The unemployment rate for teenagers in the US is about 25% currently, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is more than three times the unemployment rate of all workers, which is currently around 8.5%. I shared this video in my Labor Relations class tonight – it is an interview with the late Milton… [Read more…]
January 14, 2012
1/19/12 UPDATE: And now this article on TechCrunch about Bertelsmann’s University Ventures Fund. — The bigger promise of democratization and specialization of education is finally here, and it barely involves the public sector. Computer science undergrads have a standing employment offer from Google. Yet universities insist that taking Sociology 101 is important to a “well-rounded education.”… [Read more…]
December 19, 2011
Check out this video of North Koreans bereaving the loss of Kim Jong Il. (HT to Business Insider) Yes, it is unbelievable. When you get to 1:20 of the video, watch the kids in the background look around as if it say – “I guess we should do what everyone else is doing.” Throughout the video,… [Read more…]
December 14, 2011
Retail sales are up for the sixth straight month. But… 1. The average American lost $21,000 in net worth in Q3, 2011 according to the December 8, 2011 Federal Reserve Flow of Funds release. 2. Personal savings rates are on a marked decline after a predictable spike during the recession: 3. Disposable income is back… [Read more…]
December 12, 2011
In their paper – Cooperation, structure and hierarchy in multiadaptive games – Sungmin Lee, Petter Holme and Zhi-Xi Wu write: To epitomize, our work shows a generalization of spatial social dilemma models where hierarchies can emerge in a cooperative state. In our framework, these hierarchies need stable cooperating hubs to persist. In this sense, the… [Read more…]
December 11, 2011
Here’s the way I think of “The Cloud” - If I don’t have to worry about my data when I spill coffee on my laptop, then I’m using is The Cloud. In that vein, I’m in general agreement with Urquhart’s definition – “Cloud computing is an application-centric operations model.” (After my visit to the Silicon… [Read more…]
December 8, 2011
Seeing that I’m in the data business, thought it’d be interesting to check out the new Silicon Valley CloudCenter at a Meetup event - OpenStack Swift – The State of the Project - organized by Dave Nielsen, et al. Only in Silicon Valley can you pack a room with 60+ engineers to learn about these things.… [Read more…]
November 28, 2011
James Altucher, who wrote that Pearl Harbor caused the financial crash of 2008. Does that make the international hopes of Chinese consumer spending growth the signal the upcoming event horizon? With the global economy fighting the doldrums: The European PIIGS (and everyone thought the Euro would replace the US Dollar as the global currency) Downward revisions of… [Read more…]
November 19, 2011
Question recently posed on Twitter spurred a few thoughts: “Georgia start-ups need to grow outside of Georgia to build great companies and big valuations. Thoughts?” It’s not whether they need to grow, but whether Georgia-based start-ups are able to grow outside of Georgia. But where does this begin? Certainly not in local government, as the… [Read more…]
May 19, 2011
The Economist.com gets this one wrong. The education bubble isn’t about a student “selling” their degree in the open market. Here’s why there’s an education bubble: Student loans are securitized and resold in the same way as residential mortgages. And the numbers are staggering. Know that whole Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac thing going on right now… [Read more…]
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January 15, 2012
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