The mid-term election was certainly a shining example of Democracy in all its imperfect beauty. The will of the people was clearly apparent. A President and his war were clearly rejected. The American political conversation moved back to the middle. The founding fathers vision of a government of checks and balances has been taken up […]
Last week the British Government released the Stern Report on Global Warming. As those of you who read about it know, the report suggested that, without immediate and aggressive spending, global warming will reduce worldwide productivity on the scale of the Great Depression. The report, commissioned by the British government is the most comprehensive study […]
Since the oil embargo of 1974, there has always been news coverage of OPEC meetings. Usually it is about raising prices or cutting production. These stories are usually accompanied by pictures of smiling or laughing men. Until recently these articles usually caused a negative reaction in me, as they represented the fact that a small […]
The dramatic increase in gasoline prices over the summer combined with the perception that oil revenues fund terrorism has created a new perception on the need for the U.S. to import oil. It is now becoming clear to a growing number of Americans that dependency on foreign oil compromises our security. In a recent poll […]
I sense a tipping point in the realm of energy and alternative energy. In an earlier post I strongly argued that we need to solve the energy problem to save ourselves. That was back in May. Since then I have followed the subject closely and think that we may well be approaching a tipping point […]
The stock brokerage business was one of the first industries that was fundamentally disintermediated by the Internet. In an earlier post I both wrote about the history of the stock brokerage business and about William Yeh, the Chairman of Sogo Invest. Yeh was the man who, by launching SogoInvest where active traders could take advantage […]
Disintermediation is a favorite subject here. Regular readers know that I believe that we are in one of those historical eras when the world gets reorganized. As I have defined it in earlier posts, disintermediation always occurs during these significant periods and there is usually a dominant agent of disintermediation that forces the reorganization. In […]
So, today we are now a country of 300 million people facing an uncertain future together. What are the issues that we will have to deal with as a country as our population grows from this number, and what can we anticipate as we look at global population growth? The United States currently has an […]
Tomorrow, October 17, 2006 will be the day when the population of the United States of America will become 300 million. It will most likely get a lot of coverage, as round, big numbers always have a fascination for the media. In and of itself it is a non-event, as why is the 300 millionth […]
A few days ago I was flying back from a vacation in Austria. On the first leg of the journey home, from Vienna to London, I flew on British Airways and, walking on to the plane picked up a couple of British Sunday Newspapers. When reading “The Sunday Telegraphâ€, evidently a respected paper, I was […]