Category: Change around us

radical changes taking place around us now

The education bubble and a few ideas to address it

Glenn Reynolds has an essay based on his new book.  See today’s Wall Street Journal – Degrees of Value: Making College Pay Off.  It’s the feature article in the Review section.

The full length book is at Amazon: The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself. I’ll be waiting for the Kindle edition, available next week.

Merely one tidbit from the article to illustrate the problem and one idea for transforming eduction to reduce the cost and retain the experience.

Continue reading “The education bubble and a few ideas to address it”

Is life far better than years ago?

Absolutely yes. In most measures, most people are better off than 30 or 100 or 250 years ago.

Life just keeps getting better and better when we look at things like life expectancy, health care, standard of living, number of people living in abject poverty (the portion of people world-wide living on inflation-adjusted $1 a day dropped from 42% in 1981 to 14% today), availability of air travel, astounding technology, and the rapidly dropping cost of that astounding technology.

That’s the overarching point of a new book, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality, by Angus Deaton. The New York Times has a great review: A Cockeyed Optimist.

Continue reading “Is life far better than years ago?”

More good stuff on surveillance – 12-23-13

Here is my eighth list of good stuff on our surveillance society that I’d like talk about but only have time to recommend with a quick comment.

  • Who do you trust? and
  • Lost sale for $4B worth of fighter jets

12-23 – Schneier on Security – NSA Spying: Who Do You Believe? – The worst damage from the NSA spying fiasco is the corrosion of trust. Continue reading “More good stuff on surveillance – 12-23-13”

How to destroy a newly legalized illegal industry: Tax it to death

How could you shut down the newly legal recreational marijuana market in states that have legalized the federally illegal drug?

Well, you could pour on the taxes and regulations so heavy the legal stuff is twice or three times the price of illegal stuff.

First, a disclaimer. I don’t have experiential knowledge of the pot market, legal or illegal. My knowledge comes from the computer screen.

Why talk about this?

Three reasons. First, it helps me learn about change taking place around us in new worlds I’ll never personally explore. Second, this specific issue will allow us to see in real-time the damage caused by taxes and government regulation by watching what happens to a new ‘industry’. Third, I expect the state lawmakers and regulators are going to get an unpleasant lesson in unintended consequences. This post will be a marker for testing the idea that regulators can damage a new industry.

Having said that, check out an article in Daily Beast by Nick Gillespie:  Pot’s Black Market Backlash – How prohibitionists and nanny staters are trying to keep marijuana illegal – or at least inconvenient.

Continue reading “How to destroy a newly legalized illegal industry: Tax it to death”

A long term perspective on the turmoil and change we see around us – The best primer I’ve seen.

The two best articles I’ve read that explain the massive shifts we are seeing in the economy were from Walter Russell Mead back in June 2011. Those articles put much in perspective and give a hint at a way forward. They were foundational to me starting to focus on the radical change taking place all around us.

The Death of the American Dream I compares the painful transition away from family farms to a suburban home funded with a cheap mortgage and paid by working a life-time job. We are now transitioning away from the model that has been in place since everyone reading this was a child. It will be painful, just as the disappearance of the family farm was painful.

Continue reading “A long term perspective on the turmoil and change we see around us – The best primer I’ve seen.”

More good stuff on surveillance – 12-16-13

Here is my seventh list of good stuff on our surveillance society that I’d like talk about but only have time to recommend with a quick comment. Check out the new Christmas carol –

ACLU – The NSA is coming to town –

 

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8pcWlyUu8U4]

and fictional illustration of the cascade effect in spying and also spying on the game world –  

Continue reading “More good stuff on surveillance – 12-16-13”

Opportunities are wide open in Williston – providing mailboxes as just one illustration

When I visited Williston in October, I had a wild idea of interviewing a provider of private mail boxes in town. Time didn’t allow any effort to pursue that idea.

Amy Dalrymple has published the interview I could only dream of:  Faces of the Boom: Entrepreneur delivers solution for those without an address.

Continue reading “Opportunities are wide open in Williston – providing mailboxes as just one illustration”

More good stuff on the open frontiers in space, education, and technology – 12-7-13

Today, twelve articles on education, space, and technology (including Amazon thinking about how to use drones to deliver packages).

Education

12-3 – Via Meadia – Private Sector Warming to MOOCs – Mr. Mead points out that massive open on-line courses Continue reading “More good stuff on the open frontiers in space, education, and technology – 12-7-13”

More good stuff on the open frontiers in energy and publishing – 12-6-13

 Today, three articles on energy and publishing.

Publishing

12-4 – The Business Rusch – The Fierce Urgency of Now (Discoverability Part 3) – Kristine Kathryn Rusch summarizes what’s been long discussed: the days of get it now or you’ll never get it are gone.

Continue reading “More good stuff on the open frontiers in energy and publishing – 12-6-13”

SpaceX successfully launches satellite into geosynchronous orbit. A very big deal.

On 12-3, SpaceX put a satellite into a high-earth orbit. The Luxembourg satellite operator SES will settle their sat into geosync orbit.

This is a major deal for SpaceX because it proves they can lift into geosync orbit. That means the satellite will appear to remain in the same place relative to the ground.  They have a lot of contracts to do so and can now try breaking into the market for lifting Pentagon satellites. Up to now, they have only lifted to low-earth orbit.

Two great articles today explain the launch:

As an accountant, here are some tidbits from the articles on the market and economics of launching payloads that caught my eye.

Continue reading “SpaceX successfully launches satellite into geosynchronous orbit. A very big deal.”

Simple, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic – a way to make sense – part 4

Previous posts introduced the simple/complicated/complex/chaotic quadrants of the Cynefin Framework and discussed how that can be used to analyze development issues.

(This discussion is cross-posted from my other blog, Nonprofit Update. I’ll put them on this blog as well because the Cynefin Framework is quite helpful for understanding the messy world around us.)

Implications for economics

This framework has huge implications for discussions of economic issues. So many areas come to mind that are actually complex but we treat them as if they are complicated.

Take just one issue – minimum wage.

If this is a complicated issue, then to make life better for people, we can just increase the minimum wage. Go to $8. Maybe $10.

Continue reading “Simple, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic – a way to make sense – part 4”

Upside and downside of the Bakken boom – in-depth article & videos

The Telegraph has a full length article on Boomtown, USA. In addition to a great feature in words, there are 9 videos, of about 2 minutes each.

Upside

The upside of the oil boom is incredible. Lots of guys are making $100K to $150K by working hard doing difficult work.  The article guesses there are 10,000 men living in crew camps. Each of them is making, by my guess, between $70k and $125K a year.

My guess is most of those guys would be making $40K to $70K if they were working back home. Assuming they even had a job. Most of them wouldn’t.

Business is booming. Consumer stores are crowded. Construction is going as fast as the city can permit projects.

Continue reading “Upside and downside of the Bakken boom – in-depth article & videos”

More good stuff on the open frontiers – 11-27-13

More good stuff on the open frontiers – 11-27-13

Education

Via Meadia – Winter for Higher Ed– How would you handle a double-digit drop in volume over the last three years? That’s the status for one-fourth of private colleges.  Add in high uncertainty whether the enrollment trends will change.

Space

11-26 – Space News – SpaceX Challenge Has Arianespace Rethinking Pricing Policies –   Continue reading “More good stuff on the open frontiers – 11-27-13”

More good stuff on surveillance – 11-26-13

Here is my sixth list of good stuff on our surveillance society that I’d like talk about but only have time to recommend with a quick comment.

We are not the customer; we are the product. Remember that when you are using services of any large internet company that offers “free” services:

Schneier on Security – Surveillance as a Business Model – Continue reading “More good stuff on surveillance – 11-26-13”

Simple, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic – a way to make sense – part 3

Previous posts introduced the Cynefin framework and described a bit of how it helps make sense.

Where it gets messy

Distinguishing between the complicated and complex quadrants is the biggest challenge.

As I ponder the Cynefin framework, I realize that distinction is the cause of many heated differences of opinion.

(This series of articles is cross-posted from my other blog, Nonprofit Update. I’ll put them on this blog as well because the Cynefin Framework is quite helpful for understanding the messy world around us.)

It is also the cause of many unintended consequences. I’ve talked about that a lot on my blogs.

Applying the solutions from the complicated quadrant to issues in the complex quadrant is the conceptual cause of most of the harm from those unintended consequences.

Continue reading “Simple, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic – a way to make sense – part 3”