The Economist On Transhuman Enhancement

The Economist magazine has posted their The World In 2007 forecast. It appears as though the Transhumanists are getting more press. Since the article is only looking into 2007 the predictions that are made can’t be too wild. Scientists are not going to “cure” death in the coming year. If they do it will be pure luck rather than anything anyone can predict. The article seemed to focus most on two topics: calorie restriction diets and brain enhancement. First, I think the jury is still out on calorie restriction for humans. Honestly, I don’t think it’s a solution. Have you ever seen anyone that is putting themselves through that? They are very weak, their bones are brittle, and their organs are near failure. Sorry, I’ll accept a shorter lifespan, thank you. I’ll take “living” over merely “existing” any day. Secondly, they talk about new drugs for brain enhancement. This reminds me of something I read about years ago in a book titled Megabrain by Michael Hutchinson. Nothing new under the sun here. Perhaps Hutchinson and those of us who read his book were just ahead of our time.

Technorati Tags: transhumanism, calorie+restriction, life+extension, brain+enhancement, Michael+Hutchinson

The Vehicle For Social Mobility

This morning I listened to a story on NPR Radio on a new movie about Beatrix Potter that is coming out. The movie interests me because my son’s room is decorated in a Peter Rabbit theme and, of course, we have a collection of her books. The part in the NPR story that caught my attention was a scene from the movie that they played where Beatrix is arguing with her mother about wanting to marry her editor who was of a lower class. Beatrix points out that they were social ladder climbers and should not put themselves too high above others who are “in trade”. The Potter’s were members of the merchant class. Putting some keywords together I Googled on “victorian merchant class”. I found this really interesting page that describes the merchant class (among other things) during this period of time in London. When I think in broad terms from a big picture perspective it appears to me that being a merchant has always been and most likely will continue to be the most effective way (apart from war and plunder) of gaining riches. In an effort to find a link to validate this I came across an interesting article by UCLA professor Deepak Lal. He points out that all through history merchants have been wealthy but not always respected. Additionally, he gives evidence that there may be a capitalist gene. In any case, it appears to me that the most definite way to financial success and social mobility is to acquire the skills needed for buying and selling. I think my absolute favorite book on sales is The Little Red Book of Selling by Jeffrey Gitomer. But, looking all through history to the Silk Road, to the emergence of the merchant class in Europe, to the rise of American capitalism, and now the emergence of China as an economic power one thing stands out. It is the people who travel to foreign lands to make deals and to buy and to sell and engage in trade that prosper. Globalism is a vehicle for wealth and social mobility if you wish to use it.

Technorati Tags: social+mobility, financial+success, Beatrix+Potter, merchant+class, capitalist+gene, Jeffrey+Gitomer, globalism

Cuba Will Be 'New Florida'

When the reign of the Castros ends and Cuba realizes the futility of its communist agenda the island nation will boom. With Fidel's health failing I think people are hopeful that such a change will come soon to Cuba. If this change occurs Cuba will emerge from poverty and become a vacationer’s paradise. The Cuban exile community will return and take their money and their American knowledge and values with them. American real estate investors will build a multitude of resorts. The wealthy and even not-so-wealthy American retirees will settle there. Heck, I might even go there to visit Ernest Hemingway’s house and smoke a cigar.

Technorati Tags: Cuba, Castro, Florida

Financially Illiterate America

I found this article by route of my morning check on the Drudge Report. The title of the article tells the story: “Report Reveals 2.2 Million Borrowers Face Foreclosure on Subprime Home Loans”. To just play with some numbers lets use the average family size of 2 adults and 1.5 children. Let’s be conservative and say that some of these families are just two adults, which makes the average family size of 3. Multiply that by 2.2 million and you get 6.6 million people. Divide that by the current U.S. population of 300 million and you get 2.2% of the population facing foreclosure on their homes. This is a grim figure.

Simply, there needs to be more control on lending. Clearly, there are people getting loans who should not be and because they are high risk they are paying higher interest which likely makes their odds of defaulting even greater. I can’t help but wonder if these practices are allowed to persist because of the former Fed chief, Allan Greenspan, whose economic growth policy was formed around housing growth. Are we sacrificing the long-term viability of our citizens’ financial health for short-term economic growth?

Another problem is education. Our schools do not teach finance as a subject. Year after year we learn math exercises and English grammar, but we are never taught how to manage our money. This is a basic survival skill in our modern society. Our education system is antiquated. In the past personal finance was not that complicated. You saved if you wanted to buy something and on the rare occasion that you borrowed the terms were simple. The world moves much faster now, partly due to the advances in methods of finance. In order to do business you need to know how to get access to money and the terms of how to use that financial tool. Finance needs to be taught as a part of the standard curriculum.

Technorati Tags: financial+literacy, education

Time: It's All About You

It seems like everyone is having a good laugh about Time Magazine’s selection for Person of the Year. I heard a funny commentary about it on NPR radio yesterday and I just want to share a link to it for anyone who did not get to hear it. It’s loaded with tons of references to things that you can do online and paints a ridiculous persona that almost seems plausible.

Technorati Tags: Time+Magazine

Is Alternative Energy A Black Hole For Investors?

I just read the article, Is 2007 the Year of Tech?, at Red Herring. Honestly, I didn’t read anything earth shattering. But one statement made by Paul Wick got my attention: “Alternative energy continues to be an absolute black hole for investors, in spite of Vinod Khosla and all these other people hyping the crap out of it. It’s always five years away from turning the corner. Whether you are talking fuel cells or solar power, it just isn’t there. It’s not economical. These people are kidding themselves if they think it’s just around the corner.” I think the problem is that people are looking for a silver bullet, one thing that will replace all fossil fuels. That’s just not how it’s going to happen. When it comes to most things variety is good. The same goes for energy. When you become too dependent on one source of energy you are setting yourself up for trouble. Becoming too dependent on any one thing, no matter what it is, is never a good thing. This is why you diversify your investment portfolio. This is why local economies suffer greatly when they become too dependent on any one industry or employer if market dynamics change and facilities close. I think we need to apply this same line of thinking to our energy policy. There needs to be variety. We are starting to see this happen with automobiles and I think it is good. For instance some municipal vehicles are running on natural gas or biodiesel. Individuals are using hybrid cars and are reconsidering electric cars. Hopefully in the future you’ll have more options that 87, 89, and 93 octane unleaded gasoline or diesel. Perhaps you’ll also have a choice of propane, methane, hydrogen, or an electric quick charge where the electric is pulled from a grid supplied with a combination of nuclear, coal, wind, and hydroelectric. This is not a far off reality, it’s happening right now. It will start with a lot of small companies then when the market matures consolidation will take place. The same happened for the oil and railroad industries (among others) it will happen here again. This time, though, we will be left with a more sustainable and less vulnerable way to power our world.

Technorati Tags: alternative+energy

Feed The World

If I have to hear Do they know it's Christmas? one more time I think I am going to barf. I wish I could remember the source, but once I heard someone sum up the situation very well. This person told a story about feeling how he had to finish everything that was put on his plate at the expense of his growing waistline. Then one day someone told him, “People are not starving in Africa because you stole their food, they are starving because of politics.” You see, we can feed the world. We have had the ability to do this for nearly 30 years. Buckminster Fuller declared this in 1980: “Think of it. We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all to feed everybody, clothe everybody, and give every human on Earth a chance. We know now what we could never have known before - that we now have the option for all humanity to make it successfully on this planet in this lifetime. Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment.” We have the food but it can’t get to the people because of the ruling government’s policies and/or war. Aid workers are leaving the Dafur region of Sudan because it is too dangerous and nobody is contributing sufficient armed forces to guarantee their safety. If the UN were to send forces to the area it’s likely that their mandate would be too limited to permit them to have any effect. I found an interesting timeline of the situation in Sudan at the UN website. It begins in March 2003. Still, a very recent entry, September 13, 2006, demonstrates my point. I really believe that the majority of people in this world are good and want to end hunger. Perhaps when we reach the Chaos Point forecast by Ervin Laszlo we will choose Utopia over Oblivion.

Technorati Tags: world+hunger, Ervin+Laszlo, UN

Communication Is The Key

When I think about the actual result of many popular, pervasive technologies I see communication as the common thread. Think about the devices that we personally own: telephones, cell phones, radios, televisions, and computers connected to the Internet. All of these technologies help us to communicate better, faster, and more often. The challenge for the present and future knowledge worker is to be the best one to leverage the power of these communication tools. Your ability to communicate will determine whether you succeed or fail. It’s interesting to note that Basecamp, the popular web-based project management software, focuses strictly on the communication even though there are nine knowledge areas of project management defined in the PMBOK: Scope Management, Time Management, Cost Management, Quality Management, Human Resources Management, Communications Management, Risk Management, Procurement Management, and Integration Management. This quote by Jason Fried, the President of Basecamp, sums it up: “We had an epiphany. We realized that projects don't fail from a lack of charts, graphs, tables, reports, and statistics -- they fail from a lack of communication. The fundamental problem: People don't talk to one another. So we set out to build an elegant tool that encouraged communication and rewarded participation.” The moral of my message in this post is that if you want to be a success in business, get your head out of quantitative analysis and figure out how to talk to people.

Technorati Tags: communication, project+management

Old Fashioned Nuclear Power

I was talking with a nuclear engineer over the weekend. I asked him if the new growth and interest in nuclear power was due to advances in pebble-bed technology. I recalled the concept from reading Peter Schwartz’s article in Wired Magazine, Nuclear Now. Contrary to all the buzz, this really isn’t the design of choice for new plants. Engineers still like the old Three Mile Island style reactors. The main reason is due to new ideas on how to pump water that make the power plants safer. Some of the ideas aren’t so new, though, like using gravity instead of pumps to move the water (sounds like an old brewery design to me). We joked that finally by the year 2006 we finally figured out how to pump water. Why is this significant? Because pebble-bed reactors pump helium. The argument is that we finally figured out, after all this time, how to make a failsafe system that uses water, why would we want to start all over again with helium? Helium uses a whole new set of rules. For instance, it is very hard to keep inside the pipes. A lot of it leaks out. Innovation in the nuclear industry, therefore, is incremental in nature. The majority of the new plants that will be coming online, in China for instance, will just be refinements to an old design.

Moon Bases and Fusion Power

Imagine, what if you could have all of the pollution-free energy you wanted. All that you have to do is invent fusion power, build a base on the moon, strip mine some Helium-3 and transport it back to Earth. It’s as simple as that. But seriously, space.com has an article that basically proposes just that. Someday it just might be possible.

US-Mexico Relations

If I were born in Mexico I would have most likely crossed the border into the U.S. by now. I can’t blame Mexicans for trying to cross the border at all costs. According to The World Bank, half of Mexico’s population lives in poverty and one-fifth is in extreme poverty. In the U.S. even if you are very poor you still most likely live in better conditions than the majority of the poor in Mexico. For instance, none of our cities have anything like the slums that surround Mexico City. Mexico has problems and it shares a large border with the U.S. So while U.S. foreign policy has been focused on bad governments and assumed threats halfway around the world a storm has been gathering hurricane force right next door and is spilling across onto our side of the border. The result is the current state of illegal immigration. Pat Buchanan calls the situation an Invasion. You have to sensationalize things to sell books. Typically I think of an invasion as being perpetrated by those who have a malicious intent. I don’t think that’s the case here. To restate what I have already said; if I had to choose between poverty and opportunity I would choose to cross the border too.

Recently Mexico elected a new president. But the loser is staging rallies in the street proclaiming to be the legitimate president. And he has supporters. Their economy is bad and their government is corrupt. Our neighbor needs help. By helping our neighbor we would also be helping ourselves. The U.S. needs to take a more active role in directing policy in Mexico if it has any hope of solving the problems. We need to get to the source rather than trying to form plans and policies, such as amnesty, which are simply ill conceived and will not work. U.S. foreign policy needs to focus on working more closely with our close neighbor.

Internet Education

I found this paper that provides a picture of what education will look like in the future. I think it paints an accurate picture. Basically, the Internet is finally going to revolutionize our educational system. Right now we are trying to fit computers and the Internet into the traditional educational model. But, this doesn’t get us anywhere. The real power is in using the Internet as a global asynchronous communications platform for constructing a virtual classroom. In this virtual classroom you can find information and mentors that allow you to choose your own method of learning on topics of your choosing so that you can create your own unique transcript. This transcript will follow you for life and will be a record of your unique skill set and knowledge. This transcript will become part of your virtual persona and will also include projects that you have worked on. Rather than performing exercises in a classroom environment, the work that you do in the virtual classroom will actually go toward completing something of value. In essence you will be an apprentice of the particular mentor/teacher whom you are studying under at that time to learn a particular technique. This will increase human learning and productivity tremendously. Also, canned standardized programs will exist that will teach basic concepts on a need-to-know basis. This form of education will move thinking out of the bygone era of the industrial age and into the information age and beyond.

Secondary Effects

The December 4, 2006 issue of Time Magazine has an article titled, Why We Worry About The Wrong Things. In the process of discussing the irrationality of choosing to drive instead of fly the article mentioned that during the days following 9/11 approximately 1000 more people died in car accidents than did during the same period the previous year. So if you factor that in, the terrorist attacks can be said to have killed approximately 4000 people instead of the estimated 3000. You could go further and add the number of deaths (both military and civilian) from combat and sectarian violence in Afghanistan and Iraq. This makes the total number of deaths caused by the events of 9/11 higher still. So while this analysis is backward looking it still makes us painfully aware that we must consider just not the immediate effects of our decisions but also every link in the chain of events that follow.

Increase Your Net Worth

For starters, instead of asking how much you have or even how much you can get try asking, “How much can I give?” Second ask, “Does what I have to give have value?” The only legitimate way to make money is for someone to give you money in exchange for something you give to them. This is true whether you are a business, a self-employed person, or an employee of someone else. You GIVE something of value and are compensated by being given money with which you can purchase things that you cannot produce on your own and that are of value to you.

Reframing the situation from “How much can I get” to “How much can I give” is a powerful way to reshape your thinking about how to align your values with what you are doing for a living. Do you have something to give that can benefit others? We humans are interdependent individuals. We rely on others and others rely on us. This is the basis of civilization. Your work and your life only have value if you have something to give. To increase your net worth give and you shall receive.