How Much Is a Trillion?

With the Democrats taking power in 2009—and because this time around it looks as if the Obama administration will actually attempt to implement a genuinely left agenda—rhetoric is heating up. Hence not a day passes but some legislator is on television using “trillion” as another scare word. Overcoming my own fears, I looked at that [...]

Technical Support Report

Emphasis on technical. I was reminded this morning of Alan Turing, the gentleman who first proposed a test for Artificial Intelligence (AI). Here is a computer and a keyboard. Sit down and send a message to Smiley Face up on the monitor. No sooner did you hit the Enter key—or, rather, after a polite little [...]

Running out of Synergy

The merger was fed by heady ideas that did not quite pan out—that big online audiences would necessarily yield big profits, and that there were profound synergies to be had by owning different media. [New York Times, “Time Warner Plans to Spin Off AOL,” May 29, 2009.]
You stand on the sidelines and watch huge, very [...]

Climbing Mount Prosperity

A while back now I was looking up the biography of a playwright (Heinrich von Kleist) and discovered in the process the surprising extent to which, in the eighteenth century still, public bodies regulated trade—so much so that even opening a bookshop was a difficult endeavor. This reminded me of my historical studies in the [...]

Farmer’s Market

Saturday in May, and the West Park Farmers Market opened its annual season in neighboring Grosse Pointe Park, in Michigan. Brigitte and I got there a little late. The vendors were in various stages of demobilization. Indeed, as we were walking from our parking spot behind a building, a woman was wheeling a huge, bright-yellow [...]

The Walls of Thucydides

As he settles down to begin what today we regard as the first ever great historical account ever written, The Peloponnesian War, the “world war” of Greece which pitted Athens against Sparta, Thucydides looks back at the general state of Greece (Hellas) and gives the following summary:
[I]t is evident that the country now called Hellas [...]

The Self-Employment Army

This morning the  New York Times  featured a person described as a recovering drug addict who has become a yoga teacher at the suggestion of a rock star. I’m impressed. How many more rhapsodic labels could you squeeze into that sentence? Well, I could suggest one more. Right ahead of the phrase “yoga teacher” might [...]

Casino Fatal

Whenever I see the term “financial services industry,” it causes me to smile without much mirth—especially nowadays when my portfolio is much more ambitious than one share of Marley (see last post). I smile at a word in that phrase, the word industry. It’s borrowed from another realm where real things are actually lifted, steel is [...]

Hello Portfolio

Many years ago, just emerging a tiny bit in business, I managed to get my name in the paper. Within days I had a call from a stock broker eager to sell me some shares of stock. By coincidence the stock he was pushing was Marley, a leading producer then of industrial cooling towers—and also [...]

Issue v. Structure

During my dealings with Congress in the 1970s I came to realize that issues dominate the discourse at the cost of comprehensive solutions. I saw this early, and indeed complained about it often enough so that, once, a senior Congressional aide took me aside to clue me in on what he called the “political attention [...]