Happy New Year!
I'm cleaning up my desk and catching up on my reading, here's a few random things that I found interesting but didn't find time to talk about:
Amory Lovins, author of "Winning the Oil Endgame" has a very interesting podcast on the principle theories regarding capitalist solutions to the energy crisis. He has a great slide show that illustrates how a visionary government can get us off oil in a decade. This is part of the TED conference and you can literally spend all day watchng videos on the various topics so really click around a bit when you have some time.
Also from TED – This is why I think biotech is going to be more profitable than oil next decade. The paradox of choice. Al Gore being funny but with good info too.
T is required to provide a "reasonable" DSL service free of contract lock-ups as part of their merger and here is an article on attempting to find it. The service is worth considering as a back-up to cable or whatever if you can find the roughly $20 a month service in your area as the question is "For $250 a year would you like your connection to your trading accounts to be much less likely to fail."
A couple of fun things in Gizmodo's top 20 hits of 2007.
Did China discover America in 1421?
For those of you who think an asteroid hitting the earth is one in a million, here's a very near miss 35 years ago. Also from my science geek side; a nice video on superconductors – I want my flying car! I talked about not wasting time last month but now wired says that time, on the universal scale, may be another commodity we are going to run out of!
Here's why companies like Nanosolar, Miasole and Heliovolt are going to make the current solar faves obsolete very soon. This may explain Cramer's desperate pumping of FSLR as there is a lot of money tied up in traditional solars that will have no way out and Nanosolar just got $100M from VCs (including Larry and Sergey!) plus another $20M from the DOE. They are targeting $1 per watt this year. FSLR is at $8 per watt and plans to get 20% cheaper per year.
Meanwhile, we're going to need some kind solution to food prices soon as they are climbing way ahead of forecasts. If only science could come up with some way to use solar power to grow food…
BusinessWeek's scathing article on Homeland Security's failings and a sickening article about how, despite all the positive spin, we once again had record troop deaths in Iraq in 2007. It's important to tell you this now as the US has just jointed Russia, France, Maialysia, China, Taiwan, Singapor and the UK in the top 10 countries with the least amount of privacy rights for it's citizens. That's right, we have less freedom to say what we want in private than people living under dictatorships! Here's a great video on the Top Ten Signs Your Country May be Going Fascist.
Bhutto's fatal mistake may have been to attack the US policy, not just toward Pakistan, but on dealing with terrorists in general according to Len Hart, who wrote an interesting article on the subject saying: " War is a racket fought by the masses for privileged elites, big corporations, and venal politicians like Bush. The war racket creates victims in the US and enemies –potential terrorists –abroad." Meanwhile, CSI Pakistan may have a little trouble figuring out whodunnit in the assasination as they skipped the autopsy (which is mandatory under Pakistan law in murders) AND they hosed off the crime scene!
What was hot and what was not in the US markets from Ticker Sense:
China's economy is 40% smaller than they have been given credit for in the MSM (not by me, I've been talking about the China myth all year!). I've been holding back on this, trying to gather moreevidence after the World Bank study we noted a couple of weeks ago, but there is no way – amazingly, there are no objective statistics we can use but the LA Times editorial does a good job.
India's economy also got downsized by the World Bank but they keep trying – now they are outsourcing pregnancy!
Maybe a real video of the new IPhone upgrade. Speaking of Apple, check out these custom laptop covers – I don't know how hard this is but if you could do this live at a tech show, you'd make a fortune!
Maybe this is only fascinating to me but it's the history of New York City since 1/1/2000.
