Power Pal

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...