Today I helped one of my superior spy on another colleague’s workspace in the network.  The spying does not involve any hacking or illegal activities.  All you need to know is where his files are stored in the network.  We suspect this guy is lying about his work progress.  In his status report, he claims everything is on-track, but we found out he haven’t touch his files for almost a week.  The network is the only place any work can be done relate to the project, so what has he been doing?

Spying others workspace is probably the worst way of progress tracking.  It violates the trust among colleagues.  In normal situations, I would rather have the objectives stated clearly, ask him to make a release of his work and assign someone to do the audit.  Yet, sometimes spying unavoidable and it is the last resort to get things under control.

The guy whom we spied on works in a remote office and is already laid off a few months ago.  His last day of work is the end of this month.  Somehow the managers high up think they can squeeze productivity out of him for whatever reason.  When we ask for more body, we got this guy suppose to worth two man months of human resources.  This guy is already fired, so we can’t threaten to fire him again for their poor job.  His termination package is not tied to his performance, so we cannot give any incentive for him to work hard.  Before he walk out of the door, he already got job offers with huge pay raise lining up.  Only idiots would think zombies can get any real work done.

In the old days when people buy diamonds, they have to equip themselves with vast knowledge of the jewelery so that they won’t get rip off by the shops.  They have to know how to determine the grade of the diamond, learn how to examine the rock in order to determine the fair value they should pay.  Now, diamond is getting more and more common, it has moved down market from luxury goods to commodity.  The economist’s definition of commodity is anything that is replaceable by another indistinguishable items with the same quality.  We don’t have to know anything about the physical appearance of the diamond, we just need to know how to read the certification of the diamond.  Each diamond has a bar code imprinted by laser, which corresponds to its certification.  All measurements of the diamond required to determine its value are listed in the certification.  Then price of a diamond is easily found in the open market by comparing the price of similar diamonds.  The certification system of diamond lower the trading cost of diamond.  As long as the consumers have confidence in the certification agency, there are less room for market manipulation by the middle men in diamond trade.

I wonder is it possible to set up similar certification system for jade, pearl and other jeweleries.  It is more reliable to price the jewelery with objective number than subjective impression on how good the jewelery looks.  On a second thought, why jewelery should have a price after all?  They are practically useless, so they have only psychological demands.  People want jeweleries only because other people want jeweleries, not because anyone need the jeweleries.  If jeweleries are just a proxy for people to show off how rich they are, wouldn’t it more efficient to simply show off your net worth?  If you are rich enough, you don’t need any jeweleries, your identity ellipse whatever you wear.  If you are not that rich, why waste money on jeweleries trying to impress the lesser minds?  Why not spend the money on yourself instead?