Apple, Android, And Ancient Greece

Sandy Was Global Warming

Wild fires in Greece a few years ago was global warming acting out. Sandy hitting NYC last year was global warming making itself felt. Global warming is a costly proposition. It is cheaper to keep the earth in a good shape.

Dear Mr. President: Time to Deal with Climate Change

Whether you can develop a practical and sustainable strategy to address climate change—specifically, to begin lowering carbon dioxide emissions—will define the success of your new term as president. ..... the potential for global warming over the next decades threatens consequences so dire that they could overwhelm any progress you make toward other long-term economic, social, and political goals. .... will require innovative new technologies and overhauls of the world’s energy, agricultural, and transportation infrastructure. .... The $90 billion in your 2009 stimulus bill for energy projects and research breathed new life into the search for cleaner sources of energy ... transforming our energy infrastructure would take decades .... much of the energy spending in the stimulus bill, suggested one, resembled “pork-barrel politics” to satisfy the immediate need for jobs ..... reduce carbon dioxide emissions and begin stabilizing our climate. ..... the real reason to transform our energy system is to avoid the most catastrophic effects of global warming. ...... we can no longer wait without risking dramatic upheavals in global security and the health and welfare of hundreds of millions of the world’s inhabitants. ..... global emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel combustion reached a record 31.6 metric gigatons in 2011. .... It is quite possible that if this is not done over the next four years, it will be too late.

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Breaking Up The Euro Feels Unthinkable

The solution is to give Europe a political union that matches the monetary union. The continent is going through hard times. But it is not like breaking up the Euro is an easy solution. You could break the Euro and all the problems would still be there. The loans would not vanish.

Tempted, Angela?

it is looking ever more likely .... A chaotic disintegration would be a calamity ..... For the moment, breaking up the euro would be more expensive than trying to hold it together. But if Europe just keeps on arguing, that calculation will change. ..... Begin with Greece. There is a common fallacy, not least in Germany, that dropping the Greeks would be a fairly costless way to teach a useful lesson. In fact the European Central Bank (ECB) owns Greek bonds with a face value of €40 billion ($50 billion), which would be converted into devalued drachma and which Greece might not service. A further €130 billion or so of loans that Greece has received in the bail-out would have to be written down, or written off. The €100 billion of the temporary debts Greece has stacked up in the ECB’s payments system would crystallise into a loss. Add in a one-off grant of say €50 billion to tide Greece over—call it conscience-salving “solidarity”—and the bill might come to €320 billion. Estimating the price of a “Grexit” is guesswork, but Germany’s share might reach €110 billion of this, about 4% of the country’s GDP. ...... Ireland, Portugal, Cyprus and Spain also all owe investors abroad a net sum of 80-100% of GDP (the gross debt is much larger). ...... With the single market in peril and depression looming, Mrs Merkel would come under huge pressure to pay whatever it takes to save the rest of the euro zone. She would have no time to negotiate the pan-European federal discipline that she has always demanded as the price for German aid. A rescue would be a blank cheque. .... A bolder Plan B would amputate well above the site of infection, cutting off Spain, Ireland, Portugal and Cyprus too. Italy, which has net foreign debt of just 21% of GDP, would probably escape the chop: even with its heavy debts and chronic lack of competitiveness, Mrs Merkel would reckon that the euro zone could not function politically without it. ..... When you add up the ECB’s holdings of their bonds, the temporary debts in its payments system, written-off rescue loans, and a care package to soften the blow of being chucked out, the total for Spain, Ireland, Portugal, Cyprus and Greece comes to perhaps €1.15 trillion. Germany would also have to put money into its own banks, hit by losses in the five departing countries. Altogether, this might cost Germany getting on for €500 billion, or 20% of GDP. ..... the euro zone’s members should use their combined strength to create a banking union and to mutualise a chunk of the outstanding debt (as well as introduce policies to temper austerity and promote growth). ..... This more federal Europe would also involve costs. Recapitalising banks and financing a euro-wide deposit-guarantee scheme might cost €300 billion-400 billion, perhaps a third of it paid for by Germany. But this would be a one-off and might be reclaimed from the banks. Mutualising a slug of debt would lift Germany’s interest costs by €15 billion or so a year. The numbers are rough, but, even allowing for some extra loans to the south, rescue would be cheaper than break-up. And that is before you factor in the enormous political costs of disintegration, with, say, Greece departing into a new Balkan hell. ..... had the politicians agreed on who should pay what or on how much sovereignty to surrender. ...... Southern Europe’s economic rot is deepening and spreading north. Politics is turning rancid as the south succumbs to austerity fatigue and the north to rescue fatigue .... breaking up the euro would be riskier than fixing it. ... the choice will be between an expensive break-up sooner and a really ruinous one later.

Europe going down the tube like this was not my idea of an Asian century.

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An Athlete's Racist Tweet

Coat of arms of Greece since 7 June 1975. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Greek Athlete Kicked Off Olympic Team For Tweet

She tweeted, “with so many Africans in Greece, at least the West Nile mosquitos will be eating food from their own home.”

Free speech is protected but racist tweets bringing social ostracism is a good thing. This was a good move on the part of the nation of Greece.

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• Greek Athlete Expelled for Racist Tweet

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• Greek athlete expelled for racist tweet

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Dinner At Arianna's

Headed to a dinner party at Arianna's place on 17th St this evening. bit.ly/yLGKTZ

— Paramendra Bhagat (@paramendra) February 23, 2012

What should I wear? I think I am going to wear my boots.

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Black Friday
Wearing Black
Black Buddhas: The Madhesis Of Nepal: Documentary

Meeting Arianna Huffington

Apple: $10 Billion To $400 Billion In 10 Years

Image via CrunchBaseAnd with most of the growth happening once the Great Recession hit.

CNN: At $400 billion, Apple is worth more than Greece

Only Exxon Mobil has a higher valuation, at about $420 billion. PetroChina (PTR) is Apple's closest competitor, at $270 billion, and Microsoft follows at $235 billion. ..... Apple's market cap is higher than the gross domestic product of Greece, Austria, Argentina, or South Africa. ..... Despite its size, Apple is still one of the fastest growing technology companies...... a $15 price cap for e-textbooks

This is a remarkable story. It came from the company inventing one new category after another. There were digital music players before the iPod, but I remember a Time or Newsweek front cover that said: iPod, therefore I am.

The iPhone was the gizmo that really did it for Apple. This was truly a trailblazing product. It shook the landscape.

And now Apple marches into TV and textbooks. TV is a hard nut to crack.

I stay fascinated as to how Apple manages to keep its startup culture. It still acts like one.

The Unfacebook

I am a huge fan of Facebook. I check in not as much as into my Gmail account, but it is close. I think things will only get better. I love the video clips I can access, the music, I am enamored with its personality tests. One test told me what I have long suspected, that I am "an advocating inventor." Too many people think of me as a politician. I also like the scrabble I saw and added yesterday. There is no time limit. You make your next move the next time you log in. Wow.

Most of my "friends" at Facebook are people I have never met though. I have met a few cool people who do interact, but most are people who okayed the friend request and then were gone.

In the way I use Facebook might be the germ of the Unfacebook.

Facebook is a walled garden. It is designed for you to more efficiently stay in touch with people who you already know. And I am thinking, what a waste.

What if you want to go online with the express intention of meeting people? Real people? People that you otherwise do not know, will not meet?

So you create a site. And it allows users to create an extremely detailed profile of who they are. Like extremely, extremely detailed. By the time you are done, it is a pretty good snapshot of who you are. Not everyone has to completely complete it, of course, and it is just that people will know how much of your profile you have completed.

So you create an account. And you log in. You complete your profile. Then you want to go meet people. How would that work?

People's names and photos will not show up when you do searches. Instead you will have to seek areas of interest, or hobbies. You will have the option to narrow down your geographical area. Maybe you just want people in your city. Or not.

It will not be just interest. It will also be level of interest.

There will be social interests, there will be cultural interests. There will be work related interests. There will be activity interests.

You seek grounds of common interest. And you explore the depth of the interest.

As you get to know each other more, you exercise the option to share a little bit more of your extremely detailed profile.

Detailed personality tests will be kind of mandatory. And there will be automatches based on pesonality type, areas of interest, geography, social choices, etc.

I guess what I am getting at is, you will get the name and the face of the person towards the end and not at the beginning like happens with the current hot social networking sites.

Often times you will meet people and strike a small conversation, and you realize you have run out of steam, there is nothing much to explore, nothing much to talk about anymore, and you move on. You don't bother to know more about the person, let alone learn their name and figure what they look like.

Or you might meet people you do want to share your name and face with early in the process, if you feel like it.



The power of the internet is not the people you already know. The power of the internet is people you can meet and get to know that you never would have if the internet were not there.

This concept can also be extended to group formation.

Groups would self form, grow or dissolve based on shared interest and engagement. And it could be scaled. Maybe there are 1,000 people who want to discuss the raging fires in Greece right now. But that group might have died out in about three weeks.

This will also work great for people who belong to ethnic groups that are small in number and are dispersed.

And of course the whole site should make great use of the rest of the web.

Maybe there should be automatic Google searches and YouTube searches for all areas of interest.

So if my interest is Barack Obama, I would get the top 5 headlines on him when I log in, and the headlines should be top, middle or bottom of the page depending on how much I am into Obama according to the system. Do I talk about him a lot?

The system should make room for degrees of friendship. There should be an entire spectrum.

Best friend is at one end. Block this person from my system should be another. He should never be able to contact me again.

There is the activity partner. There is the acquaintance. There is the colleague. There is the friend. There is the conversation partner, the game partner. There is the lover.

I think this Unfacebook is closer to our social realities and how we go about meeting people when we want to meet people and expand our social horizons.

Somebody could launch this Unfacebook, or like Facebook 2.0 was all the applications, Facebook 3.0 could be this Unfacebook. And if you do adopt this, invite me to sit your Board, fellas.

And after you feel like you have become friends with someone, you of course will have the option to bring them into your walled garden, into the Facebook 2.0 zone, the Facebook of today, the Ununfacebook.








Mark Andreessen, Facebook Fan: Analyzing the Facebook Platform, three weeks in