The money quote: “[Superintendent Mike] Scott recommended the board approve the raise, saying it could hamper the district’s ability to draw good candidates for jobs and may push some to other better paying districts.”

And he’s absolutely right if all he is going to do is compete based on money.

It’s a great lesson for all of us running a business. Competing on price is a lose-lose proposition. It is all about why people want your product, not what it gives them or how much it costs.

Same for my town. Our schools don’t have to pay top dollar for teachers and administrators if we compete on other grounds: excellent training, incredible support, fantastic curriculum, exciting opportunities.

No one goes into education for the pay, just like people don’t buy products because of the price. So why are we making it about the money?

The events of the last few weeks surrounding Apple’s iPhone 4 and the antenna problem have bordered on hysterical, at least if you are in the Silicon Valley distortion field. There are various distortion fields around the country — movie industry in LA, media in NYC, politics in Washington — but it seems over the past 15 years the Silicon Valley field has grown to rival these others in size and depth and influence.

Here’s the reality: no one cares about this problem except Silicon Valley and those of us who are connected to that world but live outside it. And I think this Valley distortion problem has gotten worse. A decade ago there were strong technology companies outside the Valley: Microsoft dominated the northwest, Dell dominated the south, IBM dominated the northeast. Sure, Apple, Oracle, Cisco and the bulk of companies were in the Valley but at least there were outside voices.

Now these three behemoths have faded in importance and Google, a Valley company, has risen in its place. As if the epicenter of tech activity wasn’t squarely in the Valley before, not it really is.

Watching Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, berate John Gruber of Daring Fireball and MG Siegler, a TechCrunch writer, on air brought this problem front-and-center for me. It seems to go like this: If it doesn’t pass mustard with the technorati in the Valley than, by God, it must be lousy technology. Unfortunately the screwy nature of the Valley is as likely to render good tech bad as bad tech good, at least in how the rest of the world views it.

Arrington, if you missed it (video here if you have 20 minutes to waste), road rough-shod over Siegler and Gruber again and again, proclaiming loudly that he can’t make a phone call with an iPhone 4 while in the heart of San Francisco, a place where you couldn’t make a phone call on ANY AT&T phone, period. The entire time he does this while holding a Sprint Android-based EVO, a device that Arrington uses and admits gets 20-25 minutes worth of battery life. Not exactly a strong leg to stand on there, Michael.

What the world really thinks of the iPhone 4:

• Apple has sold 3 MILLION iPhone 4′s in three weeks.
• Only 1.7% of those phones have been returned.
• Apple has a 3 week wait, if you order an iPhone 4 today.

And Apple hasn’t even shipped the white iPhone 4 and will add 7 new countries in the next few weeks.

For some reason, I don’t think the antenna problem is as much an Apple weakness as a Valley one.

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Unless you are from Cleveland (I was born there but moved to Portland, OR in college) and are a sports fan of its teams, there is just no way to understand the emotions of the city right now. (And for those of you critcizing Dan Gilbert, you are absolutely right. It was silly and probably stupid but that letter was not aimed at players; it was aimed at Cleveland fans. And every fan in the city wanted to give Gilbert a ticker-tape parade just for saying it.) Some of this is about LeBron James but most of the reaction is to a lifetime of heartache, of almost wins and our players bringing championships to other teams and teams moved and hopes dashed. It is visceral and emotional and had absolutely nothing to do with LeBron leaving. Well, not totally anyway. It is anything but rational.

It is a long history of this. It is Michael Jordan’s shot over Craig Ehlo when the Cavs were the best team in the league, it is Jose Mesa imploding in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the 1997 World Series to an expansion team that bought a championship. It was about Earnest Byner fumbling on the one yard line that would have sent the Browns to the Super Bowl and John Elway driving 98 yards for a touchdown and the win in another playoff game with one minute left on the clock. It was about Bill Belichek cutting Bernie Kosar and Manny Ramirez winning multiple World Series’ in Boston and Cliff Lee and CC Sabathia facing each other in game one of the World Series last year both playing for different teams. It is about Brian Sipe’s interception in the end zone that cost us the Super Bowl appearance in 1980 and about 30 years of futile owners and managers who traded away championship players for over the hill nobodies. It is a little about LeBron James and the fact that our best hope for a championship in a long-time was unable to do it even when the Cavs surrounded him by five [actually, four as LeBron was the fifth] former All-Stars. And it was, most of all, about Art Modell ripping out the heart of the city and selling it to Baltimore in the back of an airplane (and then that team winning the Super Bowl shortly thereafter).

Rationally you and your commenters are right. The balance of power in the NBA has shifted to the players. There are four major teams in the NBA and the rest are also rans: Boston, LA Lakers, Orlando and Miami. Each team has multiple All-Stars who were brought together in circumvention, you could say, of the intention of the rules of the league. And I don’t think anyone in Cleveland would begrudge LeBron for saying he wants to win championships and he feels his best chance of doing that is in Miami with Wade and Bosh. He happens to be right, in my opinion, given how the NBA works. Even Clevelanders would say we have lost good players before and will in the future, too. Sure, the initial hurt feelings would have been that but that is not what drove fans into the street to burn LeBron jerseys. What drove fans into the street was the way he did it.

What did LeBron do? He signed a three year contract and, one year into it, started courting the media and talking about free agency, giving the impression he was just waiting out his time. He didn’t tell the Cavs until he was on the air, giving Cleveland no chance to sign another top notch free agent (whether they could or not), he did it with an in-your-face style that is completely not Cleveland, and he did it in the most narcistic, self-serving way. It was an embarrassment for the city and an affront to the state.

And given everything else, given all the close calls and stolen dreams, it was completely unexpected from a Cleveland native son.

15 years ago there were few choices. If you wanted to watch a movie without interruption you were stuck with premium cable channels, buy it at a store, a movie theater and places like Blockbuster.

Now I have these choices plus so many more. I can watch instantly on Netflix, download one from various sharing sites via BitTorrent, and rent one from Redbox or Netflix. A decade ago it costs me $4 to rent a movie. Now I can get one at Redbox for $1.

And so it goes. Yesterdays killer company becomes today’s roadkill.

So let that be a lesson for all of us. Stay up-to-date. Adjust to the competition. Don’t bite off more then you can chew.

Even focused solely on developing killer calculators for the iOS platform, it is more than a full-time job. Over the past few months all we have done is kept up with Apple, developing powerOne for iPad, re-developing for iPad and, approved by Apple last night, now ensuring iOS 4 and iPhone 4 compatibility.

But it isn’t enough to keep up. Our next step is to leave them all in dust. And so we begin to develop powerOne version 2. I can’t wait!

I believe very strongly that economic success is all about positive thought. I said quite some time ago on this very blog that fear drives the US economy like no other issue. When times are good, happiness drives the economy higher and every negative — wars, droughts, terrorist attacks, whatever — makes the economy dive. The inverse, I believe, is also true. In downturns it is the negatives that outweigh the positives.

A second belief is that the practice of economics is too complicated. Economists — and politicians — like to talk about the Fed and interest rates and inflation and deflation and spending money and tax cuts and all the stuff that goes along with it.

These are just levers and descriptors, though. To solve a downturn all we really need to do is to improve positive thinking.

So rather than a discussion of more government spending or tax cuts, we should be talking about American’s greatest fears, short-term and long-term, and our government should enact policies to fix that.

Personally, I am more concerned about US and state current and future debt obligations than anything else. I think we have spent like drunken sailors on shore leave for the past 25 years and it is time to pay the piper. I think it is time for a national discussion about what we should and can expect from our governments.

And for me I know getting our debt under control sure would improve my mood.