I grew up in the era of the Apollo moon launches. One of my earliest memories is traveling to Cape Canaveral and watching from the beach as one of the missions was launched towards the moon. It was pretty incredible.
Despite frequent moves and attending six schools between elementary school and college, science was in the [...]
We’re spending a billion dollars a day on the Iraq war. Elsewhere in the world, we’re having food riots, because poor people can’t get enough to eat. The U.N.’s World Food Programme estimates the food gap at $500 million. That’s half a day’s worth of the Iraq War to keep millions of people from starving [...]
It’s almost April 15th, that wonderful time of the year when we pay taxes.
And I say this time of year sucks!! It doesn’t suck because of taxes; they’re inevitable. It sucks because of all the whining people do about taxes.
People complain about taxes all the time. We’re pretty ungrateful, here in America. We have among [...]
It’s amazing. I always found it odd when applying for a mortgage that banks considered income, but not asset base. If I have a bunch of money and invest in an investment that’s growing in value by 33% per year but not throwing off income, they won’t consider that in deciding to grant a mortgage. [...]
The New York Times reported today that a system has been developed that would let us avoid vote fraud by engaging the populace in double-checking the vote. It’s a very elegant system, developed at MIT. Interestingly, it was developed by Ron Rivest, who also developed some of the very popular private key cryptography that underlies [...]
I was reading reports that Michael Bloomberg was rumored to announce his candidacy for President. A friend mentioned that he had reportedly said he would spend up to $1 billion to get elected (no sources were cited).
I was thinking: what would you do if you were going to spend $1 bn on a Presidential campaign?
Rather [...]
I was just reading an article in the Boston Globe about the trade deficit hitting a 4-month low when I stumbled across these two paragraphs:
In a second report, inflation at the wholesale level jumped sharply in July, rising by 0.6 percent, far above the 0.1 percent increase analysts had been expecting. The bigger-than-expected jump reflected [...]
I don’t like to get too political too often, since my Blog is mainly about business.
But sometimes, the depth of our current incompetence is just too great to ignore. We’ve repealed Habeas Corpus, our Congress just approved Bush warrentless spying on Americans, and it turns out almost 200,000 weapons in Iraq are “missing” (can you [...]
How much of our prosperity is driven by innovation, hard work, productivity, yada, yada, yada, and how much is simple demographics?
The Long Now is an organization that encourages long-term thinking. The have free seminars about long-term perspectives. I just finished listening to The Depopulation Problem. The author talks through many economic and social issues, all [...]
I’m not quite sure what to say. The Senate has voted to raise mileage standards to 35 mpg by the year 2020. U.S. auto folks claim it will never happen, as AutoBlog reports.
Is it just me, or are these folks crazy? Gas gas gone up 100% in the last 10 years, and 30% in [...]
