. the regular train ticket. The "Joustava" ticket is the former business class ticket with added flexibility. And the new arrival is the "Ennakko" ticket for the early booker who can buy what is essentially a "Perus" ticket but with more limited options when it comes to making changes to the ticket. Now, why is the flexible economy ticket the most expensive? What's going on?
Additionally an interesting bit is in the trains themselves. I can leave Helsinki at 16:30 and arrive to Kuopio at 21:38 with the Pendolino and no need to switch trains. Or I can leave Helsinki at 17:12, make two train switches and arrive at Kuopio at the same 21:38 with the same Pendolino. The first two legs, however, are travelled with an InterCity 2 train and a regular, old train. So someone please tell me what the point of the Pendolino exercise was when the train that was supposed to improve travel times is actually operated at slower speeds than the older equipment.
Seriously, someone please put an end to this non-sense. Privatize the whole company as it appears that the government is impotent when it comes to making what is fundamentally a for-profit company work.
Edit: As a funny additional thing to notice is that the prices above are student prices. Blue1, a Finnish airline, is offering to fly me to Kuopio and back again for roughly the same amount of money that it would cost to get the Joustava student tickets. Oh, and the Blue1 tickets aren't student discounted...
So, what we can see here is that VR has implemented three types of tickets. The "Perus" ticket, unlike the name might imply, is not only for the Perus Suomalaiset folk, but is the old 2nd class ticket, i.e. the regular train ticket. The "Joustava" ticket is the former business class ticket with added flexibility. And the new arrival is the "Ennakko" ticket for the early booker who can buy what is essentially a "Perus" ticket but with more limited options when it comes to making changes to the ticket. Now, why is the flexible economy ticket the most expensive? What's going on?
Additionally an interesting bit is in the trains themselves. I can leave Helsinki at 16:30 and arrive to Kuopio at 21:38 with the Pendolino and no need to switch trains. Or I can leave Helsinki at 17:12, make two train switches and arrive at Kuopio at the same 21:38 with the same Pendolino. The first two legs, however, are travelled with an InterCity 2 train and a regular, old train. So someone please tell me what the point of the Pendolino exercise was when the train that was supposed to improve travel times is actually operated at slower speeds than the older equipment.
Seriously, someone please put an end to this non-sense. Privatize the whole company as it appears that the government is impotent when it comes to making what is fundamentally a for-profit company work.
Edit: As a funny additional thing to notice is that the prices above are student prices. Blue1, a Finnish airline, is offering to fly me to Kuopio and back again for roughly the same amount of money that it would cost to get the Joustava student tickets. Oh, and the Blue1 tickets aren't student discounted...
Friday, September 23, 2011
Something wrong in the land of VR
Anyone who's been a customer of VR (Valtion Rautatiet, the Finnish nationalized railway monopoly) in the past few years can fairly easily attest to the fact that the company has gone to hell. The most recent episode has been their failure in implementing a new IT system that has reached epic proportions as of late. But let's start at the beginning...
Operating a railway company isn't really rocket science. There are multiple facets to it, but let's stick to the transportation of people from point A to point B as that is the service that I mainly use. From my perspective I pay the company a certain amount of money so that it gets me from one geographic location to another in a specific temporal window. I don't care what the method is exactly, but I imagine that teleportation would revolutionize this business thanks to the radical reduction of time of travel. But anyway, my train trips consist of essentially two fundamental components: ticket procurement and the actual transport. On both dimensions VR has been fumbling with the ball.
Starting with the actual transport, to my recollection VR was decently good at operating its trains within the schedules that they had a decade or so ago. But over the past few winters, the quality has deteriorated. I mainly use the Helsinki-Turku track and more often then not jump off at the Salo station roughly three fourths from Helsinki to Turku. The travel time is typically around an hour and 25 minutes. It is not uncommon for the train to be 50 minutes behind schedule on a trip like that, which already brings it closer to 60% behind schedule. And that is when the train actually materializes and gets on its way. It's not also entirely uncommon for trains to not even show up, which leads us to another problem directly related to the business of transporting me from A to B...
Communication is in essence very much irrelevant as long as you provide me exactly the service that you promised and I can trust you to perform. If I can look at the schedule and platform information and trust that it is true, I don't really need other forms of communication with the operator. But when a train fails to materialize, there is a problem. VR has been getting the stick as of late for its inability to transparently communicate situations to the customers. It's normal that every once in a while something happens and causes problems. But then you should openly communicate what the situation is, what is being done about it and most importantly what is the impact that I have to endure. If you tell me that the train broke down and it will take 45 minutes to arrange another train, that is fine. I can then use the time to go do something else; purchase a magazine or get a beer at the station. But when you don't tell me what is going on, I have to work with the assumption that a train might materialize at any moment of time and hence I can't do anything else asides from waiting next to the track. More annoyingly there have been some occasions in which they have communicated a delay of e.g. 20 minutes. In one case I decided to pop by a store at the station and get a soft drink, only to return less than 10 minutes later to barely catch the train which had indeed showed up and was about to leave only 10 minutes into the 20 minutes given. I understand that these two demands of communication, if interpreted at face value, lead to a situation where the company will tell you every three minutes that the train will be three more minutes late ad infinitum. But if you actually think about it, VR should be an expert on operating a train network and hence one would assume that they would have the ability to give educated estimates on how long it will take to fix something. I've lived in Helsinki now for eight or so years and I'm able to give fairly good estimates on how long it will take to get from A to B with public transport at a certain time of day, assuming that A and B are within the areas I often go to. So VR shouldn't have a problem assessing how long it will realistically take to rectify the situation.
Related to the operation of the train network, VR has also fumbled with the procurement of new vehicles. They purchased a number of Pendolino trains, but those have been nothing but a source of grief ever since they started operating them. On the Helsinki-Salo route the Pendolino is only 5 minutes faster than the regular trains, and even that is only due to the fact that the Pendolino skips one stop on the way. Which raises the question of why even operate the Pendolino on that segment, since the Helsinki-Turku journey is not any faster with it. It has its uses on the longer trips to up north which actually do receive a fair amount of time savings due to the increased speeds... That is when the Pendolino is working. It appears that the train is unable to function properly when it sees snow. Also, it appears that VR is having its fair share of trouble in general from the weather phenomenon known as winter. Winters in Finland aren't anything new, so it is somewhat amazing that a "wrong" type of snow can severe the operations of a company that was founded in 1862 and most likely does know that winters occasionally happen.
Then onto the procurement of tickets. I absolutely hate to interface with humans in simple transactions such as purchasing tickets. Airlines have done a brilliant job of ensuring that these days I can even check in via a kiosk or even online with my phone at best and not have to endure the impotence of humans behind the counter. VR has, amazingly enough, had a fairly functional online ticket system from which I could send tickets to my phone or print them out and not have to endure additional pain. Unfortunately as of late I've been put into a situation where I receive free (as in beer) train tickets. Unfortunately I can only get the tickets by queueing at the station and talking to the lady behind the plexiglass. Standing in the queue today got me somewhat annoyed and I started measuring times. The five people on front of me in line took over 35 minutes to be served. That is 7 minutes per person, on average. There is no reason why it should take this long. If you use the kiosks (which aren't, by the way, working as of now due to VR botching up its IT system) buying a ticket typically takes you 30-60 seconds. It shouldn't take much more to tell a person behind a plexiglass to do the same. So that leads me to think that a) the system that the lady behind the plexiglass uses is too complicated or slow or b) the lady behind the plexiglass is too incompetent and slow. That normally wouldn't really bother me as I would never interact with her, but due to these "free" tickets I now must interact with her. Ultimately the problem should sort itself out as companies tend to make things more efficient over time to save money and increase revenue and it appears that the lady behind the plexiglass is a severe bottleneck. So you either automate her or lay her off and replace her with a more productive individual, who might be able to reduce the transaction time from 7 minutes to something a bit more decent. But, in the case of VR this won't happen because...
... VR is in fact a state-owned monopoly. Because of this status, VR will of course be a responsible employer and instead of having to be accountable to its private shareholders and make as much profit as possible, it will attempt to serve the "public interest" (see previous blog entry) better and offer safe employment and whatnot. And because of the monopoly, there is not competitive pressure to keep VR improving itself. In fact, the only pressure comes from VR's incompetence and the fact that at some point people will just decide that it's a better idea to use a car rather than a train to go from A to B. In fact, factoring in the delays and incompetent people, airplanes may actually start being significantly faster on domestic trips... And at best they are also cheaper already when going to e.g. Lapland.
Recently VR has decided that it wants to be an airline. Or at least use similar pricing systems. That should be a relatively positive note for anyone who has a degree in applied mathematics as you've just received another potential employer who will now employ you to tweak the algorithms ad infinitum. The rationale for this is of course quite clear: certain trains are especially popular. Like the 5 PM train out of Helsinki to Turku. This is always very full and unless you've reserved a ticket in advance, chances are that you'll get to stand or sit in the corridors. At the same time there are routes which are operated with half-empty trains, possibly due to the fact that VR needs to perform a function that is in the public interest and hence operate routes at times which may at best be uneconomical. So naturally VR wants a system to encourage people who can travel at off-peak times to use those trains and then charge significantly more from people who want to travel at peak times. Nothing wrong with that per se. The issue I have with this is that because it is a state-owned company and technically looks to do the whole "public good" thing, then I have an issue with the pricing scheme. People who are willing to pay more do not get preferential treatment in Finnish public healthcare and neither should that be the case with VR, if we strictly interpret it. If you want to act like a profit-seeking entity and leverage these types of approaches, then I feel that we should inflict some competitive pressure on VR as well by opening the railway system up for other companies as well. You shouldn't be able to cherry-pick in this way.
However, this brilliant plan to switch over to dynamic pricing models and new IT systems in fact failed very visibly. The system VR bought turned out to not scale, meaning that the whole ticket system has been in a state of havoc as of late with the primary companion, our old friend Accenture, coming out into the public media and giving statements along the lines of "We have no idea what is going on." So, again the plague of the public sector, i.e. the incompetence of playing the role of customer in IT projects, has hit again. To be fair, many private sector companies also fail in these types of large operations, but fortunately then they feel the whole impact themselves. With the case of government-owned monopolies, it's the tax-payer who ultimately foots the bill for this type of ass-hattery. I wouldn't say it's so much a problem with Accenture as it is with VR. Accenture is a profit-seeking company which of course lies and cheats in the offers it makes and ultimately churns out endless amounts of billable hours. That is precisely why you want to be very much on top of things and keep your consultants on a very tight leash if you're the customer. Otherwise they will bend you over the table and let you have it. Additionally, what kind of moron doesn't stress-test a system thoroughly, and more importantly what kind of moron does a complete roll-out of a new system all at the same time? If there's one thing I've learned about IT systems, it's that you want to do rolling launches where you start with updates to certain parts and see how it goes from there. At any point of time if things go wrong, you immediately revert to the old system to contain and mitigate the impact of your incompetence. But how does the super-team of VR and Accenture go about it? Yes, in the same way as our other old friend, Danske Bank... Hilarity ensues.
I guess I could continue onwards with this, but as one final note, I truly enjoy the pain that the lady behind the plexiglass inflicts on me. After waiting for over 35 minutes, she tells me that the ticket voucher I have from the Ministry of Labor is not valid. It has been made invalid overnight with no type of grace period. Then when I decide to pay with actual money, she is unable to comprehend a simple statement such as "1 student ticket to the 7 AM train on next Monday from Salo to Helsinki". Then when she finally is able to produce the ticket and I tell her to just give it to me, she insists on printing receipts and then placing everything in a paper sleeve before giving the pile of paper to me. Which is rather interesting as VR brands itself as a green company. I merely want the ticket and nothing else: why do you insist on throwing so much paper at me which I anyway will throw away...
Operating a railway company isn't really rocket science. There are multiple facets to it, but let's stick to the transportation of people from point A to point B as that is the service that I mainly use. From my perspective I pay the company a certain amount of money so that it gets me from one geographic location to another in a specific temporal window. I don't care what the method is exactly, but I imagine that teleportation would revolutionize this business thanks to the radical reduction of time of travel. But anyway, my train trips consist of essentially two fundamental components: ticket procurement and the actual transport. On both dimensions VR has been fumbling with the ball.
Starting with the actual transport, to my recollection VR was decently good at operating its trains within the schedules that they had a decade or so ago. But over the past few winters, the quality has deteriorated. I mainly use the Helsinki-Turku track and more often then not jump off at the Salo station roughly three fourths from Helsinki to Turku. The travel time is typically around an hour and 25 minutes. It is not uncommon for the train to be 50 minutes behind schedule on a trip like that, which already brings it closer to 60% behind schedule. And that is when the train actually materializes and gets on its way. It's not also entirely uncommon for trains to not even show up, which leads us to another problem directly related to the business of transporting me from A to B...
Communication is in essence very much irrelevant as long as you provide me exactly the service that you promised and I can trust you to perform. If I can look at the schedule and platform information and trust that it is true, I don't really need other forms of communication with the operator. But when a train fails to materialize, there is a problem. VR has been getting the stick as of late for its inability to transparently communicate situations to the customers. It's normal that every once in a while something happens and causes problems. But then you should openly communicate what the situation is, what is being done about it and most importantly what is the impact that I have to endure. If you tell me that the train broke down and it will take 45 minutes to arrange another train, that is fine. I can then use the time to go do something else; purchase a magazine or get a beer at the station. But when you don't tell me what is going on, I have to work with the assumption that a train might materialize at any moment of time and hence I can't do anything else asides from waiting next to the track. More annoyingly there have been some occasions in which they have communicated a delay of e.g. 20 minutes. In one case I decided to pop by a store at the station and get a soft drink, only to return less than 10 minutes later to barely catch the train which had indeed showed up and was about to leave only 10 minutes into the 20 minutes given. I understand that these two demands of communication, if interpreted at face value, lead to a situation where the company will tell you every three minutes that the train will be three more minutes late ad infinitum. But if you actually think about it, VR should be an expert on operating a train network and hence one would assume that they would have the ability to give educated estimates on how long it will take to fix something. I've lived in Helsinki now for eight or so years and I'm able to give fairly good estimates on how long it will take to get from A to B with public transport at a certain time of day, assuming that A and B are within the areas I often go to. So VR shouldn't have a problem assessing how long it will realistically take to rectify the situation.
Related to the operation of the train network, VR has also fumbled with the procurement of new vehicles. They purchased a number of Pendolino trains, but those have been nothing but a source of grief ever since they started operating them. On the Helsinki-Salo route the Pendolino is only 5 minutes faster than the regular trains, and even that is only due to the fact that the Pendolino skips one stop on the way. Which raises the question of why even operate the Pendolino on that segment, since the Helsinki-Turku journey is not any faster with it. It has its uses on the longer trips to up north which actually do receive a fair amount of time savings due to the increased speeds... That is when the Pendolino is working. It appears that the train is unable to function properly when it sees snow. Also, it appears that VR is having its fair share of trouble in general from the weather phenomenon known as winter. Winters in Finland aren't anything new, so it is somewhat amazing that a "wrong" type of snow can severe the operations of a company that was founded in 1862 and most likely does know that winters occasionally happen.
Then onto the procurement of tickets. I absolutely hate to interface with humans in simple transactions such as purchasing tickets. Airlines have done a brilliant job of ensuring that these days I can even check in via a kiosk or even online with my phone at best and not have to endure the impotence of humans behind the counter. VR has, amazingly enough, had a fairly functional online ticket system from which I could send tickets to my phone or print them out and not have to endure additional pain. Unfortunately as of late I've been put into a situation where I receive free (as in beer) train tickets. Unfortunately I can only get the tickets by queueing at the station and talking to the lady behind the plexiglass. Standing in the queue today got me somewhat annoyed and I started measuring times. The five people on front of me in line took over 35 minutes to be served. That is 7 minutes per person, on average. There is no reason why it should take this long. If you use the kiosks (which aren't, by the way, working as of now due to VR botching up its IT system) buying a ticket typically takes you 30-60 seconds. It shouldn't take much more to tell a person behind a plexiglass to do the same. So that leads me to think that a) the system that the lady behind the plexiglass uses is too complicated or slow or b) the lady behind the plexiglass is too incompetent and slow. That normally wouldn't really bother me as I would never interact with her, but due to these "free" tickets I now must interact with her. Ultimately the problem should sort itself out as companies tend to make things more efficient over time to save money and increase revenue and it appears that the lady behind the plexiglass is a severe bottleneck. So you either automate her or lay her off and replace her with a more productive individual, who might be able to reduce the transaction time from 7 minutes to something a bit more decent. But, in the case of VR this won't happen because...
... VR is in fact a state-owned monopoly. Because of this status, VR will of course be a responsible employer and instead of having to be accountable to its private shareholders and make as much profit as possible, it will attempt to serve the "public interest" (see previous blog entry) better and offer safe employment and whatnot. And because of the monopoly, there is not competitive pressure to keep VR improving itself. In fact, the only pressure comes from VR's incompetence and the fact that at some point people will just decide that it's a better idea to use a car rather than a train to go from A to B. In fact, factoring in the delays and incompetent people, airplanes may actually start being significantly faster on domestic trips... And at best they are also cheaper already when going to e.g. Lapland.
Recently VR has decided that it wants to be an airline. Or at least use similar pricing systems. That should be a relatively positive note for anyone who has a degree in applied mathematics as you've just received another potential employer who will now employ you to tweak the algorithms ad infinitum. The rationale for this is of course quite clear: certain trains are especially popular. Like the 5 PM train out of Helsinki to Turku. This is always very full and unless you've reserved a ticket in advance, chances are that you'll get to stand or sit in the corridors. At the same time there are routes which are operated with half-empty trains, possibly due to the fact that VR needs to perform a function that is in the public interest and hence operate routes at times which may at best be uneconomical. So naturally VR wants a system to encourage people who can travel at off-peak times to use those trains and then charge significantly more from people who want to travel at peak times. Nothing wrong with that per se. The issue I have with this is that because it is a state-owned company and technically looks to do the whole "public good" thing, then I have an issue with the pricing scheme. People who are willing to pay more do not get preferential treatment in Finnish public healthcare and neither should that be the case with VR, if we strictly interpret it. If you want to act like a profit-seeking entity and leverage these types of approaches, then I feel that we should inflict some competitive pressure on VR as well by opening the railway system up for other companies as well. You shouldn't be able to cherry-pick in this way.
However, this brilliant plan to switch over to dynamic pricing models and new IT systems in fact failed very visibly. The system VR bought turned out to not scale, meaning that the whole ticket system has been in a state of havoc as of late with the primary companion, our old friend Accenture, coming out into the public media and giving statements along the lines of "We have no idea what is going on." So, again the plague of the public sector, i.e. the incompetence of playing the role of customer in IT projects, has hit again. To be fair, many private sector companies also fail in these types of large operations, but fortunately then they feel the whole impact themselves. With the case of government-owned monopolies, it's the tax-payer who ultimately foots the bill for this type of ass-hattery. I wouldn't say it's so much a problem with Accenture as it is with VR. Accenture is a profit-seeking company which of course lies and cheats in the offers it makes and ultimately churns out endless amounts of billable hours. That is precisely why you want to be very much on top of things and keep your consultants on a very tight leash if you're the customer. Otherwise they will bend you over the table and let you have it. Additionally, what kind of moron doesn't stress-test a system thoroughly, and more importantly what kind of moron does a complete roll-out of a new system all at the same time? If there's one thing I've learned about IT systems, it's that you want to do rolling launches where you start with updates to certain parts and see how it goes from there. At any point of time if things go wrong, you immediately revert to the old system to contain and mitigate the impact of your incompetence. But how does the super-team of VR and Accenture go about it? Yes, in the same way as our other old friend, Danske Bank... Hilarity ensues.
I guess I could continue onwards with this, but as one final note, I truly enjoy the pain that the lady behind the plexiglass inflicts on me. After waiting for over 35 minutes, she tells me that the ticket voucher I have from the Ministry of Labor is not valid. It has been made invalid overnight with no type of grace period. Then when I decide to pay with actual money, she is unable to comprehend a simple statement such as "1 student ticket to the 7 AM train on next Monday from Salo to Helsinki". Then when she finally is able to produce the ticket and I tell her to just give it to me, she insists on printing receipts and then placing everything in a paper sleeve before giving the pile of paper to me. Which is rather interesting as VR brands itself as a green company. I merely want the ticket and nothing else: why do you insist on throwing so much paper at me which I anyway will throw away...
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
The Corporation and The Public Good
Just a quick note. I put the documentary film named The Corporation on and have been watching it out of the corner of my eye. I've seen it before, so essentially I'm just passing time and know that it is very much anti-corporation in its agenda. But one thing that jumped up was in the first part of the film how they clearly articulate that the primary purpose and responsibility of a company is to create profit for its shareholders. The continue by contrasting this to the public good by stating that profits surpass even public good in the priorities of a corporation.
But, what is public good? Can it be quantified or measured? What generates more public good and what less? If Finland supports the bailout of Greece, does that create public good for the Greek and does it reduce the public good for the Finns? Is it a net positive or net negative change? With a brief amount of thinking, I tend to feel that defining public good is very problematic. If public good as a concept was clear and everyone could subscribe to it, very many problems would be solved. So in this context I think contrasting the profit-driven nature of companies with something as hazy as the "public good" is somewhat problematic. Especially when you consider at the core what companies do.
Companies are profit-driven by nature and by legal requirements and obligations to its shareholders. Of course companies can engage in many nasty red ocean strategy tricks and be very cutthroat. But at the end of the day the company must provide a good or a service to a person or group who is willing to pay money for it. If a company is unable to perform this, it will soon go out of business. So, if a company produces a good or a service for an individual who buys it and which results in the decrease of "public good", is it the company's fault or the customer's? I don't think it's the TV network's fault that TV is full of reality shows: I think it's us as the consumers who are to blame since we (or at least some of you) seem to want to watch them. But maybe the customer is tricked and doesn't know better. Maybe the state should look out for the "public good" and tell the individual that reality TV in fact decreases "public good"? But I'm not sure that it does. The concept of "public good" is most likely very much tied to the context, the values of the perceiver, and whatnot. So more often than not an elite, typically a political one, is imposing their concept of "public good" upon me. Fortunately, at least in Finland, it is often enough the case that the results aren't significantly net negative and occasionally they might be net positive so that I don't have to storm to the streets.
The environment is often considered important. It is argued that it is in the interest of everyone to reduce pollution and save the environment. I guess at the end of the day the planet itself doesn't really care what happens to it as it will always survive in one form or another. Humans, however, may not if we pollute the planet we inhabit to an extent where life becomes impossible. So from the perspective of humanity, preserving the environment in a state that allows us to survive is very much net positive. I think nobody contests that. But how to get there? Recently nuclear power has been decided to be opposed to the "public good". The people who want to further "public good" have instead seemed to decide that fossil fuel based energy production methods are a better way to go, or at least less net negative than nuclear power. But strangely enough there is also a healthy amount of literature suggesting that nuclear is in fact much better than coal, oil, or gas. In this case, again, putting some metrics down and trying to assess via those which route produces more "public good" might offer some more support on decisions. Perhaps a structured way of defining "public good" in this context would be warranted. Unfortunately I haven't seen this being done (then again, I haven't looked that much, so please send me links to articles if you know of anything interesting). So far my limited understanding is based on following the research of a friend of mine who seems to take a relative engineering view of the problem and writes pieces which appear quite transparent and coherent. And based on that I think that while nuclear may not be the ideal way to produce power, it creates more "public good" than the alternative of fossil fuels (based on direct deaths, CO2 emissions, cost, ...).
Linking back to the original point, as it's very much unclear in the power discourse what is in the interest of the public, declaring that companies are bad for putting profits ahead of the "public good" seems somewhat childish, especially when it seems that very often these two in fact appear to correlate. Especially when you consider the alternative proposed, i.e. public ownership. For some strange reason a strong government tends to historically lead to increased centralization of power and hey, let's face it, nothing bad has ever come out of that. No government has ever oppressed its citizens. Sounds like a brilliant idea. Let's look at the shades of gray a bit more, shall we?
But, what is public good? Can it be quantified or measured? What generates more public good and what less? If Finland supports the bailout of Greece, does that create public good for the Greek and does it reduce the public good for the Finns? Is it a net positive or net negative change? With a brief amount of thinking, I tend to feel that defining public good is very problematic. If public good as a concept was clear and everyone could subscribe to it, very many problems would be solved. So in this context I think contrasting the profit-driven nature of companies with something as hazy as the "public good" is somewhat problematic. Especially when you consider at the core what companies do.
Companies are profit-driven by nature and by legal requirements and obligations to its shareholders. Of course companies can engage in many nasty red ocean strategy tricks and be very cutthroat. But at the end of the day the company must provide a good or a service to a person or group who is willing to pay money for it. If a company is unable to perform this, it will soon go out of business. So, if a company produces a good or a service for an individual who buys it and which results in the decrease of "public good", is it the company's fault or the customer's? I don't think it's the TV network's fault that TV is full of reality shows: I think it's us as the consumers who are to blame since we (or at least some of you) seem to want to watch them. But maybe the customer is tricked and doesn't know better. Maybe the state should look out for the "public good" and tell the individual that reality TV in fact decreases "public good"? But I'm not sure that it does. The concept of "public good" is most likely very much tied to the context, the values of the perceiver, and whatnot. So more often than not an elite, typically a political one, is imposing their concept of "public good" upon me. Fortunately, at least in Finland, it is often enough the case that the results aren't significantly net negative and occasionally they might be net positive so that I don't have to storm to the streets.
The environment is often considered important. It is argued that it is in the interest of everyone to reduce pollution and save the environment. I guess at the end of the day the planet itself doesn't really care what happens to it as it will always survive in one form or another. Humans, however, may not if we pollute the planet we inhabit to an extent where life becomes impossible. So from the perspective of humanity, preserving the environment in a state that allows us to survive is very much net positive. I think nobody contests that. But how to get there? Recently nuclear power has been decided to be opposed to the "public good". The people who want to further "public good" have instead seemed to decide that fossil fuel based energy production methods are a better way to go, or at least less net negative than nuclear power. But strangely enough there is also a healthy amount of literature suggesting that nuclear is in fact much better than coal, oil, or gas. In this case, again, putting some metrics down and trying to assess via those which route produces more "public good" might offer some more support on decisions. Perhaps a structured way of defining "public good" in this context would be warranted. Unfortunately I haven't seen this being done (then again, I haven't looked that much, so please send me links to articles if you know of anything interesting). So far my limited understanding is based on following the research of a friend of mine who seems to take a relative engineering view of the problem and writes pieces which appear quite transparent and coherent. And based on that I think that while nuclear may not be the ideal way to produce power, it creates more "public good" than the alternative of fossil fuels (based on direct deaths, CO2 emissions, cost, ...).
Linking back to the original point, as it's very much unclear in the power discourse what is in the interest of the public, declaring that companies are bad for putting profits ahead of the "public good" seems somewhat childish, especially when it seems that very often these two in fact appear to correlate. Especially when you consider the alternative proposed, i.e. public ownership. For some strange reason a strong government tends to historically lead to increased centralization of power and hey, let's face it, nothing bad has ever come out of that. No government has ever oppressed its citizens. Sounds like a brilliant idea. Let's look at the shades of gray a bit more, shall we?
Monday, September 19, 2011
Stockholm Half Marathon 2011
Well, the first and most likely last half marathon of this season is over and what can I say... The Swedes definitely know how to arrange an event. The half marathon in Stockholm was in just about every way better than its Finnish counterparts, and not least because I've managed to run my best times there. Everything just seems to work there and the overall atmosphere was amazing.
Related to my last entry about measurements, I guess it's only good to present some measurements from this exercise as well. My target time was 2h00m00s (my previous time from Stockholm was 2h00m21s, or something thereabout). This means 7200 seconds or 341.26 seconds per kilometer (or 5m41.26s) for 21.098 kilometers. And the result? 1h57m36s according to my measurements (the official time was 2s better, but as I took measurements with my own watch and the kilometer times are based on those, I'll just use the 36s one for the review of the run).
The chart below is probably the most relevant one, considering that I wasn't able to get my heart rates due to some technical glitches. The diagram shows the per kilometer deviations from the target time and the red line shows the average deviation from the target per kilometer over the entire run. The biggest thing to note is the profile of the diagram, which I think has slightly improved when compared to previous events. My main sin, as shared with so many other runners as well, is starting too fast and then tiring out when the going gets real. The positive bit is that I was able to keep the initial pace fairly well intact and at no point did I entirely collapse.
This time I was able to find the two hour pace runner and tagged along for the first eight kilometers. This resulted in the fairly accurate times for the first four kilometers after which the pace runners in fact sped up a bit. The seven kilometer blip is due to a drinking station hassle. The pace keepers started slowing down a bit at around eight kilometers to apparently adjust the pace back to the two hour target, but considering the relatively good feeling I continued going at my own pace and decided that as long as the pace runners don't catch me, I'll be very well off in respect to my target.
One thing that separates Stockholm from Helsinki is that the amount of entertainment along the course is significantly higher. I didn't keep exact count, but I think there were five or so DJs spread along the course and two or three live orchestras playing music. This was in fact very helpful in keeping up the pace and positive mood during the mid part of the event. During the 18th kilometer my run started dragging a bit as can be seen from the diagram. It turns out, however, that Prodigy's latest album is a very decent approach to keeping the pace at least somewhat reasonable after switching to defensive running and changing the focus from running as quickly as possible to ensuring that the original target is at least met. And of course the fact that the last kilometer or two of the track were surrounded by people cheering you on helped as well. Overall the run was surprisingly enjoyable, especially when compared to the HCR'10 and Espoo Rantamaraton fiascos of last year.
Finally, here are some of the official statistics from the organizers for my run:
Related to my last entry about measurements, I guess it's only good to present some measurements from this exercise as well. My target time was 2h00m00s (my previous time from Stockholm was 2h00m21s, or something thereabout). This means 7200 seconds or 341.26 seconds per kilometer (or 5m41.26s) for 21.098 kilometers. And the result? 1h57m36s according to my measurements (the official time was 2s better, but as I took measurements with my own watch and the kilometer times are based on those, I'll just use the 36s one for the review of the run).
The chart below is probably the most relevant one, considering that I wasn't able to get my heart rates due to some technical glitches. The diagram shows the per kilometer deviations from the target time and the red line shows the average deviation from the target per kilometer over the entire run. The biggest thing to note is the profile of the diagram, which I think has slightly improved when compared to previous events. My main sin, as shared with so many other runners as well, is starting too fast and then tiring out when the going gets real. The positive bit is that I was able to keep the initial pace fairly well intact and at no point did I entirely collapse.
One thing that separates Stockholm from Helsinki is that the amount of entertainment along the course is significantly higher. I didn't keep exact count, but I think there were five or so DJs spread along the course and two or three live orchestras playing music. This was in fact very helpful in keeping up the pace and positive mood during the mid part of the event. During the 18th kilometer my run started dragging a bit as can be seen from the diagram. It turns out, however, that Prodigy's latest album is a very decent approach to keeping the pace at least somewhat reasonable after switching to defensive running and changing the focus from running as quickly as possible to ensuring that the original target is at least met. And of course the fact that the last kilometer or two of the track were surrounded by people cheering you on helped as well. Overall the run was surprisingly enjoyable, especially when compared to the HCR'10 and Espoo Rantamaraton fiascos of last year.
Finally, here are some of the official statistics from the organizers for my run:
| Split | time | diff | min/km | km/h | place |
| 5K | 0.28.17 | 28.17 | 05.40 | 10.61 | 5869 |
| 10K | 0.55.18 | 27.01 | 05.25 | 11.10 | 5280 |
| 15K | 1.21.42 | 26.24 | 05.17 | 11.37 | 4843 |
| 20K | 1.51.06 | 29.24 | 05.53 | 10.20 | 4937 |
| Finish | 1.57.34 | 06.28 | 05.54 | 10.18 | 5086 |
Overall there were about 10500 or so runners, so in that respect I'm also relatively satisfied that I finished in good mid-range territory ranking-wise. The next steps from here will be to try to solidify my running and try to be able to consistently run sub-2 hour times. I don't hold any serious expectations of being able to improve my time too drastically and don't really even hold that as a priority. For the rest of the winter I think my focus will be on learning how to swim. Additionally a classmate of mine also suggested taking up Savate, which I at least tentatively agreed to. So, essentially the goals for next year will most likely be to run at least one half-marathon with a target time of less than two hours (ideally matching 1h57m34s or faster) and to complete a sprint triathlon with no specific other target (if I'm not able to find a suitable triathlon from Finland to try, then I'll just test out the triathlon by myself to see how that feels). It may be also reasonable to revisit these targets early next year to see what the feeling then is and possibly revise them as needed, depending on e.g. how the swimming goes.
But for now I'm just going to kick back for a moment and try to get my legs back into shape again.
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Measurements
One thing I've learned over the years is that I can't trust myself. We humans tend to be absolutely terrible at many things. Our yearning for causality and stories leads us to make conclusions which actually don't hold true under closer inspection. We are influenced by feelings of fear and greed and often succumb to hubris. So it's no wonder why it seems that the life of a typical person is very much a tragicomedy.
To tackle the above, I've been trying to impose some structure in my life via quick and easy exercises. In a separate blog I'm documenting the year of my life from a daily financial perspective: how do I spend money, are there any easily observable trends, and so on. In HeiaHeia I try to track my exercises. And recently Google Docs Spreadsheets combined with forms and linked to the home screen of my iPhone provides me with an easy, quick, and flexible framework to start tracking anything with relative ease. The point here is that gathering data is critical to be able to do any type of educated decisions. Having a hypothesis about what to change to improve a bit in your life is fine, but if you don't have any way to judge whether or not the results materialize and are what you wanted, it's relatively pointless to invest any effort into change.
On the other hand, gathering raw data and analyzing it also motivates you by giving very concrete and quick feedback with which to evaluate how you're moving along. Measuring the times of standardized jogging routes enables you to see how much faster you're able to run. Add a subjective measurement of how the exercise felt and you can start analyzing on a rough level what your strong points are and what are the potential shortcomings when running training for a half-marathon. Or tracking your spending enables you to find things such as how much money you spend on pointless things or in bars and how rigorous financial discipline is useless if you go splurge on an individual day every once in a while.
I guess ultimately this entry is merely a personal note to remind myself again that everything can be measured and just about everything should be measured. And once you start measuring things, you can start improving them. And that's good since at least for me happiness correlates relatively strongly with change achieved in a certain timeframe.
To tackle the above, I've been trying to impose some structure in my life via quick and easy exercises. In a separate blog I'm documenting the year of my life from a daily financial perspective: how do I spend money, are there any easily observable trends, and so on. In HeiaHeia I try to track my exercises. And recently Google Docs Spreadsheets combined with forms and linked to the home screen of my iPhone provides me with an easy, quick, and flexible framework to start tracking anything with relative ease. The point here is that gathering data is critical to be able to do any type of educated decisions. Having a hypothesis about what to change to improve a bit in your life is fine, but if you don't have any way to judge whether or not the results materialize and are what you wanted, it's relatively pointless to invest any effort into change.
On the other hand, gathering raw data and analyzing it also motivates you by giving very concrete and quick feedback with which to evaluate how you're moving along. Measuring the times of standardized jogging routes enables you to see how much faster you're able to run. Add a subjective measurement of how the exercise felt and you can start analyzing on a rough level what your strong points are and what are the potential shortcomings when running training for a half-marathon. Or tracking your spending enables you to find things such as how much money you spend on pointless things or in bars and how rigorous financial discipline is useless if you go splurge on an individual day every once in a while.
I guess ultimately this entry is merely a personal note to remind myself again that everything can be measured and just about everything should be measured. And once you start measuring things, you can start improving them. And that's good since at least for me happiness correlates relatively strongly with change achieved in a certain timeframe.
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