Left to His Own Devices

There are so many ways to make a living. Take this guy for instance.

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Green VC Stars

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There's a lot of VC money going into "green tech" projects these days - $2.2 billion in 2007! I read an article in Forbes about the next generation of VC's leading the charge. The bios of these folks is truly ridiculous. Here's an excerpt: This trio could get hired anywhere. Aileen Lee was president of her section at Harvard Business School. Trae Vassallo learned to program when she was 7 and at 28 cofounded a wireless e-mail company that Motorola bought for $550 million. Samir Kaul led the effort to sequence the genome of the arabidopsis plant and then built three life sciences companies from scratch. He's only 33. These three are among venture capital's new guard. That's kind of humbling.
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Graying of China

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The Poor Get Richer

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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.
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