One of the best technology reads last week was a New York Times’ big Sunday article on the outsourcing of high-technology manufacturing The iPhone Economy. The piece is a really thorough examination of how high-technology product manufacturing in East Asia has not only resulted in jobs going there that would otherwise be here, but...
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In a perfect world, this talk by noted author and electronic liberty activist, Cory Doctorow, would be a viral video that would reach millions of people instead of the just a bit over 110,000 it has so far. Because in it he explains in relatively plain English what is going on in the copyright...
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The irrepressible, outspoken Barry Ritholtz has a quick post today regarding whether or not Microsoft is even worth holding as a stock any more. The highlight from his take: During the past decade, MSFT returned exactly zero to investors, including dividends. They are a bloated, bureaucracy run by bloated, bureaucratic CEO. The paradigm has...
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I’ll expand on this later but in the meantime, there is a public forum today at the Eagle Point Lodge on the future of planning in the City of Clinton. There will be a number of breakout sessions and members of the public are encouraged to attend. Begins at 4:30. More in the Herald....
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He also makes what I think is a critical point about how 9/11 changed our perception of threats and our reaction to "security warnings." There are numerous academic studies that show that people react to repeated security warnings that come to nothing by basically tuning them out. And by warning people about...
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Taking the pulse of the GOP race this morning we find: Michelle Bachmann is now her party's frontrunner in the race to be the next President of the United States. And while you let that thought marinade in your brain juices for a moment, consider that barring her total implosion, she will remain the...
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One can be forgiven for snorting with a bit of derision at Standard & Poor’s decision to take a notch out of the USA’s credit rating by lowering it from AAA to AA+. These are, after all, the morons who rated the credit default swaps of the 2000′s as investment grade and look where...
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This post was written for the Des Moines Register Political Opinion Page. Yeah, so three months and no posts. I don’t have much to offer in the way of an excuse really. Work has certainly been a factor. But more than anything it has been a combination of a numb depression at the direction...
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So, let’s say we have a business in town; one of the city’s largest employers. In recent years they have spent tens of millions of dollars in improvements to their other facilities in town to make many of them state-of-the-art. But the company headquarters is located in an architectural landmark in the old downtown....
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