Cost versus Price versus Value versus Profit

People are way too confused about the differences between cost, price, and value. Cost is how much money it takes a business to make a product or perform some service. It represents the combined expenses of labor, materials, and talent as well as the prorated expense of overhead and access to capital. Price is how much money the producer or service provider wants from the customer in exchange for their product or service. The difference between cost and price is profit. Value is the benefit customers perceive they will get from their transactions. Cost, price, value, and profit combine in 16 different ways depending whether each is either too high or too low.

Fountain Pens, Ballpoints, and Rollerballs

While I love to have and use a fountain pen, I must admit that ballpoint pens are a superior technology. Ballpoints don’t clog. Their ink doesn’t dry out if not used. They won’t leak onto your clothes. They write on more types of paper. And other advantages I cannot think of right now.

But some things about ballpoint pens peeve me. My biggest peeve is the tiny globs of ink that don’t just look bad but cause sticky smears. Next the writer must put pressure on the tip. They just don’t glide across the surface like fountain pens. And most of the times, you must make a quick scribble just to get the ink flowing. Finally, when writing in cursive it is harder to join the letter tails if, like me, you use your palm to lightly support your hand and shift its position every two or three letters. While some brands are better than others. Bics are the worst. Cross IMHO makes the best. Cross tips write immediately (no scribbling) but they still form those annoying globs.

Fortunately there is another option: rollerballs using liquid ink. These are the best option for Super Big Fat Pens for aesthetics, convenience and function. From a purely aesthetic perspective they rival fountain pens. No globs. They come in a wide variety of colors and the slightly delayed dry-time allows you to seamlessly join letter tails. For convenience, no more scribbling to start the ink flowing. Be careful though, an open tip will bleed out against a porous material just like a fountain pen! Most importantly though, rollerballs meet the functional needs of people with arthritis because they require little to no pressure on the tip and glide easily across the page.

Having evaluated a wide number of ink cartridges I have settled on Montverde as the superior choice for my customers; although, I would love to hear back from you. 

My Business Principles

My business strives to build a total user experience around products uniquely suited to the practical needs of their users. My business refuses to compromise the essential function of any product for incidental benefits.

My business strives to provide elegantly design each product to match its intuitively obvious purpose. My business refuses to undermine the effectiveness of any product for the sake of superficial appearance.

My business strives to solve my customers’ problems in the most direct way. My business refuses to let ease of production take precedence over the purest expression of a product’s purpose.

Good and Good Enough

As David Foster Wallace observed, “Mediocrity is contextual”. Not everything needs to be perfect, only the things that truly matter. No one should suffer for the sake of aesthetics. No ornament, flourish or embellishment has greater beauty than the simple elegance of intuitive functionality. Never let an extra feature undermine clarity of purpose. Pursue excellence selectively. Remember, the dog that chases two rabbits catches none and perfect is the enemy of done. Make the essential excellent and let the incidental be adequate.

"Quality is never an accident" -John Ruskin

Good design makes it immediately obvious to anyone what a tool does and how to use it. Why do people navigate impossibly nested folder in their file system? Or click through a series of menu choices to change a setting? Whose fault is it when users push the handle they’re supposed to pull. People shouldn’t have to do some complex rituals to use their tools. They should be instantly familiar. Procrustes’s bed cripples the unfortunate travelers that sleep upon it. That is the horror that awaits the unwitting users of arrogant or thoughtless design. Man must not serve his machines.

Signs of On-Coming Depression: UFOs

I know that I'm heading into a period of depression when I start to become interested in all things bizarre and esoteric, such as UFOs, alternative ancient history, etc. At least I have warning signs.

The Romance of Angst

Existential angst romanticizes the lonely and ultimately futile struggle against complete annihilation. At the same time, it places the burden of finding significance on the individual existent. It is both a liberating and terrifying place to live, each day saying “yes” to a world grinding inevitably toward an eternal “no”.

At least that’s how I felt when for many years following that day on the train, the day when I admitted to myself that I no longer believed in God, I traded away the false hopes of simplistic Christian faith for the wistfully pleasant contemplation of my alienation from an indifferent universe.

Personally I think people can only support that seductive sense of the human condition in a godless universe for so long. Eventually the reductive view of Man prevails leaving atheists with the bleak conviction that human beings are electro-chemical reactions advanced by chance and necessity. We are only physical and purely physical things aren’t about anything; they just are. That perspective is literally dehumanizing because it dismisses as illusions the very things that make us human, such as rationality, signification, choice, and personal identity.

As I see it, hope is not about clinging to comforting illusions; but the choice to leave open the possibility that human beings are more than we think they are. It is about taking the existential stance that our capacity for reason reflects something fundamental about the universe (not a convenient instinct) and that experience can access facts about reality (a relation versus alienation). These are two ideas that lead me away from atheism although I did not realize so at first.