Crazy Green Companies

I read an article in Forbes about this company called Planktos whose idea is to dump iron dust into the ocean to cause phytoplankton to bloom and suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Also read an article about this company that is building a diesel rotary engine. Apparently it's much simpler than a piston engine and gets much better efficiency - 51 mpg.

Comments

Nine Prescriptions for Building the Duke Entrepreneurial Community

I think Duke can have one of the strongest entrepreneurial communities in the world. Are we there yet? Well, not yet. But there's a tremendous amount of momentum that I saw build in just the past two years while I was getting my MBA at Duke. While leading Duke's 10th annual business plan competition, the Duke Start-Up Challenge (DSC) , last year, I witnessed a near doubling of participation on campus in just a single year. The interest on the ground was clearly there and building rapidly. But now that I'm an alum, I'm looking back and wondering ... how do we rev-up the Duke entrepreneurial community even more? I read a great article by Daniel Isenberg, a professor of management at Babson, called " How to Start an Entrepreneurial Revolution " in the June edition of the Harvard Business Review. Isenberg outlines nine prescriptions for governments that want to create entrepreneurship ecosystems in their countries. Although he was focused on governments an...

Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano

I found this opinion piece ( Democrats aren't innocent bystanders ) interesting on how both Democrats and Republicans share responsibility for polarizing the electorate and undermining some of its faith in democracy. It references two other posts that were pretty good as well: The Disease of Delegitimization The Weimarization of the American Republic The second article is really long and heavy on history. But given all of the comparisons people make between the current times and those of post-WWI Germany, I found it interesting to dive in to understand where the comparisons are coming from and how close we really are. The short answer is that we aren't that close (phew). Seems like post-WWI Germany was incredibly fragile. This was a good excerpt that summarized it: So, unlike the 60s, you have a dynamic in which both sides are behaving like radicals, in which the establishment isn’t yelling “stop,” and in which oikophobia is more evenly distributed, relative to its Boo...

A Possible Solution to the Mortgage Crisis

Came across this one on Mankiw's blog as well (... someone has been stealing my WSJ's each morning before I can pick them up outside). Martin Feldstein, a professor at Harvard and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors for Reagan, had an opinion article in the WSJ yesterday that outlined a possible solution to the mortgage crisis. Criteria for the plan is: don't shift burden to taxpayers, don't force banks to eat all the losses, and create an incentive for homeowners to stay in their homes. The idea is that the US government would provide loans to homeowners up to 20% of their mortgage amount, with a 15 year pay-back period and adjustable interest rate based on the two-year treasury note. The whole thing would be funded by selling more two-year treasury notes. This would obviously not stop anyone from walking away from their home if they have negative equity, but it might prompt those that are worried about that scenario happening to them in the future to sti...

Power Pal

Search This Blog