{"id":374,"date":"2006-06-09T12:38:25","date_gmt":"2006-06-09T16:38:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2006\/06\/09\/the-law-of-unintended-consequences\/"},"modified":"2006-06-09T12:38:25","modified_gmt":"2006-06-09T16:38:25","slug":"the-law-of-unintended-consequences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2006\/06\/09\/the-law-of-unintended-consequences\/","title":{"rendered":"The law of unintended consequences"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Came across an <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.sun.com\/roller\/page\/jonathan?entry=a_roof_in_midtown_manhattan\">interesting blog post<\/a> just now by Jonathan Schwartz, the recently installed CEO of Sun Microsystems, who says he was on an airplane with a senior executive from the hotel industry, who told him that flat-panel televisions had helped to <em>drive down<\/em> occupancy rates in the industry. Why?  Here&#8217;s what he said, according to Jonathan:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;Apparently the space savings and lower power consumption of a flat panel TV (think about it, they&#8217;re quite a bit smaller and draw far less energy) allowed hotels to skip having to put giant media cabinets in their rooms. <\/p>\n<p>And they could save on their total power (and air conditioning) envelope, as well. Which freed up space, power and budget for more rooms. Which led to a glut of new rooms.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Is that really what happened? That&#8217;s hard to say. The industry may have just built too many rooms because it was expecting travel to continue to grow and it didn&#8217;t, and this particular executive decided to blame it on cost savings from flat panels. Still, it&#8217;s an interesting theory &#8212; and an illustration of how the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Unintended_consequence\">&#8220;law of unintended consequences&#8221;<\/a> can jump up and bite you when you least expect it.<\/p>\n<div class=\"syndication-links\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Came across an interesting blog post just now by Jonathan Schwartz, the recently installed CEO of Sun Microsystems, who says he was on an airplane with a senior executive from the hotel industry, who told him that flat-panel televisions had helped to drive down occupancy rates in the industry. Why? Here&#8217;s what he said, according &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2006\/06\/09\/the-law-of-unintended-consequences\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The law of unintended consequences&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}