Power Pal

I read an interesting article in USA Today a couple weeks ago while traveling. USA Today actually is pretty fun reading. Anyhow, the article was about the Argentine wine industry and how it has grown over the last 30 years or so. Sue and I have been trying out Malbec's from Argentina lately (including the Norton winery they mention in the article), so I thought it was interesting to read the background on the whole industry. Apparently the wine industry was already pretty big in Argentina, but they generally only sold their wines locally. But a part-time UC Berkeley economics professor put the lesson from Napa Valley into action. Napa was able to elevate their wines to be competitive with those from Europe. He figured, why not do that in Argentina? So he did. And he made an interesting decision in pricing the wine that demanded people respect Argentina's product. Here's an excerpt: By 1990, Catena had returned to Argentina and begun producing wines for sale abroad. As he

I read an article in the WSJ about a month ago about how Silicon Valleny should be able to withstand the next bust period. Apparently in the last bust between 2001 and 2005, one in five (or 20%) of people in the valley lost their jobs. That's a lot. Things have been picking up lately (the traffic keeps getting worse) and a bust period is likely in the next few years. Apparently this time, though, it shouldn't be as bad as last time. A couple reasons the articles sites for that: Start-ups are running leaner these days: It's cheaper to operate web start-ups because of cheap technology, "open source" software, and offshoring. Most companies aren't going public: A bunch of profitless Internet companies went public in the last bust, but they aren't this time around. So the common investor won't be affected. The downside of that last point is that most companies aren't going public but instead holding out for an acquisition by a big player like Microsof

I read a short article in the WSJ about how the utilities are backing a lawsuit to get auto companies to reduce emissions. Why would they do so? California has a goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across the state significantly, I think 25% by 2020. So, where does the burden fall? If it doesn't fall on the auto companies, it would then fall on the utilities (like PG&E). That's why they're backing the lawsuit to shift the burden to the auto companies. Simple self-interest.

I read this article in USA Today a week ago, but thought it was appropriate to write about it today given that I just gorged myself during Thanksgiving dinner. The article is about how many children go hungry or are at risk of going hungry in the U.S. One of every four children in New Mexico and Texas and one of every five in a dozen other states live in households that struggle to provide enough food at some point during the year. California is in that latter category of one out of five. That's absolutely amazing to me. I suppose I know very little about the problem of poverty in America. Interesting, cause my last post was all about income mobility in America. But indeed, there are millions of Americans, 35 million in fact (about 12% of the population), that fall into that "food insecure" category. The report found that 13 million children are at risk. It was nice to find that 15 million low-income children get free school lunches and 7 million get free breakf

I read two articles in the WSJ about income mobility in the U.S. One article was about how middle class blacks born in the 1960's are more likely to make less money than their parents than comparable whites. And the other article was about how incomes have changed over the past decade. In the latter study, they found that the poorest Americans increased their incomes the most while the richest declined the most. This actually reinforces similar studies from the 1970s and 1980s. The main take-away from the study is that opportunity and merit continue to drive American success, rather than luck, accidents, or privileged birth. The American Dream remains intact. Good to know. No need to increase taxes on the rich. The former study about blacks is pretty interesting as well. It looked at children born in the late 1960's and how they have fared in the late 1990's and early 2000's. It certainly confirmed with what was found in the other study about how the poorest students

Read in a WSJ article that Al Gore is joining as a partner with Kleiner Perkins to focus on energy and climate change investments. He said he will donate his salary and all his earnings to the environmental group Alliance for Climate Protection. Although he didn't say whether he would commit his earnings from future Kleiner investments (where the real money comes in anyway). It's really interesting the type of career switching this guy has been able to do. Vice President, U.S. House of Representatives, U.S. Senate, state senate, Nobel Peace Prize winner, activist. Admirable guy ... although I have to admit that I voted against him.

Finally getting around to commenting on this old WSJ article . Think back 15 or 20 years and the idea of buying tap water in a bottle (except for sparkling water) would have seemed pretty ridiculous. But that's exactly what most people do these days. To put just how ridiculous that is in perspective, I did a few back-of-hand calculations based on the following paragraph from the article: Coca-Cola Co., with a 36% share of the $106 billion-a-year U.S. nonalcoholic ready-to-drink beverage business, says it plans to build a plant that will be able to recycle as many as two billion 20-ounce bottles a year. Atlanta-based Coke won't say exactly where the plant will be located or when it will open. The company already has invested $41 million to build recycling plants in Australia, Austria, Mexico, the Philippines and Switzerland. But the move reflects a wider push by Coke to boost the amount of recycled material in its U.S. bottles to at least 10%, up from just under 5% in 2006. So,

I read a really interesting article in Knowledge@Wharton about what is called "The Resource Curse". It's an economic paradox in which countries that have substantial natural resource reserves, particularly in petroleum and natural gas, are actually worse off as a result compared to countries that do not have those reserves. The article primarily focuses on African nations that are major oil exporters or where recent oil reserves have been discovered. The cause of the paradox seems to be several fold (these are my conclusions from the article): Over-valued currency leads to decrease in exports - The export of oil greatly inflates the value of the country's currency, causing any other exported item to be uncompetitive in the global marketplace. Agriculture, manufacturing, or most other industries are at a severe disadvantage compared to neighboring countries. This has a substantial impact on the average, every-day African citizen. Single industry economy leads to atr

Continuing on my " cork " theme of postings, I read an article about a liquor store in Washington D.C. that is near and dear to my heart - Cork 'N Bottle . Apparently the new owners are trying to change the face of liquor stores on Georgia Avenue in D.C. by not allowing people to buy single bottles of beer. They're even doing wine tastings. Not sure how successful they'll be, but it sounds like a great idea to me. That area could use an overhaul. Long live Cork 'N Bottle.

I read a book review in the WSJ a few weeks ago. The book was about the cork industry. I'm not exactly a wine connoisseur, so I don't know much about the general industry. I do know that out of the many bottles of wine I've had, I've never come across a rotten cork. I was quite surprised to read the statistic about the percentage of wine bottles where the cork ruins the wine. Here's the excerpt: For a couple of hundred years, winemakers and wine drinkers understood that the wine in a small percentage of bottles -- as much as 3% to 5% -- would suffer from the contamination of bad corks (and, sometimes, bad barrels). The culprit was a chemical called tricholoanisole, or TCA. It caused wine to become "corked" -- that is, to smell like a moldy pile of damp cardboard. The TCA problem -- apparently originating at the early stages of cork harvesting -- seemed to get worse over the past few decades. But the cork industry, dominated by a handful of big companies in

An update to my post about Japan Needing More Babies . I read an article in the WSJ (a summary of an LA Times article) a few weeks back about the graying of China and the implications it will have on its economy in the coming decades. Here's an excerpt from the article: While China's population is relatively young, by the middle of the century it is set to become one of the world's grayest societies. Today, less than 8% of China's population is 65 or older. By 2050, that proportion will rise to 24%, compared with Europe's 28% and 21% in the U.S. In sub-Saharan Africa, the proportion of elderly individuals will rise to less than 6% from 3% now. Moreover, at 1.3 billion, China's population is impressive now but will be less so in the future. According to U.N. projections, most of the world's total population increase from 6.5 billion today to 9.2 billion in 2050 will come from sub-Saharan Africa and the Muslim world. India's population is expected to ove

In my quest to become Mayor of Mountain View, there seems to be hope for me yet. An American born Indian guy named Bobby Jindal just won the Governor's seat in Louisinia a week or two back. That's a pretty amazing commentary on how far the U.S. has come in the past decades. Just 15 or 20 years ago, David Duke (a leader of the KKK) was in the running for Governor in Louisiana. It was a landslide victory in favor of Bobby Jindal. So, to go from David Duke to a landslide victory for an Indian guy is simply amazing. Jindal has quite an interesting background, including a stint at McKinsey & Co. after he got his Masters degree from Oxford.

I came across this blog post and thought that a few of these ideas were interesting. Here are the ones that stood out to me: 2. Control your insecurities. Insecurities oftentimes come leaping out of a person's brain and mouth so quickly that the speaker has no idea what words he just blurted out. People that always have to be correct are insecure. People that constantly saying "just kidding!" after every single joke are insecure. People that respond to a joke at their expense with anger or insult are insecure. Insecurity beguiles confidence and weakens your Self. Becoming a better individual means accepting your Self, and not hiding it under the veil of insults, "just kiddings", or factoids. Either you accept mediocrity about your personality completely and without shame, or you change it. Period. If you're fat, either go on a strict diet and exercise regime or accept it and even be willing to poke fun at yourself. If you have a high voice, buy some tapes t

I read a few interesting articles lately on the purpose and objective of business schools in developing "leaders" or "managers" or "professionals" or "entrepreneurs". It's a pretty interesting debate when you consider how fiercely competitive it is to get accepted to one of these institutions. This article by James Heskett from HBS refers to a book that's being published this month about how business schools originally wanted to "professionalize" management the way that other graduate institutions have done for law and medicine and theology. But in fact, the real outcomes of these graduate business schools is that they produce people that are not interested in being managers, but instead interested in personal, short-term career opportunities and entrance into the elite networks that being minted at an elite business school allows you. Apparently the schools started out wanting to create "professional managers", but h

I read this great article in the WSJ about how blogs and social networking sites are being used by 20-somethings to push and fund their favorite causes. The article mentions how people are using these sites to push out donation requests to all their friends in their network. I recently learned about how these Facebook applications work and I can definitely appreciate the potential here. All of these are donation related though. I'd be more interested in applications where you're getting people to do stuff in the real world. Still very cool though. The laundry list of different charitable donation sites was pretty interesting. I can't believe there are so many of them. I wonder if they'll all remain independent or if they'll consolidate at any point.

Ok, so maybe these aren't as crazy as the $1 Billion House , but they're still pretty crazy. So out of these five homes that are vying to be the most expensive house ever sold, I'd go for this one - Tranquility : Tranquility - The 38,000-square-foot, nine-bedroom compound sits on 210 acres in Zephyr Cove, Nev., overlooking Lake Tahoe. Asking price: $100 million.

Just a quick update from an earlier post of mine about Terry Gou and Hon Hai Precision Industry. Saw another article in the WSJ about how the gigantic company I had never heard of is quintupling its investment in Vietnam to $5 billion. First off, WOW! That's a crazy amount of money to be throwing around. Second, Vietnam is heating up!

Read an article in the WSJ about how wine makers in France are trying to reclaim a lot of the lost market share to beer products by creating box drink versions of thier product. Seems crazy to me, but I could certainly see the boxed wine being useful at concerts, sporting events, on airlines, etc. But I've never bought a "box-o-wine" before. I wonder if I'd buy a sippy box of wine?

I read an article in the WSJ about how a lot of utility companies require their customers to pay their bills at check cashing chains if the customer wants to pay in person. PG&E is actually one of those utility companies. This may save the utility company money because they can shut down their own regional customer service and payment centers, but it also means that you're directing your customers into places that are pushing payday loans. A lot of these loans can carry interest rates in excess of 400% annually. I don't know what loan shark rates are like, but that's ridiculous. I'm not saying they should re-open their service centers, but at least send partner up with a reputable institution like a bank chain (BofA or Wells Fargo or something). I'm sure they'd welcome the foot traffic as well given most people don't go to branches anymore.

I read an article in the WSJ a few weeks ago about serial entrepreneurs and what it takes to be one. Here are some typical traits of these folks: Higher propensity for risk, innovation, and achievement Less scared of failure More able to recover when they did fail Recruited top talent from their previous ventures Acquire financing from the same source as previous ventures There was an interesting quote about why someone would want to start another venture even in the event that they were successful in their previous venture: By contrast, serial entrepreneurs' main job is the act of creation -- and thus they keep creating new businesses, often after they no longer need the paycheck. "Most people can't understand why someone who made $10 million would do it again," says Seth Godin, who founded Yoyodyne, an interactive direct-marketing company bought by Yahoo in late 1998. He's now running a new online venture called Squidoo, a free tool that lets users build Web p

I've been slowly making my way through the book Good to Great and just finished reading the chapter on confronting the brutal facts. The last story Collins relates in the chapter is about James Stockdale. Here's an excerpt from Wikipedia that summarizes it: In a book by James C. Collins called Good To Great , Collins relates how Stockdale described his coping strategy during his eight years in the Vietnamese POW camp. "I never lost faith in the end of the story, I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade." When Collins asked who didn't make it out, Stockdale replied: "Oh, that’s easy, the optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, 'We're going to be out by Christmas.' And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they'd say, 'We're going to be out by Easter.' And Easter would

I read an interesting article in California Magazine (magazine for Cal Alumni) about how much investment is flooding into Berkeley (via BP and venture capitalists) to do research into and to commercialize sustainable energy solutions. So what is the new "triple bottom line" I mentioned in the title of the post? Here's a quick excerpt that explains it from the article: Its members combine tech savvy with business skills in pursuit of a “triple bottom line” of social change, environmental benefits, and profit. Basically, you can bring about 1) social change, produce 2) environmental benefits, and make 3) profit while doing that. Lawrence Berkeley National Labs director Steven Chu believes the top two solutions to the energy problem are 1) energy efficiency and 2) harnessing the power of the sun. There are a range of solutions that fall into the "harnessing the power of the sun" solution. Here are the excerpts: LBNL director Steven Chu looked at controlling greenh

Read an article in Knowledge@Wharton about how VC firms approach their investments in today's start-ups that are primarily differentiated by their ideas as opposed to their technology. Because of Web 2.0, many new media companies can focus their efforts on developing a good idea that is going to gain critical mass rather than a new technology as there are many technologies that can be leveraged. An interesting exerpt about the current investment environment: For now, the VC funding keeps rolling in. PricewaterhouseCoopers' Money Tree survey revealed that first-quarter venture funding was $7.1 billion, the highest level since the fourth quarter of 2001. Of that sum, Internet-specific companies garnered $1.3 billion, the highest level in five years. While the initial public offering market has been difficult in recent years, buyouts are prevalent. In 2005, News Corp. bought social networking site MySpace for $580 million. Yahoo purchased del.icio.us and Flickr. Google acquired

I thought this short article in the WSJ was a nice, quick synopsis of the U.S. mortgage mess. The graphic is pretty nice as well. Basically, the sequence of events was as follows: As housing was booming, lenders made more subprime loans to unqualified borrowers (around 20% of mortgages were classified as subprime). The subprime loans were securitized and sold to investors (many of which didn't understand the real risk inherent in the investment as the complexity behind them were hidden by how simply they were packaged up). Delinquencies on these subprime loans remained low at first as home prices were rising. As home prices rose, borrowers were able to refinance their mortgages to continue to make payments. As the housing market leveled off, delinquencies steadily increased. Rating agencies have been downgrading all these investments and investors have no one to sell them off to.

Read an article in the WSJ this weekend about Terry Gou, the founder of Hon Hai Precision Industry - also known as Foxconn . The company employs 270,000 employees primarily in a campus in Shenzhen outside Hong Kong. The complex has its own fire department, book store, dormitories, hospital, swimming pool, and athletic complex among other things. The manhole covers on the streets read "Foxconn". An excerpt regarding the company's revenues: Hon Hai's revenue has grown more than 50% a year in the past decade to $40.6 billion last year. It is expected to add $14 billion in revenue this year. That is roughly the equivalent of Motorola's adding, within a year, the sales of CBS Corp. This has got to be the biggest company that most people have never heard of. Apparently Terry Gou hasn't taken an interview since 2003 as he believes the lack of media deprives his competitors of information and protects the privacy of his customers, which include Dell, Apple, and Noki

I read an article a few weeks back that seemed like such a great idea for one of those tear jerking, inspirational movies. The article was about how Liberian amputees, soldiers or civilians that were wounded in the many civil wars in Liberia, started a soccer league as a way to foster reconciliation, a way to reclaim some dignity for the amputees, and a way for the general population to change their perceptions of the amputees. Many amputees previously viewed as butchers are now viewed as heroes. Pretty amazing story. The video of these guys playing soccer is pretty amazing as well.

Read an article in Forbes about the best and worst school districts for the buck - i.e. what educational results do you get for the money that goes into the school district. Two of the top districts: 1) Marin, CA - $6,579 per pupil spending, 1133 college entrance exam 5) Montgomery, MD - $8,845 per pupil spending, 1090 college entrance exam Two of the worst districts: 89) Baltimore, MD - $8,599 per pupil spending, 1,025 college entrance exam 95) District of Columbia - $10,473 per pupil spending, 968 college entrance exam

Saw this article in the WSJ about how dirty airplanes are. Here's an excerpt: Still, the airlines say their schedules for cleaning aircraft haven't changed this summer despite the rampant delays. JetBlue Airways Corp. says its planes undergo a "maximum deep clean" once a month, same as before, a process that includes a thorough cleaning of the lavatories and galleys, vacuuming of carpets and cleaning of seats, seat trays and side walls. Southwest Airlines Co. says its deep-cleaning cycle is 30 days, too. AMR Corp.'s American Airlines says it also keeps a 30-day average. Continental Airlines Inc., like many airlines, says its planes also undergo an overnight cleaning, which includes replacement of soiled pillows and blankets, vacuuming of cabin floors and cleaning of lavatories and passenger seating areas. Between flights, though, the cleaning tends to be cursory. American says that it picks up trash and cleans seat-back pouches between flights, but that it doesn

Read an article in the WSJ about one of the top selling cars in Russia having one of the worst safety crash tests ever. The Chery Amulet completely crumpled in the Russian crash test. The video on YouTube says it all. Scary.

Read an article in the WSJ called " In India, a Retailer Finds Key to Success is Clutter " about how Indian consumers are more comfortable shopping in cramped, cluttered, noisy, often dirty environments instead of more sterile, organized environments that are common with Western retailers. Kishore Biyani has built India's largest retailer, Pantaloon Retail, by attracting Indians that have traditionally been only comfortable shopping in open, public markets. Attracting people to big chain stores carries unique challenges. Biyani talked about three different "types" of Indian consumers: Mr. Biyani divides India's 1.1 billion people into three types of consumers. "India One," as he calls them, are those with good educations, good jobs, and much disposable income. They also are the target audience for many foreign companies seeking to sell their wares here. Mr. Biyani estimates that such customers comprise about 14% of the total population. Where he s

Read an article in Forbes about how Jack Goeken is working on a company to popularize the LED lightbulb. The company Borealis Lighting (by PolyBrite International) currently have LED bulbs priced at $10 - $14 that will deliver six times the light per unit of electricity that an incandescent does. A 60-watt incandescent send out 13 lumens per watt, a comparable fluorescent 50, the LED 85. I can't wait until these are cheaper and hit the stores.

Read an article in the New York Times called " In Silicon Valley, Millionaires Who Don't Feel Rich " about how entrepreneurs in the valley with millions of dollars of net worth still don't feel like they're rich and continue to grind away with their jobs in hopes of making more money. I also read an article called "Close to the Vest" in Forbes about how Google has produced a ton of young millionaires that are cashing out and creating spin-off companies of their own. One excerpt at the beginning of the article: Mr. Steger, 51, a self-described geek, has banked more than $2 million. The $1.3 million house he and his wife own on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean is paid off. The couple’s net worth of roughly $3.5 million places them in the top 2 percent of families in the United States. Yet each day Mr. Steger continues to toil in what a colleague calls “the Silicon Valley salt mines,” working as a marketing executive for a technology start-up company,

I read an article in the WSJ a few weeks ago about how Facebook has internally valued itself at about $8 Billion and how it resisted bids to be acquired by Yahoo and Google. I just wanted to pause to consider how ridiculous that is. This WSJ blog entry also mentions that $8 Billion is about 267 times earning. An excerpt from the article about how old it is: The site, founded by a Harvard University student in his dorm room three years ago, says it attracts some 30 million active members, nearly double the previous year. This has led to rampant speculation that Yahoo or Google will swoop in and take it over. A continued excerpt that discusses offers from Yahoo and Google: Turning down suitors has already proved smart. Yahoo offered to pay $1 billion for Facebook in September 2006. Google was said to have offered more than double that amount shortly thereafter. Recently, board member Peter Theil indicated the company is worth some $8 billion, based on internal valuations. To put th

Read an article in the WSJ opinion section on Friday about how the United States is on the wrong side of the Laffer Curve . The Laffer curve represents the concept of taxable income elasticity - i.e. how there is an optimal level of taxation via a tax rate that would maximize tax revenue. The article in the Journal highlighted how the United States has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world - at 39.3%. That 39.3% tax rate generates around 2.5% of GDP in tax revenue. Compare that to Ireland which has a 12.5% corporate tax rate but generates 3.6% of GDP in tax revenue. How can this be? The reason is that companies have an incentive to move more of their operations overseas (e.g. to the Cayman Islands) to avoid the IRS's ridiculous tax rate. It's self-fulfilling in a way. The higher the tax rate, the more companies move their operations overseas to avoid that high tax rate, which means you need an even higher tax rate to make up for the loss in revenue. If you inste

What would a $1 Billion house be like? Believe it or not, the world will soon find out. Who would need such a home? Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries, is building a 570-foot-tall home in downtown Mumbai. An excerpt from the WSJ article: Whatever the price, it will be monstrous. Called "Residence Antilia," the home will have 27 floors, including six floors for parking (Mr. Ambani needs somewhere to put his 168 cars), as well as another floor for car maintenance. It will have a theater floor (with hanging gardens), a health-club floor, a floor for guest apartments, four floors for the family living quarters and some other floors for odds and ends, like airspace and "safe rooms." The roof is slated to have three helipads (his, hers and the children's), which the government has yet to approve. And the home is expected to have a staff of 600 people. Wow.

Just read an article in the WSJ about how Japan may consider an increase in its consumption tax from its current level of 5%. The reason - they need the revenue to cope with the aging population in Japan. It's a similar issue to that of social security in the United States. As the population ages and there are not as many children born (as a percentage of the population), there are fewer and fewer wage earners to contribute to social security payments. As a result, payments or taxes must be higher. Birth rates are a key economic measure to monitor when looking at the long-term challenges of supporting the aging population. To put in perspective how dire Japan's situation is, they are ranked second to last in terms of birth rate - at 8.1 births per 1000 population. Germany's in a pretty bad situation as well with 8.2 births / 1000 population. Some benchmarks from the CIA World Factbook: #1 - Niger - 50.16 births / 1000 population #119 - Israel - 17.71 births / 1000 popula

Technology is really amazing. We saw the opera Don Giovanni this past Friday at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts . It was broadcast in high definition live from the San Francisco Opera . The opera was simulcasted (via satellite) free to four different venues for a combined audience of 10,000 people. The other venues were in Davis, Santa Rosa, and San Jose. I never would have imagined such a use for technology, but it was really impressive. The opera house's next big experiment is coming in September where they'll be simulcasting the opera Samson and Delilah in AT&T Park (again for free!). The ballpark has the highest quality outdoor high definition scoreboard in North America. Should be cool.

Read two articles tonight that seemed apparently contradictory. One was an article in the WSJ today about how the Fed is shifting its focus from the benign inflation readings of the past few weeks (somewhere in the 1 - 2% range) to future inflation because of low unemployment. Makes sense right? Low unemployment means higher demand which means higher prices which means inflation. I immediately read an editorial by Steve Forbes in Forbes magazine called "Do Bad Economic Ideas Ever Die?" where he talked about how for some reason people still think that the ecomonic trade-off between inflation and unemployment holds. Here's an excerpt from the Forbes article: The current concern about inflation sadly confirms the staying power of bad ideas, in this case the notion that economic growth creates inflation. The Phillips curve, which posits that there is a tradeoff between inflation and unemployment, has long been discredited by events and academic research. Since Ronald Reaga

Read a few articles in the WSJ today about cars and it also reminded me of a show I saw on cable this past weekend. Here they are in no particular order: $3000 car - Nissan and Renault are teaming up to build a $3000 car in India. It should open up the opportunity for many Indians to buy cars that were only previously able to buy motorcycles. It will likely mean more congested roads and more pollution though. Sulfur Fuels in China - China is likely going to delay enforcing more stringent auto-emissions standards because its refineries don't produce enough low-sulfur gasoline. Energy in China - I saw a recent University of California Journalism show ( Frontline: Undermined ) on cable that talked about (among other things) the increasing appetite for automobiles in China and the impact it will have on the environment. Despite that impact, buying behaviors are not effected by "green" messages. The increased cost isn't justified in most people's minds. The segment

I read an article in HBS Working Knowledge titled " How Property Ownership Changes Your World View ". It's about an economic study conducted in Argentina that showed how owning property changes your view of the world. They found an area in Argentina where 1,800 landless families occupied an area of land that was owned by someone else (i.e. they were squatters). After the change in government in 1984, the state proposed to pay off the original owners and grant the squatters ownership of the land (subject to litigation by the owners to adjust the price). By 1998, 62 percent of the squatters owned land the other 38 percent did not. They conducted a survey of each group to see if the families would have different views. The results were pretty telling: Di Tella and his coauthors found that squatters with land titles believed individual achievement is possible by a margin of 31 percent over those who did not hold title to their land; the margin for those with the materialist v

You just don't get big, creative dance sequences in American movies anymore. The closest thing to a musical you get these days are Disney movies. I recently had someone forward me an old Bollywood clip . I don't know what time and place this is from, but I want to go there.

I came across these two new technologies from Microsoft and Google today. Microsoft Surface - It's a 30-inch tabletop display that allows several people to work simultaneously using just their hands without a mouse or keyboard. You can grab data with your hands and move information around between objects using gestures and touch. I've seen various versions of this in development. The new iPhone has some of these features as well where you can modify photos using touch. Apparently this is going to reach the market in Winter 2007. Pretty cool. Google Street View Maps - Google added an additional feature to their maps application where you can get a "street view" of a location that you've mapped. It's essentially a 360 degree view from street level that you can rotate and walk along. I think Microsoft Live Maps had something like this where you could virtually drive around a city, but this is much cleaner, much faster, and far better executed than Micros

I read a book review in the Wall Street Journal a week ago that was pretty interesting. I'm going to put it on my reading list as it seems both educational and fun. The book is called The Sushi Economy . The subtitle is "Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy". It's about the rise of the sushi industry worldwide and the many far-flung impacts it has (including the creation of a global supply chain and global demand for tuna).

I read an editorial in the Wall Street Journal a week ago titled "The Poor Get Richer" . It was basically about how the poorest part of our society has in the past 10 or 15 years increased their earnings more than any other segment of society. The findings are based on a study performed by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The CBO said that the main causes of the surge were a combination of welfare reform, expansion of the earned income tax credit (where people need to work to get the credit), and wage gains from a tight labor market. Cash welfare fell as a percentage of overall income while earnings from work rose after the welfare reforms put into place in 1996 under Clinton. Graduation rates have also been good for families with breadwinners, including those with women as the head of the household. There is still a real problem with chronically poor families though. But it's very encouraging to see that the welfare reforms are paying off.

Saw an episode of the Discovery Channel show Future Car and my jaw was dropping the whole time. In dealing with the sustainability issue of energy for transportation, you have to look at both sides of the problem - the source of the energy and the use of the energy. Two particularly impressive design concepts that we'll likely see in the coming years to use energy and resources better were the following: Loremo - a car that gets 157 miles per gallon of diesel. It could drive from Denver to L.A. (1000 miles) on around 7 gallons of diesel. That would take about 42 gallons of unleaded gasoline in my car. Unbelievable. The core idea here is that there is no point in driving a 150 lb human around in a 1.5 ton vehicle that is specifically designed in a way to be resistant to the wind. There is no need for the vehicle to be that big. So, make the vehicle as light as possible (while maintaining sturdiness) and make it as aerodynamic as possible. Great idea. Could be a bit scary driving i

Been reading the book "tuesdays with Morrie". I haven't gotten all the way through it yet, but wanted to capture a few quotes that I thought were interesting. "Do what the Buddhists do. Every day, have a little bird on your shoulder that asks, 'Is today the day? Am I ready? Am I doing all I need to do? Am I being the person I want to be?" (p81) I think I fail to reflect and meditate on life on a regular basis enough. It was one of my goals a while back, perhaps I should try it out. "Learn how to die, and you learn how to live" (p83) My take on this is that once you really truly accept that you're going to die, you also can start making choices about how you want to meet that end and all the things you want to do leading up to that. "Looking back makes you competitive" (p120 I love this one the most. If you really think about it, you really get competitive when you start thinking about how two people could have started at the same star

Read an interesting article in HBS Working Knowledge newsletter today about a new book that talks about reaching impasses in your life that require you to take a fresh look at your life to get "unstuck". I definitely feel like I've reached several of these in my life, so this article is pretty interesting. I suppose this is another way of saying "mid-life crisis", except that it can happen many times in your life. Here is an excerpt from the article where the author describes what he means by an "impasse": The meaning of an impasse, although it's usually first expressed as a failure or in an internalized notion of inadequacy, is a request for us to change our way of thinking about ourselves and our place in the world. At impasse our model—our cognitive map of life and of the way we're going to fit into it—is no longer working. We all carry a representation of the world, our work, how we do our work, and how we fit in and where we're going;

We watched the movie The Pursuit of Happyness last night. It's a pretty incredible story and one that really leaves you feeling humbled. You lose perspective on how easy (relatively speaking) it is to be successful if you have the resources to support that pursuit. It takes resources to go to college or continue your education. If you're in the poorer end of the population, how do you invest in yourself? You need both the time and the money, either directly or via access to credit, to break out of that lower-class, paycheck to paycheck lifestyle. That's the economic perspective on the movie. The one that really touches you is what drives people to improve themselves. In this case, it was all about how Chris Gardener was trying to succeed simply to provide a home for his son. I suppose there is no better motivation. Great movie. I highly recommend it.

Read an interesting article in US News & World Report about how other countries are able to manage different aspects of society better than the United States. There are about 30 different examples in the article, but here are a few interesting ones: Removing all street signs, street lights, and speed limits . Apparently by removing all of these constraints, drivers feel less safe while driving and hence drive much more defensively. It also gives them a much greater feeling of interdependence with other drivers and with pedestrians. Upper class buses . In Colombia, they created a high-end commuter bus line. Many upper middle class commuters use it and it is far cheaper and quicker to setup than rail lines. I would absolutely use public transportation to commute to work every day if it were more convenient. Graduated fines . In Finland, fine amounts (e.g. for speeding tickets) are scaled based on means rather than a flat rate. They take half a days income as a base and then u